How to Work with an Evolutionary Worldview in Daily Life

with Amy Edelstein

One of the grandfather’s of what’s called an Evolutionary Worldview is the great visionary (and mystic) Alfred North Whitehead. He famously wrote, “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding.” It is that wonder that a deep insight into process awakens in us. Seeing the vast swath of time in which our world unfurled changes our sense of self. It redefines the contours of our philosophy. And it creates in us such a sense of awe and optimism that we truly see the world through new eyes.

As author Carter Phipps wrote in his book Evolutionaries, “It’s not hyperbole to say that how we think about evolution affects how we think about life, the universe, and everything.”

So what is an evolutionary worldview? How do we practice it? Where does it lead us? Can it change the world?
Let’s take a closer look:

1. Awaken to an Evolutionary Worldview

Opening up to the profundity of an evolutionary worldview is not just a cognitive intellectual event, though we may start there. It is an “awakening.” I say that because it radically shifts our sense of self from the limited and fixed identity we take ourselves to be into an identity with process. Our self-identity, at a fundamental level reveals itself to be inseparable from the movement of energy, matter, life, consciousness, or space. From the infinitesimally small quarks and mesons to the vast reaches of billions of galaxies, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “We are moving!” And moving, when you look deeply, means “I, as I take myself to be–from this particular perspective–am inseparable from the stuff of the vast cosmos and the stuff of the mystic heart.” That is a radical displacement of who we think we are.

2. Shift from Relating to “Objects” to Relating to “Experiences”

Usually we think of ourselves as bits of stuff, as solid objects that have some kind of interaction with other solid objects. Me with you with the environment. Anthropologist, early systems thinker (and cultural radical) Gregory Bateson talked about “the relationship between.” What’s significant, he said, are not the five fingers on our hands but the space or relationship between them. Think about it. It’s a pretty fascinating shift. When we move from things as the primary focal point that gives us cues about our environment to events, we get a different and arguably far more accurate sense of how the world works. We shift our sense of the world from static to process, from solid to fluid, from discreet objects to interconnected occurrences, experiences, events in process. That is more true to the flow of life and evolutionary unfolding. More importantly, it gives us space for all kinds of new capacities, insights, and potentials to unfold and emerge.

3. See the World in Deep Time

When you think about time, when do you start? At your birthday? 0 AD when Christ was born? 5774 when the Judaic calendar began? When the earth was formed out of swirling energy and dust? Scientists pin the formation of our universe at approximately 13.7 billion years, give or take a few. That’s a looooong time ago. Cosmologists pin the formation of other stars and galaxies as older than that. If we take our beautiful world’s birthday to be unfathomably long ago, and look at the unbelievable stretches of time it took to get us where we are now, with human consciousness just at the last blip, we get a different appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and the delicacy of our moment in time.

4. Appreciate the Magnitude of Our Moment

Consciousness has been around for a long time. No one quite knows the beginning. The great realizers point to a consciousness that transcends space and time as we know it. The “why” of how consciousness appeared to us is what’s called the “hard” problem of neuroscience. And if neuroscientists call it the hard problem, we can rest easy with our own perplexity. In an evolutionary worldview, the question of consciousness – the nature of it, when it arose, how, why, and where we can go with it—is a central one. Perhaps most salient to “practicing an evolutionary worldview” is recognizing that human beings have the rare gift of being “aware that we are aware.” Because of this, as Barbara Marx Hubbard tells us, “This is our moment of choice, we can consciously participate in the process of evolution.”

5. Locate the Frothy Edge of Human Consciousness

Early humans some 30,000 years ago, developed some pretty far out paintings. When you see the blood red hues of their horses galloping across cave walls, the urgent life that practically bursts out of the stone speaks to an aesthetic, awareness, communication, and experience that’s disconcertingly more familiar than we might expect. But still, our capacities to think, self reflect, and understand complexity have developed significantly. We couldn’t have had this exchange 26,000 years ago. We’ve changed. We’ve evolved in our capacity to be conscious. Take stock of where we’ve come to. Just look at the subtle and delicate interconnections we can appreciate, the inner sensitivities. The sense of the numinous, the sacred. The appreciation of awe and wonder. The intimations of nonseparation between immaterial consciousness and the material world. We’re conscious of this subtlety. Locate yourself at that edge. Feel into it. Then tip forward ever so slightly into the future

6. Peer into the Future

As we’ve seen, the capacities of consciousness have evolved. If we can see back to earlier forms where capacities we have now we’re in their barest potential, that means there are capacities that haven’t been birthed yet. They haven’t unfurled their beauty yet but they will. Look forward to humans 45,000 years from now. They will have capacities of intuition, complexity, empathy, sensitivity, connection, and love that we have yet to discover. Consider this possibility. Allow your mind to rest at the edges of the known. Resist trying to imagine or understand. Allow the unknown future to be ahead of you, beckoning you towards it. Lean ever so slightly into it. Open to majesty we have yet to discover. Make yourself porous to the future. Ready for what we cannot yet imagine. Teilhard de Chardin said our future discovery of higher orders of harmony and integration, higher orders of Love will be as profound as human’s second discovery of fire. Let go into the wonder of that potential.

7. Make Yourself Ready

Being ready for the wonders of what has yet to come requires us to be coherent and integrated people. Like a rocket ship needs to be trim and tight, well configured to withstand the pressure and upheaval of breaking through the earth’s gravitational pull, so we need to cohere at the level of self. We need to smooth out the cracks we allow in our personalities, the things we know better but indulge in, I don’t mean that extra bite of ice cream, I’m referring to bad motive, meanness of spirit, vindictiveness, pettiness, charge. Those actions create cracks in the exoskeleton of our being. That will cause us to shake, rattle, and roll when we want to hold steady and reach through the known to a next order of interrelatedness, harmony, and love. How do you tighten up those weaknesses? By falling so much in love with a higher order of being that our lower impulses become as instinctively unattractive and passé as the social mores of the Vikings in the 8th Century.

8. Become an Archaeologist of Yourself

Look within. That Viking still lurks within us. We don’t act on their crude impulses anymore. But we are the stuff of our past. This is called Big History. Appreciating that just as Jerusalem is built, layer by layer, on cities before, so our we. Every archeological epoch has its own population. Its own currency. Its own fashion. Its own social customs, marriages, rites of passage, deaths. In our own being, even in our 21st Century times, we still have reactions and feelings that we can trace back to our reptilian brains. We carry the layers of our past. Not just our personal history, family experiences, cultural customs. We carry our deep past. Understanding the rich layers that make us up allow us to separate out the outdated responses, even when those responses are clothed in contemporary colors. As we understand and leave behind unnecessary, lower reactions, we transform. We become the stuff of cultural evolution—exactly as we are. Our transformation is the transformation of the culture around us. 1970s feminists coined the phrase, “the personal is the political.” In an evolutionary worldview, I’d say “the personal is the cosmic.” Our transformation can become the actual evolution of consciousness.

9. Imagine an Anthropology of the Future

Can we really study the artifacts and culture of the future? Not exactly. Looking at the past teaches us much about where we’ve come from. We learn about emergence over deep time by exploring the formation of galaxies out of gases. We see the emergence of new life and the complexification of creatures by observing the wondrous diversity of nature. We learn about early civilization by studying single-celled organisms and the graceful cooperative as well as pioneering adventures of e-coli bacteria. (Yes, they indeed collaborate and also have scouts that break out and search for new habitats. Once new frontiers are conquered, other ecoli follow on their own wagon train. Go west young single-celled critter!) Take a leap in evolutionary time and look at us. A huge shift. Many similar principles. Now open yourself up to the possibility of anthropologists coming to study the artifacts of a future we can’t yet imagine. Not just the physical artifacts but the new orders of inter-relatedness. The new depths of sensitivity and compassion. The new understandings of nonduality with process itself. Can you feel it? The prickly excitement and anticipation of capacities we can’t yet imagine?

10. Commit to Transformation

An evolutionary worldview looks at the vast process of matter, life, consciousness, and values. Aligning ourselves with the deeper currents of development sets us in harmony with the movement of time, space, and energy. It integrates us with the biosphere, nature, the creatures around us, our human sisters and brothers. As we awaken to a more profound identification as process, we realize that as the Pali Canon says, all that is has arisen co-dependently. We are interconnected. Then the Talmud’s advice on difficult life questions, “to consider the effects of our choices down to the 10th generation” makes more practical sense. Our own commitment to a deeper integration of self, our own aspiration to evolve becomes imperative for these higher capacities of consciousness to emerge more perfectly through us. Commit to becoming porous, to opening the weave of ourselves, to allowing new vibrant new colors to emerge, which will shape our collective consciousness and paint the contours of the landscape we inhabit.