The Power of Volition

The Power of Volition The second tenet of Evolutionary Enlightenment is the Power of Volition. This tenet calls us to a great responsibility. It asks us to endeavor to be responsible for nothing less than the destiny of the evolutionary process, here and now, as ourselves. And the way you embrace that Herculean task is through first and foremost making the noble spiritual effort to take responsibility for all of what makes you who you are. That means striving to come to terms with all of your past, and all of the karmic consequences of that past. It also means courageously stretching to embrace all the historically accumulated complexity of your present circumstances. Only then will you or I or any one of us be in a spiritually empowered position to consciously create our future. Why is it so important that we take this enormous responsibility on our own shoulders? Because it has been ours all along. But we are only just beginning to awaken to that fact. Remember, when we traveled all the way back to that instant when this entire cosmic process was born, and we located the impulse that caused something to burst out of nothing? We discovered that that evolutionary impulse is the energy and intelligence animating our own Authentic Self. The Power of Volition is about aligning with the profoundly self-implicating recognition that as that primordial impulse, you and you alone are the one who is responsible for all of this—from the initial choice that became the big bang all the way to the brink of the as-yet-uncreated future. The evolutionary impulse, when it awakens to itself within you as your Authentic Self, has no hesitation whatsoever about embracing that responsibility. How could an energy and intelligence that is powerful and audacious enough to have given rise to an entire universe have issues with responsibility? That surging momentum, which is the force of Eros, the God-impulse, is utterly one-pointed. In that impulse, no fear, no doubt, no hesitation, and no division exist. So when the force of Eros awakens in you, as the Authentic Self, that part of you experiences no ambivalence about being accountable. That part of yourself doesn't aspire to be responsible; it already is. That is its very nature; it is one with the First Cause itself. Your ego—both personal and cultural—has many good reasons to resist such an overwhelming responsibility. For many of us, our identity has been shaped, both consciously and unconsciously, by the belief that we are victims—of fate, of circumstances, and of other people. The separate ego does not want to be fully accountable and tends to hide out behind one excuse or another. This attitude is reinforced by the hyper-individualistic postmodern cultural context in which many of us have grown up, a context that tends to foster a sense of victimization. For those of us who have spent a lifetime identifying with the personal ego and the culturally conditioned self, it will require nothing less than a heroic effort and a wholehearted intention to embrace this kind of deeper responsibility for ourselves. Once again, that unhesitating responsibility is already the attitude of your Authentic Self, fueled by the energy of the evolutionary impulse. In order to align with that part of yourself, you will need to do whatever it takes to renounce the ego's excuses and proclivity to see itself as a victim. Until you become aligned with the natural inclination of the Authentic Self, the Power of Volition can be engaged with as a practice that can enable you to get there. Like all of the tenets, this tenet is both the path and the goal. Keep in mind that the practices I teach are never merely techniques. They point directly to what the self-liberated posture of Evolutionary Enlightenment already is. They only seem like techniques from the point of view of the unenlightened mind. But in fact, they simply reveal how evolutionarily enlightened awareness looks out upon the world. From that liberated perspective, the expression of the Authentic Self is always wholehearted intention, which is what the first tenet is all about. And it is an attitude of unconditional responsibility, which is what the second tenet points to. * * * That being said, engaging with the second tenet as a practice is no small matter. It means actively and deliberately endeavoring to take responsibility for your past, your present, and your future. Taking responsibility for your past means unconditionally accepting the fact that you are here, right now, because of your own choices. I don't just mean the decisions you made yesterday, or last week, or even last year. From the biggest cosmocentric perspective, that responsibility reaches all the way back to the beginning of time, through every stage of the evolutionary journey. It started at the very first moment, with the original choice to become, when you, as the primordial creative impulse, made that momentous decision to create something out of nothing. It embraces everything that has happened as a result of that cosmos-creating choice—including but infinitely transcending the personal and cultural experiences that have shaped your personality and your self-sense in this particular lifetime. Why is it so important to take responsibility for the entirety of your past, for all of your creative and karmic history? In the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment, it's to make you available —available to participate in the present and the future in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Spiritual inspiration gives us the courage and breadth of vision to want to be that responsible for ourselves and the entire cosmic process that created us. And the simple reason we want to be that responsible is that, first and foremost, we want to be free. Free, in this sense, means available. Available means we are no longer endlessly distracted by the karmic momentum of the past, by the fears and desires of the personal ego or the culturally conditioned self. Only when buoyed by a measure of inner freedom from that momentum will we be spiritually awake here and now and therefore available for the overwhelming task of consciously creating the future. What I am proposing here is an intimidating prospect for most of us. Just ask yourself: Am I ready to take unconditional responsibility for all of myself, right now, without excuses? Don't be surprised if you see yourself recoiling, hesitating, grasping for justifications as to why you're not ready just yet. Why do we experience fear and hesitation at the mere thought of wholeheartedly embracing this kind of responsibility? Because life probably hasn't been a smooth ride. We have suffered. We have all been hurt, to some degree, in our lifetimes, and we carry the memory of that trauma with us. I'm not talking just about childhood wounds here. What I'm pointing to stretches way beyond our personal life-experience. We all carry accumulated cosmic and cultural impressions—memories of pain, suffering, conflict, and chaos that are remnants of our deep-time evolutionary journey. Remember, that trip has not been a peaceful one. The journey from energy to light to matter to life to self-reflective awareness has been a rollercoaster ride, to say the least. From stars imploding into black holes to the fiery birth of our own planet, the journey has been one of explosive violence. The grand emergence and gradual evolution of life from primitive cells to more complex creatures has been a non-stop battle for survival. Can you imagine what it would be like to live in fear of being consumed or torn apart by a wild beast or a neighboring tribe? The majority of human history has been a tale of war and bloodshed. In the same way, higher human development is a messy and complex process, often plagued by emotional and psychological wounds and traumas. The entire journey from the big bang to the present moment is a story of conflict. In fact, that's a fundamental expression of the creative process. So it's understandable that even a highly evolved, sensitive human being would experience, to some degree, a lack of trust in life. It makes sense that there would be, within us, an instinctive unwillingness to trust and to be undefended. But this deep existential mistrust, fear, and suspicion, as reasonable as it may be, is an enormous obstacle to our higher evolutionary aspirations. It is preventing too many of us from stepping forward to embrace the responsibility that we must take if we are to be the ones who will consciously create our future. My point is that emotional wounds and psychological scars are an almost unavoidable result of our collective developmental process. This is why it is so, so important to come to that point in our own spiritual evolution where we are finally ready and willing to be wholeheartedly accountable for ourselves—for who we are and how we are. Heroically, we must be ready to accept unconditional responsibility for the seen and unseen consequences of everything that has ever happened to us. I'm not saying that you are responsible for what other people and life may have done to you, or for events and circumstances that were beyond your control. I am saying that you need to take responsibility for the consequences of those events within yourself. No matter what has happened to you in the past, you cannot allow yourself to take the position of a victim. As long as you allow yourself to be victimized by your own past wounds and traumas, it is inevitable that sooner or later you are going to wound and traumatize others, and therefore your own past will continue to have negative consequences in the present moment. All kinds of unconscious and conditioned responses naturally arise within us as a result of our personal past and our cultural and biological history, which can, at times, manifest as irrational fears, unfounded aggression, or misplaced resentment. These responses generate a powerful momentum of their own. That's what karma is—the accumulated consequences of everything we have done and everything that has happened to us, both positive and negative, experienced deep inside us as a slow but relentless momentum. Karma can be both positive and negative. Positive karma is the momentum of those actions and consequences that actually cause evolution and higher development to occur. Negative karma is the momentum of those actions and consequences the weight of which inhibit evolution and higher development. If you don't take responsibility for your own negative karma, it's almost inevitable that you will continue to act out of that mistrust and hesitation, that fear, aggression, and resentment, and most likely end up perpetuating for others the same reality that you have not been willing to put an end to in yourself. That's how the powerful momentum of karma continues to be generated—from person to person, from year to year, from decade to decade, from generation to generation, and even from lifetime to lifetime. For most of us, negative karma is a powerful force—the accumulated momentum of countless actions motivated by fear, ignorance, and selfishness. Look at your own life. Look at your parents, your family, your friends. Look at the culture around you—at your country or your ethnic group. See how the chain of karma has been handed down. It's simply the law of cause and effect ceaselessly playing itself out in self, culture, and cosmos. As long as you are living and breathing, acting and reacting in this vast interrelated process, there will always be cause and effect. It's unavoidable. But the whole point of embracing the Power of Volition is to take responsibility for that unavoidable reality and make it conscious Unless you sincerely strive to become more conscious, then the past is inevitably going to determine how you act in the present moment. Remember, we all have a measure of freedom in relationship to the choices we make—not absolute freedom, but some degree. And if you accept that truth, that measure of freedom is always enough to make it possible for you to begin to take responsibility for yourself. But if you insist on being a wounded victim, you are choosing to remain oblivious to your choices and their inevitable consequences. And you will use the measure of freedom that is your birthright to do more or less what you have always done, because that's what feels safe and predictable and known. In this way, your choices continue to be driven by unconscious motives arising from unresolved karmic issues, from this life and even from others. Unless a transformative moment arises in your own development when you are finally willing to take responsibility for all of your past, without conditions, no matter what the implications, that karmic momentum will not come to an end. If you don't embrace it, it will continue. It always does. And that momentum will determine your choices and your destiny. The point of Evolutionary Enlightenment is for the best part of you—the Authentic Self—to take the reins not only of your own destiny but also, as audacious as it may sound, the direction of the interior of the cosmos. And you can see that it just would not be possible to take on even a fraction of the burden of cosmic evolution unless you were willing to at least take unconditional responsibility for your own karmic burden. How could an unconscious victim be expected to be responsible for evolving the interior of the cosmos? How can any one of us heroically embrace that responsibility and make the right choices if we are hiding out, holding back, fiercely protecting our woundedness? Of course, some people have experienced such severe trauma and suffering that they are too damaged to take on this kind of radical responsibility. For the rest of us, however, as harsh as it may sound to some, if we really want to create a different future, we have to get over ourselves. After all, in light of the fact that it was you who chose to initiate the entire evolutionary process, what are a few psychological bumps and bruises? In light of the fact that that process is now depending on each and every one of us to create the next step, even the deep scars of ethnic and cultural conflict are no longer valid excuses for holding back. From the biggest perspective, do we really have time to excessively dwell upon the past? If your life-context is merely personal, your psychological, emotional, and cultural wounds can seem overwhelming. But when you see them as a very small part of a very big picture, you'll be able to handle them and keep them in perspective. You will accept that your karma is your responsibility, not anybody else's. * * * The power and purpose of practicing the second tenet is to free the evolutionary process from the burden of your own unresolved negative karma—both personal and cultural. And the way you do that is through taking it all on your own shoulders. You bear it, so that no one else has to suffer its consequences. Heroically, you strive to free the world from the accumulated momentum of your lower impulses, your ego's conditioned fears and desires, and the unenlightened and evolutionarily uninformed values of your cultural past. Most importantly, through doing so, you liberate the best part of yourself—your Authentic Self—to consciously create the future. Only when we are willing to take responsibility for the karmic consequences of everything that has already happened, will we be in a position to shoulder the infinitely greater responsibility for that which has not yet happened. When you liberate the most precious gift evolution has given you—your freedom to choose—from the weight of the past, not only will you cease to create negative karma but you will begin to generate an entirely new, positive, spiritually empowered momentum. How is that new momentum generated? Through your own choices, through your own volition. When the inspired intention to evolve, which comes from the original creative impulse, is married with your heroic willingness to take unconditional responsibility for your own karmic predicament and your choices, then conscious evolution becomes possible. Of course, it's not possible for any one of us to be completely conscious. But if these tenets are taken seriously, if you live them, you can become conscious enough to make all the difference in the world. When you use the measure of freedom you have in every moment to actualize your evolutionary potential, dramatic and extraordinary change in the world around you is inevitable. And it's not dependent on anyone but you. You, as a human being, are choosing, through your own higher will, through the Power of Volition, to activate the process of evolution in and through yourself. You become the evolutionary agent.