The Arc of Evolution
Read Chapter 1 of 'Whole Mate: the Future of Relationships" by Dr. Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Entry 1. The Mysterious Drive for Life and Love
Have you ever noticed that pop-psychology writers, often quoted in the mainstream media, sometimes dismiss the deepest human motivations for relationship and love as merely the drive for survival? As if by using the word survival they could hide the magic and mystery of it all.
Our desire for life is not a biological given. It is one of the great mysteries of the Universe. The desire for survival is the interior desire for life. It’s the built-in, axiomatic purpose of the Universe. In a sense, survival is just another way of saying life.
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Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025, Chapter 1. The Arc of Evolution.
Reality is organized to increase the possibility of life. All organisms are wired for, to borrow Bruce Lipton’s expression, ferocious and inexplicable drive for life.[1] The insatiable desire for life is programmed into our cells. No organism will readily give up its life. Try to kill a bacterium, and this most primitive of organisms makes every evasive maneuver possible to ensure that it will live. It does not say, Okay, I will wait here until you kill me. When our lives are threatened, our fight-or-flight response typically kicks in well before our rational minds have registered the threat. This will to live and to create life is an expression of consciousness, coded into our exterior cellular structure.
As survival is another word for life, so life is another word for love, because both point to full aliveness. Life and love signify some level of consciousness or awareness. Life and love imply some level of telos—focused direction or purpose. Life and love are as much entwined with the will to connect as they are with the will for aliveness. That is why, when we find ourselves in love, we are fully alive and motivated to survive and thrive.
When we are in love with a beloved, the loss of him or her sometimes causes the loss of our will to live. But if we live and love more deeply, from a higher level of relationship consciousness, we know that our beloved is an expression of life itself. Madly loving our beloved is part of being in love with life. His or her uniqueness connects us to all of life. Through uniquely loving our beloved’s uniqueness, we love all of life.
The desire for survival is the mysterious drive for life and love. The method for life is love, and love is relationships.
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Entry 2. Survival of the Fittest Means the Fittest for Love
Relationships and survival are inextricably intertwined. The first stage in the old relationship deal, role mate relationship, was based on our will to survive. Survival and relationship were one and the same. These relationships were an expression of our will to live. They served us well. We are all children of survival.
We now know that to survive does not necessarily mean to engage in a competition where only the strongest survive. Rather, to survive means to thrive through relationships. Survival of the fittest includes the fittest for relationship, cooperation, and collaboration. Survival of the fittest means the fittest for love. Survival through relationships is the process of evolution.
To survive means to be in the relationships that best assure survival. Love and survival are bound to each other. We survive through love in the form of relationships. To be in love is to be willing to sacrifice one’s own survival for the sake of the other. This is what providers and protectors, as well as homemakers and nurturers, have done throughout history. Precisely how these roles play out, and whose role it was to incarnate these core features of love, evolved as relationships have been evolving. This evolution of relationships is also the evolution of love.
In a recent book, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argued that altruism is a fundamental evolutionary driver.[2] Although Darwin’s work is primarily known for the idea of survival of the fittest, he also wrote about love as a primary driver of evolution. Evolutionary theorist David Loye points out that, in Darwin’s early notebooks, as well as his last great classical work The Descent of Man, terms referring to Eros and ethos appear over a hundred times as being central to the lifeworld and the human evolutionary process.[3]
This notion is echoed in the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who describes Evolutionary Love as the core driver of the entire evolutionary process.[4] The core impulse of Evolutionary Love is the force that draws together, integrates, and drives the entire process of evolution toward survival—toward life and love. Evolutionary Love is the allurement that lives at every level of the Cosmos.
The first mysterious impulse of all of Reality is survival. But survival is but an exterior expression, which points to a core interior quality of life and consciousness: self-love. The desire to survive is sourced in the inherent self-loving realization of life that it has intrinsic irreducible value that deserves to live. Relationships are the evolutionary key to survival. From the interior perspective, they are the key to ever deeper life and consciousness. The inherently creative intelligence of self-organizing Cosmos lures itself to higher and higher levels of surviving and thriving—or, said only slightly differently, of life and consciousness.
Everything—from quarks to human beings—survives, thrives, and evolves its own depth of life, uniqueness, creativity, complexity, and consciousness through relationship.
Entry 3. Reality Is Evolution of Relationship
One of the core mysteries of Reality is how a new whole emerges out of many parts. A star is fundamentally distinct from an atom, yet both are wholes that arise mysteriously from an aggregate of parts. How this happens is not merely a scientific mystery. It is not a riddle with an engineered solution. The mystery of a new whole emerging from many parts is the very mystery of relationship itself. An atom emerges from the relationships between the subatomic particles that constitute it. A star emerges out of a vast cloud of distinct atoms in relationship with each other. A living cell emerges when molecules discover new pathways of intimacy that connect and bond them so intensely that new life is born. The Earth system is a complex set of mysterious relationships beyond our wildest imagination.
This is the core movement of Reality toward relationship. The leading-edge emergence theory knows with great certainty that Reality has direction. Not direction imposed from without, but direction from the inherent Eros and telos of Reality itself—a direction that moves toward deepening intimacy. The meaning of this sentence is unpacked in the next sections of this chapter (and indeed, in the rest of this book).[5]
Inner reality and outer reality—interiors and exteriors—always mirror each other. As the great hermetic philosophers wrote: As above so below. We now know that it is not about an above and a below, a heaven and an earth. Rather it is about inside and outside. Love is an interior quality, and it shows up in the exterior laws of how the scientific structure of the Universe operates. How could interior and exterior sciences not mirror each other? They are describing the same Reality from two different perspectives, inside and outside.
Let us get radically clear about these ontological truths on the structure of Reality. Evolution moves toward ever-deepening relationships. The Universe brought forth elementary particles. In the first nanoseconds, quarks moved to create relationships, combining to form protons and neutrons. At the beginning, relationship attempts between protons and neutrons failed. The Universe was too hot, and the first relationships were torn apart by the pull of other particles. Reality could not unfold or evolve until relationship wisdom deepened. Mixing physics and psychology, we might say that a single neutron had to learn sufficient communication skills before it could interact with a proton and remain bonded in stable intimacy. The laws of relationship apply all the way up and all the way down. However, it took Reality only three minutes to cool enough for these protons and neutrons to form a new form of relationship, heavy hydrogen nuclei. The neutrons, in fact, desperately needed the protons in order to survive. Without forming a stable bond with a proton, a neutron disintegrates within 15 minutes.[6]
Imagine a trajectory of cosmological evolution: the spiraling line of emergence from a subatomic particle at the moment of the Big Bang to the whole system of chemical elements in the Universe. Subatomic particles come together to form an atom; atoms come together to form a molecule; simple molecules come together to form a complex molecule; and complex molecules come together to form the structural basis for life. A staggering number of individual parts come together; they survive and thrive through relationship. At each step, a new whole is born.
Now imagine complex molecules transforming and evolving into single cells. Imagine single cells coming together to birth multicellular life. Imagine multicellular organisms coming together to create the wildly elegant and dazzling relationships that eventually manifest as fish and, much later, as amphibians and reptiles. Finally, imagine how ever-deeper relationships eventually manifest the first mammals and, over time, human beings.
The story of the entire Universe is the story of the emergence of ever more functional, complex, and beautiful forms of relationship. Surviving and thriving through relationship is the core motivating energy of the evolutionary journey. The Universe moves toward greater relationship—to greater love. In a very profound sense, the story of the Cosmos is the story of the evolution of love.
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Entry 4. Allurement Toward Relationship Is the Nature of Reality
The Universe did not have to be this way. It is theoretically possible for it to have existed as trillions of individual disconnected particles that never create bonded relationship. Yet the Universe moves toward ever-deepening relationships in all of its expressions. Relationships are at the heart of creativity at all levels of Reality. The Universe Story is the story of the emergence of ever better, truer, more functional, and beautiful forms of relationship.
Relationships are an expression of the primal force of Evolutionary Love.
Relationships emerge at every level of Reality in response to allurement. A few moments after the Big Bang, quarks were drawn together by the allurement of strong nuclear attraction. Planets and stars are drawn together by the allurement of gravity. People are drawn together by the allurement of love. All three are expressions of the same mysterious allurement toward relationship that is the very nature of Reality, and which we can also call love. The exterior expressions of love might be strong nuclear attraction, gravity, electromagnetic attraction, mating behavior, or pair bonding. All these terms refer to relationships. All are external expressions of an internal quality we call love, or Eros.
Allurement toward relationship is the nature of Reality. At the level of galaxies, we call it gravity. At the level of quarks, we call it strong nuclear attraction. At the level of protons and electrons, we call it electromagnetic attraction. These physical expressions of relationship are what cosmology calls primordial. In other words, they explain everything, but nothing explains them. For example, there is nothing deeper one can use to explain gravity. It is primordial. In that sense, gravity is revelatory of the nature of the Universe. It just is. All of these exterior expressions refer to the inner allurement that is the animating structure of all of Reality’s being and becoming.
It makes sense, then, that the evolution of relationships is the core structure of Reality. If the attraction that generates relationships on all levels is an exterior expression of the interior quality of allurement or love, it is literally natural, biologically speaking, that the evolution of relationships participates in the evolution of love. From a scientific perspective, relationships are the cause and the method of evolution.
It is shocking when you realize how simple it is. Reality is Relationship. Every step that drives Reality forward is an evolutionary transformation in the nature of relationships.
Entry 5. Trajectories of Evolution
Exterior and interior evolution has at least five major trajectories, and we can trust each of them to occur again and again. In this sense, Reality is honorable and trustworthy.
First, the Universe moves from simplicity to ever-greater complexity and interconnectivity. More complexity entails more interconnectivity. For example, an amoeba is more complex and has more nodes of interconnectivity than an atom. This is self-evidently true because the amoeba includes and transcends the complexity of an atom. The amoeba contains the world of matter, in which the intimate configuration of the atom is fundamental, and transcends it to add cellular life. Each level of evolution includes and transcends basic dimensions of what came before it and adds distinct new dimensions. We can trust the Universe to move to ever-increasing levels of complexity and interconnectivity.
Second, the Universe expresses complexity through ever-greater uniqueness. The more complex an organism, the more unique it is (more uniqueness, in this context, means more and deeper distinctions between individual organisms). An amoeba is more complex and therefore more unique than an atom. A human being is more complex, and therefore more unique, than an amoeba. We can trust the Universe to reach for more and more uniqueness.
Third, the interior of interconnectivity is intimacy. Evolution may be understood as the progressive deepening of intimacies. We define intimacy as shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness, coupled with mutuality of recognition, mutuality of pathos (= feeling), mutuality of value, and mutuality of purpose.[7] The evolution of intimacy can also be expressed as the evolution of relationship.
Fourth, the Universe is ceaselessly creative at ever-evolving levels of depth and complexity. It always brings forth newness. The creative advance into novelty, to borrow Alfred North Whitehead expression, is one of the core features of Reality.[8] We can trust the Universe to be ever-more creative throughout the process of evolution.
Fifth, the Universe evolves to ever-higher levels of consciousness. Different levels of evolution express different levels of consciousness. Consciousness is an interior expression of complexity and uniqueness. More consciousness means that every level of evolution is more aware of its surroundings, others, and itself. An amoeba has more consciousness than an atom. A plant has more consciousness than an amoeba. We can trust the Universe to reach for ever-greater depth of consciousness at every level of evolution.
A human being has a more evolved consciousness than that of a plant or even a dog. A human being has a deeper, wider, and more subtle relationship to self, to other, and to Reality. A human being can write poetry about her inner state. A human being can be conscious of her part in a human community, and she can feel called to steward the planet in a way that is not possible for either dogs or amoebas. Human beings have more capacity to be loving. Human beings can liberate each other from loneliness and communicate at a level of depth unavailable at earlier levels of evolution. Human beings also can evolve to include wider and wider circles of love throughout their lifetimes.[9]
To sum up our conversation so far: The Universe is driven to ever-evolving levels of creativity, complexity, consciousness, intimacy, and uniqueness by the profoundly nonrandom processes of ever-deepening allurement and love.
Entry 6. Intimacy and Eros
Human beings have the capacity to evolve to deeper and wider forms of relationship. This is the evolution of love, which can express itself in multiple relational vectors, only two of which we will discuss here.
The first is the evolution of intimacy. We define intimacy through the following interior science equation:
Intimacy = shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness x mutuality of recognition x mutuality of pathos (= feeling) x mutuality of value x mutuality of purpose
Intimacy is an expression of Eros, the animating energy of all of Reality, which we describe by another interior science equation:
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, moving toward, desiring, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness
These qualities of Eros are expressed in intimacy as shared identity and the other elements of the intimacy equation—mutualities of recognition, feeling, value, and purpose. In effect, intimacy and Eros are overlapping yet distinct dimensions of relationship. Eros is the energy of being and becoming in Cosmos that drives Reality to ever-deeper intimacies. Eros and intimacy govern all levels of evolutionary reality. Reality is the evolution of Eros expressed as the progressive deepening of intimacies—in other words, the evolution of relationships.
An example of the evolution of intimacy at the human level is the movement from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to cosmocentric intimacy.[10] At every step of this evolution, intimacy means a felt sense of shared identity (expressed as love, care, and concern) with those in your circle of intimacy, with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose. But at every level, the circle of intimacy grows wider and wider:
An egocentric circle of intimacy includes your family and/or a few close friends.
An ethnocentric circle intimacy includes your tribe, nation, religion, company, or team.
A worldcentric circle of intimacy includes every human being on the face of the planet.
Finally, a cosmocentric circle of intimacy includes not only human beings, but also animals, and eventually plants, and then the planet itself. It evolves to include other galaxies in all of their expressions. Eventually, the entire Universe is included in your circle of intimacy. You have a realization of intimacy with all things.
The same intimacy formula applies all the way down and all the way up the evolution chain. For example, it applies when subatomic particles are allured by the Eros of Cosmos to become an atom. Protons, neutrons, and electrons come together in a shared identity (being elements of the same atom), while retaining their (relative) otherness. For this to become possible, they need to recognize and feel each other (in the language of physics, this happens through the medium of strong force between the quarks within the protons and neutrons, the residual strong force between protons and neutrons, and through electromagnetic attraction between the nucleus and electrons). Mutuality of value, in this case, points to the informational and value structure inherent in the subatomic particles, which synergize as the informational or value structure of the atom. Finally, the subatomic particles form an atom, which allows them to function as a whole within larger wholes (molecules). This is their shared purpose: participating, as an atom, in larger wholes.
Entry 7. The LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty and LoveDesire of Reality
There are three core levels of relationship in the human realm: role mate, soul mate, and whole mate. It might be easy to think of the level-one role mate relationship as the beginning of relationship, but it is not. Reality is Relationship, and Reality existed long before human beings engaged in what we currently think of as relationships. The evolution of life and love is the ever-deepening emergence of more passionate, profound, and powerful forms of relationship. Role mate relationship marks only one of those evolutions.
About five hundred million years ago, in the early Paleozoic era, the stickleback fish represented the edge of the evolution of love. The male stickleback fish expresses his desire through his mating dance. After a successful dance, his mate deposits her eggs in his nest, and he quickly moves in to fertilize them. That was the level of intimacy available at that moment in the evolution of love.
Over a hundred million years later, reptiles have evolved from their amphibian and fish ancestors. With this physical evolution comes the evolution of intimacy. Sex organs now exist. The vagina and the phallus come into being, allowing for a direct intimacy between the masculine and the feminine that was previously impossible and unimaginable. This new level of intimacy, brought about by the inherent relationship intelligence of Reality, changed the very course of life’s evolution.
This inherent relationship intelligence, this desire for ever-deepening expressions of intimacy, is not imposed on Reality. It is an inherent feature of the ceaseless creativity of Reality itself. Reality is creative. There are no conventional English words (yet) for the interior of the Reality’s ceaseless creativity; we refer to it as LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty and LoveDesire. This interior impulse generates ever-deeper forms of love, relationship, and intimacy. This is not random. It is the expression of nonrandom plotlines of Reality, moving from matter to life to the depth of self-reflective mind.
When evolution moved from reptiles to mammals and eventually to humans, love and intimacy again went through a momentous leap. Not only were these more evolved organisms able to be intimate by merging their bodies, but they also became so profoundly bonded that some could stay in relationship for entire lifetimes. In time, Reality evolved, and humans and other creatures enjoyed increased capacities for arousal, relationship, and even ecstasy.
The deepest levels of human intimacy and relationships are the most complex, conscious, creative, and unique. When humans and, with them, human relationships first emerged, there was a momentous leap forward in the evolution of love. But all the same principles apply at each level. Each new level of relationship transcends and includes what came before it. At each level there is more consciousness, more uniqueness, more capacity to love, more creativity, and more depth or complexity. All of this means that the continued movement of evolution in human beings is the evolution to higher and deeper forms of relationship.
The physical sciences now tell us what the interior sciences have long been saying: human beings are personally implicated in the great Universe Story. In the language of the interior sciences: That which is above comes from you. In the language of exterior sciences, the direction of the whole is directly dependent on the action of its parts, and a higher order can arise from chaos through local interactions.[11] Our relationships, and the emergence of new forms of relationship, participate in and generate the great movement of Reality.
Entry 8. Emergencies Create Emergents
In the introduction, we outlined some of the core features of today’s relationship crisis that invite and demand a relationship revolution. Evolution has only one possible response to crisis in relationships: a profound and potent evolution of consciousness, which is an evolution of relationship. When a crisis reveals itself, a new expression of relationship seeks to emerge.
This is not a fanciful conjecture but the very nature of Reality itself. When there is a crisis, new forms of relationship rise to meet the new life conditions. There are myriad examples that illustrate this, but we will give one of the most dramatic. One of the key momentous leaps in relationship history has been described by many evolutionary theorists as the oxygen crisis.[12]
Three and a half billion years ago, single-celled life (prokaryotes) appeared in the Earth’s seas.[13] Life became semi-immortal. Single-celled life divides in order to procreate. For vast stretches of time, the seas were filled with life, absorbing the nutrients of the Earth. Prokaryotes used hydrogen from water for an early form of photosynthesis. This process gradually produced an overabundance of oxygen in the atmosphere, which began poisoning the single-celled life that dominated the planet. Faced with this threat, life might have decided to adapt and live within its limitations. It did not.
Instead, life followed the call of its own creativity. Alfred North Whitehead called this essential property of life the creative advance into novelty.[14] It is the move toward ever higher and deeper forms of intimacy. The oxygen crisis became an evolutionary driver. The crisis motivated innovation and transformation, leading to a revolution in relationships.
In an extraordinarily complex process, life evolved a completely new form of relationship. For the first time, cells learned to join with each other, and the core structure of life moved from prokaryotes to eukaryotes (complex single-celled organisms), and then to the multicellular life as we know it. This took place without the aid of scientists, researchers, or computers, billions of years before anything vaguely approximating a human brain existed. This took place through the inherent self-organizing LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire of Reality, which always move toward ever-higher forms of intimacy and relationship.
With the emergence of multicellular life, pretty much everything changed. When multicellular organisms learned to join their genes to create new life (through sexual reproduction), a radical newness and diversity was created. It was a radical leap in both exterior structure and interior consciousness. This movement of LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire directly seeded the future emergence of plants, animals, mammals, and human beings.
The crucial point is that crisis is an evolutionary driver that always deepens relationship. In response to new life conditions, the current form of relationships is replaced by more capable, more complex, and more conscious forms. We are now poised to take the next momentous leap in the evolution of relationships. It is a move from joining genes to joining genius. It is the move from role mate and soul mate to whole mate—the rise of evolutionary relationships.
The Universe is an honorable place. The Universe can be trusted. The Universe can be trusted to manifest crisis. The Universe can be trusted to respond to crisis by evolving love into deeper forms of intimacy and relationships.
Entry 9. Passionate Protozoa
The same laws of relationship exist all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Partners who want to form a relationship must find each other first and always need a catalyst to do so.
You can observe this in a simple experiment.[15] Put a couple of old, half-rotten leaves in a glass filled with water. Put the glass under a lamp for a while. Here is what you will see:
Soon, the protozoa hanging on the leaves come to life. They procreate through asexual division. A few days later, their food supply runs low. The protozoa begin to seek the best place in the glass to survive. Some gravitate to the bottom of the glass where there are many nutrients (leaf debris and dead bacteria), but little light. Others gravitate to the top of the glass, nearest to the light. The environment near the top is quite different from that of the bottom of the glass. There is plenty of light, but hardly any nutrients. Soon, the protozoa are doing so badly that they can no longer procreate. The ones on top are missing food, and the ones at the bottom are missing light. There is a crisis.
In response to the crisis, something wondrous and beautiful happens: All of the protozoa in the glass produce attractants to which the other protozoa are irresistibly drawn. Eros is activated. Both groups of protozoa swim along the trail of scent and meet in the middle. Two protozoa, one from above and one from below, link together. Their cell membranes abut, and an opening manifests, through which the protozoa exchange cell components. In the exchange, the protozoa share some of the skills they have developed to survive at either end of the glass. Crisis catalyzes the creation of new relationship. This relationship allows the protozoa to grow strong and begin to reproduce again. Crisis leads to a transformation in identity, a transformation in relationship, and a transformation in Reality itself. Crisis gives birth to new emergents.
The wondrous exchange quickly ends. The partners split up. Each returns to its part of the glass but with new skills, more knowledge, and an expanded capacity. For many of the protozoa, the merger opens new possibilities. They are better able to thrive even with limited food and light. They once again begin to reproduce actively until they run low on nutrients or light. And then it begins again: the release of the attractant, the swim to the middle of the glass, and the erotic goings-on to survive and thrive. These are the antecedents of role mate relationships in the biological realm.
Much has changed since protozoa first covered the Earth, but some things have remained the same. Like protozoa, men and women try to survive on their own. They try to earn enough income to be independent, find enough hobbies to avoid feeling lonely, and deny their desire and need for a partner or spouse. But they always meet crisis, just like protozoa. They struggle to pay for everything they want, they find themselves lonely on a Saturday night, and they recognize that sometimes it’s just nice to have a partner. For humans as well as protozoa, crisis catalyzes relationships. Humans also find their way into relationships to promote their own survival.
Entry 10. Relationship Is Transformation
Among the three levels of human relationship, the first two—role mate and soul mate—are part of the old relationship deal. The third level, whole mate, is a core component of the new deal. All three levels express different levels of consciousness. Each one has a different core motive for relationship. Each one lives relationship differently. Each one has a very different set of relationship technologies. Whole mate relationships include the best dimensions of role mate and soul mate plus entirely new dimensions, skills, and capacities. It is a new level of relational consciousness that we call evolutionary relationships.
The new dimensions of whole mate are not limited to new ways of coping or better ways of communicating in relationship. They involve a fundamental upgrade in the source code of relationships and, ultimately, in the nature of relationships and love itself. The new relationship deal invites you to play an active and conscious role in the momentous evolution of relationship and of love.[16]
While the old-deal relationships always involve exchange and negotiations, a balance of giving and receiving, whole mates realize that the very distinction between giving and receiving is an illusion. Whole mates know that giving and receiving are one.
In some sense, all relationships come with a cost. To receive the gift of a relationship, there is always a gift to be given. The First Principle and First Value of Eros, by its very nature, asks us to give up our ego’s grasp for superficial pleasure. Through that sacrifice, depth pleasure returns to us a thousand-fold. In our transformation to a higher level of relationship, we are driven to give our partner pleasure. We are amazed that in giving pleasure, we receive even greater pleasure. This transformation allows the scorecard to disappear as beautiful sex, connection, and intimacy take us into the Heart of Reality.
These laws of relationship are built into the very structure of the Cosmos. A neutron does not simply bond with a proton. For a neutron to create a stable relationship with a proton, both the neutron and the proton have to undergo transformations. What happens is almost beyond imagination in its beauty: the protons and the neutrons each give over a part of their mass, and it is transformed into an explosion of heat and light.[17] The essence of whole mate relationship is similar, mirroring the basic processes of most elemental structures.
Entry 11. Evolution Accelerates
In the past, leaps in development took billions of years. But the rate of growth and transformation is now exponential. Between our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our great grandmothers—literally a blink on the time scale of eternity—pretty much everything has changed. We moved from horse-drawn buggies to cars and then to planes as modes of expedient transportation. We moved from newspapers, to radio, to television, to the internet, to Facebook as means of sharing information. We moved from handwritten letters, to telephones, to faxes, to cell phones, to texting as ways to communicate. The move from muscle to microchip, from industrial manufacturing to an information/service economy, has changed everything. Our medical technology, education, food, business, international relations, politics, and economics—everything has changed.
This increase in the pace and depth of transformation is sometimes called the rate of accelerating returns. It points to the exponential nature of new growth and new possibility. Truly getting the idea of exponential growth is a hugely powerful realization. To illustrate the concept, teachers often use a classic Indian legend of chess and seeds of grain.
The legend tells of a game of chess between the local king and Lord Krishna himself. In the Hindu religion, Krishna is one of the forms in which Spirit or God appears in human guise. The king was a big chess enthusiast and had the habit of challenging wise visitors to a game of chess. One day a traveling sage—Krishna in disguise—was challenged by the king. To motivate his opponent, the king offered any reward that the sage could name. The sage modestly asked just for a few grains of rice, but he did so in the following manner: If he won the chess match, the king was to put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and double it on every following one.
Having lost the game and being a man of his word, the king ordered a bag of rice to be brought to the chess board. Then he started placing rice grains according to the arrangement: 1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on. Following the exponential growth of the rice payment, the king quickly realized that he was unable to fulfill his promise because on the twentieth square the king would have had to put 524,288 grains of rice. On the fortieth square, the king would have had to put 549,755,813,888 grains of rice. And, finally on the sixty-fourth square, the king would have had to put 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 grains of rice, or about 659 billion US tons. It was at that point that Lord Krishna revealed his true identity to the king and told him that he didn’t have to pay the debt immediately but could do so over time. That is why, according to legend, pilgrims in Indian temples are fed rice, called Paal Payasam. The king’s debt is still being repaid.
In the arena of relationships, the core structure of Reality itself, evolution is accelerating exponentially, as the grains on the chess board. Everything is changing.
The snapshot of the evolution of relationships in which we are engaged in this book is but a snippet of the evolution of relationships which has been the plotline of the evolutionary story since the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang.
Role mate relationship was the primary form of relationship for two hundred thousand years.[18] The first glimmerings of soul mate relationship appeared only relatively recently in evolutionary history. It is only in the last few decades that it has become the fundamental form of relationship in the western world. Now, within our lifetime, relationships are undergoing their next great evolution.
The inherent creativity—or LoveIntelligence, LoveBeauty, and LoveDesire—of Reality self-organizes from within to evolve and transform relationships. Each new challenge, every crisis, is an evolutionary driver that gives birth to new possibilities. New and momentous leaps emerge out of the Field of pure Potentiality. While it may have taken several million years for single-celled organisms to make the leap to multicellular organisms, everything is changing much faster now. New and never-before dreamed of possibilities for relationship are being born in this very time that we live.
Entry 12. Conscious Evolution
The story of evolution was not available to human understanding in previous generations. Evolution is finally awakening to itself, as a part of the emergence of Conscious Evolution.[19] This does not mean that evolution first becomes conscious in us. It does mean that we awaken to the realization that evolution is conscious in us, in at least two distinct forms:
We realize that the evolutionary impulse moves in us, as us, and through us.
For the first time in human history, we are able to feel, sense, and know the evolutionary story from matter to life to the depth of the self-reflective human mind.
We become aware of the evolutionary story and become the storytellers, even as we realize that we are also both the authors and actors in the next chapters of the story.
All stories have plotlines, and the evolutionary story is no exception. A key plotline of this story is the evolution of relationships. Conscious Evolution in this sense means that we are finally awakening to the evolution of relationship—the animating Eros of the Universe Story itself.
To recapitulate:
Reality is Relationship.
Allurement is the core feature of Reality; it is its fundamental nature. It is one expression of what we usually call love. Love, therefore, is the force that binds atoms, molecules, cells, plants, animals, mammals, and ultimately human beings. Relationship is the exterior structural expression of the interior drive to love.
Now consider this:
At each level of relationship and evolution, the depth of the bond, the awareness of the bond, and the pleasure and delight of the bond evolve to higher and deeper levels. Relationships seek deeper and deeper forms of intimacy and love.
There is a crisis in human relationships, a breakdown in love’s inherent drive to bond and evolve.
Evolution, or Reality, responds by evolving relationships and therefore evolving love.
The evolution of relationships and love catalyzes the entire evolutionary process, which resolves the current crisis.
When we use our own lives to evolve our relationships or, even more dramatically, to evolve through our relationships, we participate directly in the evolution of love. Isn’t that amazing? All of Reality depends on the evolution of relationships.
[Read footnotes below.]
This is an excerpt from our new book Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, which you can order on Amazon now.
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For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Gafni, Marc & Marx Hubbard, Barbara, Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2025, Chapter 1. The Arc of Evolution.
Footnotes
[1] The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth, by B. Lipton (2014), Chapter 1: Our Drive to Bond.
[2] Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, by D. S. Wilson (2015). Wilson is part of a long lineage of evolutionary thinkers. This line of thought was powerfully articulated by Kropotkin in his epic work Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Kropotkin was followed by many thinkers including Charles Sanders Peirce, James Mark Baldwin, and many others, who read Darwin more carefully than the neo-Darwinian reductionists (who hijacked the mainstream discourse with a dogmatic materialism, as flawed as the religious fundamentalist dogmatism against which they were properly rebelling). My own work is very much located in this heterodox lineage of evolutionary thought. The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis. Volumes 1-6, by M. Gafni et al. (forthcoming).
[3] Darwin scholar David Loye makes this point in several of his books. See for example, Darwin’s Second Revolution (p. 2), by D. Loye (2010). Loye searched for terms like love and various other terms connoting moral sensitivity. The particular phrases Eros and ethos are not Darwinian, of course. We mean these terms as two meta-topics expressed, according to Loye’s research, in a variety of different terms. See also the Prologue of Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today, by D. Loye (2018). In his own words: "How could it go for so long unnoticed that in Origin’s classic sequel on human evolution, Darwin wrote only twice of 'survival of the fittest' but 95 times about love. And this with only a single trivial entry for love in the loveless index still in use worldwide. Even more remarkable in a battered world desperately in need of moral guidance is the Darwin who wrote 92 times not of selfishness but of the Moral Sense as the ultimate over-riding prime driver of evolution."
[4] See Peirce, Charles S. “Evolutionary love.” The Monist (1893): 176-200.
[5] In particular, Eros and intimacy are defined in Entry 6 of this chapter.
[6] The technical name for that is decay. A neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.
[7] We explore the concept of intimacy in more depth in the next section.
[8] See Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928, by A.N. Whitehead (1929). In this essay, he mentions creative advance into novelty four times: “…‘becoming’ is a creative advance into novelty.” (p.28). “The aim of the philosophy of organism is to express a coherent cosmology based upon the notions of ‘system,’ ‘process,’ ‘creative advance into novelty,’ … as ultimate agents of stubborn fact.’” (p. 128) “The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty.” (p.222) “Both are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty. Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other.” (p.349)
[9] We discuss this dimension of evolution of love in the next section.
[10] See Entry 3 in Chapter 9. Outrageous Love for an in-depth exploration of this evolutionary trajectory.
[11] This is the process of self-organization, first described by the Nobel-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine.
[12] We discuss this event in deeper detail in the companion volume, The Evolution of Love: The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships in Response to the Meta-Crisis (forthcoming).
[13] What we conventionally refer to as life has a number of key features like sentience and reproduction that do not exist before. This is a great emergent leap from the previous level where sentience, or life as we know it, did not exist. Having said that, we know now that matter is not dead. It is driven by its own inherent self-organizing processes that move it to higher forms of complexity. The old sharp split between sentience (life) and non-life is rapidly disappearing in evolutionary science. As one leading scientist remarked to us, “It looks more like sentience all the way up and all the way down.”
[14] See footnote 21.
[15] We are gratefully indebted for this example to German neurobiologist Gerald Hüther.
[16] See Chapter 6. Whole Mate.
[17] This mass, which by Einstein’s mass-energy relation E=mc2 is released as energy, is known as binding energy. The Sun and other stars use this process of nuclear fusion to generate thermal energy, which is later radiated from their surface.
[18] Of course, throughout history, the roles themselves were very different than the roles in the relatively recent form of role mate relationship, which talk about in this book.
[19] See Chapter 8. Evolutionary Impulse at the Heart of Evolutionary Relationships, Entry 8 for a more in-depth discussion of Conscious Evolution.
Whole Mate: The Future of Relationship
A revolution in relationships is taking place across the western world. It is happening in different ways for all people in all classes of society, and it is breathing life into a new vision of relationship and self. The product of this revolution—a third, higher level of connection called the ‘whole mate relationship’—promises to have a far more powerful effect on the quality, joy, and potency of our lives than any other single shift in culture since the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
In Whole Mate: The Future of Relationships (the first of two volumes on the evolution of relationship), Marc Gafni and Barbara Marx Hubbard define and explore three primary levels of relationship (role mate, soul mate, whole mate) and describe for the first time how the evolution of relationship will change the world as we know it.
Each of us wants to live well and love fully. We want not just to survive or thrive, but to experience real purpose and meaning. We want a new vision of success, of what it means to be a real man and a true woman. We will find these things on the other side of the revolution.