Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber have been holding the “Guru-Pandit” dialogues for more than six years. For this inaugural issue of EnlightenNext magazine, they return to some of the foundational principles underlying their many far-ranging conversations.

Cohen: Today we’re going to be talking about our favorite subject: the relationship between the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of culture. This is a topic that you and I have been pursuing from many different angles for the entire time we’ve been having these dialogues. But the evolution of consciousness is a tricky thing to talk about, because consciousness is a tricky thing to talk about! And the reason for that, as you well know, is that consciousness is not an object.

The way most people first discover consciousness is through some form of spiritual experience. I’m talking about the momentous occasion when someone stumbles for the first time upon that miraculous dimension of the self that transcends memory and time, that deepest part of ourselves where there is no cognition, there is only Being. This discovery leaves a permanent mark on our souls. But unless we have this kind of direct experience of what consciousness is—where we recognize that it’s not an object and it’s not imprisoned by time—it will be very difficult for us to discuss the subject of consciousness, or even use the word, without it inevitably conjuring up an image of an object, like a cloud of white mist or something. But if consciousness were a mist, that would mean it is a thing, and therefore it couldn’t be consciousness!

The discovery of consciousness—and its infinite, timeless, formless, immortal nature—is, of course, what enlightenment has traditionally been based on. But today, what I would like us to talk about is the fascinating and complex and infinitely subtle relationship between this discovery of the mystical nondual ground of consciousness and the evolution of culture itself. When I say “culture,” I’m talking about the way we think about and understand our shared experience. Culture is based on shared values. I’m talking about the conceptual and cognitive prism through which we as individuals interpret our shared experience.

You know, you’ve had an enormous influence on me as a teacher and thinker in this regard. And as my own development has progressed, I’ve been awakening to something that you have been pointing to for a long time, which is the way our shared values are most often unconsciously shaped by the culture we grew up in. Except for very rare individuals, our values are not consciously created or chosen as a result of deep introspection. Rather, they have been absorbed for the most part through our cultural conditioning. And of course, that’s not necessarily bad or wrong. That’s just the way it is.

In my work as a spiritual teacher, I’ve observed an interesting predicament: People can have a powerful awakening to what consciousness is, and yet the lens through which they see the world, which is made up of their values, or conditioned convictions in general, is not necessarily impacted by that experience at all. This is something that you and I have spoken quite a bit about in the past. And it seems to me that a process of ongoing discussion, dialogue, introspection, and contemplation needs to be undertaken by many of us in order to bring the light of awareness to this complex and important question. For those of us who are interested in the evolution of consciousness and culture, we need to begin to see and understand the culturally created structures that make up our individual and collective selves. We really have to learn how to “unpack” and make conscious what our own values are. It seems that this process is as important a part of spiritual evolution and transformation, individual and collective, as the experience of consciousness itself—maybe even the most important part.

A theme of many of our discussions has been the recognition that the way in which we interpret our experience really determines how we value it and how we see it. Individuals from different cultures, backgrounds, and levels of development can have similar experiences but interpret them in completely different ways. And the way that we interpret our experience really does determine the way we see reality, the way we see ourselves, the way we perceive the world, and the way we see the relationship between the self and the universe. In my teaching work, I have been putting more emphasis on the necessity of cultivating our ability to see this for ourselves. In other words, if we want to evolve, we need not only to awaken directly to what consciousness is but also to develop our cognitive capacities so that we’ll be able to see our conditioned values as objects in awareness rather than as fixed or inherently real constructions. As you would put it, we need to be able to make subject object.

I’m beginning to see that so much of spiritual development is really about finding ways to creatively compel ourselves, through our own inspired will and intention, to actually evolve. Ideally, I believe, we will get to the point where the experience of enlightenment, which is the direct awakening to consciousness, becomes automatically fused with the experience of a higher level of cognition. Ultimately, it should become one nondual event where these three different aspects of our experience–the Ground of Being, the creative impulse to evolve, and our highly evolved capacity for cognition—all become part of one matrix, one unfolding experience. I’m very much trying to convey this new truly nondual and inherently integral potential to as many people as possible, as well as to illuminate and clarify these subtle and complex relationships and how these different dimensions of the self and the cosmos affect one another.

Absolute Consciousness and Relative Consciousness

Wilber: Right. Well, I think you’ve touched on several very important points. I would start by saying that when it comes to consciousness, we can talk about absolute consciousness and we can talk about relative consciousness.

Spiritual traditions often make a distinction between absolute truth and relative truth, and they certainly do the same thing with consciousness. So absolute consciousness is indeed pure consciousness. It’s not a thing; it’s not an object; it’s not a mist. If you have to think about it at all, it’s a vast, open emptiness in which all objects arise. Moment to moment, right now, you’re aware of various things going on in the world. You’re aware of a table in front of you; you’re aware of a telephone; you might be sitting on your porch and looking outside, aware of clouds floating through the sky; you’re aware of mountains, streams. All of those are arising in your pure awareness. And enlightenment is the discovery of this pure openness, this pure, radical Ground of Being.

But that’s just the absolute component. What have become so important, as we have started to create an East-West integration, are the relative aspects of consciousness. And these relative aspects have to do with how you interpret that absolute experience of consciousness. What are the different ways of interpreting spiritual experience? For this we find that there are developmental components, or stages, associated with the types of shared values that we have as cultures and with the types of values and worldviews that we hold as individuals as well.

One of the easiest ways to understand these shared interpretations is through the names that were given to them by Jean Gebser, who was a real pioneer in the mid twentieth century in looking at the evolution of these relative structures of consciousness. He called the stages archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, integral, and higher. So you can have a full-blown satori, or consciousness experience, but depending on where you are in this developmental scale, you’ll interpret it according to different values. You can interpret it in a magical, or egocentric, fashion: “I and I alone have this pure consciousness.” You can interpret it in a mythic, or traditional, value structure, which is the next major stage, and believe that this experience is given just to one group, one people, or one chosen tribe. You can experience it in a modern, or rational, fashion. You can experience it in a pluralistic, or postmodern, fashion. And you can experience it in an integral, or post-postmodern, fashion. These are all relative aspects of consciousness. And what you and I are particularly looking at is the importance of a full enlightenment being an experience of both absolute and relative consciousness.

Cohen: That’s right.

Wilber: Both the absolute and relative dimensions bring something to the table. The experience of pure consciousness brings an understanding of radical freedom, openness, timelessness, eternity, and absolute reality, but that has to manifest itself. There’s spirit in action, and what that looks like depends on how you interpret it in the relative world. Interpreting that experience of consciousness in mythic terms will give you a traditional or even fundamentalist orientation. Interpreting it in modern terms will give you a scientific orientation. Interpreting it in terms of postmodern experience or structure will give you a pluralistic view of reality and of what consciousness is.

Right now, the leading edge of development itself, or the relative unfolding of consciousness, is starting to move from the pluralistic, postmodern stage into integral. That means that all of our values will start to get reshuffled and become more inclusive, more comprehensive, more superholistic. For example, the roles of men and women will start to expand. All the ways that we structure a culture, a society, will fundamentally change. And they will change based on both the absolute and the relative aspects of consciousness.

So we really have work to do in two dimensions. In the absolute dimension, we have to work first to discover this already free Self, this open, empty ground of ever-present awareness. Then in the relative dimension, we have to develop from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral. Both of these are very important aspects of a truly comprehensive approach to consciousness awakening. What we find, unfortunately, is that there are many teachers and approaches, from the East and the West, that center on just one or the other. What we find in a lot of New Age approaches to spirituality, for example, is just a focus on the now, on absolute consciousness, on the unmanifest, on the pure Ground of Being. And at the same time, in the West especially, what we too often find is just a focus on the relative aspects of reality and of consciousness, just a focus on evolution and growth and development, without any understanding of the Ground of Being, which is the support of all of that.

So you and I are trying to combine both of those dimensions—the absolute and the relative—and one of the phrases we use to cover these two fundamental spaces is “evolutionary enlightenment.” That means that as spirit manifests, its manifestations evolve, and the very nature of enlightenment itself is going to continue to evolve along with it. We don’t want a static enlightenment that works just with absolute consciousness, nor do we want a spiritless evolution that works just with the evolution of matter and doesn’t understand the role of the Ground of Being. We want to have an evolutionary enlightenment—one that understands spirit itself but also understands that spirit is unfolding in this world and as this world. The world that spirit has created is evolving.

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?

The Birth of an Integral Culture

Wilber: Definitely. One of the things you have said so often is that the interpretation of a spiritual experience is as important, or more important, than the spiritual experience itself. That sounds kind of shocking at first, but the more you think it through, the more you realize it is exactly right on the money. So for example, somebody at the traditional, or mythic, stage of development who has an experience of pure consciousness will interpret it very, very differently than somebody would who is at the pluralistic, postmodern stage of development. Somebody at the traditional, or mythic, stage will interpret it in very concrete, literal terms and also as an experience that is given just to a particular path or mythology or chosen people, whereas somebody who’s experiencing the same pure consciousness or ground and is interpreting it from a pluralistic, postmodern, relativistic stage of development will see that it’s something that is available to all sentient beings in equal measure.

If we look at the culture wars, for example, they’re made up of the three middle stages of development in this value structure—traditional values versus modern values versus postmodern values. But an experience of consciousness per se, a satori experience, won’t necessarily help you choose among those value structures because they are all relative structures and relative interpretations. What you want is to develop to an integral stage of development, because that is the first stage that understands the relative importance of all of the previous stages. Everybody is born at stage one, at the archaic stage, and unfolds or develops from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic. All of those are called first tier because they all believe the same thing—that their values are the only real or important values in the world. When you make the leap to second tier, however—what Clare Graves called a “momentous leap” of value—then, for the first time, you realize that different people are coming from different stages of development and that all of those previous stages have a role to play. Part of what we want to do in order to construct an enlightened society is not just to get everybody having an experience of pure reality, not just to get everybody living in the power of now, but to find ways to have our culture governed by integral values, values that are truly comprehensive and truly all-embracing.

The integral structure is the value structure that is basically the truest to the real nature of absolute consciousness. So it’s only by having both an awakening to the absolute and its creative impulse and a development to integral that we get a true understanding of evolutionary enlightenment. With the emergence of the integral stage of development, we can see that the original creative impulse that goes all the way back to the big bang has been present in all of the stages of evolutionary unfolding. That impulse has gone through the entire tree of life and all the way up through human beings, through archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral stages and is now finally blossoming in the form of an urgent evolutionary enlightenment unfolding. That is experienced hand in hand with this Ground of Being, with this motionless, pure, formless emptiness. Only a culture that has an integral compass is going to be able to make room not just for practices that help you to realize absolute consciousness but also for practices that help you to develop through these relative stages of consciousness.

This is so important—not just as a theoretical issue and not just as a practical concern, but because the biggest conflict we’re up against right now, in terms of spiritual understanding, is between the pluralistic stage and the integral stage. The pluralistic stage, although it’s the highest of the first-tier stages, is still a stage that thinks its values are the only true values. The pluralistic stage hates rational values, hates traditional values, and hates archaic values, and yet it claims to be nonmarginalizing, multicultural, sensitive, and all-inclusive. And although it’s attempting to be all of those things, it’s not. It denies hierarchical development; it denies gradations of depth and awareness; it denies degrees of unfolding of consciousness from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to cosmocentric. All of those beliefs are actually hurting an evolutionary enlightenment. They’re actually slowing it down—

Cohen: They inhibit it.

Wilber: Yes. They inhibit an integral evolution. They did wonderfully up to their stage, and they were very important in overcoming some of the problems with traditional values and some of the problems with scientific materialism. All of those were handled beautifully by the pluralistic, or postmodern, stage. But now we’re ready for the next stage. We’re fighting to get an integral awareness to blossom. One of the things we have to constantly battle against and deal with is the number of people who are having an experience of the absolute but are interpreting it through flatland, pluralistic, postmodern terms because that cripples their further growth, and it also cripples their capacity to integrate all the previous stages of growth. That, of course, is what integral does. It takes all of that into account.

Cohen: What you’re saying is all too true. One of the very delicate dimensions of all this has to do with the actual process of taking this leap from the pluralistic stage to the integral stage and beyond. How exactly is that step taken? When individuals come on a retreat with me and spend some time in my company, for example, and also begin to see the world through the perspective that I’m sharing, it’s not difficult for them to have a powerful experience at the level of consciousness, and also for their cognition, their way of thinking, to be powerfully affected. I know that in the work you’re doing, the exact same thing happens. An individual awakens to a higher stage and a bigger, deeper, more comprehensive, and more inclusive worldview that is absolutely liberating and inspiring and gives so much confidence. But then the interesting and important question is: How can they make that new deeper and higher recognition their own? There’s a delicate process that happens where individuals can see, recognize, and understand many of the things that we have been speaking about, and yet unless it’s consciously pursued, it’s very easy for them to fall back to cognitive structures, values, and perspectives that they were holding, both consciously and unconsciously, before they awakened to higher and deeper evolutionary and integral values and perspectives. The most tricky and delicate part of this process is really about learning how to traverse this territory oneself, to make these bold steps forward with one’s own consciousness, with one’s own cognition, with one’s very own soul.

It’s an arduous, and even heroic, endeavor. It’s challenging. We’re talking about individuals making quite significant leaps forward in a very short period of time. And as we know, the whole evolutionary developmental process at the level of culture has sped up dramatically. On one hand, this leap from postmodern pluralism to an integral evolutionary worldview would seem like the obvious next step, but at the same time, in terms of our individual self-structures, it’s an enormous leap to be taken. That is the delicate part of all this, and it’s also very exciting. And what I’ve found is that if we’re trying to create a new consciousness and culture, it’s infinitely easier to do it together with other people who are inspired by the same vision and the same possibilities and potentials as we are. When we’re on our own, unless we are firmly established at this new stage, inevitably we’re going to fall back. That’s our habitual tendency. But when we cultivate relationships with other individuals and other groups of individuals who are sharing these higher values and perspectives and insights, it’s through sustaining those relationships that a new world is literally created. That’s when we begin to think together about life and what it means to be a human being in different ways, and then all the issues that we all have to deal with are brought into the light of the new perspective and have to be questioned and scrutinized. That’s how these new values are actually cocreated and codeveloped with other people who want to take this next step with us. We really need each other to do this.

Uncharted Territory

Wilber: That’s exactly right. There are, in a sense, two delicate steps toward a fully integral approach to realization and enlightenment and consciousness. One is getting unstuck from the pluralistic postmodern worldview, getting out of the worldview that denies all ranking systems, hierarchies, and value gradations. This is an enormously difficult thing for individuals at the postmodern stage to do because it seems that they are then judging people in a negative way. But the judging is simply in terms of depth, in terms of degrees of inclusiveness. The postmodernists have thrown out judgments based on exclusiveness, which is good, but they have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They’ve thrown out the judgments of inclusiveness as well. And so they don’t have an understanding of how these stages of development are important—and also crucial to their own emergence. The pluralistic worldview itself emerged from five or six hierarchical stages, each of which transcended and included the previous ones.

The segment of the American population known as the cultural creatives—some twenty percent, or roughly fifty-five million Americans—has basically moved from modern rationalism and scientific materialism to the next stage of pluralism and postmodernism and multiculturalism. But that’s a very flatland stage; it’s a stage that doesn’t have an understanding of discriminating wisdom based on degrees of developmental depth. So the first delicate issue is helping to get people out of that automatic, knee-jerk, postmodern-jargon series of approaches, which is “anything that has any ranking is wrong.” They’re overlooking the fact that they have their own ranking; that itself is a very strong ranking. So we can’t avoid ranking. What we want are rankings that are fair and equitable and open to justice rather than rankings based on race, color, sex, or creed.

So getting caught in the postmodern cultural creative stage is the first delicate step that most people have to get over. The second delicate step is that once you understand the integral stage—once you understand theoretically that it includes all of the previous stages, and makes room for all of their values, realizing that human beings are born at square one and that everybody goes through all of these different stages of value growth—then there’s the thing you’re talking about. Once you understand the importance of both absolute and relative, and the importance of things we call quadrants and levels and lines and states and types, once you get all of that theoretically, then you have to embody it, you have to awaken to it, you have to make it a genuine realization in your own being. And that generally takes practice in a spiritual community.

This is one of the reasons we call these dialogues that you and I have been having over the years “The Guru and the Pandit.” I have represented the pandit position and raised the theoretical issues and many of the academic issues that need to be raised—hopefully not in a dry, dull sense but in a way that’s spiritually alive. I have never stepped into the public role of being a spiritual teacher or a guru. But it takes a guru, generally speaking. It takes a spiritual path and some sort of involvement with a spiritual community for people to convert this integral theoretical understanding to an integral, embodied, alive, realized understanding. And that’s one of the important things that you’re involved in.

Both of these delicate steps are necessary for culture at large to move away from its fragmented and divisive and quarrelsome state, away from the culture wars where we are at each other’s throats, with traditional values hating modern values, modern values hating postmodern values, and postmodern values hating all of them. It’s important to see that those are three necessary unfolding stages of development in every human being’s growth. And for us to be able to have that kind of harmonious culture, we need both of those steps. We need to move from a fragmented view to an integral view theoretically, and then we have to find ways to embody it, to practice it, and to put it into being.

Cohen: Indeed. And because we are at this very delicate point in our cultural evolution, it seems so urgent that more and more people take these steps more quickly. It’s unusual for an individual to realize that he or she is literally on the edge of unknown territory. Most human beings are born and die within a preexistent cultural context that they don’t necessarily feel is up to them to define. But at this particular time in history, for these new integral and evolutionary stages, structures, and potentials to emerge, it requires rare and heroic individuals who are willing to bear the emotional, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual overwhelm of realizing that they have to be real pioneers. Where we’re going now is uncharted territory. More and more people at this edge are working very hard to lay down these new structures, as you have often said, but the truth is that there’s no panel of experts or ascended masters who have already figured this out for us. This is something we’re all working through and need to work through together, with other individuals that have that same pioneering spirit and have awakened to the conviction that this needs to happen and we’re the ones who have to do it. This adds a certain kind of weight, gravitas, and, of course, excitement and thrill to the endeavor of spiritual transformation and evolution at this particular time.

Wilber: Absolutely! That’s one of the things that makes being on an evolutionary edge so “good news/bad news.” On the one hand, it’s a pioneering edge; it’s being at a place that has more perspectives than previous positions, that sees more and embraces more and understands more. But it’s also a situation where, as you say, these things haven’t been figured out; they are all being tested as we go along. People are still trying to work into what the exact meaning is of a truly evolutionary enlightenment, a truly integral enlightenment. And there’s no book that gives us the final answer. It’s all being done right now in the hearts and minds of those individuals who are treading the path. That’s where the book is being written. And that also means that it can be very, very hard on individuals who are moving along this new path.

I think a lot of people look at things like the great notion of evolutionary enlightenment or integral enlightenment and think, “Well, if I’m at an integral stage, everything must be wonderful, everything must be just super-keen.” But actually, things can be just horrible, because you’re being laid open in a very sensitive way. You are transcending all previous defenses. It can be a situation that’s very, very difficult. You are in a position where, as I say, it hurts more, but bothers you less. My favorite politically incorrect definition of a pioneer is the guy with all the arrows in his back. That’s what it can feel like when you’re pursuing this path. And, as you say, there is no final tribunal, no court of judges or enlightened masters that have gone down this path before. We’re all making it up as we go along, but we’re grounded in our understanding, in our growth, in our inner development and realization.

That’s what makes a careful consideration and discussion with others who are attempting this path so important. Sharing what we’ve learned and continuing to open up to each other’s insights is so very, very critical. Because, as obvious as it sounds to say that we need to include all of the developmental states and stages in a human being if they’re going to find their full potential, fewer than one percent of the spiritual teachers in this country are doing it.