The Radical Evolutionist

A while ago someone who had read one of my little tirades against contemporary leftism said to me "So you're a conservative then?" People often assume that if you're not one thing you must be the other but I don't identify with either political side, being only concerned with politics to the extent that they reflect or deny spiritual realities. From that perspective, I would certainly say I lean more to the right than the left but the modern right doesn't have much that is traditional about it, particularly since it has abandoned any religious attitude to life. And even when it is religious, it tends to be stuck in the past and unable to evolve. That is not necessarily a bad thing, given the direction change usually takes nowadays, but it can also lead to rigidity and an arid spirituality of the letter rather than the spirit.

From its own point of view, the keynote of the left is the idea of progress and I am definitely in favour of that. As far as I am concerned, this is not the issue to find fault with as regards leftist preoccupations. If we define a conservative as wanting to remain in the past without change and a progressive as seeking change, I am in the latter camp. But what sort of change? That's the point. It seems to me that the modern left wants to remake humanity severed from its roots and the natural truth of its being. We need to grow but proper growth must come from the roots. In fact, if you take the example of a tree you see that when the tree grows, the roots must actually go deeper into the earth. That’s an example to think about. To progress and go further you don't deny the past. You deepen your roots and understand them better, perhaps going from a shallow grasp of what they really signify to one that better takes in their grounding in the bedrock of truth.

So it's not the idea of progress I reject in the left but progress cut off from the past and based on a false foundation. That is why I call this post (with a tip of the hat to John Michell*) the radical evolutionist. Radical, of course, means of the roots, and evolution must grow out of the past to be real progress. What doesn't grow stagnates and then dies but to change the traditions of the past without having fully understood them and absorbed their lessons can easily lead to disaster. We need to have the proper balance between past and future, being faithful to our roots but able to expand beyond their current expression. The perfect example of this was Christianity which stayed true to its Jewish roots while also going dramatically beyond those, though without denying or rejecting their fundamental nature.

The question then arises is Christianity, as we now understand it, the limit to our growth? Has our spiritual understanding gone as far as it can go or are there further horizons beyond those we now can see? Of course, a Christian would say, yes there are but these will be revealed in heaven. Very true but that's not what I mean. Is there a deeper understanding of spirituality that we can, and therefore should, have even now? We cannot dismiss the expansion of consciousness that has taken place over the last 2 to 3 centuries but we have to see that that has usually manifested itself on the material plane instead of the spiritual one as it should have done, and often with very bad results. Somehow we have to integrate that with a genuine spiritual understanding, particularly, for us in the West, one centred on Christ though not restricted to Christianity as it has been. What this means is that our spirituality must become a more active, inner one and not remain a largely passive thing dependent on established doctrine. This higher understanding has always been present within Christianity but usually regarded as proper only for mystics and saints.

I said in a comment on an earlier post that we are living at a time when we have to find our own path to God for only thus can we know him for ourselves and not at second hand. The inner path need not reject the outer path but it has to make any truths of that path our own. Traditional Christians might baulk at such a statement knowing that it can lead to heresy and inflation but they should understand that a developed spiritual consciousness requires full participation of the imagination, which is a spiritual faculty when properly developed, and it must be an individual achievement rather than a collective one. At the same time, those wedded to contemporary beliefs about progress have to see that the future must be built on the past and cannot do without the truth of Christ. That must be the soil in which any new understanding about life has to grow. This will not wholly replace but deepen the faith and knowledge of the past.

The wonder of God is that there is no top nor bottom to an understanding of him. We are called to deepen our knowledge of divine reality until we reach the point of transformation into a higher being, one that includes but transcends the merely human as we now know it. It is a fifth kingdom, one beyond that of mineral, vegetable, animal and human. This was the state of the Masters who taught me and it can be our state too. This is the spiritual meaning of radical evolution.

* who published a book of essays under the title The Radical Traditionalist.