Involution and Evolution: a metaphor for the recaptured-goodness and growth-to-goodness models

Wilber talks of evolution - Human reaching up to Spirit - and involution: Spirit reaching down to pull us up. Both evolution and involution are processes of our growth. Evolution fits with the "growth-to-goodness" idea that we are reaching for Heaven; involution fits with the "recaptured goodness" idea that we need to peel away imposed trappings to reach something that was originally had but subsequently lost.

Evolution is like evaporation; involution is like condensation. Both are necessary to sustain us. Both are central to the flow of energy and the process of life. In condensation, one adopts a more concrete form and falls away from the heavens to feed the Earth; in evaporation, the shining light of Eros excites you to enter a transformed state and rise up to join the clouds that are your birthright. You float with them, bask in the sun, gaze down on the world until you feel called to return to the fray.

But the raindrop, arriving in the ocean, feels a tragic loss and does not know how it happened.  The knowledge of the vistas from the heavens - perhaps those memories are too flightly, too formless to speak in a brain of water and matter? But the raindrop has a vague intuition that something has been lost, and seeks to refind it by returning to its worldly roots upstream, the only roots it can fathom having - yet this is a vain attempt, of course, as returning upstream goes against the nature of water itself and there is little to find there in any case, except more forgetful water.

Credits to KW for these inspirations. He writes beautifully on this topic in One Taste p 305-318.