Dear Andrew Cohen,
I am riveted by “Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening.” Your theme that enlightenment need not be limited to elitist and eisegetical experiences, memory, but invites us to become co-pilgrims in and through this evolutionary epic, feels both important and strategic for this climatically transitional time.
Perhaps because I just finished reading Charles Eisenstein’s “Sacred Economics,” which also tells an evolutionary story, I am hearing your voice as inviting evolution toward the primal economic value of health. Not just healthy outcomes for human nature, but for all of Earth’s Tribes.
I am also influenced by at least three other evolutionary models that offer some interesting collective redundancy about the evolution of consciousness as emerging toward a cultural revolution of bicamerally balanced (Julian Jaynes, evolutionary developmental psychology of Left-brain language and cultural bicameral dissonance) eco-consciousness as eco-logic, a dialectic co-arising Earth’s RNA enculturation with AnthroCentric DNA as YangDominant ecobalancing YinRecessive regenerational CQI Standards for health assurance, surviving thru thriving, inclusively polycultural in diastatic/climax universal spacetime position.
Where you think of “vertical momentum,” I read deep Exterior/Interior Landscape Ecologically Rooted Cooperative UnEarthing.
Where you choose “creative,” I choose regenerative [PermaCultural.
Where you remind us, and warn us, that “ [t]he evolutionarily enlightened soul lives for change” I want to nuance eco-consciousness is of both positive and negative change, both nurturing and toxic, and more polyculturally enlightened ecosystems nurture therapeutic, healthy change, and disinvest of pathological, dissonantly unhealthy and both economically and ecologically irrational change. Wow, that was kind of long, so you can see, perhaps, I am also influenced by the geometric systems of mind revolutionary Prime-Relationship dynamic system theory of Buckminster Fuller.
So, again, where you choose “change” I would probably choose “optimizing polycultural health” of positively deviant evolutionary trends. (recommend www.positivedeviance.org kind of a health-related social-evolutionary systems theory, producing surprisingly positive health and safety outcomes. Makes me wonder what positively deviant characteristics, patterns, lifestyle decisions, economic and political decisions might we find in the population of seasoned ecotherapists and feminist-permaculturists and organic farmers? Probably more cooperatively Win-Win strategists and interdependently-relationally/transactionally oriented, more eco-centric, and less Left-brain dominant competitive Win-Lose egocentric. I’m guessing that’s what Earth’s climatically changing voices might be showing us as important PolyCulturally Healthy Positive Deviance.
“we are part of a process that is [cooperatively] going somewhere.” Again, while I realize this word “cooperative” may be implied by our evolutionary context for you, that is not necessarily the perspective of more marginalized, stigmatized, under-valued readers who understand our evolution story as profoundly Win-Lose competitive. I learned in grade school that the theory of evolution supports the historical accuracy of survival of the fittest; certainly suggesting it would be to one’s advantage to at least steer away from those who are the least fittest, as these are inevitably hopeless losers in life’s crapshoot.
It is both good and important news, then, that Earth’s evolution of ecoconsciousness is both positively trending toward polyculturally cooperative interdependent health optimization, while monocultural competitive independent wealth deposits have already begun to wilt.
“Most human beings don’t live for change.” but do live for love, synergy, healthy thrival, which requires developmental change.
I suspect our deep “preconscious orientation toward stasis” is also a deep dis-logical cultural orientation toward Win-Lose political/relational and economic/normative/monomial competition stasis.
While “living for change” does indeed sound “unbearable,” living for sustainable polyculturally-inclusive cooperative health-therapy for Me and We sounds like an opulent life of Beloved Community abundance could at least be a shared hope among the evolutionarily enlightened.
To conclude, for fear of excessive redundancy, from p. 185, your sentences in quotes, with my perhaps too dense nuancing in brackets:
“The cultural ego is the [Left brain dominant-languaged OVER Right brain recessive-inductive] status quo, which lives in both our [Left] conscious [language] and [Right-autonomic temporal-syntaxed, regeneratively functioned] unconscious [unlanguaged] minds.”
“It [cultural ego] consists of all the deeply held images and conditioned [norms of Earth’s ecological positive/negative] beliefs that define for us what [evolutionary] life is supposed to look like.” [cooperatively struggling with, not competing against while using Win-Lose Evolutionary Gaming Programs and stories, language, absorbed into an ecoculturally dissonant struggle with insufficiency, lack of adequacy, shortness of ego’s time]
“It is impossible to separate any notion of individuality and personal [political, economic, familial, tribal, cooperative, ecological, healthy, therapeutic] identity from these core values that have such an [Tipping Point as wu wei] influence on who we are and how we see the world.”
Which brings me to the third teleological evolutionary theory in my life, an emerging TransMillennial Taoism, perhaps. Where we struggle against our unraveling Left-brain dominant straight white male over-representation on the “Most Likely to Stay Healthy through Future Generations”, I see Yang power, paradigmatically parallel to Buckminster Fuller’s “convex polynomial universal energy”; and where we struggle with our Right-brain recessive non-white, not-straight, feminist over-representation on the “Most Likely to Help all of us Stay Healthy through Future Generations, I see YinYin as WinWin unitarianly opulent flow-pattern frequencies, paradigmatically parallel to B Fuller’s “concave bilateral unitarian dipolar co-arising/co-falling Time,” breathing in this healthy intimacy of sacred eco-conscious passion, to breathe out cooperative peace inclusive of all Earth’s Tribes.
Do you happen to know what I mean?
With warm regard, Namaste,
0-Liver Glory
