Spiritual Evolution
How We Are Wired for Faith, Hope, and Love
George Vaillant is a psychiatrist and Harvard professor who, for 35 years, led Harvard’s 70+ year Study of Adult Development. (You learn a thing or three when you follow the development of teenagers as they grew into great-grandparents.) In this book, he tells us that we can evolve spiritually. Leaning on his experience running Harvard’s study plus cultural anthropology, ethology and neuroscience, he walks us through the biological underpinnings of the positive emotions that make up our spirituality: faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion and awe.
Big Ideas
- Spiritual EvolutionExiting the cocoon.
- Caterpillar to ButterflyThe 7 primary positive emotions.
- Faith: It Does a Body GoodIt does a body good.
- The Greatest of The Theological VirtuesThe #1 theological virtue.
- Hope: It Saves Lives (How’s Yours?)It saves lives.
- What Do you Believe? Show Us. Don’t Tell Us.Show us. Don’t tell us.
“Just as a prism separates white light into a spectrum of discrete colors, so this book separates spirituality into a broad spectrum of positive emotions. By focusing on the positive emotions, I wish to perform for spirituality what the science of nutrition has performed for the world’s discordant diets. Just as nutrition identifies the vitamins and the four basic food groups that make other people’s peculiar ethnic diets nourishing, so neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and ethology identify the love, community building, and positive emotions that enduring religions have in common. …
Spiritual Evolution builds on the relatively new scientific disciplines of ethology (animal behavior) and neuroscience—both of which have enabled the scientific study of positive emotions such as love, joy, awe, and compassion. Each of these emotions has a neurobiological basis and an evolutionary architecture that will be explored in individual chapters. …
We need to bring our positive emotions to conscious attention, and we must not disdain to study them with our science. If my purpose as an author can be oversimplified into a single wish, it would be this: to restore our faith in spirituality as an essential human striving.”
~ George Vaillant from Spiritual Evolution
George Vaillant is a psychiatrist and Harvard professor who, for 35 years, led Harvard’s 70+ year Study of Adult Development. (You learn a thing or three when you follow the development of teenagers as they grew into great-grandparents.)
In this book, he tells us that we can evolve spiritually. Leaning on his experience running Harvard’s study plus cultural anthropology, ethology and neuroscience, he walks us through the biological underpinnings of the positive emotions that make up our spirituality: faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion and awe. (Get a copy here.)
I picked the book up after reading Barbara Fredrickson’s great book Love 2.0. She quoted George as saying “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I thought that was pretty amazing and here we are.
As you’d expect, the book is packed with Big Ideas. I’m excited to share some of my favorites so let’s jump straight in!
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Download PDFI believe that I can see a direction and a kind of progress for life. ... If my hypothesis is correct ... with their cyclical development horse, stag, and tiger became like the insect, to some extent prisoners of the instruments of their swift moving or predatory ways. ... In the case of primates, on the other hand, evolution went straight to work on the brain, neglecting everything else, which accordingly remained malleable.
Get the BookSpiritual Evolution
“This architecture, and the evolution of the title, do not, however, refer to just natural selection. There are actually three forms of evolution that are relevant here: genetic, cultural, and individual. For selfish reptiles to evolve into loving mammals took genetic evolution that led to the development of the limbic system, the brain region underlying our positive emotions. For loving, playful, passionate mammals to become creative scientists and intellectual theologians took genetic evolution that led to the development of our huge neocortex, the brain region underlying both our science and our religious dogma. Although these two very different regions are neurologically rich in their connections, they sometimes treat each other like strangers. Emotion and reason, spirituality and religious dogma often fail to understand each other.
For humans to have evolved into Samaritans who often place compassion, forgiveness, and unselfish love above a mentality of might-makes-right has required cultural evolution, for cultural evolution is more rapid and more flexible than genetic evolution. True, evil probably still occurs at the same per capita rate as it did in the Iron Age. However, with each passing century, cultural awareness, if not always scientific understanding, of the positive emotions gains ground and contributes to community survival. Positive emotions have been experimentally shown to help humans behave more communally and more creatively and to learn more quickly.
The third kind of evolution is the individual over the human life span. Drawing on my thirty-five years as director of Harvard’s Study of Adult Development, I explore the brain maturation and increasing social awareness that takes place in all of us as we mature from self-absorbed teenagers to generative grandparents.
Evolution toward spirituality takes place not only in the genetic and cultural arenas but also in the lives of every one of us as we mature our focus from caterpillar ‘me’ to community butterfly.”
In Love 2.0, Barbara Fredrickson talks about exiting our “cocoon of self-absorption.”
Where do we go from there?
In short, to the loving-kindness of the community butterfly. We evolve. Spiritually.
George walks us through the big-picture process and points out that we have, in fact, spiritually evolved on three fronts: genetically, culturally, and individually.
First, we used to all be cold-blooded reptiles. That little reptilian brain of ours was rather good at keeping us alive, but otherwise was pretty selfish. Thankfully, 200 million years ago, we became mammals. With our new limbic system, we developed the capacity to connect and to love. Then, our prefrontal cortex dropped in and we evolved even further.
So, step 1 of our spiritual evolution was genetic.
Then culture helped out. From the introduction of verbal language (150,000 years ago) plus written language plus printing (900 years ago in China; 560+ years ago in Europe) plus all the other remarkable institutions that pushed us forward, we evolved.
And, finally, we have the opportunity to evolve during our life span.
Which, of course, begs the question: Are you? :)
I type that with a smile. Of course you are. Let’s explore some Ideas on how to Optimize the process!
Or as Albert Schweitzer, a both passionate and thoughtful scientist, maintained, ‘Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.’
Caterpillar to Butterfly
“In closing this chapter, a note of caution is needed. I suggest that a faith emphasizing trust and positive emotion is more mature than a faith made up of words, prohibitions, and rigid beliefs. Am I not asserting that one is better than the other? In so doing, I risk inventing a circle that draws me in and excludes others. Butterflies, however, are not better than caterpillars, nor are grandparents better than the grandchildren that they adore. Butterflies are only caterpillars at different levels of maturation. Feelings and passion are not better than prose and belief; they simply arise in different parts of the brain. Only connect the prose and the passion! That is what human evolution is all about.
Over time, just as evolving humanity is better shielded by science from capricious famine and infant deaths, just so its faith traditions—once depended on protective but negative emotions of abject fear and righteous anger—can give way to the positive emotions of faith, love, hope, joy, forgiveness, compassion, and awe—the positive emotions whose biological underpinnings will serve as foci for the next seven chapters.”
Because we evolve spiritually does not mean that one stage of spiritual evolution is “worse” than another. A caterpillar is just at a different stage of development than the butterfly.
And…
It’s both wise and fun to lean into the highest within ourselves, so embracing the positive emotions that help us exit that cocoon of self-absorption is a good idea.
Why positive emotions? George tells us: “The human capacity for positive emotions is what makes us spiritual … to focus on the positive emotions is the best and safest route to spirituality that we are likely to find.”
Here’s a quick look at the seven key positive emotions:
1. Faith. George makes the distinction between belief and trust. Belief is a set of thoughts. It’s cognition. Faith, on the other hand, refers to the emotion of trust. Trust that the world has meaning and that love and kindness exist.
2. Love. All mammals are programmed to love. Humans are THE most wired to love. Hence, love is the shortest definition of spirituality. Get this: “Remove a mother hamster’s entire neocortex, and she will seem feeble-minded in a psychologist’s maze. But she can still love and raise her pup. Damage her limbic system only slightly, and she can be a wizard at mazes but an utterly incompetent mom.”
3. Hope. Hope is all about believing your future will be better than your present. We’re going to talk about just how powerful it is more in a moment.
4. Joy. Although joy is the least researched of the primary human emotions, it’s also one of the most powerful. The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin “considered joy the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” Which reminds me of Walter Russell’s gem from The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe: “Joy and happiness are the indicators of balance in a human machine, just as a change in the familiar hum in a mechanism immediately indicates an abnormalcy to the practiced ear of the mechanic.”
5. Forgiveness. Forgiveness requires the capacities for empathy and for future-thinking. And, paradoxically, benefits the one who is doing the forgiving even more than the one forgiven. Quit munching on the poisonous resentment and forgive.
6. Compassion. George tells us that love and compassion are very different. Whereas love is about connecting with someone we find appealing, compassion is the desire to separate someone (even if we don’t find them appealing) from their suffering.
7. Awe. Awe and a sense of the sacred are perhaps the most “spiritual” of the positive emotions. It’s that sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves in which we connect to the whole of humanity. (My sunrise hikes have become my source of daily awe.)
Sidenote: Faith, love and joy are known as the “theological virtues.” Love that.
P.S. The neuroscience researcher George comes back to the most is Andrew Newberg. We created a Note on his great book How God Changes the Brain where he tells us: “These studies support our argument that fear-based religions can be hazardous to your health. It’s too bad that the Surgeon General can’t place a warning sign on certain passages from the Bible or Koran, especially those that encourage violence toward people who hold different beliefs.”
Plus: “The enemy is not religion; the enemy is anger, hostility, intolerance, separatism, extreme idealism, and prejudicial fear—be it secular, religious, or political.”
Let’s focus on the positive!
Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.
Faith: It Does a Body Good
“Trust and confidence, like the other positive emotions, stimulate our parasympathetic, not our sympathetic, nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is catabolic: fight-or-flight uses up the body’s resources. The parasympathetic nervous system is anabolic: faith, hope, and cuddling build up the body’s resources.”
That’s from the chapter on faith.
When we have trust and confidence in the ultimate rightness of the world/God/something bigger than us, we’re WAY healthier than those without that core faith.
Think about it: Cultivating your positive emotions stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system. It literally calms you down. Allowing fear and anger to dominate? That’s catabolic. It’s chewing up your internal resources.
Back to Newberg. In How God Changes the Brain, he shares 8 ways to optimize your brain. The #1 tip? Faith.
Here’s how he puts it: “Faith… If we don’t have faith that we’re making the best decision we can, then we will be swallowed up in doubt. And doubt, at least as far as your brain is concerned, is a precarious state in which to live. Faith is equivalent with hope, optimism, and the belief that a positive future awaits us. Faith can also be defined as the ability to trust our beliefs, even when we have no such proof that such beliefs are accurate or true.”
The Greatest of The Theological Virtues
“Modern ethology and neuroscience make clear that all mammals are hardwired for love. Of all the fauna on earth, however, Homo sapiens is the most radically dependent on love. Thus, ethologist Konrad Lorenz called love ‘the most wonderful product of ten million years of evolution’; psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote, ‘Without love humanity could not exist even for a day’; and Saint Paul concluded, ‘And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’”
Love.
We’re wired for it.
And, as we discussed in Love 2.0, we don’t need to reserve our love for those closest to us. We can open our hearts and create “micro-moments” of “positivity resonance” all day every day.
Trying to create at least 3 of those micro-moments every day has literally changed my life. It’s nuts how easy and awesome it is. Check out the Notes on Love 2.0 for more tips/examples and, if you haven’t yet, JOIN ME in making this a daily goal! (Trust me, you’ll thank me. :)
At every important stage in our life it is human affection that nurtures us, sustains us and comforts us. ... To me the image of a mother’s breast feeding her baby is the most potent symbol of human love.
Hope: It Saves Lives (How’s Yours?)
“Like humor, creativity, and springtime, you cannot study hope objectively, or even rationally. Nor can you quantify the beauty of butterflies, or the grace of five-year-old children. Yet all are real. Perhaps of more importance, hope saves lives. The strength of a patient’s hopeful religious commitment is a consistent predictor of survival after heart surgery. As the Johns Hopkins neuropsychologist Curt Richter noted many years ago, if rats swim until exhausted and are then rescued, in the future they can swim much longer without drowning than can naive rats without a history of prior rescue.
In psychologist Martin Seligman’s laboratory, Madeline Visintainer reproduced Richter’s experiment, only more dramatically. She examined the survival of rats that had experienced inescapable shock, sometimes called learned helplessness, compared to rats that had been exposed to shock that they could terminate. (The helpless rats yoked to the empowered rats received shocks only when the latter did.) Visintainer calculated how to inject rats with just enough cancer cells so that half the rats would be expected to die. She then injected cancer cells into one group of thirty rats that had experienced, through their own efforts, successful escape from painful shock. She injected another group of thirty rats that had experienced the same shock as the first group, but in a setting where they were powerless to escape. Instead of 50 percent, only 27 percent of the hopeful rats died of cancer, while 63 percent of the hopeless rats died.”
Hope.
It’s probably my most naturally favorite virtue.
Shane Lopez walks us through the science of hope in his great book Making Hope Happen.
Short story: Hope has three components. First, we need to believe that our future will be better than our present. Second, we need to believe it will be better because of what we will do (science-speak: because of our “agency”). Third, we need to be willing to try multiple “pathways” to bring that better future to fruition (aka, be willing to go from Plan A to Z!).
Check out the Notes for more. For now, let’s focus on those remarkable swimming rats.
Recall from our Notes on Isaiah Hankel’s book Black Hole Focus: “In the 1950s, Curt Richter, a Harvard graduate and Johns Hopkins scientist, did a series of experiments that tested how long rats could swim in high-sided buckets of circulating water before drowning. Dr. Richter found that, under normal conditions, a rat could swim for an average of 15 minutes before giving up and sinking. However, if he rescued the rats just before drowning, dried them off and let them rest briefly, and then put them back into the same buckets of circulating water, the rats could swim an average of 60 hours. Yes, 60 hours. If a rat was temporarily saved, it would survive 240 times longer than if it was not temporarily saved. This makes no sense. How could these rats swim so much longer during the second session, especially just after swimming as long as possible to stay alive during the first session? Dr. Richter concluded that the rats were able to swim longer because they were given hope. A better conclusion is that the rats were able to swim longer because they were given energy through hope. The rats had a clear picture of what being saved looked like, so they kept swimming.”
NOTE: The rats who had been rescued/experienced being saved (who “had hope” of a better future) swam 240 (!!!) times longer than those without hope.
That, my friend, is a LOT longer.
Hope matters.
Then we have hopeful and hopeless rats injected with cancer cells. More than TWICE as many of the hopeless rats died of cancer than the hopeful ones.
Hope REALLY matters.
Let’s take a moment to build our hope muscles.
Think of a time when you got through a tough challenge. You were shocked by life but you made it through. Feel the power you displayed during that challenging time to get where you are today.
You have the ability to make your future better than your present. That’s hope.
KNOW that you have the power to face this and ANY challenge you may face in your future. That’s true Confidence 101.
Suffering equals hope destroyed, and suffering is more than pain: it is loss of control, it is despair, it is the loss of hope. However, if the loss of hope transforms pain into suffering, the return of hope transforms suffering back again into manageable pain. Suffering is the loss of autonomy; hope is its restoration.
What Do you Believe? Show Us. Don’t Tell Us.
“Karen Armstrong, a former nun and a master of autobiography, is one of the foremost teachers of comparative religion alive today. In her magisterial The Great Transformation, following the 1948 lead of German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Armstrong has entitled this period the Axial Age. She sets its dates a little earlier (900-200 BCE) than I do, but her melody is the same. In Armstrong’s words, ‘The Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not necessarily regard this as supernatural. … If the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly and explained—with great courtesy—that this was not the appropriate question. What mattered to Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Isaiah was not what you believed but how you behaved. Show me, don’t tell me. ‘God’ was the experience of loving compassion, not an all-powerful, judgmental, and often angry patriarch.”
The Axial Age was a period of great cultural transformation.
A time in which we received the gifts of Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Christ and Isaiah.
I love the way Karen Armstrong frames the hypothetical question about God.
What mattered for these great sages was not what you BELIEVED but how you BEHAVED.
And, ultimately, “God” was the experience of loving compassion. (Which brings us back to our shortest definition of spirituality… Love.)
So… What do you believe?
Don’t tell us. Show us.
Gandhi once remarked to an English friend, ‘I don’t think much of your Christianity, but I like your Christ.’ In other words, Christian beliefs annoyed Gandhi, but he trusted Christ’s behavior.
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