The most important point about understanding the meaning of growth is that materialistic, mechanistic science cannot explain why green grass grows, even though these words coexisted in Old English with the same PIE root.

To define growth, it is necessary to abandon the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time, entropy being a measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

For, as all beings in the Totality of Existence are interconnected in Wholeness, there are no isolated, closed systems. All systems are open to the creative power of Life pouring through structures in the Cosmic Psyche, which leads them to take the external forms that they do.

So, growth is primarily the increase in the complexity of structure, where wholes emerge that are greater than the sum of the preceding wholes because of the new relationships that seem to appear out of nothing.

Of course, sometimes growth can be quantitatively measured. But, if we are to understand what is happening to us all as a species, reaching out to our fullest potential as human beings, we need to look at growth qualitatively, with meaning and common purpose.