Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

First of all, I would like to thank all of our readers for your warm-hearted outpouring of support during these challenging economic times! And I especially want to thank EnlightenNext magazine’s first major sponsor, Mr. Richard F. Schaden and his Beyond the Edge initiative. Without his personal, practical, and financial commitment to the evolution of consciousness and culture, this issue would not have reached your hands.

With regards to the current status of EnlightenNext as a regular periodical, Executive Editor Carter Phipps lays out in the “World of EnlightenNext” section what our future looks like, at least for the time being. As he explains, we are as committed as ever to performing the important task of attempting to define the leading edge of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, but please have no doubt that we need your help to do this.

While we were working on this issue, which contains more articles on the relationship between science and consciousness than we have ever done before, I had an interesting insight. At a certain point, I realized that theoretical physicists have a lot in common with enlightened masters. I’m referring to those path-finding scientists who are pushing the boundaries of the known and are trying to make connections that will lead to a clearer picture of the deeper structures that make up our physical world. It became apparent that such individuals will often take bold intuitive leaps when they are trying to understand things that have not been seen or even recognized before. Great mystics undertake a similar process. Intoxicated by the ecstasy of their own higher state, they use the eye of intuition to grasp, in ever more profound ways, the mystery of who we are and why we are here.

In our lead feature for this issue, Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston and Associate Editor Joel Pitney interview Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist, professor of psychology, and one of the world’s leading consciousness researchers. Buckle your seat belts as he presents a truly breathtaking description of a quantum-based theory of consciousness. In “Irreducible Mind,” Senior Editor Ross Robertson interviews renowned theoretical physicist Henry Stapp, who makes the unusual point that the quantum world is more mind-like than matter-like.

Continuing the series we started almost a decade ago, Ken Wilber and I have nothing less than our twenty-fifth dialogue, this time about the distinction between what I call the vertical and the horizontal domains as they relate to individual and collective spiritual evolution. Also in this issue, Gary Lachman, our favorite scholar of Western mysticism and the occult (and the former bass player for Blondie), contributes a wonderful portrait of the life and work of one of the founding fathers of integral theory, Jean Gebser. In “Intuitions of the Beyond,” Executive Editor Carter Phipps conducts a moving and inspiring interview with teacher, philosopher, and past-life researcher Michael Grosso about the perennial question of whether the personality survives after we die. Finally, Senior Editor Elizabeth Debold has an informative discussion with Marilyn Schlitz, president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, about the institute’s groundbreaking research on the relationship between mind, body, and matter.

In the hard work we did together preparing this issue, I learned more than ever before about how the micro-world of physics, the macro-world of matter, and the ever-mysterious domain of consciousness relate to one another. Even though some of these articles may require more than one reading, I’m sure the result will be well worth it!