The future is not a given. What's going to happen is not already known and is not predetermined. So often, we tend to hold onto metaphysical worldviews that tell us that the higher levels and stages of development are already laid out. But they're not. This is a new way of thinking: the recognition that the structures of the future are yet to be determined, yet to be created. And they don't create themselves; they are created to the degree to which human beings at the leading edge consciously engage in the evolutionary process. Only those individuals who are way ahead of their time begin to create these new structures or grooves in consciousness, and in time, when others progress through the lower stages, they're going to follow those grooves that have been laid by the evolutionary pioneers who went before them. When enough people take that path, those grooves get deeper and eventually become stages that everybody is going to develop through automatically. So the awakening human at the leading edge today bears a profound responsibility to be an evolutionary pioneer—to be the one who is literally living in that place between the present and the future. There is no one else who can do this for us.
Andrew Cohen