Evolutionary Salons are strategic conversations that have the qualities described in "What is an Evolutionary Salon?". At this time (2006), they are the core of this movement for conscious evolution, ranging from small living room gatherings to large conferences. In general, they engage and serve people who already think in terms of conscious evolution or evolutionary spirituality, who are open to transformative experiences, and who want to be part of a larger movement along these lines.
However, as this movement matures, it will tend to use other forms of strategic conversation to stimulate conscious evolution. Examples of strategic conversations that are not Evolutionary Salons include:
- a spontaneous conversations between a conscious evolutionary and someone else, that generated some sort of evolutionary breakthrough.
- an academic seminar about the dynamics of conscious evolution.
- a conversation or email exchange between 2 or 3 people who have been introduced to each other by a conscious evolutionary who believed that the connection had evolutionary potential.
- a conference organized to produce a product -- a publication, an agreement, a website, a piece of software, a political campaign, etc. -- that nurtured conscious evolution in the larger movement or society, but provided no in-conference experience of personal or collective evolution.
- a one-time gathering organized by conscious evolutionaries that helped mainstream sector leaders transform their sector in sustainable, life-affirming directions, in which the idea of "evolution" was never mentioned.
We expect that many people who participate in such strategic conversations will subsequently be responsive to invitations to the deeper, more intrinsically evolutionary experience of an Evolutionary Salon.