Jeff Carreira

Jeff Carreira

If you ask Jeff Carreira what he’s most excited about he will reply without hesitation—“finding new and powerful ways to catalyze and facilitate human development.” Master teacher, philosopher, writer, lecturer, evolutionary pioneer—these are just a few descriptors that come to mind when describing Carreira and his extensive career seeped in the study and practice of Evolutionary Enlightenment.

Carreira’s lived experience of the principles and practices of Evolutionary Enlightenment are no accident. His years of dedicated seeking came to an end when he met spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and embraced the perspective of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Carreira then immersed himself in the American historical roots and underpinnings of enlightenment and spirituality through intensive study of the philosophical traditions of Transcendentalism and Pragmatism to uncover how they have helped shape the form and practice of evolutionary spirituality. And he doesn’t take such extensive inquiry lightly, stating that, “Philosophy is not a luxury because real philosophical inquiry is critical if we want to understand who we are as human beings in the 21st Century.” He reports on the fruits of his own philosophical inquiry in a blog called Evolutionary Philosophy and has been asked to lecture at such prestigious colleges and universities as The University of Pennsylvania, Bennington College, Oglethorpe University and the University of Western Australia.

Before embracing spiritual life Carreira received his undergraduate degree in physics and worked as a research engineer as part of a small team that designed, built and tested electro-optical devices for the telecommunications industry. After five years he realized that life’s deepest questions could not be answered through science alone, whereupon he decided to move to a more humanitarian field. He received an M.E.D. and certification as a special needs teacher, which lead to his becoming the director of a small school for adjudicated youth.

It was during this time that a chance meeting would change the course of his life forever. “I met spiritual teacher, cultural visionary and radical evolutionary, Andrew Cohen (Evolutionary Enlightenment), and that was that.” Over the course of the next eighteen years, Carreira’s life rapidly altered. During his first decade of engagement with Cohen, he participated as part of a small group of highly committed students who engaged in extensive individual and collective spiritual practices. These years of unbroken work with such a powerful– and empowering– spiritual mentor in such a concentrated environment lead to many profound realizations and experiences.

“Two experiences in particular shaped my understanding of reality.” Carreira shares, “The first was a two-month long silent meditation retreat with Andrew in the summer of 2001, during which we engaged nonstop in spiritual practice over a period of 60 days. During this time I experienced explosive energetic awakenings, periods of constant consciousness, and prolonged times of deep abidance in the awareness of pure being.” Carreira further describes that the most significant realizations of that retreat occurred “ when we came together as a group and in the context of dialog fell into shared experiences of ‘enlightened mind’.” It was these experiences of collective awakening that revealed to Carreira the truly unified nature of human consciousness.

The second transformative experience that has shaped Carreira’s character and teaching work occurred during a 2005 retreat in India. It was here that he experienced a deep recognition of what Andrew Cohen refers to as the “process perspective”. From this perspective, he experienced the reality of the fact that, what appears to be our individual existence and our personal development is, in truth, an inseparable part of a singular process of cosmic evolution.

These experiences were the stepping stones for Carreira to becoming a prominent member of Andrew Cohen’s conscious evolutionary community, located in an exquisite New England setting in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Cohen’s umbrella organization, EnlightenNext, would soon become home to Carreira. He swiftly integrated into the work being brought forth by Cohen and from there took on a leadership role. He was a founding member of the EnlightenNext center in Boston, acted as EnlightenNext’s marketing director, and in 2001 served as Andrew Cohen’s personal assistant until taking his current role as Director of Education in 2005.

In this position, Carreira is a senior teacher for EnlightenNext and to this day remains one of Cohen’s closest students, colleagues and associates of spirit. Working closely with Cohen, Carreira teaches and develops courses designed to bring the transformative power of the principles and practices of evolutionary enlightenment to people all over the world. “We want to inspire people to engage with their own development and to recognize that, by committing wholeheartedly to these practices, they are directly engaging in the evolution of the cosmos itself.”

The inspiration from these and other realizations lead Carreira to the exciting new co-venture between spiritual teacher and fellow pioneer in the field of human transformation, Patricia Albere, which they refer to as The Evolutionary Collective (EC). “Patricia’s far-reaching background in methods of human transformation combined with our mutual passion for collective development is inspiring us to create opportunities that will allow people to explore and experience one of the leading edges of human development. “

For more information on Jeff Carreira and/or The Evolutionary Collective (EC) please contact: Kimberly Blozia, 718-909-8995/ Kim@evolutionarycollective.com.