It’s the dance of ideas and insights

If you are interested in the big questions about the nature of life and the human experience, the evolving Universe and our own potential role in creating the future, then look out for Andrew Cohen’s dialogues with the likes of Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra and on June 20th at the EnlightenNext Centre, experimental biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Andrew Cohen and Rupert Sheldrake have met on several occasions previously. I have been out of the country for every one of them unfortunately so I have had to settle for the videos. This is one I don’t want to miss. They don’t by any means agree on everything, but they have developed a rich rapport over the years, so you can expect this conversation to go further than any they have had previously. Plus they both have new books out, Rupert Sheldrake’s “The Science Delusion – Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry,” and Andrew Cohen’s “Evolutionary Enlightenment – a New Path to Spiritual Awakening,” Both have been well received.

So what can we expect to hear?

Here is a teaser. If the Universe is not dead but alive, is it conscious? Are the planets conscious? Is, as Rupert Sheldrake suggested in an interview with EnlightenNext magazine, the Sun conscious? Or is it only as Andrew Cohen says when the evolutionary process awakens to itself through us that the Universe becomes truly conscious?

“The view that Rupert Sheldrake has of Science that excites me,” says Mark Vernon in a review of “The Science Delusion” in The Guardian that I really enjoyed, “..is that Science emerges out of the discovery of our own experience…”

Hence Sheldrake’s controversial theory of morphogenetic fields, and his experiments with telephone telepathy, and dogs that “know” when their owners are coming home. What Sheldrake is pointing to here is that consciousness is not trapped in a brain as Science insists it is, but is something we share between us. This is a view central to Andrew Cohen’s philosophy of conscious evolution as well.

One of the things I find so exciting about the prospect of attending a dialogue between these two men is the very fact that they don’t agree on everything. It’s the dance of ideas and insights between them garnered from their own fields of knowledge and experience that is so compelling. To say it’s rare to find a meeting between a reputed scientist and a spiritual teacher that is this creatively fertile and thought-provoking, is an understatement!

For information about the event on 20 June go here http://enlightennext.org.uk/2012/04/17/freeing-the-spirit-of-enquiry/