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Spirituality

Steve McIntosh on “Evolutionary Enlightenment”

by Tom Huston

Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh weighs in on EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen’s new book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening…

Andrew Cohen’s important new book, Evolutionary Enlightenment, demonstrates spiritual evolution on every page. Rooted in the venerable soil of Eastern nondual teachings, while simultaneously expressing an emerging new form of evolutionary spirituality, Cohen’s insights provide rich nourishment for the discerning seeker. Evolutionary Enlightenment clarifies what it means to transcend one’s ego and sheds new light on the true nature of the self. Moreover, this deep yet accessible book effectively integrates the science of evolution and the new integral philosophy of development into a livable form of spirituality that will transform all who practice it.

Even though my personal spirituality is rooted more in the Western theistic tradition than the Eastern nondual tradition, I nevertheless find Cohen’s teachings to be compatible with my own sense of spiritual truth. And I am especially grateful for his discussion of cultural evolution in Part IV of the book, with its emphasis on using our spirituality to catalyze the emergence of a higher form of civilization. Cohen himself has evolved considerably since his last book was published ten years ago, and his current teachings now reflect the leading edge of spiritual evolution in our society. Evolutionary Enlightenment is a modern-day masterpiece—a splendid contribution to the new field of evolutionary spirituality.

—Steve McIntosh, author of Evolution’s Purpose, and Integral Consciousness

Learn more about Andrew Cohen’s new book »

Learn more about the work of Steve McIntosh »

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Sep 25, 2011 | 3 comments | View Post

Discovering the Spirit of Fire (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

When it comes to the great founders of evolutionary spirituality in the twentieth century—individuals like Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, and Alfred North Whitehead—we have an inexcusable lack of good biographies to guide our appreciation of their pioneering work. The recent biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, by scholar Peter Heehs is one exception. The work of scholar Ursula King is another. King’s book, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin is a powerful and illuminating work that captures the spirit of Teilhard’s remarkable evolutionary vision and passion. Beginning with his childhood days in the verdant hills of Auvergne, France, she follows his prolific life from France to China, to his travels around the world, all the way to his final days in the gritty streets of New York City. “However far back I go into my memories (even before the age of ten),” Teilhard once wrote, “I can distinguish in myself the presence of a strictly dominating passion: the passion for the Absolute.” Driven by this inner calling, this unique scientist/mystic searched the outer world for ancient biological fossils and plumbed the inner world for new spiritual truths.

King’s Spirit of Fire is a highly recommended introduction to Teilhard’s life and is liberally sprinkled with quotes and observations from his visionary mind. In the following excerpt from the book, King explains why she feels the great Jesuit’s thinking is so salient to our own time in history: Continue reading…

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Aug 24, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post

The Power of Evolutionary Spirituality with Ursula King — Live in London

by Elizabeth Debold

EnlightenNext London has created a summer festival that is going to be a flat out celebration of philosophy, dance, music, and Spirit–a tantalizing and uplifting combination designed to make the spirit soar. It’s the Midsummer Renaissance Festival on July 30-31. Most of the EnlightenNext editorial team will be there to engage in dialogue and interviews with some extremely fascinating people. On July 30, I will be interviewed by Lee Chalmers–Lee is both a business consultant, a champion for women (check out her latest post in HuffPo UK), and is edging her way into politics. We’re calling the talk “Women Creating the Future.”

On July 31, I’ll be in dialogue with University of Bristol theologian Dr. Ursula King. Ursula has an expertise in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin–a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who was one of the 20th C.’s most authentic and powerful voices of a new, evolutionary spirituality. Ursula always transmits a palpable enthusiasm–which literally means divine inspiration–for humanity’s spiritual evolution. Our dialogue takes for its title a line echoing Teilhard: “Discovering Fire for the Second Time.” The “fire” that Tielhard refers to is a particular kind of love, or Eros, that burns from the Divine into Creation. In fact, in the audio below, Ursula recites Teilhard’s quote in an interview that I did with her in 2009 about her book, The Search for Spirituality where we speak together about the evolutionary fire that has brought us to where we are today.

Ursula King abrev. audio 5 min (click here)

What I particularly appreciate about Ursula is her impatience with retro ideas of spirituality–trying to take the deep wisdom from the past and stick it, unchanged, into the present. She’s not against the great religious traditions, but sees that they have to be updated for our times. And I completely agree with her about the need for a world-embracing spirituality that is not at all divorced from life and that calls us to evolve our humanity. I hope that our dialogue on July 31st points us in that direction!

Well, that’s just a taste of what’s to come. If you are in the UK at the end of July, please come and say hello, and check out this vibrant midsummer scene!

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Jul 22, 2011 | 3 comments | View Post

A Portal for Creation (Quote of the Week)

by Andrew Cohen

In the way that I use the term, God is the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is driving the process forward in every moment. And that energy and intelligence cares desperately about change and innovation and the release of potentials that have not existed before. So it is constantly looking for portals through which it can enter into the world and consciously engage with creating its next step. As conscious human beings who have been blessed with self-awareness and free agency, we are those portals. Each and every one of us is potentially a portal for the energy and intelligence that created the universe. You have a human body and a human personality, but from a certain perspective these are merely sheathes through which the cosmic creativity can shine. From the vantage point of the creative process, your human form, your personality, with all the particulars of your own history, your personal relationships, and your life circumstances, is a vessel for an infinite process that is trying to go somewhere. How conscious are you of this? How conscious is any one of us that in this very moment the cosmic process that produced us is now dependent on us to take its next step?

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Jul 15, 2011 | 13 comments | View Post

The Subtle Trap of the Messianic Meme (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

Our society is very familiar with apocalyptic thinking—especially when it comes clothed in religious garb. Indeed, it seems that every few years another date for the rapture or end of the world or the return of Christ is set, anticipation reaches a fever pitch, and then the day goes by with no noticeable change in our global social order. Then speculation dies down for some time before another date is set by yet another religious leader filled with messianic conviction. But religions are not the only place we find such convictions. In his latest blog posts, EnlightenNext Executive Editor Carter Phipps argues that messianic thinking has become quite attractive in progressive circles as well, where so many people believe that we are reaching some sort of culmination of history and that we need some sort of era-defining event to pave the way to a new future. He calls our attention to the dangers of this way of thinking and suggests that the hype around 2012 as the final year on the Mayan calendar is just the latest example:

2012 is the progressive version of traditional eschatological thinking. It’s the idea that an event is going to occur that is dramatically outside the normal processes of history and change everything, lifting the majority of humanity to a higher level of consciousness and creating a more enlightened future. There are darker versions as well, where a sort of mini-apocalypse has to occur before we get to the better side of the future, but generally 2012 represents a positive version of eschatological thinking. It’s a more benign strain, we might say, but it’s still the same basic song, just a prettier arrangement.

Read part one of this post, “Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style.”

Read part two of this post, “No More Messiahs (Part II).”

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Jul 09, 2011 | 6 comments | View Post

A New Spiritual Orientation (Quote of the Week)

by Andrew Cohen

Evolution is a new spiritual orientation. Most of us with a Western education are familiar with the idea of cosmic evolution—we’re aware that the cosmos is in a process of ever-greater complexification and that we are part of that evolving process. We’re aware of the Darwinian notion of biological evolution and accept the scientific evidence about how life has evolved. And some of us are even aware of the notion of cultural evolution, the recognition that culture has been developing over time through a series of stages. But very few of us are really awake to the notion of spiritual evolution. Seeing evolution as a spiritual unfolding that has an exterior and an interior, and understanding that our own experience of subjectivity is the leading edge of the interior of that creative process, is a very recently emerging idea. Traditionally, spiritual teachings pointed to a static attainment. The aspiration for enlightenment was the aspiration to come to rest in a steady state—in nirvana, in heaven. But when spirituality is reinterpreted from an evolutionary perspective, it is the aspiration for infinite becoming. The evolutionary impulse is an infinite reaching towards the future that affects the way we think about everything. Now we are no longer looking for spiritual liberation and release beyond the world, or after we die. We realize that the spiritual release is found in unconditionally, radically, and totally embracing the creative process of infinite becoming, as ourselves. It’s a very different orientation to spiritual liberation.

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Jul 04, 2011 | 9 comments | View Post

Behold the “Possibilian” (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine who is searching for a middle place between the dogmatic certainties of both religion and science. Between the New Atheists’ unequivocal rejection of God and traditional religious believers’ embrace of the same, a whole host of other possibilities, according to Eagleman, are getting squeezed out of the picture. He even has a name for the person who occupies that middle place—a possibilian. A possibilian is a person who acknowledges that our understanding of how the universe works is extremely limited and our ignorance truly vast. A possibilian shies away from anything that even hints at dogma or final certainty and allows the tools of science to sort out truth from falsehood. The following talk, taken from TED Houston, is an eloquent call for a spirit of humility and an attitude of exploration as we move toward a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.


View David Eagleman’s TED Talk on YouTube »

To read our review of David Eagleman’s book Sum, click here (and scroll down the page).

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Jun 01, 2011 | 19 comments | View Post

The Meaning of Suffering in an Evolutionary Universe (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

The issue of suffering has always been one of the great fault lines of the science and religion debate: How can tremendous suffering exist in a universe created by a beneficent God? In Rediscovering Teilhard’s Fire (SJU Press, 2010), a book of collected essays exploring the work of Jesuit priest and pioneer of evolutionary spirituality Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Catholic theologian John F. Haught addresses the complex issue of suffering. Using Teilhard’s writings as context, Haught brings his scholarly brilliance to bear on this hoary issue, explaining how the reality of suffering is better accounted for in a theology that incorporates the scientific truth of an evolutionary universe—a universe that is in a constant state of “becoming.” In the following excerpt from the essay, Haught elucidates the importance of looking to the future for God’s answer to the world’s suffering, rather than to some imagined perfection of the past.

Teilhard proposes an alternative cosmological framework, one that is fully supported by science, to serve as the context for theology’s reflections on the meaning of suffering—and here I am talking about all of life’s suffering and not just our own. In a universe that is still unfinished…the attribute of perfection can be applied only to a future cosmic unity that will occur in the everlasting care of a God who calls the universe into being from up ahead in the future… Evolution places in question all [theologies] that have nourished themselves on nostalgia for a lost paradise. It leaves no legitimate room for resentment that paradise has been lost since creation has never (yet) been a paradise. Both the biblical logic of promise and the pattern of evolution have together barred the door to our ever returning to Eden. Henceforth our attempts at [theology] must…place life’s suffering and sacrifice in the context of hope for future fulfillment.

To read the complete essay, visit the MetaNexus Institute online.

To read EnlightenNext magazine’s interview with John Haught (winner of a Folio Gold “Eddie” award), visit:

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j42/haught.asp

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Apr 06, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Spiritual Masters: Bernie Glassman on Taizan Maezumi Roshi

by Bergen Vermette

Taizan Maezumi Roshi was a Japanese pioneer of Zen Buddhism in America. Like others of his time, he travelled across the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century to teach Zen and establish local schools in the US. As a result of his training in multiple lineages, Roshi was able to combine Rinzai koan study and Soto shikantaza (a specific type or Zazen) which made for a powerful hybrid teaching. His legacy includes institutions and centres across the country as well the gift of dharma transmission to twelve successors. One of those successors was his senior disciple, Bernie Glassman.

Bernie Glassman is a pioneer in his own right. As a spiritual activist Glassman is well known as a leading figure in the “socially engaged Buddhism” movement. His many projects and social initiatives include the successful Greyston Bakery in New York (run primarily by the less fortunate), which gives all profits to other projects such as low-income housing programs, community daycare, and a health centre for those suffering with HIV/AIDS. His famous ‘street retreats’ challenge preconceptions about spirirual practice by inserting participants into daily life lived on the streets. Practitioners eat in soup kitchens, sleep in homeless shelters or in public spaces, practice Zazen in parks and receive dokusan (interview between student and master) in alleys. On March 26 Glassman will speak to EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen about his time with Maezumi Roshi as part of the online celebration “Awakening to Your Highest Self: Tales of Transformation from 25 Spiritual Luminaries”.
Continue reading…

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Mar 26, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

Spiritual Masters: Father Thomas Keating

by Bergen Vermette

During the latter half of the 20th Century, many progressive seekers in the west left the traditions of their upbringing and headed east in search of mystical truth. For many, mainstream Christianity had become devoid of many of the mystical elements that it once possessed, and those hungry for more often looked abroad. Father Thomas Keating took a different approach. Drawing on ancient source texts of the Christian contemplative tradition – such as, The Cloud of Unknowing, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross – Fr. Keating undertook a collaborative effort to revive the Christian mystical and contemplative tradition.

Father Thomas Keating is an American Trappist monk and priest from the Roman Catholic tradition. The Abbot at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, he is one of the founding members of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., an international, ecumenical spiritual network that teaches the Christian contemplative practice of Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina. A true living master of the Christian tradition, Father Keating is an advocate for the resurgance of spiritual mystiscism in Catholicism and some consider him to be one of the few genuinely realized Christian saints alive today. He is the latest addition to our ongoing series about spiritual masters.
Continue reading…

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Mar 21, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post
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