Involution, Evolution, Consciousness and Western Destiny

While eastern Aryan religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism to some extent have followed a path of spiritual evolution through detachment, the European Aryan worldview is more a process of involution. Whereas Indians etc. have chosen to ignore the material world and taken this rejection to the extreme of describing the outside world as “Maya” - illusion - we have (from the Ancient Greeks onwards) forced our consciousness into previously inanimate objects.

We have “involved” ourselves in matter. Of course the route we have chosen is extremely hazardous, with the danger that we become trapped in materialism without appreciating higher values, but the benefits are enormous. I wonder if because of our nature western civilization was pre-destined to undergo this “fall” into matter, a process which accelerated after the scientific and industrial revolutions in Europe (i.e. what Julius Evola calls modernism).

If so, then for me the only meaningful course is to continue with our involution into matter until we have “broken through”, perhaps by Faster-Than-Light travel or some other technological means, to another “spiritual” realm. We already know from quantum mechanics that solid matter is far less solid than previously suspected; I think this could have been our civilization's initial step upward from the Nineteenth Century nadir of perception of a purely mechanical, dead universe.

Complexity

The Eastern path of spiritual evolution may be premature, at least for us Europeans. Eastern and Western philosophy concur that once an entity reaches a sufficient level of complexity it can experience human-like consciousness. Instead of reflecting on what already is, we in the west have projected this complexity into nature and experimentation, thereby creating an unprecedented control over matter. Yet we welcome more challenges. Our scientific and technological impulse toward creativity shows no sign of abating.

For us, materialism is not the evolutionary “dead end” as it is so often described in esoteric writing; instead it is our road to becoming something more than human.