Andrew Cohen is a unique and fiery voice in today's spiritual scene. Author of numerous books and publisher of the highly respected magazine, What Is Enlightenment?, Andrew brings a profound sense of depth and urgency to contemporary spirituality.
Andrew and Ken—known by many as “The Guru and the Pandit”—begin this latest conversation by addressing a common criticism of their dialogues together, namely, that there is no true dialogue to speak of: they simply pat each other on the back and agree. Ken suggests several reasons why that isn’t quite accurate, among them being the fact that to really get to the bottom of a detailed theoretical disagreement can take several hours at a minimum—which is well beyond the scope of both IN and WIE? (Integral University, launching in November, will be the home of such high-flying theoretical debate).
In an effort to understand how a “spiritual” person should relate to conflict, Andrew leads us into the heart of this dialogue by suggesting three different ways that Spirit—or the Absolute, the Sacred, the All—is often characterized: as emptiness or cessation, as ever-present nondual suchness, and as the creative impulse of Spirit-in-action. As he explains, how you understand conflict will vary widely depending on what definition of Spirit you are using.
Jumping into the fray, Ken points out that perhaps one of the most complete statements of how to relate to conflict was in the Bhagavad Gita. When faced with the impending necessity of battle, Arjuna asked Krishna what he should do. Krishna’s answer was simple: Do your duty and remember the Lord. In the relative world, do your duty as a soldier and fight for all that is good, honorable, and just—but do so in constant remembrance of the ever-present perfection of nondual suchness. Do not hate your enemy—for they are your very own Self—but do not fail to act forcefully if that action serves a greater good.
That wisdom still resonates today: allowing Hitler to exterminate six million human beings because one’s spiritual beliefs don’t permit the use of force under any circumstances would border on being criminal inaction. In that situation, you’re not being spiritual; you’re failing to “do your duty” as an ethical human being, and so your “remembrance of the Lord” is going to be deeply, deeply fractured.
A strong advocate of “evolutionary spirituality,” Andrew mentions another kind of imperative placed upon awakened individuals in the twenty-first century: that of consciously evolving the form and expression of enlightenment. Going on, he explains that as one committed to the evolution of spirituality, one is necessarily going to be in certain kinds of conflict with the forms of yesterday’s spirituality—and that’s okay! Each moment of Spirit’s ongoing rendezvous with its own fullest potential is both an ecstatic birth of the new and a grueling death of the old, and to resist the former for fear of the latter is certainly understandable. But to mask that fear of relative change by claiming that one is simply representing eternal Truth is to once again to find God in one half of a pair of opposites. As Andrew and Ken agree, a truly nondual realization embraces and transcends all opposites, including creation and destruction, form and formless, evolutionary and eternal….