the evolution paradigm

historical consciousnessModern Historical Consciousness

historical consciousness

Excerpt from “Modern historical Consciousness”, a seminar given

by Ravindra Svarupa dasa

Modern Historical Consciousness

The “Evolution Paradigm”

Overview of presentation

•Part One: The standard Paradigm

•Part Two: The modern Paradigm

• Part Three: Standard for Progress – the “Passion Paradigm”

• Part Four: The Paradigm shift

historical consciousness

par-a-digm (par'uh diem , -dim) n. 1. an example serving as a model; pattern,

exemplar, pattern, matrix, standard, criterion, yardstick.

A paradigm is a fundamental framework for looking at things; it establishes not only the theoretical terms for explanation, but also an orientation which determines in science what avenues are worth exploring, what problems are worthwhile addressing etc.

Part One: The standard Paradigm


What was the standard world view until the 18th century?


The central conception in this world view is summarized in the expression "the great chain of being." The history of this important idea was investigated by an American philosopher named Arthur O. Lovejoy. He published his work under the title The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1936; paperback reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960)


The idea of the chain of being is connected intimately with the concept of what we will call here the Absolute Truth, that is, the self-existent ultimate source of all there is. This conception is clearly articulated, for example, in Plato's dialogue on cosmology named the Timaeus.


The Platonic idea is that there's a higher unchanging realm, a realm of "ideas" or of ideal "forms“.

The philosophical doctrine that the essences objectively exist outside the mind in some fashion or another is called "realism"; the opposite doctrine is "nominalism."

There is some truth to Plato's realism. The realm of the forms does seem to correspond closely to something the Vedic traditions regard as existent, and that is the Vedas themselves.


It is also possible to find a correspondence between the Platonic forms and the creative potentiality latent in the brahmajyoti. We know from the Vedas that the brahmajyoti contains the bija, the seeds, for all the species in the world, and that Brahma creates by making the various seeds manifest.

The bija seems to be like a Platonic form, at least as these forms are understood in later Neoplatonism, where they are thought to possess a creative potency.


In the Platonic scheme, the impersonal Absolute cannot of course at some point make a free decision to create; rather, the world flows from it out of its own necessity.


Hel-len-is-tic (hel uh nis'tik) adj. 1. of or pertaining to Greek civilization of the Mediterranean region and SW Asia from the death of Alexander the Great through the 1st century B.C., characterized by the blending of Greek and foreign cultures.

In Hellenistic times an influential Neoplatonic school of thought arose. In its hands the Platonic conception of the Absolute and its emanations underwent further development and dissemination. From there it entered decisively into mainstream Christian thought through two theologians: St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite.

Au-gus-tine (ô'guh steen , 1. <Saint> A. D. 354-430, one of the Latin fathers in the early Christian Church;

Di-o-ny-si-us (die uh nish'ee uhs, -nis'-, - 1. <Saint> died A. D. 268, pope 259-268.


The writings of Dionysius are Neoplatonic: The structure of being is hierarchical, a divine order, with God as its origin and cause. From the Absolute the rest of reality proceeds in the form of ordered, graded steps falling away from the One, each step further from the origin bringing a unit decrease in being or power. At the top, is the One--the ultimate perfection, the most perfect being. Then you move down, through all gradations of being, to chaos at the bottom.

The word "hierarchy" comes from two Greek words: "hieros," which means "holy," and "arche," which means "order." Hierarchy is "sacred" or "holy order."


Everything has its proper place within the whole. Those entities higher up the ladder, closer to God, partake more of the divine nature--have more perfection--than those below. Yet everything is perfect in its own place.

The Great Chain

"Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises and from Mind, Soul [these are Neoplatonic ideas], and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life, and since the single radiance illuminates all and is reflected in each [the "single radiance" is the Original Being] as a single face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer's golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth."

Plo-ti-nus 1. A. D. 205? -270?, Roman philosopher, born in Egypt: founder of Neoplatonism

One of the most elegant and concise descriptions of the great chain of being comes late, in the eighteenth century. We find these lines in Alexander Pope's poem called Essay on Man:

Vast chain of being! Which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see [that is, microscopic], no glass can reach, from Infinite to thee [that is, a human being], from thee to nothing.

Pope 1. <Alexander> 1688-1744, English poet.

The history and content of the idea of the "Great Chain of Being," is the paradigm of reality that ruled European thought from the 2nd Century AD until the 18th Century.


The “principle of plenitude.”


Everybody believed it implicitly or explicitly. You may find a convenient capsule description of this world view in a small book entitled The Elizabethan World Picture, by the Cambridge don E.M.W. Tillyard (Vintage Books: New York, n.d.). This work has been used in English literature courses for a half a century to help modern people understand writers like Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and John Milton.


Thus we should understand that the eventual collapse of this world picture, the destruction of the great chain of being was an immense and revolutionary change in consciousness. That change was so profound that modern Westerners now have to approach their own not-so-distant past as something completely foreign and strange.

Part Two: The modern Paradigm

It began developing in Europe during the last half of the 18th century, reached full flower in the 19th century, and of course continues largely unabated today. It is important to recognize that this particular way of viewing the world has a history.


The history of the “Chain”


Of course, the idea underwent a great deal of development and modification over the centuries. Thinkers worked out various implications of the idea (e.g., the principles of plenitude), and wrestled with some inherent contradictions. For example, Christian thinkers who tried to cement the Christian revelation of a personal creator onto this Neoplatonic concept of an impersonal emanation met with mixed success, as you can imagine. In orthodox Christian thought, creation has to be an act of free will, yet whenever theologians tried to think about creation, this idea of God inherited from Plato and Plotinus was always in their mind, a God whose creation was an emanation out of necessity.



Part of the idea of the chain from its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins was that even as the chain is a structure descending from God, it also serves at the same time as one going back to God, a ladder of ascent. It formed the path of the ascent of the soul to God. In the Christian context, this path of ascent could be followed only in contemplation, as the mind rose step by step to the summit. However, in the original Platonic and Neoplatonic context, the chain was not only a path for contemplation, but also it was the path of the ascent of the soul through the process of transmigration. Christian thinkers retained the idea of the chain as a path leading up to God, but the Church rejected the allied doctrine of transmigration of the soul. One of the consequences of this rejection was eventually an increasing sense of stasis, of frustration.



The possibility of evolving up the chain through one's improved karma is absent--you are stuck where you are. The hierarchies of human society are, after all, seamlessly part of the cosmic universal hierarchy. Gradually, then, the whole system began to seem enormously oppressive to many people. The idea of transmigration having been ruled out, individual progress within the world system was ruled out. The concept of the great chain naturally supported a thoroughgoing social and political conservatism; the perfection for each person consisted in conforming to the requirements of his own place, and not in striving to rise to another's (this idea is also found in Bhagavad-gita). Yet people still need some sort of hope for betterment, some prospect for progress. The loss of the notion of transmigration, once an integral part of the idea of the chain, turned the social conservatism of the hierarchy into oppression, and when common people in frustration sought to overthrow kings and nobles in order to advance themselves, they brought down around them, as it were, the whole cosmos.


Vol-taire (vohl târ', vol-) n. 1. (François Marie Arouet), 1694-1778, French writer and philosopher.

The temporalizing of the “Chain”



Nie-tzsche (nee'chuh, -chee) n. 1. <Friedrich Wilhelm> 1844-1900, German philosopher.

God is death!

This consciousness is not a result of the facts of bio-logical, sociological, or psychological development discovered by Darwin, Marx, and Freud: rather, this consciousness produced those "facts."

Dar-win (där'win) n. 1. <Charles (Robert)> 1809-82, English naturalist.



Schil-ler (shil'uhr) n. 1. <Johann Christoph Friedrich von> 1759-1805, German poet, dramatist, and historian.

Faust (foust) also <Faus-tus>(fou'stuhs, fô'-) n. 1. a magician in medieval German legend who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.



o-me-ga (oh mee'guh, oh may'-, oh meg'uh) 1. the 24th and last letter of the Greek

alphabet (O). 2. the last of any series; the end.

Omega: God is at the end of evolution – the future

“Historical consciousness is the instinctive habit of the modern mind. It is the characteristic of historical consciousness to understand everything genetically, in terms of, development, progression, evolution. When you attempt to understand something in the world, you automatically ask how did it come to be that way, how did it evolve or develop from simpler, more primitive units. This is historical consciousness.”

Part Three: Standard for Progress –the “Passion” Paradigm

CONSCIOUSNESS

HistoricalOriginal vs.

The evolutionary, historical perspective is the shared, unquestioning assumption of modern scholarship. Go into a department of religious studies and say "I believe this text was revealed by God, and was transmitted intact. I believe that a tradition can preserve its original teachings intact in spite of all kinds of..."--nobody will believe you for a minute. Not just that: they will know you are not worth taking seriously. For the premise is that such things just doesn't happen, and the matter is not up for discussion. To suggest otherwise is not merely to make a wrong claim; it is to step outside of the very rules by which they operate.

Standard for Progress:

The “Passion” Paradigm

The academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) looks at every aspect of our tradition as a human product, the result of social, cultural, economic, psychological forces interacting in history. Scripture--sastra--is especially subject to the same considerations. It is a human construct that grew and developed over time, and critical analysis shows how a text thought to be "revealed", entire and complete at one time and place, contains within the traces of the submerged histories of its parts.

The classic example of a paradigm

The whole material world is more or less in the mode of passion. Modern civilization is considered to be advanced in the standard of the mode of passion. Formerly, the advanced condition was considered to be in the mode of goodness. (BG 14.7)

Part Four: The Paradigm shift

From the very beginning, Prabhupada indicated that evolution is the weakest point in the edifice of modern consciousness. If that theory goes, then it would seem that the whole mind of modern humanity is up for grabs. The evolutionary paradigm puts a frame around people's lives; it tells them "this is who I am and this is how the world came into being, and this is how I got here." If the theory of evolution is abandoned as discredited, people are going to say, "Here I am, here you are, here's this world around us--and I have no idea of how I or you or this civilization or this world got here."

Knowledge is not a simple thing: It depends on what you love and what your expectations are.

We know what we are interested in…..and what we love.

What is the underlying cause for the acceptance of a paradigm?

What is the cause of “knowledge”?

teñäà satata-yuktänäàbhajatäà préti-pürvakamdadämi buddhi-yogaà taàyena mäm upayänti te

SYNONYMSteñäm—unto them; satata-yuktänäm—always engaged; bhajatäm—in rendering devotional service; préti-pürvakam—in loving ecstasy; dadämi—I give; buddhi-yogam—real intelligence; tam—that; yena—by which; mäm—unto Me; upayänti—come; te—they.TRANSLATION

To those who are constantly devoted to serving Me with love, I give the understanding by which they can come to Me.

sarvasya cähaà hådi sanniviñöomattaù småtir jïänam apohanaà ca

The director of the buddhi is Supersoul. "I am situated in everyone's heart [as the Supersoul] and from Me comes remembrance, knowledge, and forgetfulness" (matah smrtir jnanam apohanam ca).

Apohanam means literally "shoving aside." Shoving aside what? Shoving aside Krishna. Prabhupada explained this phenomenon by saying that if you want to forget Krishna He will give you the intelligence to forget, and if you want to remember Krishna, He will give you the intelligence to remember. Prabhupada asked once where do all these arguments come from--that there is no God, or God is dead or the creation can arise by chance from nothing, and so on. These are clever arguments; people who are otherwise reasonably bright accept them. Where do these arguments come from? They come from Krishna, Srila Prabhupada said. Krishna Himself gives the intelligence they can forget Him.

Than

k yo

u

Thank you

Thank you

Epilog

Much of the medieval world-picture, with its transcendent eternal source that is perfect and complete, with its production of a structured world of iterations of hierarchies, with its systems of correspondences, with its notion of perfection as the fulfillment of one's own--well--dharma, seems familiar to ISKCON devotees because what devotees are getting from our tradition, even though it seems an exotic import from far-off mysterious India, is in fact astonishingly close to the world-picture of medieval times.

Our ways of thinking and acting are near kin to what was the European standard until a few hundred years ago. Thus, Srila Prabhupada may then be said to be restoring to us as Europeans our own lost cultural heritage. Restoring it, I should add, in a form free from defects in thought and action that lead to its abrogation a few hundred years ago. In the future, we may look back at "modernity" as merely a nasty interruption in the true advance of Western civilization.

We know through sabda, through proper hearing, that the theory of evolution is wrong…. Now we want to help bring about a total revolution in human consciousness. If we don't do that, Krishna consciousness will not survive. Krishna consciousness is so incompatible with the modern temperament that if we don't eradicate it, it will eradicate Krishna consciousness. That's my conviction, and I think Krishna will give us the tools and show us the way, on the condition that our faith is unflinching.

One who is engaged in the practices of Krishna consciousness could just wait for that historical consciousness to go away, along with other forms of acquired material conditioning.However, one discovers that when historical consciousness is examined historically, one discovers some things about it that help us free ourselves from its grasp. Srila Prabhupada compares such a procedure to felling a tree with an ax whose handle is fashioned from the tree's own limb.

the evolution paradigm

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