Syntony Quest: Evolutionary Consciousness

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Evolutionary: Consciousness | Literacy | Competence | Praxis

Evolutionary Consciousness

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“You see things as they are and ask Why?
But I dream things that never were and ask: Why not?”
— George Bernard Shaw

“Think big picture....
The more you try to grasp, the more possibilities you have”
— Allan Weisman

Learning to learn is ground zero. It is a prerequisite because the whole syntony quest is a learning and design journey. The first stage of evolutionary learning calls for the development of an evolutionary consciousness – an active and embodied awareness of the deeper patterns of what’s going on in the world and of the magnificent interconnections in our living and creative universe.

The Club of Budapest defines planetary consciousness as “the knowing and feeling of the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind, and the conscious adoption of the ethics and ethos that entails.” This is an essential aspect of an evolutionary consciousness. In addition, an evolutionary consciousness implies a normative, creative, and purposeful lived awareness that strives to guide humanity toward the design of a better future with all the living and non-living aspects of our world.

The development of an evolutionary consciousness implies becoming aware of the processes of evolution of which we are a part in order to becoming co-creators of evolutionary pathways. It involves embracing a consciousness that is aligned with the larger scheme of things.

The development of an evolutionary consciousness involves…

…Becoming aware of evolution

Have a bird’s eye view of our place in the universe and of our evolutionary story — where we are coming from and where we are headed.
Realize how brief our presence on Earth has been and how majestic the dynamics of the universe are.
Recognize that we have been evolving blindly and this is putting our own future into jeopardy.
Appreciate unity in diversity.

…Expanding our consciousness

Learn to go beyond biologically based limitations, such as the evolutionarily derived biases in perception that direct our attention to sudden changes but not to slowly developing long-term changes.
Embrace the whole of humanity as our family and the planet as our home.
Expand our sense of self in order to empathize with other beings, including Earth as a whole, and take care of them as we care for ourselves.
Learn to feel our interconnections with everything and live in ways that demonstrate this awareness.
Be aware of the problems around us, locally and globally.
Recognize our uniqueness as individual human beings and learn who we are in relation to everything else.
Embrace partnership values (cooperation, linking, power to).

… Preparing ourselves for becoming evolutionary change agents

Learn from the mistakes and burdens of the past and try to not repeat them.
Embrace paradox and cope with uncertainty in the path toward evolutionary action.
Value intuition and feelings in addition to rationality.
Have the openness to take every life situation as a learning opportunity.
Trust oneself and others as the default mode of interaction.
Be hopeful and responsible.
Learn to be ethical in an evolutionary sense.
Learn to align our values and world views with the larger processes of which we are a part.
Identify the opportunities that are opportunity increasing.
Learn how to act in ways that provide for an increasingly healthy and robust environment in which to work/play/learn.

The evolutionary story

Our planet was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Humans have lived on Earth for about 2.5 million years. Civilizations developed about 10,000 years ago and written histories cover approximately only 5,000 years. In the last 200 years (0.00000044% of Earth time), humans have wrought more change on the planet than anything else in the past billion years. An analogy may help gain perspective on these time spans:

Imagine a movie that runs a full year representing all the time since the origin of the earth. Each frame in the motion picture is the equivalent of one year of real time. The normal movie speed of twenty-four frames a second has to be increased about six times to 146 frames (years) per second to fit this movie into a single year. That means that 8.752 years of real time would flash by during each minute of the movie…. A day of the movie would represent 12,602.240 years. Imagine that the movie begins on January 1, coinciding with the origin of the earth, and ends with our present time at New Years’ Eve the following year. As the movie runs for weeks, no sign of life is seen. The first glimmers of one-celled microbial life do not develop until March….

In our year long movie, more complex life forms… do not develop until August and September. Larger and still more complex multicellular organism do not appear until November. Dinosaurs appear about December 13th and become extinct after about thirteen days. Mammals appear about December fifteen. The genus Homo does not develop until five hours before midnight on December 31. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) developed only 100,000 years ago; eleven minutes before midnight. Civilization does not appear until one minute before midnight. A lifetime of a modern human would be only one-half of a second. (From Milbrath, Lester, 1989, Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning our way out, SUNY, p. 2).

From this perspective, the industrial era has lasted about two seconds. During that era, humans have used up and scattered a large proportion of the resources contained in the earth’s crust, altered and exploited ecosystems to serve strictly human needs, held all other species at their mercy, and driven many species to extinction. We are now well on the way to poisoning the biosphere and changing the earth’s climate. In comparison to the dinosaurs who survived on the planet thirteen days, can Homo sapiens last even one day? Viruses and bacteria have long preceded us, and at the rate we’re changing things, they may well be the next dominant life form long after we are gone.

Psyche: A game for the evolution of consciousness

Psyche is a “universal guide for human affairs in the form of a game combining the wisdom of highly developed ancient civilizations with the discoveries of modern psychology” (from the foreword of the Psyche game manual). The game, developed by Mexican psychologist Armando Perez, is a contemporary synthesis of ancient systems of self-discovery from Mexico, China, Greece, India and Persia played as a board game. It is a wonderful tool for self-reflection and for the conscious exploration and transformation of your conscious energy.

You can learn more about the game at: www.psychegame.com

The following books provide a partial list of suggested reading for developing your evolutionary consciousness:

Berry, Thomas (1988). The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Chaisson, Eric (1987). The Life Era: Cosmic selection and conscious evolution. New York: W.W. Norton.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1993). The Evolving Self: A psychology for the third millennium. New York: Harper Collins.

Eisler, Riane (1987). The Chalice and the Blade: Our history, our future. Cambridge: Harper & Row.

Elgin, Duane (1993a). Awakening Earth: Exploring the evolution of human culture and consciousness. New York: William Morrow.

Feinstein, David and Krippner, Stanley (1988). Personal Mythology: The psychology of your evolving self. New York: Jeremy Tarcher.

Hubbard, Barbara Marx (1998). Conscious Evolution: Awakening the power of our social potential. Novato: New World Library.

Laszlo, Ervin (1996). The Systems View of the World: A holistic vision for our time. New Jersey: Hampton Press.

Laszlo, Ervin; Grof, Stanislav and Russell, Peter (1999). The Consciousness Revolution. Boston: Elements Books.

Macy, Joanna (1991). World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley: Parallax Press.

Milbrath, Lester W. (1989). Envisioning a Sustainable Society: Learning our way out. New York: SUNY.

Theobald, Robert (1997). Reworking Success: New communities at the millennium. Stony Creek: New Society Publishers.

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