While many natives of the northern hemisphere head off on their summer getaways, our summer months have been anything but relaxing! And that’s not a bad thing! In fact, at EnlightenNext we’re taking advantage of the summer months to make some serious leaps in the future of our organization (that’s why, as you may have noticed, we haven’t been posting as frequently to the blog over the past few weeks!). Here’s a bit of an update about what’s been happening in the world of EnlightenNext:

First off, starting on July 25th, three of our editors (Elizabeth Debold, Tom Huston, and Megan Cater) and many of the other EnlightenNext staff have been stationed in the beautiful hills of Tuscany, Italy for the first ever Being & Becoming retreat led by our editor-in-chief Andrew Cohen. You can read more about the retreat here, but in brief, it is the inaugural event in a new EnlightenNext initiative that we call The Discovery Cycle. Marked by a 3-week long retreat on one end of the year and a virtual conference on the other end, the Discovery Cycle is designed to explore with with as many people as possible the mysterious relationship between the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of culture.

As for the few of us that have stayed behind here at our headquarters in Western Massachusetts, we’re working feverishly to put the final touches on our next issue, which will be shipping out at the end of August. I don’t want to give away too much about what’s coming down the pipe, but we’re very excited to be featuring some great interviews with a wide variety of contemporary spiritual teachers like Genpo Roshi (Big Mind), Jun Po Kelly (Mondo Zen), sufi teacher Aliya Haeri, and Roshi Bernie Glassman (Zen Peacemakers). Here’s a sneak peak at our cover:

This past Friday morning, Ross Robertson and I appeared on a community radio program out of Burlington, VT called The Howie Rose Show to speak about Ross’ popular feature article, “A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century.” I’m a regular guest on the show, calling in every Friday morning along with my fellow EnlightenNext colleagues Tom Huston, Diane Bensel, and Christiana Briddell, to speak about EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen’s spiritual teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment and the myriad ways that it challenges many of our subconscious cultural assumptions about reality. It’s a lot of fun, and we’ve gotten to explore a variety of interesting subjects with our hosts, from the relationship between meditation and creativity to the current state of Generations X and Y. I’ve posted the audio recording of today’s show below. If you’d like to listen to more episodes, check out our blog for the show (and other topics) here. Enjoy!

Click below to listen (42:53 minutes)

This past Friday I interviewed Jason Silva and Max Lugavere, two 27-year-old producers and co-hosts of Current TV, the Emmy-award-winning cable network started by Al Gore in 2005 that has since become the fastest growing network in TV history. Picked out of hundreds of applicants, Silva and Lugavere have become the faces of the network, a role that earned them a reputation as pioneers within the emerging movement of web-enabled “citizen journalism” and “user-generated-content” the potential of which has been made so clear with the Iranian election protests.

Current TV’s mission has from the beginning been to “democratize” television and provide a platform for younger filmmakers that may have a harder time gaining access to larger media networks. (Check out “Good News in TV Land,” by EnlightenNext contributing editor Maura O’Connor) To that end, Current gathers around 30% of their short films and stories from outside of their studios. But unlike YouTube and the many other user-generated-content platforms on the web, Current TV isn’t just a free-for-all in which the talented is all mixed up with the tedious. They are known as the “HBO of the YouTube generation,” and through editorial selection and a unique voting process, the best and most thought-provoking interviews on Current rise, like cream, to the top. As they say, they’re trying to “raise the conversation” that’s happening online.

The reason for our interview was the fact that Silva and Lugavere’s late night talk show on Current, called Still Up, will be featuring EnlightenNext among a variety of other sources in a July 13th episode dedicated to the evolution of consciousness. Describing the upcoming show as “a televised version of an Alex Grey painting,” the two plan to feature everything from “esoteric techno optimism” and immortalism of Ray Kurzweil (which they’ve also made a short film about) to an interview with Deepak Chopra and a review of the variety of opinions about what if anything will happen in 2012.

Our conversation was a good one. And while I was very interested in hearing what they had to say about the current status and future of media, I was most keen on finding out what they thought about the future of Generation Y, which has caused so many employers, cultural critics, and parents to scratch their heads. As Tom Huston pointed out in his recent column, we’re the dumbest, the most idealistic, the most technologically adept, and the most narcissistic generation ever. . . and no one quite knows whether the future is in capable hands. And so as two budding thought leaders and broad cultural voices for our generation (they think of themselves as Bill Maher for the next generation), I wanted to find out where they stood on the issue.

You can listen to the interview below (18:38):

And to watch their upcoming Still Up episode on the evolution of consciousness, airing at midnight Eastern, 11 Central and 9 Pacific on Current TV, which you can watch on the following channels:

DirecTV 358
Dish Network 196
Comcast 107
Time Warner LA 142
Time Warner NYC 103
Time Warner everywhere else: Check local listings.

In addition to being the founder and editor in chief of EnlightenNext magazine, Andrew Cohen is also the pioneering spiritual teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The following clip is from a talk Cohen gave during an eight-day retreat in which he describes the moral obligation that is inherent in awakening to what he calls the “Kosmocentric perspective.”

Click below to play audio clip (3.5 min):

Click here to purchase the entire CD set of this 8-day retreat, including over 6 hours of audio.