By Eb Schmidt

I am writing this article because of my past involvement with EnlightenNext and Andrew Cohen.  Although I left the inner core of students a few years ago, I was part of the evolution of Cohen’s teachings and organization for more than 10 years. When I heard that some of his former students were speaking out publicly in a negative way about their time as Andrew’s students, I felt compelled to share my own experience. I want to tell my story not only because  I feel  that  a number of ex-students have misrepresented and even distorted the facts of their time with Andrew, but also  because I feel strongly that they have betrayed their own experience with a Teacher whom they chose freely. I also believe that they are tearing down a possibility and potential that they themselves freely gave their lives to, had experienced deeply, and then later denied. 

These are friends with whom I shared intimately in the depths of real spiritual life, a life which is fundamentally about testifying to the utter goodness of life and defeating the cynicism which is so pervasive in all of us–through our willingness to manifest something deeply positive. And while I do not want to go into possible details of Andrew having made mistakes (he has never claimed to be perfect), these possible mistakes pale in the face of the magnitude of Andrew’s vision, and how much he has already accomplished since he began teaching. It is my intention and hope that sharing my own experience will contribute to a more balanced picture of what it meant/means to be involved with Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext.

Today I run a productivity and cost consultancy out of Massachusetts, USA and NRW, Germany. I am married to my wife of nearly 25 years and am the proud father of two children who are close to graduating from college. And while I am not at this point in any formal relationship with Andrew Cohen or EnlightenNext, I am deeply grateful for the guidance I received. I have no doubt that my time as a student of Andrew catalyzed a change in me as a person and expanded my view on life in ways that are undeniably profound. In fact these changes still continue to amaze me.

The Beginning

Pretty much from my early teens I was deeply interested in the meaning of life. When many years later I attended my first Vipassana retreat with Goenka in India, I felt I had found what I was looking for all my life – a simple yet effective way to begin to purify myself of ego. After many retreats and ten years of consistent meditation practice, I came to realize, as my teacher at that time put it, that enlightenment could be several lifetimes away. The first thing I  heard about Andrew Cohen was that he was clearly and boldly pronouncing that Enlightenment was possible NOW, if one only wanted it badly enough. I became his student not long after meeting him for the first time in Amsterdam I spent more than ten years in his formal body of students, both in Germany where I started a center with my wife and a few friends, as well as in the United States. A few years ago, after a long period of struggle, Andrew asked me to leave his core body of students. While this request did not come as a surprise, it was both a shock and a relief. I have remained close to the community, and still continue to support Andrew’s work in various ways.

I met Andrew after I came across his first book, “My Master is My Self”. This book convinced me beyond any doubt that this man was what I considered to be “fully enlightened”. Since my Vipassana teacher had honestly declared himself not to be enlightened, I had looked at quite a few others teachers such as   Ramana Maharshi and Osho. While I would have loved to have met the former, I was not that interested in getting involved with the latter. For my taste, I found that a lot of Osho’s behavior was questionable, and not a good example of how I believe enlightenment should look in the world. Enlightenment for me was THE goal to attain, THE way to live, another possibility, something the East had come to discover two thousand years ago as Nirvana, Samadhi or whatever the name, a reality that needed to be rediscovered and which offered so much more than the materialistic values of the world that I had grown up in.

When I first met Andrew, I was surprised to find someone who was apparently very much like me and my age. He looked like a “regular guy”, married, with no extravagant or outlandish behaviors, and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.  If you were to meet him on the road, you would have never guessed that he was “enlightened”. And meeting him on the road is exactly what actually happened to me months later when I traveled to my first retreat with him in India. I was on my way from the airport to the Old Delhi main station for the train to Bodhgaya when I ran into Andrew in front of the station. He was waiting there for some of his friends and students who had just discovered that the train to Bodhgaya was delayed for some hours. We all decided to stay over in a nearby hotel.  Since it was New Year’s Eve, Andrew invited me to have dinner together with everybody and celebrate. Can you imagine how thrilled I was about this start of my trip?!

And so while in one way Andrew could not have been more “normal”, being on his retreat for nearly two weeks in Bodhgaya revealed an altogether different side of him that had nothing to do with the “guy from next door”. By the end of the retreat, I was convinced that I was sitting at the feet of a 21st century Buddha! He had not only rediscovered enlightenment here and now, but as his own teachings continued to evolve through his own ongoing inquiry, he also was developing the teaching of what he now calls “evolutionary enlightenment”. This enlightenment teaching is not about transcending life, which is the goal of traditional spiritual teachings. Instead, Andrew was emphasizing the importance of immersing oneself fully in life and actually becoming one with the life process itself. And this oneness with the life process I found was continuously and consistently revealing itself through Andrew’s own simplicity, clarity, joie de vivre, and ceaseless creativity. His inquiry into the big questions of life was just too compelling to not get excited about. He has consistently continued to demonstrate over and over to me up until today, through his own integrity, something that I sensed from the first moment I met him – that LIFE IS GOOD and profoundly significant.

One of the things that struck me most strongly on this first of many retreats with Andrew was the humanness and accessibility of Andrew himself as well as that of his senior students. This was very different from the Vipassana world that I had been involved in before. And the other thing was Andrew himself, his view and vision were so bright and my soul was deeply yearning for what he was expressing and representing. At the same time he made it very clear that this perspective was something that I could manifest in the same way that he was doing, and that he wanted me to become an expression of that same perspective. His example and his demand to continue to stretch and evolve, which were both simultaneously present, created a certain tension. I began to understand this tension to be an “evolutionary tension”, a force inside oneself that pulls one to ones highest potential.

Before I left the retreat, I invited Andrew to come and teach in Germany. After two weeks of being immersed in his perspective and teachings, I found myself to be deeply in awe of this person I felt so fortunate to have met.  So I was shaking in my boots when I invited him to come to Germany. Looking back, this was the beginning of my life in a spiritual community. Or should I say our life, because my wife got equally excited about Andrew.  It did not take long for both of us, including our two children, to become more deeply involved in these “revolutionary” Teachings.

The Unknown Side of Enlightenment

It was an enormous matter to organize a teaching trip for Andrew. There was so much to take into account, and it was something new for me to discuss so many details of the process with others. We had to find a suitable teaching venue as well as a place to stay for Andrew and the students travelling with him. We had to spread the word, invite people, the press, etc.  Fortunately, Andrew sent one of his close German students over to Germany to assist us. With her help, the first teaching in Germany was a big success!

One of the things I remember and was proud about was how amazed Andrew was by how many Germans showed up to hear him teach. From then on I invited Andrew to come to Germany twice every year. My wife and I also continued to join his longer retreats in India and Switzerland. We got very excited about starting a center in Germany, and soon became part of Andrew’s formal body of students. By then we had moved out of our cozy house in the countryside and had moved with our two children to the city of Cologne, living together with other students of Andrew in a community. This was quite a dramatic shift from our pretty bourgeois and insular life style.

Being a student of Andrew’s is a  deeply challenging matter, as one enters into his world with the intention of becoming “free”—which means transcending ego conditioning. And while Andrew gives everybody a lot of space to find their way, he also expects to see results in his students after they have engaged in his teachings for a while and lived together with others who are striving for the same thing.

Was I prepared for what was going to come? No, but I definitely learned that one of Andrew’s sayings is certainly true: “It is not enough until it is too much”.  Being a student of Andrew means being ready and willing to confront oneself in the deepest way.  It means seeing that one is not separate from the ONE that is the source of everything, and also facing into that part of oneself that is unwilling to submit to that recognition of the ONE. And it also about our willingness to do whatever needs to be done to move beyond the grip of the ego, and  to express the deepest truth of who one has discovered oneself to be.

While obviously I had signed up to be a formal student of Andrew because I considered him to be enlightened, I also knew that the question which was most intriguing to Andrew was the relationship between the “one and the many” –how does the deepest spiritual realization that there is only ONE translate into the world of time and space? How is enlightenment expressed in today’s world? How do I live my highest inspirations and revelations in today’s ever confusing world of multiplicity and materialism? And we, his formal body of students, were the “real time laboratory” for discovering and manifesting an answer to that question.

Out of our responses to his teaching, Andrew very early on began to recognize that the enlightenment of the individual was not really the goal of his vision. He started to see that something much more explosive, engaging and creative was being expressed through people coming together in the pursuit of enlightenment.  This mystery that manifested through a group of people with the same shared intention was in fact far more interesting and significant than “personal enlightenment”. This was something that was unlimited and completely new as far as we could tell. We discovered that the liberation of the individual was a by-product of the emergence of unity as it was expressed through the many, when they were inquiring together into the source and meaning of LIFE, with vulnerability and transparency.

As Andrew’s translator, when I drove him to the teaching evenings in Germany and picked him up afterwards, we spoke quite a bit about the significance of his teachings and the potential we both saw for Germany. Both of us had reservations about Germany, although we could not have come from more different backgrounds. Andrew as a Jew, although with a secular upbringing, understandably had reservations about Germany and the Germans. Initially he couldn’t imagine coming here to teach. I myself, after travelling fairly extensively around the world, had developed a certain distaste for being German. I had come to view my compatriots as superior, often insensitive to the feelings and lifestyles of foreigners, and more than happy to complain about the things that were not functioning like they did in Germany (i.e. as they should!). Among other things, the Germans made the best cars in the world. I had learned that Germany was the country of poets and thinkers.  And yet we had little relationship to our not-so-recent past which I, like many other Germans, was more than happy to avoid. At home we rarely spoke about the war. And in my high school, despite several outspoken attempts by our teacher, we never managed to learn much about the horrors of the Holocaust, which was always like the “elephant in the living room”.

Our little community in Cologne was thriving. We generated quite a lot of interest in Andrew’s teachings, and spread the word into many German cities. We were quite happy and satisfied “doing our thing”. What soon became obvious though was that we all had strong ideas about how to do things best, and had little to no inclination to take advice or guidance from others. We continued along with scant acknowledgment of the inner struggles that we were facing.  It slowly became apparent that we had more difficulties than the other non-German students in exploring the unknown parts of our experience. To make a long story short, the contours of the German conditioning began to emerge in a way that was increasingly difficult to ignore. Part of this conditioning had to do with a total lack of awareness about what we as a people had done under the Nazi regime to “others”, particularly the Jews.

Although I personally had nothing to do with the holocaust, what has become increasingly clear for me over time is how strongly the atrocities of my parents’ generation have impacted my life.  I became aware of the fact that we did not talk about the holocaust at home.  It was never a topic in school (many of my teachers had been soldiers), and we never spoke about the holocaust in public without automatically feeling bad and guilty about it. This mix of superiority, avoidance, and guilt about one of the most horrible crimes of humanity was always silently in the air. I started breathing it like everybody else when I was born, and it became part of my personality.

When community members from other centers around the world would come to Germany I was always thrilled when they were impressed by the German technology, the slick cars and the like. But I did not like it so much when they told me how unfriendly or even hostile they were treated at a bakery if they could not speak much German. I have come to see that as a “good German” you have to function. And if you don’t, well sorry but you have a problem! Being human or being a “mensch”, the paradoxical Yiddish word which means a “good human being”, doesn’t mean anything as long as you do not function!

Given our long heritage of thinkers and scientists I knew that we Germans are highly intellectual. When Andrew first mentioned that we are in fact very emotional, I could hardly relate to his comment. To my surprise I am finding more and more proof of how emotional we actually all are. After ten years of living in the US and getting familiar with the American way, I am often shocked by the intensity of simple German interactions, especially if things are getting out of control. We are emotionally so intertwined with our conviction of “being right” and our need to be in control, that the “Hi man, relax” approach of the American character seems both outlandish and refreshing at the same time.

Did I ever expect to go into questions like these when I signed up to become enlightened? Did I ever expect to uncover my own conditioning to such an extent? And then to be asked to leave it behind and go beyond all of it – to be true to my heart and embrace other human beings in raw vulnerability? I don’t think so. I just wanted to feel good and be free. I was ready to change to some extent. But change in a fundamental way? Change what I considered to be “me”? Forget it! It took a lot of pressure for me to start looking at what was being exposed about myself, and even more to begin to take responsibility for it. I became proof of one of Andrew’s favorite sayings – “Everybody wants to be enlightened, but nobody wants to change”.

While compared to the average German I was pretty beyond the norm, having traveled to India many times and having left a well paid job at one of the most successful firms in the country in exchange for a community life in America. But I was still the “typical German” in Andrew’s community. And looking back I can see how German I was and still am.

Can There Be A Guru After The Fuhrer?

While this is quite a provocative question, I do think it is a crucial one, and not only for Germans. Because deeply trusting anyone or anything is a profoundly challenging matter for all of us.

A Guru, according to the Upanishads is the “dispeller of darkness”. The Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5 says: “The syllable ‘gu’ means shadows, and the syllable ‘ru’, he who disperses them”. Because of the power to disperse darkness, the Guru is thus named. The Upanishads further elaborate that “in the presence of a true Guru, knowledge flourishes, sorrow diminishes, joy wells up without any reason, and abundance dawns”.

To make the sacred relationship between the Guru and the disciple work, the student needs to be obedient. “Obedience”, as declared by Sri Swami Sivananda, “to the Guru is better than reverence. Obedience is a precious virtue, because if you try to develop the virtue of obedience, the ego, the arch-enemy on the path of Self-realisation, slowly gets rooted out. Only the disciple who obeys his Guru can have command over his lower self. Obedience should be very practical, whole-hearted, and actively persevering. True obedience to Guru neither procrastinates nor questions. A hypocritical disciple obeys his Guru from fear. The true disciple obeys his Guru with pure love, for love’s sake.”

That is an incredible and profound statement that is probably difficult to understand in a materialistic world. I got excited by the idea of obedience to Guru, practiced it for several years, and clearly experienced the flourishing of Knowledge, sorrow diminishing, joy welling up without any reason (what a revelation for a German control freak!), and limitless abundance dawning. And yet, after many years with my Guru, I reached the limit of my willingness to obey. That part in me that wants to have it his way wasn’t willing to go any further. Oftentimes I wondered whether coming from a cultural background in which a whole nation has trusted a devil (Hitler), and continuously avoided the truth of its history,  makes it more challenging to give oneself over to an outside authority. Are we ready to TRUST at all?

I want to use my father’s story as an example to illustrate the cultural backdrop in which Hitler operated. My father was born in 1924 as the second son of an upper class engineer who was the CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company. His youth was quite happy, and he has fond memories of his time as a Pimpf, (the beginning rank in the Nazi regime) and the first years of Hitler Youth. Why? Because the Nazis had actually set up a great environment of camaraderie, care, fun, and training to move these young people into their net. Would my father as a young adolescent have ever claimed to be a Nazi? Surely not. Was he aware of the ambitions of Hitler as a 10 year old? The answer would have to be no again.

When the opportunity arose to be present at a parade in Düsseldorf where Hitler was going to show up, he was part of a group which was waiting to see Hitler ride by. So he was standing there with the other “Pimpf”, waiting for the Fuhrer to show up. When Hitler got close to my dad, who was strongly short sighted, he took of his glasses! He believed that one should look at a God-like person like Adolf Hitler only with the naked eye.  The consequence was that he did not even see a thing when Hitler drove by in his open car!

My father was seventeen when he was drawn into the army to serve Hitler’s vision. He was sent to the Russian front. When after three days of travelling in the cattle wagon on the train, he and his comrades made it to the Ukraine in the middle of the night. They had to walk through a swamp area that had just been the center of heavy fighting. His first memories of getting out of the train were of walking through the swamp and hearing the screams of wounded soldiers, friends and foes alike, whose cries had to be ignored.

I have only tried once to find out how he felt about this at the time, but as is often the case you do not get too much of a response from people who have lived through such extreme times. My father was more than lucky a few times, and survived the war. It was only as a POW in England that he found out about the atrocities the Germans and his Fuhrer had committed. And only then was his belief in the Fuhrer and the system completely devastated. He felt betrayed and robbed of his youth.

Why am I going into such detail with this story? Because like my father, there were millions of Germans who had believed in Hitler, and later felt betrayed by the Fuhrer. These people had given themselves over to Hitler and the system to a degree that is very difficult to relate to. And as the little incident with my dad and his glasses indicates, Hitler was revered as being much more than a “regular guy”. Many people had altars in their homes, and were willing to support the philosophers and thinkers who were the architects of the Nazi regime in being the perpetrators of the most inhuman crimes in history to date.

After reading a great number of books about Hitler, the war, and the Holocaust, I have come to understand that Hitler was obsessed with a vision. His vision was of a world which would be dominated by the superior Aryan race that was ruling over the “lower species” of their fellow humans. And to that end he was willing to wreak havoc around the world. My father is an intelligent man with ideals. Should he have seen what was coming?

Like the Guru, Hitler demanded complete obedience from his followers. As history revealed, far too many Germans subscribed to the Fuhrer’s ideas and were willing to bring unbearable suffering to millions of people. Many of the war criminals who were executed in the Nuremberg trials showed no remorse for what they had done. Very few were ready to take full responsibility for their deeds. Most were still relishing in the perceived glory of the Fuhrer’s vision, utterly unwilling to look starkly at the naked and horrible truths. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein… and the list goes on and on.

We are living in a time where corrupt political leaders have severely compromised the trust that has been given them by their people.  Do we even consider politicians to be trustworthy? And if we turn to religious leaders, does it look any better? The church has been fighting one scandal after the other.  And once the ice of silence and compromise has been broken, nearly every day new horror stories of child abuse and sexual escapades surface in the news.

In wise foresight,  the German Catholic Church long ago started to allocate a certain budget to cover child support for their “slightly too liberal” clergy. And while the collapse of such an old institution might seem understandable for the generation of the sixties, the falling from grace of eastern teachers and gurus who brought the ancient wisdom from the East to the West has been all the more disappointing for the Baby Boomers: Amrit Desai, Rajneesh, even the highly revered Yogananda or Swami Muktananda are just a few names of those who have not been able or willing to live up to the standard they were apparently setting for the world. The financial gurus who have pushed the whole world to the brink of collapse are the most recent ones to participate in creating a world that seems to have lost its values. Somehow understandably, most of us, either consciously or unconsciously, have drawn the conclusion that you cannot trust a leader – that the era and time of leaders and Gurus is gone. So can there be a Guru after the Fuhrer? Is anybody still willing to be obedient to a Guru???

I have already related much of my story about my time with my Guru, Andrew Cohen. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met Andrew and to have been accepted as his student. Few people these days have the privilege to work with a true Guru. What makes it so extraordinary? It is a relationship rooted in the unmanifest. The goal is for the Guru to help the student to transcend his ego, become free and become a manifestation of the source of LIFE. It is a sacred relationship that has two parts to it. The Guru has to prove their worthiness of being a Guru, and the student has to prove their worthiness in being ready to obey the Guru. Andrew always demanded from his students that they were fully aware of the seriousness of what they were getting into. In my own experience with Andrew, I can only say that he has always been a true Guru. In fact, throughout my entire time as his student I have only become more aware of the incredible integrity of this man,  and the heavy price he has been willing to pay for this job. Andrew also has a vision that is unique amongst Gurus that I am aware of: the vision of creating an enlightened culture through the emergence of a miraculous potential that he calls “intersubjective nonduality”— this means the direct experience of oneness in a context of relatedness.

So both the Guru and the Fuhrer have a vision, and they both demand obedience. And usually both have very charismatic personalities as well as the ability to get people excited about their vision. This was one of the first things that struck me with Andrew: How much he was willing to support that unknown part in ourselves that recognizes the perfection of LIFE, over and over again, in spite of all the doubt and weakness that we as students were offering him. And in the same way the Fuhrer had an incredible ability to draw people into his negativity – he managed over and over again to convince his followers to stick to this vision and to his orders, even when they had come to the conclusion that it did not make any sense anymore to continue fighting, and when the enemy had been too strong or the losses too grave to make it worthwhile. There were heart-wrenching situations in which loyal generals were ready to face Hitler and tell him the truth of what was actually happening in the battle field. Yet every single time a meeting like this took place, the generals emerged from the meeting once again convinced by the Führer to return to continue a battle which had already been lost.

Being obedient to a leader such as the Fuhrer obviously yields completely different results than being obedient to a Guru. In a materialistic world, the vision of the Guru always seems more vague than the hard cut “truths” of a Fuhrer. The Guru always pulls you towards utter positivity into the Oneness of LIFE, while the Fuhrer – always appealing to the negative part in us – thrives on the separation and destruction of what is good and sacred. They are both expressions of fundamental forces of the universe.  Looking at this in the most simplistic way, they are the “angel and the devil” of our childhood picture books. But good and evil are real forces and it is up to us to make the distinction.

These days, amongst long-term students and many former close students of Andrew Cohen, I am witnessing a transformation that is as remarkable as it is humbling. The people I have been sharing my life with for a more than a decade and who were initially just as arrogant and selfish as myself, have grown into protagonists for an enlightened culture in their own right and with their own unique expression. Being in touch with any of them always reinforces in me the most fundamental lessons I learned from Andrew: that LIFE is good, that genuine transformation and evolution is possible and that everything matters. To me this is an extraordinary testimony to the fact that it is not only still possible, but essential to trust, and that there can be a Guru after the Fuhrer. If one is lucky enough to find a true Guru and is willing to pay the price for transformation – the results are glorious!

As a postscript, my father, after his devastating wartime experience, interestingly enough returned to his religious roots. He is now, in his mid-eighties, following a calling to write a book about his belief in God that is being published soon.

Eb Schmidt can be contacted at eb.schmidt@gmx.net