Both/And

The challenges of spiritual evolution are many, but for me at this time the greatest difficulty is staying present to both the temporal and the timeless, simultaneously.

The temptation to ignore or discount physical or emotional pain as irrelevant to my spiritual journey is enormous. Recently I found myself fuming over a slight at my office. I found out via email at week’s end that my boss had decided to promote one of my colleagues to be his deputy. All well and good except I was unhappy that he didn’t let me, as one of his senior staff members, know about this in person.

Immediately after the rush of anger and disappointment came an internal admonishment that great spiritual warriors let these kinds of hurts go. In the grand scheme of things this snub had no meaning. Turning to my spiritual training, I remembered from The Four Agreements not to take anything personally, nor to make assumptions. I opened my heart and forgave my boss, knowing that as I fumed he was blissfully unaware of my pain. I turned all of it over to God. I affirmed that it was all in Divine Order.

Three days later, as I related what happened to the guys in my men’s group, I was still pissed! Only now I felt a complete failure as a spiritual warrior. Even though I did my forgiveness work and my affirmations, I still felt hurt and humiliated. What the heck was wrong with me?

One of the guys said something that helped to me an “ah-ha” moment. He said that I had every right to feel as I did, and that all I could really do was to embrace how I was feeling and stay present with it with as little thought about it as I possibly could. Spiritual warriors do not stop being human; although we know how it turned out, Jesus’ crucifixion was nonetheless both physically and emotionally agonizing.

The Immediate Challenge: Healthy Green

Andrew Cohen, in the summer 2006 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, wrote that

[t]o consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. one without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that one, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future.

At the leading edge of this consciousness evolution, which is basically at the Green mature rational egoic wave, what is necessary for us to assume responsibility for how this evolution occurs? I assert that what we must focus on is consolidation of healthy Green, for that will lead almost immediately into the transpersonal waves and the integral embrace.

We face this developmental challenge even as Green must deal with assaults from its two junior stages. As I wrote in the “Three Blind Memes” series below, the world is enjoying an unprecedented collision of three powerful First Tier memes: Amber premodern (which can also be understood as the preconventional, traditional, mythic/membership, rule/role stage), Orange modern (conventional, rational/egoic, scientific), and Green postmodern (postconventional. vision/logic, sensitive self).

Amber, as the oldest member of this triad, arose as part of the shift in the human social and economic structures from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, some 13,000 years ago.

Orange first appeared as an identifiable feature during the so-called Axial Age around 600 BCE, but did not manifest in significant numbers until after the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century CE.

Green first appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century, but showed up in sufficient numbers only in the 1960s.

One of the characteristics of this evolutionary trend is the accelerating rate of new memetic emergence. It took Amber around 40,000 years to emerge from the previous Red magic wave, but it took Orange less that 13,000 years to arise from Amber. And Green required less than half a millennium to appear.