Evolutionary Enlightenment 101: Part I

Part I — 51%: The Magic Number

Do you know what the magic number is in spiritual physics?

I’m talking about that all-important equation that makes it possible for us to understand how radical spiritual transformation actually happens. Radical spiritual transformation, in the way that I teach, means significant and demonstrable evolution beyond ego.

Once you see the answer clearly for yourself, it seems obvious. But before you see it for yourself, it remains an ever-impenetrable mystery as to why and how human beings evolve beyond ego. But I figured it out.

To be honest, it took me many years to see this as clearly as I do now. I became a spiritual teacher twenty-three years ago, in 1986. I discovered what I call the Authentic Self about fifteen years later. The Authentic Self is the evolutionary impulse. The Authentic Self is Eros, which we experience at the highest level of our being as the urge to innovate and create that which is new. The Authentic Self is the spiritual impulse, the mysteriously felt urge to evolve at the level of consciousness itself. It’s experienced as a compulsion to become more conscious, more awake — more in touch with life at the deepest level. And it’s the drive toward the new enlightenment — what I call Evolutionary Enlightenment. It’s not the old traditional aspiration towards enlightenment, which was a longing to transcend the life-process, but is, in fact, the very opposite. It’s the drive to become one with the life-process.

In this new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything — a nondual integration with the entire display of manifestation. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be — so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it’s going. And the reason this aspiration is so significant is that, if we succeed, the very process we endeavor to take responsibility for literally begins to awaken to itself through us. What could be more important than that?

But in fact, that’s just the beginning. This potential becomes even more powerful and significant when the profound awakening of and to the evolutionary process happens in and through several people at the very same time. When this occurs, self, culture, and cosmos evolve before our very eyes. That means that the world we occupy and cocreate begins to transform as we do. The old model of enlightenment was one in which the individual transformed but the world remained the same. In the new model, the point is no longer merely the transformation of the individual; it’s the evolution of self, culture, and cosmos through the individual. When several or many take that all-important leap beyond the unenlightened and unconscious conditioned reflexes and aspirations of the individual ego and the culturally conditioned self at the same time, that’s when the new enlightenment tangibly enters into the creative process. That’s when our greatest potential — to consciously evolve together — actually becomes manifest in the real world, with real people. And do you know what makes the manifestation of our greatest potential possible? It’s the magic number: 51%.

That’s when an individual crosses over to the other side. And this simply means that the evolutionary momentum of the Authentic Self has become the driving force within the heart, mind, and soul of the individual. When this occurs, the fears and desires and conditioned aspirations of the personal ego and culturally conditioned self have been displaced to a significant degree — at least 51% — by the unstoppable drive of the evolutionary impulse. Now it is Eros, the powerful urge and creative spark driving the entire evolutionary process, that has become the dominant intelligence and energy within the individual. Now we can change the world from the inside out.

Our innermost interior is consciousness, and it is that infinite ground of consciousness itself and the all-important creative spark of Eros that emerges from it that ever compels us to create the world anew. When we awaken to the Authentic Self and cross that 51% threshold, we no longer have any choice. In fact, we realize, from now on, that that’s the only reason we’re alive.

Read Part II — A Higher We: The Real Meaning of Incarnational Nonduality

Filed Under: Consciousness • Cultural Evolution • EnlightenNext Editors’ Blog • Evolutionary Enlightenment • Evolutionary Spirituality • Integral Philosophy • Spirituality

Tags: 51%, Andrew Cohen, Authentic Self, Consciousness, ego, Eros, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Evolutionary Impulse, incarnational nonduality, interiority, spiritual transformation