There are obvious issues of morality and justice in this spiritual periodic table of human choices. The following description of its origin is an attempt to reconcile those issues with the notions of good and bad in the Abrahamic religious tradition with those in the Darwinian understandings of evolution.
Our Most Basic Spiritual Choices[1]
The innate and distinctly human character of the moral issues in our basic spiritual choices has been pointed out in both our religious and scientific institutions. In the Abrahamic religious tradition, Adam and Eve were set apart when God said,
Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. Gen. 1:26, (New Revised Standard Version)
God uniquely privileged humankind when He enjoined, in Genesis 2:16–17, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” After eating of that tree, we were told in Deuteronomy 30:14, “the word [the knowledge of good and evil] is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”
In the theory of evolution, the distinctiveness of humankind is also recognized. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote,
The differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense is by far the most important. . . . It is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man. . . . The moral sense follows, firstly, from the enduring and ever-present nature of the social instincts, secondly, from man’s appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of his fellows; and thirdly, from the high activity of his mental faculties. (Great Treasury of Western Thought, 582 ) emphasis in original)
Both narratives deal with issues that have been around a long time. Both have notions of “good” and “bad.” The biblical account suggests a good within our heart that identifies with the creative spirit of humankind and with all over which we have dominion. Let’s term that sense of self the holistic self. It is what I experienced and called the little self the night I was caught up in the unfathomable relational web of the creative spirit.
The Darwinian account suggests a moral sense of good “summed up in that short but imperious word ought.” In his book Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, 6th ed., David Buss discusses the advances being made in understanding how this “ought” sense of self could have evolved. Those advances resulted in a broader notion of evolutionary fitness that genetically rewarded selfless behaviors, such as that of a young man willing to risk his life for his country. Let’s term that resulting sense of self the altruistic self.
The third is a sense of self that both accounts deprecated, one with “evil” and the other with “lower animals.” There is an uncaring sense of self-centeredness in both the notion of “evil” in the biblical account and in the survival-of-the-fittest notion of the Darwinian account. Let’s term this sense of self the egoistic self.
Although all three self-orientations were alluded to in that Night of the Little Self, I lacked the words for what did and didn’t change other than an old, competitive big-self view of life being subordinated to a new, inclusive little-self view of life. Words for the change in the spirits I would be heeding came through when I read through the Bible again. Words for what didn’t change came when I realized, for example, that a person heeding a truthful spirit and a person heeding a deceitful spirit had a common concern: the nature of their disclosures. Neither did my basic concerns with life itself, with worthiness, with what to do when things went wrong, and with what of me lived on after death. We all have these universal concerns, regardless of the spirits we heed when addressing them.
There are many words for sharing these concerns and the spirits they evoke. They enrich our stories and enliven our songs. The names for these concerns and related spirits are filled with nuances and shaded with connotations. Because these spirits and concerns are relationally interdependent, assigning them common yet distinguishing names is fraught with ambiguity. Those that worked best for me when composing the songs to be sung in Act 4 by our self-orientations are given in Table 1.
[1] Mark Johnson, “Our Most Basic Spiritual Choices,”
Abiding in God (Oviedo: EA Books Publishing, 2024), 225–229.
