Well, after a multi-month absence from Zaadz, consumed by life in the fast lane, I'm finally determined to really start blogging.  No more of this half-baked, biannual posting.  My new blog, KosmicTom.com, began construction last spring, and I've posted a few sample/trial posts, but have never been able to fit the whole blog thing into my temporal budget and/or consciousness.  I think it's because I grew up online in the 90s, and by the time blogging became a legitimate verb, I was far too busy in the real world to get into it.  But if life isn't about pushing the boundaries and evolving, I don't know what is.  So I invite all interested parties to visit me at my new site.  It's gonna be hot. :)

In a comment left in response to my post of an Andrew Cohen video clip below, Craig Persel voiced an idea that is very popular in enlightenment circles, which contends that when one is grounded in a state of enlightened consciouness, one's actions and behavior are inherently "unconditioned."  As someone who's written 10-page articles critiquing this idea in WIE, I felt compelled to take issue with it, once again.  (Hey, I'm as conditioned as the next guy!)  You can read Craig's original comment here, and here is my somewhat, ah, verbose response:

Hi Craig,

Regarding your comments, I’d ask you to read my response to Michael, if you haven’t already, since he made a similar point.  But I can see why you might conclude that Andrew hasn’t experienced “pure consciousness” based on watching him in that video.  Unlike Adyashanti, Eckhart Tolle, and many other teachers of enlightenment who tend to speak in a calm, peaceable manner, Andrew’s on fire with the Authentic Self, which is the creative force or evolutionary impulse itself—a very different state/stage of consciousness from the nirvanic stillness of the Ground of Being.  And the difference between these two modes of egoless consciousness, or two types of enlightenment, is the same distinction that Andrew’s making in the video.

Traditional enlightenment is based on the realization of the Ground of Being as one’s deepest Self beyond mind and time.  That’s what Adya and Tolle teach, even when they use “evolutionary” language (which is a critique I’m currently working on for an upcoming issue of What Is Enlightenment? —which, btw, is a very good question...).  The qualities of that traditional state of enlightened consciousness include “silence,” as you said, as well as peacefulness, equanimity, ease of being, etc. (think Ramana Maharshi, or the Buddha in meditative repose).  And that was the kind of enlightenment that Andrew initially began teaching, back in 1986, as transmitted to him by his guru, H.W.L. Poonja (which Andrew recently reflected upon in a blog entry titled “Overwhelming Gratitude”).  Andrew still teaches that, but now it’s in a much bigger context, and it’s only a small—yet foundational—part of the full picture of what he believes “enlightenment” really means for life in the 21st century.  If you ever attend one of Andrew’s retreats, he often spends the first few days focusing on nothing but awakening participants to that state, transmitting it through lengthy, powerfully still and silent meditation sessions (as well as by simply directing individuals’ attention back to the effortless, rock-bottom primacy and immediacy of their own consciousness as they listen to him with open eyes).  I’ve been in sessions with Andrew where he’s said not a word, just plunging a roomful of students into profound stillness for three hours straight (which seems to go by in the blink of an eye).  On my first retreat with Andrew, in France in the summer of 2000, he spent a whole week having us do nothing but dive into the stillness and depth of the Ground of Being by “letting everything be as it is.”  Nowadays he seems to be giving most participants a taste of that state within the first day, which is amazing, and also allows him to devote more time to the bulk of his teachings, which aren’t about experiencing pure consciousness, which is easy; they’re about living it, which is hard. 

And that’s when all of the tremendous complexity of the human condition enters into the picture, with all its cultural, biological, psychological, karmic, etheric, economic, chemical, gravitational, temporal, and spatial conditions and limitations.  There is no such thing as a human being—enlightened or otherwise—who isn’t subject to conditioned limitations (legends of Babaji notwithstanding...although even he, to whatever degree, would presumably be subject to at least some conditioned restraints on the gross, subtle, or causal manifest planes of existence).  What traditional, Ground of Being enlightenment gives you is some space and distance from your conditioning, so you can begin to see it, and see through it, as not being who you ultimately are.  But no matter how frequently you return to that stillness, and spontaneously act from it, your behavior, actions, and expressions will be conditioned to some degree.  The stillness of pure Being is unconditioned; the human being is not.  If you’re a Jewish man from New York, you will, after your enlightenment, still tend to look, act, and sound like a New York Jew, to whatever degree that generalization has merit.  If you’re British, you will tend to look, act, and sound British.  If you’re a medieval Japanese Zen monk, you will tend to look, act, and sound like a medieval Japanese Zen monk.  And if you’re a postmodern, green (in Spiral Dynamics and Ken Wilber terms), mild-mannered German-Canadian, you will tend to act that way and express that conditioning, no matter how frequently you seek refuge in the primordial stillness of the Now.  Conditioning, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad.  It’s just the way the interconnected Kosmos works, the “chain of dependent origination,” as the Buddhists would say.

The thing is, while I have no doubt that gaining some distance from the conditioned mind and ego by profoundly awakening to the Ground of Being does enable one to act “spontaneously,” with radically unpremeditated freedom, it does not—in and of itself—guarantee the moral or philosophical or cultural beneficence of such action.  The Ground of Being is not human-hearted.  It is not human at all.  And that’s where Andrew’s teachings about Ego and the Authentic Self come in, which is what the two models in the video represent.  The Ego and the Authentic Self can both be “vehicles” for the human expression of the Ground of Being; they can both be expressions for the “silence” that one spontaneously acts from and immediately returns to, as you put it.  But only one of them, the Authentic Self, can be considered—at this point in our species’ development—a universally wholesome, moral, and beneficial expression of that primordial Ground.  The Authentic Self is Eros, the evolutionary impulse that is driving the whole Kosmos forward.  It is a passionate, spontaneous, wholly engaged, life-positive energy and intelligence that has no interest in the past and is only interested in creating the future in its own nondual image, from moment to moment to moment.  The Authentic Self is radical God-Consciousness, and its “flavor” is 180 degrees opposite that of the Ground of Being (though the stillness of that Ground tends to still underlie it, experientially).  (Think: Jesus overturning the money-changers’ tables in the temple, or Zen masters whacking students with big sticks—though those examples of awakened passion perhaps lack the Kosmocentric perspective that seems inherent to the Authentic Self as we understand and experience it today.)  You could say that the Ground of Being enlightens the human experience, while the Authentic Self enlivens it.  If the Ground of Being is God “the Unmanifested,” as Eckhart Tolle puts it, then the Authentic Self is God the Manifested.  And awakening to both of those parts of the self together, simultaneously, is what Ken Wilber has called “incarnational nonduality.”  It’s what Andrew’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment is about, and it’s what you see fueling his passion and excitement in that video.

Anyway...my point (if I have one!) is: Even the Authentic Self can't be considered unconditioned as soon as it’s expressed through a human being in any way, shape, or form.  But I think it is less conditioned, limited, and constrained by past karma than the expression of a more traditionally-enlightened person, who, in turn, is less conditioned than a purely ignorant person, who would be someone who’s unawake to either the Ground of Being or the Authentic Self and identified primarily with the ego.  So there are degrees of freedom.  Yet, once again, all human expressions—enlightened or otherwise—are inherently conditioned, because the human body-brain-mind-soul-sociocultural-interlinked-cosmic-system is one big, conditioned, evolving Process, never the same from moment to moment and always constrained, at least in part, by what came the moment before.  The Ground of Being is free of all that, but the Authentic Self IS that process—totally one with it—and embraces it all wholeheartedly as not being an obstacle to total freedom.  It just wants to evolve the whole thing, so that freedom and divinity shines through the world of conditioned form with ever-increasing clarity.

Is any of that clear? ;)

Let me know if I should try to explain any part of my ramble here.  It’d be easier for me to write more than try to edit this...

Best,

Tom

p.s. There’s also a whole discussion of the “Wilber-Combs Lattice” we could get into, which shows how different mystical states have different expressions at different stages of individual and cultural development, but I wanted to try to explain this without reference to states and stages, at least for this round.

Attention, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Once again, WIE.org--the vast, multimedia-suffused website for What Is Enlightenment? magazine--has been nominated in the Living: Religion/Spirituality category for "Best Damn Spiritual Site in da Kosmos." 

Last year we were also nominated, and though we didn't pick up the prize for the main Webby Award, we were completely and utterly psyched to receive the People's Choice vote (which I blogged about here).  And that's the very award that I'd now like to kindly, gently, and oh-so-persuasively ask all of you WIE fans out there to help us claim for our second year running!

It takes only about 2-3 minutes to place your vote, depending entirely on how fast and focused you are:

• Go to http://pv.webbyawards.com/account/login
• Click on “Register to vote now”
• Check your email for your activation code and click on the link given
• Go to the Website Section and click "vote now" to go to the ballot
• Scroll down to the Living Section on the ballot page and click on the Religion and Spirituality link
• Click circle next to What Is Enlightenment?
• Click “cast my vote!” and you're done.

What could possibly be simpler? 

Hmmm?

If you answered "nothing," you're absolutely right.  So vote!  Now!  Please!  Do it for the enrichment of your own consciousness.  Do it for the evolution of culture.  Do it for the sake of the entire multidimensional cosmos.   Consciousness - Culture - Cosmos, our magazine's new integralized, I - We - It tagline, as featured on the cover of our New Issue, now on sale at sophisticated bookstore (and Whole Foods) establishments everywhere.

And if supporting in your own small way the evolution of consciousness, culture, and the cosmos at large isn't a big enough reason for you to vote for us, then . . . well . . . I guess those competing websites have already won, haven't they? :)

Voting ends April 27th, so place your vote now--and I mean quick, before something in this fast-paced crazy world totally distracts you!!

I'll thank you when it's over.

My teacher, Andrew Cohen, lets it rip as he explains why Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Jeff Foster, Wayne Liquorman, Ramesh Balsekar, Gangaji, et al., are all slightly out to lunch:

“I have seen that real existence is apart from every kind of seeking.  It is from the beginning radically free of any goal of liberation or salvation.  It is unqualifiedly free, present, active, creative and alive.  I have seen that life need not be tied to seeking and the pursuit of its own nature as a goal.  However, such was not the case with the ancient path, which assumed the dilemma of existence from the beginning. . . .

“The present world, unlike the ancient one, has decided radically for life.  Therefore, its path and its realization must be unqualifiedly alive.  It must not only realize the truth prior to creation, but it must realize the truth of creativity itself.”

--Franklin Jones (Adi Da), The Knee of Listening (1973), pp.158-159

Found in Issue #1 of WIE.  A quote from The Life of the Buddha, according to the Pali Canon, by Bhikkhu Nanamoli:

I've been listening to the Beatles since I was in the womb (this lifetime anyway), and have loved them ever since.  And now, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can all savor their glory endlessly, whether through our 500+ Beatles tracks in our iTunes libraries or by watching multitudes of rare clips on YouTube, such as this one that I stumbled across yesterday:



All you can say to that is: Frakkin' A !!!

Now, if you're a true Beatles fan, you'll also want to know why those of us at What Is Enlightenment? think that what the fab four generated together, betwixt them (and in human culture at large, worldwide), was "A Kind of Innocence We'd Never Seen Before."   That was one of the feature articles in WIE #25, from 2004, which featured an exclusive photo of the Beatles from their famous Shea Stadium performance (also rendered in 3-D to make the b&w shot more intriguing for a magazine cover):



Surveying the power of the Beatles (and the Grateful Dead) to transmit--and unite thousands of individuals simultaneously within--a field of collective consciousness, my fellow WIE editor Ross Robertson wrote:

___________
"As far out as the Dead were, they never broke free of a relatively marginal counterculture. The Beatles, on the other hand--everybody loves the Beatles. 'There was an alchemy in the way they came together that made two plus two equal not four but forty,' journalist Mark Hertsgaard writes. They gave the words 'come together' a whole new meaning.

"In the summer of 1965, when the Grateful Dead (then known as the Warlocks) were still earning their first stripes in the bars and clubs of the San Francisco peninsula, the Beatles played not the largest, but the first-ever concert held in a sports arena in the U.S., at Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York. . . .

"There were 55,000 people there, screaming so loud the Beatles could barely hear themselves playing. At least Deadheads listened to the music; Beatles fans couldn't even get to the first note without succumbing to something like a virus that made them yell till they were hoarse, some sort of 'emotional epidemic.'  It was as if they were ripping holes clean through the walls between them: Who knows the depth of impact this had? How about when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, a year and a half earlier? Seventy-three million people were watching. That's forty percent of the U.S. population, roughly equal to the total number of televisions in the country that year. During that hour, precincts across the nation reported the lowest crime rate in half a century--even thieves, thugs, and malcontents took a timeout for the Beatles."
___________

:) And the joy of having a job like mine is that you get to wear headphones all day while you write, rocking out to the sonic soundscapes of an intersubjective revolution in consciousness that retains its soulful power to this day. . . .

In the off chance that you aren't already a subscriber to the exemplary publication known as What Is Enlightenment? magazine, there are now plentiful copies of WIE's best issue yet--Issue 35! (or "i35," as we call it back home)--abounding at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores and magazine retail establishments.  The above picture of my hands was taken at the Silverdale, Washington, Barnes and Noble store a few days ago.

And if Will's beautiful cover isn't persuasion enough for you, rest assured, this issue is just as gorgeous on the inside.  It's informative.  It's groovy.  It's even kinda sexy, in a post-trans-hyper-Darwinian sorta way.  Plus, it'll teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the nature of physical and spiritual evolution but were afraid to ask.  Check out the Table of Contents to see all the cool stuff we packed inside this one (quite nicely, I might add).  You can even preview the issue by reading one of its feature articles here.  And then, after your appetite for conscious cosmogenesis is sufficiently whetted, just mosey on down to your local bookstore to purchase your very own copy, today! 

Operators are standing by.  The evolutionary train waits for nobody . . .

(No, we editors aren't paid on commission.  We just take healthy pride in our work. :) 

While I'm at my parents' house in Silverdale, Washington, visiting the family for xmas, the miracle of Evolutionary Enlightenment has been steadily unfolding, more and more, back at my real home--Foxhollow in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Foxhollow is the global center for EnlightenNext and the primary residence of my spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen.  And there, on Christmas Eve, the liberating joy of what Ken Wilber has called "incarnational nonduality" was so palpable that Andrew felt compelled to blog about it.  (See: "Something to Celebrate: An unexpected experience of intersubjective Self-delight.")  It's a striking post--conveying the essence of his teachings in a disarmingly non-abstract, non-philosophical way--and I highly recommend you take a brief moment out of your busy day to check it out.

In other news... As you can see from my post below (and the pic above), I'm engaged to be married to a beautiful, smart, sweet, funny, and in-every-other-way-incredibly-awesome woman--and that marriage is happening...um...in 3 days!  (Gulp.)  It's a rather unconventional wedding, as my mother tried to explain to a woman at Ben Bridge jewelers in the Silverdale Mall the other night, since it's happening in a context of Evolutionary Enlightenment (not your standard Christian or Jewish or secular wedding)...and there are five other couples involved!  (See my friend and EnlightenNext coworker Ellen Daly's post about it here.)  It also isn't technically a wedding at all, since there's no ceremony and the legal certificate has be had independently, if any couples so choose--but for all meaningful purposes, it's a marriage.  See, we're in the business of creating a revolution in consciousness and culture, subverting wacked ancient traditions and limited fixed ideas at every turn, so it's all part of the evolutionary agenda...

After all, what would it really mean for two autonomous, independent, spiritually liberated human beings to come together in the most intimate communion possible while not losing sight, even for a second, of their own radical freedom and the vast Kosmic and evolutionary context in which they abide?  For two selves grounded in the truth of One Self to then meet and act and evolve the very nature of human relationship with that Self being the primary reference point for all engagement and interaction?  Not the two becoming One (which is what tantra is about), but the One expressing itself as two, in space and time and real life...egolessly...with not a trace of karma being created in the nondual process.

At least, that's the theory.  And it's quite a bold prospect... Something radically new to prove possible to a cynical world that has a very screwed up and complicated relationship to romance and sexuality... But I think I'm up for the challenge.  I mean, it certainly beats the samsaric alternative.  Our world could use a few healthy examples of genuine commitment and egoless love...

Right?