“Evolve or Repeat,” is a concise statement that’s been echoed by philosophers, theologians, shamans, and sages for centuries. Its power shines like the sun. Your experiences; every mistake, success, or failure, teaches you something about yourself, and the adjustments you need to make for your future happiness. Evolution is a learning game. The goal is to understand what works for you, and what doesn’t.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santyana
Like almost everything in nature, evolution is fractal. Civilizations evolve, societies evolve, communities evolve, tribes evolve and families evolve, but most importantly we each evolve independently. Our evolution drives everything else; it’s a quest for insight, experience, wisdom, and love. Everyone enters the Great Wide World to work on their spiritual development and share experiences with each other.
An Individual Task
Personal evolution, however, is an individual task, it happens internally. We can’t do it for anyone else and no one can do it for us. Often we think our mission is to help others change and grow, interfering with their work, instead of focusing on our own. We should be learning from them, which is why they were put in our path, but we attempt to change them instead of changing ourselves, which complicates our evolution and theirs.
“Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.” ~ Tom Robbins
Numerous spiritual disciplines suggest that life lessons are served up repeatedly until we learn them. Each time the lesson repeats, it becomes harsher, until the pain and suffering are too much to bear and hopefully, we finally understand the lesson. When we realize everything depends on ourselves, not what is happening externally, we begin to grasp that we can only change and grow ourselves, not those who share our lives.
I Fought the Law and the Law Won
Every situation and experience in life is an opportunity to learn, grow and evolve. While the evolutionary process is difficult, you will attain the results you seek when you follow nature rather than culture. Culture in the 21st Century does more to retard your evolution than hasten it. Natural laws will guide you on the evolutionary journey, and when you abide by those laws on your adventure, happiness, and joy are the outcomes. Natural laws are the guardrails on your rollercoaster ride in the Great Wide World.
“In everything you do, be careful to treat others in the same way you’d want them to treat you, for that is the essence of all the teachings of the Law.” – Matthew 7:12
As you navigate the path that leads to your destiny, every decision you make, big or small, can change your life’s trajectory. A few key principles can help you keep it between the guardrails.
- Everything that happens is a learning experience.
- Personal experience is required to understand the truth.
- You only struggle with what you don’t understand.
- Understanding is vital to your evolution.
- You are the only one who can effectuate your evolution.
- Your destiny is inevitable, it is your blueprint.
- Culture attempts to teach you to avoid your destiny instead of using it to find happiness.
Instead of complaining about the trials and tribulations in life, embrace them, they are life’s teachers. When you ignore a lesson, your struggle and suffering will increase until you cannot ignore it any longer. Once you understand the lesson and make the necessary adjustments; happiness, and joy replace the pain and suffering. That’s when you know you’ve aced the exam and can move on to the next lesson. Life is a never-ending education.
Fear Not
Fear is a major impediment to evolution. A figment of your imagination that makes it difficult or impossible to accept new ideas and behaviors. Traumas, fears, and phobias reside in the unconscious or reactive mind. As you evolve and become more conscious, you become less susceptible to fear and trauma. One of the missteps in present society is that we rarely allow our children to experiment and test boundaries themselves. We yell or redirect them, so they never understand the lesson personally and codify their self-confidence. The next time they face a similar situation, they do so with fear.
Another way to look at it I suppose, is that fear is the perfect indicator of our evolution. There’s no escaping it, we’re hardwired. However, as we develop our frontal lobes or neocortex, ( the part of our brain that separates us from the lower beasts) we can override our lizard-brained instincts. Sadly there’s no way to conquer our lizard brain completely. Still, there are opportunities to fire up the neocortex and better understand the emotional responses tied to our fear and trauma.
Pride Goes Before the Fall
Pride is another barrier that can impede evolution. It may just be the root of all evil. It was the reason along with envy that Satan was cast down to Earth from Heaven. While self-respect might be a good thing, self-importance, conceit, and pride will stop your evolution dead in its tracks. Feeling satisfaction for an achievement is okay, but when those things define you, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. One spiritual belief suggests that the consequence of clinging too tightly to those things that will inevitably pass away, is pain and suffering.
“Your boast becomes a prophecy of a future failure. The higher you lift yourself up in pride, the harder you’ll fall in disgrace.” ~ Proverbs 16:18 TPT
Pride is complicated too because it can carry positive connotations. Self-worth, self-respect, and self-confidence are positive qualities. On the other side of the fence though we have; arrogance, conceit, egotistical, high-mindedness, haughtiness, insolence, pompous, presumptuousness, self-importance, vanity, and hundreds more. It’s one of those things that is painfully obvious in others but we seem unable to recognize it in ourselves. Practicing humility is perhaps the best method for dealing with pride, and the golden rule as expressed in Matthew 7:12 above, is the most important law to guide your evolution here in the Great Wide World.