Gaia Community: Katherine's Blog

Food preferneces and higher consciousness

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:25:41 GMT

One of the biggest no man’s land – you can’t touch this – each to his own – sacred personal territories in our post modern lives is the area of food preferences. We like what we like. And we feel entitled to what we like, food is our reward for having to endure the stresses of being, alive and present. It’s the great escape into comfort and pleasure, and when you combine it with TV or a party and a few drinks, you can achieve a powerfully sedative and sedentary affect on consciousness. The last thing we want to do is to have to think about it, or to eat in ways that don’t jive with our emotional or psychological pleasure patterns. And if we do start to think about it, maybe because we get too sick or too fat, or are starting to age, we often go to the other extreme, eating whatever we are told is good for us, with no attempt to consciously connect mind body and soul and intuit what it needs to be truly nourished, or woken up!

We have gazillions of preferences, all based on the things I listed in my last blog entry, but rarely do we question them or doubt their validity. This is one of the core domains of the separate individual, our belief that we are isolated and distinct from the universe we live in, that we have a separate private life, and can choose to be connected or not. If you walk around a grocery store there is no way you would know from looking at the products on the shelves, that they come from living, growing organisms. There is no way you could feel something in common with them, as other living things that once grew or walked on the same earth that we do and that have contributed their lives for us to live. When do we ever think about that, as our hand moves from plate to mouth?

Even choosing to become vegan, which is refusing to participate in the killing and slavery of animals, birds, fish and insects, by not eating or using them, and an honorable endeavor with a high ideal, can be a profoundly arrogant stand. If it is taken in ignorance, with no gratitude or humility borne out of our dependence on livings things in order to be, whether that be a carrot or a cow, where will it lead?

So how do we dig into these preferences and become conscious, even just a little? Sometimes it seems to happen by accident, but I think it’s a matter of where we choose to put our attention. In my twenties, I was a beer drinker, loved to work out hard at the dojo and then have a few pints. Also loved to eat, and would almost always overeat. Then an interesting thing happened – I started doing yoga more intensely and experienced a lightness of being and clarity that I had never encountered before. In a short time I developed a distaste for the grogginess and stupor that accompanied the above habits and before I knew it I had quit drinking and stopped overeating without skipping a beat. That always amazed me – but now I can see that going to a relatively higher level of consciousness brought with it higher preferences, which I chose to pay attention to and align myself with.

The thing is, most of us have these higher preferences in us. We just haven’t learned to pay attention to them, to be interested in our experience and find out how to act on them.

This is what I hope to awaken in us through this blog.

Submitted by Katherine Miller on February 2, 2008 - 3:50pm.

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Food, glorious food!

Submitted by Isabelle de Geofroy on February 11, 2008 - 10:12pm.

Thanks so much for bringing this topic up, Katherine! Making appropriate food choices is a very confusing terrain, one that I've struggled with for a long time. When I was young, I tried being the rebellious vegetarian, but saying no thank you to meat as a guest in someone's home seemed ungrateful to me, even arrogant. It was just another way of being a nonconformist. Over time, I realized that I actually felt better when I ate meat in reasonable quantities. Now I've come full circle and eat pretty much in the same way as how I was raised, which is an Americanized version of the French approach to food: lots of vegetables and salads, meat or beans for protein, bread and pasta, and fruit for dessert. And I make an effort to take the time to sit and have my meal and enjoy every bite! That's my baseline. Where I get thrown way off balance is by the onslaught of huge portions in restaurants, and most of all, the overwhelming availability of very sweet foods. I find it extremely difficult to resist, even as I'm aware that this is the American collective ego coming at me, enticing me into unconsciousness with an endless array of choices for my taste buds. My body doesn't like it...too much sugar, and a sickeningly sweet taste arises in my mouth. Too much food and I feel heavy or sleepy.

Your blog has already added to my awareness of what's happening...and yes, our relationship to food is deep and primal, and there are many layers to be discovered. Bringing an evolutionary enlightenment perspective to food has so much potential! I'm excited to keep going with this.

Isabelle

Value metabolism and food

Submitted by Marion Blake on February 14, 2008 - 3:48pm.

I was thinking about how our choices around food preferences reflect the levels of consiousness on the spiral of development. Like you, Katherine, my attraction to cabbage is that Eastern European conditioning, and my loyalty to Traditional consiousness. I remember being so relieved to see people drinking coffee on my first trip to Foxhollow..and thinking maybe there was more to food choices than being spiritually and nutritionally "correct", whatever that is. I've been looking at the reasons some of my friends are going raw, saying that is the way to eat to maintain optimal vibration with the universe. I'm realizing that there is something about this inquiry that's not about the conclusions around what to eat that is important. My relationship to food has definitly developed.. I don't eat merely for enjoyment, or not even just to keep the vehicle in optimum condition. I'm struck by how "awake" we need to be, how aware of our motivations, and how robotic I can be when I come at things from a "wanting to know the right answer' position. Steve McIntosh talks about "value metabolism" that is a capacity of Integral consiousness. One way I understand value metabolism is its the capacity to appreciate what is valuable at every level of development, to include that, as we transcend, and drop the scafolding that was appropriate for that "lower" level of development only. That sure opens things up in the way that I think about food!

Chocolate and Consciousness

Submitted by Ana Miller on February 6, 2008 - 2:04am.

Dear Katherine - It all makes sense to me. Of course the ego wants nothing to do with the questioning of food choices (hand me that 70% cocoa, piece of chocolate, please). I live in Northern California and people here are completely insane about food. Everyone is a connoisseur and it kind of seeps into your interior culture that you can eat what you want, whenever you want it (and by god it better be organic and sustainably grown). And you can actually think you're being totally 'conscious of what you are putting into your body', when in fact it is just another narcissistic and often time 'arrogant stand' as you said. I can actually feel the evolutionary tension in 'paying attention' and ever remaining 'interested' in this area of my life. It really can't be separated from wanting higher consciousness.

Love, Ana

The Great Comfort

Submitted by Kathryn Edwards on February 13, 2008 - 6:11pm.

Yes, this is a very important thread or line of communication. What an area of conscious disturbance for many of us! Once upon a time, when I had the time, I was very committed to a raw food diet. I even had my own garden! Between the growing and the chopping it was a very labor intensive process, though well worth it. Then on the advice of a naturopath, I went on a wheat free diet. Avoiding the 'white stuff' is a true challenge. The neat thing was many of the restaurants and cafes, where I was living caught on to what had become a local trend and offered many wheat free alternative. Returning to the states was a shock! Even in the San Francisco bay area, there were no wheat free alternatives in the cafes! (I have to throw this in though; I did stumble upon an amazing Vegan restaurant while in Santa Cruz and immediately thought perhaps I should live here again!) To go against the flow of society with regard to eating, is extraordinarily difficult. It seems we almost have to hermetize ourselves OR be motivated by greater intentions for sure! So, no doubt Katherine, you are on the right track in terms of bringing authentic consciousness to what we eat. Staying tuned to this thread as a means of engagement and support could be very helpful.

Kathy ~ Asheville, N.C.

Tags: eating, consciousness, vegan, vegetarian, cooking, diet, health, spirituality, food

Developing consciousness, of food

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:02:49 GMT

Looking back over my first two blogs on food and consciousness I can see it isn’t just a jog down memory lane. There are many different dimensions to a conscious/unconscious relationship to food and I hit on quite a few of them:

Culture – one of the biggest influences on our food identity

Social responsibility – which includes a huge array of ethical questions all directly connected (whether we like it or not) to the consequences of the foods we choose to eat

The rational, scientific, material orientation – eat it because it’s good for you, or because it’s fuel

Or, the gourmet/gourmand sensory reference point, eat it because it has to be the most wonderful thing you have ever tasted…

And finally the mysterious, unknowable, sacred dimension of food, the transmission of life force and the divine, the fact that we depend on the consumption of other life forms for our own lives.

And I am sure there is more, but even the word food is so underneath the radar of our conscious selves, it’s more a sound, pre-thought and primal…that sound is desire, need, survival….food enters us, becomes us, assuages our unspoken fears, fills the scary emptiness of our insecurities….receiving food is probably our very first experience of love, pleasure and happiness. You can’t think about and be objective about something that close, that intimate, something that basic to our very being, that strips us of our supremacy and individualism, makes us just one more component of a very living system, dependent on every other component for that system to exist. You can’t be objective about something this intimate, unless you get very conscious.

Tags: food, consciousness, aesthetics, health, spirituality, cooking, vegetarian

Food and consciousness - continued

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:54:07 GMT

My education in macrobiotics gave me my first insight into the deeper aesthetics of food. Instead of taste being the primary target I learned how taste, texture, color, presentation and preparation, when combined along the principles of yin and yang, produced a kind of alchemy in the meal prepared – it now held the power to transform you on a physical and mental level. I experienced these changes myself and always wondered why more people didn’t flock to this kind of diet when it held so much promise for curing illness, disease, and even neurosis. I even tried to cure my mother of MS, and succeeded in getting her into remission for 9 months, but she hated not being able to eat the food she was familiar with and went back to her old ways. After awhile it became clear that for most people the sacrifices they would have to make to follow such a diet were too extreme, and even for those of us that were willing and experienced profound change, our fundamental relationship to life stayed the same. The confidence, vitality, security and happiness that macrobiotics was meant to deliver never appeared.

Even so I continued to delve into the nuances of macrobiotics, inviting friends over for long dinners, or elaborate, gourmet picnics on the beach. I also cooked for pregnant and nursing mothers, and for yoga retreats. Often I would prepare meals made from plants and herbs I had foraged in the Boston Arboretum, whilst carrying my young daughter on my back. People started telling me I should open up a restaurant so I was definitely getting better. (The very first macrobiotic dinner I cooked in the study house I was living in was so bad that I was advised to either study up or refrain from cooking again)

After about 5 years of this I met my first spiritual teacher, Amachi. I wasn’t in the market for a guru, it wasn’t my trip, so it took me awhile to realize the relationship had occurred in spite of me. The turning point was my first experience of prasad. I was sitting in a garage in New Hampshire, the floor covered with rugs and the walls plastered with images of Krishna and Ganesh, about 30 of us blissed out in the presence of Ama. An Indian family arrived carrying a big pot of something very hot and handed it to Ama, who smiled with delight. She immediately took the lid off, plunged her hand into the steaming sticky mess and before we knew it big whacks of the impossibly hot, exotically spicy, and incredibly sticky pudding were slapped into our palms with Amachi laughing uproariously and urging us to eat, eat. It was an exalted experience of that alchemy, food, prepared by the devotee, transformed by the divine mother, received from the hand of God, eaten in a field of love, devotion and surrender to the guru. I had no idea what it all meant – only that something beyond the known had happened, I had received the sustenance and the blessing of the divine, through a pudding! on some level that my grosser, materialisitc self could not get a handle on.

To be continued J

Tags: food, consciousness, aesthetics, health, spirituality, cooking, vegetarian

Food and Consciousness - just the beginning

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:49:56 GMT

This is the first step towards sharing in blog form the evolution of my passion for the aesthetics of food and my growing experience of how this is related to consciousness. Recently I started to see more clearly just how important this connection is to developing a third tier culture. I would like to use this blog to explore this more fully and invite anyone who is interested to email me at kmiller@enlightennext.org.

I have also begun to see how my experience growing up has influenced the drive to make sense of this fundamental dimension of being alive. I love eating, and preparing, food. The Eastern European side of the family has a reverance for food that borders on the sacred - eating traditional fare together is what bonds us together, physically and emotionally, and also historically, to our unknown and distant ancestors. I was given the impression that if we stuck to this simple, salt of the earth, true food, it would keep us on the right path and even insure that we made it to heaven! My deep admirarion for cabbage comes from this side of the family.

We also fished, hunted, and raised animals to put meat on the table and I became concerned with the ethics of eating at an early age. Sometime around the age of 4 or 5 something flipped in my kid consciousness. I went from being curious about what happened when I pulled the legs off spiders, to crying over every accidently squashed bug. This developed until, much to the confusion and bewilderment of my folks, I became a vegetarian at 15.

But not eating meat doesn't necessarily mean eating well. After years of various indulgences I found my physical and mental health slip sliding away. It was at this point that I discovered macrobiotics. Also known as macroneurotics in some circles, :), it was the first time I sytematically tried to understand food and it's effects. It had an immediate and recognizable effect on my health and well being. It also taught me a whole slew of techniques and principles for food preparation and cooking that have helped me to push a creative and exploratory edge for the last 25 years.

To be continued :)

Tags: food, consciousness, enlightenment, eating, health, sprituality

A movement in the making

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 18:32:51 GMT

Evolutionary Enlightenment Webcast

Tags: Evolution, communication, enlightenment, authentic, inquiry

The Evolution of Evolutionary Enlightenment

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Fri, 04 May 2007 19:32:07 GMT

This is a video clip from a class I taught in Lenox, MA in which I describe the development that I have seen in Andrew Cohen's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment during the sixteen years that I have known him.

Katherines Evolutionary Enlightenment Course

Tags: andrew cohen, evolutionary enlightenment. wie, what is enlightenment?

A commitment to the highest....

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 03:51:11 GMT

The EE Course has finished – there was such a high level of engagement and inquiry these last three classes that after each one was over I felt slightly disoriented, my normal reference points had been left behind in reaching for a higher, bigger, purchase on the reality of the Kosmocentric context we find ourselves in and in trying to communicate that. We were all trying to grok something that is not already known or recognized as real, having to leave all reference points in the Known behind. When everyone in the class is doing that it’s like a group brain starts functioning. I often felt we were just beginning to coast on the edge of that collective brain wave, feeling out new ways of assessing the Universe we live in with this new tool, so different from our usual earthbound, two legged perspective…:)

We not only learnt something about our true purpose here in the Kosmos but also how we are to realize that purpose, the challenge is to put it into practice with the same sincerity, zeal, and commitment that everyone applied in the classroom. In the end this isn’t really a merely academic course, but an engagement that increases in the intensity of its demand for authenticity over the five classes until one is catapulted into action, compelled to live up to one’s highest understanding…..that’s my goal for the class participants, and my commitment as the teacher.

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Back into the teaching stream

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:20:17 GMT

Time to dust off my keypad and get my thoughts streaming into the blogosphere….I’ve been teaching the EE Course in Boston with co-teacher Andrea Hurley, and teaching Evolutionary Enlightenment stirs the mind and the heart and whips up that irritating appetite for change that won’t let you rest, but just keeps joyfully mysteriously needling you for more, seemingly cajollingly but actually relentlessly demanding full forward motion into a potential not yet realized…and it seems to be affecting not only me - the whole class is being stirred on some deep level to consider possibilities that from one perspective may seem ridiculously idealsitic or science fictional, but from a bigger, more universal perspective seem like the logical next step in the pursuit of a leap in conscious evolution.....How about....
….the creation of a new being as the next step in evolution…..considering ourselves as developing organs of perception for the Universe to know itself….that we not only could be, but are responsible for this whole Universe coming into being in the first place and therefore responsible for what it becomes…..

Big ideas, big imperatives, that tend to make the gut contract involuntarily even at first glance! Thank God for Class 3 next week – Meditation – that perennial practice of Being, that zero point that provides a firm platform for diving into the rushing stream of complexity that is Becoming…….

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Collective consciousness and evolution

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:51:46 GMT

Wow, my blogging skills are definitely not keeping up with the momentum of all these Evolutionary Enlightenment courses being taught all over the world! The weeks have been flying by in a blur of preparation, presentation, and synthesis of all we are learning by teaching the courses, in a constant cycle of giddy, off the starting blocks before the guns have a chance to go off kind of enthusiasm. Here at Foxhollow the second course of Evolutionary Enlightenment has been taught from start to finish for the first time ever. It was an experiment in team teaching which I think worked perfectly to convey the collective aspect of conscious evolution…preparation for the classes was so different than for the first course. Jeff Carreira and I would sit down to go over the course material and were soon in a headlong ascent of unself-conscious inquiry into the principles we were going to be teaching, an opened ended inquiry and discovery which just kept going and going – what you could call Enlightened Communication. By the time we came to the class all we needed to do was just continue the conversation, and that wasn’t hard because of the intersubjective space we had been building since the first course. Everyone was so open! This second part of the course is really about the most exciting part of Evolutionary Enlightenment - the collective emergence of a new Being, the formation of a new culture, the realization of one’s purpose as we reach towards a Kosmocentric consciousness.

By the end of the class the main question on everyone’s mind was “What Next?” As a result a local group is being formed to keep going amongst themselves. And I invited everyone that has taken the course to a pilot presentation of an introductory video to Andrew’s teachings on Evolutionary Enlightenment that we needed to get some feedback on. (great success – learned a lot – back to the drawing board!) We have so many other courses being planned or in development - the next few months are going to be very productive…..

And now we are preparing to do a teacher training session for our next batch of EE Course teachers, about 20 of them, starting the 4^th of December….!

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No stopping the forces of evolution....

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:31:18 GMT

The last two plus weeks have been a full tilt head on collision/dance with this evolutionary life – no rest for the weary or the wicked :) or those passionate about the evolution of consciousness… Between Jeff Carreira’s business course adventures at UBS and Deutsche Bank, Andrew Cohen’s teachings in NYC and the opening of the NYC EnlightenNext Center (whilst Jeff and I taught an impromptu 2 hour EE class to 20 acupuncturists here at Foxhollow)……Andrew’s talk with Deepak Chopra the next day with an audience of 1000 (while another group of us was busy breaking the Foxhollow bubble by partaking in a day of practice and paradigm cracking meetings at the Cambridge EnlightenNext Center…)……teaching the first class of Part 2 of the EE Course – the whole class swimming in the field of consciousness together……the posting of Andrew’s blog on www.ac.org ………The Evolutionary Enlightenment Intensive this past weekend (my hat for that event was a chef’s cap)…..the flurry of visitors from allover working together in our kitchen, asking questions, engaging enthusiastically with what they had learned on the retreat and putting it to the test……and then, another week gone round, the second class of Part 2 of the EE Course – The Universe Project.

And what a class! Jeff employed some unusual means to get us to see how we see and what it is to be awake and aware, conscious, that our consciousness is the consciousness of the Universe. In this class you just have to let go of everything and let your imagination run wild - it takes a leap to get that we are trying to conceive of something we haven’t yet got the wiring to do. I keep thinking what it must have been like for the first organism to see – it must have been responding to something in its experience that it wanted more of - and seeing was that next step in conscious awareness. We are at that place now in trying to understand who we really are at this moment in our history as the Universe itself…trying to develop new organs of perception simply through reaching for something we can feel but not see, barely imagine or intuit but not yet grasp…

Jeff and I also hit a new level of freedom in teaching together – a deeper level of letting go to our individual passion for what we are doing - a new layer of self consciousness fell away in myself and also in relationship to Jeff as being other… and only two more days until the next class where we will start to go into the 6 principles…!!!!

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Touch down

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 03:29:04 GMT

Wow, I feel like I've just run through the tape at the end of a race! Or, since the first class I taught all those weeks ago felt like jumping out of an airplane, this feels like I've just landed, both feet firmly on the ground...and looking up into the sky I can see all my fellow teachers of Evolutionary Enlightenment at various stages of freefall..it's not imagination, it's really happening, and consciousness is moving, expanding, and changing as a result. What an adventure this has been, into the realm of authentic engagement - giving what I've got in terms of life experience in these teachings to the class in real time, and pushing the edge of my development as a teacher...and class 5 really embodied both these aspects. We covered all of the 5 tenets, going into what the rules of engagement would be for living an Enlightened life, with a kind of serious intent that that was only possible because of the depth we had gone to together in the previous 4 classes. There is so much in these tenets, Andrew often says he never gets tired speaking about them and he's been teaching the tenets in particular for over 10 years now! We grappled with the absolute context in living the tenets, the position of freedom first before all else, and my experience was that that created an openess and receptivity inthe room - all the other tenets seem to flow out naturally from there and make perfect sense.

By the end of the class I experienced the kind of bonding that happens when you all push through something, individually and together, that brings you all higher and further than you have ever gone before. There was an ecstatic tension in the air and people hung out for a long time after the class. I realized the personal goal of bringing my first class, step by step - and I think better and better - through the entire foundation of these beloved teachings. :) Joy! It releases a passion to only do more, and more and more.....the teachings are true and real and practical - change, transformation and evolution is possible and there is a noble endeavor, in this post post modern world, to be engaged with that could change the world……!

Many of the people in this class will be coming back for the next 5 weeks to take Part 2 of the course, which Jeff Careirra and I will be teaching, so stayed tuned for further updates in this ongoing pursuit of authenticity and the evolution of consciousness...

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Class 4: The Ego and the Authentic Self....

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:06:23 GMT

Every week, as a way of setting the context for the class we are about to begin, we do an overview of the previous classes to see where we have come to and where we are headed. It's becoming my favorite part of the class. One of the greatest gifts of these teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment is that it shows us how to locate ourSelves in the midst of a surging sea of postmodern narcissistic conditioning and the overwhelming complexity of the world and times we are living in. And the more we learn - the more accurately we can see and place ourselves - the more powerfully we can take responsibility for our lives: for who we are now and who we want to become, and for what the world is now and what we want it to become. In the last four classes I have felt almost overwhelmed at the surge of consciousness and potential that emerges as we continue to reach for a perspective on ourselves and our predicament, from the highest and deepest understanding we have come to up to that point.

This class was a deep investigation into Andrew’s teachings on the Ego and Authentic Self and our actual, in the moment experience of these two completely contradictory relationships to living. Learning to discriminate between these two expressions of ourselves is one of the most important foundational elements of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Which brought us to a huge discovery: the fact that we exist before these two options as the chooser, the one who decides in every moment, which life-stream or path we are going to follow, and therefore who we are going to be. Bringing light to this chooser, as Andrew says, allows us to choose the Authentic Self over the Ego, and it is this movement – from Ego to Authentic Self - which sets the ground for a new culture, a new moral theology and, in my opinion, changes the world as we know it.

Last week Jeff Carreira had a guest spot in my class introducing a new slide he had developed – it went so well we decided to teach the last two classes in this session together. There is something really amazing to teach something you love so much with another who is also completely passionate about it. There is such freedom to be your self, distinctly different in personality and expression and in some cases, even in understanding, and yet at the same time experience the complete absence of boundaries and other. By the end of the class it felt like we were all in a moment that would never stop, where consciousness itself was our only identity.

And there is only one more class to go! But the good news is that Jeff will be teaching the second level right afterwards for 5 more Tuesdays, and I will be assisting him – so this particular adventure in the pursuit of Evolutionary Enlightenment won’t be over soon!

The other completely exciting news is that 5 more classes in Evolutionary Enlightenment are starting up world wide this week, with 17 more to come......so if you feel a tremor in consciousness at any point it might be due to this.....

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Into the deep end...

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:11:54 GMT

We really stepped into the deep end together in class 3 - exploring meditation, and it's role and significance, in the evolution of consciousness in the 21st century...The most challenging part is stepping back far enough to see what our actual relationship, free or unfree, is to all of our experience - we are, after all, highly conditioned beings, usually completely identified with thought and feeling. The idea that we are not responsible for our thoughts goes against the grain of our new age upbringing and when it was brought up in the beginning of the class, it was the first time many had considered it....deeply contemplating this turns everything upside down and we found ourselves wondering who we are and what are we doing here from a complettely different place!

We spoke at length together about the meditation instruction, "letting everything be as it is", and what it really means in the practice of meditation. It's much more radical than you might think at first glance - even the experinces of "observing" or being "detached" that people reffered to, don't touch it, it's such an absolute postion of no relationship whatsoever to whatever arises in consciousness. When we finally meditated together, listening to Andrew Cohen's guided meditation, there was a united attention and intention to explore this position and a deep stillness enveloped the room.

It's exciting to see the consciousness of the class as a whole, as well as individually, developing - the intersubjective aspect of our exploration into Evolutionary Enlightenment is becoming more and more pronounced and when we all meditated together this became even more experiential....we are able to go so much farther and deeper together....

Here's what one student had to say:
"I am just writing to say that last night's class was freeing and filled with the collective consciousness....I feel that there was a significant collectiveness that was present during our meditation- it was incredible and I think this class has superbness to it and a deep commitment to all be free and better this world- it feels ecstatic. I think we are all superheros of enlightenment."

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On the trail of class three

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:02:00 GMT

I just had a thrilling teaching session with EE Course designer, Jeff Carreira, reviewing the first two classes we have done, and then delving deeply into the the next step they are leading to - our real live experience of and engagement in the practice of meditation - as an entry point to Evolutionary Enlightenment and the authentic self. I find this whole process of learning to teach incredilbly Enlightening ; ) . It brings all one's LIFE experinece right into the present, into the fullest context possible. All of it becomes fodder for learning when it is seen from the perspective of change and development in real time real life for the highest purpose. I have this funny experience of it not being MY life anymore but just a particular stream of human development, that when seen from afar, is just one stream amongst a galaxy of streams, all moving forward with One purpose. It is so mind bogglingly impersonal! It frees one up from any idea that any experience could be inherently limiting, which is what we end up discovering in the practice of meditation itself. What a fantastic journey to be on together.....

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Two down - three to go!

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 20:06:52 GMT

Class 2 of the Evolutionary Enlightenment course, Context is Everything, took us all out further on that edge of understanding, knowing and not knowing, flying and falling, than we expected. Afterwards, I discovered a couple of people from the class walking around wondering what had hit them and they weren't so sure of who they were anymore... It was a powerful message to Wake Up! and realize our place in the Universe, to deeply consider our role in the evolution of the Universe itself, something Andrew Cohen calls "the Universe project". Just stretching our minds and bodies and souls to embrace, as fully as possible, the biggest context, from the biggest possible perspective, puts us there, teetering on that edge, scarily overwhelmed and compelled by that very impulse to evolve. The continually amazing thing to me is that you can get to a really deep, full understanding of these big questions - who am I really? what am I supposed to be doing here?, simply through taking your own experience so seriously and going so deeply into it, that you start to unravel them from what seems like the inside out, until you realize there is no inner and outer, what's inside is outside and visa versa! We are the Universe itself....

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A new step into the unknown

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:38:07 GMT

Last night I taught the first of 5 classes in the Evolutionary Enlightenment Course, here at the EnlightenNext headquarters in Foxhollow - it really was a leap into the unknown, even with the excellent training, support and advice from the course designer, Jeff Carreira (check out his blog!) . In the end the feeling is of throwing yourself in and giving it all you've got, knowing there is so much to give and a lot to learn at the same time. The fact that Jeff and I also share many years as students of these teachings of Andrew Cohen makes it even better - it brings out the true purpose of a collaborative relationship based in no limitation and the evolution of consciousness itself. From my own experience of the class it is obvious that I am going to be developing right along with everyone else and the very act of attempting to convey this teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment puts our collective attention on exactly that place, in each one of us, that wants to know itSelf ever more deeply and expand it’s Self knowledge ever more infinitely.

We have a really great group of people – 21 so far – a nice cross section of the Berkshires and beyond, with a couple more people coming next week. I’d love to hear any questions or comments you have so we can all set the stage for an even bigger leap into the unknown in Class 2!

In love and inspiration, Katherine

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promise ahead

http://flametamer.gaia.com — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:28:05 GMT

Hello All,

This is my first foray into blogger world! I have a specific purpose - to initiate a conversation between myself and anyone interested in taking the Evolutionary Enlightenment course I will be teaching in September. Once the class starts this will be a place for me to post my thoughts on how its going and for anyone in the course to do the same - a fertlile ground for us to continue going into what gets opened up in class and what happens during the (contemplative) week between each class....This is the last day of the teacher training course and I am looking forward to the classes ahead and the opportunity to share this with as many interested souls as possible.....

Currently myself and some of my friends and fellow students of Andrew Cohen are experiencing an explosion in consciousness like never before. Take a look at this video if you wnat to know more! Love, Katherine

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