AC: There is one other aspect to all of this that I wanted to go into. Several months ago, an extraordinary event occurred a number of times among a group of my students. They witnessed and directly experienced the spontaneous descent of a cosmic power—a powerful conscious presence within and without that was instantly enlightening. In other words, each individual experienced, in their own consciousness, inherent liberationand the unlimited potential that the liberated heart and mind feels as the living universe calls for our unconditional participation in the process of its own unfolding. These are excerpts from some of the letters they wrote to me describing the event.

"Last night we literally reached a critical mass and exploded. Revelation after revelation as a living understanding of the sweetest perfection is being unraveled in front of our eyes. The emerging presence is a mystery that can never be known—all it recognizes is One, and it's on a seek-and-destroy mission against all separation. We were on our knees before this miraculous phenomenon: impersonal enlightenment. None of us has any idea where we are going, but we are being consumed in the white heat of perfect communion."

"I finally understood that this is actually enlightenment manifesting between us. It is unheard of that a group of unenlightened people, who are willing to leave self-concern behind, start to experience the enlightened vision and BE it. It is amazing how easy it felt, really like a natural state ... I see now why you call it Evolution!"

"This tremendous explosion has unalterably shifted our attention to a vast and unfathomable presence—it is as if this new cosmic Being speaks as us, through us, manifesting the bigger view that It alone perceives."

It seems that it was both the collective nature of the event and the willingness of the participating individuals to bear witness to what was unfolding that made the emergence of this consciousness possible. This thing has happened a few times, among different groups of my students, and I realized that this expression of enlightenment beyond the personal was really the target that my teaching has been heading toward for the past sixteen years. I had never heard of anything else that sounded similar until I read about Sri Aurobindo's descent of the "supermind,"* which sounded very much like what my students were experiencing. I was wondering if it sounded similar to you?

KW: Well, yes. I wasn't present for the phenomenon you were describing, but I think I get a pretty good sense of it. And it does really tie in to what we were saying earlier. In a sense, the nondual realization, which at least became a historical realization for a fair number of people right around the turn of the century, including Sri Aurobindo, is still unfolding. I mean, the world of form keeps unfolding, keeps evolving—spirit's own self-expression keeps unfolding—and it happens, as far as we can tell, to build on what it did yesterday, which is why evolution is indeed an unfolding event in the world of form. So as this incarnational nonduality, this ultimately ecstatic tantric nonduality itself, began to unfold, and its forms of manifestation began to unfold, you find that by the time you get to people like Sri Aurobindo, there's such a full-bodied understanding of this process. Even though some of the earlier sages were ultimately enlightened for their time, there's a richness, an unfolding, a resonance of spirit's own incarnational understanding in some of these recent sages that just gives you goose bumps.

AC: Wow. So you're talking about the evolution of enlightenment itself.

KW: Yes. If we talk about enlightenment as the union of emptiness and form, the pure emptiness doesn't change because it doesn't enter the stream of time, but the form does change, and the two of those are inextricably united. And therefore, there is, in that sense, an evolution of enlightenment. And what we find in some of these sages, particularly in the modern era when evolution itself was understood—which is to say when evolution became part of the consciousness of spirit's manifestation—is an increasing transparency of enlightenment manifesting in the world of form. Under those circumstances, the type of descent that Sri Aurobindo was talking about, the descent of the supermind, is something that he certainly thought would be increasing in frequency as evolution continued. And I do think that's the case. The phenomenon you described certainly sounds like it would be kind of a miniature example of just that.

The notion of, in a sense, higher states coming down and grabbing people where they are and lifting them up is itself an old notion. And I think there are many examples of lesser states, in a sense, descending upon people. You can be in the egoic state and have a descent of a subtle reality, for example. But I think that because the world has already been opened to nondual incarnational realization, we are going to see these things increasing in depth and profundity as time unfolds.

AC: For Aurobindo, though, wasn't the supermind still a theoretical ideal? I mean, as far as I know, he didn't succeed in bringing it down in the way that he wanted to—making it manifest in the world.

KW: Yes. That's correct. And that's why I say it's hard to know exactly what was going on with your group without everybody kind of having a look-see.

AC: Sure. Of course. But I think the important thing was that there was a very powerful meeting beyond the personal. There was the awareness that "I am going beyond the personal together with many others." In other words, there was a simultaneous realization of the nondifference between the One and the many, supported by the ecstatic realization that this is everything. And at the same time, there was the awareness of an overwhelming compulsion in the individual and the collective to give all of oneself to the greatest possibility that there is.

KW: Yes. I can tell you what I think that is, quite apart from whether it's a specific instance of Aurobindo's supermind. In my personal opinion, what was happening there was basically a perfect example of an all-quadrant nondual occasion. And as you know, the quadrants in my model represent I, We, and It [see diagram]. And the general idea, in my own view, is that these aspects of experience are inextricably interconnected whether we realize it or not. So sometimes people can just give emphasis to the "I," but there's always the "we" and the "it" in the background, whether they're aware of it or not. And my basic belief—I've stated it in theoretical books, but I also believe it should be practiced—is that an integral spirituality would be all-quadrant, all levels. And all levels means, of course, that we're spanning the entire spectrum. We're not stopping at immersion in nature, we're not stopping at ascent into heaven, or mere nirvana, but we're embracing the nondual as well, so that we span the entire spectrum of consciousness. And then, that is manifest simultaneously, fully, and transparently in all four quadrants, or in the "I," the "we," and the "it" simultaneously. I think the fact that you have a sangha, a small community, that can work on this together for a long time has allowed, in the instance you described, a four-quadrant manifestation of that nondual realization. So that would be the good news. The bad news with all these things is, of course, that it's a messy process. And every time something great like that happens, there's all the shadow stuff that comes with it, and the recoil that comes with it, and the aftereffects.

AC: Absolutely. There's the egoic withdrawal, the rebellion against the sacred nature of what was revealed, and the profound terror of what it demanded.

KW: That's always difficult. It's where discriminating wisdom is so important. And the incredibly difficult thing is that, in some sense, we're all pioneers in this.It's a relatively new type of occasion—the modern and the postmodern form of incarnational nonduality. And because there are so few precedents, discriminating wisdom is harder to come by.

AC: Yes, I know, because it's all so new.

KW: That's right. It's all new, and therefore you can't exactly draw on old compass points. So nobody can really be sure that they're absolutely right, although a part of these nondual states is that they always carry a certain type of unshakable certainty. I mean that's just their nature—you're introduced to what is, and what is, is. Period. There's no questioning that. But its actual manifestation gets very dicey. It's really hard to tease apart the aspects of this that are truly certain and the aspects of this where I'm just being lazy, misinformed, egoic, fearful, idiotic, those kinds of things.

AC: Isn't that always true when one's on the edge? Or pushing the edge, shall we say?

KW: It is. But the difference is that if you're in a tradition where the pioneers figured this out and then handed on the tradition, like in Zen Buddhism, for example, you've got tradition and lineage to fall back on. They have looked at pretty much all the pitfalls of that particular realization, and in that sense, I think traditions and lineages are very good things. But every time new types of realization come into being—and that means, again, whenever the world of form has so evolved and changed that you need a different type of evolutionary enlightenment or incarnational nonduality you've got to rewrite the instruction manual. And we all f that up!

AC: The thing is, that as you've been saying, the traditions can and do establish a standard, but, at the same time, in terms of evolution itself, at least in relationship to what we've been speaking about, they can actually prevent evolution from occurring.

KW: Oh, absolutely. I mean that's an old story. And whatever form we come up with today, we will prevent the new emergence later. We'll make the same mistake ourselves. But that need not stop us from being critical now.

AC: Absolutely.

KW: I can give you a very specific example in the field that I work in a lot, which is the effort to integrate some of the discoveries of Western psychology with some of the traditions that have a really sterling understanding of emptiness and nonduality within their own world of form. The Vajrayana, for example, is a wonderfully complete system—for feudal Tibet. That's not to say that the levels they describe aren't here. They are still here. Their realization of emptiness is probably unsurpassed. But the world of form has changed. And either you get on that train—the spirit's evolutionary train—or you become that which prevents evolution. And that's one of the real difficulties.

At that point, as you say, the tradition, which helped stabilize an important understanding, becomes that which prevents a new unfolding. And that's very dicey, of course, because then you have to be really careful about what you're doing here. So many of the problems faced by contemplative orders in this country—and I mean Buddhist and I mean Christian and I mean Vedantan—could be helped enormously by a simple infusion, in the world of form, of the understandings from developmental psychology. But they don't want to do it because it seems to imply their tradition is not complete, their tradition isn't a whole path, there's something wrong with their tradition, and so on. And we're really not saying there's anything wrong with their realization; we're just saying that we can help with the vehicle, with the world of form, by telling them things that we have discovered in the world of form that weren't known a thousand years ago. And if they're not going to incorporate that into their own understanding, then their nondual realization will be inadequate because they're not living up to the world of form.

AC: It seems now that so much is changing so fast in the world, a lot of the traditions are going to have a lot of trouble. The world of form we are living in is changing so quickly and so radically. With new forms of communication, the world is becoming so much smaller, and I wonder if the traditions are going to be able to keep up with the evolving needs of spiritually hungry people without holding them back in many ways. But there are very few people who really want to push the edge of human potential anyway, so maybe it's ultimately not that important.

KW: Well, it is a disturbing question to those six people doing so, Andrew! Again, part of this very delicate balancing act is that the traditions have a fund of absolutely invaluable, incredibly precious knowledge and tools for transformation. And, again, I myself am not saying that any of those are wrong. I'm just saying that there are other tools today that need to be added to that. And when you do that, you do get a different picture. And the picture is not only, "Here are some tools for transformation that can help your other tools," but it also gives you an even fuller type of incarnational nonduality, which, in a sense—and I think this is what you were saying—jettisons the lingering perfume of escapism, or mere transcendentalism, or get-off-the-wheel-ism that does tend to pervade some of the traditions.

AC: It seems that when one has made a serious emotional investment in a particular spiritual path, one's faith that that path can lead one to perfect liberation is usually based on the conviction that the path itself is perfect and completely whole. And when it dawns on one that maybe one's chosen path or tradition doesn't in fact have all the answers to every question, especially for this evolving world that we're living in, it can be a disturbing moment of reckoning for the practitioner.

* In Sri Aurobindo's philosophy, "Supermind" refers to a dynamic force and plane of consciousness superior to mind that perceives the Absolute Unity of all existence within the realm of diversity, and that unleashes a profound transformative potential when it descends into the manifest world.