The radical immediacy that he spoke about over and over again had a profound impact on everyone present. It was as if a secret doorway of direct access to enlightened consciousness had been revealed to us. This wasn’t an “easy enlightenment” path. In fact, holding a liberated posture of freedom in the face of our personally and culturally conditioned tendencies takes everything we’ve got and a little more. Nevertheless, the challenge of liberation was nothing in the face of the awe-inspiring recognition that enlightenment, however challenging it might be, is always possible now!

EnlightenNext has developed The Evolutionary Enlightenment Essentials Course to support anyone who wants to live with the awakened radical immediacy that Andrew Cohen presented on retreat. In eleven monthly conference calls conducted by EnlightenNext director of education Jeff Carreira, you will be introduced to the subtle and profound teachings that Cohen gave during his “Being” retreat. Each month you will listen to a short audio clip recorded during the retreat that illuminates essential elements of the “posture of enlightenment.”

Many of the audio clips were taken from dialogs that Andrew Cohen had with retreat participants. With the guidance of Jeff Carreira you will be able to analyze and understand the subtle points that Cohen brings to light in his responses. You will also have the opportunity to engage with other sincere aspirants in small group discussions about each month’s topic. And, prior to each monthly conference call, you will receive preparatory materials including other related audio clips from the “Being” retreat to prepare you to make the most of your experience on each call.

This course will be offered one Wednesday each month and you will have the option to join Jeff Carreira live at two times during the day: the first at 3:00PM (Eastern Time US) and the second at 9:00PM (Eastern Time US). Each call will last for about 90 minutes and an MP3 recording of the call will be emailed to you afterwards.

The celebration was held at the EnlightenNext world headquarters in Lenox Massachusetts. The day began with a public dialog featuring EnlightenNext founder and spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and the renowned Indian spiritual master and activist His Holiness Swami Chidanand Saraswati. These two luminaries explored the relevance of enlightenment – both traditional and evolutionary – to the modern world and left an audience of over 300 people inspired and jubilant about what was shared. The celebration continued with a mini jazz festival opening with Andrew Cohen’s own band Unfulfilled Desires, and subsequent performances by international jazz sensations Leni Stern and Oz Noy.

After weeks of non-stop planning and preparation the celebration was an unmitigated success. And it all ended just in time to give many of us at EnlightenNext a few hours to pack our bags before catching flights the next day for Colorado and this year’s Being & Becoming retreat. Andrew Cohen’s annual Being & Becoming retreat is one of the anchor events in the EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle of courses and activities. This year was the second official Being &Becoming retreat, which meant it was both the close of the first year of the Discovery Cycle and the start of the next yearly cycle.

On August 1, one hundred and seventy people flew into the mile high city of Denver, Colorado and took a two hour bus ride climbing another 3000 feet to the remarkably beautiful retreat facility known as the Shambhala Mountain Center. Nestled in the Rocky Mountains, this 600 plus acre retreat center was first built by the great Tibetan spiritual master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his many Western followers.

The first half of this annual retreat is called “Being” and it is devoted to the discovery of the timeless depths of freedom that the great Enlightenment traditions have been shepherding humanity towards for millennia. The liberation that these traditions have always heralded as the ultimate attainment is also the essential foundation for Evolutionary Enlightenment. Over the ten days of the Being retreat, participants spent many hours in meditation, sometimes so inspired that they would sit straight through the night in the empty stillness they had discovered.

In addition to the time spent in meditation, participants also spent a few hours every day with Andrew Cohen asking questions about their experience and learning about his approach to Enlightenment. In these profound sessions, Andrew shared his breathtakingly simple and direct approach to awakening. Over and over again he reiterated that he was not a meditation teacher, instead he spoke almost exclusively about the position of enlightenment. Cohen spoke about Enlightenment as a chosen posture of liberation in the face of the complex and often chaotic experience of being alive. In meditation, he instructed, one simply adopts the position of being already free from anything and everything that occurs in the mind.

You can find an audio clip from the retreat here: http://www.entertonement.com/clips/xrhtfpksbx–In-Defense-of-Trying

Cohen gave what many might consider surprisingly few instructions for meditation during the ten days. Instead he relentlessly directed participants to examine with greater and greater seriousness, depth, and clarity the nature of their own intention to be free. Clarity of intention, he explained, is the foundation of the spiritual life and wanting to be free more than anything else will give you direct access to the liberating depths of meditation. As the days passed, more and more people discovered that truth. Persistently and sincerely examining their own intention through silent contemplation and meditation, a passion for liberation ignited within them which often catalyzed profound experiences of insight and awakening.

After ten days of profound and unbroken concentration, it was hard to imagine changing course. But over the course of a one day transition period we were joined by over one hundred more people tobegin the second ten-day retreat with three hundred participants. This segment of the retreat is called “Becoming” because it is devoted to exploring the creative energy of what Andrew Cohen calls the evolutionary impulse. Andrew Cohen has been developing Evolutionary Enlightenment for nearly a quarter century andawakening to this impulse within us is the unique goal of this teaching. .

At the start of the retreat Andrew told all of us that his intention was to work with us so that together we could create heaven on earth for at least the ten days of the retreat. He defined heaven as a place full of inspired people, animated by the thrill of seeing themselves and those around them consistently developing. Andrew asked and we all agreed to this collective goal of creating heaven on earth. With our mission clear, the retreat had begun.

During the Becoming retreat, participants engage in a very full schedule that still includes three to four hours of meditation each day, with the addition of two sessions daily with Andrew and one facilitated discussion group. Every morning Andrew gave a talk that would introduce and explore themes central to Evolutionary Enlightenment. Each afternoon 12 different groups would meet, guided by a pair of experienced discussion group leaders to continue the exploration of the morning’s topic. After the discussions everyone would gather together again and Andrew would hear reports on how the discussions had gone.

As each day passed the group leaders reported that development was evident. This meant that greater and greater degrees of transparency and authenticity were expressed by each member of the group, and the discussion was taking everyone to new depths of insight and understanding. As the retreat progressed participants reported experiences of tremendous intimacy generated by the shared developmental intention.

In the closing days of the Becoming retreat it became increasingly clear to Andrew Cohen and his close students that something miraculous was happening. People began to experience and give voice to a profound sense of – and preference for – a moral obligation to move the process of evolution forward in and through their own lives. And in this way, many were seeing directly for themselves how their participation was a manifestation of the big bang and that the inspired exhilaration they felt about development was the same energy that is driving the kosmic evolutionary process. Many people spoke with deep authenticity about recognizing that they were the consciousness of the universe awakening to itself as a singular evolving being. By the end of the it was hard to imagine not continuing this exploration together.

At the close of the Becoming retreat everyone was treated to a closing party featuring the jazz band Unfulfilled Desires with Andrew Cohen on drums. It was an ecstatic afternoon as hundreds of people gathered and talked about the discoveries of the retreat and the liberating view they now shared on themselves and the world.

The success of the retreat alone was surely enough to make this a month worth remembering and yet there was much more to come. Immediately following the retreat, Andrew Cohen headed to Boulder, CO with some of his close colleagues and others from the retreat. Unfulfilled Desires played for three hours to a packed house at a music club called The Rock & Soul Café. The energy generated from the retreat obviously inspired the musicians and fans of the band called it their best performance ever.

The next four days were spent meeting with friends in the area including two visits with Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh, a beautiful afternoon spent with Ken Wilber, and a few precious hours with Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi. As one day slipped into the next it became clear that the magic of the retreat had not stopped and was still fueling each meeting and event.

Relationships were strengthened and deepened and many of us began to realize that a higher synthesis between Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment was emerging. I had the opportunity to spend time with a number of prominent members of the Integral community and found myself at times almost bursting as synergistic energies and insights seemed to be coming at me from every direction. These two worlds, long tracking much the same territory, now seem to be converging toward a more unified, harmonious and, dare I say, integral manifestation. It was sometimes hard to contain the excitement of bearing witness to such a powerful merging of genius and vision.

And no single event captured the full extent of that union like the August 29 public dialog between Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber at the Boulder Integral Center. Andrew initiated the dialog by speaking about his and Ken’s shared passion for both exploring and defining what it means for Enlightenment to evolve. Ken then gave a short talk outlining the history of how the interpretation of non-duality has developed in Buddhism. The sold-out audience was not disappointed by this lively and engaging dialog. Both Andrew and Ken spoke with tremendous clarity and conviction, and together they became the embodiment of the same synthesis of vision that had been rumbling through conversations in the days preceding the event. Three hours passed in what seemed like the blink of an eye. We then spent another hour in informal discussion and it appeared to many of us that a new chapter in the growth of the Evolutionary/Integral movement had been initiated.

I am now back at the EnlightenNext world center in Massachusetts. I have the fascinating feeling that in spite of the fact that so much looks the same – everything is different. There is plenty of work ahead, but it will now happen with the benefit of new avenues in consciousness and culture that seem to have been paved. The month of August has been a month ruled by the unbridled potential of the future and fueled by the inspired convergence of like hearts and minds.