A Mysterious Compulsion to Evolve

Cohen: Absolutely. That’s a very clear description of the terrain we are both working in.

One other point I’d like to bring out is that when spirit took the leap from formlessness to form, from nothing to something, from being to becoming, it emerged from emptiness as the creative impulse—the urge to become, the desire to exist. This creative impulse expresses itself at all levels of the human experience. Any human being can locate it at the lowest level of their being—at the gross physical level—as the sexual impulse, which is really the presence or movement of the big bang as a biological imperative. But at higher levels of being, humans are the only life forms we know of that are compelled to innovate and to create. We can see this especially in individuals who are pioneers in their fields, whether they are great philosophers, musicians, artists, politicians, or poets. Most individuals who are deeply talented are driven by a sense of urgency, an ecstatically urgent sense that “I must bring into life this potential that I see and experience in the depths of my own being. This must come through me.” If we get to know them, we will usually find that truly great human beings are driven by a passion that transcends their separate self-sense, even though their separate self-sense might identify with it.

So we can begin to see that there’s a relationship between the first cause—the original impulse to become, which we call the big bang—and the human experience of consciousness. First, there’s the sexual impulse. Then, there’s the compulsion to innovate. And in the way I understand it, the highest expression of this creative impulse is the urge to evolve at the level of consciousness itself, which is really the same thing as the spiritual impulse. For the individual at the postmodern stage, for the person stepping into this integral stage that you were speaking about, this is felt as an internal compulsion that says, “I must become more conscious.” It’s a felt compulsion toward consciousness. And when I say “compulsion,” I don’t mean something that the individual feels he or she would like to do if he or she had the time. There’s a sense that “this must happen,” almost like a moral obligation: “I must do this; I must become more conscious.” I find it interesting that so many of us who come from a secular background, where the religious or spiritual instinct is not something that we have been culturally conditioned to feel, nevertheless find ourselves compelled toward consciousness.

So for human beings at the leading edge, the highest and most profound expression of this creative impulse that began with the big bang is the spiritual impulse, or the urge toward consciousness. And that impulse is two things: It’s the desire to discover our own ground—the source of our birth and the home from which we all originally came. But it is, simultaneously, the original creative drive itself. To put it in theological terms, it’s the God-impulse. It’s the will to create and the will to evolve. So as you were saying, enlightenment evolves. You were making a distinction between the relative dimension and the absolute dimension. At the level of the spiritual experience, the absolute or nonrelative dimension can be experienced either as this open, empty, timeless ground from whence we all came or as this mysterious compulsion to evolve that seems to come from consciousness itself, from the very source. The nature of that drive is also absolute. And that’s why it’s experienced as a mysterious, impersonal, ecstatic compulsion.

Wilber: Yes. The traditions themselves sort of made a distinction between those two approaches. Some grabbed on to just the absolute, the formless, unmanifest Ground of Being and tried to make the realization of that formlessness, that nirvana, the be all and end all of spiritual practice. Many traditions did that, including Patanjali’s yoga and Gautama Buddha’s Theravada Buddhism. But as spirit continued to evolve, men and women realized that there was a fuller type of spiritual realization, one that included both spirit’s unmanifest dimension and its manifest dimension—the developmental, evolving dimension that is active and moving in the world as we know it. Those traditions called themselves nondual, meaning that the absolute and the relative were not two, and they declared that in order to have a full realization of spirit, you had to realize this formlessness, this pure unmanifest presence, and you had to realize spirit in action in the manifest world of form. That realization is deeper than just realizing absolute consciousness itself. That realization carries what you’re talking about, which is not just a freedom given to me by realizing this absolute formlessness and not just a type of fullness given to me by realizing the world of form. It is an active, dynamic connecting of the two so that the very experience of spirit is an experience of spirit’s own compulsion to manifest, spirit’s own compulsion to evolve, spirit’s own compulsion to develop. That’s a deeper, wider, fuller realization than realizing just the Ground of Being or the unmanifest formless state. And that’s what you and I are looking at in particular—the continued development of nondual forms of spirituality that are fully connected with the evolutionary impulse.

Cohen: Absolutely. And what’s so thrilling is this point where the awakening to this absolute creative compulsion or impulse bumps up against our postmodern predicament. What happens when an awakening individual begins to discover different perspectives and levels of freedom and kinds of insight that completely turn his or her world upside down? As we get directly in touch with the passion and inspiration and conviction of the evolutionary impulse itself, that impulse has to be filtered through worldviews, values, and perspectives that can make it possible for us to actually move forward together. The impulse itself is the experience of an exhilarating compulsion to evolve, but that exhilaration is just an experience. To make that thrilling experience of freedom and exhilaration and confidence and conviction manifest, it has to be filtered through our values and perspectives. And the worldviews, values, and perspectives that we have been culturally conditioned by don’t usually have room or space for the new kinds of perspectives and insights we begin to experience when we awaken not only to the Ground of Being, but also—and maybe even more importantly—to this driving creative impulse.

That’s why I feel the work that you and I and so many others are doing is important. Because unless we’re able, through very careful, enlightened, and rational thinking, to create new structures in consciousness that can support the emergence of the higher potentials that we feel so inspired by, we might just be lost in an experience. These new potentials won’t be able to manifest themselves as new and higher realities without the evolution of our values and perspectives. I think the work at hand here, as you’ve been saying, is not only to have the experience of awakening to the absolute nature of consciousness itself—both as the Ground of all Being and as the creative impulse—but to ask questions like, How am I thinking about what it means to be me and what it means to live in this world? What is the world? What is culture? What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What does everything actually mean in light of this experience that I’m having?