The Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings of Andrew Cohen

Two Dialogues on Impersonal Enlightenment

Dialogue 1

Q: You mentioned Personal Enlightenment and Impersonal Enlightenment. What’s the difference between them?

Andrew Cohen: In the first, the interest in Enlightenment is for personal gain. That means: “I want to have a particular insight, a particular experience or a particular understanding—because I want relief from suffering or because it fascinates me, etc.” The second refers to the discovery of an interest in Enlightenment for its own sake—not for your sake.

Q: Do you mean for the good of everyone, or just for its own sake?

A: For its own sake. For its own sake will be for the good of everyone—that will be the result, but that is not the idea in mind. When I speak about Impersonal Enlightenment I am speaking about a condition where one is so hopelessly enamored with the Truth itself that one is completely lost in it. In that total immersion, the living fact of Enlightenment itself and all that it implies and signifies, has become the sole love of your life. It’s not for your sake anymore. It’s only for its own sake, for the sake of Enlightenment itself.

Q: Does Personal Enlightenment eventually lead to Impersonal Enlightenment?

A: Not necessarily.

Q: Isn’t one liberated from duality in Personal Enlightenment?

A: Yes, but then the realization of non-duality occurs within the context of the personal.

Q: So then you’re saying that the Enlightenment becomes limited somehow by the personal?

A: Yes. It’s delicate. It’s a very delicate matter. Listen, Personal Enlightenment is a secret. In Personal Enlightenment you are living incognito. You know the Truth, but it’s a secret. It’s a secret that only you know about. But because you know that’s fine with you, you don’t care because you are free. That’s Personal Enlightenment. That is quite an extraordinary event in itself and no doubt very rare. But I’m speaking about something different. I’m speaking about something that is not a secret anymore. I’m speaking about something that cannot be a secret anymore. Because the kind of secrecy and the inherent compromise that must take place in the condition of Personal Enlightenment becomes an impossible possibility in the condition of Impersonal Enlightenment. There is an inherent compromise in living a secret even if it is an extraordinary secret, because in the realization and practice of Personal Enlightenment one “fits in” and tolerates the inherent compromise in and of the “world.” The world here represents the condition of accumulated ignorance that the world mind is—that he or she who is supposedly Enlightened, has transcended and gone beyond.

Q: What is the difference in how one knows the personal and impersonal?

A: For someone looking from the outside or from the point of view of the knower himself?

Q: The knower himself.

A: In Personal Enlightenment compromise does not trouble the Enlightened one. In the Impersonal condition that kind of compromise is not a possibility.

Q: What is the compromise?

A: Fitting in.

Q: So in Personal Enlightenment there is no motive left to change anything?

A: Right, exactly. In Personal Enlightenment the person doesn’t care because they have achieved a self-satisfied condition of freedom and personal liberation. Beyond personal liberation there is a profound discovery of something else. One comes upon a particular sense of urgency where one can’t help but care. You have to go way beyond Personal Enlightenment to even begin to know what I’m talking about.

Q: Go way beyond it?

A: Yes. Destroy it even! Then and only then will the kind of caring I’m speaking about reveal itself—before that it can’t.

Q: But once you get a glimpse of freedom and you see that you don’t exist in the way you thought you had existed, where is the motive to change? Who do you want to change and why?

A: A glimpse of the Absolute is a glimpse of the destruction of the known and of everything that has been created. In that glimpse you realize that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. You discover that there is no one to become and therefore nothing to change. Beyond that, beyond that point is a condition where one is overcome with a tremendous sense of urgency and purpose that has nothing at all to do with you.

Q: Would that come from the Absolute itself?

A: It couldn’t come from anywhere else.

Dialogue 2

Q: Could you give some examples of what the difference is between Personal Enlightenment and Impersonal Enlightenment?

A: What is the difference between a burning match and a raging forest fire?

Q: It’s difficult to understand.

A: To find this kind of understanding you have to feel deeply in your heart.

Q: It seems like the forest fire has to spread.

A: Yes, but it means and implies much more than that. It is the discovery of a choiceless and absolute commitment to the realization of perfect purity in yourself for the sake of all beings – not for you. This is something very sacred and very delicate and has to be discovered individually on a very deep level. The effect of this discovery, this realization, is very explosive and it will affect other people by the fact of its mere existence—but in it, there is no idea whatsoever to “help” anybody else. There is only complete, choiceless, one-pointed devotion to the realization of perfection and a knowing of the urgency and necessity of that. There is an evolutionary urgency, an evolutionary necessity that some people come upon and when discovered, they will do whatever it takes to succeed perfectly.

Q: Is Personal Enlightenment a prerequisite for this?

A: No, not necessarily. Some are able to leap directly to the perspective I’m referring to, while others will be unable to comprehend or perceive what I’m speaking about before the realization of Personal Enlightenment, while still others may never be able to comprehend it or perceive it. If you are lucky, eventually you will come to the point where the idea of personal freedom is no longer what allures you, no longer what interests you. What allures you will be something way beyond that, and the discovery of that evolutionary urgency will become your passion, your only love and your sole reason for existence.

What I’m speaking about cannot be contained. Because of this it frightens people. Because for this kind of absolute transformation love has to be so deep—you have to have so much love in your heart, because otherwise it won’t be possible. In what I’m describing there are no boundaries, and the implications of that are revolutionary.