~an interview with Ken Wilber in Pathways: A Magazine of Psychological and Spiritual Transformation.

“Pathways: What about the notion that these {meditative} experiences of “One-Taste” or “Kosmic Consciousness” are just a by-product of meditation, and therefore aren’t “really real”?

Ken Wilber: Well that can be said of any type of knowledge that depends on an instrument. “Kosmic Consciousness” often depends on the instrument of meditation. So what? Seeing the nucleus of a cell depends on a microscope. Do we then say that the cell nucleus isn’t real because it’s only the by-product of a microscope? Do we say the moons of Jupiter aren’t real because they depend on a telescope? The people who raise this objection are almost always people who don’t want to look through the instrument of meditation, just as the Churchmen refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and thus acknowledge the moons of Jupiter. Let them live with their refusal. But let us— to the best of our ability, and hopefully driven by the best of charity or compassion— try to convince them to look, just once, and see for themselves. Not coerce them, just invite them. I suspect a different world might open for them, a world that has been abundantly verified by all who look through the telescope and microscope, of meditation…

The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and still ahead of ours. In other words, they are most definitely not figures from the past. They figures of the future.

In their spirituality, they did not tap into yesterday, they tapped into tomorrow. In their profound awareness, we do not see the setting sun, but the new dawn. They absolutely did not inherit the past, they inherited the future…

We are yet the bastard sons and daughters of an evolution not yet done with us, caught always between the fragments of yesterday and the unions of tomorrow, unions apparently destined to carry us far beyond anything we can possibly recognize today, and unions that, like all such births, are exquisitely painful and unbearably ecstatic. And with yet just the slightest look— once again, within— new marriages unfold, and the drama carries on.

Evolution— wherever it appears— manifest itself as a series of transcendences, of ascents, of emergences— and emergences of higher order wholes. For to remember is really to re-member, or join again in unity, and that is why evolution consists of a series of higher order wholes until there is only wholeness. Evolution is holistic because it is nature’s remembrance of God.” ~ from The Simple Feeling Of Being by Ken Wilber

Or you could follow Juan Enrique into, what seems to me, a truly terrifying world!

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