God's Playing A New Game

Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen on
The Myth Of The Given

In this remarkable dialogue, Wilber and Cohen challenge the tendency towards fundamentalism inherent in all major religions - Eastern, Western and everything in between.

About God, they argue that when seen in an evolutionary context, who and what God is can no longer be taken as fixed - that from a developmental perspective, God is also evolving, just as we are.

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Wilber: Albert Einstein is said to have performed the following thought experiment when he was contemplating relativity. He asked himself a question: if you were literally riding on the edge of a light beam and you held a mirror in front of you, could you see yourself? The answer is no. If nothing travels faster than light, light can't get to the mirror to reflect your reflection, so you would see nothing.

That's another good image for the edge of evolution. There's nothing in the future to see. We're creating it as we go out there. And it's pretty scary to look in the mirror and not see anything.

Cohen: The Authentic Self is the expression of the evolutionary imperative itself, within the human heart and mind. It is a perpetual, unending and always ecstatic impulse in consciousness that strives only to create the future. But in order for the authentic self to function uninhibitedly, the individual has to be willing to continually let go and embrace ever more of the world of form in every moment. For the individual, emotionally, psychologically and philosophically, this is what is so ultimately challenging about a truly evolutionary context at the level of consciousness - the relentless demand to continue to let go at these very deep and subtle levels.

I think it's only a rare individual who actually is going to have the courage, the authenticity of interest, the fearlessness, the liberated awareness to be able and willing to continually let go in that way and at the same time have his or her own deepest sense of confidence in the nature of being and in life remain absolutely unthreatened.

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Towards the end of the interview they discuss The Shadow - what they call the disowned self. They explain how, starting at a very early age, aspects of ourselves which are seen as unacceptable are denied, repressed and projected, creating myriad forms of dis-ease as the repressed aspects fail to develop past the stage at which they were split off.
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Wilber: Now if we could get rid of these impulses just like that and they stayed out there, there would be no problem. But the trouble is that they are actually parts of our own self, and every time we push something to the other side of the self-boundary, we diminish our own consciousness; we make ourselves smaller. And that keeps us out of the present moment.

Cohen: In order to free up our consciousness, we have to own these repressed parts of ourselves - we have to embrace all of them, we have to bring light into all the dark and hidden corners of our self, we have to claim ownership of the entirety of our I - before we can authentically transcend our ego in the spiritual sense.

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They go on to explore the shortcomings of either meditation or psychotherapy alone to unblock and liberate these repressed aspects. As Ken Wilber puts it, "The meditative context is all about letting go, but we can only do that if we deal with our dissociated impulses first ... What we want to do is basically heal the vehicles through which we will manifest our enlightened awareness."

Andrew Cohen sums up: "...it is only those who awaken to a larger purpose, a purpose bigger than their own wholeness, salvation or even enlightenment, who will actually find the energy and the resources to begin to own these darker and more unconscious parts of themselves and really change in ways that make all the difference in the world."

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