Outside of small interest groups such as evolutionary spiritualists and transhumanists—or science-fiction literature and Hollywood movies where the idea of intelligent robots is a matter of entertainment and diversion—the concept of radical human transformation remains unfamiliar to the public in general, and its naturalness and inevitability has not yet entered the public imagination. The public and even much of the intellectual community remain ignorant or in denial of the most significant potential changes ahead.
What is the best way to serve evolution (or cosmic purpose) in the larger sense? Does evolution stop with the advent of the human on the stage of cosmic history? Can there be a higher, nobler goal than the individual’s welfare and happiness? Should there be such a goal? These questions have not received the attention they deserve.
I believe that this sense of a greater calling, this great ideal of abandoning the self in order to embrace the larger world, lies deeply within every one of us. Just like the fearless pilots in the Apollo program, there are those of us who are still willing to sacrifice, even die, for scientific adventure. What we lack is a cosmic vision, together with a down-to-earth understanding of the problems we should tackle and the accomplishments we should aim for.
We may outstrip our forebears in wealth, creature comforts, health, and lifespan, but a person or a culture that is unable to compete with the past’s greatest expressions of human spirit is in some sense a backward one. In fact, we are now equipped to identify bigger goals than were even known by those who shaped the world we live in today. But few of us have the ambition or insight to “belong to the ages” rather than just to the moment.
We have reached a threshold: modernity and science seem to be putting the human species in danger, but at the same time they are offering the unprecedented, seemingly incredible promise of a quantum leap in the human condition. As we stand at the posthuman frontier, should we retreat by actively curtailing further progress, or instead bravely and responsibly embrace the challenges ahead?
The notion of humanity’s place in the universe must be brought to the foreground in order to answer Nietzsche’s still-unaddressed concern about the “death of God” and the corresponding lack of human purpose in a scientific age.
We need a higher goal, a new covenant with that which is greater than ourselves, if we are to move toward and realize our greatest purpose and potential. And there is little we can find in our current culture that promotes further cosmic evolution through human transformation and the creation of higher intelligence and nobler aspiration.
Our most overarching human objective seems to have been reduced to the simplistic notion of the maximization of human happiness, which requires little more than that everybody be nice to others and “do no harm.” This feel-good goal is at best egocentric complacency, with the implicit assertion that humankind is an end in itself. It plays safely and pleasantly to the lowest common denominator of human desires. At worst, however, it represents a decadent self-indulgence that flatly flies in the face of what we now know about how the universe evolved, where we came from, our place in evolution, and what our potential is.
Peace, prosperity, harmony, and human happiness are not ultimate ends in themselves; they become great goals only in the context of how they can serve a larger, cosmic purpose—which I will refer to as the one true Creation. Although I do not pretend to be able to fathom this purpose in its totality, or what the next great leaps in evolution and consciousness will “look like,” our ever-increasing understanding of science and evolution has given us some tantalizing clues.
We can say that we are part—or maybe even a focal point—of an amazing cosmic process that started with the Big Bang more than thirteen billion years ago. We can also say that the effort to consciously participate in the unfolding of this grand evolutionary process is the greatest purpose we can find and identify with, and it constitutes a new kind of heroism for our time.
There is only one universe and one truth regarding its fundamental nature, which is revealed to us bit by bit through our practice. We got to where we are today by submitting ideas to rigorous tests in debates and real-world practices. Bad ideas are discarded and perhaps forgotten, good ideas are allowed to spread and drive decisions, and new ideas are encouraged to emerge. This evolutionary process never ends. When we cooperate with this process, our culture and civilization advance; when this process is suppressed, the culture or civilization becomes out of touch with reality and irrelevant.
We have now discovered the extraordinary process by which energy and light gave rise to matter, matter to life, life to consciousness, and conscious beings to culture, technology, and all the miraculous creativity and ingenuity of our civilization. It seems to be self-evident that future sentient beings with expanded conscious capabilities will be “natural” extensions of this cosmic process.
It is essential for us to find a narrative, a goal, a purpose that is greater than merely our own happiness. In fact, in order to shed any light on the meaning of the self and of our humanity, our point of reference must be outside of it.
Our emphasis is not just on human history, but on the link between the history of humanity and that of the history of the universe; not just on human relationships, but on the link between the human condition and the cosmic future. Only from this greater perspective can we break free of our instinctive recoil and cultural taboos and consider our posthuman future from an informed yet open-minded position.
If novelty endlessly arises in the course of time, how can one be sure that humanity is the pinnacle of the entire cosmic evolutionary process?
Compared with the 13.7-billion-year-old universe that contains at least billions of galaxies, our existence is of absolutely negligible magnitude, both physically and temporally. Humanity has yet to comprehend this implication and shift its attention from an inward-looking fatalist being to an outward looking, willful, autonomous becoming.
The human being is neither the final product of the universe nor merely an accidental happening on a little planet.
Evolution is how the world functions and creates. Evolution is in fact a profound cosmic process, not just a theory of how biological species were originated and evolved.
The principle of evolution offers a new context for answering the deepest questions we can raise. Why are we here? Why has life continued to survive and thrive after billions of years? Why is there good and evil? Why is happiness so elusive? Why do we have to die? Why do we live in a vast, mostly empty and cold universe that is seemingly devoid of life except on Earth? Every one of us has at least touched upon such questions.
Modern science and evolutionary theory help us to see, as far as we can, the world as an interconnected whole and as an endless drama unfolding. They help us to find our peace in the whole process.
Evolutionary theory does not answer the “ultimate” question of why the universe exists—nothing within the universe can—but it is the best explanation we have to answer the question of how highly organized and complex structures like human beings can arise through spontaneous, random actions at much lower, simpler levels.
Evolution is a non-miraculous process that has never ceased functioning in universal history, and there is no reason to expect it to come to a grinding halt in the future. Taken apart and examined in detail, evolution seems to be a chaotic mess; put together, the entire process makes sense and reveals a directional grand pattern in spite of its random nature.
We, as self-conscious intelligent beings, are not merely passive participants in the pursuit of personal freedom and happiness, but active directors in the drama of cosmic evolution. Humanity’s conscious efforts to transform itself in this way can be called conscious evolution, and conscious evolution is the new wave beyond natural and cultural evolution.
The ultimate meaning of our lives rests not in our personal happiness but in our contribution to cosmic evolution—a process that transcends the human and yet is integral to who and what we are in the universe.
We are masters of the universe, not in the sense that the universe was put in place and designed for us, but in the sense that, going forward, we can determine our own destiny and that of the universe.
Collectively, moving our highest concern from human happiness to cosmic transcendence is very difficult, but not impossible, for two reasons. First, we are not forcing ourselves to give up our human goals, since the pursuit of happiness is the most realistic way to realize the higher goal. Second, deep down we really do have what it takes to open a drastically new era in cosmic evolution.
If we examine what we know today and keep an open mind, we can perceive a movement in the universe toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness that is as convincing as experiencing the power of love or the beauty of the natural world.
Intelligence and spirit have filled the universe, and new horizons invisible and unimaginable to us have opened up.
From the vantage point of the cosmos, the scope of our vision is very limited, individually and collectively, and will remain so as long as we remain human. Thousands of years of cultural and technological evolution have done wonders to increase our knowledge of many things and our ability to apply that knowledge to make a difference in our lives, but all of this has had only marginal impacts on our intuitive perceptions of the world. Yet, that says nothing about future evolution beyond human beings and the potential for our spiritual descendants to make sense of it all and to expand intelligence and spirit beyond our wildest dreams.