Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber on Meditation

I've spent many years meditating singing Kon and such things and I always knew that there's just more to Enlightenment than that and I'm really grateful to actually hear teachers Express that and I'm just kind of curious what kind of role you view like meditation like what role it has and everything and how how long have you practice meditation about 10 years really that's pretty good so you start start started a feus um have you found it useful um yeah it's it's definitely supported me a lot in my own life but I don't see as much like I'm really drawn to supporting others you know like the situation that the world is in and helping that and I don't see how me sitting and being at peace really does much for that and I just know that there's more I need to be doing and okay I'll I'll give you a bit of sestry first sestry meaning meaning a spacious logic that has no meaning and I try to do that first um there's developmental psychologists have looked at Scales of development for for decades literally because once you start getting on to that one of the first things you want to know is how can we help adults move through these stages it's sort of a natural inclination Lawrence Colberg spent 20 years of his life trying to do that Carol Gilligan did um um Kurt fiser Robert Keegan Howard Gardner and interestingly there's only one thing that's been consistently demonstrated to move people an average of about two stages and that's meditation so that that's Point number one point number two amirit sen the great Nobel prize winning Economist demonstrated that there's never been a famine in Democratic countries and the reason is because of information flow can allocate resources wherever they're necessary item number three a democracy stem from at least stage five moral development since 70% of the world's population is not at that then then the single greatest thing you can do to to end World famine is to meditate meditation has a profound impact on the average level of Consciousness in the world and so that's it's very very very important so I think go ahead and spend time meditating that's exactly something you should be doing why does it work there's this is again a little bit technical but there's a fundamental rule about development and that's the subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage so what happens when you meditate this is probably why meditation has been demonstrated to move people through stages is basically you're looking at your own mind you're taking time you're relaxing you're you're you're you're settling into yourself you don't necessarily have to be introspecting you could just be resting with everything that's arising let everything arise just as it is and self liberate in its own space but when you do that you're still making it an object and when you make it an object the the only thing that can't be made an object is I I or the pure witness or God so meditation is a way basically to help you disidentify with finite objects and rest in that grounded being which is your very nature your very self so that again a little bit abstract summaries of that but I think it's extremely important and and don't ever let anybody tell you that it's just you know not having any impact on the world you're changing the fundamental fabric of the cosmos when you meditate okay great first of all if someone really understands what meditation is that that it's it's not a physical posture but it's a posture in relationship to life or it's a non-relative relationship to all experience so the posture of meditation is have no relationship to your experience right it's the only time that where anybody would consciously choose to have no relationship to their experience now and not identify with right not not identify with it but what's important to understand is that that the that this the meditative posture of no relationship is a is a non-relative or absolute position because you know meditation is it's you know it's it's an experience but it's also it's a it's a it's a perspective and it's a posture and often the problem is a lot of people who do meditate don't really ever contemplate the implications of what it means to take that position in relationship to their experience now if someone really knows what they're doing when they're meditating first of all the experience that they're going to have will remove any doubts about why they're doing it okay if if someone actually knows what they're doing what's what they're going to experience will be so uh so profoundly liberating from anything that's ever happened every single time right always being ever new always being ever knew that um because what happens is you is is is is the is the meditative posture releases you from the world stream releases you from being trapped in the universe and being trapped in time and one of the questions is how many times does any of us need to have that experience of ecstatic freedom from being trapped to be convinced and and if we are really interested in in in in higher development then it then it's more than essential it becomes it's absolutely foundational in you know no matter what that the individual will truly become uh that that the essence of who they are that the personalities that the foundation of the personality the self sense is grounded in that in that kind of absolute conviction now to be the honest thing is a lot of people meditate without having discovered that conviction and that's why they begin to doubt about whether they should be doing it or not now ultimately when when the conviction is discovered based on real experience meditation it becomes something a lot more than just sitting in a particular posture for a particular period of time but it becomes it becomes your ultimate refuge in relationship to life itself at all times and all places through all circumstances that's where you truly abide and or ultimately always coming from if you're truly free okay so so the issue of meditation you see it's something we need to do and it's also something we need to think about of course meditation is not the time to do it because the implications are always Prof are always it's because once again the position you're taking isn't relative and you you can't say that about many things in life if anything else you see what I'm saying just God right no and but then once you find but once you find the answer to that question and this is what I'm interested in is what's the nonre or absolute relationship to life now that's a real dicey question dangerous question but then in an evolutionary context in in a spirit you know in a spiritual and truly evolutionary context what is an absolute relationship to life or what is a more even though it doesn't really make sense to put it what is a more absolute relationship to life and these are all the the questions that come into it so there's a lot more to it than just the kind of the the sitting still or practicing unfortunately a lot of people practice meditation but most of the time they get into a rut without even knowing it because when this thing is really live you see it's I mean it's like anything else that you do you know when you're when you're the reason I I it's not the meditation that's the issue it has to do with the level of Engagement of the individual who's doing it so even if you look at many Traditions waybe the founder of the tradition that the vehicle for their Liberation was some kind of meditative path if that was the case and then you find maybe they have thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers and very few seem to have the same experience I don't think it was necessarily anything wrong with the particular method because you most methods are pretty good if they're you know if they're real but I ultimately think it has to do with the passion or the intention of the individual who's doing it how much they really want to be free and how much they really care about it it also has to be surrounded by ethics the this the traditional three pillars are always Sila Tiana PNA in other words ethical Behavior then meditation and then non- du awareness and in America in particular we PR of the dhab bum kind of approaches people want to get into well I can just get into non-conceptual absolute mind and do whatever I want love love and do do as you will it's sort of the standard thing there and then that's simply not true at a fundamental level it's true but at a more fundamental level it's not you you you you you you arise and it's it's the combination of your wisdom which is your capacity to understand absolute emptiness or God head or I in or the abyss and then your capacity to do the right thing in the world of form and both of these have to rise together and the union of emptiness and form is the union of absolute and ethics in the world of form so really an ethical Foundation is always stressed and some traditions actually stress um training compassion before you get into deep meditation because once you get a hit of big mind where everything is right then if you do then there's no reason to practice ethics unless unless you learned it on the way up um but Charles Manson had a motto if everything is one nothing is wrong okay so that's what's wrong with that path also it makes sense that the more we evolve and develop ourselves the more we see and the more we know the more responsible we have to be willing to be as individuals so in other words the the moral bar is raised for us as individuals because we have seen more right deeper higher you see so therefore how we what we do how we are who we really are this has to do with our eth our moral development and what and what our ethical and moral relationship to the world and to life actually is begins on a certain level to count far more than whatever our meditative or spiritual attainments may or may not be and we talked about that in in the last gur panded discussion because the idea we were using Emanuel can Emanuel k a lot of you know said that basically he was looking for what what's the foundation of ethics and he said behave as if the maxim governing your behavior were to be a universal rule for all rational people it's sort of a a bit of a variation on do un to others as you would have them do un to you and so on it's a basically it's a way to have Universal fairness but right now we're saying that if these structures are actually getting laid down evolutionary if they're not given if the great chain is not given in some fixed Eternal platonic form and it's not but that means that you're doing that your behavior to the extent that you actually live up to your highest you are actually creating structures that future Humanity will inhabit and that that's an ex I can't think of anything more Galvanizing in terms of getting yourself ethically straight than that is it's not just act as if the maximum govering your behavior is going to it's it is creating a more of a genetic field it's not as if it's is therefore choose your acts very very very carefully and make sure that the next ACT that you do comes from your higher self make sure the next thing that comes out of your mouth comes on your very highest self and under those circumstances There's Hope for the future but that structure is being laid down is God laying them down it's Spirit laying them down through us there's no there's nothing else so we have to become appropriate vehicles for Spirit laying down the very structures that humanity is going to inhabit and if we don't do that then that is a guilt that we will carry with us for eternity if that's possible so choose very very very carefully