An Evolutionary Spiritual Activist Perspective

The blog entry below is a specific application of the principle of using crises to facilitate the life-affirming evolution of civilization. This perspective is part of a larger spiritual activist narrative described in another piece I sent to my list a few days earlier, which I posted on the co-intelligence.org website rather than this blog. I now use it as a major source of my own inspiration, for I, too, often lose touch with that particularly powerful Big Picture. Take a look at “Something Bigger than Life is Trying to Work Through Us” http://co-intelligence.org/SomethingBigger.html. As the nature of evolutionary activism is a major inquiry of mine at the moment, I expect more postings will be showing up here on that subject during the coming months.

3 Responses to "An Evolutionary Spiritual Activist Perspective"

Andrew Carter MacDonald says:

August 13, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Nicely said, Tom. Thanks for keeping your voice out there.

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Ken Jennings says:

August 16, 2009 at 1:34 pm

Tom, thank you for your article. I really enjoyed reading it. My sense is that there is nothing bigger than the evolutionary process of life itself. So I feel that something bigger than SELF is trying to work through us. After reading your article, I made a post on my blog http://lookinginto.wordpress.com commenting on some of my thoughts regarding the nature of crisis. I feel that on a fundamental level, a crisis (personal, societal or global) confronts the illusion that the SELF stands separate or apart from the inter-connected fabric of life. In order to resolve the crisis, a reconnection needs to occur. A reconnection (or relationship) where the SELF loses its importance so that the evolutionary process of life takes precedence. This reconnection should be activated by a deeper understanding of our part in the process – a conscious transformation where we consider our actions (and assumptions) in a much broader context than the needs of SELF.

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Tom Atlee says:

August 16, 2009 at 2:20 pm

<head><style>body{font-family: Geneva,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:9pt;background-color: #ffffff;color: black;}p{margin:0px}</style></head><body id="compText">Excellent perspective, Ken.  <div><br></div><div>Let me clarify a few points that I see aligning with yours beyond the seeming disagreement of our words.</div><div><br></div><div>When I say "life" — in the idea of something "larger than life" working through us — I am referring to the forces of biological life.  Biological life, itself, arises from the dynamics of atoms and subatomic "particles", which arose from the energetic dynamics of the Big Bang (which continue in new ways at the quantum level).  Each layer or sequence in this great Unfolding — pure energy, subatomic "particles", atoms, chemistry, biology, culture, mass communication, etc. — adds its own contribution to the dynamics of Evolution, its own dimensions of differentiation (separateness, identity), connectedness, and communion.  And I sense all those layered dynamics are working through everyone and everything at the same time, at all levels, in all realms.  THAT is what I mean when I refer to "something larger than life".  Those layered dynamics together have — or are manifestations of — a creative power and driving force that I simplify into the concept of Evolution as the/a sacred power of the Universe.</div><div><br></div><div>I resonate with your sense that the drive for evolution derives from a fragmentation of wholeness, which you identify with the fragmentation of SELF from the world.  But I see the fragmentation of SELF as only one manifestation of the fragmentation-of-wholeness dynamic.  Our personal sense of SELF is an emergent phenomenon of our level of physical/biological organization and various perspective-shaping influences of our cultural and individual experience.  Some more "primary" cultures do not have the same alienation or sense of uniqueness that the modern SELF experiences — especially in Western and/or industrial societies.  The idea of a SELF separate from community, place, nature, etc., is to them very strange, indeed.<br><br></div><div>Everything, everyone, every stage of development has gifts and limitations.  The experience of a separate self offers us the gifts of differentiation, of creative diversity, which vastly increases the evolutionary potential of us as a collective (given that evolution is driven by the interaction among diverse entities).  But, as you note, it also brings a limitation of hiding or degrading the connections between us and the world, generating crises.  But that, too, has evolutionary potential, because these crises can drive us to reconnect (as you so well describe), but in ways that preserve the gifts of our diversity, our unique differences, for the benefit of the dynamic Whole of which we are a part.</div><div><br></div><div>When stars differentiate from interstellar hydrogen gas into separate balls of "fire", they are making a contribution, generating energy and new atomic structures, even as they create instabilities that result in their ultimate collapse and/or explosion.  Eons ago, patterns of self-generating ("auto-catalytic") molecules linked up into communities that created boundaries between themselves and (what became) their environment, and became cells.  These "cell wall" boundaries gave them a new level of identity while at the same time introducing death, when the cell wall is broken down and the cell’s molecules dissolve into the flow of raw materials.  These are the antecedents of the SELF — our "skin enclosed egos" are constructed of stardust and cells — just as nations and multinational companies (which are separate from and connected to their world) are composed of individual human selves.  This dynamic unfolds at every level.  Each break in "wholeness" drives a renewed effort to regain — or, significantly, gain new — wholeness.  And thus Evolution drives US — individually and together — into new configurations in its eternal search for wholeness.</div><div><br></div><div>So I agree with you, while offering this possibly bigger screen on which to paint the dynamics you and I see.</div><div><br></div><div>Coheartedly,</div><div>Tom<br><br><blockquote style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid"></div></body>

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