Imagine our solar system forming and heating up from clouds of star dust pulled together by gravity, our planet congealing from the swirling mass, gradually cooling and almost imperceptibly bridging the gap between non-organic and organic matter, gradually and eventually developing more and more complex forms of evolving life that struggle to survive.
Picture man's emergence from the lower primates and his subsequent slow spread in a thin layer to all points of the globe, gradually being culturally influenced by different environments, and just as gradually increasing in numbers that begin to not only encompass more and more global space, but also to remix in newer and stronger cultural combinations.
Picture man within this completely intertwined and codependent ecological system on earth, the first form of life on the planet with the technology (a natural result of consciousness) to begin to attempt to control it's own evolution, the most recent graphic example being the emerging ability to manipulate his genetic code.
Imagine this 'leading edge' (personified by man) as well as the rest of the entire global 'preorganism' becoming more and more unified as the barriers of it's lesser organizations gradually dissolve, and information passes more and more freely between all points within the preorganism/ organism.
Imagine this global organism beginning to exert more and more interaction with, and more and more control over, an interconnected section of the entire universal energy system within which it resides and within which it grows, consuming more and more resources and taking up more and more space.
Imagine other myriad organisms of this same scale scattered throughout our four dimensional energy sphere, all at roughly equivalent points in space-time, all around the same approximate level and rate of development, and all struggling to survive.
Now picture these organisms reaching the peak of their power and gradually waning to be incorporated and superseded by more advanced pre-organisms/organisms within the total energy system - emerging through the connections between the previous organisms in a flowing, interconnecting evolutionary process.
Now it is necessary to see this entire scenario not only as evolving in three dimensions, but as a smoothly flowing organic design in four dimensions, all 'parts' occupying completely essential positions within the total four dimensional energy system, and existing simultaneously as a series of events and eternally.
I would like to call this property of the universe existing both as a series of events and eternally 'sequential-eternalism.' It is a 'dualism' that is again, not unlike the 'wave/particle' duality in quantum mechanics.
Correlating works, ideas or systems:
The study of cosmic evolution
The "Out of Africa" anthropological model (the most plausible explanation for the evolution of man)
The history of human civilization
The science of Genetics
Pierre Tieliard De Chardin's Omega Point Theory (a brilliant look at a possible similar destiny of the earth) The probability of large numbers of life supporting planets within our universe.
The emerging science of Complexity ( the study of the emergence of complex structures from more simple structures in virtually all areas of human inquiry)
The Global Economy
The Internet
The fifty percent order, fifty percent chaos mathematical characteristic of emerging complex structures, plus the length of time that generations of star systems take to synthesize heavy elements strongly implies an overall rate of development of life that is universal within our universal energy system.