How would a scientist prove or disprove the existence of God? What could they possibly be looking for? Bernard Carr and Chris Parish held a public dialogue late last year at EnlightenNext titled “Consciousness and Cosmos”.

Having traversed widely differing pathways, Carr and Parish draw on their insights borne of a lifetime of enquiry. Parish is a committed life-long practitioner of enlightenment, expert Enlightened Communication facilitator, and director of EnlightenNext in the UK. Carr is a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary, University of London, Chair of the Scientific and Medical Network, and former President of the Society for Psychical Research.

You can read an editorial that Carr has written for the Scientific and Medical Network about the evening’s dialogue, which he titled Cosmic Conversation.

You can also listen to a podcast produced from the conversation on the evening.

This blog was submitted by Andrew Poulson:

I’ve been coming to the Tuesday night ‘meditation and evolution’ evenings at EnlightenNext for a couple of years now and find them an opportunity to explore in depth and detail significant aspects of the nature of Enlightened Awareness.

In an audio clip we listened to this past week, spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen suggested that if we go deep enough into our own Selves during meditation, we can discover the ground of our own being, and that one of the distinguishing features is its infinitely compelling nature. By this he means that the more you put your attention on that ground, the more you are drawn to go deeper.

My experience of meditating at the Tuesday meetings usually bears this out. I inevitably find a kind of ‘field’ of consciousness opens up for me. Most of the time I feel as if I am in this field, and occasionally there is a shift – I begin to identify myself AS consciousness, which has the qualities of spaciousness and connectedness simultaneously. It also has a visceral quality, which can even feel quite uncomfortable at times, and to remain in that field requires a willingness to surrender to IT. But I find this ground does have a compelling nature. When the group comes out of meditation I often feel a desire to keep going.

The discussion that follows is generally considered the ‘evolution’ part of the evening. Patrick Bryson, an experienced student of Andrew Cohen, leads the discussion and helps participants enquire into and tease out the details of their experience during meditation. As people give voice to and make distinctions about their direct experience, a sense of movement is created – the qualities of spaciousness and connectedness persist during the discussion, but take on a new heightened quality.

As with the meditation part of the evening, I find that a surrender is required of me in order to stay in that flow, and I don’t always succeed. But when I do, and feel really plugged in, I notice an intense interest in what is about to unfold. This is not about a psychological expansion, in terms of learning new information. There is something else going on, and it can also be felt on a visceral level.

Often I leave feeling as if I have really gone somewhere in consciousness I haven’t been before, and somewhere that I would not have been able to go on my own.

For weeks now we have been collectively inquiring  into the importance of meditation and what we find when we have no relationship to the content of consciousness. This Tuesday evening we went further. Patrick Bryson led us in a discovery of Non-Duality and the incredible significance of recognising that there is only One, not two.

We listened to an audio by spiritual teacher and philosopher Andrew Cohen taken from his summer retreat in Italy, in which he taught that when we discover non-duality there is no longer fear, because we realise there is only One without a second. In that realisation there is nothing to be afraid of because there is only One.

The ensuing dialogue was very illuminating. I was particularly struck that, from this discovery of non-duality, we can allow all of our human experience to be present; in this bigger context there is nothing to be afraid of. In fact this is the very way that we evolve – by choosing to allow all of our experience to be present, we then have the freedom to consciously make new choices in how we respond and act. It has stayed with me through the week and I’ve found at times I’m not trying so hard to control my experience and instead becoming more interested in what my experience actually is.

I’m looking forward to our next evening dialogue (Nov 1) when we’ll be looking into the topic: The Best Vacation You’re Ever Going to Have – Only in a context of absolute withdrawal from engagement can you be free of all problems.

Deeper than Darwin: The Further Evolution of Consciousness. Why the seemingly esoteric subject of the evolution of consciousness actually couldn’t be more relevant for our lives

We’re pleased to announce the second in our ongoing series of Evolutionary Worldview dialogues — conversations that bring together original thinkers visionaries and cultural innovators – David Lorimer and Chris Parish at the EnlightenNext UK Centre, Thursday, 10 November, 7:30pm.

Lorimer and Parish will explore the implications of Charles Darwin’s great discovery. With his earth-shattering On the Origin of Species, Darwin launched, arguably, the beginning of the end of the great mythic religions and the elevation of science as the primary source of truth for Western civilization.

The implications and ramifications of his momentous discovery have continued to reverberate through the passage of time. The evident truth and fact of evolution inspired gifted 20th century visionaries, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, as well as many others before and since, to add their own interpretation and insights to the understanding of evolution. They observed, inferred and experienced that there was far more to the concept than simply natural and biological evolution. Entering into the interior dimensions of evolution, they began to map out the territory of consciousness itself.

It is precisely into this territory that the innovative writer and educator David Lorimer and EnlightenNext’s Chris Parish, a dedicated explorer of consciousness, will take us, uncovering wisdom, profound truths and new perspectives on the implications of the evolution of consciousness, making a case for how valuable and meaningful these ideas are for the lives we lead today.

Venue: EnlightenNext UK
Thursday 10 November, 7.30pm

David Lorimer has had a long fascination with this area of enquiry and has published several books, including Thinking beyond the Brain and Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality. He is also a director of the Scientific and Medical Network as well as the Wrekin Trust.

Chris Parish has devoted much of his life to evolutionary spirituality. For 25 years he has studied, practiced and taught Evolutionary Enlightenment under the guidance of Andrew Cohen and become an authority in the field. He currently serves as the director of the EnlightenNext UK.

On Tuesday evening we continued with our weekly inquiry into the relationship between meditation and enlightenment with Patrick Bryson. This time we were inquiring into the nature of Mind, a very interesting subject and key to understanding and developing one’s meditation. (On previous weeks we learnt how to meditate and explored the qualities that are found).

The evening began with a short audio from a recent retreat with Andrew Cohen in dialogue with a woman about meditation. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, the goal in meditation is ‘to have no relationship to the content of consciousness’, or to the movement of the mind. The woman explained how difficult it is to have no relationship to the content of consciousness. Andrew agreed with her and said that it was difficult if we haven’t discovered for ourselves that the true nature of mind is – very simply – a mechanical process.

Following this illuminating exchange, we meditated for 20 minutes and afterward each person discussed what they found in their experience. Initially we found that most of us are unquestionably identified with the movement of our minds, that it IS really difficult (and takes practice) to learn how to leave it all alone. Through the course of inquiring into our experience with Patrick, and being fully engaged and interested in what was happening, a deeper interest in what lies beyond the mind was activated and people started speaking in different ways about their discoveries of freedom, a sense of limitlessness, and the dissolution of any restricted or small sense of self – leaving behind the often mechanically conditioned ways we tend to think about ourselves. This was an active inquiry, coming from the source of meditation itself, and not from the mind, and there was a profound and ever-deepening discovery of unity and non-separation between us as we went further and further into the always fascinating terrain of the nature of enlightened awareness.

I’m really looking forward to next week when we will explore: The Primary Freedom that is discovered through meditation and how important this is as a new foundation for life.

This week’s Enlightened Evening topic that we looked into was “The Nature of Consciousness is Lightness of Being and Joy”.

Patrick Bryson, one of Andrew Cohen’s senior students, led the group of us gathered in the EnlighenNext Centre in London into a deeply intimate investigation of consciousness and also more subtle and profound perspectives on our experience. After he set some initial context as to how the evenings usually proceed, and the vision and mission of EnlightenNext, he then played a very moving audio of Andrew Cohen speaking about this topic from the last Being and Becoming retreat in Tuscany. Andrew was saying in the dialogue that the nature of consciousness IS joy and lightness of being and that we will experience that if we simply put our attention on that and not on the movement and meanderings of our own minds. He went on to say however that if we do put our attention on the movement of our minds, we would NOT experience lightness of being and joy. It’s pretty simple and easy to understand this, but it’s challenging and subtle when you actually try to do it!

And that’s exactly what we did next. We all then sat very still, with the express aim to have no relationship to our minds and to directly experience the nature of consciousness for ourselves. When Patrick ended the period of silence I felt like I was in another dimension, where I lost track of time, felt very light, and yes very joyous! What was also interesting was when we attempted to speak about it together afterwards. The more we made the effort to really articulate our deepest experience it became clearer and more obvious that consciousness and this inner dimension is something we actually share – and talking about it together revealed more facets and dimensions of it. Looking forward to continuing next week!

What if we could, at will, access that which is ever-new, so that our lives can be a reflection of the perfect unity that lies at the heart of life? Patrick Bryson, a long time student of Andrew Cohen, posed this question at the start of Tuesday’s Evolutionary Enlightenment Evening as one way to understand the practice of meditation.

These days it’s common to approach meditation as a method to relieve stress but in Evolutionary Enlightenment, learning how to awaken to the ground of one’s being is specific in that it can create a deep, unquenchable source of strength and confidence for life if we are willing to trust and make the right effort.

Listening to a short audio clip of Andrew Cohen speaking about Being from the recent retreat in Tuscany was a revelation. In only a few minutes one could understand the non-difference between the revelation of enlightened awareness and the practice of meditation. When we strive and learn how to have no relation to the content of consciousness, we discover a profound truth for ourselves that simultaneously lies at the deepest level of our own being and at the source of life itself.

After practicing this together, we spoke about the various challenges and discoveries that people attending had encountered during the silence. Patrick responded by pointing out that the experience of struggle that can be inherent in this approach does not in any way interfere with the deeper reality of already being, that everything is already as it is, untouched by our mind’s activities or our emotional responses, however we may qualify them, as positive or negative.

When we relax at an existential level we discover the deepest part of the self that is already free. This is the discovery of non-dual awareness, an ungraspable yet deeply meaningful encounter with life and reality.

We took the discussion deeper. Something intriguing happens when we deliberately and intentionally decide to devote time to focus on Nothing. Beyond being only a pleasant experience, if we peer more deeply, we can find that there is something more than just ‘emptiness’; there is something significant and subtle that can become a compelling, ever new source of endless fascination.

I recognised a quality of pure goodness, and the more I saw that, in my own experience, the more positive IT and I seemed to become, as if consciousness was becoming even more aware of the pristine quality of itself through me.

When the session ended I was sitting on the edge of my seat, bursting with positivity. It felt like we were just getting started and I didn’t want the dialogue to end.

On Tuesday evening we had our first public event at EnlightenNext London after Andrew Cohen’s annual Being & Becoming retreat in Tuscany. Inspired by this powerful event Chris Parish introduced and transmitted the foundational understanding that underpinning everything that is, there is an infinite ground from which we all have originated. Drawing on his 40 years of experience and practice within various Buddhist teachings as well as his 25 years with Andrew, Chris showed the highly attentive audience that ‘The art and science of stillness’ as defined by Andrew Cohen is both very simple and profoundly subtle practice and insight that gives us immediate access to our very own source of spiritual strength and inspiration.

Chris showed us that when we authentically draw on the traditional wisdom and science of meditation while understanding that we exist within an evolving universe, we can step out of the seemingly endless prison of our mind that is locked into a purely psychological relationship to experience. And it is the understanding that meditation is not just an experience but a position of freedom that makes us available in a much deeper way for engaging in life with growing creativity and commitment.

After a short audio of Andrew Cohen explaining how to meditate from the recent retreat in Tuscany, we put it to the test ourselves as a powerful timeless dimension filled the room. Chris explained that when we sit down to ‘have no relationship to the content of consciousness’ a door opens (if we just do it) transforming this abstract phrase into an ongoing fascination with the ever new and infinite nature of being.

In the dialogues that followed the meditation we were all able to go into the subtlety and paradox of discerning with our rational minds what it means to leave our minds aside for a few moments and directly engage with the source of our being. Chris explained that ‘It doesn’t really matter what our minds are doing’. This is such a refreshing discovery and not what we are usually told in more traditional approaches to meditation practice, which generally tell us that a still mind is the goal. But unless we discover for ourselves that we are not our thoughts it is understandable that we will conclude that our sense of identity is one and the same as our mental process.

Someone asked about mindfulness, which is a buddhist term. This opened up into a fascinating exchange about how the cultural context in which we learn to meditate influences the outcome. Mindfulness is about the practice of awareness, which is very important to cultivate, but if this is taken in isolation (ie; purely as a technique and not connected to the depths of our being) it can make us petty and controlling of ourselves, stifling our spontaneity and creativity. The point of meditation in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment is to let go in order to discover the source of our being so we can learn how to freely engage with life. These are important conversations and guided by Chris’s deep knowledge and experience engages us with the power of meditation not just as a self-help relaxation technique but as a direct engagement with enlightenment here and now.

Every Tuesday you can learn about the ever-evolving nature of Evolutionary Enlightenment and, as well as benefiting from the wealth of knowledge and experience of Andrew Cohen’s senior students, you can meet many like minded evolutionaries passionate about co-creating a new way to be together.

Other States of Emergence

Cosmic Interior by Patrick Bryson

In the last decades, other pioneering work has been done by David Bohm and Otto Scharmer, whose methodologies you might know from their wide application in business and corporate settings.

Twentieth-century theoretical physicist David Bohm pioneered what is now called “Bohmian Dialogue”. Bohm described this as “an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.”.  Dialogues are held in groups of twenty to forty people, facilitated by an experienced participant, but avoiding any sense of leadership or hierarchy.  There is no agenda; the main purpose of the dialogue is to allow people to “explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions”, thus unhinging these fixed beliefs and allowing for an emergence of a shared, participatory consciousness.  Bohm saw this style of dialogue as critical to the survival of humanity, given the extreme levels of dispute and violence that rule the world, and which “point to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought”. 

These three methodologies might seem similar because of their intersubjective nature as well as their focus on the emergence of consciousness.  But does that mean they are the same?

Although all three provoke heightened awareness of emerging consciousness, a closer look reveals some important differences.  Firstly, there is a difference in context.  Bohmian Dialogue seems to be built on the premise that human thought has a defect that threatens the continuation of humanity and needs to be “fixed”.  Enlightened Communication and Theory U, on the other hand, are built on the premise that human beings have the capacity to develop into a higher consciousness, which happens in a context of evolution of consciousness.

But there is a subtle difference between these as well.  Theory U creates circumstances for participants to tap into this higher consciousness and design new solutions to complex problems, but does not aim to develop the individuals beyond that point.  After the workshop, participants go home and implement their solutions.  Enlightened Communication, on the other hand, was withdrawn from public offerings because it was recognized that a lack of development in participants had become an obstacle to the purpose of the very state experiences produced.  This indicates that inherent to this state is a purpose that transcends the individual’s and even humanity’s needs, and calls for the development of consciousness itself, through the development of the individual.  In the words of Chris Parish: “One starts leaning towards being more interested in what we can create together than in what I can be…  This is the evolution of consciousness itself”.

Seeing the Obvious/Invisible

Here, we might be seeing both the success and the challenge of the Enlightened Intersubjective.  This state enables relatively inexperienced individuals to get in touch with the emergence of an exciting new consciousness.  But not everyone seems able to appreciate the evolutionary purpose that goes with this experience, and it takes careful training to ready an individual for turning the experience into the very transformation that experience calls for.

Again Integral Theory can help us understand why.  As Evolutionary Enlightenment is a very new teaching, and the state of the Enlightened Intersubjective has been proven to be easy to experience but hard to “hold” in any consistent way, one wonders what is required to “see” at a level where one can stabilize it.  After all, the realization that consciousness evolves as the interior of the Kosmos is relatively new, so it only makes sense that many would not be open to this insight yet.

In a previous article I have written that when looking at recently emerged post-metaphysical forms of enlightenment, the concept of kosmic address is helpful to understand why what seems obvious to some, seems invisible to others.  “Ken Wilber defines kosmic address as: Kosmic address = altitude + perspective.  This means that kosmic address is as much about the object as it is about the subject”.  My proposition is that depending on the sufficiency of one’s altitude (or level of development) and stabilized access to states (meaning the conscious capacity to enter certain spiritual levels of awareness), this new spirituality is “seen” from either a 3^rd, 2^nd, or 1^st-person perspective, which means: various degrees of appreciation and ability to internalize and integrate what is seen.  In the case of the Enlightened Intersubjective, with an Orange or early-Green Altitude and access to subtle awareness, one can “stretch up” enough to appreciate this state in the 3^rd or 2^nd-person, meaning that one can either have an “arms-length” appreciation of it, or engage with it to some degree.  However, such an experience will hardly lead to transformation, as it cannot be sufficiently internalized at that level.  In order to embrace this state as one’s own genuine 1^st-person experience that leads to transformation, one needs to have both a fully integrated cognitive complexity to understand evolution (anywhere from the late Green Altitude upwards) and the spiritual depth to relate directly to the causal/nondual realm (anywhere from stabilized access to the causal realm upwards).

Conclusion

Spiritual States have traditionally occurred in the great spiritual traditions with Being or transcendence as their apex.  With the arrival of evolution into our understanding of enlightenment, the Enlightened Intersubjective, a state that occurs between individuals as a surge of consciousness/Becoming while being grounded in the traditional ground of Being, seems to be the emergence of a new Spiritual State.

These days, various forms of emergent consciousness are being used to solve humanity’s problems, however the particular nature of the Enlightened Intersubjective is that it inspires and facilitates further evolution of consciousness, putting the evolution of the individual in service of that.  The Enlightened Intersubjective creates a condition in which Enlightenment can be directly brought into the mundane dimensions of life as a heartfelt, concrete reality that deeply inspires the individual to open up to a radically expanded perspective.  Widely establishing the mastery of this state would therefore greatly serve the development of human consciousness and culture.

But in order for this to be widely and successfully used, two things will be needed.  Firstly, we need sufficient altitude growth to post-Green levels that recognize the emergence of consciousness; something that cannot be taken for granted in levels of development below Green because of the cognitive complexity that is necessary to embrace such an idea.  Secondly, we need a wider embrace of the spiritual dimension of State-Stages in our general culture and discourse; our current culture is still quite hostile to this idea and generally pushes spirituality into the realm of the religious, occult, and improbable.

Although innovative Green and post-Green business methodologies are starting to move in this direction, a greater evolutionary understanding will be necessary to promote the wide use of a state that not only appreciates emergence, but facilitates the development of emergence.

This was the last of a 3-post article.

Do you want to experience an Enlightened Intersubjective that is going to blow your mind? Book now for the EnlightenNext Midsummer Renaissance, a fabulous mix of philosophical dialogue, music, art, and entertainment celebrating the uncharted heights of our human potential!

The Enlightened Intersubjective and its Properties

In my last post, I wrote about Enlightened Communication. But this way of communicating invokes a very specific state, which I call the Enlightened Intersubjective, and which has very specific properties. First of all, it is an intersubjective state. This means that it does not occur in one individual, but is invoked between individuals. Andrew Cohen writes: “What was once a subjective experience becomes an intersubjective experience. Because we meet in the Authentic Self, the difference between the one and the many disappears and the enlightened mind becomes the one voice speaking to itself”. Or in the words of Chris Parish: “Emergence happens betweenpeople.  At this point in evolution, we can’t be fully human without other people. Historically, the fact that human awakening happens between subjects is still a relatively new discovery”. 

Evolutionary Biologist Rupert Sheldrake

Referring to Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, Chris calls this consciousness a field rather than a static property: “Consciousness really is not subject to time and space at all… it is nowhere and everywhere, you can’t grasp it… It is not separate from us, [or] between us… it is more like a field”.

So does this consciousness only occur between people?  Using the lens of the four quadrants of Integral Theory reveals that more dimensions are active than obvious at first sight. It arises in the collective interior or Lower Left, but this is paired with a strong individual interior experience in the Upper Left. And, assuming that this state is related to Sheldrake’s morphic field, the interior experience would coincide with collective exterior, or Lower Right, networks of morphogenesis, which is channeled through the individual’s individual exterior, or Upper Right neurological capacity. So even if the Enlightened Intersubjective may arise in the Lower Left, it actively connects all quadrants or dimensions of our experience. But then what is cause and effect; what is the “home” of this unusual phenomenon?

Enlightened Communication Pioneer Chris Parish

The answer might be in the fact that this field is far from static. Participants describe getting in touch with this consciousness as a dynamic surge. Andrew Cohen describes it as “a tidal wave rushing in, a consciousness that seemed to collectively surge forth… and then, just as quickly as it rushed in, like all waves do it would return back to its source and disappear”. I dug up a letter I once wrote to Andrew Cohen (in December 2002): “As soon as we sat down, I felt a surge wiping the room clean of all self-centered motivations, and when we spoke, a [wild] current was created that took us far beyond what we could understand”. Chris Parish describes it as a strongly felt “self-arising impetus to move forward”. If looked at from an Evolutionary Enlightenment perspective, this consciousness holds the dynamic expression of what Andrew Cohen calls the Evolutionary Impulse. And placing this dynamic emergence in the context of the quadrants, we can see that while catalyzed by the collective act of human communication, it emerges or, in Ken Wilber’s language tetra-arises, in all quadrants simultaneously.

Yet this wild emergence is not the only dimension. According to Chris Parish, “people often say that after these discussions, or even in moments of quietness between thoughts, they feel that their experience is deeper than a whole day of meditation; it is totally at peace”. One participant says: “We were as One Body. This unity destroyed all boundaries between meditation and communion, speech and silence”. Another participant describes what Chris calls an “interplay” of Being and Becoming: “When someone spoke, it was like they stepped forward from some unborn place to become. As soon as they finished speaking, they seemed unborn again, and my mind could not remember who had just spoken”. What we are seeing here is the state of Being, or the empty ground of Enlightenment, which seems opposite to the dynamic surge of emergence described previously.

Nonduality? Paradox? New State?

Are these the properties of mere randomly occurring phenomenological states? If that were the case, there could not be the coherence in all the various descriptions from participants. Phenomenological states are states like being happy, angry, or bored; states that come and go, subject to internal and external influences, but without specific structure. In my own experience of Enlightened Communication I can have an experience of the Enlightened Intersubjective that is unequalled in its exhilaration, yet go through a phenomenological experience of anxiety (about not “knowing” the right answer), fatigue (because of a late night), or irritation (because of an annoying participant); but the coherence in participants’ descriptions of seemingly contradictory state experiences points to the existence of a structure behind them.

It is here that I turn to the classical state-sequence of the great traditions, which have been brought together in a theoretical framework for the first time by Integral Theory. Pioneer Daniel P. Brown, who compared three major Eastern traditions and found great similarities in the stages of spiritual realization, identified the sequence of “gross preliminaries and training, then subtle experiences of light and luminosity, then variations on formless absorption or causal “black near-attainment”, [and] then breakthrough into nondual realization”. Depending on the tradition, these are stages of increasing embrace of the non-manifest, or divine, or primordial nature of Spirit. Although one can peak-experience any one of these states, when training them in a spiritual tradition they tend to occur in this specific sequence, and can even be invoked at will.

I tried holding the Enlightened Intersubjective against the light of this sequence. In beginning an Enlightened Communication session, participants often walk in fresh, and we can assume that they come in from a gross state of awareness. But by beginning the discussion and requesting from each participant to leave their personal issues behind and focus on a spiritual text, a discussion unfolds that quickly takes everyone into a subtle dimension. Participants are encouraged to focus as much as on what is said as on what is not said but sensed between them; rather than focusing on the gross reality of words spoken, one tunes into the source they come from. The more the subtle field of consciousness becomes a felt reality, the more participants are able to tune into it and gain confidence in its reality.

And here, we are getting to the point. On the one hand, participants gain enough confidence in the subtle reality of the field of consciousness that they gain access to the state of “deep meditation” that Chris Parish described. This sounds very much like opening a door between the subtle and the causal state. At the same time an emergence takes place, causing animated, sometimes fiery discussion, described by participants as the “surge” or “current”. How do these two phenomena go together? The nature of the causal realm is that the manifest dimension of reality falls to the background; one gains confidence in a non-manifest reality, and as one enters the causal realm, one lets go of the manifest. But here, in the Enlightened Intersubjective, one feels rooted in what Brown called “formless absorption”, yet passionately engages in manifest form and one’s own creative emergence as a human being.

Could it be that the Enlightened Intersubjective is a quick road to nondual awareness? This might be so, but it still does not solve the problem of the trajectory taken: the nondual state classically only takes place after absorption in the formless, or cessation, experienced in the causal state, which is usually a hard-fought state that requires a painful process, called dark night of the soul, of letting go of one’s attachment to the manifest. Here, there is no exclusively non-manifest realm, nor is there a dark night to go through; what we are seeing is the highly unusual and previously unknown simultaneous occurrence of two seemingly opposite states, which build on each other yet are distinct, and arise in one process rather than as separate, static qualities.

I think that we are seeing a new state phenomenon, which, given that Enlightened Communication takes place in the context of a new evolutionary spirituality, would make sense. The traditional sequence of gross-subtle-causal-nondual seems to now include the possibility of gross-subtle-causal/evolutionary-nondual. Logically, with the emergence of a new, evolutionary enlightenment, the spiritual states themselves would be evolving, too.

Next: Part 3 - Other States of Emergence, and Seeing the Obvious/Invisible

Do you want to experience an Enlightened Intersubjective that is going to blow your mind? Book now for the EnlightenNext Midsummer Renaissance, a fabulous mix of philosophical dialogue, music, art, and entertainment celebrating the uncharted heights of our human potential!