Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

Yes, it’s true. After sixteen years and forty-one issues carrying a banner that boldly asked the question What Is Enlightenment?, our masthead will now read EnlightenNext and will be dedicated as The Magazine for Evolutionaries.

What Is Enlightenment? has never been just a magazine. It has been and continues to be the expression of a commitment to spiritual liberation and the evolution of consciousness by a dedicated group of individuals who want to share their passion with the world. In recent years, because our parent organization, EnlightenNext, has grown and evolved in exciting ways, the magazine has become just one of the many expressions of our collective vision. So in order to more truly reflect its connection to all of the work we are doing, we have decided to rename the magazine EnlightenNext. I’m sure this new step in our own development will only help us to share more of the very things people look to us for: information, inspiration, new ways of thinking, and spiritual conviction.

How is EnlightenNext magazine going to be different from What Is Enlightenment? It will be better! Not only will it be a more transparent and powerful expression of an evolutionary worldview, it will be accessible to more people. I can’t tell you how many times friends and subscribers have complained that, while they love and support the work we are doing, they simply don’t have the time to read our long articles—friends like evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who has told me this on more than one occasion. Famed Way of the Peaceful Warrior author Dan Millman even suggested on a recent visit that we publish a second magazine that would contain our features in digest form!

The fact is, until quite recently, in spite of hearing this feedback repeatedly, we felt we wouldn’t be able to express our passion for what we are doing unless we produced an overstuffed Reuben sandwich every single quarter! So the main difference now is that the magazine will be a little shorter and a little more accessible . . . we hope! With all the manifold ways we’re now planning to get the word out, we’re hoping that the shorter print format will not only enable more readers to feel excited rather than intimidated by our publication, but will also give us much-needed time to devote to other forums for engagement.

You see, not only are we changing our name, we are endeavoring to expand the ways we can share the message and spirit of our mission to include as many people as possible. As I mentioned in our last issue, we are planning to initiate an EnlightenNext annual conference beginning in 2010. And we have some other big plans as well: an internet radio program that will feature the work we are doing with the magazine and beyond; an EnlightenNext web presence to provide a second-to-none forum for all things relating to the evolution of consciousness and culture; and regular international conference calls with the editors. All of the above will be supported by an annual spiritual retreat open to all individuals who are interested in learning how to put the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment into practice.

You may be wondering why we are changing our name. There are many reasons. (And I can’t tell you how many heated debates we’ve had over the years about taking this step.) First of all, we have found that more often than not, people call What Is Enlightenment? simply “Enlightenment” magazine. It seemed that the significance of a title that asks this question was lost on so many of our readers that it wasn’t really serving its intended purpose. In addition, experts in publishing have often told us that it’s a terrible idea for the title of a magazine to take the form of a question.

The reason I originally chose that name was that we started the magazine as an expression of a real-time inquiry. For me, at least, the clash of traditional Eastern enlightenment concepts with postmodern secular cultural convictions in the spiritual marketplace was creating a lot of intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual confusion. To try to help sort out this mess and come to some clarity about a subject that is not easy to grasp in the first place, my students and I attempted (I believe successfully) to initiate a process of open, transparent, and inclusive inquiry in as public a forum as possible. I knew I wasn’t the only one who was trying to find my way through the often challenging complexity of East-meets-West spirituality. So as I was in the process of asking the important questions to further my own development, I was trying to include as many other interested souls as I could. The general feedback we’ve gotten over the years has been that we’ve definitely been doing something right, and this seems to be more true now than ever.

But something has changed. Over the years, our dedicated practice of spiritual and philosophical inquiry has led to some genuine—and often enlightening—discoveries. And the magazine has become more a vehicle for sharing our passion for what we have found than it is a vehicle for merely asking important questions. Our regular readers will already know that we are passionate in our commitment to evolutionary spirituality and to all of its moral, ethical, philosophical, and spiritual implications for our collective future. The evolution of consciousness and how it relates to the evolution of our shared culture is what we are dedicated to, and that’s what this magazine is all about.

We feel that as culture evolves, so must the meaning and significance and expression of the spiritual impulse. It seems obvious to more and more people at the leading edge that the spirituality of the future will be defined by our awakening to an evolutionary worldview. Such a worldview is based on the recognition that reality at every level—from the gross to the subtle, from cosmos to consciousness, from the ordered patterns of matter to the ineffable depths of Being itself—is all, in its infinite and elegant complexity, part and parcel of a creative process. And it’s a process that is going somewhere! Waking up to this ever-invigorating Big Picture provides a new spiritual worldview that has the capacity to reorient the often cynical and alienated modern and postmodern self in ways that can be life transforming.

Some of us feel that this emerging and literally cosmic perspective is the next enlightenment. That’s why we’re calling the magazine EnlightenNext.

We already have the next three issues of the magazine planned, and we are busy at work on the first two. The feature section of the first issue with our new banner (No. 42) will be an introduction to evolutionary spirituality. Issue 43’s feature section will be dedicated to a topic we are all interested in: “Sex, Spirituality, and the Evolution of Culture.” And then, following the raging success of our “Real Evolution Debate” (in Issue 35), we are going to dedicate a similarly styled feature section in Issue 44 to what we’re calling “The Real Consciousness Debate.” We hope you’re as excited about our new beginning as we are.

Thank you for your support.

Andrew Cohen