No Hesitation

One of the fundamental pillars of the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is the individual’s willingness to take absolute responsibility for his or her own self—for everything you have done in the past, for everything you are doing in the present, and for everything that you will do in the future. People often ask, how is this possible? How can I take complete responsibility for myself when there are so many things I am not even conscious of, so much I still need to learn about myself? And I always say, you begin by taking responsibility for what you do see, but it is also possible to take responsibility for what you haven’t yet found out.

There will always be things we don’t know about ourselves. There are mistakes that are yet to be made. But you don’t have to be perfect, because nobody’s perfect. Even God is not perfect, in an evolutionary context. When I use the word God, I always speak about he, she, or it as having two faces: the Unmanifest and the Manifest. In the unmanifest realm—beyond time and form—God is inherent perfection, ever unchanging and always free from the process of becoming. But from the perspective of manifestation, in the world of time and form, God is struggling to create a perfect universe—and what a chaotic process it is. The entire creative unfolding is very messy and full of errors. But the good news always is that if you step back far enough and look at the process as a whole, you can see that there is development, and that is what is so deeply positive about it. But the manifest God isn’t perfect. Why? Because he or she is still evolving. So obviously we couldn’t possibly be perfect. That is the nature of the developmental process. So if you want to be a liberated human being in a developmental context, you, in all your imperfection, have to be willing to take responsibility now for all the mistakes and wrong choices that you are going to make in the future.

What that means, practically, is that you have to assume a position from which you will never crumble, never recoil, and never back down. You have to stand firm in your highest intention, no matter what you may discover about yourself. We are all imperfect beings, but there is a fundamental wholeness and integrity that we need to maintain, no matter what, if we are sincere in our intention to evolve. And that requires a profound level of unbroken transparency and authenticity. Your intention is an action; it’s not a statement. It is an active position that you are taking, and that position has to be held even when you make mistakes. Of course, unconscious or unwholesome motives exist in all of us. We want to do everything within our power not to act out of them, but what matters most is that if you do act out of ignorance or unconsciousness in ways that negatively affect others, you have to be able to take responsibility for it immediately. There cannot be any gap of time before you are willing to face and accept the fact that you did it. You may wish you hadn’t, but if you want to evolve beyond ego, you cannot make any excuses, and most importantly, there cannot be even a second of hesitation. Nobody is perfect, and that’s not a problem. But what is a problem is backing down from your fundamental intention. In an evolutionary context, there is never an excuse for that. You cannot afford to back down if you want to create a new world.