Radical, Transformative, Impersonal, Evolutionary Enlightenment ?

[Guest guest]

Conscious Evolution

by Andrew Cohen

 

In my previous post, I boldly declared that "at last, it seems that

the precious vision of evolutionary enlightenment is emerging in a

stable context—a context in which it can for the first time begin to

develop or evolve." [read] And that is exactly what has continued to

unfold in my student body in the three-month period since that time.

It has been and continues to be a fascinating and rewarding

experience for me personally to bear witness to the actual

development of what may be a new human potential.

 

Since its first significant emergence on July 30, 2001, this

potential has revealed itself in a series of powerful eruptions of

enlightened or nondual awareness among different groups of my

students. A deeper or higher state of consciousness that transcends

ego would miraculously engulf many individuals simultaneously, in

such a way that suddenly the very ground of relatedness or

intersubjective awareness would be enlightenment itself. As has been

described on this blog, it literally took years for this new

potential that I call Radical, Transformative, Impersonal,

Evolutionary Enlightenment to even begin to come into being. When it

did, it emerged as an intoxicating and profound shared state

experience, in which many were coming together in what I call the

Authentic Self, for longer and longer periods of time. Last

November, this state was sustained for literally weeks on end, and

spread like wildfire throughout my entire international student

body. Indeed, its presence was even making it possible for

individuals who had never met me personally to have easy and often

instant access to this same state when attending meditations,

discussion groups, and all manner of events at our centers around

the world.

 

As my good friend Ken Wilber has made very clear, there is an

enormous difference between the experience of a higher state of

consciousness and the actual attainment of a higher stage of

development. Indeed, higher states, which we can find access to

through spiritual practice and spiritual experience, are usually

temporary. As miraculous and profound as they can be, they do not

guarantee a permanent transformation, an actual shift to what could

be called a new stage of development. However, higher states can be

deceptive. Why? Because they carry with them a bigger perspective,

an expanded worldview accompanied by the experience of penetrating

clarity and a profound sense of absolute conviction. Why is this a

problem? Because the tremendous power of that clarity and

conviction, riding on a wave of ecstatic spontaneity, easily

convinces the individuals that the newfound perspective has suddenly

become their own permanent attainment—a new stage in their own

development. Inevitably, what all too often happens is that when the

intensity of the state experience fades, the bigger perspective

simultaneously evaporates, and they find themselves more or less

back where they started. The fixed, rigid, conditioned, and

unconscious structures of the individual and collective ego are left

untouched.

 

Over the last few weeks, since my return from India and Israel, all

of my attention has been devoted to stabilizing this most recent

eruption of higher consciousness among my students. I'm convinced

that if enough individuals can hold the perspective they are finding

in that state, it will actually become the ground for nothing less

than a new stage of development—a higher order of human relationship

defined by the evolutionary, ego-transcending, top-down perspective

of the authentic self. At the end of January, I called everyone to

our world center in western Massachusetts, and we spent an intensive

thirty-six hours together in teachings and dialogues about this

process. Over the two weeks that followed, my students have begun

what I believe may be an unprecedented form of spiritual practice:

collective or intersubjective meditation and contemplation for the

purpose of conscious evolution. While they are finding increasingly

easy access to higher states of consciousness, what has changed so

dramatically is that not only are they making the heroic effort not

to get lost in the ecstasy, but they are also consciously struggling

to actually stabilize themselves individually and collectively on

higher ground.

 

Indeed, suddenly the state itself is no longer the goal, but has

become merely the vehicle through which collective awareness is

being focused like a laser beam, revealing and releasing deeply

embedded structures in consciousness, which is generating a powerful

process of transformation.

 

In gatherings large and small, and even on international conference

calls of up to a hundred men and women at a time, a kind of

spontaneous self-reflection is occurring that usually takes place

only within rare and deeply inspired individuals. This sort of

conscious inquiry in the presence of a higher state of consciousness

is unusual in a collective context. In fact, usually when a

collective ecstatic state has been generated, it is used by the

individuals involved as a means to escape from the mind rather than

engage with it. I can't tell you how many times, over the years,

I've seen individual and collective explosions of higher

consciousness, which always seemed to hold so much promise,

gradually disappear—only because the individuals were unwilling to

make the effort to actually see and understand all the subtle

changes that were happening within the realm of their own subjective

experience.

 

Recently, however, this cognitive and contemplative engagement with

the higher state experience, and the liberating perspective it

reveals, has initiated a process that perhaps could truly be called

conscious evolution. Through this disciplined practice of

collectively bringing focused attention to the nature and qualities

of the state itself, old structures in consciousness are becoming

transparent, disembedding not just one but many individuals

simultaneously from the fixed, rigid, conditioned, and unconscious

positions of the individual and collective ego. As all this

continues to unfold, I feel, welling up from the deepest core of my

being, a growing sense of ecstatic confidence. The vision that for

so long was obvious only to the eye of my own intuition is now

becoming an embodied, living reality.

 

 

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