Evolutionary Worldview Rising
by George Pór

Collective Emergence

“I don’t want followers, I want partners” is a rare statement from any spiritual teacher. Yet, those were the exact words I heard Andrew Cohen speaking in his seminar on March 27, in London. The upper floor in the EnlightenNext Centre in Islington was packed with his students and people who have just become curious about his “evolutionary enlightenment” teachings. The seminar had a relaxed atmosphere with lots of laughter and developmental insights to act on.

I found it inspiring to spend a day with Andrew, mostly because there is nothing essentially personal about him. Yes, he is a man with bushy brows, inimitable laughter and a very unique teaching style, but what is essential about him is that he is a conduit for a force much larger than himself, which he calls the evolutionary impulse, the urge towards ever-greater complexity and higher integration.

Coming from a different angle but reaching the same conclusion was David Bohm, who wrote:

I’m proposing that we need to learn how to dialogue with each other because of all the fragmentation in the world. It seems to me the only way we can overcome that is by experiencing our wholeness together. We need a kind of social enlightenment to help that take place. In the past, people have developed ways to foster individual enlightenment, a higher intelligence for the individual through meditation or mystical insight or what-have-you. But we haven’t worked on ways to develop a higher social intelligence. (Bohm, 1989)

What attracted me to Andrew Cohen’s work in the first place was the strong resonance of one of its core ideas with how I sense where we are at on the human journey. It is the recognition that enlightenment itself can and must evolve from an intimate personal experience to a collective emergence. In a conversation with Ken Wilber, Cohen said once:

[T]his next step that we’re speaking about points beyond individual enlightenment. It points way beyond the personal domain of the individual, to the emergence of some kind of collective or inter-subjective higher mind. I am talking about a kind of emergence that would release an awakened consciousness whose source of power comes directly and miraculously from themerging of minds beyond individual and collective ego. (Cohen, Wilber, 2003)

A higher collective mind conjures up images of Star Trek’s Borg, the totalitarian supermind that annihilates individuality. The Borg is a picture-perfect portrait of the supermind on egoic steroids. On the opposite end of what a supermind can also be, is the collective intelligence of humankind guided by its awakened, collective consciousness. It’s a consciousness that is continually informing and emerging from the live conversations of all those around the planet, who think and act from a space beyond individual and collective ego.

On the way to collective emergence

we should endeavor to form systems that integrate harmoniously with their environment and behave in reasonable, healthy and responsible ways. Systems that behave more like a wise and revered person, a balanced and contented person, even a yogi or a saint…We may create regimes that recognise our humanity, that encourage our growth and development, that harness the best of our potential and lead on to greater growth and evolution on all levels.(Ringland, 2005)

Yes, we may, but if it’sleft to chance it may not happen. To be effective, integrally-informed design strategies guided by an evolutionary worldview will have to be brought to bear on the choices and decisions that we make as an evolutionary movement. As John Stewart, the author of Evolution’s Arrow, wrote in a seminal political essay:

Evolution on Earth will not advance beyond a certain point unless it is driven consciously and intentionally. If the transition to intentional evolution does not occur, evolution on this planet will stall, and humanity will not contribute positively to the future evolution of life in the universe–we will be a failed evolutionary experiment…Conscious organisms will need to envision the planetary society and design strategies to get there.If it is left to chance, it will not happen…(Stewart, 2008)

If social evolution is left to the chance that today’s dominant forms of organizing (states and markets) give them to unfold, the ongoing complexification, differentiation, and integration will not cease, but the future of humankind can become hostage to the collective ego a half dozen supercorporation resulting from further mergers and acquisitions among today’s multinationals.

If life’s ongoing complexification gets coupled with the widespread eruptions of beyond-ego levels of consciousness, then and only then we shall have a chance to create a civilization as advanced morally as technologically. It will be a civilization, where excellence and solidarity stop fighting each other, and the forces of Eros and Agape absorb each other and configure a world of higher harmony.

What is at the stake at this crossroad of our evolutionary journey, the choice between those two “if” paragraphs, gives a particular sense of urgency to evolve a worldview that can guide us in these turbulent times.

Evolving the Evolutionary Worldview

Just like people, a worldview goes through cycles of life, from birth and youth to maturation, decline and death, when it gets replaced by an emergent one that is a better fit to interpret and interact with a changing world. We are living in the midst of one of those epochal transitions. The emerging evolutionary worldview is still in its infancy, albeit with a surprising vitality.

On May 15 there was a virtual seminar on the Evolutionary Worldview, which attracted 14,000 subscribers and about 9,000 active participants, and involved the use of a variety of social media. Before signing up, I read what Carter Phipps, one of the magazine editors wrote about the subject, and felt inspired by the freshness and openness of his position:

A truly evolutionary worldview–with its own values, ways of seeing, and sense of identity, purpose and meaning–is something that doesn’t already exist. It’s still very much in the process of being defined. As one of my favorite evolutionaries, the great French philosopher Henri Bergson, wrote in his 1907 classic Creative Evolution: ‘A philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day…It will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another’. (Phipps, 2010)

I certainly agree with the collective and progressive nature of developing the new worldview. However, I’d draw the circle of its contributors wider than “thinkers” and “observers” unless they include everyone who thinks and observes. I expect important streams of contributions coming from evolutionary movement activists, as well as interdisciplinary and system scientists.

Closely associated with the concept of “evolutionary worldview” is the one of “evolutionary guidance system” that was the focus of the work of the late system scientist, Bela Banathy, who dedicated a section of his major opus, the Guided Evolution of Society, to that. (Banathy, 2000) This comment is just a placeholder for an inquiry that those interested in evolutionary worldview will need to engage in if they want to make the best use of the freshly minted worldview for affecting societal transformation.

Worldviews is a main topic of research in the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (CLEA, 2008) Its researchers definethe functions of a worldview as follows:

A worldview is a map that we use to orient and explain, from which we evaluate and act, and put forward prognoses and visions of the future. Hence:

1. orient;
2. explain;
3. evaluate;
4. act and;
5. predict are the basic aspects of a worldview. (Wikipedia, 2010)

We can say that a worldview is evolving if it performs those functions increasingly well. The evolutionary worldview is a young one but, to the extent of our integral development, we can already use it for:

• Orienting ourselves in a seemingly chaotic events of daily life, individual and social.
• Explaining the major forces at play in how the big questions of the day get decided.
• Evaluating the fitness of social institutions and practices.
• Acting on yet-to-develop evolutionary strategies.
• Predicting the future by being busy co-creating it,

By “integral development” I meant, in this context, that the evolutionary worldview is both arising from and supporting the work of these quadrants:

Figure 1

A healthy, evolutionary worldview cannot be but integral, co-arising from all quadrants of AQAL. Only then will it be robust enough to provide foundations for the cognitive, philosophical, and moral orientation of an individual or society. An evolutionary, post-metaphysical spirituality can inspire the worldview and its chance to help it evolving is even greater when in dialogue and collaboration with the other quadrants.

The same is true of evolutionary leadership, defined as the theory and practice of sensing and acting from the highest context, with the deepest clarity and compassion, for the good of the whole. The outside aspect of the worldview, evolutionary leadership manifests in our observable behavior and corresponds to evolutionary consciousness on the inside. One can also say that it is practiced by leading from an evolutionary perspective in each of the four quadrants, as Peter Merry convincingly demonstrated it (Merry, 2010)

The plural of evolutionary consciousness is in the culture, in the collective values, beliefs, and principles embodied in the practice of human groups aligned with evolution’s directionality. In “classic” representations of the quadrants, the Lower Left is also the place where worldview sits. However, most things have an interior/exterior and singular/plural aspect or perspectives, thus different quadrants can be drawn for different contexts. When the worldview becomes the context, its quadrants can be drawn as above.

The evolutionary movement (LR) is the social body of emergence, its networks, communities, systems of influence, collective sensing and meaning-making organs, websites, and enabling technologies. The growth and development of the movement, its becoming the harbinger of the new civilization is not separable from its co-evolution with the quadrants of evolutionary spirituality, culture, and leadership.

There’s a spiral characterized by developmental altitudes, which is arising from each of the quadrants. The spirals co-arising from the four quadrants are spinning on each other’s backs and co-creating that which is emerging.

Integral theory provides many clues to a deeper understanding of their inter-relatedness. I’d greatly enjoy diving into the investigation of how the integral perspective strengthens the evolutionary perspective, and vice versa, but then I’d never get to write the Notes I intended for this issue ofIntegral Leadership Review: a report of my experience at the virtual seminar of May 15. So for now, I will settle to use the 4 quadrants as the organizing framework for trying to describe what happened. The notes that follow do not claim to be an objective summary of the virtual seminar. They are the notes coming straight off the chords that they struck in me.

First, a bit of more context. During its 18 years history, the EnlightenNext magazine that designed and hosted this seminar, became a place of passionate yet open inquiry about all aspects of consciousness and culture. The seminar of May 15 event covered many important elements of what an evolutionary worldview consists of and what it will take to bring it about. First, I will outline some of those key points, then I will address what I think is a critical next step for moving forward: the terrain of culture building needs to be mapped out – so that a shared picture of where we are going (and with whom we are sharing the journey) can be held by the evolutionary explorers in their quest to move the edge.

Virtual Seminar on the Evolutionary Worldview

I still remember the joy and excitement of a month-long virtual event, called Knowledge Ecology Fair ‘98, of which I was the main instigator and a co-designer. In the design and facilitation team, we also felt exhausted, at the end of each day. The late 90’s was also when the limitations of the first wave (technocratic) knowledge management became obvious in our group of organizational and knowledge innovators, and we started spreading the “knowledge ecology/gardening” memes in response to that.

Hosting the virtual workshops of KE Fair ‘98, the café conversations, feeding the resource library with new summaries from their most vibrant threads, providing user support, and coordinating our teams working on the whole, day after day and week after week, was not an easy job and we had only 400 people connected virtually! With 14,000 subscribers to the very intense 7 hours of Evolutionary Worldview virtual seminar, the challenges of the organizers must have been an order of magnitude bigger, and the whole system worked, fluidly, without any major hiccup. At the end of day, many of us participants, remarked that in spite of the sustained attention with which we were present in this many-voiced global gathering, there was no fatigue. It was a sign that something vital was occurring and its full meaning would reveal itself only over time, through the openings that the seminar created for expanding our individual and collective consciousness.

The hosts and core faculty for the seminar were Andrew Cohen, Founder of EnlightenNext and Editor in Chief of EnlightenNext magazine; Executive Editor Carter Phipps; and Senior Editors Dr. Elizabeth Debold and Ross Robertson. Listening to their live and recorded conversations with Don Beck, Steve McIntosh, Deepak Chopra, Vanessa Fisher, Diane Musho Hamilton, Ray Kurzweil, Marilyn Schlitz, Brian Swimme, and Ken Wilber was a true treat! Seeing them sharing the same virtual stage and listening to their speaking of what they are present to, was like an immersion in the frothy edges of the evolutionary worldview rising.

The design of the seminar included the smart use a variety of social media that enabled parallel channels of communication between us. Throughout the presentations, dialogues, Q&A’s, and breaks, we could also exchange with each other and the rest of the world bursts of short reflections in a stream of tweets tagged with #enext, share photos taken at the 60 “evolutionary worldview” house parties around the world via a blog, and have conversations in a dedicated chat room about what we were listening to in the thought-leader dialogues that kept streaming at us for 7 hours.

With that many interactive channels available, it was almost tempting to go on a media diet. I cherish the experience of multi-screen, multi-channel communication that “digital native” cyber youth is so good at, and I also appreciate the opportunity to dedicate my full attention to letting in, as deeply as I can, some essential information coming through a single human voice. Fortunately, at this seminar I didn’t have to choose between those different modes of listening and discovery. I could switch between and dance with them, following an inner rhythm of learning by listening and by speaking (writing).

We could all participate in the seminar just by listening to the speakers and emailing or calling in questions to them, rather than get overwhelmed by the multiple, open communication channels. In fact that’swhat the majority of the participants did, which still left several thousand of us making sense together of what we were hearing, or just sharing our excitement about the insights gleaned from what was happening, by chatting and feverishly tweeting.

Content-wise, there was a good balance between “foundations” and “implications”, with an appropriate emphasis on how much is still unknown. Here follows what I noticed, using the 4-Q lens shown in Figure 1.

Evolutionary Spirituality

At the heart of evolutionary spirituality is the Law of Complexity/Consciousness, first expressed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Matter complexified from inanimate matter, to plant life, to animal life, to human life. Or, from the geosphere, to the biosphere, to the noosphere…As evolution rises through them, matter continues to rise in a continual increase of both complexity and consciousness.“(Wikipedia, 2010b)” There’s a lighthearted expression of the same law in a Dilbert cartoon at the bottom of a blog post, where I talk about “volcanic ash / distant proximities / Earth Commons rising / singularity / Teilhard de Chardin / Dilbert” (Pór, 2010).

How does that law relate with non-duality, another trait of evolutionary spirituality? During the seminar, somebody asked Andrew Cohen, what is your simple and short definition of consciousness? The answer came:

It’s a complex question and it is difficult to give a simple and short answer…Consciousness is the subjective context through or in which we experience everything. So consciousness is the ground of all of our experience…Consciousness can also be experienced when we penetrate deeply enough into the nature of our own subjectivity. Eventually we will discover a dimension that is timeless, in which the awareness of time and the awareness of the world, the awareness of space, the awareness of our own cognition, and even form, disappears. There is simply an awakening to a timeless and formless realm or domain…that’sa kind of mystical awakening, and then on the other end of the spectrum, there is an awakening of consciousness, which is the awakening to Eros, the driver and will to exist, the cosmic will to Become.”

Elizabeth Debold added, “the emergent recognition of non-locality as Brian [Swimme] talked about. As this is discovered, this relates very much to the perennial recognition of not-twoness, that there is only Oneness.

The new question that that explanation left me with was this: How to reconcile the immutable Being and the creative impulse in the perennial Becoming? That’s the question that I held in the back of my mind as I listened to Ray Kurzweil speaking about evolutionary spirituality:

So human technology and cultural evolution is a continuation of the biological evolution that created the technology-creating species in the first place. And what happens during evolution? Well as things get more complicated, they get more capable, they get more knowledgeable, they get more creative, they get more capable of more high-level emotions like love, so they become more loving. What do we mean by the word God? Well, God is an ideal meaning infinite levels of all of these qualities and all-knowing, infinitely creative, infinitely beautiful, infinitely loving and we notice that through evolution entities move towards infinite levels, never really achieving infinite levels, staying finite but exploding exponentially to become more and more knowing, more and more creative, more and more beautiful, more and more loving…moving exponentially towards this idea of God, never really achieving it but moving in that direction, so it’s moving in a spiritual direction, so we can say evolutionis a spiritual process.

It seems to me that those critics of Kurzweil, who dislike his futurism for its technological determinism, miss the point. In Kurzweil’s technological singularity, we accompany technological evolution to its highest currently conceivable form, but the process is pulled from the same direction as what Teilhard de Chardin termed the Omega Point, a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving. In the depth of that directionality, we (re-)discover the non-dual; the inherent unity of all of Earthkind, of all of existence, which we are moving towards is already here and always has been.

Evolutionary Culture

Culture, in the context of evolution, appears with the emergence of the human species and includes all the values and practices that it uses for organizing itself, evolving and thriving. In a similar meaning, we can talk about the culture of communities, organizations, nations, etc. A culture becomes evolutionary when its dominant value becomes evolution itself and the development of the highest individual and collective potential, unfettered by its institutions.

Carter Phipps said in the seminar, “business is such a dominant feature in our culture today and as business goes, culture goes to some degree.” That has always been true since the beginning of the industrial era. We only have to look at how the needs of capitalist reproduction shaped our systems of education, governance, law, etc. What is new now is that it goes more the other way, too: as culture goes, business goes to some degree. Just think how IBM and other companies have embraced open innovation and open source processes, or how the public culture of social media and Web 2.0 is shaping Enterprise 2.0 and gradually, the companies’ relationship with their customers and employees.

There is also the dynamics of the “self/culture” co-evolution that is currently limited by the collective egoic aspects of the dominant culture. Andrew Cohen pointed out: “You are not just an individual. You are culture incarnate. As an evolving self, you are the manifestation of a collective conditioned way of seeing and responding to life…” (Studyguide, 2010)

Once we are aware of that, we have the choice and responsibility about switching allegiance to collective ego, to collective intelligence and wisdom. It’s a promising, “transcend/include” kind of shift that can free untapped sources of individual and social creativity. It’s a shift that requires lots of courage and structures to support it.

[The] new stages of cultural development are not individuals. They are intersubjective structures that are created in consciousness as human beings come together having transcended old value systems and worldviews and created new ones. So if the shared foundation upon which we build new structures is the transcendence of individual and collective ego, we are going to be consciously creating nothing less than an enlightened culture. (Cohen, 2007)

Evolutionary Leadership

Don Beck reminded us,

It is the first time that we have to deal with billions of people moving through pre-modern, modern and post modern simultaneously…It’s too complex for single minds to understand it. Our interest is to find the master code to keep the system healthy. It’snot a linear job…There are different futures for different folks but at different layers/levels of complexity.

If evolutionary leadership is the theory and practice of sensing and acting from the highest context, with the deepest clarity and compassion, for the good of the whole, as stated earlier, then Beck’s point spells out one of the high-level contexts, from which budding evolutionary leaders need to learn to operate: the planetary transition that is occurring at multiple levels of complexity. If our emerging planetary reality is too complex for any individual mind to understand, then what leaders can and need to do is to prepare to learn and work in communities of evolutionary leadership practice.

Another aspect of evolutionary leadership got clarified when talking with Deepak Chopra, Andrew Cohen asked him,

What does it really mean to embrace leadership, heroism and especially how that relates to the whole notion of evolution of culture, because of course the degree to which each one of us is willing to do that, is the degree to which we will have a real effect.” Chopra replied: “a leader represents what is already dormant in the collective consciousness. It just needs a little bit of stirring from the leader so that it can unfold…To bring light where there is darkness and not just be philosophical about it but actually be really practical…How do we act right now? If not now, then when?

Then he said something that went beyond talking about leadership; he demonstrated it in action. He said,

Hopefully, everyone has a piece of paper to write down 5 questions and the answers to them.

1. What kind of world do I want to live in and do I want my children to live in?
2. What is my role to bring it forth?
3. If I am part of an organization involved with this type of work, what kind of team do I want/need?
4. Where do I belong in the larger network of this conversation?
5. What do I see as the need and the solution to this need?

Well, asking smart questions is an act of leadership, but Chopra went further by suggesting that we send our reply to the EnlightenNext team and ask it to make them visible to each other, by posting them somewhere. To see such an example of evolutionary leadership was truly impressive. Opening the possibility for an action-oriented, collaborative inquiry, Chopra opened a door for us to graduate from a loose, ad hoc network of interest in evolutionary worldview, to a network of communities that share practices that shape the culture in their common domains of action. That possibility takes us to the last quadrant to touch on.

Evolutionary Movement

One of Chopra’s 5 questions was this: Where do I belong in the larger network of these conversations? In order to come up with an answer allowing me to bring forth and use my gifts for the high impact, I need a good map that shows the key nodes/attractors in the complex ecosystem of evolutionary initiatives and conversations. What is needed to create and keep such a map up to date? What could become possible when all those who move the edge discover the co-creative resonances with initiatives/projects/organizations in the neighboring niches of the ecosystem? Those questions call for a U Process (Scharmer, 2007) for prototyping the map and improving it by learning from its uses and users.

Moments of breakthrough emergence are occurring with increasing frequency in many domains of action. In the chatroom of the seminar I read news from people opening collaborative inquiries with their colleagues, driven by questions like “what would our group look like if we designed it from a world-centric perspective?” It is a practice worth replicating and, I guess, it will be, as the ego-centric perspectives seem to have outlived their usefulness. That message ended with: “I will let you know how it goes.” There’s the promise for a whole new paradigm in those eight words. By discovering how to connect the awareness of those moments with each other, across the globe, we will let the parts see the emergent whole and vice versa.

Ken Wilber reminded us,

What we call the Renaissance was participated in by about 1,000 people and that is astonishing. About 1,000 people defined an entire culture. But the choices they made were at the leading edge. Because they were choosing some of the highest stages of development at that point, they were laying down structures that became the future of humanity…The same thing can happen today if you are awakened to the leading edge, if you are operating and working and choosing from your authentic self and you could very well be part of the next 1000 people that will be laying down the form of tomorrow that is going to become the structures that Spirit in Action is actually creating.And we are doing this now as a conscious process…

The Renaissance analogy is a good one, also, because it puts in sharp contrast two salient points of the difference with today’s situation: scale and speed with which new social, artistic business, and other innovation practices can spread. The promise of a digitally enabled, new Renaissance, stirred up by the desire to evolve to our next level of capabilities and compassion, is just too good to drop. So where are the 1,000 people/initiatives/projects shaping the future of our culture? Once we start mapping those who are moving the edge of evolution in their domain, we will see that their number is not in the 1000s but more likely, in the 100,000s.

Connecting and Mapping the Evolutionary Edge in Every Area of Culture

We need a framework and shared clarity about the basic distinctions and dimensions we want to map, before selecting/building the mapping tools and the inclusion criteria. All that requires teams of “evolutionary cartographers.,” and they are already forming as we speak. That is happening just in time, as good maps of emergence are needed to navigate its turbulent waters.

The larger social structures are proving to be inadequate to solve the problems they’re creating. New social innovations are emerging everywhere, but they are not sufficiently connected or empowered. So right now, any effort that we can make to connect and create greater synergy and participation in this awakening process is probably the most important thing we can do. (Marx Hubbard, 2003)

To enable greater synergy and participation in intentional evolution, by connecting our conversations, we need to grow shared mental models of the evolutionary landscape. “Only by connecting our conversations can we grow wiser together.” (Pór, 2008)

Motivated by the need for good visual representations for navigating and attenuating the complexity of social emergence, for the last couple of years, I kept asking everyone who cared to listen:

How can we develop collective sensory and meaning-making organs for contributing to humankind’s intentional evolution and amplifying the creative resonance and collective intelligence in the ecosystem of evolutionary initiatives?

What Functions Would Such Organs Perform?

As organs of the social movements at the crest of the evolutionary wave, their primary function is to serve the self-organizing collective consciousness, intelligence, and wisdom of those movements and their ecosystem as a whole.

Good maps can help the movement become more co-intelligent and wiser, more aware of itself as whole, and more vibrant with life, by connecting it with more of its parts.

The form that the mapping process would take will most likely include a triple network: a network of movement cartographers creating a network of maps, supported by a network electronic tools such as a bio-mimicry-inspired community knowledge garden and an online magazine. That triple network would serve us in our effort to:

1. Research and map common patterns of practices worth replicating across a vast range of initiatives that seek a sustainable world.
2. Provide the ecosystem of beyond-ego individuals and organizations with a platform to connect among each other, to collaborate and coordinate their action.
3. Seek, discover and tell the story of emergence into a wiser culture, as it unfolds.

“Wiser,”

as in: capable of embracing broader perspectives, working for the healing of the Spiral as whole.

The Evolutionary Worldview mega-seminar was one of the early coming-out parties of evolutionaries as a global movement. I’m certain that there will be many others, organized by different streams of the movement. The next one is “The Evolutionary’s Guide to Changing the World,” a 6-Week Virtual Course offered by Enlighten Next. If you know about other events or if you feel called to bring your talent to the work of the (currently not-founded) “evolutionary cartography” project, please do let me know.

References

• Banathy, B. (2000). Guided Evolution of Society. New York: Kluwer/Plenum Publishers.
• Bohm, D., Briggs, J. (1989). Quantum Leap. New Age Journal CLEA (2008) Research Topic 4: Worldviews and value systems, society and culture. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/res/4.shtml (retrieved on May 20, 2010).
• Cohan, A. (2007). How a New World Is Born. What Is Enlightenment? Issue #36.
• Cohen A., Wilber K. (2003). Vertical vs. Horizontal Development. What Is Enlightenment?
• Marx Hubbard, B. (2003). Interview in Faster Forward. What Is Enlightenment? Issue #23.
• Merry, P. (2010). Evolutionary Leadership. Monterey: Integral Publishers.
• Phipps, C. (2010). What Is an Evolutionary Worldview? EnlightenNext Editor’s Blog.http://magazine.enlightennext.org/2010/04/20/what-is-an-evolutionary-worldview/ (retrieved on April 21, 2010)
• Pór, G. (2008). Connecting Our Conversations: becoming Wiser Together. Kosmos Journal.
• Pór, G. (2010). volcanic ash / distant proximities / Earth Commons rising / singularity / Teilhard de Chardin / Dilbert.http://www.community-intelligence.com/blogs/public/2010/04/volcanic_ash_distant_proximiti.html (retrieved on May 23, 2010).
• Ringland, J. (2005). The Second Cambrian Explosion or the Global Human Meta-System-Transition. http://bit.ly/dzBcTb (retrieved on May 20, 2010).
• Scharmer, C. O. (2007). Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. Boston: Society for Organizational Learning.
• Stewart, J. (2008). The Evolutionary Manifesto: Our role in the future evolution of life.http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com/man.html (retrieved on May 20, 2010).
• EW Studyguide (2010). Andrew Cohen on the Implications of the Evolutionary Worldview. In A Study Guide for the Evolutionary Worldview Seminar http://blog.enlightennext.org/ew1/studyguide/ (retrieved on May 24, 2010).
• Wikipedia. (2010a). Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies. (retrieved on January 13, 2010).
• Wikipedia. (2010b). Law of Complexity/Consciousness.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Complexity/Consciousness (retrieved on May 23, 2010).

About the Author

George Pór is an evolutionary coach, mentor, thinker-activist and a strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government and civil society, in matters of culture change, social media strategies, and transition to sustainable organizational and social practices. He is Founder and Senior Consultant of CommunityIntelligence Ltd, and former Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD and London School of Economics. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at Universiteit van Amsterdam. His passion is to inspire and enable organizations, business and social ecosystems to navigate the shift to an evolutionary culture capable to nourish and engage the full creative capacity of their members and stakeholders. George is the author of “Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice” and “Cultivating Collective Intelligence: A core leadership competence in a complex world” chapters in two anthologies. His client list includes: AT&T, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Dutch government, European Commission, European Foundation for Management Development, European Investment Bank, Ford Motor Co, Hewlett-Packard, INSEAD, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, Sony-Ericsson, Swiss Re, and Unilever. He speaks English, French, Hungarian and Russian. His webpage is at http://www.community-intelligence.com/node/182. He lives in London and can be reached at george@Community-Intelligence.com .