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.