Accessing Evolutionary Intelligence
A Conversation with Emily Lane
[This conversation has a 7/10 Woo Rating]
"Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble"
- Albert Einstein
One of the most impactful ideas I've ever explored is the idea that there's an intelligent evolutionary force guiding us into wholeness, integration and complexity. Whether you call it the holotropic attractor, syntropy or the Tao, I believe personally harmonizing with this force can bring profound flourishing. So I am always looking to deepen and enhance my understanding of practical ways of doing so.
My latest guest Emily Lane is a delightful Irish entrepreneur who successfully climbed the corporate ladder and burned out twice before she finally got the message that it was time for a change. As she set out on a round the world trip in search of new horizons she had an unexpected detour when she effectively died during a rafting trip to Ecuador. The out-of-body experience that followed untethered her from a "matter-bound," personality-based perspective and led to a gradual series of deeper awakenings over the next twenty years. She now helps leaders and executives find effective means of harmonizing with what she calls "Evolutionary Intelligence." Please enjoy our full interview on Spotify/Apple Podcasts.
One of my most rationalist (and rather stuck and unhappy) friends once sneered at the tendency of spiritual people to refer to everything as made of energy. I asked him what everything was made of. He replied "matter." I asked him what matter was made of. He replied "molecules." I asked him what molecules were primarily made of. He sulkily muttered "energy." Emily's basic point is that, in treating the world as indifferent and inert, we diminish our ability to use an energetic gradient to find beneficial future directions; to get unstuck.
One of the simplest and most transformational practices that emerged from researching my Accelerating Wisdom Series was keeping an energy diary. This involves spending a couple of weeks documenting which activities give you energy and designing your life around them. Emily goes deeper and describes how you can structure your entire day to enhance your access to the field of evolutionary intelligence.
In the early moments between sleeping and waking in the morning she suggests practicing "Celestial Rain Catching." This is a mystical term for becoming more attuned to impressions and ideas that flow to you naturally in this liminal space. Many of history's great geniuses and visionaries did everything they could to maximize this powerful state of expanded awareness.1 Emily recommends you do the same by having a pen and paper ready beside your bed the night before. In the morning when you wake-up, while still in this liminal space, reach out and write down everything that you're feeling, hearing, knowing and sensing without editing or interpreting. She describes this as “taking dictation from the divine;” writing with a pure, unfiltered stream of consciousness. Next, observe what insights have been revealed. This helps to map the patterns of this broader intelligence. And then it’s about engaging your rational mind and putting them into action. In my own life, I spend weeks or months researching and thinking about different interesting ideas then sometimes get a sudden synthesis one early morning that seems "obvious" only in retrospect.
Unsurprisingly, Emily says if you're not leveraging meditation you're missing out on a critical tool. But she recommends doing so after you've exercised your physical body in order to quiet the mind. Over the course of the day she also suggests grounding yourself in the earth; either lying down or walking barefoot. She believes that rubber-soled shoes can create a barrier between us and the surface of the Earth. We then end up running on the limited “bio-battery” of our physical body, rather than being plugged into the infinite energy source of our planet. She believes this simple daily act of grounding helps us to remove inflammation, support our immune system, clear our heads and enhance our overall wellbeing. She also recommends you end the day by bathing in fine-grained salt. This helps clear the residual energetic connections and sends you off to bed with a clear head.
One thing we discussed in more detail is the concept of spirit guides or guardian angels. This was a feature of Emily's lived experience that became increasingly available to her over time. As she told me, this included what she believes were direct interventions in not one, but two potential road accidents. The specific concept of extra-dimensional beings is one personal Woo-buicon to cross for me. I simply have no direct experience to take a view either way. Conceptually at least, I understand that, if everything is ultimately non-material, the existence of beings that exist outside of our perception becomes not just possible but probable. Still, it was pretty surprising to me that the clear majority of respondents to my informal Twitter poll believe spirit guides exist.
We discussed the dynamics of direct experience in much more detail in our conversation. My current approach to asking for outside assistance is to pray "thy will be done." This expresses my belief that I'm a catastrophically bad judge of what I actually want, especially relative to the effectively infinite evolutionary intelligence of the universe. So I desire that I become increasingly aligned with and in service of that emergent force. The word that came to Emily throughout our conversation was trust. This can all sound a bit self-sacrificial but it's been the path of maximum fun for me so far. And as Emily emphasizes in her native Irish: "craic [fun] is a strategic imperative."
The core theme running through all of Emily's work is the importance of attuning to resonance. She recommends we cultivate our sensitivity to vibrational cues that appear “highlighted” in our reality, like book passages, ideas or fragments of conversation. I call these "sticky ideas." I have found that paying increasingly close attention to sticky ideas, and then sticking with them, has unlocked exciting new paths for me more effectively than anything else I do. Indeed: the stickiest idea I've ever encountered was about sticky ideas themselves: Carl Jung's belief that your future self beneficially directed your evolution by influencing what you were interested in in the present.
Emily invites us to experiment with this evolutionary “signposting,” by cultivating sensitivity to higher vibrations and then simply “following the energy.” The logical tracking of the relationship between the energetic impulse you choose to follow and the results that follow might eventually build a “Book of Evidence” that even the most rational mind will find hard to ignore.
Please enjoy our full interview on Spotify/Apple Podcasts.
After the end of my interview with Dr. Stephen Larsen in Episode 5 of the Accelerating Wisdom Series, he casually remarked that Emanuel Swedenborg was among the finest visionaries of all time. Coming from a man who spent his life rubbing shoulders with giants like Joseph Campbell and Stan Grof, this was a huge signpost to me! And yet I’d never heard of him.It turns out that Swedenborg was a savant inventor and scientist who lived between 1688 and 1772. Once he felt his intellect had mastered the understanding of the external world, he turned his attention inwards. The result of his work was an elaborate and esoteric mapping of the spiritual landscape. Swedenborg utilised the period of time between sleeping and waking as critical to receiving new insights. New ideas would be presented to him in the form of symbols or emotions. He came to regard the source of these insights as sacred and divine.
So many great ideas in this one.
As to the question of spirit guides: I don't think it's a matter of "believing" but of experiencing. The center for shamanic studies can help :)
This is superb. Nice marriage of science, rationality, and that which cannot be explained by either. Thank you for gracing us with this.