A Day of Enlightened Communication in New York City

Since his retreat in Tuscany Italy Andrew Cohen has been asking his students to look into the values they hold in an attempt to see for themselves how culturally conditioned they actually are. (If you are curious to hear Andrew Cohen addressing his close students you can listen to this podcast recording excerpted from a conference call he held two weeks ago with students from all over the world.)This is exactly the theme that I intend to continue with during the one-day seminar that I will be holding in New York on September 29^th called “Leading by Example”. Because it is almost impossible for us to see our own cultural conditioning, I intend to devote most of this day to discussions between small groups of people lead by experienced facilitators. Discussions of this type in the work of Andrew Cohen are generally called Enlightened Communication because when people follow a few simple guidelines for engaging together in dialog a field of consciousness can open up between them that gives access to a depth of insight and wisdom beyond that of any individual in the group. (Click here to read an article describing the experience of this type of communication.)

Back to the topic of values, what Andrew has being saying about values reminds me of a story about my father. When he was a young man he left a factory job making sails for ships to join the military. After being stationed for two years in Germany during the Korean War he returned home. With some trepidation he approached his father (my grandfather) to explain that he was going to make use of the GI bill and go to college with funds provided by the government. My grandfather couldn’t understand (and I think when he didn’t understand things he tended to get irate as many of us do.) Why would my father leave a perfectly could job at the sail factory to go back to school? He already graduated from school and he was risking loosing a perfectly good job.  Now my grandfather came to the United States as a child along with 6 or 7 (who’s counting) of his 13 brothers (the rest came later.) During the depression years he worked sweeping the mill floors for 10 cents a week (the exact amount of the salary seemed to change with different retellings, but certainly it wasn’t much.)

In terms of values, my grandfather valued the security of having a job above all else. He grew up under a gloomy shadow of poverty. Going to school wouldn’t put food on your table, or so he might have thought. My father was of a different generation – a more developed generation (if I am allowed to make such a judgment.) You and I are closer to him than my grandfather. Sure we can do the mental arithmetic and see why my grandfather would give up a free college education to work in a factory, but it is very hard for us to emotionally relate to it. Our values are different at a deep level. But you can imagine that during some heated conversations my father was having a difficult time explaining to my grandfather why a college education was worth more to him than a factory job, even though to us it seems obvious.

What this illustrates is not some mental deficiency in my grandfather but the challenge that any of us face when we attempt to look at our values from the inside out. It is easy to see someone else’s values, but our own values don’t look like values to us, they just look like what is true. That is why we argue over them. This point is simple but profound. Right now you and I are holding on to values with tenacious strength that we are not even aware of. We are clinging to things the way they are – to reality as we see it – with Herculean effort. This is why evolution at the level of consciousness is so enormously challenging, because it necessitates a shift to a value system that is not yet ours.

The teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is aimed at catalyzing a transition from worldcentric values to kosmocentric values. In order for any of us to make this leap we must find the courage to explore our experience of reality without defending it. How are we going to do this? Together, that’s how.  When people come together for the sake of inquiring into the truth with real sincerity a possibility for discovery becomes available that just doesn’t exist when you sit and think about these things on your own. On our own we are just too “in it” to see it. With others, even though we share very similar values, there are enough differences so that distinctions come to the surface to be investigated and learned from.

This is why during my seminar on Saturday September 29 we will be using small group discussion to help uncover our values and examine them together.

You can register for the seminar here.