02.16.11

Andrew Cohen’s muddle on ‘evolution’

Posted in General at 1:26 pm by nemo

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/

Blurb from Enlightennext mag/blog:

Evolutionary Becoming: A New Orientation (Quote of the Week)
by Andrew Cohen
The notion of evolutionary becoming, or evolutionary emergence, is a very new and unique orientation for the self. It’s hard to even conceive of how different this orientation is from the ways we have traditionally and culturally been conditioned to …

Cohen is peddling a load of baloney on the subject of evolution, as noted here many times. Evolution and a ‘spiritual path’ are not the same thing. It was Blavatsky who seems to have started this confusion, with a literature on the subject of evolution and spirituality that was mendacious and misleading, and therefore useless for any practical purpose.
Andrew Cohen’s strategy here is unclear, pehaps he is simply ‘not too swift’ and in the middle of a dumb mistake.
Evolution must certainly have had a spiritual component, but one, in the spirit of Samkhya, would have been an aspect of nature (so let’s be wary of the term ‘spiritual’), and this must have been present at the dawn of homo sapiens. But we don’t know how that worked, or what happened, and these gurus are as ignorant as anyone else. You can’t be ignorant here, and peddle ‘spiritual enlightenment’ as a path.

The point is that evolution in the real sense is vastly more complex than we know, and there is no better understanding of the subject among self-styled gurus like Cohen who doesn’t know what he is talking about. His hyped evolution thesis is doing a disservice to New Agers and to the public in general. Further, he is too chicken to declare against Darwinism, leaving his usage ambiguous.
OK, Cohen is a fake and a fraud, but what about Gautama Buddha?
The question of human evolution is far larger than most people realize, and absolutely beyond the capacities even of a man like Gautama. Note that evolution is a coming into being of materializing entities, enlightenment going in reverse gear.

Further, Gautama was smack in the middle of the macroevolution we call the Axial Age, and yet he didn’t realize this fact, how could he have?!! But that shows that even enlightened consciousness cannot resolve the mystery of human evolution: the question is an order of magnitude beyond the capacities even of Buddhas.

I think Cohen should drop this theme. He focusses on it obsessively to try and promote his shennanigans, but this approach can only backfire.

Note that while Buddha couldn’t have/didn’t resolve the ‘evolution’ question he was an exemplar of the evolutionary mainline sequence of the eonic effect in its Axial Age phase. His teaching was a reformation of ancient Jain religious forms that no doubt emerged in primordial Axial Ages lost to us.
Whatever the case, the term ‘evolution’ should refer to species level developmental processes, and these are beyond the acitivities of individuals doing spiritual paths.

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