Humanity: horizontal development
More than two thousand years ago, Cicero uttered the famous phrase: “O tempora, o mores!”– in his First Oration Against Catiline.
These words, however, had a political rather than philosophical implication. But throughout history, thinkers, religious figures, writers, and poets, in their own ways, have addressed the crisis unfolding in the consciousness of their contemporaries, seeking and proposing ways out of the impasse in which they believed society had found itself. Today, this subject is studied and analyzed in the context of new challenges posed to the spiritual condition of ordinary people by the technological achievements of human civilization and the triumph of scientific knowledge over mythology and religion.
For example, John Vervaeke has developed the concept of a “meaning crisis.” In the article “Diagnosing the Current Age: A Symptomology of the Meaning Crisis”, of which he is a co-author, Vervaeke describes the current state of society as an “existential vacuum” — a sense of aimlessness or disintegration that distends our experience of life in its personal, social, and cultural dimensions and leaves us spiritless, disconnected from the world. As its cause, Vervaeke identifies a succession of historical forces and influences (including the Protestant, Industrial, and Scientific Revolutions) that decayed the structure of our “worldview attunement” and, in essence, led to the loss of the institutions of wisdom and religious participation that allowed us to ameliorate perennial problems of self-deception, nihilism and despair.
Different authors offer other approaches to the spiritual condition of humanity, describing it as complex or catastrophic, for example, and generally accompanying their assessments with epithets to suit every taste. I have cited Vervaeke’s view above merely as an illustration.
My aim, however, is to look at this problem more broadly, drawing, among other things, on my own experience of inner intuitive revelation, which, in my view, should be present in any philosophical inquiry.
At present, the fact that humanity has undergone intellectual and creative development is hardly questioned by anyone. Looking at technological progress and all the innovations in various areas of our lives, it is difficult to argue otherwise. Certainly, some regions of the Earth lag behind this process or participate in it only to a limited extent, relying largely on the consumption of the results of other people’s intellectual labor. Nevertheless, a certain critical mass of humanity seems to set the bar, gradually drawing the rest along with it. All of this is accompanied by globalization, in which geographical factors and distances no longer separate isolated pockets of progress. Ideas are exchanged and, consequently, so are technologies.
We are witnessing the gradual transformation of humanity into a kind of mental community.
Yes, it consists of states with very different interests; it contains numerous traditions, religions, and moral approaches. Yes, it is something of a colorful patchwork quilt. But it constitutes a unified whole in which events in one part of the world can transform social life on nearly every continent within a matter of months, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, for example.
Nevertheless, this community has one particular feature: material consciousness.
No significant part of it has risen above the physical world. Humanity has adapted to it as fully as possible, taken root in it, and put it at its service. Over the past several thousand years, our consciousness has become more complex and expanded, but not vertically (for interacting with subtler planes of being), but horizontally (for serving its “earthly” interests). The development of the scientific worldview is gradually undermining traditional forms of religious thought in a significant part of Western society. As a result, we are witnessing, for example, the spread of agnosticism and the loss of the Church’s sacred character in the eyes of those who were once its parishioners.
And yet human consciousness was material several centuries ago, and even earlier. Religious beliefs and adherence to dogma are not in themselves signs of a higher level of spirituality compared with the views of an agnostic. They are signs of conformity to a particular form of collective development. Whatever the environment, so are the beliefs. It is just that, compared with, for example, the Middle Ages, there is now more information and freedom. Everyone is free to choose (in Europe, at least) whatever suits their taste.
And so the material consciousness of different societies and groups gradually merged into a conglomerate whose intellectual development and technological progress are like roots increasingly binding it to the physical plane.
And the problem with this conglomerate is by no means a “meaning crisis” (as Vervaeke calls it) caused by the breakdown of the religious worldview. That is merely one particular aspect, one manifestation of the process described above. Nor is it that technology will enslave humanity, as many fear.
The problem lies in the ability of its spiritual component, on a planetary scale, to transform only horizontally, becoming increasingly complex and expanding.
Get Anton Balanov’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Thanks to the high intellectual level of some of its members and to globalization, this community is exerting an ever-greater influence on the planet’s physical world, on its emotional plane. But as a whole, it is incapable of moving higher.
“We would not love God unless He first loved us,” wrote Augustine of Hippo in his treatise On Grace and Free Will.
And this thought can quite naturally be projected onto the situation concerning the development of human monads on Earth. In order to become aware of and manifest our spiritual essence, this inner love, we need the support and, often, the direct help of those in whom it has already manifested itself and who are willing to share it. And this help comes only “from above”.
It is a profound misconception to believe that humanity will gradually, through its own efforts alone, create a particular spiritual-material environment — the noosphere (the evolution of which was discussed, for example, by Teilhard de Chardin).
Humanity is capable of generating teachings such as secular humanism on its own — teachings that are not entirely logical, as if walking along the edge and ready to fall into the abyss of the “law of the jungle.” It can explore other planets in the Solar System. This community of consciousnesses has managed to imitate its own material thinking through artificial intelligence. But in its present state, it is incapable of comprehending its true spiritual nature. It is difficult to rise above one’s own limitations, especially when, having confined oneself to the exploration of material reality, one believes there is nothing “above” to begin with.
In one of his lectures, John Vervaeke remarked: “Ignorance is a lack of knowledge; foolishness is a lack of wisdom.”
At the current level of development, humanity’s collective consciousness has an abundance of information about the physical world and is developing very successfully in this direction. But wisdom (not in the everyday sense, but in a more integrated sense) — as an understanding of the principles and causes that lie beyond the material plane of existence — has always descended to us “from above”: both directly through prophets and through individual representatives of humanity who perhaps did not claim to possess “universal knowledge,” but who manifested their genius in ways that allowed those around them to at least glimpse beyond the familiar horizon.
Humanity, like other consciousnesses inhabiting the physical world of Earth, has never been left without support or a certain degree of guidance. Prophets came at the right time and corresponded to the conditions and cultural paradigm of the social environment in which they manifested themselves (I wrote about this in my essay What Was Christ Silent About?).
And there is one more nuance that is often forgotten: Earth is also a separate consciousness.
It is not standing still, not only in the cosmic sense but also in the spiritual one. It is an entire system in which humanity, and even the physical world, are far from being the only elements of significance. In general, we should abandon anthropocentrism, a kind of spiritual narcissism. Earth as a system, unlike the community of human consciousnesses, is developing in a comprehensive way.
And it is not humanity that changes Earth on the spiritual level; rather, the planet itself improves the conditions for different monads. We must attune ourselves energetically to it, not the other way around.
What is at issue here is the gradual transformation of Earth’s emotional-mental sphere, the transformation of the environment in which there may no longer be a place for the material conglomerate of human consciousnesses in its present state.
Humanity, like all the other inhabitants of our planet, undoubtedly influences both its physical world and its subtler structures. But I am not inclined, following Teilhard de Chardin, to regard the “Spirit of the Earth” as the result of exclusively human spiritual unification. The “Spirit of the Earth” was already formed long before the emergence of Homo sapiens. And it is not for human monads to change the spiritual environment they inhabit, but rather to participate in its perfection, to enrich it while developing independently themselves. Although, given humanity’s constant slide into materiality, this option seems somewhat idealistic.
Thus, the current state of human consciousness is characterized by the formation of a kind of global community in which there is neither the Brownian motion of individual monads nor a fully-fledged system that could be called such. It contains a critical mass of elements with sufficiently high intellectual potential, while at the same time their level of consciousness largely belongs to the material world. Hence the aforementioned “meaning crisis.”
But humanity, as has always been the case throughout its history, is incapable of escaping the confines of the physical plane on its own. Transformation requires help “from above” — help that is deliberate and systematic. No gradual spiritual evolution can take place on its own in this situation.
And finally, this entire community of consciousnesses does not exist in an absolute void in which it would possess unlimited freedom. Humanity exists on a planet that has its own consciousness and that is not standing still on the spiritual plane but is developing, thereby transforming the emotional-mental environment in which human monads exist.
This is precisely what makes the present moment distinctive. Human consciousness is not in crisis – the ever-deeper penetration into matter is also a form of development, although, one might say, not the most optimal one even in the medium term. Nevertheless, this consciousness is in need of transformation, at the very least to correspond to the changes in the spirituality of our planet. As for how this transformation will take place, with whose help, on the basis of what principles, and in what form, I will explore these questions in one of my forthcoming essays.
