Evolutionary Awakening - Inherit the Wind

My Evolutionary Awakening…

I naturally wake up early in the morning. I have all my life. At 4 am I’m wide awake with lots of energy. I gather my computer and either turn on music or flip on the TV and let the news of the world play softly in the background as I write and let myself wander inside the details of the day and the creative projects I am working on. On Wednesday, I was surprised to see that the movie INHERIT THE WIND was on with Spencer Tracey and Gene Kelly.

The last time I saw it was 1967. I was fourteen years old living in our English Tudor home on Long Island with my mom, dad and older brother.

I didn’t know it then, but I was fortunate to live inside a safe and nourishing home and life.

Mornings were always the same. My mom (who actually looked like Donna Reed) would wear her apron, move around the kitchen, making scrambled eggs and bacon to add to the cut-up fruit and English muffins already being passed around. One morning as I sat across from my Dad, I was aware of the warm, easy sanity that we lived in. But I was also aware of something else that existed in the background of my experience, like the pale green color of the stucco walls throughout our home.

“There must be something else.”

“THERE MUST BE SOMETHING ELSE”

THIS can’t be IT!

You do ‘this’ for 70+ years and then die?

What’s the point? My life at that time was basically good, stable, safe with the freedom to think, express myself and make my own choices. I had friends, good grades and a supportive family that was fundamentally happy and content.

It wasn’t in my parent’s nature to pressure me about who I needed to be or what I should do with my life, so it felt natural to experience and feel the possibilities and potentials of life. That was the ground I stood on, unquestionable and real.

One afternoon, my brother and I were watching TV in the family room. INHERIT THE WIND came on and somewhere in the middle of the movie, Jay (no doubt channeling some divine disincarnate teacher of mine) says, “Did man create God or did God create man?”

Trust me, he never spoke like that or initiated philosophical or spiritual conversations. The words entered my brain and started bouncing around like a ping pong ball in a small space.

DID MAN CREATE GOD OR DID GOD CREATE MAN?

Somehow it went past my cognitive thinking, like a zen koan and dropped into a deeper place in between the cracks lodging itself disturbingly and emphatically in a deep part of my psyche. I didn’t exactly want to start thinking about it but I couldn’t help turning it over and over wondering what was really true.

Did we invent God as an all-purpose answer to the mysteries and questions human beings just couldn’t answer, I wondered?

Did we develop an idea or image of God to give us comfort, make us feel not so alone, helpless and confused?

After all, the people of times past invented gods and goddesses to explain thunder, lightning, the seasons, sun and stars. Maybe we really didn’t know?

My mother was the Sunday School Superintendent at our church when I began attending nursery school at two and a half years old. The songs and stories were delightful but as I grew older I never felt anything mystical or compelling in relationship to religion.

When I was thirteen years old confirmation studies began, classes that led to becoming a member of the church. I found the classes boring and whenever possible skipped out and visited a friend that lived across the street from the church.

The final weekend confirmation retreat came a few weeks after my brother asked me the “God question.” I pleaded with my mom not to have to go and spend a weekend with kids that I didn’t really like and teachers that didn’t seem to know much of anything. I made an all out effort just before getting out of the car and getting on the bus while my Mom fell into hysterical laughter witnessing my dramatic attempt not to be trapped in, what appeared to me, a completely boring and useless weekend in some tacky place in upstate New York.

Nonetheless, I went and stayed up late each night trying to get answers from the teachers by asking them – DID GOD CREATE MAN OR DID MAN CREATE GOD? I really wanted to know. The other kids would leave as soon as the lesson was over and some poor uninspired teacher would be left to try to satisfy my insistence with repetitious answers that never came close to addressing what I was really asking.

It only made the uncertainty of it all that much clearer.

At the end of the weekend my question was still unresolved and I wrote an essay on why I would not be joining the church.

Fortunately my parents supported my honesty and directness and allowed me to not get confirmed. I wrote about my connection to Jesus. I had a felt sense of who he was, believed in how he lived and his ability to love, inspired me in a very real way.

So back to present time… On Wednesday as I watched the movie again after all these years, I found myself crying and laughing, realizing that my awakening and the beginning of my fifty five year journey began with EVOLUTION. Of course it did.

But it’s important to clarify what I mean by evolution as an awakening at this time. We automatically think if Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection as a scientific explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. Darwins is commonly cited as the person who “discovered” evolution. But, the historical record shows that roughly seventy different individuals published work on the topic of evolution between 1748 and 1859, the year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. That was the period of time where science was challenging our more religious and mythical beliefs and the beginnings of the industrial revolution were also coming into existence.

I am in the midst of writing my next book that will explore in more detail about what I am sharing here. But I wanted to begin to express the mystical fire of evolution as a significant force of complete awakening – both spiritual and manifest. It’s a new story of evolution, a new living reality we can be sourced from and by. Humanity’s main evolutionary advantage has been having the ability to self-reflect. To think about thinking, have increasing mental capacities to create and understand. Civilization and the miracle of what we have created over the last six thousand plus years has been a result of humanity’s capacity to think and create.

But when we discovered evolution, even at a rudimentary level, we began to have a different potential for a new kind of self-reflection. It’s a kind of reflection of the universe turning back on itself. We became aware as a species of ourselves, deep time and being inside a much larger process as human beings. Evolutionary awakening allows us to experience and understand the process that we are a part of as we have moved from light, to matter, to life, to thought and now developing forward to the Divine. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who lived from 1881 – 1955 saw the beginnings of this awakening. He said that the Divine was present in the very beginning but as an implicit form and that the evolutionary process ultimately was to make divinity explicit. We can now begin to move as a humanity from the process of ‘civilization’ to ‘divinization’.

Evolutionary awakening has to do with this higher order capacity to live from being aware of this larger process as oneself with others. The awakening depends on a being able to come inside shared unity. It is not a mental or cognitive awareness (as self-reflective consciousness) but rather something new that functions differently. In shared unity we enter together into another dimension of existence and give form to that potential. It’s become clear that the future is no ‘when’ but ‘where’ and in complete unity with who?

a quote from The Mother (companion to Sri Aurobindo) I resonated with so utterly…

It’s enough, you see, when that web gets more and more stifling, more and more stifling, there comes a moment when something inside us really CRIES OUT – it cries, “Something else, something else! I need something else! Enough of this!

In unity,

Patricia Albere