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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Andrew Cohen: CREATING THE FUTURE

The spiritual challenge of our time, put very simply, is the demand to literally create the future ourselves. The structures of consciousness that lie in front of us don't yet exist and it's up to us as individuals, together, to actually create those new structures. It's a deadly serious matter. Creating the future at the leading edge is dependent upon each one of us waking up, transforming, and developing as individuals, and making whatever effort is necessary to transcend our attachment to the endless fears and desires of the ego, or separate self-sense.

Traditionally, the spiritual seeker would aspire to become enlightened, which means to transcend ego, in order to escape from the suffering of this world and abide in the timeless ground of being. But enlightenment itself is evolving. I don't think that what the world needs now is more people resting in the timeless ground of being. I think we have to resist the temptation to get lost in timelessness and begin to embrace the overwhelming urgency of the evolutionary crisis we're in—which is a crisis of consciousness, a crisis of understanding, a crisis of development. Many of us can intellectually appreciate our predicament, but that's not enough. We have to bridge the gap between our capacity to cognitively appreciate the problem and our willingness to actually become the solution as ourselves, as truly enlightened human beings.

Andrew Cohen

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