This  is another video clip taken from a seminar that I did on  meditation and  the nature of the self in New York.

I thought some of my blog readers might be interested in my podcast episodes so i decided to post them here. enjoy...

Thursday, Apr 05, 2007

Cosmic Consciousness vs.a Kosmos-centric Level of Development

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In this episode Jeff Carreira distinguishes between the experience of what many have called Cosmic Consciousness and the creation of a Kosmos-centric Level of Development.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 8:43 AM |     

Friday, Mar 23, 2007

Creating a New Society

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In this episode Jeff Carreira talks about the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment as the creation of a new culture and society and challenges people to become more active in that effort. He then responds to a question about the importance of being able to communicate these ideas in language that is easily understood by all.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 2:12 PM |     

Saturday, Mar 17, 2007

Living on the Progressive Edge

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In this episode, Jeff Carreira describes Andrew Cohen's conception of Natural Hierarchy on a conference call with a group of people from California. He goes on to talk about the responsibility inherent in being part of the most progressive segment of the population.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 3:53 PM |     

Monday, Mar 12, 2007

Depth and Meditation

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In this episode Jeff Carreira describes what he means when he speaks about discovering more depth within yourself and then relates this to Andrew Cohen's instructions for meditation.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 2:56 PM |     

Monday, Mar 05, 2007

Instructions for Meditation

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In this episode Jeff Carreira explains Andrew Cohen's instructions for meditationa and responds to questions regarding what it means to "do nothing" in meditation.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 9:35 AM |     

Saturday, Mar 03, 2007

An Experience During Meditation

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In this episode I describe an experience I had while meditating on a retreat guided by Andrew Cohen. In the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment having spiritual expereinces is not the goal, but the experiences that we do have serve to inspire us and give us confidence in our ability to live beyond ego.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 6:12 AM |     

Monday, Feb 26, 2007

Creating a four quadrant solution

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In this episode Jeff Carreira discusses how our deepest experiences of the discovery of purpose and meaning in life are often followed by the arising of fear and doubt. Understanding this as an impersonal mechanism of the mind can give us enormous strength through challenging emotional experiences. Later, in response to a question, he explains what he sees as the relationship between the revolution in consciousness and culture that Andrew Cohen and Evolutionary Enlightenment is aimed at and the four quadrant model of Ken Wilber.

Sunday, Feb 25, 2007

What is the meaning of your life?

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This episode of the EnlightenNext Evolutionary Enlightenment New York podcast was recorded during a conference call on February 15. In it Jeff Carreira first explains why it is much more difficult to look into the question “What is the meaning and purpose of your life?” than it is to look into the question “What is the meaning and purpose of life?” This discussion is followed by a powerful question from a call participant discussing her own struggles with this challenging line of inquiry.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 1:55 PM |     

Saturday, Feb 24, 2007

An Invitation to Evolve in New York City

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This SPECIAL EDITION episode of the EnlightenNext Evolutionary Enlightenment was recorded during a seminar that I conducted in New York City on February 17. In this segment of the seminar I describe how it is that I think conscious evolution can occur within individuals and more importantly within culture as a whole. I conclude this segment with an invitation to all those present to join me in a six month experiment to create an evolutionary movement in New York City.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 3:35 PM |   

On the weekend of April 28 and 29 I will be leading two one-day seminars with my friend and colleague Katherine Miller.

On Saturday, April 28 we will lead a seminar called, “Beyond the Individual: Awakening to the Field of Consciousness” and on Sunday, April 29 we will lead a seminar called, “The Qualities of Collective Awakening: Exploring the Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment.”

Before I describe these seminars or how they came about in more detail I first want to say a few words about my co-presenter.

Katherine Miller has been a dear friend, fellow spiritual compatriot and working colleague of mine during most of the fifteen years that I have been associated with Andrew Cohen, EnlightenNext and the teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Over the past year I have had several opportunities to teach with Katherine and each one of them has been a joy and a privilege. As an instructor, she has a clear and delightful manner and a deep understanding of the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. We share a love for the intricacies and subtleties of consciousness and when we teach together we always manage to pull the best out of each other. So it is with great pleasure that I introduce her as my partner in conducting these two seminars.

This weekend of seminars occurs after two months of work that I have been doing with people including weekly conference calls, two previous seminars and numerous conversations and email exchanges. All of that engagement has been preparation for the material that Katherine and I will be presenting during this weekend.

The content of these two seminars was originally intended to be the second part of the five week course on Evolutionary Enlightenment. I have decided that restructuring the content into these two one-day seminars will provide a more powerful platform. I also decided not to require that people do the first course on Evolutionary Enlightenment prior to taking either of these seminars. That decision is based partly on the fact that I have structured these seminars to be self-contained, partly because I believe that they make just as strong an entry point into these teachings as the first course does, and partly because we now have more course offerings that can provide context for this seminar.

These two days will be devoted to exploring the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Unlike some traditional teachings of enlightenment, the goal of this teaching is not a person’s individual attainment of awakened consciousness. It is aimed at creating and stabilizing an awakened field of consciousness that is shared by many individuals and that can become the basis for the construction of an entirely new future.

The shared higher consciousness that results when people practice evolutionary enlightenment together is the sole focus of both of the seminars that Katherine and I will be conducting on the weekend of April 28 and 29.

On Saturday we will spend the day exploring the profound shift that occurs when you recognize that the consciousness that we all habitually think of us as coming from inside of us is actually a field that we all share. On Sunday we will be examining very closely the characteristics that emerge within and between individuals in that higher field. Through Andrew Cohen’s work of over 20 years, he and his students have discovered that people who enter an awakened field of consciousness experience different qualities of being. These qualities have been characterized by Andrew as what he calls The Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment. We will explore each of these six qualities during the seminar on Sunday.

What I am most excited about regarding this weekend is Katherine's and my intention to take both our own teaching and the experience of participants to a greater level of depth than in any of our previous work. To create this seminar will be drawing on our own understanding of Evolutionary Enlightenment as well as our over 15 years of experience as part of what you might call a spiritual experiment in which we and others have engaged in intensive individual and collective spiritual practice. We intend to spend the next few weeks working together to build on what we have done in the past and create an entirely new presentation of the material.

During this seminar weekend we will work slowly and deliberately first to help deconstruct the normal experience of consciousness and then reconstruct an experience of shared consciousness that can be recognized and examined by all of us. We will be presenting simple but profoundly subtle concepts while interspersing each session with brief periods of meditation to maintain a heightened degree of awareness and depth. In this way I feel confident that we can help everyone present experience the reality of what I believe is the next stage of human consciousness.

You can register for either or both of these seminars here.

I have recently written more about these seminars, if you are interested click here. 

Monday, Apr 09, 2007

Collective Awakening

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In this epidose Jeff Carreira is joined by co-host Katherine Miller to discuss the ultimate goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment as a collective awakening to a higher consciousness from which a new culture can be created. They describe this awakening in terms of Ken Wilber's model of the four quadrants.

GETTING ON MISSION

Soon after the emergence of EnightenEd Conscious ness that occurred on July 30 Andrew Cohen asked me to become his personal assistant and I have served him in that role ever since. During the next few years the inter-subjective consciousness that had immerged on July 30 occurred repeatedly between numerous groups of students. Andrew constantly worked with us in an effort to help us stabilize that miraculous shift.

In November of 2005 there was an emergence of this higher mind that occured "non-locally". It was being experienced by Andrew Cohen's students in places all over the world during the same time period. So exciting was the new emergence that Andrew felt compelled to make a public announcement of it on his website.

Around that time I accompanied Andrew on a retreat in India and something happened on that trip that dramatically altered my life's trajectory.

During one teaching Andrew was passionately describing his realization that the leading edge of the evolution of the universe is the awakening of human beings to the evolutionary process itself. As he spoke I could see that the passionate insight that he was expressing was being met by the excited interest of the retreat participants and that their excitement was pulling more passion out of Andrew. It became so clear to me that what I was watching was not a teacher speaking to students, but the very edge of the universe evolving into a deeper understanding of its own nature. The cycle of insight eliciting interest and that interest in turn eliciting more passion and so on, was the frothy edge of evolution right in front of me.

One of the things that Andrew was saying was that once human beings wake up to the fact that they are part of an evolving universe any further evolution depends on their conscious participation in it. I had heard him say that many times, but this time I realized that I had always reinterpreted what he was saying by replacing "depends on" with "can by accelerated through." So in my mind the way I always heard the statement was: once human beings wake up to the fact that they are part of an evolving universe any further evolution can be accelerated through conscious participation.

What I "saw" clearly on that retreat was that we "had to" consciously participate in evolution or evolution would end. It makes total sense if you think about it. Once single celled asexual organisms evolved into multi-celled sexual organisms the future of evolution was dependent on the multi-celled organism's participation - in this case in the reproductive act. The multi-celled organisms could sit there and try to divide asexually as hard as they wanted to, they would never create another being and soon that evolutionary line would die out.

After that retreat I realized that we as human beings are in the same situation. Now that we see that the universe is evolving as our own consciousness, we have to participate or our line will die out. At that point I looked at the global challenges that we face and saw them as symptomatic of our lack of engagement with our own evolution. The human race is not fulfilling the demand for conscious evolution and the results are the global problems that we see around us. Our evolutionary line is failing - or at least that is what hit me so strongly.

I had been charged with creating a course on Evolutionary Enlightenment a year before that, but had never made any progress with it, but now I had an entirely new motivation. I knew that we had to educate more people about our critical role in evolution and I knew that we could. So I put together the first course in Evolutionary Enlightenment and I did so in such a way that I would be able to successfully train others to teach it, even those with less experience than myself. I taught the course a few times in the spring, we then trained 26 teachers in August, ran 28 sections of the course worldwide to about 550 people in the fall and trained 20 more teachers a few weeks ago.

I am currently scheduled to lead seminars throughout the United States and Europe. I am about to train over 70 people to give presentations on Evolutionary Enlightenment and have 38 sections of the original course scheduled to be taught worldwide over the next few months.

Stay tuned...

THE BIRTH OF EVOLUTIONARY ENLIGHTENMENT

The time of that retreat was the most powerful of my life. I had more spiritual experiences than I ever even believed would be possible. I still have the journal that I kept at the time. After about three days I started to have powerful realizations of all types that seemed to get stronger each day. I had intense Kundalini explosions in the middle of the night with blinding white light rushing up my spine and out through the top of my head and I spent three days completely unable to lose consciousness even through all stages of sleep. (A description of this experience can be found on my podcast.) Even so, nothing could have prepared me for what was going to happen on the evening of July 30^th 2001 – the date that Andrew Cohen later dubbed “The Birth of Evolutionary Enlightenment.”

By that time we had been on retreat for one month and in the evenings we had started to meet together with other students who were not part of the retreat. We were talking about our experience and they were talking about what they were learning about a radically new way to communicate together. As we met together night after night different people would begin to experience this new method of communication that we would later call Enlightened Communication. Then on July 30 the last person who had not really jumped into those discussions flipped in and something outrageous happened.

A tremendous energy engulfed us and we began to recognize that the way were speaking together was not as separate individuals drawing on separate minds, but rather as separate mouthpieces for one intelligence that we were all sharing. It became more and more obvious that I higher mind, with a higher perspective and higher values and ideals was connecting us. And as we met over the next few weeks every time we came together it felt as if we were plugging into that higher mind. There is no way for me to do justice to those weeks in the context of this blog post. My friend and colleague Carter Phipps wrote about it in the pages of WIE and you can read more about from his perspective there.

After some time the consciousness that we had been holding seemed to slip though our fingers, but all of us who took part in that event were left with no doubt about what we were doing together. The higher mind that had emerged between us had now become what we recognized as a higher human potential, a higher way of being and stabilizing that consciousness had become our goal.
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A COLLECTIVE ADJUSTMENT

One thing that I have come to realize over the years is that Andrew Cohen is absolutely serious in his intent to create a revolution in consciousness and culture with enough impact to help guide humanities future. If you think about how much momentum the human race has accumulated you will get a sense of what it will take to alter its current trajectory. How many people would you have to transform and to what degree would they need to change to have a real affect? Those of us who are students of Andrew Cohen’s were draw to the notion of creating a truly revolutionary movement in the world and after being with Andrew for many years he assumes that the lives we live are revolutionary. In point of fact, he often found that our lives fall far short of the radical dedication to evolution that is the demand of our time.

The personal drama that I described above was part of a larger shift that Andrew was trying to bring about among his students at the time. I remember it starting when Andrew called about 30 of us together for a meeting. He explained that none of us were as serious about liberation as we thought we were. He felt that we had lost touch with the original passion for transformation that had driven us to take on the spiritual life in the first place and had settled into a comfortable alternative lifestyle. Outwardly we all agreed that he was right, but inwardly none of us really believed that we were anything less than deadly serious.

Over the next few months Andrew attempted to get us to face our own lack of commitment and take seriously our expressed desire to create a revolutionary spiritual movement. We had many meetings lead by more senior students. Andrew used various forms of “Dharma Theater” like staging a mock New Year’s Eve party as a metaphor for the lack of seriousness with which we were treating life. And in the end, when nothing seemed to make a difference in anyone’s attitude, he asked us all to leave. He said that he would rather start over with new students than continue the way things were going.

He told me later that he never really expected us to leave. He thought that he would tell us to go and then we would realize that he really meant business and start taking ourselves seriously. We left.  Then slowly one by one we started to convince Andrew to allow us to come back and start again. I was the last person to be allowed back. In the end he took back 12 of us and he immediately had us do a two month long retreat consisting of spiritual practice from about 4am until about 10pm everyday.
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RISING AND FALLING

After spending a couple of years helping to get the EnlightenNext Boston center up and running, I decided to move onto a property in Western Massachusetts that would become the home of his spiritual community. I soon moved to the property called Foxhollow in Lenox, MA that is still my home.

I continued to work marketing of the magazine “What Is Enlightenment?” as I had done in Boston and I became EnlightenNext’s first official employee when I was hired into the position of marketing director. Initially I was a shooting star. I began bold initiatives (including convincing Andrew to speak at five Whole Life Expos) and managed a busy department while helping the members within the department develop.

Eventually I succumbed to one of what Andrew Cohen has called the two main pitfalls of men on the spiritual path – arrogance. Secondary to my success and the respect that I was garnering from my peers and from Andrew himself I adopted the attitude that I was the only one doing “it.” Increasingly I did whatever I wanted and didn’t listen to anyone’s advice, criticisms or suggestions. When finally I began to see that I was in fact acting like a fool I succumbed to the second of the major male pitfalls – weakness. Unwilling to face myself with courage and humility I collapsed into an emotional heap. I stopped performing my job and eventually became the first employee of EnlightenNext to be fired.
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LETTING GO

One of the most powerful experiences I have ever had occurred about a year later. After a difficult year of slowly drifting apart I decided to tell my wife that I felt that for both of our sakes, she and I should end our marriage and start fresh. Approaching the moment that I had decided to talk to her I began to experience abject terror. By the time I began to speak the fear in my mind had grown so strong that it took on the form of a screeching sound in my ears. As I told her what I was thinking the noise in my ears was so loud that I could not even hear the words that came out of my own mouth.

Once I had told her that I thought we should separate the noise stopped and the terror vanished and I was enveloped in total silence. All at once I felt an enormous weight lift off of me. It was as if a lead suit that I had worn since birth and never knew that I had on had fallen off of my shoulders. The suit was heavy with the burden of all of the ideas about what was good and what was bad that I had inherited from my upbringing and from the society in which I lived. All of a sudden their were no more rules. I had no sense of what I should do next. I was free, completely free. I felt so light that I actually thought that I was floating off of my chair and put my hand underneath myself to check that I was still firmly planted. (I was.)

Then I began to realize that everyone is burdened by their own version of unexamined conclusions about life. I began to realize how much everyone was suffering from this and I cried so hard that my stomach hurt. And then I started to think about how easy it was to shed that burden and I saw what a cosmic joke it was that we all suffered so much from ideas that all we had to do to be rid of was decide to let them go. I started laughing so hard that my side ached.

For about half of an hour I cycled back and forth between uncontrollable crying to equally irrepressible laughter. In either case I stopped when my stomach hurt so badly that I could not continue. I had let go of the life that I was living. It was not just my marriage that I was leaving. I was convinced at the time that everyone I knew would shun me for choosing to follow a spiritual path and I was ready to accept those consequences. I was free.
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FINDING

I first encounter my soon to be spiritual teacher when I walked into the entrance of a local spiritual bookshop and his photo on a poster caught my eye. Andrew had a huge smile on his face and the caption beneath the photo said, “If you truly want to be free in this lifetime, nothing in the world can stop you.” Now that wasn’t want I was hearing in my Buddhist studies. From what I had read about Buddhism, if you imagine a bird dragging a silk scarf across a mountain that is a mile high the number of times the bird would have to fly by before the mountain was worn down to nothing is the number of life times that you will live before you are enlightened. Hard to imagine that this lifetime would be the last pass across the mountain, isn’t it?

I asked in the bookstore and found out that Andrew had a book called “Enlightenment is a Secret” which the store didn’t have. I ordered one and came back for it two weeks later. I picked up the book and before I got back in my car I opened it. An hour or so later I was still sitting on the side walk beside my car reading the book. Every stop I made that day I read a little more and thought about it. I wouldn’t have called it this at the time, but I was definitely having a powerful spiritual experience. The original poster I had seen was advertising a talk being given by Andrew.

A few weeks later I went to one of three evening talks that Andrew Cohen was giving. I arrived early and found about 30 people lined up outside the door. I didn’t know anyone there, but some were later to become some of my closest spiritual compatriots. I struck up a conversation with the woman ahead of me in line. We bonded around the fact that neither of us had ever seen Andrew before or knew very much about him.

I listened to Andrew that evening with interest, but I had no idea what he was talking about. As I told my wife when I returned home that night, “He struck me as a very sincere man and all the words he was using I recognized to be English, but in the order he was using them I couldn’t understand the sentences.” My overall impression had been very positive based on his obvious sincerity, but cognitively I just didn’t get it.

Over the course of the next few months I read “Enlightenment is a Secret” over and over and over again. Every time I got to the last page I moved my book mark to the beginning and started again. Six months later Andrew returned to speak again for three evenings and I was determined that I was going to get it this time.

The first evening he spoke I went determined to ask him a question. I spent the whole evening tied up in a mental knot of fear trying to get my hand to travel the foot or so into the air required for him to notice it and ask me if I had a question. When the evening ended I hadn’t asked a thing, and I hadn’t heard a word that he said.

The next night I decided to ask nothing and just listen. I sat intently staring at him and listening carefully to every word. He must have noticed my unblinking stare because at one point midway through his talk he asked me my name. That was the only interaction we had. I had heard every word, but like the first night I has seen him, I had no idea what he was talking about.

On the third night I was absolutely and utterly determined to be the first to ask a question. He started off the evening asking if anyone had any questions and my hand darted overhead.

“I have read your book “Enlightenment is a Secret” and I know that everything in it is true.” I said and then asked, “But where do I find the faith to be able to commit myself to it and know that everything will turn out OK?”

“Who said everything is going to turn out OK?” He said, “It might turn out to be a complete mess. If you knew that everything was going to turn out OK you wouldn’t need any faith would you?”

Upon hearing this, my mind whirled with a stream of insight and realization that fell in one of two categories. One – this was a man that was not trying to tell me what I wanted to hear, he was telling me what he saw as the truth. Two – if I wanted anything big to happen, I was going to have to take some big risks.

He talked to me directly for about 15 minutes I think, but the only things I heard in the swirl of my own thoughts was something about the part of me that insists on a guarantee getting its head dragged to the chopping block and something about enlightenment being a one-way ticket. If you get on the train for real, you don’t come back. I didn’t know it then, but nothing was ever going to be the same.
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SEEKING

I had rejected my Catholic rearing years before college and was actively entranced with the big questions of life.  I was fundamentally an atheist and a materialist so science seemed to be the answer to it all and physics was in my opinion the science of all science.

I never did find the answers in physics. I realized half way through my senior year that although the study of physics was all about discovering answers to the question “why are things the way they are?” you do in fact always, no matter which direction you move into, seem to come to one “why” too many. One “Why is this like this?” that can only be answered by “Because it is.” I graduated anyway.

What do you do when you graduate with an undergraduate degree in Physics? You go to graduate school, you teach physics in high school, or you become an engineer. I became an engineer. I worked as an associate engineer for a semi-conductor laser manufacturer on the route 128 high-tech belt around Boston. I worked for a team of outrageously intelligent PhD’s who would come up with laser designs to exacting specifications and I would figure out how to actually build them and then turn them into product lines.

When I woke up one morning and found myself working on a laser design that was going to be used in a micro camera mounted on a military missile so that it could be flow via TV screen into some dictator’s bathroom, I started to have doubts about the ultimate value of my chosen profession. I quit.

By this time I was married and I took some time off, went back to school and got a master’s degree in education. Yes, I was going to switch to curtain number 2 and teach physics in high school. I got a job in a small school for incarcerated teens and I became the director of the school after my first year of working there. In the end I stayed for four more years, touching a few young lives deeply, but always troubled when we would send them back into the same situation that had made them dysfunctional in the first place.

During this whole time I was still trying to find the big answers. I studied cognitive psychology at the Harvard extension school, read every book that caught my eye with my taste gradually running more and more in the direction of the overtly spiritual. In the end I decided that I was way too rational and started to see a new age teacher once a week. We did crystal healings, past life regressions, I even went along when she said she was in contact with beings from other planets, but when she told me about the little people (3 feet high) who live under the earth’s crust and only emerge out of a whole located in the Antarctic, that was that. I had more than my fill of the new age for this life time.

I started going to a Buddhist meditation center in Boston and meditating regularly. I started seeing some of the spiritual teachers that would come to town too. That is when I met Andrew Cohen.
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BEFORE THE BEGINNING

I was born in the sixties, but I grew up in the fifties. Somehow all of the counter culture excitement that swept through the United States during the sixties and early seventies – a movement that I should have been too young to participate in, but old enough to be influenced by – seemed to move straight past the small town in Rhode Island that was my port of entry to this life. Like a tornado that destroys a neighborhood but leaves one house untouched, I seemed to miss the whole event until long after it was over.

When it came time for me to choose a major for college I wanted to study fine art and found myself under subtle but heavy pressure to reconsider my options. Architecture was a much more acceptable way to allow my artistic side to expresses itself. In the end I decided to major in…engineering (I didn’t hold up well under pressure.)

After a year as an engineering student I realized that if I didn’t get out of there, that was where I was going to end up. The only class I really liked freshman year (and one of the few I passed) was physics. So I became a physics major.
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Something exciting is beginning to unfold around the project that I initiated in New York City in February. This project which has come to be part of a bigger EnlightenNext initiative called The Universe Project, consists of my work with people educating them about Andrew Cohen’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment through a series of seminars and weekly conference calls and then whatever engagement happens between them as a result. And what I have been noticing is that the project is taking on a life of its own.

One of the things that made this most clear to me was Andrew’s response when I had the opportunity to explain to him in detail during a long car ride my plans for the seminar that Katherine Miller and I will be conducting on the weekend of April 28 and 29.

I explained to him that during the first day titled “Beyond the Individual” Katherine and I want to explore the field of consciousness. Most of us consciously and unconsciously relate to our awareness as if its source resides someplace inside of us. But Katherine and I intend to demonstrate that consciousness is a field that we exist in – an ocean in which human beings swim. We don’t want to merely intellectually explain this fact, we actually want to guide everyone to the direct experience of the field of consciousness.  Over years of work with Andrew Cohen, Katherine and I have learned how to turn attention onto the field o that exists between people and by doing so make that field increase in strength and awareness. Our first task on the Saturday Seminar will be to establish a field of consciousness among the participants. Our second task will be to explore that field in an evolutionary context. In other words we will discuss the evolutionary implications of what we are experiencing as we experience it. This type of living, real-time investigation is one of the most thrilling things I have ever experienced.

Then on Sunday during the seminar entitled “The Qualities of Collective Awakening” we will continue with the exploration of the day before by examining Andrew Cohen’s Six principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment. In my experience exploring the new terrain of collective awakened consciousness is like discovering a new world. At first you are overwhelmed with the bewilderment and joy of finding yourself in a completely alien landscape. Then your natural curiosity begins to overtake you as you explore your new surroundings. Everything around you is so different and fresh that it forces you into a state of wide-eyed awe and inquiry. This is exactly the state that we want to engage with during this second seminar day.

I described to Andrew how Katherine and I wanted to use a combination of presenting our own experience, meditating together with everyone and discussion to achieve the results we intend to. He was very excited about everything that he heard, which of course gave me more confidence that something extraordinary and marvelous is going to happen over that weekend.

What is so unique about this weekend is how much preparation has gone into it. And I don’t just mean linear preparation – in other words people learning things at previous seminars or on conference calls that will create a foundation for what we will do on this coming weekend. Sure that is true, but the preparation I am speaking about goes way beyond that because all of us who are connected to this project to whatever degree are now part of a connected field of consciousness. I am talking with Andrew and getting his guidance as I prepare for the weekend, Katherine is also preparing, people are writing to us, people are talking about these ideas, people are thinking about these ideas, people are listening to podcasts, reading blogs, participating in calls, meeting others etc. etc. etc. All of this activity is what develops the field and when we get together for the weekend seminar we will all benefit from everything. That is how consciousness works; it is not limited to individual interactions or even by our concept of reality.

In a sense the preparation for the seminar is part of the seminar itself because the build up in the field of consciousness around it is a perfect example of what we want to explore in it, namely, how the field of consciousness can be perceived, engaged with and evolved. What could be better!

The more I think about it, the more excited I become. What is happening around this project in New York, as far as I know, is also unique because never before have a group of people who are not officially students of Andrew Cohen been this deeply and consistently engaged in his methods of development. I have learned and continue to learn so much from Andrew about the subtleties involved in facilitating evolution, not just as individuals, but as groups of individuals. First of all to trust and be able to act with relentless whole-heartedness even though you are working in a certain way “blind” without a guaranteed outcome. Andrew teaches that in Evolutionary Enlightenment by definition you cannot know how things will unfold and you have to be willing to work in the midst of unending insecurity with totally confidence not in yourself, but in the evolutionary process itself.

That is how the New York project is unfolding and that is part of the reason that I feel so excited about it. When during the seminar in February I decided to ask people to engage with me for six months I had no idea what I was going to do. And true to form things have unfolded much differently than what I had expected.

I had said that I had two goals for the project. One was to have 1000 people in the New York area engaged by August. Well at this point our mailing list is over 600 people strong, but the people engaged are not only from New York. So I guess the project decided to expand itself. J The other goal was that those engaged experience development and from what I am hearing from people many are. Everything seems to be working so I have no intention of slowing down now.

I hope to see you at the upcoming seminar.

You can register for the seminar here.

This is the latest podcast recorded during a conference call last night

The Field of Consciousness

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In this episode Jeff Carreira is joined once again by co-host Katherine Miller for a discussion into the revolutionary possibility that consciousness is not something that exists within us, but rather it is we who exist within a field of consciousness.

Flight delays and states of consciousness

I am writing this post sitting in a small jet stuck on a runway at the Pittsburgh International Airport. I’m writing mainly to alleviate the tension of not knowing if I am going to take off or not and to distract myself from the frustration from having been stuck at this airport for nearly 24 hours.

It seemed like a good plan when I came up with it. I needed to go to Pittsburgh for the weekend to meet the parents of my new fiancé Amy. We took a long train ride to Pittsburgh so that we would have time to do some work on the way down and planned to fly back on Monday to New York leaving myself a day to get settled before I was scheduled to lead a public meditation at our center.

It is now 3:10pm on Tuesday so it is unlikely that I will make it to meditation tonight, but I have had the opportunity to observe the movement of mind through a variety of mostly unpleasant states. It can be fascinating to focus on the background state of consciousness as it moves and shifts in response to the ever changing circumstances of life.

Flights getting cancelled, information from the airline being continuously vague and incorrect, customers exploding into angry tantrums and even flight attendants acting boorishly under the pressure of so many upset customers, all serve as an intriguing experiment in strong states of consciousness.

How do we know what is True?

What I find most compelling is how our emotional response and the intellectual conclusions that we draw about everything mix and become virtually indistinguishable. During challenging times you see more of what is going on in your mind all the time because the volume is turned up much louder.

For instance when I first got on this plane (over 90 minutes ago) I was rudely addressed by the flight attendant. Immediately my nervous system exploded in an electro-chemical discharge of anger and resentment. At the same time I could rationalize that she had probably had a difficult couple of days too. My rationalizations did seem to mitigate my emotional response on a superficial level, but more deeply I was still completely upset for having spent over 24 hours stuck in an airport only to be mistreated.

At the very same time as all that, I also knew that what I was experiencing was just a state of consciousness that would arise and fall away in its own time. I knew that it was affecting my perspective on reality and that it made the conclusions I was drawing suspect. I also knew that knowing all this wasn’t going to change my mood or decrease its duration. What a complex thing human consciousness is!

Now, well over an hour later, I am more resigned to the fact that I am not going to make it to New York in time to lead meditation. I am making plans to reschedule the event and I my mood is more even. It is obvious to me in this state that none of this is really anyone’s fault. The fact is that the Northeast has just been hit by a major storm and all of the airports around New York City are experiencing extreme back ups.

But wait a minute, does that mean that the flight attendant had to be rude? Isn’t she still responsible for the well being of her passengers? And how about the airlines? Are they totally innocent? The fact is that my original flight yesterday did leave the ground after a long delay only to be returned due to technical malfunction.

It is clear that the background state of consciousness affects conclusions, but which conclusions are accurate? When I was more frustrated and upset the conclusions that I was drawing were more vindictive. Once I calmed down my conclusions were more reasoned. Which are accurate? I believe that it is too simplistic to merely assume that the more reasoned conclusions are the more accurate.

The ever-changing field of consciousness and a higher moral calling

Now if you further consider the affects of being part of a field of consciousness you add another whole level of complexity. Even if we think only mechanically, the way the flight attendant treats me affects me and I in turn affect the people around me. Each of them affects still more people. We are all totally interconnected. Our emotions and thoughts are part of one continuous web.

In this plane, sitting on a runway for nearly 2 hours, are about 36 irritated people. Each I am sure could talk to you for an hour about all of the circumstances that make this unfortunate situation the worst thing that could have happened. All of our thoughts and emotions and all of the ways that we affect each other’s thoughts and emotions create a delicate interplay. Each thing that I do has some subtle or gross affect on the field and each thing that anyone else does as well.

If you think about it, this is a perfect metaphor for the state of our world. We are certainly in a challenging circumstance and the volume seems to get turned up each day. What are the effects of our actions on the interconnected human field of consciousness that we are a part of?

When we begin to accept the reality of a field of consciousness what we simultaneously have to begin to grapple with is the existence of a new sense of morality. In this higher ethic we feel a sense of responsibility not only for the affects of our actions on our immediate surroundings, but on the state of the field of human consciousness itself.

The Mysterious Sense of Being Something

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In this episode Jeff Carreira and co-host Katherine Miller explore the mysterious ways through which a sense of self emerges in the field of consciousness. If consciousness is one undifferentiated field, how is it possible that something could exist as separate from that field that could become a “self?” What is it that I call “me?” Who or what are we? These are the questions that Jeff and Katherine dive headlong into duirng this edition of the podcast.

Guided Meditation

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In this episode, recorded during a guided meditation event in New York City, Jeff Carreira describes Andrew Cohen's instructions for meditation and goes on to describe his own experience of the practice and its critical significance for the evolution of humanity. This podcast includes 30minutes of guided meditation. (Note: The recording quality of this podcast is not as good as others here, but because of the nature of the material I have decided to publish it anyway.)

The Qualities of the Authentic Self

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In this episode Jeff Carreira and co-host Katherine Miller discuss the emergent properties of the Authentic Self explaining that these qualities do not belong to an individual human being, but are characteristics of the inter-subjective awakened field of consciousness that can arise between people. In response to questions they go on to describe both the Five Tenets of Enlightenment and the Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

This past weekend Katherine Miller and I lead two seminars in New York City. Our intention for the weekend was to use one day to deconstruct the sense of self and go into what it would mean if consciousness were a field. On the second day we intended to use the practice of Enlightened Communication to discuss Andrew Cohen’s six principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

As it turned out my ideas about what should happen had to be left behind…

The first day went similar to how I had thought it might. We deconstructed the sense of self together and introduced the idea that maybe the awareness that we usually think of as ours is actually the awareness of a field of consciousness that we are all a part of. Many found the inquiry thrilling and even disconcerting at a deep level. People were very engaged and asked probing questions that made me have to questions many of the ideas about how reality works that I had walked in with. It was a true collective learning experience and in essence together we came up with a different model of consciousness, fields of consciousness, and the individual sense of self than what I had brought to present. We had gone much further than I had planned and everyone seemed to leave ignited with curiosity and enthusiasm.

Going into the second day I had very little idea how we could possibliy go beyond what we had come to the day before. I decided to be open to anything…I would have never guessed what was going to happen.

At the very beginning of the day a single questioner brought up a challenging question about his own lack of faith and cynicism. My initial response was to divert from the question for fear that he would lead the whole group into a quagmire of self concern. Yet, there was something in his question that seemed so earnest that I decided to take it seriously. That one question changed the direction of the entire day.

What erupted out of that moment was a shared collective interest in finding a way to communicating this view of enlightened evolutionary development that could be heard and understood by a much larger audience of people. Person after person pursued questions of how can we truly communicate the urgent need to evolve in a way that everyone can relate to and get inspired by. It was clear to me that it was not the individuals in the room that were speaking, but some larger consciousness – what Andrew Cohen would call the consciousness of the Authentic Self – that was using this group to voice what it felt needed to be heard and responded to.

My experience cycled from being so deeply moved by the depth of authority, authenticity and wisdom that was entering the room to being terrified that I was not doing my job. I went through bouts of terror where I was convinced that I as the presenter needed to present, but every time I tried to restart my intended program the energy in the room wouldn’t let it happen.

By the end we were all clearly plugged into a higher state of collective consciousness. Everyone wanted to talk about how we can make the message of Evolutionary Enlightenment accessible. What amazed me was how completely this discussion was aligned with discussions that many of us have been having throughout the organization. There were uncanny similarities and even answers given through this seminar to questions that were being raised by our board and managing directors. At moments like this you just have to stop trying to make sense of everything and realize that there maybe more going on in consciousness than you are aware of.

I will definitely be posting more on this in the days and weeks to come.