I just found your website, and I can’t tell you how good it is to see this happening. I met Andrew Cohen on a retreat in March of ‘06. Before then, I’d been a seeker for about 12 years following a spiritual awakening when I was nineteen. Meeting Andrew and learning about his teaching cleared up a profound amount of confusion that I’d picked up as a seeker. His articulation of the science of consciousness, evolution, and the post-modern condition rung so true and so deep that I knew I’d finally found not only a great and rare Teacher, but my own destiny as well. Andrew transmitted an absolute confirmation of life’s inherent positivity that explained my past spiritual experiences, gave deeper meaning to them, and made them more real before my very eyes – something I’d found nowhere else in all my seeking.

When I returned home to Seattle and spoke to my employers about the retreat I’d just been on, they immediately became “worried about me” and pointed me to the blogs against Andrew written by some of his former students. For about two days straight, I read through all of them. At a soul level, I can honestly say, those were the darkest hours I will ever meet. Not so much because I began to doubt Andrew, but because I seriously began to doubt my own spiritual insight that I knew had culminated in meeting Andrew, and the deeper stream of intuition I had been following that led me to him.

Over the course of reading those blogs, I moved into the aspect of myself that has no access to anything higher, deeper or more meaningful than all that I have been conditioned to believe is true by this secular/materialistic culture. It is the part of me that denies the miracles I have witnessed because they demand that I change to meet their goodness. If there is a capacity for evil in me, I found it on that day as I faced turning away from my own heart’s deepest longing.

But thankfully it just so happened that I had signed up to participate in a global meditation sit with Andrew’s student body the next day. I think we called it a World Wide Meditation Intensive or something like that. It was a Saturday and I’d committed to sitting for four hours, excited at the time by going deeply into the thrill of unbound consciousness with so many people from around the world. But that excitement had more than dissipated, in fact I had never felt so bad. It was a kind of pain that makes me understand the mythology of Christianity in a very direct way – the temptation to turn away from God, the enticement of it, and the hell realm of the soul’s eternal torment that results. In truth, I had turned away, or part of me had. But I sat down to meditate anyway as I’d said I would.

At first, I was aware of nothing but the pain of loss, disappointment, and utter heartache. Slowly, however, the realm of meditation I had come to know and love engulfed me: No one to be, nothing to hold on to, just timeless bliss inherent with unknowable possibility. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point after sitting for quite a while, the truth of what I had been experiencing, the real challenge of the spiritual life, and the choice I had to make came before me like a line drawn in the sand. I understood then the harsh reality of a force against Spirit that exists in all of us if we give it power, and that so often we encourage and support it in each other in the guise of care and protection. It is true, we are often ignorant of how much damage it does, and most are not to be blamed. My employers, for instance, likely were concerned for my well being, but are wholly ignorant of the cultural conditioning that drove their response.

Three and a half years later, I am living at the EnlightenNext World Center in Lenox, MA and hope to become a core student of Andrew’s. He is much more careful and moves slowly in letting people become his student precisely because of the people who were once in my position – passionately testifying their undying commitment to evolve spiritually under his guidance – yet turned against it and betrayed him in the end. For me, those insane blogs brought to light something that I needed to see in myself, and in culture at large. But, mostly, they must be stood against in an attempt to redeem what they undermine in all who read them, something that is already so fragile in most of us. That is the spiritual confidence that I can, We can, make a new and better world based on enlightened values.

So, thank you again for starting this blog!

Much love,

Meg