I am leading a seminar in New York City in a couple of weeks (click here for more information) and in preparation I have been conducting conference calls on Thursday nights. I recently received a brief email that I thought was a perfect example of the challenge that we face when we strive to see ourselves clearly. I thought some of my blog readers would appreciate my response to the letter so I have posted it here for you.

Jeff,

Ok reality is constructed and interpreted and thus one is responsible ok and..................I cant get hold of what we are inquiring into............what’s the inquiry that we will be engaged in fully in the all day event........what’s the question?

 Sincerey, X

 

Dear X,

Thank you for your question. I hope you don’t mind, but I am going to use it to go into what my seminar is about in some detail. The mild frustration that your note carries with it is totally natural in the kind of investigation that we are attempting to embark upon together and I think I can help you and others understand why. Here goes…

Seeing Postmodern from Postmodern

The first thing that I am attempting to help all of us do is to see our own postmodern conditioning. I should start by saying that I am hardly an expert on postmodernity, but I have realized that it is very challenging to see cultural conditioning for two reasons. First, it is simply how we always have been so it just seems like the way things are. Second, it is also how everyone around us is so again, it just seems like the way things are. Analogously it is similar to why none of us hear are own accents. I am from Rhode Island and believe me many people have told me that I have a strong accent. But to me it doesn’t sound like I have an accent…they do! The same holds true for cultural conditioning and specifically in this case postmodern conditioning.

That is why looking into it together can feel frustrating, because we just seem to be talking about things that are obvious anyway. On the other hand, when things that have just seemed like “the way things are” begin to be recognized as conditioned ways of seeing, we find a source of liberation that pulls the rug out from under us in the most delightful way.

Your brief note affords two opportunities to examine our postmodern culture. The first is the fact that you accept the fact that reality is constructed and interpreted as being self-evident. That particular way of seeing is very new in human history. It represents an extreme degree of individuation in the human psyche where we not only see ourselves as individuals but we see “our” reality as individual too.  During my seminar we will take this investigation further and also examine how it has produced enormous good for human kind (very few of us would choose to live in 1207 over 2007 J) but is also partly responsible for so much damage – as in to our environment - even though the knowledge that the damage is occurring does exist. If that damage is not touching “our” reality, it can be difficult to really care.

The other thing that gives you away as a postmodern (and please don’t take this personally – we all have it…that’s part of the fun) is the ‘been there/done that” jaded attitude that comes through in the tone of your note. The ability to be jaded is also a very new development in the human condition. You can imagine that a serf in medieval Europe probably didn’t feel jaded in quite the same way – even though he/she probably had plenty of reason to! We as postmodern humans have seen so much, and know so much and are so intelligent that we are very difficult to impress. Once again, obviously being intelligent has been a very, very good thing…but it does have some down sides. For instance it is very difficult for us to recognize something new. Why? Because our super developed minds are so good at comparing everything instantaneously with other things that we already know.

So one of the things that I want to do during the day we are together is leave everybody with a tangible experience of the postmodernism within themselves.

The Possibility of a Higher Perspective

But to be truthful the investigation that I discussed above is the very beginning of what I want to cover in New York. In fact, I hope to have that part mainly done over the next two conference calls so that we can hit the ground running in the Big Apple. The main thrust of what I want to do on the 17^th has to do with getting everyone to consider (beyond our postmodern self) what it would mean to live for a higher purpose. One of the down sides of our hyper individuation is that we often loose touch with the one reality that we all exist within. In the seminar we will discuss what it would mean to be directly connected to a higher sense of meaning. I know we all think we are connected to a higher sense of meaning, but that is because we are postmodern and we think we know everything. J My plan is that all of us, including me, will go way beyond whatever we think we have come to.

This leap into seeing from a higher view can be equated to vertical development. We all have infinite room for development without entering into a higher perspective. That development can be called horizontal and represents our efforts to grow and expand across the playing field that we are on. There are many opportunities for horizontal development. Cognitive, emotional, etc … for those of you of an integral persuasion think of Ken’s levels and lines…but when we think about leaping into a new view, or context, that means leaping up to a new playing field – and that new playing field is also horizontally infinite, but once we discover that there are higher and higher playing fields the leap upwards begins to become much more interesting than exploring any one playing field.

A Kosmoscentric View

Once we have gone into what it would mean to uphold a higher view in the lives that we live, I intend to introduce the world-view of Evolutionary Enlightenment which is fundamentally rooted in a Kosmoscentric perspective. From that perspective our role as agents of evolution is seen as being of primary importance and worthy of restructuring our lives around.

So that is what I intend to cover. Thank you again for writing and please understand that nothing that I pointed out here is personal to you. We are all part of the same conditioning and those of us that are beginning to wake up to it are trying to break out of it for everyone’s sake.

 

This coming Saturday I will be conducting a seminar in New York City called “Living with Meaning and Purpose.” (Shameless self promotion) The topic of the seminar revolves around what it means to live in accordance with an absolute context and the Kosmoscentric Context that is the philosophical framework of Evolutionary Enlightenment specifically.

As luck would have it, I just attended a two day retreat with my teacher Andrew Cohen this past weekend that addressed this exact topic in relationship to the life I am living as one of his committed students and partners in the creation of a new future.

The weekend retreat was what Andrew refers to as Revolution Retreats. During these weekends Andrew gathers with his closest fifty or so students. Those students are currently leaders in the work of Evolutionary Enlightenment or well on their way to becoming leaders.

During this past weekend Andrew introduced us all to his recent thinking about what he recognized as the emergence of a new phase in his work. The first phase of his work involved personal Enlightenment. Teaching in the tradition in which he was taught, he was mainly concerned with liberating the individual from their own compulsive and neurotic relationship to life. The second phase of his work has been deemed Evolutionary Enlightenment and was centered on manifesting and controlling the field of awakened consciousness that began to emerge between many of us working with him.

But it was a few weeks ago that Andrew had a major epiphany that became the inception of Evolutionary Enlightenment 2.0 (EE2?). His epiphany occurred when a business consultant that our organization (EnlightenNext) is working with during some restructuring that we are going through told us that in her 30 years of experience she has never worked with any group who could change as quickly as we were. She wanted to do a case study of our restructuring for a class she teaches at NYU and asked our CEO, Bob Voss, if he would do a guest lecture for her. It was these occurrences that lead Andrew to realize that the awakened consciousness that existed between many of his students was already affecting they way we lived and worked and that these benefits needed to become the focus of the next phase of his work.

This new phase of our work will involve studying and documenting human development as it relates to the most fundamental principle of Evolutionary Enlightenment, namely individual’s willingness to abide beyond ego.

The purpose and meaning of human life (remember my seminar) for those of us who are dedicated to the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment is to explore the potential of development beyond ego. Ego, as Andrew carefully explained to us this past weekend, comes in two forms. It can arise as the lust for power or recognition on one hand, or as fear and inertia on the other. Both of these forms hinder the development of the individual. When a persona has to some significant extent transcended these motives it has a dramatic effect on how they live and evolve. A group of people striving to transcend these motives together creates a powerful engine for transformation. Demonstrating this potential through our own lives has, as of this weekend, become the primary and explicit task of those of us who are dedicated to Evolutionary Enlightenment. In this new phase we will push our ability to develop in all aspects of life: health and fitness, work and leadership, spiritual practice, cognitive development, creativity…etc. Reporting on everything that we learn along the way…

Much More on this topic to come…

SInce writing my last post about the weekend retreat on which Andrew Cohen discussed what he saw as a new phase in his teaching work Andrew himself has posted on his blog about the same event. You can read Andrew's post here:

Making Enlightenment Meaningful: The beginning of a new phase in my teaching career

Last Saturday I lead a one day seminar in New York City called Living with Meaning and Purpose. The seminar went very well. During the day we started by exploring out own relationship to higher philosophical ideals and more importantly how those ideals are reflected in the way we live our lives. In the second part of the day we discussed the kosmos-centric perspective that is the ultimate philosophical context of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

For the most exciting thing that happened that day is that I asked all of the attendees to join me on a six month experimental exploration in the evolution of consciousness and there was indeed enthusiastic general agreement. So I intend to work with this group of people and to grow the group until we have created a significant evolutionary movement.

If you want a taste of what happened on Saturday you can listen to part of the day on my podcast (click here).

We just finished the first day of Andrew Cohen’s eight day winter retreat in which Andrew has explained that he is going to conducting a real-time experiment in conscious evolution through guided discussion groups with all of the retreat participants.

Today he gave two teachings that will serve as context for the discussions that will start tomorrow. He spoke entirely about what evolution at the level of consciousness is and how we go about facilitating it in ourselves and each other. In human beings, he stated, consciousness only develops in relationship. Conscious evolution is catalyzed through what Andrew refers to as creative friction. That friction can occur within ones own mind by “rubbing” ideas against each other or with other people through serious discussion. (Andrew did make it clear that even when we are thinking the ideas that we are bouncing off of each other are not all our own in the first place so even this is in a sense a dialog with others.)

It is this function of creative friction that makes focused discussion and inquiry such a potent vehicle for individual and collective growth. That is why Andrew intends to devote so much attention on this retreat to discussion groups that are guided by experienced students of his.

I will be one of the discussion group leaders and I intend to blog during each day of this retreat to give you a real sense of what is happening and what we are all learning together.

One last thing that I want to mention here is the idea of the “choosing facutlty” that Andrew went into in depth during the afternoon. The choosing faculty is the part of the self that chooses. He spent a great deal of time with it and was making the simple but profound point that the choosing faculty is not an individual – that it has no characteristics in and of itself, but that it (or you) become whatever it chooses the instant a choice is made.

I have written before on this blog about the choosing faculty which is why I wanted to mention it here. What I personally found so illuminating is how it is the fact that the choosing faculty itself is completely devoid of characteristics that makes us totally responsible. If the choosing faculty were not empty – if it had even the slightest of inclinations – we could still claim to be victims of that inclination. The fact that the choosing faculty has no qualities whatsoever means that at the deepest level there is absolutely nothing we could possibly be victimized by except our own choices.

Please stay tuned!

During this second day of the retreat Andrew Cohen initiated the discussion groups that he introduced in concept yesterday. He gave a powerful talk in the morning session about inquiry in which he explained that in order to discover something new we must find the perfect middle point between “not knowing” and “wanting to know”.

By not knowing he didn’t mean being empty of thought, but rather not holding on to fixed ideas and conclusions that we already have come to in the past. If we go into an investigation unwilling to let go of what we think we already know we can never come to new levels of understanding.

At the same time we cannot just fall into the meditative oblivion of not knowing either. There has to be a real desire to find out, to come to new conclusions. Without the drive of wanting to know we would just be in a meditative state and the evolutionary element would no longer be present.

After the morning session we conducted the discussion groups. All of the retreat participants were grouped according to the amount of experience they have with the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. After the discussions everyone met again with Andrew and dialoged with him about what had happened in the group discussions.

That afternoon meeting with Andrew was truly remarkable because it gave everyone present what is generally an inside view of how a teacher works with his students. There are many students on the retreat who have been working with this teaching for 5, 6, 7 and more years. Andrew addressed his longer time students frankly and with high expectations.

It occurred to me that everyone was going to benefit not only from the instructions that were being given, but also by seeing how a spiritual teacher engages and works directly with students. In our post-modern world where the idea of a spiritual teacher or guru is often shrouded with mystery here was a spiritual mentor plying his trade as it were in a public forum.

Andrew spoke today almost exclusively about the distinctions between the authentic self, the ego, the ground of being and the choosing faculty. He asked people to describe their own experience of these different parts of themselves and then directed us to talk about these distinctions when we met in the afternoon.  

Initially in the discussion group that I was leading I found that I had to make a great deal of effort to hold the discussion to just these distinctions. The group momentum seemed to want to move on to further implications. As we continued to make distinctions over and over again we found that what might seem like simple and obvious differences between aspects of ourselves were not nearly as simple or obvious as they initially appeared. Soon we found ourselves in uncharted waters.

The thing that swept the whole group up into a thrilling investigation was the point about the choosing faculty that I had written about in my blog post from day one. We were talking about Andrew’s emphasis in this retreat on the fact that the choosing faculty is not a person and has no preferences itself. It is merely the function of being able to choose. In our discussion someone likened it to a car’s ignition. The ignition allows the car to start, but it doesn’t start the car.

As we talked about this fact, the discussion became both exciting and impassioned. It seemed that for all of us there was some emotional investment in the choosing faculty having some self-nature – some preference in some direction. “If the choosing faculty has no preference then why do we choose anything, why don’t we just sit there?” was the question that naturally arose.

This is a fascinating question that I think leads to what I wrote about in my earlier blog post – our own absolute responsibility. If the choosing faculty has no preference, if it makes no choices itself then what is responsible for the choices that we make? We are! That’s it, no preference to start with, just an ability to choose with no direction to it at all – total freedom…thrilling and terrifying!

As we continued we were naturally led into a profound contemplation of who we are. Who is this entity that I call me? Who is making the choices that lead to who I become?

It all remains an open question of course and we did eventually loose the intensity of that inquiry by succumbing to the temptation of letting the discussion veer away from our own experience and into the safer waters of theory and philosophy. But for a while we were deep in the unknown, none of us certain where we were heading or what we were going to learn or most importantly what it would mean about who we were going to be. That depth of investigation is rare to even touch upon, and even more difficult to sustain.