By Marc Pell

At a young age, around 13 years old, I discovered what it was like to live free of fundamental confusion, self-consciousness and neurotic self-concern. In that I discovered my ‘natural self’, as I thought of it at the time. For an extended period I was living a different life, very different. I had been freed up, unburdened by a lot of unnecessary, conscious and unconscious self-imposed life-denying restrictions. I realised that up until that point in time, I had only been living at something like 10% of who I could be. I had discovered a part of myself that has an inherent integrity and an independent moral sensitivity. I discovered spontaneity of being, clarity of mind and a confidence in Life. The quality of every relationship that I had and the connection with other people was dramatically different. There was a joyous liberated intimacy always available that previously I had no idea existed. Somehow I had been shocked into letting go of my ideas and investments in my own future and I started to discover a sense of purpose in being alive of a kind I had never experienced before.

As instantaneously as it occurred, after a few months, one day I found myself back in the ‘unnatural way of being’. This was a return to an awkward, confused, self-conscious, neurotically self-concerned and lethargic situation. Not only that, for some reason I was not just back in the ‘old way of being’ but I was back there with a vengeance. Also it was clear in my experience that this was not a neutral event; there was something that felt unwholesome about this apparent backward movement. This was obviously very confusing and at the time I could not understand why on earth it happened.

After this initial ‘breakthrough’; how to recreate the phenomena where I would find once again my ‘natural self’ was my ongoing preoccupation. As a young boy, I would have spontaneous recurrences of this ‘different state’ of being from time to time. Over the years as I grew up, I read many self-help books, went to various ‘New Age’ group sessions and for a couple of extended periods of time, did some therapy. Though some of these things felt helpful to some extent, I realised what I was interested in was in a different ballpark altogether.

There was a point where I connected the experience of this freed up sense of self to ’spirituality’. Then it was a matter of a number of months of checking out all kinds of spiritual activities, books and techniques until I went to a talk by Andrew Cohen. Though at that time I had no idea what a Spiritual Teacher was or even that Andrew Cohen was such a person. There were a number of things that he said that evening that made it clear that he was not only speaking about the awakened Freedom that I had experienced, but that he was a complete expression of it.

After about a year of being very involved with like minded people in London who where very fired up about these new spiritual teachings, I took the opportunity to make a formal commitment as a student of Andrew Cohen. As soon as I did this it gave me a great boost in confidence in that deeper part of myself that I had for so long had so much trouble trying to constantly re-discover. Also along with this I became aware of an inherent responsibility. Responsibility for what? For Life itself!

Though my initial time as a student I actually did not have that much direct contact with Andrew Cohen but it was nonetheless very powerful. With a renewed confidence in the best part of myself and with ongoing and close relationships based on integrity, commitment and ongoing development with many of the other students in London, this was very supportive environment. I found that I was going from strength to strength and was finding a deeper and deeper experience and confidence in the fact that fundamentally everything is already more than OK. I had an ongoing clarity of perception that was quite profound and was developing a passion for what is true and right that was starting to take me by surprise. There was a certain awakening of what I can only describe as a ‘big care’. This is where you discover a burning forceful passion in yourself that cares very deeply about what it means to be ‘here’. In retrospect I can see that something was starting to shift inside me at a very deep level where I was beginning to genuinely care more about Life itself than I cared about my own personal life. At this point I decided it was too much; I did not want to care that much. Of course anyone interested in the spiritual life will hear that it is all about ‘letting go’, ‘surrender’ and ‘giving up the personal agenda’ and that is true. I was starting to find out what that really meant, and it had nothing to do with what I ever imagined. How could it? There was a majesty, power and glory that I came directly into contact with that could never be imagined or known beforehand. But I decided, for me at that point, It was too powerful, too all consuming.

This is only the beginning of a very full story. Essentially after deciding to cool off from this miraculous process that was just starting to get going, I found myself in an awkward and unusual situation. It was very similar to the uncomfortable experiences I had as a young boy; though this time I had gone a lot deeper and had a lot more understanding and of course I was now an adult. There is no way around it; this kind of situation is not good at all. At this point I became a lot more vulnerable to all the forces within and without that resist any sign of positive evolutionary transformation. Because I had genuinely begun to make at least some real progress in transcending the status quo of my conditioning and begun to get a sustained hint of what Freedom beyond the confines of the separate isolated self is, these forces began to become very apparent.

For an extended period of time I found I was being bombarded by doubt. It was ongoing for days, weeks and months; a very intense experience of doubt, doubt, doubt. It is a doubt that arises specifically in light of awakening to this absolute positivity of existence. To choose to believe in that doubt would be to deny what has been discovered and all the implications inherent in that. There was an overwhelming temptation to fully embrace this doubt; because resisting it was like unrelenting torture. I was aware how if I completely gave in to this doubt my life would take a very different route. Not that this was the first time, but I was already in a pretty unwholesome state having turned away from the direct path because it was too challenging. I could see that if I gave in to this doubt at this point, I could really get in to some serious dark negativity as some other former students have done who turned against their highest and deepest understanding, and even Andrew himself. That whole period of time was very ‘touch and go’ for me, but despite being unsteady in myself I was determined not to take that route.

One of the things that Andrew Cohen would say to his students, and he would very often say it in public Teachings, is that if one is not willing to wholeheartedly give oneself to the spiritual life then the other alternative is to devote oneself wholeheartedly to doing good in the world. So a few years after meeting Andrew Cohen, along with a few friends who had also been students, I decided to take option two. This turned out to be a remarkable period of time. We chose environmental work which we all felt very passionate about. We really wanted to contribute in a big way and make a difference. Very soon we were completely active with a number of environmental issues in connection with some of the most prominent national and international environmental groups.

Before meeting Andrew Cohen it had never occurred to me to actually do anything that could contribute to the good of the World despite always having empathy for environmental and social issues. So this was definitely breaking boundaries. I found in myself a serious interest, care and passion for the environment and for ‘the world’, to a degree that I never had before. For my friends and I the environmental work was the priority, everything revolved around that. It wasn’t a sideline or just something we did in our ‘spare time’. We met a lot people who genuinely cared enough to do something about our environment and about social justice. We also had a lot of experience working with others to ‘make a difference’. It became immediately apparent that working together for the greater good in this situation looked very different from our experience of coming together for the greater good in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It really hit home for all of us how we had knowledge and experience of a completely different order of being together. We knew of a level of trust, intimacy and, most importantly, an enormous creative potential that can become available between people. And now being much more engaged ‘in the world’ it was obvious that this was a very rare knowledge – and it was desperately needed.

When I had decided to ‘do good in the world’ I did it with a completely open agenda. I had no fixed ideas where it would lead or any fixed amount of time I planned to do it for. It was a very full time and I was involved in a number of ‘high brow’ activities. After about two and a half years though, almost out of the blue I took the opportunity to once again be in a formally committed Teacher / student relationship with Andrew Cohen.

For the last two and a half years I had been very engaged with the environmental work. I was very much ‘out there on the street’ – literally – doing all kinds of activities. This included basic information tables for the public, street theatre, helping to organise events and also involvement in various types of peaceful group demonstrations from about five people to at times over a hundred thousand, engagement with local and national press, organising and at times running various environmental interest groups and also the occasional involvement in high profile media events. The result of many of these activities would have their own ‘waking up’ effect, especially the high risk, high profile events that got headline national and also international media coverage, where I knew we were ‘making waves’ to a significant degree. I had met and been involved with many inspiring individuals. I had to constantly ‘stretch’ myself to do something I hadn’t done before or to make waves so that something that really needed to happen would happen. This was all happening of course in our current secular cultural context in which the profound potential that lies (for many people) just below the surface is hardly known about and where the spiritual dimension of being a human being is not recognised as being real. So it was a great joy and relief to once again take the step to live a committed life in the context of the ever-evolving Teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. There was a remarkable resurgence of this deeper and miraculous part of the self; now clearly identified in these Teachings as the ‘Authentic Self’. It was clear that things had evolved and developed since I had last been so involved. In clear comparison to the environmental work that I had been doing, I could see the difference between working hard to fix problems, or at best make positive changes in the current cultural paradigm, to effectively creating a completely new World that’s such a radical step beyond what has been before. They are two very different movements and intentions. Obviously the World being the way it is currently both are needed – in big measures!

Marc Pell