HOW HUMANITY CAME INTO BEING

In the standard model as given by modern science, the evolution of consciousness has depended on the increase in the size of the brain. Changes in nutrition, like the discovery of how to cook food with fire, resulted in an enlargement of the hominid brain, and thus in the evolution of modern man. Mind is ultimately the product of matter. This book suggests a reverse perspective. Reality has an inside and an outside, and it is the inside which is the ultimate dimension. Lockley suggests that the evolution of the human mind is part of a vast cosmic process in which consciousness is a power which is immanent in matter and in life, but that it fragments into particles of self-consciousness as human self-awareness increases. Mankind has not yet reached the end of this process. The omega point will be reached when the self-awareness of each individual embraces the unity of all consciousness in love. The book's approach is appropriate to its subject and is holistic. Arguments from psychology, paleontology, ancient myth and legend, the evidence from yoga and mystical experience, are all assembled to make the case. Resolute defenders of the standard model will ignore the appeal to ancient traditions. Likewise Rudolf Steiner and Teilhard de Chardin will be dismissed as mere mystics unworthy of scientific interest even though Teilhard was an eminent palaeontologist. However Lockley has other arguments that are more difficult to brush aside. Although he does not make too much of this, the reductionist interpretation of consciousness is logically and philosophically impossible. Mind cannot be reduced to matter. A thought may be correlated with a brain impulse, it may require that impulse to exist, but a thought is a thought, and not a difference in electric potential in a neurone. Chalmers' 'hard problem' remains. Mind and matter cannot be united in the terms in which we know them. They require an insight which transcends them both. The theme is the evolution of human consciousness. Just as the change from homo erectus to modern man involved an increase in brain size, so it is difficult to deny that it must have involved a corresponding change in inner consciousness. Lockley suggests that originally early hominids had a generalised psychic awareness that each individual shared with the pack. As modern man evolved, this awareness became individualised and sharpened to become the intensely separate and self-aware consciousness of modern man. Mind as we know it is a local crystallisation of a wider universal power. The rational, analytical mind of the scientist is the consummating result of the process. Yet rational self-awareness must accept that it is unlikely to be the end point of evolution. It has at least one further step to go. Einstein replaced Newton, not to disprove him, but rather to build on the foundations he provided. In the same way we assume that present day quantum physics will be in time superseded by a better theory of sub-atomic energy, and that the cosmology of the 'big bang' will be put aside for an even more embracing picture of cosmic origins. Why then should not the very intellectual cast of mind that produces these changes be subject to further evolutionary change itself? What is there beyond isolated ego-centred rationality? Unusual mental states like extreme genius, the awakening of kundalini energy and the chakras, and the cosmic consciousness which comes from spiritual experiences, all point to the higher further evolution of the human mind. An awareness of the field of universal consciousness transcends separate individuality but does not destroy it, just as a genius in music or mathematics produces work which is of universal impersonal validity, and yet they are more themselves in that work than they are in the forgettable flawed personality which supports the genius. Lockley ends the book with a paean to universal love and the Divine creative process which is working through the emergence of human self-awareness. He does not espouse a doctrine of easy and inevitable linear progress: evolution is too complex for that. The future evolution of mankind contains dark possibilities. Nevertheless his vision is profoundly optimistic. The evolution of human consciousness leads to its consummation in the Divine Omega point. What is required to turn these arguments from an eccentric alternative perspective to an accepted vision for the role of humanity for the 21st century? At least four developments can be suggested. Firstly the bankruptcy of materialist reductionism has to be widely recognised. Secondly there has to be a realisation that this perspective transcends the conflict between purely physical science and religion: it leaves them both behind as limited dogmatisms. Thirdly the wider dimensions of unusual conscious experience have to be explored and catalogued so effectively that they can no longer be ignored. Lastly, this alternative vision has to have practical consequences. Psychiatrists treating those suffering from drugs, sexual abuse, or stress should find it more effective to see their patients as a pure consciousness descending into a damaged brain, rather than a damaged brain producing a damaged consciousness. One awaits the future.