Naturally I began thinking about Buddhism in general and Buddhist Psychology in particular, and how it addresses the development of wisdom and peaceful living, no matter what age.

But, why do we have so much trouble acknowledging a spiritual evolutionary continuum? If there are evolutionary material genes, why can’t there be evolutionary spiritual genes?

Well, I’ve got news for you. Long before Darwin and company, the Buddha and his contemporaries had already discovered evolution. He clearly saw that the life-form of the human being was not a creation, but was evolutionarily connected with all other life-forms, had developed out of them and could regress back into them. But he went further than the materialist scientists. He made evolution a personal matter. He saw that living beings do evolve, in more than a strictly physical sense. He taught that we personally and intentionally evolve ourselves toward higher states of awareness and happiness, or deteriorate ourselves toward lesser awareness and more wretched embodiments. We do so in this life, and in the course of billions of lives, just as it takes billions of lives for a paramecium to become a butterfly. It is sheer dogmatism, prejudice, and unscientific arbitrariness to insist that matter does exist but mind does not.

An evolutionary biology that excludes the infinite continuity of being’s minds is highly unscientific, philosophically naïve, and pragmatically inaccurate.