The Whole of the Holy Life

In the early days of my teaching career, it became more and more obvious to me that the Buddha was right when he said: "Association with like-minded people is the whole of the holy life." And that is simply because the holy life, the spiritually enlivened and awakened life-if it is to have any real impact on the world-is about the sharing of higher values with other human beings. Any individual can experience liberating insight and clarifying revelation in the privacy of their own subjective interior.

But when insight and revelation are being experienced as part of a shared higher state, something truly sacred begins to occur. The potential of a new, more enlightened world emerges here and now. And then, when it is not only seen but also acted upon, that which was only an unmanifest potential suddenly becomes a powerful manifest reality. We see and feel the world change before our very eyes in the most real way imaginable.

Andrew Cohen