Reflections on my conversation with Lenaa Kumar
In a recent conversation with Lenaa Kumar, author of The Autobiography of God, we returned to a question that has occupied me for many years. It also comes up repeatedly in my conversations on co-creating the Third Attractor.
If we recognize that everything is an expression of one consciousness, how should we live in the world? Does that recognition lead us to accept everything as it is? Or does it give rise to a greater responsibility for what the world can become?
The answer depends on what we take awakening to be. It also has practical consequences for how humanity responds to the crises of our time.
The Perfection of What Is
One of the central insights of the nondual traditions, Advaita Vedanta in particular, is that our deepest nature is already whole, free and complete.
When the mind becomes still and our identification with thought and personal history loosens, we can discover a dimension of consciousness that nothing can touch. Nothing is missing there and nothing needs to be added. There is no problem to solve, no future to reach and no separate self that has to become something.
I spent many years immersed in this recognition, and I know how liberating it is. The freedom we were searching for turns out to have been present all along, beneath the activity of the mind and our efforts to make life match our expectations. From this vantage point, the distinctions between good and bad, creation and destruction, life and death lose their absolute character. Everything arises within the same indivisible reality.
The Indian tradition expresses this through the relationship between Shiva and Shakti. Shiva is pure consciousness, the unmoving ground of existence. Shakti is the dynamic energy through which the universe manifests. This understanding is close to my own.
Yet it leaves a question open. If everything is an expression of the divine and already perfect as it is, how should we relate to suffering, injustice, destruction, and the real possibility that humanity creates a future no one would want to live in? Are we meant only to witness it?
Agency Without a Separate Self
Lenaa and I also discussed free will. In the classical nondual view, the individual self is ultimately an illusion. No separate person stands outside the movement of existence making independent decisions. Everything happens within one reality.
I agree that there is no separate self. I question whether it follows that there is no agency. Agency may itself be an expression of the one reality.
Evolution has produced increasingly complex forms of organization. Life emerged, nervous systems developed, consciousness became able to reflect on itself, and human beings learned to imagine futures that do not yet exist. We can anticipate consequences, examine our motives, recognize destructive patterns and decide to change them. These choices are conditioned by biology, culture, history and many influences we are unaware of. Conditioned choice is still choice, and it still has effects.
From a nondual perspective, the more useful question is not whether an independent individual has free will. It is whether the evolutionary process has developed the capacity to become aware of its own movement and to influence its direction. If it has, that capacity operates through us. We are the universe becoming conscious of its own creative potential. This is the point at which nonduality becomes evolutionary.
The Risk of Spiritual Passivity
Certain interpretations of nondual spirituality have concerned me for a long time. The recognition that everything is already perfect can turn into a quiet withdrawal from responsibility. If everything is the divine unfolding, why change anything? If there is no doer, who acts? If the world is the play of consciousness, why care about its future?
I understand the reasoning. I also think it confuses the absolute perspective with the way we have to live in the relative world. From the standpoint of timeless Being, nothing needs to change. From the standpoint of Becoming, everything is changing and our participation matters. Both are true. I see no contradiction in recognizing the perfection of existence while feeling responsible for reducing suffering and building a better world.
A deeper realization of nonduality can make this responsibility arise more naturally. When we no longer spend so much energy defending a separate identity, we become available for something larger. We can act from freedom rather than fear and from care rather than self-interest, because the wellbeing of others and of the whole is no longer separate from our own. That is a very different foundation for action.
This raises a further question. If the impulse to create a better world is itself an expression of the divine, why should acceptance count as more spiritual than participation? Why should the stillness of Shiva be more fundamental than the creative energy of Shakti? The more complete view is that they were never separate.
What If Many People Awakened?
Toward the end of our conversation, Lenaa and I reached a clear difference in perspective. What would happen if every human being awakened?
In one reading of Advaita, the manifest world depends on the interplay of ignorance and realization. If ignorance disappeared entirely, the conditions that sustain the world as we know it might disappear with it. This is a coherent metaphysical position, but it is not how I understand the potential of awakening.
I think about what could happen if a significant number of people were established in the recognition of their non-separate nature and also awake to their capacity to participate consciously in evolution. How would political systems function if their participants were less driven by fear, insecurity, tribal identity and the pursuit of power? How would economies change if people experienced themselves as part of a larger living whole? What would education look like if the development of consciousness were one of its central aims? What kinds of communities would form if people were less identified with their separate selves and more interested in discovering together what none of them could create alone?
Awakening does not automatically produce wisdom, emotional maturity or ethical responsibility. The history of spiritual traditions offers enough counterexamples. We still need psychological development, ethical reflection, cultural evolution and better systems. The real question is what happens when these develop together: a humanity that is more conscious, better able to hold complexity, more connected to life and more willing to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions.
I see no reason why awakening should end the evolutionary process. It may open possibilities within it that we cannot yet imagine.
The Third Attractor as Conscious Evolution
This brings me back to the question behind my podcast series, Co-Creating the Third Attractor.
Humanity appears to be pulled toward two unattractive outcomes. One is the attempt to maintain order through increasing control, centralization and authoritarianism. The other is fragmentation, chaos and the breakdown of the systems our civilization depends on. The question is whether we can take part in the emergence of a third possibility: a future that is regenerative, compassionate, creative, free and connected to the living world.
After many conversations with people from very different backgrounds, I am increasingly convinced that the quality of consciousness we bring to this challenge matters a great deal. We need new economic models, political structures, forms of governance, technologies and ways of living together. All of them will reflect the consciousness of the people who create and use them. If we remain identified with fear, separation, competition and control, we will likely reproduce those patterns in whatever we build. If we retreat into spiritual acceptance and leave the world to itself, we hand its future to the very forces we are concerned about.
There is another option. We can awaken to our non-separate nature and let that change how we participate in life. We can recognize that the future is open, that we do not know what will emerge, and that our participation can make a real difference.
This cannot be done alone. If nonduality is true, the idea that isolated individuals will build a new civilization belongs to the old story. We need to find out what conscious co-creation actually involves. What happens when we meet beyond fixed identities, ideologies and personal agendas? What becomes possible when we listen and inquire together and allow something new to emerge between us? This intersubjective dimension of awakening has barely been explored, and I believe much depends on it.
The Freedom to Become
Spiritual freedom has usually been understood as freedom from: from the world, from identification, from suffering, from the cycle of becoming. That understanding holds real truth.
Once the freedom of Being has been recognized, another freedom becomes available: the freedom to become. It is the freedom to participate in life without being governed by personal fears and desires. It is the freedom to care about the future without needing to control it, to act fully without attachment to success or failure, and to see ourselves as expressions of a creative process that began long before us and will continue long after us.
This is what evolutionary spirituality offers. We can rest in what we already are and, from that freedom, commit ourselves to what is still becoming. I think this is what an awakened life in the twenty-first century asks of us, and it may be the foundation from which a Third Attractor can emerge.
I do not know what the future will look like. No one does. I am convinced that the way we take part in its emergence matters, and that our awakening, individually and together, may be among the most important contributions we can make.
