Consciousness, Culture, Cosmos

During this past weekend I was on a retreat with Andrew Cohen and 80 of his closest students from around the world. Andrew stated right out front that the theme of the weekend was taking Evolutionary Enlightenment from theory to practice and the first thing that he wanted us all to look into the nature of the next developmental stage in human consciousness, or what is sometimes called Third Tier development.

Andrew first instructed us to read excerpts from his most recent dialog with Ken Wilber from the current issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine which is all about envisioning this Third Tier stage of development. When we met together with him he asked different people to articulate their own understanding of this lofty goal and he responded to each answer he received.

As the weekend progressed we moved from meetings with Andrew to discussion groups with other students diving more and more deeply into the question; what is “third tier”? Andrew was stressing how important it was that this goal become real for everyone, because if the goal is not real you cannot possibly attain it.

In a series of discussion groups focused on an exploration of what third tier is a powerful experience of what I might call “third tier cognition” began to emerge between us. One of the most striking characteristics of this way of seeing was that the distinctions between my individual consciousness, the collective consciousness of the group of us in the room and the consciousness of the universe itself began to breakdown. It was as if Individual consciousness, cultural consciousness and the consciousness of the cosmos was collapsing into one unified experience of consciousness at all levels. There was a direct cognition of the fact that all of these levels of awareness are present in me all the time.

Because of the unity that we were experiencing in these three very different levels of awareness it became self-evident that as any individual’s consciousness expanded so to would the consciousness of the group and also of the universe itself.

It may sound far-fetched, but it does also perfectly describe what I have come to understand a kosmo-centric perspective to be – the recognition of non-separation of consciousness and the non-separation of the individual, the culture within which we exist and the universe itself.