The New Enlightenment

Our self-reflective awareness is undoubtedly the highest and most profound expression of the big bang, and when we begin to truly appreciate this, inevitably it radically reorients our understanding of the goal of the spiritual life. Indeed, the very concept of enlightenment needs to be updated so that it is in alignment with this emerging cosmic perspective. In light of what it has taken for life to reach this threshold, it simply doesn't make sense to conclude that the highest spiritual attainment would be escape or transcendence or freedom from incarnate existence. Nor does it even make sense that enlightenment, as more recent and more inclusive definitions tell us, means becoming one with the world and one with that formless dimension that lies beyond it. Because the universe is evolving in time, to become one with it we have to become one with the process of evolution itself at the level of our own consciousness. In this, we human beings find ourselves in the drivers seat as never before, and the implications are dramatic. In fact, a new definition of enlightenment must express the dawning revelation that from now on, our conscious participation in the evolutionary process has literally become essential to the creative unfolding of the cosmos.

When you begin to let this in, you feel the power and energy and intelligence that is driving the whole process begin to awaken in your own soul. That creative impulse is none other than your own self—your inherently free authentic self, beyond ego. When ego, which is the perennial obstacle to enlightenment, is transcended, consciousness automatically deepens and expands. You begin to care less and less about your personal self and more and more about the vast context in which this process is occurring. Why? Because when any one of us awakens to the very impulse that initiated this miraculous unfolding, we realize that it is our process, and it is on our shoulders to carry it forward. The power and energy and intelligence that created this universe is now dependent upon us, the highest forms of life, to let its evolutionary imperative become our own raison d'etre. That's when we become God in human form, literally. Being an incarnated human being—which means being you, being here, right now—is miraculously transformed into a sacred event. And this is where we find a new definition of spirituality, which I call Evolutionary Enlightenment, that completely meets the reality of our human predicament and potential at this particular time. But we also have to meet its extraordinary demand.

Evolutionary Enlightenment is the most challenging spiritual endeavor because in it there is no promise of escape. Too many of us still secretly hope that one day we will be released from this process and able to rest forever. Only when we are finally willing to face into the enormity of the context we are living in and its profound transformative implications for ourselves personally will we begin to develop genuine spiritual maturity. And that's what this world so desperately needs: mature, enlightened human beings who are willing to wholeheartedly take responsibility for the entire process, forever— to participate in the creation of the conscious universe, with and as the very force that created it. That impulse, which is your very own authentic self, can never rest, until the light of consciousness has permeated all matter in the universe.