Fuck Conscious Evolution

People seem to be talking a lot about 'conscious evolution' these days. This is the notion that we as conscious beings can cause our DNA to change in a direction we want it to, forcing our own 'evolution'. I can't really speak to the scientific validity of such and idea, but I assume it is pretty unsupportable.

What we can 'evolve' though, as individuals, is our own consciousness, and our own presence. So much of life we go through like robots. Consume this, consume that, see this image, feel this way, feel this way, act like that. Thinking about everything as it's happening requires concentration. Thinking about things as they are happening allows us to escape our programming.It allows us to chose a new course of action and to move in a new direction, away from karma.

As a society we don't seem to embrace the notion that concentration itself is a muscle of a sort, that will get fatigued if pressed beyond its normal operational parameters. Well, that part we get. After a day of intense concentration (taking a test, say) we all tend to feel exhausted. We then typically resort to one of our pre-established coping mechanisms - probably food or alcohol. These coping mechanisms allow us to disregard concentration, and just put the brain into a pleasurable auto-pilot. In a sense, we're relaxing the muscle of concentration, chemically.

But concentration can be trained. It doesn't have to be exhausting. And oh the rewards one can reap by living an active, present life. So many things could benefit from concentration. Almost every bad habit people can imagine can be fixed by learning to concentrate. So, how do we learn to concentrate? How does one exercise the muscle of an active mind? By sitting quietly, concentrating on the breath or some mantra, to the exclusion of everything else. When the mind wanders, we pull our concentration back to our breath or our mantra. Over time it gets easier, and we can then start to explore some of the other aspects of meditation if we so desire.

I think of it like this: one could do asana simply to expand the range of motion and ease of motion in ones body. This has enormous benefits in day to day life. Once you have a finely tuned body, you could use it as a means to achieve all kinds of other physical expressions that were previously impossible, and that may even be the point of becoming more flexible.

One should not lose sight of the benefits of practice that permeate every moment of mundane existence. Cultivating an understanding of the mind as a muscle that needs exercise may even help motivate us to exercise it.