Retreat on the Dead Sea

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. :)