The following essay was written as an appendix by Michael Wombacher to the book
“11 Days at the Edge: One Man´s Spiritual Journey into Evolutionary Enlightenment”.
While Michael is not a “former close student”, as are other contributors to this site, he suggested posting this appendix here as it sheds further light on the “controversy” surrounding Andrew Cohen.
To set some context for this appendix and its inclusion in his book Michael writes:
“During the 8th day of a retreat in Montserrat Spain in 1995, after having experienced both the liberating thrill of the direct and repeated revelation and intoxication of evolutionary enlightenment, as well as the powerful surges of fear regarding what it would all mean regarding “my” life, I was hit by an explosion of ego “backlash” that was almost demonic in its dimensions. However, due to the degree of objectivity I had been able to cultivate throughout this time I was able to see through it and see it for what it was – the voice of the personal ego rebelling in the most violent way against the potential of its own diminution and ultimate dismantlement. In seeing through it I then considered the violent reaction of some former students as well as entire segments of the culture against what Andrew Cohen represented. The enclosed essay enumerates some of my impressions in the wake of that event.
The Controversy around Andrew Cohen:
Purity, Corruption and Spiritual Authority Figures
I recently read an illuminating preface to Andrew’s booklet, In Defense of the Guru Principle6 by one Professor James R. Lewis,7 a specialist in non-traditional religions who has studied religious controversies for the past fifteen years. Based on his experience he had initially concluded that Andrew’s suggestion – that he attracted so much hostility due to his insistence on spiritual purity – was off the mark. However, as he states in his short essay, “I was having difficulty putting my finger on exactly what it was…” After some incredibly negative press, Professor Lewis had initially concluded that Andrew and his community were “suffering at the hands of an irresponsible mass media more interested in exploiting sensationalism than in the less than titillating truth.”8 Wanting to sort this out for himself he decided to visit the home of Andrew and his community in Massachusetts to do a little field research.
“I was frankly impressed,” he said of his visit, adding that “not only was it clear that Andrew Cohen led a simple, unpretentious lifestyle congruent with his teachings, but I also found Cohen’s students uniformly mature, likeable and mentally alert. I had studied many spiritual movements at close range, but in all those years had never encountered a group with which I felt more comfortable.”
While at the community he spent much time speaking with students about their experiences with bad press. The biggest problem, it turned out, was less the rancorous articles freely published in a number of magazines and newspapers, but their complete inability to get their own rebuttals printed. Lewis cites one “spiritual” magazine that had written a horribly negative and one-sided article about Andrew without so much as checking the simple facts of the story, whose content they swallowed wholesale from disgruntled former students. Yet when Andrew wrote a measured rebuttal the magazine refused to print it for being “too critical,” despite the fact that they had eviscerated Andrew on the very same pages. Even the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe got in on the act, refusing to print letters to the editor from Andrew’s students. Reading of these episodes, I was reminded of an event I’d heard about in the mid-nineties when Andrew was roundly criticizing other spiritual teachers for their ethical shortcomings. At the time someone suggested to a senior editor at a major magazine touting the benefits of yoga and meditation that it might be interesting to do an article on Andrew and his teaching work, to which the editor flatly responded, “We’ll do an article on Andrew Cohen when there’s a scandal in his community.” This from a magazine claiming to be a beacon of spirituality for our post-modern culture. All were waiting for Andrew to fall. In 1994 the late Suzanne Segal, who was becoming recognized as a powerful teacher in her own right due to the publication of her extraordinary story of awakening entitled simply, Collision with the Infinite, said to Andrew, “Everybody out there is waiting for you to make a mistake.” She herself had been amazed at the controversy swirling around Andrew who, in his own words, had naively assumed, “that the spiritual world at large would welcome with open arms my unwillingness to compromise the truth for anyone. How wrong I was.”
How wrong he was indeed. Even his mother turned against him. Soon after Andrew’s awakening he had sent her a letter boldly declaring, “Andrew is dead.” He then invited her to come to India to see what had happened. Upon her arrival she immediately recognized the magnitude of her son’s transformation and when asked whether she wished him to relate to her as his mother or as his student she declared for the latter. However, when pushed, like any other student, to confront her ego she turned on him vengefully. After an ugly parting she wrote a book portraying Andrew as a dangerously deluded megalomaniac who plied the same spiritual waters as Jim Jones and David Koresh. Shortly before its publication she casually informed him that in its pages he would be cast, “as a dangerously deluded and frighteningly pathological figure whose insatiable thirst for absolute power over pathetic and weak-minded individuals is couched within the pretense of a passionate interest in the spiritual Enlightenment of humanity.”11 Moreover, she added with a conspiratorial wink, that she hoped that he wouldn’t be upset that she’d changed significant facts in order to add drama, thus making the book more saleable. Literary license and all that. “Little did I know,” Andrew later said of this event, “that even the conversation we were having at the moment would itself become, in her book, so distorted as to have no resemblance whatsoever to what was actually occurring between us.”12 In perfect alignment with this vicious and mean spirited assault, his mother called some time after the book’s publication to inquire whether or not Andrew had as yet slept with any of his students.
That the answer to that question and others like it was and continues to be a resounding “NO” has undoubtedly been an irritating source of consternation to Andrew’s angry detractors. For all their vitriol and grotesque distortion, the noteworthy truth is that during the twenty years of Andrew’s relentless push to spiritual and cultural revolution, there has never been a single scandal to compromise the stand he had taken: to become a living expression of the opposite of everything that’s wrong with the world. Yet in taking this stand Andrew ignited powerful forces that converged in incendiary fashion.
Among them was Andrew’s own understanding of the significance of enlightenment itself: “What has always intrigued me is that many people appear to be interested in the experience of love while they so often seem mysteriously able to avoid its implications…many have been drawn to me initially because of the experience of love that they have felt in my presence. And while the majority may be more than satisfied with that, for me it has never been enough. I have never been able to allow those who have come to me to settle merely for the experience of feeling better13…It is because the demand to drown and truly lose oneself in that ocean for eternity is not made often enough that so many seekers end up satisfied with being mere voyeurs of their own Self, rather than living expressions of it…The course of my life as a teacher has been defined by my continuous insistence that the experience of love and bliss is meaningless when it is not supported by a life lived with true integrity…Ironically, it is because of this that I have been the object of much controversy…[and] it is precisely this that has simultaneously attracted some and repelled others.”14 As Andrew says elsewhere, he has never “been able to divorce the experience of love from its absolute demand.”15
That demand collided with the collective inertia of the alternative spiritual culture like an asteroid crashing into earth. Fascinated with itself and content to be “voyeurs,” that culture would rise to fight tooth and nail in defense of its position, a position that put nothing on the line and vehemently affirmed the “sensitive self” in its false regency over consciousness. As Professor Lewis observes, “it began to dawn on me (after visiting Andrew’s community) that what was going on here was something other than what I had first supposed. While a number of critical pieces had appeared in the mainstream press, it was becoming increasingly evident that the real nexus of the controversy was to be found within the spiritual subculture itself. Although his critical analysis of this subculture has been couched in relatively mild terms, Cohen has breathed life into his critique by establishing a community of students who have responded to the call to awaken. Had he merely been a critical voice, or had members of the Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship (now EnlightenNext) quietly pursued enlightenment without stepping on anyone else’s toes, the response might have been different. In combination, however, the dual thrust of Cohen’s challenge fundamentally calls into question the vested interests of the ‘spiritual establishment’ – that informal network of organizations, publications and teachers who have become comfortable with something less than the goal of ultimate freedom.
“I began to see that the attention of the mainstream media had obscured the basic source of the controversy. Long after the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe will have forgotten about Andrew Cohen, the spiritual establishment will continue to attack him. This ‘establishment’ might be nothing more than an informal network of people who know people who know yet other people. In whatever way it is organized, however, it is clear that it has closed ranks against Cohen and is actively trying to discredit him. And, contrary to the conclusion I had reached in my initial evaluation, the attack has been provoked by the very reason indicated by Cohen.”16 That reason, of course, was his unyielding demand for integrity with respect to what one has realized. A small thing, it would seem, though apparently not insignificant.
The final, and I suppose root force behind this bad chemistry was that selfsame voice that had so shocked me with its vehemence and murderous aggression. “He’s crazy,” it had said, pretending to seek my rescue from the clutches of a madman. “Run for your life,” it had suggested with panicked urgency. “I’m your friend.” That traitorous voice lay submerged within the ego’s deepest structures and clearly recognized the threat to itself in Andrew. Cornered, forced to face its own exile or destruction, it attempted a powerful sleight of hand, projecting its own darkness upon the other while pretending to wear their light. It has become abundantly clear to me that the violent backlash that Andrew has suffered from much of the spiritual culture is but a collective manifestation of that very same voice. After all, ego is both individual and collective.
6 Andrew Cohen, In Defense of the Guru Principle, (Lenox, MA: What is Enlightenment Press, 1999).
7 James R. Lewis is Dean of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at the World University of America, and Senior Editor at the Center for Academic Publication. He is a world-recognized authority on non-traditional religions, and is the author of Cults in America, the authoritative Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions, and Doomsday Prophecies.
8 Cohen, In Defense of the Guru Principle, pp. xii-xvii
