This week Kyrsten Perry led the weekly Tuesday night session at the EnlightenNext UK Centre. In these sessions, people are introduced to the teachings of evolutionary enlightenment and, through discussing their experience with others, get a sense of what an evolutionary perspective on life means.

I go almost weekly and the format isn’t always the same.  This week we began with an audio clip from the source and inspiration of Evolutionary Enlightenment, Andrew Cohen, who was giving a short talk on evolution as part of an online course entitled The evolutionaries guide to changing the world.

In this talk, Andrew asked his listeners if they believed evolution was really possible. He said that it isn’t difficult to believe in evolution that happens outside of ourselves (I can say that is definitely true). Most of us have been taught about the evolution of the cosmos in school and about the emergence of life and of human beings during that process.  We’re taught that evolution is a physical, material process that happens outside of ourselves and is separate from our internal experience.

But what about the evolution of the human being, Andrew asks? What about the evolution of you and me? What about our interior evolution: emotional, psychological, intellectual, and, dare I say, moral and spiritual development? How much do we believe that we can really change? Change our values, beliefs and the relationships that we have with others? Do we believe that our own evolution is not separate from the evolution of culture? And how much do we recognize that these dimensions of evolution are not separate from the vast cosmic process of evolution that we are all intrinsically part of?

Kyrsten led the discussion that followed this short audio.  As each person spoke about his or her understanding and experience of what Andrew was talking about, there was a deepening recognition of the complexity of the process that we are in the midst of—its interior and exterior dimensions—and the fact that each of us is right in the centre of this process.  Evolution is happening through us! We could all see that materialistic values are very much part of the culture that we live in and have profoundly shaped us as 21^st Century human beings. But in spite of this, we found, and continue to find, somewhere inside ourselves that we are compelled and inspired to go beyond all our material values towards something deeper and truer to our experience of the simple fact of being human. This IS evolution in action.