Origin of Human Nature
A ZEN Buddhist Looks at Evolution
Published on 2. January 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
245 pages
978-1-84519-260-0 (ISBN)
Description
Offers an original and fertile way to integrate spiritual and scientific views of human evolution. It offers a new and refreshing alternative to the way we think about our origins: random mutation (mechanistic neo-Darwinism), Genesis (God did it all personally), and Intelligent Design (God personally does what we can't otherwise account for). The result is an invigorating perspective on how our best qualities -- our capacity for love, our appreciation of beauty, our altruistic capability, our creativity and intelligence -- have come into being and evolved. How we think about our origin matters: if we think we are machines living among other machines, we will act accordingly. By showing evolution as a creative and intelligent process with its own inherent logic, THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN NATURE resolves the dilemma of how to have, at the same time, both truth and ethics. Instead of starting in an imagined remote and 'uncertain past' and moving to the present, this book starts at the certain and 'immediate present' and works back. That consciousness, creativity, and intelligence exist is certain. The question is: how can these have evolved? Dr Albert Low has made a study of human nature throughout his life. To write this book he draws on his prolonged meditations on creativity and the human condition, his years of providing psychological and spiritual counseling, and a wide-ranging knowledge of Western psychology, philosophy, and science.
Reviews / Votes
"In The Origin of Human Nature, Dr. Albert Low breathes new life into old terms - the transcendent, consciousness, awareness, evolution, creativity, intention - not by going around science, but by going through it. In the current frenzy to purge science of purpose, meaning, direction, and values, Low's insights are a welcome resource. One might say that our survival depends on the wisdom in this book." -- Larry Dossey, MD, author of The Extraordinary Healing Power of Everyday Things."The old religious models don't seem to work for us these days. And so we have turned to secularity, to the cooler gaze of science, especially the neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins and others. Albert Low shows that the bloom of their answer - the random-mutation mechanistic evolutionary system - that once seemed so promising, cannot account for our capacity for love, appreciation of beauty, altruism, creativity or intelligence. And it cannot offer us meaning or direction. So we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place of ambiguity... The Origin of Human Nature offers a model that lives creatively in just that ambiguity." -- Professor Robert Forman, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, CUNY, founding Co-Editor of The Journal of Consciousness Studies and author of Grassroots Spirituality.
"In this intelligently written book Albert Low gives us a modern Guide for the Perplexed; a richly thoughtful reflection on the roots of human nature that glows with a deep respect for both science and the spirit." Allan Combs, author of The Radiance of Being.
"The battles over evolution are fought by two sides that are far too rigid in their thinking, the Biblical literalists on the one hand and the mechanistically committed materialists on the other. But our human and spiritual nature is much bigger than fanatic literalism or scientistic dogmatism, and Low's refreshing book offers a more open direction to explore the potentials of evolution for real human beings."
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Liverpool
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
ISBN-13
978-1-84519-260-0 (9781845192600)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Introduction; On Darwin's Theory; On Subjectivity and Objectivity; 'Knowing', the Basis of Experience; Knowing and Evolution; On a New Way of Thinking; On Intention; Intention as Dynamic Process; The 'Blind, Unconscious, Automatic' Process of Intention; On Causation and Programming; What is Creativity?; Creative or Mechanical Evolution?; The Evolution of Intelligence; On the Evolution of Consciousness; The Ambiguity of 'I-You'; The Birth of Ego; On Humans and Evolution; Epilogue.