We are looking through our current practitioner's guide and making some changes for release after the Being & Becoming retreat in Colorado AND we can't make this guide GREAT without YOUR input! We realized recently that we need your voices - the thoughts and words of more real practitioners of Evolutionary Enlightenment to make this guide come alive. We need to hear your experience of being a practitioner and we want to print some of those in the guide book itself so that future practitioners can be inspired by you!

"Abandon the process of overcoming the past and preparing for the future. All that's involved is the profound renunciation of time itself. It's very simple."

"One description of Enlightenment is life without a future...Unless one has abandoned the future, unless one has finished seeking absolutely, and unless the issue of being free has been solved forever -  it will be impossible to see clearly for more than a brief instant. "

                                                Andrew Cohen, "Enlightenment Is a Secret"

Enlightenment is the destruction of time. Like oil and water, Enlightenment and time do not mix. When you realize that Freedom has no history you will laugh and it will all be over.  Andrew Cohen (EIS p.66)

When I first met Andrew Cohen in 1992 he wasn't teaching about evolution much at all.  At that time he was teaching about spiritual liberation and I had come to see him because I was longing for freedom. He directed me to examine that longing. What does it mean to want to be free? What would it mean to be free? And how would being free be different from how I am already?

Catherine has asked in recent comments some important questions and her inquiry gives me an opportunity to propose a challenge to all of us who gather on this evolutionary forum. Catherine is rightly questioning the results of all of our evolutionary work when she states, "Anyone who claims to be serious about it should get radically enlightened in a few years. Isn't' it what Andrew said, and many others as well?" And she goes on, "What have we accomplished so far? What are our results? None of us is radically enlightened, hence so far we have nothing to show to people external to the group in order to get their heart adhesion."

She is right to say that without results we cannot effectively attract others to this work, but... 

This comes from a new blog I just started:

I called this blog “Are you a Romantic?” because I recently discovered that I’m one and I’d bet good money that you are too, but maybe not in the way you’re thinking. I am not talking about roses and candy boxes. I am talking about the 17^th and 18^th century philosophical, literary and cultural movement. I’m talking about Johann Goethe, Johann Fichte, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Jane Austen to name a few. And in America I’m talking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman to name a few more.

Thank you to everyone for such an out pouring of expression in the honor of that which is of spiritual value to each of us.

Click here to listen: http://www.enlightennext.org/membership/index.php?q=node/4026

At the World Center of EnlightenNext we are at the start of an open house in honor of Freedom Has No History Day...take a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMwDwDnb8Gg

Here at the Enlightennext Center in Foxhollow we have set up an active blogging hub and all day people are blogging to honor this day.

Click here to watch a few seconds of the "action." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZU-fBWJGzw

In 1993 after "my first real encounter with Andrew Cohen" (see my last post) I wrote to him to describe my expereince of insight as a result of his teaching. I don't have a copy of that letter, but I do have a copy of the letter that Andrew wrote back to me. This is a copy of the letter he wrote.