Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant, and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man.
The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.
Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic.
Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order....I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Evolution works through indirection: each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.
Man's body had a different shape in the past from that of the present, and from that which it will have in the future. During involution it was approximately spherical, as it still is during ante-natal life, because the intra-uterine development is a recapitulation of past stages of evolution.
Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits.
The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no examples of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty-"the kingdom"-not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form man.
Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
I like to use my own language. Political movements are like living creatures - they develop. Each document expresses the times, the different stages and is part of the natural development.
For if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men?
Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.
If we can simply distinguish between the different successive stages of evolution, it is possible to see primeval events within the earthly events of the present.
