Living Enlightenment: The Five Tenets
Enlightenment or spiritual awakening is the revelation and direct gnosis of a nondual dimension at the heart of reality, the experience of which – at least momentarily – silences the ego, and completely destroys any sense of separation or spatio-temporal existence.
The pristine liberation and bliss that this primal state experience elicits is beyond anything that can be described. It is the feeling of being itself, a state of limitless freedom from time, and the cycle of birth and death. It is heaven, paradise, nirvana, Godhead – the definitive answer to the question who am I?
But upon re-entry, as temporal reality coheres around us again and we confront the paradoxical truth of embodied existence in all its complexity, the next question that naturally and spontaneously arises for the realiser of nondual truth is how shall I live?
Here Andrew Cohen offers a comprehensive overview of the Five Tenets – a set of principles that, individually and collectively, represent both the path and the goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment.
The founder of the teachings is your guide as you take an experiential journey through the Five Tenets, grounding you in a practice that truly is living enlightenment in every sense of what that means.
Living Enlightenment
The Five Tenets
1. Clarity of Intention – Wanting To Be Free More Than Anything Else
2. The Power of Volition – Taking Responsibility
This tenet calls you to disengage from the deeply embedded negative patterns and victimised belief structures of the separate self-sense, and step into a new relationship with the whole of reality through identification with a deeper impulse.
The primordial principle that is responsible for all of creation is none other than you – your own Authentic Self. As that one, you don’t experience ambivalence or hesitation. You are compelled to take unconditional responsibility for all of reality – past, present and future; personal, collective and cosmic.
3. Face Everything and Avoid Nothing – The Ultimate Spiritual Practice
Striving for the highest means you must find a way to become unafraid – not only of your dark shadows, but also of unleashing your own higher potentials. Becoming authentically transparent to ourselves and others involves courageously aspiring to reverse the ego’s perpetual habit of avoidance.
No mean feat, but enlightened transparency is always already the natural condition of the Authentic Self, so as you diligently practice this tenet, you discover – as with each of these principles – that the path and the goal are one.
4. The Process Perspective – The Impersonal Truth of Existence
The fourth tenet compels us to view every aspect of our own condition, and the human condition itself, within a vast cosmic context. As we practice and discover liberation from our habitual identification with a fundamentally personal orientation, we are empowered to place our experience within the immense and deeply impersonal context of cosmic evolution.
As the Authentic Self, we recognise ourselves to be part of this infinitely unfolding and relentlessly positive developmental process of creation.
5. Cosmic Conscience – For the Sake of the Whole
When we begin to awaken deeply to each of the tenets, and as we identify more and more with the Authentic Self, finally a threshold is crossed. We find ourselves caring more deeply about the evolutionary impulse than we do about our ego’s fears, desires and goals.
This doesn’t mean that we lose our precious gifts of sovereignty or individuality – it means that a deep sense of moral obligation to serve this cosmic unfolding is awakened in us, and our sovereignty is liberated to become a choiceless vehicle for the evolutionary impulse, for evolution itself.