By Judy Fox
I am one of Andrew Cohen’s oldest students having met him in 1986 when he had been teaching formally for only around six months. His teachings have changed enormously over the years, but the seeds for everything that have unfolded were there in the early days. My purpose in writing now is really two-fold. I would like to write primarily about those early years to attempt to give a sense of what it means to be in a relationship with a true Guru. This is no small matter and in some ways could take a lifetime to fully express. I would also like to address the accounts given from some of Andrew’s ex-students which so glaringly omit the recognition we all had of what Andrew was taking on in us and the enormity of the task.
To get us to temporarily let go of our conditioned way of acting based on fear and desire was not difficult, but to get us to truly change, to live up to what we had experienced and knew to be true, that was a whole other story. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of time, energy and love that Andrew poured into each one of us to help us to evolve, let go and truly change.
The Real Deal
When I met Andrew in 1986, I had been very seriously involved with Vipassana Buddhist meditation for ten years. In spite of all the extensive and intensive practice that I did with many teachers starting with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and ending with Christopher Titmuss and Christina Feldman, I did not find my life more enlightened, free or sane. What I found was a desire to continually go back into retreat and meditate. I would experience a lot of peace, bliss and insight on retreat, but when it was over, I had not fundamentally changed. After ten years, I had even begun to teach meditation, but inwardly I had become disillusioned and quite lost. I found as well that this gap also existed in the teachers that I knew; in other words a gap between what they were teaching and how they were living.
When I truly met Andrew and recognized who he was (and that took awhile given my background and suspicion of gurus) it was like nothing that I had ever experienced before or since. I knew beyond a doubt that my life as I had known it was over. I had come home, a home that I had yearned for all my life. I experienced a profound trust and letting go and an intimacy with all Life; with oneself, others and with Andrew. One could call it Love, this intimacy, but it was not a personal love. Andrew was the focus for this “event” but it radiated out to all those who were around him. The intimacy and love between all of us who were with Andrew during this time was beyond anything that any of us had ever experienced and at the same time it was totally natural. From my own experience I knew for the first time what it meant to be a disciple of a true Teacher, a true Guru, and that it was like no other relationship. I would flash upon the biblical scenes of Christ and his disciples (even though I was not brought up as a Christian) and I understood what they must have felt.
When one merges into Life with this degree of trust—trust in the unknown, in that which is beyond the mind, beyond time and space—then we recognize for perhaps the first time how much mistrust and cynicism has been our on-going state and how much self-aggrandizement we have habitually indulged in. Only after meeting Andrew, did I recognize what a superior position I had taken as a spiritual seeker/meditator.
I had met many teachers before Andrew – both from the East and West, but I had never met anyone like Andrew. Besides working and meditating for two years at a Meditation Center in Western Massachusetts which was heavily focused on Vispassana Buddhist meditation, I had lived at a Zen Farm in California for about 6 months and did a number of Zen retreats in the Soto and Rinzai tradition. I had also been to Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado for two summers when the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was teaching, and I had worked at a meditation center in Wiltshire, England for a year and consequently did a year-long retreat there. During these ten years, I met many teachers, both from the East and West and from an assortment of Buddhist traditions. Fundamentally the teachers from the West were sincerely dedicated and many of the teachers who I met from the East were very impressive, but still I can say without hesitation that Andrew was different.
What was it that was and is so unique about him? For one thing I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is the Real Deal, and by that I mean that he is living what he is teaching. He is the ultimate expression of integrity in every aspect of his life. He really lives from a deep place of not knowing and at the same time always strives for perfection in everything he does. I think it is very rare to truly live from a place of not knowing without the rigidity that often comes from being steeped in a tradition, especially when this is combined with an unusual degree of wanting to find out for oneself what is true. In a way he is a blend of the Western modern man of reason who always wants to find out what the truth is, not settling for superstition in any form, and at the same time is totally immersed in the ungraspable mystery of Life. He manifests the unchanging nature of the ground of being and simultaneously is always leaning forward, changing, learning and developing. This I had not experienced in any of my past teachers.
Another factor that has always struck me is the depth of Andrew’s simple humanity. He has so much heart, uncompromising and at the same time so very flexible, soft and full of humor. You knew that he was, and would always be, totally straight with you. This is a very rare quality and one that inspires so much trust. When I say Andrew is always straight I mean that you never feel that the important things are left unsaid. There is never any pretence, hidden agendas, or what I would call shadows; he is transparent. Andrew naturally responds very directly to life and to people. His directness is coming from a penetrating clarity and a desire for the highest to be expressed in his students. And although his teachings have changed enormously since the early years, he always responded to the aggression of the ego, to pretence, neurosis, any place in us that wants to be special, separate or hold onto a problem. Since most of us do have masks or shadows of pretence to whatever extent, at first this degree of undefended responsiveness could be very disarming, and perhaps even alarming, but no matter what one’s responses were at any given time, it fundamentally inspired such a deep trust. It also gave one “permission” in one’s contact with Andrew, perhaps for the first time in one’s life, to be that direct and straight with oneself and others.
“Not One Drop of Selfishness”
In meeting Andrew an incredible change took place in us in all directions, inner and outer, as the awakened Heart took precedence over the egoic Mind. But in spite of that, for all of us, the ego would eventually resurface and regain control. As a Guru Andrew was endlessly creative in how he worked with us in order to wake us up and help us face the truth. I remember with one close student who was very uptight and full of self-doubt, Andrew had him sit up front next to him while he was teaching in the most loving way. He was given a cup of tea. They both actually had cups of tea! And every time this man would indulge in self-doubt, he was instructed to have a sip of tea. When the man took a sip of tea, Andrew would take a sip too. It was very sweet. Andrew was trying to help him to relax and let go and it worked!
Very early on Andrew challenged me because after everything had been revealed to me—and I had experienced more bliss, ecstatic joy and oneness of being than any human being could ever ask for—I went back into the neurotic mind that always wants more, compares and indulges in paranoia and self-doubt. When one has tasted and realized such oneness, then retreating back into the neurotic mind and all that that entails is selfish. How one responds to such a deep realization of oneness reveals everything about our basic condition. In the Light, all the darkness and ignorance gets revealed very quickly.
I didn’t see myself as a selfish person, and from a conventional point of view, I would not have been considered selfish. I had done a lot of volunteer work with the elderly and dying for example. But in the light of the higher consciousness and higher aspiration for liberation that I was experiencing, yes, I was very selfish. And looking back now, it is quite impersonal. I am part of a whole generation of selfish people—post-modern narcissists—for whom the realm of one’s own feeling experience and the freedom to do what I want in “my” life is of utmost importance. I had always lived my life as I wanted and indulged in my emotions in a big way.
I had already known Andrew for over a year. I had been given so much – more than any human being could ever want in this life time. Many times there was the sense that I could die now because everything was so perfect but still it wasn’t enough, I wasn’t satisfied. Rather than being grateful, I wanted more, more bliss and affirmation. Andrew responded by asking me to write him every day without one drop of selfishness. I did that for close to two weeks and at first it was a real struggle as I could only write one sentence, but by the end of those two weeks something had cracked in me and my heart opened. The heart opening was in relationship to Andrew but really our relationship to Andrew was a microcosm of our relationship to all of life, to the unknown and to limitless possibilities. When that happened, I was filled with gratitude and love and only wanted to give endlessly. In that ecstatic state, the best of us comes out and for quite a long time afterwards the heart took precedence over the mind and all its endless preoccupations.
Everything is Seen
There are so many incidences that I could relate about myself and others that illustrate how Andrew tried everything and experimented in so many ways to wake us up to what we had realized and to change. The relationship with a true Guru or Master is like no other. I had no experience of a Guru from my past and never sought a Guru. The mere idea of having a Guru was distinctly unattractive to me. Even if I had never known about the corruption of so many Gurus, I still would have found the idea totally foreign and scary. It represented a loss of independence and discrimination, the idea of being a blind follower. This is no doubt very much the cultural conditioning of the Western mind. So you can imagine it was a real turnaround for me, to meet and acknowledge Andrew as my Teacher and Guru. It really felt like a choiceless decision. It turned my life upside down in the most glorious way. I was afloat in unknown waters and life took on epic proportions.
The relationship with a Guru is based on trust and a knowing that the only thing the Guru wants is your liberation and your willingness to live your highest potential. It is said a Guru is a dispeller of darkness. Everything eventually is seen in a Guru’s presence – things about yourself that definitely don’t fit your self-image. Nothing that Andrew has ever said to me was untrue but, almost from the very beginning, it was often a shock to some degree because it did not fit my self image of the “nice, good spiritual” person who really does care. It can be totally excruciating to hear the truth of who we are. In the conventional world this truth would never be revealed because we live in a collusion of compromise never daring to believe that anything more grand and exquisite for human beings and life could be possible. It is a precious gift to hear the truth from a true Guru. In spite of how excruciating it is, you do always know that he or she really does see you, the heights of what you are capable of and also what is in the way, the ego and all its self-deceptions. And you also always know that the Guru’s motivation is pure and that makes all the difference. It’s quite amazing to actually know that a Guru’s motivation is pure because there is so much corruption in many teachers, not all, but many. In meeting what I am calling a true Guru, you see with new eyes the glory of what is possible, a previously unimaginable goodness in life and its potential. You see this because of the Guru’s own state, where he or she is dwelling.
The ‘Untrue” Self
When Andrew really started taking on our egos and pride, which is traditionally the greatest hindrance in the spiritual journey, and after we had been with him for quite awhile and we still weren’t changing, one of the tools that Andrew used with his older students was to give us names that epitomized our core condition, our core way of operating in the world that was based on survival and compromise; not on liberation of the self, maturity or sanity. This core condition in many ways, as I reflect upon it now, was based on our own personal conditioning and also on the collective ego, or that which is formed by our culture. I was given the name “Dizzy.” Andrew really hit the bull’s eye in terms of capturing my fundamental condition. I was horrified and ashamed. It captured my modus operandi on so many levels: the dizzy dame, dumb lady who asked stupid questions, disorganized, losing things all the time, lost in my own world of feelings and thoughts and not willing to be straight, simple, direct and transparent. This was the persona that I put out to the world when underneath there was a smart, perceptive human being who understood and saw much more than she expressed. She also was in need of a lot of development and was lazy and didn’t seem to think it was important to be organized and together in the world. She was the “sensitive” creative being who didn’t have to be that grounded and practical.
When Andrew first gave me my name, and for most of that year, I didn’t budge from a stance of embarrassment and lack of interest. The only way one can change is by beginning to get interested in really getting a full view of who we are. Andrew has always said that we can’t see ourselves objectively and this is true, but with his help and the help of others, we actually can, but we have to be individually motivated to do so. Also we cannot quickly grasp the full extent of what is being reflected as often it’s so close to us, but the important thing is to be interested. Nearing the end of that year, I did finally start getting interested and a lot got revealed in unexpected and sometimes quite mysterious ways, and by the end of the year Andrew took my name Dizzy away. It wasn’t like I had totally finished with this condition since it is so core, but I had begun to change. The “vessel” as they say in Buddhist literature has to be purified to be worthy to be a conduit of freedom and integrity and that is on-going. A lot changed for me. For a time I manifested a degree of simplicity, clarity and lack of pretence that was simply because I started to face into myself. It was in some ways quite miraculous, but it certainly was not the end of the story. The human condition, as I said earlier, is huge and it can’t be taken for granted and we can’t rest on our laurels and that is what unfortunately many of us did.
The Female Ego and True Women’s Liberation
At a certain point Andrew really starting honing in on the female collective ego. Even though on some level we all knew about the ego and had faced into our own “personal” egos to one degree or another, this was on a whole other level; it was personal and collective. It first started to become apparent when we had so much difficulty and resistance as women to meeting together in a higher perspective. But it really showed its face when Andrew brought this fact up with us. He was met with a huge NO from all of us! It wasn’t as if we literally said “no” but on a visceral and almost preconscious level this was our collective response. We showed absolutely no interest to find out what this was about. It was so huge and so close to our skin because what Andrew was touching upon was just the tip of the iceberg.
It was the female collective ego that had been developing over centuries and, in terms of our real awareness of it, had also lain dormant for centuries. This was Big. It was like the discovery of the New World, but in this case it was about the female psyche and ego and our response was: “Don’t get near this. This is our secret”. It was a secret even from ourselves but we also did know something about it. I think we all had intimations that we weren’t really as “trusting” or “good” as we presented ourselves to be, but this had to be kept a secret. It was part of our make-up as women: the pretence, the façade, the subterfuge where appearances are more important than anything else. It was also part of our sexual power over men, the main power that we had. We could not admit to not being fundamentally “good” and, even worse, to being aggressive, mistrustful and dishonest. Maybe we could do this on a personal level but not on a collective level. Andrew started to crack into that secret and you can imagine how difficult that was. The face of female Pride reared its head up and said “You are not getting near me. No way!” This response was visceral and on a totally irrational level. The feeling was that if we were exposed in this way, we would literally die.
For a very long time Andrew kept telling us how uninterested we were in looking into what was going on, and that in itself was devastating to our self-image of being these fundamentally “good” and caring spiritual human beings. How could we not be interested? And for a long time we really didn’t even believe it to be true. Yet, at the same time, we were terrified that it was true. We tried to carry on as before but once the “secret” was out of the box, more just started to be revealed.
For many reasons based on our biology and our past history over eons, women have developed a very complicated ego to survive in a world in which it was literally not safe. We learned to be very manipulative in order to survive. Our survival depended upon looking good, “winning the man,” being seen in a good light. Out of this conditioned core of fundamental insecurity comes a craving for affirmation. Of course men have their own particular culturally and collectively conditioned ego to deal with, but men aren’t so attached to being fundamentally “good” since that has not been so culturally valued. Also men have been out in the world in a way women have not been for centuries, and consequently have developed a much higher degree of objectivity. Women are particularly conditioned to be very feeling-based. Feelings reined supreme over rationality and objectivity. So while this is understandable in the big picture of human evolution, it made it very difficult for us as women to clearly navigate our experience together. It was almost impossible for us to trust each other when we were just with other women. Under the façade of niceness, there was a fierce unacknowledged competitiveness. Most women (and men!) have no idea that this exists. This was a huge condition that had to be faced and transcended in light of a much higher aspiration for human beings, men and women, together. We began to see that transcending these collective structures was so essential if we were going to be able to evolve and create a new awakened culture together of a whole different order.
As you can imagine cracking into the depth of this uncharted terrain was a major undertaking for Andrew. He had no idea that these deep structures that collectively bound women into a web of collusion and compromise were there, until he discovered them himself through us. He had no precedent in spiritual tradition with which to deal with this either.
Over the years there would be breakthroughs with us women which we could not sustain. We were dealing with not only the individual ego that has formed through our personal history, but with the collective ego of the female gender. The difficulty for us women was our mistrust and competitiveness, but probably the biggest obstacle to transcending this in ourselves was our prideful refusal to let go and really see our “personal” experience from an impersonal perspective.
You cannot imagine how much it took from Andrew over years and years, first to get us to acknowledge this conditioning (which was not personal but which we all took personally), and then once acknowledged and looked into, to get us to the point where we actually wanted to change. And even then it was a whole other leap to actually change. It is one thing to get one woman to transcend her condition, but it is quite another to get a collective of women to change. It was a monumental task – a huge battle – and for a long time it was not clear at all if it was going to happen. There were no guarantees. If it had been left up to us, we would have never gotten interested, period. So many of us continued to “fall” in the face of this challenge and express gross ego in the worst way and fundamentally not care. It is only because of Andrew’s relentless desire to liberate us as women that some of us did finally change and a true sisterhood has emerged in which women are expressing an authentic autonomy and interconnectedness that was unimaginable before.
For myself, as I look back now, my way of dealing with being confronted with ego, and particularly aggression which I really didn’t want to see in myself, was to project this aggression onto many of my own sisters. I became “weak,” cowering and inept which was really all a façade to cover up my own unwillingness to face myself impersonally and fully acknowledge my own aggression, lust for power and mistrust. I opted for a passive aggression where I could blame and resent others. I was a coward. A coward doesn’t stand up for herself, she doesn’t show her cards, but underneath she knows so much more. This is really an untenable position to take because it does not allow for any authenticity, any true meeting with others. This position of cowardice which I took to the extreme was also an impersonal stance with some of the women, meaning it was the same conditioned reflex that manifested in many of us. Others took a different stance, had a lot more courage, but also were often coming from wanting to be in a powerful position. In either stance, one is holding on to oneself, still wanting to have power. This was a whole dynamic that had to be seen, acknowledged and transcended, and finally it did change, but, as I keep saying, it would take an enormous degree of relentless “hammering” from Andrew before it actually did.
Projecting the Shadow
Dealing with the refusal to really face ourselves and change is an ongoing part of any genuine spiritual path. It is often what seems like an endlessly arduous task of climbing up a steep mountain with the summit shrouded in clouds. All we know is that we have to keep going or fall. Because staying on the “straight and narrow” demands such ongoing humility and relentless honesty with ourselves, we are often tempted to seek relief by projecting our “shadow” onto others, for example “my sisters are out to get me” or “Andrew is punishing me” etc. But this projection, which can very insidiously distort the actual facts of what is occurring, is a direct result of the refusal to take responsibility for our own condition. It doesn’t take much to go there and lose true perspective on what is happening, especially in an excruciating and challenging circumstance. When this shape shift occurs we then become the “victim” and everything gets distorted very quickly, faster than the blink of an eye. The delicacy and subtlety of what we are involved in with this relationship can be so easily distorted when we are not clean with ourselves.
It is exactly the knowledge of the dynamic I have just described (and this is something that was exposed between us repeatedly) that I find so seriously omitted from the accounts of some of those who have left and still harbor so much resentment. They don’t acknowledge their own refusal to take responsibility for their shadow. From being a student of Andrew over time one does learn about this distortion that can easily happen and therefore even if one decides not to change, one really doesn’t have any excuse for not taking responsibility for ones own distorted perceptions. We were taught how to be objective and rational by a training and practice that we had all been so fortunate to receive. We also all knew very quickly after being with Andrew that what we were embarking upon was ENORMOUS—it was and is a heroic task and that is what thrilled the best part of ourselves.
This Relationship is for Life
I am not one of the core students now which means I am not part of the on-going group of students who directly receive guidance from Andrew and are now really partners with him. But one thing I know for sure: he is no longer doing battle in the way he had to do for so many years. The ego, individual and collective, is not in control anymore. It’s a major victory and what is emerging is a truly evolving transformed community of autonomous, profoundly interconnected human beings that are caring deeply about creating a new future with higher and deeper values.
Andrew is still however my teacher. This relationship is for life. To deny it would be to go against my heart and soul. I only have profound gratitude for everything that Andrew has done, not just for myself, but for the evolution of the whole human race. As long as one stays connected to Andrew, the teachings and the depth and breath of what one has realized and recognized in meeting him, then development and evolution is always possible. I feel tremendously passionate and committed to this life of the Spirit that is ever new, ever changing and ever reaching for deeper and higher values of goodness and truth. I have learned and continue to learn so much. My conviction in what is happening is unshakable and the resounding positivity that has always been the pulsating lifeblood of Andrew’s vision now makes truly significant and profound change possible for us all.
Judy Fox can be contacted at judy@guru-talk.com
