The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

interaction between groups of neural maps. Higher consciousness enables the process
of mental picturing to occur at will and comes with the capacity to intentionally choose
from a series of response options, including ignoring the stimulus. Learning enables us
to enact intentions from a previously determined set of values. When playing cricket, the
batsman has milliseconds to adjust the angle of the bat to strike the ball to the boundary.
Registering the exact speed, trajectory and spin of the ball and reacting accordingly is an
acquired skill (with possibly innate factors playing some role, such as acute eyesight and
motor control), but a good batsman will improve with practice. The intentional choice
to play this one down the on-side or let it pass is definitely a question of higher order
consciousness, though the batsman may describe it as instinct.
Higher level consciousness requires an underpinning of primary consciousness,
but in order to form connections between different perceptual categorizations to
then form conceptual categorizations, a broader time frame is needed than present
consciousness supplies. In order to extend the present into a consciousness of before and
after there needs to be a higher point of reference.
Higher consciousness requires a self, a point of reference that can relate past
experiences with future possibilities. Damasio uses a different distinction between core
and extended consciousness. The former provides a transient, momentary awareness
of states of mind (and body), a sense of transient self. Extended consciousness is able
to call upon memory and anticipation of the future and provides the individual with a
complex sense of identity as well the ability to know and recognize other beings. Core
consciousness is essentially a biological phenomenon, experienced primarily in the realm
of feeling. Extended consciousness permits language and conscious thought as well as
creativity and invention. At the highest levels of extended consciousness, we are able to
think and conceptualize.
As Terence Deacon has convincingly shown in his book The Symbolic Species, 25
the basis for higher order consciousness is symbolic thinking and memory. Symbolic
thinking enables human beings to have a consciousness of self and non-self, what
forms the basis for a subject-object and subject-predicate relationship to the world. In
evolutionary terms the most developed form of symbolic thinking is language, which
I shall discuss in detail later in the book. Let it suffice at this point to say that the path
to language evolved first out of the human need to communicate and then through the
emergence of representational cognitive activity. Communicating is a primary means of
interacting with the outside world, it is a continuous process of perception and inner
response. The evolution of syntax, which gives it structure and sequence, is closely related
to the cognitive structures through which we order our view of the world.
But language, in its full sense, has yet another dimension. It reveals something
of the inner nature of both the human being and the cosmos. As I shall discuss later, it is
this spiritual aspect of language and its close connection to other higher order forms of
consciousness that spans the threshold between soul and spirit.
Between Body and Spirit
Steiner describes the relationship of body, soul and spirit as follows; “The spirit
is the central point of the human being, the body the instrument by which the spirit
observes and learns to understand the physical world and through which it acts in it. But
_________________________
25
Deacon, T.W., 1997, The Symbolic Species, Allen Lane.
84