One Big Yes (Quote of the Week, 6/28)
by Andrew Cohen
What is our very own personal experience of the evolutionary impulse? And what is its unique quality as it expresses itself in our physical bodies, in our urge to innovate, and in our spiritual aspirations? If we examine the movement of this impulse at different levels of our own being, what we become aware of is that its nature is overwhelmingly positive. If we look at the psychic and emotional quality of that impulse as it vibrates within us, in our biology and our consciousness, we can indentify that vibration as the manifestation of one big yes—the expression of the fact that life is good. Existence is good. Becoming is good. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything that happens within the evolutionary creative process is good. The process itself is quite messy and takes all kinds of wrong turns, in nature, in culture, and in consciousness. But the drive itself, the evolutionary impulse at the heart of the process, is overwhelmingly positive, and that overwhelming positivity is the very essence of what manifest Spirit is.
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. 
One of the most challenging virtues for any smart, progressive, sophisticated person to cultivate today may be the quality of inspired conviction, or the utopian belief that something radically new and different is possible. In fact, we live at a time when the ideal of living passionately for anything beyond our own personal happiness or maybe that of your family and friends often seems naive, traditional, or even dangerous. 
When we experience a profound awakening to the evolutionary impulse, we can never really go back to the way things were before we tasted its magnetic and ecstatic promise. We can’t go back to the unenlightened values and convictions of the personal self, nor can we continue to be spiritually inhibited by the powerful materialist convictions of modernity or the persuasive relativistic assertions of postmodernity. That’s because now we see and feel the pull of the possible and it will not let us rest. Because of what is becoming visible on the horizon of our inner vision, we are captivated by the immediacy of the potential within our reach.
Why is it that some of us are driven blindly, madly, and passionately to struggle to transcend our own limitations? And to do so not merely for our own sake but for the sake of a higher purpose that we feel yet can barely see? Why is it that in those precious moments when we are most conscious and most awake, we intuit a deeper sense of conscience and care that is not personal? What is that soft vibration that tugs on our hearts and beckons us to courageously leap beyond the small confines of our ego so that we will participate in the life process in a much deeper and more authentic way? In the way I understand it, this is the deepest and most profound manifestation of the evolutionary impulse itself—the very same energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process fourteen billion years ago. That energy and intelligence is now awakening to itself as the spiritual impulse, 
EROS n.
Part II — A Higher We: The Real Meaning of Incarnational Nonduality
Today 
