Cosmic Conscience

Cosmic Conscience The fifth tenet of Evolutionary Enlightenment, Cosmic Conscience, represents the fundamental motive or raison d'etre of the evolutionary impulse or Authentic Self. Remember, that impulse gave rise to this entire life-process, and when it awakens in our own hearts and minds, we find that we care passionately about only one thing: evolution. In that impulse, there is no other motive than to create the future, unceasingly, and the needs and desires of any individual are always secondary to that greater purpose. This one-pointed passion is what awakens in you as spiritual aspiration, and through the practice of each of the tenets, you align yourself more closely with its forward-reaching momentum. The fifth tenet signifies a tipping point in the path and practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment—an inner threshold that, once crossed, changes everything. It points to that moment in your own evolution when you begin to care more about the process as a whole than you care about your ego's fears, desires, or concerns. It represents the essential shift of identity that this teaching rests on: the shift from ego to Authentic Self. When this occurs, your very motive for pursuing enlightenment evolves from a fundamentally self-centered motive to one that is focused upon the evolution of consciousness itself. Once again, the kind of care that this tenet points to is not a practice or a technique—it is the natural or inherent motive of your Authentic Self. But until you have crossed the threshold where that motive becomes your own raison d'etre, the deliberate and intentional contemplation of what this tenet points to is an essential part of the path, because it puts everything else in context. * * * When we embark on the spiritual quest, most of us, understandably, are pursuing freedom or enlightenment for our own sake. This is why we begin by asking, What do I really want? What is more important to me than anything else? But once your intention has become clear, and you sincerely pursue that one-pointed aspiration, a profound shift occurs. Over time, as your soul develops and matures through the practice of the first three tenets, you will see the quality of that intention evolve. And as you embrace the fourth tenet, and learn to see yourself as a very small part of a very big process, your relationship to the spiritual path becomes dramatically recontextualized. You discover that it is not about you. As your understanding and experience grow, you will come to realize that spiritual evolution is not a personal matter. Indeed, to the seeker who is becoming a finder, it becomes more and more apparent that the felt aspiration for spiritual freedom is nothing less than the vibration of the larger evolutionary process awakening to itself within the human heart and mind. In this, you recognize that the pursuit of enlightenment could never have been merely for yourself alone. Remember, fourteen billion years ago, something burst out of nothing, and the leading edge of that miraculous surge of Becoming is found in your own interior, experienced as the emerging capacity for higher consciousness. That's the purpose of enlightenment: to liberate that glorious as-yet-unmanifest evolutionary potential. * * * The fifth tenet is the only one of these five tenets that cannot really be practiced in and of itself. The deeper motive it points to emerges authentically as a result of sincerely practicing the other four tenets. If you wholeheartedly pursue your own Clarity of Intention, take unconditional responsibility for your Power of Volition, fearlessly Face Everything and Avoid Nothing, and cultivate a Process Perspective, you will become aware of a spontaneously arising sense of Cosmic Conscience—a care for the vast evolutionary process of which you now know you are a small but significant part. And you will recognize that your own spiritual development, your liberation from individual and collective ego, is absolutely essential for the evolution of the interior dimension of that process. This is why your motive becomes: I want to be free not for my own sake but for the sake of the whole. That is the awakening of Cosmic Conscience. When this becomes your own primary motivation for seeking liberation, something very significant has occurred. What began as a freely made choice has become a choiceless obligation. Your fundamental motive has evolved from one that is essentially self-serving to one that is not separate from the very motive behind the expanding universe—the pure passion of the big bang, the God-impulse, which is your Authentic Self. This shift of motive is the key to everything. It's amazing what profound transformations can occur when human beings awaken to a larger context and a higher motive than the fears and desires of their own egos. We are all capable of greatness when we feel directly connected to a higher purpose. Think about the human virtues that emerge, for example, in times of war—the heroism, selflessness, generosity of spirit, and risk-taking that are often expressed when a group of individuals bond together in order to defend themselves, their families, their country, and their values from an external threat. That kind of crisis can bring out the best in us. In an instant, our narcissism and petty self-concern can vanish—not because we are trying to improve ourselves but because we have been shocked awake to a bigger picture. Often people who return from war report that despite all the horrors, it was the best time of their life. They discovered what it was to be awake, living on the edge, fueled by the ultimacy of a life-and-death context. Imagine what it would be like if a significant number of us felt that same sense of urgency in relationship to our collective spiritual evolution, to the need to develop at the level of consciousness. The change we would be capable of would be dramatic. Now, of course, in times of war, the primary motive is survival and the goal is the restoration of peace and security. When our fundamental sense of identity shifts to the evolutionary impulse, we are motivated by a similar sense of urgency, only now, our objective is not peace, or physical survival, or emotional and psychological comfort. In an evolutionary context, the goal is not peace; it's perpetual development. Evolutionary Enlightenment is inspired by the ecstasy that compels us to create the future. And it's not a future that's going to unfold by itself while we go back to sleep. It's a future that we forge the hard way through direct, conscious, intentional engagement with the life-process. What is it that will inspire us to find the courage and the heart to take our lives this seriously, to get to that point where we are motivated by the overwhelming urgency of the call of the future? It's difficult to get human beings to feel as passionate about the imperative to evolve as they would feel if their life was being threatened. But that's what Evolutionary Enlightenment is calling us to. And the fifth tenet points to that all-important threshold in our own consciousness and conscience where we begin to care that much. * * * When your motive evolves in the way I'm describing, the spiritual impulse becomes the stronger part of who you are, more powerful than your ego's motives. Your spiritually awakened conscience and your passion to create that which is new become much more influential than your attachment to the status quo of your culturally conditioned values, beliefs, and perspectives. And it's important to appreciate what a profound shift this represents in the balance of power within you—the struggle for dominion over your body, mind, and soul. When that shift from ego to Authentic Self occurs, it is unmistakable and it changes everything. And yet how it happens can seem like an ever-impenetrable mystery. What makes human beings evolve beyond ego? When exactly does that balance tip, so that an individual's center of gravity moves to a higher level, no longer centered in the fears and desires of the personal self? This can be a confusing question. What I've discovered is that there is actually a science to how this seemingly miraculous shift takes place. The science of radical spiritual transformation comes down to what I sometimes call "the magic number": fifty-one percent. That's the secret: Only when the Authentic Self becomes more than fifty-one percent of who you identify yourself to be does the balance shift. On first hearing, that may sound like an overly simplistic approach, but this is quite a profound revelation. This equation sheds light on the most important question for anyone who wants to embody the evolutionary impulse in this lifetime. It explains that the fundamental shift in motive occurs when, and only when, the fearless, passionate, evolutionary idealism of the Authentic Self becomes the greater part of who you are, at a conscious and unconscious level. Remember, the Authentic Self or evolutionary impulse is the part of you that already has absolutely no doubt it wants to be free or enlightened more than anything else. In fact, that part of you is already perfectly free. But it is also experienced as the part of you that aspires toward unqualified freedom. Why? Because you are still divided. To the self-sense that remains primarily identified with ego, the inherently free Authentic Self is experienced as a desire for that which you ultimately already are but haven't deeply realized yet. Until you reach that point where your primary locus of identification shifts from the ego to the Authentic Self, your experience will still be, to some degree, one of separation from that which you long for. Only when you make that all-important shift of identity will the state of inherent freedom, which is the already present condition of the Authentic Self, finally be recognized to be that which you always have been. Until you reach that point, you will experience it to be your highest aspiration. When you are spiritually inspired, that's the part of you that wakes up and knows something miraculous is possible—the passionate idealism that you feel surging through your system. Consistent, meaningful, and demonstrable transformation only occurs when the individual's awakening to the Authentic Self crosses the threshold from fifty to fifty-one percent. Otherwise, you can experience an awakening to higher potentials, and taste the thrill of the evolutionary impulse stirring within, but as long as the motives of the individual and collective ego remain stronger within you, sooner or later the clarity and conviction and inspiration you find will become a possession of your ego. You may find access to mystical intuitions, feel deeper sentiments and emotions, and even have glimpses of enlightened awareness, and yet all those qualities will be hijacked by your ego if that is where your identity is still rooted. When that line is finally crossed, however, when the balance of power shifts, the ego becomes the weaker part of the self, and that is what changes everything. So the initial goal, the primary target in this teaching, is to get you so inspired by your own potential and by the urgency of our collective predicament that you are willing to do whatever you need to do in order to cross that threshold. And once again, the way you do that is to embrace the first four tenets—making spiritual evolution your highest priority; taking unconditional responsibility for yourself; facing everything and avoiding nothing; and cultivating a process perspective. Each of these aligns you with the position of the already liberated Authentic Self, which only wants to evolve, already feels responsible, has no motive to avoid, and recognizes itself to be the source of the entire evolutionary unfolding. And in this way, you can slowly but surely tip the balance of power within yourself, until you cross the fifty-one-percent threshold. When this all-important shift occurs, the fears and desires and aspirations of the personal ego and cultural self will have been displaced to a significant degree—at least fifty-one percent—by the unstoppable drive of the evolutionary impulse. Now it is Eros, the powerful urge and creative spark driving the entire evolutionary process, which has become the dominant intelligence and energy within your own self. You will start to feel a growing momentum, a backdraft propelling you forward, because when the Authentic Self is the dominant presence in your being, you feel directly connected to the source of the creative impulse. You are no longer running merely on the fuel of your own will and intention; there is now a deeper and higher motive, a cosmic energy and intelligence that is catapulting you forward. However, crossing the fifty-one-percent threshold is not the end of the path—it is just the beginning. As you take that step, the ego doesn't just disappear, or even lie down quietly. If it continues to represent as much as forty-nine percent of your self-sense, then you still have a long way to go. But because the balance of power within yourself has tipped from the ego to the Authentic Self, you begin to experience a tremendous sense of obligation and what I call evolutionary tension. You realize you simply cannot continue to live for your own sake alone; indeed, you awaken to the moral imperative to ensure that the process evolves through you. This obligation is Cosmic Conscience. And the degree to which you awaken to this emerging moral imperative is the degree to which you will actually find the wherewithal to handle your own ego. However overwhelming its fears and desires may be at times, you will know that who you really are and what you're here for is far greater than any of those personal concerns. That alone is what makes it possible to abandon your attachment to and investment in many of the relative and sometimes unwholesome expressions of self and embrace the ultimately empowering and ennobling qualities of natural dignity, humility, and self-respect that Cosmic Conscience engenders in the human heart and soul. * * * The emergence of Cosmic Conscience is very significant, not only for your own higher development but in relationship to the evolution of our shared culture. From a certain point of view, the evolution of culture can be described as the gradual widening of our circles of care and concern for something greater than ourselves—from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric and beyond. In ethnocentric and traditional cultures, for example, everybody cares about our survival. If you are part of a close-knit tribe, religious group, or community, you feel a sense of solidarity. Everyone is there for each other in the face of a perceived threat, but the circle of care and concern is still quite localized. The fifth tenet points to a much wider circle than that, wider even than a worldcentric care, in which we feel a sense of responsibility for the welfare of all our fellow humans and the plight of our shared planet. In the fifth tenet, we experience a felt sense of cosmocentric care, which is more identified with the evolutionary process as a whole than with any lesser notions of self. Indeed, now you awaken to a sense of care for consciousness and where it is headed, because your sense of self is no longer merely related to your own family, your fellow Jews or Christians, Americans or Chinese. This is what uniquely emerges at a cosmocentric level of development: a felt sense of ecstatic urgency about the evolution of consciousness itself. When you feel this at an emotional level, it's quite a significant evolutionary event with profound implications for where our shared culture is headed. How often in your life have you experienced caring about the emergence of that which is higher more than you care about anything personal? This kind of cosmocentric care is not related to your ego, and it's not related to your ethnic background, to your traditional religious orientation, or to your culture. It comes from a deeper, higher part of yourself that is free from all the lesser though very real dimensions of who you already are. When you start to emotionally respond to life from that part of yourself, something extraordinary has begun to happen. * * * When you are living the fifth tenet, when you embrace a cosmocentric perspective, the world of the Authentic Self becomes the world you live in. You may still exist and function in the ego's world, but that's not your home anymore. And the idea of living "for a higher purpose" almost doesn't make sense once you cross that line, because at an interior level, you and that purpose have merged. It's no longer external to who you are but has become the very source of your sense of self. To a significant degree, you and that higher purpose are indistinguishable. That's what Cosmic Conscience means. Your entire life becomes permeated by the future-oriented passion of the evolutionary impulse, because that is who you have become. When that pure passion becomes your own passion, your life becomes ennobled—it becomes an expression of the holy life, the spiritual life, a life of meaning and value. You feel as if you have come home and have found your place in the whole matrix of the cosmos. You know who you are and why you are here. As long as your fundamental motive is personal and self-centered, life will never deeply make sense. But when you embrace a higher motive that transcends the personal sphere, every moment becomes infused with a powerful sense of purpose. As you awaken to the vast dimensions of your own cosmic identity, you find that naturally you care about the future of that process more than you care about your own happiness, or even your own enlightenment. And to your surprise, you will find that, in the end, it is really this care, above all else, that liberates you from ego, because as a result, you find yourself remarkably and quite spontaneously less preoccupied with and less burdened by your personal fears and desires. The ego's petty self-concern is displaced because you are no longer living for your own sake but are now living for the sake of the whole, consumed by a passion to be utterly free so that nothing will inhibit your ability to participate wholeheartedly in the evolutionary process. When a purpose that is so much deeper and higher than yourself comes into your everyday awareness, you simply don't have the energy for those fears and concerns any more. You become so consumed by the ecstatic nature of the evolutionary impulse, by its dynamism and inherent, explosive freedom, that your ego's self-concern and your culturally conditioned ideas and beliefs no longer have the power to distract you in any significant way. Something infinitely more important has entered the center of your being, and your heart is captivated by that. In this way, your personal liberation becomes merely a spontaneous byproduct of your care for the evolutionary process itself. This is how, in Evolutionary Enlightenment, the transcendence of ego is achieved. Ego is full of narcissistic self-importance, but it never wants to take on the burden of this kind of awe-inspiring responsibility for evolution, because in so doing it loses its freedom to act in its own self-interest. Awakening to Cosmic Conscience implicates you in the most profound and dramatic way. It says, "The universe is depending on you." And this is why it has the power to completely unseat the ego in a way that I don't think anything else can. The irony, in this case, is that this does not happen in the traditional way, through awakening, in mystical revelation, to the fact of your personal insignificance. In this new enlightenment, ego is transcended through seeing quite the opposite: your cosmic significance. The solution to the exaggerated sense of self-importance that afflicts most of us is not to feel less important but to discover and take responsibility for just how important you really are. There is no greater challenge to narcissism than awakening to Cosmic Conscience: to the fact that the evolution of the interior of the cosmos is depending on you. That is why this tenet is the ultimate solution to the postmodern predicament of narcissism and exaggerated self-importance. You start out on the spiritual path thinking, "I want liberation for myself—I want to become an enlightened human being." But sooner or later, for anyone who seriously pursues that intention in an evolutionary context, you will come to a point where it is glaringly obvious that there is something infinitely bigger than your own personal spiritual aspirations that is calling you. It's no longer "I want that" but rather, "That wants me." And that is a truly religious feeling—an authentic religious sentiment in a completely post-traditional context. That's the beauty of it: the over-inflated postmodern ego always wants for itself, and the only thing that can really turn the tables on its unending craving is the startling recognition that the very thing you were seeking wants everything from you. It turns your whole world upside down. I can't imagine anything that could be more appropriate or more liberating for those of us at the leading edge at this pivotal moment in our culture's unfolding. And I can't imagine anything more desperately needed for the evolutionary process than for a small but not insignificant number of us to cross this momentous threshold.