As we evolve culturally from traditional to modern to postmodern, through Integral stages of consciousness and cognition, we begin to gain a capacity to see all of our human experience, and all of the experience that's happening in the world process around us, as being part of a Kosmic process of unfolding. We gain the capacity to see every aspect of both our inner and outer experience, in all its totality, from the perspective of the process. We begin to see this is all one process. It's one Kosmic process that we're actually bearing witness to, and participating in, at the leading edge.
As we bear witness to this process it begins to dawn on us that, as we awaken beyond our social, cultural and psychological conditioning, we have a degree of freedom to choose. We begin to realize that actualizing the freedom to choose can become the ultimate act of creativity for the individual. This expresses itself in two ways.
First, our choice manifests as self-creation; or, the transformative process of self-realization and awakening that occurs when we begin to choose beyond the limits of our old patterns and wounds.
Second, we awaken as the leading edge of the cosmos, as outrageous love itself, choosing ever higher levels of love, care and commitment.
What begins to happen then is that we awaken to a new level of insight. We begin to appreciate the inherently sacred significance of the fact that the creative process has given us a measure of freedom to choose. We are dazzled by this realization, finding ourselves coming closer to, you could say, the "creator" (to put it in theological terms), or, in other words, to the energy and intelligence that initiated and animates the universe.
In evolutionary mysticism, we are talking about God as the energy and intelligence that created the universe. Remember, the God you don't believe in doesn't exist. This simply means that we're not referring to a mythical notion of a spiritual being that exists outside of, or beyond, the process. When we begin to see from the perspective of process -- that is to say, that the energy and intelligence that initiated this process is going somewhere -- we are seeing from God's perspective.
As we liberate our own consciousness from unconscious identification with biological drives, survival drives, cultural perspectives and values that are no longer relevant, we liberate and cultivate our own capacity to make choices that express ever greater freedom. We begin to understand that the energy and intelligence that initiated and animates the universe, or God, or that "1" without a "2," is gaining -- through our own increasing measure of freedom - a more profound ability to affect the creative process, through our own individual choices and actions here in the world around us.
An unedited first draft text from forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid