In Memoriam: Adi Da (1939 – 2008)

November 28, 2008 | 13 Comments

I was stunned to learn last night that the infamous Western guru Adi Da passed away yesterday on Naitauba, his island ashram in Fiji. He was 69 years old. A friend forwarded me an email that was circulated among Da’s devotees last night, which explained the circumstances of Da’s passing:

Everyone here has been shocked at how quickly the Mahasamadhi occurred. Bhagavan Adi Da was sitting in His Chair Working… Just a minute before, He had been Giving Instructions relative to His Divine Image Art. A few minutes before that, He had been speaking humorously and laughing. And then He silently fell over on His Side and within a very short period of no more than a couple of minutes, He had entered into His Mahasamadhi. Dr. Charles Seage and Dr. Andrew Dorfman diagnose that Beloved Bhagavan suffered a fatal heart attack. There were no signs of struggle, but a quick and painless transition.

I was never involved with Adi Da or his community, apart from knowing some close current and former students of his, seeing his art on display at the Venice Biennale last year, and “considering” many of his books, videos, and audios when I was a teenager. But this news hits hard nonetheless. Despite his faults, Adi Da embodied the Guru Principle in a time and culture where few have dared to, boldly standing for Transcendent Depth in an age of runaway materialism and superficiality. And his brilliant writings on the nature of (traditional) spiritual enlightenment are extraordinary for their sophistication, depth, and sheer power of spiritual transmission.

The following is my favorite passage, taken from a famous talk called “The Gorilla Sermon” that he gave shortly after he began teaching in 1972:

â€œYou spend your entire life within the dream, within this vast adventure, to find the princess in the crystal palace and save her from the dragon, or to wait in the crystal palace to be rescued by the prince. You live an endless, endless adventure, millions and millions of ages, year after year after year, of numberless complications. But at some point along the way, you become serious enough to examine your motivation to seek, to examine the cause, the root, for which this goal is only the symbol. At last one realizes that one cannot find oneâ€™s symbolic satisfaction. And this falling into oneâ€™s dilemma, then falling through it, is the unqualified Intuition of oneâ€™s Ultimate Nature and Real Condition. . . . Read more

Posted in Consciousness, Culture, Nondual Mysticism

Introducing…EnlightenNext magazine!

November 3, 2008 | 3 Comments

Hello, everyone. I apologize for going AWOL, but all of my time and attention were required to help complete our latest masterpiece, the premiere issue of EnlightenNext magazine (formerly known as What Is Enlightenment?):

Here’s a TOC blurb I wrote for the issue:

For our debut issue under the name EnlightenNext, we unveil the magazineâ€™s revamped design and take a fresh look at many of our favorite topics, including evolutionary spirituality, science, culture, politics, philosophy, religion, integral theory, and what it really means to pioneer a new stage in humanity’s collective evolution. It’s a compelling, eclectic exploration that you won’t want to miss. Featuring: Arianna Huffington, Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen, John F. Haught, Susan Neiman, James N. Gardner, an exclusive profile of the Dalai Lama, and more.

Subscribe today! :)

Posted in EnlightenNext, WIE

Smash the Mirror

September 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

We just finished our daily two hours of morning meditation practice together here at the Evolutionary Enlightenment ashram called Foxhollow, and from the stew of mystical quotes ingrained in my memory, these three power-packed zingers came rising to the surface of my blissed-out psyche:

â€œPast and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.â€
–Jalal al-Din Rumi

â€œTime is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.â€
–Meister Eckhart

â€œWhen you become less concerned for your particular search, for your inwardness, for your adventure, you have simply become more sensitive to your Real Condition. You have felt the sunlight falling on your sleeping eyes. When your eyes have opened in the morning light, everything will be obvious to you. And you will know that you have never slept, that you have never dreamed, that you have never been limited to any thing that has appeared. You have never been in any condition that you have assumed. There was always only Reality Itself, your True Nature, Which is Love-Bliss, Consciousness, the Unqualified Intensity.â€
–Adi Da

Another full-on workday begins, and yet, from a certain point of view, nothing has ever really happened.

Life is mysterious like that.

Posted in Nondual Mysticism

The Irony of Postmodern Oblivion…

September 14, 2008 | 3 Comments

…is that there’s nothing ironic about it. It’s real, and it’s painful.

I was shocked and saddened — and more than a little pissed off — today to read that David Foster Wallace killed himself! His wife, Karen, found him on Friday evening, at about 9:30pm, in their California home…hanged.

For those who don’t know, DFW was perhaps the greatest Gen-X and postmodern writer on the planet. I adored his writing, particularly his funnier pieces (like his famous cruise-nightmare essay for Harper’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”). I guess I still do, though from here on out, his postmodern prose will be forever tainted by his ultimate act of postmodern narcissism. Similar to listening to Nirvana, I guess, though DFW was a tad brighter (in every respect) than Kurt.

The NY Times article says:

Mr. Wallace was a professor in the English department at Pomona College in Claremont.

â€œI know a great novelist has left the scene, but we knew him as a great teacher who cared deeply about his students, who treasured him. Thatâ€™s what weâ€™re going to miss,â€ said Gary Kates, the dean of Pomona College.

What a self-indulgent coward. What a bastard. He abandoned his wife, his students, his legions of Gen-X and Gen-Y fans…and gave the world yet more reason to think that giving in and giving up is somehow a valid, appropriate response to no longer having Meaning or Truth handed to you on a silver dogmatic platter. No matter what else his young students and fans might have learned from his genius mind and godlike mastery of the written word, this is the final lesson they’ll be left with: It’s okay to give up, because thanks to the insights of modern scientific materialism and postmodern deconstruction, we’ve learned that everything’s relative, life is ultimately aimless, and therefore nothing really matters anyway.

Thanks for the tip, David. Too bad you’re dead wrong.

Tonight I pulled my signed copy of DFW’s Oblivion down from my office shelf and opened it at random to p.173, my eyes immediately landing on this passage (which doesn’t seem so random at all, but such is synchronicity):

Now we’re getting to the part where I actually kill myself. This occurred at 9:17 PM on August 19, 1991, if you want the time fixed precisely. Plus I’ll spare you most of the last couple hours’ preparations and back-and-forth conflict and dithering, which there was a lot of. Suicide runs so counter to so many hardwired instincts and drives that nobody in his right mind goes through with it without going through a great deal of internal back-and-forth, intervals of almost changing your mind, etc. The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are. (Although actually being conscious of this is a whole different matter.)

David Foster Wallace was, if nothing else, conscious of the force of postmodernism. In a real sense, he was postmodernism; he helped create and flesh out its contemporary expression, ensconcing its ironies deep within the collective consciousness of our whole Gen-X/Y generation, showing extreme self-awareness how to become even more self-aware of itself, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. And the final message of postmodernism/DFW, after all that sensitive introspecting? There’s no point and no hope.

Which is reason number 8,291 why we postmoderns who are to any degree awake to our cultural condition’s limitations, failings, and very literal dead-endness need to start doing everything in our power to EVOLVE beyond it, together, not just for our own sake (though that’s a pretty good reason) but for the sake of the whole of humanity. And I really mean exactly that. We postmoderns, of course, in our oh-so-hip, above-it-all irony, tend to laugh at such sentiments or put “for the sake of humanity” in scare quotes, smiling in our smug cynicism. But what the hell are we smiling at?

It isn’t funny anymore, not when we’re talking about our relationship to being alive. Even DFW’s friend, the Gen-X writer Dave Eggers and his gang of young, postmodern, hyper-ironic comedy writers at McSweeney’s have, today, blanked out their homepage with the simple statement that they are “devastated and lost.”

I pray that we elect Obama on November 4th… My generation needs him, bad. The whole world, in fact, needs a major dose of genuine hope, optimism, and idealism. We need a reminder that, deep down, life is more ecstatically POSITIVE than any self-absorbed mind could ever dare to imagine! I myself didn’t used to believe it. I was suicidal too. In fact, even after years of countless powerful, mind-blowing, and heartbreaking spiritual experiences — ecstatic, soul-swooning glimpses of Life’s inherent screaming GOODNESS — it took me a very long time to be convinced. That’s how deeply entrenched we are in the swamp of cynicism. That’s how bad it is: not even God can pull us out anymore. But as you can see, it’s literally a matter of life and death that we’re talking about here. And events like this only make me that much more committed to doing everything I possibly can, together with other like-minded souls, to help save our little project called humanity in order to take it forward into the future — to potentially radiant, soul-soaring vistas that will only ever be seen by those who vow, for the sake of Love, to never give up.

Posted in Consciousness, Culture, Evolution, Popular Culture, Writing

All Hail the Onion!

September 12, 2008 | 1 Comment

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

“Existence is a vulgar absurdity”! :) Those mad scientists of satire are on a roll this week:

Obama Suddenly Panicked After Gazing Too Far Into Future.

King Tut, the Gen-Y Version.

Being A Detective Who Talks To Ghosts Not As Exciting As It Looks On TV.

But these still don’t touch the all-time classic:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs.

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Popular Culture

Integrity: the Foundation of an Integral Life

August 22, 2008 | 2 Comments

After setting up my profile at the new, just-launched Integral Life website, I’ve been visiting the nascent discussion forums and have started to engage with other members a bit. In the section headed “What does an Integral Life mean to you?” I responded enthusiastically to one member’s suggestion that integrity seems to be an essential element of the integral stage. This is an all-important point that I feel often gets overlooked in discussions about integral development, about integral life practices, and about the orienting direction and mission of the Integral Revolution as a whole. Here’s what I wrote:

I think integrity, more than anything else, needs to be the foundational factor of the integral, post-postmodern stage. This isn’t fundamentally about lines, levels, or quadrants; it’s about continually striving for perfect integrity, in the biggest possible sense and for the biggest possible reasons (and knowing that, in an evolving Kosmos, we’re never going to reach a static perfection).

The AQAL framework is needed, though, to guide us in this inwardly felt pursuit, illuminating as it does the fact that at this point in our species’ development, integrity needs to happen at all levels, across all lines, between the One and the Many, the Inner and the Outer, simultaneously. It’s an inconceivably enormous task, planetary in scale (and beyond), and impossible for any individual to achieve alone. All we can do is all we can do, however, so I think the wholehearted and committed cultivation of our own individual integrity should be our personal pursuit and ongoing contemplation, 24/7. And from that increasingly solid foundation, we can inspire others with our own living example and thereby endeavor to forge integrity in the intersubjective and interobjective domains as well…

I’m a student of Andrew Cohen’s, and his “Six Principles of Evolutionary Enlightenment” are essentially pointing to this radically nondual, AQAL integrity: where an individual’s purest motives (1st Principle) are mirrored in that individual’s actions (2nd Principle), and where that fully autonomous, integrated individual (3rd Principle) lives and works in nondual harmony with the greater collective of his peers and society (4th Principle), all of which is happening in a Kosmocentric, integral edge-pushing context of constant evolutionary tension (5th Principle) and holonic natural hierarchy (6th Principle).

In my own experience, I know that even after over a decade of studying and, to some degree, mastering integral theory at a cognitive level, the only thing that seems to have any traction whatsoever in actually inching my self — and my life — out of its profound embeddedness in the postmodern swamp is my own sincere pursuit of integrity. Because if there’s anything that is antithetical to our culture of postmodern fragmentation (and our own relativistic and narcissistic values), it’s integrity — forged in the soul, for the sake of the whole, from the Ground of Being up.

Posted in AQAL, Andrew Cohen, Consciousness, Culture, EnlightenNext, Evolution, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Integral Philosophy, Ken Wilber, Kosmos, Nondual Mysticism, Philosophy

The Kosmocentric Stage – Part 2

August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment

My wife snapped this cell-phone pic of London’s famous statue of Eros, the Greek god better known as Cupid (his Roman derivative), while we were walking through Piccadilly Circus on Saturday. There were lots of people sitting around the base of the distinctive landmark, but hardly anyone seemed interested in the statue itself. If only they knew what it represented! I said to my wife, who is also a student of Evolutionary Enlightenment and therefore shares my emotional connection to that symbol of the primordial, creative Love and Energy that gave birth to this limitless Kosmos over 13.7 billion years ago and surges through its every atom still…

The 20th-century philosopher-theologian Alfred North Whitehead, in his Adventures in Ideas (1933), offered this beautifully succinct ode to Eros, the Kosmocentric God:

â€œWe must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realizations, each in its due season. Thus a process must be inherent in God’s nature whereby his infinity is acquiring realization.â€

And yesterday, in my teacher Andrew Cohen’s quote of the week, he also referenced this “first-born of the gods,” updating and invigorating its ancient significance in a powerful explanation of the newly emerging Kosmocentric view:

“When a human being awakens to the cosmic perspective of what’s called ‘deep time,’ it is always nothing short of a spiritual revelation. This occurs when the self directly glimpses its own nature as the product of a developmental process that is occurring on many levels simultaneously â€” cosmological, planetary, cultural, biological, psycho-emotional, and spiritual.

“It was my own gradual discovery of and awakening to this perspective that eventually compelled me to reinterpret and redefine the meaning and significance of enlightenment for our own time. The first step in this awakening was seeing through what appeared to be my own personal experience and discovering that it was actually a very small part of a vast impersonal process. The second step was recognizing that the process itself is evolving on multiple levels, in and through time. It was then that I saw that the primordial urge to become is the new and emerging face of the eternal God. I began to understand that the evolutionary impulse, God as Eros, is the God of the future.”

In the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment, we typically refer to Eros as the “Authentic Self,” which you can read more about here. In my next post in this “Kosmocentric Stage” series, I plan to explore the basic progression of the evolution of consciousness and culture, as it proceeds in expanding orders of care and awareness from me, to us, to all of us, to all that is; or from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to…Kosmocentric. Stay tuned. :)

Posted in Andrew Cohen, Consciousness, EnlightenNext, Evolution, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Integral Philosophy, Kosmos, Philosophy

Quote of the Day, brought to you by Plotinus

August 11, 2008 | 2 Comments

“You ask, how can we know the Infinite? I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The Infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longerâ€”in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite anxieties. Like only can apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the Infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self (á¼…Ï€Î»Ï‰ÏƒÎ¹Ï‚), its divine essence, you realize this unionâ€”this Identity (á¼•Î½Ï‰ÏƒÎ¹Ï‚).”
– Plotinus, â€œPlotinus to Flaccusâ€ (3rd century AD)

Posted in Consciousness, Nondual Mysticism, Philosophy

Blissed and Gone

August 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Today at the main EnlightenNext center in Lenox, Massachusetts, we had what we call a “practice day” — meditating together from dawn to dusk. Our colleagues at the London center did the same. Meanwhile, our spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, was leading two hundred people through the finer points of Evolutionary Enlightenment for the last day of his ten-day retreat in Tuscany. If you visit the homepage of AndrewCohen.org soon, you can listen to a 44-minute streaming clip from the retreat of Andrew speaking about the Ground of Being — that primordial, unmanifest, unseeable emptiness from which all things arise and to which all things return.

There’s nothing like spending a whole day doing nothing but abiding in, and as, that eternal and infinite source and substance of all that is. I can see why the concept of the Sabbath, a day devoted purely to the contemplation of the sacred, has endured for millennia. Even for those of us lucky enough to be able to live in a spiritual/religious community 24/7, there’s still nothing like having a whole day each week to drop everything, step utterly out of the mind and ecstatically beyond time, and focus all of one’s attention on God.

By the end of the practice day, as we were finishing our last meditation & chanting session tonight, I was sitting so far out of time, blissed and gone, that it could have been any year, any century, for all I could tell. When the entire universe is experienced as ungraspably ever-new, moment to moment, you realize that nobody actually knows anything…except that the universe is ultimately an absolute Mystery, and that mystery is what we really are.

Posted in Andrew Cohen, Consciousness, EnlightenNext, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Nondual Mysticism

Ordinary Terrestrials Putting Crop Circles to Shame

August 9, 2008 | 4 Comments

Mac Tonnies’ blog tipped me off to “the largest sand drawing on Earth.” Check it out!

Very impressive stuff…though not quite as impressive as the Olympics opener yesterday. That three-hour spectacular display of epic magnitudes of machinelike human precision and techno-majestic creativity almost made me want to enroll in the Communist Party. (I kid!) It was extremely powerful, moving, and is definitely worth finding a video of online, for those who missed it. I suspect it might have been the fullest, most beautiful display of worldcentric unity and human ingenuity that this planet has ever seen. Or at least the largest and most expensive. If the Chinese wanted to convince the world that they’ve become fully capable players on the modern (orange vMeme) sociocultural stage, they’ve certainly got my vote. Now, whether or not that’s a good thing remains to be seen… Here’s hoping they move through this stage of development quickly, on their way to peace-and-love lovin’ postmodernity, at which point they’ll reel back in collective horror at their human rights treacheries, apologize to the world, and then — 1/5th of the human population that they are — make their karmic recompense by helping to lead our species to the post-postmodern stars…

Posted in Art, Culture, Integral Philosophy

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- Welcome to the personal blog of Tom Huston, one of the editors at EnlightenNext magazine. Arising from the cultural milieu of late 20th-century America, armed with the combined powers of Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment, he has become … Kosmic Tom.
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- Andrew Cohen - A radical teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment.
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- Carter Phipps - Meet the executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine.
- Don Dixon - The philosophical musings of a kosmic space artist.
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