Will The Real 'Evolutionary Spirituality' Please Stand Up?

Chest out. Thumping it with your fists. Stomping your feet into the ground. Creating the illusion of thunder. Strutting about like a peacock. Sending the message to all gathered around: there is no lack here!

The stance of the conqueror, of the victor, of the triumphant one--which is to also attempt to assume the stance of the one for whom lack has been dealt a fatal blow--is itself the place of a pronounced evolutionary advantage. Whether by force, by wits, or by sheer dumb luck, the ability to at least subdue lack for the time being seems to me to be some sort of hallmark of evolution. Too much lack and there is not enough surplus of energy/calories/time to pursue the female, to reproduce. The starving are simply not know for their sexual escapades. To the victors go the right to reproduce.

In high school I played on the basketball team (or, played on the bench I should more properly say). There was a tacit agreement between the competing towns/teams that the winners of the game would be allowed to shag the opposing teams cheerleaders (of course, this right was only extended to the top-line players... the best 3 or 4 members of each team, not us bench-warmers who never broke a sweat). Anyway, my point is that to the victors go the spoils. You win the War? Then you get the Women. The right to reproduce--at least in mock, late 20th Century, post-sexual revolution style--was given to the winning team, i.e., the team that didn't lose, the team that had exhibited the least amount of lack that night... the team with the most points.

Definitely there is somewhere programmed into us a sense that 'more is better.' From an evolutionary perspective this is seen as being the primary way that certain beings/entities acquire an advantage of over others. The trouble with this comes in looking at the 'more is better' tendency within us from a spiritual perspective: Do we really want to put 'others' down in order to make ourselves appear superiour? How spiritual/religious is that when we are supposed to have realized our inherent oneness (read equality) with all our relations?

Perhaps that represents a sort of impassable chasm between the evolutionary and the spiritual. While the former is all about securing an advantage--about being superiour in some way, in order to acquire a surplus over and against your competitors--the latter is all about not doing just that! Traditionally speaking, the spiritual has been about resisting precisely the tendency or urge to assume a superiour stance and a dominating disposition; such that we might be led to say that any sense or indication of their being an 'evolutionary spirituality' is itself a sort of oxymoron. It is a statement that may sound good to the ear, but really means nothing, because it is a combination of two elements that lead in two totally different directions.

In fact, I would say that 'evolutuonary spirituality' already exists--and has existed for some time now! I would say that 'evolutionary spirituality' is itself the religious fundamentalism that most of the Planet is dealing with at present. That 'evolutonary spirituality' is the well-known extremism of the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu variety (not to mention others). It is summed up in the 'My way is superiour to your way' ethos that operates in each and every instance of fundamentalism, no matter the strain. So, contrary to what some suggest, I would say that 'evolutionary spirituality' is not what we need, but what we need to get away from: that we need to trancend the madness of evolutionary spirituality and the havoc it wreaks, and is wreaking as this is being written and read.