Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

Welcome to one of the most eclectic issues we’ve ever put together! If you are a long-time reader, you may remember that when What Is Enlightenment? first became a real magazine, over ten years ago, each and every issue was dedicated to a single theme. We used each new topic we came up with as an excuse to spend literally months on end doing exhaustive research and discussing our findings often late into the night. The original idea was to explore whatever we were researching from as many angles as possible and, in so doing, attempt to create our own version of what a truly integral and spiritually informed perspective on a particular topic might be.

Those were the good old days! When I think back, putting together a magazine in this way with friends and students gave all of us an opportunity to really roll up our sleeves and learn how to think creatively together. And it worked. Our reputation for producing a publication that was an expression of both spiritual depth and intellectual and philosophical rigor grew, and it attracted the attention of thinking people. That’s because in the way that we worked, we really did think deeply about . . . everything.

In a marketplace where the content of most spiritual magazines tends to promote either outdated “progressive” spiritual thinking, the repackaging of traditional religious dogma, or just plain New Age make-believe, some people started to notice. We received many letters from all over the world saying that we were pushing into new territory. The more we struggled with trying to understand and contextualize the various subjects we were researching, the more we found the spiritual orientation of the East-meets-West movement philosophically narrow and even confining.

So we pushed our boundaries. And our evolution as a publication really reflects our own development as a community of committed individuals who are endeavoring each and every day to put all the pieces together and find out what makes the most sense according to the latest information. Because we’re all passionately dedicated to evolutionary spirituality, it enables us to remain flexible and open-minded. There isn’t any particular way of seeing the world and our role in it that we’re trying to protect. We remain busy trying to figure it out with the rest of you.

We may be a lot better informed and wiser than we were when we started, but we don’t feel that much closer to that lofty goal of having figured it all out than we were all those years ago. And though we’ve gradually moved away from the single-theme format, we’re still deeply committed to bringing a truly integrated, well-thought-out, and spiritually informed perspective to everything we do. It’s just that now we’ve become more ambitious: we continue to widen the scope of our inquiry to include as much of the Kosmos and culture as we possibly can . . . and still make our copy deadlines!

So even though this is the most eclectic issue we’ve ever produced, I still feel we’ve been true to our mission. For our main feature, my colleague and close friend Carter Phipps has written an informative and thought-provoking article bringing to light the staggering influence of depth psychologist Carl Jung and evolutionary pioneer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on our postmodern, spiritually sophisticated minds. In what I feel is a landmark piece, “The Divine Feminine, Unveiled,” my postfeminist colleague Elizabeth Debold takes aim at one of the contemporary spiritual marketplace’s sacred cows. My interview with former Mr. Olympia Frank Zane explores what it means to push the outer limits of physical development, while my dialogue with Ken Wilber ventures to the further reaches of spiritual development. And last but not least, associate editor Carol Ann Raphael has written a captivating review of spiritual adept Adi Da Samraj’s recent art exhibition at the Venice Biennale. So as you can see, we’ve come a long way from our single-theme days. But I hope you agree that it’s a sign of our development that we can present such a diversity of content and still, through it all, be expressing the higher integrity of a spiritually informed perspective.

Enjoy!