Note:  Since this project is essentially a compendium of resources for co-evolutionary emergence of higher and more integral modes of consciousness and life, it is a great pleasure to feature writing by others that precisely describes the essence of what the project was created to promote.   Our thanks to George Leonard and Michael Murphy for permitting us to feature the following preface to The Life We are Given, the manual for their program of Integral Transformative Practice (ITP). 

Joining the Evolutionary Adventure

(the Preface to The Life We are Given: A Long Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart and Soul, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, published by Tarcher/Putnam, 1995)

Like the human heart, the world points beyond itself to something greater and more beautiful than its present condition. That some-thing attracts us all, in different ways, and leads many of us to seek transformation. Does it secretly inform the entire evolutionary adventure? Could it be that the human heart and the world's heart are one in their self-surpassing?  We believe that they are. As we grow in love and strength, we become vehicles for the world's growth. We bring new sustenance to our families, new joy to our friends, new light to our places of work. We enhance the physical things around us, and the earth itself.

More and more of us are waking up to this fact. Never before has humankind enjoyed so much knowledge about our evolutionary universe and the ways in which we embody its stupendous adventure. It becomes more and more evident that our own well-being is indissolubly linked to the health of society and our environment. It is possible, now more than ever before, to see that our own growth is rooted in, and furthers, the whole world's advance.

We are fortified in this perception by the emerging story of our universe. It is, we feel, the greatest story of our time, our story of stories, this immense panorama of universal evolution from the in­credible birth of space and time to the emergence of human culture. To various degrees all of us are influenced by it, and each of us can turn to it for inspiration. Through transformative practices of the kind presented in this book, we can share the most fundamental tendencies of the world's unfoldment—to expand, create, and give rise to more conscious forms of life. Like evolution itself, we can bring forth new possibilities for growth, new worlds for further exploration.

The story of evolution as it has been elaborated by modern sci­ence, is a new story for the human race. Though a few poets and philosophers had guessed that humans developed from simpler forms of life, the fact of evolution was not widely recognized until Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The deeper implications of this enormous revelation are still dawning on us. Many physicists and biologists, for example, believe that something more than chance and material causes is involved in the universe's awesome journey. The world's advance from atomic particles to consciousness, from inorganic matter to the human awareness of God, confronts every thinking person, leading many of us to wonder “What is impelling it all?  Where is the universe headed? What is the relation between  evolution and higher powers?  Can the human race advance any further? Can it move closer to God:”

Since the nineteenth century, a compelling answer to these questions has begun to emerge among certain scientists, philosophers, and laypeople.  That answer, we believe, will grow in the world's imagination, and it has guided the work described in this book.  In simple terms, it can be stated like this:  While remaining transcendent to all created things, the divine spirit involved itself in the birth of the material universe.  The process that followed, the uneven but inexorable emergence of ever higher organization from matter to life to humankind, is then—at the heart of it—the unfolding of hidden divinity.  Evolution follows involution.  What was implicit is gradually made explicit, as the spirit within all things progressively manifests itself.  In the words of the Indian philosopher Sir Aurobindo, “apparent nature is secret God.”

This idea has been developed in different ways by the German philosophers Hegel and Friedrich Schelling;  By Henry James, Sr., the father of William and Henry James; by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson; by the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin; and by twentieth-century thinkers such as Jean Gebser, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Sri Aurobindo.  The vision put forth by these and other philosophers reflects intuitions reported by countless people since antiquity that they enjoy a secret contact  or kinship with the founding principle of the universe.  The recognition of a reality ordinarily hidden but immediately apprehended as our true identity, our immortal soul, our “original face,” our secret at-oneness with God is implicit in much Buddhist, Hindu, Platonist, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought.

The idea that divinity is present in all things, manifesting itself through the immense adventure of evolution, helps account for the mystery of our great surplus capacities, our yearnings for God, our inextinguishable creativity, our sense of grace in human affairs.  It helps explain our quest for self-transcendence and humanity's proliferation of transformative practices.

For it is the case that people in every culture, and in every age, have invented ways to realize kinship or oneness with divinity.  Neanderthals held burial ceremonies, indicating  their sense of an afterlife, and Cro-Magnon peoples, more than fifteen thousand years ago, left us cave drawings of Shamanic figures.  These Homo sapiens had developed an awareness of themselves in relation to things beyond.  In awareness, this reach beyond the ordinary world, there occurred an immense evolutionary leap.  The universe awakened to its secret soul, its guiding presence and destiny.  That awakening has been nurtured ever since through innumerable practices of transformation that have arisen around the globe.

Such practices appeared on earth long ages ago, through shamans such as those depicted in Stone Age cave paintings.  These first specialists of human society had extraordinary powers to overcome pain, understand others, and provoke ecstasy in themselves and their fellows.  Around fires at night, they led ceremonies with chanting and dance and sometimes with hallucinogens.  Through mythic narrative, they reenacted the world's creation and led members of their group though symbolic death and rebirth.  In their spirit-body they flew to the gods, descended to the underworld, and remembered their secret identity.  These first masters of transformative practice sustained humanity's  intuition that mind and flesh can be transformed in the fire of our secret divinity.

Many peoples have preserved the spirit of Stone Age  shamanism and have extended our reach into the unseen.  On the Indian sub-continent, for example, inspired philosophers have enlarged our spiritual vocabulary,  broadened our metaphysical imagination, and invented yogas now practiced in every part of the earth. The Indian witness to our latent divinity is typified by the Katha Upanishad:

                Finer than the fine, greater than the great, the Self hides in the secret heart of the creature . . .

For more than three thousand years, India has been a laboratory for spiritual exploration, constantly illuminating our capacities for extraordinary life.  Through the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that began there, its teachings have spread around the world.  Today, its philosophies and practices are enjoying a great renaissance.

Transformative practices also spread from China and Japan, extending the sense of our secret source into the things of everyday life.   China's feng shui encourages a reverent sensitivity to dwelling and landscape; its medicine and martial arts incorporate yogic and Shamanic lore about the body's potentially luminous anatomy; its decorative arts convey the subtlety and depth of mystic insight.  Japan's aikido, its gardening and home-building crafts, its arts of tea ceremony and flower arrangement, bring the illumination of Zen into the simplest things, reminding us that they physical world is suffused with enlightenment.

This diffusion of soul-awakening from the East is complemented today by the rediscovery of Western esoteric traditions   People of many intellectual persuasions have embraced the teachings of cabalistic and Hasidic mysticism, with their emphasis upon the divine splendor, the zohar; which shines forth when we live in accordance with God.  Sufism has had a similar revival.  In both Islam and Judaism there are ways to find holy joy in daily life—around the dinner table, in the wedding bed, at our places of work.  In the words of the Talmud and various Sufi writings, a good work, a good marriage, a feast among family and friends, can provide a foretaste of the life to come. 

And the words of Christian  mystics are being published in record numbers.  The early desert fathers, orthodox Greek and Russian saints, medieval mystics such as Hildegarde of Bingen and Meister Eckhart, the Spanish ascetics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Protestant ecstatics such as Jakob Böhme and George Fox, and other God-intoxicated people of ancient, medieval, and modern Christendom influence us today through their newly translated writings, their vivid examples of holy life, and their imaginative ways of self-transcendence. 

Every sacred tradition is having a generative influence in the global village, stimulating countless people to embrace once esoteric ways of growth.  This worldwide event has helped produce a momentous new stage in the development of transformative practice.  For today, more than every before long-term human change can be understood and guided with the help of science.  There are many reasons for this,  among them new advances in the understanding of psychodynamics by modern psychology; demonstrations of our capacity for highly specific change in psychoneuroimmunology, sports medicine, biofeedback training, placebo studies, and hypnosis research;  new discoveries about the mind's ability to reshape motivations, emotions, and the flesh; and sociologists' demonstrations that each social group nurtures just some of our attributes while neglecting or suppressing others.  Never before has there been so much scientifically based knowledge about the transformative capacities of human nature.  This knowledge, combined with the lore and inspiration of the sacred traditions, gives the human raced an unprecedented opportunity to make a great evolutionary advance.  It is possible now, we believe, for humanity to pursue its destiny with more clarity than ever before.  To quote the poet Christopher Fry:  “Affairs are now soul-size; The enterprise is exploration into God.”

Every person on this planet can join the procession of transformative practice that began with our ancient ancestors.  That is the guiding idea of this book.  The ways of growth described here, which can be adopted by anyone, embrace our many parts.  We call them integral to signify their inclusion of our entire human nature—body, mind, heart, and soul. 

When wisely pursued, such practices bestow countless blessings.  If we do not obsess about their results, they make us vehicles of grace and reveal unexpected treasures.  In this, they often seem paradoxical.  They require time, for example, but frequently make more time available to us:  They can slow time down, and open us to the timeless moment from which we have arisen.  They require sacrifice, but they restore us.  While demanding the relinquishment of established patterns, they open us to new love, new awareness, new energy7; what we lose is replaced by new joy, beauty, and strength.  They require effort, but come to be effortless.  Demanding commitment, they eventually proceed like second nature.  They need a persistent will, but after a while flow unimpeded.  Whereas they are typically hard to start, they eventually cannot be stopped.

For most of us, integral practices require hard work.  But with patience, the initial discomfort they cause turns into an ever-recurring pleasure.  Renewing mind and heart, rebuilding the body, restoring the soul, become sources of endless delight.

Because they arise from the same primordial source, transformative practice and the world's evolution have similar patterns.  In both, there are periods of stasis—long plateaus of the learning curve—followed by bursts of rapid development.  In both, things are sacrificed as something new emerges.  In both, new levels or dimensions of functioning take into themselves what went before, giving fuller expression to our latent divinity.  And in both, there are times when the process of change itself graduates to a higher level.  We are, it seems, involved in such a momentous transition.  The discovery of evolution, the marriage of science with the sacred traditions, and the recognition that our entire human nature, including the flesh, can grow in the light of God: all this conspires to make possible transformative practices with unprecedented depth and power.  This book, we hope, will open a doorway to such practice for you.