The Utopian Impulse

Cohen: I think it’s interesting to begin to understand that the spiritual impulse is also an impulse toward higher relatedness, especially for individuals who are more developed. Initially, that impulse is felt as a desire to experience a deeper state, to be connected to life, to the deepest part of oneself, to wholeness. But then, as we begin to awaken to the deepest part of our self and that inherent wholeness, inherent fullness, we find that part and parcel of that spiritual impulse is a desire to connect and come together with other people in the context of the deeper wholeness that we’ve realized, that we’ve experienced, that we’ve awakened to. And I don’t really think it’s possible to separate one from the other; in other words, it’s not possible to separate the desire to experience higher states from the desire to meet and connect with other people at a deeper level. And that’s why, I think, when people begin to awaken spiritually, often they are drawn to form new relationships, because they want to connect in the context of something deeper that maybe they weren’t aware of or connected to before.

Wilber: I think so. I think that’s another way of describing, basically, what the four quadrants are [See diagram, p. 41], in essence: I and We and It, or self, culture/community, and nature/the objective world. And all of these go together. So in terms of this thing we call community, it’s not that there’s a separate self that somehow dropped to earth, parachuted to earth, and then wandered around till it smashed into some other separate self. It’s that self and other show up simultaneously and are, in fact, parts of the same thing. And the point I try to emphasize theoretically, and the point that you certainly emphasize in your practice, is that self and culture and nature go together. We have to liberate all three of them, or none at all.

Cohen: Yes, they’re all part of that one whole. So when one’s own self evolves, deepens, becomes more whole, then one naturally begins to seek for that same depth and wholeness in one’s relationships with others. As we awaken to higher states of consciousness, as we begin to see our own presence here in this unfolding process in a larger context, and especially as we awaken spiritually, there seems to be a utopian idealism that is an inherent part of the evolutionary impulse itself. It’s an urge toward greater wholeness, greater fullness, and even toward perfect relatedness. Of course, we can’t forget that some of the worst mistakes that have happened historically have been a result of this kind of idealism, but the drive toward utopia itself is part and parcel of the evolutionary impulse. I know I’ve felt that way from the very beginning of my teaching career, and obviously you are also driven or moved by a utopian impulse. I actually think that this impulse is part of the human experience at all levels, the minute we evolve beyond mere survival needs.

Wilber: Yes, I think that’s true.

Cohen: If you’re at a survival level, I guess utopia would just mean being able to have all the food and creature comforts that you can imagine. But beyond that level, there are many versions of it. For many of us today, an unenlightened version would be the American dream. Of course, it never usually works out once you get there, but what’s important to see is that once one has moved beyond mere survival, the utopian impulse is always there. It is part of what it’s like to be deeply in touch with life and the evolutionary impulse, and I think it has really always been part of what’s driving humanity forward. Of course, it’s led to a lot of wrong turns and enormous catastrophic consequences at times; nevertheless, it’s objectively important to realize that that’s part of what drives us in our best moments.

Wilber: Oh, exactly. And I can give a slight tweak to what you’re saying and tie it in with what I call the “Atman Project.” One of the things that I’ve tried to show is that, indeed, there is this drive toward perfection, or this drive toward something better, this intuition that there’s something fully whole that I can reach for that is better than anything that has gone before. In my book The Atman Project, I actually went back to the earliest stages of life and showed that you can see every stage of human development as a working out of the Atman Project: Human beings seek wholeness on the physical level because they intuit that they are infinite and eternal in a spiritual or absolute sense, but they apply it to a relative plane. They apply that intuition of perfect Atman [Universal Self] to the ego and try to make the ego into perfection.

Human beings, even according to the spiritual traditions, have at least two components to them: one is absolute and one is relative. And we intuit both. So the utopian impulse often comes from sentient beings intuiting their absolute nature—their Buddha nature, their Christ consciousness—and therefore wanting that ideal as a realization. Even the postmodernists do that. Community and relationship are really in a sense the Atman Project of the postmodernist. That’s where they sense something can be better. That’s where they sense their own deeper and higher ground. The best of them are goodhearted, genuine, moral, liberal-thinking people who want their political philosophy to stop prejudice and stop marginalization, because they think something utopian, something better can be brought into being. And so the Atman Project is that combination of a true intuition about an absolute, ultimate, great perfection, call it what you will—Godhead, Brahman, Tao, and so on—but applied to or through modes or bodies or memes or egos or cells that aren’t perfect.

Cohen: A very good example of that, which I often speak about, is what I call “the promise of perfection” that is inherent in the romantic and sexual impulse. For example, if you fall in love with somebody, if the sexual impulse is awakened and there’s a particular object of your desire, and then you fire it up with the romantic ideal, you become absolutely convinced, at least for a few hours, and maybe a few days or weeks, that you will find perfect happiness in the arms of that perfect other. That’s also a utopian impulse, an ecstatic reaching forth toward absolute perfection, fullness, and contentment. But of course, in that particular domain, it’s an illusion—a biologically and culturally programmed illusion.

Wilber: Absolutely. The Atman Project can latch on to any of the seven chakras. First, you try to achieve immortality, perfection, wholeness through the physical realm, the first chakra. And once you’ve tried everything in the physical realm and that doesn’t work, then you move up. If you can’t eat your way to God, maybe you’ll fuck your way to God, so you try the second chakra. That doesn’t work. Then you try power. Then you move up to the mental levels. Then you move up to soul. And finally, at the upper reaches, you stop seeking altogether. The authentic self, the evolutionary impulse, has exhausted all these relative planes that you have misapplied the intuition of perfection to. And now you are ready to simply awaken to that ever-present presence that is infinite and eternal and a great perfection.

Cohen: Well, in an evolutionary context, don’t you think that probably forever, or as long as this experiment in life, in creation, continues, there’s always going to be that kind of ecstatic reaching forward, reaching forth to manifest that utopian urge toward fullness, toward perfect relatedness, toward profound integral interrelatedness at all levels, which, when you’re awake, is simultaneously always already fulfilled and always just about to be? We could call it a kind of enlightened duality.

Wilber: That’s an excellent way to put it. There are very different types of enlightenment, but one of the really important ones is just that: It’s going from trying to seek enlightenment, where you are driven by a sense of deficiency, of valuelessness, of lack of fullness—to discovering that ever-present wholeness. Then there is that “enlightened duality,” where even though you’re aware of the great perfection, you are still driven, not out of a lack but out of an overflowing.

Cohen: Yes. And hopefully, as we as a species evolve into higher stages of development, that overflowing is what’s going to be driving more and more of us.

Wilber: Abraham Maslow, when he was looking at the hierarchy of human needs, found that there were two different kinds of needs and there was a huge jump between them. The needs that go up from physiological needs to safety needs to belonging to self-esteem to the beginning of self-actualization are all what he called D-needs or Deficiency needs, because they are driven by people feeling that they lack something. But then the highest needs are those of self-actualization and self-transcendence, and those needs are not driven by deficiency but by what he called B or Being values. They are driven out of a sense of fullness, not out of a sense of lack. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about.

Cohen: Exactly. That’s what I mean when I use the term “top-down” as opposed to “bottom-up” development, which we’ve discussed at different times. To me, top-down means that you have reached that point of overflowing. It means you have transcended your ego to such a significant degree that while you are still interested in evolution or constant development, you no longer see yourself as not having arrived or not being on the other side. This attainment is something that can’t be faked. The question always is, To what to degree is an individual authentically resting in the fullness of their already enlightened self? To reach that point of overflowing, at least fifty-one percent of whatever the self is must be abiding in that fullness, beyond ego. That doesn’t mean that there is not an awful lot more of the self that needs to be consumed by the fire of the spiritual impulse. But when I say top-down, what I mean, specifically, is that the unenlightened seeker has died. So then it’s a different kind of development or a different relationship to development. For example, if one has crossed that fifty-one percent threshold, it means one has to act like it. One can no longer behave like a hungry ghost—always seeking for fullness. It means the inherent fullness of one’s being has to be acted out in one’s personal conduct and also in one’s relationships with other people. One has to display, demonstrate, and actualize the fact that one has realized the inherent fullness of one’s ultimate nature.

Wilber: Right.

Cohen: And also one’s relationship to development, to ongoing and perpetual evolution, would begin to express a certain kind of maturity, consistency, and self-confidence. That’s what I mean by top-down. Because what I’m interested in is a unique kind of development that can happen between people, which can only occur when each and every one of the individuals involved has reached nothing less than that fifty-one percent point.

Wilber: As we’ve often discussed, one of the things that you are pioneering is a new form of intersubjective yoga. And in a sense, for intersubjective yoga to work—in order for the community to actually be a utopia in the positive sense, not the crazy, absolutistic, fundamentalist sense—everybody has to have reached that fifty-one percent point, which means they are being driven by overflowingness because fifty-one percent of the self is now full, and therefore is going to overflow. And that’s an entirely different motivation. It’s a motivation of superabundance and of overflowing top-down fullness, not a motivation of deficiency.

Creative Friction

Cohen: The way I envision utopia is all about a potential that emerges when a lot of the factors that we’ve been discussing come into play. A group of serious and dedicated individuals would come together, and there would have to be a significant number of them who have reached this top-down or fifty-one percent point of development so that they’re no longer seeking in that desperate way, but they’re fundamentally finders who are interested in higher development. They recognize the larger evolutionary context, the seemingly infinite developmental process that we’re all a part of. And because they have each transcended ego, at least to a significant degree, they are able to come together in a context of what I call natural hierarchy. Natural hierarchy means that the inherent hierarchical context of life at all levels is realized, and you admit and acknowledge the hierarchical differences that exist between individuals at different levels. If we can come together in a context with other people where we can admit all this, see all this, without being threatened, and also have transcended our own egos to a significant degree, then a miraculous capacity for intersubjective creativity emerges. And that, to me, is when it gets really exciting. That’s the whole point. Because then individuals come together not merely in a state of harmony or lack of conflict, which is the green or pluralistic ideal of peace, but in a process that I call “creative friction.” To me, that is the definition of post-postmodern utopia, where, as you would say, we transcend and include our highly developed individuated self in a higher intersubjective process of engagement beyond ego. The living manifestation and expression of this creative friction that is experienced in an intersubjective context where hierarchy is recognized is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. That’s living ecstasy; that’s being one with the creative principle; that’s God manifesting on earth as, in, and through all of us.

Wilber: I’m right with you on that. I think one of the subjects that there is the most confusion about out there is the nature of the enlightened state, and the nature of ultimate reality itself. What we too often find is some pretty loopy version of “the ultimate state is just the One.” And there’s no understanding of the One and the many, or the many and the One, or the whole notion that nonduality doesn’t mean the absence of One or many but means neither One, nor many, nor both. It exceeds all of those, but it doesn’t mean they’re not present. I think earlier you called it “enlightened duality,” where there is still the absolute One and there are still the relative many, but now they are consciously in a dance. And that’s what’s interesting. It’s not that all of a sudden enlightenment means one hundred percent of the world becomes white light and everybody disappears.

Cohen: No way! But what’s important here, especially in terms of making this leap beyond the postmodern state of arrested development that we were speaking about earlier, is recognizing that the absence of conflict, in and of itself, is not higher wholeness.

Wilber: No, it’s death.

Cohen: And even authentic saints can unintentionally tend to give people the wrong idea about this.

Wilber: Yes, I know.

Cohen: The absence of conflict is not enough. Authentic friendship—where human beings are creative partners, lovers of life, God, and spirit—requires individuals to be able to come together and conflict with each other in the most creative way possible. It’s not necessarily going to be peaceful, but it will be ecstatic. It demands autonomy, a very highly developed capacity for autonomy and independence where you’re willing to embrace and dance and argue and fight in the most creative way with other people.

But in order for that to happen, the ego has to be transcended to a significant degree by both (or hopefully many) parties, so then we can come together and begin to rub up against each other in the most creative way possible. Then it wouldn’t be the ego that was creating the friction; it would be what we’ve often referred to as the authentic self, or the God impulse, that would be creating the friction itself. Now, for individuals who haven’t taken that leap that we were speaking about, beyond fifty-one percent, this would not be seen as very attractive. But to me, that ongoing creative friction is the definition of deep spiritual, psychological, and emotional health and vibrancy in a community or intersubjective context.

Wilber: Yes, I agree with all of that. If you look East and West, there are two fundamental notions of the God-realized person, the enlightened person, the awakened person, the person who is saved or liberated. One is some version of the saint, or the arhat—and that’s basically somebody who fundamentally is dead from the neck down. I don’t mean to be irreverent, but it’s certainly the notion that there is the absence of conflict. And there are not really even any positive qualities associated with such an individual, besides some very abstract virtues of universal compassion, or universal love, or universal wisdom and so on. The arhat, or the saint, is in touch with pure emptiness, pure perfection, pure nirvana—not samsara. There’s no form at all; it is gone.

The other version is the siddha. There was a big change, particularly with Nagarjuna in the East and Plotinus in the West, where it wasn’t just emptiness versus form, or the One away from the many; it was the realization that emptiness and form are not two, and because that’s the case, nirvana and samsara are not two. Now that’s an entirely different ballgame, because now there is this creative tension where there is a nirvanic component and a samsaric component in every moment of existence. And so what you are doing is balancing and harmonizing the infinite aspect of every moment with the finite aspect of every moment. That creative tension is what evolution is all about, and what fullness is all about. And the siddha is the one who plays with emptiness and form and is in touch with both of them.

Cohen: Right.

Wilber: And that’s a very, very different concept than dead from the neck down. The siddha is much more interesting, and the evolutionary siddha is really, I think, the only form of enlightenment that makes any sense at all. And it’s certainly the one that we have to embrace now: an integral evolutionary siddha. And they’re much more interesting characters.

Cohen: Yes. [Laughs] I agree wholeheartedly. And just to add to that, taking everything you said and then bringing it into the intersubjective context of relationship, the whole notion that being happy means there is no conflict is a very reductionistic way of looking at the meaning of happiness. For those integral evolutionary siddhas, happiness would mean that we are so much on the same page that we can really fight in the most creative way, in such a way that would challenge each of us, hopefully at the deepest level, the level of the soul, so that we could each ideally only evolve as a result. But of course it takes guts and it takes heart; it means you have to be willing to stay in the ring, so to speak. And if you’re not afraid, if you have crossed that fifty-one percent point, then you’ll experience that as an ecstatic engagement with life itself. You’ll experience it as ecstasy, not as conflict.

Wilber: Yes. There’s a metaphor I’ve always liked. We’ve all heard about the ocean and the waves. The ocean is supposed to represent the One, nirvana, the absolute, the ultimate, the infinite, and so on; the waves are samsara, the manifest, form, and so on. And in terms of these two different views of happiness, the question is: What do you do with the waves of life that are crashing ashore all the time? The arhat gets an iron and tries to iron out all the waves, in order to just have a nice flat calm ocean. The siddha gets a surfboard and rides the waves. It’s a corny metaphor, but it’s a very good one because a wave, after all, is a combination of the ocean and the wave; it’s the entire ocean expressing itself. And so instead of trying to get rid of that wave, you’re riding the evolutionary impulse. And surfing is exhilarating, even though it can also be painful and difficult and frightening. Surfers say it’s the most exhilarating thrill you can imagine.

Cohen: It’s the only thing there is to do.

Wilber: And that’s what being an integral evolutionary siddha, a self-realized authentic self, is all about.