On Evolution, Ego, and Why
We Don’t Have Time to “Be Here Now”

It probably goes without saying that many of humanity’s most significant leaps forward have been achieved by creative individuals—men and women, fueled by necessity, genius, or divine inspiration, who stepped beyond the confines of the status quo to contribute something novel to the world. Less renowned, perhaps, are the cultural advances that have been achieved by a creative duo of individuals working together—allies or colleagues who, driven by a shared passion to change the world for the better, freely tested the limits of the familiar, the safe, and the known.

These days, as friends and partners mapping the evolving edge of consciousness, spiritual teacher (and What Is Enlightenment? founder) Andrew Cohen and spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber—the guru and the pandit*—may be on their way to becoming such a team. Like a spiritualized fusion of Watson & Crick and Lewis & Clark, these contemporary pioneers are attempting to discern the deep structures of human nature while continually venturing into uncharted territory. Chronicled for the past few years in the pages of this magazine, their dialogues have united Cohen’s depth of experience as a teacher of enlightenment with Wilber’s formidable theoretical knowledge, and together, the guru and the pandit have endeavored to explore a number of new pathways through the vast field of human potential.

So last fall, when Cohen and Wilber held their first-ever public discussion during a sunny afternoon in downtown Denver, Colorado, it was an exciting event. Admittedly, I was struck by its significance more than some, having been a student of Wilber’s writings and a founding member of his Integral Institute before becoming a student of Cohen’s teachings and an editor of WIE. But it was clear from the many people I spoke with afterward—including Integral Institute members, supporters, and their friends—that everyone was affected by what happened that afternoon. Sitting in a packed conference room, we were treated to an exploration of awakened consciousness and the future of spirituality that was anything but abstract. After all, this wasn’t simply a dialogue between Cohen and Wilber but rather an intensive—and implicating—Q&A session in which members of the audience had the opportunity to question them about anything and everything: from the problem of ego to the purpose of meditation, the nature of the enlightened state, and the risk involved in surrendering one’s life to the evolutionary impulse.

In the following pages, we’re happy to present to you a few of the most thought-provoking highlights of this nearly three-hour event.

* In Sanskrit, a pandit is a scholar who is deeply proficient and immersed in spiritual wisdom.

Opening Remarks

Ken Wilber: We live in rather extraordinary times, if you think about it. We have access to all the world’s great living traditions. This has never happened before in history. We are blessed to be able to experiment with and mine the various ways that Spirit has chosen to make itself known in the past. This is a challenge, and it’s a threat. It’s something that we want more than anything else, yet it’s something that we’re frightened of more than anything else (and if you’re not frightened, you don’t understand it). So it’s a very delicate balance. Fortunately, we have God on our side. Unfortunately, however, we have egos; we have self-contractions.

So what we want to do today is talk about both sides of that street and ways that you can tip the scales in your favor. And also look at some of the ways that all of us are inherently dedicated to not waking up—which we know is the case, because the empirical evidence is right there. Of course, there’s also the fact that we are all here together today, pooling our understanding and resources in order to engage in arguably the greatest adventure there is: the adventure of consciousness, the adventure of waking up, the adventure of going so deep into yourself that you stumble and fall into infinity. Under those circumstances, a new destiny arises from consciousness. And this destiny is one of pain and suffering plus bliss and ecstasy, minus your fundamental objection to life. And that’s quite an extraordinary thing to realize you can do without.

There’s a politically incorrect definition of a pioneer: the guy with all the arrows in his back. That’s fundamentally what any of us who are trying to push the envelope are up against. We’re running into the stresses and strains of cosmic reluctance, because what are being laid down or created right now are actually structures of consciousness. The structures of the future are not Platonic givens that drop down from heaven. They are structures that we build every time we have a thought that’s just a little bit higher than the thought we had a moment before, or engage in an activity that’s just a little bit more noble than the activity we engaged in a moment before, or transmit our own state and the transmission is a little bit deeper than it was a moment before. In these ways, cosmic habits are built up, and that’s basically what we’re engaged in. It’s an extraordinary adventure. I can’t think of anything like it.

One of my favorite exercises from Quaker prayer gatherings is: “Let the next sentence out of your mouth be from your very highest self.” Everybody gets quiet at that point! But that’s the kind of attitude we want to bring to these dialogues. New structures in consciousness are being laid down right now—they are just faint footprints on the face of the cosmos. So your behavior, to the extent that you live up to your highest, is actually creating structures that future humanity will inhabit. Therefore, choose your acts very, very carefully. Make sure that the next action you take comes from your highest self. Make sure that the next thing that you say comes from your highest self. Then there’s hope for the future. Those structures are already being laid down. God is laying them down; Spirit is laying them down—through us. So we have to become appropriate vehicles for Spirit to lay down the very structures that humanity is going to inhabit. And if we don’t, that is a guilt we will carry with us for eternity.

Andrew Cohen: Ken was just speaking about what it would mean to give up our fundamental objection to life— or what I would call our refusal to transcend our almost pathological engagement with our narcissistic inclinations.

Wilber: Yep. (Laughter from audience)

Cohen: So what would it be like to truly give that up—to be so serious about it that it wasn’t a joke anymore? The reason to strive to do that would be so that we were able to take up the ultimate challenge, the adventure that Ken was speaking about, which, to put it very simply, is to actually create the future ourselves. As he was describing, the structures that lie in front of us don’t yet exist, and it’s up to us as individuals, together, to actually create those new structures. I feel that the degree to which, on an individual level, we are willing to let in the absolute uncompromising fact that the future literally depends on us will mean everything about the kind of person we’re going to be, the kind of relationship to life we will have, and ultimately the difference we’re going to be able to make in this world. So it’s a deadly serious matter.

What I’m very interested in, and what Ken and I have often discussed, is how enlightenment itself is evolving. As human understanding develops and we begin to understand the spiritual path in an evolutionary context, we can see that it is no longer about merely transcending the world but about embracing this active dimension of what it means to consciously create the cosmos. Until very recently, God, or the creative principle, was something that we were asking for help from. But I believe we’ve reached a time in history when God, which I would describe as the energy and intelligence that created the universe, is now completely dependent upon us—upon those sentient beings who have reached a level of development where we’re capable of beginning to appreciate who we are and why we are here. God is not “up there” waiting to save us. That creative principle is who we are—not just in the formless, unmanifest dimension but in the creative, manifest world, as the evolutionary impulse, the spark that initiated the big bang, which is our own Authentic Self. The mysterious compulsion to evolve that we experience at the level of consciousness is nothing less than God becoming aware of himself, herself, or itself, as us. In this awakening, we directly know that the future depends upon us. It’s no longer just an idea; it’s an emotionally felt absolute reality.

So I think that creating the future at the leading edge is dependent upon each one of us waking up to this Authentic Self and making whatever effort is necessary to begin to identify with that thrilling creative passion and to transcend our attachment to the fears and desires of the ego or separate-self sense, which go on forever. Traditionally, the seeker would aspire to transcend ego in order to abide in the timeless ground of being. But I don’t think that what the world needs now is more people hanging out in the timeless ground of being! I think we have to resist the temptation to get lost in timelessness and begin to embrace the overwhelming urgency of the evolutionary crisis we’re in, which, as Ken has stated much more eloquently than I can, is a crisis of consciousness, a crisis of understanding, a crisis of development. Many of us can intellectually appreciate our predicament, but that’s not enough. We have to bridge the gap between our capacity to cognitively appreciate the problem and our willingness to actually become the solution ourselves, as truly enlightened human beings.

On Risk and Trust

Question: Once we surrender to what you’ve called the “creative principle,” how can we know that we’re on the right track, that
we’re really acting on behalf of a better future?

Cohen: How can we know? Well, it’s a very delicate question, but part and parcel of the kind of awakening we’re speaking about is that you begin to directly intuit or cognize a higher order. It’s experienced as a kind of harmony or fullness or integration, a higher structure that makes profound sense out of everything, and the best way I can describe it is that it’s self-authenticating or self-legitimizing. This may be a silly metaphor, but it’s almost like you can hear the angels singing. These intuitions are of the impersonal structures of consciousness itself, higher and higher manifestations of the ultimate truth of oneness. So the higher you go, the greater is the sense of being at the very center of the universe, of creation—of seeing with the eyes of God. Now, as to whether the individual is actually enlightened or is some insane pathological maniac, I guess others will have to make up their own minds. I mean, Hitler obviously had his own visions too . . .

Wilber: There’s one way you can tell a little bit, and this is approaching it more from the pandit’s side of the street. When that higher manifestation comes down, to the extent that it’s healthy, you should feel it resonating in all four quadrants—and it feels deeply, deeply right. So it’s impersonal in the sense that it’s a higher person; it’s not just radically without person. It’s God in the first person; and it’s also dealing with the world and dealing with you and we and it, and you can feel it resonating. When it hits all four quadrants, there is something very right about it. If it hits just one or the other, there’s something inherently a little bit off. It’s very seductive, because you can get one or two and you think, this must be right. But it may be just resonating with the I—not resonating with the you or the we, and so on.

Cohen: So unless it’s all quadrants, it won’t vibrate in that way that is self-authenticating.

Wilber: Right. And even if you mentally have to back off and check, write it down—all of us have to do that. Andrew’s right on the money in saying that when it comes down and it’s healthy, you feel its authenticity; it creates an extraordinary sort of coming into manifestation of the next higher you. But then you can stand back and reflect on it. That’s what critical reflection is—after the fact, you do a little review process.

Question: So Andrew’s speaking more about the felt experience that it’s right, and you’re saying it also fits the four quadrants.

Wilber: Yes.

Cohen: But it’s also seen—it’s felt and seen as a whole. I don’t want to reduce what we’re talking about to a felt experience. I’m describing a higher level of cognition in which the emotional experience and what’s being seen, what’s being cognized, cannot be separated. The felt dimension is actually the least important part of it. What matters is what’s happening in consciousness. New structures will have to come along to be able to contain what’s being seen at moments like that.

Wilber: Yes, and it’s not itself an experience.

Cohen: Right. But you know, the directly felt and seen dimension of this is always going to be moving faster than our understanding of it.

Question: So are you saying that at a certain point we have to trust that what feels right is beneficial for the cosmos? We can never ultimately know?

Cohen: Well, I’m just saying that if you are pushing an edge in the way Ken was describing it, you are inherently going to be exploring territory that is, relatively speaking, unknown. So it takes a certain kind of courage to let yourself go that far. And of course, there is a risk there. Now, the risk is only felt by the separate-self sense or ego. The part of you that is pushing this edge, the creative impulse, doesn’t experience it as a risk because pushing that edge is a function of consciousness at that level. But when your human self, your ego, begins to be overwhelmed by that energy that’s endeavoring to create the future, two things can happen. To the degree to which you identify only with that consciousness that’s trying to create the future, there’s no fear. But when you step back and start thinking about it, there can be a recoil, an absolute terror.

When it comes to the question of whether one is on the right track or not, whether one is actually in touch with a higher level or just a little crazy, we have to be careful. How do we define sanity anyway, especially when we’re talking about pushing an edge? I mean, in a world where most people are struggling to even keep up the pretense of integration, what does sanity actually mean? None of us should take for granted that we know what it is. Perhaps relatively speaking we can know, but when we are speaking about pushing the edge, about reaching for higher levels of development, the difference between madness and a higher expression of profound sanity may be very difficult for one who is not wise or enlightened to distinguish. It opens up questions that should force all of us to sit back and maybe question a lot of our assumptions.

So I think what I’m trying to say is that there are no guarantees. Of course, what Ken said is true—if you could see that all four quadrants were being taken into consideration, you could probably have a sense that you’re on the right track. But still, when you’re talking about pushing the edge, there’s always going to be an element of enormous risk.

Wilber: Let me play the other side of that too. What Andrew’s saying is very important, and you also have to balance it with a fundamental trust. There’s a very fundamental moment in consciousness where you establish trust. You can’t distrust what’s arising moment to moment. That very point of touching what’s arising moment to moment—you can’t doubt that. If you did doubt that, you’d be aware of the doubter. So you are in basic trust of the universe as it is arising. And that moment of contact with the universe when it’s arising, that moment of touch, is Spirit. You can’t fundamentally doubt the existence of Spirit, any more than you can doubt the arising that’s happening right now. So it’s important to do all the things that Andrew’s talking about. And it’s important to then stand back and reflect: Does it seem like it’s resonating with all the different components in me, such as the quadrants? But don’t ever lose track of that fundamental trust, because that’s the very nature of God in you that’s touching this world. And it’s very palpable.

On Experience vs. Action

Question: You were saying earlier that the ultimate state is
not an experience. But I often feel that state as a powerful
experience or sense of overflowing into the world.

Wilber: Let me try to explain. Right now, you notice things arising. You have an experience of this; you have an experience of that. Objects are arising in your awareness moment to moment—they come, they stay awhile, they go. Now, the space in which these experiences come and go is not an experience—that vast openness, or spaciousness, is not an experience. It doesn’t come and go; it’s unborn. It’s also called emptiness because it’s transparent; nothing sticks in it. And it has no moving parts, so it can’t break down. That’s the part that’s not an experience. Out of that (although it’s not really out of that) there can be movement, obviously, in the gross manifest realm. And that can be looked at as an overflowing, which tends to have more of an experiential component, because you’re moving in the world of manifestation. So there’s time and motion, and there’s superabundance and it’s overflowing. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t confuse the ultimate state with an experience.

Cohen: At the beginning of the path, we tend to measure our progress in relationship to moments or periods of time when we’re experiencing what you described as that overflow. In other words, when that which exists beyond time is felt in the context of time, when it rubs up against time, so to speak—in those moments it becomes more obvious to us. And so we think when we’re having that particular feeling experience, we are there or it’s happening. And when that feeling is absent, we are not there and it isn’t happening. But when you begin to wake up to who you really are and what the absolute nature of this whole process is, you give less importance to those moments of overflow as an indicator of who you are and what’s ultimately true. As you mature, you become more centered in what’s always true no matter how things feel or how they appear.

Wilber: When I was studying with Chagdud Tulku, who was one of the great Dzogchen masters, people would come to him and say, “Oh God, I finally got it. There’s this clarity and it’s just so unbelievable! I get it. I get it.” And he was very funny, because he would ask, “Did it have a beginning in time?” They’d say, “Yes, about half an hour ago.” And he’d always say, “It’s not it. Come back later.” So anything that has a beginning in time is not real.

Question: In what you’re both saying, I hear a call for action rather than experience, an emphasis on doing rather than being.

Cohen: Yes, because the fact is, we’re all self-centered experience junkies who have a very materialistic relationship to our feeling experience, and we have to cut that out! The future needs to be created now, and we don’t have any more time to sit around and enjoy the ride. We have to make something happen. Of course, there is a dimension to all this that never moves, that infinite ground of being that is the foundation of everything. But since the sixties, everybody’s been talking about “be here now,” and now we have “the power of now”—it’s the same old thing. Personally, I think the last thing we need is more being here now. It’s not enough.

A real integrated understanding of enlightenment has to embrace both dimensions. The absolute nature of everything is inherently free and inherently full and inherently perfect. And any liberated perspective, including an evolutionary one, has to be based upon a deep realization of that truth. But that’s just the foundation. Upon that foundation there’s an urgency to embrace this creative or evolutionary principle. Most of the time, we’re all so lost in neurotic self-concern that if someone tells us, “Transcend the mind. Be in the moment,” we go, “Ahhhh,” and we feel some relief, and we say, “That’s it.” But I say, “That’s not it.” All we’re feeling then is some relief from our narcissistic self-obsession and from “the burden of existence”—which is, ridiculously enough, how a lot of us actually feel about being alive. When you realize that the universe can only know itself through the unique capacity for consciousness that you and I possess, suddenly it’s not a burden to be alive. It’s the greatest gift and the greatest privilege to be a human being, right here, right now.

Wilber (to Questioner): Does that help you understand your experience?

Question: Well, it is nice to hear more emphasis on doing. I resonate with that—not less being, just more doing.

Wilber: But don’t get stuck in doing, or Andrew will go after that too.

Cohen: Yes, if it is doing that is not informed by the mind of enlightenment.

Wilber: Make sure you get that part—seriously!

Cohen: Of course, there are a lot of people doing great work who are not being compelled by the mind of enlightenment, and I’m not criticizing that in any way. But I’m talking about something different here. I’m talking about being compelled from the deepest and highest part of the self. And remember, the degree to which you’re willing to respond to that compulsion is the degree to which you will experience self-liberation in that moment.

Question: But the spot right before that is a little scary.

Cohen: Right, yes. Because the spot right before that is the ego’s hesitation, inertia, and self-concern. It’s the part of ourselves that we all have to get over, sooner rather than later. We don’t have time to carry on like that—even though most of us aren’t willing to give up the luxury of time. We don’t have time to endlessly—

Wilber: —be here now. It takes too long! (Laughter)

Cohen: Right! And also, we don’t have time to endlessly struggle with the ambivalence of the ego. The ego will always be ambivalent. The Authentic Self, which is not separate from the energy and intelligence behind the universe, experiences only the ecstatic compulsion to create the future, with no sense of hesitation whatsoever. But the ego is identified with the past and attached to the way things have been, full of doubt and terrified of change. And on it will go, ad infinitum. So finally a decision has to be made, if you can permit me to say this, for eternity. It’s not just a choice you make for your life, right now. When an individual awakens and makes this choice absolutely and irrevocably, I’m convinced it reaches beyond this lifetime.

On Ego

Question: What practices do you teach to guard against ego—to catch oneself when one is acting out of ego?

Wilber: There are two things I think are really important in terms of catching ego in your own path. One refers to the Absolute Self, if I can put it that way, and the other refers to the finite self. Meditative or contemplative traditions are very good at helping you reawaken to the Absolute Self, to the ever-present witness or Maha-atman, which is the Godhead in you. What you’re likely to face there are ways you can mess that up, remnants of ego that get stuck there, and the traditions are pretty good at rooting those out. What they’re not good at dealing with, because they can’t see it, is the shadow of the finite self. So people can be relatively enlightened in certain traditions but have shadow elements that are quite shocking, because there’s no way meditation can get at them.

I use several ways to get at that shadow, but one is a process that we developed at Integral Institute called 3-2-1 (as in third person, second person, first person). There are two versions of this practice. In the morning when you wake up, you think of a dream and think of the element in the dream that’s the most disturbing—it could be the most attractive, most positive, or most negative. So that’s a third-person object or “other.” Now, most psychodynamic theories agree that these elements that disturb us most are parts of our own finite selves that we haven’t come to terms with; we’ve repressed them or projected them and they appear as other. Your finite self has split something off from itself and that shadow element will screw you up all the way to enlightenment and back, because there’s no way to get at it. So in the morning you simply take one of these elements and hold it in front of you and talk to it. Now it becomes second person. And once you’ve converted it to second person, then the next step is to make it first person, to identify with it, to actually speak from that place: “I am the monster,” and so on. That’s a very good way to help you get out of the victim mode, because one of the primary ways you get into the victim mode is by projecting some aspect of yourself that you hate outside of yourself, and then it attacks you all the time and you can’t figure out why. So that’s the 3-2-1 process. You can also do it at the end of the day—take an event, thing, or person that upset you and follow the same process.

Here’s where meditation can make it worse: If you’ve split off some aspect of your finite self and turned it into a third person, and you say, “I’m not angry, but boy that person seems to be angry at me. I don’t know why; I never get angry,” and then you sit in meditation and say, “There is anger, there is anger, there is anger,” all it does is increase the disassociation. So meditation increases the disassociative capacity vis-à-vis your own shadow. That’s one reason why, if people get deeply involved in meditative practices, after five, ten, twenty years all they have left are enormous shadows, and everything else is gone. And if they’re teachers, they get together over lunch and talk about their shadows! They can bring a great deal of mindfulness to the shadow; they just can’t cure it.

So meditation is very important, but you have to remember that there are things to keep the Absolute Self straight and things to keep the finite self straight, and you want to try to have at least a practice or two to cover both. If you don’t do both, you’re in a great deal of trouble. The 3-2-1 process basically keeps your finite self healthy, even while you try to transcend it.

Cohen: In the way that I teach, I try to get people, number one, to recognize that they have an ego, and number two, to actually become deadly serious about transcending it in a way that is significant.

I don’t personally believe it’s possible for anybody, through the power of their will, to transcend ego completely. There apparently have been rare individuals who accomplished such a thing, but it seems to me that this was really a force of grace or karma, something that just seemed to happen. But I am convinced that it is possible to transcend ego to a profound degree, simply through the power of one’s own awakened intention to do so. However, getting an individual to take seriously for more than a nanosecond the possibility of actually transcending their own ego is very difficult. The very notion is just not part of our culture. But if it’s not going to happen as an act of grace, the individual has to want to achieve that more than anything else.

One thing I put a tremendous amount of emphasis on is getting people to begin to pay attention to their own experience, and not just when they are practicing meditation. Once you really get what meditation is, it becomes something that you’re always doing. And if you are paying attention in this way, then you are going to become aware of what ego is and what it feels like. You will become aware of the fact that we all have all kinds of unwholesome motives arising within us.

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.