Evolutionary Blog

Often I am asked just how what I do as an Evolutionary Guide -- assisting others in evolving how they relate to themselves and how they relate to events (ego and emotions) -- has any real practical applications particularly in business. It is a fair question. One that, to me, has an obvious answer: always, daily, in every context. But let me be specific:

What causes people to be less productive and to suffer emotionally and decide to give up on their dreams and desires—to simply not “go for it”? 

Many things, but some of the more salient points would be:

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1. Taking things personally

2. Extrapolating out negative futures from limited data

3. Focusing on the problem(s) rather than solutions

4. Staying on course for too long after they know they need to adjust because they are afraid to admit their mistakes

5. Self-doubt

6. Fear

7. A lack of efficacy in communication

8. … 

… the list could go on and on and on. 

Likewise, their opposites--which we could sum up as simply being free and moving with confidence, efficacy and velocity--are all sourced in the same place.

What do they all have in common? The degree to which we experience any of these things is determined by our “stage” of development, which in turn determines how we relate to ourselves and / or how we relate to the events around us. It’s the “place” we react from and interpret through. 

There is no more important “soft” skill that one can develop than their capacity to witness--the capacity to objectively examine a situation, an event, or a thing, or even themselves from outside of themselves which, in turn, is developing the capacity to dis-identify from any thing, situation, person, role, project, opinions …again, the list goes on. And therefore, there is no greater developmental endeavor one can engage in than personal evolution--increasing our capacity to not only witness, but to take on an ever-increasing number of perspectives. 

This will even translate to learning “hard” skills more easily because you can throw yourself into the endeavor with great fervor, and without all of the self-consciousness that stops so many people from trying new things. You will be inclined to take on greater responsibility, ask for what you are worth, be willing and able to understand another’s perspective -- while maintaining your sovereign right to disagree -- communicate with greater ease and skill, employ greater agility and flexibility in your projects, and …well, be happier.

It’s simple: if you judge yourself when you are ineffective at something--experiencing embarrassment and even shame--that’s going to get in your way of trying new things. It will seem “risky”. The more you limit yourself the more you live in the world of saying, “That's just not me”. And the world of me/not me becomes increasingly limited, and it is the world that most people live in.

The nature of evolution is evolving just as our relationship to evolution has been evolving from biological to mental and emotional to spiritual -- to bio-technical.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes we will be able to upload our entire brains to computers within the next 30 years or so. That will certainly change things, won’t it? But this is not a piece about the coming Singularity--no doubt an “event” that many long for, others fear, and still others will see as a sign of the coming rapture, and many have not even heard of. 

Getting To Grace, a Comprehensive Introduction to NLP and Evolutionary Awareness in Harbin Hot Springs in November. Earlly registration is now open. Details »here«

Often, we experience some change or transformation--perhaps we go to a weekend event or workshops and we are certain it changed our lives. And yet that feeling fades. Maybe it takes a few months. Maybe it takes a few weeks. For some of us, it takes just a few days.

Why is that?

The answer is quite simple: we've confused transient emotional states for a stable shift in our "stage" of development. But you can have the change -- and keep it.

The understanding of “evolutionary consciousness” is perhaps the most important thing lacking in spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.  -Ken Wilber

 

Condense a process that would normally take a decade into a few months or a year; accelerate your personal evolution.

We could say that "personal development" allows you to increase your skills in a very predictable, linear fashion. "Transformation" allows you to generate instant and unpredictable results. "Personal Evolution" includes aspects of them both, and yet transcends them both, giving you tremendous power and access to your internal life as well as capacities for the external--increasing your core capacities to handle whatever life throws at you. And have that emergent version of you be a more stable version you can count on as a new standard.

Those transient positive states can become permanent traits.

The path is clear. The "how" can be shown to you. The potential results for you are nearly limitless.

• Clear your past emotional imprints reducing or eliminating your reactionary patterns, responding to situations with new resources, and establish your foundation

• Build a solid relationship with yourself
  • Distinguishing your values in every major context of your life
  • Begin to live in conscious and intentional alignment with your values
  • Increase your esteem for your self
  • Develop the skills to navigate your own interiors
• Expand your embrace through community, life purpose, relationship, or Divine Union
  • Continue the path of depth and expansion

In this evening, discover:

• How you can rapidly clear negativities from your past including
  
  • anger
  • fear
  • guilt
  • shame
  • Etc.
• How to build true esteem for your self--strengthening your "immune system for life"
• Debunking myths about ego and self-esteem that are inhibiting healthy development
• Effective strategies for managing the most powerful force in your world--your own mind
• Effective approaches to Purpose, Relationship, and fulfillment through deeper understanding of yourself and others
• To use your upsets [or the upsets of others] to distinguish values, producing conversations that bear fruit from the rocky soil of conflict
• The differences among the stages of Divine Communion, Divine Union, and Divine Identification

Yes. All in about 2 hours. If I hurry.  *grin*

Your Personal Evolution is the gateway to the future and the life you envision for yourself.

Yes, it will take the gristly and gritty work of building the muscles of facility with Self.  AND it will be the most valuable endeavor you have undertaken because it will bear fruit in every context of your life, whether that is a romantic relationship or a creative or professional project, or as deep as fulfilling on your life purpose.

Let's explore this unfolding together. Let's accelerate the process together.

What: Introduction to Personal Evolution
When: Tuesday, September 24th | 7:15pm to 9:15pm in San Francisco
Where: »» RSVP «« for exact location

Here:

404 Bryant Street @ Second,
San Francisco CA 94107


Cost: free
Value: priceless

Be sure that you've read Part 1 » here «.

[Note to the reader: "God" is used throughout as a signifier to point to wherever you put your worship. It could be conventional religions as I will mainly address, but you could just as easily replace it with Gaia if you "put your worship" there--if the environment is your ultimate concern. or you could replace it with polytheistic beliefs such as Hinduism. Or maybe you put your worship in the Universe, consciousness, or Community. Consider that whatever your ultimate concern is, the concepts in this article can apply to that thing as "God" for you. Doing this will allow you to get the most from this article. -Jason D McClain]

As I asked in Part 1:

"...was Jesus really born of the Virgin Mary? Was Lao Tzu really born as a 900 year-old man? Is the earth really resting on the head of a giant serpent (or the shell of a giant tortoise)? And of course, the subject of great debate most recently it seems: is the Earth really only 6,000 years old? Are these facts—with belief in them required to enter into the afterlife? Or are they gorgeous and useful poetic metaphors pointing to a greater truth in a way that people at the time could accept, pointing to Divine power?"

These metaphors are a testament to the belief in stunningly powerful, mystical, and magical forces embodied in "Spirit". Stories told to the good common folk of those eras. Metaphors they could relate to. This was useful and good—in fact, it could have been no other way at the time. However, the vast majority that count themselves among the world’s religions have lost touch with this simple wisdom: that metaphors of their spiritual traditions do indeed hold tremendous aesthetic value and inspirational mythopoetic beauty, however, they are not the Truths themselves.

Nor should they really matter when discussing spiritual merit. Would we say someone was not a good person if they acted with love, grace and charity all of their life, dedicated to the service of others, but rejected the idea of the Virgin Birth? Of course not.

Sadly, focusing on the details of the metaphoric stories as a basis for “faith” rather than the individual relationship with the Universal Truths results in losing access to Divinity and Spirit. Ending up, in turn, hopelessly (and endlessly) arguing over details of form and presentation-details of stories told long ago so that simple people could easily have access to God. These arguments aren’t just friendly disagreements or intellectual debates engaged in among scholars; they have split families and divided congregations--and sent nations to war on too many occasions for us to want to list here.

The fact that this is so, and that is springs from traditions that were and are meant to free the spirit, spread love, and acceptance, and give hope to the hopeless, is no less than tragic.

So that we can attempt to avoid the same pitfalls, let us set aside what is “true” or “false” about these mythopoetic themes and focus instead on the more personal and individual experience. This is what is relevant for our discussion that is focused on the context of personal evolution.

For that, we need to address not the truth, but the utility of our relationship to the Divine--"to" vs. "with." This “to vs with” business is not just fun with prepositions. It has a very practical impact on our internal life and emotional experience.

The manner in which we relate to anything determines its meaning and importance in our lives. Whether that thing is a significant other, a new career opportunity, a rainy day, traffic on the highway, and/or yes, even “God”. Perhaps we should even say In fact, especially God—not because that is accurate, but simply because of the impact that our personal relationship with God has on our real-life happiness.

Let’s take traffic.

We have all experienced traffic on a highway. How do you relate to it? What is your interpretation of it? Do you view it as a waste of time? A hassle? An increase in vehicular pollution? Or perhaps you see it as a welcome break and use it to unwind on your way home listening to relaxing music or an opportunity to listen to a favorite book on audio? The obvious point is that how you “hold” this experience we call “traffic” in your subjective world will give rise to a specific and tangible emotional experience around it, or what we will call an “atmosphere”.

 “It is never the thing itself, but rather your relationship to it”.

Knowing that let’s take it out another level: it is not just how you relate “to” traffic that will determine your experience. While this is true, we could take one more step and realize that we are not just in traffic--if you are in your car in the middle of traffic, you are the traffic. You are at the very least a component part of it as a whole.

Think about that the next time you are cursing the traffic you are in.

You can see what we have done there, and you are likely already familiar with the importance of and the ability to “frame” your experience described in the above paragraphs. This is nothing new. Most of the wisdom traditions teach that how you interpret an event will determine your emotional experience around it—and with regular practice, you can discipline your mind to interpret your experience in a way that leads you to have the emotional experience of life that you desire. Simple. Not easy, but simple.

And yet, when we get to the context of God—we go all whacky. As if it somehow no longer applies.

Just as we examined if your relationship to traffic serves you, we will examine the same of your relationship to God.

I was with a client and we chased the source of his "issue" to a particular construction he has of God—and God and spirituality is very important to him.

Condense a process that would normally take a decade into a few months or a year; accelerate your personal evolution.

We could say that "personal development" allows you to increase your skills in a very predictable, linear fashion. "Transformation" allows you to generate instant and unpredictable results. "Personal Evolution" includes aspects of them both, and yet transcends them both, giving you tremendous power and access to your internal life as well as capacities for the external--increasing your core capacities to handle whatever life throws at you.

Enjoy true freedom. Reveal an ever-increasing degree of your Divinity ... and produce profound results in your life in the process.

The path is clear. The potential results for you are nearly limitless.

• Clear your past emotional imprints reducing or eliminating your reactionary patterns, responding to situations with new resources, and establish your foundation
• Build a solid relationship with yourself
  • Distinguishing your values in every major context of your life
  • Begin to live in conscious and intentional alignment with your values
  • Increase your esteem for your self
  • Develop the skills to navigate your own interiors
• Expand your embrace through community, life purpose, relationship, or Divine Union
  • Continue the path of depth and expansion

Take two hours for yourself and...

Discover:

• How you can rapidly clear negativities from your past including
  
  • anger
  • fear
  • guilt
  • shame
  • Etc.
• How to build true esteem for your self--strengthening your "immune system for life"
• Debunking myths about ego and self-esteem that are inhibiting healthy development
• Effective strategies for managing the most powerful force in your world--your own mind
• Effective approaches to Purpose, Relationship, and fulfillment through deeper understanding of yourself and others
• To use your upsets [or the upsets of others] to distinguish values, producing conversations that bear fruit from the rocky soil of conflict
• The differences among the stages of Divine Communion, Divine Union, and Divine Identification

Yes. All in about 2 hours.

Let’s accelerate the process of movement through the stages--so we can play more, love deeper, laugh longer–and hurt for only as long as is necessary for us to learn what we must learn to deepen our experience of ourselves.

To unfold our depths; to reveal our Divinity.

And isn't that what it’s all for anyway?

Your Personal Evolution is the gateway.

Yes, it will take the gristly and gritty work of building the muscles of facility with Self.  AND it will be the most valuable endeavor you have undertaken.

Let's explore this unfolding together. Let's accelerate the process together.

What: Introduction to Advanced Personal Evolution
When: Saturday, March 30th | 11am to 1pm in San Francisco
Where: »» RSVP «« for exact location

Cost: free
Value: priceless