Four Phases of Evolutionary Cycles

to which we can give the names of: seeding; birth; culmination; death. To these are linked four actions or impulses that allow the passage from one phase to another of the cycle: the gestation, which starts from seeding and brings the system to birth; the growth, which regulates the system from birth to culmination; the aging, which brings the system from culmination to death and, finally, the disintegration of the forms adopted in the cycle and their re-elaboration, which is the prelude to a new seeding.

Unlike the case of a linear and monotonous temporal progression, in the case of a cyclical evolutionary process the forces that act and, consequently, the actions that can be performed in each of these four phases, are not the same.

Let us analyze, as an example, a vegetative cycle that is significant and exemplary of the phases of an evolutionary cycle. The beginning of the cycle occurs with seeding: the act by which the germinal contents or seeds that will have to be developed in the cycle are planted. By making the bark rot, the gestation process takes place and the assimilation of the principles that will be developed and, after the necessary time, there will be the birth or visible and external manifestation of those germinal principles that were contained in embryo.

After the birth of the sprout, we witness the growth of the plant. In this phase the active vital forces, united to the ecological conditions of the earth in which the system is found, provide what is necessary to grow and develop the system to the maximum degree. This development phase or ascending phase of a healthy organic evolutionary cycle manifests syntrophic forces, aggregating, constructive and regenerative forces are at their maximum degree.

If the growth rate of a tree or a man were kept constant throughout life, we would arrive at organisms of mastodontic dimensions that would find themselves having problems in natural adaptation. Conversely, the constructive aggregating forces exert hyperactivity only in the first part of an evolutionary cycle, that is in the development phase necessary and functional to bring the organism to an optimal level for achieving its purposes, or rather to the culmination of the cycle.

When the system is at its culmination the tree is formed, the organism is ready for the realization of its ultimate purpose and therefore possesses for a determined period of time the possibility to realize it and to accomplish the end of the evolutionary cycle, thus passing to another phase or state of evolution. It is the moment of realization of the evolutionary cycle, or of its failure.

Once the window of opportunity for realization is finished, either the system has succeeded in realizing its purpose, or it is necessary to change the ecological conditions for such realization. Indeed, since the system has had its occasion for a realization, if it has not succeeded with such ecological conditions then it is necessary to operate a shock and change the environmental conditions to thus provide a new window of opportunity.

The entropic, disintegrating and desiccating forces come into action that lead to the disintegration of the system whose remains will pass through a re-elaboration that will provide support for a successive seeding.

These four phases are characteristic of the evolution of an enormous number of systems. An animal, a vegetable, an individual, a people or a religion or movement of thought, all are subject to the same laws. The phases are always the same because they are characteristic not of a specific system, but of the type of evolution of the system: that of every form of organic evolution that uses temporal cycles for its own evolutionary development.

Elements of Initiatic Astrology

If for contemporary physicists the Sun is the source of free Energy that allows the Earth and other Planets their dynamic and biological evolution,⁴ for those initiated into the Science of Principles the visible Sun identifies the source of every life and of any light or rather the Divine Verb manifested by Christ, the Sun of Justice, origin, providential means and end of every evolution.

⁴ Lineweaver C.H., Egan C.A. (2012) The Initial Low Gravitational Entropy of the Universe as the Origin of Design in Nature. In: Swan L., Gordon R., Seckbach J. (eds) Origin(s) of Design in Nature. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht.