The EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle

It’s been a little more than a year since I first laid out my vision in two posts on this blog for a new annual cycle of spiritual practice and development (The Universe Project and The Universe Project Continued). Over the past couple of months, we’ve taken some big steps toward concretizing that vision, including setting a date for the first Being & Becoming retreat, which will be held in beautiful Tuscany, Italy, from July 25 to August 16, 2009, and deciding on a place and time for our first conference, which will be held in London in 2010. We’ve also come up with a new name for the cycle, which was previously known as “The Universe Project.” After much debate and creative collaboration, we decided on: “The EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle: Awakening Consciousness & Engaging Culture” I’m thrilled to see what was initially just my own vision becoming clearer, closer, more concrete and more accessible each day.

In my New Year’s webcast, I spoke at length about how I hope these events will affect and transform those who participate in them. If you missed it, you can listen to the broadcast here, and I’ve also included a short edited version below.

The Being & Becoming retreat will be an opportunity to take as many people as are interested on the journey of evolution—to give people the internal experience of what actually occurs in the evolutionary or developmental process. We’re going to spend the first half of the retreat going into the traditional Eastern definition of enlightenment, which means going back to before time began. We will do this by going very deeply into the meditative experience—so deeply that we can actually feel and see and know what it’s like to exist before anything happened, before the universe was created, before anything existed. We’re going to go so deep that we know what pure being is.

I don’t think you can really understand what conscious evolution is about unless you actually have the experience of knowing what it’s like to be before anything exists. It is only when you know that no-place that you can understand where the desire to exist comes from. So we’re going to be spending half of the retreat going very deeply into the experience of Being until we all know directly—not just philosophically but experientially—what it actually is.

In the first half we will be asking ourselves what it would have been like to be before the universe existed. In the second half, we’re going to, in a sense, reenact what happened when something came from nothing. What was it like to experience that explosive transformation from nothing to something, from being to becoming? What does that burst, that surge, actually feel like? We are going to experience the innermost essence of going from Being to Becoming. To put it in theological terms, we are going to find out what it would be like to be that One without a second that some people call God, who took the initial leap from nothing to everything. So this second part of the retreat is all about becoming—the desire to exist, the desire to evolve.

These two parts, taken together, will enable us to find out, experientially: What is the nature of consciousness when it is at rest and what is the nature of consciousness when it is surging relentlessly towards the future? As I teach it, in Evolutionary Enlightenment, unless we embrace both these dimensions of consciousness, we don’t really have the whole picture.

The nature of consciousness, as both being and becoming, is already enlightened, which means already free from the individual ego and the culturally created self. And when we discover this inherent freedom of consciousness itself and the surging momentum that is driving toward the future, we realize that it already exists within us even though we usually are not aware of it. In this discovery, we find ourselves experiencing an ecstatic desire to participate in the life process freely and fully and with a level of commitment and spiritual confidence the likes of which we’ve never known before.

So the goal of the retreat is for individuals to have this experience, so they will come out of it with a deep self-confidence, a sense of finally knowing who they are, and feeling that they are an integral part of something that has been in a state of becoming for fourteen billion years and now is in desperate need of their own faculties for cognition and engagement. I would hope that at the end of a retreat like this, most people will feel that they want to participate in the life process with a level of commitment that they never have felt before.

The second big event that we are going to be focusing all our work on is the annual international conference on the theme of the evolution of consciousness and culture. My students, colleagues, and I have been learning about and devoting a lot of time to this topic in recent years. We have begun to see that internal development expresses itself as what the world we create together looks like, and that the shared values, shared beliefs, and shared perspectives that create culture really are in fact created. They are created by human beings, as they have been throughout history. So when people make cultural evolution a conscious and deliberate intention, an extraordinary possibility begins to emerge. We at EnlightenNext are part of a small but committed network of individuals all over the globe who are feeling a strong desire to create a new world, a new culture, a new perspective, a new way to see the human experience, and a new context from which to participate in life and to build the future.

Until now, EnlightenNext magazine has been the main expression of our inquiry into the relationship between the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of culture, the evolution of the spiritual experience and how it relates to how our values evolve. That’s why the magazine has turned on so many people—because when they read it, they feel that it’s not just a magazine, that there’s something potent being transmitted that’s touching them very deeply, inspiring them, and even awakening them in some way. But now we want to make this work we’ve doing with the magazine an intersubjective process that many people will be able to participate in. We want to create an exciting environment where many, many people are going to be able to experience the thrill of collective inquiry, guided by a perspective and a direction, and helped by a lot of brilliant and deep thinkers. And our goal is for as many people as possible to experience cognitive development in a philosophical and spiritual context. When you really begin to develop your capacity to understand how life works and what it means to be alive, you feel things clicking into place. More of the world literally comes into your awareness, more of reality, more of the universe. And the more you see it, the more it seems to become a part of who you are.

We want this to be the kind of event that no one is going to be able to attend and leave unscathed! We want to present these ideas in such a way that people are not going to be able to avoid having their own consciousness and cognition actually evolve to some degree simply because of having spent time in this particular context with this group of people for five days. We want them to leave not the same people they were when they came.

So through these two events, the conference and the retreat, we want to begin to demonstrate how the evolution of our interiors affects the evolution of the exterior world we live in, and have people participate in this process. And this will all be happening in a context of intentional development, so that both events are part of an ongoing cycle. The retreat is not an end in itself—it’s part of a cultural, developmental practice and process that’s also going to be enacted through this annual conference with real people who are interested in exactly the same subject and who very much care about the world and want things to really change. The conference isn’t just a conference—it’s part of an ongoing developmental process or cycle, because the energy that’s supporting the conference is going to be the energy that has been generated by the retreat. So the whole process is one integral whole.

When you realize that consciousness and culture are one—not just as a metaphysical statement but as a literal, manifest truth—something very profound occurs. When this perspective is internalized, when the splitbetween subject and object, between consciousness and matter, is seenthrough in the deepest way, the fundamentally dualistic perspective that most of us are unconsciously holding disappears. Suddenly we can no longer see the inner without seeing the outer; and we can no longer see the outer without seeing the inner. This inherently holistic or integral embrace of life becomes not just a conceptual overlay but the very way that we see. When this occurs, when we internalize this perspective, we become new human beings.  So the relationship between the conference and the retreat is designed to generate this awareness of the inherently integral nature of who we are, at an experiential level.

We’re initiating this cycle, but we don’t know where it’s going to lead. What we do know is that anybody who participates is going to have the opportunity to understand the process that they’ve already been a part of since something emerged from nothing fourteen billion years ago—and be able to see and feel that larger process in every moment. That’s spiritual liberation, soul liberation, in an evolutionary context—when we begin to see that it is possible to embrace the experience of being human, unconditionally, radically, and totally, as being the deepest expression of what enlightenment is about. It answers all of our deepest existential questions in the most profound way. It doesn’t remove our problems, but it puts us in a position to be able to roll up our sleeves and really get down to making the world a better place, starting with ourselves. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what we’re here for!

When you get over yourself and see beyond your own ego, you begin to understand that you’re here for a reason. And when you know who you are and you know what you’re here for and you embrace those two answers wholeheartedly, unconditionally, and unselfconsciously, you’re a liberated person, you’re an enlightened person—and you’re also an evolutionary. To me, an enlightened evolutionary is someone who has found the answers to those questions, who knows who they are and why they are here and is beginning to engage in a committed way with other people who have also made that similar discovery, so that together we can begin to create a future that’s going to point the way for many, many others.