Together, Andrew and Ken generate some of the most interesting, passionate, and leading-edge conversations on spirituality and evolution anywhere in the world. For this reason, we are pleased to announce that Integral Naked will be regularly posting new material from this dynamic pair for several months to come. If you haven’t profoundly entered into these dialogues, we sincerely invite you to do so. Whatever you think of Andrew or Ken, their conversations are out of this world!

In this dialogue, Andrew and Ken explore the possibility that, in the not-too-distant future, advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology will enable us to extend human life by decades, or even centuries and millennia. Given that exterior advances in science often seem to far outpace the interior growth necessary to wield those technologies responsibly, what kind of world lies ahead of us?

Ken goes on to give a brief rundown of three different notions of immortality, corresponding with the three different selves (or “bodies”) we each have. To the gross, physical self, immortality simply means cheating death and living forever. For the subtle self, or soul, immortality is achieved through limitless reincarnation and rebirth. For both the physical self and the soul, immortality means everlasting existence in time—but for the causal, or ultimate, Self, immortality is “attained” through understanding that one has never entered the stream of time to begin with. Immortality then is not living forever, but realizing timeless eternity.

As Ken explains, it is this intuition of eternity that ultimately drives the various immortality projects of the separate self-sense (or ego). Intuiting the infinite, the self then (mis)applies that intuition to its physical form or its soul, and then tries to make that vehicle of selfhood last forever. Such is the activity of what Ken calls the Atman project: the intuition of infinity applied to finite occasions—and in an evolutionary context, those finite occasions are developmental.

Using the chakra model as a simple way to locate an individual’s developmental center of gravity, one can find examples of the Atman project at each chakra. This means that, given the opportunity to live, say, for 5,000 years, people at chakras 1, 2, and 3 would, respectively, eat, copulate, and conquer for 5,000 years. And this is the point that is so often missed by extremely intelligent, extremely well-meaning theorists: most human beings will simply perpetuate the values of their level of development for as many years as you add to their life. Nazis would have loved life-extension technology.

Given such a stark example, it’s easy to see how without an understanding of stages of interior development, efforts to extend human life are going to be a decidedly partial, or even reckless, affair. Andrew goes on to expand on this topic by sharing his vision for a radically evolutionary nondual spirituality, in which one identifies as, and takes responsibility for, the creative impulse of the entire Kosmos—for the sake of evolution itself. As Andrew and Ken agree, it’s at some of these higher levels of development that maybe, just maybe, we can display the wisdom necessary to live up to the demands of what may soon become a very long precious human birth....

We invite you to join in on this special “extended play” dialogue between these two extraordinary souls....