Editorial

A Revolution in Consciousness and Culture

Andrew Cohen

Editors’ Picks

From humble beginnings to international success, What Is Enlightenment? has spent a decade and a half taking our readers on a multidimensional exploration of contemporary spirituality. For this special anniversary issue, we asked ourselves a simple question: Which articles from the last fifteen years best represent the spirit of WIE and why? The following selections represent seven different answers to that question—the editors’ picks for the “greatest hits” of the magazine named for the remarkable inquiry that has inspired us all.

Archimandrite Dionysios

The Enemy Within

What would Christianity’s Desert Fathers have had to say about the ego in spiritual life? WIE traveled to a remote Greek Orthodox hermitage to speak with an inspired modern-day renunciate about the passion for purification that burns at the heart of this ancient tradition.

Introduced by Ross Robertson

Vimala Thakar

Awakening to Total Revolution

Enlightenment and the World Crisis
“Spirituality is the seed, and social action is the fruit born from it,” writes spiritual master and social activist Vimala Thakar in an essay exploring the true meaning of wholeness.

Introduced by Maura R. O’Connor

Brian Swimme

Awakening to the Universe Story

Part I: Comprehensive Compassion
A visionary cosmologist explains why this may be the most critical yet potentially transformative time on the planet in sixty-five million years.

Part II: The Divinization of the Cosmos
An exploration of the work and vision of Christian mystic and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Introduced by Jessica Roemischer

Eckhart Tolle

Ripples on the Surface of Being

Interview by Andrew Cohen
“When the inner transformation happened,” this modern mystic recounts, “it was so fulfilling and blissful simply to be that I lost all interest in doing.” In this captivating interview, one of the spiritual world’s most popular figures speaks about the inward stillness he’s discovered and what it really means to “transcend the world.”

Introduced by Carter Phipps

Dr. Beatrice Bruteau

A Song that Goes On Singing

A contemporary renaissance woman—scientist, philosopher, and Christian contemplative— evokes the creative impulse behind the evolutionary design of the universe.

Introduced by Elizabeth Debold

Sheikh Ragip/Robert Frager

The Man with Two Heads

What happens when you combine a leading transpersonal psychologist and an ordained Sufi sheikh . . . in the same person? WIE interviews the alter egos of transpersonal psychologist Dr. Robert Frager, founding president of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, and Sheikh Ragip of the Halveti- Jerrahi order of Sufis, to find out how one man walks the line between psychology’s endeavor to heal the ego and Sufism’s call to destroy it.

Introduced by Wren Bernstein

Who’s Transforming Anyway?

Stacey Heartspring Encounters the Postmodern Craze of Neo-Advaita
Join Stacey, WIE’s most ephemeral correspondent (and loosest cannon), to find out just what makes the Neo-Advaita world tick!

Introduced by Tom Huston