The Council at the Edge of the World
In the old stories, when a people reached the limits of what their inherited answers could sustain, they gathered at the edge of the known world. Not at the center of power, but at the boundary where maps dissolved into ocean, desert, or sky. There, elders, tricksters, builders, healers, and scouts argued—not about what was true, but about what questions mattered enough to carry forward. The myths tell us that when a culture stops asking living questions, it does not die dramatically. It calcifies. It survives for a time, then breaks.
This essay belongs to this liminal gathering. It is not a temple of answers but a council of questions convened at the evolutionary frontier—where inherited adaptations no longer reliably serve, where personal survival scripts collide with planetary-scale interdependence, and where the old gods of certainty lose their authority. In mythic terms, this is the moment when the tribe discovers that the fire it mastered can also burn the forest that sustains it.
The figures at this council are familiar. Adaptation sits heavily armored, scarred from victories that once ensured survival. Sublimation arrives lighter, carrying seeds, stories, and unfinished plans. Chaos is present, restless and unpredictable, reminding the council that no path unfolds without risk. Consciousness watches quietly, newly emerged, uncertain of its role but unable to withdraw. Cooperation speaks softly at first, because it always has, yet its voice carries farther than expected.
The questions raised in this chapter are the questions such a council must ask. Why do we cling to ways of living that now threaten our own extinction? How do we persuade the warrior of survival to lay down arms long enough to recognize the village, the ecosystem, the future generations as extensions of self? How do we decentralize the self without dissolving it, avoiding both the tyranny of ego and the seduction of cosmic grandiosity? These are not abstract inquiries. In mythic language, they are trials—tests of whether a species can outgrow the adaptations that once made it successful.
In this cosmology, evolution is not a benevolent guide nor a cruel judge. It is the field in which these figures interact, sometimes cohering, sometimes tearing one another apart. Attractor basins appear as temporary camps along a long migration. Some provide shelter; others become traps mistaken for homes. Dreams, visions, and transpersonal experiences are not messages from outside the world but disturbances within it—signals that the current organization no longer fits the terrain. They are the drumbeats that call the council back together when the path forward is unclear.
Evolutionary Questions
In understanding evolution, there are a number of challenging questions that come up.
“Why are we so resistant to change, even when resistance is obviously killing us? What can we do about that?”
“How do we facilitate a movement from an emphasis on personal survival (adaptation) and a de-emphasis on selfless reorganization to the opposite? How do we develop a sense that tending to the collectives which sustain us rather than primarily to our narrowly defined self-interest is, in the long run, in our greater self-interest?”
“How do we move from psychological geocentrism to polycentrism without getting stuck in psychological heliocentrism in the process?”
“How do we know when we have a good balance between precipitation/adaptation and sublimation/selfless organization?” “How do we develop enough objectivity to clearly assess same?”
“While evolution does not require consciousness, purpose or intention, these are emerging characteristics of humans and human culture, which need and demonstrate them. Is it reasonable to predict they will play a larger part in the evolutionary unfolding of humanity and culture as humans become more mature and healthier as a species?”
“What evidence is there that relational exchanges that underpin healthy human relationships – respect, reciprocity, empathy, and trustworthiness – enhance access to states of oneness with nature, devotion, formlessness, or the non-dual?”
“How strong is multilevel/group selection relative to individual/gene-level selection in humans today, especially with rapid cultural change?” “To what extent do chaotic dynamics (sensitive dependence on initial conditions, nonlinear interactions) influence evolutionary trajectories, particularly in complex systems like ecosystems or human societies?”
“How do adaptive mutations spread in fluctuating environments—recent work challenges neutral theory by showing helpful mutations arise often but get disrupted before fixation.”
“What role do emergent properties and self-organization play in major evolutionary transitions (e.g., from cells to multicellularity, or individual to cultural superorganisms)?”
“How might consciousness and intentionality feedback into evolutionary processes, enabling “conscious evolution” via deliberate cultural/behavioral modification?”
“To what extent are evolutionary outcomes deterministic vs. highly sensitive to initial conditions?”
“How can we identify attractor basins in cultural and biological evolution?”
Considering these Questions in the Context of Evolutionary Theory and The Dreaming Kosmos
Evolutionary theory, particularly when integrated with evolutionary psychology, multilevel selection, cultural evolution, and insights from systems and chaos theory, offers naturalistic explanations to these questions. These draw on empirical evidence from human behavior, cooperation studies, neuroscience, and theoretical models.
The Dreaming Kosmos does not pretend to have “right” or “complete” answers to these questions. On the contrary, its answers are more likely to include significant errors and be partial. Nor is the above list meant to be exhaustive. The point of this exercise is to expand the window of exploration by looking at these issues from the perspective of The Dreaming Kosmos as a stress test of the theory. Are its answers parsimonious? Do they tetra-mesh? Do they not violate Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy? Are they useful? Can they be translated into principles that have practical applications in our daily lives? If so how? What might be the expected results?
Why are we so resistant to change, even when resistance is obviously killing us? What can we do about that?
Our ancestors benefited from routines that reliably supported survival and reproduction in predictable environments. Humans evolved in small, stable social groups where adaptation was mostly incremental. Evolutionary psychology views this as an adaptation. We exhibit strong psychological resistance to change due to evolved mechanisms that favor stability and energy conservation. Rapid, global-scale threats like climate change, pandemics, and nuclear risk are outside the “ecological envelope” our cognitive and social systems evolved to handle.
Our psychological inertia is a combination of status quo bias, that is, preference for familiar patterns and short-term survival heuristics. We respond to immediate threats rather than long-term ones. It is also due to social conformity and network reinforcement Our behavior is stabilized by group norms. For example, our work behaviors are largely shaped by our employer and co-worker’s expectations and behaviors.
Change signals potential risk, triggering loss aversion, status quo bias, and threat responses, such as via the amygdala. This resistance persists even when it is maladaptive in modern contexts because evolution optimizes for ancestral fitness, not current well-being. Cultural evolution can override this through norms or education, but individual-level adaptations make rapid shifts difficult.
The Dreaming Kosmos views this resistance as a combination of evolutionary hard-wiring, as above, and an adaptive bias toward stability and balance as foundational for healing and transformation. For example, psychological geocentrism, the assumption that personal survival is more important than collective cooperation, is generally effective in the short term. It is only when long term consequences are considered that it is found to be ineffective. But even when personal survival is found ineffective, humanity runs into powerful social and cultural headwinds. Since Edward Bernays in the 1920’s, humanity has learned how to weaponize inherited cognitive biases in order to manipulate others to believe and want those things that benefit governments and advertisers, independent of the goal of evolutionary adaptation.
Can we design interventions or “evolutionary scaffolds” that reliably nudge systems toward adaptive long-term behaviors? On a personal level, our dreams present an ever-available way to access viable long-term selfless reorganization. How can collective intelligence be structured to override evolutionary and cultural biases that favor the short-term? The success of those social and cultural systems, like the current Chinese model, that favor long-term solutions and collective intelligence increases social and cultural pressure on competing others to do the same.
How do we facilitate a movement from an emphasis on personal survival and a de-emphasis on selfless reorganization to the opposite? How do we develop a sense that tending to the collectives which sustain us rather than primarily to our narrowly defined self-interest is, in the long run, in our greater self-interest?
Survival-focused behaviors dominate because they are directly reinforced by biological and social selection as well as the cognitive biases mentioned above. Selfless reorganization, in the form of sublimation and cooperation at scale, often feels costly unless it produces indirect benefits. Think of five year plans in relationship to quarterly profit and loss reports.
Multilevel selection theory explains this tension. Selection operates simultaneously at individual and group levels. Selfish traits, such as free-riding, often win within groups, but groups with more cooperative/selfless individuals outcompete selfish ones. In humans, cultural group selection amplifies this. Reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and reputation-based cooperation show evolutionary pathways for prosocial behavior. Norms enforcing reciprocity, empathy, respect, and trustworthiness as well as group-benefiting behavior spread via imitation and punishment. Evidence shows that these relational qualities foster cooperation, enhancing group survival and, indirectly, individual fitness in interdependent societies. Long-term, recognizing collectives as extensions of self-interest aligns with evolved social instincts, especially in large-scale human groups where pure individualism fails. Cultural evolution allows norms, rituals, and institutions to amplify these behaviors beyond immediate survival stakes.
How do you scale altruistic behaviors from small groups to global societies without collapsing into coercion or free-rider problems? The answer on a personal level lies in understanding our own vulnerabilities and how they can be weaponized. On a collective level the answer mostly lies in the application of consensus definitions of law. While justice is rarely just or fair in the eyes of those who fall under its purview, when respect, reciprocity, empathy, and trustworthiness are rewarded and become widespread norms, antisocial behaviors tend to be crowded out.
Can we identify tipping points where cooperative behaviors self-organize into dominant cultural attractors? The Dreaming Kosmos notes that collective accountability, enforcing responsibility and behaviors based on prosocial relational exchanges, in the form of laws, combined with sufficient consequences for ignoring them to generate those behaviors, becomes increasingly necessary as humanity becomes increasingly interdependent. This may be the core evolutionary issue confronting humanity today: Are we capable of enforcing sufficient accountability to group norms to keep personal adaptation from sabotaging collective self organization? When we see the most powerful countries in the world submitting themselves to consensus definitions of justice, making themselves accountable before them, we will have reached a tipping point, where cooperative behaviors are self organizing into dominant cultural attractors.
How do we move from psychological geocentrism to polycentrism without getting stuck in psychological heliocentrism in the process?
Psychological geocentrism is the developmental framing of childhood: “I am the center of reality. All that occurs revolves around me and my perceptions, assumptions, worldview, preferences, and feelings.” Evolutionary psychology links geocentrism to adaptations for individual survival and kin favoritism. Consequently, most humans rarely outgrow psychological geocentrism.
Mystical, near death, and psychic experiences tend to move humans toward psychological heliocentrism, the assumption that “I am one with All, with Wisdom, Truth, and Goodness. Therefore I not only know what is true and right for me but for you as well.” In psychological heliocentrism identity merges with the source of life in a form of grandiosity. This maps to shifts in identity from egocentric (“I’m the center”) to over-idealizing one external center, like a leader, ideology, or a self one with Truth and Goodness: “My true, authentic Self is One with All.” This is an evolutionary dead end on the path to an identity that mirrors the polycentrism of the cosmos, in which all points are equally central and irrelevant.
Avoiding heliocentrism involves balanced multilevel processes, including kin selection for close ties, reciprocity for alliances, and group selection for broader collectives. It involves embracing multi-perspectivalism, something most are capable of but many never learn due to cultural and social pressures to maintain self/other distinctions. Polycentrism emerges via expanded social cognition, empathy, and cultural norms promoting interdependence. Cultural evolution facilitates this with institutions and narratives that decentralize without fragmenting. This is fundamentally a multi-level selection problem. Evolution works on both individual and group levels, but humans often fail to intuitively integrate the two.
What cognitive or cultural interventions most reliably create the subjective sense of alignment between self-interest and collective-interest? States that provide both security and opportunity for development generate trust, foundational for expansion of identity to include the “other.”
The Dreaming Kosmos views the tendency to get hijacked by psychological heliocentrism as due to 1) a strong evolutionary bias toward maintaining an intact self as a survival necessity, leading to beliefs in an afterlife and reincarnation, and 2) the strong experiential evidence of interior individual mystical and psychic experiences. These tilt conclusions toward an interior individual bias and away from the four quadrant balance necessary for tetra-mesh. “Tetra-mesh” is a concept from Integral AQAL that states that there has to be some degree of congruence between interior and exterior, personal and collective quadrants in order for emergent selfless reorganization to maintain itself.
How do we know when we have a good balance between precipitation/adaptation and sublimation/selfless organization?How do we develop enough objectivity to clearly assess same?
No strict “balance” metric exists in evolutionary terms; it’s context-dependent. Adaptation due to precipitation handles immediate environmental pressures, while the selfless organization of sublimation builds long-term group resilience. Multilevel selection predicts trade-offs. Excessive individualism erodes groups while excessive selflessness invites exploitation. Objectivity arises from evolved metacognition and perspective-taking that is enhanced in humans via theory of mind, but it’s imperfect due to cultural and inherited cognitive biases as well as weaponized social and cultural reinforcers. Practices like mindfulness can improve assessment by reducing reactive emotional interference, fostering clearer evaluation of individual vs. collective outcomes.
How do we measure sublimation, such as empathy, cooperation, long-term planning, and creativity at individual and collective levels? IDL answers by putting sublimated selfless reorganization, accessed as dream/life issue reframings and recommendations to the test personally in a dream yoga and collectively through structuring research to falsify predictions.
The Dreaming Kosmos supports practices like the interviewing of both dream elements and the personifications of life issues in order to generate subjective sources of objectivity. Because these know us better than others (because they are aspects of us), yet often know us better than we know ourselves (due to our chronic subjectivity and their relative objectivity), they can provide remarkable degrees of autonomy that can effectively reframe life issues, worldviews, and identity in broader, more integrative and multi-perspectival ways. When this is combined with personal experience and exterior sources of objectivity, as in expert advice and chatbot feedback, our relative degree of objectivity increases. This does not guarantee sufficient objectivity, but it does increase our objectivity.
While evolution does not require consciousness, purpose or intention, these are emerging characteristics of humans and human culture, which both demonstrate and need them. Is it reasonable to predict they will play a larger part in the evolutionary unfolding of humanity and culture as humans become more mature and healthier as a species?
Evolution requires no directing consciousness, but humans uniquely possess reflective awareness, symbolic thought, and intentional cultural modification. As cultural evolution dominates through the influence of memes, norms, and technology, conscious choices increasingly shape selection pressures. For example, medicine, ethics, law, and policy increasingly override genetic imperatives. Consciousness is increasingly actively directing evolutionary trajectories as an emergent feedback mechanism. Cultural intentionality also appears to be playing an increasing evolutionary role vis-a-vis genetic selection. Purpose and intention emerge as by-products of complex brains and sociality, potentially playing larger roles as humans engineer environments and behaviors. While we don’t yet have a good understanding of how collective intentionality in the form of shared goals, norms, and institutions interact with biological evolution at multi-scale levels, there is little doubt that it is real and its influence is increasing.
The Dreaming Kosmos notes that the existence of consciousness, purpose, and intention in humans means that we are largely hard-wired to project these assumptions onto nature and evolution. However, existing evidence supports the conclusion that these are evolutionary emergents rather than a priori drivers of evolution. Evolutionary pressures in humans then drive, in purposeful ways, objectivity in the form of expanded consciousness, purposeful, human-directed life (and world) design, and behavioral consequences based on waking intention rather than biological and cognitive presets. Evidence from cultural evolution models suggests greater maturity and health could amplify the constructive contributions of purpose, consciousness, and intention to future evolution.
What evidence is there that relational exchanges that underpin healthy human relationships, including respect, reciprocity, empathy, and trustworthiness, enhance access to states of oneness with nature, devotion, formlessness, or the non-dual?
Evolutionarily, empathy and cooperation predate humans, as they are seen in primates, with non-dual-like states likely enhancing group cohesion or stress regulation. Anthropological studies show small, cooperative, egalitarian societies report more frequent experiences of “oneness with nature.” Nature-based mindfulness fosters “oneness” by restoring attention and reducing ego-centric processing, linking social bonds to broader interconnectedness.
Relational qualities such as respect, reciprocity, empathy, and trustworthiness correlate with experiences of oneness with nature, devotion, or non-duality. Meditation and contemplative practices show enhanced relational sensitivity correlates with non-dual experiences. This occurs in the form of altered default mode network activity and increased empathy via temporoparietal junction. Non-dual awareness predicts lower anxiety and depression and mediates well-being gains. Oxytocin, endorphins, and other neurochemical systems link trust and attachment with transcendence and awe.
While we do not know how universal this link is across cultures and developmental stages, the fact that relational exchanges show up in cells as precursors of these prosocial relationship factors, as well as in mammals, implies that we are observing the components of cooperation, demonstrated by Darwin as fundamental to evolution as individual survival.
The Dreaming Kosmos notes that nature is interdependent and co-arising, meaning that relationship is fundamental. Therefore, relational characteristics that support interdependence and relationship are more likely to be both adaptational and support selfless organization than are those that are not.
How strong is multilevel/group selection relative to individual/gene-level selection in humans today, especially with rapid cultural change?
Various markers indicate that multilevel/group selection is growing stronger very rapidly in relationship to individual gene-level selection. The Dreaming Kosmos predicts that this will level off when a degree of collective coherence exists that establishes a working balance between precipitation, personal survival, and adaptation, on the one hand, and sublimation, collective survival, and selfless organization on the other. That is, gene-level selection is not going to be minimized or overshadowed by multilevel and group selection but instead enhanced as its strengths are optimized and its limitations, such as the heuristics of cognitive biases, are reduced.
To what extent do chaotic dynamics, in the form of sensitive dependence on initial conditions and nonlinear interactions influence evolutionary trajectories, particularly in complex systems like ecosystems or human societies?
The Dreaming Kosmos views chaotic dynamics as intrinsic to evolution as the context in which selfless organization is most in evidence. Chaotic dynamics are also intrinsic to sublimation, and therefore will continue to have a major and compelling influence on evolutionary emergence. In fact, as humanity outgrows its over-reliance on psychological geocentrism and its emphasis on adaptation, chaotic dynamics can be predicted to be more influential in the future evolution of humanity.
How do adaptive mutations spread in fluctuating environments?
Recent work challenges neutral theory by showing helpful mutations arise often but get disrupted before fixation. This question also reflects the role of sublimation and selfless organization in evolutionary change. Dreams provide an excellent context in which to view and understand how sublimation is typically disrupted before stabilization and integration by pre-established forces of adaptation, such as attractor basins of all kinds. This bias is probably hard-wired into evolution and is unlikely to change. The bias toward stabilization supports adaptation, meaning that most of the “experiments” of life do not and will not bear fruit. One analogy is to the number of acorns an oak tree produces relative to the number of oak trees that grow. Mutations, even helpful ones, are unlikely to survive. When enough do, a species continues. That in addition to the low survival rate of gametes of all kinds, in proportion to the rate of their production.
What role do emergent properties and self-organization play in major evolutionary transitions from cells to multicellularity, or individual to cultural superorganisms?
The perspective taken by The Dreaming Kosmos is that emergent properties and self-organization supply a necessary inherent balance to adaptive precipitation. Emergent properties, as probabilities, will always vastly outnumber the number of evolutionary transitions that occur. It takes countless failed emergent properties to establish a stable foundation for a major evolutionary transition to succeed. Once this principle is understood, patience, persistence, and long-term planning are recognized to be pre-requisites to further human evolution.
How might consciousness and intentionality feedback into evolutionary processes, enabling “conscious evolution” via deliberate cultural and behavioral modification?
We see this occurring around us continuously. In fact, consciousness and intentionality employed to modify behavior takes up the lion’s share of attention in societies permeated with the memes and narratives of group and global culture. “Conscious evolution” is occurring at an increasing pace, for better or for worse, whether we like it or not. Symbiosis with AI is one profound example, due to deliberate cultural and behavioral modification. Humans increasingly experiment on themselves to discover the real limits of biology and genetic modification. The danger that these experiments will discover and then surpass genuine red lines of species survival are increasing, and as a result, focus on how to contain these experiments in realistic, constructive ways is an increasing social and cultural human imperative.
Multiple, verified cases of reincarnation, including birthmarks corresponding to the claimed antecedent, point to consciousness and intentionality persisting across attractor basins independent of time, space, and embodiment. This is a highly contentious claim, and we shall return to it in depth in future essays.
To what extent are evolutionary outcomes deterministic vs. highly sensitive to initial conditions?
Determinism and sensitivity to initial conditions appear to be two sides of the same coin. This conclusion is based on the quantum oscillation between determinacy and indeterminacy, a polarity that is observed in that between precipitation and sublimation at every level of evolutionary emergence.
How can we identify attractor basins in cultural and biological evolution?”
This appears to be largely a matter of definition. If “nouns,” and “things” are defined to be, by definition, attractor basins, then this issue disappears. The distinction then becomes that between nouns and verbs, a preponderance of beingness or a preponderance of doingness.
The Question as the Next Adaptation
Every myth worth preserving ends not with an answer, but with a question strong enough to carry a people forward. The Dreaming Kosmos proposes that, at this stage of human evolution, our next adaptive advantage may not be a new technology, belief system, or identity, but a new relationship to uncertainty itself. The questions explored in this chapter about resistance to change, cooperation, consciousness, chaos, and selfless organization, are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are evolutionary instruments, ways of keeping adaptive precipitation and sublimation in dynamic tension. If humanity is to mature as a species, it will not be because evolution suddenly acquires purpose, but because humans learn to hold survival and cooperation, determinacy and indeterminacy, self and collective, as co-arising processes rather than opposing absolutes. In mythic terms, the council does not disband because agreement is reached. It disperses because listening has improved. And for now, that may be enough to keep the journey alive.