Listen to this audio dialogue between Ervin Laslo & Marc Gafni. The topic is Evolutionary Love.
Ervin Laszlo is a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He is the Founder and President of The Club of Budapest, Director and Co-Founder of the Ervin Laszlo Institute for Advanced Study (ELIAS) and of the Laszlo New-Paradigm Leadership Center (Italy)… He is the author or co-author of fifty-four books translated into as many as twenty-three languages, and the editor of another thirty volumes including a four-volume encyclopedia.
Marc Gafni is the Co-Founder and President of the Center for Integral Wisdom, the author of many books including the award winning Your Unique Self, a visionary scholar and integral wisdom teacher.
Ervin Laszlo: “…everything that happens from the original Big Bang in this universe or in prior universes, when things fall together and move together and create wholes, larger and larger, more and more complex wholes which more and more interact, more and more communicate with each other, and they are really entangled as a physicist would say.
That’s because there is built into each element of this universe, each particle, each atom, each cell in a living organism, its belonging to the others, its coherence with this larger whole, which comes through in spirituality. It comes through in a deeper philosophy. It comes through in a deeper, honest theology. And this is basically what the motor is. If this universe was not built in such a way, was not created with its laws of nature and development in such a way that things pull together to create wholes, then we wouldn’t be here to ask these questions and the universe would still be a random concourse of perhaps carbon – but carbon is already highly integrated – so photons or initial particles, neutrons and electrons, and that wouldn’t be much more than that. Even creating an atom calls for pulling together the elements of the nucleus and the electrons that go around it. So, evolution is what happens, is the essence of things, and evolution is based on the attraction, on the relation of the parts to each other.”
Marc Gafni: “Allurement… you’re describing a core allurement that exists between all things. You just stated it, of course, so beautifully and so musically and poetically. So let’s try and enter into it for our listeners – and there’ll be tens of thousands of listeners on this set of calls – so I really want to try and break it down for people. So when we talk about – the phrase you use is, not evolutionary love, the formal phrase you use is an all-embracing love, which is a beautiful phrase, which is the force of – and I’m borrowing Thomas Berry’s word – allurement that coheres everything together. Let’s try, if we can, if I could invite just to show people three or four just simple examples. Although you mentioned a couple implicitly even in your first opening, but just as we come deeper into the symphony to get a sense of where do we see that? Where can an average, intelligent layperson see that as it’s unfolding in the evolutionary ascension?”