Darwin, Wallace & Thinking About Rigor in the Spiritual Quest

One of his pet peeves was how he saw Alfred Russel Wallace as the true discoverer of evolution and that his glory and place in history was stolen by the plodder Charles Darwin. As far as Grant was concerned it was all about class.

Well, I just noticed that on this day in 1858 Darwin received the paper sent by Wallace that pushed him to publish his own work. And thinking of Grant led to thinking about Darwin and Wallace and science and, wouldn’t you know, religion.

I suspect there were many reasons for Wallace not getting the credit. Perhaps he deserved it, he did write his observations and formulation and distributed it to others, first. Admittedly his “publishing” was to an extremely limited audience. One, if I’m correct: Darwin. Among the reasons for his losing out to history, I’m pretty sure, was class. He wasn’t a gentleman, and he didn’t fully fit in with their class-bound scientific establishment. And therefore it would be more difficult for his views to get the hearing they deserved. So, all shifted toward Darwin.

But, also, frankly, Wallace wasn’t the best figure to carry the banner for this dramatic advance in biological science which would become the foundation for all biological thinking. Among his eccentricities, Wallace was a believer in spiritualism and was apparently blithely willing to posit a nonmaterial origin for human consciousness.

Darwin, on the other hand, had a more rigorous approach to his inquiries and limited his conclusions to what could be derived from the presenting evidence.

I’m not arguing one cannot hold unprovable spiritual views in order to be a scientist. Not at all. But there was something about Darwin’s creative agnosticism (a neologism, as many know, coined by Darwin’s close associate Thomas Huxley), which is about as important for the establishment of the modern scientific stance as the actual formulation of the theory of evolution.

And that somehow takes my thinking toward the place of rigor and agnosticism in the realm of spiritual inquiry.

Recently I was speaking with a friend about spiritual matters and we were discussing where we find authority. Against what do we measure our experiences? What keeps us from following our own private fantasies, or worse, simply our appetites? Both of which we both agreed are unlikely sources of authority, unreliable at best, wildly self-serving at worst.

Now, I cannot accept the authority of texts. For many reasons. But mainly because I don’t believe in divine dictation. Every putative divine text has too many internal contradictions or obvious errors of fact to be thought of as anything more than inspired. Inspired I believe, but literal truth I cannot. And therefore the authority of texts is always going to be too tentative for me…

But, I don’t accept the authority of my personal visions and revelations, either. (And anyone who follows serious spiritual disciplines such as Zen meditation is going to have such things as personal vision and revelations, let me assure you. Check out the technical term, makyo.)

So, where is there authority, how do we check our spiritual journey?

Or, is there none? Are we completely on our own in a world without meaning or sense?

Over the years I’ve found a couple of things that make me believe there is a farther shore to which we can make our way, and pointers on how to get there. These are my starting points, my premises. I think it’s okay to have premises, so long as we are aware of them as our axioms and so long as we’re willing for them to be challenged.

For me, to push a bit beyond the metaphor of “farther shore,” the premise with which I begin is: our human experience is sufficiently reliable to discover what is truly important in one’s own life, and for human life in general. I believe within our human consciousness we can access a stance to life that is consonant with the way things are, that brings a profound sense of connection and a deep and abiding peace.

This is my experience, my confession, my axiom for most everything I think in the spiritual realm. And I found my way to this position following what I saw in the lives and most of all within the disciplines of the Zen ancestors. But, also, by extension within the mystical traditions of the world, and particularly those of my natal Christian heritage. My interpretation of these disciplines and experiences is modified, I freely acknowledge, by the perspectives of Huxleyan agnosticism, as interpreted by Stephen Batchelor, via, again, the Zen traditions of “not knowing.” And, just a little, also informed by modern Western psychological theories…

I’ve come to trust the value of just sitting, the practice of mindfulness given itself a critical twist by Dogen, and the koan introspection tradition developed by the disciples of Hakuin, and particularly its modern version as developed within the Harada Yasutani Zen lineage.

And, most of all I trust the place of awakening these disciplines take us to…

That could be enough, but I also find the Unitarian Universalist tradition, itself rooted in the Western spiritual stream and modified itself by its encounters with the developing scientific method, one more central thread for me in articulating my path and checking my walk along the path…

So, all this, I find, creates possibilities for an openness that is liberating. It is a way to see past appetite and private revelation, while fully acknowledging we must walk this path ourselves, you and I.

But, also, providing that authority, that way to check, that seems genuinely to work.

Two cents.