COHEN: That's why these days, I give far more importance to the clear and conscious cultivation of the vast perspective of the enlightened mind. And while, as I said before, the experience of higher states can reveal that perspective, I have also found it works the other way around. Interestingly enough, grasping the big picture can actually be a catalyst for the experience of higher states. In this way, the perspective itself becomes the vehicle that helps people's minds expand and hearts open rather than any particular experience.

WILBER: I don't want to draw too many parallels to the traditions, because Spirit moves on, but even in Dzogchen there's the ”View” or “Right View,” and they tell us that when you get Right View, it helps you get emptiness—ever-present, nondual, unborn, radical emptiness. And the View is just as important as that experience.

COHEN: Indeed—the grasping of new perspectives can generate a real and thrilling experience of freedom. This is something I've often found reading your work. Sometimes, when you refer to the Four Quadrants [see diagram], for example, you say they're “just a map,” but for this reason I feel they're much more than that.

WILBER: I don't mean it that way, but please go ahead—I want to hear.

COHEN: Well, for example, I've had several powerful insights just recognizing how deeply embedded I and most of us are in a materialistic, dualistic, Cartesian worldview, without even being aware of it. When one gets glimpses of the multidimensional or, in your words, tetra-integrated cosmos—that everything, as one, is emerging simultaneously in all four quadrants, it's nothing less than enlightening, which means that it can truly shatter a dualistic worldview.

WILBER: Yes, I agree. It deepens spiritual realization. And thank you for saying that, because I really do think that that framework does reach right up into the unmanifest. And when you come out of the unmanifest, having an integral framework deepens your spiritual realization. It doesn't matter who we are, we are brought up in a world where we are deeply conditioned from day one in what you call a Cartesian worldview, the whole subject-object mess, and people get one quadrant and not the others. So the fact of the matter is that there are these four dimensions—and I always say at least four, because there could be multiple dimensions . . . but there are at least these four fundamental ones. And what happens is that even as you mentally walk through them, like you say, it digs into dualistic ruts that you didn't know were there.

COHEN: Oh, absolutely.

WILBER: And it liberates, it causes satori, it causes spiritual realization.

COHEN: Without a doubt, because the way we think about our experience, consciously and unconsciously, determines everything. And it's interesting how this understanding and emphasis has naturally emerged as part of my own evolution.

WILBER: I agree—and frankly, it's been part of my own evolution too. I've tended to underplay both the role of an interpretative framework and the role of View. People tend to assume that I came at it the other way; that because I had written so much on this framework, I thought the framework was superimportant to realization. But I didn't. I'm basically an old Zen person, and I was taught to sit manifesting Buddha mind as shikantaza [a form of meditation meaning “just sitting”], and anything resembling concepts was just bad, bad, bad, and simply not the way it's done. So I came to this understanding myself quite late, in terms of even theoretically agreeing with it, let alone in my own particular spiritual practice. I earned this the hard way, in both the mental and supramental dimensions of my own realization, even in my own writing. I think that as you grow as a teacher, whether it's a guru teacher or a pandit teacher, it really is a matter of deepening the understanding of the central importance of View.

COHEN: Absolutely. With my own students, I feel this is the crux of the matter, because when people hold the View, they are going to be my partners, not my followers.

Partnership Beyond Ego

COHEN: You know, despite the postmodern self's passionate identification with being an autonomous individual, most people don't want to be truly autonomous and independent—especially in a supercharged context like the one that I create, where I really do want, in my own crazy way, to actually catalyze a new level of development.

WILBER: And they don't want to hold partnership with you in that?

COHEN: Well, of course, they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be here, but the question is, to what degree?

WILBER: What strikes me as interesting is what you said about partnership—partnership in the true View, on the other side of ego. In order to go into this, I want to speak more about what I really mean by the four quadrants, because you're right, they are not just some objective map that you look at. The system I've developed, which I call “integral post-metaphysics,” is based on the understanding that every occasion is without dimensions; it simply arises moment to moment, and yet it manifests itself. And when it does so, it simultaneously possesses an inside and an outside as well as an individual and a collective dimension. Taken together, this gives us the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective. You have to draw a boundary someplace, and then you've got an inside and an outside, and as soon as you have that, you have a singular and a plural, an I and a we. That's the four quadrants, and each moment unfolds in those dimensions. Does that make sense?

COHEN: Absolutely.

WILBER: And that's the beautiful part, that all these dimensions are the manifestation of the ever-present is-ness, and what the quadrants are is just a reminder that in the manifest world, we must always take those dimensions into account because they are there. But the paper on which the quadrants are written is the unconditional, the unborn. What it really means in very experiential terms is that moment to moment there is this ever-present is-ness, and yet as soon as you feel it, as soon as you locate yourself in it, there's an I.

COHEN: Yes. The minute you locate yourself, the whole world appears.

WILBER: Exactly. As soon as there is an I, there is an it or an object, and then there's a we; there is some resonance with some other subjectivity someplace. For example, you and I are resonating right now; we are each an I and we are forming a we, because we have some mutual understanding, and the telephone is an it. So there's an I, a we, and an it. Now what happens when you're working with evolutionary enlightenment—or probably with any spiritual practice, but certainly when you are on the leading edge like you are—is that when you are plunging people into a causal, or nondual, open-eyes, ever-present, non-effort state, then, as you were saying, their authentic self speaks. In other words, an I arises that is an authentic self. And it should arise in a community of other authentic selves. As soon as you emerge from that nondual state and locate yourself as a separate entity, you should be resonating with other selves that are at that same level. If not, you basically end up having to pull people up. That is what the guru does. The guru manifests as an I that is going to form a we with students and help pull their I up to that same level. That's the struggle that you're engaged in all the time. It's an uphill pull, so that when you resonate as an I, you can have a partnership, a we, that is more or less at the same level.