Integral Evolution

One of the dangers of working as closely as I do with my own spiritual teacher is that it is possible to take for granted that he is your teacher. Over the past fifteen years my relationship with Andrew Cohen has grown to include his being my boss, my colleague and a dear friend among other things. But yesterday I was reminded that he is first and foremost my spiritual mentor.

For sometime now and for the last few days in particular Andrew Cohen has been telling some of us who are his male students that he wasn’t feeling the sense of unity that he feels is critical to our development. In order to respond to his observation a number of us had planned to meet together last night, but then in the end cancelled the meeting. After hearing that we had decided not to meet Andrew reflected to us that our lack of urgency we were expressing seemed to prove that we were not seeing what he was talking about.

After hearing that we did meet together and what happened showed all of us beyond doubt that we were indeed missing the point that he was making. After a very short time of speaking together we were all once again swept up into the experience of “Consciousness, Culture, Cosmos” that I had described two blog posts ago. Submerged in the perception of this miraculous “we” space none of us who were meeting could relate to the fact that we hadn’t met together in so long. It was obvious in that space that exploring this collective consciousness is absolutely critical to what we are trying to together.

The consciousness that we were experiencing gives a truly integral view of evolution. It is not integral because you see how your individual development affects the development of the group. It is integral because you see that the consciousness that we share together transcends but includes our individual consciousness and that development of either IS development of the whole. It isn’t that individual consciousness is separate from the collective consciousness. It simply is seen as one aspect of it and individual evolution and collective evolution cannot be separated.

As this all became so clear in dialog together, it also became clear that the consciousness that we were sharing speaking together is not the consciousness that any of us had as an individual. All of us had wanted to postpone speaking together. Everyone had reasons that made sense at the time, but now that we were together seeing how critical it was that we were together none of the reasons that we had made sense. The consciousness held by the group had different values than that held by us as individuals. It was also clear that what was now clear to us had always been clear to Andrew which is why he started pushing for this in the first place.

If you have not experienced shared consciousness before this all might seem disconcerting, but in fact it is anything but. Coming into contact with an impersonal dimension of collective consciousness doesn’t feel like losing yourself, it feels like discovering your larger sense of self.