In my morning meditations before leaving for British Columbia this past Tuesday, I was thinking of the phrase the evolutionary urge. I found a fascinating article by two scientists with the formidable title “Role of Evolutionary Urge in Epigenetics and Gene Culture Co-evolution: A Meta-evolution Perspective.”

When Keahi Ewa and I were traveling together on the plane, I had the article on my laptop. Keahi was listening to music. Every five minutes, I elbowed her, saying, “Listen to this,” and then quoted the article.

This is from the article:

The urge of the species itself is the reason of change in gene, which enables the organism to build the right chemical building blocks, the properties which get manifested as morphological, physiological and anatomical changes in the species.

They are proposing that species evolve not by chance, as Darwin theorized, but by the urge within all of Creation. Even if you’re thinking of it at a purely physical level, does it not make sense that wherever the urge to adapt and thrive is not present within any form, that form will go extinct? And where the urge to adapt and thrive is strong, that form will tend to continue? We could look at this principle at all levels of Creation and bring it right down to us as human beings. A human being who doesn’t feel the evolutionary urge and then move with it, allowing it to shape and form the way they are in the world, is not going to thrive. The same is true for us as a species.

How did we get here in this present moment? We are from a long line of adapters. We are from a long line of people who felt the evolutionary urge. That urge, moving through our lineage, led us to now. So here we are in the fields in which we function, feeling that urge.

Ken Wilber says that, in the human experience, creative evolution occurs when we transcend and include what went before. Think of the field of Attunement. I can think of two bad ways to go. One would be this:

Nothing that was taught by the founder of attunement, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, in 1936, can change. Anything that happened after that is irrelevant. It’s not true to Attunement.

 Of course, that approach does not work. The practice of Attunement would cease to have meaning on that basis.

By the way, that’s not what he did. Lloyd Arthur Meeker was constantly inventing new practices to carry Attunement forward, to evolve it and to let it thrive. At one point, at Sunrise Ranch, there was a great need for Attunements to be shared and he was trying to devise a way to cover it. He got hold of a sterling silverware set and he passed out the silverware to people as a conductor of life current and he shared long-distance Attunement to people who were in their homes, holding pieces of silverware.

The other bad approach to Attunement would be this:

Throw out all that was in the past—it’s irrelevant. We’re here, the new purveyors of Attunement to the world today.

Creative movement includes and transcends what went before. It has to go past what was in the past to answer the evolutionary urge within us. That creative urge has intelligence. It’s seeking what works with what’s happening—what’s happening externally in the forms present in the circumstance in which we find ourselves, and what’s happening in the invisible creative factors that are also constantly changing. We ignore these things at our own peril. The changing field, with both visible and invisible factors, is where life is. The evolutionary urge leads us fully into that field.

The evolutionary urge is in all things, and it’s in us. Here is more from the article:

The adaptive changes in the species enable it to accept new opportunity for living or to resist the unfavorable environmental change. But the response may or may not always be successful. It is the intensity of the urge that determines the success or failure of the organism to adapt.

If this urge is within all things and within all people, the difference isn’t actually the urge itself. It’s the person’s openness to the urge. We can become dulled to the urge. We can turn our back on it, apparently. It’s there, and it may be driving us crazy because it’s inside, saying, Come on, let’s go, let’s create! Move, change, become! But then we have the choice not to listen. We can distract ourselves with the good-old-days and what’s-not-going-right and what-they-are-doing, and all the things that can keep us from the intensity of the urge.

Lloyd Arthur Meeker used this expression to speak to the imperative to answer the urge within us all. According to your response, so is it established unto you. Our openness to the urge and how we let it move us establishes what happens for us. It’s the intensity with which it registers—and then the willingness to be activated by it—that matters.

In the process of evolution, a critical factor in human experience is knowing what changes and what rightly never changes. The essence of our Being at the core of our own souls is unchanging, and we shouldn’t try to change that. We’re not here to reinvent our core, and it doesn’t have to be improved. It’s already beautiful and relevant. But how we manifest in the world evolves if we are moving with the evolutionary urge.

Sometimes we see people get it backwards. They try to change who they are at the core, or they deny an eternal truth of their own Being. And then they become obstinate about the way that they’re living in their life, and they won’t change what has to evolve if they are going to thrive.

This paragraph from the article addresses the authors’ meta-evolution perspective:

The process of evolution therefore occurs in a metaphysical plane where the urge to survive and the perception of the environmental challenges together lead to the change of form in the metaphysical domain and then through genetic mutations onto the physical domain. This metaphysical domain has to do with the perceptions of the individual or collectively of the species which are…electromagnetic in character.

The scientists are interested in the somewhat mysterious realm that surrounds the human genome: epigenetics. Our epigenetics are tied to human consciousness and culture. Even without any change to the genes, epigenetics are influencing how the genes are manifesting in life experience. The influence of consciousness and culture is shaping the evolution of the human experience and the evolution of the human genome.

So the authors are saying that there’s not only evolution in the genome, there’s evolution in the metaphysical domain, which is an electromagnetic field for the manifest world. We are interested in world peace and an end to global warming, and so much more becoming manifest in the world. But how do such things happen? According to this article, evolution happens first in the metaphysical space. The metaphysical space is the causal space for the physical space. It is where life is and where we have conscious power. This is where we play as creators together. Of course we are interested in the physical reality in which we live. But that doesn’t move in a creative direction without a shift in the metaphysical space.

Thus our hypothesis is that the all-pervading ElectroMagnetic Fields (EMF) [are] the urge or instinct, which is responsible for the organization and form of material systems at all levels of complexity, not only in the living systems but also in crystals, molecules and atoms and nuclei. These EMFs are responsible for the form and organization of all material systems. They themselves have characteristic structures. And thus everything is derived from the electromagnetic fields present.

The metaphysical domain that the authors address correlates with the pneumaplasmic layer that surrounds the human body. This is a field of auric substance that connects us with the evolutionary urge, and which pulsates with that urge.

This is the last paragraph of the article:

It may be noted that the question of genesis of urges themselves is sure to lead us from psychology to the domain of philosophy just as the why of evolution leads us from biology to psychology. The cosmic mind which is the repository of all urges, itself resides in pure absolute consciousness which is bereft of any urge what so ever. Any further analysis of such philosophical aspect is clearly beyond the scope of the present article.

They took their essay as far as they could on a scientific basis. They might have their own personal philosophy, but they are looking at reality from a scientific perspective, and pressing the envelope in the scientific world.

But here we are, with an interest in not only studying reality but keenly passionate about the practice of what they are addressing. I’m not willing to wait around for a scientific study to verify that this works. I know it works from my own experience. In any event, we each have our own personal scientific study going. We are firsthand observers of our own human experience. And we can experiment with our own response to the evolutionary urge within us, and see what happens. For me, I want to prove out the power of the evolutionary urge and share that experience with the world.