But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse consciousness bypassed all those problems entirely, because the storehouse—as the ongoing product and accumulation of actual human actions—was itself created in part by evolutionary processes, inasmuch as human actions themselves underwent change, growth, development, and evolution. An added benefit of deploying the notion of the storehouse consciousness is that it helps explain what the Great Traditions mean when they speak of involution/evolution in a narrower and more specific sense (for example, what Plotinus called Efflux and Reflux): Involution/Efflux is the production of the manifest world via a successive manifestation or “stepping down” of Spirit into lesser and lesser versions of itself. Using Christian terms, Spirit goes out of itself (lila or kenosis) and steps
