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By Andrew Cohen Spiritual Teacher, Founder of Evolutionary Enlightenment
The teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is about the profound awakening to evolutionarily enlightened consciousness and its manifestation and expression in the world. Enlightened consciousness, by whatever name, is the movement of consciousness beyond the personal ego or narcissistic separate self-sense. Traditionally, in most of humanity’s Eastern mystical schools, the attainment of enlightened awareness did not include being awake to evolution. Indeed, traditionally Eastern enlightenment meant something very specific: that one had awakened to the timeless, formless Ground of all Being. Typically, spiritual aspirants discovered this profound dimension of consciousness through the experience of deep meditation. That meant letting go of compulsive identification with, and attachment to, thoughts and emotions and sinking slowly but surely into absolute non-activity. This happens when we slow down and cease compulsive thinking. Through focused concentration, we become both intensely still and profoundly awake. When, in this way, our attention begins to release itself from the conditioned mind and thought process, we fall ever more deeply into a deep meditative state. This is when we discover the limitless interior dimension of our own Being, when consciousness begins to open to itself to an immeasurable degree and when we discover the unmanifest dimension of reality. In that mysterious domain, there is no time, no space, no world, and no mind. Nothing has happened yet. This absolute nothingness or voidness or emptiness is traditionally called the Ground of Being. When we discover the literally infinite, timeless, formless nature of this dimension, we recognize that "This is what it was like before the universe was created." To attain direct knowledge of what enlightenment is, it's important to understand that everything that exists—the entire universe, time and space and all of life, including each and every one of us—is a manifest or material expression of that which does not exist. From nothing came something. The unmanifest became the manifest. From the empty void, this whole material universe, which eventually gave rise to energy, matter, life, 15
and the capacity for self-knowing awareness, dramatically emerged. Everything that exists came from this absolute nothingness. That means nothing is the source of everything that is. This fundamental mystical insight is basically this: that the ultimate essence of everything that exists is this no-thing-ness. Traditionally, this is the revelation that enlightens, that frees the self from attachment to the world, the process of creation, and everything in it. Evolutionary Enlightenment, however, is focused on the manifest or active or creative expression of enlightenment. lt is a different orientation for spiritual development and a completely new context in which to understand our human experience. lt is a radical embrace of manifestation in which you begin to see your own incarnation—whoever you think you are, including your human personality, your body, your mind, and your soul, all the way from the gross to the subtle, including your deepest spiritual revelations to your most mundane experiences and everything in between—within a truly cosmic‚ evolutionary context. You realize that who and what you are as a sentient being is a product of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolutionary development. Every dimension of who and what you are is intimately related to, connected with, and an expression of the creative process as a whole, which began when something came from nothing fourteen billion years ago. In this new understanding you know that every part of yourself is also not separate from that empty ground from which literally everything emerged when time began. That unmanifest dimension is always at the very core of ALL of your experience in every single moment, including this one, whether you are aware of it or not. When seen from an evolutionary perspective, unmanifest nothingness is not nothing. There is nothing happening there, and yet, inherent in the nothingness is an ungraspable mystery that is deeply compelling. That is why, when you enter into a very deep state of meditation, it is always so absolutely enthralling. Why? Because in that absolute nothingness there always exists the infinite creative potential for everything that burst forth as