The Kosmocentric Stage - Part 2

August 19, 2008 By Tom

My wife snapped this cell-phone pic of London’s famous statue of Eros, the Greek god better known as Cupid (his Roman derivative), while we were walking through Piccadilly Circus on Saturday. There were lots of people sitting around the base of the distinctive landmark, but hardly anyone seemed interested in the statue itself. If only they knew what it represented! I said to my wife, who is also a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment and therefore shares my emotional connection to that symbol of the primordial, creative Love and Energy that gave birth to this limitless Kosmos over 13.7 billion years ago and surges through its every atom still…

The 20th-century philosopher-theologian Alfred North Whitehead, in his Adventures in Ideas (1933), offered this beautifully succinct ode to Eros, the Kosmocentric God:

“We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realizations, each in its due season. Thus a process must be inherent in God’s nature whereby his infinity is acquiring realization.”

And yesterday, in my teacher Andrew Cohen’s quote of the week, he also referenced this “first-born of the gods,” updating and invigorating its ancient significance in a powerful explanation of the newly emerging Kosmocentric view:

“When a human being awakens to the cosmic perspective of what’s called ‘deep time,’ it is always nothing short of a spiritual revelation. This occurs when the self directly glimpses its own nature as the product of a developmental process that is occurring on many levels simultaneously — cosmological, planetary, cultural, biological, psycho-emotional, and spiritual.

“It was my own gradual discovery of and awakening to this perspective that eventually compelled me to reinterpret and redefine the meaning and significance of enlightenment for our own time. The first step in this awakening was seeing through what appeared to be my own personal experience and discovering that it was actually a very small part of a vast impersonal process. The second step was recognizing that the process itself is evolving on multiple levels, in and through time. It was then that I saw that the primordial urge to become is the new and emerging face of the eternal God. I began to understand that the evolutionary impulse, God as Eros, is the God of the future.”

In the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment, we typically refer to Eros as the “Authentic Self,” which you can read more about here. In my next post in this “Kosmocentric Stage” series, I plan to explore the basic progression of the evolution of consciousness and culture, as it proceeds in expanding orders of care and awareness from me, to us, to all of us, to all that is; or from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to…Kosmocentric. Stay tuned. :)


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