In every great epoch there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issue.
—Henry Thomas Buckle, introduction to History of Civilization in England
Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with the last living person who knew Teilhard de Chardin. Jean Houston is a global teacher, author, storyteller, and Evolutionary all wrapped up into one, and the story she tells of her own initiation into an evolutionary worldview is truly mythic. At the age of fourteen she was living in Manhattan, the grieving daughter of recently divorced parents. One day, while running to school, she accidentally stumbled headlong into an elderly gentleman, who asked her in a thick French accent, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?” “Yes!” she managed to reply as she ran off down Park Avenue. “Bon voyage!” shouted her new acquaintance.
That accidental collision would prove to be a decisive moment in the young woman’s life, and set the stage for an unlikely friendship. The next time she ran into this man was the following week, while walking her dog. He recognized her immediately, and they struck up a conversation. It didn’t take long for her to realize that this man was no ordinary adult. He had “no self-consciousness,” she remembers, and seemed to be “always in a state of wonder and astonishment.” Unable to grasp his complex French name, she simply called him “Mr. Tayer.” But somehow, her fourteen-year-old mind was perceptive enough to appreciate that she was in the presence of greatness, and the conversations with “Mr. Tayer” were worth remembering and writing down.
He taught her many things on their rambles in Central Park over the next couple of years. She recalls how he filled her young mind with visions of “spirals and nature and art, snail shells and galaxies, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral and the Rose Window and the convolutions of the brain, the whirl of flowers and the circulation of the heart’s blood. It was all taken up in a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter.”
The last time she saw him was in the spring of 1955, the Sunday before Easter. At one point during the conversation, she worked up the courage to ask him a question about himself. His answer would remain permanently etched in her mind: “I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future,” he told her. “Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world. Remain always true to yourself, but move ever-upward toward greater consciousness and greater love.”
“Those were the last words that he said to me,” she recalls. “Then he said, ‘Au revoir.’ ”
For weeks, she returned to Central Park and waited for him, to no avail. Only years later, when someone gave her a book called The Phenomenon of Man, did all the pieces fall into place. There on the back cover was the unmistakable face of Mr. Tayer. Teilhard de Chardin had been her mentor, and he had died Easter Sunday in 1955. She went on to build a remarkable life commensurate with the lessons she learned on those magical walks in Central Park.
Pilgrims of the future. That is a perfect way to describe the Evolutionaries in this book. A pilgrim means a person who comes from afar, traveling on a quest to a sacred place. In this case, that pilgrimage destination is not a physical place but a psychic, cultural, and cosmic possibility—the as-yet-unrealized potential of the future. To be an Evolutionary means to reach out beyond the edges of what has already occurred, to see oneself as journeying into uncreated territory. And I think all the Evolutionaries in this book, whatever their spiritual or religious convictions, would feel at home with that characterization of their life and work.
In the same way that priests once were tasked with interpreting the mythic, metaphysical world, and scientists are culturally designated to help us understand the natural world, I have proposed in these pages that “Evolutionaries” is the best term yet to describe those individuals who feel called to illuminate and interpret the many dimensions of the evolutionary universe that we find ourselves living in.
I hope it has become clear how that activity, that multidimensional grasp of an evolutionary context, always points us toward the future. Remember that I identified the phrase “we are moving” as the touchstone proposition of an evolutionary worldview. And what do we do when we find ourselves riding upon something that is in motion? We immediately and instinctively look ahead. We peer out in the direction of movement to see where we are going, what possibilities or challenges lie in our path. When it comes to evolution, however, we are not looking ahead in space, we are looking ahead in time. Evolutionaries may dig deep into the past and explore the dynamics of our world from multiple angles, but the very nature of an evolutionary worldview means that the inner compass always comes to rest with its needle pointing toward the future.
There was a time, a couple hundred years ago, when the word “scientist” was not yet a concept formed in the collective mind. The modern activity of science was itself still too new to require such a designation. “Natural philosopher” was the term being used to describe scientists of the day, a phrase that was more rooted in the premodern world and didn’t really capture the objective, experimental pursuits of science. Today, of course, the distinction seems obvious; in the early nineteenth century, it was a barely formed intuition.
Whether “Evolutionaries” ultimately captures the mind-space of the culture and survives as a designation, only time will tell. But I hope the reader has been able to appreciate, in the course of this book, just how significant this new lens is through which we are able to examine the nature of consciousness, culture, and cosmos. And I hope that it has become clear how much evolution as an idea has expanded beyond Darwin’s framing. The idea has gone viral and escaped the walls of biology, moonlighting in numerous fields, transforming far more than the way we think about fruit flies and fossils. We can certainly still appreciate the time-tested and scientifically verified idea that evolution is happening at the level of the gene. But as these pages have shown, in science, culture, and spirituality, evolution has come to mean much more. As we have progressed through the book, chapter by chapter, we have examined the evolution of cooperation, agency, technology, information, worldviews, consciousness, perspective, creativity, God, and even evolution itself. The sheer pervasiveness of an evolutionary worldview is reflected in that list. Evolution is a promiscuous metaconcept that breaks down intellectual silos and integrates across disciplines. It is truly “a curve that all lines must follow.”
Today, we can see how the spell of solidity is being shattered in discipline after discipline. The result has been a long, slow revelation that the ground beneath our feet is moving forward in history. We are in the midst of an epochal shift from a world of stasis to one of constant movement, from a universe of settled being to one of creative becoming, from a cosmos composed of matter in stasis to one made of events in motion. As we add this new sense of temporality to our universe and it becomes more integrated into the patterns of our perception, informing our cultural worldview and restructuring our psychology and neurology, a new sense of the world will reveal itself.
I know that for those who have found the insights in these pages rewarding, sooner or later questions will arise as to how one should go about applying them to a world that is desperately in need of so many of the individual qualities and evolutionary principles described here. I appreciate that impulse. When one begins to internalize the ideas of an evolutionary worldview and authentically question the spell of solidity that centuries of cultural conditioning have cast over our consciousness, the result is powerfully liberating. And the sense of possibility that arises on the other side of such an experience is intoxicating. I would only point out that to actually absorb these ideas is to change one’s deepest structures of self, perhaps irrevocably. That does not happen in a day, in a moment of revelation, or in five simple steps. It takes time, consideration, contemplation, deliberation, and introspection. We must be willing to risk our established modes of knowing and seeing the world around us. We must find the courage and authenticity to not settle for superficial bursts of inspiration or temporary flights of insight but to pursue these ideas all the way to the deepest interiors of the self, where new perspectives take root and new worldviews form. If you want to apply these ideas, that’s where you have to start.
So many people today have lost faith in the power of deep thinking, in the ability of novel insights and emerging truths to change our hearts and minds, to freshly inspire and radically reorganize our categories of consciousness. And they are often convinced that when it comes to the problems of our global society, fundamentally, we already have the answers. All we lack, they feel, are the practical resources, the institutions, or the collective will and political power to apply them. I understand the frustration, but I would suggest that theirs is the frustration of a static worldview—one that does not allow for the possibility of genuine evolution, either in the world they are seeing or, more important, in the lens through which they are seeing it. I hope this book has begun to challenge such convictions.
I’m convinced that the emergence of an evolutionary worldview has the potential to have a beneficial effect on all levels of society over the next decades and centuries. But just as it took time for the essential ideas of the European Enlightenment to find their way into the lived political and social freedoms we now enjoy so readily, it will take time for the core insights of the evolutionary worldview to develop into the political and social applications that will more directly address the global challenges we currently endure.
In fact, I would suggest that many of the ideas highlighted in this book belong closer to the core of this emerging worldview. Not quite practical, they help define the space in which more pragmatic expressions can be forged over time. There are no doubt many books to be written about the way in which evolutionary ideas will influence psychology, politics, social change, history, economics, law, and many other fields. I look forward with great anticipation to reading those books. Perhaps I will even write one. But the power of those works will still reside in the willingness of the authors to invest the time and personal commitment to care about the truth of these ideas, to break the spell of solidity in themselves so deeply that their own perspectives could never remain the same. Then, and only then, will they be helping to create the very patterns and practices that will help define and build this new worldview.
Like Teilhard, I aspire to be a pilgrim of the future. I have great conviction in the power and potential of this new worldview. I genuinely believe it can dramatically energize our society and provide a pathway into the future that is consonant with the best of human culture. I am not alone in that conviction. Indeed, the most powerful part of writing a book such as this has been the opportunity to spend time in the company of so many others who share a passion for this cultural project. As I mentioned in the very first chapter, there is absolutely nothing “solo” in this endeavor. Building an evolutionary worldview that has authentic cultural resonance in the twenty-first century is a massive undertaking, requiring the help of all those who, inspired by the beauty of an evolutionary vision, have made it a significant part of their life’s work. Unlike Teilhard, Huxley, Aurobindo, Whitehead, Gebser, Bergson, Baldwin, and others, today’s Evolutionaries are not lone torches, shining brightly in an otherwise pitch-black night. They are part of a larger movement—a fledgling, unstructured, diverse movement, but one with great cultural promise and significance. I hope this book helps galvanize and unify those already shaping this field and inspire a new generation of Evolutionaries to see just how compelling, fulfilling, and culturally relevant the ideas at the heart of this emerging worldview are. In the past century, as Teilhard predicted, we have taken up the tiller of the world. May nature’s exuberant creativity guide our hands. In pursuing our passion for the possible we will find the future of evolution.