A Higher We

A Higher We The ultimate goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment is to come together with others in an egoless culture, free from all the usual obstructions to our higher creative potentials and capacities. This is a very bold and noble aspiration, one that is much higher than most of us would even consider reaching for. But when you awaken to the Authentic Self, you will find that it becomes your natural inclination. Indeed, when that powerful energy and intelligence begins to surge through your body and mind, you will find that you are spontaneously drawn to come together with others—others who are awakening to that same spiritual impulse, who share its sense of purpose, urgency, and passion. And why is it that we feel compelled toward higher relatedness in this way? Because that is the nature of the impulse itself. In traditional enlightenment, which is about awakening to timeless, formless Being, there is no such thing as relatedness, because there is only One. But in Evolutionary Enlightenment, when the emphasis shifts from Being to Becoming, one wholeheartedly enters the world of time, form, and relatedness. In fact, one discovers that relatedness is the whole point of the manifest world. The universe was created so that relationship could occur. Why else would God, or the energy and intelligence that initiated this process, have ever left the timeless singularity of the ground of Being? Before the big bang, in that empty ground, there was only unbroken Oneness. But that One chose to become the many, and in the birth of the many, relatedness became the very fabric of the emerging universe. Indeed, one way to understand the evolutionary impulse is as a desire for perfect relatedness —an overwhelming urge to make manifest its ultimate nature as seamless unity in the realm of multiplicity. So when you experience that impulse as the compulsion to evolve, the direction in which it is pointing you is always toward ever more profound expressions of its own inherent singularity, or nonduality. You find yourself mysteriously and miraculously and ecstatically compelled by it. That's why you feel drawn to others—because the evolutionary impulse is drawn to itself. When the evolutionary impulse meets itself, there is egoless relatedness. And that is what those of us at the leading edge who want to push the boundaries of our own spiritual development need to discover. We have to find a way to meet one another in a place we've never been before, in a higher state of consciousness and a higher stage of development that are unhindered by the separating influence of the narcissistic ego and the less enlightened values of our modern and postmodern culture. Anyone can experience egoless consciousness in the stillness and solitude of deep meditation. It is easy to be egoless when there's no relationship. But if we want to catalyze evolution in consciousness and culture, we are going to have to share our deepest convictions and spiritual intuitions of what's possible, and then work hard, together, to make that possibility a reality. In order to do this, we need to make the heroic effort to go beyond ego at the same time, while we are creatively interacting with one another, in the midst of all the complexity of human life. * * * When many individuals simultaneously embrace the path and practice I've been describing, and make the all-important shift from ego to Authentic Self, this is what becomes possible. When this happens, consciousness beyond ego, which is enlightenment, can emerge not just within your own individual interior, but between us, as human beings. What has traditionally been a subjective experience now becomes an intersubjective experience—a new expression of enlightened awareness that emerges in the space between subjects. That space is the interior of the cosmos. The interior of the cosmos is not just inside your own head—it's something we share. That's what intersubjective means. It is the "we-space" in which we share values, perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews. It is culture. Culture is the expression of our collective interior—the invisible structures that exist in that intersubjective domain. These conscious and unconscious, mutually agreed upon beliefs, values, and perspectives are embedded in our language, our customs, and our social systems. Most of the time, the cultural or intersubjective worldspace we share has little to do with higher evolutionary values or enlightened awareness. It tends to be conditioned by a conglomeration of beliefs and perspectives that come from both our current modern and post­modern cultural experience and from our past, our ethnic roots, and our traditional heritage. Our collective interior, more often than not, has little room for that which is new. Our complex emotional and psychological worldspace is made up largely of what has already happened and what already exists. When you transcend the outdated beliefs and values of our shared history, and use your gifts of self-reflective awareness and free agency to activate new and higher potentials within yourself, something of greater significance than your own personal awakening can occur. Indeed, when you come together with others who are endeavoring to transcend history in the same way, cultural evolution starts occurring through you and between you. Nothing is more spiritually intoxicating than this: when you feel your own interior actually moving, forward and upward, in a context in which others are moving in the same trajectory at the very same time. In this way, a momentum is generated in consciousness—a vertical momentum toward that which is new. When that momentum is generated, you realize that you are going somewhere —and not just as an individual, or even as a collective. In a small but not insignificant way, culture itself is moving. When you know this is possible and then you experience it, directly, it's like discovering the key that unlocks the door to the future. When you feel that shared interior moving and vibrating with a sense of direction, you know it is possible to change the world, because the world starts within. This is why I sometimes speak about Evolutionary Enlightenment as changing the world from the inside out. Changing the world means creating the underlying structures for a new level, or stage, of cultural development. Those structures are something we have to build together, in that intersubjective dimension, in the space between subjects. My vision of a new world is not some vague utopian ideal a thousand years away; it's a new structure in consciousness that emerges between us, in the most interior dimension of the cosmos, in real time, right now. At first, it is glimpsed as a new potential, then tasted as a thrilling intersubjective experience of consciousness beyond the familiar boundaries of the individual ego and the outdated structures of the culturally created self. Eventually, if each of the individuals involved has the heroic commitment necessary to sustain the perspective revealed in that experience, that perspective becomes an actual structure in our shared culture. As it stabilizes, that structure becomes the ground for new and higher orders of relatedness. * * * These new and higher orders of relatedness are hard to conceive of, because they are outside of our usual frame of reference. Imagine what it would be like if there was no sense of otherness when you were with other people. How would it feel if there was no trace of self-consciousness, and no preoccupation with superiority, competition, fear, mistrust, or unworthiness? Dare to consider, just for a moment, the possibility of being so at ease in the company of others that there was nothing to hide, nothing to defend, only the fearless transparency of egoless awareness and the ecstatic urgency of the evolutionary impulse. That is what it feels like when we awaken to the Authentic Self, together. The experience of egoless unity or oneness has always been the highest spiritual ideal. The problem, as I've said, is that usually we can sustain the awareness of absolute unity only in a state of solitary meditation or quietude—when the mind is very still and awareness is unmoving, when the many disappear and dissolve into the immanent oneness of consciousness itself. When we emerge from that state and become aware of the many, we usually lose touch with the awareness of the One. Imagine what would happen, however, if many individuals were able to remain conscious of that absolute unity while creatively engaging in the world of multiplicity. Imagine if you could have that same experience of One without a second with your eyes open—not immersed in stillness, withdrawn from the world, but passionately engaged with other people and with the life-process. In this way, the experience of nonduality emerges in the space between you and others, so that although you are relating, as many, you experience yourselves as One. And that One is a vast unfolding process that is going somewhere. * * * When the consciousness of One is shared by two, or ten, or thirty, or more, you experience a kind of intimacy that may surprise and even shock you. What you are meeting those other individuals in has nothing to do with the kind of personal intimacy that the ego can relate to, and nothing to do with the familiar ways in which our culture has taught us to seek for connection with other people. In earlier stages of our cultural development, we experienced intimate connection with those in our family, our tribe, our religious group, or our nation. In our current modern and postmodern context, we tend to seek for intimacy primarily in romantic relationships, in personal friendships, and in nuclear families. For most of us, trust and intimacy is always a result of sharing experience with others, over time. In the mutual awakening to the Authentic Self, we discover, to our amazement, a new and radical form of intimacy that has nothing to do with time or shared history. In fact, it has nothing to do with anything personal whatsoever. When two or more people awaken to the evolutionary impulse, and glimpse the singular nature of the infinite vastness that is the cosmocentric perspective, there is simply no sense of otherness. Even though you can be aware of the objective fact that there is one person here and another person there, emotionally that distinction is not experienced. There is no felt sense of duality, gross or subtle. When two or more individuals come together in this way and have a conversation, the experience is almost of thinking out loud with yourself, because there is only one Authentic Self. The ego can only have relationships with other separate individuals, but the Authentic Self can only have a relationship with itself. If you awaken to the Authentic Self and another person awakens to that same self, you will feel a strong pull to come together, but interestingly, what you are drawn to is not the other individual's unique personal qualities. You are drawn to the very same evolutionary aspiration that is awakening within you. The Authentic Self isn't interested in other individuals. It is always only interested in itself in others. In that shared higher state, carried by the evolutionary impulse, there is an ecstatic intimacy that cannot be surpassed. It is a sweetness that is infinitely deeper than the experience of sexual union, personal friendship, familial connection, or ethnic bonds. It is not separate individuals coming together; it is one Self delighting in consciously recognizing itself. * * * In this newly emerging intersubjective enlightenment, the meaning and significance of nonduality evolves. That same singularity we taste in deepest Being is now experienced in time, in the body, in action, in Becoming, and most importantly, in relationship. It's what I sometimes call "intersubjective evolutionary nonduality." Nonduality, once again, means oneness or not-two-ness. Intersubjective means between subjects, between individuals. And evolutionary means it is not static or fixed, but perpetually developing. So intersubjective evolutionary nonduality, to put it simply, means One between two, evolving. It means the experience of Oneness in a context of dynamic, perpetually developing relatedness. When two or more individuals discover the truth of Oneness through awakening to the Authentic Self, in the same place and the same space, the timeless paradox of nonduality enters the stream of time and becomes the evolving context for a new cultural emergence. To me, there is nothing more profound than this. If God is that One without a second, then the human experience of intersubjective evolutionary nonduality is the most culturally significant expression of what God actually is for those of us at the leading edge of the evolving world. When a number of apparently separate individuals are liberated from the familiar boundaries of the individual ego and the outdated structures of the culturally created self, the One surges through the many, and the many know that they are the One, and there is a dynamic evolutionary dance between them. Remember, what is occurring here is always far greater than any of the individuals present. The energy and intelligence that created the universe is drawing human beings together for its own purpose. And our personal spiritual aspirations, our connections with each other and with life itself, whether we know it or not, are simply serving that purpose, which is the perpetual evolution of the interior of the cosmos.