The Evolution of Enlightenment
I think the sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the cosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. . . . I think they disclose the face of tomorrow.
—Ken Wilber
Allow yourself to deeply take no position. Allow everything to fall away until you are resting in and as pure Emptiness.” The words were timeless, transmitting the same current of stillness, peace, and inner freedom that the enlightened teachers of the East have shared for millennia. But they were about to lead somewhere that few if any of those great sages ever ventured. “Emptiness has no qualities, absolutely no qualities,” the speaker continued—not a bearded, robed monk but a clean-cut Jewish American in his midthirties. “But if one is able to stay perfectly in that Emptiness, there is a quality that begins to manifest right above the surface. It has something to do with the source of all life, with Love, and with an evolutionary impulse.”
The speaker was Andrew Cohen, and the year was 1991. It was the first time I ever heard the term “evolutionary impulse.” Little did I know that those two words and the marriage made that evening between the timeless wisdom of enlightenment and the idea of evolution would become the foundation of Cohen’s future teaching and set the direction of my own life’s work. But it must have made an impression, because I always remembered that description of an impulse arising just above the surface of emptiness, like a primordial ripple—the evolutionary power of life itself, arising in our own consciousness as something comes from nothing in the depths of the self. More than a decade later, Cohen would begin to explicitly refer to this teaching as a new kind of enlightenment, one that embraced the inherent creative power at the heart of an evolving world.
Today, Cohen’s name is almost synonymous with the idea of “evolutionary enlightenment”—the fruit of his efforts to bring an evolutionary worldview to the Eastern mystical traditions, to weave being and becoming into one seamless spiritual vision. His journey has been taken in public, in the pages of the magazine he founded, EnlightenNext, where his dialogues with spiritual leaders from every tradition, as well as with scientists, philosophers, psychologists, activists, and more have shed light on the many facets of contemporary spirituality and set a new standard for spiritual inquiry. His vision, however, is not merely philosophical. He is a teacher and mentor to hundreds if not thousands around the world, working to create a contemporary movement of Evolutionaries—a global network that is one of the first spiritual communities of practice based explicitly on an evolutionary worldview.
That night in 1991, however, while the message hinted at something new to come, the setting was decidedly rooted in the old. Cohen was leading a retreat in the small northern Indian town of Bodhgaya, the very place where the Buddha is said to have sat under the Bodhi tree twenty-five hundred years ago and attained enlightenment. This young American teacher was making an impression in this pilgrimage town where Western seekers come to practice meditation at the local temples and busloads of Tibetans descend every winter from their mountain homes to pay homage to the great founder of Buddhism. Amid the heat, dust, barreling buses, and intolerable mosquitoes, I remember the spiritual atmosphere of the place, the quiet village evenings, the powerful chanting at the local temples, the uncommon devotion of the Tibetans as they did their prostrations, one by one, in the presence of the legendary Bodhi tree, and the early-morning calls to prayer as the Muslim minority made their presence known in this Hindu/Buddhist town.
In those days, not long after I first met him, Cohen’s teachings were much more focused on enlightenment than evolution, reflective of the spiritual tradition out of which he came, Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual school of Hinduism founded by the Indian sage Shankara in the ninth century. But Cohen was not a traditionalist, and he was determined to shake up the progressive spiritual scene, which he felt had grown settled and stagnant in the years since the first wave of seekers from the West had headed off to Asia in search of mystical awakening and liberation. Cohen’s teachings were refreshingly empty of rites or rituals; and he taught without the support of any extra philosophy, dogma, or traditional props. In an East-meets-West world grown accustomed to the stiff formality of Zen monks, the strange exotica of Tibetan Buddhism, and the enigmatic smiles of Eastern gurus, this young American with wisdom beyond his years was a true novelty.
In keeping with his no-nonsense New Yorker personality, Cohen’s teaching style at that time could probably best be compared with the “sudden” school of spiritual enlightenment. He was convinced that one didn’t need years and years of practice to realize spiritual freedom, but simply a clear, unambiguous intention and a passionate desire to go “all the way.” This teaching style reflected the circumstances of his own awakening, and was deeply influenced by the method of his final mentor, H.W.L. Poonja.
Cohen had met Poonja in 1986, at the end of a long period of traveling and seeking, much of it in India, where he meditated, attended retreats, encountered different teachers, and adopted different practices, pursuing his own enlightenment with an unusual seriousness and determination. Poonja was then a little-known teacher, despite having an impeccable pedigree as a direct student of the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi. Cohen’s time with Poonja was short, but it was enough to catalyze a life-changing transformation. In their very first conversation, it became suddenly clear to this young seeker of liberation that “I had never been un-free.” As he recalled years later, “In the innermost depths of my awareness I saw a brook that was moving swiftly downhill and I knew that the unrestricted freedom of that fast-moving water was my own natural state and had always been so. I knew then, without any doubt, that unenlightenment was an illusion.”
Over the next several weeks, Cohen continued to undergo a dramatic awakening—one that would soon launch him into the unexpected role of teacher and guide to others on the spiritual path. The effect of Cohen’s transformation on friends and acquaintances was immediate, and his ascension from seeker to teacher to leader of a movement was lightning-fast. Within a year he was traveling around Europe, teaching every night, and within only a few years, this once nondescript seeker found himself responsible for a global community—“a job I definitely had not been looking for,” he later reflected.
While supporters lauded the depth of his spiritual insight and critics voiced their apprehensions about his remarkable confidence combined with relative inexperience, both missed a quality of Cohen’s character that would set him apart from his contemporaries and ultimately prove more decisive to his future than any particular spiritual vision or mystical breakthrough. He had a strong desire to learn and a willingness to evolve. While his spiritual awakening had been powerful, it had come with no traditional instruction kit by which to make sense out of the extraordinary complexity of the human condition. He had no encompassing philosophy, no theology, no textual authority—just a simple message: Realize and respond. Realize enlightenment, and everything else will take care of itself. The power, the liberation, the freedom was in the sheer simplicity, and the transmission from teacher to student—the key was in the internal transformation, not the external instruction.
Over time, however, this bare-bones approach began to prove inadequate to the unique demands of his new role. While many of his early students experienced powerful revelations comparable to his own, they found it difficult to sustain the transformations amid the challenges, inner and outer, of life in a postmodern Western context. But Cohen didn’t hunker down and defend the timeless, pristine simplicity of enlightenment against the perceived ignorance of the phenomenal world of ego and illusion. No, he did what any well-adjusted person would do. He began to ask questions, lots of questions. What is the meaning of spiritual realization today? What does it mean now, in our messy, confusing global village? What is its significance, not just for the individual but for human culture? What makes a person change? He had many questions—so many, in fact, that he decided to start a magazine with a question as the title: What Is Enlightenment? It was a sincere question that would take him almost a decade to answer.
In order to truly appreciate the answer he would come to, as well as the broader sea-change in spirituality it would reflect, I need to take a diversion from Cohen’s story and travel back in time and across the ocean—back to the time of the first great wave of Evolutionaries (the early twentieth century), and down to the southern half of the Indian peninsula, where two profound and contradictory visions of the spiritual life were vying for prominence in that ancient land of enlightenment. In these two visions, we can see the broader philosophical roots of Cohen’s struggle to reenvision enlightenment for an evolutionary age.
EVOLUTION IN THE LAND OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Ask anyone to name a great figure of twentieth-century India and the response is likely to be unanimous: Gandhi. Who could argue? Mother India was blessed to be led through the turbulent waters of the early twentieth century by one of the most impressive individuals she has ever produced. But in addition to giving birth to perhaps her most powerful social revolutionary, the last century also witnessed India give life to one of her foremost mystic sages, Ramana Maharshi, and one of her most brilliant spiritual visionaries, Aurobindo Ghose, more commonly known as Sri Aurobindo. While Cohen started out his teaching career in the lineage of the former, he would eventually find himself much closer to the sensibilities of the latter.
In these two giants we see two radically different visions of enlightenment and the spiritual path—one based upon timeless being and one based on evolutionary becoming. We see one person focused on a dimension beyond and behind the manifest world and the other fascinated by the powers and possibilities that promote the evolution of the manifest world. And we see two diverging paths that may represent a critical juncture in the history of mysticism.
For those unfamiliar with Maharshi’s story, it is a classic of Indian lore. In the late nineteenth century in the South Indian region of Tamil Nadu, a common village boy underwent a powerful and unexpected spiritual awakening at the age of seventeen. This revelation completely transformed his sense of self, and he proceeded to leave home without telling a soul. He wandered off, half absorbed in an altered state of consciousness, and days later wound up in a temple at the base of the sacred South Indian mountain of Arunachala, near the town of Thiruvannamalai. Essentially removing himself from the world and society, he threw away all possessions and thoughts of his former life, and he spent a couple of decades in silent meditation in the caves and temples around the mountain and local village. Little by little, a collection of disciples gathered around him. Eventually, and somewhat reluctantly, he began to teach, becoming one of the most renowned sages in the world by the time of his death in 1950, catching the attention of the likes of Carl Jung and providing the inspiration for W. Somerset Maugham’s classic The Razor’s Edge. And he never left the foot of that mountain.
Maharshi’s teachings were simple but powerful—a version of self-inquiry that encouraged the seeker to follow the question “Who am I?” until he or she realized the source of consciousness directly, realized the Self behind all manifestation, and through resting in that consciousness forever, could win final and complete liberation. He was a teacher fully in the mold of India’s mystical giants, a deeply enlightened human being who represented the transcendent Vedantic religious tradition with all the authentic power of his own unmistakable awakening:
Existence or Consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it.
Maharshi died more than half a century ago, but you can still feel something of his tremendous spirit vibrating in the hot and dusty plains around Arunachala. When I visited his ashram in the early 1990s, a slow but steady stream of Westerners had started to make their way to Marharshi’s former home to pay tribute to his legacy, study his minimalistic teaching, and meditate beside the same mountain that once inspired the great master. Swamis rambled along on the roads, and a number of ashrams were nestled at the base of the hill. In fact, the whole mountain seemed like a monument to the enlightenment tradition of the East.
My stay there was peaceful and invigorating. I meditated a great deal, walked around the mountain, and visited some of the local holy men, several of whom had been students of Maharshi himself. One evening, as the hot Indian sun was beginning to settle on the western plains, I set off up the mountain, looking to get a front-row seat for what promised to be a beautiful sunset. After scrambling up a few hundred feet, I found a rocky outcropping that afforded a tremendous view of the expanse of land below, and from which I could observe the brilliant crimson colors splash themselves across the sky. Soon I discovered that I was not the only person to be so inspired. A young Indian sadhu (spiritual renunciate), dressed in orange robes, soon joined me on the outcropping and introduced himself, and we sat together watching the sunset, talking about the spiritual life. A bright young man; he was, like me, in his early twenties, and he had given up all worldly ambitions to seek God in the style native to his homeland. He talked to me about his hopes and dreams and we shared our respective thoughts, passions, and plans for the future.
We must have talked for the better part of an hour on that ledge. It was a kind of magical encounter, one of those rare moments that can only really happen when you’re young, on the road, and have time to spare for exactly those kind of chance, unexpected meetings. As darkness descended, I eventually made my way back down the mountain toward my sleeping quarters in a local ashram. I was left with the impressions of a deep conversation, and I felt like I had a lot in common with this young Indian, despite the fact that we came from vastly different backgrounds and would likely lead divergent lives. I was entirely rooted in the modern world, and looking to embrace a spiritual life that led me forward into the future—whatever that might mean. My young Indian friend had embraced an ancient path, one that was rich and beautiful, full of tradition and all the dignity that goes with it, but one that seemed as far from the modern world as the lives of the saints who had meditated for centuries on these hillsides. Perhaps it would lead him to happiness, I thought, or better yet, to genuine enlightenment, but it was simply not a direction I could follow.
The overall impression of the almost archetypal nature of that meeting has only deepened with time. It seemed as if I was meeting myself on that mountainside, the same young man in two different periods of history. Chance intervened, our paths met, and two roads diverged—one into an uncertain future, the other into a timeless past.
Spirituality today faces a similar choice between two distinct paths. It can resign itself to the well-worn grooves of its former glories—its mythic power, moral insights, and mystical achievements. Or it can venture forth into virgin territory, discovering a new role for spirit in the consciousness and culture of tomorrow. There is nothing inherently wrong with continuing to mine the depths of tradition’s impressive accomplishments. But if spirituality wants to be more than a respite from the world, more than an alternative to the cares and conundrums of life as it marches by at a distance, it must change. If it wants to reclaim its old power as maker of history, not just witness; as contributor to the future, not just an escape from its burdens; then it must discover a new relationship between the insights that lie beyond time and the world that marches forward in time. “I hazard the prophecy,” Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “that that religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness incarnate in the passage of temporal fact.”
The timeless power of enlightenment has rarely shone as brightly into this world as it did through the luminous gaze of Ramana Maharshi. And yet no hints of any new religion were to be found in the red dirt pathways at the foot of Arunachala. To catch a glimpse of that brave new future we would need to venture northeast, to the edge of the Bay of Bengal, where Sri Aurobindo once sought refuge from the British colonialists in the oceanside town of Pondicherry.
It is some kind of irony of history that two of the greatest sages of the twentieth century, each modeling a completely different vision of the spiritual life, would end up living so close to each other during the exact same time period. Sri Aurobindo never met Ramana Maharshi, though the two teachers lived only a few hours’ bus ride apart. Ramana never left his beloved mountain and Aurobindo never left Pondicherry, the French colony that offered him political asylum and spiritual haven for the last four decades of his life.
Aurobindo’s upbringing could not have been more different from Ramana’s. Born to a Brahmin family, he was sent to school in London at the age of seven and ended up at Cambridge, one of the top students in his class. After university, he headed back to India and began to familiarize himself with the culture of his homeland. Change was afoot in the land of his birth, and it wasn’t long before this bright young Indian inserted himself right into the middle of the independence movement. A natural orator with a sharp tongue and sharper intellect, Aurobindo rose rapidly in the movement, eventually becoming its political leader, decades before Gandhi would assume that role. Once referred to as “the most dangerous man in India” by his British overlords, Aurobindo was focused on political revolution rather than spiritual evolution. His religious career didn’t even begin until a fateful encounter, at the age of thirty-four, with a yogi. This simple holy man instructed Aurobindo to reject all thoughts that tried to enter his mind. If it sounds like an easy task, I would suggest that you haven’t tried it. But Aurobindo took to it like a yogic savant. Within moments, his mind “became silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit.” He describes how “I saw one thought and then another coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was free.”
In a few short days Aurobindo had achieved a goal that many pursue in vain for a lifetime. But ironically, to him, it was unwelcome—“precisely the experience he did not want from yoga” as his biographer, Peter Heehs, describes it. Suddenly, this political revolutionary and social activist, who deeply cared about the world and, in particular, the fate of his homeland and countrymen, was immersed in an experience that seemed to be telling him that the world was, in fact, unreal.
It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought [in which] there was no ego, no real world . . . no One or many even, only just absolutely That, featureless, relationless, sheer, indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real . . . what it brought was an inexpressible Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom.
Even given his newfound and unsought immersion in this nirvanic state of consciousness, Aurobindo managed to continue his revolutionary activities. But change was coming. Implicated in a misdirected assassination attempt that had been organized by his younger brother, he went to trial and was jailed for a year by the British government. It was in the confines of prison that Aurobindo’s interior life began to expand and deepen. Meditating in his cell, he began to realize that the perception of the world as illusory was only the first step on his path, and that this initial realization was just the beginning of a much richer and more all-encompassing sense of the spiritual life. Under the watchful eye of his British jailors, Aurobindo stepped out of the tradition of his Indian forefathers and began to develop a new, evolutionary view of the spiritual life. “Nirvana in my liberated consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realization,” he wrote, “a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale. . . . And then it slowly grew into something not less but greater than its first self.”
A year later, Aurobindo was out of prison and seemed to be resuming his political activities, but his spiritual sensibilities would not be denied. And when he heard that the British forces were closing in for another arrest, he escaped to Pondicherry, seeking political asylum. He would not leave for the rest of his life.
Safe from the attention of the British, and removed from his active role in the independence movement, Aurobindo’s focus turned fully to his inner endeavors. A small band of acolytes gathered around him and he began to teach and write, publishing a magazine called Arya, which would become the vehicle for his philosophy. The purpose of the magazine, as he explained in the inaugural issue, was to “feel out for the thought of the future, to help in shaping its foundations and to link it to the best and most vital thought of the past.” From 1914 to 1921, he published a series of articles and essays that would form the backbone of his philosophy and later become the basis for his books The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga.
It quickly became clear just how much evolution would play a role in Aurobindo’s unique spiritual vision:
The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. . . . If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.
In the same way that Teilhard was working to reenvision Catholicism in the context of an evolutionary cosmos, Aurobindo worked to reinvent Hinduism, to evolutionize its central tenets. His was a vision in which human beings, as currently constructed, are just one link in a chain that will extend far beyond our current existence into future transformations, both spiritual and physical. In a similar fashion to Teilhard, he saw evolution as progressing from matter to life to mind and then projected it forward into future spiritual or supra-mental planes and states of consciousness. Like his Jesuit counterpart, Aurobindo also mapped the connection between physical complexity and interior consciousness, noting that “the better organized the form, the more it is capable of housing . . . and more developed . . . consciousness.” Less connected to the scientific story than Teilhard, he saw physical evolution as secondary to the spiritual evolution unfolding through physical forms. More significantly, he was one of the first to see the spiritual awakening of the individual as integral to the larger evolutionary progress, stating that the liberation of the individual is the “primary divine necessity and the pivot on which all else turns.” In this respect, he embraced the great liberation teachings of the East. “By attaining to the unborn beyond all becoming, we are liberated,” he wrote, his words echoing centuries of traditional wisdom. But then, as always, he would soon come around to add an evolutionary dimension to his message. We cannot stop with the realization of that which lies beyond becoming, he explained; rather, it is “by accepting the Becoming freely as Divine” that “we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its self-conscious expression in humanity.”
Aurobindo writes powerfully and cogently about philosophical issues that still trouble us today, while also capturing subtleties of the spiritual life that students of his work are still trying to fully grasp and put into practice. He called his path Integral Yoga to express the all-encompassing, world-embracing nature of the spiritual life that he called upon his students to live. A voracious reader and exemplary student, Aurobindo would certainly have been well schooled in Darwin’s theories, but also was no doubt exposed to the grand evolutionary systems of the German idealists, whose work his philosophy certainly calls to mind. He denied any explicit influence, but some seems likely nonetheless.
Evolutionary pioneers love to have a go at naming the next stage of human evolution—the step after Homo sapiens sapiens. They must figure that, sooner or later, someone’s attempt is going to stick. Teilhard used the term Homo progressivus. Author John White prefers Homo noeticus. Barbara Marx Hubbard likes Homo universalis. Biotechnology entrepreneur Juan Enríquez suggests Homo evolutis. Buckminster Fuller came up with Hetero-techno sapiens. Science writer Chip Walter coined the term Cyber sapiens. Aurobindo named his future human the gnostic being and claimed that such a being would have transcended conventional ego and achieved a sort of universalized self—a self in whom the very processes of the universe (or multiverse) were internalized. A gnostic being would still be an individual but would, as Aurobindo writes, “know the cosmic forces and their movement and their significance as part of himself.”
According to the sage, the gnostic being would seek the larger transformation of human culture. “This calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals,” he wrote, “but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence.” To this end, he formed a community around him that would attempt to actualize his vision. This initial ashram survived him and was led through the 1950s and ’60s by his longtime collaborator and confidante, the Mother (aka Mirra Richard), a French painter, musician, and accomplished spiritualist in whom Aurobindo had recognized unusual spiritual capacity. In Aurobindo’s work we can see an important milestone in the history of this emerging new philosophy. His was one of the first attempts to apply the spiritual principles of an evolutionary worldview, not just in the articulation of an inspiring vision or a beautiful philosophy but as a practical context for living, as a path of individual and collective transformation.
As the 1960s came and went, as the East came to the West and vice versa in a cultural exchange that would alter both regions permanently, Aurobindo’s name was not prominent among the many teachers and teachings celebrated in the counterculture. And yet his influence was nonetheless profound. His writings had a significant influence upon a young philosopher named Ken Wilber. His student Haridus Chaudri founded the California Institute of Integral Studies and helped sponsor the visits of a number of Eastern luminaries in the 1960s. But perhaps Aurobindo’s greatest influence on the West was through the life of a young Stanford student named Michael Murphy, who read his writings and was inspired enough to make the trip to India in the 1950s to visit Aurobindo’s ashram, just a few years after the master’s death. Murphy’s experience would prove formative, and when he arrived back in the States, this young Evolutionary used his family property to open an institute based around the idea of an exploration of new human capacities. The Esalen Institute, as it was known, would be the launching point for the human-potential movement that would have a huge effect on American culture in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Aurobindo was never an influence on Andrew Cohen in his early years as a seeker and teacher. But the new spiritual current he had worked to set in motion was no doubt making its momentum felt. With the benefit of hindsight, we might look back and say that in the early ’90s, Cohen’s own path was beginning to leave behind the traditional enlightenment of the great Ramana Maharshi and embrace one more associated with the new kind of evolutionary vision spoken of by Aurobindo, but such conclusions are more after-the-fact interpretations than conscious calculations. Cohen knew almost nothing of Aurobindo’s work at the time. Clearly, however, these two very different teachers, separated by time and geography, were inspired by the same source, lit up by that impulse that appears just above the surface of emptiness for those with the eyes and the heart to recognize it. Aurobindo, when he discovered it in his prison cell, called it the Active Brahman. Cohen, starting that winter in Bodhgaya, would call it the evolutionary impulse.
AWAKENING THE EVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE
While Cohen knew nothing of Aurobindo in those formative years, what he did know was that his own understanding of the purpose and significance of enlightenment was developing rapidly. Enlightenment, he was coming to understand, could not be contained within the private confines of the self. Increasingly, he felt that its meaning extended beyond the experience of a higher state of consciousness, however profound, or the personal transformation of a single, individual life, however dramatic. Spiritual transformation, in this day and age, must inevitably have real implications for our shared moral, philosophical, social, and practical lives—not just for the self but for society. Intuitively, he had always felt that spiritual awakening was somehow connected to the broader evolution of the human race, but giving voice to that emerging vision—giving it philosophical weight, moral clarity, and intellectual coherence—would take some time.
Always curious to engage with other spiritual leaders, Eastern and Western, Cohen made it a point to pursue dialogues and discussions with the local luminaries in whatever cities or countries he happened to be traveling through. Many of these dialogues would end up as content for What Is Enlightenment? magazine (later to become EnlightenNext), which was expanding and fast-becoming a nationally recognized forum for exploring critical questions of the spiritual life. But the magazine was more than a public forum; it was also the open-ended canvas of a living personal inquiry, as Cohen and his team of editors, of which I would become a part in the late ’90s, sought to understand how our own spiritual passions and intuitions fit into the larger scheme of a postmodern culture.
As the decade passed, Cohen continued to speak, teach, and travel, expanding his international network of students and establishing centers around the world. Always at his best in the teaching role, he was a tireless voice of spiritual optimism in a progressive spiritual culture that had grown a little bit sleepy and more than a little bourgeois. “Everybody wants to get enlightened,” he would often say, “but nobody wants to change.” He sensed that a deeper source of motivation was needed, and he began to speak about a different kind of enlightenment that was not for the sake of the individual but “for the sake of the whole.”
The millennium came and went, and several critical lines of influence began to converge. First, Cohen and the editorial staff came across the work of Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, along with contemporary evolutionary thinkers such as Brian Swimme—all in the period of about a year. A healthy dose of evolutionary perspective was transmitted to everyone in the offices of What Is Enlightenment? and for Cohen, the effect was particularly powerful. “I’d never really come across anything like this before,” he reflects. “In Teilhard and Aurobindo, I started to hear echoes of my own passion—a passion for awakening to the truth of who we are, and then daring to allow ourselves to experience the urgency to make it manifest in this world with all of our being.” It helped him to further a process that had already begun, to recontextualize and reinterpret his own enlightenment in an explicitly evolutionary context.
The other significant piece to the puzzle was Cohen’s budding friendship with Ken Wilber. Wilber was on the front lines of the intellectual debates of the day, trying to influence the evolution of knowledge, and Cohen was on the front lines of individual and collective development, trying to get his students to actualize the shared spiritual potential of conscious evolution. In many respects, theirs was a friendship born of mutual recognition and support. Long a seeker himself, Wilber had deep respect for the enlightenment traditions of the East, recognizing in this spiritual innovator “a fresh and profound approach to spirituality grounded in his own awakened awareness.” Cohen found in Wilber’s work a synthetic and brilliant intellectual framework that helped to contextualize his increasingly independent spiritual sensibilities.
Teilhard. Swimme. Aurobindo. Wilber. In the spring of 2002, What Is Enlightenment? published a landmark issue with the headline “The Future of God: Evolution and Enlightenment in the 21st Century,” presenting the converging currents of what we were recognizing to be a coherent new movement, a dawning “evolutionary spirituality” unique to our time in history. In this emerging movement, Cohen’s voice was joined by others who were similarly inspired—great thinkers informed by evolutionary philosophy, brilliant theologians exploring the changing face of God, and powerful leaders inspired by the cosmic insights of science. But Cohen remained first and foremost a spiritual teacher, someone who was combining enlightenment and evolution in a way not seen since Aurobindo had breathed the ocean air of southern India more than half a century ago. Soon, Cohen began to call his teaching evolutionary enlightenment. In his 2011 book of that title, he explains the essence of what had driven him in his quest to forge this new spiritual path: “I believe that those of us in the twenty-first century at the leading edge of consciousness and culture urgently need a mystical spirituality and a source of soul liberation that points us not beyond time but toward the future that we need to create,” he writes. “I believe the spiritual impulse today is calling us not away from the world but toward that big next step we need to take in our world. That next step will not emerge by itself—it must be consciously created by human beings who have awakened to the same impulse that is driving the process. Awakening to that energy and intelligence . . . is the source of the new enlightenment.”
Since he first began to speak about that impulse decades ago in the birthplace of Buddhism, Cohen has come to more deeply understand its nature—his spiritual intuition now informed by his own study of evolutionary principles. The evolutionary impulse, he writes, is “the energy and intelligence that burst out of nothing, the driving impetus behind the evolutionary process, from the big bang to the emerging edge of the future.” Cohen is not the first to posit an energetic drive at the core of the evolutionary process (Henri Bergson’s élan vital is just one of several similar ideas), but he may be the first to specifically identify its expression at multiple levels of the human experience. He explains that the evolutionary impulse, expressed at a biological level, is felt as the sexual urge to procreate, while at a mental level, it is experienced as the uniquely human desire to innovate and create. And most important, that same impulse, he believes, is also felt spiritually as the mysterious longing to transcend self-limitations and evolve at the level of consciousness—the longing that had been driving him for decades.
Making this critical connection between the personally felt spiritual impulse and the cosmic evolutionary impulse has allowed Cohen to find a new answer to the question “What is enlightenment?” While always honoring the traditional mysticism that triggered his own awakening, Cohen feels that liberation, to be relevant in our time, can no longer merely be about freedom from the world and all its complexity. Rather, spiritual freedom—liberation from the petty concerns of ego, narcissism, fear, and desire—gives us the freedom to participate in the larger creative process of the evolving cosmos. And that freedom is not just found through letting go into the timeless depths of being, but also through allowing one’s very self to be overtaken and enlightened by the energetic power of the evolutionary impulse. “Free, in this sense, means available,” he writes. “Available means we are no longer endlessly distracted by the karmic momentum of the past, by the fears and desires of the personal ego or the culturally conditioned self. Only when buoyed by a measure of inner freedom from that momentum will we be spiritually awake here and now and therefore available for the overwhelming task of consciously creating the future.”
While many people are inspired by the notion of conscious evolution—awestruck by its vastness, energized by its promise, motivated by its moral implications—Cohen has particular insight into what it actually takes for an individual to follow through on that inspiration. It is wisdom that has been hard won through years in the evolutionary trenches, working directly with individuals and groups. He knows from experience that no matter how inspired we are, as long as our attention is distracted by psychological issues or culturally conditioned biases and assumptions, under pressure it will be almost impossible for us to stay in touch with that evolutionary vision, let alone contribute to its unfolding. And so he has created a spiritual path and practice to address the human challenge of becoming “fit vehicles” for an evolutionary life.
The transcendent freedom of enlightenment, the creative energy of evolution—brought together into one singular spiritual vision. It is a teaching that produces neither saints nor monks nor ascetics nor mystics but rather a particular kind of Evolutionary—awake to the depths of spirit but alive with the promise of the future, and free enough to respond to a world in need of evolution. Aurobindo had sown the seeds, Cohen was beginning to reap the harvest, but in truth, I believe it was far beyond either of them. Both were carried by a larger current: the evolution of spirit itself unfolding in the depths of individual realization over time.
An evolutionary worldview, as I mentioned in chapter 2, carries with it the realization that even our deepest intuitions of spirit are not static, fixed, or unchanging, but they too are developing as history itself moves forward. Yes, there may still be animistic beliefs and shamanistic trances, totems and taboos, meditating monks, whirling dervishes, and humble souls reaching toward heaven on bent knees. There may be deists and theists and nature mystics, pantheistic passions, pagan rituals, channeled spirits, and attentive mitzvahs. There may be God-bearing witnesses to the glory of heaven above and ten-thousand-seat stadiums delivering souls to a happier home. All of these are part of the rich tapestry and history of the religious calling, many still serving important roles in the complex story of human consciousness and evolution. But at the tip of spirit’s arrow, where evolution is restless and ever seeks to transcend itself, new forms and new expressions are being created, and it is here that a new enlightenment tradition is forming, a path of transformation that can liberate our spirits and strengthen our souls for the enormous tasks ahead.