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!

Introduction

painting by Patrick Bryson

Over the last few decades, a very new insight has been gained: the fact that consciousness is not static, but emergent. Several methodologies have been developed that make use of this fairly newly discovered phenomenon, and I have been intrigued by these.  I have been a long-term participant and facilitator in one of them (Enlightened Communication, which was developed in the context of the teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment) and received training in another (Theory U, developed by Otto Scharmer).  This involvement has made me aware of some distinct qualities in the state invoked by Enlightened Communication, which in my view makes it a candidate for being a Spiritual State, as seen in the context of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, and a very new one at that.

By Spiritual States I mean the sequence of meditative states in several great traditions, first identified by Daniel P. Brown and then more widely popularized by philosopher Ken Wilber.  These states all show an increasing embrace of oneness with the nature of Spirit, or, in some traditions, ultimate unity with God.  They can be trained through spiritual practice, they can be consciously invoked, they occur in a very specific order, and they have transformative potential for the serious practitioner.

I think that the state invoked in the art and practice of Enlightened Communication is such a distinct spiritual state, and I call it the Enlightened Intersubjective. Enlightened because of its connection to the empty ground of Being that runs through all known Spiritual States.  And Intersubjective, because this state exclusively occurs between people, in active engagement, with a strongly emergent quality, setting it apart from the known, more solitarily experienced, Spiritual States of the great traditions.

In this paper I will explore the nature of this state and compare it with the states invoked in two similar methodologies, Bohmian Dialogue and Theory U.  This will shed an interesting light on the various uses for these states, and the impact they can have on our world.  I will use the lens of Integral Theory, of which, for the sake of brevity, I assume a basic knowledge in the reader.  But if I am assuming too much, you can find all necessary explanations in Ken Wilber’s  great book Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World.

But first, let me disclose a few assumptions.  Firstly, spiritual states are hard to measure and any approximation is usually guesswork, which, depending on one’s level of experiential expertise, might be more or less accurate.  My writings here are not based on measured facts but on assumptions informed by published and unpublished work, a recently conducted interview with pioneer of Enlightened Communication Chris Parish, and personal experience.  Secondly, I am of the view that any Spiritual State cannot be seen as separate from the context it arises in, and will discuss these states as such.  And thirdly, as I have been a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment for twenty years, you might detect both a depth of understanding and unapologetic evolutionary bias in my views on spirituality!

That being said, I hope that this exploration will be enjoyable, and will add to the development of the field of twenty-first century spirituality.

What is Enlightened Communication?

French Priest and Paleonthologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, with an ancient turtle

Enlightened Communication is a communication process that has been developed during the last decade in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the spiritual teaching of Andrew Cohen.  Building on twentieth-century spiritual giants like Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard the Chardin, this teaching takes Enlightenment into a new, evolutionary context.  We have evolved to a level of cognitive complexity that allows us to understand the phenomena of deep-time and evolution, and this casts also a new light on Enlightenment.  Andrew Cohen explains that if life is not a static, circular event, but something that evolves, then Being, or the formless ground, can’t be its only apex anymore; we now understand life as a process with Being and Becoming, or the creative drive, as its two faces in eternal interplay.

Instructions for Enlightened Communication are simple: usually a brief text is used to provide focus to the discussion, which occurs in a controlled context facilitated by one or two leaders.  Participants are asked to refrain from either speaking about personal issues or being abstract.  This is a remarkably simple way to put the Ego, or limited self, to the side and let a more authentic response emerge from each individual. Andrew Cohen writes: “Suddenly all participants find access to a kind of knowing and cognitive capacity that has nothing to do with any prior accumulated knowledge.  They find access to the source of wisdom itself”.

Indian Activist and Sage Sri Aurobindo

Enlightened Communication started as several spontaneous waves of revelation that occurred in focused dialogue between students of Evolutionary Enlightenment, which some of the very writers and readers of this blog have been a part of.  With increasing experience, this gradually got honed down to a very particular style of discussion with clear guidelines, which for several years was widely practiced in public events all over the world. Chris Parish, the Managing Director of EnlightenNext London, in particular pioneered this method and took it all over the world. Usually these discussions are organized in groups of between four and twenty people, although as conference call technology advanced up to fifty people from all over the world started to participate.  And the remarkable thing is that, in my own experience, even with that many participants, these discussions are disciplined, spacious, and extraordinarily profound.

Contemporary Spiritual Teacher Andrew Cohen

Although the public Enlightened Communication Groups were very popular, after several years they were modified into less obvious forms. The reason for this was that people struggled to turn the experiences into true transformation, because they lacked the tools to integrate and internalize them into their entire being.  Realizing that these discussions were becoming counterproductive to the very wisdom revealed in them, it was decided to only hold them in their most distilled from with a those who actively engaged with the teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment.  “This is a very subtle emergence. Living by it is much more demanding [than experiencing it]”, says Parish: “It takes a lot of development… you have to become more interested in in the development of this consciousness than you are in yourself”.  This strategy indeed helped to integrate this emergence into the general discourse, practice, and even business culture surrounding Evolutionary Enlightenment.  According to Chris Parish, “it is now the reality of the field of consciousness that we inhabit and create together.  And now this consciousness challenges us to develop an autonomy that doesn’t come from the separate self-sense… and that’s a new thing to develop”.

Next: Part 2 – The Enlightened Intersubjective and its Properties, and Nonduality? Paradox? New State?

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!

Every once in a while we get to experience real magic. A moment when a multitude of elements come together to create something that is far greater than the sum of it’s parts; a moment that you may have been a part of, but where it really isn’t about you in the small sense, but about something far greater.

So this is where it started. I am stood by the side of the dance-floor, itching to move. I love to dance, really love it actually, and there are moments when I experience it is an unbearable urge to move, to let go, to flow with the universal energy that is fundamental to the rhythm of life itself. But I wasn’t quite ready to let go fully, not yet

It was a Saturday evening and Andrew Cohen and his Jazz-Funk-Rock Band Unfulfilled Desires were burning up the room with fire and passion. The music was tight and full of intention (and I am saying this as someone who can’t really hear Jazz, it usually has no real impact on my psycho-physical state – meaning it doesn’t make me move ). But when I hear Unfulfilled Desires the transmission of Enlightened inspiration bypasses my years of musical conditioning, jaded by electronic dance and hip-hop music. I imagine a large part of the electric energy coming off the band this night was due to the occasion. It was the 25th anniversary (Jubilee!) of my spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen’s, spiritual awakening. The weekend had started on the Friday with a sublime and beautiful celebration in acknowledgment of Andrew’s awakening, together with many of his closest students.
This was followed on Saturday by what must be a phenomenon on conscious broadcasting: a 13 hour webcast with Andrew himself interviewing 30 spiritual leaders about the men and women that inspired them; amazing individuals that have inspired and compelled others to evolve and develop from the depths of their beings. I must say that from my own experience, throughout the whole day, I was drawn deeper and deeper into the significance of spiritual transformation and the true power of the relationship between a spiritual aspirant and their teacher – it really is a dynamo for the universe to evolve!

Now this is what Andrew called his gift to the Cosmos. As we go back to the side of the dance floor this was where I was about to experience another gift from Andrew. As I stood there feeling the overwhelming urge to rip onto the dance floor, I was looking over at Andrew playing the drums, getting into his groove, and he turned his head to me and gave me a little nod, signifying that I should get out there and go for it! Without any hesitation I was moving. It didn’t matter that there were around 200 people watching, I was given such sweet and awesome permission to let go. So there I was, an empty dance floor, feeling out the space, ready to get into my rhythm, when all of a sudden I was joined on the floor by another dancer, and no ordinary one at that! It was a gentleman named Joe Gifford who was not only an extraordinary contemporary dancer in his time, but was strutting his stuff at the grand old age of ninety – how cool is that! As soon as Joe came onto the dance floor I felt an immediate respect for the man; for his years on this planet, and for a lifetime of experience in movement. Joe was not only a high-level contemporary dancer in his younger days, but continued and developed his movement practice, teaching others and helping people with areas like public speaking and more recently working with music conductors. His physical age at this point almost made the depth of his movement that much more beautiful. He moves from a place of real depth, truly original and free movement. Although I have had a wealth of profound and inspiring experiences of freedom and letting go through dance (it is actually how I had my first spiritual experiences, which ultimately led me to the spiritual path) I had to surrender to the experience and freedom that he brought.

So there we were, Joe and Jody, duelling it out man to man. There was friction and tension that a true dance battle brings, but with no ego screaming for attention. We moved and spun and let go more and more, interweaving one fluid movement that had a life of its own, almost like we were being and creating a dance that had it’s own nature beyond us, with a motive to come alive and to experience itself through us. This was one event, one happening; the band flying and undulating with cosmic rhythms, the whole gathering co-creating a cosmic cocktail of creation together.

Here is a short video taken on an iPhone:

It was pure joy, a transcendent experience, and a rare moment experiencing a motive for dance that was truly beyond myself. Even though I have had many experiences of deep letting go with dance, more often than not it is also filled with a lot of self-concern, and narcissism. I consider myself a pretty good dancer, and this has been reflected and confirmed by others on many occasions. So even though I love to dance, the experience of being on the dance floor is often filled with an infinite variety of self conscious impulses and references: who is looking at me, what do they think of my dancing, how do I look compared to him, or the extremely frequent, is she looking. I can truly say that this was one time where none of that was present; no self concern at all, and I could drop into the true joy of letting go and creating something in consciousness together with other people.

I am in total gratitude for this. In gratitude for the nod from my Guru, to being able to dance with such an accomplished and beautiful man such as Joe, and to being part of a creative process where something like this could happen. It had a deep impact on me and strengthened my conviction in the path I have chosen to live, with my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen. A life where the music we are dancing to, and playing on our iPods, is the cosmic rhythm of the Universe: a symphony we are listening to and participating in as one chorus of creation.

If you would like to hear what Andrew is teaching yourself and are base in the London area, he will be speaking about the topic of ‘Spiritual Self-Confidence, at the UK EnlightenNext centre next Monday. Click here for more details.

I started seeking for spirit in the late seventies like many people after a personal crisis (brought on by the clash between my strict Irish catholic upbringing and too many mind expanding drugs!). When I look back now, I can see that in a simple way I was looking for confidence, a deeper confidence in myself and in life, which I knew I didn’t have at the time. The journey that I started then has been started by millions of people for similar reasons and defines a whole generation looking for answers.

On the way I have become fascinated by how complex we all are. We are often at odds with our own experience and with others, and yet conscious enough to temper our primitive impulses because of an inate moral sense of what’s right for the common good. In spite of these motivations that pull in different directions we are capable of simple acts of love and generosity on a daily basis too. Some of us can even stand out as spiritual heroes, setting an example for others that give us all a touchstone for hope and goodness. Through encountering spiritual heroes, we can awaken to the need to not only draw on their inspiration but work at the bold task of becoming that which we long for and gain access through their embodiment.

On Saturday 26th March, as part of the 25th Anniversary of his enlightenment, Andrew Cohen broadcast over 25 interviews with spiritual teachers about their relationships with their teachers. He did this to give due attention to the importance of spiritual mentorship in an age where this is misunderstood and even decried as irrelevant because the emphasis is often on finding our own inner truth for valid historical and cultural reasons.

We do all need to stand on our own feet and be self-authors of our lives. But life and spiritual evolution is a complex issue and one of the great gifts of post-modern thought is the understanding that the deeper structures of our identities are formed in relationship and it is this paradox of alone/together that brings a fascinating cultural light to the question of spiritual evolution. We can all benefit tremendously by honouring the potential inherent in this understanding.

In this light I wanted to share what I’ve discovered through my relationship with my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, which is primarily a Guru/disciple relationship. As many of the interviews on the 26th March broadcast revealed, meeting your teacher (as it was when I met Andrew Cohen) is a profound and deeply meaningful event because the teacher opens a window to directly seeing our own potential (not someone else’s).

In an authentic Guru relationship the next phase is that you get to see your own ego and there is no way to make this pretty. The ego in this case is the accumulation of all the limited and negative aspects of self. To confront this in oneself can be very demanding and this is where all the problems and misunderstanding arise about spiritual mentorship and progress. To be honest most don’t make it past this point but whether or not this is the case, I think it is of the utmost importance to understand the nature of the human transmission of spirit because except in rare cases this is how enlightenment and in fact the transfer of any deeper knowledge actually works, whatever shade or colour we believe in. This is how we are made. Through this understanding we can find the wisdom of humility versus arrogance, surrender versus isolation and soul strength versus weakness that is the seat of real spiritual self confidence because we get to find out, for ourselves, that life is REALLY good.

To explore this topic further Andrew Cohen will be in London on 11th April giving an evening talk where he is looking forward to engaging us all on the nature of Spiritual Self Confidence.

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…

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.

We have just finished a very successful event here in Edinburgh.

Andrew Cohen delivered a fantastic talk in the presence of over one hundred people, in the immaculate venue of St Johns church on Princess St Edinburgh. In two hours Andrew laid out his Kosmocentric vision for who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. His emphasis was to engage people and encourage them to think in a much broader way by laying out the fact that we have all been produced by a cosmic process and that process is going somewhere!

He explained that in Spiritual development, peace or transcendence is only part of the picture. The emphasis in Andrews Cohen’s teaching is that meditation is not an end in itself but it’s the foundation of what he calls the new enlightenment-the awakening to the evolutionary impulse. When we have an experience of this evolutionary impulse we experience an overwhelming ecstatic sense of care for the life process that liberates us from any sense of self contraction Then the goal is to do the spiritual work individually and collectively by riding on the waves of this energy to transform ourselves out of the culturally conditioned self to become higher more integrated conscious expressions of spirit in action! After the talk – Director of Edinburgh Inter-faith presented Andrew with a tartan scarf as a memento of his trip. This was a beautiful touch.

Dr Robin Wood, founder of Renaissance2, and Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext, debate the macro-outcome of the current micro-shifts going on around the planet right now. What’s it going to be? And how is it unfolding? What role can you play in all of this?

For more information about Renaissance 2:-

Addressing a question that’s surely as old as humanity itself, an enthusiastic gathering of people took on the perennial investigation into man’s relationship with a higher power at the EnlightenNext UK Centre one recent Thursday evening. The discussion was organised by the 21st Century Meetup and was advanced by a panel of six men and women of diverse beliefs and moderator Francis Sealey. The members of the panel were a Muslim, Humera Khan; a Christian, Elaine Storkey; a Hindu, Jay Lakhani; a humanist, Laurie Taylor; a Unitarian, Andrew Pakula; and a practitioner of Evolutionary Enlightenment, our own Chris Parish, Managing Director of the EnlightenNext UK Centre.

The following clips will give you a taste of the conviviality that pervaded the evening.

The evening got off to a lively start when each member of the illustrious panel had five minutes in which to present their position on God. From having no interest in the question of God whatsoever as voiced by the humanist to expressing the joy of a living a life completely surrendered to God, and everything in between, the panelists described their understanding of what the term God refers to. Following this brief introduction, moderator Sealey opened the floor to questions. There was no lack of questions as members of the audience brought their own ideas, predilections and belief systems into the discussion. Always passionate if sometimes contradictory, the conversation covered a gamut of issues and, if not having definitively resolved the question by the programme’s end, the range of opinions that emerged over the course of the discussion provided much food for thought for everyone. Indeed, many attendees stayed on for a vegetarian dinner in the EnlightenNext dining room and further discussions that carried on long into the evening.

What was especially interesting to observe were the affinities that became apparent across certain religious belief systems or within the wider perspectives of some of the panelists. Also, it was fascinating to see how much people cared, whatever their persuasion, about God and the implications of what God’s existence or nonexistence meant. On the part of the audience, there was an enormous amount of genuine interest in seeking a fuller understanding of the ideas espoused by the panelists. Everyone seemed to really want to find out for him or herself what was at the heart of seemingly contradictory positions. If nothing else, the evening was a rousing rebuttal to that long-touted assertion that God is dead. At the EnlightenNext Centre God was very much alive, whether one believed in him or her or not!

Ian McNay interviews Chris Parish on Conscious TV. This is a fascinating interview in which Chris reveals the sources of his lifelong interest in spirituality and pursuit of enlightenment.