Spirituality And Its Evolution

In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great. But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man’s inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future. Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of “evolution”: the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard’s famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Spiritual Evolution is a life’s work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.

The Presence of the Infinite sheds new light on the important subject of spiritual experience. Using the emerging insights of evolutionary spirituality, integral philosopher Steve McIntosh enlarges readers’ capacity to have spiritual experience more abundantly and use it more effectively to improve their lives and the world around them. The Presence of the Infinite starts by providing a timely cultural analysis and critique of the various forms of spirituality that are vying for influence in contemporary American society. Building on this context, McIntosh shows how evolutionary spirituality overcomes the limitations of religious, secular, and New Age spirituality by better harmonizing science and spirit. Evolutionary spirituality’s transcendent potential is found in its deepening realization of the essentially spiritual qualities of beauty, truth, and goodness. McIntosh then uses evolutionary spirituality’s enlarged understanding of what spiritual experience is and how it works to consider the question of ultimate reality. This leads to an examination of conflicting ideas that regard spirit as either formless and nondual, or as loving and creative. By working to harmonize and integrate these alternative conceptions of ultimate reality, McIntosh shows how evolutionary spirituality can achieve a synthesis of nondual and theistic teachings of truth that can produce a spiritual renaissance in America and beyond. The Presence of the Infinite is destined to become a definitive text in the exciting new field of evolutionary spirituality.

These personal essays by esteemed scientists worldwide describe the spiritual journeys they have taken. Autohirs share their own experiences of learning to blend an understanding of the Divine with scientific perspectives.

A practical guide to conscious evolution for personal, spiritual, and global transformation • Provides spiritual practices to manifest a meaningful connection between Self and God/Source/Creator and psychological exercises to heal the shadow self • Offers an in-depth overview of religion and spirituality, both the old paradigm and the evolving new one • Includes the first fully written account of the First Nations Peoples’ oral wisdom teachings on the 7 Dark, 7 Light, and 7 Rainbow Arrows for evolving consciousness We are living in an unprecedented time of change, a new epoch with a new consciousness. We have reached Zero Point in our personal and collective consciousness and are now in a phase of accelerated conscious evolution and manifestation of personal and collective vision. As the current political, economic, and social systems begin to collapse, people are instinctively and intuitively reevaluating their lives and asking what has real meaning and value and what brings them true peace and happiness. Humanity is now poised to establish a unified, co-creative new world that reflects the evolved consciousness of awakened hearts and minds, of collaboration, and of peace. Presenting a guide for these auspicious times, Nicolya Christi offers psychological and spiritual tools to accelerate conscious and global evolution and initiate a New Consciousness for the post–December 21st, 2012, epoch. She gives an in-depth overview of religion and spirituality, both the old paradigm and the evolving new one, and explains how all trauma results from “empathic disconnection,” which hinders our spiritual growth. She provides spiritual practices to manifest a meaningful connection between Self and God/Source/Creator as well as psychological exercises to heal and integrate the shadow self and dissolve psychological wounds. She offers the first fully written account of the First Nations Peoples’ oral wisdom teachings on the 7 Dark, 7 Light, and 7 Rainbow Arrows for evolving consciousness. She also writes in depth about the evolution of relationship and aspiring to a higher love and sexuality. Detailing several maps and models for conscious and global evolution, this handbook inspires each of us toward a consciously evolving spirituality and a true and authentic relationship with God/Source/Creator.

How are we to reconcile a literal reading of the Creation story in the Bible with what science tells us of how the universe and humankind came to be? Based on the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, E. Kent Rogers's Seven Days of Spiritual Evolution points the way to a deeper symbolic meaning hidden within the narrative of Genesis 1. Using his experience as a mental health counselor and spiritual practitioner, he develops practical techniques for spiritual growth on our own personal journey from the darkness to the light.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

Religious capacity is a highly elaborate, neurocognitive human trait that has a solid evolutionary foundation. This book uses a multidisciplinary approach to describe millions of years of biological innovations that eventually give rise to the modern trait and its varied expression in humanity’s many religions. The authors present a scientific model and a central thesis that the brain organs, networks, and capacities that allowed humans to survive physically also gave our species the ability to create theologies, find sustenance in religious practice, and use religion to support the social group. Yet, the trait of religious capacity remains non-obligatory, like reading and mathematics. The individual can choose not to use it. The approach relies on research findings in nine disciplines, including the work of countless neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. This is a cutting-edge examination of the evolutionary origins of humanity’s interaction with the supernatural. It will be of keen interest to academics working in Religious Studies, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, and Psychology.