If you’re a regular reader of What Is Enlightenment? you may already be somewhat familiar with Andrew Cohen, and you may even have heard of EnlightenNext. Cohen is the founder of WIE, and he appears in its pages regularly, both in dialogue with philosopher Ken Wilber in the “Guru and Pandit” feature and in his own column, “Enlightenment for the 21st Century.” What you wouldn’t necessarily know is that WIE is only one of many endeavors Cohen initiated to pursue the goal of developing a new stage of consciousness beyond ego, which is the purpose of his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. As head of EnlightenNext, he is the spiritual leader to a community of students worldwide who seek to transform their individual and collective lives in order to create a new template for human culture. Intrinsic to this vision is the exploration and creation of a new women’s liberation. For twelve years, Cohen has worked closely with his female students to discover how true autonomy, authentic communion, and spiritual freedom can be achieved and stabilized by a group of women.

As one student herself explained: “We’re experiencing a higher way to be together, free from the structures of competition and mistrust, simply because we’re each independently interested in a shared goal: communion beyond ego. It’s as though all the edges and parameters and restrictions, all the codes of behavior and inherent self-limitations that come from our deep sense of what a woman should be and how she should act, are being transcended. And in their place is a sense of surging joy. It’s as though we’re liberating the Self and freeing our souls from the identity of Woman.”

Throughout the history of the world’s great religions, there have been individual women and groups of women, in both the East and West, who have traveled the path of enlightenment or sought communion with God, carving out important roles for themselves within their respective traditions—even if those roles often fell short of real equality with men. Perhaps what distinguishes the women’s group at EnlightenNext is that their work seems to bridge this age-old tradition of women seeking enlightened consciousness and the feminist movements of the last half-century, with their focus on the social and psychological structures that women must overcome to achieve equality and freedom. In addition, the EnlightenNext women emphasize looking to the future for new answers and solutions, which is notable given that the zeitgeist of women’s spirituality is more about past conceptions of women as feminine nurturers, caretakers, goddesses, or divine mothers.

The women at EnlightenNext have histories spanning different continents, cultures, and even decades. Alka Arora, Andrew Cohen’s wife of twenty-one years, was born and raised in India and has been a spiritual practitioner for twenty-nine years. Ellen Daly, who has been involved with EnlightenNext for eleven years, is a book consultant and writer. Rosalind Bennett, formerly a stage and screen actress in Great Britain, now manages the production of EnlightenNext’s audio-visual materials, and is also currently developing seminars and programs, along with Katherine Miller, on the new women’s liberation. Miller, who has been a student of Cohen’s for sixteen years, is a senior instructor of Evolutionary Enlightenment courses and is also a gourmet vegetarian chef. These four, along with other committed women, have become self-described sisters, bound together by the intensity of their endeavor to “create a new culture among us,” as Daly told me, “a culture where women are autonomous individuals, and also unified with one another in a sisterhood. Each of us believes that this is what’s needed if women are going to be equal partners with men in creating the future.” And it continues to be a radical experiment, in part because each of the women involved has willingly chosen to make her own life the ultimate testament to its success. In other words, they’re not looking to simply publish a report in a couple of years and then move on; in fact, they don’t really believe there’s an end in sight.

“The way I see it,” says Miller, “it takes work to transcend the old and build the new, and once women reach a new stage, there’s going to be another one to work toward. I no longer think of evolving women’s consciousness in terms of a fixed goal. I see it as a noble adventure, but we don’t know where or when it will conclude.”

The journey has frequently been a challenging one, both for Cohen as a spiritual teacher working to motivate his female students to attain new heights of spiritual liberation as a group, and for the students themselves. In the interview that follows, these four resolute women speak of the formidable fear they experienced as they sought to give up the old to make way for the new. “For us to be successful in our attempt to establish egolessness and communion among us,” Arora told me, “and not just to experience these things as fleeting states but to really establish a new ground for women to stand on, has been an ordeal. It’s taken a very long time. I think it speaks to how deeply ingrained the structures of women’s conditioning are. It speaks to the immensity of this task.”

These difficulties may also speak to the fact that there is little historical precedent for their efforts. In 1986, the eminent historian Gerda Lerner published The Creation of Patriarchy, which proposes that women must give up their search for empowerment in a matriarchal past and recognize that, on the whole, they have little to no experience as conscious shapers of history. “If recording, defining, and interpreting the past marks man’s entry into history,” she writes, “this occurred for males in the third millennium BC. It occurred for women (and only some of them) with a few notable exceptions in the nineteenth century.” Lerner believes that this absence of any tradition whatsoever, from any period of time, that could “reaffirm the independence and autonomy of women” poses the greatest impediment “toward developing group consciousness” for them. “In line with our historic gender-conditioning, women have aimed to please and have sought to avoid disapproval. This is poor preparation for making the leap into the unknown required for those who fashion new systems.”

But if Daly was right when she told me that the women of EnlightenNext are “finally beginning to explore what enlightened, undifferentiated, unified consciousness expressed through a group of women might look like,” is it then possible that a “new system”—the new chapter of women’s history Lerner believed was “the essential ground on which women of vision can stand”—is in the works? Such claims may seem too audacious, even hubristic, but there is something undeniably exciting about taking the possibility seriously. As Lerner herself wrote over two decades ago, “Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most ‘unfeminine’ quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world.”

What Is Enlightenment: I thought it might be good to start by asking a question that you probably get asked a lot: Is it problematic to be exploring a “new women’s liberation” under the guidance of a male spiritual teacher?

Ellen Daly: The way I see it is that before now, theories of women’s liberation had to come from women because they were about women liberating themselves from male structures, from patriarchy, from men. But the kind of liberation we’re talking about doesn’t really have to do with that. It has to do with liberating ourselves from structures within that are about being women. In this regard, it has been incredibly helpful to work with a male teacher—someone on the “outside,” so to speak—who has had enough objectivity to recognize these deeply impersonal structures in each of us, because so often we lacked the ability to step outside of them enough to be able to recognize them ourselves.

Rosalind Bennett: I don’t think it’s ever been problematic, and that’s largely because as a guru, Andrew has never made distinctions between his male and female students in terms of the level of responsibility, or potential for enlightened consciousness expected of them. In that way, I’ve never met anybody who has a more egalitarian approach to the sexes.

WIE: While learning about your backgrounds for this profile, I was struck by the fact that none of you went from being interested in women’s liberation to becoming spiritual seekers; all of you were spiritual seekers first and then became interested in women’s liberation.

Alka Arora: That’s true. When I became a student twenty-one years ago, I was mainly interested in enlightenment. I wanted to experience freedom as a person, not necessarily as a woman per se. When Andrew first started teaching in Rishikesh, India, this quickly became all of his students’ state of being—it was like we were in a prolonged state of enlightened freedom. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was phenomenal. Coming together was bliss. There was a joy between all of us that would pound through the walls. It was an explosion of positivity and unity. People just wanted to be together to discuss and share everything about the freedom they were experiencing.

Daly: It’s true. When I went on my first retreat at nineteen, there was a kind of intimacy between all of Andrew’s students that I’d never experienced before. And one of the most striking things for me was that there wasn’t any sexual tension in it. You could be with men and women, and all of those dynamics that usually work just under the surface weren’t there. I felt, as a woman, that I didn’t have to worry about those things in the way that I usually did—I could finally relax. It was such a revelation.

WIE: So why did a woman-specific liberation become an issue for you as Andrew’s students?

Daly: Our entire journey into women’s liberation has had to do with trying to make that initial experience of communion a stable and consistent state between us. Interestingly, Andrew quickly noticed that this sort of ecstatic communion would take place more naturally between groups of his male students, but when the women were in their own groups, it never happened.

WIE: Why did he split the men and women into separate groups?

Katherine Miller: It was a very organic thing. When the men came together with each other, they felt such a degree of trust, unity, and fulfillment among them that they naturally wanted to come together on their own more and more. And what they discovered as a result was that their own biological or cultural programming to depend on women for a degree of emotional or physical wholeness was somewhat lessened. The men experienced a great amount of freedom instead of what is so often a limiting, enslaving attachment to the other sex.

Bennett: The idea was that if the women could do that as well—find that kind of trust, unity, and fulfillment between us, which we normally think we need to get from men—then the two groups would be able to come together in a more enlightened, free way.

Daly: It also came from a recognition that, culturally, we place so much spiritual value on the “other” in life. That was my experience growing up. I thought that if I found the perfect relationship, I wasn’t just going to have a physical companion; I was going to be made whole, to be fulfilled on a spiritual level. I think we’ve transposed a lot of spiritual yearning onto the romantic relationship, and that creates an overemphasis on that area of life. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with relationship in and of itself, but the illusory spiritual promise attached to it needs to be transcended if we want to be truly liberated. Andrew felt that for women, the way to break the bondage to this idea of finding fulfillment in men was for us to experience real trust with other women.

Arora: But the problem was that the women couldn’t do it! I remember the first time Andrew realized this and asked us about it. He said during a meeting, “Why is it proving to be so difficult for you all to come together beyond ego?” And what I remember most is that at that moment, inside, there was a tremendous welling up of something. I didn’t know what it was, but later I recognized that it was fear. Tremendous fear. No one wanted to answer his question. We froze up. There was a tangible wall of fear in the room; frankly, that wall didn’t come down for years. We were terrified of finding out why we couldn’t come together as women.

Bennett: That was really the beginning of a big battle. The first aspect of the battle was the phenomenon of this fear about coming together as women. The second aspect of the battle was that we weren’t even interested in finding out what this phenomenon of fear was all about! We spent many, many years trying to avoid the question, all the while pretending that we were interested in it and therefore that we were “good” spiritual seekers. Because of this avoidance, it was virtually impossible for us to begin to look at the structures of the female psyche that we were so obviously scared of revealing.

WIE: What do you understand those structures to be in retrospect?

Miller: I think they are very classic female tendencies, ones that most women are familiar with in our own lives: competition, lack of trust, excessive personalization, dependence on affirmation from others, formation of our identity on how we want to be seen rather than on who we actually are. And women, unfortunately, are really good at manipulation and colluding with one another. The thing is, these things are not just characteristics of individual women—they are deep grooves in the consciousness of Woman. They are completely impersonal. It took us a long, long time to realize the significance of that distinction, however.

Daly: They are impersonal because they are rooted in primal survival mechanisms. For women, survival on a physical level has been something that we’ve always ensured through psychological means as a result of being the weaker sex. In other words, we’ve always competed through our appearance, our intelligence, etc.—competed with other women for men—because for thousands of years, men were our source of protection and safety. We’ve always been physically more vulnerable as women, so it’s difficult for us to drop our defenses and completely trust others. In a context of spiritual enlightenment, however, going beyond ego means transcending this separate sense of self, which just so happens to be fundamental to women’s sense of safety. It’s almost as though women’s physical fear of survival has gotten transposed onto this fear of going beyond ego.

WIE: When did things begin to change for you as a group of women who were confronted with these structures?

Arora: I had an interesting experience in the spring of 2006 where I felt as though I was able to see through the veil of illusion, so to speak. I realized how insecure we were as women, how fearful we were of letting go, and how low we were willing to sink as a result. It was an experience where my own history lined up and I understood what my shadow was, so to speak. It was not wanting to be a responsible human being. I did not want to take responsibility for standing on my own two feet, for being an autonomous person who wasn’t somehow always victimized by her experience. I was traveling at the time, and all of a sudden, I started to recognize this as a phenomenon all around me, in all the women I was meeting and seeing. It didn’t matter what country I was in.

Bennett: Alka’s experience was just a few months before all of us traveled to Montserrat, a very old monastery outside of Barcelona, for a two-week intensive with Andrew. That was a very significant time for us.

WIE: How so?

Bennett: I think we’d each independently come to a reckoning within ourselves that we had to transcend basic structures in the female psyche in order to achieve something greater. And the Montserrat intensive came at a time when we each had decided that we couldn’t wait for anyone else to do it for us—that we had to achieve our goal—and this was where we would do it. We decided, very consciously, that we were going to prove that it was possible to transcend ego, to come together, and to collectively evolve.

Miller: It was as if each of us took absolute responsibility not to waver no matter how intense our internal experience was—even if we felt tremendous fear, resistance, or denial. We just said, “Okay, I’m not going to balk at anything. I’ve made a decision to be victorious, and I’m not going to hesitate or retreat from that decision.” Each of us held ourselves accountable. And because of this, when we came together—which we did every day—we didn’t disintegrate as a collective. In the past, we had always divided and succumbed to all the egoic patterns of competition, collusion, etc., that we were describing earlier. This time, the group was staying unified at the same time that the individuals in it were developing in their autonomy.

WIE: What was that experience like?

Bennett: Prior to the Montserrat intensive, I had an unexamined assumption that freedom was emotionally based, that I had to feel free in order to be free. But what I learned, what all of us learned there, is that freedom is ultimately a choice that any of us can make. And we just kept making the right choices—to be autonomous, to never compromise our highest and truest values, to care about the potential of the collective more than the survival of our self-image and our egos—in every moment.

Arora: It’s true. It’s hard to imagine the amount of joy and trust that emerged as a result. And it’s continued since then, far surpassing any ideas that I ever had about it before. I think of the sisterhood that has emerged as a holy thing. It’s heaven.

Bennett: When we met together—I can’t totally explain it—there was something mysterious there. We would just put our bodies in the same room together, and there would be a dropping away of existential tension that you didn’t even know was there. And this would release both a transparency and an ecstasy between us. It was a new consciousness.

WIE: How is this experience changing your ideas about what it means to be a liberated woman?

Miller: Once we started to experience this profound individual autonomy at the same time as this communion with one another, forces within us were released that were not necessarily “womanly” at all. These forces seemed to have more to do with agency, more to do with eros. It was a big revelation because all of a sudden, none of us were interested in being those things that are so often associated with “woman.” What we experienced wasn’t “nice,” “soft,” “nurturing,” or even “good” in the way we normally think of it.

WIE: Between the four of you, you represent more than sixty years of experience on this path of attempting to go beyond ego collectively and to discover what enlightened liberation looks like for women in the twenty-first century. How do you hope to communicate this journey and what you’ve learned to other women?

Daly: I see our specific job as creating a microcosm of sorts that can prove a new culture for men and women is possible. In a larger sense, it seems to me that in order for humanity to take the next evolutionary step, the world needs liberated women who will work side by side with men to get us out of the many planetary crises we find ourselves in.

Arora: I think when other women see that it’s possible for women to really trust each other and that real freedom, unity, and sisterhood are attainable in their own lives, their own longing for those things will be liberated.

Miller: It’s obvious in so many ways that women still need to rise up together and consciously engage in the evolutionary process. What we want to say is: We can’t wait any longer. The time is now.