During this past Tuesday’s Enlightened Evening programme at the EnlightenNext UK Centre, we looked at why it’s so important to combine mystical insight with the best, newest, truest ideas that humanity brings forth—with a Big Idea!  The conversation was a natural extension of the previous week’s discussion in which we had focused on the mystical experience itself—knowing the deepest dimension of ourselves—the infinite ground of our being—that we discover in meditation.

Chris Parish led us in our discussion, bringing with him the fruits of his lifelong engagement with spiritual practice and an innate intellectual rigour borne of a very curious mind.  After listening to a short audio of Andrew Cohen from his recent Being and Becoming Retreat that took place in August in Tuscany, the collective interest in the topic of those of us in the room revealed that this conjunction of spiritual experience with bold thinking has had and will continue to have a big impact on cultural development and where we are headed as a species.  As one participant pointed out, those people who have had enormous impact on the lives of men and women throughout history were both great mystics and true revolutionaries – people like Jesus or Mohammed, for example.  It goes without saying that the world changed enormously as a result of these two men.

Boring more deeply into our subject, we came to appreciate that profound spiritual experiences bring with them a responsibility that goes beyond the value the experience may have for us personally.  Indeed, it can (and should!) galvanize us to think more deeply about the world we inhabit in the face of the profound unity with all of life that a spiritual awakening reveals.

Today here at EnlightenNext we recognise that the Big Idea for our time is Evolution and as we move forward in the weeks ahead we will look into the marriage of Evolution with Enlightened Awareness during our Tuesday evening discussions.  As we recognised last Tuesday, Evolution is not only a Big Idea that makes sense of our contemporary understanding of the world, for many of us (especially the 300 of us who were on retreat with Andrew Cohen in Italy) it is also grounded in our very own experience of developing and changing as individuals and as a culture.

Evolutionary Enlightenment – a new path to spiritual awakening by Andrew
Cohen; reviewed by John Bunzl

The radical essence of Cohen’s teachings is that we are one with the evolutionary process and that we are at its leading edge. At the dawn of the 21st Century, as our self-reflective consciousness awakens us to this, we realise that the evolutionary process itself now needs us to take responsibility for its further development. The idea of traditional religion that we remain dependent children praying to a God “up there” is thus turned on its head, as Cohen explains: “The fact that highly evolved beings can now awaken directly to the evolutionary impulse means that God, as the creative principle, is able to see, hear, taste, touch, and feel like never before his or her own creation, through us.” God—or the creative principle behind the evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang—thus needs us to take responsibility for its further development.

Most would agree that, given today’s rampant materialism and its negative social and environmental fall-out, humanity’s stage of maturity hasn’t progressed beyond adolescence; that is, we still haven’t yet taken responsibility. And perhaps that’s one reason both traditional religion and secular materialism retain such strong appeal: because both of them leave us in a position of adolescent dependency or irresponsibility; whether it be the spiritual dependency of praying to a God “up there” to solve our problems for us, or be it our secular faith in political leaders to somehow get us out of a deepening global crisis they haven’t the first clue how to solve. What stands in our way, as Cohen points out with such brilliant clarity, is ourselves, our fear, and our unwillingness to take proper responsibility. As Bernard Shaw also recognised: “Freedom means taking responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

But for Cohen, the new enlightenment in which we take proper responsibility doesn’t reside in experiencing the timeless, formless ground of Being for its own sake; infinite, blissful, intense and liberating though it may be. Rather, it’s so much more than that. It is all of that plus a purpose. It is all of that plus being convinced, in the most profound sense imaginable, that I must further the evolutionary process; that furthering it becomes my primary sense of self. This is what Cohen calls ecstatic compulsion. As it happens, I’m not a very spiritual person and I don’t even meditate. But I know what Cohen says to be true from my own direct experience. That is, from an altered state experience that occurred about 13 years ago; a split-second experience of the purest deepest bliss of loving emptiness which is the ground of Being and into which came, not so much an idea, but a burning conviction—an ecstatic compulsion—to give form to the quite impersonal conviction or idea that instantaneously filled the emptiness in that moment. It was enlightenment with a purpose. And I’ve been working on the Simultaneous Policy (Simpol) campaign ever since, the slogan for which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Humanity taking responsibility”.

For me, this just happened pretty much by chance and my “long night of the soul” remains with me, and beckons me. But for Cohen, evolutionary enlightenment is already a way of life; a whole-life practice crystallised in five tenets which explain what taking responsibility for the evolutionary process actually entails, means, feels like, and how we can make it our way of life too. As he concludes, “For those of us at the leading edge at this critical moment in human history, what could make the meaning and purpose of spiritual enlightenment more apparent? What could make more sense or be more compelling on an emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual level than the simple recognition that “It is up to me”?”

John M. Bunzl
International Simultaneous Policy Organisation www.simpol.org
September 2011

It is fascinating and an evolutionary journey to be a participant on the 10 Agreements course led by Dr. Elizabeth Debold and Mary Adams. Each Monday a small, intimate group of us women are meeting at the EnlightenNext UK Centre in London alongside women around the world to create a space in consciousness–to delve into the deeper aspects of ourselves from an Evolutionary Enlightenment perspective.

From the perspective of Evolutionary Enlighenment, I am learning that I am the product of a 14 billion year cosmic evolutionary process and I am at the leading edge of this process. As a woman I am learning that from the perspective of this cosmic evolutionary process, the fact that my gender is woman is an accident of birth; it is an arbitrary fact. Unconscious habits, motives and impulses are not unique to me but are structures in consciousness as a result of an impersonal process common to womankind. I am seeing that I have conflicting motives and desires that originate from different levels within myself and from different eras of human history, such as the biological or from the modern, traditional,or post-modern era. As a woman, I can become aware and take responsibility for these different levels within myself, especially those that are outmoded. That is so I, and all us women can develop and evolve to create a new culture and future.

It is a delight each week to discover over and over again that I/we as women are Spirit and ttat we can fundamentally trust in the inherent goodness of Life! We as women are agreeing to live in a new way. We are the new Renaissance!

 Last weekend I had the pleasure of getting out of London and discovering that culture thrives outside the metropolis, too.  I was in Wales, a land of rolling hills and low skies, attending the Hay Festival and its cousin festival, How the Light Gets In.  It was a cultural and literary haven for someone like me who loves to read and discover creative, intelligent thinking at its best. 

I went there with my EnlightenNext colleague Faheem Nusrat and we spent the lion’s share of our time at the newer of the two festivals, How the Lights Gets In.  This offspring of the hugely successful, ambitious Hay Festival, is focused on philosophy and the arts and had a great line-up of talks, panel discussion, great entertainment for all of its 10-day run—10 days being the Hay Festival model that seems to magically work, even in the relatively remote (by urban standards) town of Hay-on-Wye, where the festivals are held.  

The first session we attended was perhaps the highlight of our time there.  Entitled “The Search for Openness”, it was a talk given by How the Light Gets In founder (we subsequently learned) Hilary Lawson.  Basically, he presented a synopsis of his beautifully crafted philosophical argument designed to get us beyond the dead-ends of post-modernism.  His language was fresh, clear and free from jargon and his ideas about openness and closure, the later being the title of his newest book, seemed very akin to me to what in Evolutionary Enlightenment we call Being and Becoming—that the primary state or condition of the universe is one of complete openness (or the infinity of the ground of being) and at the same time we are here in manifest form in a manifest world to take action.  But let me read the book before I reduce his subtle thinking too simplistically.

And speaking of openness, another attractive feature of the festival was the friendliness and easy camaraderie among everyone.  Very quickly we were engaging with other festival goers—I imagine because we were all so uplifted and excited by the richness of the ideas that were being exchanged.  It’s a dimension of a festival that’s especially important to us here at EnlightenNext London as we are busily preparing for our very own festival:  Midsummer Renaissance, A Celebration of Spirit, Philosophy, Music, Art & Creativity.  This will be an urban festival like none other:  a blend of some deeply important thinking about our human condition with hip, boundary-breaking art and music.  Don’t miss it!  You’ll find all the details here.

When people think of doing spiritual retreats they normally think of going into the hills or to a retreat centre to get away from life in the fast lane and relax and enter a space where there are no challenges in order to feel and develop a deeper sense of confidence and peace!

I have been attending Evolutionary Enlightenment retreats led by Andrew Cohen for the last ten years now…and what if I were to say to you that these retreats can not only slow you down and put you in touch with the joy of being at the heart of existence but they can also propel your life onto and into a faster lane than you ever thought was possible!!!!

My experience tells me that this evolutionary fast lane isn’t the fast lane of conventional life, defined by worries, tension, stress etc. It’s a dynamic divine fast lane, potentially filled with enlightened creativity. These retreats, when approached with sincerity and an openness of heart to learn something new, can reveal a new domain of human existence not usually explored. My experience is that each retreat is completely different, challenging and deeply rewarding as it works on many levels simultaneously—building on one’s previous experience, though certainly not in the same way each time but in a way that has emergent properties, too. In other words it is not just the same old thing being revisited over and over again.  Rather, it is actually calling us to REALLY change and move to places we have never been before!!!

I am swimming in an extraordinary stream of heightened, blissful consciousness here at the EnlightenNext World Centre in the western mountains of Massachusetts.  The Awakening to Your Highest Self:  Tales of Transformation from 25+ Spiritual Luminaries webcast has been underway for over seven hours now and the atmosphere here is literally soaked in love, bliss, gratitude, reverence, joy, mystery, devotion and deep humility as we listen to one remarkable story after another of that most profound and important of all relationships—the teacher/student, master/disciple relationship.  In honour of this, the 25^th anniversary of having met his teacher, Andrew Cohen is speaking with at least—the number keeps climbing!—25 spiritual luminaries about what happened when they met their teachers.  These are tales that are moving beyond description, heart-breaking in their sacredness, humbling in the rarity of their occurrence in our contemporary secular world and riveting in pointing out to those of us fortunate to have found a true spiritual Master just how extremely precious the teacher-student relationship is and how never ever to lose sight of our enormous good fortune.

Some people sought out a teacher; others were engulfed by an experience that they still can’t completely understand.  Lives are transformed forever and the world is that much more filled with light and consciousness as a consequence whenever someone recognizes a higher calling activated by an encounter with a great teacher and has the courage to follow that call without reservation.  These are love stories that are eternal.  As Andrew Cohen said in his introduction and many others have reiterated along the way, a relationship with a teacher, once it begins, never ends.  These stories are signposts along a journey that transcends time and carries us to the deepest part of ourselves.

You can still sign up and if you do, you’ll receive an MP3 recording to listen to whatever you may have missed from earlier in the day…and to listen to again and again.

You can listen to the full audio of the evening presentation here:

“We are not just creatures of the past but also creatures attracted to the lure of the future”
Diarmuid O’Murchu

We had the pleasure of welcoming Dairmud O’Murchu to the EnlightenNext Centre last Saturday evening for a dialogue with our MD Chris Parish. Coming from different backgrounds and very different spiritual orientations, they met on common evolutionary ground, each enriching the perspective and insights of the other.

Dairmuid is a priest (a missionary, his ‘parish’ is the entire globe), social psychologist and author of many books but mostly he is a man of a man of action and deep learning. His words carried the conviction won of someone who has learned from experience as well as from the knowledge passed on by others. The topic of the evening, as is often the case here at EnlightenNext, was evolution and how it changes ‘everything’…and, most importantly, how it affects what it means to live a spiritually inspired life in the 21st Century.

Like over 200 of my evolutionary sisters around the globe, I spent last Saturday delving into what has defined Woman throughout the ages.  Our goal was and is—last week was only a beginning!—to gain some objectivity on what makes us tick today.  We were a serious, focused group taking on this important investigation here at the EnlightenNext UK Centre in London. And at the same time we were filled with joy, lightheartedness and having a really great time just being together.  As much laughter as poignancy was in the air as we uncovered behaviors and responses that were common to all of us, no matter our age or our national origins.   

I think it is such a privilege, and so very important, to be doing this exploration collectively.  I was around for the first wave of the feminist movement in the 60’s, though not much of a participant.  This time round I am convinced that women getting serious about our liberation—and by that I mean, spiritual liberation, the next frontier for women and men—is the only way we’re going to be able to move forward, not only as women but for culture at large.  If we want to liberate our fullest potential and create a new woman’s consciousness, we must unearth the deeply embedded, largely unconscious structures that drive us now.  We’ll never become true and equal creators with men until we do.  And the new spiritual values that I long to see (in the very near future!) defining a culture beyond materialism and narcissism won’t come into manifestation.  We now know that we live in an evolving cosmos…and that evolving process is us—you, me, and all of humanity, which is a truly humbling thing to contemplate.  That means it is up to each and every one of us to change, develop, and evolve.—to become a richer, more conscious and more humane expression of what that profound process can produce. 

We were an enthusiastic group of 14 here in London, including one who participated from home, sinking our hearts and souls into the Encore rendition of the A Call to Evolve Virtual Seminar led by senior students of Evolutionary Enlightenment Elizabeth Debold and Mary Adams.  The seminar had originally been offered in November of 2010 but because of so much demand, they offered this encore.  I found doing this seminar the second time round was every bit as deep, enriching and implicating as it was the first time, if not more so.  Things sink in deeper when you revisit them and as this is a constant, ever evolving investigation, there will always be more to explore and look into.

At some points in these kinds of inquiries, whether it’s an hour-long meeting or a weekend seminar, I get a palpable glimpse of new potentialities rising up.  Something changes; we’re relating to each other in new ways.  New avenues of insight are emerging out of the collective.  We’re inhabiting terrain infused with new values.  It’s that pull of the possible that is so exciting and so sacred.  And it was very much alive among us, wherever we were on the planet, last weekend.

On the heels of a New Year’s Eve party that rocked the house and took the tradition of ringing in the New Year with an explosion of joy and celebration to a whole new level, the start of 2011 here at EnlightenNext is keeping the promise of that landmark party. 

For our first event of the year Andrew Cohen was back in town (6 February), leading a half-day seminar at the EnlightenNext UK Centre.  I personally couldn’t have imagined a better way to launch the year.  And his topic was riveting:  The Evolution of Enlightenment.  The whole discourse surrounding enlightenment is so steeped in ancient religious and philosophical history and timeless wisdom that even coupling the word ‘evolution’ with ‘enlightenment’ can have a startling effect.  It’s an audacious proposition—that our understanding of enlightenment, its meaning and purpose, can evolve—and during the course of the seminar it was evident to me and I’m sure to everyone in the room that Andrew was leading us into virgin territory.  

He covered many points about the topic of the day, taking his cues from audience questions, which I found to be unusually genuine, thoughtful and intelligent from an audience of many people who had never seen or engaged with Andrew before.  But perhaps what stayed with me the most from the seminar was the powerful and original message that enlightenment is about this world.  It’s about our deep engagement with and our creative response to the very real world we are living in now, day to day.  It’s not about getting away from anything at all.  Not about getting off the wheel of life, as a Buddhist might put it, nor about getting to some perfect heaven after this life is over.  It’s about becoming enlightened now so that through our enlightened understanding and awareness we can bring about a better world.  When our creativity becomes unleashed from unenlightened behaviours and conditioning, we become agents of positivity, integrity, moral values and the truth of spirit.  It’s a very inspiring as well as demanding challenge but the longer I am a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the more I can’t think of anything more worthwhile not liberating to do. 

Get a taste of the seminar yourself by watching this video excerpt, which covers the last 15 minutes of the seminar.  It will give you a much fuller sense of what I am talking about from Andrew himself.

 Last Sunday was one of those special London days: full sunshine, bright, crisp, refreshing.  A perfect day to devote to exploring the life-affirming, spiritually rich teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Andrew Cohen had been invited by Alternatives—a very popular London-based convener of lectures and programs of interest to seekers of all persuasions—to give a one-day seminar on his teachings that are redefining enlightenment for our time.  He started off with a provocative query:  is being English a help or a hindrance to the evolution of consciousness?  That rightfully captured the audience’s attention which, from then forward, stayed keenly focused on Andrew’s riveting discourse.  But rather than delve into the landscape of British conditioning, he carefully laid out the very large context in which we would be exploring the implications of humanity’s fairly recent discovery of evolution and how evolution thoroughly and profoundly transforms our understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. 

Sweeping through the vast expanses of Cosmic time, Andrew described a process that has been unfolding for far longer than our human minds can fathom.  Doing so, he took us deeper and deeper into the infinities of space, time, and consciousness; indeed, into the very ‘mind’ of God, to that mysterious point where something came from nothing. 

Then, he changed gears and we rode the evolutionary impulse up through its many manifestations in the unfolding of the universe, through the developmental stages of human consciousness and culture and on into the future, endlessly, forever.  It was a lot of ground to cover in a few short hours but thanks to Andrew’s razor-beamed articulation and his embodied transmission of what he was conveying, the inherently positive energy and creative power of the life process was alive in the room.

Q&A followed, characterized by much enthusiasm, interest and, in typically British fashion, pragmaticism:  how do we apply these new insights to our lives?  By transcending ego.  In a particularly beautiful turn-of-phrase, Andrew said, “transcending ego liberates our capacity to fly.”  Indeed, we were just taking off when the seminar came to an all too early close.  To quote Andrew again:  “It doesn’t feel like we’re finished.  Let’s meet again.”  I know I’m not alone in the UK hoping that happens very very soon.