Andrew Cohen Interviews Steve McIntosh (Part I)

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to actv I'm Andrew Cohen and I'm very pleased and excited today because uh I'm going to be speaking with uh a very good friend of mine uh the great Steve MacIntosh and I'm going to be asking him about uh a very interesting book project that he's working on but uh Steve and I have been uh friends and I think we're very close friends by now uh for about five years and I'm a I'm a big admirer of his work he is a he's he's a brilliant thinker and uh every time I speak with Steve I I feel that my um my mind is becoming more informed and more integrated through the through his uh very deep grasp of integral philosophy and integral thinking so to tell you a little bit about Steve Steve uh uh is a lawyer he was a lawyer and he's also an entrepreneur uh he's a for first and foremost he's an integral philosopher and Steve is the author of two books his first book which made a very big impression on me was called integral Consciousness and his second book which was released uh a year ago I think October was released in October was called Evolution's purpose uh Steve's also the founder of a new Think Tank called The Institute for cultural Evolution and uh I'm I'm a a board member of that uh Think Tank I'm very excited about the work of that think tank and I think maybe Steve we should maybe we should do one of these discussions together just about the think tank that would probably be a great thing we could do together that would be excellent I'd appreciate that a lot but the the reason we've come together today is because um Steve and I were having a informal conversation a couple of days ago like we like to have and Steve was telling me about his new book so Steve has a working title and the title is called evolutionary spirituality beautiful true and good and uh I was so excited about uh uh what Steve was telling me about his new book that I I stopped our convers ation short so we could we could speak about it uh on on this new platform so welcome Steve thank you Andrew it's a pleasure to be here with you and uh I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you no I've been looking forward to this uh ever since we had our conversation let's take a deep dive into into the the the fundamental ideas behind the new book and I I remember in our last conversation I think you you made four fundamental broad distinctions that that the so if you could maybe take us through the four fundamental broad distinctions which were very very interesting and then explain to us the thesis of the book what you're trying to accomplish that would be fantastic sure well I'm trying to describe evolutionary spirituality um from my own perspective I'm trying to you know there there are others like yourself you know in evolutionary Enlightenment you do a beautiful job of of describing how the spiritual teachings of evolution illuminate a new kind of spirituality and so I'm supplementing that I'm I'm standing on your shoulders with and and trying to take a little bit further um and part of it comes from um my description of what the spiritual teachings of evolution reveal in Evolution's purpose but in Evolution's purpose my previous book that book was aimed at the main stream you know I was really trying to argue to those who were skeptical or otherwise dubious of that that Evolution was a spiritual teaching and and you know that book has served its purpose but now this book on evolutionary spirituality is really speaking to people who are already appreciate that spirit is real in other words I'm not trying to argue with Skeptics or materialists um I'm trying to describe what what spiritual teachings of evolution are offering um that is fresh and new and exciting and what goes with that is that what spirit is is in a sense the presence of the infinite in other words we don't have the evolutionary spirituality doesn't have to uh decide or or conclude that the source of creativity in the universe is either you know a loving personal God or an impersonal creative principle I think that that the plurality of what Ultimate Reality is can be retained at the level of evolutionary spirituality but what we can begin to use do is use the science of spirit um the the science of evolution itself what it discloses about spirituality to begin to um to to to make certain conclusions like that we live in a universe of of purpose and progress that there they there that there's a kind of a panentheistic reality that is that spirit is both imminent and Transcendent that that the Transcendent nature of of spirit is actually part of each of us embodies this Universal structure in our own lives right just as like we embody all the levels of physical evolution in our bodies you know from hydrogen up through uh all the biological achievements and we EMB body in our minds all the stages of Consciousness that Humanity has gone through since its first emergence you know we're using all those stages in a kind of an internal mental ecosystem that makes up our Consciousness we're also and I think when we come to have a spirit an experience of spirit we can also see how we each embody this larger structure of the universe that is that there's the infinite you know the one the being as you describe and then there's the becoming you know the finite universe that exists within the infinite right and that's this concept of pantheism that spirit is is the world that the that spirit is is emanating from the world but Spirit also transcends the world it's not just equal to the world there's a Transcendent element right the being and the becoming are are one and yet two and yet three anyway um in the book The maybe I should sort of go through the organization of it to kind of give a more concrete conception of what I'm teaching here so after the introduction and explaining integral philosophy and these sort of stages of cultural Evolution sort of a quick primer on evolutionary thinking chapter uh two involves uh the challenge of spiritual leadership for the developed world and there identify three different kinds of of kind of spiritual teaching the traditional forms of spirituality which you recognize as the established religions what I'm calling secular spirituality which in a sense is the new atheism and you know critical thinking and and uh religious naturalism and and and really identifying that much of what science has revealed is a kind of spiritual truth you know when you when you have a the big picture of the universe like this inevitably it contains not only um you know mundane scientific facts but also life-changing spiritual truths that we can use for our spiritual growth so I I really want to honor and include kind of what I'm calling um secular spirituality and there are some secularists like elain de Vuitton who even understand atheist M as a form of spirituality or at least a substitute for spirituality you know I I I when I was explaining some of your U some of these distinctions to some of my friends uh this particular uh this particular idea that there is a form of that secularism in and of itself you know has its own form of spiritual is its own form of spirituality uh a lot of people found that very interesting but but I understand it because because it because because because it because it ex expresses a metaphysical position and and a metaphysical conviction that's what makes it a spiritual position it's a description of Ultimate Reality exactly the meaning of the self and the ultimate nature of reality even though you know the purpose is no purpose it's all an accident or kind random that's still a metaphysical position no matter what you do exactly but because we can see how science is discover y of the history of evolution you know and otherwise the scholarship that's brought us the history of humanity that these are you know again this forms the foundation of evolutionary spirituality so we have to recognize how much we've gained from science and instead of just cherry-picking science or just using it for our purposes in ways that it would not appreciate like Progressive spirituality does I think we have to honor secular spirituality for the great achievements in truth that it has you know it is absolutely absolutely so we have so we have traditional spirituality secular spirituality the next one was Progressive spirituality which we've been speaking about yeah and and that's not just of course the new age um it involves all the contemporary forms of what might be called alternative spirituality or spirituality that has a a post-modern center of gravity even though it might be pre- traditional or traditional or you know that is these definitions are tricky and it's not not without some trepidation that I begin to describe these broad outlines but if we're going to understand what our opportunities for Spiritual Evolution are culturally um that I think this kind of exercise in charting the cograph of the current cultural state of the marketplace of ideas is a very important you know uh uh precursor to discovering what our opportunities for further Evolution look like well it's also helpful to make these distinctions because it helps us to make sense out of these differing World these different differing spiritual worldviews that that that exist today that'll help us and I think it's part of the idea here is is it helps to see what the next step actually is yeah so then after describing what's on offer in the marketplace of ideas you know there's all these there there's millions of people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious and while some of these people and probably the majority of America's Youth and while some of these people can be counted as a you know being participating in Progressive spiritual culture and describing himself themselves spiritual but not religious in that way that's only a tiny fraction of the millions who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious so I think that these people are saying that they haven't really found any kind of spiritual explanation that appeals to them but they know that the universe is not just a random accident either so this is kind of what this culture is calling out for is is a um a more inclusive and a truer explanation of what's spiritually real and so that's the challenge now that leads to the the next chapter chapter 3 which is about a sort of a overview or a description of what U evolutionary spirituality is you know what are its basic tenants and there I draw on the work of the Contemporary teachers of prog of evolutionary spirituality including yourself and you know some of the work that I've done and of course Ken Wilbur and and other teachers evolutionary spiritual is just emerging now and there are plenty of um of those within Progressive spirituality are using the term evolutionary but nevertheless remaining within the cultural center of GRA I'm very I'm very aware of that that that ever since the the whole notion or topic of kind of of of evolution uh as as it relates not to uh to to Cosmic Evolution or biological evolution or cultural Evolution but spirituality or mysticism has come has has come to be shared culturally I've noticed that there there are uh many Progressive spiritual teachers that have Gra grabbed on and Incorporated the the word Evolution into their own teaching but without without in without in many cases actually understanding the significance of it so so so once again you're making the distinction between traditional spirituality SEC secular spirituality Progressive spirituality and evolutionary spirituality right okay right and so the the there's a variety of things that distinguish evolutionary spirituality from Progressive spirituality so I first tackle those with a chapter that's sort of as an overview the rise of evolutionary spirituality I'm calling it and you know what its basic tenants are then that leads to a chapter on I I'm calling evolving our understanding of spiritual experience itself right and and this chapter um begins to apply what evolution teaches us about what spirit is and this teaching comes out of this understanding of this Universe structure of being and becoming right the the the the big bang itself inaugurating the emergence of the finite universe and with with our growing understanding of The evolutionary impulse as you've been so good at describing this evolutionary impulse is it gives us a direct phenomenological instruction of the purpose of evolution within us right in other words because we can feel the evolution of the evolutionary impulse we can feel the impulse within us this helps us know from the inside what evolution is all about you know where it's going and and what it wants and and and what our purposes are for participating in it and so uh this then helps us appreciate that spiritual experience in a sense is an experience of the being it's an experience of uh the infinite that is upholding the finite universe and that the purpose of the finite Universe to add to you know being through becoming that that's in a sense the purpose of evolution it's the purpose of spiritual experience and it's what spiritual experience is that is when we have a spiritual experience we are perfecting the finite Universe we're bringing the infinite into the finite or more accurately we're making the finite translucent you know transparent to the infinite that lies underneath and so you know it's through this evolutionary teaching you know brought To Us by The evolutionary impulse itself that we can come to understand spirit with a new kind of scientific clarity you know again it's not science but it is an understanding that's based on these Universal structures that are disclosed by science right evolutionary emergence being and becoming infinite and finite so um spiritual experience then is understood not only as the the mystics have appreciated it which is certainly a big part of our understanding of spiritual experience but we also come to see that intrinsic value right values such as the Beautiful the true and the good are forms of spiritual experience also and so one of the things I hope to do in this chapter on spiritual experience is unify the the um well-developed scholarship on spiritual experience that brought To Us by many Mystics throughout the ages with this evolutionary understanding of of the role of of the beautiful the true and the good as essential elements of spiritual and in your and in your teaching in your philosophy um the Beautiful the true and the good represent becoming yeah