Katherine Miller and I taught the course, Living Enlightenment: Discovering the Path of Evolutionary Enlightenment-  over the internet last weekend --it was a first! There were 6 of us total- 1 from California, 2 from Chicago, Katherine and I in Foxhollow and 1 from upstate NY. We each had laptops and phone connections (except one who only had a phone connection) and were able to share our powerpoint presentation- including videos, and talk together via teleconference at the same time.  I was amazed at how powerful the weekend was- we spent about 6 hours both days exploring the fundamental principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Not being together in person meant that we had to have more discussion to get a sense of how everyone was understanding. At one point we did a meditation and I had the sense that everyone disappeared, there was a strong unity of purpose and intention. I think that this ability to form holons- a small whole unto itself which is a part of a larger whole, over the phone has revolutionary implications. Because it means that an intersubjective learning, which is a crucial aspect of evolutionary enlightnment, and of the creation of culture can start to form between individuals who don't even know what each other look like, but who share a common intention- in this case an interest in evolutionary enlightenment.

I have become more and more interested in how much can be created over the phone since listening and participating in the Universe Project Thursday night phone calls. We open up the NY EnlightenNext Center for these calls and generally have a group of 12 or so who listen together over our sound system and participate. People call in from all over the US and it seems that a real structure of consciousness is being built. This is all so new that it is sometimes difficult to quantify, but each Thursday the conversation seems to build. On Nov. 1st Andrew Cohen will get on the call for a second time (he initiated the conversation on the Universe Project last month....) he is going to speak about making the shift from the Ego to the Authentic Self..... 
Who knows what we will find out about the nature of consciousness and about creating a global mind and what it means to create a culture where the values transcend time and space. It definitely starts to mess with one's sense of self. On a recent conference call with Jeff Carreira, who is the Education director for EnlightenNext and a pioneer in this form of communication, he gathered people from New York, Copenhagen and a few cities in Australia who have recently done seminars with him for a conference call... it was one global inquiry into the evolution of our cultural values-from the state of the post modern predicament, to what it would look like to embody new values, to how to deal with feelings and emotions that are the core of our identity. When I hung up the phone,  I realized  that having a conversation like that across the globe literally shifted my own sense of who I was. It was as if I became dis-located....the normal boundaries that make up my sense of myself weren't present and for some time I was disoriented. The more I think about it the more excited I am about the possibilities that lay ahead for a kind of transformation in culture and values. It makes you appreciate technology as a way to evolve our ability to communicate on all levels.......
We'll see what the next stage brings......

At the moment I am at the EnlightenNext NY center with some of my colleagues. We are preparing for Andrew Cohen's visit to the City on Thursday and feeling the buzz of ego-less engagement. Although we are each doing our own thing, the field is undeniable. I have been a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment for sixteen years and yet I feel that in many ways I am just beginning to taste the power of this perspective to catapult a shift in culture. Which means how we are together! For myself, I have always been more attuned to the Eastern perspective- the perspective of enlightenment where there are no differences and there is also no sense of time at all let alone evolution. So although I have understood intellectually that we are a part of an evolutionary process, I couldn't really relate to it as myself. But lately, I have begun to look deeply at the historical structures that make up who I am at this moment.  And in this investigation I am becoming more and more interested in how it all began. How consciousness has evolved through the centuries and how all of that past is who I am. The more I learn, the more I see that history to be my history- not some disconnected, meaningless facts. And somehow it is all leading up to where we are Right Now and the future we are called to create......


     "An extraordinary latent potential for unbridled creative engagement and egoless compassion lies deep within us, waiting to be released into this world. But most of us don't see this, or if we do, we don't realize that it is not going to happen by itself. At this juncture in human history, the evolution of our species requires one thing and one thing only - our conscious, wholehearted participation. We bear a profound responsibility to be evolutionary pioneers."      - Andrew Cohen

I think it is time to update my blog!! Lately, my attention has turned primarily in two directions, and both are absolutely linked- our work with EnlightenNext here in New York City and the New Women's liberation project....the common theme is the evolution of consciousness. And both have a single mission- which is to create an enlightened culture....which literally means a culture beyond ego. Somehow it feels that if ever there was a place to be able to create a new culture on the leading edge, New York is the place. It struck me the other day when I was in Central Park- a friend of mine brought her son and we were in the playground- there on the cushioned asphalt I contemplated the height of first world recreation and city planning...I thought of India and how it is developing and how far it is still from this kind of creation. There, what you feel most in need of is infrastructure...basic, foundational, practical structures to support people developing at an astronomical rate. But when that is taken care of the human mind and heart turns outward to express more and more care and creativity in it's endeavors. And somehow amidst everything else I was aware of the responsibiity we have to make it all mean something more than just human recreation. What would it mean to be an example of a kind of development that is always on the edge and evolving our ability, as the creative impulse itself, to care more.

In terms of a new women's liberation, this is the work that is closest to my own heart. We can't have an enlightened culture without enlightened women and men together creating the pathways... As Andrew Cohen's students, this has been the focus of our lives for a long time -in a more internal way. But lately, we have begun to meet with others and bring our own understanding to bear on the question of what it means to create a new culture- based on the deepest spiritual values.This is a work in progress that includes all of us.....and I will continue to keep you posted.

Jeff and Katherine will be at the EnlightenNext Center in New York this weekend for a seminar that promises to take all of our understanding and experience of what it means to create an enlightened culture to a whole new level....the saturday seminar is called Beyond the Individual- Awakening to the Field of Consciousness, and Sunday will be: The Qualities of Collective Awakening: Exploring the Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment.  For more information check out our EnlightenNext NY events page-  if you are interested you can register online.
That's all for now.......
love and revolution!

I arrived back to New York from India yesterday.....after a whirlwind 3 and 1/2 week tour of the country. I taught the course in Rishikesh, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai and had talks at the Rai Business Schools in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. I left India only 7 months ago but the rate of change taking place all over the country  is unbelievable....in Hyderabad I stayed with friends in the "extension" area and I realized that the only restriction to that extension is the land, otherwise there is no end in sight and also no end to the need for expansion...the construction is non-stop-apartments, neighborhoods, roads. In Rishikesh people are coming from Delhi, buying land that used to be used for agriculture and selling it in pieces at prices that rise by the day....and no where is the change more evident than in Bangalore. The original IT city is expanding outward and huge tall apartment complexes are being built in the outskirts of the city. The question remains though how will all of the people who live in the apts and have cars be able to drive through the horrendous,  notorious  traffic?!! The number of domestic airlines that seem to keep appearing has risen to at least 10- the latest is one called Paramount. I realized this trip that it is very difficult to predict where this will all go- the momentum is huge and people are working very hard and making a lot of money. The middle class is getting richer and most say the poor are getting poorer so the gap is increasing. 


I was curious to teach the course and to see what the response to Evolutionary Enlightenment would be this time around. Andrew has been coming to India since the
1980s-his initial awakening was there and his wife Alka is a native of Mumbai...so there is a deep connection all around. One of the ways that many of the people that I met had heard about Andrew was from a column in the Times of India called the Speaking Tree. In that column a discourse or article from some spiritual teacher is posted daily. In Mumbai one of the women in the course came from Pune and had read an article in the Speaking Tree last September called The Big bang  in You is Cosmic Consciousness which was taken from a quote of the week of Andrew Cohen called Cosmic Conscience. She was deeply impacted by the article and said that it made sense of a lot of her experience in a way that she hadn't found before so she went searching on the website and knew that whatever it took she was going to find out more. In her searching she saw that I would be coming to Mumbai to teach the course...on the second day when we were discussing the 4th class which describes the Authentic Self and the Ego. We spoke about her experience as an example of the Authentic Self, that passionate, one-pointed, doubtless conviction and pursuit.... versus the Ego which in this teaching describes that part of us that has absolutely no interest in change and development and will always find a noble excuse to give up. The third aspect of this particular class, and the one that I personally find incredibly compelling, has to do with what Andrew calls the Choosing Faculty. This says that there is the Authentic Self and there is the Ego- both are impersonal forces, but there is a third part to this picture and that has to do with you....the one that can see these two streams and makes a choice. He goes deeply into what he describes as the Choosing Faculty. Jeff C. who is the designer of this course and the director of Education of EnlightenNext writes a lot about this in his blog- he also talks about something Andrew said in his recent retreat when he further developed and described the nature of this faculty saying  "the choosing faculty is not an individual - it has no characteristcs in and of itself, but it (or you) becomes whatever it chooses the instant a choice is made."  It is a powerful description and it stunned us. In 3 of the courses I did the class asked to repeat the video where Andrew speaks about this. It is so clear and simple and yet takes absolutely all victimization out of the picture exposing that raw place where we are constantly choosing to be the person that we are. The other aspect of the course that had a big impact on people was the class about meditation. Meditation in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment has a clear purpose. As Andrew describes, we can't just jump directly from the Ego (-1 )to the Authentic Self (+1)we have to first be able to meditate-let everything be as it is, take no position in relationship to all of our experience or go to zero. This is something that Andrew spoke quite a bit about in Montserrat last July. I know that I meditated for many years before I met Andrew, not totally clear as to why I was doing it,. I think my idea was that I would have some kind of massive, mind-blowing experience that would overwhelm me and leave me a forever-transformed individual, in it's wake. But that never did happen and nor was I clear with myself that this was what I was waiting for. In starting to see that meditation is a position that is taken in relationship to all experience... a position of taking no position in relationship to the content of consciousness...much has changed and I am no longer separating the meditation practice from what it means to live an enlightened life.  

One man in the course in Mumbai mentioned that he felt it was difficult for many Indians to fully grasp the concept of vertical development, especially in a spiritual context, because first of all there is still a deep belief in the concept that life happens in cycles, rather than vertically. The other thing that gets in the way is that Enlightenment is generally seen to be an end point, something that I myself believed very deeply...The concept that enlightenment itself is actually evolving is compelling but also not easy to see...we tend to see ourselves as static entities that somehow exist in an evolving universe, but it is really tough to see that consciousness, which is who we are, is also evolving. There is a great clip that we use in the course taken from a teaching that Andrew did in New York last year called What is the Evolution of Consciousness? It is like a guided meditation into consciousness itself and what it would mean for that part of us to develop. I will be doing regular conference calls with the people who took the course so that we can keep fueling the momentum and stay in touch with the latest edge of the teachings. If anyone reading this would like to join the calls please email me and I will send you the information. The first call will take place the week of March 19th.

The Rai business school talks were different from the courses in that I usually only had about an hour and I was speaking to people who had never heard of Andrew. We spoke about leadership and the core values that make up a leader in the 21st century in the context of evolutionary enlightenment where again we highlight the difference between the Authentic Self- the evolutionary impulse which is also the spiritual impulse- the part of us that only wants to evolve and develop- as opposed to the Ego which in this teaching is the part of us that has no interest in development and only wants to be somebody and get something for itself.. Most of the students were business and engineering students so this was an out of the ordinary class....   it was great to open to the the spiritual dimension of what it means to be an authentic leader and it was pointed out to me by one of the deans how ironic it was that this was coming from a jewish american woman given that the foundation of this teaching has deep roots in India.

There is much more to say and to speak about and I welcome the dialogue. As I said India is changing so quickly that it really is hard to guess what the future will be....and at the same time that is a ripe environment for the kind of revolution in consciousness and culture that this teaching alwasy calls everyone to!!!!

I am writing from Chennai mid-way through my 3 week trip. It has been a whirlwind, stopping in various cities and climates from the cold torrential rains of Rishikesh to hot and dry Hyderabad and hot and humid Chennai... meeting old friends and new. The course is going well. I spoke yesterday at Rai business school here in Chennai to 45 students. The teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment offer a new perspective, especially for many Indians, who have heard spiritual teachings their whole life but are questioning how to make it all relevant to their very hectic lives. These students were all business and management students so the idea of being responsible to see things from the biggest perspective, to lead people in that kind of responsibility, had an effect on them. In Hyderabad we spoke about how Evolutionary Enlightenment stretches us to look from the biggest possible context there is- the 15 billion year old context of evolution...it is difficult to conceive of and yet the experience of everyone stretching towards it, automatically awakens a thrill and passionate desire to find out more....or what Andrew Cohen calls- the Authentic Self. It is awesome to experience the Authentic Self together with others from other cultures because it really points to how impersonal it is and starts to hint at a direction that is totally positive, where we can come together way beyond where we thought possible. In Hyderabad the other point that seemed to have the biggest impact on all of us was the idea of vertical development -that the subject of one level becomes the object of the subject of the next. It is this particular point that really caught the attention of one of Andrew's Indian students, Sudhaker- who is a teacher in his own right and we spoke about this a lot. Investigating enlightenment and evolution and development, constantly yields new insights because I know for myself, they are usually not looked at together. The idea of enlightenment is usually about arriving at a particular state that never changes, and evolution is only about change and development. It seems that the more we speak about evolutionary enlightenment  the more sense it makes and the more non-dual everything becomes. The Authentic Self is none other than the Evolutionary impulse...something explodes inside when you consider that. And the deeper the consideration the greater the fusion that takes place.
Next stop is Bangalore tomorrow morning....I will speak at the Rai University there on Friday night and then do a weekend retreat on the 24th and 25th.

Peripatetic means traveling from place to place, especially working in several establishments and traveling between them....so to be true to my peripatetic nature, I am about to embark on a 6 week trip to India. As you may have read, I am the director of our EnlightenNext Center in Rishikesh and have spent the past two years living in India prior to moving to new york. Now I am going with a very particular mission. I am going to be teaching the weekend Evolutionary Enlightenment course in 5 different cities- Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and will also do a workshop in Rishikesh. It will be great to see what happens and how people respond.
If any of you know people in any of those cities in India who would  be interested in taking the course, let me know and we can invite them. In my experience in the past, many Indians very much appreciate Andrew Cohen's work-they resonate both with the enlightenment aspect of the teaching, or the unmanifest, which is easier for people in general, and also with Andrew's boldness and his passion and willingness to tell the truth and to address human nature straight on. So, I am very much looking forward to going through the course with people and exploring how relevant  these teachings are in the Indian context which at the moment is undergoing a huge shift.....I will keep you all posted here on the developments, and again please refer me to anyone you know in India who you think would be interested.speak again soon.....

We had an incredible meditation here at the EnlightenNext New York Center on Tuesday night. Not many people came but after what is always a shockingly and deeply still meditation (being that it is in the midst of NY city...sirens and all....) we had a timeless conversation on what it means to be responsible for evolution; questions like is the younger Gen Y generation more open to change than the rest of us, how to stay true to the biggest context in the midst of worldly life,  what exactly is the Authentic Self and does the Authentic Self need the Ego in order to get it's juice??..that last one got a categorical no from me...as Andrew Cohen says, the Authentic Self and the Ego are parallel lines that never meet....and if the Authentic Self is the creative impulse, the big bang in manifestation, than it surely doesn't need anything to make it work...at the same time it led us into another conversation about ego- what is it and will we ever get over it. Do we have to get over it?? If the truth is that we are at a point in time where God is waking up to him or herself, through us and where the call is for us to take responsibility to evolve consciousness in order for humanity to move to a higher level of development, as part of the Universe Project -then you can see that whether we have egos or not, is almost irrelevant because we still need to do this. It is a stretch to understand and let this in. You can see how powerful it is to speak about it with other people because a field is created-and in that there is a doubtlessness and conviction that we can do this. And  you start to understand using a higher mind....the Guru mind..this is what Andrew Cohen calls Enlightened Communication. People leaving their egos behind and wanting to find out what is possible for the sake of evolution itself. It is a thrilling adventure and discovery of what the mission of consciousness itself is- as yourself- with others-autonomy and communion in action!

Hi there....Last Saturday I jumped in the car with 4 other compadres and drove the 4 and 1/2 hours up into the far reaches of Burlington Vermont. Beautiful drive, great conversation...I was to do an awesome presentation on Evolutionary Enlightenment called- Living With Meaning and Purpose, An Introduction to the Conceptual Framework of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It is a powerful presentation that consists of videos from Andrew Cohen's weekend retreat in Foxhollow in October. Only 3 new people actually came, which was unfortunate and made me question the value of such a trip...but the presentation itself is fantastic and has the power to loosen up very embedded and fixed ideas we have about who we are. Calling to question our relationship to so many beliefs that we think we have outgrown: like the idea of a loving God outside who is watching over us, this could be in the form of any kind of being or deity or metaphysical concept that exists outside of us....(as Andrew once said in a teaching- I just flew in from Europe and didn't see anybody up there in the skies....) And yet if we look closely, this idea is often at the core of our thinking-especially when life becomes chaotic and seemingly meaningless...Andrew reveals the fact that in our post modern lives, we don't live by an Absolute concept but rather one that is relative and therefore doesn't provide any True rudder. And at the same time we still somehow cling to the absolutes that were given to us by the traditions even though they are outmoded and in many ways we have already seen through them.  Then the question becomes- what does it really mean to live our lives based on an Absolute Context, rather than a relative one-Right Now? Is there One Truth or are there many truths?? And is this One truth what we use to navigate our lives and give us meaning an purpose? All of these questions came to the surface during the presentation. It is always amazing to me to see how conditioned I am, in spite of how sophisticated I may think at different times, or how large my vision gets of what is possible- when I look honestly at the choices I make and where they come from it is somehow mind boggling. Which is why, for me personally, the fact that some of these old ways of being and relating may come from outmoded ideas, that came to life at a time when traditional religions were presenting an Absolute context to guide the moral lives of humanity....starts to rattle the very core of who I think I am and what is truly motivating my actions. I think all of us left the evening with more questions than we came with- and also more answers and more passion to investigate and live true to what we know!

Then on Monday we had our last get together following the Course in Boston. I showed them a sneak preview of the presentation and then we meditated together. A significant victory occured when one of the students, who was always saying that he never meditates but generally just thinks, had a deep and powerful experience of true meditation... Just goes to show that nothing is impossible if we want it (see: Clarity of Intention, the first tenet of Evolutionary Enlightenment!)

And last but definitely not least...we are in a countdown towards Declaration Day which we are celebrating in all of the EnlightenNext Centers around the world on December 10th. There will be a webcast with Andrew Cohen and other events not yet determined. Andrew wrote all about it on his latest blog called Creating the Future, Together...and I will continue to write more about it here on my blog.
Speak to you all soon..................
Love,
Gail

One of the most powerful and disorienting aspects of evolutionary enlightenment is the realization that there isn't an end to development- so we are making an eternal commitment to evolution...and at the same time, all of this is occuring in a context of Absolute and unconditional Freedom. So even though we supposedly finished the course on Tuesday night, it feels like we are just beginning to live the reality of a new understanding and a new way of being. Our class decided to come together again in two weeks to finish some of the videos (we ran out of time in this class...) and to speak about our experience and what to do next.  The last class is where we discuss the 5 fundamental tenets of Evolutionary Enlightenment, which describe both the path and the goal. They define the Enlightened relationship to life and are possible to live regardless of where we may happen to be located. In other words, even if we are in ego- if we want to be free, we can live in a way that is true to our highest aspiration even in the midst of ego. To me, this is one of the most explosive aspects of the teaching, because it means that any of us can live an enlightened life, in an authentic way, if we want to! There are no special characteristics or conditions- it is truly unconditional. This brings us much more deeply into the question of volitionality- what are we doing and why.... and highlighted the power of the first tenet, Clarity of Intention, and the kinds of forces we may need to go up against to be true to that. We had some very fascinating and compelling discussions about the nature of freedom itself, and also about developing the soul. One intriguing question was- is the Soul the same as the Chooser. Because Andrew defines the soul as the capacity for goodness, integrity, authenticity and transparency....and it is in our choices that we express these qualities.  We didn't come up with hard fixed answers, but the investigation went very deep. I was moved by the level of trust and the intersubjective current that was in the room. One woman remarked that she felt a current of meditation throughout the group. This is a natural outcome of the kind of transparency and interest in the goal that people were expressing and is a perfect launching point for Class 2 which Jeff will be leading on Dec. 3rd and 4th which will explore the upper half of the model- the 6 principles.
I will be doing an afternoon seminar on Evolutionary Enlightenment  in Vermont on November 18th for any of you who are interested... And I plan to continue this blog, so stay tuned.
Thanks to everyone in the class and all who made it possible- including Barbara, Kenzo, Andrea and everyone at the Boston Center. See you in two weeks!!!

Time is speeding along- we just finished the fourth week of class- which describes the difference between the Authentic Self and the Ego. Again it struck me how Andrew says that these are parallel lines that never meet. There is the part of us that is absolutely passionate about evolution and development, and the part of us that is only interested in our own fears and desires and hates change! And in the middle is what Andrew calls the "Choosing Faculty" which is who we are. We really saw in this class how implicating it is to see all of this, because once this choice is revealed to us in our experience, than the creation of heaven or hell is literally in our own hands. It really pointed to what someone brought up as the morality inherent in this choice. Because what you see is that one of these streams is absolutely positive and an expression of life itself, and the other only expresses limitation. But the fact that it is us who makes the choice is both the most liberating and also implicating part of the picture. We had a really great discussion about this. At one point in the class there was a lot of tiredness and someone commented about how the Ego will never be interested in no limitation!! But again what is so liberating is to just start to experience these aspects in oneself as impersonal and absolute...the ego will never be interested in change (especially when the unlimited possibility of freedom is knocking at the door!!) and the Authentic Self is always interested...there is such a simplicity to the teaching, although that doesn't always mean it is easy! And again, the only way to get from the ego to the authentic self is to leap into the unknown, or the ground of being, to let it go--- then this miraculous force that only wants to create the universe becomes available to us to choose. Next week we will get into the Five Tenets, which provide the framework to always live true to the authentic self no matter what. These tenets describe how to live a life beyond ego...and all of this points to Part 2 of this course- what Katherine and Jeff are teaching now in Lenox, which explores the true goal of this teaching which is a collective emergence that that is all about creating a new culture based on the highest principles!! I have to warn you all I don't think that there will ever be a final course to this trajectory!!!
Love,
Gail