Eckhart Tolle on the Evolution of Flowers - II

The first flower probably did not survive for long, and flowers must have
remained rare and isolated phenomena, since conditions were most likely not yet
favorable for a widespread flowering to occur. One day, however, a critical
threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an explosion of color
and scent all over the planet—if a perceiving consciousness had been there to
witness it.

- Continuation of the first paragraph in Eckhart Tolle’s 'A New Earth'

Has anyone ever seen a flower survive for long? Last time I checked they blossom in the morning and wither away in the night. Is that long by any standards? In the last post, examining the first sentence of this all-time spiritual bestseller, we have seen how Tolle seems to have such a callous disregard for facts, but here, in the third sentence, he outdoes himself! Doesn’t he even know that flowers have notoriously fleeting span of life, even those flowers that blossom even in the most favorable of circumstances? Whatever does he mean by “the first flower probably did not survive for long”? Oh it was trampled by the dinosaur, poor lonesome flower! Or it could be that Tolle spends much of his time in Amida Buddha’s golden paradise, where flowers thrive perpetually in all their never-fading splendor! And looking down upon the Earth of 100-150 million years from his lofty perspective, he naturally felt compassion for the first flower, the most delicate and vulnerable thing, it barely ‘survived’ for a day in that cruel harsh world teeming with monsters! What a tragedy!

In the first place, there could be an original species of flowers that marked the transition from gymnosperms to angiosperms -- a bridge -- but in no way there can be a ‘first flower’ in an individual sense as Tolle talks about. Tolle talks as if this ‘first flower’ of his was some kind of unnamed great hero, a pioneer, or a Buddha being who is now all but forgotten! Is there any possibility for him to ever understand that evolution of one species from another happens mind-numbingly slowly, spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of years, in barely noticeable series of gradations, driven by the forces of random mutation and natural selection? Certainly much of evolution on this planet has taken place in a series of spurts, but they are considered spurts only in a relative sense, and they too would span thousands and tens of thousands of years, not anything like a day or a month or a year.

You can have an individual creature born with a different color or some such trait, owing to accidental mutations in a few genes, but you cannot have such a complex thing like a beautiful, multi-petaled, fragrant flower popping up from nowhere where there was none earlier. If men evolved from apes, flowers too must have evolved from some close resembling predecessors. In case of man, we can make a definitive cut-off mark, based purely on functionality, that when the ape jumped down from the trees and learnt to walk erect on two limbs it became human, or was on the way to becoming human, but that early hominid australopithecine species resembled apes in every other aspect, despite 3 1/2 million years of evolution after branching away from a common ape-human ancestor about 7 million years ago. The ‘first human’ was vastly more ape than human, there would have been just a hint of unique humanness, he (or rather it) only barely opened a door for a long and protracted evolution on the path of becoming human. Similarly we could point to a species saying that these were the first flowers, but they could have been hardly distinguishable from their non-flowering counterparts in gymnosperms!

The ape jumping from the trees and adapting to walking on land is a very dramatic event, and yet even that could have taken generations upon generations to happen. I don’t think there was any first heroic ape that risked its life and limb and went further than any ape and thus miraculously got transformed into a technically human-like creature overnight! And if we were to find the Tolle’s first flower that blossomed into existence one fine morning, we would have to , in theory, make a time-lapse photography of flower evolution spanning millions of years! It would be a very long-lasting flower indeed!

But Tolle doesn’t seem to have any concern for any science, any reason, any sense, he just seems to be interested in making a dramatic, poetic, picturesque, piquant opening for his book so that he can lure millions of naïve readers, including Oprah Winfrey, who would perhaps consider him as the next step in evolution, the final flowering of human consciousness!

This book is obviously about some kind of evolution of consciousness on earth, but fortunately Tolle went after flowers, and later on in these preliminary passages after birds, and (surprise, surprise!) precious stones and their supposedly highly evolved state of consciousness, but left most other things of biological evolution on the planet earth, which is apparently the prerequisite and precursor of his actual theme of spiritual evolution. And we must be eternally grateful to him for doing us, his humble readers and mostly gullible suckers, this favor. He either left out intentionally or totally forgot about the emergence of eye: ‘One fine day, in the murky depths of the primordial oceans, a fish woke up and found that it could see the whole infinitely vast world.” And this fish is the archetype of all Tolle-type characters who could see into infinity with their spiritual eye, even in our dark ages!

And then he left out the fish jumping out of the sea on to the land. Imagine a particular individual fish which finally gathered courage and took the bold leap, the grand daddy of all adventurers and explorers of the world! But thank god, Tolle at least spared the fish: ‘The first fish that jumped on to the land barely survived for a few seconds, but through its Christ-like sacrifice it paved the way for further evolution of consciousness on this planet. One small leap for a fish, one giant leap for evolution of the divine mind!’ Blather blather. He mercifully left out too the rodent which dared to come out from its deep dark hole and boldly surveyed the benighted planet in the long aftermath of the huge asteroid impact, the event which marked the death of dinosaurs and the beginning of a whole new era. “The first mouse that crept its way into a dark sunless land couldn’t survive for long, because obviously the circumstances were very unfavorable, but it set a tremendous precedent. Mice began to crawl out from their holes slowly, gingerly, here and there at first, but then one day a critical threshold was reached and the earth was teeming with mice and rats, those noble mammalian creatures without whose courage and foresight we would not have been here.” And boy, he totally forgot the mother of all colorful explosions on the planet, the original event which kickstarted evolution, the Cambrian explosion!

Come to think of it, Tolle wanted to talk about the glory of biological evolution, and just broached upon flowers, birds and precious stone evolution – left everything out, at least going by the first few pages, beyond which I couldn’t go. I feel this is exactly what a teenage school girl (oh romantic roses, yeah, oh lovelorn cuckoo, yeah, oh lovely diamonds yeah!) would do if she was asked to write about some highlight events of evolution on the planet! I would have been impressed if a school girl, budding with literary talents, wrote this stuff, but considering that an Amazon.com sensational no.1 selling writer comes up this, it sounds so agonizingly pathetic! It says something about our times and the average caliber of readers. Only chick-lit, Harry Potter, or other incredibly juvenile muck like The Alchemist (When I was reading this latter book I felt extremely surreal, I couldn’t believe that this was something meant to be read by people!) seems to sell these days. Ironically, Tolle proves his point very clearly (my assumption that it is his point going by the blurb etc) — that the collective consciousness of this planet can use a dramatic leap of evolution, or else we could be stuck in juvenility and imbecility forever.

I fervently hope that one day soon a new age will dawn when the best-selling spiritual guru writers of the times finally manage to have an idea of what they are writing. Not just prattling like this, imagining and projecting images in thin air, pure day-dreaming sloppiness and nothing else. In the Zen tradition, they call mind’s illusions ‘sky flowers’ – Tolle must be living veritably amongst these sky flowers, and I am sure these sky flowers have a nasty tendency to survive indefinitely, unlike their earthly counterparts. Maybe, Tolle’s legendary first flower actually dropped from the sky, however it couldn’t survive for long on the earth, because the consciousness of the planet was not developed enough yet to sustain the beauty of these flowers. Yes, I am getting the drift now, how sublime! It is all about consciousness, and strange it is that people who seem to have no touch with reality, lost in reveries and fantasies as they are, can write so eloquently about consciousness.

“Flowers must have remained rare and isolated phenomena, since conditions were most likely not yet favorable for a widespread flowering to occur.” I simply have no idea what he is talking about, I mean obviously neither the first flower appeared overnight, nor the planet was carpeted with cheerful, lovely and vibrant flowers in any kind of rush. It could have taken 10, 20, 30, any number of millions of years – the kind of geological time scales we humans have no faculty of actually imagining. And there is no need to use “most likely”, it would have been naturally so barring any experiments by aliens who could have visited the planet then. And it has nothing to do with favorable conditions either, because even when the conditions were very favorable it would have been so, i.e., taken that much or more time. The first flowering species must have been very successful in reproduction, since flowers are sex maniacs (though Tolle’s entire thrust through this passage is that flowers are all about ‘enlightenment’)! Still, however easy the original functional flowers could have made the reproduction process, they couldn’t have taken over the planet like some nasty virulent virus. Tolle, though, talks exactly as if he is talking about some pandemic, he says ‘one day a critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an explosion of color and scent all over the planet’. Mark the ‘one day’ again! Listen, sutpid man, evolution doesn’t deal with days, it deals with eons! And what on earth is a critical threshold, in this context. Again I haven’t a clue.

Maybe while writing this first paragraph of his magnum opus, Tolle was dreaming about his future book, how gullible people here and there will read it, at first reluctantly, because the conditions are unfavorable, since JK Rowling has just come up with her latest installment, but the Harry Potter fever subsides for a while, and people are clamoring for more juvenile stuff, conditions get favorable and his book picks up sales, one day a critical threshold is reached, and everybody on the whole planet is reading only this book in no time, there is an explosion of color and scent, consciousness on this planet finally becomes fully enlightened, a new earth! We are all awakened to our life’s purpose, which is obviously to read Tolle’s stupid books!

And then suddenly Tolle too wakes up from his reverie! So if you are awake, Mr. Tolle, man, let me tell you: 70% of Earth is and was covered with water, so when the flowers would have managed to spread all over the land, still the whole earth wouldn’t be covered by them, right? You get my logic? And further, I can understand that you would have spent all your time seriously meditating, good for you, but if you had ever seen those Discovery channel documentaries about the wonders of the sea, you would have perhaps realized that a significant portion of this 70% of earth’s surface would have been covered by seemingly an infinite variety of fishes in all colors and even shapes, sporting intricate and awe-inspiring designs on their skins. And in fact, there would have been vastly many more species of both sea and land creatures in those times. Imagine, 90% of the species becoming extinct in one mass-extinction 225 million years ago, and 80% of the surviving species becoming extinct 65 million years ago, not to mention a variety of other extinctions! Imagine the absolute abundance of flora and fauna in those ages! So guess what, Mr Tolle, the earth had already been brimming with color and life, and even scent, long before the advent of your ‘enlightened’ flowers.

Besides, flowers are not the “enlightenment” of plants, as you write a little ahead in your raving reverie, they are the sexual apparatus, literally they are the genitalia-equivalent of the plants! You are just projecting the fantasies and fancies of your mind onto the world, though you and all other spiritual gurus keep telling, “Don’t project your mind onto things, don’t get identified with your mind, don’t get carried away by it.” You got carried away badly, dear enlightened writer sir! However, I think not only you but we all should learn to go beyond glibly dispensing advice and sometimes try to follow it ourselves instead!

One last thing, and this is a whopper even by the benchmarks set by all the preceding whoppers of these four lines of the first paragraph. “if a perceiving consciousness had been there to witness it” – Do you mean, sir, that bees busy pollinating the flowers don’t have any consciousness to perceive? Again you display incredible deficiencies in common sense and general knowledge. Colors have evolved with the explicit purpose of attracting bees, not because the plants got poetic and artistic or enlightened, as you imply! Are you so utterly unconscious that you don’t realize that consciousness, and enough consciousness to ‘perceive’, exists in all kinds of insects and animals other than humans? Incidentally, only the plants who got enlightened (according to you!) through their flowering cannot perceive or see their own colors! But still I don’t think you don’t realize that animals are also conscious, cognitive, witnessing and perceiving creatures (though they can’t talk), what I think is that besides having problems with science, common sense and all that, you also have problems with language, what you meant is “appreciate”, not perceive” – “if a consciousness had been there to appreciate it.” Phew!

If these are the people who are going to lead us to the next higher level of consciousness, very dark times seem to be in store for us indeed!