Evolutionary Enlightenment

Evolutionary Enlightenment is a philosophy that mixes teachings about Enlightenment from Eastern traditions with a Western scientific understanding of evolution.

Evolutionary Enlightenment is inspired, on one hand, by the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the Buddhist tradition. On the other hand, it also follows in the tradition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the German Idealist philosophers. In contemporary culture, it is associated with the work of Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext, and Ken Wilber, a leading figure in the Integral movement. The ideas of Evolutionary Enlightenment have been discussed and elucidated over the past five years by Cohen and Wilber in the pages of EnlightenNext magazine, as well as in Wilber's recent book Integral Spirituality. An evolutionary approach to Enlightenment or self-realization is also outlined in the work of Beatrice Bruteau, a Teilhardian scholar and theologian, and mentioned in the recent bestseller A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. The cultural relevance of this approach to spirituality has been recognized by those studying broader cultural change, such as Spiral Dynamics author Don Beck, who has called it "a map or model for personal emergence, showing the qualities that individuals must embody to become the leaders we now need."

Read more about Evolutionary Enlightenment:  Integral Theory, Bibliography

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