Blissed and Gone

August 10, 2008 By Tom

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.


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