Miracles and Human Evolution

 Is there any reason to believe that human beings have reached the climax of their evolutionary potential? Or, as a species, is there room for us to imagine a next stage of our development? To be clear, we are long way off from realizing our potential.  When we look around at the world today, we see evolved nations constantly engaged in murderous brutality toward defenseless children, women, and other civilians, even boasting about their barbarity. These rich and powerful barbarians are also wreaking havoc on the planetary environment, destroying numberless species of nonhuman animals.  Given this vast twofold assault on life everywhere on our planet, human evolution today seems to have turned suicidal—a menace to the entire planet and its living creatures.

In view of this take on the human situation, I can imagine a cynic saying, “it will take a miracle to save us from ourselves!”   Cynicism aside, I would like to intervene with  an optimistic note.  I think we have ample evidence for certain extraordinary human capacities that, once awakened, might turn the tide against the dark side of human nature.  The interesting point to underscore: unleashing these higher capacities is based on certain altered states of consciousness. The starting point for evolutionary advance is our consciousness.  

Consider an altered state familiar to us all, dream consciousness. Research demonstrates, as I know from experience, that dreaming is sometimes spontaneously conducive to precognition or telepathy. But we can also intentionally produce effects from our consciousness.   Meditative states in which a yogi or a shaman alter the shape and flow of their consciousness may result in extraordinary phenomena, for example, of healing,  levitation, teleportation, etc.

Perhaps the most spectacular altered state of consciousness comes with the near-death experience (NDE). Thanks to modern techniques of resuscitation, thousands of people have near-death experiences that radically transform them, in which, for example, they emerge newly endowed with expanded compassion and intellect. The NDE may well be the most extraordinary, altered state of consciousness. It may be the key to the next step in human evolution.

The NDE appears in almost every way to leave us with the conviction that there is another nonphysical universe that we enter when we shed our physical body at death.  In addition, the NDE points to the telepathic and empathic expansion of consciousness as constituting our future humanity.

The scientific challenge must be, how do we learn to induce this critical altered state without incurring literal near-death?  What I found was that it was possible among mystics, yogis, and shamans.  In my study of Joseph Copertino, a mystic famous for all manner of supernormal phenomena, we found a person whose entire spiritual practice was oriented toward psychically disconnecting himself from life itself.  Through fasting, meditation, and self-mastery of all ego-bound attachments, he broke through to states of mind that freed him from the normal constraints of gravity, enabling him to levitate and defy other common constraints on mental and physical life.  For example, he read the minds of the people around him so clearly and casually that his superiors asked him to be more discreet about commenting on what folks were privately thinking. If you were supposed to be deep in prayer and your mind wandered to thoughts of a steaming plate of pasta, Joseph would catch you out. Annoying, to be sure. (See my book, The Man Who Could Fly.)

The key point: Information about supernormal powers collected by critical investigators speaks to the evolutionary potential of human beings.  Given the urgent need to get on with the transformation, we ask: How do we set into motion a process leading to a truly higher education?  How do we awaken our planetary consciousness?  We need to examine the   spiritual practices known to induce breakthroughs to transformation.

Crossing psychically into the higher spaces is sought in many ways. Let me try to describe what seems to be the essence of the process.  In a normal waking moment, whether boring or fascinating, our entire consciousness is occupied, and simultaneously in many ways. We’re thinking about something, a recent event or a future scene we’r worried about; we’re having sensations, visual, auditory, tactile. There is always awareness of our body, sitting in a chair, walking, meeting or somehow connecting with other people, mentally or physically, and so on and so forth.  The entire field of our awareness is occupied with sensations, emotions, intentions, memories, assumptions, and so on and so forth.

The supernormal depths of ourselves are buried beneath all that immediate personal consciousness.  But—and this is key--it is possible, thanks to the freedom to direct our attention to one thing and to exclude all else, to radically control our mental life. Not easily done but it is open to experiment. And we have a viable concept.  What is needed is to clear the entire field of personal consciousness to make room for the transpersonal content to flow in. If so, there is a way to propel oneself into the postmortem universe of consciousness that near-death data seem powerfully to indicate.  If this is a coherent concept and hypothesis, it means that reason and empirical data, free from religion and mythology, enable us to talk rationally about the existence of a psychospiritual soul and afterworld.

The great experimental challenge of this new science of spirituality: How to empty the entire field of consciousness of its personal associations.  Well, there is a surefire method: stop your heart from beating, which cuts blood off to the brain, and you die. In this way, the near-death experience results, as we know from thousands of case histories. Our job is to figure out how to gain control of our conscious personality, creating the space that allows for the influx of what lies deep within us.  The intriguing idea is that we may be traveling through life with a treasure-chest of miracle powers within us.  The difficulty is that the extraordinary influx that awaits us is linked to the worst thing we can imagine happening to us.   For details, see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief (Available at Anomalist Books or Amazon.