KW: One time I did an interview with a major Buddhist magazine, and the interviewer had looked at A Brief History of Everything. He saw the four quadrants, and he saw that Buddha was in the upper left quadrant and not the other ones. So I was in trouble already. He asked me, "Well, are you saying that Buddhism isn't complete? What can you do that Buddha couldn't?" And I said, "I can drive a jeep!" It was a flippant point, but it was a point. I mean, you can't find anything about heart surgery in the Tantras or the Sutras, for example. So we really have to adapt to the world of form, and part of the present-day world of form is that we live in an evolutionary universe. That's part of our own self-knowledge. And we have all this extraordinary information and research gained from Western psychology. Even if we're living in the world of samsara, we understand the world of samsara much better than somebody who's meditating in a cave. So why not combine both of these?

AC: In terms of spiritual development and evolution, I've noticed, and I think it's been proven to be true, that for most human beings our natural tendency is toward homeostasis. In other words, it seems to be the human tendency to want to resist change, to want to create the illusion of security in an insecure universe, and, above all, to avoid at all costs having to face into the awesome and unlimited nature of life itself. But the fact is that in this world we're living in, in this evolving universe, everything is changing all the time. And so in order to be able to respond to this ever-changing world in a way that expresses the freedom of enlightened consciousness in time, in order to be truly at one with the evolving universe, so to speak, one would definitely have to free oneself from the natural inclination toward homeostasis. What that represents for most of us is the ego's blind attachment to false security in this insecure world. Now, in the enlightened state, as I understand it, one is resting in the unborn, unmanifest ground of being. And if one is truly free, if one is truly abiding there and never moving from that ground, then in the world of time and form, in the most ideal case, one would be free from the ego's attachment to that which is false, and the expression of that liberation should be that one was liberated from a static relationship to time. In other words, one might have certain routines, like drinking coffee every day or always preferring rice to noodles, but one's fundamental relationship to time and the changing world would ideally be a consistent expression of dynamic freedom and creativity in the world. So again, to be free in an evolving universe, one would definitely need to free oneself from this natural inclination toward homeostasis.

KW: Well, I think that's right. And I think, again, what you're talking about is the paradox of incarnational nonduality—because it is a paradox. And that's what's so astonishing. On the one hand, there is a realization that you literally are the infinite unborn in every single moment of existence—twenty-four hours a day, in every realm of the universe. That's unshakable, unmoving, unmistakable, undeniable. And you are this embodied individual, one slice of manifestation looking out on the rest of manifestation. Both of those are true. And in the world of form, which is indeed unfolding, evolving, constantly in dynamic process, how your individuality then bumps up against the rest of your manifestation becomes very interesting. Because that's where this great mysterious process occurs, where on the one hand, you are radically liberated in all moments, and on the other hand, you have a duty, an obligation to push against those parts of the world that don't share your freedom and fullness.

So, as you've been saying, there's almost a kind of divine obsession with tinkering with your own manifestation. That's the paradox. And holding both of those in mind is difficult for anybody who has a type of nondual realization. It's very much as if you create this extraordinarily beautiful model and then you get a hammer and start bashing it because you don't like parts of it. We manifest this extraordinary universe and then we bitch about parts of it and try to fix it. But that's the game. That's the extraordinary paradox of this thing. And I do think that one of the first things you do have to do is get that individual vehicle aligned with the rest of the process of manifestation, and that means a dynamic constant changing. And to the extent that you hold back from that, or you recoil from that, you're not standing in the Self, capital S. You're standing in the ego, afraid of this and afraid of that.

AC: Exactly. Precisely. Truly standing in the Self would be a human life where one was fully embracing the life-process, ultimately, completely.

KW: Certainly on a good day!

AC: Indeed. Being a teacher, it's interesting for me to consistently observe, in my students, that the natural inclination of most individuals, and even more so of a collective, is homeostasis. I mean, it's one thing to get an individual to let go of that which is inhibiting their ability to begin to embrace life with the kind of totality that you were just speaking about. But it's another thing altogether, and infinitely more complex, to get a collective to do the same thing. In fact, it's almost impossible, but I hope not completely.

KW: One of the ways that I would slightly reframe what you're saying is that homeostasis is a strong drive in individuals, but there's also another drive that's equally strong, and that's Eros, or even Agape—the drive that takes you beyond yourself in one way or another. And what I hear you saying is that oftentimes, you get the expansive drive and then it's like, "Okay, I've done enough of that. Whoa! Time to contract. Get away from me!"

AC: Exactly. Time to rest in self-satisfaction.

KW: "Hey, I expanded two inches, get the f away from me now."

AC: Right. "I've done it. I've done it." You know, it's hard for people to understand that the truth is that we will never have done it. It will never happen—not if we are really doing it!

KW: Well, the whole spiritual process, as you know, is designed to leave stretch marks all over the ego. That's rather the point. And it's about as pleasant as childbirth too.

AC: Well, I don't think people are interested in ego death these days.

KW: Why, good heavens, no! That would be marginalizing, cruel, nasty, not honoring the plurality of ultimates!

AC: Ken, there's an interesting situation I've become aware of in this emerging exploration of evolution and its relationship to enlightenment. On the one hand, there are a lot of people who are very fired up about evolution these days, and it's great because their passion for evolution is almost always expressed, in one way or another, as an inspired interest in the health and welfare of the evolving world. However, because their interest is not also in the transcendent, in that mystery that abides beyond the world, they often don't seem to be very aware of what I would call the sacred. And then on the other hand, for many of the people in the nondual traditions who are passionate about transcendence, and for whom enlightening one's consciousness is of primary importance, the welfare of the evolving world rarely seems to be a significant matter.

KW: Right. And this is another variation on the theme that we've been developing. Again, it's a simplistic notion, but there is samsara, there is nirvana, and there is their nonduality. And sometimes, ironically, people who have, shall we say, a keen, accurate understanding of samsara, and are nobly motivated within samsara, can do better for the world than those who are merely looking at nirvana, even though, in some sense, that might be a higher state. And it's very strange to see people who aren't in touch with the sacred doing really good work in the world, and to see people who profess to be in touch with the sacred basically ignoring, denouncing, or renouncing the world, and thereby increasing the suffering in the world.

AC: What a crazy world! You know, it's hard to know where we're all finally headed, but when some of the traditions do talk about the highest stages of human evolution, they often see it as involving some kind of absolute transcendence of and control over the physical form. Some call it the attainment of "the light body." The yogic, Tibetan, and Christian traditions all have variations on this concept. Do you believe that it's actually possible, as some believe, through spiritual practice, to attain what's called the "body of light," and through that attainment have such absolute control over the physical realm that one would literally be able to control one's very cells?

KW: Well, I think, as is usually the case with these issues, that there's a grain or several grains of truth in it. And certain fantasies, wishes, hopes, fears, that inevitably get hung on these things. On the one hand, there are certain positive things that are behind the notion of a light body. And you sort of need a complicated esoteric psychology and ontology to go into it. The simplest way to approach it is to say that as the dharmakaya, or emptiness, infuses the rupakaya, or form, with ecstatic, blissful release, that form itself tends to take on a transparent or luminous quality. And this is another variation on the whole idea of nonduality—that basically things that were thought to be "spiritual" and in some other realm, "up there," can in fact be present in this concrete body, and transfigure it. There's a lot of truth to that in many ways, and I think we have to honor that truth. On the other hand, this notion is made-to-order for egoic fantasies of omnipotence. And yogic traditions are not immune to this. I mean part of yoga, indeed, was what you would call a "higher yoga," the realization of the transcendental self—just as in the martial arts, the highest levels were often infused with a Zen understanding of nonaction, spontaneity, and no-mindedness in the midst of fighting. But a large part of the yogic tradition, the lower part, so to speak, was basically egoic fear and control over natural processes. So the idea there is that if you are totally enlightened, you can totally control samsara. And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

AC: You know, when I used to teach in Bodhgaya, India, I met many Tibetans, and, almost without exception, they were convinced that if someone was fully enlightened, not only were they omnipotent and omniscient, but they were also incapable of suffering on any level, including the physical.

KW: There's a strange kind of mixture between the old ideals of the merely ascending path of nirvikalpa or nirvana and the tantric ideals of the nondual. The classic drive in both the Patanjali Sutras and the Theravadan tradition really is to get into that unmanifest cessation. And in that state you can feel no pain. There literally is no pain. Again, it's very similar to the state of deep, dreamless sleep that people are plunged into each night. There's no pain, there's no ego, there's no suffering, and so on. That's very similar to the nirvanic state. And if you can do that consciously, you can do just what some of the monks in Viet Nam did—you can pour gasoline on yourself, set yourself on fire, and not blink once. That's nirvikalpa; it's not nondual. The unfortunate part about nondual realization is that you don't become less sensitive to suffering, but more. Because you cannot escape into nirvikalpa. You are ensconced as the witness under all conditions, and therefore you notice everything arising moment to moment. And that means pain and suffering and hurt, and so on. And, if anything, you can feel it more intensely because there are no filters. There's no egoic protection. There's no way to say, "Okay, time off. Where's the morphine?" So that part is paradoxical as well because the pain arises in a sea of ecstasy, but the pain doesn't go away. So the notion of full enlightenment meaning you can egoically boss your cells around doesn't quite work, I think!

AC: You know, in Sri Aurobindo's tradition of Integral Yoga, which definitely claims to integrate enlightenment and evolution in ways that few nondual paths had previously, they seem to be speaking quite a lot about that kind of thing. They are literally talking about the "enlightenment of the cells" as being the highest expression of spiritual evolution.

KW: I know that. The real "descent of the supermind" is supposed to be a transfiguration into a bodily being of light. Frankly, I think that's a preliminary vision of the stage of incarnational nonduality that is just emerging, and I think a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, it will have a completely different form. You know, we might be existing inside fiber optics, our entire consciousness luminous digital bits scattered through all eternity. We don't know what it's going to look like. I think that was just one enlightened vision of what a rupakaya transformed by and infused by dharmakaya would look like. But that's just one possibility, and I think we're going to have a much better understanding as the decades and centuries unfold. I'm not sure it's going to be exactly like Sri Aurobindo thought, but it might be. I'm just saying it's going to be interesting to see what actually unfolds in the world of form.