About: Andrew Cohen
Posts by Andrew Cohen:
Soul Connection: The Deepest Kind of Relationship.by Andrew Cohen on May 15, 2013 Soul connections are eternal. Every other relationship we have, no matter how sweet, kind, intimate, or apparently meaningful, will in the end be revealed to be only temporary. 3,536 views |
The Impossible Paradox of Life & Death.by Andrew Cohen on May 8, 2013 A few days ago, my wife and I found out that my little friend and life companion has terminal cancer. 557 views |
The Only Place in the Universe.by Andrew Cohen on Apr 23, 2013 The Buddha called the deepest dimension of the Self, and the deepest dimension of Reality, the “Unborn” or the “Uncreated.” In his profound teaching of meditation, the direct experience of this depth dimension was the source of spiritual liberation. 226 views |
A Theologian of Renewal.by Andrew Cohen on Apr 10, 2013 Haught, who’s life and work have been influenced significantly by the great Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has found his own path through Christian theology and come to some very interesting conclusions about the relationship between science, evolution, spirituality, and theology. 47 views |
India’s True Prosperity.by Andrew Cohen on Apr 2, 2013 Home Blogs The Evolution of Enlightenment India is still a magical place. What we hear most often about the Motherland these days is her extraordinary leap into the modern world, her burgeoning prosperity, and her enormous contribution to the global economy. And while this is all true, I feel her greatest gift to the world still remains what she is most famous for: the gift of spirituality. I just returned home after twelve days in that ancient and still mysterious land. In spite of the fact that in Western culture, India’s ochre-colored holy men are often seen as clichés and holdovers from a bygone era, I believe that in fact India’s spiritual heart is still alive and bursting at the seams with mystical potency. Advertising Like so many Baby Boomers, I went to India for the first time almost thirty years ago as a seeker, and came back a finder. I also met my wife there. So my connections to the Motherland run deep. But in spite of those connections, I was beginning to wonder to myself if her spiritual currency was as rich as it once was. Yoga, once a lofty spiritual practice only for initiates, has become a mainstream commercial enterprise all over the western world. Newspapers and both men’s and women’s magazines have countless articles about the health benefits of yoga postures and breathing techniques. And meditation is becoming more and more popular as a potent remedy to the existential challenges of modern life. In popular media, it’s not uncommon to see attractive women in bikinis sitting in the lotus posture appearing to be experiencing a higher state of consciousness. And the funny thing is, in modern India herself, these very same glitzy, and often cheesy, new age images of the spiritual life are also abundant. It certainly wasn’t this way thirty years ago. When what was once considered to be the realm of the sacred appears to be catering to the more superficial emotional and psychological needs of modern and postmodern culture, it’s easy to wonder if spirit’s true face has gone into hiding. 88 views |
Living on the Edge of Everything.by Andrew Cohen on Mar 19, 2013 Those who seem to be most alive, most in touch with life and their own creative powers, are individuals who are demonstrating what it means to live on the edge of their own potential. They may be musicians like the Stones, or they may be artists, writers, politicians, engineers, scientists, philosophers, or mystics. 39 views |
Why the World Needs More Spiritual Heroes.by Andrew Cohen on Mar 12, 2013 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! 55 views |
The Bright Side of Globalization.by Andrew Cohen on Mar 4, 2013 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 [...] 35 views |
Tony Robbins & the Buddha Compare Notes.by Andrew Cohen on Feb 25, 2013 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? 201 views |
Zen & the Art of Conviction.by Andrew Cohen on Feb 14, 2013 There’s always something electric in the atmosphere when someone dares to assert spiritual convictions in a decidedly secular context. 71 views |
 Why It’s Important to Lose Your Mind (at Least Twice a Year).by Andrew Cohen on Jan 29, 2013 “How many of us think it’s important to regularly create the space in our lives to temporarily let go of everything we are usually consumed by? And I do mean everything.” 542 views |
What Would Our Lives be like if Every Day Was like New Year’s Day?by Andrew Cohen on Jan 12, 2013 In those moments you are free from crippling self-doubt and the long shadow of cynicism, because you are experiencing the overwhelming positivity that is the very nature of existence itself. 35 views |
A Friend You’ll Never See.by Andrew Cohen on Dec 30, 2012 I recently read an excerpt from the controversial number one bestseller Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife by Dr. Eben Alexander in Newsweek magazine. In it he describes, with a powerful self-confidence, a dramatic near-death experience that occurred after suffering from an extreme form of meningitis. 366 views |
 What to Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive.by Andrew Cohen on Dec 23, 2012 The following was originally written on December 15, 2012. Last weekend I published a post titled, The World is Getting Worse (And Other Lies) on BigThink.com, in which I shared some inspiring data and anecdotes that have helped me to embrace what I consider to be “The Good News of Progress.” What does that mean? In [...] 45 views |
 The Meaning Of Your Life.by Andrew Cohen on Dec 15, 2012 It means never again having to wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the heck we are doing with our lives. 203 views |
Evolution from the Inside Out. {Video}by Andrew Cohen on Nov 6, 2012 When most people think of evolution, they think of the growth and development of the exterior dimensions of reality—the biological evolution of natural species, the development of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the present, or the rapidly accelerating advancement of technology. But… 57 views |
In Defense of the Soul.by Andrew Cohen on Oct 29, 2012 Awakening to the infinite sooner or later brings us face-to-face with our own soul. And the soul has many dimensions… 112 views |
Peace Is Not the Answer.by Andrew Cohen on Oct 11, 2012 It continually amazes me that the majority of spiritual seekers from the most affluent countries on our small planet seem to be looking for one thing above anything else: Peace. 465 views |
The New Spiritual Ideal.by Andrew Cohen on Sep 11, 2012 “Radical indeterminacy” perfectly captures the position of what I call the “new enlightenment,” or Evolutionary Enlightenment, which is based upon a growing recognition that the human experience is in fact a small but not insignificant part of a cosmic evolutionary process that began almost fourteen billion years ago. 183 views |
Is Your Ego Big Enough For God?by Andrew Cohen on Sep 3, 2012 The bigger our self becomes after we’ve transcended the crippling effects of narcissism, the more powerfully and creatively we will be able to live our precious human lives. Because we’ve gotten over our small selves, we will be living for a higher purpose. 111 views |
Taking God Seriously.by Andrew Cohen on Jul 30, 2012 The rational values of the culture that we live in may have freed us from the myths of the past, but unfortunately they have also undermined our capacity to have any faith in the unseen metaphysical domains of our innermost interiors. 108 views |
The Case for Certainty.by Andrew Cohen on Jul 19, 2012 My hope is for a new spirituality that is based equally on the attainment of existential certainty and the ability to embrace complexity, subtlety, and nuance. For this profound higher synthesis in human consciousness and culture to arise within and between us, we need to do the hard spiritual and philosophical work that will actually make it possible. 174 views |
When God Falls Out of the Sky.by Andrew Cohen on Jun 17, 2012 At this critical juncture, our own future and the future of our planet will be determined by the conscious choices that we human beings make, rather than by the whim of a higher power or according to some predestined plan. 248 views |
I Learned More about Sex When I Gave It Up.by Andrew Cohen on Jun 3, 2012 If we know we don’t need each other in the desperate ways in which we often imagine we do, it changes the romantic and sexual dynamic that we share culturally in dramatic ways. 1,197 views |
Why Mysticism Matters.by Andrew Cohen on May 22, 2012 The lightness of being that flows from the heart and mind of the mystic is very different than the sometimes disconcerting absolute self-confidence of the religious believer. 350 views |
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Globalization Isn’t Just for Economists.by Andrew Cohen on Apr 27, 2012 So, in my talks, which many young Indians did attend, I found myself in the odd position of explaining to them that India’s great gift to the world has been her rich spirituality and that her greatest luminaries have been powerfully enlightened men and women who all, in one way or another, courageously bucked the status quo in pursuit of their own higher development. 36 views |
Do We Need Faith to Believe in Progress?by Andrew Cohen on Apr 20, 2012 Men and women of great spiritual commitment, whether they are realized Himalayan yogis, high Buddhist Lamas, wise and revered Rabbis, beloved Christian Priests, or ecstatic Sufi mystics, tend to emanate both a powerful positivity and an uplifting compassion. And it is their spiritual conviction—based upon either strong faith or direct mystical experience—that has made them, throughout human history, such important pillars of both solace and inspiration. 45 views |
Do You Have Spiritual Self Confidence?by Andrew Cohen on Apr 7, 2012 As I spoke to bright young audiences in urban centers throughout North India, I found myself telling these young people that I had originally come to India seeking for Enlightenment because I couldn’t find it at home in modern, wealthy America. I explained that her most lauded luminaries of the last 100 years, people who had influenced myself and countless others, people like Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, and Mahatma Gandhi, were all bold individuals who bucked the status quo in order to follow their own muse. 297 views |
A Meditation on the Indefinable Nature of the Divine.by Andrew Cohen on Mar 12, 2012 How many times have we heard the word “love” being used to define that which is ultimately indefinable? I suppose it is because that’s the only word that can even bring us close to grasping the ungraspable. 126 views |
What Is Love?by Andrew Cohen on Mar 5, 2012 Have you ever considered for yourself what love actually is? 854 views |
Piercing the Romantic Illusion.by Andrew Cohen on Feb 27, 2012 This is the powerful and at-times-overwhelming illusion that perfect happiness, perfect contentment, perfect fulfillment, and perfect completion lie somewhere beyond the boundaries of our own selves—more often than not, in the arms of the perfect other. 1,098 views |
“I Trust You” – More Difficult (and more powerful) than “I Love You.”by Andrew Cohen on Feb 15, 2012 We can understand love either from the perspective of what it is or what it is not. Love is the uplifting experience of joy, ecstasy, fulfillment, contentment, delight, and abandon. Love is not the painful experience of fear, doubt, suspicion, jealousy, obsession, and attachment… 767 views |
Living in an Infinite Universe.by Andrew Cohen on Feb 10, 2012 Last week I gave a talk at Alex and Allyson Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) in upstate New York. I based the talk on an interesting story that I had heard on NPR earlier that morning about some new scientific discoveries that support the surprising hypothesis that apparently the material universe is infinite. Included here is an excerpt from my talk (a rough transcript). Enjoy! 259 views |
“I Have Seen the Mountaintop:” A Vision of the Possible.by Andrew Cohen on Jan 16, 2012 This great soul was a visionary. What is a visionary? Visionaries are those rare and inspired individuals who see great promise and imminent potentials for human consciousness and culture that most of us haven’t even begun to imagine yet. They see far beyond the present to a future that has yet to be created. For them, in a sense, that future already exists because their awareness is illuminated by inspiring and compelling images of the possible. Unless we, like Dr. King and other great spiritually awakened beings, invoke that same capacity to see and intuit beyond where we already have come, it is unlikely that our lives will be expressions of anything other than the status quo. 628 views |
Inspiration Is Liberation: New Year’s Reflections on the Nature of Existence.by Andrew Cohen on Jan 9, 2012 If we really pay attention to the powerful experience of inspiration that we feel on days like this, we will recognize that it is a felt sense and experiential conviction that we can really do something that we hadn’t believed possible—that we are capable of breaking through to new ground, attaining higher levels of our own potential. If we look more deeply into the thrilling experience of inspiration when we feel it surging through our bodies and minds, we will see that it really is the sense that anything is possible. And that experience of inspiration is simultaneously an experience of freedom, of spiritual liberation, because when we are deeply and profoundly inspired we feel unrestricted by any fundamental sense of limitation. 378 views |
The Posture of Freedomby Andrew Cohen on Nov 25, 2011 Under the right circumstances, it is not difficult to have a powerful experience of the ground of being, to taste its indescribable peace, bliss, rapture, and stillness—like a still forest pool, in which you sink ever more deeply, where your mind is not moving at all. It is very important to taste the inherent liberation of your own infinite depth, but that kind of experience, in and of itself, will not necessarily teach you how to have a liberated relationship to the chaos of your own mind and emotions. 326 views |
Spiritual Self-Confidence.by Andrew Cohen on Oct 20, 2011 With all of the complexity and seemingly overwhelming problems we face on the planet today — environmental crisis, economic breakdown, inflated materialism and narcissism, etc — it’s easy to become cynical about change. But there’s a deeper source of positivity — called “Spiritual Self Confidence” — that can give us an anchor within the inevitable storms of life and awaken in us a powerful sense of meaning and purpose. 445 views |
Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber LIVE @ Boulder Integral Center October 9, 2011by Andrew Cohen on Sep 30, 2011 On Sunday, October 9, Boulder Integral Center is proud to host Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber, for their third live Guru and Pandit event. Using Cohen’s new book, Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening, as a starting point—a book that Wilber calls “one of the most significant books on spirituality written in the postmodern world”—these two mystical pathfinders will explore why only a profound integration of timeless Being and dynamic Becoming can offer a spiritual realization that makes sense of life in today’s rapidly changing world. 356 views |
Evolutionary Enlightenment by Andrew Cohen: Book Trailer featuring Linus Roacheby Andrew Cohen on Sep 29, 2011 Let yourself follow this theological fantasy, just for a moment… 401 views |
Why Are You Here?by Andrew Cohen on Sep 28, 2011 Scientists look at the big bang from the outside, so to speak, using complex instruments and the laws of physics to show us the explosion of light and energy, which became matter, which, in turn, gave rise to life, from which emerged the capacity for consciousness. But the perspective I’m sharing with you is one that looks at that very same event from the inside—that gets right beneath the surface of the stillness before the beginning, and locates the very impetus behind that primordial moment of birth. 1,982 views |
The Resonance of Awakening: A Dialogue with Ken Wilber.by Andrew Cohen on Sep 22, 2011 I’d like to talk about the relationship between enlightenment and the evolution of culture. The world we’re living in is a very different world from the one that existed two thousand years ago, one thousand years ago, or even five hundred years ago. And our needs as evolving human beings in the postmodern context in the twenty-first century are dramatically different from those of individuals in the past. What does the postmodern expression of enlightenment look like? How can the revelation of emptiness or nonduality help me make sense out of the human experience in the twenty-first century? 562 views |
A Friend You Can Never See.by Andrew Cohen on Aug 15, 2011 In meditation, you want to discover what awareness is, free from attachment to any object. In the enlightened mind, awareness itself becomes the object of awareness. To discover what this means, you need to let your attention expand beyond all objects in consciousness—beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond the world, beyond this infinite universe. Even the universe can become an object in consciousness. The hardest thing to understand about enlightenment is that the object of our seeking is not an object. 1,202 views |
Transcending Ego: An Attainable Goal.by Andrew Cohen on Aug 7, 2011 In the way that I teach, I try to get people first and foremost to recognize that they actually have an ego and begin to understand how it functions, and secondly to become serious about transcending it in a way that is significant. 559 views |
Spontaneous Revelation & Noble Effort.by Andrew Cohen on Jul 22, 2011 There are two ways that you can experience the intoxicating joy, profound peace, and ecstatic wakefulness of the Ground of Being: spontaneously or through effort. 508 views |
A Moral Predicament.by Andrew Cohen on Jul 9, 2011 Most of us live in a culture of such extreme narcissism and secular materialism, we have no context for knowing how to honor and respect a dimension of life that is infinitely greater than the personal sphere. We are culturally unprepared to respond to our own deepest spiritual experiences, and therefore, even after glimpsing the glory of our own potential, we rarely make the noble effort to actually transform ourselves for the highest reasons. 578 views |
The Promise of the Future.by Andrew Cohen on Jul 2, 2011 When you experience this evolutionary impulse moving within you, you will feel an unbelievable excitement and thrill about life. Why? Because of what it is possible to create. 582 views |
Meditation: A Portal to a New Dimension.by Andrew Cohen on Jun 22, 2011 When you go deeply into the meditative state, your awareness detaches itself from the thought-stream. Then your identification with emotion, memory, time, and body begins to fall away. You become aware of something very mysterious. 397 views |
An Event with Andrew Cohen and Swami Shankarananda.by Andrew Cohen on Jun 6, 2011 Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext, and Swami Shankarananda, founder of Melbourne, Australia’s Shiva Mediation Center, will engage in a dialogue that explores the similarities and differences between their two outlooks on spiritual enlightenment. 128 views |
The Moral Implications of Spiritual Awakening.by Andrew Cohen on Jun 3, 2011 Evolution is about vertical development, and enlightenment is about the experience of consciousness beyond ego… 1,172 views |
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