I think integrity, more than anything else, needs to be the foundational factor of the integral, post-postmodern stage. This isn’t fundamentally about lines, levels, or quadrants; it’s about continually striving for perfect integrity, in the biggest possible sense and for the biggest possible reasons (and knowing that, in an evolving Kosmos, we’re never going to reach a static perfection).

The AQAL framework is needed, though, to guide us in this inwardly felt pursuit, illuminating as it does the fact that at this point in our species’ development, integrity needs to happen at all levels, across all lines, between the One and the Many, the Inner and the Outer, simultaneously. It’s an inconceivably enormous task, planetary in scale (and beyond), and impossible for any individual to achieve alone. All we can do is all we can do, however, so I think the wholehearted and committed cultivation of our own individual integrity should be our personal pursuit and ongoing contemplation, 24/7. And from that increasingly solid foundation, we can inspire others with our own living example and thereby endeavor to forge integrity in the intersubjective and interobjective domains as well…

I’m a student of Andrew Cohen’s, and his “Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment” are essentially pointing to this radically nondual, AQAL integrity: where an individual’s purest motives (1st Principle) are mirrored in that individual’s actions (2nd Principle), and where that fully autonomous, integrated individual (3rd Principle) lives and works in nondual harmony with the greater collective of his peers and society (4th Principle), all of which is happening in a Kosmocentric, integral edge-pushing context of constant evolutionary tension (5th Principle) and holonic natural hierarchy (6th Principle).

In my own experience, I know that even after over a decade of studying and, to some degree, mastering integral theory at a cognitive level, the only thing that seems to have any traction whatsoever in actually inching my self — and my life — out of its profound embeddedness in the postmodern swamp is my own sincere pursuit of integrity. Because if there’s anything that is antithetical to our culture of postmodern fragmentation (and our own relativistic and narcissistic values), it’s integrity — forged in the soul, for the sake of the whole, from the Ground of Being up.

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. :)

There’s nothing like spending a whole day doing nothing but abiding in, and as, that eternal and infinite source and substance of all that is. I can see why the concept of the Sabbath, a day devoted purely to the contemplation of the sacred, has endured for millennia. Even for those of us lucky enough to be able to live in a spiritual/religious community 24/7, there’s still nothing like having a whole day each week to drop everything, step utterly out of the mind and ecstatically beyond time, and focus all of one’s attention on God.

By the end of the practice day, as we were finishing our last meditation & chanting session tonight, I was sitting so far out of time, blissed and gone, that it could have been any year, any century, for all I could tell. When the entire universe is experienced as ungraspably ever-new, moment to moment, you realize that nobody actually knows anything…except that the universe is ultimately an absolute Mystery, and that mystery is what we really are.

That’s the question I want to explore over the coming weeks on this blog. It’s something that, as a student of Andrew Cohen’s teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment, I think about all the time, and it’s also a clear line of inquiry that I think may finally give this blog of mine some juice (and compel me to make the time to post to it!). The question of what it means to be Kosmocentric — to be identified with the Kosmos as one’s own Self, to be alive to the “post-postmodern” state/stage/perspective of consciousness — has been explored to some depth in the writings of integral philosopher Ken Wilber, as well as in the regular “Guru & Pandit” dialogues between Wilber and Andrew Cohen in the pages of What Is Enlightenment? magazine. But I think the concept is so new, the territory so vastly uncharted, and the implications so important for the future of human evolution that it can’t be inquired into enough.

So, to kick things off, let’s start by addressing an obvious question: Why is this term spelled Kosmocentric instead of Cosmocentric (or even Cosmos-centric)? The simple reason is that it has to do with the difference between the ancient Pythagorean conception of a living, multidimensional Kosmos vs. the modern scientific notion of a dead, material Cosmos, as elucidated at length by Ken Wilber. In Wilber’s integral philosophy, the difference between that K and C is profound; it’s the difference between a universe suffused with Goodness, Truth, and Beauty and a universe suffused with random chance and physics. So, true Wilberian that I am, I’m going to stick with this very useful convention. (You can read a short explanation I wrote about the distinction here.)

Next, check out this two-minute video, just produced by the A/V department at EnlightenNext, featuring Andrew Cohen explaining what it means to hold “A Kosmocentric Orientation”:

To be continued . . . (Comments and questions welcome! I’d love to get a real discussion going if people are interested in this.)

A: Well, I’ve met one or two people in my life in whom it appeared that the ego had literally died. But in those rare cases, I don’t think it was a result of the individuals’ own choices or efforts — it was more like a spontaneous combustion, an act of grace. So I do believe that the death of the ego is possible, but I don’t think it is an attainable goal. If something like that is going to occur, it’s beyond our control, and it’s extremely unlikely for most of us. I don’t personally think it’s possible for anybody, through the power of their will alone, to eradicate the ego completely. But the point is, it doesn’t really matter. If you are willing to face and take responsibility for your ego’s self-centered motives, conditioned responses, and often irrational impulses, to such a degree that you are able to choose not to act on them, they might as well not exist. If you don’t act on them, the world is never going to know about them. There won’t be any karmic consequences. And that is a reasonable, realizable, attainable goal. So I am convinced that, in this way, it is possible to transcend ego to a profound degree, simply through the power of one’s own awakened intention to do so.

To read the full piece that this quote is excerpted from, click here.

And if you want to hear an exclusive audio excerpt from Andrew’s retreat in Italy, which is happening right now in the hills outside Florence, you can stream or download “Faith, Strength, and Consciousness.”

(Tip of the day: add &fmt=18 to the end of any YouTube url to view HQ videos and/or original-quality files as they were uploaded to the server; for blog embedding instructions, which require additional code tweakages, click here.)

I swear, if my generation weren’t so painfully narcissistic, we might actually be capable of mustering up the energy, inspiration, and life-positive creativity to build a better machine instead of wasting our time cynically raging against the old one, following in the victimized footsteps of the Boomers and Gen-Xers like so many cloned sheep. :)