The Importance of an Evolutionary Worldview (Quote of the Week)
by Andrew CohenIt’s important to have a spiritual path and a spiritual practice that gives us access to the infinite source of our own being as spirit. But at the same time, it’s also important to embrace a very progressive and leading-edge perspective on the evolution of culture. For example, there are individuals living in traditional cultural contexts who might be very expert meditators but when they come out of their meditative state will still uphold and advocate worldviews and perspectives that would seem extremely outdated and inappropriate in a modern and postmodern world. While meditation and spiritual practice are important in order for us to find access to spirit, it is equally if not more important to reach for an evolutionary worldview—one that will enable us to embrace the world of progress and cultural development in such a way that our spiritual enlightenment is able to carry real meaning and transformative power in our own time.
What does it mean to be a spiritual hero? It is a bold and audacious idea, but I think that especially in our time, when there are many people looking for ways to step forward and make the world a better place, more and more of us are going to have to be willing to be just that, in order to take responsibility for where it is that we are all going. We’re going to have to be willing, in all our imperfection, to be exemplars of what’s possible and to stand for Spirit in a disbelieving world. When we awaken to the truth and reality of Spirit, we see much more deeply into the nature of who we are and into the nature of reality itself. And it is there that we can discover a fearless courage to live this life for the highest reasons, and be a representative of that deeper and higher reality in this world. I have no doubt that the degree to which any one of us is willing to do that is the degree to which we’re going to have a real impact on the future of our evolving consciousness and culture. 
There is more to enlightenment than the liberating discovery of the inherent perfection of the absolute, or nondual, nature of all things. And that more is the emergence of a powerful imperative to evolve. When something came from nothing, and the explosion in motion that is all of life came into being, a perpetual state of becoming was born. In the spiritual revelation, that movement is experienced as an impersonal command from the Self to transcend, to evolve, to utterly transform this world so that it can become a dynamic, living expression of the perfection that it already is. This spiritually inspired passion, which arises from the Self, unleashes the fire of absolute love and ego-defying compassion into this world. 
