The Roots of Evolution
I.
I just text my dad asking him a question, to which he replied “I don’t know, still thinking about it.”
Me: “Too much thinking obscures the truth.” (laughing emoji response from my Dad, a consummate rationalist, intellectual and logical thinker. And seafood lover.)
My dad, Gautam, enjoying his lunch as I was texting him. Photo by Ruma, my mum
“What’s your gut response?” I continue (aka what do you feel about it, what does your body say, what’s making sensation instead of making sense? - thanks, Alok.
Our minds (with a lowercase ‘m’) are the most conditioned, colonized and inauthentic parts of us, and ‘thinking’ is the way we have been trained to make decisions about ourselves and the world. Thinking takes its orders from external authorities (anything dogmatic like religion, science, ideologies), instead of from our innovative, undogmatic, take-it-or-leave-it inner authority, accessed through the heart, the gut and the body. All this disembodied thinking, and the inevitable confusion that arises from it, is what has collectively got us into such a twisty, polarized labyrinth where we continue to wait for instruction from the same groups and institutions that have got us into this mess in the first place, hoping they’ll get us out of it this time around.
Don’t get me wrong, our minds are incredibly powerful and fun instruments - when used correctly. The mind is here to receive information and inspiration, come up with thoughts and ideas, assess and analyze which it does, tirelessly in our information age. The mind is not the boss, however. (Rule of thumb: if you’re feeling confused, the mind is in the driver’s seat, which it has no business to be in.)
We receive the mind’s data and we decide through our inner authority (the heart-soul-body) what, if anything, to do with that information. We also, as all lineages of meditation and spirituality teach us, do not believe all our thoughts. We submit the ones that don’t feel nourishing, the ones that feel like they could probably cause some inflammation if believed, to investigation and inquiry.
The mind assesses and evaluates. The heart-soul-body feels and knows.
These days, ‘embodiment’ has become something of a buzzword - which I’m actually pretty thrilled about because that means there’s more awareness around it. However, what I’m also seeing is a lot of thinking about what embodiment is and ‘how to do it properly’.
Here’s another rule of thumb: embodiment goes beyond what we’re thinking about that we’re doing. Embodiment happens when we stop letting the mind run the show, when we stop making decisions from thinking about everything, and defer instead to our heart-soul-body’s authority.
Now more than ever, we have to claim our birthright of thinking for ourselves. To do that effectively, we first have to start feeling for ourselves, which means rooting down into the wisdom of the heart-soul-body, and letting that supply the nutrients that raise us up into the world.
Or, in the words of Lord Krishna to Arjuna on the great battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita: “Established in Being, perform action.”
(not: Established in thinking, perform action.)
II.
All the Indigenous wisdom traditions from around the world that I’m familiar with - including the almost extinct European ones - contain fundamental commonalities. A shared, intuitive well of wisdom gleaned from a felt-sense relationship with Earth + Cosmos, which was tapped into separately by diverse peoples from disparate locations, but which, through their specific mythologies, point and speak to a mutual knowing.
What Joseph Campbell’s observations compelled him to term the monomyth.
One of these commonalities is understanding that evolution hinges on involution - those processes that must necessarily take place in the subterranean realms in order for the visible forms of growth to take place above ground.
For involution-evolution to happen without distortion, it has to be free from the hurrying interferences of clock-time (a linear, life-organizing construct that exists within the larger context of time as a simultaneous, multi-dimensional happening; a spiral, akin to the ringed markers of time found in trees.)
This rhythmic arising of evolution from involution has at its essence the movement of consciousness.
The western scientific-materialist view tends to almost exclusively value the above ground, objective and measurable results of growth or evolution, which has to take place within an arbitrary, preordained container of clock-time (the faster the better). This view also sees consciousness as something that exists only in the physical organ of the brain.
Meanwhile, our Indigenous ancestors, who naturally saw themselves as stewards of their larger Earth-body, recognized that it was the health of the soil, and the unmeasurable, unhurried dynamism contained in what looked like doing nothing, that would allow for the natural arising of evolution - in this case, the nutritious yield from healthy soil - to take place.
Thankfully, the burgeoning popularity of regenerative farming, polyculture and permaculture food forests is highlighting the growing understanding that as the soil is allowed to rest and regenerate, tended to by humans through collaboration and observation rather than through domination and the injection of toxic chemicals, it naturally produces nutritious bounty.
Food grown from soil free from hustle culture is better for our body-minds, which are inseparable from the larger ecosystem of earth + sky that we belong to.
As for consciousness, the new science of quantum physics is confirming what our Indigenous ancestors knew, what the earliest spiritual and esoteric traditions like the Vedas affirmed: that Consciousness is all there is. Everything emanates from, is imbued with and returns to Consciousness.
This is also what the living principle of animism rests on, a principle that again is common to Indigenous traditions from around the world, and is a key aspect of decolonial/liberation work. Animism is that evolved state of awareness that is able to feel and relate to all phenomena - seen and unseen - as animate and infused with consciousness.
Just because a rock or a tree or a bird does not speak and communicate through human language does not mean that it’s not conscious and animate - which literally means imbued with soul or anima. The hubris of believing otherwise is what has got us into such a seething mess - a mess that will be of tremendous use in the compost heap soon enough.
When seen through the nature-aligned truth of animism, and that consciousness is all there is, the process of involution is understood as the flowering or awakening of consciousness within deeper and denser states of matter.
As this involution happens, in its own time and rhythm - which actually is naturally quickening for us as the consciousness of our planet is rapidly opening up to its multi-dimensionality - the process of evolution occurs.
There is a rooting down for the organic and sustainable rising up to occur.
This is the soil in which Root + Rise is cultivated. Each season, guided by a myth from one of our planet’s storytelling traditions, we root down through practice into the deeper and denser layers of the body-nervous system-psyche, those parts where consciousness has become frozen in time through trauma and repression. We tend those parts of us, allowing for a gentle opening and awakening of consciousness from its frozen slumber.
The dominant culture that we’re being called to compost has made it so that we have been trained to mistrust the wisdom of our wild and magical bodies, to the point that we don’t feel safe to fully inhabit them. The vast majority of us have abandoned our bodies, living mostly in our heads. Our bodies are calling us back, which is also the Earth calling us back, to root down.
As we move into autumn, a season that is all about the initiation into that involutionary descent, we are being guided by the Cherokee Legend of the Cedar Tree in Root + Rise.