The Universe Project: Making it real

Last week Andrew Cohen held two conference calls/webstreams speaking to hundreds of people outlining his vision for the universe project. The listeners ranged from close students to people who are just becoming interested in his work. On the call Andrew explained that whatever it was that initiated the process of evolution that has resulted in the universe we now exist within can be experienced by humans in different forms. He explained that the sexual drive is a lower level experience of the universe’s desire to evolve into the future. Creative passions of all kinds, artistic, scientific etc. are higher levels of that drive and the spiritual passion to evolve to higher consciousness is the highest form of the initial impulse of creation. What Andrew is describing is a leap in perspective, a shift in view on the human experience. In effect he is presenting a new human self-concept.

The leap he is pointing to has at its core a radical shift from seeing oneself as a “thing” to seeing oneself as a “process” and in fact as the process of evolution itself. If you think about your experience you will see that before everything else you see yourself as a “thing”. Some object, in my case called Jeff that has a definite boundary in space (a body) and a definite boundary in time (a lifetime). This experience of being something exists before thought, before anything else.

I don’t have to wake up in the morning and think, “Don’t forget, you are Jeff, remember that all day.” No, I wake up and I am Jeff, before I even think I am Jeff. Even in dreams I am still Jeff. This sense of being someone lies at the core of our experience of being alive. That sense of being someone is essentially a sense of limit that is placed on reality before anything else happens. That is what I want to call ego for the purposes of this post. That ego, if unexamined, is who we are. And even if we have seen beyond the limitation of the ego – or separate sense of self, more often than not that experience of the infinite is seen from, or quickly usurped by, the vantage point of the ego. Hence when speaking about spiritual experiences we say things like, “I experienced the infinite” or “I experienced Oneness.” Who was it that was having that experience? Was it the infinite experiencing itself, or me experiencing the infinite?

Because we are so deeply embedded in ego the perspective that Andrew Cohen laid out last week can seem very difficult to understand. Essentially he is telling you that you are not a human being wanting to evolve; you are the universe itself wanting to evolve. When you begin to wake up to the fact that you are the universe, it might be more accurate to say that the universe is waking up to the fact that it thought it was human.

You can see that in beginning to work with these ideas we are dancing at the edge of the unintelligible. Not being able to understand something in an evolutionary context is not necessarily a bad thing, it might me that you are looking at the next step. It makes sense that the next step wouldn’t really make sense to us before we make that leap. But for now we who are the intrepid first explorers of this brave new sense of self have to bear our experience of confusion and keep leaning in to what we don’t know yet.

Yesterday I was on the phone with many of the Evolutionary Enlightenment teachers that I have trained to teach Andrew Cohen’s teaching. I had scheduled a virtual training with them to help them continue their own development. And something very fascinating came up in discussion that relates to exactly what I am writing about now. Several of the teachers explained that they had a much better grasp of the shift from a world-centric perspective to a kosmos-centric perspective (which I would say fundamentally is the same shift in identity that I have been describing here) than they did when they trained a year ago. Because they understood it better themselves they were able to explain it more clearly and the people in their classes were getting it faster and to a greater depth than the students they had last year.

As we discussed this phenomenon, which seemed to be consistent with all the teachers who are teaching all over the world, I pointed out that there were lots of “world-centric, separate self dominated” assumptions inherent in the way that we were interpreting our experience.  In essence we saw the “kosmos-centric” perspective as something that existed “out there” that we were getting clearer about and because we were clearer about it, we were able to better explain it and help others be clearer about it. Now this is certainly true, but I did point out another possible interpretation of our experience. Perhaps the kosmos-centric perspective was itself more clear now. Maybe last year we were seeing it as clearly as it was…then. Maybe now it is clearer. Why? because more people have been thinking about it, talking about it, working with it and most importantly taking actions based on its reality. Maybe we are actually succeeding in brining a new perspective, a next step in human consciousness into reality.

This way of thinking doesn’t create an object out of us or kosmos-centricity. There is just the process of bringing something new into being and our seeing it more clearly and its being clearer cannot be separated. As we spoke about this on the phone we all entered into a profound altered state. Men and women standing in different parts of the globe from California to South America to Europe, Israel and Australia, were all united in the reality that they were contributing to the development of the next stage of human consciousness and most excitingly we were seeing the fruits of that development in our own students. What could be more exciting!