By Debbie Wilson

Meeting  Andrew Cohen

Sitting cross legged, cramped in a living room of a home somewhere in Amsterdam in 1986, I was among the many people who had traveled to Holland to see this new spiritual teacher called Andrew Cohen. I had seen him teach in the UK and had been far more affected by his authenticity and the power of the reality of what he was teaching than I wanted to be. I was of the school “be a light unto oneself”. I was deeply skeptical that a young American from NYC could be enlightened, much less a genuine Guru. I went to Holland to find out what on earth I was going to do with what was stirring inside of me.

Back in that living room tea was being served and there was a profound silence as we all drank. I found myself telling Andrew about the fear I experienced when he had been speaking about dying completely into Enlightenment. His reply was to tell me that I had, for the first time, walked to the edge of the cliff and looked over—but that it was up to me to jump. I sat there staying with what he said, not backing away. I heard Andrew say “good”. He knew somehow—and at that point I made a choice at a soul level to jump. I fell, into the abyss of consciousness, overwhelmed by the understanding that we are all One and the voice of that Oneness which is LOVE. Cynical “me” was thrown headlong into the wondrous life of a spiritual seeker becoming a finder. Thus began a spiritual odyssey that matches every great story ever told, and which has still in no way ended.

Andrew Cohen: American Guru & Human Being

I was a student of Andrew Cohen for 23 years. For a good part of that time I was one of his close “committed students” whom he trusted to run centers and be an example to other students of courage, independence, and humility. I was one of Andrew’s close students because of the risks I took, the independence I showed, and my consistency in relationship to my intention to live according to my own evolving understanding of how to live my deepest spiritual experience. I worked closely with him and was privy to seeing what a real human being he was. I had the opportunity to observe Andrew Cohen over many years. Over and over I was moved by his integrity, consistency, profound interest in LIFE, and deep care for his students’ rising up to their greatest potential.

Andrew always listened to different viewpoints on all matters, and would alter his plans and points of view according to what he was hearing and learning. I saw first-hand how much he anguished over students whom he knew had been deeply affected by their own recognition of truth and had started to live according to a higher view, but then would fall prey to the power of their own egoic structures, fears, and desires. There were many times he would be unable to sleep. I and others would sit up with him as he tried to work out how to help his students deal with whatever variety of egoic resistance they were currently doing battle with. He received endless letters from us all. He read every single one (and still does!). He was always the first to respond to even the smallest glimmer of true heart from anyone.

I have never met anyone like Andrew Cohen – so real, always interested, always looking to the future and not resting on any success, no matter how significant. When I say that he anguished over us – it was our souls, our spiritual development that he deeply cared about. He cared that we fully embodied our highest attainment and then that we each took it further, with our own independent interest. I so often had the sense when I worked closely with him that he bore our karma on his shoulders until such time as we were willing to shoulder it ourselves. And for this he has been condemned, for caring too much and believing that enlightenment, evolution and genuine change is really possible for the likes of you and me.

It is a much harder thing to believe that Andrew Cohen is the “real deal” in this post modern context where it would be actually a relief to find Andrew is, like so many other Gurus, on a megalomaniacal ego trip. Because as individuals we are then conveniently let off the hook! Why? Because suddenly we don’t have the positive tension of a LIVING example. Just that fact alone creates a rub which provides the friction needed for radical change. In Andrew Cohen, it is safe to say we all met our match. How many of us get our highest aspirations taken seriously by someone who is himself an example of living a life in truth? And then, how many of us stay true to that aspiration when we find that the price to be paid is: whatever it takes. Period. This means giving up all our cherished ideas about ourselves as well as unflinchingly facing our small-minded, selfish, petty, nasty, and even cruel selves. When the unpleasant news begins to dawn on us that we are not the heroic warriors of our own spiritual Hollywood that we all wanted to imagine ourselves to be, and when we are having our butts kicked by the Guru who we said we wanted to take us on – who are we going to blame? An interesting question, and one that reveals a great deal about not only the fundamentally gross state of the human condition, but also the profound delicacy of the spiritual quest.

True Battles with Ego

To admit one has an ego is one thing. To be serious about facing the structures of ego within oneself as they manifest in a personal, gender, cultural, and even collective sense is an endeavor that ups the ante to another level altogether. To embark on this daunting task with a spiritual guide,  a Guru that you have committed yourself to,  is way beyond any known stratosphere. Here we enter a realm where all bets are off. You are left alone with your own spiritual conviction, depth of experience, your own dense egoic structures, and a guide to whom you have said “YES, this is what I have wanted all my life”.

When we find out who we really are, or maybe, more accurately, that we are not who we thought we were, the challenge is then to face the truth of the human condition in and as ourselves, and to evolve one step or huge leaps at a time. It is an enormous undertaking—far bigger than anyone can imagine. Those of us who committed ourselves to being students of Andrew Cohen did so because we knew that this was bigger than simply a personal enlightenment experience. We knew that we had stumbled upon a spiritual revolution for the 21st century where we no longer needed to look back at the teachers from the traditions, useful as they have been. We had found a Guru who spoke our language and understood the struggles of the modern day seeker.  Andrew was able to communicate the timeless wisdom of the ancient spiritual traditions with sparkling clarity, directness, and realness.

Some of us, when we found ourselves not up for this greatest of all evolutionary challenges, after having consciously chosen to make ourselves grist for the mill of evolution, left the community. Inevitably we would then have to come to terms with what was revealed to us about ourselves, the fact that we are now saying that we don’t want to go all the way with our chosen Teacher, despite our earlier declarations, and to deal with the fact that Andrew took us more seriously than maybe anyone ever had in this life. Those who left then have to find a way to come to terms with everything that happened, which means trying to understand whether everything that Andrew did to get us to face ourselves, to break individual or collective ego, was in fact justified.

I, for one, have no doubt that everything Andrew did served to allow me to reach for the highest part of myself. Andrew called me not only to evolve in a radical way into a truly mature human being, but to profoundly expand my world view and the significance and purpose of my life. This view is something way beyond anything remotely personal, and continues to evolve.

It is because of my own grappling with my decision to leave that I find it heartbreaking when I hear other ex- students of Andrew condemning him and reporting alleged acts of “abuse” as having “damaged” them. Many of the things I hear that they claim happened actually did, and some are outright lies. But more than all the so-called details, it is utterly wrong to be writing about these things with no context of the enormity of Andrew’s vision for the entire human race, and with the sole intent to smear Andrew and portray oneself as a helpless victim. I feel a deep sense of outrage that people I not only knew so well, but with whom I shared intimately in some of the most sacred and delicate times of our own lives, have become such distortions of themselves, expressing such a transparently one-dimensional view. To see their descent from a subtlety of understanding and expression of the highest dharma which they have experienced deeply to tabloid press-like smear tactics is painful. However, it’s not too hard to understand, as this is the easy way out. It is a simple, clear example of how gross ego is, and how its function is to destroy anything that reveals a higher standard or view where ego has no place and can no longer exist. It is as if they have forgotten their own intention to reach for something higher, and are denying their own deepest understanding in order to justify their own failure. So they all sound the same—angry, hurt, dark, and cynical. And worst of all, they are even convincing, because their complaints appeal to the “sensitive” post-modern self and the simplistic and cynical view that all gurus are corrupt, and that radical evolution is not really even possible.

Believe me, those who continue to have an “axe to grind” with Andrew like William Yenner the author of  “American Guru” are no angels and no victims, as I am certainly not. All of them have revealed gross egoic tendencies of selfishness, cowardice, manipulation, anger – just as I did. And yet there is no mention in their tales of woe of the gross ways they behaved in a sacred context when their egos were squeezed, or of how they mistreated their close brothers or sisters.

What affects me most is that each one of these people has expressed a level of humanity and view that I find painfully absent in their statements. What brief mention is made in any of their accounts of the ‘good times” and intimacy we shared has been reduced to something small and deeply personal. There is not even a trace of the big heartedness and independent intelligence that they each have expressed, in some cases far more eloquently than I will ever be able to. This is, to me, more testimony that ego is the most destructive, evil force known to man, capable of annihilating the critical steps our human race urgently needs to take to expand beyond a personal world view.

Women’s Liberation with a 21^st Century Male Guru

One of the most profound aspects of Andrews teaching is his teaching on women’s liberation. I think it might also be one of the areas for which he has been most criticized, and it is definitely an approach to women that has sparked much controversy. He has been accused by many of being chauvinist and misogynistic—at the very least!  But my experience is entirely the opposite, despite the fact that facing the female ego has been, and continues to be, the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Anything Andrew has found out about egoic structures has been through his ongoing observations of his students. Early on he saw that we women did not fundamentally trust each other. We found it difficult to come together in a shared higher view, and tended to see things through a strongly personal perspective. When he brought his observations up with us women, although intellectually we knew that what he was saying was true, on an emotional level there was a unanimous wall of refusal to believe it. For the first time I saw the force of ego in a collective form.

It is not easy to be a student of Andrew Cohen. As a woman you are certainly not going to be admired for your beauty and your charm. You will not be invited to any “goddess worship” parties!  Andrew refused to allow us to default to the fundamental victim status that comes from the biological reality of being the physically weaker sex. For ages we had learned to justify using sexual power and manipulation to get what we wanted. We hid behind men, and learned to be covertly (and not so covertly!) fiercely competitive and mistrustful of other women. We came face-to-face with the ease with which we would lie to protect ourselves. We saw that we had, in fact, spent our entire lives up to this point lying whenever it was convenient. All of us expressed a fundamental lack of interest in embodying an awakened perspective when it came down to embracing the totality of our conditioning as women.

Andrew was calling us to be co-creators with men in the evolution of a new kind of human being. We “saints” and “very nice women” were confronted with the seamy underbelly of our actual condition. What was being revealed about us as women in this context of evolution flew directly in the face of the established female roles of the Goddess, Mother, and Matriarch. We were challenged to look way beyond all of our inherited cultural beliefs such as “men are selfish brutes, and women are sweet, nurturing, and delicate”. So not only were we up against our own view of ourselves, but we were challenging the deeply entrenched status quo that has kept the world turning for centuries. It is no small wonder that we had a battle of epic proportions on our hands!

There are very few teachers or scholars who have had the courage or willingness to expose the underbelly of women’s conditioning in an effort to free us from all of these constraining structures so that a desperately needed new paradigm can reveal itself. The leap Andrew was calling us to was not so we could place ourselves on yet another pedestal, nor was it about our own personal individual enlightenment. It was a leap which involved facing and transcending the biological and cultural roles that have defined the feminine, so that we could actually dare to start to redefine the feminine and begin the heroic task of moving culture forward, creating a new consciousness that the likes of Carl Jung and Gerder Lerner had only dreamed of, or briefly seen. Perhaps we had not originally signed up for this awesome task, but the discovery that one’s personal yearning for Enlightenment has led one to be the guinea pig in the huge churning edge of Creation is something I shall be ever grateful to Andrew for.

A New Women’s Liberation: My Own Story

My own battle with the female ego began a couple of years into a standoff, and ongoing crisis, between all the women and Andrew. Early on his vision was of a truly independent woman, able to stand alone and express a liberated self-confidence which needed no affirmation from men. This was a woman who could come together with other women in deep trust and with a steady focus on a higher goal. For a long time Andrew’s vision was just that—a vision. Early on he described our collective response to the actualization of that vision as a “visceral NO”. We fought him tooth and nail, despite all our stated intentions to the opposite.During this time it appeared that I was steady, maintaining a view and living a standard of being a woman who cared deeply about enlightenment and supporting my sisters in rising up to a higher center of gravity. There was a period of months when every woman who had shown leadership had “fallen” in the face of their own egoic tendencies. I was left alone carrying the burden of an objective, higher perspective. I was an example to all the women that it was possible to face one’s ego and not collapse, because I knew that a higher perspective was at stake. But slowly cracks started to appear. I became attached to wanting to be “the One”, to being seen as special. I became addicted to a lust for power. I would have outbursts, expressing a dark intensity that could really hurt, scare and even damage people who were struggling already with their own evolution.

One day Andrew met with me and confronted me about this intensity that so issuing from impure motive in myself. He told me that it was unacceptable to treat anyone like that, especially because of the position I held. I knew the game was up and that my time had come to let go of something which was an expression of the darkness of the entire human race as myself. The rage and actual physical NO that arose in me was a thousand times more destructive and violent than anything I expected. This was even despite the fact that I seen many other women fall in the face of the same force.  And also despite the fact that Andrew had warned, explained, and helped us over and over to understand what we were up against when we chose to live in a context where human evolution and the transcendence of ego is the shared intention. The brighter the light that one stands for, the greater are the forces of darkness invoked both within and without. In the context I was living in I became like a devil because what I did was so destructive and I was rightly depicted as such.

All the women who had looked up to me as an example watched me fall prey to the same conditioning that they themselves were struggling with. Because I had held myself as an example, and had been demanding that they meet me in that as well, the effect was devastating. The women were now without a rudder. Andrew Cohen is an example of someone who unwaveringly holds a higher view, but he is not a woman. So for each one of us women who had been stable expressions of liberated womanhood, we were responsible for all of the women who were looking to us. Now, as a result of my demise, there was no woman to be found who was willing to face herself and hold a higher view that was more sacred than one’s self-image. This was a huge crisis, not just for us women, but for Andrew. He saw far more clearly than we did at the time that women’s evolution as a whole, and true “women’s liberation” was deeply in jeopardy.

The stakes were now unimaginably high. Andrew Cohen, being the relentlessly creative teacher that he is, had to come up with something to try to break the stalemate and get evolution moving. Thus the women’s locker room at Foxhollow, the principal center of EnlightenNext, was a room that became a crucible for one of the most profound teachings on the condition and Liberation of women that I know of. Many letters that we wrote both individually or collectively about our struggle went up on the walls. This room became a mirror of who we really were. Every day there was some new revelation. Cartoons went up depicting our various behaviours – all the ways that we acted out habitually and mechanically from our conditioning, as well as letters that showed our anger (we quickly found out that the adage – “there is no fury like the wrath of a woman scorned” was real!). Our profound disinterest in higher matters, when push came to shove, was a shocking revelation. It was excruciating to have this blatant and constant reflection in our every day lives, this revelation in minute detail of how small-minded and petty we could be with each other. Some of the most intense letters and cartoons showed how readily and casually we would condemn another sister. Who us? We were spiritually evolved, not the trailer trash of talk shows. How wrong we were! Cartoons of me and the way I was behaving appeared on the walls. My letters in response to the cartoons went up on the walls for all to see. The revelations of my disingenuousness and my fake attempts at redeeming myself were clearly reflected in those letters, exactly like the mirror that Andrew intended. Letters that I and others wrote that expressed a breakthrough into higher view also went up. There were also letters from women who had felt (and rightly so) betrayed by me up on those walls. The women’s locker room was like a hall of mirrors, some kind of ongoing and “in your face” reflection that was difficult to avoid, despite how strongly all of us wanted to avoid it all.

One would think to read and directly experience the humiliation of such an austere reflection would break one’s heart and engender enough humility to face oneself and start to change. But, as we were all finding out, the human attachment to ego is a far deeper thing when placed in a context of really transcending it for real as opposed to “accepting it”, “unconditionally loving oneself”, or whatever other jargon is so freely used these days to justify continued compromise in spiritual circles. Andrew Cohen is the only person I have known who never compromised with himself or with us. The more I peer into this the more it seems to me that he is being condemned by some simply for having taken us, and our claims that we were deadly serious, for real.

So what happened to the locker room? Why were the cartoons and letters taken down? Because victory started to be won by the women. Not a personal victory but a victory where women worked together to hold a higher view and to rise above selling each other out. We began to stop being so destructive and personal. And as soon as this side of the women revealed itself, Andrew had all the letters and cartoons taken down.

This higher view, perspective, experience came in waves, fading and re-establishing itself, each wave stronger and more evolved than the one before. Other crises and victories have happened over the years since. But in the last few years there has been a consistent expression of an evolutionary view being expressed, lived, and cared for by women. What is manifesting is a maturity in women that is not often seen. It has been unimaginably hard fought for and won. For those of us that endured the ordeal of the locker room of letters and cartoons—a crucible of excruciating purification for those that came through the other side—we were the front line of women, the “infantry” so to speak. We were the first wave to come face-to-face with the structures of the female ego on a collective scale. We were the ones who struggled through our dense resistance to make the first steps, thanks to Andrew’s fierce insistence, which continue to allow the emergence of a radically new kind of human female.

Now Andrew Cohen’s early vision of a truly independent woman who could stand alone and work together with other women in a context of transpersonal unity and creative purpose is becoming an actuality. Some of the women who have left Andrew have become fierce critics, particularly of his use of the locker room of cartoons and letters, and now label his refusal to compromise as “abusive”. They could not be more wrong. I will be the first to say it was excruciating going to that room every day and seeing what letters were up that revealed more horrors of the woman’s condition, or a cartoon of oneself depicting the truth of how conditioned and egoic one really was. There is no one who can say I was lightly treated in that room – by far the opposite! And it could not be further from the truth that I have been damaged by being shown the truth of who I am.  Having my condition revealed so graphically means that I never ever forget what I am capable of. When I see the force of ego raise its ugly head, I recognize it as a structure of resistance to something higher. I smell it and know it for the destructive force it is. This means even to this day I have the gift of making a different choice—a choice for something unknown, fresh, and Free. If Andrew had put his arm around me, told me everything was okay, that I was the good person I believed myself to be, if he had stopped short of pushing me to the very edge, the world, and I, would be far worse off. I would be living in a world of illusion instead of REALITY. And thus the possibility of being involved in the gritty wheels of genuine transformation would be lost, sold out to a life of comfort and denial.

Reality Check

So because of all this I feel so deeply that it is an abuse and violation of all that is Good and True that the detractors of Andrew, some of whom were as close to him as I have been, now portray themselves as “injured victims”. The deepest truth is that their own heroic struggle collapsed in the face of having met their Match – which in the end is always our own True Self.

Debbie Wilson can be contacted at debbie@guru-talk.com