by Roberta Anderson

ENTERING POST-GRADUATE SCHOOL WITH A TRUE GURU

I was a student of Andrew Cohen from the fall of 1989 to late in 2001. With the exception of a few months when I left the community, I managed to stay in the always-simmering cauldron of Formal Students over the twelve years that I lived, breathed, worked, ate, lived, thrived, and at times anguished in the ongoing and sometimes unbearable intimacy of this tumultuous and seething evolutionary community I had managed to land in.

Funny to think of it as an “accident”, as I was in truth an “old seeker” who had read all the literature, lived closely with fellow seekers and done a lot of “sadhana” with a couple of well-known Teachers for ten years before meeting Andrew Cohen. I had in fact asked and maybe even begged at some level, to find a true Master. It was time to “get on with it”, whatever “it” was.

My own initial meeting with Andrew Cohen was preceded by finding a copy of his first book, “My Master Is Myself”. I could not believe the force emanating from this book. I even put it under my pillow during the first couple of days it took to read it. There was a soul-level recognition of something I’d longed for with my whole being for a very long time, and was beginning to despair that I would ever find.

My first meeting with Andrew, which occurred soon after finding this book, sent me hurtling out into the cosmos into a radically new and unknown dimension. The deep abiding peace and immense gratitude which was overtaking me was something I had never experienced. I found myself weeping in amazement and gratitude at odd times over the ensuing months. At that time I was spending a lot of time driving around northern California for business. I kept a photo of Andrew in the car, as I could not even believe this new reality I’d been exploded into. Suddenly everything was so different that I had to keep checking to make sure I hadn’t just imagined what had occurred in this meeting with Andrew Cohen. All my old notions about who I was and what everything was were blasted into infinity. I, like many of us, even thought that finally it was “all over”. Little did we know that being suddenly spun out into this unknown and beautiful new place with “no warning” was just the prelude. Now it was finally time to begin the Real Work—the work of acknowledging and releasing all of those old and now obsolete (but extremely stubborn) structures which were in the way of us becoming established in this new reality.

The unsuspecting and naïve “serious seeker” can never begin to imagine the fiery, all-consuming, and wildly unpredictable force field they are entering when they find their purported heart’s desire. To encounter the “Guru Principle” in one’s own life is a rare thing indeed, as well as an extraordinary and precious gift, regardless of how our own egos interpret it later on down the line after having had a deep taste of what real transformation entails. The interesting thing is that I asked for it—I even cried out and begged for it–as did many of my close friends who shared our years together with Andrew. Many of us have lost touch with this fact—or with the great thrill we felt in finally finding a Guru with sacred fire burning in his veins and who epitomized nothing but Radical Revolution of Everything. I remember this handsome, “hip” Teacher from New York, who transmitted the wisdom of the ancient masters in American vernacular, saying numerous times in different teachings—“My only purpose is to destroy you”. Okay, okay. Of course this was the story we’d all read about, and knew in our guts was, after all, the real and only point of this Sacred Work. And yet none of us had even an inkling of what kind of vortex we had entered—that this kind of “spiritual life” was the Real Deal—something way beyond anything, even all the hair-raising tales we’d read in the spiritual literature. Because we had all been longing for this change with every fiber of our being, we all ended up climbing The Steep Path across The Chasm of Fire. Andrew’s Sangha was a sort of “post-graduate evolutionary school”, and far more demanding than any of the more traditional “spiritual schools” we had previously known, and so the adventure continued…

NOT JUST LOVE, BUT LOVE AND TRUTH!

We all found so much more than we’d asked for or even expected. And certainly a lot more than any of us were ostensibly ready for, despite our “spiritual experiences”, great longing, and deep love of the Dharma. For a long time we all managed to remain deaf to the news that this meeting with one of those rare humans who was a living embodiment of the Guru Principle—was always only about effectively and relentlessly dismantling EVERYTHING we’d ever thought or known or were clinging to. This process would challenge and push us on physical., intellectual, emotional, and spiritual levels far beyond any place we’d ever even imagined, and for sure farther than we thought we’d honestly wanted to go.

We did our very best to carry on with “business as usual”. There were numerous intimations that we had waded into deep waters and had finally found a True Guru, and this was deeply thrilling to all of us. Yet, when the fires of purification began to scorch, part of me still wished that Andrew would be more like a kindly vipassana or Zen teacher, a kind of democratic “kalyana mitra” guiding us gently along the gradual path to Enlightenment. I was secretly personally attracted to the “saint” model of a Guru who would love and affirm my beloved “self”. In Tibetan Buddhism, full awakening is characterized as the full union of Love and Truth. I was all for the “Love” part, but please spare me the “Truth”! The ongoing revelation of my own lack of authenticity and addiction to a false persona was very hard to stomach. It was a soul-level shock to discover that my beloved Guru was more like Mt. Vesuvius, continuously erupting with astonishing and unpredictable and ever-creative force, which often scared the living daylights out of me. And who, worst of all, didn’t even appear to really give a damn about my precious “self”! This was a dreadful affront. Life with a real Guru is nothing if not an ongoing assault on everything you’ve held dear about your beloved self-image that you’ve been honing and refining for ever so long. Even if you know in your guts that this “death” of the false self is necessary for something new to be born, the process is unbearable beyond description. The humiliation and the constant “burning” we all experienced were something that you can’t even really convey to those who have not lived through it.

HMMM, THIS AIN’T NO TEA PARTY!

It has taken me a long time to let in or even begin to grasp the enormity of Andrew Cohen’s vision. He saw early on that humanity was in deep trouble—“homo sapiens” in its present form was way too limited and primitive to deal with the increasingly complex problems facing us as planetary citizens. Andrew could see as well that the emergence of a new kind of human was critical for the survival of the race and the planet—and that this radical change needed to occur quickly, as the message from all sides is that time is quickly running out.

Andrew  Cohen’s entire being was/is nothing less than an ongoing expression of this urgency. There was no time for the “many lifetimes” approach of traditional teachings. His detractors, of course, find his methods too extreme and intense. But Andrew, as we all knew, is deeply surrendered to the Force of Evolution itself—and this force is really only about the destruction of all obsolete and dysfunctional structures, so that a new kind of human can emerge from the rubble. This can not happen with a teacher who wears kid gloves and invites his students to tea parties. Although we were happy to speak about the dharma in intellectual terms (which many of us were pretty good at), none of us had any idea that Everything needed to change for us to be transformed from deeply self-centered men and women who viewed everything and everyone as separate from ourselves—to a new kind of human who KNOWS with every fiber of their being that who they are is nothing less than the Intelligence of the Universe, and that they are fully responsible in and as themselves for the process of evolution.

This is an unimaginably enormous leap, and one that is unlikely to occur in a gentler kind of “spiritual university”. From very early on, Andrew had a vision of something which had to manifest. His vision of the emergence of a Collective Being which includes Everything as Itself, and is thus fully responsible for Everything, was way beyond anything we could imagine or had even ever thought about. And attempting to manifest this vision of course required so much more than we ever thought we would have to give.

WHEN THE EVOLUTIONARY SEEDS BEGIN TO SPROUT

Conventionally-minded friends are horrified by what we experienced, and I rarely even talk about my years with Andrew Cohen. For those who don’t have even an inkling of Andrew’s vision, the whole thing sounds “abusive” and dreadful. “What kind of crazy person would ever get involved with such madness?” When I left the community and moved to Montana in 2003, for many months I felt like I’d been drawn and quartered and boiled in oil, at the very least. I managed to function and participate actively in life, but my initial experience was of being almost catatonic at a soul level. It was as if the whole playing field had been laid waste. I was waiting to find out what I really knew or had to give, if anything. I had no idea who I was, and was curious to see who I might be apart from Andrew and the community I had immersed myself in for twelve years. What did I really know from my own experience? What was I supposed to be doing here on earth? Did I even care about evolution? I didn’t speak to anyone for at least a year about what we’d all lived through. Even then, one can never get close to the whole story except with those who’ve shared it with you, as it is supremely daunting to even try to convey the hugeness of the context we all shared with someone who wasn’t there. Frankly, I wavered and teetered all over the place in my attempts to make sense of this tsunami I’d voluntarily inserted myself into. Brief periods of clarity would open up, only to be followed by falling again into confusion.

But during these six years after I left for a new and unknown life, I continued to find to my surprise that some unknown seeds had been planted in me during my time with Andrew Cohen. When I left, Andrew had told me that “The seeds of the Teaching are in you”. Frankly, I felt that I had been a “failure”, as I’d come to a place where I felt so deeply stuck in my recalcitrant self-centeredness that it seemed I could not continue. But as I continued to relax into allowing the unleashed and untrammeled force of whatever I had encountered to invade my being, I began to experience something new. I realized that by dint of just hanging out and hanging in as closely as I could during my years as Andrew’s student that, despite my intense inner struggle, my own view and understanding was continuing to open up and reveal new vistas.

THE HIGHER VIEW CANNOT BE HELD BY THE MIND

To find and express the deepest truth of these cataclysmic and earth-shaking years during which I lived closely with Andrew Cohen in his community requires a rare level of honesty at a soul level—a deep willingness to keep digging and sorting and looking, as well as a continual attempt to remember and re-align myself with that precious, subtle, and delicate discovery of a magnificent and cosmic perspective which our meeting with Andrew catalyzed us all into. This, I can see, is the ongoing challenge for all of us, and it is not at all easy. We have all had many powerful experiences of higher “states”, but to do the intense and deeply challenging work to convert these “states” into grounded “stages” of human development is a very big deal indeed.

To get anywhere close to what was actually going on during our time with Andrew also requires a massive degree of humility and willingness to “not know”—to live in the constant knowledge that the mind, which is fundamentally mechanical and limited, can only deal with and process perhaps five percent of the total story. To begin to understand this is HUGE. One of its major roles as a consummate “knower” is to take the available “data” and synthesize it into something from which one can then take a summary position, wrap it all up neatly, and pop it into a box as “already known and processed”. And this is what I see occurring in many of Andrew’s students who left early on—and even in a few who stayed longer, who are still speaking from the stance of the Wounded Ego. There is a grand tension one must be willing to reside in when faced with the mind’s zeal to “wrap things up”, and this tension is often supremely uncomfortable. And when one who has been initiated into a higher view then falls once again into a lower perspective and attempts to make sense of an experience from the lesser view, predictably there results a huge mess and enormous confusion. And this is what we who have lived through this time together are still continuing to experience and wrestle with each other about in various blogs and books, as we attempt to make sense of our life-altering experience. And so, for the last few years, separative and warring “factions” have continued to arise among ex-students who have shared a great deal at a soul level, and who are in fact more connected than they even know.

So we are talking about the radical act of suspending the mind, that thing which KNOWS absolutely everything, and taking that leap of faith to a higher view. This is an enormous challenge for those who have lost touch with this view or who are in denial of it. But nonetheless it is always available. Because as has been witnessed ad nauseum for all of us, the scenario of that limited but exalted knowing mind attempting to categorize and make sense of our soul-rocking time with Andrew, when we have temporarily lost touch with a higher and even “cosmic” perspective, results in all hell breaking loose. It seems like “hell hath no fury like a student who feels they have been scorned”, or maybe more accurately, an ego which doesn’t get validated. The “maligned ego” just keeps cranking out separative and nasty accusations time and time again, with its relentless devotion to a self-centered perspective. That ol’ dead horse just keeps getting whipped and beaten. It’s so easy to lose touch with the fact that that “thing” which is so busy making war with Andrew, their old friends, and even their own experience, is, in fact, the very thing which needs to be released for a higher view to reveal itself. And that this kind of release requires letting go of EVERYTHING—not only one’s cherished and beloved “self”, but even Andrew, his Teachings, and in fact all we’ve ever tried to cling on to as a safe refuge.

THE ENORMITY OF ANDREW COHEN’S VISION

My own struggle, which was definitely not special to me, was of attempting to do hand-to-hand combat with seemingly lifetimes of a deeply self-centered perspective. I came to AndrewCohen, like most of us, from a fundamentally personal view of Enlightenment. I wanted to be free of the suffering concomitant with the human condition for myself. Truthfully I didn’t give a damn about anyone else, although I tried to pretend that I did. As an “older student”, Andrew continuously pushed me to take responsibility for the whole situation. I fairly consistently dug in my heels and fought him and everyone. Andrew’s vision was so far beyond anything I’d ever thought about that I sometimes felt that he had suddenly began teaching a kind of “dharma” that I didn’t understand and hadn’t signed up for. It all seemed way too demanding and intrusive into my “personal life”. “Where was the LOVE (for my own ego!)? It is no joke to contemplate the enormity of this transition from a self-centered person to someone who not only cares deeply about everyone else but is willing to participate fully at all times with the human condition and the whole situation AS ONESELF. This is the work that Andrew engaged us all in. And as we discovered, these deep, dark, and sticky old structures die hard—they do not gracefully roll over and die. We are talkin’ huge, crusty, and highly resistant structures!

Early on in my spiritual pursuits, I came across a quote by Trungpa Rinpoche—something about how “it’s better to not even begin the spiritual journey unless you intend to finish it”. When I think about this, I realize how naïve and arrogant I was to think that I was “one of the chosen ones” who would march continuously forth, maybe even leading the charge! The fact is that the “fallout” and “blowback” of even sticking one’s toe into this particular vortex is huge. It’s like some kind of enormous and deeply impersonal cyclotron with the molecules getting splattered all over the place. It’s indeed no small wonder that so many of us continue still to carry on about our time with Andrew in various blogs and individual emails, nursing our “wounds” and trying to make some sense of whatever that “tsunami” was that we wandered into.

WHEN THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE CALLS YOU

So to speak in practical and here-and-now terms, I have to say, that not only was my highest potential revealed during my life-changing meeting with Andrew, but also my own egoic limitations—my laziness, delight in resting in the easy way, refusal to be simple, vulnerable, straight, and honest with virtually anyone, as well as my fundamental commitment to Number 1, The Great Moi! Those “other people” outside of my immediate sphere were their own problem! And for both of these grand revelations, the only true response has to be Gratitude.

I guess I’ve been the most surprised to continue to discover that despite myself and the density of my own egoic resistance, somehow “I” have changed in unimaginable ways. Much despite myself, this formerly sluggish and selfish person has exploded with some unknown energy which I’d never expected or imagined. My friends sometimes comment on how they can’t even believe what a “hard worker” I am, or even how intense what they describe as my “relentless enthusiasm” is, as well as how much I care (!) And they are talking about that lazy person who was always about doing the bare minimum, at best. Many of my friends even look to me as an example of an authentic, liberated, and independent woman—so clearly very much occurred (which I didn’t understand and resisted quite a lot at the time) during those years when Andrew forced us women to look starkly at all of the manipulative games we had played for so many centuries as a result of the conditioning we had inherited as females.

I can only say that all of this has only to do with those seeds which were planted in me when I met Andrew—despite the fact that I had no idea what the hell was going on at the time! That evolutionary fervor which I used to marvel at in Andrew has now infected my own life. The ongoing revelation of the truly Sacred which comes from giving oneself utterly and with no reservations to LIFE itself at all times, no matter what, has mysteriously taken me in its sway. This is not the old Roberta Anderson—in fact she bears only a dim resemblance to that “terminally self-centered person” who showed up at “satsang” in 1989. And for this, the only true and right response is GRATITUDE! Those memories of what seemed like relentless, endless, and ongoing butt-kicking and “humiliation” even tend to fade, as I continue to do whatever I can to stretch and open to the “cosmic” view. For all of this, I bow down. Not only to Andrew, but to that mysterious and grand Force that he is in fact himself deeply surrendered to.

Something that continues to surprise me is that my own view continues to open, despite myself, from the personal to the impersonal to the cosmic. I have had numerous spontaneous and unexpected experiences of “collective intelligence” around the globe which have blown my mind. I am beginning to understand Andrew’s interest in the emergence of “inter-subjective structures”. There is so much that I didn’t understand and/or resisted vehemently during my time with Andrew that I am now directly experiencing. I continue to discover that, despite myself, my view seems to be morphing into including more and more of the Grand Story.

So because of all of this, the fairly constant undercurrents of whining, wanting “revenge”, “compensation”, feeling deeply “abused” and “victimized”, insisting on “apologies”, or whatever—frankly just shrivel up and fall apart when they continue to show up again and again in our shared universe. “How I suffered with that sadistic monster!” etc. Give me a break! Grow up! Get a grip! Look up! Way, way, up! I am blessed, you are blessed—supremely, though it may take a while for the whole Enormous Story to be revealed. You had the guts to find this Guru and to give whatever you had to this profound evolutionary transformation. Thank yourselves and your own excellent karma and stop whining! Why not start manifesting everything that you have received? It’s time, (and overtime), for something beautiful, astonishingly new, and refreshingly amazing to start showing up. As yourself! Let’s hear it for “homo luminous”, my friends. No matter what we think, this is where we are going and must go.

I realize that I left the community around 2001 when finally, the deep structural changes in everyone who’d managed to hang on longer began to occur, as well as in the community as a whole. And I recognize that many of the “ardent detractors” left way before this time and never even experienced anything about the beginning of the “fruition” of Andrew’s vision. As I’ve said, I am one who has wavered, actually quite a lot, in attempting to maintain this “higher view”. This is of course easier for my friends who were blessed to witness and live through this initial species transformation which is making this entire radically intense ordeal really worth everything. But despite my own wavering, the higher force of Love and Truth continues to cycle about and captivate me. Despite all those forces which only want to bitch, criticize, complain, and express in spades how much they’ve been “victimized”, I keep finding that the Good Stuff keeps popping in and out and up—stuff like Gratitude and Appreciation for a Higher Way and this truly mysterious and incredible transformation that is clearly taking over so many of us old friends. I fully realize my own propensity for being some kind of wild and radical idealist. But the rock-bottom truth is that ALL Of US, no matter what our current “deeply-entrenched position” is, have had a profound soul-level initiation into the Non-Dual. And despite this contrary thought, that analysis, that resentment, this firm “position” etc., we have all been deeply infected with the Virus of Oneness. And Singularity is where we are all headed. I look forward to meeting many of you there. As one of my teachers, Adi Da Samraj, was fond of saying, “Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!”

Roberta  Anderson can be contacted at roberta@guru-talk.com