Audio 3: The Plotline of the Story — Evolution’s Trajectories

The Greatest Story Ever Told: Audio series with Barbara Marx Hubbard & Marc Gafni

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Welcome to week 3 of New World Story, the universe: a love story, the greatest story ever told. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard. Week 3. Episode 3 coming at you.

When we talk about evolution as a story, we say evolution is a story, it means it has a plot line. It’s going somewhere. It’s that it wants to go somewhere. It has a direction. We might say that just like every other dimension of reality, the evolutionary dimension of reality has an inside and an outside. Me, Marc, I have an inside and an outside. I have my physical body. I have the organs of my body, all the different systems of the body. That’s my exterior. And then I have an interior. I have values. I have yearnings. I have longings. I have love. I have desire. Those are interiors. They don’t just express themselves on the outside. They’re actually an interior quality. For example, when I fall in love, there is an exterior expression, there’s a whole cocktail of neuro-hormones that take place and that explode throughout the body. That’s the exterior expression of love. It causes me to act in particular ways which are also exterior expressions. But there is an interior feeling. That feeling is not reduceable, love is not reduceable to neuro-hormone secretions. That’s not what love is. Love is an interior feeling. Desire is an interior quality.

We never reduce that whole universal love story. We never reduce interiors to exteriors or exteriors to interiors. We don’t say there’s no physical world, it’s all just love on the inside. No, there’s an interior quality of love. And then there’s always exterior expression. Nor do we say that the world is only exteriors, but there’s no interiors. We don’t say the world is only actions, but there are no values. Values are an interior. The nature of reality is, if we would have to say, clearly, reality is interiors and exteriors, all the way up and all the way down. That’s a big realization. That’s a big deal. We need to always take into account what’s happening on the inside and what’s happening on the outside. Does that make sense, everybody? In myself, I have my interiors: my consciousness, my love, my values, my yearning, my longing.

I have exteriors: my physical body and all of the table of elements that live in my body, and all of the cells that live in my body, and all of the organs that live in my body, etc. Same thing that’s true in culture. In the social group, not just in the eye, there’s an interior. The interior are the values of the culture. That’s the interior. How the culture feels on the inside, how it experiences reality. Then you have the exteriors which are the way the culture organizing itself. For example, communism would be one way, socialism, to organize a state. Democracy would be another way to organize a state. Those are different exteriors. Culture, the interior of a culture, is how the culture feels as a democracy, not how it’s organized. What is the experience of freedom in a democracy as opposed to the interior feeling of a dictatorship, for example? There’s a different interior feeling in the culture. If the culture is a fundamentalist culture, it’s based on the religious values of one religion that says it’s the exclusive religion. There’s one feeling to that kind of culture. If it’s a pluralistic democracy, there’s another feeling. There’s always interiors and exteriors, all the way up and all the way down. That’s the nature of reality.

Evolution is an exterior. When we talk about evolution, we talk about evolution almost always as an exterior. It is the process of natural selection mutation, which is animated by the intelligence of reality, which guides the evolutionary process all the way up the evolutionary chain. That’s absolutely true. That’s the exterior of evolution. But what’s the interior evolution? This is really beautiful. The interior of evolution is desire, is yearning. Reality yearns to unfold. Reality yearns, desires the story to unfold. What story does reality desire to unfold? Ah, that’s the plot line of the story. Reality desires to unfold five core plot lines. The arrow of evolution moves in five primary directions. There are five primary trajectories to evolution, meaning the nature of the evolutionary story, the nature of reality being a story, not merely a fact. Reality being a love story means it’s going, it desires to move in a particular direction.

What are those five directions? Number one, reality moves from simplicity to complexity. That’s the outside exterior description. But on the inside, the interior description is reality yearns to become more and more complex. But more and more complex doesn’t just mean structurally complex. It means there’s a yearning for more and more joining to happen, more and more merging to happen. More and more merging of two parts that create a greater whole, which is called a synergy. A synergy is a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. So the internal yearning of evolution is to move towards higher and higher synergistic emergence. It’s a fancy word, but all it means is parts that come together and form wholes that are larger than the sum of the parts.

An atom is more than subatomic particles, it’s an atom. It’s a whole new thing. A molecule is more than a bunch of atoms, it’s a molecule. A cell is more than molecules come together. It’s actually come alive, life has emerged in it. A cell is an entirely new emergence. A multi-cellular structure is completely different from a singular cellular structure. We keep going up the evolutionary chain, eventually we get a plant. Then we get really early fish. Then we get early animals. We get later animals. We get mammals. Those aren’t just parts coming together in more complex forms. They’re more complex forms that form new wholes. The new whole that’s formed, that’s a synergistic, it’s a synergy. It brings together two parts into a larger whole. Evolution yearns, its desire is, its inner motivation is to move from simplicity to complexity, which means more and larger and deeper wholes. That’s the direction of evolution. That’s the first trajectory, the first plot line of the story.

The second plot line in the story is evolution yearns for more and more creativity. It’s actually creativity, deeper, higher creativity that drives evolution. Evolution is ceaselessly creative. This is really important. This creativity is not, as in the old universe story, a creativity that’s merely outside of the story. There’s a kind of grandfather in the sky that says, “Abracadabra,” and all of the sudden there’s a dinosaur. “Abracadabra,” all of the sudden, there’s a human being. We actually know that’s not the nature of reality. There’s actually a ceaseless, inherent creativity in cosmos. This inherent creative force in cosmos, which is clearly intelligent. It’s an intelligent creativity. How do I know it’s an intelligent creativity? It’s really simple. Mitosis and meiosis, the great symphonic, dazzling symphony of reality, which takes place in the cellular world as cells move towards reproduction, is more complex, more beautiful, more dazzling, more stunningly intricate than could be designed by the best minds alive and all the super computers put together. Yet, mitosis and meiosis emerged before there was even a neo-cortex! no super computers, no brains, no neo-cortex. Yet intelligent reality, its ceaseless creativity manifests mitosis and meiosis. Wow. Manifests photosynthesis, which all the human brains and all the super computers couldn’t develop or come nearly close to developing photosynthesis.

That’s because there’s an inherent creative process which kind of moves and explores forward, which is inherent to the nature of reality itself. The second arrow of evolution, the second plot line of the evolutionary story is the movement towards higher and deeper creativity. Evolution yearns, evolution desires more and more creativity.

Three, evolution moves, desires, yearns for more and more uniqueness. Evolution is more and more unique. More and more unique expressions find their manifestation in the evolutionary process. The more specific, the more precise, the more unique is the natural trajectory of evolution. Evolution is drawn forth by the pull towards ever-higher levels of uniqueness. Wow. Beautiful.

Number four, evolution moves towards, is pulled towards, evolution desires ever-greater, ever-deeper levels of consciousness. More and more consciousness. What does that mean? Let’s just take a lot at a snapshot for a second, and it’ll put it all together. Let’s say we move from an atom to an amoebae, an early cellular organism, to a plant, to a dog, to a human being. Real simple. Atom, amoeba, plant, dog, human being. Then let’s put an enlightened human being. Not a prehistoric hunter who is moving only for the survival into tomorrow, but an enlightened human being who has a felt sense of love, care, and concern for all of reality. We’ve got atom, amoeba, plant, dog, human being, awake human being. That’s a snapshot of evolution. In each one of those steps in the evolutionary chain, you have more and more consciousness. An amoeba is more conscious than an atom. A plant is more conscious than an amoeba. And we have an enormous amount of evidentiary material on each one of these which suggests that. A dog is clearly more conscious, has more interiority, than a plant. A human being, ultimately, can build a hospital, in a way that a dog can’t. A dog is a beautiful, gorgeous wholly. But a human being actually can care for all of humanity, can build hospitals. Human being has a greater depth of consciousness that’s possible. That’s the evolution of consciousness.

That snapshot we see, all these trajectories, these plot lines are beautifully, gorgeously at play. Evolution moves from an atom, to an amoeba, to a plant, to a dog, to a human being, to an enlightened human being. There’s always more and more complexity. There’s more and more creativity. There’s more uniqueness. There’s more and more consciousness. Those are the first four trajectories or plot lines of the great evolutionary story.

The fifth plot line, with which I conclude and turn to beloved Barbara, the fifth plot line is the one that we’ve talked about in the first episodes. What have we talked about in the first episodes? We’ve talked about love. That, actually, love, the movement towards higher and higher levels of felt care and concern, deeper and deeper levels of inter-connectivity in the inside of the physical structures of reality, the move towards more and more inclusiveness. In my circle, felt circle of care and concern, these are all expressions of the evolution of love. Love, actually, drives the whole story. Actually, the move from simplicity to greater complexity is the move of more and more inter-connectivity. The move of more and more creativity, which creates deeper wholes, which have more and more points of mutuality, recognition, union, embrace, is the movement of Eros, of love. The movement towards more and more uniqueness is the movement towards more and more distinction, to recognition. To love is to see clearly, to recognize distinction. The movement towards more and more consciousness is the movement towards higher and higher love.

It’s all the movement. The entire story is driver by evolutionary Eros. We might say that evolution is love in action. That’s what evolution is. Evolution is love in action. To participate in evolution is, therefore, to participate in the evolution of love. To participate in the evolution of love, you actually have to have a felt sense of what it means to realize that I’m not separate from evolution, which is some abstract theory, that actually evolution is awakening as love inside of me. I am playing a larger game which is that I am participating in the evolution of love. Barbara, maybe you could talk to us about what does that feel like. What’s that feeling of the universal love story awakening in me, beloved.

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

I have been thinking about this, Marc. I woke this morning with a feeling of sadness about something. I asked the universe, “What can I do to really release this sadness?” Then I was remembering the universe love story. I was remembering that impulse of creation from the origin of the universe, all the way on up through the billions of years, as an impulse of ever-increasing love, connectivity, wholeness, and consciousness. I said to the universe, “Let me actually feel that for real. How do I feel if I take it right, internally, and put my attention on being the impulse, internally, as love?” This is not just ordinary human love, as you say. It’s evolutionary love. It’s been through the billions of years to get right into every single one of us in this moment. And if it got into me, as I ask the universe to let me feel the impulse of evolution as love within me. There was truly a burst of glory.

There was no way the sadness could hold. Because the impulse of love was so profound within that sadness. I could feel its yearning, if you could personify the impulse of evolution, to have gone through the billions of years to ever and ever-higher consciousness to gt to me and to you and to every single one of us. There is not only love there, but the divine spirit, God, however you choose to call it, I fell in love with the love of the impulse. It’s like falling in love with love. It’s falling in love with God as love. It’s falling in love with conscious evolution, as love becoming conscious in you. I made a choice this morning that there’s no reason why I cannot put my attention on my own impulse as love all the time.

When I started to do that, and got on this phone call, as an example, and heard everything that you were saying, Marc, about the trajectory and extraordinary quality of evolution itself, realizing it’s all love, it awakened in me something that you might say is an eternal aspect of love, that won’t stop, no matter what. I’d like to trace it for a moment, now, realizing it is love and let’s take time to feel it together right now, everybody listening, to go within and feel that impulse that’s motivating you to live, to breathe, to be. As that story within you of more love. It has a spiritual quality. That is to say, you are incarnating that frequency of divine intent, from the source of creation, however you call it. You are becoming one with that. That spirit in action, God in evolution, consciousness force, cosmic intelligence, whatever name we choose, and there’s no really good name for the evolutionary aspect of God, the thing you realize is that your own innovation and motivation to be more of who you truly are is that.

What that does is it completely gives courage to you, that if your impulse to create more is coming from the same source that’s creating the universe, and you say yes to it, and it expresses itself as a feeling of love and awareness, you become so much greater than you are without it. Our spiritual growth, then, starts to wake our social potential. It presses us deeper inward to pick up the design and outward to express that creativity through unique vocation. Marc speaks a lot about the evolution of uniqueness. One way of looking at it is the evolution of unique vocation. Everyone’s calling, everyone’s purpose is an expression of this uniquely. We start working from within ourselves toward the higher consciousness, greater freedom, more complex order, knowing that the force is with us. Just like in Star Trek. The force is with us. When we’re doing this. Conscious evolution develops, for us, an evolutionary spirituality as we learn to attune to these inner patterns of creation.

There’s a word I like very much here that comes from Eric Jantsch in his book Design for Evolution. The word is syntony, syntony. It’s a way of knowing through resonance or harmonizing with that which you seek to know. And I quote, “Syntony, which seems to be due to direct communication of individual human consciousness through some resonance process, seems to exhibit the same characteristics of holographic communication that govern genetic information and brain functions.” As we have learned, though not too well, to design social roles, our unique vocation, our life purpose, we have to learn how to design systems of syntony. This means applying a focus of our more rational mind on this level of the inner mind to the inner impulse to guide us to life’s purpose in the world, through love. This is a practice that we can all do. Feel the inner impulse of creativity within you, recognize it is an expression of the deeper process of creation, recognize that the purpose of that process is greater love, and feel your life purpose becoming a gift of love. Right now, I feel that. I feel my life purpose. Whoever is listening to this is connecting to your life purpose. Together, these life purposes joining through syntony or resonance, resounding with the deeper impulse uniquely within every of us is turning us on to be new humans, to be co-creators, to be expressions of evolution itself.

Now, let’s take it and we say, I am love expressing. That is my unique spiritual impulse. I have a unique life purpose. And I’m outside, looking at a world suffering everywhere.” Every single system is failing. Health care. Government. Environment. All the old structures of the past failing. And here am I, this little person, who just happens to have fallen in love with the inner impulse of evolution. I know I have a life purpose, but how in the world do I know which of these things to do? All of them look impossible. It doesn’t look as though it would be conceivable to change the government system when it needs it. Or to change the healthcare system, even if I’m a little, tiny person doing something better. How is it possible that I could think all of this could work? It certainly couldn’t work if I think I’m doing this alone. But if I realize that whatever my unique impulse to create, in my case, let’s say, to communicate, I’m not doing this alone because the impulse of evolution is in that vocation. Like right now. Yes, I’m doing this alone. I’m sitting in my room doing this. You’re out there. You’re not alone because you’re with others. Let’s just tune into the shared vocations now.

It’s not just my vocation to make a better world, or your vocation. It’s our vocation, each of us, to make a better world, uniquely. Let’s imagine all of that being orchestrated by the way nature creates whole systems. Then you and I, as individual, unique humans, begin to feel empowered by the power of creation. Not as just people greater than somebody else, but as persons empowered. Then, we feel ourselves going into the media, which is the internet now, is the new nervous system. With, if you think of internet and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, we’re speaking into it right now, and you’re listening into the nervous system. What’s happening now is every one of us, my voice, your thoughts, we’re all contributing into that awakening of our greater nervous system. What Teilhard de Chardin called the know-sphere, the mind-sphere, we’re turning it on right now. Then we begin to realize that we have the technologies, we have the resources, we have the know-how, as Buckminster Fuller said, to make the world work for all. The little part that each of us is doing within it, empowered by the trajectory of the whole universal process of creation, you begin to feel yourself as possibly an awesome human. You have to watch out for being overly awesome, but that’s who you are.

I’ll end with a thought from my friend, Jerry Glenn, who wrote a book Conscious Technological Civilization. He says, “In this world view, we’re seeking the merger of the mystic and the technocrat to achieve an altogether new civilization. When this happens, we will have a world renaissance that could be properly called the ‘conscious technological civilization.'” The mystics are masters of consciousness, and they technocrats are masters of technologies when we merge with the impulse of evolution as love. Oh my. We see the new world dawning in our midst. Thank you.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Oh my. We see the new world dawning in our midst and we see the new human being born. Let’s finish out our third podcast. Let’s bring it all together. What does it mean to become the new human? To become the new human is to be part of the new story. But it’s to be part of the new story not unconsciously, but consciously. The new human wakes up and says this, “I want to play a larger game. How do i play a larger game?” I create right context with reality. I realize I’m living in an evolutionary context. To live in an evolutionary context is to realize the story is waking up in me and that the story is moving towards more and more complexity.

Story line one. Plot line one: more and more creativity. Plot line two: more and more uniqueness. Plot line three: more and more consciousness. Plot line four: more and more love. Reality is evolution from simplicity to complexity, from less to greater creativity, the evolution of creativity, the evolution of uniqueness, the emergence of higher and higher levels of uniqueness. We’re going to talk a lot about uniqueness later on. It’s the evolution of consciousness and culture. And it’s the evolution of love. To become a new human is to realize, and this is the end of episode three, that my love story … My love story includes my consciousness, my creativity. The beautiful complexity and higher order of my life, my uniqueness, all of that is part of the greater love story. My love story is not separate from the greater love story of reality. Reality needs my service. Reality needs my love. Reality needs my uniqueness. Reality needs my consciousness. Reality … Replay. Reality needs my consciousness. Reality needs my creativity.

Every moment is our last second. Every moment. Barbara and I talked right before this episode. Every moment I realize that this very second took 13.7 billion years of evolution to prepare. 13.7 billion years of evolution leads to this very moment. What I choose in this very moment, my evolutionary integrity, my aliveness, my Eros, my love, my creativity, my uniqueness, my consciousness, in this moment is reality taking its next step forward, reality surging forward in the evolution of love. That is what it means to be a new human or to be a lover in this great, new story, awakening to itself, the universal love story.

This is the end of episode three. Marc Gafni. Barbara Marx-Hubbard. Signing off. Barbara, you want to give us a goodbye?

Barbara Marx Hubbard:

Goodbye, everybody. Just take this next week to experience the impulse of love in you and see what happens.

Dr. Marc Gafni:

Amen. Hallelujah. Have a great week, everyone.

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