Today is an exclusive live video interview with Andrew Cohen, for the interview series “Interviews with the Leading Edge.”
In this series of interviews, I engage with people who are on the leading edge of transformational change, doing work to further the consciousness revolution and how it is manifesting in culture, politics and spirituality, in order to help bring along a more enlightened society.
Andrew Cohen is one such person.
Andrew is the founder of Evolutionary Enlightenment, the former editor-in-chief of EnlightenNext magazine, the author of seven books, and the former spiritual leader of a community known as EnlightenNext, with centers in seven countries.
There is controversy that encircles Andrew. Over its few decades of existence, the EnlightenNext community became an audacious experiment in consciousness that facilitated remarkable leaps in collective maturity. Yet simultaneously it was caught in a vortex of cultish behaviors that ultimately led to its collapse in 2013.
Read Andrew’s biographical information.
I caught up with Andrew in Saratoga Springs, NY, and in this interview Andrew talks about why the Enlightenment community fell apart, along with a number of other themes: his own background and what led him to become a spiritual teacher; the path that led him to start teaching evolutionary enlightenment; the difference between traditional enlightenment and evolutionary enlightenment; what waking up to the evolutionary impulse means; the promise of utopia; why the traditional guru model is no longer valid and the dangers and pitfalls inherent in it; what a scenius is all about; and more.
In addition, during the interview Andrew talks about his three-year self-imposed exile, and what that was like. His journey took him into the depths of his own shadow, revealing painful psychological and emotional truths about his own condition – and, as he talks about during the interview, the complex reasons for the collapse of EnlightenNext.
As Andrew starts teaching again, he is speaking of an emerging new direction for spiritual practice in the 21st century and beyond, one in which the teacher-student model is evolving to meet the needs of mature adults in postmodernity and beyond.
Andrew’s teachings are profound and his words are wise, and the interview is a compelling examination of the ideas behind evolutionary enlightenment and its connected threads of awakening to the evolutionary impulse, innovation, creativity, genius, vocational arousal, the promise of utopia, and becoming an evolutionary, along with how to move past the mythic guru model.
To learn more about Andrew’s work, you can go to www.AndrewCohen.com.
Having attended Andrew Cohen’s talk at Yoga Mandali , I felt a familarlity with the man being interviewed. Over the course of the video a kind of affection for Andrew’s sweetness grew and also an expanding grasp of his ideas…..Thank you, Michael. I am always so impressed with your composure, articulateness, frame of reference and ease in navigating in the vast sea of ideas your interviewees present you with. All of these things give you the perfect qualifications to be uniquely outstanding in this role.