An Incredible Moment in Time

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. . . . for the full and perfect fulfillment of the evolutionary urge, [the spiritual] illumination and change must take up and re-create the whole being, mind, life and body: it must be not only an inner experience of the Divinity but a remoulding of both the inner and outer existence by its power; it must take form not only in the life of the individual but as a collective life of gnostic beings established as a highest power and form of the becoming of the Spirit in the earth-nature.
— Sri Aurobindo

The goal now, as audacious as it sounds, is not merely to transcend the world but to transform the world, to become an agent of the evolutionary impulse itself. Indeed, in surrendering one's ego to that, one literally feels oneself being filled up with a divine and luminous energy and a passion to transform the world and the whole universe for a cause that has nothing to do with oneself. . . . Eventually, I started to call this teaching "evolutionary enlightenment" or "impersonal evolutionary enlightenment." In this teaching, there is an emphasis not only on the realization of emptiness and pure Being but also on the need to become a radically and profoundly transformed human being who is going to be able to manifest our higher evolutionary potential in the world. . . . And in this evolutionary enlightenment, the significant element, as I understand it anyway, is the surrender to the movement of an awakened compulsion to participate wholeheartedly in the evolutionary process for the sake of evolution itself. That's what evolutionary enlightenment is all
about, not merely the attainment of one's personal liberation from or transcendence of this world.
— Andrew Cohen