Andrew Cohen: Several months ago, an extraordinary event occurred a number of times among a group of my students. They witnessed and directly experienced the spontaneous descent of a cosmic power—a powerful conscious presence within and without that was instantly enlightening. In other words, each individual experienced, in their own consciousness, inherent liberation and the unlimited potential that the liberated heart and mind feels as the living universe calls for our unconditional participation in the process of its own unfolding. These are excerpts from some of the letters they wrote to me describing the event.
“Last night we literally reached a critical mass and exploded. Revelation after revelation as a living understanding of the sweetest perfection is being unraveled in front of our eyes. The emerging presence is a mystery that can never be known—all it recognizes is One, and it's on a seek-and-destroy mission against all separation. We were on our knees before this miraculous phenomenon: impersonal enlightenment. None of us has any idea where we are going, but we are being consumed in the white heat of perfect communion.”
“I finally understood that this is actually enlightenment manifesting between us. It is unheard of that a group of unenlightened people, who are willing to leave self-concern behind, start to experience the enlightened vision and BE it. It is amazing how easy it felt, really like a natural state ... I see now why you call it Evolution!”
“This tremendous explosion has unalterably shifted our attention to a vast and unfathomable presence—it is as if this new cosmic Being speaks as us, through us, manifesting the bigger view that It alone perceives.”
It seems that it was both the collective nature of the event and the willingness of the participating individuals to bear witness to what was unfolding that made the emergence of this consciousness possible. This thing has happened a few times, among different groups of my students, and I realized that this expression of enlightenment beyond the personal was really the target that my teaching has been heading toward for the past sixteen years. I had never heard of anything else that sounded similar until I read about Sri Aurobindo's descent of the "supermind," which sounded very much like what my students were experiencing. I was wondering if it sounded similar to you?
Ken Wilber: Well, yes. I wasn't present for the phenomenon you were describing, but I think I get a pretty good sense of it. And it does really tie in to what we were saying earlier. In a sense, the nondual realization, which at least became a historical realization for a fair number of people right around the turn of the century, including Sri Aurobindo, is still unfolding. I mean, the world of form keeps unfolding, keeps evolving—spirit's own self-expression keeps unfolding—and it happens, as far as we can tell, to build on what it did yesterday, which is why evolution is indeed an unfolding event in the world of form. So as this incarnational nonduality, this ultimately ecstatic tantric nonduality itself, began to unfold, and its forms of manifestation began to unfold, you find that by the time you get to people like Sri Aurobindo, there's such a full-bodied understanding of this process. Even though some of the earlier sages were ultimately enlightened for their time, there's a richness, an unfolding, a resonance of spirit's own incarnational understanding in some of these recent sages that just gives you goose bumps.
AC: Wow. So you're talking about the evolution of enlightenment itself.
KW: Yes. If we talk about enlightenment as the union of emptiness and form, the pure emptiness doesn't change because it doesn't enter the stream of time, but the form does change, and the two of those are inextricably united. And therefore, there is, in that sense, an evolution of enlightenment. And what we find in some of these sages, particularly in the modern era when evolution itself was understood—which is to say when evolution became part of the consciousness of spirit's manifestation—is an increasing transparency of enlightenment manifesting in the world of form. Under those circumstances, the type of descent that Sri Aurobindo was talking about, the descent of the supermind, is something that he certainly thought would be increasing in frequency as evolution continued. And I do think that's the case. The phenomenon you described certainly sounds like it would be kind of a miniature example of just that.
The notion of, in a sense, higher states coming down and grabbing people where they are and lifting them up is itself an old notion. And I think there are many examples of lesser states, in a sense, descending upon people. You can be in the egoic state and have a descent of a subtle reality, for example. But I think that because the world has already been opened to nondual incarnational realization, we are going to see these things increasing in depth and profundity as time unfolds.
AC: For Aurobindo, though, wasn't the supermind still a theoretical ideal? I mean, as far as I know, he didn't succeed in bringing it down in the way that he wanted to—making it manifest in the world.
KW: Yes. That's correct. And that's why I say it's hard to know exactly what was going on with your group without everybody kind of having a look-see.
AC: Sure. Of course. But I think the important thing was that there was a very powerful meeting beyond the personal. There was the awareness that "I am going beyond the personal together with many others." In other words, there was a simultaneous realization of the nondifference between the One and the many, supported by the ecstatic realization that this is everything. And at the same time, there was the awareness of an overwhelming compulsion in the individual and the collective to give all of oneself to the greatest possibility that there is.
KW: Yes. I can tell you what I think that is, quite apart from whether it's a specific instance of Aurobindo's supermind. In my personal opinion, what was happening there was basically a perfect example of an all-quadrant nondual occasion. And as you know, the quadrants in my model represent I, We, and It. And the general idea, in my own view, is that these aspects of experience are inextricably interconnected whether we realize it or not. So sometimes people can just give emphasis to the "I," but there's always the "we" and the "it" in the background, whether they're aware of it or not. And my basic belief—I've stated it in theoretical books, but I also believe it should be practiced—is that an integral spirituality would be all-quadrant, all levels. And all levels means, of course, that we're spanning the entire spectrum. We're not stopping at immersion in nature, we're not stopping at ascent into heaven, or mere nirvana, but we're embracing the nondual as well, so that we span the entire spectrum of consciousness. And then, that is manifest simultaneously, fully, and transparently in all four quadrants, or in the "I," the "we," and the "it" simultaneously. I think the fact that you have a sangha, a small community, that can work on this together for a long time has allowed, in the instance you described, a four-quadrant manifestation of that nondual realization. So that would be the good news. The bad news with all these things is, of course, that it's a messy process. And every time something great like that happens, there's all the shadow stuff that comes with it, and the recoil that comes with it, and the aftereffects.
AC: Absolutely. There's the egoic withdrawal, the rebellion against the sacred nature of what was revealed, and the profound terror of what it demanded.
KW: That's always difficult. It's where discriminating wisdom is so important. And the incredibly difficult thing is that, in some sense, we're all pioneers in this. It's a relatively new type of occasion—the modern and the postmodern form of incarnational nonduality. And because there are so few precedents, discriminating wisdom is harder to come by.
AC: Yes, I know, because it's all so new.
KW: That's right. It's all new, and therefore you can't exactly draw on old compass points.
Read the complete Guru and Pandit dialogue in the Spring-Summer 2002 issue of What Is Enlightenment?.