Andrew Cohen: Spiritual teacher & founder of EnlightenNext

The Guru & The Pandit:
Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber in dialogue

The following excerpt is taken from “A Living Experiment in Conscious Evolution,” in issue 35 of What Is Enlightenment? magazine.

Introduction by Andrew Cohen

As my good friend Ken Wilber has always made clear, there is an enormous difference between the experience of a higher state of consciousness and the actual attainment of a higher stage of development. Indeed, higher states, which we can find access to through spiritual practice and spiritual experience, are usually temporary. As miraculous and profound as they can be, they do not guarantee a permanent transformation, an actual shift to what could be called a new stage of development.

This has been a central theme of the dialogues in this series since they began almost five years ago. For me, the relationship between states and stages is a matter of great importance, because I’ve dedicated my life to trying to catalyze the emergence of a higher stage of development, in real time, with real people. Periodically in these pages, I have spoken about the evolution of my own understanding through my work with my students, beginning with a discussion with Ken soon after July 30, 2001, the date that marks what I have called “the birth of Evolutionary Enlightenment.” Since that first significant emergence, this potential has revealed itself through a series of powerful eruptions of collective enlightened or nondual awareness among different groups of my students. A deeper or higher state of consciousness that transcends ego would miraculously engulf many individuals simultaneously in such a way that suddenly the very ground of relatedness, or intersubjective awareness, would become enlightenment itself.

What these individuals were coming together in, as has been described in previous dialogues, was an intoxicating and profound shared state experience in which many were meeting in what I call the Authentic Self for longer and longer periods of time. In November 2005, this state was sustained for literally weeks on end, and it spread like wildfire throughout my entire international student body in gatherings large and small, and even on global conference calls of up to a hundred men and women at a time. Since then, all of my attention has been devoted to stabilizing this eruption of higher consciousness. I’m convinced that if enough individuals can hold the perspective they are finding in the higher state, it could perhaps provide a foundation for nothing less than a higher stage of development.

In the dialogue that follows, Ken and I discuss these events and endeavor to put them in perspective.

“A Living Experiment in Conscious Evolution”

KEN WILBER: So how is the work with your students going? Is that recent shift you told me about continuing to stick?

ANDREW COHEN: Yes, definitely. Very exciting things are continuing to happen. But the main thing, of course, is a deepening level of individual commitment, which is what makes all things possible.

WILBER: And are you still continuing to do some of this on phone bridges?

COHEN: Yes. Because my students live all over the world, we use conference calls a lot, and as of late we’ve found them to be a surprisingly powerful vehicle for the emergence of egoless consciousness beyond the individual.

WILBER: That is so great. I just think it’s so exciting, and I know it’s authentic.

COHEN: I think eventually the results of this experiment are going to become solid enough to catalyze something that I hope will be of benefit far beyond those individuals who are directly involved.

WILBER: How would you see that happening? What is it you would be offering to the world at that point?

COHEN: Well, what people are coming together in is what I call the Authentic Self, which we’ve spoken about many times. It’s the evolutionary impulse, experienced at the level of consciousness as an ecstatic surge beyond ego that compels one and all toward the future. As you know, my students have had this experience before in powerful spontaneous eruptions, but what I’m trying to build now is a stable structure that’s going to be able to hold this and simultaneously facilitate its further development. I’m still not exactly sure where it lines up on the map, but we’re doing everything we can to make it more than just a state experience.

What’s been happening lately is that large groups of my students have been entering into an enlightened state together without needing to do any technique in order to get there. But the most exciting thing is that because they are beginning to realize that it is only a state, and not necessarily a higher stage, they are attempting to cognitively understand or deconstruct their own experience while they’re in the state together. The idea is not to get lost in the ecstasy and the lightness of being. Too often when human beings experience transcendental states of consciousness, they have a tendency to falsely assume, “Oh, now I’m enlightened,” and mysteriously forget that it’s not usually quite that easy.

WILBER: That’s for sure! (Laughs) So how big are the groups you are doing this work with?

COHEN: We come together in different-sized groups, for which we’ve borrowed the term “holon,” as each group is a whole that is a part of the larger whole. What I’ve just been describing has been taking place in what we’ve been calling a “superholon,” which would be a fairly large group of people—twenty, thirty, forty, or more. In this context, a higher mind emerges, and together, individuals are able to deconstruct their own experience so that the shared state can become an object in individual and collective awareness. Usually, as far as I know, only rare and inspired individuals engage in this kind of contemplation within the confines of their own personal practice. I’ve never heard of a situation where a collective would enter into higher states of consciousness together and then make the effort to deconstruct their own experience in this way.

WILBER: Yes, that sounds pretty unique!

COHEN: Also, if this thing gets really strong, the nonlocal repercussions are going to increase. For example, some of my senior students who are doing teaching work themselves have repeatedly had the experience that when they are alone in a foreign city leading a group or a seminar, during a period when the superholon is coming together elsewhere in this extraordinary way, they’ll know that the event they are leading will be very powerful, almost automatically. Whereas at other times, without that “nonlocal support,” they would have to work very hard to achieve the same effect. So as this consciousness becomes more stable, my students are experiencing a kind of exhilaration and self-confidence that they’ve never known before. And that’s fueling an even deeper commitment, which of course is the foundation of this whole thing.

It’s the intention and commitment of the individuals involved that gets the whole train to start moving. And it’s getting that train moving, rather than the experience of any particular individual, that I’m interested in. As you might put it, that which transcends and includes every individual and is greater than all of them starts moving the entire thing. And then we get into a whole different kind of spiritual physics. So that’s basically in a nutshell what it’s all about.

WILBER: Well, I’m a theoretician, and partly because of what I do, I’m probably more acutely aware of how you don’t want theories to substitute for reality—you want to try to push reality to conform to theories!

COHEN: Well, I like both—theories and reality! (Laughs) That’s why we’re friends.

WILBER: But from a theoretician’s point of view, I’m just going to say that what it sounds like to me is that you’re creating a stable plateau state or plateau experience, which means that it’s a state that could be extended pretty much indefinitely and that you have more or less permanent access to, and some individuals are experiencing it permanently. It’s an awareness, and although some of the actual energetics may come and go, the awareness itself is stabilized as a plateau and not a peak experience.

COHEN: Right.

WILBER: But then the questions are, number one, in manifestation, how do you see it, interpret it, live it. And number two, at any given time in history, what stage of development do you have to be at in order for this plateau experience to actually stick and not just be a hysterical phenomenon?

COHEN: Exactly. That’s what I’m working on.

WILBER: And this nonlocal thing you described is really strange, but that is how morphic fields* work. You must have heard the stories about, for example, one laboratory trying to crystallize a complex molecule for years and years and years, and then as soon as they succeed, a dozen other labs do it in the next month without even knowing about one another! It’s like once somebody punches through into a new potential, it does become more and more likely, and then it becomes more and more likely nonlocally. That’s true for almost anything.

So I think you’ve created, at the very least, a plateau state that has its own stable pattern and that you’re gaining access to more and more quickly. And then, like you say, almost anybody can come in off the street and walk into that field. So that’s what you’re working on: how that thing is going to stick—and not just in an individual, as you say, but in a kind of superholon.