One day when I was 15 my mother returned home from Devon England after meeting spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen for the first time, she walked in the door, glowing with bliss I had never seen in my short life like it . . . I remember my father becoming instantly bright red in the face with anger . . . “you’ve fallen in love haven’t you” he growled . . . and in a way I guess she had.

So I wanted to tell the story of a long-time student of Andrew Cohen. Casting my eyes through the array of links  . . . (we’re all fascinated to see what google dredges up), a good deal of it pretty scathing stuff about Andrew Cohen, all sounds pretty heavy, what kind of a deranged idiot would want to be a student?! A good piece of advice I received when I was a five year old still applies . . .  “You don’t want to believe everything you hear “ — So as an effort to help put the record straight about this remarkable, if a bit unusual life . . . Im going to blog about it :)

THE PAST: Three years later, after being pretty adamant I would never have a teacher, I met Andrew  . . . I was 19 years old . . . within 3 more years my life turned upside down,  I had quit college and moved into Andrews Cohen’s London community with other students.

OK fast-forward 14 years . . . a serious amount of life experience has happened, I imagine several lifetimes worth (if you believe in the multiple birth thing ;))

THE PRESENT: Last night Andrew, myself and seven other male students had a sauna together. We started at 11.30pm, Andrew had just finished a call with a young teacher named Swami Sai Premananda, a western-asian Indian growing up in Toronto Canada, he had been told to go out and teach by non other than Sai Baba, but he was starting to question some of the trappings of his lineage, and was finding a lot of strength and inspiration in Andrews own story, and exploration of enlightenment in a post-metaphysical context. As Andrew relayed the conversation all of us were marveling at the similarity in story, but also in this young teachers courage to question thousands of years of tradition in search of truth. For myself it very tangibly demonstrates Ken Wilber’s  ‘Myth of the Given’.

We spent several hours in an intense sauna recipe! You bake your brains out for 20mins then cold plunge . . . repeat until utterly totally blasted and ecstatic! The only rule is no one leaves the sauna until the the sand timer is empty . . . ok its kind of macho, but it keeps the collective field tight, the philosophy is your in it together— no matter what :)

After that we hung out for another hour or so sitting around a table, snacking on nuts and cereal, discussion among other things Ken’s health, the recent organizational changes at I-I, and then heard Andrew’s vision for the next 2 years of EnlightenNext— the ‘evolution of our revolution’ ( we often refer to our community “the revolution” because sadly the ‘C’ word belongs to a bygone era . . . the ‘60s :) ). . . more about this later

AT 2.30 am I rolled into bed, my wife who had been asleep rolled over and said with a grin ‘you have fun?’,  I smiled back and we both quickly fell asleep.

She and a group of close women students had spent the afternoon with Andrew — all afternoon from what I can tell. Terri said it was video’ed  so should have some footage of what happened soon . . . for now heres another video check this out.

OK . . . so there we have it my first post on an evening in the life of a close student of Andrew Cohen . . .

To be honest we don’t celebrate Christmas. When it comes to Christianity my upbringing is pretty secular (right Mum). Foxhollow is pretty empty; students are with their families but will be returning over the next few days in preparation for next weekend.

At 2pm Katherine (our exceptional head cook) informed a small group of guys  “there had been an idea . . .”  the Men prepare dinner. I’m sure for many men this is bread and butter, a staple life experience . . . This doesn’t apply this small group of men! Our diet has in recent years taken a serious swing in the uber health direction, from vegetarian, to vegan, to raw . . .  so when it comes to gourmet vegetarian food, most of us are a little out of practice :-) Anyhow needless to say, I think when we realized that we had an opportunity to roast potatoes, roast sprouts, roast seitan (yes seitan), gravy and peas etc and the finished product would be predominantly brown and black and not green, the mood changed from panic to ecstasy.

We followed the meal with the movie . . . about 40 of us crammed into a room with our teacher watching “Devil wears Prada” . . . if you haven’t seen it you must. Very smart and sassy plot, great characters . . . Meryl Streep was born to play her role. Its a must see for anyone out there who (like me) feels superior to the superficiality of the fashion industry . . . . Pushes all you buttons but makes you re-think your position.

New Years eve is going to be a big celebration here. We are going to have a large wedding ceremony . . . large in that several couples are getting married (Kool Aid not supplied :-). . . Oh INS please don’t panic its all kosher) At this point Andrew is planning to give a talk to his students about Sexual Relationship in an Evolutionary Enlightenment context, and then we’ll have the ceremony . . . the evening will be capped off by Andrew’s band Unfulfilled Desires playing. More on all this as the plans unfold . . .

So I’m taking a tangent here . . . confessions of an ex- artist . . . yes I have become the archenemy — the Anti-Artist . . . I have whats called MBD or Master Brand Disorder. I’ve been a designer and Art Director for 14 years now and in this time my perspective has shifted from creating “art” to ‘building brands’ . . . in other words to all you artists out there . . . Yes I sold out!

Seriously though in the last year I’ve been working with super consultant Kevin Clark, who has help the organization and me make this critical shift. With Kevin’s help we changed the name of our organization from “Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship” (How did that ever happen? I tell you it wasn’t me :-)) to “EnlightenNext” . . . ahhh! simple you see . . . the-next-enlightenment!

Over the next few months I’m going to start rolling out our new brand which much more accurately illustrates what EnlightenNext’s actual mission is . . .

So for your eyes only, on this very special occasion, I’m going to pull away the curtain and reveal all!!!! PS I have divided all we do into 4 distinct ‘streams’ (and its very important never to cross these streams)

Oh yes . . . this is all still a work in progress . . . as always everything is impermanent :)