Tuesday, Jul 31, 2007

Becoming Emotionally Rational

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In our last two calls, we spoke about choice as a faculty - a function of being alive and being human, and about free will and karma - how the momentum of choices we make, over and over again over many years, shapes our perception of what is possible, often giving us the impression that we don’t have free will. In this call we will grapple with one of the most basic human experiences in relationship to volitionality - our experience of emotion. When we are in the midst of the experience of strong emotions we often believe we have no choice. Think about it - what’s your most recent experience of fear or doubt, desire, or even happiness, and how did that influence the choices you made? The experience of fear can be as debilitating as running into a brick wall for many of us, stopping us in our tracks and rendering all our good intentions useless. But if our goal is to be free, so we can consciously change and evolve, we need to find a way to navigate by something more stable than whatever emotion happens to be on the horizon. To do that we need to develop an objective or rational perspective on our emotional experience.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 11:40 AM |   

Saturday, Jul 21, 2007

Free Will, Victimization and Karma

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In the end we either believe in free will or we don’t, and most of us don’t. Certainly we believe that we have some free will, but we also believe that there are extenuating circumstances that sometimes make a free choice impossible. Because of this we feel victimized by the experience of being alive and trapped in cycles of behavior that we are fundamentally helpless to liberate ourselves from. Is the part of us that makes choices – what Andrew Cohen calls the choosing faculty – free or not? What could possibly stop us from making the choice we want to? Don’t we always make exactly the choice that we choose? Are there some choices that aren’t choices? Do we have free will or not? These are the complex questions that we will explore on this week’s call.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 4:44 PM |   

Tuesday, Jul 17, 2007

Engagement Update

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On this podcast I outline new structures for engagement with the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment and Andrew Cohen that are being developed and will become available to students of Evolutionary Enlightenment and Andrew Cohen.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 8:30 AM |   

Monday, Jul 16, 2007

The Law of Volitionality

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The second of Andrew Cohen’s Five Fundamental Tenets of Evolutionary Enlightenment is called The Law of Volitionality and it points directly at the human capacity to choose. In this call, we will look into this utterly mysterious capacity. What is choice? How do we do it? At the more basic levels of purely physical consciousness it appears that the ability to choose does not exist. A tree doesn’t choose to grow leaves any more than we chose to grow arms. As consciousness, and the organisms it expresses itself through, become more complex, the capacity for choice begins to emerge. We as human beings are making choices constantly. Not just choices about what to do, but choices about where to put our attention, what thoughts to believe in, and what feelings to respond to. Understanding that our lives are constructed exclusively by the choices that we make unleashes the highest possibility for creativity imaginable—the possibility of creating a fully conscious human existence.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 12:16 PM |   

Friday, Jul 06, 2007

The End of Seeking

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On our next call, we will continue to explore the depth and subtlety involved in coming to a final reckoning about what is most important in life by discussing what it would mean to come to the end of seeking. Most of us are seeking, looking, hoping to find whatever it is that will make perfect sense out of life. Isn't it true? One way to understand the principle that Andrew Cohen calls "Clarity of Intention" is to think about it as coming to the end of seeking. And that means really the end. Clarity of Intention is not about "seeking" harder. It is about not seeking at all. It is about finding. When we are talking about enlightenment no one finds by seeking harder, seeking harder is still seeking, when you stop seeking you find. Often the problem isn't that we haven't discovered what is most important in life; it is that we are still hedging our bets, still holding out for a better deal and are still unwilling to take what we have already found seriously.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 2:43 PM |   

Sunday, Jul 01, 2007

Clarity of Intention

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This week we embark on an investigation into the first of Andrew Cohen’s Five Fundamental Tenets of Enlightenment—“Clarity of Intention.” This tenet asserts that the outcome of one’s quest for Truth, liberation, and growth at the level of consciousness depends entirely on what one intends in the first place. Nothing is left to chance or grace. The results of our efforts to evolve are limited only by our own intention. Those who recognize and accept the truth of this fact discover the miraculous possibility of finally becoming completely whole, unified and totally committed to life without any trace of ambivalence about why we are here.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 12:08 PM |