This blog was submitted by Peter Cloudsley:

The regular Tuesday Meditation+Evolution evenings at EnlightenNext are already a fixture in my week as they have helped my meditation to go deeper. For example, last night I had a dream that I was attempting a major project and at a critical moment, a new sense of self confidence came over me telling me it was all perfectly possible.

This came after Tuesday evening when we explored ‘Ultimacy’ – in the context of meditation this means the experience of infinity. Patrick Bryson, who leads the events and guides us, always encourages us to talk about our experience of meditation after the weekly sessions. At first I found it very difficult, even unanswerable, but now I see the point of this inquiry and ask myself this question frequently as this helps me to stay alert and to go much deeper. Also, I am learning what non-duality means – in that we can see meditation as both a means and a goal, and I am beginning to relate these insights to the whole of my life.

Last Tuesday, I shared that I had always felt a yearning in life to ‘be up to something’ beyond day-to-day activities and even work that I loved doing. Here I was seeing that a guide was coming from a deeper part of me accessed by the experience of ultimacy. Someone else said she felt this when she used to work as an environmental activist, but disagreements in her group had caused her to lose interest. Perhaps her comrades did not appreciate the need for ultimacy to unite them.

The discussion moved on to the relevance of meditation as a ground for cultural change and someone said that if culture was always evolving, why had there been retrogressive periods of fascism and right wing ideology? There are indeed dead ends in evolution too and we can learn from them when we are clear about the need to move beyond the divisive conflicts born out of the egoic self, i.e., a primary assumption of separation from life.

Someone else said there were limitations when one simply tried to do the ‘right’ thing. This person had tried it and found it could lead to conflict with others. By the end of the evening there was a tangible sense that we had moved forward as a group. We were discovering a sense that culture could move forwards consensually in spite of all our differences, if we come from the same spiritual ground.

________________________________________
Next Tuesday (22 Nov) we’ll be exploring the art and science of stillness

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.

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.

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.

At this time many of us here at EnlightenNext are thinking about and eagerly anticipating the upcoming long retreat with Andrew Cohen this August. The Being and Becoming Retreat is a major milestone in EnlightenNext’s yearly calendar. This year it will be held in the beautiful hills of Tuscany. You can read all the details here

To focus our collective attention on the power and purpose of going on retreat, we’ve decided to devote next Tuesday’s Evolution and Meditation night at the London Centre (14th June 2011) to a discussion about going on retreat and its benefits. This evening will be FREE for anyone so please do consider joining us. We will be able to engage together, watch some great clips from last year’s retreat and get a deeper sense of what it means to be able to transform our lives in order to create a better future for humanity.

So please do come along! And invite anyone else who you think may be interested and wants to learn more. If you live too far away to come on Tuesday, don’t hesitate to get in touch to discuss any questions you may have or simply to speak together more fully.

“London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.”         ~ Peter Ackroyd

When we look at the big picture and witness as Londoners where we have come from and what could be possible I think this quote serves as a beautiful guiding light. The historical roots of London are nourished with an enormity of cultural riches that lay the ground for what I believe can be a truly positive and limitless future. And yet as a culture we seem to be suspended in a mixture of uncertainty and cynicism about where we are heading and if we are going to make it ‘there’ at all! For more than 20 years the work of EnlightenNext UK has been exploring strange phenomena like these and now we are compelled to bring the conversation out of the lab and into the hustle and bustle of London’s streets and coffee houses!

In 15 locations around the Boroughs of London we have set up a monthly meetup point arranged through our page on the website – meetup.com. We have just completed our third month of this experiment and it has been very encouraging to see it gradually take shape as a hub for creative meaningful conversation. What makes the conversation so interesting is our belief that evolution is not just a continuous process that happens ‘out there’ – it is also ongoing ‘within us’. So where is the evolutionary process taking us? What is the next step for humanity? What is the next step for our local London? These are just some of the questions we explore and in doing so we further our own evolution at the level of consciousness and culture.

The decision to bring the conversation out into the wider population of London has arisen as a direct result of the natural development and careful nurturing of a maturing evolutionary culture at the UK centre in Islington -> I have witnessed with wide eyes the growing confidence and increasingly creative zest that the UK team is expressing more and more now and to which I am humbled to be a part of. I also see this reaching out to all Londoners as an act of love for our wider humanity and the life process itself.

This perspective, given the right conditions, will certainly begin to overcome in a very meaningful and comprehensive way the limitations and tensions we experience in everyday life. So please tell me more about this perspective I here you ask! Well as I hinted at earlier it looks at evolution as an internal as well as an external process which is a major component in the field of evolutionary spirituality. What I find greatly exciting about this perspective is not only does it attempt to answer all the questions we may have, that stop us from evolving in all areas of our life, but, it, as a philosophy also evolves. Over the last 25 years spiritual and cultural pioneer, founder of EnlightenNext and creator of the profound Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings Andrew Cohen, has played a major role in driving the evolution of evolutionary spirituality to its present dynamic and vibrant state.

The way in which the teachings evolve occurs only when we are intent on letting go of our own hang ups about ‘the way the world is’ and open up to the possibilities of insight we can discover when coming together in a collective space of spiritual and cultural inquiry. This is a form of communicative practice that enhances the collective intelligence, and begins the emergence of what could be referred to as a Supermind. In my experience this frequently results in multiple individual and collective insights that we would never get to on our own…

This has to be one of the defining reasons behind my own interest in Evolutionary Enlightenment, it, itself has the humility by design to evolve and remain relevant to the times. This design only works however with our participation – we must actively engage to become more aware of what ‘our times’ are. To get you thinking about ‘our times’ before our next meetup lets very briefly go into some of the themes we discuss…

1) We are seemingly in a time of hyper-individualism. With the works of thinkers such as Freud the 20^th Century marked the age of the individual. This movement was extremely positive and with the 60s civil rights movements heralded the greatest levels of autonomy history has ever seen. However in ‘our times’ in a culture of ‘whatever’ and ‘anything goes, as longs you don’t hurt anybody else’ and the ever increasing superficial identities we can assume, the age of the individual has seemingly carried itself to precarious extremes! As described by Thomas de Zengotita in the EnlightenNext article ‘Mediated’:

“As representations grow in variety, sophistication, and intensity, they create ….a “psychic sauna” of experiences, sensations, and options that we glide over the surface of, like “a little god, dipping in here and there. . . .” In a mediated world, the flattered self is the center of the universe—the consumer, the viewer, the holder of the remote control—able to opt in or out whether it be in regard to a television set or reality itself.”

2) We are seemingly in a time of confusion in the face of complexity, upheaval and unrest. Since the beginning of the mid-80s the information age has begun a speeding up of technological and societal development which can now seem daunting and increasingly complex. Add to this the converging of multiple global crises including the ongoing financial crises and unrest in the Middle East and we have a melting pot of existential concern.

3) We are seemingly in a time of cynicism. In times of hyper-individualism and confusion we can often feel isolated and as a result we can become naturally closed off to any possibility that we can have an impact on events seemingly outside of our control. Part of this cynicism seems to be generated from the failings of institutions including those that are religious and spiritual – to stay relevant to our times. Traditional institutions in many ways just don’t address the complexities of 21st century life anymore and new age spiritual groups often offer safe retreat from the complexity we face and in that – only appeal to our longing to feel at peace – rather than create any real change in the individual or culture. These are just a few reasons for why cynicism is so prevalent in our postmodern culture.

So now I must ask you some questions!

• Could there be more to evolution than what mainstream science would have me believe?
• Is there a creative potential in me that can be found when I let go of my personal hang ups?
• Does it seem that coming together collectively to find solutions to our life concerns, can begin to dissolve cynicism and start to create meaningful change?
• Would coming together like this help me to overcome and face the complexities and isolating forces of a hyper-individualized London?

Having leaned into what some aspects of ‘our times’ appear to be and the possibilities that may come from engaging with others in this new way I am reminded of another beautiful aspect of this teaching that speaks to people that aren’t necessarily believers in ‘God’ or ‘Spirit’ as a wise old man in the sky ‘up there’. Good news! As I am sure you can tell by now neither do we! Instead I would describe spirit in evolutionary spirituality as: your highest and fullest Self, your creative potential at its absolute limitless peak. Andrew Cohen calls this the Evolutionary Impulse, and it is this – come the time of our next local meetups – that I feel very excited to give full expression to, with and between my fellow Londoners! Can we discover, nurture and cultivate this Evolutionary Impulse, our highest Selves at the heart of an ‘infinite London’ and create a new and inherently positive culture? I know We can!

If you would like to join us at one of these inspiring monthly local meetups and go deeper into the many questions and themes that I have only begun to introduce to you here click on one of the meetup icons on this page and choose from any one of our 15 London venues!