August 28, 2012
The Via Positiva and Evolutionary Enlightenment – Part Five
This is the final installment in our series of guest posts from British artist, engineer, graphic designer, and philosopher, Mike King, introducing the Via Positiva – a spiritual orientation that is life-positive and interested in engagement with the world – and exploring its historical roots and discussing the direction he feels it’s pointing us to in the future.
This last essay in the series is dedicated to Andrew’s work and how Evolutionary Enlightenment fits into the broader view of the Via Positiva.
Read the introduction to ‘Part Five’ below and then download the full essay in PDF form or, if you missed any of the other essays, check them out here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. You can also now download the complete package here.
The Via Positiva and Andrew Cohen’s ‘Evolutionary Enlightenment’
In this last essay in this series on the Via Positiva I compare the Western Via Positiva with the teachings of American guru Andrew Cohen on Evolutionary Enlightenment. Cohen’s intense and extraordinary vision of a new enlightenment has a substantial following, publishing record and infrastructure to support his vision in various centers round the world. It is a vision coupled with an open invitation that Cohen has extended over many years in his dialogues with luminaries of all kinds, in effect an open invitation to come forward with a program to fulfill the vision.
The track record of Cohen’s open debates with other teachers is remarkable: it suggests an evolution in the very basis of guruship itself. It means that spiritual teachers are triangulating their own teachings with those of others, a step rarely taken before in history. This opens the door to new forms of spiritual collaboration.
In writing up the Western Via Positiva and contemplating the common ground and differences with Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment, I realized that I was in effect constructing a candidate program for instantiating Cohen’s vision. I am calling it “The Dolphin Program” on account of the animal that took an evolutionary leap which was also a recapitulation of a previous form of existence. It suggests a program in which the “evolution” of Cohen could meld with the “recapitulation” of the Western Via Positiva…Click here to continue reading (to download the PDF, ‘right-click’ and select “save as”)
Download the complete set of five essays here. To learn more about Mike King, visit his website.
Join Andrew for a series of free monthly broadcasts. The next one will be a dialogue with integral philosopher Steve McIntosh exploring ‘Evolution & Enlightenment’ on September 30th at 2pm ET (USA). Register here.
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Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, founder of EnlightenNext, and the author of 
Hello Mike,
I read your text with great interest, being myself a complete lover of the Western via positiva and particularly of Neoplatonicism and the Western enlightenment. I have tasted the wonderful delineation of your thinking and the really soft touch and refinement of it. I fully appreciate this, like a treat which is too rare is this world where simplistic ideas seem to be the only ones able to make the headlines.
I think it is nice that Andrew published you and gave you the opportunity to dialog with him. I almost envy you here because I never had this chance so far , but well… probably it is my Karmic journey here. The communication so far didn’t happen at all compared to what could have been. Complete Kosmical under-performance with Mister Andrew. Or maybe it is all that it was… God Knows.
In any case, I also have a program for the next step which differs ( maybe a bit, maybe not that much) from yours. yours is Recapitulation…. love it. I would have given my Soul for it a few years ago ( an this fact says much about European Sipritual Drive and the deep link and love between our two cultures) , but now it seems to me that it is not enough. Or maybe it is too much, too complex. You see, with the digitalization the world the capacity for attention of the human brian cannot catch anymore the complexity of refined thought. Thought like yours, like mine. We “feel ” that is “sounds” great and complex but… somehow… we don’t have time anymore for this. You are an expert in digitalization, in the virtual world. So maybe you reached the same compulsions as mine. There are two solutions out of this exponential bubble :
1. maybe the digital bubble will collapse and we will come back to simpler values including direct contact between humans. Recapitulation or a way backward ?
2. The second solution is more interesting. Somehow our capacity for conceptualization will evolve. I mean, under the pressure of the digitalized bubble it will become at the same time simpler while very refined. It will in a sense “transcend and include” complexity, it will go deeper and thus become powerful. Thinking, by simplifying itself while integrating complexity will get an impact, a real power ….
How is this possible ? well “ simply” by the power of “Enlightened Thinking”. The real schism is that there are much more modes of thinking that what is proposed up to date by our materialistic paradigm. And as you noticed, any powerfully creative human, whether artist or scientist or politician will have touched one day or another this wonderful power of Creative Thinking. `My tentative program” would go more under this direction, with cognition put to incandescence and reaching the level of certainty that only Enlightened Masters had in the past and still have at the moment. The door to the future is in the union of simplicity and refinement. In the union of Absolute Certainty and Complexity.
Some people have started to make this bridge. To paraphrase the immense ( although very little known, i have no clue why ) Franklin Merrell Wolff, there are there modes of cognition : sensation, formal thinking and thinking through Identification. The latter mode brings Absolute Certainty, the second mode corresponds to our delineate logical, scientific paradigm, and the former mode is more ancient : cognition through direct experience.
You already see that at the Renaissance, the two first modes of Cognition were re-united into one. Namely the scientific method succeeded to re-unite direct observation with logical Thinking, producing the single greatest sift of modern history.
In the next stage I believe, we humans will succeed to Unite the three modes altogether : Sensation, logical thinking and Cognition Through Identification. This will make the bridge between the Descenders and the Ascenders, between the via Positiva and the via Negativa.
In any case, it was a real delight to read you.
Keep in touch when you pass through Paris.
Love, Catherine ( the French scientist you met in the EN center last year in London)