One with the Process of Evolution

Setting our lives within the immense brushstroke of evolutionary unfolding is a powerful orientation that supports the realization of our personal and spiritual ideals.

It’s also a powerful contextualization for marriage and relationship.

Take a moment. Let your own life dissolve into the ever moving, fluid process of life, birth, death, innovation, dispersal, collaboration. We truly are non-separate from the incredible propulsion of creativity and life. We are not separate from the process of evolutionary emergence.

When we set our intimate life, our marriage or relationship, in that large a context, it repositions everything. Against that vast backdrop, how we navigate our finances, our personal idiosyncrasies, our likes and dislikes, and our moments of affection and intimacy shifts. The same instances, issues, and responses look very different. Sometimes entirely different.

Let’s go through this more experientially:

Picture the shiny flecks of the Milky Way scattered across the sky. Or imagine that you’re telescoping in to the inside world of the nucleus of an atom, and you’ve gone in so far, you’re swept up in the midst of all these tiny particles, quarks, pi-mesons, and gluons swirling around each other surrounded by incredible energy and light and little bits of matter.Visualize yourself as process, as part of the vast movement of the universe from the biggest scale of the formation of suns to the tiniest scale of nuclear particles, that’s the stuff that we’re made of. And that stuff is constantly reconfiguring at higher and higher levels of complexity and integration. That stuff has cohered and coalesced into human form and the human capacity of cognition and self-reflection. Then you can recognize for yourself, “My emotional life, my self-identity, and my self-sense are intrinsically non-separate from that unfolding process.That process began so many eons ago and now includes my partner asleep next to me!”

From this vantage point, see how so many of the things that we get tangled up in are just not that important. They’re not that significant and they’re not that profound. When we telescope out and we see the reality and the nature of the evolutionary current, how very much it includes, yet how inextricably interconnected everything is to everything else, we recognize that an over-identification with us as separate selves, separate from our partners, isolated from the world, alone, is–from that vast perspective–almost nonsensical.

Now you can see why focusing and framing a bigger perspective recontextualizes everything in our relationships.

* * * Download your free copy of Love, Marriage & Evolution for more exercises and contemplations.