Dialogue VIII

What is enlightenment for the twenty-first century? In their eighth dialogue, guru and pandit trace the contours of cultural development and explore how the evolving forms of human worldviews affect the very experience and expression of the timeless spiritual revelation.

ANDREW COHEN: I'd like to talk about the relationship between enlightenment and the evolution of culture. My ongoing inquiry has been based upon both my own awakening to the eternal or timeless ground of being and the recognition that the world that we are living in is constantly changing. The world we're living in is a very different world from the one that existed two thousand years ago, one thousand years ago, or even five hundred years ago. And our needs as evolving human beings in the postmodern context at the beginning of the twenty-first century are dramatically different from those of individuals in the past.

In my earlier days, when I was a seeker, I took very much to heart everything my teachers said. Eventually, when I became a teacher myself, I found through my own experience that many of the things I had been told were not necessarily true. I was also aware that many Eastern teachers were having trouble addressing some of the needs of Western seekers because it seemed that they were seeing things through the filter of their own premodern worldview. That was why I started asking a lot of questions. My inquiry was then, and continues to be to this day: What does the postmodern expression of enlightenment look like? How can the revelation of emptiness or nonduality help me make sense out of the human experience at the beginning of the twenty-first century? That's how my inquiry began, and that's how I've approached all the important questions.

In my own development, what has replaced the excitement of experiencing new insights and ideas is the powerful urge to actually create a new context—a new cultural context, an enlightened culture. So what I wanted to speak to you about is the relationship between the experience of awakening and the emergence of a compulsion to create that which is new based on the revelation that one has experienced, based on the higher unmanifest potentials that one has actually glimpsed. What's most important to me, and I believe to you, is evolutionary spirituality, evolutionary enlightenment—spiritual transformation in an evolutionary, developmental context. And it's the creative component in relationship to awakening itself that is so compelling, so interesting, and so fascinating. Most significantly, it's the nondifference between the enlightened perspective, directly seen, known, and felt, and the arising of a spontaneous compulsion to create, to make manifest that which is being seen. Ultimately one becomes more compelled by what actually happens as a result of awakening than by the awakening itself. And it's the ecstatic compulsion to transform the world that really becomes the focus of one's attention instead of merely one's own personal development or personal liberation. Perhaps that can lay the ground for our discussion.

KEN WILBER: Well, let me suggest that the post-awakening impulse to create—which might be experienced by somebody having an awakening two thousand years ago, or one thousand years ago or five hundred years ago—the very felt sense of that impulse changes because the world of form has changed. So if you were alive two thousand years ago, and had the identical experience you have had during your lifetime now—if you had this nondual, awakening experience that was, to put it academically, a union of emptiness and form, a union of heaven and earth, a union of nirvana and samsara—I don't think you'd experience it as evolutionary spirituality. You're not merely resting in nirvana and emptiness, nor are you merely embracing pagan arising and impulsiveness moment to moment. You've had an awakening that sees they are both part of this ground of being, and that this emptiness is manifesting as form, and you have a creative, spontaneous, ecstatic, felt urge to express creativity. But two thousand years ago, that awakening would have had no place to go in terms of an evolutionary understanding. You wouldn't have felt that. Maybe you would have felt that you could express that realization through art, and you would have been a painter. Or you would have been compelled to express it in music, and you would have become a musician.

EVOLVING FORM

COHEN: That's because the understanding of time in those days was cyclical and not based in a deep-time developmental perspective.

WILBER: Exactly. And this relates to the question of enlightenment and culture because when culture changes, the form of enlightenment changes. Now when I use the word “form,” I mean that strictly. The formal aspects of enlightenment, the manifest forms of enlightenment, are different. And it's only in the modern and postmodern world that we can conceive of evolutionary spirituality and therefore feel that as the form of our awakening.

COHEN: This is why in most of the talks I'm giving now, I provide a basic understanding of premodern enlightenment, explaining how the ultimate goal in those days was to not have to return back to this world, to not have to take form again. And then I give everybody a very brief deep-time developmental perspective, explaining how long it's taken—fourteen billion years—for matter to gain the capacity to become conscious of itself. And I point out that if this is true, it wouldn't make any sense that the whole point of awakening, or enlightenment, would be to escape from the whole process at the very instant that the universe is beginning to awaken to itself.

From a developmental perspective, the universe, as far as we know, is only just beginning to become conscious of itself, through us. That's why the ultimate point and purpose of the whole ordeal of evolution, and finally of enlightenment itself, could not be merely the transcendence of or escape from the world, but rather the active transformation or enlightenment of the world.

WILBER: I agree with you entirely about what you're saying, vis-à-vis the early forms of ascending religion—yogic and Theravadin—the aim of which was to get out of samsara entirely and into nirvikalpa or nirodh or unconditional emptiness.

COHEN: And this was true even with the Western traditions, at least in Christianity. If you live a virtuous life and you're a good boy or a good girl, you get to go to heaven when you die.

WILBER: Right. And after the Mahayana revolution in Buddhism, there was a whole movement that understood that emptiness is not other than form and form is not other than emptiness, that there is a nondual, sahaj, open-eyes realization. In other words, a thousand years ago you could have had a “one-taste,” nondual awakened realization. But you still wouldn't have the form of evolutionary spirituality because there was no form like that in your mind or in the culture's mind at large. If there had been, you would read about it in the sutras and the tantras, but you don't.

COHEN: Exactly.

WILBER: But what happened about three hundred years ago is that the world of form, which is Spirit's own formal manifestation—Spirit is awakening to itself in the formal realm as well—started producing an understanding of the evolutionary forms of its own unfolding. And at that point, this understanding entered the mental realms, so to speak, and became available not only to the average educated person but to anybody who was being brought up in that atmosphere. So an understanding of evolution seeps into the whole world now. And what happens is that the very form of manifestation is becoming awakened to itself. So if you have that “one-taste” experience in today's world—just for argument's sake, let's say it's the same nondual realization today as a thousand years ago—it's going to expand into an evolutionary spirituality, because that is a more adequate form through which to express that realization.

A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

COHEN: Yes. And yet I think that even today, when people have nondual or enlightenment experiences, how those experiences are interpreted is going to depend on how free or informed one is, cognitively or intellectually. Even in our postmodern culture, enlightenment experiences are still often interpreted in a way that tends to overemphasize transcendence, which reflects a premodern worldview. And more often than not, the result is that this inadvertently opposes the evolutionary perspective.

WILBER: And as you yourself have said, and I completely agree, the interpretation is as important as, or more important than, the experience. So what we're saying is that it's at least necessary that you do have the sahaj or nondual realization. In other words, this is not a realization that is going to be available to you if you're merely doing nirvikalpa or unconditional emptiness. You're not going to get into evolutionary spirituality if you're doing that. And if you're doing merely samsaric immersion and paganism, you're not going to get into it either because you're not going to have an understanding of the ground of being. A nondual realization of the union of emptiness and form is necessary, but not sufficient, to understand evolutionary spirituality. Two other things have to come into play. One is the actual stage that you are at—and we can look at that using Spiral Dynamics or any of the stage conceptions we've talked about before. You can have these state experiences at any stage—

COHEN:—and you will interpret them according to that stage of development.

WILBER: That's right. So in order to get to an evolutionary spirituality, you have to have a stage that's at least integral or higher. In Spiral Dynamics, that means the yellow or turquoise meme; in Robert Kegan's system, that means the fifth order of consciousness.

COHEN: And it obviously gets even more complex than that.

WILBER: Right—there's another thing. And that is that once you're at that stage, the second prerequisite is you have to have a framework that's integral or adequate to all the facts known at that time. And that will include an understanding of levels and lines, evolutionary unfolding, and so on. If you have all that in your mental repertoire, then those three things together will tend to give you an experience of this evolutionary panentheism.*

COHEN: Right, but that recognition can also occur intuitively even if you don't necessarily have that kind of mental model. I sure didn't.

WILBER: That's right. But as you said, the evolutionary model helps you flesh it out.

COHEN: Absolutely. Dramatically.

WILBER: Yes, and it actually gives resonance to the awakening experience. Your interpretive framework is like that box on the back of a guitar. The actual strings are causing the sounds of the music, but the bigger that resonance box, the nicer the sound that comes out of it. And enlightenment still comes from the spiritual strings, but the interpretation is the box behind it, and the bigger that is, the more resonant and full the sound is.

COHEN: And the more one actually recognizes and appreciates how true that is, the more dramatic, or literally mind-blowing are the implications. Because again, even those who are highly developed at a cognitive level often have a lot of trouble appreciating how much our interpretive framework influences the way we perceive reality.

NO ONE UP THERE

COHEN: For example, I was recently giving a series of talks in Europe, and I found myself reminding everybody, “There's no one up there!” And even though most of the people I was speaking to were quite sophisticated, a palpable wave of fear went through the audience. It's amazing how many of us postmodern highly educated individuals still, in our heart of hearts, cling to premodern superstitious notions of a mythical God in the sky. When it comes to those spiritual concepts that we have embraced to help us interpret our life experience, how many of us are holding onto outdated ideas that no longer make any sense? It's fascinating to see how frightened even very sophisticated people are of letting go of premodern notions of a mythical God.

Finally, I made the obvious point that whoever HE, SHE, or IT is, that is ultimately who WE are. And of course, that recognition is entirely dependent upon us letting go of a God in the sky. Two thousand years ago, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” Apparently, we still haven't gotten the message.

WILBER: (Laughs) Well, it's really true that people have this strange relationship in terms of how they interpret reality. And the fact is that in many cases, the interpretation we have creates our reality. In any event, that's sort of the message of the postmodernist. But people, I think, are sometimes a little suspicious when they hear this. They'll tell you, “Wait a minute. That's more of that head-tripping cognitive stuff.” And they'll explain that if you could just feel, if you could just have a direct experience, you'd realize it doesn't have anything to do with all that conceptual stuff. But then you ask them, “Let's say you have an interior luminosity, a light brighter than a thousand suns, and you're drenched in love and being and consciousness and bliss and so on. Is that Jesus or is that Buddha? Is that an angel? What are you experiencing?” And they'll stop. And you can say, “You see, you have ideas about this. Now let's really talk about what it is. I'm not gainsaying the experience. That's fantastic. But was that light there all the time? Did you just notice it? Did it come into being? Is it brighter or less bright—or is it the way you interpret it? Did it have a thousand arms because Avalokiteshvara does? I'm just curious . . . ”

And so it becomes clear that at least half of what we call a spiritual experience is all the ways we interpret it. And there are better and worse ways to do that. There are fuller and more cramped ways to do it. There are integral and less integral ways. And what you find is that the more integral the interpretations, the fuller the experience actually becomes.

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.