Our Theory

amazing lunar laser show

photo credit: tchola

So, what the hell is creative evolution, anyway?  It sounds cool, right?  We got that part down, I think. Aside from the cool factor, though, it does have a serious meaning and significant implications for the 21st-Century human being.

Creative evolution is essentially the result of exercising your innate ability to actually do something — to do anything — on purpose.

We contend that most of what you do is entirely of a mechanical, programmatic nature, and that only on rare occasions do you ever act as a result of what is known in the vernacular as “free will.”  That is not to say it doesn’t happen, just that it’s very rare.

We believe the human being is the most complex living organism in the known universe.  This means we have a really badass imagination, and that we have a unique ability to express, transmit, or focus the energy of life.  We believe this is enormously significant, because this moving, loving, laughing energy of life, this essential vibration is all there ever is … period.

Our perspective here is essentially nondual.  That is to say, from where we sit there seems to be nothing in the universe at all.  There is never any independent thing that does some thing to some other thing.  There is only doing or being.  Every apparently separate thing is always and only happening.

Make sense?

If it doesn’t, no worries. That’s a perfectly natural response. Why? Because you, as a human being, have a really badass imagination!  You can empathize, eulogize and catastrophize — you can dream, curse and lament — you can sit in the felt experience of reading these words in front of you and contemplate the true nature of reality. In short, your uniquely human mind is adept at parsing the Big Happening into a bunch of smaller, more manageable happenings. Thus, things are born.

You might be seeing now how the mind conjures up and collects nouns in order to manage the Great and Infinite Happening. This is what the spiritual mystics mean when they say your mind creates your reality for you. It is also what is meant by the phrase, Perspective is reality. This business of noun-making is a biologically unique skill, for sure, and one that has served us well as a species in the game of survival, but the question we are asking is this: Are you more interested in surviving or thriving?

We assume, since you found your way here, that the incessant game of survival is not as much of interest to you as the idea of thriving, but guess what: it still just wants to survive. The noun-making, emotionally volatile, fear-driven, naked-and-ashamed man-machine just wants to feed itself long enough to pass on its genetic code. It is bound to follow the script written by the three mammalian drives — 1) to have sex, 2) to avoid injury, and 3) to be seen as important, or at least to be close to someone who is.

And guess what: One such machine is your vehicle in this lifetime.

Our argument is that 99% of the exquisite comedy and tragedy produced by the human race has been executed without anything resembling free will.  The vehicle runs the show, and you’re essentially asleep at the wheel. It’s not that you are incapable of waking up and exercising free will — in fact you are uniquely qualified — it’s just that (even given your unique talents) the prospect remains harrowing, precisely because you have identified yourself so strongly and so deeply with the machine.

However, the very fact that you’re here reading these words and that you’ve somehow become aware of your plight is quite frankly miraculous and wholly unique in the realm of biological happening. If you cultivate this awareness and manage to entertain the possibility of doing something other than what is hard-wired into the man-machine out of which you stare at the world, you might find yourself doing something genuinely creative.

This is the heart of creative evolution.  It’s creative precisely because it doesn’t originate in the machine, it actually comes from YOU.

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Did you get that last part? One more time: creative evolution — as opposed to programmatic, biological evolution — doesn’t arise from your bodymind machine, it comes from YOU.

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This is an important distinction to make at this point. Most people will read that and immediately react by thinking: Wait a minute, I am my mind and body, aren’t I? Well, this is where spiritual practice and creative evolution begin — with one question: What am I, really?

This dissection of self-identification is where our further exploration of creative evolution begins. To that end, we have four pillar articles that make up our “Knowing the Machine” series. Check them out at the links below if you want to explore the human machine more. If all this seems like entirely too much mumbo jumbo for you, if you just want practical advice on mental, emotional, and physical transformation, go to the blog to see what we’re talking about right now.