EMERGENCE
I was reading Genesis today when something dawned on me: the garden myth is suggestive of a physiological change in Adam and Eve. Self-awareness, including that of nakedness, and increased pains in childbirth, resulting from the bipedal morphology of hominids, imply a physiological change. I can clearly see how the oral traditions detailing the onset of history would’ve been interpreted as a fall, but it could just as easily be primordial man’s attempt to describe the dawn of self-reflexive consciousness. By eating the apple, humans became aware of what they already were and in becoming aware of it also became judges, evaluators - aware of the tension between how things were and how they desired them to be.
Up to that point, life simply was whatever it was, incapable of reflecting upon its impulses, its actions, or its identity. Life introduced something new into the world: beings capable of standing apart from their own immediate experience to view it from an almost third-party perspective from within their own minds. The advent of self-awareness has caused great misery over the years as humans have strived in vain to be something other than what we are. We adopt false ways of being, personas, and cloth ourselves in pretense. Still, it’s clear this capacity also affords us the opportunity to look beyond what is to what might yet be, thereby wielding some influence in turning imagination into reality.
In recognizing and appreciating the dark side of human personality, I am now able to hold both the light and darkness in my heart and not turn away. We inhabit an emergent universe, one of greater and greater complexity and connection through time. Times change, people change, society changes in a series of advances and setbacks. Progress is made, but always at a cost. It is a series of tradeoffs, leading us forward, but only slowly, incrementally, and almost despite ourselves.
Christ, it seems, is working on behalf of the Father still, and is transforming people and society slowly through time. He modeled the template of all reality: the old must die to provide new and fuller life. He demonstrated what must happen to all creation and had, in fact, been happening to creation from the very beginning. All of existence has been groaning in labor pains since the Alpha moment (Romans 8:22.) Creation has been groaning, we have been groaning, and God himself has been groaning - giving birth to the new as the old is renewed and evolved into something fuller and more complete. God has had something explicit and glorious in mind for all creation since the very beginning, and we get to witness a tiny sliver of this great unfolding.
Jesus' resurrection is a hint of where things are headed. He clearly had a physical body, in that people could perceive, interact, and recognize him - though not immediately. It’s also clear he was not strictly human anymore. He could vanish, walk through walls, and levitate. I doubt a homo sapien emerged from that tomb. Paul's teachings on the resurrection mirror these ideas: the perishable becomes imperishable, the mortal clothed in immortality. Given what we know of evolution, is it really all that far-fetched? Under the right conditions, what sort of adaptations are off the board?
Interestingly enough, we seem to mirror God's agenda quite closely, like we unconsciously pick up on whatever he's working on and do so ourselves in parallel. We do so in limited, self-serving, and dualistic ways, but even that prepares us to receive his guidance, which seems to reveal and manifest itself as we're able to accept it. The leading edge of this phenomenon suggests to me God is working on universal human dignity, ecological interbeing, mystical awareness, collective consciousness, and immortality. We could be on the cusp of receiving the eternal promise of renewal, transformation, and abundant life he’s promised since the beginning. How it will come about remains mysterious, but we’re at the doorway.