Humanity's Evolutionary Journey by Duane Elgin

1. Humanity's Evolutionary Journey
In my experience, most persons have an intuitive sense of where the human family is along its overall journey of development. Dozens of times I have asked diverse audiences around the world, "How old do you think we are we as a species?" In other words, if you were to imagine the entire human family as one individual, how old would that person be? A toddler? A teenager? An early adult? An elder? Whether I've asked this question in Brazil, New York, California, or Japan, within seconds people have an answer to this informal survey-and it is the same around the world: at least two-thirds will vote that humanity is in its teenage years. The speed and consistency with which people come to this intuitive conclusion are so striking that it prompted me to look into adolescent psychology. It quickly became evident that there are many parallels between humanity's current behavior and that of teenagers:

Teenagers are rebellious and want to prove their independence. Humanity has been rebelling against nature for thousands of years, trying to prove that we are independent from it.
Teenagers are reckless and tend to think they will live forever. The human family is acting recklessly in its rapid consumption of natural resources, behaving as if they would last forever.
Teenagers are concerned with appearance and fitting in. Humans have a tendency to express our identity and status through material possessions.
Teenagers are often looking for instant gratification. As a species, we are seeking our own pleasures and largely ignoring the needs of future generations.

Recognizing that we are in our teenage years seems like good news. Assuming we can get beyond our adolescence as a species, the human family should begin to behave as teenagers around the world do when they move into early adulthood: They begin to settle down, think about building a family, look for meaningful work, and make longer-range plans for the future.
The human family seems to be working toward our early adulthood as a species. Although the outlines of our future maturity are still only dimly visible, it is clear that we are growing up, getting wiser, and working to create some form of planetary civilization. Could it be that, despite our seeming immaturity at present, we are a relatively short distance from taking a major step up in our maturity as a species?
The purpose of this report is to provide a larger context or perspective from which to view the environmental, social, and spiritual challenges facing humanity. A more spacious context can reveal new possibilities for action that were not visible before. Our problems will be no less serious. Plant and animal species are still being destroyed at a frightening rate. Our population is still expanding at a pace that our planet cannot support. We are still gobbling up natural resources with virtually no concern for future generations. What a new perspective can do, however, is alter who we think ourselves to be in the face of these intertwined difficulties. We can shift from being the victims of these problems to becoming the pioneers of a sustainable and meaningful future for ourselves and our planet.
As a way to begin creating this new perspective, let us briefly review the evolutionary road that we have traveled thus far. Since awakening in the infancy of our species as hunter-gatherers in the harsh environment of the ice ages roughly 50,000 years ago, humanity has been embarked on a long journey of learning and discovery. This journey has been purposeful. It is clear that we are going somewhere. Even in this early phase of modern life, humans explored and settled virtually every part of the Earth. With the end of the ice ages roughly 10,000 years ago, we began to settle down. Small villages came into existence. The focus of life was farming, and the food surplus that peasants produced made possible the eventual rise of small cities. Then, roughly 5,000 years ago, city-states and empires abruptly began to form in the Middle-East, Egypt, India, and China. At this time, all of the basic arts of civilization were developed, such as writing, mathematics, astronomy, civil codes, and a central government. Still, the vast majority of humanity lived as impoverished and illiterate peasants with no expectation of material progress. Then, around 300 years ago, the industrial revolution began in Europe and has since spread around the world, particularly in the last half-century.
Now, at the turn of the millennium, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Humanity has become so powerful that we appear to be doing irreparable harm to the Earth. We are being called on to develop a new level of maturity and responsibility. We also see the positive stirrings of a sustainable future in countless experiments at the grassroots level around the world. We have come to a great choice-point in our journey. Although humans have been faced with challenges throughout history, we have never before been confronted with a challenge together. Our time is unique in one crucial respect: the circle has closed-there is nowhere to escape. For the first time in our history, the entire human population is confronted with a predicament whose solution will require us to work together in a common enterprise that respects our rich diversity.
How can we make sense of this journey? Is humanity living out a larger story whose outlines we are only now beginning to recognize? Underneath the diversity of human experience, are we collectively involved in exploring, and creating, a common story? Joseph Campbell, a world-renowned scholar who invested his life exploring the myths and stories that have brought meaning to people and civilizations throughout history, discovered a common story at the heart of the world's cultures. He called this story the "hero's journey." The standard pathway of this journey has three stages: separation, initiation, and return. ." 1 The hero begins by leaving his home; he sets out on a journey of learning and discovery, with many trials and tests along the way. This is the separation stage. There comes a point in his journey where the hero undergoes a supreme test and initiation into the reality of the world and its ways. With that hard-won, sacred knowledge, he returns from his adventure with the capacity for personal renewal or even, says Campbell, "the means for the regeneration of society." 2 If we apply this simple model of separation, initiation, and return to humanity's journey, at what stage in it might we be?

Separation-- This phase seems to cover the last 50,000 years. We pulled back from nature in order to develop our unique capacities and talents as a species. The stage of separation from nature includes the hunter-gatherer era, the agricultural era, and the industrial era. The last half-century seems to mark the final severance from nature with, for example, the mass extinction of other species.
Initiation-- Initiation is a process whereby a person or community crosses the threshold of the limitations of a former life and discovers a new and larger possibility. To undergo initiation is to make a major transition, and often involves going through a powerful experience. The entire human race seems poised to move through a powerful, self-created rite of passage to become an authentic human family-in feeling and experience as well as in name.
Return-- After bonding as a family in an initiation of our own making, we will need to bring our visions of a positive future back into the world for the benefit of all humanity. We will have the practical task of learning to live in harmony with nature and building a sustainable, compassionate, and creative planetary civilization.

In his book Humankind, anthropologist Peter Farb describes how initiatory rites of passage around the world have two things in common: 3

Initiations mark the transition from one kind of life to another; and
Initiations are stressful social situations in which new adjustments to other individuals must be made.

Farb emphasizes that an important aspect of initiations is that "the journey is social rather than a solitary one. The initiation is undertaken with comrades among whom bonds are forged that transcend any previous distinctions of status, age, or kinship." 4 Friendships among initiates are generally strong as they are "linked by special ties which persist long after the rites have been concluded." 5
When we compare the common story of the hero's journey to humanity's journey, our times take on new meaning and significance: We humans are making the transition from one kind of life to another and we are entering a very stressful social situation in which we will make new adjustments to others. Our time of apparent crisis is, in reality, an initiation into a new relationship with one another and the Earth. The coming initiation represents a time of birth-a stressful but entirely natural process. 6
Reaching this stage is does not represent an evolutionary failure but rather is an expression of our great success as a species. When humanity began the journey of awakening roughly 50,000 years ago, we had only an indistinct sense of ourselves and a strong feeling of connection with nature. 7 Now we have a strong sense of ourselves, but the cost of achieving that sense has been our separation from nature. We now have the opportunity to turn from a path of separation and consciously reconnect with nature. Ultimately, we need to return to where we started, but with a new level of wisdom, maturity, and creativity. "And the end of all our exploring," T. S. Eliot wrote, "Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." 8
Figure 1 portrays this path of separation and reconnection. It is important to note that there is no negative implication in the downward direction of the first arrow. Its purpose is simply to show that we have pulled away from nature; this eventually leads to a period of transition, and then turning back to consciously integrate with nature and the universe.

Figure 1: Major Stages in the Human Journey
It has taken roughly 50,000 years for us to pull ourselves free from absorption in nature and stand apart in our uniqueness. Now our hard-won separation threatens our survival. This is a pivotal time in our evolution: we have to choose whether to make a momentous turn to reconnect with the natural world and heal the separations that divide us-without losing the scientific understanding and technical sophistication we have gained. This may be the most important evolutionary turn that humanity will ever have to make.

Go to the next section

© Copyright 1999, Duane Elgin
duane@awakeningearth.org
and by
© Campaign 2020 Initiative
Hosted by the Union Theological Seminary
Co-founders: Holland L. Hendrix, PhD and Deborah E. Stern
515 Madison Avenue Suite 725
New York, NY 10022

Posted with permission of Duane Elgin
New Horizons for Learning

http://www.newhorizons.org
E-mail: info@newhorizons.org