Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber in dialogue
What is the purpose of the universe? Is the evolutionary process God’s merry-go-round, repeating in infinite cycles, or is it a deadly serious endeavor charting ever-new ground? Metaphysical sparks fly between the Guru and the Pandit as they tackle some of the biggest questions that philosophers have wrestled with for millennia.
Andrew Cohen: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it really means to consciously evolve—to deliberately and intentionally create and co-create the future. It gets clearer and clearer to me every day that it really is up to us—each and every one of us, individually and collectively—to create the future that we hope for in our highest moments. When we reach that point in our own development where we unequivocally have accepted the fact that no one else is going to save us—not a mythic God in the sky or “destiny” or a miracle—we realize that the next step in the evolutionary process really is in our own hands.
Ken Wilber: That’s right. There is a phrase that Julian Huxley really delighted in, which is that “man is evolution become conscious of itself.” And, in a sense, that’s certainly true, given our perspective that evolution is in part Spirit’s own Self-unfolding and Self-developing and Self-growth.
Cohen: It’s amazing how, when we really begin to let this in, it gives us a completely different perspective on who we are, who or what God is, and what our role is in the creative process. Often when I speak about this, I like to take people on a theological and philosophical fantasy ride back to before the beginning of time, just to invoke the enormity of the creative process and go beyond all our conditioned ways of thinking about this. Shall we take the plunge?
Wilber: Sure!
Cohen: Okay. Now this is, of course, purely theological speculation and fun. But if we dare to let ourselves think in rather audacious terms for a moment, we could say that at the very beginning, at the moment when the evolutionary process began, when the initial leap from formlessness to form took place, you and I must have been there. All matter, time, and space were a great singularity—compressed into one fine point. Think about it for a moment. Is there anywhere else that we could have been at the moment when the universe was born? That one point was the only place to be, and in fact, we were all there. We were there, but we were there as I. Before the universe was born, there was only One, and that One had not yet become the Many. So there was only You, and You were alone. So then, if we follow this inquiry to the next step, just for the fun of it, the question is: Why did the One become the Many? Why did something come from nothing? There must have been some form of an intention in that One without a second to take that leap. And since you were the only one, the only reasonable conclusion is that you made that choice to do this. To do what? To create the universe. As the creative principle, which is one way of defining God, you/we/I chose to take form as this whole unfolding process. And from a certain point of view, what else could there have been for us to do?
Wilber: Well, yes, if you want to get metaphysical about it, you can see that it is all part of the whole Kosmic game. If you were absolutely perfect Spirit, resting in formless emptiness, delighting in your own eternal bliss and omniscience, what would you do next? And the answer is—
Cohen: —exactly what I’m doing now: becoming the entire universe!
Wilber: That’s exactly right.
Cohen: But of course, it’s only possible for us to say this now that we’ve come this far in the process, and we’re able to have this evolutionarily enlightened cognition that leads us to be able to say that this intention—whatever an intention in the mind of God would look like, before form and life were created—must have been there from the very beginning. And we realize that the spiritual impulse that begins to awaken, that compels us to seek enlightenment, to consciously evolve, is that same original intention that must have been there from the very beginning but that somehow we have lost touch with for billions of years.
Wilber: Yes, because you can’t go through that whole process of evolution knowing that you are God. That’s just not going to work. So you would have to forget who you were; you’d have to get lost—convincingly get lost—or it’s not a game and it’s no fun at all! So you get lost, and then slowly you reawaken. That’s the way this particular game is going. And at some point, evolution is going to become self-conscious, and then it’s going to become superconscious. But it’s taken fourteen billion years to get to this point.
Cohen: In the mind of God, fourteen billion years probably isn’t that long anyway. It might seem like a long, deep sleep for us, but from God’s point of view, I think he, she, it, or we are just getting started anyway. If the universe is just beginning to awaken to itself, and we have no idea how big the universe really is or how many universes there are, then in a sense, the awakening is just barely beginning. So in the mind of God, maybe fourteen billion years was just a nap!
Wilber: Yes, absolutely. You know, this may all seem like metaphysical speculation, but this Kosmic game is actually, fundamentally, the single major philosophical topic right up through Hegel. It really only came to a crashing end with flatland scientific materialism. What Hegel and the German idealists, for example, were trying to ask was, starting from absolute Being, how do you get to wars and revolutions? Why on earth would that happen?
Cohen: Right.
Wilber: Why is there something rather than nothing? What happened? How did Spirit lose itself? A lot of philosophers have played out this question in very intricate ways. Plotinus, for example, held that the One goes out of itself into the nous [thought or the Divine Mind]. From nous proceeds the world soul, and then that goes out of itself into psyche or individual mind, and finally, matter, at the lowest level of being. He called that whole process “efflux.” And then, he believed, the One returns to itself in what he called a “reflux.” I kind of like those terms: efflux and reflux. Others, like Sri Aurobindo, have used the terms “involution” and “evolution” for the same thing—the process by which Spirit first throws itself outward and gets lost in matter and then begins to slowly return to itself, finally awakening as Itself. Hegel, in eight hundred pages of detailed, dialectical reasoning, tried to show that Being goes out of itself into nothing, and then Being plus nothing together create Becoming, and then Becoming goes out of itself, and on and on and on and on through a process of involution. Then he has a little phrase, “and the jump to nature occurs,” which actually is the big bang. And evolution begins.
Now, the one difference I have with all these thinkers, whether it’s Aurobindo or Hegel or Plotinus or Plato, is that for almost all of them, evolution is seen as pretty precisely a rewinding of the videotape of involution, that everything is—
Cohen: —already there. It’s all already laid down. As I understand the notion of involution, it’s almost as if Spirit lays down a kind of Kosmic blueprint and then evolution just unfolds according to that already drawn-out map.
Wilber: Exactly. And that just won’t work.
Cohen: Yes. It’s the fact that these structures are not already laid down that makes the game a lot more exciting.
Wilber: It makes it much more exciting when you understand that there really is an authentic creativity in evolution.
Cohen: Right. And that’s what ups the stakes for you and me and anyone who realizes it. When we awaken to that fact and simultaneously recognize that we are that One who decided to do this from the beginning of everything, we begin to feel a tremendous sense of urgency and responsibility for the next step.
Wilber: That’s what makes it very, very interesting. And of course, if it happened once, it’s happened billions of times.
Cohen: Well, that’s an interesting statement—you mean that in terms of this cycle of involution and evolution, of expansion and contraction?
Wilber: Yes. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. It doesn’t really make sense that it would only happen once.
Cohen: Why do you say that?
Wilber: I mean, for Spirit, it’s just an infinite cycle of hide and seek. If you do it just once, you would eventually get to a point where now you’re awake and everybody’s awake, and everything goes up in bhava samadhi and white light, and then what? Well, sooner or later, you’re going to play the game again. So it’s just sort of a continual efflux and reflux, involution and evolution.
Cohen: But doesn’t that cancel out the whole notion of development? If we say it’s an infinite cycle, then surely we’ve been here before.
Wilber: Not in the same way.
Cohen: Well, let’s say it’s true that there is an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction that goes on forever. If we’re going to really accept that development is part and parcel of the manifest process at all levels, wherever and whenever it appears and exists, then wouldn’t there have to be development in the expansion and contraction? I mean, wouldn’t even that Kosmic process have to be developmental?
Wilber: Well, that’s very likely true. It could just go on and on, with more development occurring each time. But the idea that it would just occur once and stop doesn’t make any sense. There would be no reason for it to start in the first place. So it’s an infinite game of hide-and-seek that Spirit is playing with itself manifold ways.
Cohen: But when you say that, I start feeling a kind of Buddhist angst! I feel like I want out of here if it’s just going to go on forever!
Wilber: Well, yes, but don’t forget that on the other hand, from the perspective of Being, nothing’s happening at all. It doesn’t go on forever.
Cohen: Yes, of course. But don’t you think that from the perspective of evolution, saying this has all happened an infinite number of times before takes part of the absolute intensity out of it?
Wilber: Takes the fun out of it?
Cohen: Well, that would be a more mundane way to put it.
Wilber: I don’t know. When I was a kid, I rode the roller coaster on Long Island probably eighty times and didn’t feel the slightest desire to stop. Not once did I feel that this time was less fun because I had done it before. Once you find something that’s fun, you do it again and again. And I don’t think it’s that hard for human beings to see why the game would get started. I use an example that most people can connect with: When you are a kid and you’re first learning how to play games, sooner or later you find some game you really like. Maybe it’s a card game like go fish or a more sophisticated one like twenty-one or poker. You play it with your friends, and it’s a gas. Then your friends are gone, and you decide you want to play go fish or poker by yourself. So you deal the cards out and take your hand, and then you go to the other side of the table and try to play the other hand. But it’s no fun. The game is no fun because you always know what the “other person” is doing.
Cohen: Right.
Wilber: There’s only one way you can actually have a game with yourself—any game, whether it be checkers, chess, poker, dice. You play the other person, and you forget you are the other person. That amnesia, that ignorance, that avidya is the primary ingredient of playing the game. So the Kosmic game, on the one hand, is a spontaneous lila or sport or play, a desire to throw yourself out into myriad forms. And right next to that, co-emerging with it, is this ignorance, this forgetting. That’s why Plato would say that all knowledge is just remembering. It’s a reconnecting with something that has profoundly been known at the deepest levels. And I think that’s certainly an important ingredient. But I agree with you in that I don’t think that the entirety of the involutionary arc is laid down in all of its essentials.
Cohen: Yes. The only problem I have with what you’ve said is that often when you use the word “game,” I feel like it can take away from the seriousness of awakening to this Kosmic process and recognizing one’s own part in it from the very beginning, which really puts maximum pressure on the ego. When we call it a game, the self can relax a little bit, which may be not a good idea! Part of what is so thrilling about being on the edge is knowing that you’re responsible for actually participating in the creation of something that has never existed before.
Wilber: Right. And doing so in a way that’s never been done before, even in previous games.
Cohen: The experience of this kind of ecstatic creative edge is the thrill of radical innovation in partnership with the creative principle itself. It’s the ultimate ride at Coney Island, I guess!
Wilber: Yes!
Cohen: But that thrill, at least in my own experience, is not “I’ve always known this.” It’s more like “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this!” I think that sense that “I’ve always known this” relates more to the Ground of Being, to the deepest part of the self that never entered into the stream of time in the first place. Whenever we experience that no-place, that nothing out of which everything emerged, the experience is, “I’ve always known this, and actually, this is the place I’ve never left.” And of course, we never do leave once we awaken to it.
Wilber: Well, that’s certainly Nietzsche’s “eternal return.” I wouldn’t disagree with what you are saying—the recognition part is Ground, not path, and not really fruition either. We’re humans with form and the capacity to think, and we also have access to Ground in an intersection of supreme identity, although neither one of us alone is the One. Each and every one of us is One without a second, in the deepest part.
Cohen: Right, it’s paradoxical. You realize I am the creator in the midst of the fact that there are six or seven billion other creators. But the ultimate truth is I’m really the only one. So what does it mean to be the only one, within the understanding of the fact that there are six or seven billion other “only ones” who may or may not know who they really are? The individual who awakens to this fact is inspired to take absolute responsibility for what it means to be the only one, in the midst of six or seven billion others. It means within my own means, I’m going to take absolute responsibility for creating the future. It means I know it’s completely up to me. It means we’re no longer deferring responsibility, no longer making excuses.
This kind of realization puts a different kind of evolutionary stress or evolutionary tension on the individual to take responsibility in a very practical, very immediate, and very personal way for what it actually means for me to evolve. You realize I’m the only one who can consciously evolve because I’m the one who created all this. That may seem like an audacious statement, but what’s interesting is that when you experience that One and recognize it to be your own Self, at the deepest level, you can begin to intuit an answer to that perennial question, “Why did something come from nothing?”—and not as an abstract philosophical speculation, but from the inside out, so to speak. In that experience, you can almost imagine what it would be like to be God, abiding for billions of eons of no-time, before the universe was created. It becomes apparent that you have only two choices: you could either continue to do what you have been doing (which is nothing) forever, or you could do the only possible thing that you could do, which would be to endeavor to create a material universe in your own image. I mean, I know this sounds crazy, but—
Wilber: No, no, it’s true. In a sense, that’s exactly right. As I said before, this was probably the most common philosophical question from the time of Plato and Aristotle all the way up to Hegel. Why did something come from nothing? Aristotle argues that the Absolute, because it’s perfect, does not create anything, because if it did, that would show some sort of lack. Plato says just the opposite. He says, “An Absolute that can’t create is inferior to an Absolute that can. My God creates.”
Cohen: Right—but it’s not out of lack.
Wilber: No, it’s out of superabundance. As you said, if you just sort of feel into that Ground, that abundance, the issue doesn’t even come up.
Cohen: In my retreats and talks, I always say—and I know you agree with this—that the emerging postmodern self must have the guts to let in that as we evolve, God evolves. That the evolution of God is our evolution, nondually, which is really the end of our traditional religious orientations in the most thrilling way and which empowers the self and spiritualizes postmodern life in the most complete way possible.
Wilber: Whitehead had a couple of really good terms that relate to this. I don’t think he really understood nonduality, but as limited as his thinking was in some ways, he made a pretty good start. He had what he called the primordial nature of God and the consequent nature of God. The primordial nature is the aspect of God that is unchanging or timeless. For him, it included things that were, in a sense, archetypes, which he called eternal objects—things like color. You and I would probably say that the primordial ground is just a formless, radical absolute, prior to manifestation, that cannot even be conceived. But either way, it means an ever-present primordial nature of God. Then Whitehead had what he called the consequent nature of God, and that’s basically the world as it evolves. I think that’s a good way to think about it: the consequent nature of God is consequent on us. Our intentionality plays a huge part in it. It’s not the only thing, but it’s the only thing that is the locus of Spirit’s original creativity, still expressing itself as the freedom that we have to choose.
Cohen: Exactly.
Wilber: When we choose, we are Spirit in action.
Cohen: Well, assuming that there is a significant degree of enlightenment.
Wilber: The more enlightenment, the more Spirit, but even the intentionality of a worm, small as it is, is Spirit. What we want to do is get the ego and the lesser forms of intentionality out of the way, so that the higher self, or what you call the Authentic Self, which is a deeper, truer form of Spirit’s freedom, can act. That’s the important thing.
Cohen: Yes, because obviously, a worm can’t consciously engage in the developmental process as that One without a second. Only we can.
Wilber: Yes, but we go up and down the scale ourselves every now and then. I’ve had days where I was not much higher than a weasel!
Cohen: Well, at least that’s higher than a worm!
Wilber: It’s funny, but it’s an important thing to remember actually—that there is this whole scale of Spirit becoming more and more awake, more and more free. And the only thing that rides the very edge of freedom is the Authentic Self awakening in human beings.
Cohen: And the individual who is deeply awake to this Authentic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse, feels an ecstatic compulsion to create the future. He or she becomes aware of being not separate from God himself, herself, or itself, at the leading edge, endeavoring to create the next moment. Such an individual realizes that the only one in the driver’s seat is me, because I am the one who decided to start this roller coaster in the first place. When we embrace or awaken to the Authentic Self, we realize that I’m not really here to live my own life, and I’m not even really here for my own liberation. I’m here to create the future, because there’s nothing else for me to do. I am God in manifest form, and it’s really up to me and me alone, because I’m the only one there is to do this. So I find my own liberation as a manifest, incarnate, sentient being through committing myself to creating the future.
