Evolutionary Enlightenment

ANDREW COHEN





Traditional enlightenment is what I learned from my teacher, but Evolutionary Enlightenment is what I have discovered over the last three decades.During this time, I have found a new source of emotional, psychological and spiritual liberation that easily exists within anyone's reach. To put it simply , enlightenment is evolving. It is no longer found only in the bliss of timeless Being; it is found also in the ecstatic urgency of evolutionary Becoming. We are all part of a developmental process that had a beginning in time, and that is going somewhere.When we apply the perspective of evolution to the nature of enlightenment, it changes everything. From the perspective of the eternal timeless ground, the traditional teachers are right. The highest spiritual truth is that nothing ever happened, you and I were never born, and the big bang never occurred. That's enlightenment. But from the perspective of evolution, the entire picture changes. Time is a linear process. Fourteen billion years of development have produced all of manifestation -the entire known universe and everything that's contained within it, including its greatest mystery: the capacity for consciousness itself. Our own emerging desire for spiritual freedom is not separate from the impulse that is driving the entire process. I call this the Evolutionary Impulse. Evolutionary Enlightenment calls on us to awaken to both the timeless peace of Being and the relentless passion of the Evolutionary Impulse.