August/September 2003

The Progressive Story of America
Bill Moyers

Democratic Leadership Council Sows Division
Robert Borosage

21st Century Communication Plus Whole-Hearted Support Can Help Create A Strong Candidate
Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD

Dennis Kucininch's Grassroots Presidential Campaign Builds Momentum

The Politics of Heroin
Derrick Jensen

Deflation and the "D" Word
Doug Dowd

Radical Healing Through the Conscious Practice of Ayurveda
Myrica Morningstar

Interview With Ram Dass
John Darling

An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium
Alan Sasha Lithman

On Thawing and the Energy Cycle
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

New Warriors
John Darling

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium

By Alan Sasha Lithman

Described by Matthew Fox as “a radical book, a compassionate book and an altogether needed book calling all of us to ‘evolutionary activism,’” An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium is not only an inquiry into the nature and evolution of Consciousness but an applied research toward the willed mutation of our species. As such, this work not only addresses the inner-directed spiritual seeker but the hands-on empiricist and activist. For if we are to heal ourselves and our planet, if we are to fulfill our destiny as a species, transforming and not merely transcending, we must reconcile subject matter that has suffered through most of human history from the split perceptions, approaches and dogmas of Religion and Science—from competing traditions and ideologies that have effectively polarized and disconnected what we call Matter from what we call Spirit.

“Taking us beyond ordinary historical timeframes and planning processes,” according to Michael Murphy, “this work retrains our perspective to the larger, more integral scope of an Evolutionary Agenda.” From this more comprehensive perspective, recognizing humanity as a transitional rather than fixed species, this Agenda develops evolutionary strategies that address the core as well as the symptoms of our accelerating crises.

The radical attempt by a species to will or collaborate in its own mutation is levered through conscious choice rather than predetermined genetic mechanism. In this light, this work explores the link between our cellular, psychological and social behavior-patterning, setting forth to consciously change our “genetic psychology” if we would truly transform the world around us. In this process, the forces we call “gravity” and “love” are redefined in post-egoic terms. Building from the premise, then, that profound and sustainable change translates from within outward, from the cellular to the cultural, this Agenda goes on to propose species-level undertakings such as an alternative stock market, a post-monetary economy, and post-commercial media as the natural outgrowth of an emergent evolutionary consciousness.

May the following brief excerpts from this work serve not only as catalysts to explore this Evolutionary Agenda, but further the reader on her own path of personal and planetary transformation.

The Evolution of Consciousness

To understand where we’re heading, we must first find our true footing. Where exactly are we standing? In which time? On what ground? And who or what exactly is this “we”?

In fact, beginning literally where we are, what is this page we are reading and how did these words and thoughts manifest on it? Is it, as our outer senses tell us, processed plant matter which grew at some definable point in time in a particular bioregion of earth, now technologically transformed into paper imprinted with someone’s ideas formulated in English? Or is it recycled molecular material, spun from the original protoplasm of an embryonic Universe whose genes, coded with the DNA of Consciousness, date back to that unrecorded moment when Matter and Time, according to our mind’s grasp of Reality, began? Is it a tangible sheet of text, white with black script, whose words remain constant no matter how many times one closes and reopens the book? Or is it a whirling mass of micro-worlds, of electrons spinning at such imperceptible lightspeeds as to appear motionless and stable, energy held together in discrete forms—in this case, a printed page—by a remarkable force of physics?

Or is it all of the above, depending on which dimension, which layer of consciousness we operate, perceive and translate our reality?

An innocuous piece of paper or a symbol of the miraculous containing the secret code of Being? Held together by a force of physics? metaphysics? or simply a Force of Consciousness still slipping through the hands of physicists and others who do not yet have the inner instruments to recognize that they too are held together and in-formed by this same conscious Force, that we too are an evolving expression of that same emergent Consciousness?—of a cons-cious Presence, Self-born, Self-conceived, who in the metaphoric flash of a smile, once upon a time, once upon eternity, went supernova, kindling Being into Becoming, primal stardust sown into spiraling galaxies pregnant with planetary seeds: seeds of self ingrained in stone, crystallizing into atoms, clustering into molecules, coalescing finally into an earth whose vulcan crust still held that timeless creative Star-Fire until it could hold it no more … That Fire breaking forth through its womb of Matter, spilling forth in myriad forms of Life, cells quickening, dancing, blazing forth in a sea of grasses and flow-ering plants, celebrating from the cellular and photosynthetic through the spectrum of the four-legged and finally the two; crossing another evolutionary threshold from Life to Mind, forging from the primordial matrix of these living elements a new form for that first Fire to speak and know Itself, reconfiguring these living elements, churning the alchemy from one-celled plants to protozoa to primates to people so that people could turn plants into pages, into stories, into music, into works of art and ideas reflecting the joy and wonder of that original Creative Fire hidden in every moment, every act, every breath, every birth.

This work proposes to explore the evolution of Consciousness in a way that is both visionary yet common-sensible, based on the following premises:

• Only that which is already in-volved can e-volve.

• Evolution proceeds simultaneously on two interwoven tracks, one of form, the other of consciousness.

• Form is essentially a construct, vehicle or vessel (in Sanskrit, adhar) of consciousness, a medium through which consciousness expresses and experiences itself.

• Human being represents a particular stage in the evolving spectrum of conscious Being, a threshold of consciousness corresponding to a particular range of mental frequency or bandwidth in an infinite scale of Being.

• Humanity is both a distinct form and frequency of consciousness as well as a unique metamorphic species, an evolutionary work-in-progress, whose essential destiny and dharma is to consciously exceed itself: a transitional “bridging” species whose upper threshold of consciousness, despite formidable guardians of that threshold, can be self-bridged and surpassed in a transformational process that progressively leads to a new terrestrial species, emerging like our amphibious ancestors into a new milieu of consciousness.

• We exist in two overlapping times, historical and evolutionary, one a sub-rhythm of the other.

• We are at a transitional moment when the cresting wave of an evolutionary cycle overtakes history’s shallower process and perspective, pressing us against our upper threshold as a species, sweeping us in the inrushing evolutionary tide toward a new principle of Being.

• In the course of this transition, fraught with species-level labor pains, we are pushed to the brink of our own mutation by the accelerating intensity of inner and outer crises—a catalyst of crises which, like a psy-particle accelerator splitting the atom of our ego, continues to bombard the dense cocoon of all that remains unconscious in us, facing us with the perilous choice of transformation or extinction.

• Our primary focus as a species at this crucial evolutionary turning-point is to learn to collaborate more consciously, gracefully and co-creatively with the dynamics of this change; to learn to breathe, working with the contractions, minimizing the frictions and traumas of the transition.

Evolution and Revolution

Evolution, while primarily associated with incremental changes over immeasurably vast periods of time, is in fact a far more subversive, radical and transformative process than its revolutionary human spin-offs. For if one strips away the associative meanings and hyperbole, revolution suggests a circular movement rotating around a fixed axis that, regardless of the distance traveled, eventually returns to the orbital point where it began. This is why there is a tendency, a gravitational pull in our human cycles, for revolutionaries, once in power, to take on the qualities of those whom they overthrew—to gravitate back to past patterns, the oppressed and abused unconsciously absorbing and repeating the tyrannies of their oppressors and abusers.

The central element here that limits the effectiveness of revolutionary change is its rotation around a fixed axis, which in human terms means around a fixed consciousness. In other words, if the person, the inner consciousness, the pivotal point, does not change, shift, evolve, then things simply revolve, tethered in the case of our species to Mind and its mental reference points for Reality. The changes, then, which that circumscribed consciousness brings about remain temporal, superficial, limited in scope and degree: System-makeovers which do not reach the core person, core program-ming, eventually returning us to a variation of the previously-existing regime, a variation of ourselves and all that remains, despite appearances, untransformed in us.

Evolution, on the other hand, resembles a spiral movement rather than a closed circle. Its fractal symbol of itself can be seen in the spiraling double-helix of the DNA molecule, evolution’s mercurial messenger and the truly subversive double-agent of Change. Its serpentine image of intertwining strands conveys both

• a corkscrew pressure to penetrate, to break through stasis and status quo not only at the surface but at the center, the nucleus, the core of the form, shifting the axis of consciousness to another level, another dimension; as well as

• interlinking threads that weave together and reintegrate the breakthroughs, inner and outer movements, ascending and descending directions, bridging the disconnections between form and consciousness in one vast continuum of Being.

Evolution, then, and the persistent thrust of its evolutionary movement is a direct threat to all fixed forms, ideas, answers, truths. In which case, those systems and belief systems, whether cellular, psychological, corporate or cultural, which cling to present form, present control, present truth, no matter how true that truth had been in its moment, carry within themselves the seeds of their own stagnation, self-undoing and eventual death. In other words, when the ego of the form fixes and crystallizes, closing its borders, mind or cell-walls to new life, inspiration and ideas, that form begins to collapse in upon itself weighed down by its own gravity, inertia, entropy.

All breakthroughs are heretical to that which was broken through. In which case, Evolution is Life’s ultimate heresy (or deliverer, depending on which side of the breakthrough one finds oneself), pressing not simply at what we know and experience, but the way we know and experience. In other words, at the very axis of human consciousness in which all of our traditions and revelations are rooted: An axis of consciousness which, till now, we have equated and identified with Mind.

The gauntlet, then, which Darwin threw down—suggesting that we are part of an evolutionary continuum, most recently descended, God forbid, from apes—challenged and offended more than our religious sensibilities. For if one follows the implications of The Origin of Species past its last page, past its interim conclusions, in quest of the living and still-evolving version, there is no reason to believe that evolution arbitrarily stops with us, with this half-baked human species and its half-lit mental consciousness. And it is this subversive implication, I believe, which subconsciously pricks not only the raw nerve of our biblical-based realities but of Mind itself as Reality’s final arbiter, intermediary and god, provoking a fundamentalist backlash which continues to this day in a contagion of forms and cultures, secular as well as sectarian, all desperately resisting that inrushing evolutionary tide that presses us now toward a new principle of Being—toward a mutation of consciousness that threatens not simply our social, political and economic empires but the Empire of Mind itself as evolution’s last word.

In this sense, this work aspires to serve not simply as a support and encouragement for original thought and action—for personal, community and environmental activism—but as a catalyst and agent for a more integral and radical evolutionary activism, lending itself to that growing wave, that conscious counter-contagion of creative change and discontent churning within and around us.

The Denial of Matter

How, one wonders, is it possible for a Divine Creator to ultimately create something other than or outside of Itself? To arbitrarily conjure Something from Nothing, fashioned from a substance other than Its own Being? It is far more likely that this split arrangement—God there, mundane world here—simply reflects, describes and projects our own present schizophrenic level of perception. For if there is a Divine Being, then there is only the Divine. And what we call “Matter” can only be That in various forms, figures and degrees of Consciousness. In other words, Matter is the Body of God. In which case, what we call “Evolution” is in fact the progressive manifestation of this Divinity, the unfolding process of an eternal, infinite yet immanent Presence in Its canvass of Time-Space.

Reexamining, then, the motives and logic for this Creation, it is a strange faith indeed which accepts, let alone worships or deifies, a Creator whose sole inspiration is to get out of the Story. Why bother to create something in the first place if the intention is eventually to deny and void it of meaning? Why set up what amounts to an elaborate hoax where the plot and script condemn us to a dead-end experience?—an existential tease where the raison d’être is simply to realize the emptiness of it all, and in that realization, to turn back, frustrated, exhausted, defeated, taking refuge once again in some inner or other transcendent peace and poise where we began? Why, in fact, trade that to begin with for this suffering and illusion, unless there is some other sense that we have not yet caught?

For where is the divine logic in some stoic Heavenly Father-figure or discon-nected Witness Self masochistically plunging Itself or us into such a painfully unresolvable tale with such a pathetically unimaginative finalé?—a finalé that, if played out to its absurd conclusions, deletes not only the reality of the world but of its Author as well in some last gloriously-mystical koan that, like a dream popping and taking the dreamer with it, leaves no trace … unless we had missed some secret still hidden here in Matter, awaiting another consciousness capable of divining it?

Involution-Evolution

Only that which is already in-volved can e-volve. A child, a flower, a universe, is born, not made, carrying within its core its own seed-self, its own unique genetic code of consciousness, its own self-rhythm of unfolding and becoming.

The concept of a Great Void, then, from which all inexplicably arose, need not imply the absolute absence of Being, only the absence of manifest Being. For despite the mystique of such a Creative Void, something does not come forth from nothing. In which case, what we call Creation is not in fact so much a creation—a Genesis mystically conjured, whimsically chanced or spontaneously combusted from some absolute Nothingness—but a progressive manifestation of That which Is and, awkwardly described in present linear language, always has been.

Working from this evolutionary premise, this universe, then, did not arbitrarily arise or arrive, but unfolded from some Self-Existence preceding yet paradoxically present within it. This unfolding or evolving implies a complementary process of infolding, involving, whereby Self-Conscious-Being conceals Itself from Itself in a hide-and-seek phenomenon of Consciousness inspired, this work sug-gests, simply to explore and experience the endless mystery, joy and wonder of Self-discovery. In other words, for the sheer child-lit delight of Being.

Evolutionary Triage

To succeed in our core healing as a species, transforming the genetic conditioning of an entire evolutionary cycle, we must survive the raging symptoms on the surface. In other words, we must develop a species-level strategy that approaches healing as both goal and process, recognizing our “either-or” default tendency as a critical part of the egoic pathology and systemic unconsciousness we must root out. While working, then, to cure the core of our un-Oneness, our egoic malaise, we must simultaneously begin to practice a form of “evolutionary triage” that addresses the accelerating symptoms and manifestations of it on the surface: the bio-physical, psychological, social and ecological crises which, if left untreated, could kill us and our terrestrial life-support systems before we had the time necessary to undergo an integral species-level transformation.

For to survive the breakdown of the egoic eggshell and the centuries, perhaps millennia, of metamorphic transition preceding the breakthrough of a radically new species, I believe we must find a sustainable trans-human way of being; forging our missing links forward through an interim species and series of species before we can hope to manifest a truly meta-human being operating from a consciousness no longer subject to present ego-bound laws of physics, biology and mind. In which case, we must work from both poles of being at the same time: from either and or, core and symptom, moving from within outward as well as from the surface inward, zigzagging and cross-stitching back and forth from the psychological to the cellular, from what we call spiritual to what we call material, in order to mend the hole and reweave the whole.

This emergent healing paradigm, progressively incorporating in process the holistic nature of that next evolutionary principle and state of well-being we are seeking to manifest, contemporizes India’s earliest Vedic vision that “one finds the Truth by the Truth.” In other words, one must apply even in the quest the very qualities of that which is sought. A perspective which highlights the inherent flaw in all our Machiavellian-based approaches to health, wealth, warfare and spiritual realizations.

A New “Survival of the Fittest”

As a species, we are clearly in an evolutionary race to win ourselves and our planet the survival time needed to make the necessary changes before things are irreparable, before personal and terrestrial immune systems are too fatigued and depleted to recuperate: A race ironically where the very urgency of the crises and problems becomes the means sufficiently threatening to motivate us finally to move, to act, to change—where the poison itself homeopathically triggers a deeper process in us to find the anti-venom, the Oneness, before it’s too late. In other words, where the threat reaches our pain-tolerance threshold, cutting through our egoic resistances, rhetoric, habits, lethargies, apathies, fears and fatigues; provoking that deeper process, that deeper person in us, to find and become the cure. The fear of death, after all, still genetically trumps the fear of life, providing, this Agenda believes, the smelling salts to awaken us from our auto-pilot gravity before we crash and burn.

If the accelerating crises themselves (as demonstrated by the stasis-shattering events of September 11th, 2001) are evolution’s leveraging mechanism … interactively ratcheting up the pain in proportion to the degree we resist, deny or return to our somnambulism (in effect, providing us with real-time bio-feedback between our state of consciousness and the state of the world), then the point of our painful species-level learning experience, it would seem, is to finally recognize that:

• the pain generated by our egoic resistance not to change, not to transform, is far more painful than the change itself; and consequently, motivated by this recognition,

• if we would minimize the trauma of the transition, we must turn our survival instincts from preserving past to preserving future, learning to willingly collaborate with change.

This reorientation and reversal of realities effectively shifts our concept and application of “survival of the fittest,” providing us the commonsense rationale to devise a more conscious, adaptive and effective species-level survival strategy. For to continue unconsciously following our inherited ego-driven survival patterns and instincts, coded to preserve at all costs present egoic forms, mentalities and behaviors, paradoxically insures our death—insures the very breakdown of the form to which it so desperately clings, shattering it through its own unwillingness to widen, its own brittleness, rigidity and incapacity to progressively contain and incarnate that larger evolutionary Life pressing to be born.

This redefined concept of survival of the fittest, then, moves us from one which at all costs valued selfishness and egoic self-interest—rewarding crude strength, aggression, cleverness, deception and domination—to one which expands the definition of self and self-interest to include all; realistically rather than idealistically re-identifying ourselves with the fate of the whole; pragmatically recognizing that personal survival is in fact inseparable from the survival of the whole. In which case, selflessness becomes the humble means to Self-fullness in a scenario that redefines “fittest” as the most adaptable, resilient, egoless and self-giving. In other words, as that which effectively presents both in physical and psychological terms the least friction, resistance and rigidity—i.e., the least stuckness—to the inexorable pressure of evolutionary growth; learning to gracefully and gratefully go with Her flow. For true strength and evolutionary heroism in this scenario lies in the giving, not the taking, in self-opening rather than a clenched fist.

The practice of egolessness, then, at this critical evolutionary juncture, is no longer just a question of ethics, ideals or do-goodism, but of personal and planetary survival, shifting the matter from morality to mortality.

Alan Sasha Lithman spent 21 years (1969-1990) as a resident in Auroville, India, where he apprenticed hands-on experience in applied spirituality, community-building and environmental restoration. Considering himself an “evolutionary activist,” he currently lives in Ashland, Oregon. An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium, his third book, is published by White Cloud Press (www.whitecloudpress.com) with support from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It is scheduled for release in August, 2003.