We had opportunities in our lives that
most humans never have. Perhaps in
the golden ages of certain cultures, the
people in those experienced similar
opportunities, like, say, at the time of
Buddha in India, or, that of Hui Neng
in China...where and whenever peoples'
lives could flourish, and there was
enough freedom for exploration and
investigation.
Someone studied in India with great
musicians... I studied with an enlightened
Buddhist teacher...so, we both had the
right circumstances for our minds to be
able to evolve. The amount of time we had
available for this process was limited to,
say thirty years...from right after WWII to,
say, the Eighties, for the sake of argument...
certainly not a lifetime or the time of a
dynasty in China. Now, the situation, at least
where we grew up, is not so auspicious,
although tools of self evolving are available
to anyone in the world who cares to explore
them more than ever in history.
If one grew up in India or China when they
were flourishing cultures, one might have
become a court musician, one a court poet.
That's how karma seems to work. There was
plenty of time at those times to evolve.
Trungpa had a vast vision of what he wanted
to accomplish. Part of what he was able to do
was because he had students that groked him,
and became part of that vision. But he couldn't
fully manifest his vision at this time and place
because of the aforementioned compression
of time, the speeding up of time.
This doesn't mean he failed in his lifetime to do
what he wanted to do. To put his efforts into
perspective, he wrote to his students in his will
about his work: "Such thunderstorm does not
stop." If he died before his vision manifest, how
could he know that his work would continue
unless he could perceive time? If we were color
blind, we'd have to take someone's word about
red.
Evolution seems to involve increased
intelligence. It also involves increased
perception. Only the higher mammals
have color vision, binocular vision.
Binocular vision means these beings
are able to perceive the third dimension.
All beings travel through the third dimen-
sion, but only the ones with higher
intelligence are able to perceive it. Time
is a dimension we move through, but we
don't have perception of time the way we
do with the third dimension, although, it
is said, some humans who are enlightened
are able to perceive the dimension of time.
So, it seems logical that as humans evolve,
their perception of further dimensions
increases. Since this increase depends on
awareness, increasing the clarity of
perception, through meditation for example,
would indicate part of the evolutionary
process. Since humans are able to increase
perception, they are able to self evolve.
