Does History unfold according to a plan?
I think not.
But History does have a direction, and this direction is a bottom-up kind of thing: I mean the shape of History is a consequence of the cumulative development of individual Beings.
And that development of Beings is a matter of increasing consciousness.
God does indeed want Beings to increase in intelligence, because it is one motivation of God that Beings should come up to God's creative level (to become "divine friends", and "colleagues" of God, in the work of creation) - and that entails increased consciousness.
Beings begin as mostly spontaneous, relatively un-conscious, and with largely-automatic behaviours in response to stimuli (like those Beings we usually classify as "mineral", and that people usually claim are are non-alive).
However, all Beings have embryonic free agency and consciousness; as the basis for what comes later.
But as each being develops, matures - awareness and freedom and choice can only increase - in the spiritual realm this is obviously true.
This; despite that in this mortal incarnated sub-set of The Spiritual which we term the material - everything tends towards destruction - i.e. entropy.
The development of consciousness gives direction to history because it is ultimately irreversible: once there has been development, it cannot be undone - a Being cannot revert to an earlier stage of its development
A baby can become a child, a child can (and in the long term does) tend to develop towards adolescence and maturity... This directionality may be slowed, but cannot be stopped and the process is cumulative, irreversible.
Once a development of consciousness has happened in a Being; that has-been permanently added, and cannot be subtracted.
Such directionality true even in the temporary conditions of mortal life - despite that the developments are lost to disease, degeneration and eventual death. An adult who has lost the developments of consciousness, intelligence, freedom may be a sick adult; but does Not thereby become a child.
So History, the shape of History; is an accumulation of the effects and interactions of more and more Beings, getting more and more developed, with effects that are irrevocable.
What History is Not; is a top-down shaping of the lives and experiences and learnings of Beings.
We, as individuals, are Not being fitted-into History - on the contrary, History is emerging from the multitude of our lives.
And that is a clue to how we can, and ought to, influence History.
1 comment:
The assumption that God desires Beings who can become colleagues, friends, co-creators is the only one that provides a thoroughly positive motive for Creation in the first place, as far as I'm concerned. In this sense, things really don't unfold in a plan-like manner but more along the lines of consciousness development, as you have outlined.
It always strikes me that conventional Christian assumptions and theology cannot really posit any sort of motive for Creation other than to say it's just God and what God is/does, which, when you stop to think about it, is not really a motive at all.
Of course, conventional Christian-thinking rules out all possibilities of Beings as co-creators and declares such ideas to be category errors.
No entirley positive or meaningful explanations for history or Creation are possible if God and Beings exist into entirely disparate categories, at least as far as I have been able to determine.
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