Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [8]
Awakening to Our Evolutionary Responsibility
ANDREW COHEN
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, God is no longer “up there” ready to save us. Until very recently, that creative principle was something that we would ask for help from. But I believe we have reached a time in history when God, which I would describe as the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process, is now completely dependent upon us—upon sentient life forms that have evolved to the point where they are blessed with the extraordinary gifts of self-awareness and freedom of choice. At this critical juncture, our own future and the future of our planet will be determined by the conscious choices that we human beings make, rather than by the whim of a higher power or according to some predestined plan.
The mythical god has fallen out of the sky, and as more and more of us awaken to this fact, it begins to dawn on us that the future is literally in our own hands. Our power and impact have never been greater. It has even been suggested that at this point in evolution, the process of natural selection has been superseded by human choice. The decisions that we are making, whether we are aware of it or not, have become the primary force directing our planet’s future. Indeed, we have become gods. In pre-modern times, gods were revered as supreme beings who had the power to create and destroy life. Who has that power now? We do. We can create life in a laboratory. And we have at our fingertips the power to destroy all life on earth. Our unique capacity to innovate and our drive to create have brought forth unimagined potentials and simultaneously carried us to the very brink of self-destruction. Because our technological development has outpaced our spiritual and moral development, we find ourselves in a crisis of unparalleled proportions. And there is nobody “up there” who can help us now, no supernatural power guiding everything from on high, no God that is separate from our very own consciousness.
For the human being who begins to realize this, the implications on a personal level are profound and overwhelming. Those of us at the leading edge are beginning to awaken to the fact that we are not the people we thought we were. We are not merely individuals with a unique personal history, from a particular family, with a certain ethnic background, who may even recognize ourselves to be global citizens. We are the leading edge of a fourteen-billion-year cosmic process, and the energy and intelligence that initiated that process is now dependent upon us. Our responsibility for being here now and creating the future is much bigger than we could ever have imagined.
Most of us are simply not conscious of the vast evolutionary context in which our own choices and actions are occurring. As long as those of us who are the most fortunate, educated, wealthy, and cognitively developed are lost in the postmodern psychological disease of narcissism, materialism, and self-concern, we will never be in a position to appreciate what the power of choice actually means. But when we awaken to the enormity of the process we are a part of and begin to recognize the extraordinary significance of our freedom to choose, our enlightenment has begun. There is no other species that has the power to choose to evolve.
For the mature human being at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this is what I see as being the purpose of spiritual development in a nutshell: to liberate the miraculous power of human choice from unconsciousness and petty self-concern. Our evolution, if not our very survival, depends on it. More and more of us need to awaken to the vast evolutionary context in which we have emerged, and be ready to take responsibility for its overwhelming implications. We must begin to live the gift of human life and use the gift of human choice for the sake of evolution itself.