Spiritual Evolution

by Vaillant, George

• ISBN13: 9780767926584
• ISBN10: 0767926587
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2009-06-09
• Publisher: Harmony

Summary

In Spiritual Evolution, Harvard professor George Vaillant, M.D., lays out a brilliant defense of man's inherent spirituality. He shows that our spirituality resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are located in a different part of the brain than dog-matic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he writes, and we are destined to become even more so. Drawing on a range of psychological research and neuroscience, as well as on history and literature, Spiritual Evolution is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. It will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving. Book jacket.

Author Biography

George E. Vaillant, M.D., is a psychoanalyst and a research psychiatrist, one of the pioneers in the study of adult development. He is a professor at Harvard University and directed Harvard’s Study of Adult Development for thirty-five years. He is the author of Aging Well and The Natural History of Alcoholism, and his 1977 book, Adaptation to Life, is a classic text in the study of adult development. He lives in Boston; East Thetford, Vermont; and Victoria, Australia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Positive Emotions	p. 1
The Prose and the Passion	p. 18
Three Evolutions	p. 40
Faith	p. 65
Love	p. 82
Hope	p. 102
Joy	p. 119
Forgiveness	p. 135
Compassion	p. 151
Awe and Mystical Illumination	p. 164
The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality	p. 185
Notes	p. 207
Permissions	p. 229
Index	p. 231
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1
Positive Emotions


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, let me sow forgiveness;…
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith;
Where there is despair, let me give hope…
Where there is sadness, let me give joy;
O Master, grant that I may not so much to seek
compassion but to give compassion.
—“The Peace Prayer of St. Francis” attributed to Father Esther Becquerel (1912)


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.

Here’s a true story told by Jack Kornfield, a clinical psychologist. Traveling by train from Washington to Philadelphia, Dr. Kornfield found himself seated next to the director of a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders, particularly gang members who had committed homicide.

One fourteen–year-old boy in the program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility.

After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor [in jail] he'd had. For a time they talked, and when she left she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of his three-year sentence, she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to help set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?” “I sure do,” he replied. “I'll never forget that moment.” “Well, I did,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s how I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.” (1) And she became the mother he never had.


Her compassion! Her forgiveness! Where did they come from? We can all identify with the woman's primal growl of “I’m going to kill you.” And when, in her living room, she reminded her boarder of what she had said in court, I feared what would come next. But then I was surprised. For Hindu and Jew, for Buddhist and Christian, that moment would have been equally moving, but this story lacked even a hint of “religion.”

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Excerpted from Spiritual Evolution: How We are Wired for Faith, Hope, and Love by George Vaillant
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.