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 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.
TRANSCEND & INCLUDE
How does significant change occur? Must the old and familiar
be completely rejected for a new possibility to be born? In
their seventh dialogue, Wilber and Cohen explore what it means
to actualize our far-reaching human potential while embracing
the multidimensional complexity of the evolutionary process
itself.
ANDREW COHEN: I just got back from the Parliament of
the World's Religions in Barcelona where I had a really
wonderful experience. It was a transformative event for me
personally. I met many spiritual teachers, religious leaders,
social activists, and university professors—inspired,
passionate, caring, open-hearted individuals—from just
about every different background you could imagine. The feeling
of goodwill was infectious and it created an atmosphere that was
quite uplifting. At the airport in Boston, on our way there, I
met a woman who described her experience at the previous
Parliament in Cape Town six years ago as “my first
experience of heaven.” While I wouldn't go quite that far,
the fact that so many different people from so many different
backgrounds, cultures, faiths, beliefs, and even, dare I say,
levels of development could come together in such a spirit of
sharing and inquiry is remarkable.
The most enlightening conversation I had there was with Dirk
Ficca, the executive director of the Parliament. When we were
speaking about the gathering there and what it was that he was
trying to accomplish, he stated unequivocally that his principal
interest in creating the Parliament was to influence “the
mainstream.” He divided the spiritual/religious world into
three categories: fundamentalists, mainstream, and progressives.
He said that the fundamentalists, no matter what tradition they
come from, are never going to be interested in either coming
together with others or moving forward. Then he said that the
progressives—people like us, who are in the
minority—are already doing both those things but that we,
relatively speaking, exist in our own bubble. He made clear that
it is only in reaching the mainstream—those in the
traditions who are neither fundamentalists nor
progressives—that significant change in the world
religious body could occur. That made a big impression on me
because, as you know, in my own work, I have mainly been focused
on pushing the very edge of our spiritual potential. I have
always been convinced that pushing the edge will, in its own
way, affect the whole in the long run. And while that may be
true, the fact is, as Dirk made clear, that unless that middle
group begins to move forward, no matter how much progress a few
of us pushing into the frontiers may make, we are all
going to go down with the ship!
KEN WILBER: Definitely. And you can look at it in
a very straightforward way. That is, once you introduce a
developmental context to our understanding, it's both very
encouraging and very pessimistic at the same time. Because
seventy percent of the world's population is at an ethnocentric
level of development or lower. And that means what Spiral
Dynamics would call the blue meme, or magic and mythic, or
lower. And that's where the fundamentalists and the
traditionalists basically are. So that's number one. What he
means by “mainstream” tends to be very similar
actually to the orange meme, or rational-scientific. Because
what the mainstream often represents is an attempt to take the
fundamentalist magic and mythic dogmas and modernize
them—put them into a modern framework. And the modern
mainstream churches tend to be an expression of that.
COHEN: And if we can get the mainstream moving, it
doesn't matter how slowly, as long as they're moving forward, it
means that as a whole we can move forward together in the most
important way.
WILBER: And Dirk is quite right, I think, that the
mainstream is an extremely pivotal factor and faction in getting
that ethnocentric, preconventional, scary kind of fundamentalist
religion to move into the modern and postmodern world. Now, the
progressives are pluralistic or integral or higher, but that's
less than two or three percent of the world population. But if
we can't get to the mainstream in religion, then there's about
seventy percent of the world that's going to continue to be a
real problem. And I think that's why things like the Parliament
of the World's Religions are very important. But at best, that
is a pluralistic, postmodern, green-meme organization. So in
terms of where the mainstream action is, I think he is pretty
accurate. But it is not integral. I would say that it is
mainstream indeed, but integral is the leading edge, that
cutting two or three percent.
COHEN: Certainly. But you know, while I was there,
in spite of how bad things so often seem these days, the sense
of camaraderie and brotherhood fueled a kind of passionate
excitement about what's possible—and that's mainly what my
attention was drawn to. In any case, all we can do is everything
that we honestly can do—and if we're doing the
right thing, we'll experience the ecstatic glory underlying the
entire process, no matter what happens in the end.
WILBER: Definitely!
COHEN: As I said before, most of my own attention
has been devoted to pushing the edge of consciousness
development, focused mainly on that two or three percent that
you are referring to (which in my own work is probably a lot
less than a half percent!). And I've not really been all that
engaged with those dimensions that didn't directly relate to
that edge. This is why going to the Parliament was such a
transformative event for me. I rediscovered, in a deeper way,
that we're all part of a vast developmental process that is
inherently whole. And it's become obvious to me that any
avoidance or denial of that wholeness inevitably and profoundly
inhibits our ability to see clearly and therefore to respond in
the most beneficial way possible.
In your own work as an integral philosopher, you've always
emphasized that, as we evolve and develop from one level to
another, it's necessary to transcend and also to include what
has come before. And in my work as a spiritual teacher, I have
very clearly made a distinction between your
statement—“transcend and include”—and my
own version, which is that, as we evolve and develop from one
level to another, we must “transcend and
exclude” what has come before so that we will be
free to reconfigure ourselves at a higher level. I'm still
convinced that's true, but as a result of my recent experience,
I must admit that my view on this is changing and maturing. I
realize that it's possible to embrace a wide variety of
worldviews, opinions, and spiritual perspectives without
compromising one's own evolving edge.
WILBER: Yes, they're really not mutually exclusive
at all.
COHEN: Indeed, and the living significance of what
“transcend and include” is all about became part of
my ongoing experience at the Parliament. I met so many
wonderful, big-hearted, compassionate people who care so deeply
about the evolution and development of our world and of our
consciousness. That awakened me to the fact that being focused
only on the edge of human potential itself is an
approach that is less than whole. I had never met so many
different kinds of people who I felt I was able to
relate to with the best part of my own humanity, at a real heart
level and also at the level of mind. I think it was a maturing
experience for me because, as I said, I realized I didn't in any
way have to compromise my own position in the process of
engaging with and learning from so many others who were also
trying to uplift the consciousness of this same world.
WILBER: That's great. I think that's profound.
It's a process of maturing. Richness always continues to unfold.
COHEN: And at the same time, as we aspire to
evolve to higher and higher levels of development, we go through
this continuous process of dissolution and reintegration. In
this process of evolution and transcendence, we constantly need
to be willing to let go of, or exclude, old ways of
seeing and thinking: our fixed philosophical positions,
worldviews, self-concepts, etc. And in my own work with people,
it's one of the most challenging aspects of actual
development because it's the ultimate threat to the ego. The
only thing that actually enables real evolutionary, which means
vertical, development is that courageous willingness to
let go at the deepest level of our sense of who we are.
WILBER: It's always called a death. Every
tradition calls it a death and it's not a metaphor.
COHEN: That's the absolutely terrifying,
completely exhilarating truth of evolution at the level of
consciousness in real time!