The following is a short version of a model - a cosmology, if you will - that may be of use at our current juncture in evolutionary history, give or take 100 years. Before we begin, I must admit that some of what we are going to explore will be difficult to comprehend. It will not be difficult because of complexity, or because it involves learning new words or concepts; it will be difficult because it is simpler than we are. That said, I endeavor to take up the challenge of philosopher and psychologist William James and I hope that this model it is a pragmatic one; I believe that it will prove so. Ninety years ago - during an era in which certain individuals laid the foundations of what we call the theory of general evolution - James played with the question that he knew was the most powerful until his time in history. This question, roughly put, was "how can there be a Many and a One at the same time, and what does this mean for people in their daily lives?" I will herein att!
empt to answer this question with equally powerful (and empowering) questions.

James grappled with the aforementioned question with playfulness, intellectual ardor, and philosophical distance; between the lines, however, it seems that it challenged him deeply and personally. It pervaded most of his later work, and despite his eventual official settling on the side of "the Many" for reasons of pragmatism, he could not help but publicly leave doors open for the possibilities of "the One." This is where we will pick up the inquiry.

Systems awareness tells us that everything is dynamically interrelated. Constructivism suggests to us that how things are related is, to some extent at least, based on the needs of the "observer" as they develop themselves. This leads us into Maturana and Varela's science of autopoiesis and enaction, which describes life in terms of the continuous negotiation of self-boundaries and the co-creation of (rather than mere adaptation to) the world around us. From this point on, we will think twice about the notion of an observer being separated from what is being observed; I use the term "subject-observer."

Now we have arrived at a universe comprised of relationships wherein the subject-observer is embedded in the middle of it all. Already a Oneness of some kind is implied. Yet it is indeed counter-intuitive to cast aside the common sense notion that we are things among a universe of things that we discover, learn about, and use. Returning to our effort to answer James, in what way can we think about the Many and a One that do not contradict each other? I will suggest one way. If we conceive of the One not as a thing, but instead as a quality, we may have a resolution. What quality would it be? To this, I ask, what quality is the most ubiquitous, and what quality is one which we can never remove ourselves from? It is the quality of movement.

Quantum physics is said to be the most thoroughly proven model ever created, but for decades its theorists have puzzled over the phenomenon of "non-locality" - how things with seemingly no physical connection can influence each other in a laboratory setting. One of the explorers in this realm, David Bohm, advanced a cosmology that described an explicate order (the visible), an implicate order (the underlying fabric), and a "holomovement" - the last being a kind of movement that binds and ultimately (to my understanding) comprises all things. This is essentially the movement that we are talking about, although expressed in different terms.

Imagine movement without something that is moving - a basic Movement that is not described by physics but is simply primal. I suggest that this is the One that does not contradict the Many but fills them, connects them, and is them. How so? Using the quality of movement, we can see how an infinity of forms can exist which - although different in appearance and behavior - are always in and of Movement. And this how so? All things that fill our world - from atoms to organisms to stars to ideas and institutions - are defined by relationships. Relationships are interactivity, and interactivity is at its heart a form of movement. It is through "analogy of movement" that Movement both binds and is bound.

Let us hold in mind for a moment this notion of Movement as the One that does not contradict the Many. By itself, this does not inform us as to how the many diverse forms (including us) emerge, and why. Now we are getting to the heart of what evolutionary insight can provide us. General evolutionary thought informs us that there is a spiral of differentiation and integration characterizes complex systems, that when energy and information flows become disturbed the system may be driven to re-organize so as to maintain itself, which (unless the system devolves) requires an increase in energy density but also an increase in efficiency. This can be observed in chemistry, in species, in societies, and even in the lives of individuals as well. However, there is more to the story.

Jonas Salk suggested that in the largest evolutionary spiral of all - that of the cosmos (or reality) itself - there could be discerned five distinct planes. Shortly before his death, he named these planes the Prebiological, the Biological, the Metabiological (mind and culture), the Teleobiological, and the Symbiological. The history of the cosmos so far could be mapped across the first three planes, with the fourth just starting to emerge today. Each plane is characterized by a different time frame, a different dynamic and a different paradox-in-resolution (or what some might call a tension of duality). I interpret these planes to be essentially the "center stages" of evolution from the standpoint of a particular subject-observer, "prior" planes never becoming less important but more foundational.

Before attempting to answer the question of the origin of the Many and their relationship to the One, we need to visit one of the greatest mysteries of all: emergence. A good and classic example is how one cannot predict or anticipate the qualities of water from the qualities of its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. This principle is found at the heart of all evolutionary shifts, in the smallest and grandest places, when somehow the reconfiguration of relationships gives rise to surprising qualities. But surprising to whom? Emergence must be said to be as much a psychological or organismic phenomenon as a physical one; in fact, in this model, it will be seen as the ultimate subjective phenomenon.

Now I will attempt to bring these ideas together. We have so far used the words "differentiation," "relationship," and "movement" as concepts functionally different. In this model, however, they are all the same thing. In the spirit of transcendental idealism, evolution will be seen as an expression of Movement ("Absolute Spirit" in German Idealist philosophy) ever-finding itself. Imagine a twist in Bohm's holomovement, Movement threading itself with the needle of itself such that a new dimension of Movement is created. In that new dimension, Movement is veiled to itself so that differentiations can emerge which, in turn, allow for new dimensions of movement until a critical mass occurs, resulting in another twist in Movement. And the same process allows for another twist in Movement, and then another, and another. With each turn, Movement is allowed to flow in a new dimension in its endless re-relationship with itself and thus the perpetuation of all.

What is the sign of each turn? An internalization of the plane's characteristic process into the predominant "unit" of that plane. Moving plane by plane, its was the internalization of the process of patterning into chemicals that marked the birth of autopoiesis, biological life, and "intersubjectivity"; it was the internalization of intersubjectivity into organisms that marked the birth of mind and then culture, and "interobjectivity;" it is the internalization of interobjectivity into human beings that gives birth to dialogical communication and awareness, which will be essential to the emergence of evolutionary learning communities. and a designing democracy. We can also imagine the evolutionary turns of the future, but I will leave that aside for now.

What does this say about things, the myriad and diverse things that populate and enrich our universe? It says that things are differentiations that appear when they are needed to appear: emergence gateways that are the resolution of timely paradoxes (to which we will return shortly). It says that the order of things as we know them are the grammar and syntax of a great language - an Ontolingua - whose only vocabulary word is Movement or Spirit, spoken in myriad ways through Bohm's explicate order.

What does this say about time? It says that we experience time as linear because in our evolutionary plane we need a "sense" of movement. In fact, what we look back upon as "history" are the convergence points that provide for the greatest thrust forward into a future - a future in evolutionary terms, that is. And what of that elusive thing called "the present?" The present, that is us - the moving window of emergence. Ultimately, this model would suggest that there is no linearity whatsoever. The unfolding of "the future" mirrors the unfolding of "the past," and all evolutionary planes exist simultaneously as the perpetual life of Movement.

Exploring the question of the Many and the One, evolution and purpose, inevitably invites the question of God. Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian and "philosophical anthropologist," suggested that God was the "in-between." This also reminds me of Tao, boundariness itself - boundariness that eventually reveals itself as the stuff it bounds. Can this accommodate the God-attribute of most profound intelligence? Let us turn to Maturana again, who suggests that intelligence is not "capacity to learn" but more specifically the capacity to build relationships. Moreover, relationship being the essence of love, continues Maturana, love then is the driving force of intelligence. Does it not make sense, then, that the basic Movement is equivalent to the God that we think of as intelligence and love itself?

Finally, we must turn to the question of pragmatism. Of what use is such a model to us? Earlier it was mentioned that in Salk's thinking, each evolutionary plane featured a particular paradox-in-resolution, a premier tension of duality that led to the emergence of a new plane (or, in timeless terms, perpetuates the emergence of a new plane). In this grand scheme, what of our little lives and our little adventures? Some of you may already know the answer: they are not little. They are epic in significance. The cosmos knows not dimensions of scale but instead dimensions of uniqueness and ever-enriching diversity. We are the product of our evolutionary time - physically, biologically, and culturally - but we are also the creators of that evolutionary moment and the impetus forward. We are "just expressions of the One," yet we are at the same time unique, self-determined people beings whose personal journeys are the lifeblood of all.

At this juncture between the Metabiological Plane, which began with the emergence of mind (as we know it) some half a million to a million years ago and continued with the birth of cultures and societies, and the Teleobiological Plane, which I suggest began in earnest with the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, what are the key paradoxes for us? Put more usefully, what are the most powerful questions that we need to be asking in the course of our lives individually and collectively in order to move us forward?

I will suggest four such questions or paradoxes, which will be phrased in the same way that Buber described one of them nearly 80 years ago. He introduced the notion of the "basic word." For purposes of his inquiry, there were two "basic words" that characterized the way that people related to each other and to their word: I-You and I-It. The term "basic word" was appropriate because the "I" in the "I-You" relationship was very different from the "I" in the "I-It" relationship. For us, for purposes of our evolutionary juncture, the basic words may be: I-You, I-We (also in part alluded to by Buber and also by Mary Parker Follett in 1918), Past-Future, and Tragedy-Justice. The generic question for all of these is, Why are they different, and how do we in our lives exemplify their resolution?

The paradoxes or tensions represented by each of these basic words is confronted by us every day of our lives, and have been for millennia of human history. I am suggesting that today, they are at the forefront as we cross over into a different kind of era; it is our becoming conscious of them that places them in the center. What it means to become conscious of them and to work with them individually and collectively, that is where I will leave off for now. However, we can touch on some of the implications of each, in light of the generic question "Why are they different, and how do we in our lives exemplify their resolution?:

* I-You has implications for personal and relationships, be they with loved ones, with other community members or colleagues or business associates, with "adversaries," with strangers on the street, or with God or some other cosmic sense;
* I-We has implications for family, for community and society, for being "a people," for shifting from crowd to authentic group, and for democracy;
* Past-Future has implications for history and what we are doing with it;
* Tragedy-Justice, closely related to Past-Future, has implications for morality and ethics, guilt and redemption, crime and punishment, loss and mourning, sickness and recovery, and all manner of transcendence.

Naturally, there may be other "basic words" that are more important/timely for us, but these are what come to mind for me. I'd like to hear of any others that come to you.

I believe that the purpose of the development and sharing of this model has been to help provide a spiritual-cosmological dimension that will complement the methodological dimension of social systems design and the sociological dimension of evolutionary learning community that some of us are working to bring into the public conversation. Of course, a model is always incomplete and under constant negotiation. Also, it may seem too early to be talking about this - it does to me, sometimes - but I now believe that whenever such things do come out, they are always just in time.