Enlightened Activism

Q: Doesn't the seriousness and imminency of global crises like climate change demand a kind of immediate activism that makes pursuing spiritual transformation almost irrelevant at this point?

A: No. We have to do both. The practical solutions that we need to find to address the very real problems that we're facing, climate change among the most important, have to be based upon a shift in consciousness itself. It's just not going to happen any other way. And at the same time, the context for individual transformation has to be the desperate urgency of our global predicament. One supports the other. The change that we seek for in the world around us, we have to generate at the core of our own being. Many people who are just responding to the external crisis, unsupported by their own internal development, usually get burned out because their soul is not being fed. And on the other hand, many who are only pursuing personal spiritual transformation are simply looking for a means of escape, unwilling to face and engage with the overwhelming challenges of being a human being in this world at this crucial point in our collective evolution. So once again, we all have to do both. Only in awakening to a higher level of consciousness can we create the spiritually enlightened context for a new kind of activism.

Andrew Cohen:
Founder of EnlightenNext