I wrote a post recently quoting Andrew Cohen’s short piece, distributed by email, about the difference between what’s personal and impersonal.

This is a topic I have a great interest in because it goes to the heart of the meaning of life. We tend to think that losing the personal side of things and entering the impersonal is a loss of consciousness and a depletion of our resources. In fact, it’s a raising of our awareness beyond the imperatives of the physical life. It’s often called “the sorrowless state” and that’s because the fate of our little “person” is no longer relevant to consciousness.

Andrew Cohen covers this topic particularly well in his Evolutionary Enlightenment drive. A recent blog post delves deeply into it.

Since its first significant emergence on July 30, 2001, this potential has revealed itself in a series of powerful eruptions of enlightened or nondual awareness among different groups of my students. A deeper or higher state of consciousness that transcends ego would miraculously engulf many individuals simultaneously, in such a way that suddenly the very ground of relatedness or intersubjective awareness would be enlightenment itself. As has been described on this blog, it literally took years for this new potential that I call Radical, Transformative, Impersonal, Evolutionary Enlightenment to even begin to come into being. When it did, it emerged as an intoxicating and profound shared state experience, in which many were coming together in what I call the Authentic Self, for longer and longer periods of time. Last November, this state was sustained for literally weeks on end, and spread like wildfire throughout my entire international student body.

Impersonality is a release, not a death. Although no loss or gain is involved, it is a vastly superior situation to the ape-like existence we experience on Earth.