Past to Present . . . in a 30 seconds

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 . . .