Catalyzing Emergence

Catalyzing Emergence Evolutionary Enlightenment, and the new culture it promises, is something we can deliberately and consciously bring into being, if we care deeply enough about the potential it is pointing to. But it is not something that can be manufactured simply through sitting in a circle and practicing a certain technique or by generating a particular emotional state. It is an emergent perspective, or state of consciousness, that bursts forth spontaneously and miraculously when the conditions are right. Emergent means that it is something greater than the sum of the parts—a new order of relatedness, a new level of consciousness, a deeper and higher perspective that is always unimaginable until the moment it explodes into existence. The notion of emergence is key to understanding Evolutionary Enlightenment. This teaching is about catalyzing the miracle of emergence in the interior of the cosmos, in and through our own selves. So we need to deeply understand how emergence works, and what we can do to ensure that it occurs. Emergence is not simply the improvement of what already exists; it is the arising of something entirely new. It's not just horizontal expansion or modification; it's vertical development and growth. When I talk about verticality, it means the emergence of capacities and ways of thinking that are genuinely, authentically new and that did not exist before. It's not the same as a horizontal path, where we are modifying or improving, often in positive and important ways, the self that we already are. Verticality, in Evolutionary Enlightenment, means we engage with the spiritual process in such a way that the result is the emergence of some quality, ability, or capacity that was not there before. Emergence happens at every level of the evolutionary process. At the beginning of time, something came from nothing. With every step of this vast unfolding, that same mystery is taking place—greater degrees of complexity are emerging from lesser degrees of complexity. This process takes place in matter, in biological life, and, as we are discovering, in the inner dimensions of our own consciousness and shared culture. If we are interested in learning how to engage with consciousness at higher and higher levels, to consciously facilitate its evolution within us and between us, we need to look more closely at the extraordinary phenomenon of emergence in matter, in biological life, and most importantly, at the level of consciousness. We need to cultivate our capacity to visualize and to emotionally connect with what it would mean for emergence to occur within our own interiors, within our subjective and intersubjective experience. Emergence is a relatively new concept. How does greater complexity emerge out of lesser complexity? How did something come from nothing? How did all the matter in the universe emerge from primordial emptiness? That's the mystery of life, the mystery of the creative process. Look at the evolution of biological life. Life emerged out of inanimate matter. It started as single-celled organisms, which eventually gave rise to multi-celled organisms, which eventually, over long periods of time, gave rise to all the extraordinary complexity and diversity of sentient life on this planet. The same process of ever-greater complexification has occurred in the dimension of consciousness. But this is relatively uncharted territory, because it's not yet culturally accepted that evolution is an internal as well as an external event. From our contemporary cultural perspective, evolution happens "out there"—in the cosmos, in nature, in biological processes. But when you realize that this process is also unfolding inside you, and even more importantly, inside us, that's when the magic starts happening. When you literally begin to feel the telos, or directionality, of the entire process moving in and through your own nervous system, that is when you directly experience that movement as a vertical impulse in your own consciousness. You see that where we are headed is never static or predetermined. You awaken to what I sometimes call the "radical indeterminacy" of the life-process itself. As conditioned and mechanical as much of it might seem, the fact is that in every moment there is the possibility for novelty. In every moment there is the potential for something new. In every moment, there is room for emergence. That's the miracle of evolution. * * * When emergence occurs in matter or in biological life, it depends upon the conditions being just right. Cosmologists tell us, for example, that the moment when galaxies first formed, a billion years after the big bang, was the only moment that such an event could possibly have taken place. Before that moment, the universe was too dense, too hot, too close to the initial explosion. After that moment, it was too thin, too cool, too dispersed. Likewise, biologists tell us that for the evolutionary leap to take place in which single cells became a multi-celled organism, the conditions also had to be perfect. What I have discovered is that the very same principle applies when we are trying to catalyze emergence at the level of consciousness and culture. The conditions must be right. In fact, I often use the metaphor of a "New Being" to describe this emergent cosmocentric cultural potential. Just as individual cells came together to make up a larger organism, autonomous, evolving individual human beings consciously come together to give rise to a dynamic greater whole. And this emergent potential of Evolutionary Enlightenment is completely dependent upon those individual cells—those autonomous, evolving beings—making the effort to understand and be a living expression of the inconceivably delicate balance of conditions that make it possible for it to come into existence. Coming together beyond ego in the way I've been describing is much more than a spiritual exercise or even an ecstatic experience—it is a culturally creative act at the leading edge. The emergence of this enlightened we-space depends upon the right conditions being created and upheld by all the individuals involved. But creating perfect conditions is no small matter. When we are trying to catalyze emergence in our own individual and collective interior, the conditions we are talking about are not merely external circumstances but our own core values, our shared agreements, and our culturally constructed beliefs. No matter what new and thrilling potentials we may have glimpsed in a higher state of consciousness, unless our core cultural values shift in a significant way as a result of what we have seen, the future that we may have been inspired to create will never appear. * * * Evolutionary Enlightenment is always about the evolution of culture itself through our own transformation. To the degree to which you are capable of embodying the evolutionary impulse, inevitably you will end up challenging the cultural ego within your own self. The cultural ego is the status quo, which lives in both our conscious and unconscious minds. It consists of all the deeply held images and conditioned beliefs that define for us what life is supposed to look like. It is impossible to separate any notion of individuality and personal identity from these core values that have such an influence on who we are and how we see the world. The most challenging aspect of vertical spiritual development is the evolution of our value spheres. Given the right circumstances, it is not difficult to enter higher states of consciousness and in those higher states, to glimpse the exciting possibilities that await us on the other side of the status quo, beyond our predictable and fixed way of perceiving how things are. But it is another matter altogether to dislodge those predictable and rigid perspectives and embrace new and higher values. Our shared values are not only pictures of what life should look like but also images of what's possible. In a spiritually enlightened, evolutionary worldview, our inner eye has awakened to the ever-forward-looking vision of the Authentic Self, with its limitless sense of possibility. Unless the limitations of our traditional, modern, and postmodern value spheres are brought into the light of awareness and penetrated with the eye of contemplation, it won't matter what thrilling new potentials we have glimpsed in higher states of consciousness; we won't be able to actualize them in real time. Unsupported by the ecstasy of those higher states, we will inevitably fall back into a limited self-structure and a value sphere that simply doesn't have space for the open-ended cosmic perspective of the Authentic Self. I can't overemphasize how important this is. If we are passionately committed to the evolution of consciousness and culture, we must ensure at all costs that our conscious and unconscious shared values become an unambiguous expression of our deepest insights. Unless this is the case, the best part of each and every one of us—the spiritual impulse, our own Authentic Self—will inadvertently remain stunted in its ability to effect significant change in our world. It will stay imprisoned in unconscious preferences and unexamined values that bear no relationship whatsoever to our highest motives. Eros, or the creative dimension of God, is that burning intelligence and driving impulse that is ever-leaning forward, reaching toward the emergence of that which has not yet become manifest. Evolutionary Enlightenment is about unapologetically becoming a living embodiment of those values that create the conditions for that unself-conscious creativity at the very edge of the possible. * * * The entire notion of evolutionary becoming, or evolutionary emergence, is a new and unique orientation for the self. It's hard to even conceive of how different this orientation is from the ways we have traditionally and culturally been conditioned to relate to the human experience. With the exception of rare individuals throughout history, our orientation has generally been toward creating security, carving out a safe place in which to experience comfort and pleasure. Even revolutionaries who challenge the status quo in order to gain more rights and freedoms usually do so only until those rights and freedoms are achieved, after which they tend to settle in to a new status quo. Of course, there have always been rare individuals and inspired geniuses who are ever-reaching for that which is new, animated by the pulsation of the Authentic Self, who felt compelled to make significant progress and create new pathways in their particular fields. But what I'm speaking about here is not a particular type of genius or talent—it's a certain attitude and aspiration in relationship to the whole process of being alive. It's an attitude that the potential of this teaching is entirely dependent on, and that is completely contrary to the attitude that culture has conditioned us to have up to the present moment. Inherent in human nature is the quest for certainty and the sense of security that is its reward. So there is always going to be a tension between the conditioned self's aspiration for security and the necessity to relinquish that aspiration in order to keep moving to higher stages without ever halting one's vertical development. The shift in values that creates the conditions for perpetual emergence is a fundamental shift in orientation that is just beginning to dawn on us as we awaken to the fact that we are part of a process that is going somewhere. Most human beings don't live for change. Some of us live for achievement or greatness, but we don't live for perpetual change. I'm talking about disembedding ourselves from a deep, preconscious orientation toward stasis that has been created through thousands of years of history. For the psychological ego and for the culturally conditioned self, living for change sounds unbearable. But for those of us who are awake to the evolutionary impulse, change becomes home. That feels more like home than any particular place in this world or any relationship with another human being. What feels like home is that sense of movement—vertical movement. In our emerging recognition of the evolutionary context that has given rise to our own presence here on Earth, we become more at home in perpetual movement than in comfort and stasis. If you recognize the potential for emergence, in the inner dimensions of your own consciousness and our shared culture, then it is up to you to strive to create the perfect conditions in your life to support perpetual, vertically ascending change. The evolutionarily enlightened soul lives for change. This is a fundamental shift. It is not just about freeing our minds from fixed ideas; it is about liberating ourselves from a static orientation to life. And it's not merely a personal shift; it is a very deep cultural change in the human psyche as a whole. * * * When we speak about creating a new culture at the leading edge, beyond the status quo that we are embedded in, we don't necessarily know what it is supposed to look like. That's understandable—after all, it has not yet emerged. But we don't need to have a completely clear picture of where we are going. What we do need to know is what it means to disembed the self from that which is inhibiting its potential for vertical ascent. And as we free ourselves, in the midst of ascending, we will begin to see where it is that we are going. What is necessary, first and foremost, is to free the self to make this heroic journey. The evolutionary process is going somewhere. Its next step is not predetermined, but now, maybe for the first time in history, we can participate with more conscious awareness than ever before in the creation of where it's going. When we make the effort to identify more with the vertical energy of the impulse to evolve than with the horizontal pull of the personal ego and culturally conditioned self, we transcend the enormous weight of our own traditional, modern, and postmodern value spheres. We open ourselves up to the liberating experience of that part of the cosmos that is trying to evolve through us in every moment. We make ourselves available to that powerful telos through shifting our attention and our shared values from the security of the conditioned past to the ever-ecstatic immediacy of the possible, here and now. Unless we can make this shift, we will never be able to follow through on the promise of a teaching like this. The enormous promise of conscious evolution, of cultural emergence, will never be fulfilled beyond the experience of short-term inspiration unless this dynamic, primordial shift can be made at the core of yourself and in the intersubjective we-space between a significant number of us. Otherwise, the internal gravity of the personal self and the cultural status quo will always inhibit our capacity for ongoing higher development. Once it becomes clear what conditions are needed in order for emergence to take place, we must strive to create those conditions, no matter what it takes. If you engage with these teachings with great sincerity and urgency, your own consciousness and your relationships with others will become the stable structure through which new and higher expressions of meaning, purpose, and human potential can emerge in the evolving interior of the cosmos.