Thursday, April 25, 2002

Excellent interview with Ken Wilber in What is Enlightenment? magazine this month (not avaliable at the website--only on the newsstand so far). Also an interview with Robert Wright, which I haven't read yet. The Wilber intrerview is very good, especially if you are already familiar with his thought. I think it's clear by now that Wilber can no longer be called a normative Buddhist--taking a page from Aurobindo, he is transforming the tradition. A Buddhist heretic.

KW: ...In a sense, the nondual realization, which became a historical realization for a fair number of people right around the turn of the century, including Sri Arobindo, is still unfolding, keeps evolving--spirit's own self-expression keeps unfolding--and it happens, as far as we can tell, to build on what it did yesterday, which is why evolution is indeed an unfolding event in the world of form. So as this incarnational nonduality, this ultimately ecstatic tantric nonduality itself, began to unfold, and its forms of manifestation began to unfold, you find that by the time that you get to people like Sri Aurobindo, there's such a full-bodied understanding of this process. Even though some of the earlier sages were ultimately enlightened for their time, there's a richness, an unfolding, a resonance of spirit's own incarnational understanding in some of these recent sages that just gives you goose bumps.

AC: Wow. So what you're talking about is the evolution of enlightenment itself.

KW: Yes. If we talk about enlightenment as the union of emptiness and form, the pure emptiness doesn't change because it doesn't enter the stream of time, but the form does change, and the two of those are inextricably united. And therefore, there is, in that sense, an evolution of enlightenment.

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