COHEN AND EVOLUTIONARY ENLIGHTENMENT

The ground of being is empty of everything. It is an objectless, spaceless, timeless, thoughtless void. But everything that exists has come from this no-place, including you and me. This empty ground that we all emerged from is the womb of the entire universe. When something came from nothing fourteen billion years ago, the nothing didn't disappear. That unborn, unmanifest dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is constantly arising.

The experience of meditation enables you to know this empty ground within your own self. Even in the midst of the chaotic movement of thought and feeling, you can discover a current of stillness that is the echo of the ground of being. And there is a great mystery in that current—a miraculous, enlightening depth that seems to answer all questions and relieve all doubts.

Traditionally, enlightenment has been defined as this profound awakening to the ground of being—an awakening in which the seeker finds liberation through transcending the world of time and space. But in the new enlightenment, which is redefined in an evolutionary context, the discovery of this primordial ground is not an end in itself. It becomes the essential foundation from which the individual is freed to participate wholeheartedly in the evolutionary process. What arises out of that ground is an impulse to evolve, an impulse that is not separate from the explosion in motion that emerged from nothing when the universe was born. I call this the Authentic Self, and the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment is to liberate this creative principle in human consciousness so that it can transform us and the world around us.

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