Enlightened Communication retreat part 1

I have just arrived back from another retreat with my teacher Andrew Cohen, but this time it was dedicated to the practice and development of Enlightened Communication .

The schedule was:
06:30-Meditation
07:30-Breakfast
09:00-Session with Andrew
12:30-Lunch
14:15-Meeting with groups
16:15-Break
17:00-Session with Andrew
19:30-Dinner
21:00-Meditation 1hour min

The practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment is all about learning how to discriminate between and experience different dimensions of ourselves, then liberating the choosing faculty in ourselves to evolve beyond the conditioned self with other people to create a new higher structure in consciousness thereby participating in the transformation of consciousness and culture.
The first few days of the retreat was dedicated  to exploring what the conditioned ego is and how we can learn to see it with more objectivity in ourselves.
First of all what I was discovering with more clarity  is that the ego is simultaneously our best friend and our worst enemy. Our friend in that it is our amazing capacity to separate ourselves from our environment, if the Universe had no means of separating parts of itself from its own creation it could not revel in it's own glory. The classic developmental sequence is egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric. With each level offering a greater capacity to dissembed our identity from our ethnic roles, cultural roles etc. Allowing us greater freedom to think and see ourselves as parts of larger and larger wholes.

So ego development in that sense is good and can only help. But the downside to ego development especially in a post-modern worldcentric culture is that individuation has taken on pathological versions, just turn on the T.V or look at how people are miserably infatuated with their own self image 24 hours a day. This causes the highest rates of depression and suicide anywhere in the world, even though the western world has the most people with the highest standard of living at any time in human history.
As Ken Wilber call it the dialectic of progress, good news/ bad news.

On one hand these pathological versions can be experienced individually as depression, alienation, low self-esteem, arrogance etc. But on the other hand these individual expressions of ego  are an integral part of the collective value sphere of the culture.

So the way we explored ego on the retreat was to see it as part of a collective of values that we inherit as part of  the worldview of the particular culture we are born into.

As people explored their values they inherited due to to their own upbringing an interesting picture emerged. The people that grew up in a more traditional background had more of an emphasis on the family, it was important for them to get married have kids and be part of an extended family. With this kind of upbringing traditional religion was also part of the picture be it Hinduism, Christianity etc.

 People that were brought up in a more modern context the values they inherited leaned  towards the emphasis on achievement,  individual excellence, winning etc. God was not really part of the picture as it was with  tradition values, in fact  religion was no where to be found except in the bank account of the materialist worldview.

Then when people were brought up in a more post-modern context the values they absorbed were more to do with an emphasis on equality, were nothing can be judged to be higher or lower, everybody is at the same level whether it be Jesus or Hitler, free love for all etc.

What is interesting is that most people have a mixture of these culturally given values. We believe it is us that has chosen them , but we are so moulded by the culture we are brought into.
We experience these values like emotional shoulds i.e. I must be in a relationship, I must have kids now, I have to be successful, do not judge etc.
In the discussion groups we each talked about our background. the fruit of this exercise is to see how conditioned we all are. If we are serious about transformation seeing this as deeply as possible is paramount because without seeing ourselves (subject) as an object in our own awareness we will never be able to be a vehicle for a higher potential structure with new values etc.

I will be writing two more blogs on the retreat one on meditation and one on the exploration of Evolutionary impulse or what Andrew call the Authentic Self.