Spiritual Practice includes Values
Andrew Cohen publishes a magazine called EnlightenNext, which used to be What is Enlightenment? About 5 years ago he became very interested in Spiral Dynamics integral (SDi) and for a time was in collaboration with Don Beck. Together with Don, Cohen and his team wrote one of the most easily digestible articles on the SD material, include a lot of the (SDi) content on their website, produced a video called Leap into the Future from which a 25 minute overview of Spiral Dynamics I’ve used often in my own presentations of the SDi model.
Having participated in 5 in depths retreats at Foxhollow (the headquarter for EnlightenNext), I, personally, find Andrew’s teachings of enlightenment extremely helpful in my own personal emergence and his Evolutionary Enlightenment views are integrated into my life practice and worldview.
I have been especially pleased to find emails like this one showing up in my inbox of late. To me, it demonstrates the evolving nature and teaching of Andrew’s perspective and indicates a deeper integration of the Spiral Dynamics insights and the importance of understanding value systems into the core essence of Andrew’s work.
Freely Choosing to be Yourself
Our values are what define the choices we make, the actions we take, the life that we create. They are a set of subtle and not so subtle beliefs, ideas, and ways of seeing the world that we deeply subscribe to but may not even be conscious of. And if we’re not conscious of the values of the conditioned self, they are going to inhibit our capacity to be truly awake. So it’s imperative, if you want to be an agent of conscious evolution, to bring the light of awareness to this level of your self. What are your deeply held values? Are they your values? Did you freely choose them? Probably not. Very few people freely choose their own values. Many of us who have grown up in a postmodern world where the freedom of individual is valued above all else assume that we have freely chosen our values, but it’s very rarely true. So this is why the culturally conditioned self is a subject in all of us that needs to be made an object in the light of our own awareness, so that we will be in a position to begin to freely choose who we will be. We have to, in a sense, die and be reborn again. This is what rigorous and serious spiritual practice is all about: learning how to freely choose to be yourself. Andrew Cohen
However, I must add, that Andrew’s view, although informed by value systems, is not the same teaching as Spiral Dynamics, a model that is steeped in framing values systems and change. Nor do I think that Andrew’s integration of value systems is one that I would support, unilaterally. What I do support is his effort of integration for himself, like my own integration of the work for myself.
What I support is the integration of enlightenment teachings and value systems for personal development because value systems are important. Mike Jay, who is constantly pushing an edge of the Spiral Dynamics model, presents a provocative perspective where he indicates the process of valuing exists very early in the mental sequence in the brain as humans responded to stimulants in our environment.
There is no integration effort, at this point, that is scientifically validated, nor is there necessarily an integration that will serve everybody. The question is: what integration will serve you – living where you live, dealing with the conditions you live in?
