Notes from the Revolution

On Sunday, November 20, 2005, at the EnlightenNext World Center, Andrew Cohen made a public declaration that after nearly twenty years of teaching work, his efforts are finally beginning to show their intended results.

As mentioned in a number of recent posts, there’s been a veritable explosion of consciousness happening throughout Andrew’s international student body. Beginning with a series of conference calls that plunged everyone involved into a profound state of awakened awareness, the radically transformative, impersonal “raging forest fire” of Evolutionary Enlightenment proceeded to consume virtually every student meeting, public discussion group, and random passerby in its liberating inferno of ecstatic clarity. And it hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down.

How did this happen? And why now, after all these years? These were two of the main questions that Andrew addressed in the approximately six hours of teachings he gave to a formally invited audience of several hundred students, EnlightenNext members, and participants of recent retreats from North America and Europe. In order to set context for this new emergence of evolutionary enlightenment—and its apparent stability, as opposed to previous bursts of its potential, which came and went—Andrew laid out the history of his work as a teacher of enlightenment, from 1986 to the present day.

He started off with a surprising and powerful transmission of what enlightenment is, in the traditional sense—explaining how, in the early days, this was all that he used to teach. “The secret of enlightenment, and the secret of enlightened consciousness, is the absolute, unequivocal conviction that it exists,” he said, echoing the title of his 1991 book, Enlightenment Is a Secret. “And it’s a mystery. It’s an understanding that takes many people a long time to get.... What I’m speaking about is having an absolute conviction about that which is always unknown and that which we can never see, grasp, or truly understand with the mind. It’s ungraspable. It’s unknowable. It’s ever elusive. And yet it’s the only source of true, unequivocal, absolute confidence in life itself. And when I say confidence in life itself, I mean the reason for being.”

But after a couple of years, Andrew said, he realized that traditional, “personal” enlightenment wasn’t enough. Observing some of his students speaking together in a shared context of enlightened consciousness, he had a sudden flash of insight—namely, that inherent to the nature of enlightenment itself is the potential for a collective awakening that reaches far beyond the individual. Calling this new possibility “Impersonal Evolutionary Enlightenment,” Andrew has been working ever since to get his students to bring his vision of a shared, common ground of enlightenment—or nonduality—into manifest reality. And it’s a reality that is finally beginning to emerge.

What’s more, as Andrew said, by publicly declaring the truth of this new emergence to everyone in attendance, he knows it will only help to strengthen the collective conviction in the reality of what’s happening and to “catalyze, in a very significant if not dramatic way, the surge of this new consciousness.” As he explained it:

In his candid recounting of the past two decades, Andrew detailed the key events that led up to this—from the first time he realized that enlightenment’s true potential was in its innate capacity to bring about a collective evolutionary leap, to the repeated glimpses, or bursts, of this miraculous potential among his students over the years (such as the event of July 30, 2001, previously chronicled on this site). Throughout it all, he stressed the enormous significance of this new consciousness, as well as the intense struggle he’s had to engage in—particularly during the last ten years—in order to make it manifest.

So what’s changed recently to allow this to finally happen in such a full way?

While it’s undoubtedly the result of numerous factors—many of which Andrew discussed on Sunday and which we’ll be posting about, at length, very soon—one of the primary reasons is that there’s a deeper individual commitment and conscience present that is compelling us to take greater responsibility for the unconventional lives that we’ve already chosen to live. A new and thrilling momentum has taken hold within the shared field of consciousness. Standing “alone, together,” as Andrew put it, we are feeling compelled to live from this higher perspective, to take our places as authentic partners with Andrew, exploring together the edge of our human evolutionary potential...

As if a very full day of teachings wasn’t enough, we proceeded to throw a surprise party for Andrew’s 50th birthday that night, with acclaimed guitarist Oz Noy as the star performer. For more on this celebration and to watch a video clip of Oz Noy,
click here...