The Cosmos Wakes Up

It was a 14-billion year journey from simple hydrogen to Mahatma

Gandhi. David Loy asks: Is evolution the universe waking up to
itself?

Religions tend to deny or ignore evolution, but what happens if instead

they embrace it and make it central to their message? For Buddhists, the
relevant question is what the teachings on impermanence and
insubstantiality imply about the Big Bang and evolutionary development.
One way to approach this issue is to ask whether evolution is really as
random and meaningless as many scientists believe. According to Brian
Swimme, in his book The Universe Story, the most mysterious and, yes,
spiritualphenomenon in the universe is that if you leave hydrogen alone for
fourteen billion years, it eventually transforms into rosebushes and giraffes
—and us. Now, fourteen billion years might seem like a long time but I
think it is actually a very short period of time to evolve from Big Bang
plasma to a Shakyamuni Buddha or a Gandhi. Unless, of course, matter is
something quite different from the reductionistic way it is usually
understood.
What we usually think of as evolution—the genetic variation that leads to
more complex life-forms—is only one of three interdependent and
progressive processes through which the universe developed. It’s a story as
amazing as any religious myth.
The first step was the creation of the higher elements, formed when
hydrogen fused in the cores of stars and supernovas, which then exploded
and scattered the elements to coalesce into new solar systems. In the
second step, elements such as carbon, oxygen, and sodium provided the
material basis for the eventual appearance of self-replicating species about
four billion years ago, including the appearance of human beings about
200,000 years ago. Last but not least was the process of cultural
development that has been necessary to produce highly evolved human
beings such as the Buddha, and, in our day, Gandhi or Einstein.
To me, it seems implausible that all this is accidental. That does not
necessarily mean that there must be an outside director—a God—who is
organizing the whole thing. Instead, can we understand this groping self-
organization as the universe struggling to become more self-aware? In The
Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry offer such a nondualistic
interpretation: “The eye that searches the Milky Way galaxy is itself an eye
shaped by the Milky Way. The mind that searches for contact with the
Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way galaxy in search of its own
depths.” When Walt Whitman admired a beautiful sunset, he was “a space
the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur.”
Is this the answer to the age-old question, “If there is no self, who
becomes enlightened?” Perhaps our desire to awaken (Buddha means
“awakened one”) is nothing other than the urge of the cosmos to become
aware of itself. “Waking up” is realizing that “I” am not inside my body,
looking out at a world that is separate from me. Rather, “I” am what the
whole universe is doing right here and now, one of the infinite ways that
the totality of its various causes and conditions comes together. My waking
up is the universe waking up to itself.
What did the great Zen master Dogen say after his own deep
enlightenment, when “body and mind fell away”? He said, “I came to
realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the
great wide Earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.” According to
tradition, Shakyamuni awakened when he looked up from his meditations
and saw the morning star (Venus). Did he suddenly realize his nonduality
with that star?
Every species is an experiment of the biosphere, and biologists tell us that
fewer than 1 percent of all species that have ever appeared on Earth still
survive today. The super-sized cortex of homo sapiens enables us to be co-
experimenters and co-creators. (Is this what “created in the image of God”
means?) With us, new types of “species” have become possible: knives and
symphonies, poetry and nuclear bombs. But it is also becoming more and
more obvious that something has gone wrong with our hyper-rationality.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says that “man is a rope across an abyss.” Are we
a transitional species? Must we evolve further in order to survive at all? In
Buddhist terms, our delusions of a separate self are haunted by too much
dukkha, which motivates us to do too many self-destructive things. Maybe
that helps to explain the critical situation we now find ourselves in.
On the other hand, figures like the Buddha might be harbingers of how our
species can develop. In that case, the cultural evolutionary step most
important today would be spiritual practices that address the fiction of a
separate self whose well-being is distinguishable from that of “others.”
Perhaps our basic problem is not self-love, but a profound
misunderstanding of what one’s self really is. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it,
“We are here to overcome the illusion of our separateness.”
Without the compassion that arises when we realize our nonduality—
empathy not only with other humans but with the whole biosphere—it is
becoming likely that civilization as we know it will not survive the next few
centuries. Nor would it deserve to. We are challenged to grow up or get out
of the way. It remains to be seen whether the homo sapiens experiment
will be a successful vehicle for the cosmic evolutionary process.
All this suggests that the eco-crisis is not only a technological and
economic emergency, but a spiritual challenge to realize our oneness with
the Earth. At this point in our evolutionary history, do we really have a
choice?

From the November 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun magazine.

David Loy’s books include The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory,
Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution and 2010's The
World Is Made of Stories. A Zen practitioner for many years, he is a teacher
in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism.