Guiding Principles - Part 1

A couple of entries ago I mentioned that I’m a follower, fan and student of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s and her amazing work. Like her, I believe that we are a species which is in the process of making a major evolutionary transformation. Evolution is a continual process and one that escapes our conscious mind and eludes our daily vision because it is such a slow moving process. Yet, it is a constant force which by the sheer nature of our existence is affecting each and every one of us.


Given the belief that we are evolving as a species if we look at history as a teacher, what can we learn that might help us understand what is ahead for us as a species? Barbara has done a beautiful job of outlining what she sees as what we have learned. She has four basic beliefs, or principals that can help us make sense of the change we are witnessing every day of our lives across the planet. I want to share those with you and talk about each one as they relate to the messages I’m attempting to bring forth. It’s been said that if you want to understand your present, examine your past. If you want to know your future, examine your present.


In these principals Barbara uses the term “Nature” to represent all of the things of Life, not just meaning the trees and animals. The first guiding principal is “Quantum transformations are Nature’s tradition. The nature of Nature is to transform.”


In the mundane world, change occurs in two ways. The first is “incremental”. This is change which happens over a protracted period and is slow and continual. The other type of change is “breakthrough” or “quantum”. This type of change occurs when incremental change hits a wall. Any process, entity or structure can slowly evolve and transform through incremental change for a finite amount of time and then to change any further it transforms into something which noticeably different from its original form. Take architecture for example. If you compare one of our modern skyscrapers with one of the huts you might see in an African village, you can see how the process and materials used has transformed the end product. At various points along the way various breakthroughs occurred in the process which allows us to create structures in a way that our ancient ancestors could never have imagined. So it is with life.


As I’ve said before everything that has manifested in the physical realm in which we exist is in the process of evolving. This is constant. For static structures such as buildings, equipment and other non-living entities, their evolution is to slowly decay and ultimately be destroyed or disintegrate. This is change which we can easily go out into the world and view. Just look at any old house and you can see how it has deteriorated, decayed and is slowly falling apart yet you know that when it was newly built it was in pristine form. If completely left alone, the house would fall apart, collapse and eventually decay into a pile of rubble. That pile of rubble is a quantum transformation from the new house that had been built in its place. Slow, incremental change occurred over many years until the structure could no longer support itself and then quantum change occurred.


If you consider for a moment the entire history of our planet you can see quantum transformations easily but the key is that you have to be willing to examine it with a very high-level eye. Looking back billions of years into our history, our Sun was born. As it exploded into existence it spewed forth the original building blocks of life which would eventually become our planet and us. All of the particles slowly began coalescing into lumps, clumps and rocks until enough of these rocks formed what we now know as Earth. Slowly over billions of years the Earth boiled, cooled, froze and melted and slowly became a nursery for life. Single cell life dominated the planet until a crisis point hit and those single cell life-forms began to work together to form multicellular life. Multicellular life eventually gave way to complex life-forms. These life-forms eventually became prehistoric plants and animals. The evolutionary processes continued until we arrive at the planet as we know it today.


Only by looking at that history can you really begin to see where the transformations occurred. First there was no planet then there was. There were no life-forms then there was life. Next came plants, then animals and finally humans. If you were alive through all of that and could only see the day to day miniscule changes which were occurring without considering the history you’d probably not see these quantum transformations. Each of these evolutionary changes occurred because of some need which arose within the species until it could no longer survive and was forced to radically transform in some way.


In addition to those types of changes, mutations also emerged. As other stars throughout our galaxy and other galaxies use up their fuel, the collapse inward and when they do they emit extremely powerful bursts of energy called “gamma ray bursts”. These are some of the most powerful bursts that we know of throughout the known Universe. Because of that power their effects can be felt billions of light-years away from the original collapsing star. These bursts can and do cause genetic mutations in DNA. Also, our star, the Sun, also emits solar flares as it burns its nuclear fuel. These solar flares can also trigger genetic mutations. These mutated species then begin their own slow evolutionary journey until they hit a quantum transformation point and make a shift. These shifts are the basis for the remaining three lessons which I will discuss in the few blog entries so please stay tuned.

I know that Evolutionary theory on the surface seems to fly in the face of Creationism but to me they support each other energetically. There is clearly a difference between an inanimate piece of metal and a living, breathing animal or human. That difference is the life that existed in those early single-cell life-forms. It is that consciousness which animated those single-cells and ultimately led them to work together to eventually become us. Where that consciousness originated is where the Creationism comes from but how that evolved into us is where evolution comes in. In fact our very birth process directly demonstrates that history. A sperm and egg merge to form one microscopic cell which grows and divides until it becomes a tadpole. That eventually grows into something that resembles a miniscule human baby and finally one day, as if by Creationism magic, a baby is born. The ability to consciously create life is an attribute that we assign to God, yet here we are doing it via the God-force within us.

What quantum transformations have you seen in your life and across the planet in your lifetime?