When you locate the non relative or absolute nature of consciousness in the deepest depths of your own self, you will discover and directly experience the source of enlightenment or spiritual freedom. As you awaken to the ground of your own being, you will find that consciousness is experienced as knowing. It is not a cognitive understanding—not knowing anything particular, but knowing itself. It is a clarity that is empty of content; a weightiness that is full of nothing in particular; a profound knowing that, because of its absolute nature, is experienced as being of ultimate value and meaning. This kind of knowing dissolves all questions, because the experience of that empty ground is the answer—the one answer that always liberates each and every one of us. That answer renders the mind utterly impotent. In that questionless state, you are profoundly rooted and radically free, supported by an absolute confidence in the knowing of no-thing that changes everything.

Andrew Cohen

At the Heart of the Paradox

The ultimate spiritual revelation is that there is no other. There is only One. When any individual goes very deep into a meditative state, momentarily transcending the separate self-sense or narcissistic ego, this profound singularity at the level of consciousness itself is what he or she will find. There is an uncontainable thrill in those moments when the nonrelative nature of consciousness actually becomes apparent. It's as if the water boils over the edge, and the individual suddenly finds himself or herself overwhelmed by the absolute dimension of Being. That is the revelation that enlightens: Consciousness is One without a second, and I Am That.

The ground, or the foundation, of an enlightened perspective is the direct experience of the nonrelative or absolute nature of consciousness itself. Matter, mind, and time are all relative. Consciousness is not. And it is that interplay between the absolute and the relative, between the revelation of One and the appearance of many, that generates the awakened intensity that is the quality of enlightened awareness. An enlightened human life would be one in which the individual is living right on that edge, in the very heart of that paradox.

No Reference Points

Consciousness has no boundaries, no beginning and no end. The cognitive faculties of the human mind cannot grasp its infinite nature, because we habitually relate to the self that is observing only as a fixed, finite entity, and to every object that we give our attention to as being fixed and finite also. But when we discover consciousness, suddenly the observer who appeared to be finite stumbles upon that which is infinite. It's like stepping off a cliff into empty space. You lose all reference points, because your attention is on something that is not an object, and which ultimately, in the shocking clarity of enlightenment, is revealed to be not separate from the one who is observing. The observer and the observed are one and the same. This is why consciousness is so endlessly compelling and ever-new, even though it never changes. Usually something is compelling because there is some variety in it. No matter how beautiful an object is, over time it will become familiar and lose its captivating quality. But consciousness is not an object; it is always the same, and yet it is infinitely compelling. Why? Because it IS.

Someone who is authentically interested in the evolution of consciousness is not concerned about the past, not attached to what has come before. He or she cares passionately about creating the future, here and now. At this point in our individual and collective development, those of us at the leading edge must decide what is more important: preserving what has been or creating that which has not yet emerged. And those who choose the future must be willing to be real heroes, true pioneers.

Being a pioneer sounds very romantic, but real pioneers are individuals who leap out ahead of everyone else. They take enormous risks. They are boldly embracing new territory; they are living an experiment. They have abandoned the old structures that define our consciousness and culture and are reaching forward to create the new ones that will define a new and as-yet-uncreated future. That's the radical position that a significant minority of us need to take if we care deeply about the evolution of consciousness.

Idealism & Realism

I've always been interested in the place where idealism and realism meet. That is where there is the greatest evolutionary tension—in that place where a bold, unapologetic, passionate idealism is not in any way divorced from being realistic.

If you are just idealistic but not realistic, your head is in the clouds. And then there is also the opposite way of thinking, where you give up ideals altogether in the name of "getting real." It's not seen as hip, smart, or mature to be too idealistic these days. It's hip to be cynical, "realistic," doubtful. But that attitude kills the authentic self.

The authentic self, which is the spiritual or evolutionary impulse, is a utopian impulse. It's a desire or aspiration for heaven, wholeness, oneness, perfection, totality, fullness. So the vibration of that impulse is inherently idealistic. That utopian impulse is built into the whole evolutionary developmental process. There are lower levels of it—even the sexual impulse carries with it the desire for perfect union with the ideal other—and there are higher and higher levels of that same ecstatic compulsion.

So the challenge for the spiritual pioneer is: How do we make the spiritual impulse, which is a utopian impulse, realistic without in any way modifying its promise? That's what our job is. And we have to do that together—to engage with the life process in a way that is both unapologetically idealistic and ruthlessly realistic. That's a creative endeavor.

Andrew Cohen

In evolutionary spirituality, we are more interested in the future than we are in the present moment. Why? Because the present moment has already happened, so there is not much that we can do about it. We’ve already arrived there. But the future, which always exists in the next moment, is something we can actually impact.

Much of postmodern East-meets-West spirituality is focused on the present: “Be here now”; “Be in the moment,” we are told. And while that may bring some release and relief in the short term, in an evolutionary context, we discover that the present isn’t really where the action is. The action is in the future, because the future is something that we can actually get involved in creating. The future is something that we can take responsibility for in the most exciting way possible. When we begin to care about evolution, we feel a passion for the future that is all-consuming.

When you experience this evolutionary impulse moving within you, you will feel an unbelievable excitement and thrill about life. Why? Because of what it is possible to create. So what we begin to thrive on, what excites us, what turns us on constantly, what lights up our hearts and our minds is the evolutionary or creative potential inherent in the present moment to build the future. And that thrill that we feel is not separate from the very impulse that initiated this entire creative process out of nothing fourteen billion years ago. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, that is how we define God: as the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process. God is Eros; God is the urge to become, the engine behind the evolving universe. And that creative impulse is by its very nature, a utopian impulse—an urge toward perfection.

If you look at the creative impulse as it expresses itself at different levels, you can see that this is its nature. Often, if you meet an inspired artist, engineer, scientist, or musician, you will find that he or she is driven toward an ideal of perfection and trying to express that perfection through his or her particular talents. Even at the biological level, when the creative force expresses itself as the sexual drive, it is still a utopian yearning: “I want to meet the perfect partner, make perfect love, produce perfect children, have a perfect family, live a perfect life . . .” Even though it doesn’t usually work out that way, the creative impulse, by its very nature, is a reaching toward perfection. And since that impulse, which we experience at all levels of our being, is the same energy and intelligence that initiated the entire process, that means that God’s intention in creating the universe was and is a utopian impulse.

So in the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the most important step for the individual is simply awakening to and then aligning his or her own intention with the creative impulse, which is already a utopian impulse. It is not something that any one of us has to manufacture through philosophical or intellectual inquiry. It is the nature of the creative force itself.

Paradoxically, as you recognize the creative impulse as a drive toward perfection, it is important to understand that perfection can never be realized in the manifest world. You are never going to reach perfection; I’m never going to reach perfection. It’s not possible. Before anything happened, before something burst out of nothing, we could say there was perfection. So perfection exists in the unborn, unmanifest, unbecome state or place, which is the ground of all Being in every moment. But the minute God decided to create the universe, and took that leap from formlessness to form, perfection was left behind. And the whole creative process can be understood as the eternal striving for perfection that can never be reached. The entire Kosmos is endlessly reaching toward perfection, but destined never to get there. And as I teach it, this is the perfect posture to be assumed by the individual who wants to develop: We would strive to manifest that relationship to life in which we are always reaching for perfection, while knowing that we are never going to reach it. What a paradox! Why would you strive to reach something that you could never possibly reach? Because that puts you in the best possible position to evolve.

When you are constantly strive toward perfection, you have to stretch, you have to reach, you have to always keep moving. Too many of us tend to be lazy, self-indulgent, full of inertia;and because of this we waste so much of the precious time we have. We just want to rest, to take a break. But when we awaken to the evolutionary impulse, and assume this posture of reaching toward perfection, we have no time to waste, because there is always further to stretch. The promise of the future is endlessly compelling. When we die, when our time comes, I believe we will have to answer for what we did with our time on Earth. Did you waste the precious opportunity you had to consciously participate in the evolutionary process? Did you live a foolish and selfish life? Or did you really live passionately, with great intensity, as if the life of your soul depended on it? If you knew you had been living in that perfect posture, always reaching for unreachable perfection, you would be able to look God right in the eye and say, I Am ready for the next round.