Evolutionary Activism
This is the third post in my series on the training I took with the Pachamama Alliance. The first two posts propose that personal transformation and the transformation of our world are both urgent and interwoven. They require that we create new personal stories and new cultural stories. The last post ended with a new “meta story” that redefines who we are and what our relationship is to the whole of life… the Universe story. In this post I want to take this new story a bit further and use it to lay the foundation for how we become evolutionary activists.
The Universe story came out of a shift in worldview brought about by advances in the science of evolution. The evolutionary worldview sees humanity as the fruit of almost 14 billion years of unbroken evolution, now becoming conscious of itself. It’s the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life, right down to the atoms in our bodies, are traceable to the crucible of the big bang. We literally come from the stars. It means we’re deeply connected to all of life and that life is evolving through us. We now determine whether this evolutionary experiment will be successful or not.
The peril is that we are living in the most destructive moment on earth in 65 million years. If things remain the same, we could render our species extinct by our own actions. So many other species and entire ecosystems are already extinct. As Thomas Berry has said, we humans need to stop being a destructive presence on the planet and make the transition to a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.
The possibility is that if the creative intelligence of evolution is consciously embodied and intentionally directed, we can participate in creating a new society, a new human, and a new planet. It’s about taking the reins of destiny into our own hands and choosing to intentionally direct the trajectory of evolution on this planet. But how do we participate you might ask?
It begins with shifting our consciousness. We open to embracing our connection to all of life… all humans, the rivers, the trees, other species. Our primary community becomes the earth community as a whole. Our values and actions then shift accordingly; for example, we seek to live more compassionately and peacefully, and we seek to live more lightly and less violently in the food, products and energy we produce and consume.
And, we come to identify not only with the web of life, but with the dynamic, creative force of evolution, Life itself. At a retreat not long ago, in sacred circle each of us was asked to pick a card out of a spread of face down cards. Each card had a koan on it. When I picked and then turned over my card, the koan was: “Who is asking?” As I sat in silence contemplating the koan, what came to me clearly was: Life is asking. Then what came was: Life is asking me, will I dance with it? Will I surrender to the dance, give up control, and allow myself to be led? Will I allow the joy of the dance, of life, to overtake me?
It was about falling in love with Life… all of it. About celebrating Life in whatever form it takes and celebrating the magnificence and the mystery; being awestruck by Life and our place in the universe… falling in love with this beautiful, finite, emerald orb spinning through space… falling in love with earth and our earth community.
Then it’s about serving Life… about taking a stand to preserve life on earth and to change the story of the modern world. Take a serious look at our world – we can do better, we must do better. So we’re called to be evolutionary activists, part of a collective force, a critical mass of conscious commitment in action, working to bring forth a sustainable, just and thriving world for all.