Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

Age of Light

The Age of Light is the last of the four stages of some fourteen billion years of evolution. The first three stages are represented by the horizontal line on the left of the schema for the Grand Design of the Universe. The final stage is depicted by the vertical lines, showing evolution taking a radically new change of direction, complementing traditional involutionary spiritual paths, such as Jñāna yoga.

In The Human Phenomenon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called these four stages Prelife, Life, Thought, and Superlife, as the physical, biological, mental, and spiritual dimensions. As both Teilhard and Julian Huxley foresaw, the final stage would be reached when evolution became fully conscious of itself at its glorious culmination, the Omega Point. For, it is there that the divergent streams of evolution converge in a megasynthesis of everything.

The Age of Light also corresponds to the third and final stage of human evolution, which Ken Wilber has called superconscious and transpersonal, bringing the conflict-ridden patriarchal epoch to an end. It is in this way that Homo sapiens, as a biological species, evolves through Homo noeticus to Homo divinus.

However, this does not mean that the Age of Light is destined to last even as long as the twelve-thousand-year Holocene Epoch, as a period that is ‘entirely new’, from Greek kainos ‘new’.