Wilber: And that's what lights their candle, that's what gets them totally fired up, because they're getting two for the price of one. And what you were describing was somebody who has that experience and then slips back. So to give you a more fine-tuned understanding of the psychology of it, what happens is that when they come out of that experience, if they're really not stabilized in the higher stage, then their center of gravity will structurally move back down, and then they'll interpret both the higher stage structure and the nondual state from the lower stage of development.

Cohen: Right, and it can get pretty nasty.

Wilber: It gets pretty ugly because then they kind of resent what has gotten into them, and they feel rage. They've seen paradise and then seen it fade.

Cohen: Precisely. I've been on the receiving end of that rage more times than I'd like to remember. I've seen this happen to many people over the years, and that's why I started wondering, “Who is the individual?” Because I've seen that when they evolve into a higher level of development, they become a different person. They discover a trust in the inherent goodness of life; they become aware of different structures. They are awakened to the call of their own higher potential. They feel an obligation to it that is endless, and they recognize it as ultimately being a sacred obligation. And once that obligation is recognized as being sacred, it's a really big deal because then your higher conscience is awakened. Then you recognize that you can't really turn away from it without messing yourself up. Because once that happens, it's almost like, shall we say, the evolutionary developmental trajectory, or God, or whatever you want to call it, has got its hook into your heart, into your soul. And as much as we may want there to be one, there just ain't no way back.

Cohen: You said before that the Authentic Self, or deeper psychic, is the “seat of morality.”

Wilber: I think that is a good way to look at it. Just as we were saying, the causal transcendental Self is radically impartial. And that's the ever-present ground of radical certainty and absolute truth. But the moral compass in the manifest realm is the soul, or the deeper psychic.

Cohen: Yes—and that moral compass reveals itself only when we've actually reached what you are calling a worldcentric stage of development.

Wilber: Exactly. Worldcentric soul or higher. Then the soul partakes of the impartiality or the unflappability of the transcendental Self, so it's unmoved in a certain sense by what's happening, but it partakes of the gross manifest realm in that it makes choices. It's discriminating wisdom we're talking about, which is the moral compass.

Cohen: Right, yes.

Wilber: So that's why the soul is the seat of wisdom and of the moral choices that one has to make.

Cohen: And those choices would be based upon the recognition that the manifest universe that we're part of is constantly evolving. This fact of a developmental or evolutionary context—which we've only known for about two hundred years—is very profound. When one grasps it deeply, it completely rejigs one's worldview. Now it would seem to me that the Authentic Self would be the very part of us that would be the receptacle of this truth of our own nature.

Wilber: Yes. And that truth would be part of its moral orientation.

Cohen: The Authentic Self is the part of ourselves that is going to awaken to the moral context of the evolutionary imperative.

Wilber: I think so. And as evolution in the manifest realm continues, we don't know what particular degrees and stages of complexities there will be a thousand years from now, or two thousand years from now. It might be subtle light transfer bodies—the Authentic Self will then be awakening to that. At that point, that will be its moral compass, its moral guide. But right now, in today's modern and postmodern world, it's the evolutionary enlightenment—that is the form of the manifest realm right now. The grain of the Kosmos is the moral compass. The whole point about morality is that it follows the Eros or the grain of the universe. And that grain right now is the evolutionary unfolding. That's where the moral compass is oriented. So you try to say, “I'm going to get with the evolutionary impulse,” because the evolutionary impulse is increasing wholeness, increasing care, increasing compassion, and increasing consciousness. That's the moral compass by which we're making judgments. And the Authentic Self, the deeper psychic, is the one that is relaying that to us.

Cohen: Right, exactly. The thing is, this makes sense; it's very logical. Understanding the Authentic Self fills in the important gaps, especially for people who are interested in enlightenment today, because the old model just doesn't—

Wilber:—doesn't quite work.

Cohen: No, it doesn't answer the important questions about the right relationship to the manifest realm and to an evolving universe. So the Authentic Self has to help us really redefine and give birth to a new context—a new spiritual, philosophical, and moral framework. But very few people seem to know about it. In fact, besides Aurobindo, I've never heard anybody speak about the Authentic Self in this way.

Wilber: You have to do a fair amount of translation and it wouldn't fit quite as well, but a lot of the Christian mystics, in their orientation to the soul, are pretty good on some of that. Also, a lot of Kabbalists are pretty good on that kind of stuff, as is tantra. But even those profound mystics have always been an extreme minority—East or West—in terms of what's really going on. That's the tragedy. And in our culture right now, in our generation, unfortunately what we have, on one hand, is what I believe is a misunderstanding of the anatta [no self] doctrine, which just trashes everything manifest and puts you in that radical pluralistic, relativistic, extreme postmodern nightmare that we've talked so much about. That's what so much of American Buddhism is doing now. Or we get the neo-vedantist or pure absolute approach, on the other hand. And the Authentic Self gets gutted one way or another—in a sense, those are the two lousy choices that we have at large.

Cohen: Precisely.

Wilber: And in my opinion, it's a travesty on both sides, but it's certainly a travesty with regard to Buddhism because the Vajrayana position does have room for the Authentic Self. It does have the soul that transmigrates and carries one's wisdom and one's virtue. But all that gets trashed as well. It's truly a travesty.

COLLECTIVE OBJECTIVITY

Cohen: For me, the most interesting discovery was when, as we've spoken about previously, I saw individuals awaken to this Authentic Self simultaneously. In this, something miraculous occurs that is way beyond just seeing one individual awaken to a more deeply moral, deeply spiritual, more integrated self.

Wilber: And you see this in the kind of dharma-dialoguing, or intersubjective dialoguing that you would do as a group exercise—do you see the Authentic Self come out of that?

Cohen: Well, it's more than an exercise; it's an awakening experience—

Wilber: But you would see it happening in those circumstances?

Cohen: Definitely, yes. The goal of this kind of dialogue, which I call Enlightened Communication, is to trigger the collective awakening of the Authentic Self. And interestingly enough, as our friend Bob Richards pointed out to me using the four quadrants*, it's actually “intersubjective/interobjective.” The intersubjectivity is the dropping of ego boundaries and awakening to the Authentic Self simultaneously with other people. But in this there's the emergence of an unprecedented potential for collective objectivity—which is everything! To me, that's more important than anything else. From a certain point of view, our future may depend on it. I mean, that's the ultimate coming together. And in that coming together, a creative potential and source of, as you said, discriminating wisdom emerge that otherwise could never be accessed. That's the ground from which we can begin to deal with just about anything and solve our real problems from a truly awakened, enlightened perspective. And what's even more exciting is that as this thing emerges and gets stronger, it seems to get easier and easier for new people to have the experience.

Wilber: I think that when you're working with this intersubjective exercise, in itself it sets up a state resonance that can help somebody awaken to a finer understanding or feeling of the deeper psychic or soul. But as we've been saying, it depends upon the person's level of development how it sticks and for how long. This experience you're describing, like all states, can be experienced at many different stages of development. But what tends to happen is that even if a person has an authentic state experience, when they come out of the immediateness of it and try to digest it, of course, they are going to interpret that state—

Cohen: According to the stage that they're at.

Wilber: Yes, exactly. And it's going to look different at different stages. Nonetheless, the more you are dunked into a state that you cannot adequately interpret at your present stage of development, the more that state acts as a micro-transformative event, disidentifying you from your present stage and helping you move to another.

I think what's happening in a lot of those group settings, or experiences of group consciousness that you're describing, is that people have to be at least at a worldcentric stage of development, possibly higher, and then have that state experience. And under those circumstances the person would interpret this state as an evolutionary enlightenment impulse, whereas a person at a lower stage wouldn't have that kind of self-understanding, even though they could have an authentic experience.

Cohen: Because an evolutionary context would not yet have emerged at that lower stage.

Wilber: Right. There wouldn't be any evolutionary context. But somebody at worldcentric or above is plunged into that nondual state and they can interpret it in a sort of holarchical, increasing-depth, increasing-span, evolutionary-enlightenment kind of fashion.

Cohen: And in terms of the emergence of this consciousness itself—

Wilber: Oh, it becomes easier and easier.

Cohen: I first saw it about four years ago—it was a big explosion among a committed group of students after a lot of hard work. Then it emerged more and more often, and now, suddenly we're finding that even people with no previous exposure to this can relatively easily have the same experience. So you see, something's moving forward—that is the thing itself.

Wilber: Yes. It's morphogenetic fields, or what I call developmental grooves, which are patterns that influence the development of physical, biological, and psychological structures. For example, just as you're finding, once a difficult task has been accomplished anywhere in the world—from crystallizing complex molecules to rats learning a particular maze to linguistic words being created—the same task can more easily be repeated anywhere else in the world (as has already been demonstrated by numerous empirical studies). This is identical to what we see with the emergence of psychological forms. For example, in historical unfolding, once a certain stage of development like Spiral Dynamics' red meme had significantly emerged anywhere in the world, it began more easily appearing elsewhere around the world. A difficult, novel, creative emergence had settled into what I call a “Kosmic habit,” now available for all subsequent development.

Cohen: Yes. And that's why I think that if this thing can become stabilized in a significant number of people, other people are going to have much easier access to it.

Wilber: Right. You know, they're surfing on the underside of waves at Maui now. That's what happens with this—when it starts out, one or two people can stand up on a surfboard for about three seconds, and now they're surfing underneath the curl! Basketball—it's not the game that I played in high school. We did not take the basketball, like Michael Jordan, fly through the air, and drop it in the hoop—that's not how the game was played when I played it. We had to actually shoot the ball up at the basket, not drop it in the basket from above. Sheeeesh.

Cohen: When we wake up to this, to the miraculous dynamics of our own individual and collective evolutionary potential, nothing could be more exciting, compelling, and demanding. If we have enough courage, we face the fact that it's actually up to us to create a new stage of development. That's why it's not a game.

Wilber: Although, you know, some folks are now dropping the evolutionary ball into the basket from above, aren't they?