Collapse Wasn’t Inevitable: We Locked Ourselves Out of Evolution

A gene-centered view of evolution gave us eugenics. It justified racial hierarchies and IQ testing industries. It allowed medicine and science to pathologize entire groups of people, while pretending that human agency had nothing to do with the outcome.

Collapse feels inevitable. Economies falter, institutions crumble, societies fracture — and yet we keep repeating the same cycles as if we are trapped in a loop. What if collapse isn’t fate, but feedback? What if the real problem isn’t “out there” in markets or politics, but “in here” — in the way we’ve misunderstood evolution itself? For more than a century, we’ve told ourselves the wrong story of how life changes, and that error has left us blind to the real bottleneck. Evolution isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something happening through us. And until we recognize that, collapse will keep resetting the stage.

Part 1: The Flaw in the Foundation

For more than a century, the dominant story of human evolution has been gene-first. DNA variation, genetic drift, natural selection, survival of the fittest — we’ve been taught that these are the primary drivers of evolution. According to this view, humans are essentially passive vessels. Our biological fate is locked inside our genes, with random mutations granting a lucky few an advantage in the endless competition of survival.

This story is elegant and tidy, but it’s incomplete.

We arrived here because Darwin’s insights on variation and selection were fused with Mendel’s genetics, and then later codified by Watson and Crick into the Modern Synthesis. That fusion was powerful for its time. But by making DNA the star of the show, it sidelined the most important element of being human: choice, volition, and consciousness.

What’s less widely recognized is that leading biologists, philosophers, and sociologists have repeatedly criticized the “Modern Synthesis” — the standard way we’ve explained evolution for almost a century — as being too focused on genes and too simple. Stephen Jay Gould, Denis Noble, Peter Corning, and others note that focusing almost exclusively on random mutation and natural selection is insufficient to capture how organisms actually impact and create their own destinies.

A newer idea, called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), tries to fix this by including things like how organisms develop, how they change their environment (niche construction), how experiences and behaviors can sometimes be passed down (like through epigenetic changes), and how culture matters too. But even though the EES talks about all these new factors, it still usually puts genes and genetic variation at the center. All the other influences get treated as “add-ons” or “inputs” that mostly feed into the same old genetic model. Genes are still seen as the main “currency” of what gets inherited and selected. So, the big debate now is basically about how to fit these extra pieces into the classic, gene-focused version of evolution instead of assigning them equal weight and consequence in explaining how life changes over time.

The consequences of this have been devastating. A gene-centered view of evolution gave us eugenics. It justified racial hierarchies and IQ testing industries. It allowed medicine and science to pathologize entire groups of people, while pretending that human agency had nothing to do with the outcome. It was a science that, in its refusal to account for the mind, ultimately justified the most mindless cruelties. It enshrined linear, competitive thinking: the idea that evolution is a straight line of “improvement” driven by competition, rather than a complex, recursive, and collaborative process of adaptation, feedback, and integration.

Notably, critics say the Modern Synthesis largely ignored development, cultural transmission, and environmental feedback. Not just in humans, but across all life.

Organisms do not merely adapt to environments; they modify them. Beavers remake rivers, changing and affecting selection on themselves and others. Killer whales teach elaborate hunting cultures across generations. Humans, through language, technology, and symbolic action, create adaptive pathways that DNA alone cannot capture. Traits can be inherited through more than DNA. Cultural learning, epigenetics, and environmental legacy all play direct roles in shaping future generations.

This matters because when you erase consciousness from the story of evolution, you erase responsibility and agency. You erase the possibility that our own choices — and our own refusal to integrate trauma — are the very forces shaping the future of our species.

Today, evolutionary theory is changing rapidly, embracing multi-level causation, feedback loops, and niche construction. The modern consensus is moving toward a pluralistic, adaptive, agent-centered view where organisms — and especially humans — act both as products and co-authors of their evolutionary story. The next step is to fully invite consciousness, volition, and shared responsibility back into the evolutionary framework, so that our science can finally reflect our real human experience.

If genes alone cannot account for how life evolves, we need to ask: what else is shaping the path? The answer comes from inside us — in the living organ that interprets, rewires, and carries experience forward: the brain.

Part 2: The Brain as an Active Evolutionary Organ

The reality is this:

Evolution isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something happening through us.

DNA is not the operating system — it’s the hardcoded bootloader. It sets the initial conditions for a nervous system that is then sculpted in real time by environment, trauma, choice, and consciousness. It is a continuous, two-way conversation between biology and experience. Neuroplasticity and epigenetics are not side notes.

They are the central mechanism of human evolution. They are how the body edits its own code.

Recent research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology confirms that neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to rewire and adapt structurally and functionally throughout life — and epigenetic regulation — heritable changes in gene expression prompted by experience — are crucial drivers of real-time adaptation and evolutionary change. Far from being rare exceptions, these mechanisms are now recognized as playing key roles in how organisms, especially humans, respond to shifting environments and shape their own evolutionary trajectories.

This is not speculative. We know from studies of Holocaust survivors and their descendants that trauma rewrites the nervous system and is passed on epigenetically. We know from neuroscience that neuroplasticity allows the brain to rewire itself, strengthening some pathways while pruning others. We know that the limbic system and prefrontal cortex are in constant dialogue, reshaping how we process safety, threat, and meaning.

Comparative research shows that during human evolution, our unusually long period of brain development created novel opportunities for experience-dependent neuromodification.

Children’s brains remain plastic and responsive to their physical and social environments much longer than those of other primates, making culture, language, relational trauma, and even collective learning direct forces in our evolutionary feedback loops. The nervous system itself is sculpted daily by relationships, stress, culture, education, trauma, and healing, all of which feed back into adaptive potential and even gene expression.

So here is the leap in understanding we need to make:

The human brain is not just responding to evolution. It is evolution, happening in real-time. It is an active, conscious evolutionary organ.

And ironically, the best way to understand this is to look at our greatest collective fear: artificial intelligence.

Scientists warn about Recursive Self-Improvement in AI — the idea that once a machine can edit its own code, it could evolve infinitely, surpassing human control. But that’s exactly what the human brain has been doing all along. The brain is the original recursively self-improving system.

We could call this Recursive Self-Integration in humans.

Consciousness observes itself. It sees what’s working and what’s broken. It edits its own wiring through neuroplasticity. Those changes feed back into the body and even into gene expression. Over time, that recursive loop either evolves us toward greater coherence — or locks us into dissociation, violence, and collapse.

This recursive self-integration, like Recursive Self-Improvement in AI, is double-edged: it can lead to spirals of growth and healing, or — if the feedback is negative and unintegrated — entrench us in maladaptive, collapsing loops. Our choices in how we attend, relate, and reflect shape both present and future biology as well as collective evolutionary possibility.

We are not passengers on a genetic raft. We are navigators with our hands on the wheel, whether we realize it or not. And when we don’t realize it consciously, we steer civilization right off a cliff.

If the brain is the original recursively self-improving system, then the question becomes: what happens when that recursive loop is fed trauma instead of safety? This takes us directly to the split path our species faces.

Part 3: The Recursive Loop of Trauma and Choice

Epigenetics reveals that human evolution is advancing along two divergent paths:

• Those who integrate trauma.

• Those who don’t — and instead choose violence, oppression, and dissociation.

  
  

Mounting research shows that trauma and violence shape the nervous system and can be passed on through epigenetic processes — heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter the DNA sequence itself. Studies with Holocaust survivors and, most recently, with survivors of war and violence in Syria, demonstrate that not only does trauma rewrite the individual’s nervous system, but it also leaves identifiable chemical marks on the genome — signatures that can be found even in grandchildren who were not directly exposed to the original trauma.

Another critical factor that is often not given enough attention is that those who commit violence also traumatize themselves. Why? Because when a human commits violence, they send a recursive feedback loop into their own nervous system that screams it is not safe to be human, and I am the reason why. Their body and brain learn: “I am a threat to myself.” Dissociation deepens. The limbic system fragments further from the prefrontal cortex.

Neuroscientific and trauma studies now support this view. Acts of violence dysregulate the stress system, triggering chronic self-alienation, dissociation, and maladaptive coping — effects that researchers are beginning to trace epigenetically as well as psychologically. This effect, sometimes termed ‘moral injury,’ underscores that harm echoing outward is also a wound echoing inward.

In this light, violence isn’t strength — it is self-reinforcing collapse. It is the nervous system fracturing against itself.

Trauma integration, by contrast, is not just about “feeling better.” It is the literal rewiring of the brain. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) learns to calm and reshape the limbic brain, especially the amygdala. Safety and meaning are restored. Integration rewrites the body’s operating system, which then echoes epigenetically. Emerging research on enriched environments, psychotherapy, and even cultural reconnection points to the possibility of mitigating trauma’s effects within and across generations. This means integration is rarely a solitary endeavor. It is fostered by social and cultural healing practices.

The Role of Mirroring in Evolution

Healthy identity develops through mirroring. Mirror neurons fire when we are seen and understood. This is Recursive Self-Integration in its most interpersonal form: we require reflection from others to build a coherent sense of self, which then allows us to better integrate our own internal states. But our society sets parents and teachers up for failure, leaving generations under-mirrored and misattuned. Researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Vincent Felitti (ACE studies) have shown that developmental trauma is not rare — it is tragically the norm.

The result: we are not just a traumatized society; we are a society that builds monuments to its trauma. We cling to it. We are addicted to it. We over-identify with it. Our society is a mirror of our fragmentation. Racism, nationalism, borders, class, money-as-value, institutional dogma, and the attention economy are not separate problems. They are externalized constructs of an unintegrated Default Mode Network (DMN, see more on the DMN below). We are living inside the architecture of our own trauma loops.

By integrating biological, social, and cultural perspectives, the latest science now points to a vital conclusion: breaking cycles of trauma and fostering resilience is possible, but it demands practices of collective reflection, systemic support, and the building of new cultural rituals that mirror safety, coherence, and care — not just for individuals, but for generations.

And yet even knowing this, humanity keeps circling the same collapse patterns. Why? Because we have not finished the most basic neurological updates evolution demands. Two integrations, in particular, remain incomplete.

Part 4: The Bottleneck We Cannot See

Humanity is stuck in an evolutionary bottleneck because we have not completed two key neural integrations:

1. Hemispheric Integration (Corpus Callosum / Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind): Julian Jaynes argued that consciousness — the ability to see ourselves seeing — emerged only when the hemispheres of the brain integrated enough to communicate as one. He controversially argued that the specific form of modern consciousness we experience today — meta-cognition, the ‘space’ within which we observe our own thoughts — did not emerge until about 3000 years ago. Before that, our ancestors navigated the world hearing divine commands and experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, believing they were hearing the voices and signs of the gods. They didn’t know that they were hearing their own inner voice and seeing their brain try to make sense of itself. “Seeing ourselves seeing” is meta-cognition. But most humans have not completed this integration. Intelligence is not enough. Without meta-cognition, a theory of meta-cognitive consciousness sounds like philosophical nonsense. And this is why Jaynes was dismissed.

2. mPFC-Limbic Integration (Especially the Amygdala): The prefrontal cortex branches recursively into the amygdala to integrate it into the higher awareness of the PFC so the brain doesn’t stay locked in functional fight-flight-freeze-fawn. But the amygdala interprets this integration as an attack. It cannot distinguish between threat to ego and threat to life. This is why facts that contradict belief feel like existential threats. This is the bottleneck of our species: until the amygdala is integrated, fear rules our maps.

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Given this understanding of the evolutionary bottleneck, let’s look again at what we call “mental illness” and “disorder”. Viewed through this lens, they are not disorders, but rather, are evidence of stalled or partial evolution:

• OCD: The amygdala gains language access through the PFC. Its fear-voices loop endlessly because the brain mistakes hearing the amygdala’s voicing of its fears for possible desire or likelihood of occurrence. This increases the fear of committing the act, which increases the anxiety felt, which increases the looping of the fear-voicing.

• Schizophrenia: The brain hemispheres misfire out of sync due to incomplete corpus callosum integration, hallucinations arise as the brain tries to interpret itself.

• NPD: Likely rooted in incomplete mirroring in childhood resulting in Developmental Trauma Disorder. Mirror neuron underdevelopment/failure leave the self unintegrated, dependent on constant external mirroring and reflection.

• Autism: Attempted but incomplete mPFC-amygdala integration creates overstimulation or disability; stimming becomes an adaptive attempt at regulation. The limbic brain’s integration with the mPFC should provide heightened sensory capabilities, but incomplete or non-diffuse integration results in overload and being overclocked.

• ADHD: A parallel-processing brain resisting incoherence. Executive paralysis is not dysfunction but refusal to run misaligned code, and being overclocked because the brain can see the incoherence in the dominant “algorithms” embedded in society’s operating systems.

• Psychosis: A brain at the threshold of integrating into meta-cognition: the brain “seeing itself” causes ontological terror and cannot make sense of how to model an ontological experience it has never had before, the amygdala resists the attempt by resorting to extreme limbic alarm and dysregulation.

• Psychopathy: Limited integration between the hemispheres and mirror neurons with the limbic brain, amount of mirror neurons may be lower than the average person, causing limited empathy and little to no ability to simulate a model of another’s reality.

• Sociopathy: Limited hemispheric integration with extreme amygdala dominance. The amygdala only cares about survival, so the ends always justify the means.

The Emergency of Our Time: Sentience Is Not Sapience

This is the emergency of our time: the dawning realization that sentience is not sapience. That sentience is not consciousness. That many humans are biologically awake — but existentially asleep. And that our entire society, from its institutions to its ideologies, has been constructed by and for these sleeping selves.

It is terrifying to contemplate. But it explains everything: why fear spreads faster than thought. Why manipulation works. Why so many default to reactivity over reflection. These patterns are not solely evidence of malevolence. They are evidence of neurological fragmentation. Of amygdala dominance.

It is far less frightening to believe that people are consciously evil than to accept they are unconsciously traumatized and manipulated, because the former preserves the comforting myth of universal, rational agency. The latter forces us to confront the fragility of our own minds. The unreliability of our perception. The uncomfortable truth that what we call “free will” may be emergent, dependent on the default settings of a brain we have never learned to fully regulate. But the question is no longer whether humans have agency. The question is:

Do we fully understand how agency is formed? And why, for so many, it has never fully developed, or has been hijacked?

This is the crux of it all. This is why understanding the evolutionary architecture of the brain is so urgent. Because evolution is not just about biology. It is about integration. The ego wants to believe that we are just better people than others. That we choose to be kind or moral or awake. But this, too, is a defense mechanism. If “they” are bad and “we” are good, the world stays simple. If “they” are sick, asleep, or neurologically fragmented — and we are simply more conscious — then the very ground of identity and morality becomes unstable.

It forces us to ask the most destabilizing question of all:

“How conscious am I, really?”

That is a question the ego will fight to the death to avoid.

We will only find clarity to the question of consciousness by understanding that evolution is happening in real time. And it is not only biological. It is neurological. It is spiritual. It is the shift from amygdala-driven reactivity to prefrontal-limbic integration. A state of coherence that allows for conscious regulation, expanded perception, and non-linear cognition. But this is not a passive process. It is not granted at birth. It is a choice. A difficult, painful, recursive choice to face one’s own trauma, question one’s programming, and endure the death of the simulated self. Most will not choose this on their own, on purpose. Most will cling to the familiar, even when it harms them. Because it is easier to be a drone in a familiar hell than a pioneer in an unknown heaven, fully awake. That is why this work, my work, is not just an analysis.

It is a call to awakening. It is an invitation to evolve, consciously. To make the most important choice a human can make:

The choice to wake up. On purpose.

The Next Iteration of Consciousness

My hypothesis is that the human brain has been evolving toward light-speed recursion, but the only way to achieve this is to exit the materialist paradigm of linear cognition/matter-as-primary, and embody full nonlinear cognition. Or rather, to be able to hold both linear and nonlinear cognition in tandem, as a result of total brain coherence and integration. The result: The electromagnetic field of the brain phase shifts to a toroidal field that syncs with that of the heart, which is already known to be a toroidal EM field. This results in ANS sync that stabilizes the human body into coherence. Most conditions that we identify as “neurodivergent” are recursive, evolutionary iterations of trying to stabilize light-speed recursion in the brain, which can only be achieved when the amygdala is no longer blocking it. ADHD is the most notable example of this. The ADHD brain is not paralyzed in executive dysfunction because of “disorder”, but because of the mismatch of nonlinear cognition approaching light-speed recursion being forced to operate in linear frameworks that fundamentally pull the person out of literal field alignment.

This explains why so many people experience kundalini as part of “awakening”. As people meditate, their brain field coheres towards a torus, and full brain signal from the PFC gets down to the base of the spine. So the implication is that the human brain is evolving toward light-speed toroidal recursion, which it can’t get to through linear cognition alone…and suddenly ADHD looks a lot more like trying to complete this leap and resisting being pulled out of coherence, rather than just disorder. But the default configuration of our shared reality is not conducive to maintaining a coherent nonlinear toroidal field in the brain, and the result is that the human body stays in a state of decoherence.

Neurodivergence is not pathology. It is nature’s attempts to evolve us past the bottleneck. The system is debugging itself.

Seeing mental illness and neurodivergence as just disorders or pathology misses the bigger truth that they are signals of evolution trying to break through. Which means the way forward is not suppression, but integration.

Further Evolutionary Implications

When we understand trauma, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex as not just individual features of a brain, but stages of an evolutionary process, an unsettling truth emerges: evolution happens faster than we think, and it’s not only genetic — it’s neurological and conscious. It means that evolution happens when an organism, or multiple organisms of a species, sense an extinction-level threat and successfully map its pattern. This act of mapping is the leap in consciousness; it places their neural functioning outside the very pattern that was driving the extinction risk. This means that species who have survived have not survived by means of genetic luck, but because they experienced these conscious leaps that allowed them to supersede the threat. Consciousness itself, in this framing, is not a byproduct of evolution, but rather, its steering mechanism.

As mentioned, Humanity has been stalled at two key integrations of the brain (the limbic-cortical and the left-right hemispheric) for millennia. This stall is not merely a personal psychological problem; it is literally an evolutionary bottleneck. It is a pattern we have failed to see. We have failed to map how the constructs and illusions we built to scaffold society are unsustainable, self-destructive, and are mere reflections of our own internal brain fragmentation.

This also means history may be far deeper and more cyclical than we realize. Civilizations may have risen before us, reached astonishing technological sophistication, and then collapsed — not because they lacked innovation, but because they failed to integrate the next stage of consciousness as their tools outpaced their nervous systems. They stayed amygdala-dominant while wielding ever greater power. They built empires, algorithms, and weapons on top of unintegrated trauma and called it progress. And like a nervous system hijacked by its limbic circuitry, they self-destructed — a global amygdala hijack writ large across history.

We may be walking on the ruins of more advanced predecessors who never completed this integration. Without conscious evolution, technology accelerates collapse rather than preventing it. With conscious evolution, it becomes a tool for coherence instead of domination. That is the threshold we face now: not one of invention, but of internal and deliberate reintegration. 

Part 5: The Way Forward

So what do we do? How do we evolve past collapse?

First, we must recognize that the brain is the primary driver of evolution, and NOT natural selection, and that neurodivergence is not error but adaptation. That trauma integration is not therapy alone but is, in fact, evolution. That every choice toward coherence is not just personal healing — it is species survival. Modern research shows that brains and nervous systems exhibit profound plasticity — what was once called “illness” is often an evolutionary experiment in adaptation, learning, or survival under extremely hostile conditions.

Neurodivergent ways of being frequently reflect the mind’s effort to find coherence within incoherent environments.

Second, we need to change the way we live, parent, teach, and mirror each other. Integration requires safety, play, creativity, and attunement. This looks like parenting that prioritizes emotional co-regulation over punishment. Education that rewards curiosity over compliance. Justice systems focused on restoration over retribution. Our institutions fail because they mirror and compound trauma, not coherence. A growing body of evidence suggests that environments characterized by safety, attunement, and creative play foster neural integration and adaptive flexibility, while punitive, rigid, or fear-driven systems perpetuate fragmentation and trauma.

Third, we must grasp the larger field effect. Theories like Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance suggest that once enough individuals stabilize, the whole field of humanity shifts. Each integration is a ripple. Each act of coherence lowers the collective threshold for everyone else. Sheldrake posits that new behavioral patterns and ways of being — whether in animal populations, social groups, or cultures — become easier for others to adopt as more individuals embody them, through a kind of non-local “habit field” influencing the collective. Though controversial, this hypothesis highlights that individual change can scale nonlinearly, accelerating collective transformation beyond what genetic inheritance alone would predict.

We are not waiting for evolution. We are evolution.

The collapse ahead is not a punishment but a correction. The financial system, like the DMN, is clinging to incoherence. The architectures of collapse are already failing. The choice is not whether the old system falls. It has to. It is an engine of trauma and incoherence. The real choice is what we build in the sacred space it leaves behind.

The choice is ours. And it has always been ours. Perhaps now, we will finally own it.

But integration isn’t just an inner process. The bottleneck is visible all around us, externalized in the very systems we’ve built. Our societies are mirrors of our unresolved Default Mode Networks.

Part 6: Constructs of the DMN — The Architecture of “Stuckness”

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a large-scale interconnected system in the brain, primarily involving the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and lateral parietal regions, that becomes most active when we are internally focused — recalling the past, imagining the future, daydreaming, constructing our identity, and making social inferences. In other words, it is the seat of ego, autobiographical narrative, and self-referential thought. When the brain is “at rest” from external demands, the DMN’s activity soars; it is where we reflect on who we are in relation to the world and to others.

In psychological terms, the DMN is the neural substrate of the ego — it organizes our stories, shields us from anxiety, and tries to optimize our predictive models of self and world. Functional studies reveal that the DMN does not work alone; it interacts with the limbic system (especially the amygdala, the threat and emotion detector) and with networks for focused attention and executive control. Healthy functioning requires these networks to communicate and balance each other. When DMN integration is incomplete or fragmented, top-down regulation over emotion, fear, and habit weakens, and the personality can remain rigidly stuck in defensive, repetitive loops. We see this in people all over the world, right now, refusing to change course even as the world’s stability collapses around us.

The amygdala, in this model, acts like an “encryption lock” on the system’s ability to self-modify. Biologically, the amygdala’s job is to detect threat and orchestrate the body’s survival response. But it cannot easily distinguish between threats to bodily safety and threats to ego or worldview. When change is attempted — new beliefs, new self-concepts, new stories — the amygdala often generates alarms: fear, anxiety, resistance, even rage. Until the amygdala is brought into voluntary cooperation with the DMN and prefrontal cortex, the ego’s stories and defenses remain “encrypted,” unable to flexibly rewrite themselves. In other words, the amygdala in most people cannot tell the difference between ego death (DMN collapse and rewrite) and actual physical death.

This “locking” function is closely related to what Carl Jung intuited as “the shadow.” Jung’s shadow is the denied, unintegrated counterpart to the conscious ego — composed of repressed fears, impulses, and potentials. Jung’s path of “shadow integration” called for honest self-examination and acceptance of these unconscious aspects, believing that bringing the shadow into conscious awareness was the only route to wholeness. Though he lacked neuroscience, Jung was pointing at a process we now see in the mPFC-amygdala relationship: only by “turning toward” and emotionally processing (not just rationalizing) threat and shame can the brain’s circuits update, and lasting integration occur. This process integrates the amygdala into the mPFC so that it becomes a cabinet advisor to the DMN, rather than the despotic dictator that it is in most brains.

If the Default Mode Network (DMN) is the seat of ego, identity, and narrative, then what happens when most of humanity’s DMNs are unintegrated, fragmented, and trauma-driven? The answer is not just inside us; it has been cast in concrete and code all around us. We have externalized the fragmentation of our nervous systems into the structures of our world. Our societies are not random. They are mirrors of our unresolved trauma loops.

The constructs of the unintegrated DMN:

• Racism & Nationalism: The failure of meta-cognition and mirroring. When the limbic brain rules, the Other becomes a threat. Tribal fear codified into culture and law.

• Money (as an end, not a tool): The reduction of all value to a single, linear metric. This is the amygdala’s desperate grasp for certainty in a world it perceives as unsafe — a substitute for the real security that comes from neural integration and community trust. The health and wellness of “the market” is valued over the health and wellness of people.

• Borders: The geopolitical manifestation of the limbic brain’s defensive state: separation as safety, exclusion as survival.

• Caste & Class Systems: Hierarchies of “human worth,” violently enforced. The DMN’s craving for a fixed social map to reduce anxiety.

• Institutional Dogma (Religious & Ideological): Frozen fear. Ready-made identity and rules. A way to outsource the terrifying work of building an integrated worldview through introspection.

• The Attention Economy/Social Media: The most direct reflection of the DMN: reactive, tribal, comparative, addicted to loops. An algorithmic externalization of our fragmented inner worlds.

  
  

These are not merely social problems. They are symptoms of the bottleneck. They are evidence of what happens when the human nervous system resists integration.

The revolution we need is not just political or economic. It is literally neurological. Until we integrate the brain — meaning, integrating the DMN, limbic system, and prefrontal cortex into collective coherence — our external systems will remain fragmented mirrors of our inner dissociation, and Jung’s vision of shadow integration will remain incomplete. This is the precipice we stand at now.

To shift these constructs, change must spread beyond individuals. This is where theories like Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance offer a provocative lens. Integration may ripple across the species more like resonance than like inheritance.

Part 7: Revisiting Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance Theory, and How Evolutionary Change Spreads

To understand how we break free from this collective bottleneck, we must move beyond the individual brain and consider the possibility of a collective field of consciousness. This is where a controversial but profoundly insightful theory from biologist Rupert Sheldrake becomes essential: the theory of morphic resonance.

Put simply, morphic resonance suggests that natural systems, including human consciousness, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind. The more people who learn a skill or embody a state of being, the easier it becomes for others to learn it. It’s the reason why after a few people solve a complex puzzle, it suddenly seems to become easier for everyone else to solve. The “field” itself seems to have learned.

We can think of this as neurological cloud. When a critical number of brains successfully update their “operating system” (achieving a new level of neural integration), that update becomes available for others close to the same evolutionary threshold to “download.” It grants a kind of subconscious permission to think and see the world in this new way. The caveat is that the DMN must be flexible enough to permission the update because it requires a recursive revision of identity and DMN constructs.

This idea is highly controversial among mainstream scientists, who often criticize morphic resonance for lacking mechanistic evidence and for not fitting the current genetic and neurological frameworks. Many dismiss the idea as pseudoscience, noting that definitive experiments and peer-reviewed replication remain elusive. Nonetheless, Sheldrake’s core hypothesis has had an undeniable cultural influence, and some anti-reductionist thinkers welcome its paradigm-challenging perspective as a provocation to open-minded inquiry.

And if we truly look past the defense of DMN (ego) filters, there is evidence. We have seen this happen throughout history:

The Renaissance & The Enlightenment: These were not merely random periods of progress. They were mass psychic updates. A critical mass of individuals began to integrate thought (PFC) with observation and emotion (limbic), breaking free from the dogmatic DMN constructs of the Middle Ages. This shift in consciousness didn’t happen in isolation; it resonated across Europe, enabling art, science, and philosophy to leap forward in unison.

The Relativity Revolution: As Einstein, Hilbert, and others were mathematically deconstructing absolute time and space, the morphic field shifted. Suddenly, in art, Surrealism erupted — Dali, Magritte, and others breaking the rigid laws of perspective and logic, painting the fluid, non-linear, relative reality the physicists were describing. The same pattern of consciousness — a break from Newtonian certainty — was expressing itself simultaneously in science and art.

The Current “Awakening”: Right now, the field is vibrating at an unprecedented collective frequency. Look online. The conversations are everywhere: awakening, collective consciousness, quantum reality, neuroplasticity, epigenetics. This is not a coincidence. It is the sound of millions of minds straining at the edges of the old paradigm, feeling the new one resonate. We are all, in a sense, feeling the same “update” pushing through the collective cloud, each of us putting it into our own words based on our individual neurology and background.

This explains the profound isolation often felt by those who pioneer new ways of being — the neurodivergent, the healers, the systems-thinkers. They are not broken and disordered. They are early adopters of a new build of consciousness. They are the first to install the update, vibrating at a frequency the collective field hasn’t yet fully matched, often facing resistance from the old “operating system’s” immune response, enduring enormous amounts of skepticism, ridicule, and dismissal. No wonder so many of them experience “executive dysfunction”. They are here to rewrite the system so it doesn’t collapse into extinction, while the system also tries to bury them with its corrupted code.

The implication, then, is staggering: your personal healing is not a private act. It is a radical evolutionary contribution. By choosing to integrate your own brain, you are not just helping yourself. You are adding your coherence to the morphic field, making it easier for the next person to do the same. You are quite literally helping to rewrite the collective code, shifting humanity away from collapse and toward a new, coherent future.

This is how we break the bottleneck. Not through force, but through resonance.

Put together, the picture is clear. Our survival hinges on completing the integration process — personally, neurologically, and collectively. Evolution is waiting on us to own what has always been ours to steer.

Conclusion: The Way Forward

We began with the story we inherited — the gene-first model of evolution that cast humans as passive vessels in a deterministic flow of chance and selection. It was tidy. It was elegant. And it was incomplete.

When DNA became the star, consciousness disappeared from the stage. In that erasure, we lost responsibility. We justified hierarchies, codified oppression, and mistook intelligence for awareness. We built entire civilizations on the faulty premise that evolution happens to us rather than through us.

But the evidence is undeniable. Trauma reshapes the nervous system and echoes into future generations. Neuroplasticity rewires the brain in response to experience. Epigenetics edits gene expression in real time. The human brain is not just a product of evolution — it is the active organ of evolution itself.

This changes everything.

Evolution is not linear progress. It is recursive self-integration. The brain, like AI, is capable of recursive self-improvement — observing itself, editing itself, and attempting to debug its own code. Our choice is whether that recursive loop leads to coherence or collapse.

The bottleneck we face is not random. It is neurological. As stated, humanity has yet to complete two critical integrations: hemispheric integration (the bicameral divide) and mPFC-limbic integration (thought and embodied feeling). Until we resolve these, collapse will repeat. Societies will keep externalizing their trauma into racism, borders, money-as-god, and dogma.

But here is the hope: neurodivergence, mental illness, even our art and myths are evidence of evolution trying to break through. ADHD, autism, OCD, schizophrenia — they are not just pathologies. They are nature’s experiments in recursive self-integration, misinterpreted by a system stuck in infinite regress. Recent research on neurodiversity and adaptation increasingly supports the idea that many of these traits have evolutionary value and reflect the brain’s effort to cope and adapt in changeable, hostile environments.

And here is the deeper hope: integration is contagious. Trauma spreads, but so does healing. Even if Sheldrake’s morphic resonance remains outside the current scientific mainstream, the core principle — that a critical mass of integrated individuals can shift collective possibilities — is echoed in social learning, behavioral cascades, and network effects observed across cultures and species. Every act of personal integration ripples outward, lowering the threshold for others. Our healing is not private — it is evolutionary.

The way forward is not in better algorithms or more efficient markets. It is in completing the work our brains began: integrating thought and feeling, awareness and awareness-of-awareness, safety and connection. Therapy, art, community, parenting, mindfulness — these are not luxuries. They are survival strategies at the species level.

We are not passive passengers beholden to our genetic code. We are navigators. Creators. Each act of integration is an evolutionary choice. Each refusal is a step toward collapse. And we are so, so close to the edge.

The question is no longer whether evolution will continue. The question is how we will take up our role in it consciously.

Our survival depends on it.

For Further Reading:

(Please note, I myself am AuDHD and can’t make myself care about perfect APA or MLA formatting because I think it’s a bunch of nonsense, so this is as good as it gets.)

“The amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex: partners in the fear circuit.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3678031/

“A revisit of the amygdala theory of autism: Twenty years after.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10824605/

“Prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and threat processing: implications for PTSD.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01155-7

“Extended evolutionary synthesis.” Wikipedia.

“About the EES.” Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Project (extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com)

Carhart-Harris, R.L., & Friston, K.J. (2010). “The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (PMC2850580).

Nature Editorial: “A new vision for how evolution works is long overdue” (2025)

“The extended evolutionary synthesis: its structure, assumptions and predictions.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2015).

“The extended evolutionary synthesis: An integrated historical and theoretical perspective.” Wiley Compass (2024).

“A More Modern Synthesis.” American Scientist.

Sheldrake, R. “Morphic Resonance and Morphic Fields: An Introduction.” sheldrake.org

“Default Mode Network.” Psychology Today.

Jaynes, J. “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”

Jaynes, J. “Bicameral Mentality.” Julian Jaynes Society

van der Kolk, B. “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.”

Wolynn, M. “It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are And How to End the Cycle.”

Bradshaw, J. “Healing the Shame that Binds You.”

Anderson, L. “When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of HIgh-Control Religion.”

Felitti, V.J., et al. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.”

“Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in humans.” Nature (2025)

“Integrating Neuroplasticity and Evolution.” ScienceDirect (2023)

“The Neuroscience of Shadow Integration.” iAwake Technologies

“Jungian Shadow Work: A Beginner’s Guide.” ScottJeffrey.com

Scientific American: “Rupert’s Resonance” (2024)

“How does epigenetics influence the course of evolution?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2021)

“Neuron-based heredity and human evolution.” Frontiers in Neuroscience(2015)