Thanks for pointing out this excellent reference Rich! Reading it, I've come to realize something about what I've been perceiving as a difference in our ideas re the "linearity" of evolutionary processes. I.e., in a prior comment about this chapter, you said: "His explication of evolution as not "linear" but rather "circular" progress..." I had previously understood your meaning of "nonlinearity" to imply that evolutionary "progress" is heavily culturally contingent and not ultimately orchestrated by the supramental; that the evolution of consciousness always proceeds by a series of "three steps forward, two steps back," or even the converse to produce what appears to be devolution. My view has been that though that is often the appearance of events, on larger time scales, one can discern an underlying almost inexorable "progress." E.g., while the destruction of 50-80% of Earth's plant and animal genera by the K-T extinction event may have then appeared to be a nihilistic horror, it in fact opened the ecological niches necessary for the eventual evolution of the human species. So I tend to see it as an example of the deeply "progressive" nature of evolution, though certainly mediated by extremely complex, holonomically emergent multiple-loop feedback processes. -- There are of course many other examples on a cosmological level. If this is what you mean when you decry "linear" explanations, then we may in fact be in full agreement. In other words, (sometimes horrific) regressive events are nevertheless often required by a deeper circular process of inexorably "progressive" evolution. Sri Aurobindo says this beautifully in the "circular" progress quote to which I think you're referring above: ...And this process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress. For in each case the lower faculty is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher faculties. Without this succession and attempt at separate assimilation we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive domination of a part of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and unduly subjected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development. With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared... ~ ron