Cosmic Puberty, or Living Radical Evolution

Monday, July 7 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

A version of this article first appeared in the July 4, 2006 issue of my inspirational newsletter.

You're not going crazy.

I know it feels that way sometimes. It certainly does to me.

One moment you feel fine, on top of the world. The next, something pushes you into a depression or despair it's difficult to pull out of. Or you feel yourself sinking into a morass of apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness.

Old patterns -- addictions, even -- poke and prod at you, demanding to be satisfied.

Intense fatigue or other strange physical symptoms kick in, for no conventionally explainable reason.

You feel as though you're going crazy.

You're not.

Then what the @#$&%!?# is going on?

It's what I call R-evolution, short for Radical Evolution.

Our humanoid ancestors had the luxury of millennia to evolve from cave to condo, from simplicity to sophistication. Even for our grandparents, evolution was a subtle process, barely discernible within a generation, let alone a lifetime.

All that has changed.

We are experiencing, in this lifetime, a revolutionary overhaul that is unprecedented in human history.

We are morphing into a new species.

You could call it the New Human, although that's not truly accurate, because where we're going transcends much of we have come to know as human.

In effect, we are stepping into our Divine Selves, into the Gods we have always been, but only as a potential.

That potential is now being realized. Not for everyone, perhaps. But for those who have made that choice, however unconsciously, that's what's going on.

Exciting? Yes.

Miraculous? Absolutely.

Fear-provokingly uncomfortable? Without a doubt.

We stand in a place of transition.

Increasingly, our old ways of living, coping and feeling secure are not working. Even many of the New Age paradigms we have grown into in recent years seem out of place, dysfunctional, wrong-minded.

We are, as Gregg Braden put it a decade ago, walking between the worlds.

Who we were is outmoded. Yet who we are becoming is not yet ready.

Remember that awkward period in early adolescence? You were no longer a child, yet seemingly far from adulthood. On top of that, your physical and emotional bodies were doing all kinds of weird and wacky things.

Welcome back to puberty. Cosmic puberty.

You're experiencing peculiar symptoms and your emotions are volatile. You're beginning to think and act in ways that are foreign to you and others. Your likes and dislikes are shifting, as are your passions and priorities.

Even the face staring back at you from the mirror seems disconcertingly unfamiliar.

In this twilight zone we now occupy between our human and divine selves, cognitive disconnect is the norm.

Our human minds struggle to control our lives in ways that our divine intelligence considers unnecessary.

Our human mind has expectations. Our divine intelligence has none.

Our human mind tries to figure out and understand, functions our divine intelligence regards as irrelevant.

Radical Evolution, or "ascension" as some would term it, is not about moving into deeper understanding. It's about moving away from understanding. It's about abandoning any need to understand and moving into a place of permanent mystery...divine mystery.

Yet we're still wired to function in human ways. Or, rather, our divine electrician has begun the rewiring, but it's a massive job. And the transition is as weird and wacky as was puberty.

That's not reassuring to the human self, which feels as though everything familiar is breaking apart.

It is. One glance at the headlines is all it take to see that. Plummeting real estate prices. Soaring gas prices. Crises in the credit world. Floods, fires and financial failure.

Our minds and bodies are doing their own version of that same dance. Sometimes, the dance isn't graceful or pretty. Sometimes, it looks more like struggle.

Think of the biblical Jacob wrestling with the angel.

That's the essence of what's going on for us: our human wrestling with our divine. The human seeks to hold onto the perceived control of knowingness. The angel, on the other hand, represents all that is free, and therefore free of control.

All that is free is the mystery. For, along with its other implications, freedom frees us from having to know, to understand, to place in context.

As we move to this next level -- a step that is gargantuan in its steepness and implications -- we are leaving behind more than we can begin to imagine. Not in the physical sense. Not even in the emotional sense. In the human sense.

Much that has defined you as human is being squeezed out of you -- in that spin cycle I wrote about some time back or, perhaps better put, in an old-fashioned wringer-washer. And as each new space is freed up, more of the divine that you already are is entering in to fill that newly created emptiness.

Put another way, it's like the child (Peter Pan) who resists growing up, leaving childish (but not childlike) things behind to make way for the adult. In this case, it's not the human adult but the divine adult that is coming through...sometimes, or so it feels, like a steamroller.

No wonder you're in emotional crisis at times. No wonder you feel as though you are dying. No wonder signs and apparent synchronicities refuse to be interpreted.

Nothing is the way it was or ever will be again. Nothing can be understood in the old ways. Nothing can be fixed in the old ways. Nothing can be controlled. Period.

There is only one magic pill, and it can be a tough one to swallow.

It's called surrender.

Yet it's the only way.

All we can do is move through our cosmic puberty with as much grace as we can muster.

All we can do is surrender...to the mystery, to the freedom, to the divine that is taking over our lives, our will and our beingness and launching us into an era we cannot predict, anticipate or understand.

See yourself as a baby bird pushing through its shell. The shell is your human construct. You are breaking through that now. It is breaking down now. The bird is emerging, regardless. And it will fly. You will fly. And life on the other side of that shell is nothing you have ever known before.

You are stressed by all this. This is natural. Your human self is in panic. This is natural.

Know that you are neither dying nor going crazy, though that is what it feels like. Rather, you are experiencing radical evolution. You are becoming the divine.

Stop wrestling the angel and, instead, step into the angel. Become the angel. Become the god, your god, the god that you are.

~ For tips on how to use writing to help you move through these r-evolutionary times, visit my other blog, The Voice of Your Muse or check out The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write and/or The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers.

Image: "Wrestling the Light" by Ivan Chan