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:

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:

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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.

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.