The Guru & The Pandit, Live in Denver : Ken Wilber & Andrew Cohen

We live in rather extraordinary times if you think about it. We have, first of all, access to literally all of the world's great living traditions. This has never ever ever happened before any time in history. So we are blessed to be able to in a sense experiment and mine the various ways that spirit in the past has chosen to make itself known. And we're all basically pooling what understanding what resources we have in order to engage in arguably the greatest adventure there is. That's the adventure of consciousness, the adventure of waking up, the adventure of going so deep into yourself that you stumble and fall into infinity. And under those circumstances, there's a new destiny that arises from consciousness. Because what's being laid down are actually structures of consciousness. These are actually being created right now. They're not platonic gibbons that drop down from heaven. They are structures that we build every time we engage in a thought that's just a little bit higher than the thought we had a moment before or an activity that's just a little bit more noble than the activity we engaged in a moment before. And so that's fundamentally what we're engaged in. It's an extraordinary extraordinary adventure. I can't think of anything like it. So, um, with that, I'll pause and see if Andrew wants to add anything, and then we'll just sort of jump in and take this in any direction that you want to take it. What I'm very excited about and very interested and in my dialogues with Ken, it's what we're almost always speaking about is how enlightenment itself is evolving. You know, as as human understanding develop, so does our understanding of even the meaning and definition of enlightenment evolve and develop. So, so now as we begin to understand what enlightenment means in an evolutionary developmental context, we begin to see and we can go into more what that means, you know, later, but we begin to see that it it means less and less about transcending the world merely and more and more about uh embracing uh the the creative dimension of what it means to literally create the cosmos. I'm often fond of saying that up until very recently I think that God or the creative principle is something that we were asking for help from often if we were in trouble if indiv if as an individual we were in trouble or if our family was in trouble or our tribe was in trouble or a nation was in trouble we would often look up to the heavens you know assuming there's anybody up there but anyway asking and asking for help for support for intervention And I I believe we've we've literally reached that time in history when the when God or the creative principle or the energy and intelligence that created the universe is now completely and totally dependent upon us and or those of us that have reached that level of development. We're actually able at least on a cognitive level of beginning to appreciate that that is actually true. And because we're beginning to grasp that who and what the godly creative principle is is who we are at the level of awareness in the way that Ken was speaking about it, but even but but but also and even more so in the creative dimension. And so what I'm saying is that we have to be willing to bridge the gap between our capacity to cognitively appreciate that these things are true and actually become that realization or that recognition ourselves as our self as an as a truly enlightened self. But in enlightened in in the sense that I'm emphasizing it has to do with uh realizing that we truly are God in human form in this sense God the creative principle and that the future literally is more in our hands now than it ever has been. And I don't think I have to tell you how important that is.