I am posting the following for my friend Gene Kieffer, who does not yet have access to Internet. -------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: To carry out its assignment well, ASCENT, the newsletter, will need Contributing Writers in all fields -- biology, neuroscience, psychology, technology, mythology, spirituality, etc. Articles should be 750 words or less. Please address your letters to: Gene Kieffer, ASCENT, Post Office Box 2248, Darien, CT 06820. Or, you may send e-mail to Gene Kieffer in care of gpmenos@firestone.princeton.edu. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * BEST KEPT SECRET IN AMERICA: You Can't Evolve Unless You Know You Can. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * About ASCENT: To tell the secret, that's the purpose of ASCENT, the newsletter for people who want to evolve. For some unknown reason, almost everyone, whether an evolutionist or ordinary individual, has grown up believing that evolution is finished, that the brain has ceased to evolve. According to some experts, human evolution stopped over 30,000 years ago. The reason for this peculiar belief? A human skull was found in Africa that had about the same volume as a modern one. Also, scientists haven't been able to detect any structural changes in the brain that would lead them to think otherwise. But that's almost like saying computers are *devolving*, because every year they're getting smaller, when we know the very opposite is true. The size of a computer has little or nothing to do with its capacity to solve problems or the speed at which it can perform complex computations and other difficult tasks. Let's get off this self-defeating merry-go-round and accept the most important fact governing our progress and our survival: We *are* evolving! There are some who say, however, that without verifiable proof, without empirical evidence, without scientific demonstration, we would be deluding ourselves. So what's the harm in that? Alright, then, consider this: Science has no proof that we *aren't* evolving. That dusty African skull is no proof at all. Nor is it any proof that we can't actually *see* the brain evolving. It doesn't have to grow larger to evolve. We've learned that much from microprocessors. Soon we'll have the 586, and it won't be any larger than the old 8088. ASCENT's mission is to purge the mind of all this nonsense about a stagnant brain. That kind of idiocy makes us behave like, well, like Homo sapiens, always ready to knock somebody over the head with a club. After the crusty old neurons and kinks have been cleaned up and straightened out, evolution can accelerate unobstructed and unimpeded. Seriously, why is it so important to believe the brain is still in a state of organic evolution? Why can't we carry on contentedly in the old rut, believing in "social evolution," or better yet, "spiritual evolution," which are already popular concepts well accepted by the intellectual leaders? Or why isn't it alright to simply believe that the mind, or consciousness, is evolving? Why this insistence on believing the brain itself is continuing to evolve, even as we read this? Good question, one answer to which has been floating around for a long time. It goes something like this. "Don't you know that we create our own reality?" Long before the New Age began, James Allen published a small inspirational book, called "As A Man Thinketh." It was a lot like "Consciously Creating Circumstances," an earlier Rosicrucian tract. Most books on magic, as we've learned, are quite similar in content and style. All make the point that it just doesn't pay to think negatively and that almost anything is possible if we think positively. Another question. What's the matter with the much-loved story that we are presently using only one-tenth of the brain, and since nine-tenths is presumably still available, why the need for further evolution? The answer is that nature requires organic evolution in order to tap into that dormant nine-tenths. And then, too, the great majority of educated people have long since accepted evolution as a fact of life. They only need a nudge to include the "fact" of *continuing* evolution in their thinking. Not mindless evolution in the Darwinian sense. (Evolution without the initial force of purpose, without increase and fulfillment of purpose in the accumulative course, is simply inconceivable.) As James Allen says, "Law, not confusion, is the dominating principle in the universe." And the Law of Evolution hasn't been rescinded. It's just waiting to be discovered. "The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities." If that sounds mushy, wait. ASCENT isn't going to be a mushy newsletter in any sense of the word. It will deal mostly in facts. And when it occasionally does speculate on what might be, the reader will be alerted to it, because all such articles will be labeled as such -- dreams.