Integral to the livelihood and well-being of EnlightenNext UK is our trading arm The Window, an events venue service. This business supports EnlightenNext, which is a UK charity and enables us to provide our events at low cost. My partner Kyrsten Perry and her staff run The Window with great professionalism and creative entrepreneurship. As part of her outreach to the Islington community where our Centre is located, Kyrsten has established a relationship with a local college who send their 17-year-olds for work experience to us. The principal of the college wants to help raise the expectations of those kids who often come from difficult backgrounds. He deliberately sends them to our charity because of the values we hold and so that they can experience a workplace environment in which people are actually happy working.

Recently a job became available at our premises and we let the college know that their students would have preference. One of the lecturers was visiting our place shortly afterwards and he related a conversation he had had with a student who was looking for work. The lecturer told the youth about the job opportunity and this young man had spent a day of work experience at our place in the past.

“So, are you going to go for an interview, since they are likely to give you a job?” he asked.

“No,” said the young guy “I don’t want to work there. People are too happy.”

The lecturer was shocked and dismayed as he cares deeply about advancing his students, and it was sad for him to hear this.

This story really makes me think: how is it that a 17-year-od in London with all of his life ahead of him doesn’t even want to be happy? It’s a puzzling phenomenon and one of several incidents I’ve become across lately that make me ponder on the current culture of our country.

Andrew Cohen’s latest blog on LOVE is nothing less than mind-blowing and heart-expanding. A ‘must read’ for anyone interested in finding out a radically sane view on the most powerful motivation that lies in each and every human being. But how much do we really understand the inner motivations present in our experience of being a human being? After all, doesn’t the capacity for compassion and consciousness seem to be hallmarks of our species? This piece allows one the great privilege to look inward and recognise our deeper self guided by Andrew’s mastery. Enjoy!

http://www.andrewcohen.org/blog/index.php?/blog/post/i-just-called-to-say-i-love-you/

We are now up to the last class in our five-week course of ‘Living Enlightenment’ and it’s been a tremendous journey for all of us. In the first class we looked at where we are as a culture generally, and a lot of our conditioned beliefs, and in the second where we are attempting to go on the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment. This means going from a post-modern ‘world centred’ perspective to one where we know we are the cosmic process itself and in no way separate from it. The last part of the course (classes 3-5) really look at the ‘how to’…the path itself. Click here to read more about it…

Currently, we’ve got a Living Enlightenment course—a fantastic introduction to the philosophy and practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment—underway at the UK Centre.  It’s being taught by Lovena Vencatakistnen and David Leckenby.  David is keeping a blog about what is transpiring in the class.  It offers insight into what is opening up among everyone in the class, including the instructors.  We include it here for the richness of the inquiry that the evolutionary perspective invariably provides:  http://davidleckenby.wordpress.com/

This week Kyrsten Perry led the weekly Tuesday night session at the EnlightenNext UK Centre. In these sessions, people are introduced to the teachings of evolutionary enlightenment and, through discussing their experience with others, get a sense of what an evolutionary perspective on life means.

I go almost weekly and the format isn’t always the same.  This week we began with an audio clip from the source and inspiration of Evolutionary Enlightenment, Andrew Cohen, who was giving a short talk on evolution as part of an online course entitled The evolutionaries guide to changing the world.

In this talk, Andrew asked his listeners if they believed evolution was really possible. He said that it isn’t difficult to believe in evolution that happens outside of ourselves (I can say that is definitely true). Most of us have been taught about the evolution of the cosmos in school and about the emergence of life and of human beings during that process.  We’re taught that evolution is a physical, material process that happens outside of ourselves and is separate from our internal experience.

But what about the evolution of the human being, Andrew asks? What about the evolution of you and me? What about our interior evolution: emotional, psychological, intellectual, and, dare I say, moral and spiritual development? How much do we believe that we can really change? Change our values, beliefs and the relationships that we have with others? Do we believe that our own evolution is not separate from the evolution of culture? And how much do we recognize that these dimensions of evolution are not separate from the vast cosmic process of evolution that we are all intrinsically part of?

Kyrsten led the discussion that followed this short audio.  As each person spoke about his or her understanding and experience of what Andrew was talking about, there was a deepening recognition of the complexity of the process that we are in the midst of—its interior and exterior dimensions—and the fact that each of us is right in the centre of this process.  Evolution is happening through us! We could all see that materialistic values are very much part of the culture that we live in and have profoundly shaped us as 21^st Century human beings. But in spite of this, we found, and continue to find, somewhere inside ourselves that we are compelled and inspired to go beyond all our material values towards something deeper and truer to our experience of the simple fact of being human. This IS evolution in action.

EnlightenNext and its business arm, The Window Venue Hire, have proudly won two awards from Ecovate, sponsors of the Green Business Innovators 2010 awards programme. Wanting to align our actions with our values, we’ve been implementing a number of sustainable environmental practices over the last few years and now we’re getting recognized for our efforts.

We won first prize for the ‘best eco initiative’. This means, of all the businesses that entered the competition, we had established an innovative recycling scheme that stood out from what others were doing. For example, our efforts, which have been underway since 2007 when we started separating paper and cardboard from plastic and glass and metal, have enabled us to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill by 70%. Also, being a vegetarian venue, we generate a huge amount of food waste, we quickly jumped on board when the Islington Organic Waste Collection trial to underway in 2009. Now we’re regular composters—yes, even here in the heart of London!—and are leading the way for others to become more conscious of their environmental impact.

Our second award from the Green Business Innovators was for the ‘greenest business in the service sector,’ for which we were the runner-up. The benefits of our work to reduce energy consumption and our environmental footprint have extended far beyond our immediate goals to become an environmentally responsible organisation. Our reputation among discerning clients has improved substantially as more and more companies want to be known for their own commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility. They see holding events at The Window as a positive contribution to their efforts. Also, we are appreciated for our demonstrated integrity, which raises the overall profile of our company significantly. And another very important benefit of our sustainability practices, we believe, is the positive impact that it has on the well-being of our staff—no small thing for us. This, in turn, directly affects the quality of service we are able to offer clients. So all in all, we’ve quickly learned that what helps the environment helps all of us in many more ways than we may think.

At the EnlightenNext UK Centre in London, Chris Parish gave a rousing follow-up recently to his popular talk which took place last autumn on the British penchant for cynicism.  In this, his more recent foray into British ways entitled Our Potential Beyond British Cynicism, Chris’s take on the British propensity for the cynical view and barbed retort was every bit as lively, humorous and on-the-mark as was last autumn’s original inquiry into the topic.  Only this time, Parish focused more on how to get his compatriots out of the quagmire they’re in rather than helping them see their predicament in the first place.

In doing so, Parish pointed out to his audience that there is life after empire and reminded us of the many achievements and cultural contributions that have their origin in this small, island nation.  Britain can be great again, he suggested, if we direct our gaze forward rather than lament the loss of our far-flung protectorates.  Check out this audio clip to find out what insights Parish had to offer.

In honour of National Vegetarian Week, which took place 24 – 30 May in the UK, EnlightenNext’s business arm, The Window Venue Hire, hosted a vegetarian food fair to celebrate the delights of vegetarianism on 27 May.  Joined by London’s foremost purveyor of organic foods, Planet Organic, and by Europe’s first organic and vegan Japanese restaurant, Itadaki-Zen, EnlightenNext’s chef, Annie Brown, organized a beautiful evening of tasting, education, and conviviality at the EnlightenNext UK Centre in the heart of Islington, London. Guests enjoyed such delicious treats as delicate sheets of wild seaweed collected off the coast of Scotland, sushi rolls made with wild garlic leaves, mini pastry puffs filled with lentils, yogurt and mint, quinoa and cocoa cookies, spicy chick pea curry and scrumptious vegan chocolate cake.  Tours of the building introduced visitors to London’s only purely vegetarian venue hire and conference centre, and Itadaki-Zen’s head chef, Nannae, inspired everyone to ply the art of sushi-making with her hands-on demonstration.

As a follow-up to this successful and what hopefully will become the first of an annual event, Annie Brown will be offering a one-day course on conscious eating and well-being at the EnlightenNext UK Centre on Saturday, 3 July, from 10:30am to 5:30pm.  During the day, participants will learn how food has evolved and shaped us, and how health and well being are our connection to life and the process of transformation.  For more details and to book, click here.

On 24 April 2010 the fourth Truth Heals conference was held in Berlin, Germany. This moving video by Renata Keller captures the events of the day, from organizer and inspiration behind the conference Thomas Huebl’s motivations for gathering people together to address this difficult chapter in German and world history to Andrew Cohen’s stirring call to action to the many genuine expressions by participants of a willingness to confront the past and move forward in a new way. To read my blog post about the conference, go here.

Truth Heals – 65 years after the Second World War – from the trauma to a new strength of responsibility from Renata Keller on Vimeo.

Over a recent long Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, integral author and prominent presenter on all things integral, Terry Patten, stopped off in London on his way back to the US to have an open dialogue with EnlightenNext UK Centre managing director Chris Parish.

(To get a flavour of their exchange, watch this video clip of their introductory remarks)

Their agenda was to explore the differences and similarities between the two worldviews that are currently emerging at the leading edges of contemporary philosophy and spirituality: the evolutionary perspective and the integral perspective. I’ve been ruminating over the import and content of their conversation ever since.

What was particularly fascinating about their exchange, aside from the many particulars of what constitutes each perspective, was the underlying orientation from which Patten and Parish were responding to what was, as far as I could tell, a single new understanding of our purpose and function as human beings at this particular moment in time at the dawn of the 21st Century. Of a new human consciousness, in other words. It was as if they were each representing a dominant dimension of our existing level of understanding as a way to describe the new orientation that is unfolding. Between the two of them a new whole, I felt, was being created. Whenever one of them spoke, I was thoroughly able relate to the truth of what they were saying to my own experience yet I knew that it was something much bigger that they were both pointing to and reaching for.

Patten, as the integralist, has a truly awesome intellectual grasp of the terrain, of the integral “map,” and an impressive capacity to articulate the subtleties of integral thought. At one level, I simply enjoyed his ability to use language in such refined ways. He spoke about “structures of meaning-making” and “problematic optical illusions” and other concepts that, though perhaps not perfectly clear, did awaken a level of recognition in my own growing grasp of integral ideas. He was speaking, I believe, from having been looking carefully and closely at the world he inhabits and using his mind in new ways to make sense of what he was observing.

When Parish, the evolutionary, spoke I found myself every bit as enthralled but it wasn’t because my mind was being stretched like with Patten but it was, rather, because I found correspondences in what he was talking about with my own moments of “knowing” that transcended my cognitive reach. His “reports from the edge” were based on what he had experienced, on what he had awakened to, and from how he had developed under the guidance of his spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen. Not that there was any lack of rationality and objectivity in his words, for he, too, was a keen observer of contemporary culture, but the wellspring of positivity and the urge to create a better world that was fueling his comments activated a different part of my interest.

As they continued, they touched on points that begged for more attention and teasing apart. For example, the dual importance of action and reflection, for one. Or the tendency for belief-based inspiration to overshadow the development of more adequate perspectives. Or, even more demanding of careful attention I thought: what constitutes real care at the highest levels of development. Nonetheless, by the end of the evening, it seemed to me as if Patten was expressing a lot of evolutionary passion and Parish was definitely holding a developmental view. Perhaps in the future another moniker will emerge that expresses the ultimate unity of the two views.

There’s rumour that more exchanges between Patten and Parish are in the works. This is very good news because, I realized, what was really going on during their dialogue was the formation of the new structures of engagement with world and culture that they had recognized and were describing. Their interaction was creating the very future they were anticipating—that new integrated, evolutionarily-inspired consciousness.