While there is a growing realization that a new species is emerging on Earth at the present time with various names, including Homo divinus, it is not yet clear what this means for people’s ontogeny in relationship to the phylogeny of Homo sapiens.

If we look first at biological evolution, in general, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. For instance, individual oaks, lizards, herrings, thrushes, and giraffes, develop characteristics similar to those of their parents and hence of their species as a whole. A similar situation applies to the evolution of civilizations. When we are young, we tend to learn what our parents and teachers want us to learn; we are programmed or culturally conditioned like machines, suppressing our Natural Intelligence as human automata. That, essentially, is how civilizations maintain themselves.

However, if evolution always followed this pattern, no new species or civilizations could ever emerge. In a process that is still poorly understood, new species and civilizations emerge because innovative individuals develop characteristics that are different from their parents, after which phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny. And in general, these ‘rebellious’ individuals have a pretty hard time of it at first because all structures, including species and civilizations, have a tendency for self-preservation, called homeostasis in systems theory.

During the conflict-ridden patriarchal epoch, when the 20-odd civilizations identified by Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History were mostly focused on the outward movement of evolution, those seeking to return to Reality did not really fit into their prevailing cultures. Their ontogeny did not recapitulate the phylogeny of the society into which they had been born.

Foremost among these were Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus of Nazareth, who were both rebels, in whose names two major religions were formed: Buddhism, from buddha ‘awakened one’, and Christianity, from khristos ‘anointed one’, Greek translation of Hebrew masiah ‘messiah’. But these religions did not usher in a new species; the time was not yet right for this to happen. The analytical mind first had to develop as far as it could until it reached the evolutionary cul-de-sac it is in today.

Faced with the spiritual crisis that today’s secular society has led us into, a rapidly increasing number of people are embodying the spiritual renaissance that we are witnessing today, both within the traditional religions and most particularly, free of them.

As this diagram from the vision page shows, those taking a short cut back to Paradise, like the mystics of old, are more focused on Oneness, not particularly concerned with the rational mind, which is needed to focus on our practical affairs in science and business. On the other hand, if we are to cocreate a sustainable society solidly grounded on the Truth, we need to unify Western reason and Eastern mysticism in Wholeness, ending the long-running war between science and religion, without which there can never be Peace on Earth.

Not that this is easy. By the time we are three years of age, most of us are so conditioned by the culture we are born into that becoming free of these restraints in later life presents an immense challenge. For both the education system and business world are designed to prevent us from discovering that Love is the Divine Essence that we all share, that Consciousness is the overall Context for all our lives, and that we are all one, not separate from God, Nature, or any other being for a single instant in our lives.

Nevertheless, more and more people are becoming free of what William Blake aptly called our ‘mind-forged manacles’, actually leading to the emergence of two subspecies of Homo divinus: Homo divinus divinus and Homo divinus universalis, returning Home to Oneness and Wholeness, respectively. As these subspecies are coming into being through the ontogeny of individuals following a radically different path from the mainstream of Western civilization, we look briefly at the characteristics of these developments in two further pages.