Gaia Community: Jeff's Blog

Are we a Self or a Self-Concept?

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:03:23 GMT

Pragmatism was a philosophy that emerged directly out of The Enlightenment that initiated the “modern revolution” and it helps when thinking about Pragmatism to think about it in relationship to The Enlightenment and the new ways of thinking that emerged from it.

Prior to The Enlightenment human beings lived in a largely inexplicable world. Things happened and there was not yet any understanding of why. Explanations were developed to explain why things happened, but to our modern ears these explanations seem magical, mystical and unscientific.

Hosts of gods were imagined to control all of nature – lightening, rain, sunshine, plant growth, etc. And everything – including human beings – were thought to be possessed of an inner essence, spirit or soul that was the initiator and controller of action.

With the scientific revolution came the beginings of an objective, experimental and scientific understanding of how things work. The world became a machine of mechanical workings that could be understood and controlled. Weather was no longer controlled by a god – it was the result of the mixture of air pressure, humidity, wind velocity, etc. There was no longer the need to imagine some supernatural intelligence at work behind and above it all.

In the human being the same thing began to occur. The functioning of the body and the brain was increasingly recognized as the real cause of human action. And the newly discovered tool of human reason was proving itself capable of understanding – given sufficient time – everything. Human beings began to lose their need of gods – or even a single God – to explain the way things are.

The Enlightenment brought with it the advent of ways of thinking that turned many against religious notions because they seemed superstitious and unsupported by empirical evidence. The Traditional world of religious belief was becoming the Modern secular world.

The pragmatists- although to differing degrees – believed that philosophy – especially that of the French and German idealists (Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, etc.) – had retained too much of the superstitions habits of earlier thinking. These thinkers were certainly challenging the traditional ideas of The Church, at the same time they still retained ideas of a priori understanding, and absolute realities that somehow existed beyond and outside of the mind – this was too reminiscent of God for some.

The Pragmatists were following in the path of the English Empiricists by insisting that knowledge had to be directly connectable to that which was within experience. No supernatural essences were allowed (again the degree to which the different pragmatists held to this view varied considerably – James strongly, Peirce and Dewey much less.)

This is why the conception of “the self” came under scrutiny. It still smacked of a superstitious belief in “spiritual” essence or soul. Instead people like William James wanted to explain the existence of a “sense of self” by appealing to our actual experience and not to a supernatural “beingness.”

Pragmatism along with other modern philosophies were criticized with the advent of post-modern thinking for throwing out the baby with the bath water and for adopting a purely (or nearly so) materialistic relationship to reality. (In truth the early Pragmatists Peirce, James and Dewey were all trying to guard against this, but perhaps it was unavoidable for the pendulum to swing beyond center once it had started its arc.)

I believe there is a wisdom to the view – that while “self-concept” is real a “self” is not – that offers a rich vein of exploration still. In evolutionary terms we as human beings have tens of thousands of years of habitual experience of assuming supernatural essences to exist within physical things – so it may take some time before we stop unconsciously attributing an essence to things – especially ourselves.

www.evolutionaryphilosophy.com

Tags: Self, Self-concept, John Dewey, Pragmatism

Charles Darwin and the Directionality of Evolution

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:54:23 GMT

I have often heard and have at times gotten into arguments about whether the process of evolution has directionality. And this argument has seen lots of air time in the media recently. I realized the other day that there is a fictional dialog that lives in my head about this topic that misleads me about the actual source of disagreement.

If you picture the argument in your own mind's eye you are likely to see that on one side there is a strong-Darwinian materialist claiming that the universe is like a blind clockmaker who stumbled upon this world through a process driven by nothing but chance. On the other side is a romantic fundamentalist claiming that monkeys cannot write Shakespeare and therefore there must be some intelligence guiding the evolutionary process.

What I realized was that no one actually denies (as far as I can tell) that there is an apparent directionality behind the universe's unfolding. Evolution clearly happens in a particular direction. For instance you can't imagine animals evolving on a barren planet before any plants appeared. Plants needed to come first - that is directionality.

What people do argue about is the mechanism of directionality. Darwin's hugely significant discovery was a theory that satisfactorily explained the apparent directionality of the evolution of species. That theory he called "Natural Selection by Chance Variation." Essentially it states that the individuals of any given species are born with variations in characteristics. Some of these variations have survival advantages and are passed on genetically to offsprings. Over time successive generations will become more uniformly adapted to the environment. And at times one species transforms into a new one through this same mechanism.

Darwin had this insight and then sat on it for 20 years before publishing his findings in the book, "On the Origin of Species" and only then because another scientist published a paper explaining a dangerously similar theory. One of the reasons that Darwin's theory was and is so controversial is that he explained the evolution of species, which meant the development of man, without needing to appeal to any form of intelligence or God. He could explain man's development through purely mechanical means.

Darwin could see that evolution had directionality and he could explain that directionality through a process resting on chance variation and survival. There are good arguments against Natural Selection being the only mechanism through which evolution occurs and many find it necessary either for logical or sentimental reasons to theorize that some form of intelligence must be behind the process. But they are not arguing for or against directionality - they are arguing for or against telos.

Telos is a Greek word meaning purpose. And this is where the problems start. Darwin found a mechanism for evolution that was devoid of purpose. If there is no intelligence behind evolution then there is no ultimate purpose, no final destination or goal that we and the universe are heading for. This leaves many of us with an uneasy feeling because it goes against our deeply felt conviction that there is a purpose to life, that there is meaning to existence. So this is the actual point that the argument pivots on, not if there is directionality to evolution - for surely there is that - but if there is purpose. OK, let the argument continue.

Tags:

Karma, Eastern Thought and the American Mind

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:59:06 GMT

American Philosophy since Ralph Waldo Emerson has had a strong connection to Eastern Enlightenment traditions. Emerson was reading the Bagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and Zoroastrian texts as they were being translated in the west for the very first time in the early 19^th century. He passed these on to his disciples and Henry David Thoreau for instance read Eastern teachings voraciously.

In the first decade of the 20^th century, William James's ideas of Radical Empiricism, which see a world of pure experience in which each moment expands reality into the next moment, so impressed the Japanese Zen Master D.T. Susuki that he sent James's papers back to his teacher in Japan to read.

In the middle part of the 20^th century Thomas Merton and Jack Kerouac picked up the baton of Eastern thought. Merton, the beloved American Catholic monk, became very close with D.T. Susuki as well as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton spent a great deal of time in the last years of his short life in the East famously meeting His Holiness the Dali Lama and Chatral Rinpoche another Tibetan Buddhist Master.

Kerouac whose novels were written in a "stream of consciousness" style that harkens back to William James's Radical Empiricism, embraced Buddhism with other famous members of the Beat Generation. He wrote his novel Dharma Bums intending it to be in part a serious work of Buddhism, but was disheartened when the novel was not taken seriously by the Western Buddhist community of the time.

This progression of American philosophy set the stage for the explosion of the East meets West spiritual movement that erupted in the1960's and 1970's. Out of that influx of Eastern Enlightenment teachings into the post-modern west emerged Andrew Cohen's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment of which I have been a practitioner and later a teacher for the past 16 years.

Besides writing this blog I host a weekly webcast in which I discuss the philosophy of Evolutionary Enlightenment and other contemporary spiritual ideas. On a recent webcast I, along with my co-host Carter Phipps the managing editor of EnlightenNext magazine, tackled the subject of Karma.

I used as the basis for that discussion some ideas that I found online in articles written by an American Buddhist teacher named Ken McLeod. In those articles McLeod describes how he feels that the term karma has been popularly misinterpreted in the West to mean "the law of cause and effect." KcLeod goes on to describe how a more accurate translation of the term Karma from the Tibetan would be "growth." I found McLeod's articles profound and the idea of karma as growth very aligned with Radical Empiricism. Incidentally, McLeod calls his particular work "Pragmatic Buddhism."

For those who want to read Ken McLeod's articles on Karma there are three links here that will take you to them.

Karma

Karma and Growth

Karma Doesn't Explain Anything

Read More of my thoughts on American Philosophy at: http://evolutionaryphilosophy.com/

Tags: Karma, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Buddhism

Hollow Bones Zen Center

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:01:56 GMT

I am heading over to Hollow Bones Zen Center today with Andrew Cohen to visit with Junpo Roshi there. I will let you all know what its like and what happens later.

Tags: Hollow Bones Zen Center, Junpo Roshi, Andrew Cohen

Is Barack Obama a Pragmatist?

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:46:57 GMT

I have noticed since President Obama's inauguration, that newspapers, magazines, blog posts, as well as newscasters and political analysts refer to him as a Pragmatist. Whenever I read or hear this reference it makes me wonder how the word Pragmatist is being used. Is it only in the more common, small "p", sense or is it being used in its more profound philosophical sense? I am thrilled at the possibility that our new president might be bringing an opportunity to reintroduce the idea of Pragmatism, in its capitol "P" sense, into the American vernacular.

In the small "p" sense a pragmatist is usually thought of as a person who is more interested in "getting the job done right" than in "getting it done their way." If that is all that is meant when the president is called a pragmatist, then his early days in the White House seem to confirm his tendency in this direction.

Pragmatism in the more profound, capitol "P" sense is the name of the American Philosophy popularized by the great Harvard University philosopher, William James during the first decade of the 20^th Century. The term was first used, however, decades before by another great American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce first discussed his conception of Pragmatism during informal meetings of an intellectual circle called The Metaphysical Club. In addition to Peirce, the meetings included James before becoming a Harvard professor and Oliver Wendell Homes jr. before becoming a United States Supreme Court justice. After James had popularized the term, another celebrated American philosopher, John Dewey , used this powerful way of thinking to alter some of our most fundamental conceptions of education and democracy.

Pragmatism rests on a very simple but radical understanding about the nature of truth. That understanding is that truth is not an inherent property of an idea, but becomes an attribute of an idea only when that idea has proved itself in action. Let's consider a simple example, the idea "I can fly." According to Pragmatism, it would only be when I actually step off the edge of a building and float away that the idea "I can fly" would become true. (Although, as we all know, it is much more likely to prove false.) When considering an idea as simple and easily verifiable as this, Pragmatism looks like another word for common sense or even a little silly.

But, what happens when we apply this same, "its only true if it proves itself to be true," validation test to some bigger ideas? Ideas like: "Everyone is entitled to truth, justice and the pursuit of happiness." or "Representational democracy is the most just political system." or "There is a God." When applied to these examples Pragmatism insists that none of them are true unless they prove themselves to be true when acted upon. Some will protest that Pragmatism is asking us to give up faith in our ideals. I would say, to the contrary, it is demanding more faith in them. If you already know that what you believe is true before you act on it, how much faith do you really need? You already have a guarantee.

A Pragmatist in the capitol "P" sense is someone who feels a profound sense of responsibility for what they believe because they know that even their most cherished ideas have to prove themselves in action. A Pragmatist can never afford to rest in the certainty that they know the truth already. They must actively engage in the constant process of examining their ideas and then acting wholeheartedly, without hesitation, but also without the benefit of a guarantee. They are always looking to see what the results of their actions are. And as soon as those prove to be less than expected, a Pragmatist is ready to reexamine his/her ideas and improve upon them or discard them entirely.

A Pragmatist believes so much in their ideas that they are willing to risk acting on them, but they are not fixed in their beliefs. They are fluid, adaptable and introspective. Perhaps one of the greatest Pragmatic statements was made by Mahatma Gandhi when he said "My commitment is to truth, not to consistency."

So is Barack Obama a Pragmatist (capitol "P")? I for one hope he is.

Here are some examples of references to Obama as a pragmatist:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/barack_obamas_soaring_pragmati.html

http://blog.oup.com/2009/01/pragmatism/

Tags: Barack Obama, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism, Jeff Carreira

Integral Evolution

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:27:08 GMT

One of the dangers of working as closely as I do with my own spiritual teacher is that it is possible to take for granted that he is your teacher. Over the past fifteen years my relationship with Andrew Cohen has grown to include his being my boss, my colleague and a dear friend among other things. But yesterday I was reminded that he is first and foremost my spiritual mentor.

For sometime now and for the last few days in particular Andrew Cohen has been telling some of us who are his male students that he wasn’t feeling the sense of unity that he feels is critical to our development. In order to respond to his observation a number of us had planned to meet together last night, but then in the end cancelled the meeting. After hearing that we had decided not to meet Andrew reflected to us that our lack of urgency we were expressing seemed to prove that we were not seeing what he was talking about.

After hearing that we did meet together and what happened showed all of us beyond doubt that we were indeed missing the point that he was making. After a very short time of speaking together we were all once again swept up into the experience of “Consciousness, Culture, Cosmos” that I had described two blog posts ago. Submerged in the perception of this miraculous “we” space none of us who were meeting could relate to the fact that we hadn’t met together in so long. It was obvious in that space that exploring this collective consciousness is absolutely critical to what we are trying to together.

The consciousness that we were experiencing gives a truly integral view of evolution. It is not integral because you see how your individual development affects the development of the group. It is integral because you see that the consciousness that we share together transcends but includes our individual consciousness and that development of either IS development of the whole. It isn’t that individual consciousness is separate from the collective consciousness. It simply is seen as one aspect of it and individual evolution and collective evolution cannot be separated.

As this all became so clear in dialog together, it also became clear that the consciousness that we were sharing speaking together is not the consciousness that any of us had as an individual. All of us had wanted to postpone speaking together. Everyone had reasons that made sense at the time, but now that we were together seeing how critical it was that we were together none of the reasons that we had made sense. The consciousness held by the group had different values than that held by us as individuals. It was also clear that what was now clear to us had always been clear to Andrew which is why he started pushing for this in the first place.

If you have not experienced shared consciousness before this all might seem disconcerting, but in fact it is anything but. Coming into contact with an impersonal dimension of collective consciousness doesn’t feel like losing yourself, it feels like discovering your larger sense of self.

Tags:

Consciousness, Culture, Cosmos

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:40:22 GMT

During this past weekend I was on a retreat with Andrew Cohen and 80 of his closest students from around the world. Andrew stated right out front that the theme of the weekend was taking Evolutionary Enlightenment from theory to practice and the first thing that he wanted us all to look into the nature of the next developmental stage in human consciousness, or what is sometimes called Third Tier development.

Andrew first instructed us to read excerpts from his most recent dialog with Ken Wilber from the current issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine which is all about envisioning this Third Tier stage of development. When we met together with him he asked different people to articulate their own understanding of this lofty goal and he responded to each answer he received.

As the weekend progressed we moved from meetings with Andrew to discussion groups with other students diving more and more deeply into the question; what is “third tier”? Andrew was stressing how important it was that this goal become real for everyone, because if the goal is not real you cannot possibly attain it.

In a series of discussion groups focused on an exploration of what third tier is a powerful experience of what I might call “third tier cognition” began to emerge between us. One of the most striking characteristics of this way of seeing was that the distinctions between my individual consciousness, the collective consciousness of the group of us in the room and the consciousness of the universe itself began to breakdown. It was as if Individual consciousness, cultural consciousness and the consciousness of the cosmos was collapsing into one unified experience of consciousness at all levels. There was a direct cognition of the fact that all of these levels of awareness are present in me all the time.

Because of the unity that we were experiencing in these three very different levels of awareness it became self-evident that as any individual’s consciousness expanded so to would the consciousness of the group and also of the universe itself.

It may sound far-fetched, but it does also perfectly describe what I have come to understand a kosmo-centric perspective to be – the recognition of non-separation of consciousness and the non-separation of the individual, the culture within which we exist and the universe itself.

Tags: andrew cohen, creativity, authenticity, retreat, meditation, choice, spirituality, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, enlightenment, awakening

The Birth of a Global Conversation

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:51:40 GMT

Yesterday I conducted a conference call with people who had worked with me during seminars and evening programs held recently in New York, Copenhagen, and throughout Australia. Those events are all documented here on early blog posts and what I have been writing about is how each of the events that I have conducted seem to pick up where the last one left off even though they are with completely different people in a different city or even country. This is the beginning of a very exciting adventure and a challenge to anyone who wants to take it up to become a part of a global inquiry - a globally integrated conversation about the potential of human beings to be agents of evolution and cultural change.

The development of that global conversation is what I see as an ambitious but achievable goal over the next year. The teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is the perfect container for such a conversation because it is based in a view of human existence that places us right at the edge of whatever is going to happen next and the purpose of the conversation is to outline what that next step will be and to facilitate it happening.

The participants in the call yesterday expressed to me in emails afterward what they experienced through the connection with people from around the world who were committed as they are to the creation of new future.

I have posted some of the comments that I received here so that you could get a sense of what was happening.

If you want to be a part of this global inquire all you need to do is sign on to EnlightenNext's Universe Project website. It is free to sign on and once you do you will receive regular updates about how this work is going.

http://www.enlightennext.org/universe-project/

EVOLUTION!

Am totally new to E.E. and don't have the group's vocabulary. I was 2 minutes late and as I understood what was going on, perspiration began to roll off me in profusion, so great was my wonderment. I had been led to this moment. What an intro! (From New York)

I was in Copenhagen and what I feel more and more, is a great sense of trust, confidence. I mean I trust, that going into the field, is a very secure place to be, even if I feel fear or anything else. Just as you said when you feel insecure, maybe unstable, then you know that you are on the right way! (from Copenhagen)

Some comments from call participants

When we link we see that we are already linked. We see that the technical connection which allows us to talk to each other is only a mimic of a transpersonal connection of understanding that already links us and only needs to be recognized. (From Sydney)

I had this strange experience of seeing how I've kept this project very 'local' and in that way 'small and manageable'...and today it just blew that up and I felt both MORE responsible and accountable because it is so huge...but also more insecure and the boundaries of even how I think about "me" and "others" seemed to be changing. (from New York)

I was phoning from home in Warwick, a town population of some 12,000, in Queensland located two hours drive west of the State capital of Brisbane and about 1,000 kms north of Sydney. I joined the conference about fifteen minutes into it after figuring out all the button pressing! - a very interesting experience, trying to visualise the various participants scattered around the globe.

It was a great call! (From Sweden)

Thank you for gathering us globally for an inspiring call. (from Philadelphia)

As the call progressed I was very much aware of the field being generated by our commitment and interest in what was happening. As soon as attention is focused on the field I can feel the potential and the creativity that is its very nature. Yes we are becoming aware of the true nature of who we are and it is so much more than I had ever considered possible. (from Perth)

There were lots more...but you get the idea I think...

Tags: andrew cohen, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, what is enlightenment?

Spiritual Authority

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:12:41 GMT

Over the past three weeks I have been traveling in Copenhagen and Australia. During that time I conducted a three-day training for students of Evolutionary Enlightenment who have now become teachers, two weekend seminars on the teaching and three talks – one at a university, one at a company and one at a chapter of the Theosophical Society. Call me a little slow on the up take, but it wasn’t until the final talk at a University in Australia’s capitol city of Canberra that I recognized that I was becoming a spiritual authority.

Of all of the events that I conducted this one had more people that had no experience with Andrew Cohen’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The audience was both attentive and respectful, at the same time I knew from the start that they were justifiably not going to take what I told them on faith. I gave a talk similar to what I had give on two other occasions.
The talk I was giving was an introduction to some of the foundational concepts and insights upon which Andrew Cohen has constructed Evolutionary Enlightenment. I first spoke of the nature of consciousness as a field explaining that although we commonly imagine that consciousness originates from somewhere within us, this teaching is based on the recognition that human beings exist within a field of consciousness. The second insight that I present is the recognition that the field of consciousness is not static – it changes and evolves over time which has been well observed by those that study the history and development of human culture. Finally I argue that at our moment in evolutionary history it is our recent discovery of the evolutionary process of which we are an inextricable part that must drive the further evolution of consciousness. These three insights create the foundation upon which I present the shift in awareness that lies at the heart of Evolutionary Enlightenment and a kosmocentric perspective as I understand it.

I realized from the first night that I spoke that I couldn’t present this as a theory or philosophy with which I was intimately acquainted. I had to express my own understanding of these things, backed up by my own experience and the reality of everything that I was doing to use these insights as the basis upon which to build a new human culture. I realized more deeply than I had ever before what Andrew has been trying to create with his closest students for over 20 years. He has referred to that possibility as “autonomy in a context of natural hierarchy.”

Andrew’s call with his students has never been exclusively to create a new generation of teachers with a similar realization to his own. He has always said that he needed partners in the creation of a new world. Being autonomous means that ones own talents, interests and efforts have to be the foundation of what one attempts to express to others. I can’t simply explain the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment and expect people to listen to me. I have to speak about the teaching in the context of the fact that I am actively devoted to manifesting the goal of that teaching. In my own case I am directly engaged in helping people develop their understanding of Evolutionary Enlightenment by creating educational programs and by facilitating individual engagement with the teaching and with Andrew Cohen himself. People didn’t want to hear from me about Evolutionary Enlightenment only, they wanted to hear my experience of Evolutionary Enlightenment ad that experience includes everything that I have worked on, created and developed in this teaching.
In speaking to audiences I find that I am fueled by three sources of confidence. The first is the trust and recognition of my teacher, Andrew Cohen that has developed over the 15 years that I have worked closely with him. The second is my own experience and understanding of Evolutionary Enlightenment itself. The third is the confidence, conviction and most importantly success that I have experienced in my work to help create a new culture based on this teaching. What I was propelled by over these weeks was a deep confidence, not based in being somebody in particular, or having the highest realization, but on my own commitment to what I am doing. With that at my back I felt that I was able to face anyone and talk simply and clearly about Evolutionary Enlightenment because I was only talking about what I actually believed and what I was actually doing.

Getting back to that last talk that I gave and the powerful moment that illustrated all of this so clearly to me – I had just finished delivering my talk and asked for questions. The questions were more challenging than I had experienced in the two earlier talks – not unfairly so by any means, but challenging none-the-less. One question was asked of me by a woman who had been listening intently from the front row. She felt that in the way I was speaking I was separating humanity from the universe. She looked me right in the eyes and demanded to know why “I” was doing that. So there I was rightfully being asked to justify my position. I didn’t feel flustered; I simply looked straight at her and explained “my” experience. We talked it through and came to the realization that we weren’t really very far apart in our views after all.

In thinking about this afterward I thought very much about the “autonomy in a context of natural hierarchy” that Andrew has been asking for. I saw that students of this teaching have the opportunity to create a powerful kind of spiritual authority – one that is based not only on the direct experience of Truth but also on what one is doing to enact that Truth into a new future. Because I was training teachers, developing programs, exploring new mediums for global spiritual engagement and a variety of other things, I was able to speak with an authority that commanded respect even if I was still justifiably expected to prove myself. Because I was able to speak about the accomplishments of my own efforts people accepted the validity of the teaching and my relationship with Andrew as my teacher without challenging it. Why? Because it is working and I could speak about that.

What I have begun to see on this trip has broken down yet another unconscious source of division that I hadn’t even known I was holding. The separation between the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment and the products of that teaching. The fruits of the teaching are the teaching, I had previously been focused on how to train people to teach Evolutionary Enlightenment. I now recognize that any way that one is working with that teaching can be used as a platform for teaching it. for teaching it. The editors of What Is Enlightenment? Magazine have long been giving talks about what they have learned from creating each issue. I wonder how powerful it would be to hear them talk not just about the content of the issues, but on the process of creating them. Their work on the magazine is Evolutionary Enlightenment. There are students of this work who are trying to transform business organization, public education, penal systems, even personal development. Their work is also the teaching.

I am beginning to see teaching Evolutionary Enlightenment outside of the context of what you are doing to bring that teaching to life as only the first step in learning to teach this perspective. The second and more powerful is to speak about your own experience of creating a new culture with these teachings. As architects of the future we can speak about our own experience of truth with a profound authority.

Jeff (During a brief layover in Dubai after a 10 plus hour flight from Perth)

Tags: Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, What Is Enlightenment, Jeff Carreira

What does culture feel like?

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:25:10 GMT

My visit to Australia is coming to a close after giving talks in Perth, Sydney and Canberra and leading a weekend seminar in Sydney. On the flight from Canberra to Perth I had time to reflect more on everything that has happened over the past week before flying out tomorrow. As I have been writing about in recent blog posts each event that I conduct does seem to add something to the last. The event in New York was an exploration of the post-modern culture that we are all a part of. In Copenhagen we looked into the new values that might become a part of whatever post-post-modern culture we create together. Here in Australia what we explored was the characteristics of the field of consciousness and the new sense of identity that begins to form as we recognize ourselves to be not separate from the circumstances around us.

During the weekend in Sydney we had a particular moment when - for me at least - this sense of being non-separate from the field of consciousness was particularly heightened. I was explaining a metaphor that I have used many times before. I was describing how human beings thinking that the consciousness that they experience originates somehow within them is like a radio mistakenly thinking that the music coming out of its speakers is coming from inside itself. As I mentioned this is a metaphor that I have used many times, but this time it seemed to take on a life of its own. Soon I was using it to explain different aspects of Evolutionary Enlightenment that I had never seen before and I was imagining creating a children's show based on the metaphor. It was a very high energy, serious and fun discussion that swept us all up in its excitement.

Later during our lunch break I was thinking about the fact that it would be easy to think of that metaphor as having immerged from me. In fact, it was obvious that even though I had been the one who brought it up, it had immerged out of the energy and intention of all of us in the room. If all of the participants had not been so engaged with me in listening I would never have felt the inspiration or freedom to have that particular analogy "pop-out" with so much vitality and clarity. As I thought more it started to become self evident that whenever we speak what comes out of conversation is never a product of just one person in the conversation, but is the product of the whole conversation and everyone's participation in it. If I were sitting by myself in a room I would never have come up with that metaphor in the same way.

When we returned after lunch the first thing that someone commented on was the metaphor that "I had come up with." As I explained what I had been thinking about we did seem to elevate into a higher view of what was happening between us. As we spoke I could see very directly how each of us was contributing to the sum of what was happening in the room. Some were not speaking, but everyone seemed to be giving real attention and open interest to what was happening and that was also a contribution. In fact it became clear that there was no way to not contribute and I began to feel, and I think others did as well, the ecstatic and at the same time almost unbearable realization of true interconnectedness. It is the feeling that you already are fully here, that what you do already has an affect and there is nowhere that you could possibly go where you could be separate. In truth even if someone were to walk out the door...that would have an affect!

Sometimes in life we want to feel like we don't matter, like what we do doesn't count yet because we have not yet decided to participate. We might not feel ready or willing to be responsible for the affect we have on others. To the part of us that doesn't want to be responsible for being human the kind of interconnectedness we were exploring feels like too much.

This weekend in Sydney certainly did seem to take the weekends in New York and Copenhagen one step further by rooting them in a direct experience of human interconnectedness - which I would say is a direct experience of human culture.

Tags: andrew cohen, evolutionary enlightenment, what is enlightenment, new york, seminars, Global Cultural Shift

Collective Inquiry in Australia

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:33:08 GMT

There is too much to write about and far too little time to write it all. I spent the morning doing a radio interview and then my weekly conference call. On both I spoke largely about what I am seeing about how a global cultural matrix of higher values can be formed. Now that I have given a couple of talks in Australia I am seeing that “it” is continuing. The investigation that I have described traveling from New York to Copenhagen has arrived in Perth and Sydney. When I speak to people I explicitly tell them about what is building in cities all over the world among the people who are engaged in the global inquiry that is “The Universe Project.”

As soon as people hear about it I can feel that they become part of it – and even more importantly, so do they! I can see how it affects them immediately. They listen more attentively, they participate more fully and they take themselves more seriously because they now it matters. They know that they are not just in a lecture or a discussion to get some understanding for themselves alone. They are part of a building, living, global, inter-subjective culture that needs them to take it further right then. And people feel ready for the challenge. People have told me that what thrills them is that they have felt done with seeking, but they haven’t know what to do with everything they have learned and now they see an opportunity to make an important contribution to a global effort.

And when people in New York or Copenhagen hear that the people in Sydney are taking up the investigation right where it was left in the earlier cities I see them change too. They become more serious because they are not just participants, but they have helped create was is now moving further. And they want to know where it goes. And the people in Sydney want to tell them what they have done with the inquiry. That is a global matrix built on engagement with a collective inquiry into human life. That matrix, I believe, will be the catalyst that will inspire, conceive of and ultimate create a global culture based on higher values and awakened awareness.

Our shared exploration of Evolutionary Enlightenment us to…

1. want to evolve more than we want to be secure
2. what to engage with others more then we want privacy
3. experience the tension of growth over comfort
4. be sincere rather than protect or self image

Those, by the way are the four values that the group in Copenhagen came up with as the values of a new culture based on an emerging understanding of our responsibility as awakening humans for the future of direction of evolution.

Is that easy?...no! Is it worth it?...definitely!

I will write again after or during the seminar that I am having this weekend to report on where “we” have taken the investigation next.

Tags: Andrew Cohen, Jeff Carreira, Evolutioanry Enlightenment, What Is Enlightenement?

Creating a Global Cultural Shift

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:27:56 GMT

This past weekend I conducted a seminar in Copenhagen with 42 people. The weekend was largely devoted to a mutual inquiry through discussion, or what Andrew Cohen has called enlightened communication. Because the weekend is dictated by the participation and contribution of the people present, every event of this type is different and what is miraculously revealing itself is how make up a single investigation….even though the people in them are different each time. This is the third seminar of this type that I have led (or been led by :)) and the forth will be this coming weekend in Sydney, Australia. It see a tremendous potential to create a global collective inquiry through this medium.

In New York last spring I led a weekend with Katherine Miller during which a dynamic investigation into the collective nature of the authentic self led to everyone involved working together to create a comprehensive visual map of both individual and collective consciousness. I will post the model that we came up with after I return to the United States.

Two weeks ago during a one day seminar we explored the conditioning of the postmodern mind. Since we were all products of postmodern culture it became a simple mater of looking into our own experience as it emerged in conversation between us. What we uncovered between us were the elements of extreme materialism and humanism that Andrew Cohen had referred to at a talk earlier in the week as the limitations of post-modern culture.

In Copenhagen last weekend we looked into what the values of a kosmocentric stage of development would be and what values that we currently hold would have to be let go of (at least somewhat) in order for the new value to immerge.
Since doing the Copenhagen weekend an idea was brought to me by a few people which was to connect the 40 people in Copenhagen with the 40 or so in New York into a combine dialog. Now that I am in Australia I realize that I will need to include them as well. So I am thinking about when we could have a conference call together so that we can all talk about what we are discovering.

What makes this so exciting to me is that I can see that it is not just separate people in separate places coming up with slightly different things. Each of the seminars goes in a direction which is unplanned by me. (I often feel that the hardest part of my job is letting the conversation that wants to happen take the forefront.) And when looked at successively, each seminar does seem to be creating another piece in a single investigation. Especially in the case of the recent day in New York and the weekend in Copenhagen it appears in hindsight that the discussion of what values would be in past post-modernism was a perfect follow up to the conversation about what post-modern values were that we had in New York.

You might thing that I was unconsciously directing the second seminar to follow on from the earlier one except that I never intended to bring up values at all. The topic only came up because someone expressed a real desire to know about it. I kept trying to switch attention back to what I thought the topic of the day should be – The Universe Project – and it kept winding its way back to post-postmodern values. Eventually I gave in and started listing what we came up with on a sheet of paper. What will happen next weekend in Sydney I can only guess, but I bet it will be the next piece in some puzzle that we are all working out and that seems to have a life of its own.

I suppose what I need to do now is to keep more detailed records of all of the seminars that occur so that people who are not on them can learn from them. I also will make it explicit clear in Sydney that what we come up with during our time together there will be added to the collective wisdom of an emerging group of global investigators who are using the framework of Evolutionary Enlightenment to generate an interconnected inquiry into the nature of human life and development.

What could possibly be more exciting?

Tags: andrew cohen, evolutionary enlightenment, what is enlightenment, new york, seminars, Global Cultural Shift

The Universe Project: Making it real

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:25:24 GMT

Last week Andrew Cohen held two conference calls/webstreams speaking to hundreds of people outlining his vision for the universe project. The listeners ranged from close students to people who are just becoming interested in his work. On the call Andrew explained that whatever it was that initiated the process of evolution that has resulted in the universe we now exist within can be experienced by humans in different forms. He explained that the sexual drive is a lower level experience of the universe’s desire to evolve into the future. Creative passions of all kinds, artistic, scientific etc. are higher levels of that drive and the spiritual passion to evolve to higher consciousness is the highest form of the initial impulse of creation. What Andrew is describing is a leap in perspective, a shift in view on the human experience. In effect he is presenting a new human self-concept.

The leap he is pointing to has at its core a radical shift from seeing oneself as a “thing” to seeing oneself as a “process” and in fact as the process of evolution itself. If you think about your experience you will see that before everything else you see yourself as a “thing”. Some object, in my case called Jeff that has a definite boundary in space (a body) and a definite boundary in time (a lifetime). This experience of being something exists before thought, before anything else.

I don’t have to wake up in the morning and think, “Don’t forget, you are Jeff, remember that all day.” No, I wake up and I am Jeff, before I even think I am Jeff. Even in dreams I am still Jeff. This sense of being someone lies at the core of our experience of being alive. That sense of being someone is essentially a sense of limit that is placed on reality before anything else happens. That is what I want to call ego for the purposes of this post. That ego, if unexamined, is who we are. And even if we have seen beyond the limitation of the ego – or separate sense of self, more often than not that experience of the infinite is seen from, or quickly usurped by, the vantage point of the ego. Hence when speaking about spiritual experiences we say things like, “I experienced the infinite” or “I experienced Oneness.” Who was it that was having that experience? Was it the infinite experiencing itself, or me experiencing the infinite?

Because we are so deeply embedded in ego the perspective that Andrew Cohen laid out last week can seem very difficult to understand. Essentially he is telling you that you are not a human being wanting to evolve; you are the universe itself wanting to evolve. When you begin to wake up to the fact that you are the universe, it might be more accurate to say that the universe is waking up to the fact that it thought it was human.

You can see that in beginning to work with these ideas we are dancing at the edge of the unintelligible. Not being able to understand something in an evolutionary context is not necessarily a bad thing, it might me that you are looking at the next step. It makes sense that the next step wouldn’t really make sense to us before we make that leap. But for now we who are the intrepid first explorers of this brave new sense of self have to bear our experience of confusion and keep leaning in to what we don’t know yet.

Yesterday I was on the phone with many of the Evolutionary Enlightenment teachers that I have trained to teach Andrew Cohen’s teaching. I had scheduled a virtual training with them to help them continue their own development. And something very fascinating came up in discussion that relates to exactly what I am writing about now. Several of the teachers explained that they had a much better grasp of the shift from a world-centric perspective to a kosmos-centric perspective (which I would say fundamentally is the same shift in identity that I have been describing here) than they did when they trained a year ago. Because they understood it better themselves they were able to explain it more clearly and the people in their classes were getting it faster and to a greater depth than the students they had last year.

As we discussed this phenomenon, which seemed to be consistent with all the teachers who are teaching all over the world, I pointed out that there were lots of “world-centric, separate self dominated” assumptions inherent in the way that we were interpreting our experience. In essence we saw the “kosmos-centric” perspective as something that existed “out there” that we were getting clearer about and because we were clearer about it, we were able to better explain it and help others be clearer about it. Now this is certainly true, but I did point out another possible interpretation of our experience. Perhaps the kosmos-centric perspective was itself more clear now. Maybe last year we were seeing it as clearly as it was…then. Maybe now it is clearer. Why? because more people have been thinking about it, talking about it, working with it and most importantly taking actions based on its reality. Maybe we are actually succeeding in brining a new perspective, a next step in human consciousness into reality.

This way of thinking doesn’t create an object out of us or kosmos-centricity. There is just the process of bringing something new into being and our seeing it more clearly and its being clearer cannot be separated. As we spoke about this on the phone we all entered into a profound altered state. Men and women standing in different parts of the globe from California to South America to Europe, Israel and Australia, were all united in the reality that they were contributing to the development of the next stage of human consciousness and most excitingly we were seeing the fruits of that development in our own students. What could be more exciting!

Tags: andrew cohen, creativity, authenticity, retreat, meditation, choice, spirituality, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, enlightenment, awakening

A Day of Enlightened Communication in New York City

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:53:46 GMT

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.

Tags: andrew cohen, creativity, authenticity, retreat, meditation, choice, spirituality, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, enlightenment, awakening

How much do we Care?

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:52:02 GMT

I am currently in the middle of revising a seminar called “Leading by Example” that I will be conducting in New York City. The seminar will be a call to arms for all who can help lead humanity to a higher level of consciousness…and that most likely includes you if you found your way to reading this blog entry.

I am putting together some video clips to use as the basis for discussion during the seminar that have been taken from a talk on the topic of soul development that Andrew Cohen gave on the retreat he just completed a couple of weeks ago in Italy. (See my previous blog posts for more on that retreat) Andrew himself has just posted his own blog entry based on that teaching…click here to read it.

One of the first questions that I intend to go into will be “What does it mean to care?” Soul development as Andrew uses the term means moral development, which means a development toward a higher capacity for and willingness to care. But what does it mean to care and how can we measure the degree to which we care?” I have been thinking about it and it seems to me that the measure of care depends on two elements. The first has to do with the intensity of care. That would relate to how intensely a person’s feeling of care is and I believe that can only be measured in observation of a persons actions in relationship to that which is cared for.

As an example if two people see a child screaming from the window of a burning house and one risks their own life and runs in to get the child, you would say that person cared more. You can of course think of endless examples like this and what they all point to is that the degree to which someone is willing to sacrifice in action for another is a measure of how much they care.

But there seems to be another element to the measure of care that has to do with the nature of what it is that is being cared for. Mother Theresa cared for all of the starving children in India and she is universally recognized as an extraordinarily caring human being. That is because she sacrificed her whole life to taking care of the poor and destitute. Now to use an extreme example, Adolph Hitler devoted his whole life to winning global supremacy for the Aryan race. Both cared passionately about something…one could argue equally passionately. The difference is that most people would agree that the care of Mother Theresa was greater, or more evolved than that of Hitler. If Hitler were to have changed his mind half way through World War II and decided to use the might of Germany to create piece in Europe most would say he had taken a moral leap forward.

It seems that the intensity of the feeling experience with which we care is only one dimension of what it means to care. In the teaching I referred to that Andrew Cohen gave on his last retreat he spoke very directly to the enormous challenge he faces in attempting to get people to care more about the process of evolution than they do about the personal fears and concerns of the ego.

In the seminar that I am preparing for New York I want to go into this slowly and with…care… I intend to use long periods of discussion in small groups so that everyone present can go very deeply into these matters and discover something for themselves that they may never have see before.

More on my upcoming seminar will be coming shortly...

Tags: andrew cohen, creativity, authenticity, retreat, meditation, choice, spirituality, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, enlightenment, awakening

It’s Time

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:28:57 GMT

Final reflections on the Retreat

I am back in the US and over my jet lag after being on retreat in Italy with Andrew Cohen for eight days. Now that some time has passed I am reflecting on the retreat and everything that happened there from a different point of view. In the middle of it naturally you enter an alternate state of consciousness that is extremely powerful. You are living in a swirl of insight and understanding that is utterly thrilling and the only thing that breaks up this state of ecstatic revelation are periods of deep and profound meditation. A wonderful experience to be sure, and very valuable, but it is somewhat one-sided at the same time.

Now, sitting here, it is time to consider what it all means, or rather, what am I going to make it all mean. As the memory of the retreat amalgamates in my mind the single message that was coming through loud and clear is what remains most obvious in memory. What was that message? Well, in a word I would say it was the question “When?”

When are those of us who “know” going to decide that we are ready to take the evolution of human consciousness to the next level? When are we going to realize…for the last time…that there is no one anywhere better qualified to evolve than we are? When is the time to work on ourselves going to be over and the time to change things going to arrive?

This line of questioning was alive in the background of every talk on Evolutionary Enlightenment that Andrew gave during his retreat. It was at the heart of every answer he gave to every question he was asked. It was present in the buzz during the lively mealtime conversations. And on the last day of the retreat when Andrew Cohen and his jazz fusion band Unfulfilled Desires ripped out a rockin’ two hour set to a crowd of excited and surprised retreat participants the same question seemed to be ring out behind each note and bang with every crash of the drums. When? When? When?

The answer to that question can only come from each one of us naturally. When am I going to decide that it is time? When have I prepared enough to go to battle? When does practice end and the game begin? In the world in which we live there is only one answer that makes any sense…now!

The time is now! That is the message that I have come away from this retreat with. The time is now and it will always be now. I look at the year behind me. I look at what Andrew Cohen has accomplished, what I along with many of my compatriots have done, and I want 10 times more to happen in the coming year.

It is time!

We are all trained. We have done the meditation, studied the great works, learned about ourselves, our world and its problems. If we all decided right now, together, that this is it! That it is our time to take hold of the reigns of creation and build a future better than we can imagine. If we all decided to do this together, and if we acted on , moving mountains would look like child’s play.

Think about it. If we all knew beyond doubt that every other person like us – every other person who cared about consciousness, higher development and creating a new future – was going to “do it” that would give us enormous strength and confidence. If we knew that millions of people were going to act together to change the world, if we really knew that, wouldn’t we join in? Of course we would. So what is missing? Trust. We don’t trust that everyone else is going to move, so we don’t either.

I am going to move further than I have before. That will be my response to being on retreat…movement. Is anyone else ready? Let me know!

Tags: andrew cohen, creativity, authenticity, retreat, meditation, choice, spirituality, jeff carreira, evolutionary enlightenment, enlightenment, awakening

The Evolution of Consciousness AND Culture

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 21:55:50 GMT

More thoughts inspired on retreat with Andrew Cohen.

Throughout this retreat Andrew Cohen continually referenced everything to the ultimate goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment. He was unequivocal about the fact that this teaching is designed to take the worldcentric, post-modern individual to a kosmocentric level of development and that this leap in the individual could not be separated from a concurrent shift in culture that must also be facilitated. Over and over again Andrew described his vision for how the evolution of the individual and the evolution of culture could never be completely separate.

In the beginning the creative impulse initiated the process that would create the manifest universe. As that impulse to become began to take form it also began to evolve – starting as energy and then energy forming into matter. After an enormous period of time something miraculous happened and some form of matter came to life. Life evolved and eventual came to hold consciousness that would eventually develop into what we experience as human consciousness. At some point that consciousness connected to a brain and nervous system sophisticated enough to begin to apply conditioning to the experience of the organism.

Initially that conditioning was based on the experience of feeling. When an organism was placed in a dangerous situation (assuming it survived) fear would be imprinted in the brain in such a way that the next time that organism was in a similar situation the experience of fear would reawaken and drive the animal away… a primitive, but effective guidance system. Overtime the brain developed to the point that it became capable of thought and at some point the first self-concept appeared in some primitive brain. That self-concept recognized itself to be a “thing” separate from everything else. For the first time in consciousness the idea of a separate thing was born.

Fast forward to us. The consciousness that pours through us has to travel through a highly sophisticated brain with an extremely individuated sense of self. Our minds have been deeply conditioned not just by the events of our own lives and perhaps those of previous life times, but also by the culture from which we come. The individual sense of self cannot be separated from the culture it exists within. For any evolution to occur that would be truly meaningful, it must occur within culture. The enlightenment of the individual is meaningless. It only exists as long as that individual is alive. But if that evolved individual is able to catalyze the evolution of the culture in which they live then all other individuals will begin to become conditioned in this more highly evolved culture. That is the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment to help catalyze a shift to the higher cultural consciousness of a kosmocentric perspective.

How can this be achieved? Culture is the relationships that are held between people. The effort to evolve culture involves helping to facilitate relationships between people that are evolving. This simple concept was the call to arms that Andrew gave throughout this entire week here in Tuscany.

Tags: andrew cohen, jeff carreira, wie, retreat, spirituality, meditaiton, enlightenment

When is your time up?

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 21:09:30 GMT

From this mornings teaching on retreat with Andrew Cohen

For the past two days Andrew Cohen has been asking retreat participants to think about when it will be there time to take full responsibility for what they know about themselves and what they know about the meaning and significance of life. When will your time be up? This morning a dialog with an unusually sincere woman who was grappling with this question allowed Andrew the perfect opportunity to expand on what he meant when he referred to the post modern state of moral depravity.

The woman began by explaining that she has had many experiences of realizing that the fate of universe rested in her hands and that it was entirely in her capability to decide to act on that. When pressed she admitted that she must have had that revelation 30 to 50 times and each time she knew without doubt that it was true. She said that she realized that her excuse for not acting was that she was waiting to have another experience of revelation that would convince her. She then added that she also knew that she had already had the experience and that having it again wouldn’t convince her anymore than it had the first 30 to 50 times.

As if that wasn’t enough, she said that she could see all of this clearly and knew that it was terribly wrong and that she didn’t care about that either. Andrew told her that what she was describing was exactly the post-modern state of moral depravity that he has been referring to. He explained that at lower levels of development moral depravity might look more gruesome – serial killing or conscious genocide – but for the worldcentric, post-modern human being the state you could describe as “I don’t care and I don’t care that I don’t care” in relation to our highest understanding about life and truth…in this case the necessity for conscious evolution.

This state of conscious apathy is exactly why we are facing all of the problems that are now threatening human existence and the world in which we live. Getting people to care about the future is the movement toward a kosmoscentric perspective. This effort to “evolve the soul” is what Andrew declared was the only thing he was truly interested in. The amount of spiritual experience that a person has does not ultimately lead to any development or evolution and will not make someone a better person necessarily at all.

Developing morally at the level of the soul is hard work. It involves great effort and the willingness to take big risks because the only way to develop morally is to act in accordance with the highest truth we know even when we don’t feel connected to it, or even want to. This is the most important part of spiritual work. Having deep experiences is easy, but growing the strength of our soul by consistently responding to what we know is hard work. For those of us who know that it is up to us and us alone to evolve the consciousness of the cosmos it means becoming absolutely committed to making the leap from a worldcentric to a kosmoscentric level of development.

Tags: andrew cohen, jeff carreira, retreat, meditation, wie, spirituality, enlightenment

The Biggest Possible Risk

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:11:15 GMT

Some thoughts inspired by Andrew Cohen’s talk this morning on retreat in Tuscany, Italy.

What is the universe project?

Everything and everything else. Everything you see and everything you don’t see. The world, the sun, every plant, every insect, animal or living thing… every rock, mountain or spec of dust… and everything thought, feeling, sensation, motivation and psychological impulse… not to mention everything created by humans, every house, every chair, every social structure…EVERYTHING. Anything you can point to is the universe project and anything you can name. It is all the manifest world of creation, outer and inner, that was initiated and is propelled by the only force that there is…consciousness and its intention to create a manifest domain in its own image.

The whole thing is an extension of that conscious intent. A tree is an extension of conscious intent, so is bird and so is an automobile. An ecosystem is a form of conscious intent and the human mind is as well. We are a river of conscious intent relentlessly bursting into manifestation. It is literally an explosion of consciousness solidifying into ever more complex forms. That is all that is happening. Beyond our individual psychology, beyond all of our ideas about ourselves, beyond the thought that we are an individual human being…beyond all of that we are ultimately only the conscious intention to create the universe. We are god.

But we as god have had to take the biggest risk that there could ever be…human being. We have taken our magnificent creation, the universe project, and placed it in the hopelessly confused, profoundly conditioned and endlessly fickly hands of humanity. As consciousness has molded itself into one successive form after another, each more complex than the last – from energy to matter to life – each step has brought a quantum acceleration in the speed of evolution. And now, to take the next quantum leap in evolutionary potential god/I has/have created self-aware consciousness in the hope that it would not get permanently deluded in identification with its newly discovered individual psychology – that it would not be terminally lost in conditioned patters of feeling, thought and behavior. Maybe, just maybe the first species to become self-aware would wake up to its true Self – as the god-energy that initiated and powers the movement of the entire universe into the future. Perhaps some few would blink there eyes open and SEE reality.

But even less likely, that some significant number of those that do wake up would have the vision, integrity, concern and passion to make the enormous effort to consistently respond to what they see. To remain awake by taking action not as the individual personality that they had thought themselves to be, but as god him or herself come to life in the world. If only a few would find the courage to respond beyond the nearly perfect illusion of personal fear and desire and break free of the well worn paths of individual and cultural habit. If only a few would insist on their own freedom, not for themselves, but so that they could act on their original intention to create the universe.

This would mean that a few, a precious few, would be willing to undergo the personal ordeal of moral soul development. That they would hold fast to their intention to evolve through all of the many storms of emotional distress and intellectual confusion that always accompanies change. The would take completely responsibility for everything in this or any lifetime that has shaped their conditioned emotional experience and for any unconscious motivation that arises as intent to act.

At this time the entire future of the evolutionary process rests in a precarious place – a human beings capacity to care for something beyond itself – for a possibility that renders all else meaningless. God as us has had to take the biggest risk by placing the future of its creation in our hands and we as god must take the same risk by acting in accordance with that which is larger than we can possibly imagine.

What is the Universe Project?

What isn’t?

Tags: andrew cohen, retreat, Jeff Carreira, wie, evolutionary enlightenment, meditation, evolution, spirituality, enlightenment

The Authentic Self Arrives in Italy

http://Jeff-wie.gaia.com — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:58:51 GMT

Day four of the retreat is coming to a close and I am writing from what has become a collective eruption of the authentic self. Andrew Cohen spoke with everyone this morning and directed that they should spend the afternoon talking together so that they would have the experience of the authentic self. There were no organized group discussions. Andrew just said we should all enter the chaos.

He then gave an impassioned talk on the authentic self and the evolution of culture. He explained that the authentic self is not an individual, but a force in consciousness and that the only way for the individual to sustain the connection to that force was to create a culture that valued the authentic self's emergence. He said that the evolution of the individual is useless unless a culture that could support and provoke further evolution was the result then went on to describe the "we-space" of shared values that we all live in and how we cannot separate ourselves from the culture in which we live.

Throughout this retreat Andrew has emphasized the cultural aspect of the teaching. Yesterday when someone asked about what they should do when they "went home" Andrew challenged everyone about the meaning of the word "home." Home isn't a place, or a geographic location, he insisted, it is a cultural value system that we share with those we spend the most time with. When we say "go home" we are talking about returning to our old values and a cultural support system that holds those values. If you really want to see where you are at and what you value look at who you spend time with and the values that you share with them.

Until today the atmosphere of the retreat has been quiet and serious, but as soon as people left this morning's teaching everyone started talking. Every other day has been warm and sunny, but this afternoon a thunderstorm broke out and a few people told me that they didn't think it was a coincidence. The lobby of the hotel was full of groups of people all sharing in one thrilling investigation into the nature of the authentic self. It was like an enlightened cocktail party as people moved from one circle of conversation to the other. Wherever you ended up you just seemed to pick up on a new thread of the same conversation you were having with the group of people you just left.

In one of the discussions that I took part in a man talked about how struck he was by the way that Andrew had described the intention of god to create the universe as the original clarity of intention. He described how this perspective meant that there was no excuse not to follow through on your own intention to create the universe because you were already in the middle of the job. As we stood and spoke we looked around and we could see that the same excitement and interest was pouring out of everyone's eyes (and there were probably over two hundred people in the lobby) and we marveled at how everyone's intention to be here and to participate was the very same intention that was not coming from any individual but from the universe itself.

We happened to look out the window and we all recognized that the force that was animating us to explore this new terrain was the same force that was making the grass grow or the sun shine. We stopped in dead silence in one completely non-dual experience of recognizing that there is one creative force that is moving everything and we as human beings evolving at the level of consciousness are simply the most sophisticated material vehicle currently available. All a blade of grass can do is grow, but we can think, understand, talk and create an inter-subjective "we-space" that is as much a part of us as our minds and bodies.

There is only one thing happening all being powered and directed by one creative force. We actually "saw" the universe project.

Tags: andrew cohen, meditation, retreat, authentic self, wie