Is It Really All About Going Back to Where We Started?
If I couldn't accept the idea that this world is flawed and that we are its corrupted denizens, then neither could I accept the seemingly more benign idea that all of life is about getting back to where we started. Could it be that untold millennia of human history—all of our aspirations and attainments, all of our struggles and failures, all of our hopes and fears, the love, the pain, and all of the joys that characterize the human experience—all of these are nothing more than the way back to where we began? If you've ever missed your exit on a limited access highway and had to double back for many miles in order to correct your oversight, you know how frustrating and pointless that feels. Is it possible that the purpose of this life has no point beyond retracing our steps back to where we went wrong at the dawn of time? In retrospect, I can see that my passion for evolutionary spirituality had its roots in this very question.
It's not that I find the idea that we are here to undo past choices that separated our consciousness from God totally without merit. To an extent, it answers some of the big questions about why life can be so hard at times and full of pain. A world peopled by beings walled off from their divine source is bound to be a world fraught with difficulties. I can even find great meaning in the idea that successive lives in this world afford us an opportunity to make the corrections that will re-awaken our true nature as sons and daughters of God. It is certainly more logical and more consistent with belief in a loving God than the idea, pervasive in the Western Christian culture I grew up in, that we have only this one life and that our eternal fate is determined by either (depending on which sect of that Christian culture one happens to belong to) the virtues we manage to develop or the faith we happen to affirm while we are here on this earth. A God who gives us every opportunity to come back to our divine inheritance is surely a more loving God than one who gives us one shot at it and then leaves us to figure out the rules for making the grade. Better to think of this world as a school for wayward souls than as a cruel tryout for heaven, where only a fraction will make the cut.
But still the question why overshadows these explanations of life's travails. Why, if we were created in the image of God and have an ultimate destiny to return to God, are we even in this loop, cycling in and out of this world, making such slow progress, and suffering so much along the way? After all, it is supposedly God's image in which we were created. Couldn't God have made us such that we didn't have the all-too-obvious propensity to mess things up? It seems odd that the first thing a being made in the image of God would do is turn its back on God—a kind of design flaw, we might speculate. More disturbing still, what if, once we suck it up and do what has to be done to re-attain the state of oneness, we fall into separation all over again? Will we have to redo the whole process of return? Will it just go on and on like that forever? If the answer to that question is yes, I cannot think of a more bleak and futile existence. Yet if the answer is no, that there will be something in the re-attained state of oneness that includes a safeguard against falling away from God again, then we're back to the same basic problem: Why didn't the all-powerful Creator just make us that way in the first place and spare all of us a lot of trouble and pain?
I remember the first time I articulated this question. I was an idealistic seventeen-year-old attending my first conference at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach. I had been reading for a couple of years about the American psychic Edgar Cayce and many of the topics covered in his remarkable trance discourses. The ideas I'd encountered there had revolutionized my life and kindled the fire in my soul. I was at that glorious stage when I was discovering the answers to all of life's big questions and my encounter with the knottier questions that would arise later on was still safely tucked away in the future. Everything fit together beautifully but for that one sticking point: If it's possible to be a free-willed being, safely resting in oneness with God, which is the promised outcome of all this that we call life, then why didn't God make us that way in the first place?
I was sitting over a meal with an older conferee (he must have been at least twenty-five or maybe even thirty!) when I voiced this question. He looked at me and said, simply, “That's exactly the kind of being God is creating right now.” In a flash, my cosmology had changed. This “aha!” moment was, for me, the first glimmer of realization that the process of becoming has inherent meaning in the scheme of things.
From “Soul Growth” to Participation in Creation
It would be more than three decades before the full evolutionary significance of this idea had taken shape in my thinking. By then, the original realization that creation is a here-and-now process rather than an event in the distant past had continued to extend as an influence over every major development in my spiritual understanding. For example, the next shift in my cosmology had been the realization that this process is not about what God is making of us, but what we are making of ourselves. Later still I would see that the goal of all this making is not a static state but a dynamic one; that is, it's not just about resting in oneness but rather our being fitted out for conscious participation in something God is doing in and through time and space. The locus of attention began to shift from soul growth as an end in itself to soul growth as a means to an end. Eventually, the connection between our co-creative role and the great cosmological and biological evolution going on all around us slowly dawned on me, coming into sharpest focus in the pages of an inspirational writing practice I had adopted along the way.
In my ongoing study of diverse points of view concerning the spiritual path, I had been listening to a CD course in which the teacher reiterated the view that had always troubled me. He described an endless cycle of involution-evolution-involution in which God pours aspects of Godself (that would be us) out into materiality and then slowly grows back to timeless, spaceless oneness—only to eventually become “bored” and venture out again into this illusory world, thus starting the cycle all over again. Upon hearing this, all of my original objections to this world view arose. I still found it hard to believe that this life was about nothing more than going back to the beginning. But other things this teacher had said had been helpful enough that I was reluctant to simply dismiss his position in favor of my own biases. I figured it deserved a second look. Was he right about this endless cycle? If he was, I was back to the question that had haunted my earliest seeking.
As I took the question to the interior inquiry that inspirational writing facilitates for me, the first clarification came in a reminder that this was not a true/false question, but rather a matter of choice between two broadly different paths—each acceptable, each honorable. Release from bondage to the flesh and the earth is the reward of any spiritual path that honors the pre-eminence of Spirit, adheres to life practices and disciplines that awaken Spirit and moves the aspirant into the consciousness of oneness, my inner source told me. At the same time (the explanation continued), there is a distinctive path which breaks outside the endless cycle of descent into the world and ascent back to oneness. This path leads to full participation in the next developmental stage of creation. One on this path is not bound by the earth, yet is fully engaged with the earth. It is a path that embraces the ongoing evolutionary process, moving forward, so to speak, rather than endlessly cycling through the same territory. It is the path of conscious, chosen co-creatorship.
When this articulation of a distinctive path that seeks to participate in ongoing, forward-moving creation first took shape via my inspirational writing dialog more than a decade ago, I had not encountered it in any formalized teaching and I was eager to start talking and writing about it. In one sense, it was so obvious. How often do we hear the term co-create in the contemporary spiritual world? And yet, despite the ubiquitous appearance of the term, in the spiritual conversation of our day a true commitment to living from an evolutionary perspective is still largely overlooked by both traditional and contemporary forms of spiritual practice. I couldn't wait to share my epiphany. But my impulse to share notwithstanding, the same inner realization that opened my awareness to the evolutionary possibilities before us advised me to hold off on writing and teaching