Last week, we discussed how to have an Evolutionary Dialogue, which is not the same as exchanging ideas…

“We need to learn how to activate the part of us that can talk about evolution, and inhabit the self that can evolve. And that’s something that has to be learned, because we relate to the world and ourselves and each other as a construct of concepts, and we need to learn to act and respond without that. So how do we have an evolutionary dialogue where we DON’T know? You step just outside who you think you are, and activate that – you need to inhabit that.” – Patrick Bryson

This Tuesday 21 May is going to be the LAST of our series, until the summer… don’t miss it! 7:30 at the EnlightenNext Centre in London or ask us if you want to tune in online from where you are. >>find out more here about 21 May

You can listen to this fabulous 4-minute clip from last week’s Meditation & Evolution session.

“In spite of how solid and fixed everything appears, in a deeper sense nothing is fixed and everything is moving…. It takes a lot of meditation to uncover this deeper truth that nothing is fixed and everything is moving *including* yourself! We need to have some sense that things are stable in order to feel secure, so this upsets the part of us that wants to have solid ground to stand on. I’m proposing that this is the most important thing you can discover: that nothing is fixed and everything is moving.” – Patrick Bryson

You can listen to this fabulous 8-minute clip from last week’s Meditation & Evolution session. Don’t miss the last two sessions on Tuesday 14 and 21 May at 7:30!

More on Evolution

Check out this powerful interview with Andrew Cohen on Life Arts Media – filmed a few weeks ago by our friend Gennaro Ambrosino.

Gennaro didn’t beat about the bush! He started the interview with the question: “How does the scientific idea of evolution as a mechanistic process contrast with the spiritual will to exist that is expressed in Evolutionary Enlightenment?”

The answer is a fascinating exploration of evolution in the spiritual context – enjoy!

Enjoy this 3 minute clip of the most recent Meditation + Evolution session, where a lively exploration of about the deeper meaning of meditation took place.

I’m looking forward to next week, 7 May, when the theme will be: Evolution Explained – activating the creative impulse. We’ll discuss the difference between meditation and evolution, what it means to break the spell of solidity, and discovering evolutionary optimism. You can find out more and sign up here.

You can listen to a short clip about meditation here:

With the sudden warm weather after the prolonged winter, nature is exploding all at once and the force of the life process is staggering: luscious cherry blossom, lime green unfurling Chestnut buds, and Weeping Willow leaves, with an impossible Hockney-esque palette of colour.

The Spectrum of Love

I’m a romantic at heart, and I love it all with a passion. I even went on a mini-Bodhisattva mission to rescue frog spawn laid in a ridiculously shallow puddle, moving it to deeper water so that the eggs wouldn’t be left high and dry as the puddle evaporated. And I love my wife, too. No, I’m not equating her with Chestnut buds and frog spawn!

Love is a word that covers such a wide spectrum of meanings and depths. There are many types of relationships and love. Human relationship–and I mean relationship in its broadest sense, not in the romantic sexual arena–allows new possibilities to emerge between self-aware individuals. This to me holds the promise for creating a culture with deeper values.

Relationship Is Everything

Well, maybe relationship is not quite everything, but it’s not far off. I’m convinced that we can only fully flower as human beings in relationship with others. The deepest urge in our own hearts is for relatedness. At the most fundamental level, we can even conceive of the drive of the universal life process itself as being similar to the urge toward relationship at all levels throughout nature. This could quite possibly be a valid answer as to why the One became the Many, and why something came from nothing.

Unique Yet not Separate

And most fascinatingly, at the very same time we are, each of us, very differentiated individuals, each with our unique combination of aptitudes, qualities and life experiences. And then added to that is the complexity and promise of a special romantic and sexual relationship. My wife and I are like chalk and cheese. I’m a reserved and considered Englishman while she’s a very extrovert Australian. Yet the relationship works remarkably well because we deeply trust each other. When we engage, there’s often positive ‘creative friction’ between us, which doesn’t preclude the occasional ding-dong. And we never let anything accumulate between us. Most of all, though, it works because we share an aspiration to evolve.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery says it very simply and elegantly:
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I’m always learning more about relationship and am eager to explore the topic with others, which is what Kyrsten and I will doing on 18 May at our day seminar Sex, Love, Romance and Deeper Meaning. Whether you are in relationship or not, you are most welcomed to join us as we delve into this subject which is so important to all of us. Have a look at what we will be doing on the day. We’d love to see you there.

Wishing you some (hopefully) good Spring weather,
Chris

Enjoy this 3 minute clip of the most recent Meditation + Evolution session, where a lively exploration of the art and science of meditation took place.

I’m looking forward to next week, 30 April, when the theme will be: Getting clear about meditation. We’ll discuss various techniques and learn what the essence of meditation is, the importance of awakening to a sense of unboundedness, and how the path and the goal can be one. You can find out more and sign up here.

You can listen to a short clip about meditation here:

RR:                    You dedicate your new book Evolutionary Enlightenment to Ken Wilbur and Deepak Chopra wrote the foreword. With all these great people involved, can you tell us what it’s all about?

 AC:                   Evolutionary Enlightenment is about putting the traditional notion of metaphysical or spiritual Enlightenment in the context of science’s discovery of evolution.

To put it very simply, in the traditional experience of Enlightenment, what the great, most renowned mystics in the world’s religions speak about is an experience of transcendence–an experience of consciousness in which we  experience freedom, freedom from the mind, from the body, from time, freedom from the whole world. The image of the Buddha sitting very stoically, very still and silently, is a metaphorical image of this kind of consciousness, of being free from the world.

This type of experience and this type of understanding is what my teacher revealed to me and what he taught me. But as I learned more about the human experience and thought more about the cultural epoch we live in, a form of spirituality that’s based upon transcendence of the world, or going beyond the world, didn’t make sense to me anymore. What became apparent to me is that in so many of the people I was encountering–whom I consider to be the luckiest people in the world because most of the people I meet are highly educated, relatively speaking, quite wealthy compared to how humans have lived for most of history, and very lucky due to the secularism and materialism which is the result of the Western Enlightenment–in these people, I found that there’s often a sense of having everything and knowing so much, but, at the same time, being deeply alienated and divorced from a deep and profound spiritual connection with life and with reality itself.

So I felt a new kind of spiritual illumination and understanding was needed, one that would enable us to embrace life more whole-heartedly and more deeply. And I realised that embracing the truth of evolution would be the way for that to happen.

Evolution is the recognition and discovery of the fact that the entire creative process that began with the Big Bang is who we are. In other words, our sense of self is not merely as individual personalities and individual bodies or members of particular families, but we really are children of the cosmos. The Big Bang was a cosmic explosion that came into being out of emptiness or nothingness 14 billion years ago when the material universe burst forth. This created the conditions that made it possible, after many billions of years, for life to emerge.

Eventually, after even more time passed, mind and consciousness emerged from life.  So when we look at evolution in this way we realise that the emergence of mind and life, and the emergence of energy and matter of the physical universe, is really one process. Evolution is one whole, unfolding process that had a beginning. And the leading edge of that process is what you and I call mind, self-reflective awareness, complex cognition, the capacity for knowing and the understanding of what it means to exist.

So I think conveying this perspective to people awakens them to a profoundly expanded sense of self in which we realise: I am the entire universe awakening to itself and bearing witness to itself in and through the form of the body, mind and personality of myself. Then we see that the body, mind and personality that we have is the vehicle or sheath through which the entire creative process can begin to bear witness to itself.

Finally, the last piece of this extraordinary puzzle is the awakening to the recognition that the energy and intelligence that created the universe and is creating the universe is a force of overwhelming positivity. The creative driver– the creative impulse or the evolutionary impulse in the cosmos itself–is overwhelmingly positive. Creative people are overwhelmed by an inspiration that compels them to bring into the world things that don’t yet exist. Human beings experience this creative fire that created the universe, this urge towards creativity. When we look into those moments of creative inspiration in which we realise what we’re capable of, we experience an overwhelming sense of positivity, moments of unselfconscious creativity. We awake to the possible. Being awake to the possible, I believe, is a new understanding of what the nature of God and spirit actually is.

 RR:                      Amazing. It’s about vibrations and frequency, isn’t it? I think your book is extraordinary because it talks about spirituality in a very different way, certainly compared to what I’ve been researching and reviewing. It’s very refreshing; I love it.

You write about non-duality early on in the book. And I imagine that the thousands and thousands of people coming to see you are all asking: who am I? You have a lovely part that talks about letting go and falling deeply into yourself and all that’s left is empty space. That’s what it’s all about really, isn’t it?

>>To listen to the audio recording of the interview, click here.

How can we not only do creative things, but be creative at the deepest level of our self?  When we identify with the process of evolution in such a way that we can’t separate our identity from the process itself, then we become creativity. We begin to see how we can evolve and develop, and become ever more creative.

Enjoy this 3.5 minute clip of the most recent Meditation + Evolution session, where a lively exploration of the topic of creativity took place.

I’m looking forward to next week, 16 April, when we’ll begin a three week exploration devoted entirely to the art and science of meditation. We will look at three key elements of meditation – defined as the practice of contemplating zero. You can find out more and sign up here.

You can listen to a short clip about creativity here:

As we were talking, the conversation deepened. From where does our ‘interest’ come? Does it come from a mundane desire to want to know something in particular? Or is there a quality of wanting to find out about something we don’t already know?

An online listener sent an interesting tweet: as time moves on, she tweeted, she finds more ‘interest’ because mortality is knocking on the door! On the other hand, we discovered that, more often than not, we tend to lose interest during the process of ageing and seek to preserve what we already know. The question then becomes: what are we choosing in life?

Obviously, awareness is fundamental to interest. But interest is not a one-way street. If we give ourselves to our ‘interest’, the object of our interest may start to hold a creative power over us and soon we may find ourselves somewhere we could never have imagined–moving beyond our limitations and surprising ourselves by our creative and courageous responses to life.

All in all, it was a really interesting evening! Looking forward to next week, when we will follow this up with a discussion about creativity, which you can learn more about here.

You can listen to a short clip from the evening here:

To put this in context, we started the year 2013 with the Three Keys to Meditation. We discovered the stillness that lies at the root of Life, before anything ever happened and before we came to be the person that we are. Then we examined the Three Keys to a Meaningful Life–trust, commitment and awareness–and learned how these three qualities enable us to pierce our often superficial experience of life and find higher meaning and purpose–what it is that we are always looking for!

But then: how do we do this? That’s were the Three Keys to Spiritual Development come in. Because if we want to get better at holding meaning and purpose in our lives, then we’re going to have to develop!

In speaking about confidence last night, we found that beyond the more superficial confidence we are familiar with–useful but limited–there is a boundless sense of confidence that comes from a deeper place within ourselves. To experience that greater, deeper confidence, we discovered, we don’t need to be perfect; in fact, we’ll never be perfect. But the very fact that we want to align ourselves with something good and wholesome gives us confidence. Indeed, we stumbled upon the great paradox that when we admit that we actually don’t really know who we are at the deepest level, the more confidence actually emerges in us. And that’s because we have nothing to prove or protect. We are free to respond from a deeper source that is creative and willing to take risks. Our certainty shifts from ‘I know this’ to ‘I deeply sense that life is good’.

During our Tuesday evening gatherings, our collective inquiry doesn’t come out of making things up or quoting from what we already know. Rather, everyone speaks from their genuine experience and then a fuller picture of reality begins to emerge. We take the liberty to explore freely together without jumping to any big conclusions–and that’s a big luxury in itself. We are simply interested in what we find out together.

Thank you to everyone who participated this past Tuesday. It was a great evening and we all learned a lot!

You can listen to a short clip from the evening here:

Check out this moving video clip by Andrew Cohen about spiritual self-confidence and the overwhelming positivity of life: (4mins, 31sec)

RR:                    I’d like my listeners to learn something about Evolutionary Enlightenment. I brought you in as an author Andrew, but you are, in fact, an international spiritual teacher, and it’s been a hell of a journey for you!  Perhaps you could tell us a bit about your journey. How did it all begin?

AC:                   Well, in my case, I was brought up in a secular Jewish family in New York City, and I had no notion of God or spirit or of anything higher. Then one night when I was 16 years old and living in Rome, Italy, I was sitting up one night having a conversation with my mother. I don’t even remember what we were talking about, but for no particular reason, the doors of perception opened and I had the most extraordinary experience.  It doesn’t make sense rationally, but all I can tell you is what happened. I suddenly became aware of the whole universe. I realised that the whole universe was one conscious being that was self-aware and infinite and that was beginning-less and endless. There was also a ‘knowing’ or an intelligence that I was aware that had no beginning and no end.  And, most powerfully, the very nature of what was revealing itself to me, this beginning-less and endlessness, was experienced as a kind of overwhelming, impersonal, absolute Love that was so profound, so powerful and so intense that it actually felt like I was being physically crushed by it and that if it didn’t stop, I felt I would literally die.

RR:                   Wow!

AC:                   That was my introduction!

RR:                   So how did you handle it? How did it manifest after that?  You were, after all, only a 16-year-old.

AC:                   You know, I’ve found that a lot of adolescents actually have metaphysical episodes, but I didn’t really know what to do. Everyone I told about it didn’t know what to make of it, and I didn’t know what to make of it either.  All I knew was that those few moments had been the most real of my entire life. I knew then that I had been more awake, more conscious and more aware of that which is Real, of Reality itself, than at any other moment, and I never doubted that.

But I had another interest at the time. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be a jazz drummer so I pursued my interest in music. It was only about six years later, when I was 22 and having a hard time in my early adulthood, that I did anything about it. I had been very haunted by this miraculous, extraordinary visitation from the unknown.

So when I was 22 I decided to give up my aspirations to be a musician in order to wholeheartedly pursue what had happened to me that night. I became a full-time seeker and did all the things seekers do.  I started getting up very early in the morning and reading everything I could on the subject of Eastern Enlightenment. I learned how to meditate and had many different teachers. Typical of my generation–I’m a baby boomer–I was very compelled by Eastern spirituality and by the whole notion of the Buddha’s Enlightenment. Eventually I went to India like many people of my generation and after two and a half years there I met an extraordinary teacher who was a living disciple of the great and renowned 20th century master of Advaita Vedanta, Ramana Maharshi, HWL Poonja.

I spent three weeks with Poonja. It was just me and him alone. He was staying at his friend’s house and I would visit him in the morning and the evening, and we’d go for walks and have talks together. At the end of that three weeks I had undergone the most extraordinary transformative experience. A process was catalysed by the time I spent with him that lasted another three weeks. And by the end of those three weeks, I was literally a different person. That’s when I started teaching.

To listen to the audio recording of the interview, click here.