Here’s a published dialogue that I did with my friend Deepak Chopra in which we discuss the challenges of standing up for Spirit in a secular culture. Enjoy!

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ANDREW COHEN: What I wanted to speak with you about, Deepak, is what it really means to be a spiritual hero. This is kind of a bold and audacious idea. But especially now that there are so many people looking for ways to step forward to make the world a better place, I think that more and more of us are going to have to be willing to take responsibility for where we are all going. We’re going to have to be willing, in all our imperfection, to embrace leadership and to really be exemplars of what’s possible.

I see you as a very courageous expression of that heroic spirit. You’re someone who’s willing to stand for the truth and reality of Spirit in a disbelieving world. And the reason that’s important, as you well know, is because when we awaken to that truth and reality, we see much more deeply into the nature of who we really are, into the nature of reality itself, and we discover a fearless courage to live this life for the highest reasons. I think the degree to which each and every one of us is willing to do that is the degree to which we’re actually going to have a significant effect.

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Well, the way I see leadership, now and in the future, is that a leader is really the symbolic soul of group consciousness. And the soul is our core consciousness, for lack of a better word, where we find meaning, context, relationships, and the yearning to access the larger archetypal being that we really are. As leaders, we represent the collective’s deepest longings and aspirations, and the highest level of imagination and creativity, all of which exist in the collective consciousness but need a little stirring from a leader so that they can unfold.

A real spiritual leader unlocks not only his or her own potential but the potential of everyone on the planet. He or she harnesses the evolutionary impulse of the universe for greater good, truth, harmony, justice, and equality. Spiritual leadership is the call to rectify all of the problems that plague humanity right now, whether it’s radical poverty or social injustice or war or conflict or ecological devastation—and not at the level at which they were created but from this deeper level where we cannot help but bring light where there is darkness.

ANDREW: What would you say are the personal implications of this kind of leadership? Especially for the individual who is inspired by spiritual sentiments and intuitions, and by an evolutionary philosophy and worldview, but still experiences a fear or reticence or existential hesitation to step out and be seen? To say, “I am awake to the ultimate reality and to the deepest truth of who we all really are, and I’m willing to stand for that in all the imperfection of my evolving humanity”?

DEEPAK: Well, we have to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of world do we want our children—and their children—to live in? What is our role or contribution in bringing about this new world?

When you ask yourself these questions, you live these questions. And you realize that you’re not alone but part of a huge impulse in collective consciousness. When you realize this, it energizes you and gives you passion for what you want to create right in this moment.

ANDREW: No, we’re not alone. But it’s all too easy to sit back, observe what the problems are, and fall into a state of despair or cynicism. It takes spiritual courage to step forward and begin to take responsibility for the solution in our own ways. Our ability to make a significant difference depends on how wholeheartedly and with how much commitment we’re willing to do that.

DEEPAK: I think if we want to really succeed in this, we first have to have a regular discipline or practice that we’ve made our own. We have to get in touch with that deep consciousness inside us through meditative practice. We also have to start to pay attention to the fact that love is a very powerful force, and the more we create the energy of love in our environment, as we are delving deeper into our own consciousness, the more we can harness and combine the two forces of being and love. Then the third element is creativity, and the fourth is action.

Being, feeling, creativity, and doing are the four expressions of our consciousness. And we now have the ability to harness these collectively, an ability we’ve never had before. Our collective being, our collective love, our collective creativity, and our collective action can solve not only any problem that exists in the world, but they can take us to a new plane of consciousness where we can literally begin to manifest what people will call heaven on earth. It is up to us now. As has been said before, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, so let’s not wait any longer. Let’s act.

The naysayers are only part of the dying paradigm, which isn’t going to last much longer anyway, so we shouldn’t pay any attention to them. I say stay immune to criticism, be responsive to feedback, and then just make the move and actually hang out with the right people. There are three important Sanskrit words: simran, remember who you are; satsang, hang out with the right people; and seva, let’s start doing things without selfish motivation.

ANDREW: That’s absolutely inspiring. And this issue you just brought up, about hanging out with the right people, has been a very big theme in my teaching. Finding each other—finding those other individuals who also feel as passionately as we do about the kind of change we’re speaking about—liberates our own spirits and gives us the courage to take very bold steps that we otherwise might not take.

DEEPAK: That’s right. For years and years, we’ve said theoretically that consciousness is a field, but now through new technologies and new research, we’re finding out that this is literally true: If you have a happy friend, your happiness goes up fifteen times. If your happy friend has a happy friend whom you don’t know, it goes up another ten percent, and if the happy friend’s happy friend has a happy friend, it goes up another ten percent. This can only happen if consciousness is a field. And if we understand that consciousness is a field, and that we are the field, then there’s nothing that can stop us.

ANDREW: If consciousness is a field, then our individual actions and responses to life are obviously going to have an effect on the field.

DEEPAK: Absolutely. Every individual is interdependently coalescing with every other individual in that sea of consciousness.

ANDREW: And individuals who have the greatest confidence in the reality of Spirit, and in its immortal and indestructible nature, are in a position to have a greater impact on the spiritual evolution of the field itself.

DEEPAK: That’s right. And we can also imbue each other with greater confidence. Our interactions with each other will enhance that confidence and give it more and more power.

ANDREW: It’s really like coming out of the closet. And the more we come out, the more we realize, “Oh, I can come a lot further out,” until we get to the point where we realize there’s no way back.

DEEPAK: Yes. There is no way back. It’s irreversible. A child that is born cannot return to the womb.

ANDREW: That’s right. Of course, once we’ve come so far out of the closet that we’re actually living for Spirit itself, our identity as an individual in the world becomes one of Spirit. The more of us who are willing to do that, the more the field will be affected in quite a profound way, and we’ll be on our way to creating a cultural revolution.

DEEPAK: That’s precisely correct, Andrew. I couldn’t have said it better.

ANDREW: So I agree with everything that you’ve said, that it’s important to have a spiritual path and a spiritual practice, one in which we can find access to the infinite source of our own being as Spirit. And alongside that, it’s also important that we embrace a progressive and leading-edge perspective about the evolution of culture. Because, for example, there are individuals who are expert meditators but live in a traditional cultural context, so when they come out of their meditative trance, they advocate worldviews and perspectives that people like you and me would find inappropriate for a modern or postmodern context. The perspectives simply wouldn’t be relevant at this moment.

So meditation or spiritual practice is important in order to access Spirit, but we also need an evolutionary worldview and philosophical perspective that will enable us to embrace the world of progress as well as the process of cultural development. This is what will allow our spiritual enlightenment to carry real meaning and power in the world.

DEEPAK: I think that’s the purpose of conversations like this, because the world in the end is a projection of our collective conversation. We do need to realize that much of our old religion and old spirituality is really a cultural mythology that has become obsolete and isn’t consistent with what we know about evolution or cosmology or everything that we call reality.

A new secular spirituality is emerging that transcends those tribal and localized cultural expressions of spirituality, which have a great deal of truth in them but may not be relevant in their entirety as they are originally packaged. So we need to evolve with this secular spirituality, which is consistent with science, and actually elevate science itself to a new level of expression.

ANDREW: Right! And I imagine we’ll get to the point sooner rather than later when it will no longer be a secular spirituality but an evolutionary spirituality. It will be based on science and upon the discovery that we’re all part of a cosmic process that’s definitely going somewhere—and is urgently in need of, and ultimately thrilled to have, our higher participation in it.

DEEPAK: I like that phrase, “evolutionary spirituality,” much more than “secular spirituality,” which is the stage we must actually get over in order to become the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos. I like that because neither spirituality nor science are going to go away, and we need to bring them together to find this impulse.

This article was originally published on Andrew’s BigThink Blog, The Evolution of Enlightenment.

Download a free chapter from Andrew Cohen’s book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. Click here to download now.

Image: © olly – Fotolia.com

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‘The Fire of Freedom’ by Elizabeth Debold

In the hurtle of history from the ancient past to the present, the doings and thinking of men appear to be the narrative line and motive force lifting humanity out of the depths of unconsciousness. I mean men specifically—the male of our species. For most of us, history is synonymous with the deeds of men: Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, Christ, Charlemagne, Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Lincoln, Gandhi . . . up to and including the postmodern revolution defined by Einstein, Heisenberg, Picasso, Foucault, and Derrida. Sure, there are women—Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Betsy Ross, Queens Victoria and Elizabeth, Sojourner Truth—enough to be collected and commemorated in U.S. schools by Women’s History Month in March of each year. Needless to say, there is no men’s history month, and so this exception seems to prove the rule. Making a mark on history is man’s work; women keep the home fires burning . . . or so the saying goes.

Is it true? With a quick look back over my shoulder, I can certainly see generations of women’s lives centered on home and hearth—the manicured suburban lawns of the 1950s, the Victorian “angel in the house,” the farmhouse and feudal cottage, the tribal woman grinding grain with an infant in a sling. As paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey points out, the mother-child relationship “is the social unit out of which all higher orders of society are constructed.” Without children, a culture cannot survive, and through the millennia, the mother-child dyad has been a fixed and protected center point around which culture has developed. Women have thus played a fundamental and conservative role in virtually every society. I mean “conservative” in the strictest sense, because women conserve and protect the cultural status quo by raising children who will embody societal norms and values.

But looking back, I also see something else: women revolting in the 1960s, women marching for civil rights and the abolition of slavery, women crossing the frontier, women defying church authority, women praying at the foot of Christ’s cross when his male disciples had abandoned him. It’s often hard to make out the faces or name the individuals. But if we look at the times and places in history where women have been on the move, we begin to see something different about the role of women in history than what might first appear when we tick off the names of great individuals or search for the great women who supposedly lurk behind every great man.

“The history of the world,” writes philosopher Georg Hegel, “is none other than the progress in the consciousness of freedom.” Hegel saw something larger than the actions of individuals at work in history; he saw that there is a direction and intention toward the gradual awakening of humanity to unity with Spirit. Such a perspective leads us to ask different questions of history. It compels us to discover how new ideas of freedom emerge in human consciousness—and how, then, these ideas become social structures that support greater liberty. And it opens the question of how the experience of the liberation of consciousness—which is spiritual freedom—relates to cultural change.

Looking at history with this in mind, I begin to see a fascinating relationship between women’s spiritual uprisings and shifts in culture. From time to time in the course of Western history, by the necessity of larger survival needs or an unknown imperative from Spirit itself, women have taken off their aprons, handed over the sleeping child, stepped outside the snug harbor of the home, and abandoned themselves to a spiritual vision and consciousness that threw the accepted roles and strictures for women into the air. Virtually every time this happens, a leap in culture, a move toward greater social freedom, erupts, often with revolutionary force. But then it seems, over and over again, women return to the protected circle of home and hearth.

As mothers of both the status quo and of revolution, women have played a paradoxical role in the evolution of culture. This comes as no surprise to those Jungians among us who divide the currents of consciousness into “masculine” and “feminine” principles and argue that the role of the feminine is this paradox: both static perpetuation of the species and movement toward the new. Poet and cultural philosopher William Irwin Thompson, for example, uses a Jungian lens to interpret prehistory and argues that it was through hominid females changing from estrus to menarche—that is, from being “in heat” several times a year to constant sexual receptivity—that “a social and cultural revolution” was created on the savannahs where Homo sapiens evolved. Thompson, supported by others such as Riane Eisler, also argues that the Neolithic revolution—where early humans began to grow plants—must have been largely due to discoveries made by women.

My interest, however, is in the times in our past when women made conscious choices toward the new. In pointing out the relationship between women’s uprisings of consciousness and cultural shifts, I can’t claim that the former caused the latter, as intriguing as this might be. There are myriad causes—technological, economic, environmental—for any epochal change in history. And the complexity of history itself makes it possible for Jungians to find all the evidence they want to give the feminine a special role in cultural change. There may or may not be more to this than wishful thinking. But at the same time, there is a certain logic to it: When the keepers of culture step outside their prescribed roles, something has got to give.

Right now, we are at an interesting point in our culture. So many women (and men) who are at the leading edge are calling for a resurgence of the feminine and a new and larger role for women in changing the world. Yet the place we tend to look for what women will bring to the table is to women’s traditional caretaking roles. A recent article on Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency even argued that “mamisma”—the emphasis on women’s nurturing qualities and the opposite of the machismo often seen in politics—might carry a woman into the White House. Are women’s traditional qualities what will bring about cultural change? To answer this question, I am going to sweep through the last three thousand years to locate breakthrough moments in women’s history: When did they occur? What qualities did women show? How might these breakthroughs relate to the epochal shifts in Western culture? And finally, is there anything we can learn from our history that might give us clues to what women need to do now to move Western culture forward?

Martyrs, Mystics, & Revolutionaries

The beginnings of human culture are lost to us. Over twenty-five thousand years ago, human beings first began to create paintings on cave walls for reasons we don’t understand. Perhaps ten thousand years ago, women somehow figured out how to grow plants, giving birth to horticulture and enabling the first large human settlements. Eventually horticulture led to agriculture, which in turn led to trade, writing, and the first large-scale societies and empires. In the process, men’s and women’s roles increasingly differentiated. To keep society growing, women needed to bear and raise children, an often life-threatening task that kept them close to home. By the time the first five books of the Old Testament (between 1150 and 250 BCE) and the Greek epics (around 700 BCE) were written, warrior cultures were well established, in which women needed the protection of men in order to survive and raise children. In these cultures, women stayed home.

Out of these warrior cultures Christianity emerged, and women emerged with it as conscious actors in history, willing to step outside the enclave of male protection. Then and now, Christ’s message was unthinkably radical: Every human being is equal in God and every human being can find freedom through a direct relationship with God. As Paul says, “In Christ . . . there is neither male nor female.” The response of women from all walks of life—women who had almost no public role in the ancient world—was remarkable. “Some ten to twenty years after Jesus’ death, certain women held positions of leadership in local Christian groups; women acted as prophets, teachers, and evangelists,” explains Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels. And the force with which Christianity emerged may even be due to the numbers of women who were enlivened and emboldened by Christ’s message. “In the fourth century,” write historians Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser in A History of Their Own, “Bishop Palladius estimated that twice as many women as men had chosen to live as solitary ascetics.”

It is difficult to imagine how revolutionary these women were. Pagels, in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, tells a number of compelling stories of women who defied their parents’ authority by refusing to marry, embraced the danger and uncertainty of poverty by giving away any money they had, challenged hierarchy by living with slaves and in partnership with men, and broke with convention by taking vows of celibacy at a time when both Jews and pagans saw women’s primary duty as bearing children (preferably sons).

Thecla, a woman who eventually preached alongside Paul, roused her mother to fury for refusing to marry the man who was selected for her. Her mother had Thecla tried in court and wanted her killed so that her example would make other young women think twice before disobeying custom. She was nearly burned alive and raped before she finally dressed as a man to escape and follow this higher calling. Hearts aflame with passion for God, the first Christian women were formidable opponents to the Roman order—stories of their singing praises to God as they were burned at the stake or sacrificed in some gruesome Roman spectacle spread throughout the empire. They were fearlessly independent of worldly authority.

Could the soaring transcendent consciousness and new moral conscience of these women have led to Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire? I can’t say, but it certainly had an effect on Constantine, the emperor who made the fateful decision to transform the pagan empire into a Christian power. He himself is said to have converted out of respect for his Christian mother, Helena, who was well known for her bold acts to further her faith.

In the tumultuous centuries as Rome was falling and a new Christian culture was on the rise, women were at the forefront of change even as the developing precepts of Christianity disparaged them. Many refused to fall into line with church authority and were attracted to gnostic cults that allowed them the spiritual and social freedom to preach, prophesy, and find God within their own hearts. Tertullian, an early church leader, speaks about the outrageousness of these women when he says: “These heretical women—how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptize!”

From the first century of the Christian era, women began to gather together, seeking the protection of a collective in order to be free to explore their commitment to a higher truth. By 800, convents and monasteries (often for both men and women) dotted the landscape of Europe. These structures gave women a spiritual home and created a blueprint for a new form of culture that would unite Europe in a common worldview. Gradually, however, the freedom that women found in early religious life was quashed by a male-led church that denied women any authority. “These eras of ferment, experimentation, and change passed rapidly,” note Anderson and Zinsser. “Each was succeeded by a far longer period of consolidation and conservatism.” Women stayed home to be helpmates, wives, and mothers.

Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fire for freedom in women’s hearts flared again. For no earthly reason that I can find—perhaps it was just the maturation of Christianity—there was an outburst of spiritual passion that led to a resurgence of mysticism. Far more women than men elected to abandon the world and give themselves fully to God in this way. Sometimes sent by their families to the convent as an offering, sometimes running away from a stultifying home life, these women mystics developed an unusual autonomy, free from the bonds of husband and children, free to become vehicles for the love of God. Many of these women engaged in ascetic practices that demanded both intense discipline and boundless trust. In their writings, a power comes through them, a conviction and clarity that still vibrate on the page. At the same time, a new type of love was finding expression—courtly love—through the songs and poetry of male troubadours and, as Riane Eisler points out, female trobaritzes. Courtly love was an idealized love of a knight for a noblewoman that ?was never consummated. Woman, for perhaps the first time, was celebrated in culture for her capacity to catapult her admirer into transcendent rapture.

But for many reasons, this didn’t continue. The Black Death decimated the convents, which never were repopulated. Women were back at home. Between one-third and two-thirds of the population of Europe died; worldwide, the estimate is seventy-five million dead. And for some reason at this most desperate hour in history, the cult of the Virgin Mary blossomed throughout Europe, to the surprise of the church hierarchy. In Civilization and the Transformation of Power, James Garrison observes that “the confluence of the Black Death and the adoration of Mary was followed by a whole new ordering of reality in Europe, which resulted in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and eventually, the Enlightenment.” This may be all of a piece, one movement in consciousness—women mystics, an ideal of courtly love, and the cult of the Virgin. Could these expressions of love and freedom, by women or directed to women, have helped open the way for humanity to think new thoughts and see the world differently?

As the winds of change began to whip and the new ordering of reality emerged through the Reformation and Enlightenment, women again stepped forward. Despite the fact that from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth, thousands of women were accused of witchcraft and publicly executed, women couldn’t be held back. Anderson and Zinsser tell us that in the sixteenth-century Reformation, “women again became rebels and zealots, seizing opportunities with a fervor as intense as that which had motivated the believers and proselytizers of the early church. They protested, they fought and died as martyrs. . . . They studied, they preached, they converted others. For some, God spoke through their visions and thus gave them the authority to criticize and to prophesy.” And would the Enlightenment have arisen in France—a France that had only two hundred years before been propelled toward freedom from English rule by a young mystic named Joan of Arc who herself was burned at the stake—without the salons, initiated by women, that allowed freethinkers to debate, discuss, and plot?

The women’s salon movement defied the status quo of the courts and fanned the flames of liberty. The first salon was created by Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet, in the early seventeenth century. She defied convention and propriety to build a house in which there were rooms for people to sit and talk, creating an atmosphere in which women and men could meet and speak as equals. At Madame de Rambouillet’s suggestion, those women and men in her circle made a pledge not to have sex with each other, another controversial decision that “freed [them] for a role beyond that of wife or courtesan.”

Starting in France, over the course of almost two centuries, the salon moved across the continent and crossed the channel to England. Everywhere it went, it spread the Enlightenment ideals of rationality, freedom, and enjoyment of this world. For some salonières, the intimate setting was just another venue to attract male attention, but for others it was, as German salonière Henrietta Herz said, a complete break with tradition and the expression of “an exuberant freedom of spirit.”

Over time, the salons were repudiated; it was considered too dangerous for women to have the ears of men in power. And so again women returned home to roles that were changing to reflect a growing belief that women were men’s opposites, incapable of rational thought, too delicate for the passions of the body, and ideally suited to the domestic sphere.

By the early nineteenth century, smack in the middle of the flowering cult of domesticity, women were on the rise again—in the United States. This time the powerful confluence of the democratic ideals rooted in Christ’s message of equality and the grim reality of slavery created a context in which a few women, ignited by a spiritual vision that gave them the courage to break taboos against women in public life, put their lives on the line to speak out, first against slavery and then against their own second-class status. Their authority, though ridiculed and questioned, was unassailable. They pored over the Bible, became reacquainted with a Christ freed from the biases of churches, negotiated, and organized. These women—among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Ida Wells—were tireless and fearless, and their words prophetic.

Over the span of seventy years, the leaders of the suffrage movement worked to get an all-male Congress to give women the basic right to vote. They needed a mass movement. So, to elicit women’s support for what was considered an unladylike activity, the twentieth-century suffrage leaders no longer spoke of equal rights with men—the message of equality was too radical for most—so they coaxed women to join by arguing that women had a higher moral sense than men and that this was needed to keep the country on the right path. It worked: Millions of women petitioned and marched. But after 1920, once the vote was won, women rushed back home again.

Then finally, after the Great Depression and Second World War, the baby boom generation of unprecedented prosperity took to the streets to finish the work of the previous century. After fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, young educated women in America began to agitate for their rights, creating a tidal wave of consciousness change that wreaked havoc with tradition and then swept across the Atlantic to Europe. These women had no God or religious faith to anchor and exalt them. Through a collective practice of “consciousness raising,” they questioned every aspect of a woman’s life, upending it all—sexuality, work, marriage, children, and religion. Under this scrutiny, the authority of the established order that divided the world by gender began to crumble.

And these women didn’t return home. They, and the generations after them, might have wanted to, but they couldn’t—not like before. Home life had finally lost its mooring to a larger social structure sanctioned by God or custom. Now women have choices that would have boggled the minds of our foresisters. Marriage, children, and all that has been the core of women’s lives have become optional, not just for a few courageous souls but for all of us postmodern women. The house has fallen down.

Where Do We Go Now?

Following the trail of these culture shifts—traveling from the savannah to the Roman provinces, moving through Europe, stopping in France and crossing to America—at each cataclysmic confrontation between the old and the new, we find women. Inspired women defied the authority of the Roman Empire, the early church, the medieval church, the custom of the courts, the ideals of perfect womanhood, and the demand to marry and bear children. Before there was Christianity, women claimed the freedom to proclaim Christ’s word; before the birth of the Renaissance perspective, women saw life from a God’s-eye view. At each of the brief moments when women rose to reach beyond the known, there has been a sudden illumination like the flash of a camera, revealing the potential for women and men to be social and spiritual equals. And after each glimpse, women abandoned their hard-won freedom and autonomy, got caught in the undertow of tradition, and sided with the powerful forces that custom can rally to its defense. Until now.

Until now because in the last forty years we have made a radical break with tradition. We are free, as no women have ever before been free, to invent our lives, to do as we please, to work or not, to marry or not (or marry multiple times), to have children, adopt, or not. Our foresisters could barely imagine what we have: the freedom to control our reproduction, the sanction to learn and think independently, the ability to earn our own living, the potential to have an impact on the world.

The entire trajectory of human history until now has been based on the need to protect the mother-child dyad, even though so many women and children have often struggled for the barest survival. Women’s relationship to children, and to the men who have protected us, has always been the ground of our existence. For women within patriarchy, this has meant both intense competition with other women and the constant insecurity of depending on another—someone physically and socially more powerful—in order to survive. Hence, over millennia, women created vast arts of subtle manipulation, obfuscation, and attraction until we ourselves became hooked on the need for affirmation. Yet even though this dyad is no longer the pivot around which our lives turn, women continue to practice the survival arts designed to attract and keep men’s attention—despite the fact that we no longer need to be dependent. We are the social equals of men.

Now, for a growing number of us, there is no God, no church, no custom, no home, no “other” to anchor the center of ourselves. Millennia of carefully catalogued reasons for our subordination, both biologically and culturally imposed and self-enforced, have fallen away, and with them, surprisingly, our sense of security in relationship, our knowing who we are and what we are here for. Our freedom has cost us our core, rending the web of relatedness that has defined us—daughter of, sister of, wife of, mother of . . . This relatedness is a force—a program etched into the female brain to enforce the mandate to give birth, to do evolution’s bidding to create a species that would eventually stand and look God in the eye.

Struggling, some of us are reaching back to recreate the old and familiar roles. Most of us remain desperate for the affirmation of relationship—and are willing to do almost anything to find or keep one, while some are trying to bring nurturing and connection into the workplace, transforming the world into the home that we have left behind. The habits of deference, of caretaking, and of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, particularly men, still shape us from within.

These habits are operating structures in Woman’s consciousness, often blinding us to the reality that we privileged postmodern women have achieved social equality with men. Who would we be if we were free of these structures—yes, even free of the compulsion to appear caring? One of the lessons that I take from history is that the deep changes that have moved consciousness and culture forward have not come from women who are primarily identified with our biologically based role as caretakers. Change has emerged from women who dared to defy tradition to wholeheartedly heed Spirit’s call to be free.

After more than two thousand years of struggle toward equality, what freedom does the deepest spirit in woman yearn for now? Dare we risk liberating ourselves from these habits that are so ingrained in our cells and psyches? It’s monumental—a different kind of liberation of consciousness that challenges each of us to confront and transcend the psychic habits of the past in and as ourselves. In this, women may indeed hold the keys to cultural change. Standing together as women, holding the spirit of our courageous foresisters in our hearts, we can shift the core dynamics of dependence on men and separation from women that have held our culture in place. Then we can join with men in a new way to take equal responsibility for the planetary crises we face and, together, give birth to a radically different future.

Andrew is currently on a ten day visit to India which has included talks in Mumbai, Bangalore, Rishikesh and a weekend retreat in Delhi. Click on the images below to view the full galleries on Andrew’s Facebook page:

India: Day 1 – Mumbai

India: Day 2 – Bangalore

India: Day 3 – Bangalore

India: Day 4 – Bangalore

India: Days 5 & 6 – Rishikesh

India: Day 7 – Rishikesh

India: Day 8 – Rishikesh

India: Day 9 – Delhi

I’m an amateur jazz drummer.

Last night, as I was surfing my favorite drumming site, drummerworld.com, I came upon the most astounding video. Four very young Japanese women all dressed in punk-chic attire playing the most powerfully virtuosic and soulful jazz I’d heard in a long time:

Seeing this video really got me thinking about how much the world is really changing. Let me see . . .

The most popular rapper in the world right now is South Korean superstar PSY, whose hit “Gangnam Style” has had more YouTube views than any other video in history.

Soulmate, a north Indian blues band, gained widespread recognition after becoming the ancient land’s sole representative at the 23rd International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee.

A friend of mine, Paul Grant—a former rock drummer from California—has become a highly respected master of Indian classical music and tours the world playing the santoor. This formerly blond-haired and still blue-eyed American also plays the Kashmiri sehtar, Afghan tambur, the bass sitar, and other instruments. Another friend of mine, the renowned Danish bassoonist Peter Bastian, has also become a recognized master of traditional Gypsy folk music in both Bulgaria and Turkey.

Before his retirement in 2012, one of the most loved professional basketball stars in the world was China’s Yao Ming. Because of his enormous popularity, particularly in Asia, he is considered to be responsible for expanding the NBA’s reach to embrace the entire globe. In the 2012 London Olympics, the Gold Medal match in Women’s Soccer was the most watched event in the history of the NBC Sports Network as 4.35 million viewers tuned in to see the USA beat Japan 2-1.

This past January, an African American was inaugurated for a second term as the President of the United States, not even 150 years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated for passing the 13^th Amendment. The next President of Afghanistan just might turn out to be a woman. The heroic Fawzia Koofi bravely faces death threats every day as she defies the Taliban and its attempts to keep Afghanistan in the middle ages.

There is serious speculation around the world that the next Pope could be an African. Both Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana and Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo of the Democratic Republic of Congo are rumored to be under consideration for the challenging task of leading the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

Tibetan Buddhism has produced female Western masters of great renown. London-native Tenzin Palmo was one of the first westerners to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist nun and after spending twelve years in a Himalayan retreat, started the first nunnery for westerners in Italy. Pema Chodron, a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, may be one of the most respected teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the west.

The fact that the world is in such an extraordinary state of flux and change is definitely being felt very strongly in my own life. My day job is being a spiritual teacher. I’m American, but I travel constantly and teach all over the world. In fact, I’m just about to embark on my third teaching trip to India in the last twelve months.

This one will be a short trip—only twelve days—to Bangalore, New Delhi, and Rishikesh (that Holy pilgrimage town on the banks of the Ganges river made famous when the Beatles went there on retreat with their Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968 and introduced Eastern mysticism to the world.)

Like many Baby Boomers, I went to India in my twenties looking for Enlightenment and now, over a quarter of a century later, I’m returning to the Motherland—a westerner—to share with modern India the ancient gift that she gave to me.

Yes, the world really is changing.

This article was originally published on Andrew’s BigThink blog, The Evolution of Enlightenment.
Download a free chapter from Andrew Cohen’s book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. Click here to download now.

Image copyright: Anton Balazh – Fotolia.com

In this interview, which was part of EnlightenNext’s ‘Awakening to Your Highest Self’ event, Andrew speaks with Roshi Bernie Glassman, world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen Movement and founder of Zen Peacemakers, about his relationship with his own teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi.

Contrary to most traditional teacher/student relationships, rather than being taught to adhere to any rigid understanding of Zen, Glassman was encouraged by Maezumi Roshi to study it deeply, to “swallow everything up,” and then to “spit out” anything that didn’t make sense for the American culture in which he was to share it. Listen to Glassman tell this story and more in the audio below:

To download the full audio recording, ‘right-click’ here and select “Save Link As…”
 

An imaginary round table discussion with Anthony Robbins and Gautama the Buddha on being the best we can be.

I was musing upon an interesting idea: What would it be like if the historical master of enlightenment, Gautama the Buddha and the legendary personal development coach Tony Robbins had a conversation about higher human development? What might their differing answers be to the following questions: how can we be the best we can be, how can we cultivate pure motivation, and what does it mean to live on our edge? This is what I came up with.  

Moderator: Thank you both for agreeing to participate in this dialogue. You both are renowned for representing the very leading edge not only of your own fields but of human development itself. You are also both very gifted teachers with large followings all over the world. Your capacities to guide others through the arduous and challenging path of self-mastery and spiritual enlightenment are second to none. That’s why we thought it would be such a gift to have you both together at the same table sharing your thoughts and ideas about human transformation in the 21^st Century.

Anthony Robbins: Thank you very much. It’s nice to be with all of you.

Gautama the Buddha: I am deeply honored. May all sentient beings experience peace and freedom from suffering!

Moderator: So let me start with you Tony. I have three questions. The first one is about how we can better ourselves. Everybody wants to know how they can be the best they can be. What advice can you give us?

Robbins: The best advice I can give is exactly what I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for the last thirty years. First and foremost, take massive action! What that means is this: figure out the different ways you want to change your life, and then get down to business. That requires you to set clear and coherent goals, and most importantly, to create strategies for meeting those goals. Start NOW, today, this minute. Don’t wait a second longer. Don’t let old habit patterns continue to get in your way and bog you down. Come up with a clear plan for how you want to change your life—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Think about your career, your relationships, your hobbies—what would you like to be different? The most important thing is taking massive action to change your life into the life of your dreams . . . today.

Moderator: Thank you Tony. That’s very inspiring! So Gautama, how would you answer the question of how we can be the best we can be in this rapidly changing and fast-paced world we’re living in?

Buddha: Dear ones, that is a very important question! Ever since I attained my Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree all those years ago, I have been preaching to the multitudes a powerful teaching of self-liberation that can awaken us at the deepest level of our being. In my philosophy, the “best” we can be is to become fully liberated, fully enlightened—to become nothing less than a living Buddha. And in order to succeed in becoming liberated in this way, we must put the Dharma (spiritual teachings) into practice with all of our hearts. That means making the noble effort to develop a strong moral foundation in the very core of who we are.  Upon that strong foundation we must strive to overcome lifetimes of ignorance by learning how to transcend our conditioned minds through the deep practice of meditation.

Deep meditation will give rise to Samadhi—a powerful glimpse of the ultimate truth of our own nature. That truth is emptiness or voidness or nothingness. That is the direct experience of freedom itself. This kind of breakthrough will liberate us from what I have discovered to be the number one obstacle to happiness: desire. Desire for the things of this world. If we cling only to this freedom from wanting, we will be greater than the greatest. 

Moderator: Wow! Thank you for that, Master Gautama. My head is spinning and I feel dizzy listening to your words of timeless and perennial wisdom.

Tony, my second question is about goodness. How can we become better people? Caring people? Less selfish and more giving to others?

Robbins: Thank you. Now that’s a great question! You know what? I feel passionately that good people tend to be happy people. And in order to be happy, I believe it’s essential that we are progressing in the most important areas of our lives. Whether it is our intimate relationships, our work, our finances, our physical health and wellbeing, and also our spirituality. To be happy we need to know without any doubt that we are developing, we’re moving, we’re growing. Once again, that’s what gives us the deepest and most satisfying connection with life—much more than getting what we think we want, whether it’s a new relationship, a new car, or a promotion.

Also, people who know that they’re developing in the most important ways almost always experience a deep sense of gratitude. They know what it takes to grow and don’t take it for granted. And finally, gratitude inspires us to help others, to serve others, in the same way that others have helped us. So I believe that “good” people are happy people and happy people are grateful people. 

Moderator: Thank you so much for that Tony. You have helped me to see how I need to get more serious about and focused on my own development. Instead of merely experiencing life, I need to get into the driver’s seat and put my foot on the gas!

Master Gautama, how would you respond to the question of how we can become better, more caring, loving, “good” people?

Buddha: Friends, what you call “goodness” is already your true nature! Loving-kindness, compassion, and generosity flow naturally and spontaneously from the heart and mind of one that has been liberated from ignorance, egotism, and selfishness. What is ignorance? Ignorance is the belief that you are separate! In order to become a “good” person, a kind person, a loving person, you need to see through the illusion of a separate existence. And in order to do that, you need to meditate deeply on two fundamental truths about reality. The first is the profound recognition of the ultimately empty nature of all phenomena in existence. 

The second is the interconnected nature of all things seen and unseen, known and unknown.  When you meditate with such intensity that your mind becomes translucent, you will see directly for yourself what I’m pointing to: the ultimate nature of reality is an empty luminosity—an ungraspable mystery that silences the mind and opens the heart. “Goodness” flows from the one who has realized this truth.

Moderator: Master Gautama, thank you so much for that—I feel like my mind is going quiet. But before it shuts down altogether, I need to ask my final question to both of you.

Tony, now that you’ve clarified what it means to better ourselves and also how we can become a good person, I have one more query. What does it mean for each and every one of us to be on our edge—to live on the very edge of our potential?

Robbins: Well, I think in many ways I’ve already answered this question. First of all, to be on our edge means that we are evolving in the most important areas of our lives.  And second, to live on our edge, to me, has to mean that we’ve stopped living selfishly.  To put it simply, if we’re really on our edge, we’re helping to change the world.

Moderator: Thanks Tony. Gautama?

Buddha: I agree wholeheartedly with the great one Robbins! I would say that to be on our edge and to live on our edge means that we are either aspiring Buddhas and Bodhisattvas or fully realized Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Remember, such individuals incarnate for the sake of others. They are no longer in this world merely for their own benefit. Such illumined ones are here solely to bring the light of higher awareness into this world so that more and more of us can awaken . . .

Moderator: Thank you Tony! Thank you Gautama so very much! You’ve given myself and all of us so much to think about and so much to live for.

Download a free chapter from Andrew Cohen’s book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. Click here to download now.

Image: © rivansyam – Fotolia.com 

For thousands of years, human beings have discovered true freedom and liberation by awakening to timeless, formless Being or what the Buddha called the “unborn” or “uncreated.”

Yet the world is evolving and so is our understanding of enlightenment.

In the following audio clips—taken from last year’s Being & Becoming retreat in Tuscany— Andrew speaks about the importance of both the enlightenment of the Buddha and also a new evolutionary enlightenment which inspires us not to transcend the world but to embrace it wholeheartedly and creatively. Listen below:
 
Clip 1 – Discovering a Completely Different Motivation to be You
Theme: In this audio Andrew speaks about the shift that occurs when we start to become an expression of the freedom that comes from knowing who we really are. (6 min)

To download the full audio recording, ‘right-click’ here and select “Save Link As…”
 
Clip 2 – Enlightenment in Action
Theme: In this clip Andrew introduces his teaching on ‘Becoming.’ He describes how the question that has always compelled him is, “How does the experience of transcending the fears and desires of the ego translate into human behavior?” (10 min)

To download the full audio recording, ‘right-click’ here and select “Save Link As…”
 
Clip 3 – The Universe Awakening to Itself
Theme: During this audio clip Andrew Cohen describes how each one of us is that one without a second that decided to come into form and initiated the process of evolution that has produced us in our current form as awakening human beings. (7 min)

To download the full audio recording, ‘right-click’ here and select “Save Link As…”
 
Image: patrickbryson.org

I recently listened to an amazing interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor and director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine about his new book, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. This is one of the most fascinating and compelling interviews on the subject of life-after-death and transmigration that I’ve ever heard. To those of us who already have no doubt consciousness, subjectivity, and the soul transcend the mind-brain-body, this will be an enormous source of inspiration. Those who are still attached to the idea that consciousness is produced somehow by the biological brain will find this to be a challenging listen.

In the interview, Dr. Parnia explains that one hundred years ago it would have been hard for us to imagine that someone would be able to go to the moon and come back and tell everyone what it was like. According to him, modern medical science is now making it possible for us to explore the mystery territory beyond death—that domain that we’re all headed for when our hearts stop and brainwaves cease to function. Fascinating and compelling indeed!

You can listen to the full interview below:

To download the full audio recording, ‘right-click’ here and select “Save Link As…”

“A Window On To Andrew Cohen”….The Adrian Silas Interview With Andrew Cohen 2013. from Adrian Silas on Vimeo.