Introduction to Part II

Anyone who is serious about embarking on the path of spiritual evolution must make the effort to acquaint themselves with the territory. The territory of Evolutionary Enlightenment is the interior of the cosmos. What is the interior of the cosmos? It is your very own experience of consciousness and cognition, right now. The exterior of the cosmos is matter; the interior is consciousness. So the territory is your own self, in the deepest sense of what that means—all the way from the radically impersonal depths of pure timeless Being to the complex workings of your ever-evolving individual self-sense. Spiritual development, in the context of this teaching, is about compelling ourselves, through the power of our own inspired will and intention, to actually evolve. And in order to evolve—to consciously evolve—you first need to get to know the multidimensional nature of who you are and how you are. You need to be able to recognize and understand what constitutes your interior world—the infinite nature of the spiritual ground of your own being, the higher human capacities that make conscious evolution possible, and also the unconscious conditioned structures that can obstruct and obscure that potential. This is complex and subtle territory that is, for most of us, relatively unfamiliar. Indeed, it continues to surprise me how little most of us seem to know about ourselves—not only about our psychological interiors but also about the deeper dimensions of the internal universe. In Part I of this book, we took a cosmic journey of awakening. In Part II, from the perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment, we will examine the fundamental dimensions of the self, both relative and absolute; illuminate the unique challenges and potentials of the cultural context in which we find ourselves; and explore some of the higher human capacities that enable us to participate in such a bold and significant task as the evolution of the interior of the cosmos.