WHAT IS EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY?

Evolutionary spirituality is an integral way of thinking and being in the world grounded in a personal, meaningful experience of the epic of evolution as ones own creation myth, or cosmological sacred story.

What distinguishes evolutionary spirituality from other meaningful approaches to life is its celebration of cosmic history as sacred revelation. Such an inclusive approach provides common ground for all religious and non-religious alike. It supports appreciative ways of thinking about the past, enlightened ways of being in the present, and empowering ways of imagining the future, grounded in the most inspiring and subjectively truthful interpretations presently available of objectively true scientific facts and widely accepted theories based on those facts.

EVOLUTIONARY EMERGENCE (Directionality )

While every religious tradition will necessarily mythologize cosmic history differently, all will share a similar, if not identical, scientific understanding. Evolutionary spirituality in all its myriad of forms is rooted deeply in what the majority of the worlds scientists hold to be true, real, verifiable. Heres one articulation of the basic flow of the evolutionary epic

Everything is in a time-developmental process. Galaxies evolve. Solar systems and planets evolve. Continents, oceans, mountains, and rivers evolve. Bacteria, plants, and animals evolve. And human consciousness, culture, and technologies evolve. Everything is in a developmental process. Everything is interconnected and interrelated. And nothing is itself without everything else.

From the perspective of the whole, evolution clearly evidences directionality. The universe has become increasingly complex over time, with each stage building upon and incorporating earlier stages. The galactic era, for example, emerged out of and integrated (i.e., transcended and included) the radiation era. In the biological era, life has repeatedly discovered ways to create cooperative, interdependent wholes out of self-interested, formerly competitive parts, and then do the same thing at a higher, or wider, level of organization.

Cooperative groups of self-replicating molecular processes formed the first simple cells. Groups of these cells formed larger and more complex cells, and these in turn formed cooperative groups of cells that become multicellular organisms. Groups of multicellular organisms formed cooperative insect societies and human social systems.

In the human realm this process has continued and expanded considerably over the past 100,000 years. Initially cooperation existed only within small family groups. Since then, cooperative organizations have progressively expanded in scale to produce multi-family bands, then tribes, then agricultural communities, cities, and empires, then nation states, and now some forms of economic and social cooperation that span the globe.

This direction is progressive. Each stage transcends and includes (incorporates and builds upon) earlier stages. The vital point to remember, however, is this: This process has happened successfully in evolutionary history only when the system becomes self-organized or self-governed in such a way that it is genuinely in the interests of the parts to cooperate in the service of the whole that is, where they benefit by doing so and/or suffer in some way by not doing so.

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Introduction to Evolutionary Spirituality - Evolutionary Spirituality