The audio above is an AI-generated 'podcast' crafted with careful prompting and highly selected data sources, which you can view here.Ideas don’t just flow. They collide.
Like powerful rivers meeting at confluence points, great ideas create turbulence when they encounter resistance. The stronger the current, the more dramatic the clash.
This turbulence isn’t random chaos — it’s the dialectical process Hegel recognized. Thesis → Antithesis → Synthesis.
And no idea has generated more productive tension than our concept of the divine.
What many call “God” is often shorthand for something else: the Evolutionary Impulse.
That innate drive within all living systems to adapt, to improve, to reach for something better. The force that pushes us forward even when we don’t recognize it.
For 12,000 years, humans have sensed this impulse and built narratives to explain it. Some called it God. Others, the Logos.
The Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, (571BC-?), named it Tao Te Ching (The Way of the natural force of unfolding)
The German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), named it Weltgeist (the world spirit).
The French philosopher, Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), named it Élan Vital (the vital force).
The Indian mystic, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), named it The Divine Force of Evolution.
The French Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) saw it culminating in le Point Oméga (the Omega Point) or the final letter of the Greek alphabet.
The Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser (1905-1973), named it Ursprung und Gegenwart (Ever-present Origin)
Different names, different languages for the same universal force.
When Jesus of Nazareth walked dusty Palestinian roads around 27 AD, he embodied this impulse in its purest form.
His message wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t institutional. It certainly wasn’t imperial.
It was relational. Interconnected. Revolutionary in its simplicity.
The Gospel of Thomas (excluded from the canonical Bible) quotes Jesus saying: “The Kingdom of God (or the Evolutionary Impulse) is inside you and all around you, not in buildings of wood and stone.”
This wasn’t religion. This was awakening.
The early Christians gathered in homes, shared resources, and challenged empire with a radical alternative: loving community where all were equal.
Empire noticed. And empire doesn’t tolerate alternatives.
Then came the great bifurcation.
By 312 AD — as the Roman Empire was collapsing and the Byzantine Empire emerged — Emperor Constantine saw something useful in this growing movement. Not its essence, but its potential as a unifying force for a fracturing empire.
What happens when empire adopts your revolution? It stops being revolutionary.
The emerging Byzantine Empire didn’t embrace Jesus’ original teachings—it transformed them.
Suddenly, the Kingdom of God wasn’t within you. It was in Constantinople’s grand cathedrals with gold-plated domes.
The divine was no longer directly accessible. It required proper intermediaries, approved rituals, and imperial sanction.
The Evolutionary Impulse that propelled early Christianity didn’t disappear. It bifurcated.
One path followed Material Consciousness — hierarchical, control-oriented, focused on power and territory.
This path gave us:
The Doctrine of Discovery justifying colonization
Cathedrals that reached to heaven while peasants starved
A theology of sinfulness requiring institutional redemption
Divine right of kings
Crusades in God’s name
For nearly two millennia, this Material version of Christianity served as humanity’s most powerful coordination technology—transforming abstract theological concepts into concrete systems of governance, property, and social control. It’s not too far a stretch to say that this belief system played a significant role in leading us into the metacrisis.
The other path — quieter but persistent — continued as Mycelial Consciousness: interconnected, relationship-based, flowing like networks rather than peaking like pyramids.
This path survived in:
Desert monastics fleeing imperial religion
Mystical traditions across Europe
Quakers with their radical equality
Liberation theologians centuries later
Indigenous wisdom keepers
Both claimed the same source. Both called themselves Christian. But they represented fundamentally different expressions of the Evolutionary Impulse.
This pattern — the bifurcation of transformative ideas — isn’t unique to Christianity.
Every powerful movement eventually faces the same fork in the road: Will it maintain its revolutionary essence or will it be co-opted by existing power structures?
Buddhism split between imperial patronage and forest renunciates. Islam between caliphates and Sufis. Democracy between performative voting rituals and genuine people power.
Even today’s technology movement bifurcated between centralized platforms extracting attention and decentralized tools fostering connection.
The pattern is always the same: A new idea emerges, threatens existing power, and then is either quashed or it grows in coherence. Thesis (old idea) → Antithesis (new idea) → Synthesis (outcome).
In 2025, we’re experiencing another bifurcation of the divine.
Not between denominations or even religions this time. Between fundamentally different beliefs of what drives human progress.
One path — still following Material Consciousness — promises salvation through more extraction, more control, more separation from nature. Technofeudalism presented as freedom.
The other — emerging through movements like bioregional regeneration — recognizes our fundamental interconnection with all living systems. It echoes the mycelial networks beneath forest floors, sharing resources and information without central command.
This isn’t just philosophical musing. It’s about how we organize everything: our economies, our communities, our relationship with the planet.
It’s about how we telegraph what we believe about the Evolutionary Impulse in this critical moment.
What matters is not how much CO2 we emit, or whether we’re within Planetary Boundaries, or whether we’re engaged in colonialism or extraction: It’s which belief system we choose.
Remember Saul of Tarsus?
Educated. Respected. Absolutely certain he was right as he hunted down those who didn’t embrace Material Consciousness as their worldview.
Then came Damascus. Blinding light. Three days of darkness. And nothing was ever the same.
We need our own Damascus moment.
A flash of insight that blinds us to the comfortable certainties of Material Consciousness. A moment where we can no longer see the world through the lens of consumption, constant growth, and annual salary increases.
Because right now? We’re Saul before Damascus. Educated. Respected. Absolutely certain our economic stories about unlimited growth on a finite planet make sense.
The beliefs we cling to about money, success, and how the world works aren’t just comfortable—they’re our identity. Giving them up feels like a kind of death.
It is.
But what follows blindness? New vision.
For 12,000 years, we’ve coordinated human activity through various forms of slavery because the alternatives seemed impossible:
The Golden Thread We Don't Talk About
The audio above is an AI-generated 'podcast' crafted with careful prompting and highly selected data sources, which you can view here.
Now we have alternatives. They're emerging all around us.
What if our devotion to (or even constant critique of) Material extraction is actually persecuting the very Evolutionary Impulse that’s trying to emerge through us?
What if the voice asking “Why do you persecute me?” is speaking through disappearing forests, collapsing ecosystems, and our own disconnected hearts?
The conversion we need isn’t gradual. It’s Damascus-level. Dramatic. Disruptive. Complete.
From extraction to regeneration. From hierarchy to network. From scarcity to abundance. From Material to Mycelial.
The Evolutionary Impulse continues either way.
But which version will you serve?
Author’s Note
You may find elements of this essay challenging, particularly if you hold Scripture as the divinely inspired and inerrant word of God. When ‘The Bible says...’ forms the foundation of one’s worldview, questioning the historical development of Christianity can feel like an attack on faith itself. This isn’t my intention.
The metacrisis we now face — ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and spiritual alienation — demands that we examine even our most cherished narratives and foundational beliefs. Just as Saul required blindness before becoming Paul, perhaps we need to temporarily suspend our certainties to see with new eyes. The patterns of extraction and hierarchy that have dominated our relationship with Earth aren’t merely economic or technological — they’re theological, even Biblical, at root.
Historical evidence increasingly suggests early Christianity contained diverse interpretations before imperial standardization. The Nag Hammadi library, including the Gospel of Thomas, wasn’t discovered until 1945. It revealed spiritual dimensions of Jesus’ teachings that emphasize direct experience over institutional mediation. These texts don’t invalidate canonical Scripture but provide a fuller picture of Christianity’s formative period.
Jesus himself challenged religious authorities who prioritized law over love, ritual over relationship. His teachings about the Kingdom of God being ‘within you and all around you’ align more closely with what I’ve termed Mycelial Consciousness than with the Material Consciousness that often dominated institutional religion. Recognizing this isn’t abandoning faith — it’s recovering dimensions of it that enable us to meet today’s unprecedented challenges.
Transformative moments in history have always required letting go of what seemed certain — it’s the End of the Familiar. Copernicus asked us to surrender Earth’s central place in the cosmos. Darwin challenged our separation from other living beings. Today’s metacrisis asks something equally profound: reconsidering whether our relationship with the divine is primarily about control or connection. This may be difficult. Even painful. But as Jesus said, new wine requires new wineskins.
I write this not as someone hostile to faith and religious beliefs. I write as someone who walked away from Christianity in my early 20s because there were facets of what I was taught that made no sense. As I approach my 60s, I now believe that the Evolutionary Impulse — that has always moved humanity forward — is still speaking today. Perhaps the most faithful response to our moment isn’t defending unchangeable beliefs, but allowing ourselves — like Saul on the Damascus road — to be changed by an encounter with this living reality that calls us toward greater wholeness.
References
A Metaphysical Interpretation of the Bible by Steven L. Hairfield Ph.D (2013): https://www.amazon.com/dp/0988456273/
Hegelian Dialectics: Often represented in simplified form as a three-stage process of Thesis → Antithesis → Synthesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic and Deep Dive
Evolutionary Impulse: The innate drive—an active organizing principle—within all living systems to adapt and evolve into higher expressions of itself. Deep Dive
The Gospel of Thomas: A collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, discovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt. It differs from the canonical gospels in that it lacks a narrative structure and focuses solely on Jesus’ actual words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas and Deep Dive
Timeline of Christianity: An historical timeline that encompasses two distinctly different periods in Christian history: Roman Empire (27 BC-330 AD) and the Byzantine Empire (330-1453 AD) when Christianity changed form to become the state religion and developed its distinctive Eastern Orthodox character, codified in the canonical Bible as decreed by the Roman Church. This form is associated with Material Consciousness. Deep Dive
Doctrine of Discovery: Invoked by Pope Alexander VI in 1452 & 1493, this Papal Bull established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. https://doctrineofdiscovery.org and Deep Dive
Technofeudalism: The next form of slavery and control, using surveillance and digital currencies to nudge behavior. The concept is fully explained in a 2024 book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1685891241, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism, and Deep Dive.
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