What’s Conditioning You Today?

May 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Karma: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.


Posted in AQAL, Philosophy, Kosmos, Ken Wilber

Public Displays of Meditation

May 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Only in California…

The dude in the shades near the end says it all. :)

What I don’t get is why, after leader Max Simon tells them to be still even if accosted by security guards, everyone seems to get up and leave when the security guards tell them to. How about a little passive resistance, people? Take your stand in the Absolute, and be like a strong tree that can’t be moved!!


Posted in Culture, Popular Culture, Consciousness

Presbyterians Get Grape Juice

May 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Indexed’s Jessica Hagy is trying to provoke the ire of Catholics today:


Posted in Culture, Religion

Ken Wilber Interviewed by Salon.com

May 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment

It’s long, it’s comprehensive, it’s accessible, and it’s awesome: “You Are the River: An Interview with Ken Wilber.”

From the intro:

Ken Wilber may be the most important living philosopher you’ve never heard of. He’s written dozens of books but you’d be hard-pressed to find his name in a mainstream magazine. Still, Wilber has a passionate — almost cultlike — following in certain circles, as well as some famous fans. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have praised Wilber’s books. Deepak Chopra calls him “one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness.” And the Wachowski brothers asked Wilber, along with Cornel West, to record the commentary for the DVDs of their “Matrix” movies.

And a funny bit from the middle:

Q: But somewhere down the road — 50 years from now, 500 years from now — once neuroscience becomes much more advanced, will scientists be able to pinpoint where [our] values and thoughts come from?

KW: I’m saying we’ll never understand it. The materialists keep issuing promissory notes. They always promise they’re going to do it tomorrow. But interior and exterior arise together. You can’t reduce one to the other. They’re both real. Deal with it.

To learn even more about Wilber, read WIE editor Carter Phipps’s superb introduction to the integral maestro here.


Posted in AQAL, Culture, Nondual Mysticism, Scientific Materialism, Philosophy, Consciousness, Ken Wilber

Charles Fort & the UFO Sightings of Yesteryear

April 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I’m reviewing a book for the next issue of WIE called Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer. It’s an utterly captivating portrait of Fort’s peculiar life and work, about which I knew very little before reading Steinmeyer’s book. Having weaned my fledgling imagination, as a kid, on Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series — a classic compendium of “Fortean” phenomena — I was dimly aware of Fort by his towering reputation in the field of occult research, and I became even more conscious of his extensive influence once my teenage studies of UFOs began in earnest. But I now wish I’d tried to find out more — and sought out his actual writings — years ago, because his skeptical approach to mysterious phenomena and humorous self-awareness of the absurdity of it all are qualities I would’ve resonated with completely, back when such paranormal interests consumed all of my waking (and dreaming) attention. These days the mysterious realm of Forteana is just an abiding background interest of mine, but I always experience the same old thrill and sense of wonder when reading accounts such as these:
Read more


Posted in Integral Ufology, WIE, Kosmos

Welcome to the Center of the Universe

April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Here it is, What Is Enlightenment? Issue 40, available now at a newsstand near you!

Buy it today!

Here’s my compelling description of the issue, written in marketing-ese:

Ever since Copernicus proved that the universe doesn’t revolve around Earth, humanity’s place in the cosmos has steadily continued to shrink. But we may be far more central to the universe than we think. WIE explores the ways in which science is coming to understand our true cosmic significance. Plus, we join Deepak Chopra for a candid tour of his mythic life, take an illuminating look at the New Atheism movement, and question the purpose of existence with Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen. Featuring: Joel R. Primack, Nancy Ellen Abrams, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paul Davies, Janna Levin, Stewart Brand, Rupert Sheldrake, and more.

It’s an awesome (and gorgeous!) issue, if I do say so myself, and you can click the image above to see the full table of contents. If you’d like to get started reading it right now without getting up from your chair (lazy slacker!), you can subscribe to our new WIE digital edition, which replicates the entire issue (ads and all) in a slick zoomable, flippable, online format. I don’t know how many trees you’ll be saving (since the magazine is printed on 100% recycled paper), but the CO2 output from the power used for you to read it on your computer screen is probably less than the CO2 used by the printing plant to print an issue (maybe?). Really, though, it’s just plain convenient. Paper magazines take up space.

In other WIE news, we’ve just started a weekly email called “Think About This,” featuring exclusive quotes, article outtakes, excerpts from our research materials, etc., as well as cool video clips and other things we editors come across online. Subscribe to our email list today (here, in the little box in the right column) and see what you think.

Oh, and if you’ve read the new issue of the magazine, I’d be very interested to hear what you think. Pro or con…bring it on! I might even include you in our next issue’s Letters/Comments section (I want to start expanding our “Letters” to include blogosphere activity, like New York magazine does).


Posted in WIE, EnlightenNext, Kosmos, Consciousness

The Authentic Self

April 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest production from our A/V department at EnlightenNext, providing one of the simplest and coolest explanations to date of a key component of Andrew Cohen’s teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment: the Authentic Self.

You can get another explanation of the Authentic Self here — or, for the more direct revelation, just take a moment to look within and find the ecstatic passion for LIFE surging up from the depths of your own heart and soul…


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

Radial Parsecs of Noise Pollution

March 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

While we’re in the midst of the proofing, tweaking, brain-numbing stage of dealing with all the excruciating minutiae that’ll allow us to get Issue 40 of WIE out the door and off to the presses, I thought I’d post this short clip of the awesome opening scene from the movie Contact, since I was thinking about it this morning and then happened to see it this afternoon in a post on Posthuman Blues. (Add that to the annals of exceedingly minor synchronicities.)

It’s also related to the next issue’s main feature article, an in-depth interview with the authors of The View from the Center of the Universe, although the clip unfortunately ends right before the really Kosmocentric part — where the camera pans back (many gigaparsecs) to show all of the cosmic imagery contained inside little Ellie Arroway’s eye (read: consciousness)…

Actually, I just found a clip with the above sequence in reverse, which zooms into Ellie’s eye. Now that’s more like it! (But you should watch the original first.)

P.S. I’ll reply to the latest comment on my post below as soon as I get the 20+ minutes required to do the question justice…


Posted in WIE, Science Fiction, Kosmos

Freedom Is Not a Feeling

March 2, 2008 | 7 Comments

I started spiritually seeking when I was 16 years old, after it suddenly became impossible for me to continue functioning in “daily life” without knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt (and beyond religious and scientific dogma), why my life, this planet, or anything else existed at all. Since that time, I’ve tasted pretty much every variety of spiritual experience in the book (sans psychedelics), but as a typical postmodern narcissist, who’s grown up feeling inherently beholden to nothing and no one — not even God — even my most powerful spiritual experiences have tended to be quickly subsumed into the bottomless pit of my ever-insatiable ego. And why should I, or any of us, expect otherwise? Living in a culture of narcissism, where the superficial (but sophisticated) ego is the only layer of the self one is ever taught to cultivate or care about, our deepest experiences — no matter how genuinely “sacred” and “profound” — literally have no other ground to land upon. The egoic quicksand relentlessly subsumes even ecstatic glimpses of the Divine into its repertoire of personal experiences, and then that’s pretty much the end of it…until the next great experience comes along. That’s what the ego does — accumulating experience to bolster its self-image. That’s all it does. And it never seems to get enough.

This is why it’s taken years of constant, repeated instruction from my spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, for the importance of soul development to even start to make sense to my postmodern, Gen-Y ears… Read more


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

Cephalopodic Cloaking Devices

February 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment

If you haven’t read it yet, check out the Times’ article yesterday on the miraculous camouflage capacities of cuttlefish and octopuses. I’d seen videos of their miraculous feats of invisibility before, but came across this TED Talks video today that offers some pretty astonishing examples. The Predator has nothing on our eight- and ten-legged seafaring friends…


Posted in Science

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