Integral Evolution
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.
Consciousness, Culture, Cosmos
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.
The Birth of a Global Conversation
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...
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)
What does culture feel like?
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.
Collective Inquiry in Australia
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.
Creating a Global Cultural Shift
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?
The Universe Project: Making it real
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!
A Day of Enlightened Communication in New York City
Since his retreat in Tuscany Italy Andrew Cohen has been asking his students to look into the values they hold in an attempt to see for themselves how culturally conditioned they actually are. (If you are curious to hear Andrew Cohen addressing his close students you can listen to this podcast recording excerpted from a conference call he held two weeks ago with students from all over the world.)This is exactly the theme that I intend to continue with during the one-day seminar that I will be holding in New York on September 29th 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.
How much do we Care?
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...






