This is a painting I did a couple of years ago entitled “Homo vesica piscis” (Acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 10″)
“Your Spiritual Evolution Starts Now” is one my more popular posts and also one of my personal favorites because, in one little 300-word essay, I express the seed of an incredible idea — a Unified Evolutionary Theory that encompasses both scientific and spiritual evolution.
What my theory expresses is simple. Fish wanted food that was on land. They splashed in the shallows, used their flippers to skip in the mud, and 65 million years later, they had legs. Fish became amphibians which became reptiles which became mammals and now there are people. In other words, you don’t walk around because you have legs.
You have legs because you want to walk around. And you are not going to have wings unless and until you desire to fly. This is immensely powerful stuff as it is. But in this followup post I want to expand the idea somewhat.
Sure, the first fish who took it a little too far must’ve died flopping on dry land. But there is nonetheless hope for each of us within a miraculous gestalt, a great and grand holistic process of which each of us is a part.
This great and grand process is about more than fish becoming amphibians becoming reptiles becoming mammals becoming humans. It encompasses matter we normally consider inert and “non-living.” Water and minerals, the so-called “primordial soup” of a billion years ago, produces monomers which become organic polymers which become amino acids which become microorganisms which become tiny creatures which become fish, and so on. Matter has desire also. It wants to live.
Matter wants to live not just as biological life but as cosmological life. The dust of the universe wants to coagulate to form planets, and planets with enough mass want to become stars so they can illuminate other planets and enable. Silicon wants to become chips, and chips want to produce artificial intelligence.
Everything in the universe wants to evolve, to become, to shine.
I’m definitely going to be reading Chardin’s “The Phenomenon of Man.” It’s next on my reading list.
Imagine my surprise to discover the work of French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin was a student of evolution and a paleontologist who was involved in the discovery of both the Piltdown Man hoax and the game changing Peking Man. He also had some very interesting notions about the evolution of the universe, ideas that closely mirror the cascading realizations I’ve had over the last year or two, the ones I’ve expressed above.
Not at all surprisingly, many of Chardin’s writings were suppressed by the Catholic Church and were not published until after his death. He calls his view the “Law of Complexity-Consciousness” and refers to the ultimate destination of the universe as the “Omega Point,” an idea that one could and should compare and contrast to Kurzweil’s “Singularity”. Even more amazing, Chardin’s model is not all at odds with the Qabalistic model I’ve discussed before.
Humanity needs to realize this stuff, and realize it quickly, or else we are all going to go extinct on this little blue ball. All of the work that went into this evolutionary journey over the last 4.5 billion years — the work of dust becoming planets and suns, the work of mineral water soup becoming proteins which became microorganisms, tiny critters, fish, reptiles, birds, and people — will be wasted.
So many wonderful and miraculous ancestors worked so hard to get us here, and there is so much potential left in us, in this world, in all its inhabitants animal, vegetable and mineral.
How can we permit failure in carrying forward this torch?
Robert Mitchell Jr. 