Andrew Cohen: How do you define God? | Big Think

Andrew Cohen: How do you define God?

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“There is no one out there and there is no one up there.”

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Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen is an American spiritual teacher, bestselling author, and founder of the global nonprofit EnlightenNext and its award-winning publication, EnlightenNext magazine. His original teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment redefines spiritual awakening within the context of cosmic evolution and highlights a new understanding of God or Spirit as the creative impulse toward change in both self and culture.

His bestselling book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening is the product of his 26 years of work and has garnered praise from some of today’s leading spiritual and cultural figures as one of the most important spiritual works of our time. Andrew lives and works at the EnlightenNext headquarters in Western Massachusetts and spends much of his time travelling around the world giving retreats, seminars, and public talks about Evolutionary Enlightenment.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How do you define God?

Andrew Cohen: Okay. Well, I- also I always give a caveat. I say, “Well, I’ve been teaching for 22 years.” I said, “For most of that time I never used that particular word because it usually would bring up notions of some kind of mythical figure that doesn’t exist anymore and that never really did exist.” So I always- I keep reminding people that there’s no one out there and there’s no one up there. The way I describe what God is I say that God is the sum totality of everything that exists and doesn’t exist. So the sum totality of everything that exists and doesn’t exist we could say is being and becoming. Being represents the unmanifest empty ground or void from which the material universe sprung forth 14 billion years ago and becoming is the entire manifest cosmos. So the unmanifest and the manifest as being and becoming, that entirety, the totality of everything that is and is not, is what I would say what God is. And then finally I would say that in evolutionary spirituality and in evolutionary enlightenment we want- we begin to put a great deal of attention on the becoming or eros, the becoming and the urge to become side of who and what God is because I think for the individual at the leading edge at the beginning of the 21st century that- the created impulse, the ecstatically urgent desire to be here and to- as the greater process I think is the most important aspect of who and what God is for us to realize right now.

Question: How do you define Love?

Andrew Cohen: Well, the answer is absolutely yes but there are different forms and expressions of love, of what love is, so the love that a mother feels for her child is very different than the kind of love that a lover feels to his beloved, which is very different than the kind of impersonal absolute love that is the very nature of what God actually is.