Beyond Soul Growth. Lynn Sparrow Christy

along on the currents of the unconscious evolutionary drive, or will we use our capacity for self-reflective awareness to move into conscious participation in the evolutionary advance? The call is stated eloquently by Barbara Marx Hubbard:

      Conscious evolution is the evolution of evolution, from unconscious to conscious choice. While consciousness has been evolving for billions of years, conscious evolution is new. It is part of the trajectory of human evolution, the canvas of choice before us now as we recognize that we have come to possess the powers that we used to attribute to the gods.⁴⁵

      Now, in our own day and time, we are on the brink of the next emerging consciousness, where a fully matured, self-reflective awareness holds the potential to lead us onward to its natural expression: universal or unity consciousness.

      Unity Consciousness: Our Evolutionary Future

      Students of the Cayce readings will recognize that destiny often spoken of wherein we can know ourselves to be ourselves yet be one with God. Such a paradoxical state is hard to comprehend, as most of us for most of human history have experienced unity and selfhood as an either/or proposition: Either I can blend with the group or I can be a rugged individualist; either I can meet my own needs first or those of others first; I can be either one with God or a unique consciousness. Our very notion of being a self is predicated upon recognizing what is not self, and it's hard to escape the dualistic implications of that. Yet surely we have also known those moments when, in the midst of an especially compatible group, we have felt more like ourselves than when in a discordant setting. Or perhaps there have been shining moments when we experience our very selfhood fulfilled in an act of sacrifice or service for another. Anyone who has ever become engulfed, even for a brief moment, in the beauties of a natural scene has known a deeper sense of selfhood in those moments than is “normal” in a daily life cut off from such oneness with nature. These are but just a few foretastes of how we will someday find our deepest selves within the full consciousness of oneness.

      We shouldn't be surprised, really. It is the pattern of nature. Only cells that are healthy and functional as individual cells can make up a healthy organ. Should we expect, then, that cosmic oneness would erase individuality? Cooperation, rather than loss of the individual components, is the key to higher orders of functioning. Similarly, it is individuals who are psychologically healthy in themselves who can form healthy relationships. Wherever we care to look, collective bonds become stronger and more resilient when component members bring their individual strengths and resiliency to the collective. British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane may not have been a theist, but even he pointed out the natural extension of the pattern. Referring to the humanist religion of Auguste Comte, which posits a “Great Being,” (that is, the human race seen as one) instead of a traditional notion of God, Haldane wrote, “Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a ‘Great Being.’”⁴⁶

      This “something” that brings and holds such collective bonds together is that mysterious drive underlying all of evolution. “Latent infinity” is what one Cayce reading⁴⁷ calls it when describing the primal drive toward connection that brings two cells together in conception. Teilhard de Chardin, in talking about how the component parts of any material substance are held together, says that they are not independent of each other. “Something holds them together. Far from behaving as a mere inert receptacle, the space filled by their multitudes operates on it like an active centre of direction and transmission in which their plurality is organized,” he wrote. As this applies to future human evolution, he says that at each developmental step “we shall find ourselves faced by the unimaginable reality of collective bonds.”⁴⁸ To know ourselves to be ourselves and yet be one with God—which is to say “to be one with the All”—that is our evolutionary future; and it is predicated upon a matured and healthy selfhood. Or, as we may also describe it, unity consciousness is the blossoming of the bud which first emerged in self-reflective awareness.

      It may seem like a snail's pace for it to take 2,000 to 2,800 years for self-reflective awareness to blossom into widespread awakening to cosmic, universal or unity consciousness. And such consciousness may appear to be on the most distant of horizons for us even now. Neither state is exactly commonplace among the mass of humanity, even though the pioneers of both these attainments have been sprinkled through the world's religions for more than 2,000 years now. But when we stop to consider this in the context of what is often called “deep time,” we realize that 2,000 to 3,000 years is a very short time span indeed. Scaling the entire 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang to the amount of time in a single year, the time elapsed between the Axial Age and now would amount to a matter of a few seconds! As illustrated in Figure 1, “A Deep Time Perspective,” the earth would not have formed until mid-September, with the dinosaurs not arriving until Christmas Eve. Humans would have just shown up within the last ten minutes of December 31, and the Axial Age would have been less than seven seconds ago if now is a nanosecond before midnight at the conclusion of our one-year scale.

A Deep Time Perspective

       Figure 1

      This long view is important if we are to have the patience and persistence it will take to nurture the evolution of consciousness within ourselves, for it is no overnight accomplishment. Even a lifetime devoted to this cause is not an unreasonable undertaking, when we make the pace of cosmic evolution our context. Within the brief time period of our lifetimes and even the hundreds of years before our time, evolutionary advance may appear to be so slow as to be virtually nonexistent—which is often the dynamic at work when people will say, “Things getting better? You've got to be kidding! Things are steadily getting worse!” Yet more careful observation will tell us that this is not so. Although humanity is a long way from completely exorcising the demons of cruelty, greed, and domination over others, we live in a time when the majority of the world reacts with horror to public executions, blood sports, and tyrants who ruthlessly subjugate others. This was not so a mere few centuries ago, when families would gather to watch a hanging, the seats of Roman coliseums were filled with those who came to watch gladiators fight to the death and people generally accepted the inevitability of tyranny. Teilhard de Chardin puts human progress in the context of deep history when he says that, “compared with the zoological layers which preceded [self-aware humanity]…mankind is so young that it could almost be called newborn.” Elsewhere he says that “we cannot expect to see the earth transform itself under our eyes in the space of a generation. Let us keep calm and take heart.”⁴⁹

      Let us heed this advice and take heart as we, too, prepare to take up the evolutionary cause. For while the history of the world's wisdom traditions will tell us that spiritual adepts have had access to unity consciousness for more than 2,000 years, remember that there will always be outliers—those who are ahead of the pack and those who are behind the pack. Each evolutionary advance is only consolidated when it becomes the norm within the vast middle of a population. That is the work before us today: to bring a new norm to reality as we cultivate our self-reflective awareness and foster its maturation into unity consciousness in our thoughts, words, and deeds.

      ^*Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985), 360.

      ²¹Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 178.

      ²²Sri Aurobindo, Sri Aurobindo's Major Works, Volume 10: “Essays Divine and Human” (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1993), 166.

      ²³Barbara Marx Hubbard, “Conscious Evolution Defined,” Foundation for Conscious Evolution, retrieved from barbaramarxhubbard.com.

      ²⁴Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House,