Last spring senior editor Carter Phipps dove into the trenches to find the answer to a question that has been on our minds for some time now:
Is God a pacifist? In our post-9/11 world, with acts of terrorism and war being increasingly justified on the grounds of religious convictions, one has to wonder: what is the actual relationship between spirituality and violence? Seeking out answers both popular and political, religious and mystical, Carter interviewed hippies, activists, mystics, politicians, and others for their insights. As expected, the result was a collection of answers vast and varied, but there also emerged a few consistent, underlying themes—including the fact that these days there’s a rather large evolutionary perspective to take into account, in which pacifism and violence, homeostasis and conflict, are seen as dynamic partners in an undulating upward spiral of increasing complexity and unification. “What we have to be able to do,” explains cultural evolution wizard Don Beck, “is learn how to manage
emergence—not peace, but emergence. Trying to create peace means we’re operating in a closed system, and then once we bring tranquility, harmony, and unity, everything will be fine. But that’s homeostatic, equilibrium thinking. It’s not human nature.”
This issue’s
Guru and the Pandit dialogue continues the theme, with
WIE editor-in-chief/spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and I-I President/integral philosopher Ken Wilber discussing the nature of war, peace, and God from the perspective of radical nonduality. “As we begin to understand that God is manifest, unmanifest, and also transcends both,” Andrew observes, “then the question arises: What does the nature of God
look like as it becomes conscious of itself?”
And that’s just scratching the surface of the goods we packed into Issue 26. With contributors like Mario Cuomo, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Robert Wright, Ann Druyan, and Thomas de Zengotita adding their voices to the revolutionary mix—as well as feature articles ranging from “Women Who Sleep with Their Gurus” to a sci-fi comic satire on MTV—well, we may be somewhat biased, but we feel that this is by far our best issue yet.
Of course,
WIE is more than just a magazine. We’re striving to help create a cultural and spiritual
revolution, and we can’t do it with the printed word alone. That’s why we’ve recently added some new features to
www.wie.org that reveal some of the new ways in which we’re reaching out to the world, including:
WIE Unbound – an online multimedia broadcast service, where you can get the direct transmission of the kind of inquiry that makes
WIE unique by listening to our interviews with the leading-edge thinkers appearing in the pages of the magazine...
Master of Arts in Conscious Evolution – a two-year, fully accredited degree program in partnership with the Graduate Institute (TGI), based in Connecticut, that definitely isn’t just an intellectual exercise. In addition to regular studies (with
WIE being a major resource), participants will experientially engage in Andrew’s teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment, where the collective becomes a vehicle for accelerated learning and real-time transformation...
The Parliament of the World’s Religions – held this July in Barcelona, Andrew and nine of his students (including
WIE editors Craig Hamilton and Carter Phipps) participated in the extraordinary interfaith event, recorded footage for a documentary film currently in production, and generally “sat in the presence of great saints and sages, debated policy with UN officials, and discussed the state of the world with scholars and philosophers....”
Voices from the Edge – our international speaker’s forum continues pushing the edge of evolution into uncharted territory, as acclaimed personalities from the pages of
WIE—including Howard Bloom, Jim Garrison, Elisabet Sahtouris, and Don Beck—light up our London, New York, Boston, and Western Massachusetts venues (and soon the airwaves of
WIE Unbound, as well) with their inspiring global visions of second-tier insight...
And at those same venues—and others in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris—Andrew’s Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings are coming alive nearly every week in a remarkable new kind of discussion group called
Enlightened Communication. Open to the public, these groups reveal human interaction as we might imagine it to be in a perfect world, in which the egoic barriers normally separating individuals are startlingly absent. As Andrew explains in his new editorial column for Issue 26, “
The Higher WE”:
“Of course, consciousness beyond ego always means the state of enlightenment itself. So what I'm referring to is the shared experience and recognition of enlightened consciousness, where the shadow of ego or separate self-sense is entirely absent. In this experience of intersubjective consciousness beyond ego, a momentous leap occurs. It is a leap from
I to
We, from extreme individuation to a living context of intersubjective nonduality—a higher
We consciousness in which all parties experience simultaneously their own individual and collective transparency while remaining fully and completely
themselves.”
While Andrew leads 200 people deeper into this experience on a retreat in the south of France, here at home (Lenox, MA) we’re putting the finishing touches on
WIE Issue 27 (available on newsstands in November) and just beginning Issue 28. Now that we’re coming out four times a year, there’s never a dull moment here on the edge of ceaseless inquiry, and we’re loving every second of it!
For more information go to:
www.andrewcohen.org
www.wie.org
For Andrew and Ken taped dialogues, see Integral Naked.
