Evolutionary spirituality is based on the notion that the Evolution of the Cosmos was preceded by the Involution, which is the descent of Spirit into matter. The Evolution of the Cosmos is the reverse process -- the emergence or ascent of Spirit from matter. The Involution goes from the Omnipresent Reality to manifest a universe for the delight of Being, creates the planes of mind, life, and matter, and then hides them before creation; whereas the Evolution is the reverse process where matter appears, where the plane of life emerges from matter, where mind emerges from life, and Spirit from mind, and in that process enables humankind to discover the delight of Becoming (using the evolutionary philosopher Sri Aurobindo's terminology here). In other words, this is a teleological view of cosmic Evolution (matter to life to mind to Spirit) -- the Cosmos itself being the unfolding or self-discovery of the Godhead, evolving to greater and greater levels of self-awareness, with humans, since they are self-conscious, being participants in this evolutionary process and unfolding, which, it is claimed, will culminate in the divinisation and perfection of the Cosmos itself (this is the esoteric as opposed to exoteric understanding of terms such as "Kingdom of God", "Day of Judgment", "The Second Coming", etc.). To sum it up with a Sufi saying:

God sleeps in the rock,
Stirs in the plant,
Dreams in the animal,
And awakens in man.
A Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality by Tom Huston
(Original article here.)


For some, evolution has always been a fundamentally spiritual concept. Some of the first thinkers to seriously explore the topic—the German Idealists of the early 19th century—were mystic-philosophers who predated Darwin's Origin of Species by at least half a century. Writing in the year 1799, the 24-year-old philosophical wunderkind Friedrich Schelling summarized in a single sentence the profoundly original insight that was exciting him as well as his philosophical contemporaries (men like Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, and Georg Hegel): “History as a whole,” he wrote, “is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute.”

( Read more . . . also includes a list of the key philosophers involved . . . )