A Way Toward Conscious Evolution

My ultimate dream woman (sorry Arundhati Roy, but you’re second) wrote that piece in the link a while back, and it reminded me of a section from Thoreau’s classic:

It may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way — as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn — and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Evolution is a difficult and rarely conscious mandate. If, by comparison, eating leaves got me but a single night with Ms. Portman, that would be a small price to pay: an ecstasy that would glow brighter in memory all the way to my grave, for a mere lifetime boycott of flesh. But evolution among our species is like the old saw has it with life for the individual: it’s what happens while you’re making other plans.

Perhaps for Thoreau’s and Portman’s recommendations to become actualized we will have to somehow make evolution a more conscious and personal experience. One point to begin from there is to get to know our own genetic code, not merely from the science page at the Times or from books and journals, helpful as these may occasionally be — but from our own inner experience. Our genes, our DNA, represent the one element of our natural being that is both universal and truly quantum. We are all part of the genetic universe or we do not live; and DNA is one aspect of our bodies that is both substance and ether, as it were: form and non-form, to borrow the Buddhist terminology. It has a physical, molecular component and an informational one: it incorporates both hardware and software, container and code, matter and pure energy. Scientists warn us that it can be altered for the worse — mutated — by external influences as diverse as cigarette smoke and nuclear fallout.

My additional question would be: isn’t it just as rational to expect that DNA can be positively changed by such personal and private influences as, for example, clarity of thought; developmental habits of mind and body; the regular elimination of psychological waste that would work cooperatively with our physical body’s more familiar patterns of elimination; and a greater attuning toward what is invisible yet manifest to the being who lives beyond the superficial?

This, in fact, is the formative message of the new book (now available for pre-order) that I edited over the summer. It is worth reading, even if you cannot accept all its ideas; for its perspective is more meaningful than its details. If you can begin to think of your life as a movement through an evolutionary sphere, a psycho-physical hologram of sorts, rather than as a mighty struggle up a ladder or mountain of attainment, accumulation, and conflict; then you may find yourself, quite without effort or intention, on that path that Thoreau described — not merely respecting your diet, but far more meaningfully, in how you experience yourself and your future.

There is, after all, no such thing as a future written onto a stone by God or Destiny; only a storage of possibility, which the scientists call potential energy. When I use an oracle in personal counseling (which is what, in fact, I do), I use it not as a means of “telling the future,” but of inspiring my client to self-create the future that is natural and true for her. This is one path toward making evolution a personal matter, by making it a conscious one. Yet no matter what particular path you choose, the key thing is to never stop questioning, examining, and especially, respecting your self.