Creating A New World Of Enlightenment

Andrew Cohen
In the traditional notion of enlightenment, the egoless state is just consciousness or Being. There is no activity involved, no relationship.
It is easy to be egoless when there's no relationship. Anyone can experience egoless consciousness in the stillness of meditation.
The real challenge of enlightenment is egoless engage-ment in an intersubjective, creative context. That is the call of the future, a new enlightenment to bring into being.
The new enlightenment is not an individual but a collective emergence. It occurs when all individuals involved awaken simultaneously to the Authen-tic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse itself, the energy and intelligence that created the universe, experienced directly in the heart and mind.
In that awakening, there is no difference between the deepest spiritual revelation of oneness and a fully embodied, conscious engagement with others and with the life process itself.
The timeless paradox of enlightenment enters the stream of time in a collective or intersubjective context, and becomes the ground for a higher evolutionary or developmental process.
The Authentic Self or evolutionary impulse is the urge towards ever-greater complexity and higher integration. So in this state, there is living revelation that there is only One, while simultaneously there is the appearance of the many.
The many, in the knowledge of being One, are ceaselessly striving to realise greater complexity and higher integration.
If each individual is deeply committed to the Authentic Self, to such a profound degree that it has displaced the separate ego to become the primary locus of identity, something quite miraculous and dramatic starts to occur.
The nature of the Authentic Self is ecstatic urgency and unconditional commitment to creating the future. So when two or more individuals come together and awaken to the Authentic Self, a glorious future is created, at the level of consciousness, right now.
Heaven comes to earth now. Heaven is a state of being in which the ego is not necessarily transcended altogether but is overcome.
Ego is overcome when an individual's primary locus of identification shifts to the Authentic Self. Then the future at the level of consciousness does emerge in the present moment, and that's what a truly new world is.
It's not a vague utopian vision a thousand years from now; it's a new structure in consciousness that emerges at the deepest level, in the most interior dimension of the Cosmos, in real time, right now.
At first it is glimpsed as a new potential; eventually it becomes an actual structure in consciousness that emerges through the many simultaneously.
In this egoless field, everyone is relating to each other from a radically different perspective, for very different reasons. That is how a new world is born.
A new world means a new level or stage of development that we have to build together. Throughout history, there have always been extraordinary individuals who were trailblazers; but new stages of cultural development are not individuals.
They are intersubjective structures that are created in consciousness as people come together having transcended old value systems and world views and created new ones.
If the shared foundation upon which we build new structures is the transcendence of individual and collective ego, we are going to be consciously creating nothing less than an enlightened culture.