Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber: 01 God Needs Our Help

thank you all for being here test one two three four 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 is chosen to make itself known this is a challenge and it's a threat it's something that we want more than anything else and it's something that we're right enough more than anything else if you're not frightened you don't understand it oh good 500 where you were [Laughter] so it's really kind of a very very delicate scale and what always surprises me is that somehow on balance that you take this is your life isn't that the scales of your life and if you get involved in spiritual practice and you put the amount of good stuff in this pen the bliss the awareness the insight the understanding and you put all the bad stuff in this pan the bad stuff wins it's that not it's just I don't know how to tell you this did we get their money okay it's one of the closest races you ever ever see fortunately however we have God on our side unfortunately however we have egos and we have self contractions and we have the separate self selves and part of the deepest deepest most difficult lesson that you can learn in spirituality is it the ego just as it is is fine the self contraction just as it is is fine you're aware of that self contraction right now you are aware that in the very center of your awareness all you're doing is contracting the good news is that which is aware of the self contraction is God so what we want to be able to do today is talk about both sides it's up that straight and ways that you can just some extent tip the scales in your favor and also look at some of the ways that you are all of us are inherently dedicated to not waking out and that we know that that's the case because it's winning yes yes sir the empirical evidence is right there on the other hand the fact that we are here join together in this extraordinary adventure and that we have grace to have in our presence not only some of the world's greatest pandas but also some of the world's greatest gurus I'll be the Panda 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 and it's destiny is one of all the kinds of pain and suffering plus bliss plus ecstasy - your fundamental objection to life and that's really quite an extraordinary thing to realize that you can do without and also we don't thank Andrew of course very much for being here and I know that one of the great things about being a pioneer by the politically correct incorrect definition of a pioneer you all know that it's the guy with all the arrows in his back and that's fundamentally what any of us are doing they're trying to push the envelope we're fundamentally running into the stresses and strains of actual cosmic reluctance because what's being laid down are actually structures of consciousness these 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 or what we transmit our own state and it's a transmission that's a little bit deeper than what you were transmitting a moment before under the circumstances cosmic habits are built up cosmic memories are built up and so that's fundamentally what we're engaged it's an extraordinary extraordinary adventure I can't think of anything like it so try not to screw it up and that's gonna look mighty bad on your tombstone Crudup Turco is right when it could have been so one of the great things one of my favorite exercises from Quaker prayer gatherings is they would get very quiet and then the exercise was let the next sentence out of your mouth be from your very highest self everybody it's very quiet at that point oh but that's the kind of attitude in a sense you want to try to bring to these dialogues we're all going to try to touch into that deepest and highest place in ourselves and of course it doesn't necessarily have to be profound if there's issues coming up that's fine we can we can dress those as well so 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 well I I'm not sure exactly how you put it but I think about two or three minutes ago you were speaking about what it would mean to to give up our refusal to well to do two things one was to to transcend our almost pathological engagement with our narcissistic in England yes so what would it be like to truly give that up and to be so serious about it that it wasn't even a joke anymore yeah that maybe it became one of the most serious things we needed to do and but the reason that we would be striving to do that would be to would be so that we would really be able to take up the the ultimate challenge in the ultimate adventure that you were speaking about which to put it in a very I think simple ways to create is to literally create the future yeah our selves because as you were describing and as you have spoken about and written quite a bit that that that the past has already happened but the future has yet to be determined and it's going to be it and what's of course exciting about about this especially in a time we're living in is that is that the the structures that lay in front of us are don't exist yet and that is literally up to us as individuals together as individuals together to literally create those new structures and the degree to which we realize that's actually true is degree to which we recognize that the future literally depends upon each and every one of us not metaphorically and ken was very you know speaking very passionately about the fact that on one hand is the most exciting time to be alive literally is the most exciting time it's because of how much we know we've never known so much never it's never happened and we've never known so much as we do today we know more today than we did yesterday so human beings have never have never known so much and has had the potential to know so much and yet at the same time I don't think that we have ever been aware of how much the future literally does depend upon the choices that we make so the degree to which on an individual level we are willing to let this let the absolute uncompromising truth of that actually hit us I think will mean just about everything about the kind of person we're going to be but the kind of relationship to life we're gonna have and about ultimately what kind of difference we're going to be able to make in real time starting today so it's it's a deadly serious matter and so what I what I'm very excited about very interested and in my dialogues with candidates 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 evolution 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 embracing 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 as an individual we're in trouble or if our family was in trouble or my tribe was in trouble and nation was in trouble we would often look up to the heavens and you know assuming there's anybody up there but anyway and asking for help for support for intervention and I I believe we've we've literally reached that time in history when when God or the creative principle or the energy intelligence that's created the universe is now completely and totally dependent upon us and or those of us that have reached that level of development were actually able at least on a cognitive level of beginning to appreciate that that is actually true