| Accelerating Evolution Externally | 2002-10-14 16:34 7 comments |
 by Flemming FunchIt occurred to me that there's some kind of philosophical point to be made by the fact that humans will often be most creative and successful when they can place something 'outside' themselves, at least temporarily. A couple of examples: When I'm being a counselor, and a client needs to change something about their own behavior, it isn't going to happen before they're willing to put it 'outside' themselves and examine it. "Aha, I'm doing so-and-so, and that causes so-and-so, and that's not really what I want. I see now." That opens the door to them changing that aspect of themselves. And then they might re-integrate it back into themselves, so to speak. In economic endeavors in a capitalist society, the people who are most successful tend to be those who think as businesspeople rather than as workers. I.e. you don't just work hard and try to do your job well. You work towards setting up a system, a machine, a racket, a company - something that 'automatically' will be making money for you. Ideally, even when you sleep. Does the parallel between those scenarios make sense? Well, it does to me. When we can see something a little bit at a distance, we can use a lot of our human intellectual faculties better. We can be more 'rational'. Which is useful when we're trying to fix something or plan something or make it work in an optimum way. As to the personal counseling scenario, a person has a much harder time changing himself if he is BEING his problems. He will not acknowledge having those problems, or will not acknowledge that they are problems, and he'll have a hard time seeing clearly what is really going on with him. As to the business scenario, a 'worker' is somebody who has identified himself as somebody who has a job, which depends on somebody else giving it to him, and the best he can do is to show up and work hard, and stand in line for a raise once in a while. A wage slave. That's typically a person who isn't quite capable of stepping back and figuring out how the whole business works. If he could do that he would usually quickly figure out that it could be a much better deal if HE was the guy who pulled the resources together and managed them, and HE would be the one hiring other people, who would keep working even when he went out to lunch. There are lots of situations in life where being 'outside' the action isn't what you want. If you're having sex or eating a great meal or skiing in the alps, you certainly want to be inside the action. But there seems to be something about human evolution that relates to that ability to abstract from things and make them work outside yourself. You can multiply your efforts if you can make them work outside yourself. To potentially any magnitude. If I can put my words into print, they might go into a book that millions of people read. Or I can record a TV program that other millions of people see, and that can be syndicated and repeated many times. I wouldn't be able to do that if it was just myself, and people had to come and talk with me in person. It is like compounded interest. If I can put my energy (money) somewhere where it grows by itself, it will surprisingly quickly turn into a whole lot. If I can express my energy on paper so it can be copied and read many times, it multiplies much faster than I'd ever be able to accomplish by myself. If I can make a machine that will do something useful, it can do the work instead of me. And I can be free to create something else, rather than being stuck with hard, repetitive work. If I can make an organization, it can do much more than what I can do. And it might do it when I'm not there, and it might continue doing it, even when the individual people come and go. That is unbeatable. Life forms that can set up machines, organizations, hierarchies, networks, distribution channels, businesses - they can easily outcompete any life forms that have to do all their own work. Beings who do this can accelerate their own evolution. There are some problems in this, however. There's a level of maturity and responsibility that better go along with it. Just like a person who becomes isolated and shut off from their own emotions might become a ruthless killer, somebody who makes machines or organizations might do so in an irresponsible way. They might create something that does something they wouldn't even personally do, but they might still make it be multiplied and amplified. An investor might buy stocks of companies that do things they wouldn't dream of doing themselves. Executives might drive their businesses to do things they wouldn't really feel good about, if they actually were connected with it. So, the challenge is in maximizing what we can do, in accelerating our evolution, while not losing touch with our humanity or our integrity. Amplifying our creativity, while coming from the heart. |