Evolution

Each soul is an individuated particle of consciousness, which has temporarily fallen in love with its individuality. So charmed has it become with this individuality, in fact, that it has temporarily lost sight of its universal nature and come to believe it IS the individuality.

The soul in this state of identification is called the ego.

As the ego explores, exhausts and eventually become disillusioned with its separate existence, the soul never changes in essence. It is pure consciousness, or awareness, untainted by its individuated content. It is this power of awareness that gives the ego the ability to learn and grow.

The limited is constrained by its limitation. Only by contact with the unlimited can it integrate what it thinks it is not.

There comes a time for each individual when the potentials of its particular uniqueness have been exhausted. This is a necessary part of the process because it is only when an individuated particle of consciousness has fallen OUT of love with its individuality that it becomes motivated to rediscover what it truly IS.

This, in a nutshell, is the drama of creation - or at least one version of it.

Evolution is a slow process – so slow that those progressing through it often fail to recognize or understand what is going on. In the final act, as evolution proceeds toward an understanding of what the soul truly IS, the process becomes uplifting. But in the long slog when the soul is experiencing the inherent limitations of individual existence – hunger, thirst, pain, injury, failure, death, thwarted desire, unrequited love – the process can be excruciating. In fact, it’s so painful at times that the ego simply can’t face it. This results in denial, or repression, a process that divides egoity into “conscious” and “subconscious” portions. But the consequences of action are never lost, so while this division provides temporary respite from the awareness of pain, the pain itself never leaves. It is only displaced, and continues to manifest in one way or other, until consciousness manages to penetrate the experience, and through acceptance and understanding, dissolve and break it down.

If evolution is sometimes painful, it is also sometimes exhausting. That’s why, regardless of how good or bad the day, no matter how exciting, insightful and exhilarating our experience has been, each night we eagerly abandon it and fall asleep. That is to say we forget our egoity and its physical metaphor, the body, and in deep sleep, enter at least for a time, the realm of our universal identity. And at the end of life, we enter the big sleep. Only this time we abandon awareness of the body for long enough that it decays, and we have to incarnate in a new one before we can resume the process of evolution again.

The pain and exhaustion of our former lives would be overwhelming if we could remember the details, which is why we cannot. But the effects of past causes can never be lost. So while the specific memories oremain hidden from us, when we are confronted with similar situations again – usually repeated because we failed to resolve them to our satisfaction the first time – the associated feelings return along with them. These mysterious feelings, that seem to come from nowhere, we call “moods”.

As each soul is different, so the course of its evolution is different, with many ins and outs, ups and downs along the way. In some incarnations, desires are gratified; in others, not. Sometimes we are rich, sometimes we are poor. In some lives the body is sick and weak; in others it is well and strong. In some lives we may be famous; in others, we are unknown.

Some waves are big and some are small. Big waves provide the drama of the creation; they heave and soar, born of violent upheavals, racing through life whipped by storms of desire, finally crashing with a frothy roar. Little waves arise too, making their gentle way through the world with barely a trace, falling peacefully and unnoticed on the shore.

This post is dedicated to you all.