Andrew Cohen Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Andrew Cohen. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew: Hi, Rick, it’s great to be with you.

Rick: I’ll just read the little bio from the jacket of your book. Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global nonprofit EnlightenNext, and its award-winning publication, EnlightenNext magazine, to which I’ve been a subscriber on and off over the years. Since 1986, Cohen has been traveling the world giving public lectures and intensive retreats on his original contemporary spiritual path and practice, evolutionary enlightenment. Through his writings, his teachings and his ongoing dialogues with philosophers, scientists, mystics and religious leaders from almost every major tradition, he has become known as one of the defining voices of the new evolutionary spirituality. So we’re going to get into an in-depth discussion about what is meant by evolutionary spirituality or evolutionary enlightenment, but before we start doing that, Andrew and I thought it might be appropriate to have him tell his personal story, just a short 5–10 minute synopsis of the journey he’s been on since basically 16 years old.

Andrew: Okay, very good. I just noticed my dog is outside. Roz?

Rick: I guess we’re both drummers and we’re both dog lovers.

Andrew: Oh, you’re a drummer?

Rick: Well, I gave it up to become a meditation teacher like you, but …

Andrew: Oh, the dog, he’s outside.

Rick: At one point I had a nine-piece band with horn section and the whole deal, yeah, out in Connecticut.

Andrew: When was this, recently or…?

Rick: No, this was like 1969, ’70.

Andrew: Oh, awesome. Was it like R&B or…?

Rick: Yeah, sort of a jazz-rock, Blood, Sweat, and Tears kind of thing.

Andrew: Fantastic.

Rick: Yeah.

Andrew: So we have a lot in common.

Rick: We’re okay. Yeah. It was a great fun thing to do as a teenager, but at a certain point I decided this is not ultimately what I want to devote my life to.

Andrew: Yeah. I understand that. I actually started playing again about 10 years ago. And I have a band and we play a lot, but I’m getting so busy that I’m not having enough time to devote to it anymore, so I might have to let go of it again.

Rick: Yeah, isn’t your band called “Unfulfilled Desires” or something like that?

Andrew: That’s the name. That’s the name. That’s the name.

Rick: That’s great.

Andrew: Okay, so I was brought up, I’m 56 years old, I was brought up in a secular Jewish family in Manhattan. So I had no exposure to any concept of God or spirit or anything higher. The first time I was introduced to the notion of the Divine is we had a German housekeeper with a wooden leg and she knew that we weren’t being taught to have faith in anything higher than ourselves. So one day I lived on the second floor on Lexington Avenue between 93rd and 94th Street and we was sitting looking outside the window and she told me to look across the street to the twelve-story building, and there was a little kind of bungalow-type thing on the roof, and she said, “That’s where God lives.” And she said, “He can see everything you’re doing, and He knows everything you’re doing.” And I believed her for a little while. But in any case, my first initiation or introduction to spirit happened one evening when I was 16 years old. I was living in Rome at the time, Rome, Italy. I was sitting up late, having a dialogue with my mother, and I don’t really remember what we were talking about, but for some reason the doors of perception opened, for some mysterious reason. And I suddenly became aware of beginninglessness and endlessness. Often when I tell this story I describe it as, “I suddenly became aware of the whole universe,” but normally when we think of the universe, the universe has, at least in the way we think about it, a beginning and an end. So in this awareness of the totality of everything, there was no beginning and there was no end. The — that which had no beginning and had no end had a self-nature. It was a being, the nature of which was a kind of impersonal, absolute love that was completely overwhelming. It was completely overwhelming. The intensity of the feeling of the experience of ecstasy was literally, physically crushing, and I felt like I was going to die. I mean that was kind of from the immensity and the intensity of it. I became aware of the fact in those few moments that all points in space are exactly the same place, that no matter where I went I’d always be in exactly the same place. And at the time I didn’t understand what that meant. It was many years before I understood what it meant, but it was just something that became apparent to me. I also realized in those few moments that there was no such thing as death. And at the end of this revelation, or this initiation from the unknown, it became apparent to me, and I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I received some sort of message and I feel odd saying these kinds of things because I don’t really know what it meant, but at least in the eye of my memory it was apparent to me that the message was, “If you devote your life to me and me alone, you have nothing to fear.” And the implication was that if I did something else, I was going to be in trouble. And I didn’t really know what to make of it. And I was, like yourself, I wanted to be a drummer, I wanted to be a jazz musician. So I pursued that. And then in my early twenties, I was going through a very hard time, nothing was working out, I was miserable and depressed and lost. And the memory of this initial experience and this initial initiation kept reoccurring in in my mind and I remembered that I had something that I needed to do and it was to pursue this. And it kept building up and building up and building up until at a certain point when I was 20 I gave up my aspirations to be a musician and I devoted myself 100% to being a spiritual seeker. And I was kind of a full-time seeker from the age of 22, and I did all the things that seekers do. in the morning and reading about mysticism, about meditation, about Buddhism, about yoga. I took initiation from an Indian spiritual master. I learned how to meditate. I was voraciously interested in the subject. I’m a very curious person, so I met other seekers and I would go to see everybody who was coming through town. In New York, of course, a lot of people came through town, so I went to see every teacher that I could. I was curious, I wanted to know, I wanted to understand. I was on a path that was really based upon Kundalini yoga meditation, and when I was reading about Buddhism, the Buddhist description of enlightenment was one thing, and when I would read the descriptions of some of the great Eastern yogis, what they described was more similar to what I had experienced than what the Buddhists were describing. Eventually I started going to attend Buddhist meditation retreats because you could sit all day long, you could sit 18–20 hours a day, and I learned a lot about the nature of mind there. I had various teachers, for various different reasons. I became disillusioned with all of them for different reasons. I eventually, when I was 27, decided to go to India. I wanted to go to India, I’d heard so much about it. By that time I knew that I wasn’t going to … I’d met a lot of people by that point, a lot of other seekers that had been in India for 20 years, and when I met them they didn’t seem to be any more enlightened than I was, so I was pretty aware of the fact that going to India was no promise of anything, but I just felt I had to go. So I decided I was going to go for three months. When I arrived I realized that I wasn’t going to leave, principally because being in Manhattan in being a seeker of liberation was kind of weird, because in Manhattan everybody says, “What do you do?” And I was working for my brother, and I was working a little bit, but I was living in another universe than everyone else, and somehow, being in India, India gave me the permission to seek wholeheartedly and publicly. It could be public, finally it could be part of my public personality. I met many seekers throughout on this journey, and the difference between me and most of the other seekers that I met is I knew I was going to get there. The reason I knew I was going to get there is because of this initial experience, or this initial introduction I had when I was a young man. So I knew what was on the other side of the curtain, I knew what was on the other side of the veil. lot of the other seekers hoped it was true, had read about it, were hoping for something. The other thing, Rick, is that I made up my mind at a certain point when I was 22 that I was going to go all the way, whatever that meant. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that that’s what I was going to do and I never had any doubt about it. So there was a deliberateness in my intention that I didn’t find in most of the other seekers that I met. And after two and a half years in India, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for there. And I had had many teachers by that point, and I was in the kind of J. Krishnamurti state of consciousness, or J. Krishnamurti perspective. I really felt that the teachers were just going to be another trap, another place for me to get lost and stuck, and I realized that I knew I could do this, and I knew if I just could be in one place and exert enough discipline, live a very disciplined life of rigorous, deep and profound practice for a long enough period of time, it was going to happen and that it was inevitable. So I decided I was going to go to Korea and to live on a mountain there that has all these Zen monasteries, and it wasn’t even because I was interested in Zen in Buddhism, I just knew, if I had the environment and the discipline, I knew it was going to happen. I thought I would go there and stay there for five years and not leave, and to be celibate, not let myself get distracted. And that was when I heard about a teacher, of course, who has now become very well known, but at the time the great H. W. L. Poonja was unknown, nobody knew about him, nobody had heard of him. And a friend of mine had told me about him, and of course he was a disciple of the great 20th-century giant, you know, Ramana Maharshi. And I had never met a master of Advaita, let alone a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, and I was very curious. I’d never met that kind of teacher. I’d never experienced that kind of … and I was very curious to meet him. And I was told he was quite extraordinary, so I wrote to him and he told me I could come see him. And Rick, this was really way before he was discovered. So when I went to see him, he was living in his son’s house in Lucknow. He had a small bedroom on the second floor and nobody was there. When I went in he was just sitting in a lungi and an undershirt, just sitting on his bed, very unassuming. And when I went in, I told him, because I had a lot of confidence as a seeker and I was also kind of fed up with teachers, even though I was very happy to see him. I told him I don’t have any expectations, and then he looked at me and he said, “That’s good.” He said it with a lot of confidence. And so that was really the beginning. And so I had a remarkable experience, as many people have had, even in the first few moments of being in his presence. I was with a friend of mine and we were asking him, “How much effort do you have to make in order to be free?” And he whispered, he said, “You don’t have to make any effort to be free.” He whispered it. And when I heard him out of those words something happened to me, I suddenly became aware of a brook, a water running down a hill, a brook, and I realized in that moment that my own true nature was just like that water, which means that it had ever been unobstructed. And I realized in that instant, that the illusion was that something had been in the way. I realized that I had always been free, but I hadn’t known it. And I was just staring at the ground – maybe this happened for about three seconds – I didn’t say anything. So there was a three moments, three seconds of silence. When I was just looking at the ground, this happened, and he said, he shouted, “That’s it!” And I looked up at him and I said, “How did you know?” And he burst out laughing. And then I realized I was obviously in the presence of an extraordinary man. And that was really the beginning. And at that point I spent three weeks with him. I was staying in some little hotel there and I would go over there in the late morning around 10–11 o’clock and I would sit in his room with him or we would go for a walk together and I would eat lunch with him and his family. Then he would take a nap in the afternoon and I would come back and spend a few hours with him every evening. And sometimes maybe there would be one other person there, but I spent a lot of time really along with him and I didn’t really know what was happening. At certain moments I thought, “This is the most incredible person, teacher, being, master that I’ve ever been in the presence of,” and other moments I thought, “This is just some crazy old man.” And then there were two other important events that happened with him. One was, at that point in my career as a seeker, I was in an existential question that was really deeply troubling with me, that I needed an answer for, that nobody could help me with. I wanted to know, was the ultimate nature of reality emptiness, or was the ultimate nature of reality fullness? In my initial initiation experience when I was a teenager, we could say that was an experience of fullness, absolute fullness. A lot of the descriptions of the enlightenment experiences of the Eastern masters were descriptions of fullness. In the Buddhist training I had, and I went to many, many Buddhist meditation retreats, the Buddha was saying the ultimate nature of reality is empty, no-thingness.

Rick: Shunyavada, Purnavada.

Andrew: Exactly, exactly right. And at that point I really felt I had to know. This was like a life-and-death issue for me. And when I asked him, he said, without hesitation, he said, “That’s very simple, Andrew, they’re both two sides of the same coin.” And I can’t tell you, Rick, how that was such a relief to me, to know that I could let go of my confusion about it. And then finally, of course we’ve been talking about all kinds of things, but finally the catalyst to the transformation experience was finally I told him what had happened when I was a teenager, as I told many of my teachers, but none of them really knew how to respond to it. And he said, I told him, and he said, “Andrew,” he said something like, “You know everything, or you already know everything,” something like that. And in that moment, and I think, you know, it’s obviously because I was in the presence of a spiritual master with enormous grace, you know, the grace of God, so to speak, and the grace of consciousness was in and through him and all around him. He was a portal to the Divine, for sure, in the most profound and extraordinary way. And that was a big part of it, but it also had to do with his obvious spiritual authority, that when he basically said, “It’s already happened,” was the message, “You already know everything,” in that moment I felt something let go deep inside me, and it felt like, and that initiated a process that took about three weeks. But I could feel something let go in me, and so at the end of those three weeks, he told me something very big is going to happen. And then of course I was thinking, “How the hell does he know?” You know, he’s just a crazy old man, how could he make such a statement, something big is going to happen? And a part of me would go, “Oh my God, this is the most incredible thing, you know, could it be true?” And then the other part of me would say, “This is just ridiculous, and don’t get your hopes up, kid, because this is all crazy,” that kind of thing. So after three weeks I told him I was going to leave and go visit some friends of mine and I would be back, you know, I’d be back in some weeks. And I was sitting in the train station in Lucknow by myself, I was sitting in the train by myself. Oh, there was one other part of the story that’s kind of funny, that I was a very disciplined meditator in those years, very. I mean that was my … I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure about anything, but the only thing I was sure about is that I had to meditate every day. That was my anchor, it was the only thing I was holding on to and depending on for everything. And when he told me, when I was with him originally, he said, “You don’t have to make any effort to be free.” When I would go back to my room then and sit on my bed and cross my legs, I got a headache.

Rick: Yeah, I heard you say that when I was listening to recordings and the thought came to mind that perhaps you had been in the habit of making an effort when you meditated, you know, straining or forcing or concentrating, and in the relaxed effortlessness of His grace, that effort stuck out like a sore thumb and gave you a splitting headache.

Andrew: Definitely. So I had stopped meditating, so then what happened was that when I was sitting in the train, I suddenly felt my eyes close and I was being meditated. There was a current …

Rick: Spontaneous.

Andrew: Yeah, there was a current that had started to pulsate and vibrate in the core of my being, and that was really the beginning of a three-week process. And this current got stronger and stronger and stronger, and when I arrived in Delhi and I felt like there was a being, or there was something that was following me, that was with me, that I couldn’t see. And I could feel it in my solar plexus, and it would get stronger and stronger, and what the experience was of was an intense ecstasy and a burning simultaneously, a burning and intense ecstasy, that when it would really build up and build up, it was unbearable. It was physically unbearable, it was too much, and then it would recede. And as it would get bigger and bigger, my experience at the time was a feeling like I was being consumed. I literally felt like I was being consumed by a being that I couldn’t see. And I was thrilled, I was thrilled out of my mind, and I was terrified, I was scared to death both at the same time. I was more thrilled than I was scared, but I was very scared and I really felt that if this doesn’t stop, there will be nothing left of me. And then finally, one morning I was in my hotel in Delhi and I saw myself – it’s not something I did – but I saw myself, I just sat up and I uttered the words, “I surrender my life to you, do with me what you will.” And I wasn’t really direct, it wasn’t anything that I had intended to say or to do, I observed myself doing this. And I wasn’t really surrendering to Poonjaji, the master, as an individual, I was surrendering to whatever was happening. So I said, “I surrender my life, do with it what you will.” I saw in the eye of my mind a whirlpool, and I felt that all of my … whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but what I felt then was all of my own karmas were going down this whirlpool and what was going to happen next, I didn’t know. It wasn’t going to be my own making, my own choice. And at the same time, when I would meet friends, you know, the friends and fellow seekers and travelers that I’d known, that I knew, the minute I sat down with them and I started speaking about what was happening to me and this amazing experience with this extraordinary teacher, the space between us filled up with grace, and suddenly they were in the same state I was. And this kept happening, and especially in those days it was very powerful, it was very, very intense that they were being drawn into this same experience that I was in the midst of. I was a burning bush, I was a burning fire, and anybody who was getting near me who had sympathetic interest in me, who was trusting me, was catching fire too. So then I knew, I didn’t know what was happening to me because I had never heard of anything quite like this. In other words, what I had imagined before was that whatever was going to happen was going to be a purely subjective event, but what was happening to me was powerfully affecting other people right away. And then simultaneously I seemed to have access to a kind of clarity and depth that wasn’t there before. It was just kind of overnight. And so, after three weeks, I flew back to Lucknow. I went into the living room, I fell at his feet, because in a typical Indian fashion, he called himself the “master” all the time, and everybody touched his feet, which in India, as you very well know, is a sign of respect. Because in the earlier days, in the first three weeks, I told you, I’d one hand think he was this extraordinary Master, and the other hand I’d think he was probably just some crazy old man, you know, always calling himself the Master. And then I fell at his feet, and I obviously, I think I started crying. And then he said, “I knew this was going to happen.” I told him what was happening to all these people I was meeting and how they were being affected, and then he said, “I knew this was going to happen.” And finally, he wasn’t well in that period, he was quite thin, and he thought he was going to die. So he told me, I was up in his room with him, and he looked at me in the eye, I was sitting next to him, and when he wanted to look at you with a kind of ferocious intensity, it was quite something to behold. He told me that, he said, “Andrew, I want you to accept responsibility for the work.” And I had no idea what he was talking about, but he made it clear that he wanted me to carry on his legacy, what he was doing. And I don’t remember if I said anything or not, I probably didn’t say anything because I don’t think I knew how to respond to it. The other thing he said to me, he said, “I don’t want you to depend on me for anything.” He said—I can’t remember the exact words, Rick, but it was more or less—”I’ve given you everything already. Everything I have to teach you already know,” but he made it very clear to me that he didn’t want me to rely on him for anything. He wanted me to stand on my own and allow this to happen. So of course there is a lot more to the story with him, we probably don’t want to spend all that much time on that, but then I left him, I went to Rishikesh, and then I had a small group of people gathered around me, and really that was the beginning, that was 26 years ago.

Rick: Good. Let me interject a couple of questions and comments and then we’ll shift into discussion of evolutionary enlightenment. First of all, I think there’s a nice takeaway point from this which is in modern spirituality sometimes there’s this anti-guru bias, like you don’t really need a teacher, it sets up this unnatural hierarchy and just be your own teacher and so on and so forth. And I think maybe people who promulgate that notion haven’t actually spent any time in the presence of a great teacher. They don’t know how palpable and profound the transmission can be with someone like that, how transformative it can be just being in their vicinity. So I would encourage people to keep an open mind about that. Second thing is, if you had to say, okay, I mean a lot of people speak of their awakening in such a way that they could mark it on a calendar. Would you somehow say that the culmination of that three-week process was your awakening if there was a discrete event?

Andrew: Well, I mean, the way I think about it is that my spiritual initiation occurred when I was 16. When I was 22 and I made that decision that I was going to do this, I can tell you a funny story that I was going to a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst to be specific, and I suddenly realized that I was sick of this, I didn’t want to do it anymore. So I got up and told him, I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to be free.” I said it with a confidence that I’d never had in my life, because I was a very insecure person when I was a young man. And he said, “You’re just getting started,” you know, and I wasn’t intimidated. And so that was the second part of it, was that I knew that I was going to make it. So that was the second, and the third of course was meeting the Master, of course. Now in my own case, I know that this was going to happen one way or the other, and in my case of course it was through his grace that this transformation occurred, and I’m in his eternal debt for that. But I know that one way or the other this was going to happen because in terms of where I was at in my life then, I was not going to come back and settle in and live a “ordinary life.” I saw everybody was doing it and I wasn’t going to do it. And I had a small income at the time, it wasn’t very much, but it was enough to live cheaply on the road. And so because I was determined this was going to happen one way or another. So I don’t know exactly what the moment was.

Rick: For some people there isn’t a moment, it just sort of sneaks up on them and they can’t quite say when it happened. Other people have this lightning clap and thunderclap moment that is a watershed night and day difference for them. But I’d say the majority it’s more like it sneaks up like a thief in the night and only in retrospect do you realize, “Whoa, I’m on the other side now.”

Andrew: Exactly, exactly, yes.

Rick: One other thing, I listened to a lot of recordings of you in preparation for this, including an hour and a half version of the story you just told. And you mentioned that at a certain stage you had a kind of a philosophical falling out with Poonjaji, but you didn’t really say what that was. Would you mind commenting on that?

Andrew: Oh, sure. First of all, just for the record, I was like one of the original satsang teachers. I mean, I don’t teach that way anymore and I don’t call myself that anymore. But when I was with him, I kept a diary of those three weeks, and then about a year or so after I started teaching, I self-published it. The name of the diary is “My Master Is My Self.” And I think that that book helped enormously for the world to discover him because at a certain point I was teaching in Amsterdam and a lot of Osho sannyasins were there, and then after reading this book, and when any people came to me who were reading this book, they went to find out who this extraordinary man was. And I think that played a significant part in getting the word out about who he was. The thing was that Master Poonja was a fierce and ferocious rebel against tradition. And he was a radical Advaitist. I mean, I don’t think you can be more radical. His position was, “It’s always already true, you’re always already there, there’s nothing between you and what you’re seeking, always, already, right now. So, simply give up, drop the thought of separation, and you’re already enlightened.” And so, any method, any path, including meditation, is something that you do to get yourself somewhere where you’re not. So he felt even in, you know, and this is very profound, and I think one has to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of non-duality to really appreciate this, but any spiritual practice, anything that you do to get there, from his point of view, is helping to perpetuate the ignorance that you’re not already there. And of course, he powerfully transmitted that truth to anybody who was able to receive it from him, and he definitely powerfully transmitted it to me. So what happened was that that’s more or less how I started teaching, you know, people just through spending time with me and sometimes just through spending time sitting in silence, or through some kind of philosophical, Advaitic deconstruction process, I would take people to walk people back to zero. And so many people were having similar kinds of awakenings, the same kind of energetic, burning experiences that would go on for weeks, the same kind of going in and out of states of intense and uncontrollable ecstasy and then falling back to the ego and starting to doubt the whole thing and then falling back into it. What I started to realize, Rick, is that there’s a lot of development that any true seeker has to… we all need to develop, and there’s no way around it, and there’s no spiritual experience that in and of itself takes that away. So in the early years, I was having evening after evening after evening, where we were all just swimming in ecstasy, swimming in bliss. And from my perspective, that’s what did it for me, even though I think it was more than that, because I thought deeply about these things. I was inquiring, I was always wanting to know. I thought that all these people that were drenching in this ecstasy and they were drenching in this bliss and they were receiving my teachings, were going to be permanently and irrevocably transformed because it was all so obvious when we were all together, and it was all so simple. But I started to notice that it wasn’t. For most people it wasn’t, that in spite of these extraordinary, profound, miraculous, life-changing experiences, there was a lot of work that everybody had to do, and I kind of saw that. And so at a certain point I just realized it was true. They had to put in the years … in order to get to understand how the mind worked, they needed to spend hours and hours meditating and observing the nature of their own mind. There was all kinds of philosophical inquiry, moral inquiry, this is something that we needed to start a whole realm of practice in order to develop. So you have to remember that he said to me, “Don’t rely on me for anything,” and this is actually what he said to me, and I took it to heart. So that’s what I did, and when it became apparent to me that people needed practice, they needed development, I started telling people to practice, meditate and do other things in order to develop. And when he heard of this, he really didn’t like it because he thought I was destroying his direct path. And I wasn’t destroying it, I knew how to teach that way, and I still know how to teach that way. But a couple of things, I didn’t think it worked in the long term in most cases. Also I saw that it tended to make people very arrogant, because anybody who is receptive have an experience like that, but then they can get pumped up and think there are places that they are really not. And I saw other people that Poonjaji was sending out to teach, in my opinion, seemed, I thought, were arrogant and pumped up, and also had a very narrow, seemed to have a very narrow interpretation about what transformation was all about. And I started to realize, “Wow, I’m developing as a teacher in ways based upon what I’m experiencing and based upon really following my Guru’s instructions, which is really figuring this out on my own, that was really taking me in a different direction from his.” And then at a certain point it became very unpleasant. Our disagreement was fundamentally a philosophical one, but without going into much of the details, it was painful, I think it was painful and very unpleasant for both of us.

Rick: Well you know, I’m no expert on Ramana Maharshi, but from what I understand of his teaching, he offered different strokes for different folks. For some people he might have offered the sort of thing that Poonjaji, that you just described, but for others he might have advocated a meditation practice. In fact, he gave mantras to some people, as did Nisargadatta. And for others he might have said, “Well, do some service, you know, work on some selfless karma yoga, selfless service, and that’s what you need.” So he would start with the highest verse, but if that didn’t stick, then he would step it down a notch and say, “Okay, then this is for you.” I’ve heard that account from a number of people. So in a way, I think maybe, you know, Poonjaji had his approach and it was very effective for a number of people, but to my understanding, it wasn’t necessarily a perfect reflection of what his Guru’s approach was.

Andrew: No, I don’t think so. As I said, he was a fierce rebel, fiercely rebellious against tradition, and I don’t know anybody who had that same gift he had of really making it clear that there was nothing in the way.

Rick: Yeah, and I’m fine with that. I mean, different people have different roles to play and his role may not have been that of a compromiser who was going to compromise to any extent with the relative levels of reality or different stages of development. He was for those who were ready to pop, if it worked for them.

Rick: Yeah, but I mean, the thing is, like many Vedantists, his whole approach was basically, you know, fundamentally that consciousness alone is real. So if you started bringing up philosophical issues and moral issues, he’d tell them, “That’s all mine.”

Rick: Yeah, well you know, the founder of Vedanta, Shankara, he would say consciousness alone was real, but he also was devotional and advocated moral scruples and so on. He was able to play on all levels simultaneously.

Andrew: Yeah, well at least in my experience, Poonjaji definitely didn’t, and I think he had his own reasons for not wanting to, but it didn’t work for me because I’ve always been a philosophically oriented person and moral development and moral clarity to me is fundamental to spiritual development, and those were issues that he didn’t really embrace. And if you started going into it, he would basically feel that that’s all about ignorance, that’s not important. The only thing that’s important is the Absolute. Realize the Absolute and let go, that’s it.

Rick: All right, well let’s use this as a segue into evolutionary enlightenment because I want to reserve plenty of time to talk about that. And there are sort of seeds in what we’ve just been discussing that would actually pertain to that discussion, so let’s get into that. Why don’t you lay it out for us in a nutshell and then we’ll kind of pick apart the different aspects of it.

Andrew: Okay, so in my teaching I make a distinction between what I call in my language “traditional enlightenment” and the new evolutionary enlightenment. So in the traditional model of enlightenment, the traditional Eastern model of enlightenment is really about what’s called “vertical liftoff.” It’s about the experience of transcendence, transcending the mind. If we transcend thought, if we transcend the mind, you go beyond thought, you go beyond the mind. Time simultaneously fades away. People can find this, for example, in meditation. If you stop identifying with thoughts, simultaneously your awareness of time and the passing of time will also begin to fade out. And when thought disappears and time disappears, simultaneously our awareness of the world disappears. So when thought disappears and time disappears and the world disappears, when everything disappears, including our awareness of our own physical form, we make the profound discovery that all the greatest mystics from all the world’s traditions have realized that we’re still here. When the mind disappears, when time disappears, when the world disappears, when everything disappears, the fundamental essence of the fundamental felt essence of who I am and who you are hasn’t gone anywhere. So this is the fundamental and primary discovery of the world’s greatest mystics.

Rick: And that fundamental essence isn’t just an individuality, it’s more of a universal field, right? Universal quality.

Andrew: Yes, it’s infinite, timeless, formless being.

Rick: Beingness, right.

Andrew: Yeah, infinite, timeless, formless being, which I relate to that timeless, formless void out of which the entire creative process emerged 13.7 to 14 billion years ago. And the reason, Rick, why either as a meditative journey or as a mystical state experience, the reason why the experience of that realm or that dimension of reality is so liberating is because before the universe was created nothing had happened. Before time and space, nothing had happened yet. So when you awaken to the deepest part of yourself that has never been born or never entered the stream of time, you experience the freedom from history because nothing has happened yet. In that part of yourself there is no history, nothing has happened yet. So there is no woundedness, there is no fear, there is no doubt, there is no nothing. There is just the infinite nature of your own unborn, uncreated self. And the Buddha called this timeless, formless emptiness, the uncreated or the unborn.

Rick: And you also experience a tremendous relief and freedom. The first time I experienced that I felt like a ton had been taken off my shoulders.

Andrew: The burden of existence falls off my shoulders. The burden of existence, the burden of the body, the burden of the mind, the burden of time, the burden of memory, the burden of desire, it’s all gone, and it’s all gone. But then you realize, “Who I am, and who I, the ultimate truth that all mystics tell us is that the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is that there is only one and not two. There is only one and not two, and you are, and I am, and we all are, at that level, being at the deepest level, the only one that there is.” So when you realize that the only one that there is has no beginning and no end, it is the experience of perfect and absolute freedom from, like the Buddha would say, that which is born, that which is created, etc. So the traditional model, and I’m making generalizations here, but the traditional model is about transcendence, about going beyond.

Rick: I just wanted to interject here that the spiritual traditions of the East were primarily, the the custodians were primarily recluses. And I think they may have distorted perhaps the original, original teachings because of their recluse lifestyle and their emphasis on that transcendent value. But if you look back into the ancient scriptures, most of the rishis were householders and they were great enlightened kings who had all sorts of responsibilities. But what’s come down to us after so many thousand years is admittedly an emphasis on transcendence and other-worldliness and not necessarily practical values.

Andrew: So for some reason, Rick, right from the very beginning when I was teaching, when people would have these breakthrough experiences that we were talking about before, I would always look for evidence of it in their behavior. This was always the way I approached it, because to me, the value of the experience is seen in the change of behavior. And so this has always been the way I’ve approached it, for some other teachers, or even I think for Poonjaji himself. The main thing he wanted to know was that you had the experience and you knew you had the experience. And for me, ultimately, it really didn’t matter. What mattered is, what’s the effect of the experience? And I would measure the effect of the experience and the degree of transformation of the behavior. So right from the very beginning, I started shift my attention from merely the awakening, the internal or subjective capacity to awaken to the infinite, to the actual transformation itself. I wanted to see evidence that the ego had been transcended to a measurable degree through the transformation of behavior, and if I didn’t see that, then nothing happened.

Rick: Good point. After last week’s interview that I did, there was a discussion on my site where some people were saying, “Well, the relative personality is illusory anyway, so what does it matter what the behavior is? What matters is you realize who you are.” And there’s a distinction between a realizer and a saint, and the two may not be in the same package. And what I had said on the interview was, “It’s not worth a hill of beans to me if someone’s had an awakening and yet they’re behaving despicably. I would like to see the whole package, that evolutionary energy, bleed into the relative personality and really effect some kind of meaningful change.”

Andrew: Well yeah, and also, unless the mystical breakthrough actually has that effect, has such an effect on us, the kind you were just describing, I think it’s useless. So this is kind of how I was approaching it, and also at the very beginning, although a lot of people, they would come and they wouldn’t leave, so people were sticking to me like glue. So I started, there was an inter-subjective world, you know, that was just like bees to honey that I was in, right from the very beginning. And I’d always thought when I started teaching I was going to be like Master Poonja, where I would be like a traveling wizard, you know, because he doesn’t want to create anything, he just wants to be all independent. All these people were coming and they were sticking to me and they weren’t going away. And then one day I was having lunch with a group of people and I saw two people I had been having lunch with having a conversation, and it dawned on me that what these people were sharing together, the state of consciousness they were sharing together, was even more important than what they were receiving from me. And that was a very profound moment, because that was, I think, when I realized that this is really about the … now I know it, I didn’t know it then, but I realized this is really about the evolution of culture, it’s not really about what I call “personal enlightenment.” Personal enlightenment, which I say is about the awakening of the liberation of the individual, himself or herself, whereas what I used to call “impersonal enlightenment,” what I now call “evolutionary enlightenment,” is really about the evolution of culture, and culture emerges when two people share the same values. It’s what’s happening between us, it’s not just my own inner subjective experience, but it’s the inter-subjective world space between us. And so it’s affecting that inter-subjective world space that the teaching of evolutionary enlightenment is most concerned with. So I became very interested at the beginning, less on the internal and more on the external expression of higher spiritual development. And I was teaching a retreat actually in India in Bodhgaya one winter, this is probably about 18 or 19 years ago, and something happened to me one day. I was giving a talk, and the talk was called “Out of the Swamp,” and something came over me. You know, there was some extraordinary thing that happened to me, and that was really the beginning of a very, very deep shift in my outlook and my perspective. There was some kind of metaphysical metamorphosis that happened during that talk, and that was really what set me on this trajectory that we just began to discuss together, that I became interested in the larger cultural implications of enlightenment rather than just the unique subjective experience of the individual. And one of my students is going to write a book about the evolution of the teaching, because I think there are many steps in it, and I can’t even remember most of it. But is it okay if we get into the philosophy of it?

Rick: Absolutely, yeah. Let’s do.

Andrew: Okay. So getting back to what we were speaking about, the infinite nature of the timeless, formless ground of being we spoke about earlier. It was out of that timeless, formless emptiness, out of that timeless, formless emptiness, that energy and light burst forth as the Big Bang 13.7 to 14 billion years ago. So from primordial emptiness, time and space and all of manifestation emerged. Right? So we can call timeless, formless emptiness as being, the realm of being, and then the realm of manifestation, the world of time and space, the evolving universe, we could say is the realm of becoming. And if we want to say, “Well, let’s draw a map of everything that exists,” so the way to draw a map of everything that exists is you also have to include everything that doesn’t exist. So then we draw a circle – this is just a thought experiment, it doesn’t really mean You just draw a circle and then you draw a line through the middle of it and we would say at the bottom is being, timeless, formless being, which is the infinite, timeless, formless emptiness, the infinite nature of timeless, formless emptiness of being. And then out of timeless, formless emptiness of being emerged the creative process, I call it the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe emerged from timeless, formless emptiness.

Rick: Shiva and Shakti.

Andrew: Yes, exactly.

Rick: I think that’s what they were talking about.

Andrew: Yeah, it must have been. So we’re being and becoming, and so then we realize, from a perspective of non-duality, right? The ultimate truth about the nature of reality is only one and not two, that being and becoming, from an ultimate or absolute point of view, are one and not two. Being and becoming are one and not two. And that was, you could say, in the Buddha’s declaration, “Form and emptiness are one and the same.” Form and emptiness are one and the same. That was in the Mahayana revolution, was the realization that the timeless formless emptiness is inherent in the world of form, and in fact they are not different. So from a point of absolute non-duality, that’s true.

Rick: Sure, and I think there are some physicists who would tell us that that’s true from their perspective, guys like John Hagelin and so on.

Andrew: And then what we want to do is we want to come out of that absolute perspective, we want to step down one billionth, one hundred billionth, billionth, billionth of a millimeter, infinitesimally. And then boom, we realize that being, that timeless, formless being, and the infinite creative process are two … are both absolute domains that are not separate, they are one, but they are absolute domains that are completely and absolutely different. So in timeless, formless being, nothing ever happened. Nothing ever happened because there is no time there, nothing ever happened. In the creative process, things are happening all the time. And if we have an experience of timeless, formless being, we experience a kind of peace that you can’t really describe to someone who has never experienced it. Because it’s freedom from desire, it’s freedom from wanting, it’s being utterly released. When we … and remember, in both of these realms are God or Absolute Spirit, from a metaphysical point of view, a metaphysical perspective. When we experience what I call the evolutionary impulse, the evolutionary impulse is the actual felt experience of the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating universe, God or Absolute Spirit, as the evolutionary impulse, feels completely different. It feels like ecstatic urgency, ecstasy and urgency. God as the uncreated, as the unborn, the experience of God as the uncreated and the unborn, is that peace that passeth all understanding. The experience of God as the Creator, as the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe, is the experience of an ecstatic urgency.

Rick: And so then … And it’s not a neither/or situation, I don’t know about your experience, but both of those things can be there at the same time. The ecstatic urgency and the peace that passeth understanding, and paradoxically opposed as they may seem, they can both be incorporated within your experience and you can have this driven determination to manifest and push the envelope of evolution, and at the same time be in that state of satisfaction, peace, freedom from desire. Can you not?

Andrew: In my experience, the way I don’t … in my experience it’s different. I don’t think that they can coexist as an experience simultaneously, and I’ll tell you why. Because when one is in that state, when one is awake to being, especially if it is a deep experience of being awake to being, one has no interest in evolution, in creating anything, in becoming anything, in doing anything. If it is deep enough, and I have this experience myself, when I lead retreats and at the beginning I always teach people about being and I don’t go and get into evolution. I start losing all interest in the main part of my teaching, which is evolution, because I start – this is true, it happens to me often – I start sinking so deeply into the experience of being that I’ve actually gotten scared of it, I don’t think I’m going to be able to teach the second half of this retreat, because I don’t care about it anymore. Who cares about evolution? Because before the universe was born, there was freedom from desire. To answer your question, being is, in the way I understand it and I interpret it, in my experience, being relates to non-doing, inaction. The evolutionary aspiration in the cosmos, which is the spiritual aspiration of the cosmos, only reveals itself in and through movement, motion, and activity. for example, from the big coming was a cosmic explosion, it’s an explosion in motion that’s still happening. So what I describe as the evolutionary impulse, we can only experience in and through activity.

Rick: Well I agree with that, and I can understand the experience of being by itself, you know, being completely adequate in and of itself, but it’s my experience, at least to the extent I experience it, and maybe you’re talking about some more mature level of experience, that in the midst of activity, even very dynamic, motivated activity, the being quality is not entirely lost. It’s not exclusively there, but it underlies or provides a foundation for the active phase.

Andrew: Well, the answer—I agree wholeheartedly, but the way I experience that is that if the experience of being is deep enough, then there is a release, a fundamental release of existential tension. Because I know who I am, because one knows who one is, because I know who I am, because I have realized who I am, there is a relaxation of falling into oneself. And so that’s why people who have awakened in a very deep and profound way, there’s a fundamental relief of existential tension at the core of the self. And so that means physically you’ll say there’s a relaxation in the body, in terms of people’s attention or presence, you can see their eyes, they’ll be very steady, they’ll be focused. But without what’s called the natural state, there’s ease of being, right? Enlightenment is lightness of being or ease of being. So I agree with you as far as the telltale signs of people having awakened in such a way is that there’s a natural state or an ease of being that becomes just a spontaneous quality or expression of the self. And not necessarily as a feeling experience of peace.

Rick: But then when you’re back in the becoming phase, you don’t necessarily forget who you are or lose that underlying ease of being. Isn’t there a capacity to live both at the same time?

Andrew: Well yes, let me finish the description about the evolutionary impulse and then I’ll describe how I think these two support each other, and when they don’t support each other, what’s missing in both. So the evolutionary impulse is the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe. It is God as the creator. So human beings can first locate that impulse as the biological command to procreate, the sexual impulse. And I ask everybody, what does the sexual impulse feel like? The sexual impulse is the ecstasy and urgency. The sexual impulse is the experience of ecstatic urgency or ecstasy and urgency. And why the sexual impulse creates so much trouble for us is not because of the ecstasy, but it is because of the sense of urgency. Urgency says, “It’s got to happen now, it’s got to happen now, it’s got to happen now.” That’s the nature of God or spirit, that’s the nature of God as the evolutionary impulse, “It’s got to happen now,” that’s what it feels like. So at a much, much higher level, and this emerges only in human beings, the human beings are the only species or life form that are compelled to innovate and create that which is new. And of course, millions of years ago this kind of innovation was really, really, really slow. Maybe there would be one change every 500,000 years, and now we realize that our capacity innovate has reached exponential proportions. Our uniquely human creative genius as human beings is moving at the speed of light, it’s moving faster and faster and faster and faster. But if you stand back you realize that we are somehow compelled, our species is compelled to give rise to that which is new, to innovate, we are compelled towards innovation. And we can say that the greatest architects of human civilization in all fields of human endeavor were individuals who were awake to what I’m calling the evolutionary impulse, or you can call it an Einstein, or a Mozart, or a Martin Luther King. These were individuals that were not chilled out, relaxed individuals. They were driven because they had a vision for the possible, or what was possible. They saw what could be. So it could be in the realm of science, it could be in the realm of cultural evolution, and anything in between. These are individuals that see what’s possible and they’re driven, driven, driven by an ecstatic urgency to give rise to it. And as a result of the fact that they are awake to this impulse that won’t let them rest until this happens, the evolution of consciousness and culture continues to be and has been the result of that. So it’s very interesting when you realize that the creative motive in human beings, the creative aspiration and inspiration in human beings, is related to the creative motivation that causes biological life to evolve, which we relate back to the same creative motivation to exist in the first place as time, space and form. My metaphysical interpretation of the first cause of the Big Bang was, was God or absolute spirit’s desire to exist in time and form and space. And the question is why? If in a state of perfect, unimaginable ease of being and peace for eternity, why would there be a desire to give rise to a universe or multiple universes of time and space? Well the answer would be, “Why not?” Because you’re God, you’re always free, and you might get curious since you’ve been doing nothing for eternity, you might get curious about, “Maybe it’s time for me to do something,” and you say, “No, I won’t do anything.” And you could say this thought might begin to arise in your “no-mind” once every hundred billion eons of no time passes by, it might continue to arise, and it would build up, it would build up as some kind of creative tension in your being until finally you just say, “Well, why not?” And if you were God there would be no reason not to because you would not experience fear, and you become curious, “What would it be like to do?” So this is a metaphysical interpretation of the desire to exist.

Rick: Maharshi used to say, “There is no fun in loneliness,” and he would say, “The purpose of creation is the expansion of happiness.”

Andrew: There we go, there we go. So the third level of this evolutionary impulse in human beings’ experience is the desire to evolve at the level of consciousness. So spiritual seekers get bitten by a bug, something awakens in them and what their experience is, “I must become more conscious, I have to become more conscious.” And where does that come from? For example, someone like me, I grew up in a secular culture, so from whence comes this compulsion towards consciousness? This exists as inherent at a certain level in the process. We realize that the energy … remember that the greatest mystics tell the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is that there is only one and not two. So the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe, which we experience as the evolutionary impulse, is the manifestation and expression of that which is one and not two as the creative motive in the cosmos. So when human beings awaken at the third and the highest level, when they experience the evolutionary impulse, the level of consciousness, I must become more conscious, I have to become more conscious. What is happening is that we can say the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe is trying to become more conscious through us, and that is what is so amazing, amazing, so fascinating. We realize that God is everything, God is both being and becoming, God is the desire to exist and to become. And when I experience this urge towards innovation, when I experience this urge towards consciousness, it’s not me, Andrew, the unique individual who is seeking for enlightenment, it’s the energy and intelligence that created the universe person who is creating the universe is trying to evolve through me, and that I think is so amazing, it’s so exciting. It reconceptualizes the meaning, the purpose, and the place of the human experience in the 21st century in a way that I just, at least for me personally, nothing else can, because you kind of realize, “Oh, there’s something very dramatic, there’s something very big that’s happening, that’s trying to happen, and most importantly, needs me, needs you, needs each and every one of us to consciously participate as much as we are able to so that this can happen.” Because from an evolutionary point of view, from an evolutionary orientation, God in manifestation is only as evolved or as enlightened as we are.

Rick: At least in this corner of the galaxy. We might be in the armpit of the galaxy for all we know, and there could be civilizations that are a billion years more advanced than we are, but practically speaking, from our experience here on Earth, yeah.

Andrew: No, indeed, what you’re saying is true. It’s very unlikely that we’re the only ones, especially because we find that the universe seems to be getting bigger all the time. We find that it’s getting bigger and bigger, so it’s very unlikely that we’re it. But as far as we know at the moment, we’re at … but even if we do find civilizations that are infinitely more evolved than we are, the fundamental principle still remains that the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe is evolving in us, through us, as us, and does not exist in some fully … like in a traditional Eastern model, and also in Western notions, does not exist in some fully evolved state, somehow outside or beyond the process. You could say within manifestation, whatever the leading edge of the evolutionary process is within it, is as far as the creative impulse has gone within the process, and that’s what’s new.

Rick: Interesting question to ask is, why the urgency now? Why does there seem to be this acceleration taking place at this time? The easy answer is we’re probably going to kill ourselves if it doesn’t speed up. What would you say to that?

Andrew: Well I think that it’s important to understand that the nature of the evolutionary impulse is relentlessly urgent, forever and always. That’s what it is. Because if what I’m calling the evolutionary impulse, which is to drive towards existence and then a drive towards higher and higher and higher and higher existence, greater complexity and higher integration and greater complexity and higher integration and greater complexity and higher. It’s relentless. The impulse in and of itself, remember the impulse is not an individual. It’s like the sexual impulse is not an individual, but when the individual awakens to the sexual impulse, their individuality begins to express the qualities of the sexual impulse. But the sexual impulse itself is relentless, and unlike our biological experience of the evolutionary impulse, when we experience at higher levels, it’s this telos or drive in the cosmos. Therefore, Rick, no matter what happens, no matter what emerges, from God or absolute spirit as the evolutionary impulse, there is no relief. It’s an unquenchable creative aspiration. And we could say, well, you could say, well, let’s have metaphysical speculation. We could say, we could eventually guess, well, maybe the urge in this, we could say, is towards consciousness. So if the ultimate– because basically, again, this is metaphysical fantasy or speculation. God chose to create the universe in his own image. The image of God is, from a metaphysical point of view, is consciousness without beginning and end. So therefore, you could translate that and say, “Well, therefore, if I want to create a material universe in my own image, when all the matter in the universe turns to light, which would mean it becomes conscious or self-aware, then we could say that based on this kind of thinking, that initial creative aspiration would be fulfilled.” But that’s— that’s just a metaphysical speculation.

Rick: Who knows whether that ever happens?

Andrew: Yeah, well, yeah, it’s kind of unimaginable, we don’t really know. But the thing is that the nature … what’s important for people to understand is that the nature of the evolutionary impulse is relentless and unending. There is no arrival point. There’s no arrival, there’s no relief, and there’s no release. And the only place you and I can experience relief and release is when we let go of the whole process and experience being.

Rick: Yeah, well what I was suggesting though is that just as there seems to be … I mean, at the computers we’re using today, compared to what we used 10 years ago, 20 years ago, just as there seems to be this exponential acceleration in technology, everything is speeding up. I mean, the global warming is speeding up and population, and there’s so many things which in and of themselves, any one of these things could probably wipe out the species. So it seems like there’s a concomitant acceleration in spiritual evolution taking place on the planet, perhaps to counterbalance and save us from ourselves. Maybe this awakening needs to happen in order to bring about the so-called “new age,” if we want to think in those terms, 2012 stuff, and maybe that’s why we’re all feeling so virgin and why there seems to be an epidemic of people getting interested in this kind of thing and having spiritual awakenings.

Andrew: Well I actually see it quite differently. I think what I’m about to say is probably going to be quite controversial for many of your listeners. But I have to say that I realize we are facing tremendous challenges. Global warming is a very big challenge, which we are not really meeting or addressing. The global warming, overpopulation, the deterioration of the biosphere, and all the other problems that everybody already knows about that I don’t need to waste too much time on. So we are facing enormous, enormous, enormous challenges that are threatening life on Earth for human beings and for animals and for life as we’ve known it. But there’s another way to look at this, and what a lot of people don’t seem to be aware of is, things are better in our world for more human beings than they’ve ever been. So to be very specific, more human beings are experiencing a standard of living that kings and queens couldn’t even have dreamed of 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago. So the standard of living, the state of our health, our personal and political freedoms – most of us can, within reason, more or less do anything we want – our access to information and communication. I mean, the life that you and I and all of your listeners lead is a life of privilege, freedom, opportunity that is historically unprecedented. And so the thing is that things are better, there’s less violence in the world, the world is a more peaceful place right now than it has ever been in the history of human civilization. There’s a very powerful book called The Better Angels of Our Nature by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, where in exhaustive detail he makes clear that there is less war, there’s less genocide, there’s less rape, there’s less killing, there’s less beating, there’s less brutality than there’s ever been in the history of our species. And so the point I like to make, and it’s interesting that the spiritual teacher is making it, is the reason that things are better than they’ve ever been, in spite of the enormous challenges that we’re facing, is because of the great gifts of modernism, this cultural evolution of modernism, and post-modernism. So modernism really made it possible for billions of people who previously in history had no way of rising up from a life of serfdom or slavery or poverty. Modernism made it possible for this burgeoning middle class all over the world to emerge.

Rick: All that is very true, but it almost seems like the polarities are increasing because on the one hand everything you said is absolutely true, but on the other hand it is only in our lifetimes that we have had the capacity to wipe out the human race.

Andrew: But that’s also true. No, no, but this is true. The point is we are facing enormous challenges, right? We’re facing enormous challenges with nuclear weapons, with biotechnology. We’re entering into a brave new world that is very difficult for us to even begin to understand the moral and spiritual implications, the moral, practical and metaphysical implications that we’re entering into a world of this kind of complexity and possibility. I agree with you, but relatively speaking, and it’s what most people don’t know, things are better than they’ve ever been. So modernism made it possible for billions of people to rise up, and post-modernism was when millions of human beings awoke to the world-centric consciousness of the world-centric universal human. And this is when we started realizing that all human beings are created equal. was like what great saints like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi died for, this realization. Rick, you and I take this for granted, but only a few short years ago, most people on Earth didn’t see things that way. And so, in terms of the rights for women, the liberation of women, the civil rights movement, the world is now… dictators and warlords and monsters are being now brought to The Hague and put on trial. There was never this kind of thing. The world is so much more civilized than it’s ever been. So what I’m saying to you is, if we add to that the fact that technology is making all kinds of things possible, that emergence, you see, emergence is the most exciting truth that I’ve ever discovered. And emergence is something that was first discovered in biology, and emergence is when greater complexity emerges from lesser complexity. And this is very… how can greater complexity emerge from lesser complexity? These are big breakthroughs. And emergence happens in biology, it happens in science, it happens in all kinds. It also can happen in terms of consciousness also, which is what I think is so interesting. So I think we have to temper our reasonable, our understandable concern with also some faith. We need to also have some faith in ourselves because there has been so much development, things are so much better, and things are better not because of traditional religion or even because of mysticism, it’s because of cultural evolution. The world is a better place because of us. The world is a more civilized place because of us. And so what I try and advocate for people is I feel that we need to stop getting down on ourselves so much and realize that human beings are evolving and have evolved, and we’re continuing to, and we need to feel good about that and use that sense of self-confidence in order to address these quite overwhelming challenges that we’re having.

Rick: I don’t want to get you off the track, but let’s take everything you just said and bring into the context of evolutionary enlightenment, which is the main thing you want to talk about here. Give us a recap of that in the light of evolutionary enlightenment.

Andrew: Well, basically how evolutionary enlightenment relates to cultural evolution, which is very simple, which is culture are shared values, postmodern culture basically says that everything everything is relative. Postmodernism is known for pluralism and relativism, it flattens everything out. There is nothing higher than the individual. So when you awaken to evolution, when you realize that you are part of a process that is going somewhere, and that is going somewhere new, and in order to get there it needs you to make it happen. It needs your body, your mind, your intelligence, your wisdom, your compassion. It needs all of your life energy, God or the energy and intelligence that created the universe, needs all of Rick and all of Andrew to get to the next step, that truth provides us with an absolute source of meaning and purpose. And the big problem with postmodernism is, “Why am I here? What’s the point of life?” A lot of people are so nihilistic, there is nihilism and there is purposelessness. Often people get into Advaita, they also mix Advaita philosophy with nihilism, and to me it is quite dangerous and dark stuff. So an evolutionary perspective can awaken us to an absolute sense of purposefulness. And what that means, Rick, is that suddenly Rick’s existence, as Rick, as he is right now, Andrew’s existence in the world as he is right now, suddenly is imbued with meaning, purpose, and value, because we realize that the evolution of the interior of the cosmos, where we’re going, is really resting on Rick’s shoulders and Andrew’s shoulders. And so then the enlightenment dimension of it comes into it, enlightenment is always about evolution beyond ego, unless Andrew and Rick are willing to transcend their selfishness, their small-mindedness, their selfishness and their narcissism, they are not going to be able to be vehicles through which this energy and intelligence is going to be able to create the future.

Rick: So would you say that that transcendence of selfishness and narcissism is necessarily going to result in overtly obvious changes in a person’s life?

Andrew: Yes, yes, certainly.

Rick: So let’s say some guy is working a dead-end job, you know, and he’s very frustrated, but in this job market he can’t find another one, he’s got kids to support, he feels like his life is meaningless because this job is so boring, or the house, you know, a single mom with three kids who is struggling to make ends meet, how is this going to trickle down to the nitty-gritty of the lives of people like that? I mean they can’t all jump on the bandwagon and become spiritual teachers, you know?

Andrew: No, no, no, no, but evolutionary enlightenment is not for the masses. What I’m teaching is not for everybody. What I’m teaching is for people who are at the very edge of the postmodern experiment, who have come to the edge of the postmodern experiment and realize that it’s run out of gas, that it’s basically a dead end, and realize that we need to take that next step. And so what I’m teaching is really only for those people. And what I’m teaching is that once you get bitten by this bug and this kind of passion gets liberated within one’s being, awakened within one’s soul, it kind of begins to take over your whole life. Because it’s the truth that if God is the energy and intelligence that created the universe person is creating the universe, and you awaken to yourself as that energy and intelligence, your values begin to change, your interests change, and now you feel an enormous sense of purpose, purposefulness, and an enormous responsibility, an enormous responsibility. Because from an absolute point of view, from a non-dual point of view, you are and I am the only one that there is. So that means that Rick is the only one that there could have been that chose to take that leap from formlessness to form, from nothing to something, from being to becoming, which means, Rick, this is all you are doing. You did all of it, which means it’s all your responsibility. Now, of course, that’s from a metaphysical point of view, from a non-dual, absolute metaphysical point of view, it is all your responsibility, of course. And so what that means though is that when we awaken to this evolutionary orientation, we begin to feel your one’s own experiences. It emerges from within you, it’s not because someone tells you. You start to feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility for where we’re all going and that begins to take over one’s very being. So then one’s values shift, you know, the whole ego’s agenda, if one really awakens powerfulness, the ego’s agenda it just gets released. All of that becomes irrelevant. It all becomes irrelevant because now I know who I am, and who I am is a very different self with a very different agenda. And the agenda is the evolution of the interior of the cosmos. It’s a very big project and it will take over one’s entire being. And it’s so liberating, it’s so utterly liberating.

Rick: So would it be true to say that most of the people who get involved with you, who start going to your retreats and stuff, do experience this sort of world-changing transformation in their lives, that this fire ignites within them and lots of big changes happen that would be obvious to their friends and family? Or do a great many of them kind of flounder around for a long time thinking, “Okay, well I hear what he’s saying and I’d certainly like to make a difference, but what can I do?”

Andrew: Well all of the above happens. All the above happens, but you know what happens is, usually with me it’s like when I was a young teacher, what I was interested in doing was blowing people’s minds by giving them a very powerful experience of a higher state. You know, to blow their minds. But now my interest is very different. There is a different perspective I want to share with people. I want to convince people with my argument. And when people awaken to this perspective, it literally, it’s a completely different world, it’s a worldview, it’s a worldview and it’s a moral, philosophical, and spiritual perspective and a worldview, and it completely changes the way one sees everything. Now having a glimpse or an awakening to that worldview is, one experiences ecstasy and a sense of possibilities that are infinite, and that’s so liberating. But of course, that’s usually the beginning, and getting all of oneself on board with that takes years. Assuming one has the courage and the will and the inspiration to follow through, it takes time because we are also conditioned, we have other agendas. Some of those agendas aren’t conscious, there are psychological and emotional agendas, cultural agendas, there are so many different parts of ourselves that have been so deeply conditioned with other motives and other agendas that this radical shift of agenda and internalizing it to the degree I’m talking about, is an enormous process and it takes time and practice and consideration. And it’s not a snap of the fingers kind of affair. Because remember, Rick, that for example, the kind of Advaita realization we were talking about before, that’s when you step outside of time, it happens like that, boom. Evolution is development that happens in and through time, so it’s a completely different thing, right? One is you step outside of time, you’re freed from time. But remember, evolution and higher development is a consistent process that happens in time, and so this kind of development that we’re talking about takes time and is also perpetual, there’s no end to it. Like in the notion of the traditional Eastern life, someone becomes “fully enlightened,” you know, one’s burnt to ash, one’s done. And when you embrace an evolutionary worldview, we realize that we’re all works in progress, we’re all works in progress, no matter who we are, no matter how enlightened we are in an evolutionary universe, we’re all works in progress. No such thing as being completely there.

Rick: I say that in just about every interview, I say, “As long as you’re breathing, you’re evolving.” Absolutely, absolutely. Now I know you have to go in probably just a couple of minutes, right? So we better wrap it up. I just want to ask one kind of personal question, I mean, without spoiling the whole beauty of this discussion, but people have been sending in emails and so on, and as you know, you’ve you’ve had your critics in the past, and I can think back 10, 20, 30 years in my own life and just cringe at things I’ve said and done, and I feel I’ve grown out of a lot of that. Do you feel like there’s been an evolution in your own style of functioning as a teacher which would cause you to look upon things that happened in the past as a lesser developed you become more mature in certain ways?

Andrew: Well, let me put it this way. The answer is definitely, yes, that’s the short answer. The long answer is, I was very naive when I started teaching. I was 30 years old when I was fully empowered to be a teacher, and I only had 30 years’ life experience in all this. I’ve learned a lot over the last 26 years. I’m an infinitely wiser man 26 years later because I’ve learned so much about what it is that I’m doing, and I’m continuing, I continue to learn so much about what it is that I’m doing. I didn’t really realize all those years ago what was involved in all this. I thought if people said, “I want to go all the way,” they really meant it. And I didn’t realize that…

Rick: And perhaps your methods of helping them go all the way have become more refined, you know? You might have…

Andrew: Well, to put it that way, there was a certain period of time when I needed, earnestly, urgently, to have a big breakthrough, in terms of where this whole teaching was going. And so in order to do it I had to put enormous pressure on individuals who said that this was their whole life. So these were all adults who were fully in agreement about what they were committed to. So I did put enormous pressure on the people who were with me for a certain period of time, and the thing is, Rick, enormous breakthroughs occurred. Unless those enormous breakthroughs occurred, I would never be where I am now. In other words, what happened was essential and unavoidable because a portal opened up, a possibility opened up, an emergence happened that unless I had pushed as hard as I did it would have never happened. Could I have done it differently? Could it have been done more skillfully? Well probably, of course it could, but the thing is that there was never any ill will or bad motive on my part. I was only trying to catalyze a very big breakthrough. And the thing is, I have done that. Now, in terms of my teaching style, I’m in a completely different space. I don’t have any interest in doing battle with people’s egos anymore, and that’s what I was basically doing 24 hours a day for a certain period of years, and I pushed things pretty hard, because I had to get a lot of people on the other side of something. And unless I got a lot of people on the other side of something, we weren’t going to really be going anywhere new together, and this was all about going somewhere new together. So that happened, and I literally don’t teach that way at all anymore. I really don’t get very intimately involved in that kind of teaching with people, I more present my ideas, and the energy for teaching that way doesn’t exist within me anymore, it’s a fire that has gone out. But the reason is because I think I succeeded, what needed to happen then happened, and now I’m working upon and building upon all the momentum that was generated by doing it.

Rick: Good. Well you know they say that you can judge the caliber of a teacher by the caliber of the people who are around him, who associate with him, and I’ve always been very impressed by the sorts of people who have associated with you, guys like Craig Hamilton and my my friend Igal, and the people who edit and write your magazine, and the guys you talk to like Ken Wilber and all, there’s a quality that’s evident, a maturity and an intelligence that’s evident in all these people that I think speaks well of your whole effort.

Andrew: Well, thank you very much. And I also want to just end on that last point, that I’m also indebted to everybody who’s with me through those years, some of whom aren’t with me. I’m also indebted to them because they all in their own way helped to get this amazing teaching to where it is.

Rick: Yeah, great. Well thanks, let me just make a quick couple of wrap-up points for the sake of those who have been listening. And let’s do this again sometime, Andrew. You’re evolving, I believe, in evolution, maybe a couple of years from now we’ll be seeing things with even newer eyes.

Andrew: No, definitely. I’m learning all the time and I’m learning more and more and more and more all the time and I’m stunned about how far there is to go. So I would love to and I very much appreciated talking with you, I really appreciate it, thank you very much.

Rick: Great, before we disconnect then, let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. So you’ve been listening to or watching an interview with Andrew Cohen on my interview show called Buddha at the Gas Pump. The implication of that title is that in this day and age you may be pumping gas and there’s Buddha next to you doing the same thing. There’s all sorts of people waking up these days. And if you have enjoyed this interview and would like to listen to others, this is I think number 130. They’re all archived on my site, www.batgap.com. Go there, you can find them all. You can sign up for an email notification to be notified each time a new one is posted. You can subscribe to a podcast, you can listen to this on your iPod if you like. And there’s a discussion group, as I mentioned earlier, and some of the discussions get very lively. Each interview has its own little discussion area, and let’s try to keep the comments relevant to each particular interview if possible. There’s a general comments area for things which aren’t relevant to the interview. And some people actually say they like the discussions better than the interviews, so go there if you like and participate. That’s batgap.com. I’ll be linking to Andrew’s site and to his books, his newest one being Evolutionary Enlightenment, which I very much enjoyed reading. And we will see you next time. Next week is Laurie Moore, who among other things is an animal communicator, and the week after that is a priest, who has been living in a monastery and recently had a non-dual awakening and has decided to leave the monastery, and so that should be an interesting story. So thanks Thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next time. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: Thank you, Rick.