Andrew Cohen: GURU. Evolutionary thinker and spiritual pathfinder. Self-described “idealist with revolutionary inclinations.” Cohen, founder of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, is a spiritual teacher and acclaimed author widely recognized as a defining voice in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. Over the last decade in the pages of WIE, Cohen has brought together leading thinkers from East and West—mystics and materialists, philosophers and psychologists—to explore the significance of a new spirituality for the new millennium. His books include Embracing Heaven & Earth and Living Enlightenment.

Ken Wilber: PANDIT. A scholar who is deeply proficient and immersed in spiritual wisdom. Self-described “defender of the dharma; intellectual samurai.” Hailed as “the Einstein of consciousness,” Wilber is one of the most highly regarded philosophers alive today, and his work offers a comprehensive and original synthesis of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions. Author of numerous books, including Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and A Brief History of Everything, Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute and a regular contributor to WIE.

FOLLOWING THE GRAIN OF THE KOSMOS dialogue V

States, Stages, Selves, and the Directionality of Development

Who are we and how do we evolve? In this dialogue, guru and pandit explore the transformative power of what Cohen calls the Authentic Self, illuminating the dynamics by which we move up (and down) the developmental trajectory, and the miraculous collective potentials that lie on the horizon of consciousness.

THE AUTHENTIC SELF

Cohen: I wanted to speak about something we've discussed before, which is what I call the Authentic Self. In the development of my work in the field of evolutionary spirituality, I've come to the conclusion that awakening to this Authentic Self is a pivotal factor in the transformational process. And I think that a lot of people who are interested in enlightenment, including myself for a long time, have unintentionally been failing to make the important distinction between the Self Absolute, the Authentic Self, and the ego. As I have come to understand it, the Authentic Self is the deepest part of our humanity beyond ego, or the awakened spiritual conscience. The great twentieth-century sage Sri Aurobindo referred to it as the “psychic being,” and some might call it the soul.

A couple of years ago, when we did a piece on Sri Aurobindo for the magazine, we spoke to one of his oldest living disciples, Amal Kiran, a very famous poet in India. He spoke passionately about the psychic being, saying that the cultivation of this part of ourselves is the most important aspect of the spiritual path. He told us:

What Sri Aurobindo called the psychic being, or soul, is the innermost being that is encountered in the heart center. It is that consciousness that is in touch with and identical to man's highest possibility. The psychic being is aspiring all the time. Its very nature is to go higher and higher and higher. And in order for transformation to occur, that being, in all its qualities, has to come forth, come into the open. If you go through your psychic being, you are bound to reach the highest, ultimately. After speaking with him, we talked a lot about it, and we realized that Aurobindo's psychic being seemed to clearly define something that I'd intuited and been trying to cultivate in my students for many years. Now I simply call it the Authentic Self. And this recognition was very helpful to me, because for a long time the traditional enlightenment model, which only seemed to describe the path from the ego to the Self Absolute, had not been meeting my own evolving understanding of what radical realization is all about when one is no longer merely trying to transcend the world but is simultaneously aspiring to transform it.

Wilber: Yes. The traditional model goes from ego to absolute, and that's it. And now you're emphasizing the Authentic Self as an important ingredient in this whole equation.

Cohen: It is so important. The Authentic Self is a completely different dimension of the self than either the Self Absolute or the ego. It is that part of ourselves that is already whole. It has never been hurt, wounded, traumatized, or victimized. It is already whole and complete, and yet it can and does develop. For the Authentic Self, the point of departure in the developmental process is wholeness itself. This is the part of ourselves that cares passionately about evolution for its own sake, already. When individuals awaken to the Authentic Self—even if it's only temporarily—suddenly they become aware of a living evolutionary context and experience a passion and concern about the necessity for development itself. I identify the Authentic Self as synonymous with what we could call the first cause, the creative impulse, and its expression in the awakening human. The Authentic Self doesn't abide in the gross realm; it abides in what you would call the subtle realm. It's aware of everything that is happening here, cares passionately about and can act in response to everything that's happening here, but is always free from everything that's happening here.

Wilber: Right.

Cohen: The ego, or what you would call the frontal self, exists only in this world. And that's why, of course, when people fall back into the ego and the world of the personal self in the gross realm, after having experienced the ecstatic evolutionary passion of the Authentic Self in the subtle realm, they lose touch with that passion in an instant.

Now, what is called the Self Absolute or the unmanifest ground of being is that deepest part of human consciousness that, because it abides beyond time and space, beyond creation itself, does not care at all about what's happening here in the realm of manifestation. It's always free from anything that's ever happened here and always is at rest. Infinite peace is its nature. So whatever does happen in our world, in the manifest realm, has no effect on that deepest part of our self. Birth or death, Big Bang or no Big Bang—

Wilber:—not a problem.

Cohen: Right. But the Authentic Self cares passionately, cares desperately about everything—

Wilber: Yes. It's like the seat of morality.

Cohen: Exactly. And this is so important, especially for us Westerners, because in the new definition of enlightenment, which we've talked so much about, evolution is the context, rather than transcendence. And when people start to directly experience for themselves what the Authentic Self is, they literally begin to light up with awakened understanding—suddenly life, being alive, being a human being, begins to make perfect sense. They exclaim, “Oh, this is the part of me that cares about the life process, the world system, about infinite becoming itself!” And that's so important, because if we can awaken to this Self and recognize what it is, it can help us to make this extraordinary transformation. If we can identify with the Authentic Self—and through doing so, release our attachment to the ego and its fears and desires—that can be the catalyst for evolutionary enlightenment.

Wilber: I agree with what you're saying. Let me give you the way integral psychology, my own view, tends to look at this.

Cohen: Great.

Wilber: First I'll scope out the big picture, and then we'll come back to some of the finer details. One of the important distinctions we make, and we've talked about this from various angles, is the difference between states of consciousness and stages of consciousness. For this discussion we can use a fairly simplified developmental scheme—we can just say egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and then we sometimes add something like Kosmocentric. Those stages represent one's identity, moving from an identification merely with “me” (egocentric) to an identification with “us” (ethnocentric) to an identification with “all of us” (worldcentric) to an identification with the All (Kosmocentric). As permanent realizations, those are stages; they develop and unfold. States, on the other hand, can mean states of consciousness like waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and so on. You can usually experience these states at any stage—even an infant wakes, dreams, and sleeps. As professor and consciousness researcher Allan Combs says, states are free; stages have to be earned.

In any event, peak experiences or altered states tend to be temporary, transient—they come and go. They can be very important and very profound; it's just that they don't last. For example, an initial state experience of satori can be very important before it becomes a permanent or stage realization.

Cohen: Yes.

Wilber: But in relationship to what we are speaking about, if you look at the type of self or selves that a person can have in terms of states, in addition to stages, then it gets very interesting. For ordinary people in the waking state, the self they have is the ego. In the subtle or dream state, it's the soul or what you're calling the Authentic Self, which I refer to as the deeper psychic. And in the deep-sleep formless state, it's the Absolute Self. Now if we describe those three as nirmanakaya, sambogakaya, dharmakaya, or gross, subtle, causal, then those are the three major, or basic, selves that every human being possesses. We have a gross self, or ego, a subtle self, or soul or deeper psychic, and a causal, formless absolute or atman Self, capital S, a transcendental witness. So even an infant has a soul. They're not necessarily awakened to it, they're not necessarily alive to it, but it's there, yes. And they also obviously have an atman Self, even though they're not awake or realized as that transcendental Self or witness. States are free; stages are earned.

So the interesting thing is that you can now do what we call a lattice or a matrix, where you can plot stages of development and then look at the selves or the states that are occurring. The essential point, as we were saying, is that a person at any stage can have a temporary experience of almost any state—so you can have an egocentric experience of gross, subtle, and causal; an ethnocentric experience of gross, subtle, and causal; a worldcentric experience of gross, subtle, and causal, and so on. We have an enormous amount of evidence that all of those occur.

On occasion, then, almost anybody at any stage can get a glimpse of the deeper psychic, or the soul. They can have that state experience, but it usually slips and fades away. It is merely a passing state and not a permanent trait, not yet a permanent stage realization. Now, what I think happens, and the way it ties together with what you're talking about, is that at some point in actual development, between the worldcentric and Kosmocentric stages, the deeper psychic can awaken to itself, not as a temporary altered state but as a permanent realization or stage accomplishment.

Cohen: Right. And that's a very significant moment.

Wilber: So at that point you are awakening to this self in the subtle dimension. It's actually becoming alive to itself, even though in a sense it's been there all along, even though it had this kind of wholeness all along. It's been developing itself, because these stages have been developing as the vehicle through which it can express itself. But you have to be at least at a worldcentric stage of development or it's not going to stick. You can awaken the deeper psychic, or the soul, and get a taste of it, but it fades. But at some point, as we were saying, between worldcentric and Kosmocentric, it can be awakened, and there's a kind of flip. And then you hang everything off of your soul.

Cohen: Right, exactly!

Wilber: Does that make sense?

Cohen: Yes, perfectly.

Wilber: So theoretically that's pretty good.

Wilber: Of course, we've talked about what happens when people at lower levels of development have a temporary state experience of the subtle soul, or causal Self, and then they revert next week or the week after that, and then they usually feel pretty cranky about what's gone on—

Cohen: Very cranky. Even more than cranky. You see, I'm starting to see that when people really awaken to the Authentic Self, they begin to see the world in a completely new way; they discover a new morality. Suddenly they discover a completely different relationship to mind, to emotions, to the purpose and meaning and direction of life. But when they fall out of that perspective, because maybe they didn't want to face whatever they had to face in themselves—then what they do is fall back into the level of development that they were in before they had that realization. So suddenly they're not seeing things in the new way anymore, and they embrace the psychology and worldview that they had before, and then they see the experience that they had in a higher state from the perspective of the lower stage. So of course, now it's seen in a completely distorted way.

Wilber: Unfortunately that happens all the time. [Laughing] Happened to me just this morning at breakfast.

Cohen: [Laughing] It's a very weird experience to watch this happen to people.

Wilber: Well, again, you're looking at states and stages in what you're just describing. And the thing is, stages can't be skipped. For example, take atoms, molecules, cells, organisms. An atom can't have an experience of a cell and bypass being a molecule. It just doesn't work like that. So a person can be plunged into an authentic experience of a higher state—even of the nondual—at virtually any stage that they're at. They can have that temporary state experience—but then what also happens is that if the person is ready to move to the next stage of development, that experience will help dislodge their identification with their current stage, and they will then start to actually move to that next stage, in addition to having the state experience of the nondual.

Cohen: Right!

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?