07.28.11

Cohen’s confusion over evolution

Posted in General at 11:23 am by nemo

The Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment: From Minus One to Zero to Plus One

Andrew Cohen’s attempt to link evolution and enlightenment is an ongoing confusion we have commented on many times, here and at The Gurdjieff Con. Cohen, next to ‘secular buddhism’, which we have exposed, is another brand of the fake being used to undermine western New Age spiritualities. Here is one paragraph:

Enlightenment means consciousness beyond ego and evolution means development in time. So Evolutionary Enlightenment means the development in time of consciousness beyond ego. The path, in the context of evolutionary enlightenment, is, at least in theory, quite simple. It is a journey from identification with ego to identification with the evolutionary impulse. It is a radical transformation of our relationship to the human experience, from one that is fundamentally negative, narcissistic, compulsive, and rigid to one that is inherently positive, liberated, consciously creative, and perpetually evolving.

This explanation doesn’t make sense, and we have to wonder whether Cohen really understands ‘englitenment’. Enlightenment is not a ‘state of consciousness’, although it might well generate a companion state as some kind of consciousness reflecting that state beyond states, enlightenment. Enlightenment is beyond states of ‘consciousness’, and is even beyond states of ‘self-consciousness’, in the progression given in classic form: sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, ‘state four’, or turiya, vulgarly hyped as ‘enlightenment’, a useful term nonetheless. One can make these statements without being enlightened: one can easily enter ‘default enlightenment’ by understanding the mere definition of what it is: you realize you already know what it is despite the fog veiling it.
Enlightenment is closer to a process of ‘understanding’ than to a state of consciousness. If you understand that
you are larger than a mere consciousness in a body, then a very crude state of enlightenment is the case for you. This ‘default’ realization of enlightenment should be embraced by all as a freebie that can help toward a deeper ‘englightenment’, one and the same, and yet the ‘real thing’ so to speak. But basic enlightenment is a state that is already the case, as you can sense from this depiction of ‘default enlightenment’.
Read our post Schopenhauer on Death (use the searchbox) to see that being beyond ego is a already the case for all.

Evolution is development in time, OK. But that doesn’t make ‘becoming enlightened’ a form of evolution. If anything evolution deepens illusion, and takes the consciousness away from itself into world alienation.

It is possible some future man will have a different relation to his potential enlightenment, but it is hard to see how he can do anything to reach that new condition. To say he must evolve to that state is a phrase that has no meaning. It is a situation controlled by Greater Nature, and we don’t have any real options here. But we do have the options to become enlightened.
The potential for enlightenment ‘evolved’ (or was evolved in him) in the earliest men, and the evocation of that potential is one of the dramas of man’s historical development, especially visible in India. In a real sense, man is already enlightened: all he has to do is realize it. That realization, which is a form of understanding rather than a state of consciousness, cannot be achieved as an evolutionary given (as far as I know), but only as a potential. But the sad fact is that historical action tends to degrade to lower states of consciousness, mechanical states not even at the level of self-consciousness.
Perhaps it is this that confuses Cohen et al. into thinking that meditation toward enlightenment can induce a new evolution of man. That’s an illusion. Man is perfectly capable of enlightenment as he is, but the path to that is an arduous search for a method that works, or for the secret to making methods (e.g. meditation) really work.

Man has thus already ‘evolved’ that potential to become enlightened, and is already enlightened by the nature of the case: it is his job to realize it. Cohen is strangely confused here, but in all fairness, I should point to the source of this kind of thinking in Blavatsky and the Theosophists. It is absent in the ancient sutras which did not have the data for evolution that we have now. Possible anticipations of the evolutionary category are undoubtedly present in ancient India, but the details are not clear to me, and are often presented in a muddle contrasting ‘involution’ and ‘evolution’. At the risk of still another muddle of that distinction (which I tend to avoid) I might note that Cohen’s confusion might arise from thinking that ‘ego shows involution’, therefore surpassing ego is ‘evolution. But he has abandoned the distinction (which is pretty muddled), which has increased his confusion.
Blavatsky correctly saw the problems with Darwinism, and was an early dissenter, but the standards of rigor she adopted were so ragged (to put it midly) that the resulting critique did more to discredit critics than anything else. This New Age confusion of the evolution category and the self-development category is chronic and in some cases harmless, since anyone can change the meanings of words for use in other contexts. The use of the term ‘evolution’ has become so common in New Age circles as to be beyond repair. But it then requires an understanding of the different usage being adopted.
Why not stick to classic texts like Patanjali’s yoga sutras which have their own consistent usages and don’t use the term ‘evolution’.
Evolution as development in time is likely to be the opposite of enlightenment, which terminates the connection with rebirth in time.
The real early evolution of man is a true enigma, and we should respect that enigma to the extent of not letting tom-dick-and-harry gurus like Cohen come along and try to control the idea for their personal power by saying they understand evolution, when they do not.

It almost seeems as if the real evolution of man is ‘kept hidden, under lock and key’, as I have always suspected, precisely to prevent this attempted take-over by the guru types who stand to profit from the fiction they know/control the evolution of consciousness. Anyone who really understands the evolution of early human consciousness should be able to give us the ‘facts’ of how that happened. And that they can’t do. We just don’t know how it happened, and can be pretty sure it wasn’t the result of homo erectus doing meditation under the guidance of gurus.
It is possible that the evolution category is inappropriate altogether here, for man. The ‘evolution’ of man may only be applicable to the basic hominid frame, the coming of ‘consciousness’ (or the spectrum of consciousness, involving the self-consciousness) being something else, as many have suspected changing the discussion with (equally confused) terms like ‘cosmic consciousness’ to express the fact of man stepping into a larger universe. J.G. Bennett, frequently cited here, adopts this approach, in a variant.

But if the ‘power of attention’ is present in animals then it is probably correct to use the term evolution from low to high, with the high end showing this mysterious explosion of consciousness in early man onwards.
But as with the issue of ‘attention’, the question is larger than that of ‘consciousness’, it is also a question of the ‘will’ of an individual, and the emergence of ‘individuality’ and the potential ‘will’ of a free agent.

We really don’t understand ourselves well enough to dogmatize about how man evolved. It is a riddle and a half, and even ‘enlightened’ men are doubtfully able to expound on the ‘evolution’ of man.

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