What does "imperative" mean in relationship to change?

The word “imperative” came up last week in our Spiritual Philosophy “tutorial.” We were talking about what motivates us to change, and how we resist change until we reach our own internal urge or motivation – until we are “ready” for change.  I just looked up the word “imperative” in the dictionary, prompted by a friend when we talked about the meeting afterwards. The definition that gets my attention the most is “unavoidable.”  As I’ve studied Spiritual Philosophy for the last 20 years, I have come to understand and appreciate that the mind resists change until we expose ourselves enough to the experiences we create for ourselves to learn – AND we are satisfied and clear that we are learning in ways that are visible and that we are able to express, to articulate in our own unique and spontaneous ways. Words that relate to food, to senses on many levels come to my mind – we savor our learning, our experiences – like the slow taste of rich chocolate, say molten lava cake, when the temperature and texture are perfect, the taste is divine, and the memory seeps into our taste buds and cells and into our history forever.

We come into lives with a blank slate of a mind simply because we are eager to learn, virgin in our design to always move forward in growth and change as a consciousness. Our minds are then patterned by our old beliefs and how we respond to the environment we have chosen for ourselves internally and externally. As we grow and expose ourselves to experiences beyond the womb, beyond the playground, and journey into the forest and field and skyscrapers of the world we have made, we can learn to sift as we learn to savor, to consciously choose as we know what feels good and why, in the best possible (most expansive) way. Energy is real.

For me, learning to celebrate love in its many expressions has been a great challenge and the greatest gift. As I’ve broken down my resistance to love (fear) by knowing myself more through the knowledge of our human design as energy and matter, I’ve felt the life of the world in ways I did not remember or may not have imagined in a way that was clear and “knowable.”