The Emergence Process is an evolutionary path leading to the development of ourselves as more co-creative “Universal Humans.” Ten progressive steps, which unfolded in my own life journey, guide us from within to make the fundamental shift of identity from ego to Essence, from our egoic, separated local self to our essential, spiritual self, our true nature. Gradually, the anxious, driven egoic self falls in love with its own Essence and invites its own higher self to take dominion within the “household of selves.” We overcome the fundamental human illusion that we are separate from each other, from nature and from Spirit. We cultivate within ourselves the next stage of our development that has in the past been embodied only in extraordinary mystics and saints and is now approaching a “new norm” in millions of people.
The Emergence Process is designed precisely for this moment in human history when we are facing two radical unknowns that we have never encountered before.
One is devolution: the destruction of our own life-support system, the collapse of major social systems, the suffering of billions of us, as well as other species, as we overpopulate, pollute, fight, and bring human civilization and other species toward catastrophe. Something is dying. Something is over. Self-centered human behavior and unlimited growth in a finite Earth is not sustainable. We are the generation born in the midst of the end of one phase of human evolution.
The other unknown is conscious evolution: If we can learn to evolve ourselves and our social systems, we see a future of immeasurable possibilities through the integration of our spiritual, social, and scientific/technological capacities, leading toward the emergence of a co-evolving, co-creative humanity with powers we used to attribute to gods.
We are the first species on Earth to be aware that we can cause our own extinction or our own evolution by our own actions. This is the greatest wake-up call that humanity has ever had. This is a global crisis/opportunity pressing us toward the “birth,” the emergence of something new, something higher than we have ever been before…or toward devolution or destruction!
The choice is evolve or die!
It appears that we are at the threshold of the first age of conscious evolution; this is the evolution of evolution itself from unconscious toward conscious choice. For billions of years, nature has been evolving, crisis after crisis, shift after shift, toward greater complexity, consciousness, and freedom. From single cell to multiple cells, from animals to humans. But we humans in the 21st century are the first of all species to be able to place ourselves in the evolutionary story, as conscious participants in it. And know that we are causing our own extinction or evolution by our actions.
How do we learn to evolve consciously? The best response is by studying how nature has been evolving for billions of years.
From this context of billions of years of evolutionary transformation, we see recurring patterns. For example, we learn that crises precede transformation. Problems are evolutionary drivers. Nature has been taking jumps through greater synergy, making new whole systems out of separate parts. As systems become more complex, they rise in consciousness and freedom. When a system reaches a chaos point, “it is launched irreversibly on a new trajectory that leads either to breakdown or to breakthrough to a new structure and a new mode of operation,” as described by Ervin Laszlo in The Chaos Point. From this perspective, we can view the terrible crises that could destroy human civilization and much of Earth life as potentially generating the dangerous, painful, yet necessary birth of ourselves as a more mature, loving co-creative species.
Why would the process of evolution stop here? With us?
It's clearly not stopping. We see many signs of the rise of empathy, spirituality, and creativity. There are social innovations and new solutions arising in every field of endeavor. Perhaps the most fundamental and world-changing capacity of all is the maturation of our “noosphere,” the mind sphere, the “thinking layer of Earth.” It is bringing all human knowledge together and making it accessible to everyone. It is connecting us with one another beyond all existing governments and power structures. It is fostering empathy throughout the world as we become aware of and feel one another's suffering everywhere through mass media and the Internet. It is through the noosphere that we can blow up worlds or create worlds, make new life forms or destroy all life. The noosphere is our planetary nervous system. It is growing minute by minute, connecting us in a new collective brain, mind, and heart of unprecedented genius, power, and connectivity. Over four and a half billion people have cell phones! Facebook is the third-largest nation in the world. Every day new ways of being in touch with one another are growing. When you see this phenomenon of global connectivity with “evolutionary eyes,” you realize that this is a natural maturation of the planetary nervous system. Our biosphere produced human life, which created language, built cultures, systems, and technologies that are now connecting us in the noosphere. It is like an invisible new social organism linking us heart with heart and center with center. Metaphorically speaking, our crisis is the birth, potentially the birth of a more evolved human, a Universal Human, one capable of co-creating a new planetary civilization and eventually a Universal Humanity.
What is a Universal Human? It is one connected through the heart to the whole of life, a person awakening from within by a deep heart's desire to express and give his or her gifts into the world. A Universal Human is attracted to the future progressing toward the unknown, imbued with a mysterious sense of what's emerging, seeking to join with others to co-create a new and better world. It is a type of person who has expanding consciousness and awareness that the universe is evolving and so are we.
Those of us drawn to becoming Universal Humans are actually spiritual/social pioneers building a more compassionate and co-creative culture that could welcome the kind of humans we are becoming.
Let's imagine ourselves as a baby just after birth. As newborns we are panicking. We are cut off from our mother's resources. We don't even know how to breathe! We have to do this quickly, or we will die. The panic is real. However, as newborns, as we find ourselves held in our mother's arms, feeling her heartbeat, our nervous system integrates. We relax, begin to coordinate, overcoming the natural fear of separation. We take our first breath, open our eyes, see our mother for the first time…and smile. We find that we do have the capacity to breathe, nurse, eliminate, and, of course far more.
The same may be true of humanity. Hope arises when we recognize that we are all members of this one planetary body. When we realize that if we coordinate with one another, we do have the technology, resources, and know-how to make it through together. We feel an innate love for our Mother Earth or God or Essence. We even feel loved by the larger process that is creating us. We are encouraged and realize that we have the capacity and the heart's desire to survive, thrive, and evolve.
The Emergence Process is an evolutionary path for just this type of human, for those of us who are awakening right now to something new within ourselves and are yearning to give our greater gifts to heal and evolve our world.
What is a vital key to our evolution now?
If we could identify one fundamental characteristic in human nature that has been the cause of so much of our suffering, it is this: the illusion that we are separate from each other; from nature; and from Spirit, the divine, or universal creativity.
This illusion can be overcome, because it is an illusion. It can fade quickly, especially when cultivated in the Emergence Process in communion and resonance with others.
In Emergence, I use a biological analogy to describe the process. The fulfillment of this process is a “Universal Human,” a next stage in the evolution of our species. The “adult Universal Human” is a new attractor that we intuit and may be moving toward but have not yet fully manifested. Our full “adulthood” as a Universal Human will happen only in a mature society in which we have developed new systems of cooperation and new capacities of co-creation now barely emerging.
First comes Conception. This can happen at any age. It is marked by sudden awakenings, higher spiritual experiences, and inspiration from masters, avatars, great teachers, and inspired beings. These unitive flashes of higher experience lift us out of our daily identity as creature humans eating, sleeping, reproducing, and dying. We may forget these experiences, but if they are not suppressed, they will reoccur naturally, and we find that we cannot ever go back to our old limited self-identity.
Then comes Gestation. Once we are awakened by spiritual or mystical experiences, we seek deeper inspiration in our daily lives. We read books, attend classes, learn practices of many faiths, meditate, pray, and search, evolving in consciousness, ever less comfortable with our current mind-set and often lifestyle, relationships, religions. Something new arises within us, pressing us onward.
We are entering the fateful moment we are calling Birth. It is the birthing of ourselves toward our Universal Humanhood. We no longer want to seek outside of ourselves for yet another inspiration. We feel that Source coming from within ourselves. The birthing process begins with the choice each person can make to shift from being a seeker of external higher power to the recognition that each of us is an expression of that higher power within.
Then comes Infancy. We are just barely able to realize who we are becoming. We are attracted to our Essential Self that first awoke during our Conception and Gestation, training ourselves to focus on that deeper Essence of our being. We dwell in a protected Inner Sanctuary, cultivating “the bliss of union” of the human and the divine, or deeper reality, experiencing the grace and joy of its presence within us. We are initiating a process of incarnation toward full embodiment as a whole being, a Universal Human.
Then comes Childhood. At this stage we make the fundamental shift or phase change from ego to Essence. We recognize what mystics have always taught: We are expressions of universal Designing Intelligence. The Essential Self is the guide that has been guiding us. We are an expression of the inner voice we have been hearing. We are an incarnation of the Beloved we have been seeking. We begin to function on a limited scale and in a protected environment as our own Essential Self integrating and educating our egoic, local selves.
Youth comes naturally as we grow out of our childhood as young Universal Humans. It occurs when we find our life purpose, what we are born to do, and we create small communities or circles of partners and pioneering souls, beginning our larger work in the world. It is like a second puberty. We are shifting from maximum procreation to co-creation, from self-reproduction to self-evolution. We experience vocational arousal! Sexuality expands into “suprasexuality,” exciting us not to join our genes to have babies, but to join our genius to give birth to our full potential selves and our greater work in the world. We stabilize our awareness of our essential nature as an expression of Spirit, the higher power, or whatever name we call it. In this stage we “come into form” in the external world, in the co-creation of projects of all kinds. We work in all fields to re-create a world that is sustainable, compassionate, and expressive of our greater creativity and love.
Youth prepares us for the Adult stage as Universal Humans. This emerging stage, imminent in us now, can only fully appear as we, the pioneering crossover generation, successfully pass through this period of transition and build a sustainable, evolving planetary civilization.
Emergence comes from my own personal experience as a very young, still growing Universal Human becoming newer every day at eighty-two!