Evolutionary Enlightenment: An Interview with Andrew Cohen

We need a cultural revolution based upon integral cognition and an evolutionary worldview. The teachings in evolutionary life in this book can play a powerful part in helping to catalyze a cultural revolution at the level of spirit—I definitely feel that way.

If enough people do that, what will happen? And might that happen eventually anyway?

Well, in terms of the first part of the question, teaching in a perspective like this should enable people to be able to come together in a higher perspective and in a deeply united, spiritual conviction about what's possible. That spiritual conviction is empowering people for what I call spiritual self-confidence, and that will make it possible for individuals to become catalysts for a change in development that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

Whether it would happen anyway, through others who are doing similar kinds of work or not . . . I mean, I don't actually know. That's a good question and I never thought about it in that way. I think that I'm conditioned not to think about it in that way. My experience of awakening to the evolutionary impulse means that I'm constantly awake to a sense of profound urgency about the necessity of this kind of emergence and I feel very responsible for it.

I feel this is very urgent, I feel it's up to me and of course, the big part of my message is that we all need to realize 'it's up to me' because from a mystical perspective, it's only one and not two.

That's the ultimate truth, that there is only one and not two and so being awake to this truth enables a human being to feel a sense of moral conviction.

Andrew Cohen is an internationally respected spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global nonprofit EnlightenNext and the award-winning EnlightenNext magazine. For the last twenty-four years, Cohen has been traveling the world giving public lectures and intensive retreats. Through his writings, his teachings, and his ongoing dialogues with leading philosophers, scientists, and mystics, he has become known as one of the defining voices of the new evolutionary spirituality.