GROWING OUR WINGS

Evolution is so not over

When we were kids at school we had textbooks that showed human beings evolving from apes, then transforming over time into homo sapiens. On the left side of the page was a sort of hunched over ape, then on the right side of the page was a human being standing erect.

Okay, but I don’t think that’s the whole story; I think one day home sapiens standing erect will be seen as the middle of the page. We’re not done with evolution until we’ve evolved from ape to angel. One day, on the right side of the page there will be a human being having grown wings

Gremlin

Now I don’t think those wings will be literal, of course. But I think we’re only at maybe the midway point in our evolutionary journey. We have physically evolved, but spiritually we are somewhere between an infant species and something just past barbarian. Evolution is spurring us on but we sure better hurry up.

Angels, according to A Course in Miracles, are the thoughts of God. We ourselves are thoughts of God, though our essential reality gets lost and confused and discombobulated through contact with the fear based insanity dominating this world. We’re burning through all that insanity now. We have to or the species will not survive.

We grow our wings in direct proportion to how much we drop our fears. And we drop our fears by replacing them with love. Those who find such talk “woo woo” tend to be those who never tried it. It’s not a theory, but simply a law of consciousness, that love replaces fear the way light replaces darkness. Where one stands, the other cannot be. Whom I have blessed I cannot blame. Where I forgive, I cannot suffer.

I have a cousin who gave birth to four children, and with each one she labored for about an hour. How she got so fortunate no one knows, but hers was a rare experience. For most women labor is excruciating (for those of you who haven’t had your children yet, don’t worry; the memory of pain miraculously disappears after labor). I mention it because the world is so clearly laboring now - a difficult labor indeed - as we struggle to give birth to the next version of who we are.

It was from Deepak Chopra that I first heard how caterpillars disintegrate into an ugly “imaginal soup” from which emerges the gorgeous butterfly. Looking at the state of humanity now, it’s easy to see us as ugly caterpillars hugging the ground or even as that disintegrated mass of goo. But in fact each of us is an imaginal cell out of which something wondrous is about to emerge.

The goo, the imaginal soup, is the shambles of the world we have created so far. The personal pain, the global suffering, the debris of so much life not well lived. Yes, it’s easy to assume that this is the end, humanity’s ultimate failure, but as in the case of the caterpillar it absolutely is not. The imaginal soup is our processing the loss, learning from our failures, aspiring for more. We’re not done yet. We’re transforming. No longer can we simply hug the ground. That is not our destiny. We are growing our wings.