“Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”

James Allen (1864 – 1912)
Source: As A Man Thinketh

I have been wrestling with this idea for weeks now, writing when I am inspired and observing my thoughts when they don’t make sense to me. The work that I do and the process that I have gone through would normally be described as transforming but this definition hasn’t felt right for a time now. So I determined to accurately describe the process and the work and thereby elucidate myself and others on the process of living-tall order but If you have read my writing it’s basic stuff.

When you consciously begin a spiritual journey and stick with it until you have been transformed (I’ll use this word for now) your life is never the same unless or until you’ve been transformed again. The people in your life will observe this transformation, some skeptically. They will tell you that you are different, that you have changed. Here in lies my dilemma; why do we have to change to be better? For the answer to this I turn to one of the greatest prophets and philosophers to walk this earth…Bob Marley, yes Bob Marley. Here is where learned people think I’m slightly off but humor me.

Marley said (in his rhythmic Jamaican patois), “People cyaan change, if dem change, dem did change long time.” So this statement from Bob has etched itself into my psyche for years and I must say, I now get it.

To change is to become different, or make something or somebody different. This definition is straight from MS Word and corroborated by Webster and Dictionary.com. Now, for some people this is a welcomed experience to become someone different, in fact totally different. For me, not so much. I liked me, even when I realized the life that I was living was not connected to the deepest part of me. I liked me enough to listen to my feelings. I didn’t want to change me-maybe some of me but definitely not all of me. I don’t feel like I have changed, quite frankly, I feel the same. One of my favorite lines is that “you can’t change and stay the same.” Let’s call that a Marley Lindsay truism.

But enlightened people don’t change, they transform. The definition I found for transform is to change in condition, nature, or character; convert. This kind of talk kept me away from church and Christians for years. Again, I pretty much liked me. Some tweaking needed to be done but I wasn’t ready to become anyone or anything else, I still don’t-not like Jesus, not like the Buddha, not like Mohammed. I want to embed the perennial principles of their teachings into my heart so that I may evolve into all of me. This is where I usually get into trouble with my Christian brothers and sisters but…I gotta be me.

This brings me to the word that best describes the human journey on this earth and the product of a mental, psychological and spiritual wrestling match for the last few weeks; the evolution of the self is the universal quest of mankind. Often masked in the mental, physical, and spiritual development, our evolution is why we are here. The best definition I found for evolution is to come forth gradually into being. Herein lies the journey.

We can no more expect to change or to transform than we can expect the acorn to grow into a blade of grass, a rose bush, or a mango tree and not into the mighty oak. Evolution builds on your history; your journey while change and transformation terminates it and starts something different-impossibility in the human form. When we look more closely, we can see that change and transformation are circumstantial and evolution is transcendental. Evolution is consequential to the process of living. We cannot live without evolving. Spiritual living is the conscious evolution of our being. At best we expedite the process, at worst, we become mired in it and confused by what we know to be true versus what we have been told is true.

As far as I can discern then, change, as a representation of our growth is a misnomer for what we do naturally is evolve. Change is a willful act or behavior to become something other than what we are or rather how we are. Evolution is the natural development of our persons during this experience here on earth. Transformation is just a fancy word for change. We live the fullness of our being by experiencing not a different self but a more expansive one. It may seem on the surface that we change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors but we instead, matriculate to into beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that are appropriate for our current state of spiritual evolution. This would explain why we seem to change but haven’t changed, we have always been sayeth Robert Nesta Marley.  What we call change is then an expansive consciousness. Our way has always been within us. The process of living is to experience our spiritual self in the human form.

As we fully embrace our evolution as a natural part of our journey, not to forget or eradicate from whence we come but to expand our lives to include and be available to our potentials and possibilities always in the service of each other.