That idea was in my mind as I was writing, but never made it onto the page. Thanks for the reminder.

It would be a pleasure to take a look at the biological bits of your book. I can’t promise a quick turn round but I’ll take a look.

Anyway, it’s astonishing how your most recent comment parallels what I’ve been writing about in my book on the Six Elements, where I’m using the traditional practice combined with insights from science to demolish the myth of separateness. There’s stuff about us co-evolving with other species in there, plus the intimate role that microorganisms have in the body’s functioning, plus regarding them as a “microbial organ,” plus the fact that 90% of the cells in the body are not human. And I also discuss the role of viruses in evolution and how we are, to a first approximation, about 90% viral. And there’s material about chimerism and microchimerism as well. It’s all stuff that fascinates me. I can tell I’m going to be begging you to read the MS and give me feedback. If you do it’ll be a far better book.

If there were a Heart Sutra for biologists it would probably include lines like:

“No kingdom, no phyla, no class, no order, no family, no genus, no species, no living being; life itself is emptiness.”

When you start to look closely at the universe it does start to appear seamless. We have the idea in the mind for example that there are waves on the ocean. But where does the wave stop and the ocean begin? It’s of course impossible to say. But the mind insists on some level on reifying the difference.

And for good reason, I think. We need to balance Ratnasambhava’s Wisdom of Equality (nothing is separate) with Amitabha’s Wisdom of Discrimination (although everything in the universe is interconnected things are not textureless). There is a very real sense in which I do not exist as an independent being, but only exist as part of an interdependent whole, but there’s also a very real sense in which I have autonomy within the fabric of that interdependence. As a specific node of reflexive consciousness within the universe I am able to take a degree of responsibility for myself and I’m able to influence the way in which I function. I think that in order to engage in the higher evolution I have to act with a consciousness both of the degree to which “I” am interconnected and the degree to which I can act, as it were autonomously.

I mentioned eternalism in the article above, but I didn’t say anything about nihilism. Nihilism (ucchedavada) would be to say selfhood doesn’t exist, and the Buddha seems to have been wary that the teaching of anatta would be taken to be a confirmation that this is “no self”. When the Buddha said that there was no self he didn’t mean that there was no self. He meant that there was no separate and substantial self. So there is a self, but it’s non-separate and non-substantial.

Gah! This stuff makes my head spin, but then I guess that’s the point — to sweep away our normal lazy assumptions about how things are.

By the way, I don’t quite get your point about Bodhisattvas. The apparent contradiction that comes to my mind as being associated with the Bodhisattva path is along the lines of “A bodhisattva can only vow to save all sentient beings once he realizes that there are no beings to save.” I think that’s just a way of saying, “You’re not really a bodhisattva and you don’t have a bodhisattva’s wisdom and compassion until you have insight into the non-separate nature of all phenomena.” I do think of Bodhisattvas as heroes, but not for running around saving living beings. I think of them as heroes for having broken out of a limited way of seeing things. I think that’s the hardest part. Once you have the right mindset helping living beings is easy (or so I imagine).

Anyway, I really appreciate hearing your thinking on this. Would you be interested in taking a look at the occasional chapter from my book as it, so to speak, evolves?

I think we are in agreement apart from the notion of more/less evolved. I would argue that you can only say a primate is more highly evolved than the bacteria in its gut if you see the two as separate. I feel that the enlightened mind doesn’t make such a clear distinction. By not making this distinction the Bodhisattva ideal becomes a reality.

As a Dharma practice consider the humble mitochondria. Looks just like a bacteria and is in more or less every cell in every eukaryote organism. It has its own simple genome. It has its own evolutionary history separate but intertwined with the host organism. It is typically inherited down the maternal line and does not undergoing recombination at sex. When I say ‘me’ do I include ‘my’ mitochondria? Am I more advanced than they are or am I a colony of simple organisms? Now add in all my other symbiotic relationships.

There really is only one product of evolution and that is the totality of life. You can carve that totality up in many ways to tell many stories but the stories often say more about the story teller than about life. Histories are about historians.

What is it that becomes self aware and travels down the path? I guess that is the question I try to answer through my practice but it certainly is not the lone-primate-me as a product of evolution. Such a thing only exists in one world view and I know that the enlightened mind isn’t bound by a single world view.

I guess I am saying the notion of ‘higher evolution’ bugs me and I find it unhelpful. It leads to people saying the Bodhisattva Idea is a contradiction (“How can we strive for the liberation of all beings even though we know they can’t be saved!”) when it isn’t a contradiction at all. By striving for enlightenment I am all beings. Sadly I see people only considering Bodhisattavas as heroes – not a totally unhelpful image but perhaps not the most useful one for the ‘me’ generation.

I wasn’t trying to “catch” you so there wasn’t really any bait on offer. Honest! I just mentioned that idea of yours because I thought it was an interesting and original one. It’s been in my mind for years now, awaiting a chance to be expressed.

From a strict scientific standpoint there’s certainly a case for saying that all life is “equally evolved.” I understand that argument and I even agree with it as a corrective to the rather linear view of evolution that used to prevail, with diagrams of an amoeba at one end of a line of beings and a human at the other. I know for example that chimpanzees have undergone more evolutionary changes to their genome than we have to ours in the however-many-millions of years it is since our lineages parted ways. So someone could argue that chimpanzees are more highly evolved than humans. The whole concept of things being “more highly evolved” than others is clearly problematic from a strictly objective point of view if you’re just talking about genes. But we’re more than just our genes, and genes are not the only things that evolve.

As a Buddhist as well as someone who respects science I don’t see things entirely from that orthodox scientific point of view where we see everything as “equally evolved” – except from a limited point of view that is mainly genetic. From a Buddhist (and some other — I don’t know its name) point of view I think in terms of the emergence of new orders of existence. In Buddhism this is described in terms of the five niyamas. From a world that began as pure physics and chemistry, life evolved, and then consciousness evolved, and then reflexive self-consciousness (a consciousness that can alter its own makeup) evolved. And then finally a new kind of consciousness (bodhi) evolved. It seems that you can’t quite define one level in terms of the one that came before, so that no definition of life can be made purely in terms of chemistry and physics, and no definition of consciousness can be made (to date, at least) in terms of biochemistry and physiology. I think that, similarly, awakened consciousness can’t be defined or understood in terms of the unawakened mind, because the unawakened mind is limited by deep patterns that the awakened mind has eliminated. I don’t think we can grasp the viewpoint of an enlightened being any more than a dog can have an idea of what’s going on in my mind when I’m caught up in some complex moral dilemma.

So I see these new levels of complexity evolving, and I think that a blue whale, with a complex social structure and the ability to communicate, or a chimpanzee that can make tools, are more “highly evolved” (in the sense of the emergence of higher orders of being) than say, blue-green algae or a prokaryote, even if arguably blue-green algae and prokaryotes are better fitted for surviving in their niches than the blue whale or chimpanzee are in theirs and even if all these animals have undergone the same amount of evolutionary change, genetically speaking. Now in doing this I’m of course making judgments, or to put it another way I’m assigning value. That’s one of the things that higher-order organisms do, and I’m not ashamed of my evolutionary-programmed propensity to do this. Having values is an essential part of being human. Those values may only exist in the human mind but that’s the only kind of mind that (for the moment) I can inhabit. And I think that values are important. That itself is me making a value, but again that’s just what value-perceiving minds do — we have reflexive self-consciousness that allows us to examine our values and to choose those that we think are “best.”

I think the reason that the Dalai Lama said that he considered himself to be a Darwinist was because Darwin thought that compassion had evolved, so that we live in a universe that has in some sense a moral dimension (the kamma-niyama). So the lower evolution does indeed create the conditions in which the higher evolution occurs, and without the lower evolution there is clearly no higher evolution. There is a discontinuity between the two forms of evolution, and perhaps in some ways the word “evolution” with regards to the higher evolution is simply a metaphor and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I’m not attached to the terminology. But the discontinuity, I’d suggest, is of a similar nature to that separating mere chemistry and life, biochemistry and consciousness, and simple consciousness and reflexive self-consciousness. In fact the discontinuity exists where simple consciousness ends off and self-consciousness arises — where we get to questioning our values and deciding things like what kind of person we want to be, what kind of life do we want to live, what kind of society we want to create, and even what kind of values do we want to have fueling our science.

But the main point I’m trying to make in the article is that there isn’t fundamentally any contradiction between evolution and Buddhism. The two can coexist quite peacefully, even if we non-scientists and armchair scientists insist on trying to see connections that might not be welcome from a strictly materialist point of view. You’re not likely to see Buddhists campaigning for the teaching of Buddhist Creation Science in schools.

As for interdependence – absolutely! I’m writing a book right now on the six elements and how examining them reveals the notion of a separate and independent self to be a delusion. There’s a lot of science in the book, including discussion of gut bacteria, and I think you’d find it interesting (although I’ve only finished two chapters so far). The practice itself is a good way to become conscious of unconsciously-held and false assumptions that we project onto our experience. In other words it’s a tool for moving closer to the dhamma-niyama, where any values we hold are in accord with how things really are. The book aims to encourage this kind of reflection, and is in effect a prolonged experience of the six-element practice.

But there is a far bigger and generally more brilliant thing that comes out of the study of evolution through natural selection. It is the great leveler. We are no more or less evolved than anything else on the planet. Humans are animals that have evolved as an element of an incredibly complex system that includes the plants we eat, the gut bacteria that digest them (are they ‘us’ or are they separate) and the diseases that could kill us. All are equally ‘evolved’ and equally ‘advanced’ and, because of their interdependence, equally as complex. It is a traditional practice to sit in the charnel grounds and observe decomposing bodies. There are also great spiritual lessons to be learned from reaching both an intellectual and spiritual understanding of evolution and how our living world has come into existence. Holding a flower and comprehend our physical, ecological and evolutionary links with it helps dissolve the illusion of an independent self.