This afternoon, I fell into a discussion with one of my students about life, or to be more correct, death. This is not as morbid as you might at first think, since I'm teaching a Rescue Diver course, and we had been talking about life saving and the effectiveness of providing rescue breathing and chest compressions (CPR). This conversation took on a whole new meaning, when out of the blue, my student told me something that left me dumbstruck and momentarily speechless.
As we were discussing the steps in responding to a non-breathing diver and how, through the use of rescue breaths and CPR, maintaining the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain is absolutely critical, Charlie told me that he was particularly interested in this point, since he had arrived home one day and walked into his brother's bedroom, where he had discovered him laying dead on the floor. He was not even twenty years old and his brother had taken his own life.
Charlie told me that his brother had been good looking, that they came from a middle class upbringing, that they needed for nothing, that he was popular and well liked at school, that he dated many girls. Essentially, that there was no known reason at all for him to have ended his own life so early and so abruptly. Charlie surmised that his brother had figured out that there was no point to continuing, since he already had everything, there was nothing left for him. What goes on in the mind of someone who takes their own life, particularly in these circumstances, is not for me to say. Each of us has our own demons, it is just that for most of us, those demons remain under control and in check. I know that for myself only too well. I told Charlie about a good friend of mine who had died unexpectedly and suddenly a few years ago, and we got to talking about life and death, and the reason why we are here. I have a theory. I call it Spiritual Evolution.
Spiritual Evolution. Let me try to explain what I mean by this term. Spiritual Evolution is the process of developing the soul. We each develop our own soul through having experiences, meeting people, going places, attaining knowledge, and feeling emotions. In fact, everything that we do offers us the chance to grow our soul, to move it forward. As we do this, so too do we evolve our soul's into something more than they were before. It is growth, advancement, and change. I see spiritual evolution as our mission in this life.
Everyone has a voice inside of them - the voice of their heart. That voice tells you constantly what you should do, what is the right thing for you. Some of us ignore it and some of us heed it. I believe that by following that voice, we follow our one true path and by walking that path, we walk in the light. It is on our true path, basking in our own light, that we truly evolve our soul, giving it the best possible chance to attain its goal, its mission. Our one true path is our spiritual quest, our mission for this life.
How many times have you stopped suddenly, aware that the situation in which you find yourself has happened before? This occurs often in life and it is my belief that each time that it does, it is because there is a lesson of fundamental importance and consequence to our spiritual journey, that we need to learn and to assimilate. If we fail to take the correct course of action, the situation will inevitably come around again and again, until such a
time that we make the right choice or take the action that is necessary. The situation may occur in a different place, with different people, but it will be the same lesson that is being shown to us. When we make the right choices then we have learned the lesson and we are able to move on. The learning of the lesson evolves our soul and this situation will no longer repeat itself in the same way again. Déjà vu works in the same way, only déjà vu is our remembrance of the same situation but not in this particular physical manifestation of ourselves, but in a previous incarnation of our physical aspect on this planet - in another life.
Let's put this all together. The soul is trying to attain its ultimate state, to reach the point of nirvana - the point at which the release of the soul from the physical body in which it exists occurs. To do that, the soul must evolve. As we journey through life, the soul is learning, changing and evolving. When it reaches a certain point of the evolutionary process, there is no more that it can achieve in this life. At that point, it is necessary for the soul to be released from the physical body in which it resides and if it has not yet reached its ultimate objective, then it is reborn into a different physical body and the process of evolution continues. On and on. Time and again. Until the evolution is complete.
I came up with this theory because I wanted to explain to myself why it is that some people die early. You see, when my friend died, I did not understand how someone who enjoyed life as fully as he had, was taken away. It seemed to me that it was too soon. But perhaps it wasn't. What if his soul had reached its goal for this particular life? Now it was free to leave and so it found a way of breaking out of the physical body. I don't know if the soul of my friend exists again on this planet in a different physical form, or whether he has left and moved on to a different realm, I'll probably never know that. It does not matter though, since when I look back at his life, I see someone who clearly sucked out all the marrow, and then sucked out some more.
An acquaintance of mine, who worked as a nurse in a hospital for the mentally ill, once told me that she did not believe in fate because she was unable to explain why some innocent people needed to suffer at the hands of tormentors and abusers. "How could that be their fate?" she had asked me. Well, perhaps Spiritual Evolution helps to explain this. Even though in this life, they suffered, in the greater scheme of evolution of the soul, perhaps that was a necessary suffering, so that they could assimilate a lesson. We only see a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle, one single thread in the great tapestry that is life. How can we truly know what is going on, what is the whole picture in which we are just one tiny, miniscule part? We cannot.
Let me clarify one more thing, because I know the question is burning away in the back of your mind. You're thinking to yourself that surely, with the rapid growth in the population of humans on this planet, there cannot be enough souls to populate all of the new bodies that have been born? Right? Well, here is what I think. Spiritual Evolution occurs throughout all of life that exists on this planet. Every living thing has a soul of some kind. Some are simple, others are very complex. Each is at a different state in its evolution. I also believe that all life on this planet must be in equilibrium, meaning that the sum of all life, must always equate to the same answer. More humans, means less life forms of other types. Therefore, the number of souls in existence is also balanced by the number of living bodies. More simply put: all things are one.
So, perhaps Charlie's brother had
accomplished all that was needed in that particular incarnation of his physical being, and it was just his time to depart and move
on. In choosing the manner in which he did, it is entirely possible that he
passed on a message to Charlie. Perhaps this event was needed to alter the
destiny of Charlie, to steer him towards where he needed to go for his own spiritual evolution? Without that event in the life of Charlie, maybe he would not have been sitting with me in Costa Rica, learning to become a Rescue Diver and going beyond to become a dive instructor. No one really knows. All I know is that I believe in my theory of Spiritual Evolution and I'm sticking to it.
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