Sovereignty and Coherence

The goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment has always been the simultaneous attainment of autonomy and communion, within a context of natural hierarchy. This goal is also its most beautiful mystery: the seamless bringing together of these two paradoxical dimensions of enlightened awareness without apparent contradiction.

True autonomy or “sovereignty” involves the cultivation of a rare independence in one’s thinking. It demonstrates that one has struggled, and continues to struggle, with the existential challenge of being human at a very high level, and with an unusual degree of maturity and seriousness.

It also means that one is cultivating profound freedom from the opinions and thoughts of others, and from collective or cultural conditioning. It takes a great deal of effort, courage, transparency – and serious inner work – to do so in a way that is not egoic, superior or arrogant.

We need to learn how to reflect, with a high degree of objectivity, on the nature of our experience, both inner and outer. We must develop awakened alertness, and a profound commitment to our own clarity, sanity and liberation.

The more sovereign one becomes, the more one is able to authentically express transparency and integrity in and through one’s relationship with others – and it is in our relationships where this new cognitive musculature will be tested.

At the same time, in an enlightenment context, through the awakening to higher states of consciousness we are learning to recognise the fundamental truth of non-separation or oneness – oneness with oneself, the other, the others, the world and the whole universe.

As our capacity for radical sovereignty deepens, simultaneously we want to develop an ability to ceaselessly let go of any need to see ourselves as special or separate. We want to recognise and cultivate radical coherence.

The art and science of bringing these two apparently paradoxical dimensions together seamlessly and without contradiction is the miracle of Intersubjective Nonduality – a profoundly awakened state in which radical sovereignty meets radical coherence.

In this teaching, Andrew Cohen will explore the mysterious synergistic relationship between sovereignty and coherence, and the beauty of enlightened awareness when it is expressed collectively through these two channels simultaneously.