Andrew Cohen & Terry Patten in dialogue - The New Posture of Enlightenment

i realized this around seven eight years ago when i was thinking about it and it became apparent to me that it's impossible for an individual apparently not to be biased towards the absolute as unmanifest timeless formless being you know god or the absolute as timeless formless being or as uh eros or the evolutionary impulsive creative impulse it's in other words there's always there's there ha there is going to be within each and every one of us a preference it means we can be in love with both and appreciate the spiritual and philosophical significance and implications of both but emotionally there's always going to be a bias slightly in one direction or another in the evolution of my own teaching as i began to awaken to eros myself because the experience of arrows is at the level of actually pure experience is very different than the experience of the ground of being they're both apt they're both the absolute they're both god are aren't they the same in in in essence no they're not they're not because it doesn't doesn't doesn't eros isn't eros the expression of the ground of being isn't the ground of being also in a very profound way expressing itself as the whole evolutionary process since the beginning of the big bang and therefore that peace that's indifferent to what arises also is wanting to evolve yeah what you're saying they're both true they're both true but but the point is that that that god or spirit as the unmanifest ground of being at the level of human experiences experienced as peace as desirelessness as freedom from wanting freedom from attachment freedom from differentiation freedom from all things you know ultimate primordial freedom from everything and there is and and all and also freedom from the urge to become the urge to exist and the desire to participate the desire to be part of it is ecstatic freedom from all of that and and to the degree that one is is able to experience the the nature of that ground one really doesn't care whether the whole universe claps in upon itself or not and but the emotional experience is of deep and profound peace and freedom from wanting anything okay uh the experience of the absolute or god or spirit as arrows the urge to become is is this relentless urge did this re this experience of this relentless thriving throbbing ecstatic urgency that is ceasely wanting to wanting more and more and more and more and more and where it's ceaseless and it is it is ceaseless it's unrelenting and it will never be satisfied because it's always moving so no matter how far we go it'll because you see then the the attention or the nature of eros is always looking towards the next possibility and the next the the the attention of eros is never on the present moment it's always on the unmanifest potential of the next moment so it's almost it's always a kind of an unrequited show we say urge that is always seeking for the next and well it's my experience it's my experience that that the one manifest says the other i i i i ultimately i can't look at this and say oh i must prefer eros because i feel that so strongly well no but because because for me the root of my commitment to arrows was in that experience of liberation of knowledge i understand i understand that but but i understand that but the the preference it will be whether the individual feels it's more important to to experience freedom from mind and time and form whether that whether that is given greater significance or whether whether the individual gives greater significance to the fact that the universe must evolve through us and that has the greatest sense of urgency and importance i am convinced emotionally philosophically spiritually that the that that affecting change in the cosmos is more important than resting in being that i i experience it as as of greater value and of greater importance and so i can tell you personally that i give much greater value much greater importance on affecting change in the interior of the cosmos than i do upon the experience of resting and being i i can speak and i can teach people how to experience the timeless and formless ground of well-being and when i lead retreats i do that i spend a lot of time on it but it's not where my heart is anymore it's not where my heart is i i see i i i find that a little hard to understand because it's been my experience that i need i need to go back in into meditation and at least touch that utter freedom on a regular basis because that utter freedom continually gives rise to the sanity and clarity out of which i feel impelled to serve but that's always the agent of that positive evolutionary future but that's also true but i feel like i feel like part of my evolutionary urgency puts my butt on the cushion every morning because my fidelity to my practice life is part of how i'm a trustable expression well you're about this emerging week but you can also imagine coming to a point where you were so stabilized in your own development that you didn't need to sit on any cushion in order to have access to that evolutionary urgency that's imaginable right well totally i mean and and the days that circumstance prevents me from having a very long sid don't reduce that but there's a kind of uh paradox here you know the gradual and the sudden path and the transitions of of life but as a as a dharma for almost any uh serious practitioner i think most people for most people a sane life is a life of practice no one expects will ever come to an end necessarily i'm teaching these retreats now in every summer so the first 10 days is only about awakening to the ground of well-being and i and i give people the experience of it and then as they have the experience i talk about the philosophical implications of what that experience is all about we go very deeply into it when those 10 days are over we transition and we enter into a different intersubjective universe which is fueled by arrows and its flavor the flavor the content the context of of god as arrows is only about becoming and so one of the most interesting to me one of the most interesting doesn't being become that this is it's my experience that that moveless still silent vast utterly peaceful heart is getting my butt up and putting me in this chair and having me have this conversation with you and try to move forward this cultural emergent but paradoxically but that well if it's true if it's true then it's always true whether you were sitting on your cushion for two or three hours or not if okay so that's the point so if it's true then it's always true and to the degree to which we've actually internalized the actual truth of that whether we're actually you know you know making the effort to be still and actually accessed the the direct ex the direct immediate experience of consciousness as timeless formless being or not doesn't really matter yes i agree with that but in the way that i teach i put i'm biased towards uh towards the um towards awakening to the moral imperative of the of the of the urgency of the evolutionary impulse i'm leaning leaning over there but rooted in both there has to be both that has to be built and that's what i what i teach with a bias towards the the the evolutionary impulse and i i do believe over time it's going to become apparent to more and more people that there's going to be a natural preference because because that's where that's where our ultimate fulfillment in terms of our human incarnation is is actually experienced when something starts moving through us and you realize oh it's really happening it's really and that's it evolution is manifesting itself yeah but that means that that that's the that's the freedom that makes you that that validates your existence and there is a transparency in some sense i am just as completely relieved of the burden of egoity because i'm given over to something so much greater than myself that's finding its way into the world through me that that in a sense there is a cessation at the level of there isn't any motives or or distractions i don't think there's another way to displace ego that actually is effective in other words if people are very mindful if they're if they're if they have a if they've if they understand what meditation is if they know how to assume no relationship to the content of their own consciousness if there's some degree of mindfulness then ego can be controlled but it won't necessarily be transcended and i've found to really work the hard way that only when individuals find a higher purpose to live for that they're emotionally connected to and that's philosophically meaningful that ego suddenly falls to the wayside not because they're making the effort to be mindful not to act out of ego but because they found something that's infinitely more meaningful more wholesome that has that has moral weight and spiritual value and then i found it's only then i think only then and not for any other reason that people begin to find a deeper sense of dignity and self-respect moral and moral weight um yeah and that that all the mindfulness in the world i don't think is capable of generating not only that if we take a completely third person perspective on this and we say gee most of these folks were originally motivated to enter into the spiritual path because they realized that human problems were not going to be solved with the level of consciousness that created them that their world was in a dilemma that required a higher consciousness the higher consciousness that is simply getting off the wheel and appreciating a subjective piece is not the higher consciousness that's going to solve the problems of life that drove us into the path in the first place exactly it's only through becoming the embodiment of the evolutionary impulse pressing into the yet un uh still emergent not not clarified not concretized new forms of cultural expression that we have any hope of redeeming the premise that brought our whole generation and the generations before onto the path it was because we had to be the presence of a higher consciousness in the affairs of life that's what all of my work is focused towards catalyzing exactly that kind of or catalyzing the discovery and adaptation of that exactly that orientation to life exactly that orientation to life specifically because to me that's when the party starts and not one moment before because that's when we're that's when we're the reason that we're together and the reason that we're here is to actually to make it happen so our whenever we're not living we're no longer living our lives to have them becoming to get for ourselves we're no longer really have a personal life so to speak so when that realization becomes internalized and when it becomes the dominant self sense which is quite a level of attainment um that's when that's when the individual at a precognitive level knows uh that i i am the energy and intelligence that initiated the the big bang i am the energy and intelligence that's driving the whole process i'm the energy and intelligence that's becoming conscious of itself through this human incarnation and that's what a cosmocentric orientation is when we begin to see every aspect of our human experience every single aspect including our psychological experience including our physical experience including our spiritual experience as the expression of a cosmic process so i am the process awakening to itself and it's only then that we can see everything else that's happening to uh everything that's happening to us and everything that's happening in the world from the perspective of process and then it's it's not just a philosophical position it it's an it's it's it's internally it's been it's we feel it we are experiencing evolution expressing itself through us the the the urgency the only place that i would express it differently is to me the liberation in being and the liberation into becoming are different aspects of something that i would speak of as single god there's really there's really not not yes they're we language them differently we've just talked about them as if they're two things but they're one they're they're they're inseparably the ones the only once we know that without any doubt we can forget about it that's the point you see because if you know that then you don't ever have to say it again but if one's not sure then we have to keep saying no but it's all one so but if we know that then it's not a problem because the point is as we're here now we see we are incarnated see this income there's a physical incarnation which leads to the the experience of the of the subjective experience of consciousness within this within this incarnation and i realize that i am built and i am designed for action activity physical activity cognitive and relationship cultural but i've been built and designed by myself as the cosmos to act and engage with the world not to stand free from it and to uh delight in the freedom of non-existence but i've i've actually been built for action so so therefore i'm as long as i'm here right which is which is for a finite period of time and as long as i'm conscious and and reasonably aware of the reason why i'm here i am going to put more of my attention on what i can actually do here right but but you're going to be sane because you're radically free in being because as being everything is already perfect and fulfilled because you're liberated from the torment of of the kind of confusion that uh most of us experienced at the beginning of the path and out of that that sanity makes it possible for you to engage in service of something larger than yourself with integrity and not as a compensatory mechanism to give meaning to a tormented life that is fundamentally in a problem and and people who try to emulate this evolutionary urge without some grounding and that liberation are going to tend to bring an aberrated energy to it and and that aberration can distort the whole thing the we we're talking about is grounded in a connection to that liberation and that's why regular practice is so important to almost everyone who's participating in that week but your grounding in the freedom of being is is not optional and and and and has to be there and for most people the way that that manifests is through regular practice and you get no argument from me but i i but since you brought it up again i'm going to insist that that once the individual gets to a certain point of stabilization and has it has some real confidence and once they begin to awaken to eros and once they begin to actually experience it there they begin to experience a natural preference towards making something happen rather than because it's it's a natural developmental progression and i'm you know i'm sure about this because it because because i think it's it's the evolution of enlightenment itself you