Question: So it’s just about being conscious moment to moment.

Cohen: Well, yes, and a lot of teachers talk about “moment-to-moment” awareness. But the important thing is, what’s the context in which you’re being aware from moment to moment? I’ve known people who could do vipassana retreats for months at a time, paying attention to literally every thought, every emotion, every sensation, and every sinew in the body, but then I would see them afterwards and they were still acting in the same egoic ways. They were not necessarily enlightened people who were really aware of their deeper impulses. They were just good meditators.

So bare mindfulness, or attention from moment to moment, is a good technique as far as it goes, but I don’t feel it’s enough, unless you, whoever you are, care about your own effect in this world and the role that you’re going to play. When we really begin to care about the impact we’re having on others and the world, we’re naturally going to begin to give a presence of attention to our own motives. And when all these dark and impure impulses arise (which they will), because we care, we’re going to take responsibility for them and not act out of them. Now, it takes a very big heart and a courageous interest in higher development to be able to bear all of that without wincing, without pulling back, without being frightened by your own darkness. You begin to see that your potential to be a saint and your potential to be a sinner are absolutely equal. And you have to find a kind of equanimity as you observe everything that arises within you and get to the point where you’re not just trying to become a “good person.” As long as you want to see yourself as a good person, you’re going to be afraid, for the wrong reasons, of the darker parts of yourself.

I think a really heroic attitude is to embrace the darkest parts of ourselves without wincing—to know that both potentials exist in all of us, but we’re not striving to become saints, and we’re not afraid of being sinners. We want to be free. And because we want to be free, we no longer want to act out of unconscious, impure motives in a way that will have karmic consequences in the world. If you live knowing that the darkest potentials exist inside you without being afraid of them, you’re going to catch them before you act on them. If you don’t, it means there was some unwholesome impulse that you were invested in, something you wanted or were afraid of, so you didn’t care. That’s when, at least in the way I teach, karma is created. And if you are awake to some degree, you have to deal with the consequences.

Wilber: There’s a koan you can take home with you that speaks directly to this issue: “What is it in me that is conscious of everything?” And as for karma: “Karma is action that requires further action.” So be aware of that in you which is conscious of everything, and don’t merely be caught in the stream of karma, but simply know karma, and be aware of it.

Cohen: And if karma is that which requires further action, if you create karma, then you have to do whatever is necessary to correct it.

Wilber: Absolutely.

Cohen: Of course, in an evolutionary context, the reason we don’t want to create karma is not so that we don’t have to be reborn again but so that we can fearlessly embrace the reason that we’re here.

On Meditation

Question: I’ve spent many years meditating, but I’ve always felt there’s more to enlightenment than that. I’m really grateful to hear teachers express that view, and I’m curious what role you see meditation as having. It’s definitely supported me a lot in my own life, but I don’t see how my sitting and being at peace does much for the situation the world is in.

Wilber: I’ll give you a bit of sophistry first—sophistry meaning specious logic that has no meaning. Developmental psychologists have looked at scales of development for decades. And once you start understanding these, the first thing you want to know is: How can we help adults move through these stages? It’s sort of a natural inclination. Lawrence Kohlberg spent twenty years of his lifetime doing that, as did Carol Gilligan, Kurt Fisher, Robert Kegan, and Howard Gardner. And interestingly, there is only one thing that’s been consistently demonstrated to move people, on average, about two stages—and that’s meditation. So that’s point number one.

Point number two: Amrit Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, demonstrated that there’s never been a famine in a democratic country. And the reason is because information flow can allocate resources where they’re necessary. Point number three: A democracy stems from at least stage-five moral development. Since seventy percent of the world’s population is not there, the single best thing you can do to end world famine is to meditate. Meditation has a profound impact on the average level of consciousness in the world. It’s very, very important. So go ahead and spend time meditating. That’s exactly something you should be doing. Why does it work? This is a little bit technical, but there’s a fundamental rule about development: “The subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage.” So what happens when you meditate, and this is probably why meditation has been demonstrated to move people through stages, is that basically you’re looking at your own mind. You’re taking time, relaxing, settling into yourself—you don’t necessarily have to be introspecting; you can just be resting with everything that’s arising and letting it all arise and self-liberate in its own space—but when you do that, you’re still making it an object. The only thing that can’t be made an object is I-I, or the pure Witness, or God.

So meditation is a way to help you disidentify with finite objects and rest in that ground of being which is your very nature, your very Self. That’s a little bit of an abstract summary, but I think meditation is extremely important, and don’t ever let anybody tell you that it’s just not having any impact on the world. You’re changing the fundamental fabric of the cosmos when you meditate.

Cohen: First of all, if someone really knows what they’re doing when they’re meditating, the experience that they’re going to have will remove any doubts about why they’re doing it. What they’re going to experience will be profoundly liberating from anything that’s ever happened, every single time, because a meditative posture releases one from the world stream, releases one from being trapped in time.

Meditation is the experience of a particular state of consciousness that has certain qualities, which are also the qualities of enlightenment itself. This is why I always say that meditation is a metaphor for enlightenment. So when we sit down to meditate, we are consciously choosing to assume the enlightened relationship to our own experience, which means we take a position in relationship to our experience that is free—free from compulsive identification with the thought stream. If you meditate regularly with a strong intention, it gives you a deeper confidence in the limitless, inherent freedom of the empty ground of being that is your own deepest Self. It builds a conscious conviction in no-limitation, and as I teach it, this is the most significant purpose of meditation. If you are really interested in higher development, then it’s more than essential that the foundation of your personality or self sense is grounded in that absolute conviction. So until your conviction in your own freedom is unwavering, and you’re able to prove it through unbroken consistency in the way that you live, you need to keep having that experience.

Now to be honest, a lot of people meditate without having discovered that conviction, and that’s why they begin to doubt whether they should be doing it or not. Ultimately, when that conviction is found through real experience, meditation becomes much more than just sitting in a particular posture for a period of time. It becomes your ultimate refuge in relationship to life at all times, in all places, through all circumstances. But often people who meditate don’t really contemplate the implications of taking that position in relationship to their experience. The implications are always profound—because the position is not relative. And you can’t say that about many things.

Wilber: Just God.

To watch the video of Wilber and Cohen on
stage in Denver, go to wieunbound.org/gurupandit.