Evolutionary Spirituality
Register
Advertisement

In pursuit of more conscious evolution it seems advisable to name and understand more about the unconscious patterns that exist in evolution and nature, that generate its unfolding phenomena, so that we can participate in them -- or initiate them -- with aware intentionality -- in everything from our personal lives and development to the evolution of social systems and cultures. The evolutionary patterns then become evolutionary strategies.

Many of these evolutionary patterns have already been isolated by science -- evolutionary cosmology, evolutionary geology, evolutionary biology, and studies of cultural evolution and human evolution, including psychological development and spiritual development -- to say nothing of ecology, systems theory (all kinds), complexity science and chaos theory. Some examples of evolutionary patterns include:

  • Natural selection
  • Convergent evolution
  • Self-organization
  • Emergence
  • Genetic drift
  • Mutation
  • Recombination
  • Gene flow
  • Transcend and include
  • Increasing complexity
  • Simplicity on the other side of complexity

Other patterns we might name ourselves, since we notice they are useful guides for strategy, such as:

  • Dew shows up everywhere at once
  • Story fields
  • Rechannel upstream
  • Emergent S-curves
  • Group crystallization
  • Incremental improvement
  • Breakthrough or Radical shift

Other patterns are patterns in systems that may or may not be directly related to evolution as we normally think of it, but which are often (or can be) involved in how those systems evolve or how we intervene in them, such as:

  • Bell curves
  • Networks
  • Containers
  • Fields
  • Fractals

I'd love to develop dozens -- hundreds -- of these and talk about how they relate to each other. Do we want to extend these lists, or just start talking about them? My tendency is to do both, but I wonder what Lion would say....

Advertisement