By Eva Schuster

I would like to begin telling my story about my work over nineteen years as a student of Andrew Cohen by describing a public retreat with Andrew in Massachusetts in February of 2008 which I, and a number of other students and friends attended. This retreat began with many of us speaking about the values we had inherited from our various cultural backgrounds. When it was my turn to speak about my own childhood values as a young German girl, I described a picture of extreme nihilism, a picture without God and without hope. What I was sharing about this bleak terrain of post-war German values was received with a stillness and almost reverence for the intensity of this conditioning. Everyone in the room knew the power of the dark forces in the universe that define one end of the human experience. The other end of this spectrum was the reason that we had all gathered together in this room in the first place—in stark contrast to the darkness of our own human conditioning, we had all been initiated into the glory of the Absolute through our initial meeting with our Teacher. We had all been deeply immersed in the stillness of the unmanifest dimension of pure potentiality and we were all beginning to recognize its manifestation as the evolutionary impulse through our own human hearts and minds.

I have now been a student of Andrew’s for 20 years—the major part of my life, although I am not currently a formal Core student. I was the fourth or fifth German student to become interested in Andrew’s teaching. We were a clear minority in this group of about 120 to 150 students who had gathered around Andrew by the time I met him. My initial meeting with Andrew resulted, after five days, in an extraordinary and powerful enlightenment experience which shook me to the core. My heart was aflame with the desire to join this exciting movement which was springing up around this young Teacher. About three weeks after I met Andrew, a voice from within me said quietly but firmly: “This will liberate Germany.” It was a shock to me because my idea about being German was not that we needed to be liberated, but that we needed to be punished. But strangely, I also knew that the voice that I had heard was the voice of the Absolute, and that what it said was true.

I soon became part of Andrew’s student body. One night we had the good fortune to go out for a meal with our Teacher. At one point he grabbed my arm and said that he couldn’t see himself ever going to Germany because it was “too heavy”. But as time went on, we met more Germans who were beginning to get interested in what Andrew was teaching. There was an immediate and strong bond among us Germans and we all began to feel an urgency to bring Andrew’s teachings to Germany. We first translated various texts into German, and then Andrew’s second book “Enlightenment is a Secret”. Finally in 1992 we arranged for a teaching tour to Cologne, Germany. Andrew spoke in front of a substantial group of people. The topic of the evening was “The Crisis of Trust”. It was hard to tell how much impact this teaching had on the audience, but it was enough to establish an initial tunnel into the dense fortress of German conditioning.

In 1995, six of us German students established the first center in Germany, and we began our experiment in trying to live the Teachings together. We plunged in to something new and unknown together. Very quickly, it became obvious that ‘The Germans’ were a particular group. During this period, Andrew would frequently speak about what he was learning about cultural conditioning from his own students, as well as from travelling and teaching widely around the world. He was constantly helping us to bring into the light so many “hidden” forces and conditioned ways of being which we had unknowingly absorbed without question. He helped us to see that the difficulties we were experiencing in finding real stability in freedom were because we were still bound by these unseen forces, forces which had varying degrees of strength as well as different forms and styles for all of us depending on our own particular cultural backgrounds. His work at that time was to help us all to see that what we were all struggling with was in no way personal or “bad”, but that these forces are utterly impersonal and shared collectively.

Slowly, and with a great deal of resistance, we began to become a little bit interested in trying to discover what, in fact, it was that we had inherited from our cultural forefathers. What was that story that they told us that we implicitly believed? We were trying to discover a story that did not want to be told—a story that had been in fact effectively suppressed by mutual consent for a long time now. It was rough going to even get an initial whiff of the depth of our own darkness. For us Germans, that conditioning gradually revealed itself to be a fierce stance in superiority, expressed as a profound lack of humanity. If we would hurt people in the way we responded to them, or if we would act out of a need for control and for power, we were utterly unable to connect with the effects of our actions on a human level. It was as if we’d all been implanted with a mechanism which effectively cut us off from our conscience to an extreme degree.

Our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our lives were in fact quite superficial. We all carried on being “competent” and “on top of it”, and trying to look like we had good manners. Our sense of self and our understanding of life was divided into a black and white pattern that made it impossible for us and others to change and grow. We were effectively stuck. Our work with Andrew, which extended over a period of many years, was fundamentally about moving an enormous number of large and very heavy boulders (which we were even refusing to acknowledge were there!) out of the road, so that we could move forward. In fact, a lot of the time this work felt very much like were engaged in something more intense and challenging even than physical road work—emotionally it was as if we were picking against very hard rock with crude instruments in the dark—and for a very long time. The resistance was way beyond anything any of us had anticipated.

We had no idea about who we were, and knew hardly anything about our own history. It was amazing how effectively cut off all of us were. Believe it or not, we all had hardly any knowledge of what had happened during the holocaust. And not only that, we also had tremendous resistance to finding out any of the hard truths about our collective history. We did not want to know. The unspoken law of silence, in which we all had grown up, was the tacitly agreed upon rule we were continuing to live out now in our lives together— even fifty years after the holocaust. With the encouragement of a senior student of Andrew’s, who spent untold hours with us in an attempt to help us face our shared past, we finally began to at least glance sidelong at our own worst fears and long-held, darkest secrets. We watched many BBC documentaries and read books. We had many, many talks about the Third Reich. Some of us had to confront our own parents’ participation in, and support of, Hitler’s movement. We began to turn over some old and dirty rocks we’d never had the courage to look under before. During this time we, for the first time in our lives, saw what we as Germans had done to others. But despite this massive and relentless effort to help us to begin to look at, allow, and integrate these painful aspects of our own impersonal conditioning (the ones of course that we feared and hated the most), we most often stonewalled these fairly consistent attempts by our Teacher to get through to us. It seemed nearly impossible for us to find any truly human responses to the horror of what we were seeing.

There were plenty of examples of cold, inhuman behavior between us. It was clear to all of us that we had almost no connection to the rest of the community in the other countries. But none of us at that time could even begin to find the humility required to let down our guard even briefly, so that we could begin to let in a bigger picture—a picture where the dark and negative forces in the human condition could be seen clearly and objectively without fear, with the simultaneous knowledge that fundamental goodness is an even more powerful force. We would not go there. We would not even go near there for what seemed like a very long time. But slowly over time, some of us began to open up to some degree, overwhelmed by the ongoing evidence of the love and unrelenting care that our friends showered upon us. Fundamentally though, nothing had really shifted yet. The biggest obstacle we were all facing was our individual and collective superiority that we were deeply holding onto in our relationship to our own Teacher. We German students were in a stand-off against our own Teacher—a Jew!

Late in 1999 when Andrew was on a teaching tour through Europe, he spent a week with us in the center in Cologne. As he listened to our experience in order to try to find out what was really going on with us he realized that for all of us, the mere fact of “being German” was the deepest identification of self that we clung to more fiercely than anything. Our identification as Germans was even deeper than our gender identification as man or woman. Andrew told us that we were his students first and Germans second. He reminded us of the profound freedom we had all experienced in finding and choosing him as our Teacher—he reminded us as well of that period during which we were all catapulted into a full and beautiful expression of our own potential, displaying a full flowering of what we all must learn to stably manifest for the sake, not only of ourselves, but for the entire race. We met with Andrew every day during this week, and we continued meeting as well with each other. I understood at some point that I had to get to a deeper level than where I was. And that if I refused this radical effort of Andrew’s might well end up being nothing but a futile exercise. I had no emotional connection to the wall of pride and self-protection that was inhibiting me from letting go—none. But I knew that I had to leave myself behind in order to see with different eyes.

I decided to listen deeply to another non-German student as he described what it felt like to be on the receiving end of our conditioning. At that moment something profound happened: I came to experience that state of mind that would make it possible to feel right about sending Jewish people to a concentration camp. I became aware of the sense of righteousness and superiority that I had never been outside of. I had a dream that night of being a guard or officer rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camp. In my state of mind I was completely confident about my actions; I felt that the Jews were weak, and that they deserved to be sent to the camps. When I woke up, I knew that the choice to be a Nazi was possible for me, and for any human being.

Something must have happened to my German brothers and sisters as well at that time. Our next meetings were different. We began to look under the surface and to unravel what was really going on between us. Some of our defenses began to crumble. It was not pretty what we were looking at—in fact it was horrendous. But the difference was it was the truth—the painful and ugly truth. And at long last we were starting to let it in. From this first beginning a lot still needed to happen, but there was a significant break-through at this time. During the following year, Andrew felt that it would be best for us to leave Germany. Because the intense German conditioning was all around us, he felt that we would not be able to change in a fundamental way if we stayed in Germany. He felt that the benefit of being with other students in other countries would allow us to see a different human response to life, one which would enable us to embrace sanity and liberation.

It was hard for us to leave the center in Germany behind, and hard to face the fact that we had failed to transmit a liberated perspective which would attract others to join us in living the teachings of evolutionary enlightenment. The truth is that it really made no difference whether we were inside the center or outside on the street. We had all been in massive denial of the immensity and strength of our own conditioned responses and deeply held convictions. But we continued to publish the What Is Enlightenment? (now EnlightenNext) magazine in German. We had been doing this for two or three years now. We felt that with the magazine, a thread of the Teaching would still be alive in our country, and that maybe even more might be possible in the future.

In 2001, after most of us had left the community, a new chapter of the Teachings in Germany started. This chapter was called “collaboration”. A spiritually-inclined publishing house offered their support in helping us print and distribute the magazine. One member of our German brotherhood started to work together with the publisher/editor of an anthroposophical magazine. Two years later three members of our old group stepped up to the plate. We moved back to Germany to start an office for the magazine and a small center. This time the center activities were spread around the country. The three center leaders were travelling a lot and we all felt the promise of a new beginning. The fundamental difference, which is the difference, is that through this incredibly profound and long struggle to find wholeness in ourselves we are finally discovering as well the way to surrender to our Teacher. We can at last see and understand that surrendering to one’s Teacher is in fact the same as fully opening to and embracing all aspects of oneself as The Self. An impersonal perspective on our German conditioning has been awakened in us, and we are no longer intimidated by our past. We are freed from our immense pride which had manifested as self-protection, invulnerability, denial and superiority. A fundamental trust in life and human nature has begun to emerge. And best of all, a beautiful expression of human vulnerability (the very notion of which had once been abhorrent to all of us), has begun to flower among us. We, those proud and arrogant and superior ones, have joined the human race!

It must be said that not all the members of our group made it through to the other side. But we all know that the fundamental denial of our collective cultural past had been broken and a greater humanity has been liberated. It is stunning for me to even contemplate how much has shifted in all of us and to let in the enormity of Andrew’s own vision and mission. At this point in time, the Teachings are thriving in Germany. Andrew truly enjoys teaching there! Because we have finally made this fundamental shift in own relationship to our conditioning, the new people who are coming to the teachings today don’t have to go everything that we did. We were the early “guinea pigs”, those pioneers who got selected to do this initial work. We have learned that it is possible to “break the gene code” by breaking it in ourselves and allowing something new to flow through. And that is always what Andrew wanted to do—his vision was to ultimately establish a field of trust and perspective where evolution could happen freely, unencumbered by the walls of collective and individual ego. It is with a deep sense of awe, amazement and gratitude that I can say that those early words I heard spoken internally so many years ago in my early days with Andrew—”This will liberate Germany”—are really coming true in my own lifetime. None of us can say that it has not been a long and a rocky trail. But instead of those heavily barricaded and superior humans we Germans had been frozen into being, we are now mysteriously discovering so much we’d never imagined possible. Now we can finally begin to acknowledge the enormity and great significance of Andrew’s vision. This vision came to him very early on and it is a clear vision of the emergence of a new species of human—a human who finally knows that whatever we’ve learned in the past can and must all be ultimately sloughed off and left behind. In this ultimate liberation for all of us from our past, Germans and Jews, as well as all of the many warring tribes and peoples throughout human history, can ultimately lay down all of their arms and allow some new, fresh and beautiful ways of living, creating, and loving together to manifest through and as us.

Eva Schuster can be contacted at evaschus@gmail.com