SAPIENS --- a brief history of human kind.

Friday 28 Nov 2014

Comments from a Buddhist Perspective.

 This 2014 book written by Yuval Noah Harari, a popular academic from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is a winner. His quirky approach brings various important streams of meaning and practicality together to explain why humanity is at the top of the food chain.

The book is written in four basic parts:

1.         THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION --- where Fire gave us power and Gossip allowed us to co-operate. It also gave us self-reflection as a tool to use.

2.         THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION --- that sealed the Fate of our future and allowed Immaterial thought for planning and Mythology to maintain law and order.

3.         THE UNIFICATION OF MANKIND --- came with money and allowed larger gatherings in cities with Abstract Conceptual thinking creating Contradictions and Culture.

4.         SCIENCE --- that made us smart but deadly and created winners and losers.

My view of things is informed by my Buddhist practice and the author generally gives Buddhism very good treatment in his book. He singles it out as different from the other religions and to an extent recognises its contribution to psychology. He even hints at where it may contribute more generally to the scientific understanding of our world, but in the end has pulled back into the view that humanity is looking out into a relatively fixed Universe. He could have gone deeper in his reflections on Buddhism to show the pathway to the core of the present moment where the truth of things can be more readily appreciated. From this perspective I think Harari could have made more of self-reflection as a pathway to truth and taken us deeper into what the Buddha was on about 2600 years ago. More on this later!

To this end, there is an important steam of insight illustrated in Harari’s book that goes to what happens when ignorance remains unexamined. Sapiens can and do develop conceit (both positive and negative) and can think they know best about it all; believing in all kinds of things that leaves them unable to open to what they do not know. This leaves them vulnerable. Harari tells the story of the last 500 -600 years when Europeans rose up from the dark ages to be the new dominators of the world. They overtook the Arabic world along with the Sub Continent and Chinese world that were holding this position of conceit and ignorance when they were over taken.  They could easily have taken more advantage of the new exploration and subsequent domination of new lands that was taking place then. The mindset of the new conquering Europeans created entities that today we call corporations. They helped to reshape the world and its peoples into a similar mindset. The old dominant powers could not see what they did not know and were not interested to look at what they did not know. They thought they had it all and did not need any upstart thought. Hindsight shows us what happened.

This is pretty much the position we find ourselves in today. Harari writes about the likely lives we will be living in the future where we will reshape the world and its species. The end of Homo Sapiens as we know them. He speaks of bionic lives as we learn to enhance senses and abilities. Perhaps space colonies and different ways of engaging with the Universe, but always the focus is external without deep self-reflection.     

The author’s musings about where we are headed are interesting and relevant and probably a fair bet, but he has missed an opportunity to look deeper into the human condition. As cogent and as wise as his summary is, the fact remains that he cannot see deeper because like peoples who were ignorant of the possibilities in the 1500’s, his mindset still embraces the brain as king and this blinds him. Harari is by no means by himself in the scientific community when he postulates a default position that our brains construct consciousness. From the Buddhist perspective this view is clearly wrong as can be seen readily by anyone who practices just a little meditation. Our brain mediates consciousness but it is mediating what is already present in the Universe. Consciousness saturates the Universe. Everything is built from it. It is consciousness that allows us to see deeply into the Universe. It is constantly evolving and changing as we make new discoveries and think new thoughts. It is embedded into space and shapes who we are while at the same time we shape the saturated space in turn. Seeing things this way allows the quantum and the relativity of aggregated energy that consciousness creates to be unified quite naturally. Consciousness is the basic energy of the Universe.

The Buddha saw all this 2500 years ago in his “fathom long” body and mind. When a disciple asked him where everything began he said, “I have looked back over 24 Kalpa’s and no beginning can be seen.” (I always liked this statement because it provides a nice symmetry to the “endless life” so highly prized by the Christian tradition.) A Kalpa, the Buddha explained is a length of time of a universal cycle. He said “If you take the finest silk cloth from Benares and just once every hundred years, you drag the cloth over the highest mountain in the Himalaya’s, by the time the mountain is worn to the ground is the time of a Kalpa.” Very clearly the Buddha had seen and understood deep time. We are just 14 billion years into this current Universal cycle! Current thinking predicts proton decay billions of years into the future.

The Buddha also provided an insight into quantum time. He called the most fundamental units of energy “Kalopa’s”. He said “Kalopa’s come together and fall apart trillions of times in the wink of an eye”. He spoke of consciousness being “like a string of pearls but with no string.”

It is clear the human condition can be calibrated to see deeply into the nature of existence. The calibration process is the Noble eight fold path that the Buddha taught. As Harari has said in his book, most of the Buddha’s followers did not realise what he realised. They started to worship the teacher and did not practice and understand the teachings fully, remaining in the ignorance that befuddles when wisdom is not present. Ignorance leaves us believing in the experience that perceptions and feelings throw up when the mind moves with the senses.  

When this counter intuitive view of letting go of the world is developed and matured the unsatisfactory nature of what we hold on to be me and mine becomes very clear. We can let the world go and allow peace to reign.

Like Quantum mechanics with its wave and particle conundrums, Buddhism has its paradoxes. The Buddha said “When we enlighten ourselves the Universe becomes enlightened too”.  Such is the nature of absolute truth in the present moment!