In 2010 I was accepted into Queen Mary University, London for a Masters Proposal in Postmodern English. I never began the course due to funding. I had planned to study to PhD level.

EnlightenNext Magazine: 1992-2011

The context of the thesis I had submitted was years of research online into the Telos of modern Christianity and spirituality videos on YouTube for a review of spirituality in the works of T S Eliot and E. M. Forster. I had cited the American philosopher and spiritual teacher Ken Wilber as the source of my research and was aiming to review modern ideas of Art/Life in my first year as a postgraduate student. Ken Wilber had been remarked upon by ex-American President Bill Clinton at Davos and I was going to review the Modernist Tradition in light of his ideas.

Ken Wilber had partnered with American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen on many occasions and their collaboration was evident online on social media. The one ran a group called Integral Enlightenment the other EnlightenNext and through my research I found that Andrew Cohen was running an organisation in London in Angel Islington, Zone 1, and contacted the organisation with my interest.

I attended a few lectures at the centre and some social occasions for a cup of coffee and dinner over the year 2010-2011 and gradually grew disillusioned as my goal of funding my Masters Thesis via part time work as a Private English Tutor faded. I looked to the organisation EnlightenNext to get involved but nobody was interested in my ideas and I left London in 2011 and moved back to Birmingham.

The American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen closed down his organisation in 2013 and issued an online apology for how he had treated his students and how his ego had gotten in his own way. When I was present in London, there was mention of the fact that the musician Sting (my favourite musician) had been into the organisation’s Angel Islington centre. EnlightenNext had centres all around the world and had published a magazine for years.

Following further research and leading up to the writing of my poetry answering to the Postmodern response to the dominance of E.M. Forster in Postcolonial narratives and T S Eliot in poetic form; I noted the influence that EnlightenNext had. They were involved with Watkins Bookshop and I had come to be involved with them due to my interest in Mind Body Spirit books and the modern Self Help tradition. When they dissolved I understood what the leader Andrew Cohen meant when he said what he was doing was 60 years ahead of it’s time and the interesting fact that members of U.K. Parliament had been recorded as studying the organisation as well. They taught meditation and the postmodern spiritual tradition of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

By estimation I had been interested in the following writers and had researched many of their books and social media videos:

Anthony Robbins

Dr Wayne Dyer

Dr Deepak Chopra

Leonard Jacobson

Doreen Virtue

Marianne Williamson

Ken Wilber

Brian Tracy

Dr Judy Satori

Dan Millman

Michael Beckwith

Eckhart Tolle

Neale Donald Walsch

Barbara Brennan

Sonia Choquette

Paulo Coelho

L Ron Hubbard

As well as the Indian tradition involving:

Sri Sri Ravi Shanker

Adyashanti

Shirdi Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba

The Dalai Llama

Srila Prabhupada

B K S Iyengar

Sri Pattabhi Jois

Dr Pillai

J Krishnamurti

Osho

Many of these writers and public figures, along with others, had been very vocal about the year 2012 heralding a new dawn for humanity and a new age in human growth and development with the Hindus naming Sathya Yuga, the Christians naming The Golden Age and The Age of Aquarius and the ancient Mayans using their calendar as proof of a new age in humankind’s history dawning on 12th December 2012 (12.12.2012).

All of this would have formed the basis of my Master’s Thesis into modern spiritual ideas and the Modernist writings of T S Eliot and E M Forster but instead I took to paper and pen and wrote about my ideas in a different setting with poetry and letters and some novels instead. This philosophy shifted online after EnlightenNext closed and I make a note here to my researchers so that they can update their files and records and approach my work with due care and consideration and the proper focus for their further interest and study as time goes by.

Note:

Dr Deepak Chopra had called Evolutionary Enlightenment one of the most important books of our time. I only had a copy of Enlightenment is a Secret when I joined the group in 2010. Following my time in London, Andrew Cohen came to Birmingham to visit Mosely’s group The Tree of Life in 2012. Andrew Cohen was espousing a connection with the Indian guru HWL Poonja and the tradition of Advaita Vedanta before emerging his own philosophy of Evolutionary Enlightenment. I am not connected with any of these organisations in any way.

The bookshop in Birmingham Waterstones https://www.waterstones.com/ closed down and Apple took their premises and the remaining Waterstones on the High Street vastly slimmed down it’s Mind Body Spirit section to include a few titles and nothing in comparison to the fashion prior to 2012.

These poems and letters were written after a long period of meditation when I performed a research study on The Bhagavad Gita and associated texts from 2014-2018. I read the Gita some 50 times and researched other texts from ISKCON and also read the Bible. It is noteworthy that Arjuna questions Krishna persistently in the Gita and in an effort to reclaim my identity as not Arjuna I pose questions to imaginary audiences and juxtapose these fragments next to my poems for literary context. I hope this explains the fragmentary nature of these documents and sheds light on my poetic craft in the meantime.

They use emotion and explore the levels of consciousness that arise after a prolonged period of meditation – rising to chant for 2 hours in the morning and then again for 2 hours between 4 and 6 pm. They answer to transcendental senses and the difficulty of navigating the field of mental health awareness and normal waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness that was to be the subject of my PhD thesis in 2010 and they give rise to an honest appraisal of my self before a mirror which includes the sublime as well as the divine and diabolical.