A big part of our work as an evolutionary movement is to seek guidance within and among ourselves, and from the wisdoms of nature and the evolutionary process, for new ways to view old subjects.
Our goal in this is to evolve our consciousness -- to think, feel, see, and act in new ways -- that better serve the survival and thrival of humanity as part of a flourishing planet and/or that help us -- individually and collectively and through our social systems -- become conscious evolution, that is, evolution that has become aware of and wisely intentional about itself.
This section of the wiki is NOT just an open discussion space for any topic. It is a conscious effort to reformulate common topics in evolutionary terms. Please try to contribute with that in mind.
We might, for example, explore Topic X -- a field or sector like philanthropy or education or politics, or an everyday phenomenon like money or cars or love or not having enough time, or an activity like social change or eating or making a living -- with questions like
As Alan Durning pointed out in his book WHAT IS ENOUGH?, when someone has to walk many miles to get water for their family and carry it back on foot, that is not enough transportation resources. At the other extreme, when we can each drive anywhere we want at any time in a single-person vehicle whose infrastructure and use seriously degrade the natural world, human communities and human health, that is too much transportation resources. Between these two extremes, we find the space of "enough transportation resources" -- the ability to walk, ride bicycles and ride well-designed public transportation to deal with 90 percent of our mobility needs, with the occasional energy efficient car trip (often shared) to deal with rest.
This example can be applied to any area of life.
Enoughness varies with individuals and cultures, and is properly subject to debate, but almost always involves things like values, simplicity, resource efficiency, sustainability, care, the satisfaction of deep needs (as opposed to shallow conditioned desires) and non-material abundance (love, joy, community, beauty, creativity, learning, etc.). Ideally, enoughness provides a deeply satisfying and sustainable life with little or no degradation of surrounding Life.
Gandhi suggested that whatever wealth we have beyond that needed to satisfy our basic needs (enoughness) properly belongs to the community.
Many people think that what we earn or have beyond enoughness should be given to others as charity. It may be that the evolutionary perspective offers a somewhat different option: A personal and collective ethic of enoughness preserves and frees up resources that can be used to further conscious evolution.
Some specific evolutionary perspectives on money include:
1. Money is a form of life energy.
2. Money does not belong to us. It belongs to life's caring for life, evolution and wholeness, and to that part of us that is that.
3. We are the stewards of money's life energy as it passes through our life-space.
4. We may use money to sustain our aliveness (as Gandhi would say, to a point of enoughness), to make our caring real in the world, to serve our evolution and wholeness, and to help it move on to serve other life-realms.
5. Money's primary purpose is to sustain and increase our ability to serve the whole.
6. In this, money is sacred. And so there are forms of sacrilege, sin, falling short associated with money, including:
7. Money can be taken as an evolutionary spiritual practice, connecting us to the healthy unfolding of life within and around us, freeing us from ego and materialism, and calling forth our expanding compassion and creativity on behalf of the whole.
8. Part of this evolutionary spiritual practice is noticing when we sin (fall short) in how we deal with money (our own, others', society's) and noticing the ways that degrades not only money, but ourselves -- for example, taking us from our center, our compassion and our creativity into the traps of ego and materialism.