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This article appears in the World Wisdom Rising issue of Kosmos: An Integral Approach to
Global Awakening (KOSMOSJOURNAL.ORG), Vol. VII, No. 1, Fall/Winter 2007
Values, Wisdom, and Action
by Copthorne Macdonald
Kosmos Intro:
A long-time researcher of wisdom tells us
how outwardly acquired intellectual knowledge
and inwardly acquired insightful knowledge
imbue transformative action with wisdom and
make it maximally effective.
VALUES
Starting with the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, energy — that proto-physical
proto-mental reality that cannot be created or destroyed — began to cloak itself with
form, with patterned information. The detailed outcomes of this evolutionary process
have been guided by a set of algorithms we call the laws of nature. Values embedded in
the process caused evolution to proceed in certain general directions rather than others.
Among those directions are increasing complexity, increasing diversity, increasing
specialization, and increasing levels of cooperation between self-interested entities.
Cooperation? Yes. Elementary particles cooperate and allow atoms to exist. Atoms
cooperate and allow molecules to exist. Molecules cooperate and allow living cells to
exist. Cells cooperate and allow plant and animal life to exist. Human beings cooperate
and allow human societies to exist.
With the arrival of human beings, the human mind emerged, and with it values and
behavior directed by those values. As humans invented new technologies and spread
them around the globe, the impact of human behavior became increasingly significant.
Increasingly, decisions, guided by human values, overrode the laws-of-nature. For better
or worse, we human beings have become powerful agents of evolution. Nobelist Roger
Sperry put it bluntly: “Human value priorities...stand out as the most strategically
powerful causal control now shaping world events. More than any other causal system
with which science now concerns itself, it is variables in human v