The 5th of 5 tennants.

Date:   5/21/2006 6:23:08 AM ( 18 y ago)

The Fifth Tenet:
For the Sake of the Whole

The fifth tenet, For the Sake of the Whole, recontextualizes the seeker’s fundamental relationship to the spiritual path. It describes the evolution of the very motive to be free.

When we embark on the path, most of us naturally want freedom or enlightenment for our own sake. This is why we begin with the first tenet, which says I want to be free more than anything else. But if we sincerely pursue that one-pointed aspiration and authentically develop and mature, we will find that eventually our motivation begins to shift. As our understanding and experience grow, we realize that the desire to be free is not a personal matter. Indeed, to the seeker who is becoming a finder, it becomes more and more apparent that we are all part of a vast evolutionary process, and that the aspiration for freedom is nothing less than the expression of the evolutionary impulse itself within the human heart and mind. In this, we recognize that the pursuit of enlightenment could never be merely for our own liberation. The movement of spiritual awakening is part and parcel of the cosmic process of development, and the purpose of enlightenment is ultimately to bring the light of awakened consciousness to that process itself.

Fourteen billion years ago something burst out of nothing, and the highest expression of that miraculous surge of becoming is found in the human being’s emerging capacity for higher consciousness. Consciousness is not the possession of any particular individual. But it is only through particular individuals that consciousness can evolve. So the goal of evolutionary enlightenment is for the individual to become liberated from the fears and desires of the ego so that he or she becomes an open channel through which consciousness itself is free to develop and express itself in this world.

The fifth tenet says I want to be free not for my own sake but for the sake of the whole. When this becomes our spontaneous response to the longing for liberation, something very significant has occurred. What began as a freely made choice has become a choiceless obligation. Our fundamental motive has evolved from one that is self-serving to one that is not separate from the very motive behind the expanding universe—the pure passion of the big bang, the God impulse, which is our own authentic self.

When that pure passion becomes our own passion, human life becomes ennobled—it becomes the holy life, the spiritual life, a life of meaning and value. We discover that we have come home and have found our place in the whole matrix of the cosmos. We know who we are and why we are here. As long as our fundamental motive is personal and self-centered, life will never deeply make sense. But when we embrace a motive that absolutely transcends the personal, every moment becomes infused with a powerful sense of purpose. That’s the death of the ego. All our petty self-concern is radically displaced because we are no longer living for our own sake but are now living for the sake of the whole, consumed by a passion to be utterly free so that nothing will inhibit our ability to participate wholeheartedly in the evolutionary process.

Andrew Cohen



 

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