Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 36

Then, the entity finds himself as a co-creator with the divine that is manifested in self. Thus, if the choice leads the entity into the exalting of self, it becomes as naught in the end. If the choice is that self is to be used in whatever manner—as in the talents, the attributes, the associations with its fellowmen—to glorify the Creative Force, then the body, the mind, finds that peace, that harmony, that purpose for which it chose to enter a material experience.

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Selfish occupation with one's own salvation, when the world is burning, is not a sign of spiritual regeneration.

Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: Empowering Human Evolution^*

Probably everyone has had the experience of lying in bed, half I asleep, after the alarm clock has gone off. You know it's time to wake up and get on with the day's responsibilities, but in that moment, nothing seems more desirable than to stay in bed and drift off to sleep. Maybe you hit the snooze button and fall asleep again, only to awaken yet again when the next alarm sounds. The need to get up is stronger now; there's less time to do the necessary rituals of the morning, and still the desire to drift back to sleep is overwhelming. And so it goes, the battle between wakefulness and sleep, until the will to wake up and get on with the day overcomes the will to sleep.

It's much like that with humanity's sleeping consciousness. We have seen how evolution has come to a critical juncture and landed us on the transition point between unconscious and conscious evolution. It's time now for us to wake up and get on with the work of conscious evolution. Some of us are so soundly asleep that much time will pass before the struggle to awaken even begins. Others are already up and about, and the bustling sounds of their activity in the world call to those of us who still inhabit that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. It remains for each of us to choose whether to arouse ourselves from our passive slumber or succumb to it and hit the snooze button; but the call is nonetheless upon us. As one man was told in his Cayce reading, “…To make the will one with the Creative Energy should be the desire of every being…”⁷⁹

The call to offer ourselves in service to Creative Energy is not an easy one to answer, for it beckons us to a new level of engagement with the unseen laws of the universe and a lifting of human nature beyond the point to which biological evolution has brought us. Consider both the grandeur and the sobering challenge in this statement from Rudolf Steiner concerning the evolutionary work at hand:

We must unite ourselves and become as one with the higher truths. We must not only know them, but be able, quite as a matter of course, to manifest and administer them in living actions, even as we ordinarily eat and drink. They must become our practice, our habit, our inclination. There must be no need to keep thinking about them in the ordinary sense; they must come to living expression through man himself; they must flow through him as the functions of life through his organism. Thus doth man ever raise himself, in a spiritual sense, to that same stature to which nature raised him in a physical sense.⁸⁰

Make no mistake; this call stretches us beyond the commitment to “personal spirituality” that most of us steeped in New Age sensibilities hold sacred. It is a spirituality based not primarily on our own attainment of peace, enlightened states of consciousness, or a happy, harmonious life (although those things may well be its bi-products), but rather on dedication to evolution as something greater than ourselves. As we'll be seeing, this is a path that will often call us to do what we least desire to do or that which is least comfortable to ourselves. Indeed, almost as if to remind me of just how tenaciously we hold to what is personally comfortable, I found myself struggling, plodding, and procrastinating my way through the writing of this section. There was always something more “necessary” to do—hadn't I better organize my house and paperwork first so that I could really concentrate on my writing without the distraction of undone tasks? There was always something more fun to do—surely I would find it easier to get into the flow after I'd relaxed with a cup of coffee and just one chapter of that great novel I was in the middle of. Then one evening I awoke in the middle of the night with a clear sense that this whole section, calling readers to give their all to the evolutionary cause, sounded just plain preachy.

You see, the truth is, I (like so many who will be reading these words) secretly want a spirituality that showers me with its benefits while making relatively few demands on me. To meditate because it makes me feel good means that when I skip it, I hurt no one but myself. Yet the evolutionary view reproaches me that to be faithful in meditation—which means doing it when I don't feel like it or sticking with a meditation session even when my mind is wildly uncooperative—is the very least I can do if I'm serious about this evolution of humanity's consciousness bit. To address my personal failings or areas of blindness because I have a more contented life when I am growing means that when I get lazy or allow myself to be engulfed by unconscious patterns, I am simply delaying the “soul growth” that sooner or later, one day—or one lifetime—or another, I will have to get around to. Yet the evolutionary perspective chides me that it is the epitome of self-centeredness to think that my soul growth is a private affair, only about me.

How many of us are out there, dilly-dallying and thinking we'll get around to it someday while in the meantime that need for awakened, committed evolutionaries becomes more and more apparent with each day's news? If every person who has felt that stir of excitement about the potentials of conscious evolution would truly get on with it, what kind of changes might we see even now in our world? Yet still, is it not the height of egotistical self-importance to think that we hold such responsibility?