Gaia Community: Soulplex's Blog

Announcing: KosmicTom.com

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:28:43 GMT

www.kosmictom.com

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. :)

Tags: Evolution

Our Latest Beautiful Creation

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:11:29 GMT

[cross-posted from KosmicTom.com]

September 26, 2007

Here it is, the one and only WIE Issue 38, featuring ultra-progressive, inherently-integral inquiries into techno-environmentalism, the contemporary geopolitical scene, and “super-integral” possibilities at the leading edge of consciousness exploration. Plus articles on evolutionary Christianity, integral music, the fallacies of “self-esteem,” the narcissistic peril and future potential of Second Life (written by Thomas de Zengotita), and lots more. Not bad for a measly $7.50, eh?

Tags: WIE

On the Matter of Pure Being & Human Conditioning

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:02:32 GMT

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.

Tags: Evolutionary Enlightenment, Nonduality, Obtuse Philosophizing

Rock the Vote for WIE.org! Help Defend Our Title!

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 05:46:53 GMT

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.

Tags: WIE, Culture

The PURPOSE of Now

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:54:49 GMT

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:

"Being and Becoming" with Andrew Cohen (Boston, 2006)

Tags: Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment

Why Adi Da Used to Rock...

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:03:58 GMT

“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

Tags: Evolutionary Enlightenment, Mystic Quotes

Why the Buddha Rocks

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:33:54 GMT

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

I am an All-transcender,
an All-knower,
Unsullied in all ideas,
renouncing all,
By craving's ceasing freed.
And this I owe
To my own wit.
To whom should I concede it?

I have no teacher, and my like
Exists nowhere in all the world
With all its gods, because I have
No person for my counterpart.
I am the Teacher in the world
Without a peer, accomplished, too,
And I alone am quite enlightened,
Quenched, whose fires are all extinct.
I go to Kasi's city now
To set the Wheel of Law
In motion: in a blindfold world
I go to beat the Deathless Drum.

Tags: Buddhism, Mystic Quotes

The Gods of an Intersubjective Revolution

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:03:47 GMT

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:

REVOLUTION!

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):

www.wie.org/j25/j25.asp

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. . . .

Tags: Beatles, WIE, Intersubjectivity, Culture

What do you mean you haven't bought the new issue of WIE?!

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 04:32:25 GMT

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. :)

Tags: WIE, Evolution

A Day in the Evolutionary Life

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:44:04 GMT

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?

Tags: Relationship, Life, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Andrew Cohen, Culture

Andrew's latest Quote of the Week: "Unbearable Simplicity"

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:37:30 GMT

Q: I’m having trouble with meditation.

A: If you’re having trouble with meditation, that means you’re not really doing it. The powerful thing about meditation is its radical simplicity — be still, be at ease, pay attention. That’s the beauty of it — meditation means doing absolutely nothing. And there are only two positions in relationship to that: you either do it or you don’t. But often human beings find this simplicity unbearable. It confronts us with ourselves at the deepest level, and most of us just can’t bear that degree of transparency. But that’s why it’s important to learn how to meditate. It is only in the exquisite simplicity of doing absolutely nothing that you begin to be able to see yourself in ways you ordinarily would never be able to do. If you really engage with this unbearable simplicity, it’s impossible to hide from yourself.

Andrew Cohen

Tags: Meditation, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Andrew Cohen

Why students of Andrew Cohen don't run off to CA to become gurus

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:51:17 GMT

Andrew Cohen has just updated his blog with an awesome post titled, "What Is Enlightenment Anyway?" Responding to questions about why he doesn't simply hand enlightenment diplomas to his students--such as myself--and send them off into the postmodern spiritual marketplace to preach the good news of freedom-here-and-now, Andrew has composed a very clear explanation of why traditional "personal enlightenment" is dead. And why, contrary to popular opinion in our quick-fix Happy Meal society, waking up is actually hard to do.

Here's a choice excerpt to whet your appetite:

When I started teaching, over twenty years ago, many people who would spend time in my company experienced the same kind of dramatic, energetic enlightenment experience that I had when I met H.W.L. Poonja in 1986. (You can read the complete story in a short book I published from the diaries I kept at the time, entitled My Master Is Myself.) In those early days, because of what was happening in front of my very eyes on a daily basis, I thought so many people would become “enlightened” as a result of spending time with me that pretty soon the world wouldn’t know what had hit it! It all seemed so easy, so immediate, so effortless... As absurd as it sounds, I even remember wondering why the Buddha forced people to meditate in order to get enlightened. Yes, those were heady days...

Oh, and unlike Andrew's previous blog (see post below), this new one isn't 11 pages long. So even you super-time-pressed evolving souls should be able to check it out... :)

Tags: Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment

Andrew Cohen's Integrity of Soul

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:52:25 GMT

At long last, my spiritual teacher and editor-in-chief, Andrew Cohen, has written a response to the small but noisy group of ex-students who have been trying for the past couple of years to tear him down. He'd been advised by a number of people to ignore them and not provide more fuel for their raging egos to feed upon, but it's come to a point where not responding is beginning to lend their tired rantings more weight than they justly deserve.

Why are these ex-students so upset? Well, to put it very bluntly, because they probably didn't care enough about the evolution of human consciousness to give what it takes to get over themselves. In my six-plus years as a student of Andrew's, I've seen it happen numerous times. People hit a wall in themselves, in their own spiritual and psychological development, and they either muster up the kind of integrity, strength of character, and sheer love and heart it takes to transcend ego--or they don't. Some admit that it's simply more than they'd anticipated (despite Andrew's constant insistence that there couldn't be anything more challenging in life than pursuing ego death), and either step down or decide to leave and maybe pursue other, less demanding spiritual paths, amicably. And others can't bear to admit their own resistance to surrendering their attachment to ego and leave in a bitter rage. It's probably intense and hard to fathom without witnessing such things yourself, no doubt. But this particular terrain always has been intense. Jesus was nailed to a cross for it. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for it (three times over). And countless others have paid the price, in the most extreme ways, for daring to take their love of God and Truth to its logical conclusion: nonduality, or the seamless merging of the soul in its mysterious Source. And the only obstacle to nonduality is, and always has been, the illusory, mind-made, separate sense of self: the ego.

What's more, in Andrew's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, enlightened, nondual freedom is just the basis for a renewed, impassioned, wholehearted engagement with Life in all its ceaselessly evolving glory. Dying to the ego is just the beginning, in other words, for an ongoing process of conscious evolution, both in the individual and collectively with others, in order to transform (not transcend) the world and remodel it in the eternal image of our true Self. And the fact is, not everyone is sincerely interested enough in that radical possibility to literally give everything for it, no matter what it takes.

Personally, ever since I realized at age 16 that life wasn't even worth living if I didn't know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the whole point of it all is, or what we're even doing here, I've never doubted for more than brief flickers that there is nothing else to live for than the wholehearted pursuit of that sacred Truth. That's not to say that I haven't been continually challenged as a student of Andrew, that I haven't come against walls in myself and even, momentarily, contemplated leaving and going back to the unconscious, aimless life I'd been so desperate to escape in the first place--but the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment tells you exactly what to do in moments like these. You ask yourself, "Do I want to be Free more than anything else?" and then, after facing everything and taking your entire life into account, in the biggest possible context, you make your choice...

I remember very clearly about four years ago, when one of Andrew's top senior students--who'd been by Andrew's side for maybe 11 or 12 years, and was becoming a teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment himself--met with four of us young, twentysomething students, who had just recently moved to the main EnlightenNext center in Lenox, Mass. At one point during the meeting, which was a weekly check-in to see how things were going, he looked me in the eye and said, "This is about cultivating integrity of soul." That struck me deeply, and I knew it was true; the pursuit of that level of spiritual integrity is exactly what motivated me in my search for a teacher. It's why I very consciously chose Andrew Cohen, out of all other candidates out there. His integrity, contrary to what his detractors would have one believe, is rock solid. Even the fact that he criticized other teachers and gurus, in his books, for not upholding the same standard of spiritual and ethical purity that they asked for in their own students was always impressive to me, because you can't do that unless you've got some damn reliable integrity yourself to back it up--at least not with any degree of sanity, rationality, or honesty. And Andrew Cohen, to my discerning eye (after all, I was trying to find a spiritual master to offer the evolution of my very soul to), had all of those qualities in spades.

So it's always seemed ironic (and humbling) that the aforementioned senior student who devoted himself to Andrew for over a decade, and knew full well what was required to succeed--and keep evolving--in this extraordinary spiritual context, would declare that it's about "integrity of soul" and then sell his own soul short when Andrew demanded that he start living that same kind of integrity himself. He didn't just leave, with self-respect, dignity, and humility in the face of the true extent and nature of the ego; no, he split and then became one of Andrew's most vocal, raging detractors on the internet. And he joined the ranks of those who, at the very least, continue to help the evolution of consciousness by serving as public examples of what not to aspire toward in life...

For everyone out there who's read some of his (and others') bitter, cynical diatribes, please consider: You're only getting from those individuals one half (at most) of a very big and complex picture. And for what it's worth, in my life as a student of Andrew Cohen and as an editor of his magazine, What Is Enlightenment?, I spend hours with him, almost every single day, and I've seen him in just about every possible context and situation conceivable--and he's never done anything, nor have I ever heard of him doing anything (including all the extremely taken-out-of-context "claims" of impropriety his detractors espouse), that has caused me to doubt, even one bit, the adamantine integrity of soul that I sensed in him when I first had the karmic fortune to stumble upon his work so many years ago. Yes, it's hard for us postmodern relativists to believe that such a thing is even possible--especially with so little evidence from other spiritual authorities to support it--but that's precisely what makes him the rare, remarkable human being he is.

As Andrew has often observed: "Authenticity is even more powerful than enlightened consciousness."

Thanks for reading.

Tom

p.s. Check out Andrew's "Declaration of Integrity" here to get the real story...

Tags: Andrew Cohen, integrity, authenticity, Evolutionary Enlightenment

Liberation Without a Face

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 05:13:46 GMT

[Read post]

Check out this new Notes from the Revolution blog post by my teacher, Andrew Cohen: "Liberation Without a Face." It describes some important aspects of the miracle that's continually unfolding here in Lenox, Massachusetts (and at EnlightenNext centers elsewhere)--particularly among the women students. There's a video accompanying the post--a trailer for a longer documentary, currently in production--that also transmits a powerful taste of it...

A taste of what?

Freedom! Freedom beyond ego, freedom beyond gender and any false notions of self...

Tags: Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Women's Liberation, Sex & Gender

Creating the Future

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:58:15 GMT

Wow, I haven't been up here in a while... If only they'd had blogs when I was a teenager, I'm sure it would come more naturally to me...

Anyhow, while you're here, check out our recent vid on AndrewCohen.org: "Creating the Future."

I'd be very interested to hear what y'all think of it...

Tags:

Lightsabers of Liberation...

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 15:47:30 GMT

This is Andrew Cohen's latest "Quote of the Week," which you can subscribe to here. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of his teaching work, it's taken from one of his earliest teachings. It's called "A Sword in Each Hand":

If you dare to take up the banner of enlightenment, you will be attacked from all sides. From the inside you will be attacked by your own mind and from the outside you will be attacked by everyone else's mind. Anyone who dares to succeed automatically presents a huge threat. If true freedom is going to survive within you, you have to be willing to fight for it. You have to have a sword in each hand at all times. One sword is for your own mind and the other sword is for everyone else's mind. You must be ready to use them. Anyone who wants to be truly free must be willing to stand alone in the truth.

Andrew Cohen

Tags:

Mystic Quote #14

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:00:34 GMT

A memorable quote from the Oklahoma Neo-Advaitin teacher Scott Morrison (now deceased), with whom I was in correspondence during the summer of '99:

“Consciousness is one, yet infinitely diverse, mysterious, and without boundaries.”
--Scott Morrison

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Mystic Quote #13

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 05:16:22 GMT

“What comes will also go. What always is will alone remain.”

--Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Mystic Quote(s) #12: En-light-en-ment

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 12:37:15 GMT

“If false thinking suddenly stops for an instant, and you see through your own mind, the vastness of its original perfect light, the purity of its original state, no thing in it at all, this is called awakening. There is nothing to be awakened or cultivated other than this mind."
--Zen Master Han-shan

“I am the Light that is over all things. I am all: all came forth from me, and all attained to me. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Pick up a stone, and you will find me there.”
--Jesus of Nazareth, The Gospel of Thomas, saying 77

“There is a Light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the Light that shines in our heart.”
--Chandogya Upanishad

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Mystic Quote #11

http://soulplex.gaia.com — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 05:25:42 GMT

All I can say about this one is... Amen.

"The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints."

—Will Durant

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