By N. Schmidt
I met Andrew Cohen in 1991 in Amsterdam. A friend had told my husband and I about Andrew Cohen, this remarkable young teacher. The ‘Satsang’, as it was then called, took place in someone’s living room. Andrew was simply sitting in front of a crowd of about 30 people, answering questions. I had no particular expectation or intention; I just wanted to meet this man to make up my own mind. To my surprise, I was very much struck by the impact he left on me. He was emanating a sense of resting in a deep confidence and vulnerability. And although he spoke quite fast at times, and seemed almost insecure and searching for words, his modern-day-language-answers were passionate and alive, and went straight to the core of the matter.
Simply listening to and watching this man I felt deeply touched and excited in an unknown and mysterious way, and at the same time an irrational fear started creeping up in my chest. And all of this occurred after having seen Andrew for a couple of hours for the first time in my life! For an unexplainable reason I immediately knew that this meeting would change my life and answer some of the deepest questions I had…
So far I had lived a very protected, cosy, straight forward, and square life with no worldly worries, raising two beautiful little children with the perfect husband at my side, it couldn’t have been better. But after meeting Andrew, I had a growing and nagging sense that there was a totally different depth and positivity to life, pointing to another perspective altogether, which at times felt completely terrifying and threatening.
For some years before meeting Andrew I had pursed Vipassana Meditation with S.N. Goenka, an Indian teacher and I had travelled in India for quite some time. I had had some powerful spiritual experiences and had gained somewhat of a spiritual understanding in Asian philosophies. But meeting Andrew had opened up a whole different quality of depth and understanding. It felt like being infected with an inner longing for something so much greater. This longing eventually led me to give up my cosy life and, together with my family, we moved three years later to the city of Cologne to start a community with a bunch of people, who more or less had all known Andrew as long as we had.
Everything that happened in the ensuing 15 years was the most exciting, outrageous and demanding experience I had ever encountered in my life. As a “formal student” I was, under Andrew’s constant guidance and with the help of a committed group of students, privileged to plunge into and investigate the depth of the human soul. Andrew not only showed us the perfection of Life and the potential of absolute love, intimacy and care that is possible between human beings, but he also challenged us to live up to our deepest recognition and understanding of the Truth. Under enormous pressure very deep conditioned structures and layers in consciousness were revealed that flew in the face of so many of our strongly held ideas, on every level: emotional, psychological, cultural, and spiritual.
This kind of surgery into the unknown structures of the human predicament took an unbelievable amount of work from Andrew’s side. Although each one of us students had asked him to be our teacher, he had to fight an unbelievable battle with us, individually and collectively, to get us to face and live the deepest truth of ourselves. This battle was an epic one fought in the depth of our own souls and hearts. I was unbelievably privileged to witness a collective investigation into nature’s laws, laws that are hidden in deep layers and structures of our individual and collective consciousness, psyche and soul. For example, Andrew had to help his German students a great deal to even begin to start looking into the horrific events of the Holocaust. Why did he do this? Because there was so much individual and collective avoidance of our collective cultural history and conditioning and most of us were not willing at all to come to terms with it.
When it came down to looking at my own ‘German conditioning’ it turned out to be an extremely challenging task to confront the depth of potential evil that was latent in my own soul. At the same time however, the way out of this hellish conditioning revealed itself bright and clear, waiting to be walked in humble humanness.
It also was extremely challenging to raise my children in the EnlightenNext community as all the ideas about motherhood, partnership and all the concepts about what it meant to be a ‘good mother’ or woman were shattered completely. This turned everything I had thought about myself so far upside down, but made perfect – and liberating – sense! I struggled with a lot of what I had seen and learned was true in order to not face my own selfishness and simply change for the better. But in spite of my own resistance, I have found that I have changed tremendously and also my children benefited a great deal from growing up in Andrew’s community and became strong, open-minded and interested young people. They both love and respect Andrew deeply.
Andrew is an absolute and uncompromising teacher who cares to an inconceivable degree for the purity of his deepest understanding of the Life Process itself, constantly exploring and questioning everything. I never saw Andrew taking anything for granted, always questioning and asking the biggest questions possible. With this kind of inner posture he poses an uncompromisingly confrontation in matters of truth and heart: it is a kind of attitude we as human beings are not used to, it is simply too human! This individual and collective exploration into these matters was both extremely challenging and thrilling at the same time, because it revealed so much about what is actually possible between human beings.
Andrew masterfully guided us each step of my way in this unbelievable endeavour. However, in spite of powerful insights and experiences I finally had to face that I wasn’t really willing to keep going into this never ending and completely unknown territory. I wasn’t big hearted enough to lay down new pathways for the future as a morally advanced human being, to truly surrender into a trust in Life that would ask everything of me, emotionally, psychologically and intellectually.
But looking back I am so absolutely grateful to Andrew for showing me and the children a different way of being that has changed our lives for the better in so many ways. Throughout the years I saw many of my spiritual brothers and sisters falter and run away, some of them turning their back on Andrew, but I never had and still don’t have the slightest doubt, that it was themselves they were running away from. And having learned a great deal about Ego, the one and only perennial enemy when it comes to true spiritual transformation, I am not surprised that some of them, even years later, are still not willing to face their own selfishness and cowardliness, and are still blaming Andrew or the community for their own defeat.
From my own experience I can say that Andrew has always conducted himself with complete integrity, vulnerability, selflessness, love, and passion for his vision, and for those that asked to be his students. He sometimes came up with the most bizarre, creative, challenging and unusual ideas possible in order to help us face our Egos, but his intention in doing so always shone loud and pure and clear.
N. Schmidt can be contacted at ns@guru-talk.com
