UNCHARTED TERRITORY

COHEN: Absolutely. That's the whole point of what we're speaking about. This relates directly to what you've written about a “post-metaphysical spirituality,” at least as far as I understand it. What that actually means is an ever-new revelation for me—that the depth of our conscious engagement with the evolutionary process is the very edge of development itself (assuming we're actually pushing the edge). And that leading edge does not preexist. There is no—

WILBER:—predetermined blueprint out there.

COHEN: Exactly. There's no predetermined blueprint or end. And of course, if one is very thrilled by the whole notion of freedom and enlightenment, and one is grounded in zero or emptiness—which means fundamentally that one doesn't know anything anyway, so there's nothing to fear—then nothing is going to be more exciting than pushing that edge oneself. And one pursues this because one recognizes that ultimately the evolutionary process is dependent upon one's own committed engagement with it. It's dependent upon those of us who are willing to take that risk, knowing it is uncharted territory that is being mapped by individuals who are willing to go that far.

WILBER: Right.

COHEN: And that's very exciting. But of course, one can see that one has to be willing to surrender or transcend all of the protective layers that one maintains between oneself and reality in order to be able to engage with life with that kind of depth and intensity, because for most this is just too frightening. It's too stark.

WILBER: It is too stark. And that's the leap into the void that every mystic has to take. That is the leap into your own death and a leap into the future. It's a leap into the mystery and the emptiness all at the same time, which is a leap into the intensity of this very moment. And out of that awakened presence, you get this post-awakening grappling with the world of form. It's not that we just jump into emptiness and sit there smugly with a smile of eternity on our faces.

COHEN: Some people do! (laughs)

WILBER: I'm being a little ironic. But when you come back, eternity is in love with the productions of time, or emptiness is in love with the productions of form. And it's only in the last couple of hundred years that we've known the world of form is evolving. So it's really only in the past century or two that we've had forms of evolutionary spirituality as the most adequate expression of Spirit in today's world. Hell, a thousand years from now “evolutionary” could mean light beams held in the fifth matrix on Alpha Centauri. Who knows? But for right now, when we put it all together, the best we have is exactly that—awakening consciousness is in love with the world of form, and the world of form is evolving. So the more awakened you are, the more you join the evolutionary push.

COHEN: Right. And a lot of people have to get on the train, don't you think?

WILBER: Yeah!

EVOLUTIONARY ENLIGHTENMENT

COHEN: Most of the people who are either teaching or interested in enlightenment these days are still working with the static nondual model. They may have some experience of the ground of being, which has had a big transformative impact on them, but they rarely have any sense of the evolutionary dynamic you've been speaking about. And then there are a whole bunch of folks who are very excited about evolution. I've noticed that people who awaken to the deep-time, developmental context also experience a kind of spiritual awakening. They awaken to the evolutionary context and it's like a religious experience. But one without the other is not the whole picture because often the people who are very much on fire with evolution are not grounded in the realization of emptiness.

WILBER: That's right.

COHEN: And therefore the expression or the manifestation of their understanding is lacking the already free perspective, even though the ecstatic urgency of evolution, and the promise of it, is living through them in a very powerful way. But ultimately if enlightenment and evolution are not balancing each other, it's not a whole or integral picture.

WILBER: Yes, I agree entirely. And it really does tend to be one or the other. Those who have an understanding of ground, because they've often gotten it through a traditional path that doesn't have an understanding of evolutionary manifestation, are taught to express their realization in rather static forms—oneness with nature as is, or oneness with the now moment—all of which is fine. But it's really not an up-to-date version of what that satori could be. And so they tend not to get stages, and they don't get the evolutionary unfolding. It's a “one taste,” but it's a very static kind of one taste.

And then, on the other hand, if people get the evolutionary unfolding, they usually haven't had that experience of prior emptiness or of the unborn or the changeless ground. And because of that, they tie their realization to an evolutionary stage. “I have to be at this stage; then I can realize.” And that's not it at all, because that ever-present state is ever present, and you can have that realization virtually at any point. But in order to stabilize and ground it, you do indeed have to then grow and develop. So they just understand the evolutionary side of form, and the other folks tend to have the emptiness understood, but very rarely do you get emptiness together with evolutionary form.

COHEN: And that is evolutionary enlightenment.

WILBER: Yes, that's then a nondual evolutionary panentheism, or whatever general metaphors we want to use for that. We're saying that the experience or deep realization of ground, or emptiness, or the unborn is necessary. It's foundational.

COHEN: It's foundational because without that ground one is, in a sense, also trapped in a developmental perspective.

WILBER: It's just samsara at high speed! That's all evolution becomes.

COHEN: Yes, that's evolution without the enlightenment.