Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential is an effort to respond to the immense challenges and opportunities of our age. It sets forth a vision of the vast transformational enterprise of the twenty-first century, and it seeks to discover the design of evolution inherent in all nature with which we can consciously cooperate to guide our actions. It is a design of how a planet makes its transition from its high-technology, polluting, overpopulating, and also ever-more-creative phase to a system that fulfills its collective potential. It reveals a spirit-motivated process of action based on the patterns of evolutionary success and suggests how we can ease the transition by identifying key ideas, processes, people, and activities now fulfilling elements of the emerging design of this new era of evolution.
Conscious Evolution carries us beyond the human potential movement into the social potential movement. It describes a holistic social architecture to enhance and connect social innovations that are now evolving our world toward social synergy, interconnectivity, and spirit-based compassion for all. Conscious Evolution identifies, out of the breakdowns in modern society, systemic breakthroughs demonstrating that we are in the midst of a positive quantum change — a metamorphosis of humanity consistent with the recurring patterns of 13.8 billion years of evolutionary transformation.
Conscious Evolution offers processes that can bring humanity across the dangerous threshold of possible self-destruction to gentle the shift already under way — to help us realize that we have the capacity to survive and grow far beyond our current condition. This vision for a wholesome transition process is composed of initiatives that are already occurring but have not yet been connected, communicated, and understood to be vital elements of a whole-system transition.
The pattern of action has five elements. Each element is vital to further “divining” the design of our transition.
The first element relates to the new story of creation. It is essential we understand that the universe has a history. Evolution’s astonishing capacity for novelty, emergence, and transformation to ever higher orders of complexity, consciousness, and freedom has brought us from subatomic particles to our current condition, and it is still at work. It can be seen in the rise of new capacities and the commitment of millions of groups taking social action. It is felt internally as our heart’s desire to be more, give more, love more, and create more — to evolve into a cocreative society where each person is free to be and do his or her best. Simply stated, the multi-billion-year trend of nature is to transform to more conscious life. We are the first few generations to become aware of evolution and of the fact that we are affecting our own future in our every act.
Through awareness of the recurring patterns in the process of evolution, we gain a new view of ourselves as active participants in the creation — cocreators within the process of evolution. The whole evolutionary journey is seen as the story of the birth of a universal humanity. Our current crises are understood as the crises of the birth of the next stage of our evolution, dangerous but natural. All of us on Earth are members of Generation One — the first to face crises and opportunities at this global scale, with no “elders” — no one who has made this evolutionary transition before — to guide us. We are facing radical newness, all together, whether we like it or not.
The second element requires us to understand and develop the new worldview called conscious evolution — evolution by choice, not chance. Conscious evolution is presented as a potent and ever-emerging idea of the nature of reality that can guide us in the ethical and creative use of our power toward the next stage of life.
The third element awakens our social potential. A new social architecture is presented whereby we can accelerate the connections among innovating people and projects to shift humanity toward a more positive future. How do we connect what works, in time to avoid the collapse of our social systems? Media and education to foster conscious evolution are presented.
The fourth element heralds the great awakening. A world-transforming series of events are described as a way to align our higher consciousness with our emerging capacities, to create a global mind and heart change and launch us through the twenty-first century with hope in our hearts. A vision of a cocreative society, what it may be like when everything works, is offered.
The fifth element invites you to participate by using the Evolutionary Spiral, the Wheel of Cocreation, and the SYNergistic CONvergence (SYNCON) process to cultivate social synergy. It also invites you to check out the online resources section of our Evolve.org website to guide your greater participation in helping to create an evolutionary community and to find partners and link with innovators in consciously evolving together.
Conscious Evolution is written specifically for those who have recognized the desire to transform and grow. It is a call to each generation to fulfill its creative potential. It provides tools and opportunities for each of us to participate in the greatest adventure in human history — our conscious evolution.
This is our finest hour. We live in a unique time, perhaps as significant as when the first humans arose in self-consciousness in an animal world. Millions of us are rising in a more universal, holistic, or cosmic consciousness in a still largely self-centered world. We are being called forth in every field and discipline to fulfill our potential through joining together in creative action. In the Gospel According to Thomas it is said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
As we participate in this grand adventure, we will bring forth all that is within us and not only save ourselves, but evolve our world.
For me this book is an expression of my life — as a mother of five, grandmother of eight, futurist, lecturer, author, and spiritual and social explorer. In Thomas’s words, it is a way of bringing forth what is in me, and I hope it will help to call forth what is within you.
My quest has been to understand and encourage our collective potential to evolve. All my adult life I have been exploring with colleagues throughout the world how we can have a graceful, peaceful, and gentle birth rather than the further violence and suffering that has been foreseen. Conscious Evolution is the fruit of this search.
I hope to continue serving as a catalyst for the social potential movement, in dialogue with people in every sector of society about how we can best apply the ideas of conscious evolution to our challenges and opportunities in health, education, environment, government, business, spiritual growth, and the arts and sciences. Equally important, I seek to embody the qualities of a cocreative human — at eighty-four as I write this revised edition — and to continue taking the sacred journey of a conscious evolutionary myself.
Within the next few decades we can and indeed must discover and commit to an evolutionary agenda and to a universal humanity where our spiritual, social, and scientific and technological capacities are fully activated. We are now in the midst of a global awakening that poses new dangers and new potentials. I believe that we will consciously and ethically learn to use our vast collective powers for the evolution of our species and the birth of a universal humanity. It is to this vision of our collective emergence that Conscious Evolution is dedicated.