When the context for our human choices expands to embrace the infinite depths of our cosmic identity, then our unique power of free agency becomes informed and enlightened by the limitless passion of the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process.
Few people have the capacity to convey the wild and fascinating history of the occult and the characters who shaped this underground spiritual movement like Gary Lachman, a London-based scholar and former bassist for the band Blondie. His depth of knowledge on evolution, consciousness, and pop culture paired with his unique story telling ability, have made him a favorite contributor to EnlightenNext magazine, and his articles like 2013: Or What To Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive, Mrs. Satan, and Mary Wollstonecraft and the Romantic Consciousness, have added an important occult dimension to our ongoing exploration of the evolutionary worldview.
This coming Saturday from 5:30-7:30 pm (London time), Lachman will be engaging in a live public dialogue with the Director of EnlightenNext Europe, Chris Parish, at our center in London. The title of the talk is “A Secret History of Consciousness,” based on the title of Lachman’s 2003 book, and they will be exploring the saga of consciousness: how consciousness and its evolution have been understood over time by esoteric thinkers, philosophers, and spiritual masters. Continue reading…
It is so important to come to that point in our own spiritual evolution where we are finally ready and willing to be wholeheartedly accountable for ourselves—for who we are and how we are. Heroically, we must be ready to accept unconditional responsibility for the seen and unseen consequences of everything that has ever happened to us.
As you may have noticed, the activity on this site slowed to nearly a halt during the month of August. I’d like to thank those of you who wrote in expressing your concern. But I assure you, our editorial team — consisting of Carter Phipps, Elizabeth Debold, Ross Robertson, Joel Pitney, and myself — is more than okay, because we all had the privilege of attending a three-week retreat with EnlightenNext’s editor in chief, Andrew Cohen, who is also our spiritual teacher. Held this year at the Shambhala Mountain Center outside Denver, Colorado, the second annual Being and Becoming Retreat was a tremendous success, with 300 people from around the world converging in a lush valley nestled in the Rockies for 21 days of focused exploration into the furthest depths and heights of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The following video, created by EnlightenNext’s A/V maestro Rosalind Bennett, captures the spirit of the post-retreat ecstasy as retreatants share their responses to the question “What is heaven on earth?” Continue reading…
Terry Patten is one of the world’s leading proponents of integral spirituality. In the following excerpt from an EnlightenNext interview about his 2009 book Integral Life Practice, he describes the unique ability of the integral perspective to synthesize practices from the world’s many religious traditions and express the universal essence of the spiritual path:
Integral is the first full religio-spiritual path that cannot be called a “faith.” It’s beyond believing in anything. It’s about living and practicing consciously in ways that produce results. This is a form of spirituality that can stand up to the critiques of rational agnostics, atheists, and the deconstructive critiques of postmodernists. I think integral spirituality offers a skeleton key that can cut through the barriers that tend to divide the balkanized communities of practice. That’s why we emphasize integral approaches to all paths, as well as a stand-alone integral path. The fact that it can cross all those boundaries is just as important as the fact that it represents a brand new tradition all by itself.
You can hear Terry Patten in dialogue with EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen and other spiritual teachers by registering for his free upcoming teleseminar series, Beyond Awakening: The Future of Spiritual Practice, which begins on Sunday, September 12th, 2010.
The foundation of spiritual life is clarity of intention. Do I want to become a liberated vessel for the evolutionary impulse in this world? We each have to decide: what is most important to me? Once the intention is clear, the mind becomes focused. When the mind is focused there is one-pointedness. When there is one-pointedness, the evolutionary impulse will guide us. Through remaining true to our own highest intention, again and again and again, we will discover soul strength, spiritual strength—the inspired courage to take responsibility for ourselves, for our culture, and, ultimately, for the destiny of the evolutionary process itself.
Over the past two years, EnlightenNext‘s Executive Editor Carter Phipps has been participating in a kind of global think tank for conscious evolution called the Evolutionary Leaders group. This meeting of what was initially 38 people, including Deepak Chopra, Michael Beckwith, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jean Houston, Brian Swimme, Steve McIntosh, Don Beck and many more, started in 2008 with a “A Call for Conscious Evolution” petition that was signed by over 36,000 people worldwide. Since then the group has met consistently both virtually and in person, started to work on a variety of projects including a potential book and documentary, and has grown to over 50 people, including EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen.
This week, Cohen, Phipps and the rest of the Evolutionary Leaders are convening in Los Angeles for their most significant meeting to date: a week-long retreat that will include a live public event tonight from 7:30-9:30 pm PST. Continue reading…
Since its inception as a small semiannual publication in 1992, EnlightenNext magazine has spent nearly two decades tracking and shaping the leading edge of contemporary spiritual thought.
Initially bearing the name What Is Enlightenment?, the magazine was founded by spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen as a vehicle for making sense of often competing ideas about the nature and relevance of enlightenment in our time. Featuring interviews with hundreds of respected mystics, yogis, philosophers, activists, futurists, and scientists, it soon became known as one of the world’s most authoritative forums for serious spiritual inquiry, eventually evolving into an award-winning international quarterly published in multiple languages in print and online.
Over the last ten years, EnlightenNext has dedicated itself to helping define a truly comprehensive and progressive evolutionary spirituality for the twenty-first century. Bringing its unique perspective to bear on many different domains of contemporary life, from spirituality and religion to business, science, politics, the arts, and the environment, the magazine has sought to explore and illuminate the growing role we all can play as active participants in the continuing evolution of consciousness and culture.
This timeline display, organized into four distinct eras, illustrates the evolution of EnlightenNext over the past eighteen years and includes all forty-six issues of the magazine.
Click the menu button to view the slideshow in full screen mode.
It’s important to have a spiritual path and a spiritual practice that gives us access to the infinite source of our own being as spirit. But at the same time, it’s also important to embrace a very progressive and leading-edge perspective on the evolution of culture. For example, there are individuals living in traditional cultural contexts who might be very expert meditators but when they come out of their meditative state will still uphold and advocate worldviews and perspectives that would seem extremely outdated and inappropriate in a modern and postmodern world. While meditation and spiritual practice are important in order for us to find access to spirit, it is equally if not more important to reach for an evolutionary worldview—one that will enable us to embrace the world of progress and cultural development in such a way that our spiritual enlightenment is able to carry real meaning and transformative power in our own time.
What is our very own personal experience of the evolutionary impulse? And what is its unique quality as it expresses itself in our physical bodies, in our urge to innovate, and in our spiritual aspirations? If we examine the movement of this impulse at different levels of our own being, what we become aware of is that its nature is overwhelmingly positive. If we look at the psychic and emotional quality of that impulse as it vibrates within us, in our biology and our consciousness, we can indentify that vibration as the manifestation of one big yes—the expression of the fact that life is good. Existence is good. Becoming is good. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything that happens within the evolutionary creative process is good. The process itself is quite messy and takes all kinds of wrong turns, in nature, in culture, and in consciousness. But the drive itself, the evolutionary impulse at the heart of the process, is overwhelmingly positive, and that overwhelming positivity is the very essence of what manifest Spirit is.
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