Do the Evolution

All right, and welcome back. So on this episode, I want to talk about one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs.

Well, kinda. So there's this song from Pearl Jam's fifth album. It's called do the Evolution, and it's one of my all time favorite rock songs. It's hard, it's deep, it's brilliant, and it has one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen hand animated back in the day by Todd McFarlane, the creator of Spawn. It's fucking amazing. Now, what I really want to talk about is the idea of doing the evolution and what that actually means in my world of personal growth and development.

And I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before, but this phrase to do the evolution, it actually points to a very specific moment that happens in our growth and development as human beings. And what it really means in my world is related to some developmental theory about how the brain evolves. And so there's this idea they call subject object relations. In one way we can think about growing up in our lives is is we're able to take bigger and bigger perspectives or subjects, right?

Our I, what we're including in our awareness continues to grow larger and larger. The result of this is what was previously the subject of our awareness becomes the object of our awareness as we grow to include more, right? So this is kind of the classic red pill matrix moment. We become aware of the water we're swimming in. And once we can see something, we're no longer fused and solely identified with it.

It becomes an object in our awareness. And when something is an object of our awareness, it is not our awareness, right? Developmentally, we can see this in children, and they have tons of research around this about what happens at different ages and how kind of on a normal trajectory, there's like a moment, let's say, where you can do a very simple experiment. You're holding a simple card, and on one side is an apple, and on the other side is an orange.

And you show the apple to the kid and you spin it around and you say, what am I looking at right now? And they will say orange, because that's what they're seeing, right? They can only take their perspective at some point. I think it's between three and five, that additional perspective comes online and they can realize, well, what you're seeing is different from what I'm seeing.

So I'm seeing an orange on my side, but you're seeing an apple on your side. That's subject object relations kind of starting to happen now internally inside of us. This is about the moment where we become aware of our process. We actually become conscious of it. And becoming conscious of it, we can choose a different reaction, a different response, right? So we move from unconscious reaction to conscious response and choice.

That is actually the process of doing the evolution. We become more and more able to see different objects in our awareness, including interior objects. Right. As kids, at first we only see objects in the outside world. As we continue to develop, we get more and more nuanced in our capacity to see objects in our interiors, our inner world as well. Oh, hey, there's that part of me which I know pretty well, that's my two year old infant crying for touch, or there's that teenage boy that's feeling lonely and disconnected right now.

Suddenly these are objects in my awareness. And what's powerful about them becoming objects of my awareness is now I can relate to them rather than from them. Without doing this work. I might be showing up actually as a desperate two year old in one of my relationships, or as a lonely 15 year old, whatever that might be. These are things that actually have happened to me. So to do the evolution is to make the unconscious conscious forever in perpetuity, in more and more, more refined, in nuanced ways.

This shows up in the most intense and impactful moments of our lives. Do we have the capacity in a moment to become conscious of the objects inside ourselves and outside of ourselves? And when we're doing the evolution, to do the evolution is to take that leap to start to identify with the bigger subject, the bigger awareness around whatever's happening right now.

This is such a crucial capacity in particular for intimate relationships, right? When without this, two people might get stuck in the same pattern and dynamics for their entire relationship. But at some point, if you're lucky and if you're doing the work, it really helps you start to become aware of these patterns in these different parts of you or these different tendencies in the relationship start to become objects of awareness.

And suddenly when it's happening in the moment, we can name it, oh, hey, I'm doing that thing right now. I do, I'm wanting to withdraw from you because I'm not getting what I need, or you're criticizing me and I'm Wanting to attack you back. I can see our pattern playing out right now, and I'm here to say I want to choose something else. Can we connect for a moment? Boom. That's a moment of doing the evolution. You've taken a bigger perspective than what's happening and it can drastically shift the energy of any given moment.

We do this inside ourselves too, right? With emotional reactivity. When we start to notice, oh, here's this whole process that starts. And when we do shadow work and embodiment work, we get more and more refined in our capacity to feel the very first kind of preview impulses of that, ooh, my belly tightens up. Or for me, my face goes really numb and kind of flat. And I know whatever I'm about to say next isn't real, it isn't true.

Something I've talked about on this podcast in other podcasts before. Doing the work is just taking responsibility for becoming the most whole conscious versions of ourselves we can, right? We take responsibility for the wounding, for the situations we were raised in. And we try to become a more whole larger version of ourselves. We keep trying to identify with a larger and larger I. We take more and more perspectives in.

That is what it means to do the evolution of consciousness, right? We take a larger perspective, we leap forward into holding more and seeing more objects, more perspectives in our awareness, in our capacity to do that is a tremendous gift in our lives in terms of how we can show up and do the things we want to do and love the ways we want to love and serve in the ways we want to serve in our world.

So it's not only a kick ass rock song, but it's really the crux of everything I like to do in my own journey and with men, it's to become conscious where there was no consciousness before. And once there's consciousness, there's choice, there's more freedom, there's more empowerment. When we're not conscious of our processes, we have no power over them, we are totally reactive towards them.

Right. And this is one of the big shifts I see working with men. It's the amount of empowerment that comes from. Wow. All this stuff that just used to happen automatically in my body sometimes. I knew I wanted to do something different, but I couldn't quite figure it out. We now have the capacity to make a different choice. Sometimes we might make the same choice and regret it or not, but we have the capacity to do something different when we really want to, because we're on this growth trajectory of continually trying to do the evolution and take a higher perspective, which just means it includes more.

It's not necessary, not necessarily better, but it includes more. It gives us more choice. If we only have two perspectives we can take in the world, there's really only two choices we can make in. In the world. But as we take more perspectives, we have more choice. There's more nuance in ourselves. And so this process, in the heat of the moment, of being able to make an object of whatever's going on in our awareness and identify with the bigger awareness around it so we can see it, that is growth.

That is the evolutionary process in action. I would often say that's often what we really mean by enlightenment as well. It's the capacity to see all and make so many more choices and identify with the space it all arises in, so we can be a lot less reactive throughout. If you want some help doing your evolution, definitely check out my work at Evolutionary Men until next time.

If you're interested in working with me around dating, relationships, or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men. Apply.