Darwhiggian Evolution and Supernatural Election

Although it really makes no sense to our natural reason, Big Bang cosmology describes an event some 13.7 billion years ago that brought everything into being by expanding outward from a central point of imarginable nothingness. Among other things, scientists deduce that primordial event from the fact that it is still happening now. The cosmos is still banging away, expanding into....

Actually, no one knows what it’s expanding into. It’s a nonsense question, since cosmology only describes the cosmos, not the metacosmos in which it is embedded. That goes without saying, which is to say that it is an unsaid assumption of science.

For the same reason, cosmology cannot answer the question of “what was before the big bang?,” since the big bang brought the modality we call time into existence. “Before” that, there was only eternity and perhaps duration, but not physical time. To ask what was before the big bang, you might just as well ask what your phase looked like before you were bearthed and begaialed, for the answer is roughly the same.

Science adequately describes the horizontal cosmos, which is to say, inadequately. In order to acquire an integral understanding of reality, the linear/temporal/horizontal view must be supplemented by the vertical, which is where revelation, myth, and metaphysics take over. Only these modes can take us beyond the horizon of knowability that afflicts your and myopic little ego. Myth and revelation bypass the ego by making an appeal to our lower and higher intuition, respectively, while metaphysics speaks directly to the timeless intellect which may know absolute truth absolutely, since it is in the image of the divine. These are built-in ways for us to see beyond the temporal illusions of our womentary maninfestation.

We might visualize reality as a circle containing a cross. Science describes the horizontal vector, but there is a second “ray of creation” that extends from the top down and then back up again. The downward descending energy is called the “ray of involution,” while the upward ascending one is called the “ray of evolution.” Of course, this is not the same as Darwinian evolution, which only describes change--but not progress--in the horizontal.

On the strict Darwinian view there is, of course, no such thing as progress, which is as it should be. While technically a “true” theory if we limit ourselves to the horizontal, it is obviously a false and limited understanding if we don’t supplement it with the vertical view of spiritual evolution. Strictly speaking, I can assure you there are no strict “Darwinians,” for even the belief in strict Darwinism takes one out of the strictly horizontal stream of Darwinism, into the realm of transcendent ideas. In short, the theory of pure Darwinism finds itself in the embarassing position of having to express itself in a medium it cannot account for, and make its appeals to a judge that cannot exist. D'oh!

Paradoxically, in order for us to exist and possess our own free will, God cannot exist. But it is not really a paradox, for a moment’s reflection will inform your intellect that if God doesn’t get out of the way, there can be no creation separate from him, no free beings. In other words, at the top of the vertical ray is God. Even that is a bit misleading, for the top of the ray has a “face” we can see from our relative position, as well as an "interior" or "dark side" we cannot see (dark because the light would be too blinding).

Imagine a solar system, if you will, with God at the center. We all have a certain view of God, but “within” God there is the God-beyond-God that trails off into eternity. That is the temporal horizon of God’s intellectual knowability (and here I am again speaking of the higher, faith-infused heart-intellect, not the lower egoic mind).

The vertical “ray of creation” therefore extends on one end from the God-beyond-being to our world “below.” But it doesn’t stop here. Rather, just like the sun’s rays, they go one “forever,” becoming increasingly faint to the point of apparent “nothingness.” But the nothingness is only apparent, since God can only be “relatively absent” from his creation. (Keep that point in mind for later, when we discuss evil and the hostile forces.)

The Kabbala is especially precise on this point, and does an excellent job of objectively describing God's "withdrawal" and the various degrees of being in the vertical ray of creation that "reveil" him. To a certain extent, these degrees are inevitably arbitrary, as are the divisions between the colors of the rainbow. All are an aspect of “pure” white light taking on different properties as one color shades into the next.

God is like the white light who “withdraws” so that color may exist. As different as they may appear, the colors are all internally related to one another, just as the degrees of being interpenetrate and shade into one another. The real world is the entire rainbow and ultimately the white light, although each of us tends to live in just one of the colors, confusing it with the primary reality.

As an aside, I should also say that there is a pure “black” reality at the other end of the ray of creation. It is the absence of light and the blending of all of the colors into an indistinct blur. This is the leftist/totalitarian dream of E Unum Pluribus, in which a false, descending, material "one" is imposed upon reality. It is the basis of multiculturalism, moral relativism, and secular fundamentalism, for it represents a flight form the real One that unifies and transcends, toward division and rule by a secular elite.

Nazism, communism and Islamo-fascism represent “pure black” in the ray of creation, while leftism represents a degree or two or three above that. But leftism tends toward the all-black, for it is a descending theology that has no means to elevate itself, having rejected the cosmic eschatolator at the outset. Therefore it “falls” and descends at the natural rate encoded into our existence, which is 32 feet per second per second.

By the way, this is why spiritual practice requires effort. True, all things are possible with grace, but grace only operates in the cosmos as given to us by God. There are readers who don't want to believe me on this point, and I have no desire to get into an argument with them yet again. But for most of us, our “fall” must be actively countered on a day-to-day, even moment by moment basis. It is not as if you are “saved” and born again, and that's the end of it. Rather, that is only the beginning of it. It represents the formal acknowledgment of the ascending cosmic winds that one will heretofore spend one’s life trying to navigate back up toward the One at the father shore. In the formula of Sri Aurobindo, it is Aspiration-Rejection (of the lower)-Surrender (to the higher) 24/7/365/13.7 billion.

I’m still trying to get to a discussion of the hostile forces. We’re getting there, but I needed to present a bit of background in order to have an implausible framework to discuss them. Plus, I realize that most people tend to just skim blogs and have little patience for anything longer than a bite-sized paragraph or two. So I'm also trying to break it down and make it real for these omies.