THE BIG PICTURE

COHEN: In our culture of narcissism, the majority of the individual's attention is focused on the emotional or feeling state of the egoic self-sense. And when that's the case, it's almost impossible to authentically relate to the idea of a larger moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual context that exists outside of the individual's subjective field of experience. If someone is intellectually sophisticated or cognitively developed, they have the capacity to recognize these larger truths, but because of where they are developmentally, they will probably find it difficult to have a direct emotional connection to them. And without the emotional connection, these truths won't really carry much moral weight. I've found out the hard way that unless a truth—whether it's absolute or relative—has a moral weight to it, its power to actually evoke any permanent transformation or evolutionary development is going to be severely limited.

WILBER: I'm with you all the way.

COHEN: We have to be emotionally connected to truth, whether it is absolute or relative truth. And the lack of this kind of development is like an illness in our generation—I can see it in many of my own students. It is this emotional capacity that I'm trying to help them to develop. Maybe they had a deep experience or recognition of truth on an absolute level, but because of a big investment in narcissism, emotionally they're not really connected to it. And I've found that until they are, an individual is never going to change in the most important way.

WILBER: How do you handle that in students?

COHEN: Oh my God!

WILBER: Sorry to bring up such a thrilling, fun topic for you, but how do you handle this reluctance; how do you handle this lack of connection?

COHEN: Well, through confronting the individual with the BIG picture. And trying to get them to face their own refusal to take responsibility for the larger truth that they have recognized for themselves—which, when acknowledged, becomes the moral context for the spiritual experience.

You see, the big picture that I'm talking about is the evolutionary context, which I am convinced is the most important factor in awakening to a new moral framework for our own time. When we discover this evolutionary context and recognize what a big part our individual and collective transformation could potentially play in the larger scheme of things, a higher conscience awakens in our own consciousness. And if we have the courage and audacity to face this larger picture, suddenly what we're doing and why we're doing it has big moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual implications. Now there's a very real and ultimately demanding context for our own presence here. The choices we make and our reasons for making them suddenly take on incredible significance, and not just for ourselves.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO KARMA?

COHEN: You know, times sure have changed. In the old days, in the premodern era, the context for the search for enlightenment was the understanding that our own presence and participation in the world system, however big or small that looked, was part of a karmic scheme.

WILBER: Yes. That seems to have somehow evaporated!

COHEN: It really has. In premodern times there was a healthy fear of immorality or sin. In the East that meant bad karma and having to suffer through a terrible rebirth, and in the West that meant going to hell. The karmic context was the Eastern version of, "If you're a good girl or boy, you go to heaven; if you're a bad girl or boy, you go to hell." But in our postmodern context, we've outgrown the traditional narratives, and because we have yet to invent new ones, we lack such a moral imperative. We're not afraid of going to hell, and we're not concerned about the unwholesome karmic consequences of our own present choices.

WILBER: Right. It used to be hard to get rid of karma. Now all you have to do is be born a boomer. We don't have karma—we don't believe in it.

COHEN: If only it were that easy! But the fact is, once someone has seen the big picture for themselves, and acknowledged it, there is a natural obligation to make the effort to live at a higher level, to manifest, at least to some degree, what one has seen. And if one refuses to make that effort, in light of one's own realization—if one insists, for whatever egoic reasons, on avoiding the implications of the experience of one's own higher potential—one does begin to create an enormous amount of karma. Karma, in the way I understand it, is the accumulated emotional and psychological weight of fear, doubt, inertia, and self-concern, which keeps us endlessly stuck in the mud of delusion and semiconsciousness. You see, there's an evolutionary or moral imperative connected to spiritual realization. It's not a free ride. But when we find the courage to begin to embrace the totality of our own karmic predicament, real evolution occurs in real time. And even more importantly, when we make the effort to see our individual karmic predicament in light of the big picture, the evolutionary context, we begin to create a moral fabric for postmodern spiritual development.

WILBER: Well, yes. But if people will listen.

AN EVOLUTIONARY OBLIGATION

COHEN: As we were saying earlier, one can have developed a cognitive capacity to appreciate a truly integral perspective and intellectually recognize the need for an evolutionary moral context but emotionally still not have moved beyond the postmodern pluralistic, narcissistic stance. And I personally think that this is what a lot of thinkers at the cutting edge, including people who are enthusiastic about your own work, really need to get. When one authentically awakens to the evolutionary context, one discovers a sense of urgency. Often, when you and I speak together, underneath your clarity I feel this kind of urgency coming through you—a passion that just screams: We've got to wake up!

WILBER: Yes.

COHEN: This urgency is an emotionally felt one. It creates a kind of imperative, almost like a "should," God forbid!

WILBER: Well, if you have a moral compass, you're allowed to have a should; that's the thing. And you're allowed to have it in a conscious way. Even the pluralists have a should; they just don't admit it.

COHEN: Well, one "should" that emerges when we awaken to the evolutionary context is the moral imperative of development itself. In other words, the recognition that our own evolution as an awakening human is a moral obligation rather than a luxury. And that obligation is to use our God-given power of personal choice to consistently catalyze ongoing transformation, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the evolution of consciousness itself.

WILBER: Yes, absolutely. And you said that people who are using my work need to understand that as well, and I totally agree. I think you and I would agree that people are misusing my work if they don't get the sense of moral and evolutionary developmental unfolding.

COHEN: Definitely.

WILBER: And as you were saying, a lot of people cognitively get the worldcentric integral view, but because they have come from this sort of pluralistic mushy boomer background, their cognitive understanding is really infected with egocentric remnants. So they're not living up to their own cognitive understanding. And even as they talk about it, they're really sabotaging the integral view.

COHEN: Or their potential to manifest it.

WILBER: Exactly. And that's become a real problem because we have a lot of people talking about this, but they're not really acting on it. Their moral center is not as high as their cognitive center, so there isn't the urgency that you're talking about. There's none of that passion coming out of them. They're actually afraid of passion because passion for a view means you're making a judgment that one thing is better than another. And of course the "sensitive self" says, "Oh, no. I can't make a judgment." So that basically jams the entire process of their own growth and development because you can't get passionate unless you can believe in a certain direction—

COHEN: And in its rightness.

WILBER: And this is where people also get confused. In the relative world, you're making these judgments and they're always judgments of increasing holism or wholeness. So the reason worldcentric is better, is more right than ethnocentric, is that it's bigger, it's more encompassing, it includes more—it's bigger care, it's bigger consciousness, it's bigger compassion. Ethnocentric is better than egocentric for the same reason. So there's a gradient of better, of more right, in the manifest world, and that is what you have to engage passionately. But you can do that, as you well know, in the context of the vast emptiness or vast impartiality in which all of this arises moment to moment. So you're holding both the nondual one taste of equality where everything that arises is a perfect manifestation of the great perfection and the fact that among those things that arise, some are better than others. So therefore you get passionately involved in that directionality but as a manifestation of the absolute in the world of form.

COHEN: Which is real nonduality.

WILBER: Absolutely. All of that gets jammed when your moral compass is broken because you just sort of sit there spinning, going nowhere, and you think that that's one taste, you think that's sahaj or equality consciousness. But actually, it's just a meltdown. It's a complete paralysis of action in the relative world where you're supposed to be unfolding this higher and deeper understanding as a duty and dharma of your realization.