About 60,000 years ago, evolution became self-reflective, when members of Homo sapiens were given the ability to look inwards as well as outwards. This was the most momentous turning point in nearly fourteen billion years of evolution since the most recent big bang in the physical universe, preparing the way for evolution to become fully aware of itself within us humans.

However, as our lives since then have been governed by the fundamental law of the Universe, our forebears became aware of their mortality, as evidence of ritualistic burials in Eurasia from about this time indicates. Nevertheless, reflectiveness gives us the ability to come fully alive, even when facing the death of our bodies within the Psalmist’s ‘threescore years and ten’ and, today, the near-term extinction of our species.

In terms of the Grand Design of the Universe, reflectiveness marks the beginning of the transition period from biogenesis to noogenesis, as the evolution of the mind, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pointed out in The Human Phenomenon. Humans were given the ability to think, to create concepts within the Cosmic Psyche, albeit still guided by the Divine, from which we are never separate.

However, it was not until humans invented a machine with reasoning skills in the late 1940s that we humans were able to use our innate Self-reflective Intelligence to understand what has been happening to us since long before the dawn of history five to six thousand years ago, when we were given the ability to express what we could see within in written language.

For the stored-program computer is a machine quite unlike any other that the Homo genus has invented during the past two thousand millennia. Unlike the flint axe, wheel, printing press, telescope, steam engine, and telephone, for instance, which extend our rather limited physical abilities, the computer is a tool of thought, able to extend the human mind, even in some cases replacing it.

We can see the difficulty that humans have had with adapting to self-reflective evolution from the evolution of the words we have used to describe our experiences during the past few thousand years. For our innate Self-reflective Intelligence requires the inner light of Cosmic Consciousness to see clearly where Life is taking us all.

For instance, the Greek word for light, φῶϛ (phōs), with PIE root bhā-¹ ‘to shine’, used in the New Testament in the Bible, could mean both ‘sunlight’ and ‘light of life’, without making a clear distinction between them. Similarly, as the etymology of light shows, in Old English light could mean both ‘daylight’ and ‘spiritual illumination’. But it is not generally recognized that the latter meaning is primary, hidden behind what an anonymous fourteenth-century English mystic called the ‘cloud of unknowing’.

Such ignorance—called avidyā in Sanskrit, cognate with unwise—inhibits us from making the occult, esoteric, and so-called supernatural rationally acceptable. This applies equally to the theory of the Implicate Order, which we need to make explicit to live harmoniously with self-reflective evolution. It might help here to note that implicit information, as something not directly expressed or readily apparent, is quite acceptable in normal discourse.