# The Evolution of Reality

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: George Land, The Evolution of Reality, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> The Evolution of Reality
> George Land
> 
> Abstract
> The evolutionary reality of nature is moving every growing thing to higher and
> more complex levels of interconnection and interdependence. As nature’s most
> successful evolutionary partner, humanity has now created a complex network
> of connections that has brought the earth into an interdependent global village.        *
> The principle o f entropy maintains that all systems are ultimately headed
> downhill. The evolutionary evidence of creative growth and change going on
> within every natural system indicates quite the opposite. The challenge for
> humanity is to understand that the creative process o f nature is pulling all
> systems including organizations and civilization to a future different from the
> past. To align with nature’s processes requires being open to making new and
> different connections with people, ideas, resources, and opportunities. The
> Baha’i Faith is one of nature's “strange attractors’’ which holds out the
> possibility that humanity can bring into being what never existed before. The
> Bahd’i belief in visualizing a creative, purposeful peace is in complete
> alignment with nature’s creative processes.
> Résumé
> La réalité évolutive de la nature pousse tout ce qui croît vers des niveaux
> toujours plus complexes de communication et ď interdépendance. L’humanité,
> dont l’évolution est la plus réussie de la nature, a créé un réseau complexe de
> connexions qui a fait de la terre un village global interdépendant. Le principe
> de T entropie soutient que tout système est ultimement voué à la dégradation.
> Les preuves évolutionnistes de la croissance créative et du changement propres
> à tout système naturel nous indiquent le contraire. Le défi qui se présente à
> l’humanité est de comprendre que le processus créatif de la nature dirige tous
> les systèmes, y compris les organisations et la civilisation, vers un avenir
> différent du passé. Pour s’aligner avec les processus de la nature, il faut être
> ouvert à l’établissement de liens différents et nouveaux avec les gens, les idées,
> les ressources et les occasions qui se présentent. La Foi bahd’ie est une «force
> ď attraction étrange » de la nature , qui offre à T humanité des possibilités
> n’ayant jamais existé auparavant. La croyance bahd’ie, qui permet de
> visualiser une paix créative et dirigée est en accord total avec les processus
> créateurs naturels.
> 
> * This paper was originally delivered at the Association’s 12th Annual Conference,
> ’   “Converging Realities,” Princeton University, October 22-25, 1987.
> 20                THE JOURNAL OF BAHÀ’Î STUDIES 3.1. 1990
> 
> Resumen
> La realidad evolutiva de la naturaleza encamina todo lo crecedero hacia
> niveles mas altos y más complejos de interconección e interdependencia. Siendo
> la socia evolutiva de la naturaleza de mayor éxito, la humanidad ha creado
> ahora una red compleja de conecciones que han hecho de la tierra una aldea
> global interdependiente. El principio de la entropia sostiene que, en ultimas,
> todos los sistemas estàn en proceso de venir a menos. La prueba evolucionaria
> de cambio y crecimiento creativo occurriendo dentro de todo sistema natural
> indica todo lo contrario. El reto para la humanidad estd en comprender que el
> proceso creativo de la naturaleza esta ilevando todos los sistemas, incluyendo
> organizaciones y la civilización hacia un futuro distinto a su pasado. El
> alinearse con los procesos naturales requiere receptividad a for jar nuevas y
> diferentes conecciones con gentes, ideas, recursos, y oportunidades. La Fe
> B a h a i es uno de aquellos “atrayentes desconocidos” de la naturaleza que
> ofrece la posibilidad de que la humanidad pueda dar vida a aquello que jamás
> había existido antes. El convencimiento bahďí de visualizar una paz creativa y
> repleta de propósito está completamente alineado con los procesos creativos de
> la naturaleza.
> 
> rvin Laszlo* talks about systems and how systems build upon systems, and
> E   I want to extend those thoughts and his pioneering work in this area. To
> begin with a heresy, perhaps a major heresy: We have now come to the conclu­
> sion that the interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, known as
> entropy, was incorrect. There is really no evidence that the universe is headed
> into a heat death; in fact, the evidence is quite the contrary. When one examines
> the original proofs of entropy, there are errors. So the fundamental assumption
> underlying everything I am going to say here in a way flies in the face of the
> notions about entropy.
> What we see in the universe is a series of states of progression from one
> level to another in which everything is connecting at higher levels. The function
> of bringing things together has more words to express it in the English lan­
> guage, more synonyms than any other single function. I use the word connect­
> ing because what we see going on around us is a connecting process and a
> process in which all things are brought into higher levels of connection. There
> are more and more complex connections, more and more interdependent con­
> nections over time, and these processes indeed take on a pattern, a series of
> waves. They are regular waves in the sense that we have waves of seasons,
> 
> * Dr. Laszlo is rector of the Vienna Academy for the Study of the Future, director of
> the International Institute for Evolutionary Studies, and science advisor to the director-
> general o f UNESCO. Among his writings is “Humankind’s Path to Peace in Global
> Society,” The Journal o f Bahď í Studies, 2.2. He was also a speaker at the Association’s
> 1987 conference at Princeton University.
> The Evolution of Reality                            21
> 
> tides, waves of change over time. Illustration 1 shows how these waves take the
> shapes they do over time. Time is shown going from left to right, and the pro­
> cess of growth is shown in the vertical dimension.
> One of the things we discover when we start to look at processes of nature
> and the commonality of nature’s processes is the blurring of many traditional,
> sharp dividing lines. Operating throughout this process that I want to examine is
> something that can only be described as intelligence. Even at its very lowest
> atomic and subatomic levels, manifestations can be found that could only be
> described as living. It gets very confusing when you see subatomic particles
> over time manifest functions that can only be described as living and intelligent
> and, indeed, creative. I find it very difficult to draw any comfortable lines about
> some of these central issues.
> What we see in the beginning of every system, whether it is the growth of
> a child or the growth of a nation or an organization or a molecule or a crystal,
> is an initial period in which the thing that is growing is attempting to find a
> pattern by which it can organize itself and the environment around it. Its inter­
> nal pattern must match what is going on outside because of the organism’s
> integral drive to organize the environment. This first “forming” phase in all
> areas of the sciences is very confusing because it is formless. There is no pat­
> tern. When one looks at the early behavior of anything, one finds chaos, or
> what appears to be chaos. On later examination one discovers a pattern in the
> sense that this is a creative process—a process of invention, of reaching out in
> :    the environment trying different bits and pieces, and of assembling them into a
> pattern.
> 
> i
> 22                THE JOURNAL OF BAHÁ Í STUDIES 3.1. 1990
> 
> Once that pattern is found, a major shift occurs in the system. All of the char­
> acteristics of its behavior that were dominant in the first phase change completely
> one hundred and eighty degrees. It shifts into what we call the “norming” phase.
> The goal of this phase is to use and focus the energy in such a way that it gets
> the maximum return on its organization. It stops investigating, stops exploring,
> stops creating, and goes into a period of replication and incremental improve­
> ment. (See illustration 2.)
> 
> Illustration 2
> An “envelope” of sorts surrounds this growing thing. It creates mechanisms by
> which it can avoid what is different. It looks into the environment for things like
> itself, similarities, resonant congruities, and it grows on the basis of the exten­
> sion of those likenesses. It deals with differences according to how big a threat
> they manifest. If they are small enough, the organism ignores them; if they are
> larger, it may kill them; and if they are too large, it runs from them. This is a
> very successful period because the energy in the system is being used very effi­
> ciently. This is quite different from the first phase.
> If the system is successful (and well over ninety-nine percent of the sys­
> tems we have studied fail somewhere in this transition), if it makes the transi­
> tion and goes into the second phase, then it runs into a law of nature we do not
> talk about very much, “nothing fails like success.” If the organism indeed reach­
> es out and organizes its environment effectively, sooner or later it is going to run
> out of things to organize. It starts to run into diminishing returns, and it starts to
> have a problem; it goes into another transition, another phase change.
> The Evolution of Reality                               23
> 
> These phase changes are absolutely monumental. Again, the behavior of
> this system shifts one hundred and eighty degrees—to an “integrating” phase.
> The a priori rule, which said avoid the new and different, is superseded by the
> necessity to open up the pattern and to make room for the integration of the new
> and the different. The organism goes into a process (one word which I think is
> very useful is “wholing”) where it makes itself whole. At the same time another
> activity is occurring, a bifurcation. (See illustration 3.)
> 
> Somewhat isolated in various ways from the main currents of the organism,
> represented by the integrating process on the top line of the illustration, a new
> phase one is beginning. Here the organism incorporates the old system but now
> begins to explore a much broader environment and starts to organize a new pat­
> tern in this much broader environment. Again, if one were to look at it by itself,
> this process appears fairly chaotic. It is very hard to identify that new first phase
> when it is going on, and those having had experience with an entrepreneur in
> business will know what the first phase is. It is crazy. It has no pattern; it is trial
> and error. When a pattern is found, the organism moves to a higher level of orga­
> nization, usually by one order of magnitude that is at least ten times more com­
> plex and begins another second phase at the crossing point. (See illustration 4.)
> 24               THE JOURNAL OF BAHÂ’Î STUDIES 3.1.1990
> 
> So what you see in brief is a whole series of evolutionary cycles in which
> systems build upon systems. The laws that govern these changes from system to
> system are very consistent; they are basic laws themselves. The phenomena are
> much more complex at each level, and sometimes it is difficult to compare what
> is happening at the subatomic particle level to what is happening at the inter­
> phase stage of cell growth. But, in fact, when you examine the mechanisms, the
> basic laws, the dynamics of the system, you find that they are identical.
> How does all this relate to the evolution of human beings and where we are
> in this cycle? We are at a very interesting time. There is a Chinese curse that
> says, “May you live in interesting times.” We have all been cursed! If we go
> back to about fourteen or fifteen thousand B.C., we begin to see people living
> together in fairly large, stable groups. Archaeologists cannot find any stability
> in this kind of early village life. The villages appear, disappear, move around.
> There is a paradigm, a cognitive map that is going on during this period. It is an
> ancient cognitive map and a very important one for us to think about. For that
> kind of semi-nomadic and nomadic existence, the reason things happen is
> because they happen. It is acausal. Things are inhabited by spirits; if a tree falls,
> then the tree’s spirit believed that it should fall. I once went to live for several
> months with a nomadic tribe in Mexico. I discovered there were no words for
> “why” in their vocabulary. In fact, there were very few questioning words
> because things were taken for granted. Things just happen; life happens to you.
> During this period of civilization, we see people experimenting with a new
> paradigm. One day someone planted a seed on the river bank or in the debris
> next to a village and noted that a plant grew. They tried it again and again, and
> The Evolution of Reality                              25
> 
> presumably they tried a score of seeds and got the idea that if they put the seed
> in the ground something would happen. They shifted their beliefs, and gradually
> over that eight-thousand year period a new way of thinking came into being.
> They got the idea that they could manipulate their own existence, that they
> could take dominion over the planet. They began to see a causal relationship in
> the events of their lives.
> I use the word causal here as a temporal sequence—causal, as cause-and- .
> effect, as having been caused in the past. Whether this was written down or not,
> this was the paradigm; it became the paradigm. Once you have causality, then
> you have the question of who makes things happen. Before long, you enter a
> hierarchical notion of how things work. You also enter into an idea of inequali­
> ty. Some are more equal than others. Emerging from that comes determinism
> and the mechanistic idea that the universe was sort of a great clockwork mecha­
> nism. If one knew the initial conditions, one could predict with total certainty
> everything that was going to happen in the future.
> The creative human spirit is absolutely indomitable, however. For thou­
> sands of years people generally accepted as the official truth that we lived in a
> deterministic world, and yet they did not get depressed. That is amazing to me,
> when you know that this is nothing more or less than the human spirit emerging
> from a barricade of causal determinism. Because if everything is known in
> advance* life is not going to be very exciting. Certainly it does not portend well
> for my having much effect on my environment or my life or my future or any­
> thing else.
> That logical notion has been with us about eight-thousand years, and it has
> built up and built up; it is still fairly prevalent. It particularly manifests itself in
> the world that we inhabit in organizations. It is known as the “management”
> paradigm in which there is a normal hierarchy of control. The idea of the man­
> ager is to take a path, project it into the future, and control it. At some point, we
> run into a period in which the linear progression of an incremental system,
> bounded by rules that keep it within that envelope of change and growth, begins
> to change.
> We believe the evidence we see around us in the world today that we are
> now moving into the third phase—and we have been moving for some time. We
> are just starting to notice that we are living in a very interdependent world and
> that official reality is not what it was cracked up to be. We have been trying to
> grapple with the notion of reality, and this is what the third phase is about. It is a
> shift in how we conceive reality to be, and it is a gigantic shift. It is just as big a
> shift as going from having lived for thousands, indeed for hundreds of thou­
> sands, of years in an acausal, spirit-driven world where you were subject to
> nature’s whims to living in a world you could control and predict.
> We are now shifting to what we call a “creative worldview,” an integrated
> and creative paradigm. I say “creative” because there are some very peculiar
> things that come out of all of this continuity that we have dealt with in the sci­
> ences. To deal with the changes we have today, we just cannot simply get better
> at what we do. That will not do it; it does not work. We are dealing with a new
> 26                 THE JOURNAL OF BAHÂ’Î STUDIES 3.1. 1990
> 
> kind of change; it is not merely more rapid, turbulent, and complex. Now with
> all these things going on around us, the only surprise that we would have today
> is if there were no surprises. The one thing you learn to expect is that things are
> not, that the future is not what it used to be and never will be again.
> Around the turn of the century, science ran head on into a mountain of dis­
> continuities. The one that stands out deals with the nature of reality and the
> emergence of quantum physics. In today’s larger environment where new things
> are coming together, new juxtapositions are producing in their syntheses new
> energies, new phenomena that could never have been predicted. They are pro­
> ducing “quantum” discontinuities, leaps that we have never before experienced
> in the history of civilization. The whole notion of human rights is a gigantic dis­
> continuity, as is the idea that minorities and women should have rights.
> Minorities and women have been with us for some time; isn’t it interesting that
> we are just noticing that they are human beings? It is a powerful leap from the
> past, and there is a chasm between where we stand now and where we used to
> stand. In order to deal with this, in order to be effective as a human being, in
> order to live a successful life with an organization that is going to function well
> on this planet, and in order to have a planet that is going to function well, we
> need to think about a new possibility in terms of what reality is.
> I would like to discuss a couple of notions that come out of quantum
> physics. When we really begin to look at the implications of quantum physics,
> some things become apparent that are quite surprising. Whenever you try to pre­
> dict anything based on the past, you are going to make a mistake. That is very
> sure. If you try to track a particle that has been from A to B and you now try to
> project its trajectory from B to C, you might as well forget it. Whatever you pre­
> dict, the odds are extraordinarily high it will be wrong. Yet, if you look at those
> phenomena in aggregate, they will always add up to predictable patterns! The
> interesting thing about probability theory in itself is that it is not about probabil­
> ity; it is about certainty. Certain patterns are going to occur, but you can’t track
> them from their past.
> There is another way to look at all this that has eluded science, quite delib­
> erately, because it was the province of religion. I think Newton cut a very clear
> deal between the sciences and the Church of England—that was, to keep out of
> their business. That issue is purpose. In biology, one of the areas of study that
> has recently come into its own is the study of autopoietic systems, self-organizing,
> self-creating systems. Your body is one of them. Your body has about sixty or
> seventy trillion cells in it. Right now, the cells sitting next to your left little toe
> are making some decisions, and they are not bothering to go to headquarters.
> The odds are that they are going to make pretty much the right decisions. When
> you imagine running an organization with sixty or seventy trillion organisms in
> it, it is mind boggling. I am in a state of perpetual awe thinking about what goes
> on in the human body. How does it work that it works?
> I was at the New York Academy of Sciences several years ago when an
> eminent molecular geneticist had a recommendation about restructuring the
> human body. He gave a talk on “God’s Mistakes.” He had studied the energetic
> The Evolution of Reality                             21
> 
> activities of the average cell in the human body, and it turned out that the aver­
> age cell spends fully 30% of its energy doing nothing but maintaining the
> integrity of the DNA it is carrying around, about 99.9% of which is superfluous.
> Why should every cell in your body have a complete blueprint of the whole
> human body in it? That does seem like tremendous overkill. So he said. Let’s
> eliminate this “junk” DNA and put these cells on a “need to know basis,” some­
> what like the way General Motors is run. By doing so, we can reduce the caloric,
> input enormously and solve the world’s food problem. It would require a bit of
> genetic engineering to pull it off.
> Nature does this with plants and animals, and it does so throughout the
> whole system for a very simple reason—it is a self-referencing system. These
> cells are able to make independent, automatic decisions from minute to minute,
> based on their inner picture of the whole and their connection with the whole.
> They have all that information and can be extraordinarily flexible. The system
> can respond very rapidly because it has reference to its whole purpose and to
> itself as a part of the system.
> That is an autopoietic system. You see the same kind of phenomenon
> occurring when a crystal is formed on the inorganic level. Those molecular res­
> onant patterns in the nucleus of the atom carry themselves throughout the crys­
> tal and help it organize. They help individual atoms make decisions and choices
> about how they are going to locate themselves, what kind of energy bands the
> electrons are going to reside in, and so on. Every individual part has a picture of
> the whole. They have reference to purpose. So the first principle in terms of
> rethinking our way of thinking about reality is that it is very conceivable that
> the major force in terms of causing things is not the past but the future.
> If I am on a journey from here to somewhere out in the future where I
> would like to be in terms of purpose, in terms of vision, in terms of mission,
> then the issue is, How do I connect in the best possible ways with everything in
> my environment that might be accessible to me in my voyage from A to B1 To
> answer that question, we need to go to another precept of quantum physics:
> There are no “things” in the universe. There are no quanta. In fact, all you can
> find when you go looking for them are sets of relationships. Things define
> themselves by their relationships, minute to minute. If I am journeying on a pur­
> pose, on a vision, toward a new point of organization, I want to make myself
> accessible to all of the possible connections that might be around me.
> Now, how can I get in the way of this natural drive; how can I make myself
> inaccessible? I simply do what we teach people to do in the second phase of
> social systems—prejudge the connections and their environment, create screens
> that protect us from connecting with things which might be different from us.
> Let me put the positive side of it a different way. As far as we can see, the
> most bottom-line principle in terms of making a successful voyage to a destina­
> tion in the future is to embrace one condition, and that condition is “uncondi­
> tional love.” When people practice unconditional love, suddenly the
> environment—the connections—become available to them. They perceive what
> is going on in the environment without having perceptual screens and filters.
> 28                 THE JOURNAL OF BAHAM STUDIES 3.1. 1990
> 
> When love is present and when it is not conditional, it opens the door to all
> those serendipitous coincidences that occur when somebody is fully and pur­
> posely committed to loving.
> On his bulletin board, a good friend has a motto that I agree with whole­
> heartedly. The motto is Do not expect miracles; rely on them. You are a miracle.
> If you logically try to work out a progression of states leading to a human being
> out of inanimate matter, out of plants or animals, you are not going to get there.
> It requires a creative process. It requires the creation of the impossible. We live
> in the kind of universe that is constantly creating miracles.
> Atoms created their own reality, and molecules did, and cells did, and then
> plants and animals did. Now human beings are sitting here with the responsibili­
> ty of creating their own reality. It does not make any difference what the objec­
> tive reality is around us; the issue is how we relate to it, because we create
> ourselves from moment to moment in our choice of how we relate. We are self-
> creating creatures. This is very exciting because it means you can choose to cre­
> ate yourself in the way you want. However, we have not been getting that
> message out fully in the social system of all of the world yet. We still have a
> sense that there are other powers that control us, that we are in a hierarchical
> system, and even that some things just simply happen to us.
> There is a problem with all of this second-phase thinking facing us, and this
> is the challenge I would like to put to the BaháTs. What we see in systems is
> that the transition is very difficult. In transition, sometimes whole systems go
> into extinction and have to be replaced. The process is inevitable. I think that
> there is a saying among BaháTs that “peace is inevitable.” I absolutely agree
> with that, but it may not be true—in the short run—for human beings, and that
> is the issue.
> We find when we study systems that when the second phase starts to move
> into its transition, it runs into a problem of encountering the unknown, the unex­
> perienced, and it has a little bump on it which the system attempts to return to the
> past. (See illustration 5.) We now call it the “Back to Basics” bump, because
> what organizations say on the human side of things is “Gee, things aren’t work­
> ing; things used to be wonderful; let’s get back to the good old days. Let’s cut out
> all the stuff that isn’t pertinent to what we are about. Let's get tight, get right, get
> lean and mean, and everything is going to be fine.” Now, the tragedy behind this
> is that for a little while you can do it; you can squeeze fat out of any system and
> make it look healthy. I hate to tell you how many corporations are involved in
> doing this and how many large institutions, university systems, for example, are
> involved in doing this. Making it look healthy, creating an illusion of health and
> growth when in fact the environment is continuing to move along regardless of
> this resistance. The system progressively invests more and more in defense. You
> protect yourself; you defend your territories; you defend your autonomy, your
> identity, and your control. The costs are enormous; they are so great that when
> the environment moves around past you and you need to change and be able to
> accommodate the new and the different, you do not have the resources left to do
> it. You go into a very rapid decline and sometimes extinction.
> The Evolution of Reality                     .      29
> 
> Working with transnational corporations is exciting, as they are beginning
> to create their own new paradigm. They are rather quiet about it because not
> many organizations are ready to put on the front page of their annual report that
> their most important principle is unconditional love. They suspect that people
> are not going to understand it fully, and so they put the bottom-line results on
> the front page because the bottom-line results of unconditional love are abso­
> lutely astonishing. Ordinarily these companies will be four or five times as suc­
> cessful as companies who compete with them because they have given up
> competition. They don’t even bother with competition any more; their
> issue/vision/goal is to provide the maximum value for their customers and to
> make the world a better place. You forget competition in that framework and
> don’t worry about it. Competition is there to help you get better—the old Greek
> notion. Suddenly your customers get awfully happy with what you are trying to
> do for them. It is amazing! It really is so simple, yet it violates, in many ways,
> the old paradigm.
> The issue, so fundamental to the future, is for all of us to experience this
> state, this new paradigm of creativity. It has only two conditions around it:
> 
> 1. Be clear about your purpose, and be clear that your purpose is in
> alignment with the universe’s purpose. Are you helping things get connected
> at a higher level? Are you an agent of evolution?
> 2. Make yourself available for the new—and different—connections
> that can happen in your environment; practice unconditional love.
> 30                THE JOURNAL OF BAHÁT STUDIES 3.1. 1990
> 
> If you are doing those two things, you are going to be living in a creative
> process. There is a very interesting by-product of all this—joy. Isn’t it wonder­
> ful that the universe has given us an internal compass of extraordinary power,
> that we are endowed with a navigational system and a wonderful feedback sys­
> tem? It tells us when it’s not working; because if we are not feeling joy, some­
> where love is being withheld.
> It is that simple. If you are really open to connecting with your environ­
> ment, connecting with all of the different flavors and forms, and you approach it
> with purpose, you are going to experience more and more joy. You will begin to
> recognize when you are off track, because you are blessed with this kind of an
> internal guidance system. More and more people are beginning to think it is all
> right to feel joyful. Life need not be a vale of tears. What we find is that as peo­
> ple experience joy, and as they experience purposefulness and creativity and
> unconditional love, then the people around them start doing so also. They don’t
> talk about it; people just start doing it. It seems to be contagious like a virus.
> When we look at the BaháT' Faith and its goals and its objectives, we
> believe that it can be what is called a “strange attractor” in the literature of the
> bifurcation theory. It starts to hold out a new model and a new hope of a world
> in a state of what we would think of as a creative, loving, and purposeful peace.
>
> — *The Evolution of Reality (Used by permission of the curator)*