interview

ANDREW COHEN: I was never especially interested in evolution. Initially, after my awakening in 1986, I was teaching in the same way that I had been taught by my teacher. This was my experience: that everything simply was as it was. There was nowhere to go and there was nothing to do. The whole point, in that teaching, was just to realize that. It was the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. In fact, at the time I was so sure about this view that I seriously questioned the authenticity of any teaching of enlightenment that implied time, future, or becoming, and also of any teacher who was telling anybody to do anything that implied time, future, or becoming.

After some time, however, I started to notice that in spite of the fact that many of my students were having very powerful awakening experiences, in most cases, they would still at times become lost in narcissism, greed, and neurotic self-obsession—lost in deeply conditioned and small-minded impulses. So I began to put more and more of my attention on the need for the human being to actually transform. To transform him- or herself in order to become a living expression of the emptiness and purity of motive that one discovers in the spiritual experience. So gradually, over a period of time, I began to put a greater emphasis on cultivating the ability to embody and manifest that beauty, perfection, and wholeness as our humanity than on experiencing the bliss of pure Being alone.

So that was the beginning. Then, after a few years, something new started to emerge in my teaching. And the first time I became aware of it was when I started to teach retreats in India. One morning, as I was giving a talk, something just exploded out of me. I didn't know where it came from. An unbridled passion poured out of me spontaneously, calling for this miracle, this mystery beyond time, to become manifest in this very world as ourselves. It shocked and inspired many people, and it shocked and inspired me as well. That was over ten years ago.

And more and more, over time, it has started to dawn on me that this passion is really a passion for more than just enlightenment in the traditional sense or the Eastern sense, which would mean a vertical lift-off, getting off the wheel of becoming, transcending this world absolutely, and leaving no trace. My emphasis has shifted radically. The goal now, as audacious as it sounds, is not merely to transcend the world but to transform the world, to become an agent of the evolutionary impulse itself. Indeed, in surrendering one's ego to that, one literally feels oneself being filled up with a divine and luminous energy and a passion to transform the world and the whole universe for a cause that has nothing to do with oneself.

This shift of emphasis, many years ago, was also one of the reasons that I parted ways with my teacher. Whenever he would hear me speaking about there being anything to do except get off the wheel of becoming and BE, he felt that I was corrupting and distorting his teaching. So at a certain point I started to conclude that there must be different kinds of enlightenment, different kinds of awakening that actually have different results.

Eventually, I started to call this teaching "evolutionary enlightenment" or "impersonal evolutionary enlightenment." In this teaching, there is an emphasis not only on the realization of emptiness and pure Being but also on the need to become a radically and profoundly transformed human being who is going to be able to manifest our higher evolutionary potential in the world. I'd never really come across anything like this before. It was only recently, when I came upon the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin in our research for the magazine, that I started to hear echoes of my own passion—a passion for evolutionary enlightenment, for awakening to the truth of who we are, and then daring to allow ourselves to experience the urgency to make it manifest in this world with all of our being.

So what I wanted to speak to you about first was this whole question of what enlightenment ultimately is. I think it's an important question because many, many people are interested in spiritual matters these days. And I think, interestingly enough, that the traditional definition of enlightenment may not actually be able to meet the needs of the evolving world in the time in which we are living.

KEN WILBER: I basically agree with everything you said and I would obviously have just a few different perspectives on it. You went through a number of very important concepts. Maybe we could start with the one you mentioned last, which was different types of enlightenment. At first that sounds kind of funny because enlightenment ostensibly is all-inclusive, timeless, all-embracing, unchanging, eternal, and so on. So it's hard to imagine having two different types of any of those things. But in fact, even in the traditions, you find at least two major, very different conceptions of enlightenment. One was prevalent during the Axial period, starting at around 2000 B.C.E. up until roughly 100 A.D. And that was probably best expressed in the early Buddhist tradition, the Theravadan tradition, in the concept of nirvana or nirvikalpa, which basically means immersion in a formless realm, where there is no manifestation and no objects are arising. It is a state of consciousness utterly free of change, utterly free of time and space and self and turmoil. The classic analogy, for those who haven't had that experience, is that it's something like deep, dreamless sleep. You enter a state of formless consciousness. That state of nirvana was held to be the highest state of realization and was thought to be completely divorced from samsara. The world of emptiness was completely divorced from the world of form. Emptiness was transcendent and timeless; form was temporal—suffering, pain, illusion, and so on. And the goal, no question, was to get out of samsara, "off the wheel," and into nirvana.

I think the real revolution in spirituality occurred about that time, starting particularly with the genius Nagarjuna in the East and Plotinus in the West. That was the breakthrough to what could be called nondual enlightenment or the nondual realization, which is a profound understanding of nirvana, or emptiness or the timeless or the transcendent, but it's also a union because it's a realization wedded with the entire world of form, with the world of samsara. So the whole notion of the nondual traditions was not that you got into a state that was formless, unmanifest cessation, but that that formlessness or that emptiness was one with all forms that were arising moment to moment. And that nondual state, or sahaj, was, in a sense, both the basis of the bodhisattva vow and the beginning of the tantric traditions. The idea was that somehow the world of samsara and the world of nirvana had to go hand in hand or you didn't really have a full, complete, or, if you will, integral being.

So on the one hand, it's still true that the dharmakaya or emptiness or the perfectly formless realm doesn't enter the stream of time. But on the other hand, that's only half the picture. The other half is that there is a stream of time, there is development, there is unfolding, there is evolution, there is transformation. And the real key to this discussion, I think, is when you understand that the only way you can permanently and fully realize emptiness is if you transform, evolve, or develop your vehicle in the world of form. The vehicles that are going to realize emptiness have to be up to the task. That means they have to be developed; they have to be transformed and aligned with spiritual realization. That means that the transcendent and the immanent have to, in a sense, flavor each other.

AC: In the vehicle?

KW: Exactly.

AC: So you're saying that the vehicle has to become perfected.

KW: Yes. Sometimes what happens is that people get kind of dunked into emptiness. They have a radical realization of this infinite, boundless consciousness that they are. And then, as you were describing, the realization fades. They're back in the same egoic vehicle. They're the same contracted self, and they don't know what happened. But they don't want to get involved in actual practice or transformative endeavors that would make their vehicle capable of holding that realization in a fuller, more enduring fashion. So that's unfortunate because then, as you say, they are cutting themselves off from the world of time, from getting involved in that world, and from what's necessary to do in order to become a transparent vehicle of the timeless.

The best of a nondual or integral realization is that we have to basically work on both. We have to polish our capacity, in a sense, to fully realize emptiness, moment to moment. But it's the emptiness of all forms arising moment to moment. So we have to have a radical embrace of the world of samsara as the vehicle and expression of nirvana itself. Unfortunately, I think you're also right that a lot of the nondual schools don't live up to it.

People tend to err on one side or the other of the equation. They either immerse themselves in samsara or the sensory-motor domain—nature is spirit, any manifest object is taken to be spirit, and so on—or they get immersed in the formless realm of cessation. And I think what we are interested in, certainly what you and I are talking about, is a realization that encompasses both emptiness and form. And let me just add, evolution occurs in the world of form, not in the world of emptiness. But that means that evolution is half of the equation. And so unless you get involved in ways to carry evolution forward, you are not going to be fully realizing the emptiness that you are.

AC: That's great. Now I want to pursue this further. Because in your description of the nondual view where this distinction between nirvana and samsara disappears, in that interpretation of enlightenment, at least as far as I can see, the idea is still to be released from this world—basically, to get the heck out of here.

KW: I understand that.

AC: Okay, so I'm approaching the question of what enlightenment is in relationship to the world of time and becoming. And what I'm trying to isolate here is what I call "the evolutionary impulse." As I described before, it's a mysterious ecstatic compulsion to transform the world. Now, this compulsion is different, I believe, from what is traditionally spoken about in the bodhisattva vow, because at least my understanding of the bodhisattva vow is that one wants to stick around long enough to liberate all sentient beings from this world. In other words, to help them get the heck out of here. But in the ecstatic evolutionary impulse that I'm talking about, liberation is actually found through surrendering to this imperative to evolve in the world.

KW: Not getting out of it.

AC: Right. In this interpretation of enlightenment, all of one's consciousness and energy is used in the service of creation itself—beyond ego. In other words, one's vehicle is to be used for this great and all-demanding purpose. And one's enlightenment, one's ongoing daily ecstatic liberation, would be found and directly, consciously experienced through utter and perfect surrender to that purpose alone. So at least in the ideal case, if such a thing is possible, there would be no egoic motive left and one would be constantly burning up for a cause that one could grasp only partially, shall we say, because its culmination always exists in the future.

KW: Okay, yes, I agree with the general thrust of what you are saying. Let me reframe it in this way. As I said before, there was a major shift from the early Axial religions, which emphasized mere ascent, mere transcendence, mere cessation. That shift—to the nondual traditions—was epochal because it was no longer emptiness divorced from form, but a realization that emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness, as the Heart Sutra puts it. Now that shift, which led to Mahayana and eventually Vajrayana Buddhism, was important because it signaled a profound understanding that was different from the previous main types of religion that we saw. The earliest of these held that the world of samsara is spirit. That's basically the immersion in mere manifestation or mere nature. And then came the Axial period, which said, "No, the transcendent is the only spiritual reality-the merely ascending, merely timeless is the only thing that's real." And the nondual said, "Wait a minute, you're both right. And what we have to do is work out a way to do that."

Now, the original bodhisattva vow was, "I vow to gain enlightenment as quickly as possible for the benefit of all others," because, as Kalu Rinpoche used to point out, "If you put off your enlightenment, how can you save anybody, you idiot?" That matured into the tantric view and what both of them had in common, at least implicitly, was the notion that nirvana and samsara, emptiness and form, the timeless and the world of time, being and becoming, were both parts of an integral realization. And both of those parts have to be embraced. Now, I think you're right that, in a certain sense, the traditions have not always lived up to that. And also, I think there's another meaning or a deepening understanding of nondual realization as involving an evolutionary impulse in the world of evolving form.

AC: Yes, that's what I'm talking about!