All effort is made less stress­ful when we remem­ber that every­thing is always chang­ing. Every cycle is a renewed oppor­tu­ni­ty to improve upon the con­di­tions that came before. 

Our cur­rent gen­er­a­tion stands on the shoul­ders of every gen­er­a­tion that lived before us. We are respon­si­ble for what future gen­er­a­tions will inher­it. Each new gen­er­a­tion receives the gift of an improved base­line, and each new gen­er­a­tion has a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to gen­er­ate greater under­stand­ing around life’s mysteries.

Laws of nature are mys­te­ri­ous in why they exist as they do, and will most like­ly remain beyond human com­pre­hen­sion. Part of the chal­lenge of under­stand­ing these laws bet­ter comes from the fact that humans rep­re­sent only one species with­in a sym­pho­ny of species con­duct­ed by nature. Human real­i­ty is dif­fer­ent from the real­i­ty of a fish, which is far dif­fer­ent from the real­i­ty of a but­ter­fly, which dif­fers again from the real­i­ty of a cac­tus. There is most like­ly no way to know the laws of nature in their total­i­ty giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions of human perception.

Laws of evo­lu­tion reveal the chang­ing com­po­si­tion with­in the laws of nature. Biol­o­gist Rupert Shel­drake speaks of evo­lu­tion through a notion of what he calls mor­phic res­o­nance, a the­o­ry that posits laws of nature are not fixed, but more like habits which can change over time through a field of col­lec­tive mem­o­ry.¹¹ On his web­site, Shel­drake explains that through mor­phic res­o­nance, “each indi­vid­ual inher­its a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry from past mem­bers of the species, and also con­tributes to the col­lec­tive mem­o­ry, affect­ing oth­er mem­bers of the species in the future.”¹² In oth­er words, Shel­drake sug­gests that a species can strength­en cer­tain abil­i­ties, not nec­es­sar­i­ly through the nat­ur­al selec­tion of genet­ic infor­ma­tion, but through a kind of tele­path­ic trans­fer­ence of infor­ma­tion through­out the evo­lu­tion­ary field of exis­tence. In any event, change is the guid­ing force of nature. Noth­ing occurs in per­pe­tu­ity, no mat­ter how much we might try to com­mand cir­cum­stances to our will.

Dog­mat­ic think­ing forces a false premise of con­trol. Shel­drake not­ed this con­cept in his 2013 TED talk by say­ing, “Dog­mat­ic assump­tions inhib­it inquiry.” By chan­nel­ing the law of evo­lu­tion, and ques­tion­ing dog­mas wher­ev­er they appear, we become bet­ter equipped to dis­cov­er a path beyond our lim­i­ta­tions. When we main­tain this mode of intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, there is no end to the insights that can emerge.

Advances in sci­ence are prov­ing what spir­i­tu­al prac­ti­tion­ers have been shar­ing for cen­turies. For exam­ple, quan­tum mechan­ics reveals a fun­da­men­tal nature of exis­tence based on the role of the observ­er and foun­da­tion­al inter-being. As areas of exploration—like sci­ence and spirituality—are brought clos­er togeth­er through evo­lu­tions of thought with­in soci­ety, the impli­ca­tions of ongo­ing dis­cov­er­ies will become greater than the sum of their parts.

As quan­tum physics becomes more inte­grat­ed into human con­scious­ness, per­spec­tive will open to the vast scale of prob­a­bil­i­ty. The inter­play between invis­i­ble and observ­able phe­nom­e­na will come into greater dia­logue and dras­ti­cal­ly advance human poten­tial in the process. The more that we align that which we don’t under­stand with that which we do, the greater our sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty will become. And this open-mind­ed­ness will, in turn, only strength­en our sense of under­ly­ing con­nec­tion to the world we inhab­it and influence.