Andrew Cohen: GURU. Evolutionary thinker and spiritual
pathfinder. Self-described “idealist with revolutionary
inclinations.” Cohen, founder of What Is
Enlightenment? magazine, is a spiritual teacher and
acclaimed author widely recognized as a defining voice in the
emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. Over the last
decade in the pages of WIE, Cohen has brought together
leading thinkers from East and West—mystics and
materialists, philosophers and psychologists—to explore
the significance of a new spirituality for the new millennium.
His books include Embracing Heaven & Earth and
Living Enlightenment.
Ken Wilber: PANDIT. A scholar who is deeply proficient and
immersed in spiritual wisdom. Self-described “defender of
the dharma; intellectual samurai.” Hailed as “the
Einstein of consciousness,” Wilber is one of the most
highly regarded philosophers alive today, and his work offers
a comprehensive and original synthesis of the world's great
psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions. Author
of numerous books, including Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
and A Brief History of Everything, Wilber is the
founder of Integral Institute and a regular contributor to
WIE.
FOLLOWING THE GRAIN OF THE KOSMOS dialogue V
States, Stages, Selves, and the Directionality of
Development
Who are we and how do we evolve? In this
dialogue, guru and pandit explore the transformative power of
what Cohen calls the Authentic Self, illuminating the dynamics
by which we move up (and down) the developmental trajectory, and
the miraculous collective potentials that lie on the horizon of
consciousness.
THE AUTHENTIC SELF
Cohen: I wanted to speak about something
we've discussed before, which is what I call the Authentic Self.
In the development of my work in the field of evolutionary
spirituality, I've come to the conclusion that awakening to this
Authentic Self is a pivotal factor in the transformational
process. And I think that a lot of people who are interested in
enlightenment, including myself for a long time, have
unintentionally been failing to make the important distinction
between the Self Absolute, the Authentic Self, and the ego. As I
have come to understand it, the Authentic Self is the deepest
part of our humanity beyond ego, or the awakened
spiritual conscience. The great twentieth-century sage Sri
Aurobindo referred to it as the “psychic being,” and
some might call it the soul.
A couple of years ago, when we did a piece on Sri Aurobindo
for the magazine, we spoke to one of his oldest living
disciples, Amal Kiran, a very famous poet in India. He spoke
passionately about the psychic being, saying that the
cultivation of this part of ourselves is the most important
aspect of the spiritual path. He told us:
What Sri Aurobindo called the psychic being, or soul,
is the innermost being that is encountered in the heart center.
It is that consciousness that is in touch with and identical to
man's highest possibility. The psychic being is aspiring all the
time. Its very nature is to go higher and higher and higher. And
in order for transformation to occur, that being, in all its
qualities, has to come forth, come into the open. If you go
through your psychic being, you are bound to reach the highest,
ultimately. After speaking with him, we talked a lot about
it, and we realized that Aurobindo's psychic being seemed to
clearly define something that I'd intuited and been trying to
cultivate in my students for many years. Now I simply call it
the Authentic Self. And this recognition was very helpful to me,
because for a long time the traditional enlightenment model,
which only seemed to describe the path from the ego to the Self
Absolute, had not been meeting my own evolving understanding of
what radical realization is all about when one is no longer
merely trying to transcend the world but is simultaneously
aspiring to transform it.
Wilber: Yes. The traditional model goes from
ego to absolute, and that's it. And now you're emphasizing the
Authentic Self as an important ingredient in this whole
equation.
Cohen: It is so important. The Authentic
Self is a completely different dimension of the self than either
the Self Absolute or the ego. It is that part of ourselves that
is already whole. It has never been hurt, wounded,
traumatized, or victimized. It is already whole and complete,
and yet it can and does develop. For the Authentic
Self, the point of departure in the developmental process is
wholeness itself. This is the part of ourselves that
cares passionately about evolution for its own
sake, already. When individuals awaken to the Authentic
Self—even if it's only temporarily—suddenly they
become aware of a living evolutionary context and experience a
passion and concern about the necessity for development itself.
I identify the Authentic Self as synonymous with what we could
call the first cause, the creative impulse, and its expression
in the awakening human. The Authentic Self doesn't abide in the
gross realm; it abides in what you would call the subtle realm.
It's aware of everything that is happening here, cares
passionately about and can act in response to everything that's
happening here, but is always free from everything that's
happening here.
Wilber: Right.
Cohen: The ego, or what you would call the frontal
self, exists only in this world. And that's why, of course, when
people fall back into the ego and the world of the personal self
in the gross realm, after having experienced the ecstatic
evolutionary passion of the Authentic Self in the subtle realm,
they lose touch with that passion in an instant.
Now, what is called the Self Absolute or the unmanifest
ground of being is that deepest part of human consciousness
that, because it abides beyond time and space, beyond creation
itself, does not care at all about what's happening here in the
realm of manifestation. It's always free from anything that's
ever happened here and always is at rest. Infinite peace is its
nature. So whatever does happen in our world, in the manifest
realm, has no effect on that deepest part of our self. Birth or
death, Big Bang or no Big Bang—
Wilber:—not a problem.
Cohen: Right. But the Authentic Self cares
passionately, cares desperately about everything—
Wilber: Yes. It's like the seat of morality.
Cohen: Exactly. And this is so important,
especially for us Westerners, because in the new definition of
enlightenment, which we've talked so much about, evolution is
the context, rather than transcendence. And when people start to
directly experience for themselves what the Authentic Self is,
they literally begin to light up with awakened
understanding—suddenly life, being alive, being a
human being, begins to make perfect sense. They
exclaim, “Oh, this is the part of me that cares
about the life process, the world system, about infinite
becoming itself!” And that's so important, because if we
can awaken to this Self and recognize what it is, it
can help us to make this extraordinary transformation. If we can
identify with the Authentic Self—and through doing so,
release our attachment to the ego and its fears and
desires—that can be the catalyst for evolutionary
enlightenment.
Wilber: I agree with what you're saying. Let me
give you the way integral psychology, my own view, tends to look
at this.
Cohen: Great.
A MATRIX OF DEVELOPMENT
Wilber: First I'll scope out the big picture, and
then we'll come back to some of the finer details. One of the
important distinctions we make, and we've talked about this from
various angles, is the difference between states of
consciousness and stages of consciousness. For this
discussion we can use a fairly simplified developmental
scheme—we can just say egocentric, ethnocentric,
worldcentric, and then we sometimes add something like
Kosmocentric. Those stages represent one's identity, moving from
an identification merely with “me” (egocentric) to
an identification with “us” (ethnocentric) to an
identification with “all of us” (worldcentric) to an
identification with the All (Kosmocentric). As permanent
realizations, those are stages; they develop and
unfold. States, on the other hand, can mean states of
consciousness like waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and so on. You
can usually experience these states at any stage—even an
infant wakes, dreams, and sleeps. As professor and
consciousness researcher Allan Combs says, states are free;
stages have to be earned.
In any event, peak experiences or altered states tend to be
temporary, transient—they come and go. They can be
very important and very profound; it's just that they don't
last. For example, an initial state experience of
satori can be very important before it becomes a
permanent or stage realization.
Cohen: Yes.
Wilber: But in relationship to what we are
speaking about, if you look at the type of self or selves that a
person can have in terms of states, in addition to
stages, then it gets very interesting. For ordinary people in
the waking state, the self they have is the ego. In the subtle
or dream state, it's the soul or what you're calling the
Authentic Self, which I refer to as the deeper psychic. And in
the deep-sleep formless state, it's the Absolute Self. Now if we
describe those three as nirmanakaya, sambogakaya,
dharmakaya, or gross, subtle, causal, then those are the
three major, or basic, selves that every human being possesses.
We have a gross self, or ego, a subtle self, or soul or deeper
psychic, and a causal, formless absolute or atman Self,
capital S, a transcendental witness. So even an infant has a
soul. They're not necessarily awakened to it, they're not
necessarily alive to it, but it's there, yes. And they also
obviously have an atman Self, even though they're not
awake or realized as that transcendental Self or witness.
States are free; stages are earned.
So the interesting thing is that you can now do what we call
a lattice or a matrix, where you can plot stages of development
and then look at the selves or the states that are occurring.
The essential point, as we were saying, is that a person at any
stage can have a temporary experience of almost any
state—so you can have an egocentric experience of
gross, subtle, and causal; an ethnocentric experience of gross,
subtle, and causal; a worldcentric experience of gross, subtle,
and causal, and so on. We have an enormous amount of
evidence that all of those occur.
On occasion, then, almost anybody at any stage can get a
glimpse of the deeper psychic, or the soul. They can have that
state experience, but it usually slips and fades away. It
is merely a passing state and not a permanent trait, not yet a
permanent stage realization. Now, what I think happens, and the
way it ties together with what you're talking about, is that at
some point in actual development, between the worldcentric and
Kosmocentric stages, the deeper psychic can awaken to itself,
not as a temporary altered state but as a permanent
realization or stage accomplishment.
Cohen: Right. And that's a very significant
moment.
Wilber: So at that point you are awakening to this
self in the subtle dimension. It's actually becoming alive to
itself, even though in a sense it's been there all along, even
though it had this kind of wholeness all along. It's been
developing itself, because these stages have been developing as
the vehicle through which it can express itself. But you have to
be at least at a worldcentric stage of development or it's not
going to stick. You can awaken the deeper psychic, or the soul,
and get a taste of it, but it fades. But at some point, as we
were saying, between worldcentric and Kosmocentric, it can be
awakened, and there's a kind of flip. And then you hang
everything off of your soul.
Cohen: Right, exactly!
Wilber: Does that make sense?
Cohen: Yes, perfectly.
Wilber: So theoretically that's pretty good.
NO WAY BACK
Wilber: Of course, we've talked about what happens
when people at lower levels of development have a temporary
state experience of the subtle soul, or causal Self, and then
they revert next week or the week after that, and then they
usually feel pretty cranky about what's gone on—
Cohen: Very cranky. Even more than cranky. You
see, I'm starting to see that when people really awaken to the
Authentic Self, they begin to see the world in a completely new
way; they discover a new morality. Suddenly they discover a
completely different relationship to mind, to emotions, to the
purpose and meaning and direction of life. But when they fall
out of that perspective, because maybe they didn't want to face
whatever they had to face in themselves—then what they do
is fall back into the level of development that they were in
before they had that realization. So suddenly they're not seeing
things in the new way anymore, and they embrace the psychology
and worldview that they had before, and then they see the
experience that they had in a higher state from the perspective
of the lower stage. So of course, now it's seen in a
completely distorted way.
Wilber: Unfortunately that happens all the
time. [Laughing] Happened to me just this morning at
breakfast.
Cohen: [Laughing] It's a very weird experience to
watch this happen to people.
Wilber: Well, again, you're looking at states and
stages in what you're just describing. And the thing is,
stages can't be skipped. For example, take atoms,
molecules, cells, organisms. An atom can't have an experience of
a cell and bypass being a molecule. It just doesn't work like
that. So a person can be plunged into an authentic experience of
a higher state—even of the nondual—at virtually any
stage that they're at. They can have that temporary state
experience—but then what also happens is that if the
person is ready to move to the next stage of
development, that experience will help dislodge their
identification with their current stage, and they will then
start to actually move to that next stage, in addition to having
the state experience of the nondual.
Cohen: Right!