In my second post centered on the seminars that Katherine Miller and I conducting this past weekend in New York City I thought to share something about the content that we shared. One of the things that Katherine and I had had intended to do was lead those who had come to the seminars through an investigation of a model of how consciousness has evolved based on Andrew Cohen’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. As the weekend progressed however, that model we began with was built upon and reconstructed by the 30 participants present. I have spent some time thinking about what we had come up with and have summarized it here.

Before Time
Before the universe was created there was just awareness - pure awareness, pure consciousness, awareness before there was anything to be aware of, consciousness before there was anything to be conscious of, oneness, one without a second, nonduality. Nothing yet existed, no time, no space, no thing, but in that pure conscious awareness the potential for everything was there.

The Big Bang
At the inception of the universe something exploded into being. Atoms, energy and light appeared and at that moment duality was born at the most fundamental level of manifest consciousness. It would be impossible for us to relate to the consciousness of a particle of light, but since it sprang from pure awareness it must have been based in consciousness and that pure awareness itself must have had some experience of being a particle of light.

The Physiosphere
To use the terminology of French priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, at the moment that mater burst forth from emptiness the physiosophere was born. The physiosphere is the realm of non-living mater. The pure awareness that existed before time must have had at some level the experience of becoming and being mater and as mater evolved to more and more complex forms the experience of being mater must have evolved. The pure awareness that existed before the universe was now having a single experience of being mater in ever more complex forms.

The Biosphere
Continuing with the terminology of Teilhard, when mater evolved to a form complex enough, it took on the characteristics we now recognize to be life. The biosphere is the realm of living mater. At the instant that life was born from non-living mater self-awareness at its most basic level was also born. Even an ameba has some rudimentary self awareness. It may not have thought based awareness. But it has internal workings, it ingests, it moves, it expires. At some level there must be a sense of being a separate something that allows the inner workings of an ameba to know they are the inner workings. Imagining what that level of consciousness might feel like is as impossible as imagining what the consciousness experienced through a rock would feel like. Still, the pure consciousness from before the big bang was now having an experience of being life. As non-living mater became more and more complex the experience of being alive also become more and more complex.

The Noosphere
Continuing with the same terminology, when the awareness that was experienced through living mater became complex enough to become aware of itself self-awareness was born. At this point living mater became aware of itself and aware that it was aware of itself. At this point duality was created at the level of consciousness. Until this time there had only been a single ever evolving experience of being. The pure awareness of the universe had first had a single experience of being mater and then an experience of being life. Now the awareness of the universe was having the experience of pieces of life that were experiencing being themselves. An entire universe of abstraction was born. The single experience of the universe was now experiencing the illusion of being separate and each separate piece was lost in the delusion of being itself. The self aware individual emerged from the single experience of the universe.

The evolution of consciousness from this point on has been well studied, but where it has often been studied as the evolution of consciousness it might better be thought of as the evolution of the illusory sense of being something separate from the awareness of the universe itself. Many models of this development have charted the progress of the consciousness of the sense of self through stages such as egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric and kosmoscentric.

Evolutionary Enlightenment
When we as an illusory sense of self recognize ourselves to be part of the process of evolution – the very same process that has allowed the pure awareness from before the beginning to create a form of living mater (ie. us) complex enough to look back and recognize itself as part of a vast evolution process – what we are experiencing is the awakening that Andrew Cohen has called Evolutionary Enlightenment.

I am writing this blog post to tell you about an exciting weekend retreat that is currently taking place in the blistering 100 degree heat at the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel. Gathered together there, in what I have heard is a beautiful retreat facility, are 21 students of Andrew Cohen all of whom met him during the first year or so of his teaching career. The retreat that they have embarked upon is focused on a very specific goal – to awaken, record and enliven the events that transpired around the true birth of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

Although I met Andrew about six years after any of these people did, I feel a particular affinity to this retreat weekend because I along with my friend and spiritual brother Carter Phipps were part of the inspiration for it. A little over a month ago Carter and I spoke about the historical value of recording exactly what had transpired around the time of our teacher’s awakening and the early formation of his work. During a conversation that we had with Andrew about this, the idea for the retreat at the Dead Sea was hatched. Two days later email invitations went out to about 2 dozen people, 21 of whom are present at the Dead Sea this weekend.

Carter and I along with a few others have had the opportunity to participate in periodic conference calls with our friends on retreat in Israel. With each call we find ourselves pulled more and more deeply into the awakened field of consciousness that seems to have engulfed them all. From what is being transmitted to us it is clear that an illuminating picture of Andrew and his early students is emerging through the lens of time.

I have heard Andrew describe that soon after his awakening he imagined that he would become something like a spiritual wizard who would travel from place to place awakening people to the miracle of enlightenment and the truly liberated state that was their birth right. And during the first two years of his teaching work he traveled with groups of students to different parts of India and Asia, and on to locations in Israel, Holland, England and Italy. The 21 chroniclers at the Dead Sea are currently concentrated on remembering stories and discussing events that took place during this time.

While working with his first students Andrew was confronted with the fact that most of them – in spite of having awakening experiences that rivaled his own – seemed unable to maintain an enlightened perspective once the experience faded. This reality dramatically altered his plans to be a wandering wizard and Andrew and his students then embarked upon a courageous experiment in human development as he attempted to discover what would truly liberate a human being from the illusion of ego and the separate sense of self.

Things Andrew taught, practices he gave and hour upon hour of conversations with students discussing the challenges they faced together are all being remembered and recorded on the banks of the Dead Sea. Those of us who admire the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment will soon have a chronicle of how this teaching came into being. I do not know what form this chronicle will take, but I certainly intend to be sure that some of it ends up here on my blog. :)

An Interview with Amy Edelstein

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In this episode Jeff Carreira interviews EnlightenNext Director of Communications Amy Edelstein about her meeting Andrew Cohen over 20 years ago only a few months after Cohen’s spiritual awakening and the birth of the teaching that he would later call Evolutionary Enlightenment.

The State of the Universe Project Address

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In this podcast Jeff Carreira and Katherine Miller review the progress of “The Universe Project.” The Universe Project is an initiative of EnlightenNext designed to create a global dialog about the evolution of consciousness and culture. In this podcast Jeff and Katherine discuss their efforts in New York City and beyond that are part of this larger initiative.

Consciousness, Ego and Enlightenment

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What is enlightenment? This is the question that Katherine Miller and I are going to go into during this week’s conference call. Andrew Cohen has sometimes defined enlightenment as consciousness beyond ego. Consciousness means awareness or the ability to perceive. Ego in the sense that we are using it refers to the separate sense of self or whoever it is that we think we are. So enlightenment means the ability to perceive beyond whoever it is that we think we are. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the statement. For most of us, even brief moments of insight this deep are rare and when they do occur we never forget them.

        "Last Friday I gave the Authentic Self presentation to a group of people

        in Buxton. They're all artists and some of them worked with me as  hospital

        artists 25 years ago. They all loved it and responded very fully with many

        questions. I explained that the Authentic Self is the same as the creative

        impulse and that this is the highest form of creativity. Several of them

        are part of a think tank which has got Arts Council funding to explore

        creativity and they have  recently encountered many questions collectively

        that they couldn't answer and this presentation answered many of those

        questions. It's exciting because they were so open to it which I hadn't

        been sure they would be - the spiritual dimension had been missing in