Andrew Cohen: The Evolution of Enlightenment (2006)

yes um I'm very curious about what you've spoken about on your website of the collective Consciousness between a group of people and how it was elevated to something that was beyond anything that anybody had ever experienced before and um could you speak more about that well it's what I teach it's called it's called evolutionary Enlightenment I see I interpret this as the evolution of enlightenment sometimes with Eastern interpretation of the Eastern definition of what that merge means so Enlightenment if Enlightenment is the experience of Consciousness Beyond ego traditionally was understood and this is a very simplistic interpretation to be when the in the individual experiences their own Consciousness beyond the very fixed and narrow parameters of self-concern they begin to explain the infinite ground of all being they've literally consciously begin directly cognize it experience it um but it but up until recently this with all only experience within the context of of the end of the inner subjective experience of the individual like I had this amazing experience or I'm always living in depends on you know some amazing experience of an expanded State of Consciousness Beyond ego so from from the very beginning of my teaching career you know like 20 years ago when I started I always wanted to know what does this thing mean about life because because I started saying that people having these Enlightenment experiences it would often would rarely translate into any kind of meaningful observable measurable transformation about sometime in the first year and I was then I was just traveling around and teaching literally every night I was invited over to have lunch by some of these people that just decided to follow me around and I remember after lunch I saw two of them having a conversation in together a man and a woman and I suddenly knew you know it was really kind of a spontaneous recognition that whatever whatever it was they were sharing together and I knew that there was there was a way that they were meeting each other they were just having a conversation Beyond ego I was obvious to me that there was sharing in uh in a deeper and higher Place Beyond ego what they were sharing was something miraculous and I knew then that what they were sharing was more important than whatever it was they were getting from me personally but whatever and that would be I was interpreting what they were getting for me as some kind of experience but I noticed right which was their own experience I realized that what they were sharing together had infinitely more significance so that was really the beginning of my interest in all this and I've always wanted I've always been interested in transformation not was I at the beginning I was always excited when people had these amazing experiences that go wow but then after a while when I'd see people didn't change I thought who cares you see and of course now when people tell me about their experiences like it doesn't it doesn't even move it doesn't move me to hear I don't If people could tell me about the they could make up any story they wanted about about some amazing experience and it literally has no effect on me anymore because I'm interested but has the individual changed are they are they have they become a different person is there a measurable actual difference in have they evolved Beyond ego are they really a different kind of human being have they uh have they awoken to what I'm calling the authentic self do they care about the creation of the future and the evolution of Consciousness and culture as if they're life dependent on it they're living to create the future they stop living a selfish life is that a measurable and obvious uh kind of transformation we can see or are they are they just another narcissist about another great experience um and so in the earlier on I made this distinction like in in those days I called it I made a difference between what I called personal Enlightenment which was for the individual versus what I call that impersonal Enlightenment which was about Consciousness itself and then over the last eight or nine years I changed impersonal to evolutionary Enlightenment because now the emphasis is more this impersonal developmental field that we create into subjectively so what I'm interested in and what all my work is really dedicated to is um showing people how to how through coming together we can invoke an inter-subjective field of enlightened egoless Consciousness and begin to engage in the context of egoless Consciousness itself because usually when people would experience ego as Consciousness they would have to transcend the mind in the mind altogether and just be and I don't really and to me that's kind of useless because as long as you're as you're experiencing Transcendence that's nice for you but um uh what about when you come back and you open your eyes and open your mouth and I have to begin to engage with the world and life and other people that's really when the rubber meets the road that's to me when it all counts so if we can actually begin to engage meet each other in the context of being individuals in an impersonal field of enlightened or eagerness consciousness using the mind meeting in a kind of not it's a meeting in a kind of inter-subjective field of non-duality non-duality means there's only one there's not two there's only one but in the context of there being only one I'm still an individual and you're still an individual who has an evolving mind so there's the the one the the one in the many merge seamlessly into in in in in in in in in in in one kind of amazing new potential and I'm personally convinced you know and I could be wrong about it but I don't think I am that this that this means the evolution of Enlightenment because I personally don't know how this extreme post-modern narcissism this highly highly developed sensitive self ego structure that's nobody's fault that we all got so stuck on I don't know how how any of us you we're never going to be able to get out of this thing on our own we can only do it through literally meeting each other in a place beyond it together it's a leap Beyond individuality at the same time we don't want to lose the amazing capacity for individuation or individuality because that's what makes us so extraordinary that's what gives us this incredible capacity to objectify our experience and it's the last thing in the world we want to give up but we don't want to be trapped in it so we don't want to give up this this very the gift of evolution itself which is this very highly developed capacity for individuation we we want to take it with us but we want to transcend the ego at the same time and so that's basically what I'm what I'm interested in and I'm as I said I think that's what the future of Enlightenment is and I think the implications for the evolution of culture at the Leading Edge are pretty obvious when you think about it some you know it's very interesting sometimes you can think sometimes if you get extraordinary people together some you know really uh bright sophisticated Leading Edge people in their own field sometimes you get them together more often than not not a lot comes of it because often people are just they're they're trapped in their own you know they may be Geniuses in their own right but they're often trapped in their own in their own world these days so I I'm I the way I understand the evolution of Consciousness happening now it it is happening in an intersubjective developmental process where the where the individuals evolution is it completely intertwined with the evolution of this intersubjective field and both have to happen seamlessly and simultaneously at the same time it's kind of like a it's a very delicate experiment but um so that's kind of what I'm working on and it's it's a very unstable thing right now but but I'm convinced that it went in it becomes stable it's going to become much easier for a lot more people to have access to that to that process but um to me when I really started seeing this and discovering I didn't I I just felt well this is it I mean this is nothing's more important than this and then all the usual kinds of spiritual practices support that process but there but then the personal spiritual experience is not the goal it just it's just it just a means to a larger end which is this infinitely creative it's a process and an experience that is inherently meaningful because when you're in the midst of the kind of experience practice process I'm describing you're you're aware of the fact that that that literally a new potential is emerging that you are responsible for creating and you're not doing it alone because this can't what I'm describing can't happen within the subjective experience of any individual it can only happen in the context of this creative friction at the highest level and then the and yeah and then the individual becomes enlightened in the context of this inter-subjective field where it's very hard at a certain point where where does the individual where does one individual end and where does the other begin and at the same right which is the experience of communion but at the same time in that context the ex the a sense or the experience of the individual of being an autonomous individual uh is accentuated in other words one feels I have never felt more like myself my own self my own autonomous creative autonomous self in my life I've never felt more free as an individual and so in this context these these two extremes of communion and autonomy merge into one non-dual event and I so I see that as the evolution of enlightenment