The Evolutionary Clock Is Running Down

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up recreating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

In an interview shortly before his death in 1961, the great psychologist, Carl Jung, made the prescient observation that "we are the origin of all coming evil." Fifty years later, with the Earth's atmosphere warming and amidst widespread hunger, poverty, continuous wars and a massive species extinction event caused by our impact on the planet's ecosystem, we are coming face-to-face with that evil. Can we survive the multiple crises we have brought down upon ourselves? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.

"Crises are often the catalyst for change," observes spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. In the attached video, the enlightened neo-Buddhist points out that the evolutionary clock is running down for mankind as a species, and that there is a spiritual imperative for us to evolve in consciousness before time runs out.

"There is tremendous pressure on humanity - on humanity's consciousness - right now, he observes. "We all feel it. . . . There is tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everybody knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness this opportunity will be missed."

Religion, Ecumenical Faith and Science: Eastern and Western Perspectives

"Religion must be studied on a broader basis than formerly. All narrow, limited fighting ideas of religion must go. All sect ideas and tribal or national ideas of religion must be given up. That each tribe or nation should have its own particular God, and think that every other is wrong, is a superstition that should belong to the past. All such ideas should be abandoned."

-- Swami Vivikenanda -- 

Written early in the last century, Swami Vivikenanda's advocacy of a universal tolerance for all religions is based on a recognition that, in essence, all religions contain the same impartial truths,  truths that are not inherently conflictive with other faiths or, indeed, with science.

"Religion," Vivkenanda points out, "is the manifestation of Divinity already in man. . . . (and) the proof of one religion depends on the truth of all the rest."

"For instance," he reasons, "if I have six fingers, and no one else has, you may well say that is abnormal. The same reasoning may be applied to the argument that only one religion is true and all others false. One religion only, like one set of six fingers in the world, would be unnatural. We see, therefore, that if one religion is true, all others must be true. There are differences in non-essentials, but in essentials they are all one."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), p. 237.]

In the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, released in 1994, we see a similar, yet guarded, recognition of the ecumenical nature of religion expressed by what has historically been one of the most exclusionary of faiths. After acknowledging the special bonds with both Judaism and Islam, the revised Catechism acknowledges the following:

"The Church's bond with non-Christian religions is in the first place the common origin and end of the human race:

All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. . . .

The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved."

["Catechism of the Catholic Church'" paras. 839-842.]

And what about the relationship between religion and science? "Is religion," Vivikenanda asks, "to justify itself by the discoveries of reason, through which every other concrete science justifies itself? Are the same methods of investigation which we apply to sciences and knowledge outside, to be applied to the science of Religion?"

"In my opinion," Vivikenanda observes, "this must be so, and I am also of (the) opinion that the sooner it is done the better. If a religion is destroyed by such investigations, it was then all the time useless, unworthy superstition; and the sooner it goes the better. I am thoroughly convinced that its destruction would be the best thing that could happen. All that is dross will be taken off, no doubt, but the essential parts of religion will emerge triumphant out of the investigation. Not only will it be made scientific, as scientific, at least, as any of the conclusions of physics or chemistry, but will have greater strength, because physics or chemistry has no internal mandate to vouch for its truth, which religion has."

[Vivikenanda, "Teachings of Swami Vivikenanda," (Advaita Ashrama), pp. 237-238.]

For his part, roughly 100 years after Vivkenanda's time, Pope Benedict XVI has moved radically towards a resolution and reconciliation of religion and science. In addressing a Vatican conference into the origin of life in the universe (held on October 31, 2008), he made the following comments:

"(Q)uestions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence."

"To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3)."

"To 'evolve' literally means 'to unroll a scroll,' that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."

To reconcile one's religion with all "other" religions is the great task for every individual, while reconciling religion with science is the great task of all religionists and scientists alike.

In Memoriam: "To One Shortly to Die"

What words do you say to the dying? I had watched my friend decline and knew that this was, perhaps, the last time we would meet together, the last time I would be able to comfort, perhaps, the man who had brought and opened up a new vista of consciousness and being to my awareness.

How to reassure a man who really needed no assurance save what each of us might want when a companion on the spiritual path meets with us one last time on what we know will be our death bed?

Socrates, before the poison took hold, told his friends: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows." What was I to say?

We had walked a long way together on paths that had too briefly merged, and together we had explored what other wayfarers had said. And as he was no fabulist, but a realist, I chose the following poem by Walt Whitman, a spiritual kinsman, to reassure him and to ease him on his way:

TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE

From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate.
I am exact and merciless, but I love you - there is no escape for you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you feel it,
I do not argue, bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you, I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

"Apart from the physical pain," I asked him, "is there any fear or suffering?" (For I'd asked this of an enlightened man upon his death bed, and he had laughed heartily at the proposition.)

"No, just confusion," he replied.

"What confuses you?," I asked.

"Why," he asked me, looking up, "do I struggle to hold on?"

I told him that there was no longer any reason for him to hold on, that he had learned all that he had come here to learn, and that he had taught scores of others (including me) what he had learned.

"I'll have to consider that," he said. And then he asked me to help him lay back down.

I laid him down, and he slipped off his oxygen mask. I told him that I loved him, kissed his cheek and took my leave. I am told that shortly thereafter he slipped into a coma, where he lingered for a day or so before departing.

The next evening, as I sat with my father waiting for a chorale to be performed, my thoughts turned back to my friend, for he had been a musician. "How much he would like this," I thought. And just at that time, I'm told, he revived for a moment, surrounded by others who loved him, and to whom he'd taught peace.

He lingered for a moment in silence, closed his eyes, and then breathed his last. It was in a silent and smiling acceptance, I'm told, that he slipped into his final deathless sleep. He had evolved.

Aldous Huxley and "The Perennial Philosophy"

One of the foremost voices of spiritual awakening in the modern West was the writer, Aldous Huxley, While the dystopic, science-fiction novel, "A Brave New World," is perhaps his most famous work, "The Perennial Philosophy," his collection and commentary on mystic and esotreic religious writings from all the world's great wisdom traditions, may be his most lasting.

In an introduction to a translation of the Bhagavad Gita by his friends Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, Huxley penned the following concise explanation of what the perennial philosophy behind the world's greatest wisdom traditions and philosophies is, observing:

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

In "The Perennial Philosophy" itself, Huxley illustrates what he means by such "unitive knowledge" by quoting and then discussing the following observations of the Zen master, Huang Po (d. 850 C.E.), who wrote about and taught the direct transmission of enlightenment.

"When followers of Zen fail to go beyond the world of their senses and thoughts, all their doings and movements are of no significance. But when the senses and thoughts are annihilated all the passages to Universal Mind are blocked, and no entrance then becomes possible. The original Mind is to be recognized along with the working of the senses and thoughts - only it does not belong to them, nor yet is it independent of them. Do not build up your views upon your senses and thoughts, do not base your understanding upon your senses and thoughts, do not try to grasp Reality by rejecting your senses and thoughts. When you are neither attached to, nor detached from, them, then you enjoy your perfect unobstructed freedom, then you have your seat of enlightenment.

["The Perennial Philosophy," pp. 58-59]

"Every individual being," Huxley observes, "from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds may be thought of . . . as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy."

"The creature, as creature," he writes, "may be very far from God, in the sense that it lacks the intelligence to discover the nature of the divine Ground of its being. But the creature in its eternal essence - as the meeting place of creatureliness and primordial Godhead - is one of the infinite number of points where divine Reality is wholly and eternally present. Because of this, rational beings can come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, (while) non-rational and inanimate beings may reveal to rational beings the fulness of God's presence within their material forms."

Huxley, like his friend Isherwood, was a student of the Advaita Vedanta, and was clearly a pantheist, viewing everything as an emanation of the "primarily Godhead." In this respect, his views are similar to any number of spiritual giants, modern and ancient. One of these giants was undoubtedly the Sufi poet, Rumi.

Huxley was a mystic and philosopher who wrote  philosophic prose, while Rumi was a philosopher and mystic, who wrote some of the world's most beautiful mystic poetry. Writing of the many forms that the Godhead takes, he observed:

                                                          We began
as a mineral. We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state, and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we slightly recall
being green again.

                            That's how a young person turns
toward a teacher. That's how a baby leans
towards the breast, without knowing the secret
of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligences,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,

and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," p. 113]

Huxley, Huang Po and Rumi would all undoubtedly tell us that we are far more than we realize, that we are part of a larger whole, that we are but seemingly individual manifestations of that which is the divine.

Andrew Cohen and Rupert Sheldrake: Is Evoution Sacred?

In a thought-provoking dialogue (below) between spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and the innovative biologist Rupert Sheldrake, two voices from the leading-edge of our post-modern culture discuss whether evolution, itself, may perhaps be sacred.

Noted biologist and author,
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

"We can become aware of our connection to the cosmos and this vast evolutionary process," says Sheldrake," but the question is: 'Where is it going?' Does it just go ever and onwards and upwards forever until we get more and more enlightened and more and more cosmically aware? Or, does there come a point where there is some kind of a culmination of the whole cosmic evolutionary process?"

Noting that the Judeo-Christian tradition, which gave us "the vision of a progressive evolution in time," always had an explicit goal in the future, Sheldrake asks Cohen (a proponent of the teaching he calls "evolutionary enlightenment") what an 'end-state' to the evolutionary process would be.

In observing that it is a "big picture" answer that frankly verges on "the realm of fantasy," Cohen notes that the "direction or the 'teleos' of the evolutionary process is towards consciousness itself."

Spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen,
Editor-in-Chief of EnlightenNext
magazine.

Cohen posits that, "it would seem that the urge towards consciousness would be fulfilled, or would be ultimately completed, when all the matter in the cosmos had become enlightened - which means conscious. When all the matter in the cosmos had become fully enlightened," he observes, "we would say that the primary urge - if that's what it is - would be vanquished, that it would be fulfilled."

Noting that the process has "barely begun," Cohen  observes that we are at the very beginning of a process that is of such infinite proportions that it is nearly impossible to conceive. Nevertheless,  he calls this "urge to become conscious" our primary driving motivation.

For his part, Sheldrake - an innovative biologist who is noted for his theory of 'morphic fields' - observes that "there is already a large degree of consciousness throughout the  universe, and perhaps that extra awareness comes from us, rather than somehow by our own conscious development we are going to inject consciousness into the rest of the universe."

Their discussion is a fascinating leading-edge discussion of concepts that have long been an integral aspect of the ultimate teachings of both Mahayana Buddhism and the Advaita Vedanta, as two of the most innovative contemporary minds approach what may be thought of as "the biggest question" from two very different directions . . . and nonetheless come to agreement.

"When consciousness awakens to itself, Cohen concludes, "that's when everything comes alive." A point which is acceded whole-heartedly by Sheldrake.

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Perhaps it was the first exposure of Western cultures to the scriptures of India's millennial old wisdom traditions that sparked a lively interest in 'experiential transcendentalism,' or the possibility that there is a higher and more expansive consciousness above humanity's ordinary 'self' or 'egoic' consciousness and awareness. (The respected 20th-century theologian, in giving the prestigious Gifford Lecture at St, Andrew's College, Scotland, best expressed what is meant by "experiential transcendendalism," when he observed that, "Individual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.") Certainly "Brahma," perhaps the most famous of poem by the 'dean' of the "American Transcendentalists," Ralph Waldo Emerson, was inspired by his reading of that most-famed of Hindu scriptures, the "Bhagavad Gita."

The American Transcendentalists were followed by the birth of what was called the "New Thought" movement, characterized by the writings of Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy, the Chicago-based Emily Tompkins, as well as James Allen and Ralph Waldo Trine in the United Kingdom.

The English public schools between the two World Wars birthed another wave of English spiritual seekers, such as Allen Watts, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, whose presence and influence in America reached heights in the immediate post-World War II 1950's and early 60's. They would influence and collaborate to a greater or lesser extent with Huston Smith, and two young Harvard professors Richard Allport (who would re-emerge as spiritual teacher Ram Das) and Timothy Leary in their research into whether psybicillin (and later L.S.D) could trigger the mystical experiences and higher states of consciousness reported by so many of the world's great wisdom traditions.

Transcendentalism and the search for expanded or higher consciousness may have hit its heights in the 'psychedelic' '60s. With the maturation of the 'hippies' of the '60s into today's 'baby-boomers,' and the disillusionment of the "Me-Generation" of the 1970s and '80s (followed by 'Generations X, Y, and Z'), the search for enlightenment and higher consciousness gave way to the passion for "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll." Now, however, with the aging and pending retirement of the "boomers," the maturation of the "Me-Generation, and the disillusionment of their following generations, it appears that the search for transcendent experience is once again waxing rather than waning. But what exactly is meant by "transcendence" and "transcendentalism?"

Gerald Heard (1889-1971)

"Beat-era" spiritual philosopher Gerald Heard in his classic exploration of these rarified stages of transcendentalism and consciousness, "Pain, Sex and Time," discusses the nature of what he calls mankind's  ordinary "fissured consciousness" and its "ego-impulses," as compared with the evolutionary potential of the "undilated unconscious" and its potential to cause an "interior reintegration for the brave souls who are true aspirants after "higher consciousness" and spiritual awareness.

Written in 1939 and long out-of-print, "Pain, Sex and Time" was, it seems, before its time. A classic outline of how humankind's evolutionary progress and potential for ever greater and higher states of consciousness, Heard's treatise was finally re-published in 2004. It's republication, perhaps, is an indication of a groundswell of interest in man's spiritual and evolutionary potential - a groundswell, aided too no small extent, by the realization that material success and achievement is not only ultimately unsatisfactory to our inner needs, but is damaging to the Earth herself. As Heard, naively and perhaps prematurely (as it turns out), observed in 1939, only months before the onset of the cataclysm that was World War II:

"It is now obvious that men cannot live much longer the life of irrelevant distractions. We are becoming too acutely conscious and aware of time. Any stimulant, however pleasant at the beginning, repeated [often enough] becomes hateful."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p.193.]

This warning - written nearly 75 years ago - seems eerily prescient in our times, although it shouldn't. For, when we look back at the history of 'transcendentalism,' we have been on a crash course with the limitations that time has on humanity's consciousness throughout what may be called the '"Scientific Age" (which has now rapidly morphed seamlessly into the "Information Age"), and the need for a change in our consciousness has always been readily apparent, if only to the few. As Heard remarked, a handful of generations ago now:

 "There are . . . three great stages in man' evolution; the appetitive animal, the intelligent human (Nietzche's "transitional creature"), and the being who once more knows itself to be a part of the Whole, but this time is clearly aware that the Whole is a comprehensive consciousness."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p. 153.]

Now, however, rather than an early warning, Heard's remarks may represent the clear statement of an evolutionary imperative and warning. Even the incomprehensibility of man's inhumanity to man, as demonstrated in the Second World War, was unforeseeable to Heard, it seems. How much more incomprehensible would the current challenges we face with what has become a 24/7 global worldview- a population boom, environmental degradation, mass extinction of species, growing rather than shrinking poverty and hunger - have been?

Heard writes that, "Without silent recollection the mind cannot recognize its own unity, still less the wholeness of that into which it would expand."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p. 181.]

Now, it seems - with our growing awareness of the limitations of our old consciousness and the problems caused by it - that there is an ever-growing recognition that we must strive individually and collectively to meet what is our evolutionary imperative, our call to transcend the collective state-of-mind that has created the problems we face. For, as Heard also notes in "Pain, Sex and Time," those species that fail in continuing to evolve almost inevitably perish.

Ending the 'Optical Delusion of Consciousness' to Demonstrate 'True Compassion'

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

"This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

(Albert Einstein, 1954)

The primary basis of all the world's great wisdom traditions and religions is love - not "love" in a personal sense, per se, but a love without conditions and without any particular object. And, of course, the result of this unconditional, all-inclusive love is the 'compassion' Einstein speaks of, or what the Dalai Lama calls "unbiased compassion."



"Compassion,' from the Greek 'pathos" (meaning suffering), means that we recognize the suffering - both physical and psychological - of others, and that in a very real sense their suffering invokes suffering within us. Interestingly, realization of the Buddha's 'First Noble Truth' on the path to enlightenment, or "liberation from the self" (the 'Noble Truth of Suffering') is that to the 'unawakened' mid or 'imprisoned' mind, this life is dukkha, or "suffering." Einstein realized, as the Buddha did 2500 years before this time, that what the individual (indeed the world) needs to survive and flourish is "a substantially new way of thinking."

Today, as ever, there is an imperative need for this new way of thinking; or, as spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen explains,  there is an "urgency" for individuals to seek enlightened consciousness and adopt a purposive relationship to the attainment of that rarified state of being, not for themselves alone, but for the sake of others - for the sake of the Whole. We need, as others teachings have long advocated, to become what may be thought of as 21st century bhoddisatvas, vowing not to give up until there is a broad based enlightenment  - or the adoption of "a substantially new manner of thinking," to use Einstein's phraseology - amongst all human (and other sentient) beings.

Andrew Cohen, Editor-in-Chief,
EnlightenNext Magazine

The vow of a boddhisatva - even a 21st century boddhisatva - like all things spiritual, it seems, is somewhat paradoxical: There is a need for individuals to awaken spiritually for the sake of all humanity; yet, in obtaining spiritual enlightenment, individuality slips away. As Cohen observes in his book, "Enlightenment Is a Secret:"

"The most delicate and difficult task possible to accomplish in this life is simply to be Free. One who succeeds is very rare. It is hardly ever seen. If a person can be Free it is the greatest blessing. It means an alternative to the human mess is possible. Simply being awake and staying awake is a demonstration of the solution. Living Freedom is the solution. You become the answer. You become the solution. Few have the courage to do it.

And yet . . . this aspiration to be "the solution," even for the sake of the Whole, remains personal and therefore paradoxical. While all the violence and suffering that is rampant may make it seem that it is "a very selfish endeavour" to seek a higher state of consciousness and being for oneself, Cohen observes that, "Nothing could be further than the truth."

"You are doing the human race the highest service by realizing your Self," he notes. "Self-Realization is evolution. Coming to the end of aggressive, destructive and selfish behavior is evolution is action. When you evolve to the point that you are able to actively manifest the profound understanding discovered in Self-Realization you are cooperating with all the forces of nature. Only then will your own life be the very expression of the opposite of everything you claim to abhor. What more can you possibly do? What more can anyone possibly do than that? When you have Realized your Self you simply 'are.' When you have found that harmony that you are, then you will be the harmony and no longer an obstruction to it. When sturggle has come to an end, so does all division."

The end of "all division" is the end of Einstein's "optical delusion of consciousness," of course. It is the attainment of a wholly "new manner of thinking" that Einstein would undoubtedly acknowledge as the necessary state which we all need to demonstrate "true compassion."

Evolution, Karma and The Fourth Way

Karma - the universal law of cause and effect - ensures the one constant we know: the constant evolution of change.  Ouspensky observes the following in his book, The Fourth Way, at page 9:

The evolution of man, if it occurs, can only bethe result of knowledge and effort; as long as man knows only what he can know in the ordinary way, there is no evolution for him and there never was any evolution for him.

One of the early 20th century, Ouspensky's teaching, above, reflects the evolutionary enlightenment taught by modern spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen.