The diversity of life on our planet is simply staggering. According to LiveScience, there may be as many as one trillion species of life on Earth. Amazingly, each species has preexisting origins and modifications that have helped successive generations survive and adapt to their environments. This is the theory of evolution in biology. It is a movement toward a natural evolution that benefits the species and attempts to guarantee its survival and full potential.
What about humans? How do we fit into this theory given that we have the ability of self-reflection and choice? We can step beyond the boundaries of instinct like no other known species on earth. But do we? How many choices do you make in a day that are conscious and not just mechanically produced from your store of memories, thoughts, and emotions? How often have you made a decision or acted according to what was needed in the moment in an objective manner?
Sadhguru explains the deeper meaning of evolution and how it shapes our natural tendency to want to become inclusively conscious.
Sadhguru: The word “evolution” means something slowly transforming itself into a higher possibility.
Charles Darwin told you that you were all monkeys, and then your tail fell away and you became human—you know the story. When you were a monkey, you did not choose to become a man. Nature just pushed you on. When you are in animal nature, evolution anyway happens—you don’t really have to participate in it. But once you become human, once a certain level of consciousness has come, there is no more unconscious evolution for you. Only if you consciously seek, it will happen.
If you look at it with the necessary awareness, you will see the very process of life—whatever we refer to as the process of living—is a certain seeking, certain urge to include, evolve, and grow into our ultimate nature. The very nature of the being is such that it wants to go to the ultimate dimension—whatever that is.
This is a human predicament. This is not my invention. Nature is catering for a chimpanzee to become a human being. I am just catering to the human longing to evolve into something else. It is life’s idea that everything should evolve. We are just trying to serve that idea because if you don’t serve the life process, you will only be crushed by it.
Nothing else will happen because it is too big a juggernaut. It is not something that you fight with; it is something that you go with. You don’t know where it begins or where it ends, but it’s on. It is constantly longing to be something more than what it is right now.
It is the pulse of this juggernaut that Darwin felt—that everything is longing to go ahead. He tried to explain it in his own way, which became the theory of evolution, but essentially what he is telling you is if you look at the whole thing—from a single-celled animal to yourself—as one large life process, it has constantly been striving for millions of years.
It has reached a point where you are floating on the surface. Now that you have reached such a point, if you have a working intelligence, I think you will use this capability to hasten this process—you don’t want to just go at the pace of evolution that is happening in nature. A spiritual process is only talking about accelerating life’s desire. We are gassing up life’s desire to move on into a different possibility. To use a more biological term, you want to mutate. If you want to know liberation in this lifetime, you definitely need to mutate because evolution is a long process.
When you sit in a certain space or in the presence of a certain energy that seems to be a bigger possibility than what you are, that is the time to simply sit.
That is not the time to ask for something. If you simply sit, you will get the necessary nutrient to evolve very fast, to mutate from one dimension to another. Once you grow into a certain possibility, everything that is possible in that dimension will anyway happen to you. Meditating, going to the temple or sitting with a guru is not a time to ask, it is a time to imbibe and allow yourself to move into a higher possibility.
Plus receive a free eBook by Sadhguru
