After a long day of travel and high-altitude view seeking in the Rockies, we set up camp Thursday night at a basic campground nestled in a mountain valley. After making a fire and enjoying our own version of a campfire dinner feast (mostly beans and burnt veggie sausages) we decided to meditate around the dimming fire in order to keep up with our practice.

Just a few minutes into the session under the night sky, off in the distance a pack of coyotes began to howl. I’ve heard coyotes howl before, but there was something crazy about these ones – they kept at it for several minutes, in hyena-like fashion.. howling but seeming to scream with wild laughter at the same time. Everything inside of me wanted to shout out “HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS LET’S GO GET IN THE CAR!!!” but I didn’t respond to my urge, and to my surprise, not one of my fellow travelers moved a muscle or stirred from their position. We as Gen Y’s have a reputation for taking almost nothing seriously, and I was awestruck by the seriousness that we were taking in position to our practice – we had made a commitment not to move and we stuck to it, coyotes or no coyotes! The smoke from the campfire traveled around a bit and a couple of us bit the smoke pretty badly, but even so, there was no response.. we were silent and still the whole time. It’s one thing to meditate in a silent meditation hall, but it’s a whole other thing to do it staring straight into the elements. It was definitely soul strengthening.

I noticed the next day while driving in the car, that over the course of several days together we began to feel very comfortable in a way that we hadn’t before, simply due to the relationship building that was happening during our trip. As most of us know, when Gen Ys feel comfortable around each other we tend to turn into total clowns and spend a lot of our time goofing off, which I found us doing a lot of. The interesting thing I started to notice though, is as soon as someone presented an interesting observation or presented a topic of depth, there was no hesitation – we’d immediately dive right in and take whatever we were speaking about as far as we could, without leaving anyone behind. There was something amazing about seeing our flexibility as a group.. to be able to truly be our goofy Gen Y selves but then to be able to at any given moment flip the switch and head in the other direction. It was clear that the depth was what brought us together, and the fun that we shared beyond that was just that, simply fun and a merely a complement (and a great one at that) to our real reason for coming together.

Here’s to evolving Gen Y consciousness.

Walking around an area of Boulder today near the University of Colorado campus, I was profoundly struck by the scene unfolding before me. From one street to the next, the variety and abundance of retail stores was taking me by surprise. From “The Downstair Hookah Hut” to the “Outdoor Diva”, the diversity of the commercial scene was quite astonishing. As I continued my journey into this land of unlimited options I begin to recognize to a greater degree what was occurring around me. As I watched the dread head walk out of one shop and a pair daisy dukes walk into another, I suddenly had the realization of where I was, I had entered a land of seekers. I was surrounded by individuals seeking an identity, and using the plethora of options available to them, each was carving out an identity to call their very own.

In many ways I found this to be a profoundly beautiful scene, the forging of an independent identity is a journey that every young adult must navigate. Becoming more aware of the developmental process unfolding before me I felt a growing recognition that the individuals passing by me were not simply fixed objects, but rather dynamic beings finding their way in a changing world.

As this realization begin to sink in, I became acutely aware of the amount of energy and effort being expended by each person in their seeking for identity. The endless terrain of options meant each individual was required to continuously contrast, compare, and evaluate the options being presented to them.

With this realization the necessity of a larger context and purpose for ones life became very clear. Without a clear moral to the story of live, one option melts into the next and true vertical growth can be difficult at best. But when a larger context is recognized, we discover the ever-present “hand that points the way”, and suddenly the journey does not seem quite as daunting and laborious as it once was.

On the last day of the 2010 Being & Becoming retreat, all of us met with our spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, to get his insight on the Gen Y condition and how to move forward. Andrew pointed out that his teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment are the answer to our predicament, and that’s becoming absolutely clear in our few days together.

Spending time with people my age always immediately reveals my most intimate cultural values – the ones I don’t share with any other generation, and that no other age-group can really know. There is a natural ease and joyfulness in that, but the experience is otherwise a shortcut to cultural hell, in which me and my peers’ most negative traits come out for a party while we and all our intelligence & sensibility go for a nap… That’s, of course, not how it works, but a generation coming together uninhibited by other generational values does have a unexpectedly powerful effect on the individual psyche.

That’s what makes this roadtrip so significant; only by spending time together as Gen Y can we really recreate the values specific to our generation. Only by creating a culture in which Spirit is the highest & most important value between us will we be able to stand for Spirit in our age-group’s culture of extreme unbelievers. Being together in this way, we are creating our 7-person culture in which Spirit is the root and goal of all relationship. It’s is amazing to see the conditioning I thought in complete opposition with my highest aspirations fully to expressing them. This is so inspiring because it is a living proof for all of us that culture changes with absolute immediacy the second Spirit is Highest!

We’re going off to the Rocky Mountain National Park right now, so I’ll have to keep the rest of my thoughts of later. More soon in the evolution revolution!

Love, Emily

Dear Merge,

I’m writing this as the others finish packing up the last of our things; We’re leaving the youth hostel we’ve stayed in the last two nights in Boulder and heading out to explore the rustic terrain of Colorado. It’s been an incredible experience to leave a retreat of such intensity of depth together, then to continue to explore our understanding of evolution, consciousness and how we engage with life at the deepest level as we continue on. There is a deep recognition that we are not just a random group of young people who just happened to develop relationships upon meeting each other through order of mere circumsantce, as is often the case in our culture, yet instead we are all young thinkers who have been exploring these concepts on our own for years, and it’s our interest in the depth of life and the exploration of existance that brought us together, and it’s from there that we relate to each other in any given moment. It’s been a blessing to be able to continuously share that space together, without compromise, in a way that is rare in our culture today among young people. It’s times like this that really strenghten my conviction in our potential to come together as young people to create a full force movement, when a group of us spanning coasts, countries and backgrounds end up together in the middle of the United States and ban together for the sake of simply wanting to be together in the name of evolution. Looking from that perspective, nothing we do together seems like a waste of time.. from skipping rocks into a creek, to long engaging meals, to sharing comfortable silence together – we’re simply happy to be in company with others who are sharing a perspective on life that is impersonal, developmental, authentic and motivating. It’s from there that the conversation naturally and effortlessly flows, and continues to inform what we are choosing and where we are going together. We’re looking forward to the time when more of you can join us and to more time together in the future.

Wish you all were here with us,

Love,

Jeremy Funston
Brooklyn, NY

Started the day today with morning meditation practice.
After 10 days in complete silence and another 10 days is relative silence (speaking only in focused groups for 2hrs a day) our minds were open and still.
But over the past two days – since the end of the retreat – we’ve suddenly been speaking lots and partying late. As a result most of us have felt scattered and a little tired.
That changed this morning. As soon as meditation began the room became very still. Time passed almost unnoticed and at the end of the hour it was hard for us to come out of meditation. Apparently the intention and clarity cultivated over the past three weeks is not as fickle as our minds.
The experience struck us as an example of the importance of consistent practice – practice as a normal part of daily life, not just something that begins and ends with retreats.

Right before we left Shambhala Mountain Center we went up to the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, an incredibly powerful sacred monument that blew everyone on the retreat away with it’s meditative current. Here’s a video that we took reflecting on the significance and wonder of the stupa.