Relating integrity and evolution
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TGFE Page 192: “What do humility, authenticity, responsibility, and service have to do with evolution?”
The last paragraph starts out:
“To see why these four trait clusters are essential to evolutionary integrity, imagine the impact of their opposites on the evolution of an individual, a group, or humanity as a whole.”
No time to type out the whole paragraph but here’s the last sentence: “The four traits are central because only by growing in these areas are we growing in our relationship with Reality, with God, with the way things really are in a nested emergent Cosmos.”
The explanation is very accurate but it seems like something is lacking. Maybe because it starts out with a negative stance: “imagine the impact of their opposites…” Or maybe because, even though I don’t consider myself a Christian anymore, I grew up with the Ten Commandments and have “thou shalt” stamped in my brain – so that anything besides an imperitive command doesn’t hold as much weight, at least initially.
Did anybody else have a similar response?
It’s a rational explanation which has been thoroughly thought out and generally aligns with most religious traditions – but does it somehow need a stronger connection with the Great Story?
3 Responses
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John wrote: “So, to answer your question, Carl, yes, a stronger connection is needed, but maybe it’s not possible. How did hydrogen turn into humility? Maybe we just bow before the fact that it did.”
Accept what is – that’s a good lesson for me. Just bow before the fact that it did. Sometimes I can’t help straining towards trying to understand everything.
Let me think out loud here with an idea and hopefully get some feedback. I’ve been dwelling on this a bit and remembered Kahlil Gibran’s analogy about reason and passion from his book The Prophet. He used the image of a sailboat where reason is the rudder and passion is the sail. One without the other is ineffective.
With his discussion on integrity Michael has built an excellent hull and rudder. Being a meta-religious perspective could mean it is limited to this- to the rational side of things. The passion and energy, the mast and sail, will come from your connection to a specific religious tradition.
Any thoughts on this?
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There is a fantastic essay that Michael just wrote here that goes into great depth about this. Page 5 gives a specific breakdown of these traits and their importance in contributing to evolutionary growth. Here is a link to their latest podcast in which he explains more about this also.
i personally identify with these 4 traits and feel they are the absolute core to any spiritual venture. that said, i do agree that they don’t zero in on specific en devours for individuals to enhance the evolutionary process, but that is our job. if we as evolutionaries cultivate and bring these 4 traits to the table when we’re engaging in the world, then our efforts towards the evolution of consciousness will be maximized.
Humility, authenticity, responsibility, service—integrity. Now that I think of it (and I hadn’t thought of it before Carl’s post), these qualities do indeed have a weak connection to the evolutionary story. They’re in TGFE, as I see it, because of Michael’s personal history, which includes a religious background—but not because of an intrinsic link to the Story, some established path of emergence.
In contrast, take virtues like altruism and even empathy, for which an evolutionary narrative is now being created. Some of that narrative is based on scientific evidence, but that can only be sketchy, simply because there are no records from when the evolution was taking place.
I suppose one could imagine narrative threads that take you from biological evolution to humility, etc. But they would be purely speculative—“just so” stories. So, to answer your question, Carl, yes, a stronger connection is needed, but maybe it’s not possible. How did hydrogen turn into humility? Maybe we just bow before the fact that it did. And maybe something else is going on.