Renewal Fifty-Four : Volitional Evolution Revisted

(For a more detailed look at the principles of volitional evolution go to: Chapter 24: Resetting The Compass. For a look at thoughts about assessing the energy in our lives and the Big Rip instead of the Big Bang, go to: Chapter 55: The Best Answers Arise In The Space Between Thought And Deed. For further thoughts about the nature of energy as both mutable and immutable, go to: Chapter 59: The Mutable Immutables.)

I’ve had dreams for two nights running that have been very uplifting and releasing. It reminds me of working at something and having absolutely no clue or indication that any progress is being accomplished and then waking up one day and realizing that a threshold has been crossed and progress has indeed been happening. Such is the case, especially today.

Yesterday I decided to drive about 75 minutes to a shopping center that I sometimes like to visit. I felt like driving and it also felt like I should go to this particular place. I wasn’t sure why, or if there was a why, but it felt right and I could think of no real reason why I shouldn’t, so off I went.

As it turns out, there was nothing there of interest for me to buy, though I felt like it was time for some new attire. So I had a good lunch and walked around and watched people (including me). After a little time, I came across a place that brought back a memory of my last love. We had been to this shopping center before and the last time we were here an incident happened that seemed good at the time, but considering it in retrospect, I realized how it bothered me.

I walked around that particular place, and somehow started wondering if she was in the area and what she was up to (the mind does amazing things). For about 15 minutes I was caught up in the implications of that previous incident before I came to my senses and realized what I was doing. When that realization happened, I took a couple of very deep involuntary breaths and could feel something old and stale and hard leave me.

The feeling was like trying to shed a bit of densely composed matter, like some bit of energy captured, condensed, and held by the black hole in me. Apparently the assignment of that black hole is to gather experience, especially the experience of lacking, and compress it into a dense singularity and never let it escape.

In this particular case, the stones of my experience concerned my former lady friend, but went back long before her time.

I felt immensely freed, refreshed. And I noticed that I was now, more than ever, feeling the presence of a new relationship (perhaps in the way I look at myself, if nothing else). This old bit of putrefied energy could never be a part of the transformation I sought.

This experience seemed linked together with one the dreams I’d been having. Those dreams had been about the future and about release from the past. After my experience in the mall (today’s modern Bodhi Tree), I could feel that future in my presence.

In the Jacuzzi last night, I was overwhelmed by the experience. I could sense a new beginning, the possibility of a new place to live, though that part felt more than a year away. I called my son, because I felt him as well and because it felt like he will be a part of things to come. I wrote my oldest daughter and I rejoiced in the edge of what seems like a new turn and a new life. I left a message with my youngest daughter just to touch bases.

Since all of these feelings are on this side of beginnings, who knows? But I spoke it and I write it and I feel it and, after all the work at cleaning my own house, I put myself in the place that will let it be what it will be.

It is all very strange to be transformed (not that I’m there). The magnetic hold of the old being is very powerful, indeed it must be so to be cohesive. To let that cohesion disperse and reform is an incredible feat, one that would seem to require extraordinary abilities. This is all very new and the ability to remain focused on the new being and to let the old one go is the stuff of volitional (intentional) and not Darwinian evolution.

Still, these things come in rhythms and cycles and today’s feelings and thoughts will likely ebb and flow as did yesterday’s and will likely occur for tomorrow’s (I’ll bet this has been a bit obvious in these writings).

The ride is part of the process of rhythms, the waves of thoughts and feelings. The experience in time are the particulars of existence. The ability to discern between the two, to recognize their complementarity (Niels Bohr’s idea to reconcile the wave/particle paradox in quantum theory), is part of our wisdom.

Here’s to more of that wisdom.