Our Conscious (R)evolution

By Dr Jude Currivan

This work is a chapter featured in The Great Upshift by Ervin Laszlo and David Lorimer which you can order here.

If past attempts to envisage the future are anything to go by, we likely have little or no idea of what may come. Most forecasts of the future have been either iterations of the past, or a larger leap, often based on potential technological innovations, and now the consequences of the global environmental and existential threats we face. Yet nonetheless they have still been generally based on a currently prevailing worldview. Few have been able to envisage what a future founded on a transformational understanding of the nature or reality itself and our purpose and possible role within its evolutionary emergence might look like. Nontheless, we are on the threshold of such a radical and existential question: called to ask ‘what if?’ such understanding might be imminent and its corollary, ‘what then?’ It is, here and now, at a potential revelatory moment of collective choice and on the verge of a (r)evolutionary and transformational journey, that we stand.

What if?

What if, instead of viewing consciousness as something we have and experiencing it at different levels of self-awareness; that we come to understand as an empirical reality, that mind and consciousness are what we and the whole world truly are?

What if we are about to discover, as wisdom teachings have maintained, that universal mind literally in-forms the appearance of our Universe, as merely its semblance and not its fundamental nature?

What if, unity and its manifold expressions in complexity and diversity, rather than separation or uniformity, is indeed our existential reality?

What if we as a species no longer need to hope, trust and have faith in such an aspirational possibility but come to understand, experience and embody this essential realization?

What if science finally catches up and converges with wisdom teachings to provide scientifically-based evidence of the nonlocally unified nature of our entire Universe? What if we’re about to be presented with ever more compelling evidential confirmation that we’re microcosmic co-creators of its unfolding and emergent coherent and unified intelligence; a finite thought form in the infinity and eternity of cosmic mind? We are.

Such a 21st century scientific revolution is well underway and its recent breakthroughs are rapidly expanding across all scales of existence. Increasingly, its discoveries across numerous fields of research from cosmology to biology, neuroscience and the study of collective human behaviors and our innate nonlocal attributes, will radically affect not only our view of the Universe at its smallest and largest scales but every level in between and vitally for our everyday lives. Crucially, its findings are converging with spiritual experiences, indigenous and other perennial wisdom teachings and numerous meta-analyses of supernormal and multidimensional phenomena, into a cosmology of a conscious, emergent and unitive Universe and a realization of our planetary home as also a sentient and evolving being; Gaia.

A unitive narrative

This emergent understanding is enabling an authentic and unitive narrative to underpin, frame and empower our conscious (r)evolution; a collective we-volution. Such a unitive narrative has been articulated, initially by members of the SDG thought leaders group of the Evolutionary Leaders circle and the tenets of its main and generic text, as follows, invite a collective choice to awaken from the illusion of separation to an experiential and conscious embodiment of its (r)evolutionary call and the potential for a future that works for all:

The unfolding evolutionary story describes how cosmic mind, articulated in a universal ‘language’ based on digitized and vitally, meaningful, in-formation and pixelated at the most minute scale of existence, literally and actively in-forms the entire appearance and manifest forms of our Universe. The holographic principle, so named by extending research from black holes to a universal scale, is also providing compelling cosmological evidence that the Universe’s in-formed reality manifests holographically; with its innate wholeness expressed in nested and relational complexity of its differentiated and diverse parts. The mathematical signatures and dynamic patterns and processes of wholeness are being found at all scales of existence and through numerous fields of study ranging from cosmology, physics and chemistry, to biology, complex systems and collective human behaviors.

Beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, not in the old paradigm story of the implied chaos of a big bang, but as a beautifully ordered and incredibly fine-tuned first moment of an ongoing ‘big breath’, a sentient Universe emerged. As space expands from its miniscule birth and time flows from past to present to future, life embodies a profound evolutionary impulse driven, not by random occurrences and mutations, but through resonant and harmonic interplays of forces and influences that are meaningfully and coherently in-formed and guided. Gaia’s continuing emergence is embodied in collaborative and synergistic relationships and dynamic coevolutionary partnerships on a planetary scale, where, now, the conscious evolution of humanity may be realized as an integral part of our planet’s own evolutionary progress and purpose.

On planetary and human levels, the universal and archetypal relationships now being evidentially revealed are also reflected in spirituality-based and wisdom traditions and in psychologist C.G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and representative archetypes: containing the whole spiritual heritage of humanity’s evolution born anew in the mind of every individual.

Instead of the apparent separation of our inner and outer awareness, and devaluation of our inner perception, a unitive narrative values our inner cognition and invites us to inwardly hear the wisdom of our hearts. In doing so, it also honors and respects the complementarity of feminine and masculine attributes, relatedness and balanced perspectives and empowers the co-creativity of their synergies within and between us. And thus, its unity expressed in diversity guides us to a wholeness of both the inner being and outer doing in our lives and supports us in integrating our innate health and wholeness, both individually and communally.

A Coming Unitive Age?

A period, centered around two and a half thousand years ago and lasting over more than five centuries has been called the inception of the Axial Age, which has continued until now. Characterized by a series of nascent spiritual and philosophical teachings, institutionalization of religions and shifts from communal to individual values, it also involved secular innovations including coinage, leading to wider and greater complexity of trading and societal structures. Ushering in radical changes, nonetheless, the insights of the Axial Age all sought meaning and purpose for human existence. All recognized non-physical dimensions of reality and aspired to integrate inner and outer experience of life. Generally, while promoting the actualization of personal agency, they also emphasized the good of the whole and which included the sustenance of planetary well-being. Yet, I would suggest that no philosopher or revelatory teacher of those times, did nor could, anticipate the nonlinear emergence of the sweeping, technological and global changes that have continued to unfold. The progressive secularization of our collective world-view and our sense of self through a prevailing scientific and technological perspective of materialist separation, while bringing physical benefits has, nonetheless, dis-membered our psyche from our earlier roots and communal sense of belonging and resulted from the consequential disconnection in chronic trauma. Now, though, the evidence-based and emergent cosmology of a living Universe that meaningfully exists and purposefully evolves as a nonlocally unified entity, is inviting us to awaken to realize that we are inseparable from each other, Gaia and the whole world. It is calling us to re-member who we really are and heal the trauma of our perceived separation into the whole-being and belonging of our true nature. And empowering us to consciously evolve to the beings we can become. Given too, the immediacy of our global communications and the cultural potency of horizontal meme transfers, the possible dawning of a new and Unitive Age, may emerge far more rapidly than did that of its Axial predecessor. However, I would also suggest a likely similarity in the systemic nonlinearity and inherent unknowingness as to how such a unitive based future might unfold and embody its (r)evolutionary potential So, rather than attempt to forecast possible specificities, which I feel are enigmatic, I’ll now go on to instead consider how we might best enjoin its potency, to consciously evolve and be guided by principles of personal and collective unitive awareness. Such awareness embraces unitive values, the into-greation of complementary feminine and masculine attributes and naturalizes multi-dimensional perception and communications as integral aspects of our whole-being and belonging to the whole world. Its guidance also invites us to mature through our integral embodiment of mind, heart and purpose, to become conscious co-evolutionary partners with the ongoing emergent impulse of Gaia and our entire Universe.

Unitive Values

The most foundational tenet of the emergent unitive narrative is that mind and consciousness are not something we have, but what we and the whole world fundamentally are. The realization of this universal unity and its expression in radical diversity, vitally recognizes our interbeing and belonging with the whole community of Gaia and with the entire Universe and its imbued consciousness, meaning, purpose and evolutionary flow. It consequently also invites a range of unitive-based values and resultant ethical behaviors that are love-centered and inclusive. These are the same values that the most profound of spiritually-based traditions teach and what indigenous wisdom and healthy communal behaviors are based on. They call for us to recognize that we are naturally part of a universal web of life, rather than separate from it. These include reverence for all life. This embraces, honors and respects, not only people and other biological organisms, but, those who Native American teachings refer to as ‘all our relations’, including the body of Gaia, our Sun and Moon, our ancestral lineages and spiritual and unseen realms. Another is a deep and felt sense of what is fair and just, that sociologists appreciate is embodied in us and expressed from early childhood. While young, we deeply care about such authenticity and truth. Yet our societies, when based on a world view and mind set of separation, teach and show us otherwise. Reciprocity is another value which the Q’ero people of Peru call ayni, ensuring the mutuality, and balance of give and take. And, in taking no more than what fulfils a need, and especially when that is provided by Gaia, to reciprocate with gratitude. All of these values are based on an experienced kinship and participation in a world where there is differentiation, complexity and diversity but which is essentially whole and its constituent parts inseparable and as embodied in the principle of ubuntu, a Nguni Bantu term that can be translated as ‘I am because you are.’ Perhaps the most fundamental unitive value is founded on this recognition. The so-named ‘golden rule’; to treat others – and our planetary home Gaia – as we would wish to be treated ourselves, is a value that lies at the heart of the core teachings of all major religions and spiritual traditions.

Into-greation

Unitive awareness also inherently honors and respects the complementarity of feminine and masculine attributes, their innate and powerful relatedness and the benefits of including and balancing their perspectives and contributions.

As such, the emergence of a new Unitive Age empowers the co-creativity of their synergies within and between us and enables us to achieve outcomes that are ‘greater than the sum of their parts’. Each of us naturally embodies both; in left-brain analytical and right brain intuitive ways of knowing and in the complementarity of mind-based and heart-based perception – with our hearts having as large a neural network of in-formational connectivity as our brains. Our current socio-economic structures and organizations have, though, generally based themselves on mechanistic perspectives of separation and competition and hierarchical and dominating characteristics generally viewed as ‘masculine’, with these having been predominant approaches and aiming to maximize quantitative performance. Often continuing to use mechanistic terms to measure effectiveness, human beings are resources; cogs in the ‘machine’. Business plans are blueprints for action, with key performance indicators focused on aligning all parts of the machine to its aims for success which are almost completely monetarily based. Unchecked, these perspectives competitively and greedily have driven over-consumption, environmental desecration, biodiversity depletion and pollution, inequalities, conflicts and epidemic levels of stress and dysfunctional behaviors. In recent years, though, a growing, and now urgent, recognition of their limitations and unsustainability is coming to the fore. Together with inner personal development in the service of self and co-creative leadership and organizational purpose, there is an increasing appreciation of an imperative to integrate behavioral traits generally viewed as feminine, such as inclusion and cooperation Such integration stimulates transformational change from the inside out, engendering distributed intelligence throughout organizations and expanding relationships from the individual Me, to encompass the organizational We and a planetary perspective and stewardship of All. In doing so, it also ushers in and co-creatively propagates a synergistic balance of the best and continuing benefits of the past, predominantly masculine, organizational behaviors, with feminine attributes. The following eight attributes which I consider to be natural to such unitive perception and of course able to be embodied by both men and women, are still unusual in our collective practice. Yet consciously encouraging and nurturing them is I believe, vital for a potential future that works for the good of the whole:

• Servant-leader – expresses the ‘servereignty’ of serving the good of the whole rather than the sovereignty of controlling the whole

• Soul-model - authentically embodies the highest coherence of the whole rather than role-modelling from an ego-based sense of status

• Seer – perceptive co-creator of the highest purpose and meaning of the organization

• Sensor – intuitively sensing what is calling to come through and emerge, and then responding and expressing its purpose rather than imposing control

• Shaper – facilitating the emergent evolutionary ‘shape’ and embodiment of the organization

• Space-holder – enabling and empowering diverse inclusivity and belonging and individual/collective worth, value and meaning throughout the organization and beyond And where appropriate:

• Stirrer - intervening as, when and how sensed to co-enable progressive and optimal positive change, increased capacity, resilience and thrivability

• Shaker – intervening as when and how sensed to initiate (r)evolutionary transformation

Expanding awareness to our whole-being and belonging

The so-named nonlocally unified reality of our Universe, has been effectively recognized as settled science by the award of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics to three researchers whose experimental work over many decades has validated what was an early prediction of quantum mechanics and indeed a necessary prerequisite for quantum phenomena to universally manifest. The nonlocal mindfulness of our Universe naturally encompasses multidimensional levels of sentience. As attested to by universal wisdom teachings and myriad direct experience over millennia, we have inborn abilities to engage and communicate with and, vitally, to learn from them. Our intuition can then also be recognized as an inborn ‘superpower’ that all of us have access to, and that nonlocal supernormal phenomena, attributes and perception such as telepathy and remote viewing are attainable too in certain states of awareness. And that meaningful ‘coincidences’ that Carl Jung called synchronicities, when paid attention to, also denote nonlocal connectivity; nonetheless without violating the causality crucially embedded within space-time. Naturalizing this birthright offers a greater embodiment of our potential whole-being and a realization that we fundamentally belong as micro-cosmic co-creators of the unitive sentience of our entire Universe. It also beckons us to a future where we can evolve to consciously become co-evolutionary partners of its and Gaia’s ongoing emergent impulse and potential.

What then? Seeing through a unitive lens

To paraphrase philosopher Marcel Proust; "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Our world-views underpin and frame our behaviors and our behaviors also influence our world-views. So, progressively changing our perception, to view and so experience the world through a unitive lens, has the potential to (r)evolutionize our consciousness. And where, alongside, unitive approaches can actively support processes of change. When in 2017, I co-founded WholeWorld-View4 , aiming to serve the understanding, experience and embodiment of unitive awareness to serve this evolutionary purpose, our embryonic community recognized that to do so, could be expressed by a three-fold call to action: Act Local, Feel Global and Think Cosmic. At each level of the dynamically interdependent, interpenetrating and holarchic levels of acting, feeling and thinking from a unitive perspective, we asked the question of why it matters to do so. In acting local, the tenets of relating, belonging, involving and sustaining came to the fore, providing place-based fractals (both physical and also virtual) of caring and co-creative communities to synergistically link up and lift up together.

In asking the same question of feeling global, responses that appreciated that we look after what we care about and we care for what we relate to, emerged. Realizing that we and our planetary home Gaia are inseparable, invoked, thanks to visionary Michael Lindfield, the embrace of the concept of being Gaian; a profoundly sensed invitation to experientially belong as microcosms of Gaia’s sentience and evolutionary purpose. In doing so, we can learn from the profound wisdom of our planetary parent, as we seek to consciously evolve our societies, organizations and economics to undertake regenerative healing and being based on life and unitive eco-nomics. As I describe in The Story of Gaia; Our planetary home only uses the energy needed for all she achieves. She fits form to function with underlying simplicity, exquisite beauty, and intricate precision. She recycles everything with no waste. She shares and in-forms her skills locally and globally. She embodies collaboration throughout her biosphere, appreciating healthy competition and encouraging holarchic cooperation and evolutionary purpose. She exults in diversity and knows it to imbue resilience and collective genius. And she exists, evolves, and thrives within the wholistic limits and emergent opportunities of her planetary gaiasphere. And she’s been doing so for over four billion years.” Thirdly, the evocation to think cosmic elicited that, as our entire Universe exists and evolves as a nonlocally unified entity, we literally are its micro-cosmic co-creators and ourselves fundamentally embody its meaning and evolutionary purpose. Further, that our conscious (r)evolution to embody unitive awareness, invites us to become co-evolutionary partners in an ongoing, universal and planetary journey of discovery, transformation and emergent possibility.

References

1. J. Currivan. The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the center of Creation (Inner Traditions, 2017 and Audiobook 2022)

2. J. Currivan. The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of our Conscious Planet (Inner Traditions, 2022 and Audiobook 2023)

3. https://www.evolutionaryleaders.net/unitivenarrative 4. www.wholeworld-view.org