Andrew Cohen - N°4 - LAST RETREAT - January 2025

So if the enlightenment is the pursuit of ultimate knowledge, if enlightenment is pursuit of ultimate knowledge, it's the pursuit of ultimacy. What's the what's the ultimate truth? What's the absolute truth about the nature of reality? Enlightenment is the pursuit of the ultimate truth. The absolute truth about the nature of reality. What's the highest truth? What is the ultimate nature of everything that exists? And everything that doesn't exist is important. What is its vibration? So it's very spiritually profound and very helpful to enter into this kind of contemplation because if you if you're right, not everybody agrees with you. If you're right that when the big bang happened there, it was a big yes. If you are correct that there are profound implications about the nature and significance of human existence about the existence of life about the existence of the universe so I agree with you a lot of people don't agree with me either but if you're right that means that inherent in life there seems to be an urge to exist. The universe seems to want to exist. Would the universe exist if it didn't want to exist? So the existence of the universe seems to imply a desire for existence. So if the desire to exist exists, it must feel like something and it says something about who who you are and who I am as manifest expressions of that desire. So as human beings, we have the capacity for self-exolctive awareness. We have the capacity to be consciously aware of these driving principles, these inherent vibrations. And so it's very important if you want to get to the bottom of things to figure this out. So if it's true that the universe wants to exist, it means there's a profound positivity, the desire to exist. Since you said that the first cause was a big yes, sorry, the desire to exist itself is pure positivity. And if that's true on an on an absolute or ultimate level, that that means that um the nature of existence is positivity. The nature of the desire to exist is purely positive. And actually that's true. We know that it'll help to free us from fundamental existential questions about the meaning of existence. What do you think? So if it is true, does that mean we need to acknowledge it and live in alignment with it if it's ultimately true? Isn't that beautiful? So it means if we have spiritual integrity, it means we we want to live in alignment with reality as it is. Not not how we want it to be, how we think it is, but we want to live in alignment with reality as it is. Right? What is the nature of reality? What's the ultimate truth? If we think we found what the ultimate truth is, then we have to live in alignment with what we've discovered. If we have spiritual integrity, right? That gives us the direction, gives us the answer. So if the desire to exist is inherently positive, does that mean something profound about our own existence? Well, I'm not sure the creation of the ego itself is negative, but it's just as part of a developmental process, we we went off track. The ego itself is not the problem. The belief in the superiority of the ego. It's it has an overexaggerated sense of its own signs significance. That's the problem. The the ego itself is a locus of identity. It's a locus of self identity which is not inherently bad or wrong or even untrue. Just if we have an exaggerated sense of its significance becomes negative. So the my ego is not a problem. Your ego is not a problem inherently. But it it makes me feel separate and superior from light and from reality and from truth and it becomes problematic. So if in if in our spiritual education this was corrected from the very beginning, we wouldn't be in this mess. It's bad education. This locus of identification helps us toident identify myself as being different from you. My relative self sense is different than yours. So if the ego exists as as a part of a developmental process, it's inherently positive and good. It's how God expresses herself through expressing variation and variety. So the ego is part of that variation and variety and it's all good but just we have an over exaggerated sense of what it means separate from the larger picture of who we truly are becomes problematic. So the ego is not the devil inherently. Just the way we think about it creates this demonic problem. Does that make sense? But the point I'm trying to point to today is that uh if the desire to exist is an expression of the will of God so to speak to use mythic language that God wants to exist that means something about our relationship to to our body mind and personality. Right? If we realize this is the objective truth, then we become morally metaphysically obliged to live in alignment with it as an expression of that truth. This is a very different attitude towards self-realization than the psychological one. What I'm describing is not psychological. It's just subjective has to do with the definitions of reality that helps us to find our way. So in the evolutionary spirituality in the evolutionary enlightenment context this recognition that the urge to exist is inherently profoundly positive overwhelmingly positive and conceivably positive unimaginably positive plays a big role in our spiritual development because if you're going to be an enlightened person living in alignment with ultimate truth right supposedly enlighten means anything it means I'm living in alignment with the ultimate truth which is a profound thing to do. If that's true, that means our life has to become an expression of that positivity that we already are because that's the truth. Doesn't mean bad bad things happen also in a positive context. Doesn't mean bad things don't happen. But it means the ultimate truth, the highest truth is that the desire to exist is the greatest good. So this is a fundamental existential truth about the nature of reality and it has profound implications in our relationship to our own personal lives. The ego can be very victimized, very frightened and confused, very traumatizing. We can reach all kind of conclusions about life as a result, but they're only relative conclusions that are absolute conclusions. So most people come to the wrong conclusion because they're not seeing things in a big enough context. See my point in an evolutionary context. It's important to understand that the uh the life system, the life process is not fully self-actualized. The life process itself, the creative process is not fully self-actualized. The life process itself that God has created is still finding its own way through the process of created and gave rise to. So God in the form of manifest reality doesn't know everything. The system is trying to find its way imperfectly stumbling along. Follow. So the system the life system is not fully self-realized yet. Creative process is the life process trying to find its way through us as us and by this larger process. So when you realize that the system itself is is striving for greater understanding, for greater consciousness, you you can forgive it for getting things wrong. Because the process doesn't know everything either. I don't know everything. You don't know everything. The process itself doesn't know everything either. But to me, this makes life much more interesting and inherently fundamentally profoundly creative from the very beginning. So when we when you awaken to the evolutionary context and that evolutionary spirituality and evolutionary enlightenment, it gives you a completely much different and much bigger perspective on the totality of reality and know your own existence in it. This is an open process. It's not fixed. The process is trying to find its way and we're part of it. We're part of the process. So there's in the old old testament version, you know, God's already fully self-actualized, but it's a closed system. The beginning, the middle, and the end is already known. That makes us feel trapped. But if it process is open and in a state of its own becoming, everything becomes open and all things become possible, both positive and negative. Right? That creates a much more interesting universe. creates a much more interesting universe and it also we helps us to find a potential place for ourel in it that has meaning and nothing is fixed except we're going to die one day that's also relative. So this is why evolutionary mysticism, evolutionary spirituality, evolutionary enlightenment as a new orienting perspective is so important for human beings. Very important. We can't go back. We have to go forward. If we're going to liberate our species, we have to move forward, not go back. Recently in the integral world, there's been a lot of people who have been very frightened and confused by global events and feeling very insecure. and they've discovered mythic Christianity as a solution to their insecurity. Very intelligent people. Not that there's anything wrong with mythic Christianity, but there's nothing new in it. We need to move forward, embrace the complexity of reality in a much bigger context. We're going to save ourselves and save the world. I believe it's a much more creative way to think than what I'm offering. It's a big step forward. You can feel it, can't you? It's a step forward for humanity in a way that enables us to think in a much more reality embracing way. That's inherently exciting and self-implicating. Right? So, the enormity of what I'm speaking about doesn't go away. It's hard to think about such big truths. They don't go away because we stop thinking about them. The more we grapple with them in a spiritual context, the more exciting life becomes. Living with purpose changes everything. And if you live with the highest purpose, it changes everything indeed. And you find yourself and you find your place in in the world that set you free. But just to put this in context, in the old enlightenment, nothing's happening. The old enlightenment nothing ever happened. In the old enlightenment traditional vanta, traditional eastern dharma, nothing ever happened. So there's no problem. That's an absolute dimension of reality. That's why when we meditate, we have no relationship to the content of consciousness. You experience freedom from everything that ever happened. But as you enter into a state of consciousness where nothing ever happened, you experience the truth of the fact that at the deepest level of a reality, nothing ever happened. That's why Rama is smiling because he was experiencing this truth at a very deep level of it being. Nothing ever happened. So what's the problem? I'm not talking about intellectual understanding. I'm talking about a profound vibration of absolute truth. Nothing ever happened. The universe was never created. You were never born. The world never existed. That's the deepest truth. So nothing ever happened. So what are you worried about? That's the foundation of the new enlightenment. Deep realization that nothing ever happened. That's why we're spending long periods of time sitting quietly. So I want you all to have the experience of the fact that nothing ever happened. It'll set you free. If nothing ever happened, it means you were never hurt, wounded, traumatized either. Means your problems aren't real because nothing ever happened at the deepest level of the self. That means your true self is happy because it's never nothing ever happened. That's half the picture. And to be grounded in evolutionary life, we have to become very good yogis. The yogi knows how to gain access to the ground of being. What I told calls the ground of being that set you free. This experience of uh nosis nothing ever happened. You have to become very an expert at knowing that truth that sets you free. And in the way that I approach this dharma from that vantage point, we can begin to approach this evolutionary context which is a new one. So we want to put this new this new discovery of evolutionary spirituality on top of the traditional foundation of the love nothing ever happened. And we have a complete dharma that that embraces both the unmanifest reality that nothing ever happened and manifest reality which is evolution. And we become part of a complete dharma which embraces the totality of reality which is nothingness and form. Both emptiness and form are fully embraced as one piece. The dharma is going to be appropriate for this time. It has to embrace the whole picture. Not leave anything out. Dharma of the future doesn't deny the world, it embraces it. So if you're metaphysically very sophisticated, we can embrace the world while knowing at a deep metaphysical level that it's unreal. It's a little bit metaphysically demanding, spiritually demanding, but you can do it. So in evolutionary enlightenment as I teach it the two big steps we take as we go from a wrong relationship to reality which is based on ignorance misunderstanding confusion and unconsciousness a wrong relationship to reality to no relationship which is what we're speaking about today and yesterday which is where you discover spiritual freedom to the right relationship. When you get up from your meditation cushion, you have to know what the right relationship to reality is. Otherwise, you won't know what to do. You discover no relationship. You can sit still forever and have no relationship to reality and experiencing the bliss and freedom of no relationship. But the minute you open your eyes, what are you going to do? What relationship to reality are you going to assume? So you want to make sure you're you're assuming what you believe is the right relationship and the most appropriate relationship to reality when you begin to consciously engage with it. When you get up from your meditation position, the practice of meditation is is a visiting and revisiting of this primordial truth about the ultimate nature of reality which is that nothing ever happened. The universe was never born. The unmanifest dimension of reality. So that you continue to revisit this truth, this dimension, this experience, this state of consciousness, continuing to revisit it and revisit and revisit and begin to experience this is also who I am at the deepest level. I've never been born, never entered the stream of time. I'm inherently and absolutely free. This has to be clear to you at the level of experience. You need to develop spiritual self-confidence that it is. So it will help you to be to be a strong person. That doesn't happen by itself. It's not easy. We have to work on it. And as you get strong and uh grounded in no relationship and the freedom of the what I'm going to call the true self, you begin to really experience your true self as being who you who you truly are at the deepest level and start to develop spiritual self-confidence. And from that vantage point, then you want to begin to experiment with the embracing the evolutionary perspective. From the evolutionary perspective, it means that there's only one I am. There's only one truth. There's only one I in the universe. Right? Ramen calls it the I am. The vibration of the true self. There's only one self in the universe. Ramen taught us all. It's only one eye having this experience in different forms and shapes. Your ego is one small part of that eye. All life forms are having the same experience of this is my experience. There's only one eye having that experience. There's not many different eyes having that experience. That's what's so mind-blowing. I think I'm different from you. You think you're different from me. It's a relative appearance. The deepest level there's no difference between us because it's one eye having the same experience through your body, mind, and personality and through my body, mind, and personality. So we're not having the same experience which appears to be different and it's relatively speaking it's a little bit different but not in any important way because from the ultimate point of view we're the same being having the same experience in slightly different forms. So that you have to contemplate these truths and become very deeply grounded in this in this awakening. Deeply grounded deeply grounded deeply grounded to become a place where you're resting. And once you realize then that there's one eye and not many from an absolute point of view, then we begin to wrestle with the interesting question of who created the universe. If there's only one eye from an absolute point of view, who created the universe? Could it be you? And the metaphysical implications are yes, it has to be you. Because if there only one eye exists in the universe, it has to be you. It could be anybody else. If one if you if you really believe that there's a difference between a relative truth and an absolute truth and from the point of view of the absolute truth there's only one eye and you are that one without a second I am that one without a second that means you're the one who inconceivably this is inconceivable chose to create the universe at the deepest level you might not remember it doesn't mean you weren't there just because your ego can't remember doesn't mean you weren't there doesn't mean you did all this so with the evolutionary spirituality this is the manif physical time bomb. It's the explosive reality that I am the only one that could have ever been to give rise to all of this at an absolute level. It's this is inconceivable. But from an absolute point of view, it has to be true. So if if what I'm saying is true and it is true, it ties all of us right into directly to the ultimate the sense of reality, the very center of it. So if that's true, we have to wrestle with the metaphysical implications of what that means. Remember, it's not your ego didn't create the universe. Your true self is the only one that could have meant to have done this. Somehow someway because a lot of us feel very victimized and alienated by life. I didn't ask to be born. What am I doing here? This is not my problem. I don't like the way things are. Say, but you created this. No, I didn't. Yes, you did. No, you didn't. Yes, you did. No, you didn't. Yes, you did. [clears throat] So we have to wrestle with these metaphysical absolutes until they set us free because you sooner or later if you if you work with these distinctions you'll find at a certain level at an inconceivable level at a mind transcending level mind transcending way you can never really understand it you'll begin to sense that it must be true it has to be true nothing else could be true so they say what does it mean what does it mean for my relative body mind and personality then you have to figure out what it means That's your spiritual responsibility. Make sense out of it for yourself. That's your spiritual obligation. So, you're not a victim. You're a co-creator. No matter what you think about what's going on in the world, you still live a co-creator. Willingly or unwillingly. A lot of young people say, "I didn't ask to be born. You created the whole mess. [laughter] We created all of this from an absolute metaphysical standpoint. This is we created it all at a from a perspective and from a level that's cognitively impossible to understand. But you objectively can realize that this must be the case. At a certain point, it will become obvious to you. This must be the case. And as I just said, if it is, if you realize it must be the case, then you want to begin to wrestle with this truth gently, rationally, slowly, just wrestle with it. So you can squeeze out some feeling of responsibility. But from another point of view, it's very I'm saying it's completely irrational. This is why we want to learn how to make a distinction between absolute truth and relative truth. every day make that distinction and work with work with trying to make these distinctions. They're not easy. They sound like they're easy, but they're not. So liberation in an evolutionary context does not discover through the escapism of I've never been born. It's found to the realization that this is my doing. That's how you find your liberation in an evolutionary context. You begin to feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility. and set you free. What you do about it, it's up to you. These are not truths that can be lived perfectly by anybody. The enormity of it is too overwhelming. So, nobody knows how to do this perfectly. We're all beginners. These are new truths. But it's exciting. Now I see with this way of thinking I can make sense out of the whole picture. That's very liberating. It's not possible to fully come to terms with these distinction. But you want to get to the point where you're honestly wrestling with them in yourself. That's what you want to do. Nobody's figured this out. But if you honestly wrestle with these truths, it'll purify your soul. We make you ready to live for the future. So I'll speak more about this tomorrow, but this is why we have to learn to be very careful about getting too trapped in our personal story. You get lost in your personal story, you don't have any time for these big big thinking. Right? I don't have a very clear vision for the future of humanity. But I know how we can get there. The spiritual impulse, the urge towards consciousness. The spiritual impulse is an urge towards consciousness, right? I must become more conscious. I have to become more conscious. It's not a personal compulsion, but it's a universal drive in human consciousness. All of you feel this drive. That's why you're all here with this retreat with me. It's not personal to you or personal to me. So the urge towards consciousness itself is an impersonal drive and consciousness itself. And when it awakens to itself in you, you start getting very excited that you're experiencing what hundreds of millions of human beings have experienced throughout the last 5,000 years. This earth choice the possible at the level of consciousness itself. It's not personal. It's universal. Because when I want the same kind of awakening as you do, we fall in love with each other. I become you and you become me. Because that's when we we recognize that we want the same thing, the same values. But what I'm teaching here is very esoteric. This is not for most people. It's too esoteric. Not everybody's ready for this. I'm just telling you the truth. Everything I'm saying is for humanity as whole for those people who can understand it. Absolutely. Of course, it's universal. It's available to everybody. I'm only speaking about universal truths here. I'm not speak I'm not saying anything that's personal. There's nothing I've spoken about in the last few days that has anything to do with a personal truth. I'm speaking about a very vast picture that by implication includes all of us automatically. There's nothing personal in anything that I'm saying. That's why it's so attractive and so liberating for people who want to be free from the personal which is the ego. Everybody's invited. Not everybody's ready for this particular party. [laughter] It's not my fault. If you know anything about developmental philosophy, not all human beings are at the same level of development. There's different levels and stages of development. We're not all at the same level. There's lower levels and higher levels. Doesn't mean that one's inherently better than the other. It means that there's different the different levels objectively exists. Whether we like it or not, it's objectively true. This is the way reality is. The enlightenment of the Buddha and the enlightenment of Ramen are considered to be escaping from the world. So it's not world creating, it's world transcending, which I think is great. I'm a transcender. So I had all the feelings of transcending the world very well developed in myself. But I'm also a world creator. I embrace both absolute perspectives in my dharma. I didn't invent it. No, just just consider what I'm saying and accept what makes sense to you. Reject what doesn't make any sense, what attracts you about what I'm saying, what turns you on, what makes your heart beat a little faster. That's just be focused on that. Be focused on what's resonating inside you before your understanding with your mind. That's what's important. I thought about this a lot. And I think if you look at the complexity of the manifest process, I don't believe the creation of the universe was a spontaneous accident that keeps on happening. [laughter] But there seems to be too much intelligence in the way everything works together. The way one lower levels are building on building on higher levels. This is not unfolding chaos. This is unfolding complexity. I believe that there's an interior dimension to those patterns. So they're not just linear patterns, but I believe you don't have to accept this, but those patterns have their own interior dimensions of consciousness and intentionality. I believe that I can't prove it to you because then what makes that's what gives this movement so much spiritual significance because those patterns are in some inconceivable way alive with consciousness and directionality and intentionality. And I what I'm interested in is the nature of the intelligence that's at driving things at the at the core of the process. Because if what I'm saying is true, and I believe that it is true, big implications for you and for me, that means there's energy intelligence that's trying to make all this happen. It's not just linear patterns. It's not completely without an eye sense somewhere in there. Yeah, but what you bring up is a very important question because is there an interior dimension to reality that is a foundation of consciousness and sensience or is this meaningless and purposeless accident like many materialists feel? Many materialists think it's just happening, man. It doesn't mean You're an accident. It's just I'm an accident. It happens, but it happens for a reason. Purpose doesn't suddenly pop into existence for no reason. that not everything that happens in reality is arbitrary. At a certain point, everything did appear from nothing. Sure, something came from nothing. But I believe that there was there's some inconceivable measure of mind involved in this leap from nothing to something. From being to becoming, from emptiness to form. That means there was a cause prior to existence. Whatever that cause is is who you are and who I am. That's what I believe. But the spiritual implications of this being a purposeless accident or an intentional happening is very important for us. So materialists are convinced that this is one big cosmic accident. It doesn't mean anything about anything. You're a random accident. I'm a random accident. But that's true. That has spiritual implications about the nature and meaning of life and the purpose of life. But if it's not a random accident, it also has big implications within the meaning of life. The beautiful thing is that meaning your recognition of meaning is is inherent in the process changes everything. That's where spiritual redemption comes from that scares the ego to death. You mean there's inherent higher meaning and higher purpose here. The ego says what about me? Some people think that uh there's no meaning or purpose to existence which is the materialists. Some of the great religious traditions are convinced that life is a bad trip. you want to escape from. The materialists believe that life is purposeless, meaningless, inherently meaningless and purposeless. Many of the great religious traditions with implications would say that life is a bad trip that you want to escape from. If you live a religious life, you never have to come back here again. And evolutionary dharma says something very life positive like saying the whole point of existence is to realize who you are and take responsibility for all of life. which means the whole point is getting in the action. So evolutionary dharma is so significant because it's inherently life positive from the very beginning. It's not saying that it's a bad trip. Life is a gift. So that's why it's so existentially important for us. I believe at this particular time in history when life is so damn confusing anyway. That's the point. These are important questions to think about because as I said at the beginning, if enlightenment is the pursuit of ultimacy and absolute truth, we want we want to ask the biggest questions and try to make sense out of them so we can find the right direction. So as you're meditating here together, before you meditate, just remind yourself that the goal is to go back to before the beginning of everything. Before anything ever happened, you already were. That's the state of consciousness you're trying to realize when you're sitting quietly. So gently remind yourself what you're doing and why you're doing it and what it has to do with evolutionary enlightenment. So there's a particular kind of feeling that arises from the meditative state when you hit the hit the ground of being begin to directly experience a level of feeling and knowing that it's true that you've never been born. You'll experience your own eternal nature as the self, which is a particular kind of feeling of freedom. That's why you're meditating. Not to just feel better or to get a clear mind, but to know who you truly are at the deepest level. And when you hit that ground, you'll feel it. You start to feel very different. And what's very exciting about this teaching is you get to experience unconditional absolute freedom and liberation from the perspective of being. non-existence and from the perspective of being the energy and intelligence that created the universe. Different kind of feeling. It's a feeling of excitement, creative inspiration, joy. They're both states of ego transcendence, but they feel completely different. So there's two different kinds of enlightenment according to me. Not one. Interesting. No. One's a being enlightened, the other is becoming enlightenment. So I had a conversation with audit swami about 10 years ago at a conference here in India and he heard me speak and he said to me in a public forum he said evolution is an illusion. He was very traditional vantan. I said Swami G, maybe you're right, but it took the universe 14 billion years to create the conditions that made it possible for us to have this discussion about the fact that the universe is an illusion. He laughed, but he didn't change his position. These are important questions. Let's talk about evolution is very controversial in spiritual circles. Because the ancient religious traditions are very identified with the mythic truths that they believe their tradition represents. At one point I was invited to give some talks in in Mumbai in a woman's apartment and she invited all of her very spiritually educated friends. So I would make these bold statements that uh the ancient rishies didn't know anything about evolution. They didn't think the world was going anywhere. People started getting angry and shouting at me because for they were all they're convinced that if someone is spiritually awakened especially the ancient reaches to be enlightened means you already know everything that there is to be known. There's nothing new you could possibly discover. I said no they didn't know everything. Even the Buddha thought the world was flat. Then they got more and more angry. She never invited me again. So in the mythic religious traditions the true believers get very attached to their worldviews and they believe that their worldviews are are perennial or forever. This is the one the perennial truth that exists forever. There's no change in it. That's why it is the truth. So when you awaken to the evolutionary context you realize that no human we're all works in progress. Human beings are works in progress and our understanding of the nature of reality is a work in progress too. So what we believed 3,000 years ago is probably no longer as true as we thought it was then. Recently I was listening to a podcast of a very intelligent integral thinker who recently discovered Christianity. But as I'm trying to understand his his shift of understanding, he made it clear that his belief in Christianity was dependent upon his belief in the virgin birth. Then the uh the fact that Jesus ascended to heaven after he was crucified. A very educated, very sophisticated guy who made it clear that he belief in Christ was dependent upon his faith and the fact that he really rose to heaven. That this is not a mythical story, but it's an absolute truth. I was shocked by this. They say such a smart guy like that believes in these mythical stories. Yep. So, as human beings, our capacity to understand the truth is evolving, is changing. We're we're growing. That's the beautiful thing. Nothing's fixed in stone. The human race is learning about itself and about its own mind, which is good news. These mythic truths are not important. But if you awaken to these higher states of consciousness that I'm talking to you about, you don't have to depend on these mythic stories anymore for your faith. You'll be free. It means your faith and understanding of the ultimate nature of reality is very weak if it's just if it's dependent upon a mythical story. So you can have a lot of very smart people who believe in these mythical stories. We get very offended if you say they're not true. The truth is so extraordinary, so profound, so miraculous, so real. It doesn't need magical stories to give it more significance. That's the beautiful thing. Isn't that great? We don't need magical stories to give us faith anymore. That's what's due, by the way.