How and Why Should We Evolve?
Question from a reader:
Alrighty, lots of aspects to this question (I swear, they just keep getting more complex. You’re pushing the boundaries of my brain, too :D). I’m going to combine the ones that are relevant and try to give you the best picture I can, to the best of my ability, within the confines of my current understanding.“My question is not about the physical experience; I got that covered ;). Rather, I’m more interested in how and why we should evolve. For example, Jesus, Buddha, et al are ascended Masters. So how do we become ascended Masters? I understand there is the combining of knowledge (spiritual side) with experience (physical side) and that completes a needed segment…but what about evolution and ascension?”
Let’s start with the first one:
I’m more interested in how and why we should evolve. I understand there is the combining of knowledge (spiritual side) with experience (physical side) and that completes a needed segment…
Before we even tackle this question, we have to understand the entire purpose of incarnating on earth to begin with, from the perspective of your higher self.
I’m going to refer back to Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. Life is not a school, there are no lessons, and there is no growth except from your perspective within time.
Life is about experience, but there’s many layers to that experience.
First, there’s the physical experience, in a literal sense, as in the ability to touch and feel things (that was kind of the feeling I got as to what you meant when you said “my question is not about the physical experience”).
The second layer is to experience emotions. An example I often use to explain this is romantic love. In spirit, you know what romantic love is as a concept. But you love everybody and that love is an all encompassing type of love–romantic, brotherly, platonic, motherly all rolled into one–and you know that everybody is a part of you and that makes it really hard to really grasp what that experience might be like.
When you’re a child, you watch Disney movies and you know that the prince and the princess fall in love. You know what that looks like and you can imagine how it might feel, but until you grow up and you actually fall totally and utterly in love with someone, you’ll never gain a full understanding of it. It’s the same with grief, and empathy, and a variety of other emotions.
The concept of being here for lessons and growth come from our perspective in the physical. When we get here, we forget who we are in order for us to truly be able to understand the experience. Why? Because like I said earlier in the example of romantic love, it’s really hard to understand romantic love for just one person when you really truly love everyone because you know you’re all a part of each other. So you have to forget that in order to really be able to hone in on that one feeling.
As you live the experience of romantic love for the first time, you are actually just remembering it, rather than learning it. But to you, it feels like learning because you can’t physically remember where you were before you came here or that you’ve already known love in its most perfect sense.
The third layer of experience is about the experience of getting to know yourself, and specifically knowing yourself as the creator. In other words, to realize our “god self.” This is where evolution comes into play.
Just like you have to forget everything you know about love in order to experience it in all of its forms, you can’t experience getting to know yourself unless you are first ignorant of yourself. This is why we come into this world mostly unaware of ourselves–to experience the spectrum of moving from unconsciousness to conscious awareness.
It’s through the remembering process that we experience getting to know ourselves, and that feels like learning, healing, and evolution. To us, from our earthly perspective, that looks like self-reflection, expanding our consciousness, and resolving karma.
In the highest sense, we already know everything there is to know. We’re experiencing all of it in the eternal now moment, the only moment there is. Your higher self has no need to evolve, because it is are already existing and living every possible stage of evolution as we speak. It’s merely a matter of which portion of the whole that you, your individual incarnation, is currently embodying.
From an earthly perspective, of course, the reason we might want to evolve is because through that process, we can heal ourselves, alleviate our personal suffering, and the suffering of the entire collective, thereby creating a more harmonious society.
So how do we become ascended Masters?
Given my understanding of what I just talked about above, I might suggest that you do not necessarily “become” an ascended master, but rather, you already are, elsewhere. The “becoming” is merely your experience of your current awareness moving the process from a perspective within linear time. You do this by expanding your awareness to encompass that higher part of yourself, which is achieved through the process of learning, healing, self-reflection, and evolution that I talked about earlier.
By understanding that deep within, we already are everything we need to be, we can truly let go of fear of failure and of not being enough, and we can focus more on being the the best version of ourselves. I’ve written about this in previous posts under the terminology of deconstructing the ego and surrendering to our higher self.
Letting go of struggle is a “lesson” (or a remembering) in and of itself.
Thanks for being here,
Ash
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Hi Ashley, great insight here. I have just been through a process of looking back on events in my life for meaning and I also was taking a therapy group through the same process. What I learned in a very powerful way is that the greatest learning from myslef and all other in the group without exception is that the events that we would call the most challenging (most would label them negative) are where we learn the greatest amount. Now here is what I mean by ¨learning.¨
I rediscovered that that old fashion terms of ¨courage, patience, charity, humility, etc¨which are terms typically classified as ¨virtues¨, are the terms having the highest of vibrations versus their polar opposites. When we ëxperience something in our life that has us experiencing and demonstrating a virtue we are spiriling higher spiritually. Now, we can say we learned something by our experience but we can also say we gained something as well. I will tie in another important thing that this insight brought me and that is if we say we came here to experience (forget about learning for a minute) and we learn most for our challenging experiences will will also find that our life purpose(s) will be tied directly to the same experiences where we came upon those virtures. Life Contract>Human Experience>Challenges>Virtues Experienced and Learned = Ascensión Process. We came to expand upward and experiencing virtues helps us to accomplish that. Christ displayed and confirmed all those virtues, especailly forgiveness and gratitude. Note. Ashley, one day I would love to communicate with you about my five year Project on understanding the process of Life Review and learning why it is a major event that all religions spiritual teaching say will definitely occur when we pass. I will ask you a teaser question on this. If Life Review is such an important and profound event on the other side, why do you suppose the vastly popular notion here is that we should not look back, can´t change the past, what´s done is done? Someone is feeding us the wrong belief, I think. Maybe you have the answer? Light and Love to your good work. ron