Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber: Evolving Soul

in relationship to this the whole notion of development and reincarnation and all this kind of thing that I was speaking with one of my students who's doing a a a u a piece on this and we were saying that because often you know what people report okay you know what people report that they experience after you know a after Consciousness is is free to release from the body uh tends to tends to different often it's you know often it's very personal and often has to do with culture and the UN the unconscious etc etc but what I was wondering was and thinking that that if this fundamental identification from from the individual and Collective ego individual Collective ego had really been transcended one had begin to really ex you know surrender and give oneself to to this this creative thrust this Creative Drive you know at the deepest level then I would imagine that when that when uh when when Consciousness uh you know released itself from the body that one would that one would most likely begin to see and feel that God urg as Consciousness you know free from and transcending these these these personal uh you know and cultural and subconscious you know demons and ghosts and endless amounts of time and begin and you know and experience that same kind of intensity free from you know free from all this yeah it's kind of yeah well that's and so few people ever report anything like that because very few people were they're all Shirley mlan I mean they the dolly llama can't remember his past lives but oh Shirley's in there building pyramids and the tradition there's kind of a fairly common understanding in in the Traditions including the Catholic Church up to about the 4th century and that is that there basically the the soul if you want to call it that um is a repository of two fundamental capacities one is your virtue and one is your wisdom and it's the it's this is what transmigrates from life to life according to the general Traditions virtue is the subtotal of the Good Deeds that you've done wisdom is always defined as capacity to understand emptiness so in a sense this is absolute and relative truth your Your Capacity to understand absolute truth is your capacity to understand godhead Your Capacity to understand Nuna Brahma the capacity to understand the transparency of this and every moment just as it is as it's arising and then virtue is your capacity within this arising to do good deeds and so virtue is dualistic you do good and avoid evil and wisdom is non-u wisdom sees the uh same identical suchness in Good and Evil and so the the the theory generally is that it's this accumulation of wisdom and virtue that you carry from One Life to another you don't generally carry specific memories of when you were building the Eiffel Tower and that kind of thing um it's also it's interesting that the only Traditions actually have theories of reincarnation are those that are in an agrarian base uh so this is all I find this very interesting number one number two the karma that's ascribed to individuals uh is a fundamental mistake I think was made in terms of how the Traditions treat Karma and that I say he really didn't understand the four quadrants very well they weren't differentiated very well so things that happened in the other three quadrants were ascribed to something that you did in your interior MH so if you get sick you did it if something bad happens to you you did it if you're if you're blind you did it so so the actual factors that could be operating the other quadrants were ascribed to your personal volition and that's probably a very very deep mistake that's not to say that there isn't Karma there is but there's karma in all four quadrants so if somebody dumps the X and vald dumps toxic waste in in your backyard if you are a Jew at alitz you're not solely responsible for what's happening that that's a fundamental bad way to look at it so you we have to you have to sort of straighten out exactly what is your karma what are you responsible for and then that if anything is what would go from Lifetime to Lifetime but also you can just start by straightening out just what you are responsible for and what you aren't responsible for that's a very very important notion ultimately if you're talking about Maha Atma if you're talking about I I if you're talking about witness then you are responsible for everything that's arising but that means everything because you are everything that's arising moment to moment but your relative finite self is not and you have to distinguish between which is which most people who first start getting into these things confuse these two and they think that everything that happens to them is their own Bad Karma and that's that's just a new age guilt trip that we really really don't don't need so these are these are things you sort of consider then in terms of how you come down on reincarnation um if sort of you know people sort of have a sense about it one way or another shankara probably had the final say where he said the Lord is the one and only transmigrant and that probably ends that one but but um but but as as the Lord transmigrates the degree to which he she or it is is realized that's right you know and now more in an evolutionary context is the degree to which he he or she will be experienced yeah uh beyond beyond the physical form but interesting that if it was then that the that that the self then would there would be less and less you know personal and Collective Karma that would be that that would be carried along yeah exactly which I think is a very important a very important no it's still carried along yeah but you're not responsible for things going on in these other four quads I mean do diligence and and responsibility has to go to people that basically poison the environment um among other things um including you know poison the environment with really mediocre uh Speech and bad jokes and there's there's a whole horrifying the seventh ring of Hell is for people that that do that so you have to kind of watch that but there but kind of straightening up you fundamentally know what you're responsible for way way way down deep you pretty much know if whether what's happening to you is something that you pretty much need to own up to you or if what's happened to you is something that really is fundamentally not of your doing way way down deep the authentic self knows as as Andrew uses that so so so the more you get in touch with that authentic self the more you can apportion good and evil in your own life and then that's your that's your virtue and virtue along with wisdom Your Capacity to understand emptiness those are the things that go with you and if if nothing else to go with you from moment to moment don't they