Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

For those of you who have been reading What Is Enlightenment? for some time, as well as those of you who are just discovering us, I'm pleased to announce that you are now holding in your hands our very first quarterly issue! For the past twelve years, we have come out semiannually, and I have to admit that instead of being a real magazine, we had slowly but surely turned into nothing less than a big fat book that appeared twice a year. Each issue was based on a single theme, and this enabled us to cover the topics we chose with a kind of comprehensive depth that is rarely found on newsstands. And we were proud to be able to offer the world a philosophical and spiritual triple-decker sandwich every six months.

But for some time now, the editorial team and I have yearned for greater creative freedom. We wanted to be able to explore the ever more rapidly changing world that we are all living in from the perspective of enlightened awareness, in an evolutionary context, free from thematic constrictions. We longed to spread our wings and fly anywhere that seemed appropriate or important in the moment. Also, we wanted to be more inclusive, to begin to explore culture, politics, the arts, and current events, expanding our ongoing inquiry beyond the so-called spiritual marketplace. In fact, what we're trying to do, in our own small way, is help to redefine the very meaning of the word “spiritual” for the postmodern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The world that we're living in is changing faster and faster every day. And the very speed of change itself is forcing all sensitive and thoughtful souls to stretch beyond familiar modes of thinking in order to meet the overwhelming demands of our time. The way we create the future literally depends on the way that we think about it. In the pages of What Is Enlightenment? we want to help create that future by trying to expand and deepen the context in which the leading edges of that thinking are taking place. It is our firm conviction that through the practice of sincere inquiry, of honest dialogue together, we can discover new perspectives that will enable all of us to make much greater sense of our shared human experience at this pivotal time in our development. Now that we will be coming out four times a year, we hope to widen our embrace to include more and more people in the most exciting adventure there is—ever awakening to a higher and deeper understanding of who we are and what our role is in this evolving universe.