Nothing Andrew Cohen’s former student naysayers can say touches the fact that everything Andrew fought for in the crucible of his student body did, and is, bearing undeniably real, radical, transformative fruit. The power of this revelation and comprehensive understanding cannot be denied or stopped. If you want to understand what is the difference between the Old and New Enlightenment and what it took to birth and forge this emergence then take a journey through these pages…

My own account of the culmination on July 30th 2001 can be read here.

Long live the Revolution!

Pete Bampton

A few years ago I started reading some of the negative reports about Andrew that were circulating on the web. These were written by ex-students who, for some reason that I found difficult to fathom, had decided to publicly portray Andrew in the most negative light possible. One particularly disgruntled individual continues the pattern in a recent book.

I was/am more than surprised how far from my own experience these reports were/are. While some of the things that are described in these writings are technically true as “facts”, most are distorted to create a very specific impression. All of them are obviously taken out of context, hiding crucial information from those readers who would have no way of knowing the whole import and meaning of any given situation. All of the accusations are described as if Andrew’s sometimes strong and challenging responses were coming from the “void”, with little logical reason to justify them. Hence the only explanation left, because of what these commentators would like us to believe, was that he was indeed out to satisfy his own thirst for power over his students.

I was not unfamiliar in myself with what was expressed in those writings. It was the growl of that part of ourselves that had been dispossessed by the explosive light of our encounter with what is beyond mind and our limited sense of self. That part of ourselves would, and will always, fight against that revolutionary experiment that the life with Andrew represents. And here in these writings it was finally expressing itself freely, but now of course at a safe psychological and material distance from that light.

It should be noted that these writers are all people who spent a significant amount of time with Andrew and with the community, many of them in a position of leadership. And when I say significant time I mean 10, 15 years or even more. They were all very close friends of mine, since we lived all together, very close together, and I know them as very confident and intelligent people. Now, if the situation in which we shared our lives had been as it is described in these writings, how could they possibly endure such a teacher in an unjust, unrewarding environment for such a long time? From my point of view, since I lived what they lived, the answer is very simple: they could because it was very different from what they describe.

I would like to make clear that we are talking about very close students of Andrew here, as there were many who, while living close to the community, were not sharing the same kind of commitment of the smaller group of closer students. Each one of us could choose how close to the fire we wanted to live, or we would naturally end up as close as our desire to participate actively in the process would allow. After the first few years, as the whole community was moving forward, to became a close student required a few years of training in which the student got to know Andrew and the community, (and themselves!) and the kind of demand that a spiritual life actually lived in a communal context in space and time, as opposed to only in one’s own internal experience, requires.

We all were very aware that the life we had chosen required everything from us – and Andrew had made that very clear literally countless times. “Enlightenment has nothing to do with getting something for yourself” or “There’s no guarantee!” – to cite a few examples, a very different approach from some of the descriptions I have read that Andrew was luring people just by promising heaven on earth!

Looking back now, the reason that Andrew emphasized the absolute nature of this demand made sense to me from the very beginning…

Coming Home

I attended my first teaching with Andrew in 1988 in Rome and, during the second night after a brief exchange with Andrew, something mysterious opened up in my vision. I became aware of a powerful presence in the room and, more than that, I became aware of the source of that presence – a mystery that was the essence of everything. Even the room, the walls, matter itself, appeared not solid, but made of That. The people around me were suffused with light, and so unbelievably beautiful. The presence in the room was pure, overwhelming Love.

The realization came upon me that the whole of reality is ONE – everything is It, something Absolute I was perceiving directly. The bliss and the beauty of it was almost unbearable and yet a profound sense of peace, a powerful and silent stillness was at the root of everything. I saw Andrew was immersed in that and was speaking from that.

That first intense experience lasted three days. During that time, while I was once again in a more or less “normal” state of consciousness, the light of what I had witnessed meant that everything appeared totally different. Gone was the suffocating limitation in which I had tried to make sense of this mysterious miracle called life. An unlimited Vastness had exploded into my consciousness. My heart was finally at peace and I felt the unmistakable sweetness of having come home.

But together with the bliss and the spiritual experiences that were constant companions of my life then, I could also perceive something in me that was resisting the unbelievable lack of boundaries, the freedom and the huge opening of perspective, the experience of love and intimacy with my now spiritual brothers and sisters. The resistance was also there because surrendering to all of this meant the end of my reign over my own separate life, however illusory that had been revealed to be. In that vastness I, or to define it more precisely, my separate ego could not exert any control. And, I would like to point out, that this was not because of Andrew – it was inherent in the nature of that Absolute itself that had been revealed to me in spiritual experience.

Spiritual Life is a Serious Endeavour

A few months after Andrew had left Rome, I decided to leave everything to become his student. But things rarely go as planned. A few weeks into my new life, I had another very powerful experience. I was taking a short walk at night, after attending a teaching with Andrew, just outside my house. It was a very beautiful summer night, and I was looking up at the sky when I started to perceive—I ‘m not sure how to describe it—a very intense Consciousness, far more intense and awake than ours. It was (and here words really fail to describe the experience) like an intense scream coming from the depths of the universe. As strange as it may sound, I wasn’t surprised but felt I was meeting again something I had already met. This was actually something I knew very well and very intimately, but had not been fully conscious of. Then, suddenly, a profound shift occurred and I was THAT looking back at myself. I saw clearly that what I had always thought of as myself was actually just a faint veil on the surface of Reality and it didn’t really have any independent existence.

In a brief moment, everything was back to “normal” – but I was in a state of sheer panic! I was “myself” again but I couldn’t forget that I had literally witnessed my non-existence. I ran back to the house, I was really scared. All the people I was living with were in bed. I turned on the TV; I needed a big dose of normality! As I was slowly calming down, I wondered if maybe the experience I had was just a hallucination. Actually I was hoping that maybe it was so. But no matter how I tried to entertain this possibility I knew that the reality of what I had seen was undeniable.I wrote about this experience to Andrew and he was the only one who could really understand what had happened. But then, in the days that followed, the implications of what I had seen where becoming clearer to me. It is one thing to read in spiritual literature that the ego is not real and that the ultimate truth is that “I am That”, but it is another thing altogether to fully FACE into that as an actual fact. I realized that up until that point, although I thought I knew that spiritual life was a very serious endeavor, I actually had no idea of how unthinkably big and real it all is. I also realized that Andrew really had no choice, and that he was never going to stop. He couldn’t because, as I could see now, he was totally surrendered to something indescribably powerful and Real.

Something in me was completely shaken to the core. As time went by I realized that I wasn’t so sure anymore that I had what it took to live spiritual life for real, and I felt I needed some time by myself. I let Andrew know that I was leaving. He was not happy about that but I felt I couldn’t do otherwise at the time.

A few days later I was back to Rome. But it didn’t take me very long to realize that I had made a big mistake. As much as I tried, there was nothing for me there. I had no interest whatsoever in the things that used to interest me, in my old life. I was feeling quite ok, peaceful and full of energy, and even my friends were noticing that, but something big was missing. There was nothing I wanted or that I wanted to do—only a steady pressure inside was telling me that I wanted to go back.

Just a few weeks later, I wrote to Andrew, describing my experience, and I asked him to take me back as his student. I was waiting for an answer from Andrew with some trepidation, since I wasn’t sure he would accept me again after I had left so abruptly. I felt I had behaved very carelessly in my relationship with him. Andrew wrote back and told me to wait six months and then, if I was still sure that it was what I wanted, I could come back. Andrew’s responses were often like this, completely empty in their essence of any pollution from personal feeling—although he would often not hide at all what his own feelings were!

Six months later I was back in what was going to be my home for many years to come. This was the beginning of a thirteen year relationship that has been the most intensely challenging and, at the same time, the most real and rewarding of my entire life. In spite of my often stubborn refusal to give myself fully to the life I had freely chosen, Andrew has always taken my own evolution far more seriously than I ever have.

It was at times very challenging, but yet in the midst of every challenge I couldn’t hide from myself the fact that this relationship was the working out of the whole predicament I was in: on one side the ineffable knowing that comes from the touch of the Absolute and the Unknown, and on the other the relentless resistance of my ego trying to preserve itself inside his own imposed boundaries and division.

The Separate Ego

“It is the ego-sense which clinches the division and in which the ignorance we superficially are finds its power to maintain the strong though always permeable walls it has created to be its own prison. Ego is the most formidable of the knots which keep us tied to the Ignorance…

For in this vital ego there is frequently a mixture of the charlatan and mountebank, the poser and actor; it is constantly taking up a role and playing it to itself and to others as its public. An organised self-deception is thus added to an organised self-ignorance; it is only by going within and seeing these things at their source that we can get out of this obscurity and tangle.”

Sri Aurobindo – The Life Divine

It is not so rare if your desire is strong and sincere enough, and if you are lucky enough to meet that rare Teacher like Andrew is, to have a powerful and liberating spiritual experience, but those for whom an enlightenment experience is enough to be liberated are extremely rare indeed. For most of us, such an experience is only the beginning of spiritual life. It is the beginning of the unfolding, sometimes blissful and exciting and sometimes difficult and intense, of the potential innate in us as human beings, of our potential for evolution. The fundamental, all-important goal being the expression and manifestation here, in space and time, of that Oneness revealed in spiritual experience.

Spiritual life is an unthinkably serious endeavor. Real spiritual life with a Real Teacher is a constant challenge to who you think you are, since the particular way in which you limit or define yourself is the most formidable barrier to the stable realization of That which is beyond any limit and beyond the grasp of the mind. And whatever lies beyond that limit or definition becomes automatically non-self. This is the very root of separation and division in us and among us. This is what ego is.

From this point of view, on a practical level, spiritual life always involves a battle against the ego. Ideally a battle with the student and the teacher on the same side.

Being free from the ego’s clutches means being a free human being. This means facing into the many tricks and deceptions of the ego in oneself over and over again. A real Teacher will never allow his students to be deluded by it; he will always encourage and, when necessary, take the risk to push the student to face their pride and self-deception. And it has been always my experience that Andrew is such a teacher.

But the ego wants to survive, and to survive it needs to win over whatever is threatening it, to feel superior and safe, and it will use whatever means necessary to that end. Andrew will never compromise in these matters – we could put our trust in him as a teacher precisely because of that. And at those times when Andrew would win the battle, as I experienced myself more than once, the outcome was progress, renewed strength and freedom. A very different result than when the battle is between TWO egos.

There was always ample room to overcome our limitations (and we had all the help we needed – women’s and men’s meetings, meditation together and individual spiritual practice, each other’s help and, most importantly, the constant help from Andrew). The whole environment represented both the means of our evolution and the goal and very expression of it. And Andrew would very often warn us about the obstacles and limitations we needed to address, individually and collectively. We were living so closely together that anything we would do had an effect on everybody and on the whole situation.

Ego is indeed “the most formidable of the knots which keep us tied to the Ignorance” and there were times when none of Andrew’s efforts were enough. And when push comes to shove, ego will deny and hide its own real nature and will therefore fight to prove that Andrew is WRONG. And, as a last resort, there is always the possibility of an unyielding defiant response, whatever forms that might take – which by definition always wins.

This is the reason why, in the writings of former students who portray Andrew in a negative light, you will never see any mention as to what Andrew was actually responding to in those situations. Since these “critics” stuck to it for ten or more years Andrew’s behavior and motives must have made SOME sense to them – but no mention is made of that.

Context is Everything

The perspective and context that Andrew, with all the means at his disposal, was relentlessly fighting to keep alive in us, that Light that had sparked the beginning of our life together in its own unthinkably vast field, was the full meaning of our life together.

It was this that was the almost constant presence in my thirteen years with Andrew. Both in the periods when things were easy and flowing, and also in the moments of turmoil and battle, when the mind was crowded with clashing thoughts and clarity seemed nowhere to be found. This was what would make the battle against human conditioning, in ourselves and as ourselves, even in the moments of the greatest difficulty, a challenge that was possible for us to meet, provided we had the willingness to make at least the first step in the right direction.

Because this unfathomable, unknown, all pervading and all-meaning presence is the blessing of the life with a Real Teacher. It was the blessing of our life with Andrew Cohen.

The author can be contacted at enzo@guru-talk.com

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

When I met Andrew Cohen in Seattle in 1990, I was elated and tremendously relieved at seeing myself and those around me brought to such clarity through the lucid transmission from Andrew. Over the subsequent years of being a student and living in the community, those experiences – being transported to higher states of consciousness, the levels of trust between people, wanting like nuts to finally be free, and gratitude – were put to the test like nothing I’d ever experienced or could have imagined.

Prior to meeting Andrew (I had been a spiritual aspirant for some years before this meeting), I had always been convinced that through some particular realization or experience, the light would suddenly get turned on. The Red Sea would part, instantly washing away all my old obstructions, inhibitions, and dilemmas. Clarity would magically descend, and the legendary third eye would blaze. Something a little naïve about that?  Well… yes! As I settled into the slow and grinding process of Real Spiritual Work, it became obvious that it was going to take a little more boot and polish.  And as the days stretched into years and the explosive experiences stretched into community lifestyles and the sometimes joyous, sometimes harsh reality of a student / teacher relationship, my grandiose hopes were dismantled rather consistently. You see, I was a typical post-modern spiritual seeker and drop-out, and what got revealed was a brand of arrogance that was not so readily deciphered nor easily relinquished.

In being with Andrew and being swept up by the deep, renewed desire to believe in a comprehensive spirituality and become its beneficiaries was, for me and many others, a convincing aspiration, if not identity. As a boomer, former hippie, and spiritual aspirant, I was looking for a kind of righteous community which would confirm my higher inclinations and embrace me as a committed member. We all loved the notion of being members of such a “noble club”. I trusted Andrew because of his own palpable authenticity and integrity, and I trusted the fundamental recognition of a higher consciousness that all of us shared. Even if this path would doubtless present us with difficulties, what could be better than being guided by a profoundly straight-forward and liberated individual?

One of the common threads shared by all of us was that we were discovering together the reasons why we could not fit in to the traditional religious structures or all the prolific new-age belief systems. A number of us who came to Andrew had had past experiences with teachers and communities that either did not embrace the realities of the 20^th/21^st century, or found themselves compromised and corrupted by the evolutionary magnitude of it. As Andrew penetrated into the spiritual, psychological, and cultural terrain of our time, I began to understand what he meant when he said that we had become “finders”, that we were no longer “seekers”. We had all landed in a radically new and yet pragmatically simple vortex.  What we had come upon through Andrew was a way to make sense of our western, highly sophisticated, worldly existence. In this spiritually unembellished setting, such questions as to why were we all here at this particular historical juncture and how we could make sense out of our confusing, alienated, and emotionally tangled lives were answered with disarming care and penetrating simplicity. In my own rather cataclysmic early meeting with Andrew, I suddenly knew that “Here it was, right in my own cultural and colloquial backyard.” Finally I had found a teacher who was a product of my own culture and who understood me. I thought that surely some kind of divine, caring and benevolent force had rescued me. I trusted that whatever wasn’t quite clear and transparent in me would ultimately get rearranged and spit out the other end…

Entering into community life with Andrew at our helm was all pretty outrageous stuff. We all went through an initial period of deep re-evaluation of cherished beliefs about pretty much everything, including fundamental relationships and many old priorities.

At first it was difficult for me to acknowledge that I had entered into something which was clearly different from my past, including my former “spiritual life”, and that I could no longer even connect with many old friends from my former life. It was as if suddenly I had begun speaking a different language. In many ways, looking back, this early time with Andrew was a lot like the 60’s revisited. But this time something methodically new had been added to the equation: we were no longer floundering around, blindly led by our impulses and by “what feels good”. We knew that Andrew was opening up and revealing something that had been missing, misguided or corrupted in many other societal and spiritual movements. This “new story” meant that the teacher, the community and you (which included everything you did and said) represented a perspective that even had to do with something as significant as the evolution of the entire human race!

It was all very new and unknown for us. Suddenly all of us “casual ex-hippies” found that we were in fact responsible for a lot more than we had ever thought.  It was clear to us that our cherished idealism from the 60’s had unfortunately been obscured by a lack of seriousness and itinerant detours many of us took during that period. Meeting Andrew awakened our dormant idealism, and our passion for new and fresh possibilities. We now found ourselves headed out on a very new course, a course that revealed a lot of rough terrain where our awakening idealism met the test of upholding a very high and explicit moral standard that was being simulateously awakened.

Andrew made clear to all of us in fairly short order that he was not one to let the ego off the hook—ever!  He breathed sacred fire, and he meant business. I have never known anyone like Andrew who accepted his own very tough mission with such full willingness and absolute dedication to “doing the job”. No one I have ever met has demonstrated the integrity to continuously find fresh and creative ways to unravel the ego, and to stand fearlessly over a very long period of time against its personal and collective rage.  And as I slowly became more familiar with the recalcitrant force of my own ego, the news began to dawn on me that I was in trouble!

The thing that always got to me, and probably what I feared the most, was this matter of “transparency”.  And because the situation that was forming around Andrew was not at its core a therapeutic practice, transparency had a different purpose from anything I had known before. Andrew’s work was always centered around a collective awakening.  Here were a number of people coming together through the shared realization of unity with all of our egoic pretense and barriers in the mix, and it was all coming up against an immovable and yet transparent force.  The motive to want to be Free, both individually and collectively, ultimately pointed to a very real and demonstrable shift in consciousness and purpose – that a new and still unknown kind of “Oneness” could begin to emerge in time and space through the Many. For me, this distinction is central to any discussion which attempts to clarify the extreme dilemmas and confrontations which are inherent in the Guru/disciple relationship.

If these distinctions have any real power, then I think this is where unity, peace, clarity, compassion, kindness, equanimity, charisma, intellectual prowess, and spiritual attainment meet the real world. It’s no wonder that there are very few who are willing to take on the individual and collective ego. “Time will tell” Andrew would often say to our profuse exclamations of commitment and intention. With those words we knew that we were all going to be slowly and inexorably passing through a process of introspection and scrutiny where there was literally no place to hide. This is, of course, why were all so attracted – like moths to a flame – and also why we were often frightened to death.

In the ensuing fifteen years, during which I worked directly with Andrew as his student, I had no doubt whatsoever that I was deeply blessed to have met him and to be privileged to be intimately involved with the community that had spontaneously manifested around him. A sacred trust was being built, a profound and ecstatic camaraderie was disarmingly shared and a hands-on perspective into the nature of the human evolutionary process was startlingly revealed.

The often shocking revelation of the contents of our egos was not always pretty. In fact, what we were seeing could not have been in starker contrast to our beloved self-images of “good and caring” spiritual aspirants. As much as I was startled by my friends’ fall from grace when they “stonewalled” our teacher, blatantly refusing to acknowledge what was right under all of our noses, I found myself loath to be transparent when it was my turn to be in the spotlight.

Stymied and under pressure, the backlash of fear, anger, self-righteousness and mistrust put my higher and more noble longings in some unreachable and resentful shut-down. Without exception – and this fact says something about the level of transparency people were being held to – everyone who had entered into this sacred covenant ultimately had no place to hide. The higher one soared, the more responsibility one was called to shoulder. Being impeccable with one’s word and deed became of critical importance.

For myself, as many untenable situations unraveled, from my ego’s point of view, it all seemed pretty baffling and unreasonable. The dissection and fine scrutiny of a particular indiscretion seemed way over the top. In the face of deep humiliation, I began inwardly whining: “Why me all of a sudden? What have I done that has been so diabolical? I never said I was perfect!” How could heaven descend so quickly into hell?! Whatever it was, we all got to know the recesses of a cornered mind and the costumes of ego.

To appreciate and continue to love your teacher at a time like this when he is starkly reflecting the structure of your own ego back to you can be bare-knuckled tough! It’s hard enough when your spouse or partner catches you red-handed in the throes of inescapable compromise. But I discovered that having to let in this clear and excruciating reflection of the fundamental sham and pretense of my own ego, a reflection given by someone from whom I had experienced nothing but steadfast and uncompromising integrity—well, that was a different story. The forces of good and evil were now shown to be alarmingly black and white.  Evasiveness can then become not just a personal survival mechanism but a collective, “Lord of the Flies” maneuver. Looking for allies in the most familiar and idealized recesses of the past, the frantic, dislodged mind can summon up a very distorted picture, or shut down in inert defeat as if only it has the power to interpret reality. Inwardly, where before there was ecstatic revelation pouring forth in a joyful meeting of heart and soul, now the air was so thick that I could taste my own panic.

At such telling times, one does really find out what one is made of. The spiritual brothers and sisters, with whom one has shared this kind of complete transparency, are now there to witness the truth and depth of one’s commitment and humility. How one responds becomes part of your collective narrative, and for the ego, there is no worse situation. It’s very much like a “checkmate” that is veering towards a “stalemate” because the ego is refusing to acknowledge that it has been fully exposed and trapped. For the merging of real transcendence and integrity to become stable and embodied, the truth is, whether we were up to it or not, we all knew that this was the price that had to be paid. The extraordinary communion of our deepest realization had to be actualized and given authority by our own selfless surrender and transformation. We knew this implicitly and this is why we held each other to it.

One day I was sitting on the lawn in front of Andrew near his house. It was at one of those times when I was stuck in some endless labyrinth of self-concern. I knew that his guidance was the only thing that could part the clouds and let the light in. He simply and accurately described my pattern of not being willing to be upfront, honest and come clean with him and the other men about a particular incident. In retrospect, what he was pointing out was not all that devastating. At the end of this talk, he said this movement to hide from responsibility was in fact no different from how I was the first time he had ever seen me in a public teaching where I met him. I was flabbergasted, for at that first evening, then over ten years ago, I had said nothing, sitting at the back of the room amongst a hundred or more people. He said I would lean to the side to screen myself behind someone else from his gaze in order to avoid any direct eye contact or engagement. I asked him how he could remember such an obscure incident amongst the thousands upon thousands of interactions he has had with so many people. He answered that he always remembers what’s important.

What I can see now about what was ultimately revealed throughout all of this “down and dirty work in the trenches” we all engaged in for many years, is an increasingly steady and deeply shared understanding—an understanding of an authentic field and impersonal view, a continuum of one, indivisible human experience. With this understanding comes a kind of gratitude that is not then just shown through devotion, prayer and service. It’s gratitude for honouring your own existence and the rich tapestry of our relationships into which we are all inter-woven at a soul level.

Three or four years ago now I made the decision not to continue as a committed student of the teachings and with the body of students living directly around Andrew. At the time, it was like so many times before when the ante, the commitment, the resolve was being raised, and each of us had to decide where we stood with what was being called forth. In ways which are difficult to describe, but which we all knew were intimately true, I and others at different times were faced with the clearest view of our hang-ups and divided condition.

And more poignant and humbling, we now had no doubt about the immense amount of resolve, spirit, and heart which were required for such an outrageous mission to succeed. I knew at the time that I wasn’t willing to fight, or surrender, or push myself through the gauntlet of what I perceived was needed to rise to the occasion at that particular point. So very much was and is at stake in this grand evolutionary experiment. The stark truth is that the path had become too steep, and the air too thin. I couldn’t hang in there, and I know a lot of people who also couldn’t. I think our stories, knowing each other as well as we do, are really not that much different. All of us who have spent part of our lives participating in Andrew’s work know that one helluva lot of effort, pain, bliss, communion, and love has been poured into this process.

At certain junctures on a genuine spiritual path, especially in a communal context with a living Guru, one knows that there is a line being drawn that is excruciatingly clear and mutually seen and recognized.  Everything is revealed in stark relief, not only about oneself, but about where one really stands in relationship to an outrageously real choice to commit one’s life, ongoingly and authentically, to the pursuit of actualizing a liberated human consciousness in which the One and the Many become indistinguishable. To give one’s lifeblood to make certain that that consciousness will be ultimately victorious, not only as inner revelation but as a living, breathing reality in the world of time and space, is a singular matter. When one gets to this point in the journey, it is not about being “vindicated” or “righteous”. It is way beyond trying to interpret an exciting new “model of reality” and impose it on oneself. At this point everything has accelerated way beyond one’s mostly sorry story about how one might have been “maligned” or had ones ego exposed in the process, a story which one might be trying desperately to convince others of—others who have really no idea of what was being squeezed and why, and who are viewing what will always be a rare process of Sacred Alchemy through the conventional eyes of the world.

A number of us former close students are now coming together as a local volunteer activist group, motivated by social concerns and global issues. After some time of disorientation and finding our feet outside the community, we wanted to meet in the depth and transformation that we all experienced. Leaving our wounds and weapons at the door, we are beginning to rediscover through each other the perspective and driving consciousness that is an inherent part of who we are. From recent experiences and interactions over the last year with people who have chosen to re-evaluate their experience and connect with one another through an honest and positive outlook, it is proving to be stimulating, creative and dignified in ways I could have never imagined.

Nothing prompted us to come together other than our own impulse to do so. Whether it was through a particular political engagement, or an environmental/social activist bent, or just an affiliation with one another that we felt wanted to be explored and pursued, the depth of a mutually-shared internal process is surfacing and influencing how we are together. It is filtering into our work and livelihood. We were being impacted by all that we learned and discovered in our work with Andrew, and we are finding that all of this is pointing towards coming together at a higher level. By not avoiding past disputes and phobias, we are seeing how much of what makes up our world can be affected by the context in which we have learned to come together. The value of this inherent “field” which we invoke and participate in keeps bringing us, and others, together. And it keeps leading to a space which is paradoxically both familiar and also highly unpredictable.  The meetings, engagement, projects and ideas we get into are not necessarily smooth and thematically coherent. Within our particular volunteer group, made up largely of former close students, there is quite a range of directions and interests. But over the ten months that we have been meeting regularly, we have all been moved by the acknowledgment that what we all are deeply interested in is not just past experiences, or some “method” or esoteric philosophy. The powerful undercurrent that keeps convincing us that something central to us all is continuously being revealed—something which cannot and will not be held back—is giving us, throughout all its twists and turns, a space, a pause, and a reflection to acknowledge how very deep our collective understanding truly is, and hence how much we have to give.

As I continue to immerse myself in this current phase of the “work”, which many of us are now exploring, I have been interested to find that something is emerging in our own understanding about the work of conscious evolution itself. I find myself seeing and understanding with greater clarity and perspective so much about these critical times we are now living through. There is a lot to reflect on and embrace—what I and so many have all gone through together, what I have consistently found myself drawn to in this lifetime and why, the structures and entrenchment of ego—these, and other powerful forces, are all culminating in my present experience, and these forces are not separate from the whole. And there is a lot to look forward to—the outrageous and critical juncture we have come to as a human race shows how much more is now required from all of us, and how important it is that we all continue to rise up to function and participate in a new way, a way which honors all of the incredibly profound training we have shared together. The test seems to be whether we can honor this call. As Andrew has often said, “Time will tell.”

Rod Stanbrook can be contacted at rod9948@gmail.com

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

Walking down the road in Stockbridge MA, my head is buzzing after talking with everyone. Something is burning through my nervous system, wanting to come through. Something is emerging that has its own life and force. This emergence happens in apparent spaces between us that don’t really exist: in the living paradox of autonomy and communion and a palpable energetic  field that can only be Love. It is a Love stripped bare of romantic components; it has no face but the other, no urge but for union, no reason except to merge into itself and multiply. This Love only sees the Beloved, which is not another individual but a particular awareness and vibration. It is the setting for the story and the story itself; the play and the players, as well as the audience and the theatre. It wants itself, multiplied exponentially. It wants to live together, to talk, and to breathe in each other’s company. More and more and more and more endlessly. It doesn’t want to leave or sleep or deal with any practical reality. It just wants to go, go, go, onward and upward.

This force has gotten us all into major trouble, by identifying with it, by confusing it with the thrust of ego. It takes so much to face it with maturity and be able to ride this wild horse without falling off or running all over the country, unhinged. What has set this in motion is the force of the Guru Principle. It was meeting Andrew that awakened this in many of us or put that which we had been seeking for years into context and form. Most of us are post-modern boomers, from Western Europe and America, living the most privileged existence on earth of any time. And we ran smack bang into the most eternal and ancient method of spiritual evolution and transformation: the Guru.

What makes it different this time is that it was not only an individual who had taken the expression of this on as himself; but someone who has the understanding of evolution and a deep interest in what was emerging between us. It took some time for Andrew to understand what was going on. It has taken much longer for some to live it. But we are all connected by that initial recognition and Awakening, the shared consciousness that imprinted all of us in those early days.

Transforming human beings is an outrageously difficult and messy business. To get us to honor that which is not us, but comes through us, and not take it for ourselves but only give to it; it is like turning straw into gold. Andrew only wanted us to make this our own, to submit ourselves to a higher reality so that we would express only That. He wanted companions on the journey and did everything he could to get us to evolve, mature and transform, so that we could carry the gift that we had been given.

As far as I can see, the Guru Principle can move us out of the post-modern predicament of the intensity of narcissism. By bowing to a higher principle and allowing it to work through us, it is possible to go beyond the cynicism and arrogance of 21st century ego structures. Everyone who was with Andrew in the early days got a very big taste of that possibility for free. There was no price to be paid it seemed, we just let it happen. The morning after I met Andrew, my mind was like the sky; clear, empty, vast and limitless. This experience corresponded to all the Tibetan texts I had ever read. But I had no idea what was being asked of me in order to be true to that experience; the renunciation of mind, ego, position, cultural identity, gender identity, power etc, etc… None of us knew what a struggle it was going to be to live this fully. The biggest sacrifice is the price for this extraordinary gift of transformation.

Barbara Waldorf can be reached at barbara@guru-talk.com

I met Andrew in England in November 1986 soon after he began teaching. Even though I am not an ex-student as such, as I am currently running his EnlightenNext Centre in Rishikesh, I am very much on the periphery of what is happening around Andrew at this point.

The first time I met Andrew was in a small cottage in Devon, England where he was living with his soon to be wife Alka and a few close friends. We sat together in his room upstairs and he asked me about my spiritual life. In the middle of our conversation my mind stopped completely. I was suddenly overtaken by the realization that Life was One Whole undifferentiated Being that was Alive and its nature was Love. Andrew said to me at the time, “You have jumped in the river and now you are standing on the shore. Now you have to decide if this is what you want. But you may not have any choice.”

There is nothing that can prepare you for the meeting with a real spiritual Master. Something absolute and sacred was sealed between us during that first meeting. Something that I now believe is eternal.

Some weeks later I asked Andrew if I could join him formally in the spiritual adventure that had overtaken my life. I believe I was the first person to do this after he came to the West from India. It was a choice I made from the deepest part of myself. And even though I could not possibly have known all that it meant, I made it in full consciousness and with the knowledge that this was a choice in which there was no going back.

There is very little understanding of what the relationship with the Guru is, let alone a real Master like Andrew. It is the ultimate challenge, the greatest privilege and the most serious undertaking that any human being can embark on. This is because what is revealed in the relationship with the Guru is perfect purity, an absolute love that knows no other. Once this has been experienced deeply and a choice has been made to give oneself to it at the deepest level of ones being, sooner or later the promise of it has to be fulfilled. There is no going back. I know in my own life with Andrew this has proved to be true.

It is the ultimate challenge because in the reflection of a real Master like Andrew we all find out sooner or later exactly who we are as a human being. And then, as Andrew has often said, how much love do we have in our heart when we are really tested?

Andrew was always a highly controversial spiritual teacher. On his arrival in England from India in 1986 he swept into, what I considered at the time to be the most serious sphere of spiritual practitioners in the Western world, like an electrical storm. The quiet town of Totnes with its soothing approach to spirituality that made room for all the colours in the rainbow and all the time in the world; was instantly transformed into a crucible of enlightened revelation and Truth Absolute, and the chips fell where they may. Andrew was and remains to be absolutely unabashed and unapologetic about his uncompromising passion for the truth. Andrew wasn’t safe. And for many of the spiritual teachers and seekers around at the time, if they were alive at all, Andrew was just too much. But for the rest of us, including those who now view him so negatively, Andrew’s fearless refusal to see the spiritual quest in anything less than absolute or all or nothing terms, set our hearts on fire.

I had the incredible privilege to have a very close relationship with Andrew during the first ten years I knew him. In fact for years I was his best friend and confidant. He trusted me completely and shared everything with me; including many of the burdens of his life with all of us that no-one would ever have known he was carrying.

Throughout the many struggles I went through in those early years, what made it possible for me to get as far as I did, becoming one of his first senior students and setting up and leading his first Centre in London, was only my relationship to Andrew. Whatever was happening I knew that if I never allowed myself to step back from him, everything would resolve itself in the end. And this is what happened in those years, again and again and again.

In 1992 Andrew asked me to leave our community in the States and create a Centre for the teachings in London with my oldest dharma brother. It was a big moment leaving Andrew but I was thrilled at the adventure that lay ahead. Whereas many of Andrew’s students were quite intimidated at being in a position of responsibility for the teachings, being an English aristocrat, much to my chagrin, it seemed quite natural to me. But as it was, Andrew made many of his older student’s leaders during those years. He knew we were far from perfect, but we were all he had at the time and he was never afraid to take big risks. We had been together as a community with him in the States for five years at that point, and he really wanted the revolution he had ignited to get out there in the world. It was a thrilling period with new centres springing up in cities all over Europe and many new people getting involved.

I remember Andrew saying that in the very early days of his teaching there were moments when he would be filled with fear when he let in what he was really taking on as a teacher and as such a young man. And in those days Andrew was not even that involved with most of us. It was when we all moved to the States in 1988 that Andrew realized, and he spoke about it at great length in his teachings at the time, that unless he really took us all on a living community that was truly an expression of that One without a second that we had all tasted being with Andrew, was never going to occur.

In observing the ecstatic intimacy in which we were coming together with each other around him, Andrew had had a vision that the real significance of enlightenment was not for the individual but for the evolution of the whole race. It was a revolution we were convinced at the time was going to change the world, and it inspired hundreds of us to literally uproot our lives and move to America. But, looking back on it, the scale of what Andrew was taking on in all of us to make this vision stick—the post-modern ego, and the degree of individual and collective resistance there would be in all of us to give it up—was something neither he nor we could possibly have known.

It was through the 1990’s that Andrew began speaking about the unbroken chaos of his life. And it was true. His life had become an endless rollercoaster between heaven and hell. In spite of all the thrilling developments that were happening, worst of all, one by one, all of his leaders began to fall. Away from the protection of Andrew’s orbit we did not begin to have the spiritual maturity to deal with the challenges, particularly the temptations for power and position; that our greater responsibility invited. Other spiritual teachers might not have had such high standards. But Andrew was incapable of compromising on the issue of ego, especially with his senior students, who he was rightly tougher with than anyone else. And the fact was that in spite of how much we had to give, we were all still very primitive people.

After some years I was the only senior student Andrew had left. I suspect the only reason I lasted as long as I did was that Andrew didn’t want to believe the writing on the wall, until it became impossible to ignore. Even though there was a gathering momentum to my fall, I cannot forget that moment in time when I decided it had all become too much and I crossed an invisible line and stepped back into my own world.

It’s true, Andrew never expected us to be perfect, far from it. But everything that he was trying to do with us was based on trust. On a mutual bond in that which was always most important, no matter what. As Andrew’s senior students we were like a tight unit in combat, with him as our commander-in-chief, and we were absolutely dependent on each other. As long as the union with our teacher remained unbroken anything could be overcome. But once we crossed that line, we were no longer in Andrew’s world. I don’t know if I am conveying what a vulnerable position this put Andrew in. He was completely exposed to our egos and to the integrity of our own stand. Recognizing this prompted a spiritual teacher who was a contemporary of Andrews at the time to say, “You’re going to be crucified!”

I could never have imagined I would betray Andrew in the way I did. But I was so far from being the person I thought I was. Over time I had become so attached to the image I had of myself as his right hand man that I could not bear to see how addicted to the rush of power and position I had become, and the extent to which, in the face of it, I really didn’t care. This was only further confirmed to everyone but me when I was confronted by Andrew and my peers with my darkest motives. I refused to look in the mirror. And turning my back on Andrew and all my closest friends, I shut down.

There has been a lot of negative press written about Andrew over the years. And almost all of it has been written by people who were really close to him, or at least were with him for many years. And this has been used as a justification for their view. “We know what Andrew was really like.”

I could be one of those people. In fact in some respects I am. For years I have lived in the same crazy isolated world as they have. It has seemed an almost impossible leap for myself and other leaders of my generation of Andrews community to rise above the values of our post-modern ego, and realize how profoundly beholden we are, and have always been, to everyone else to live up to our potential. Fortunately for Andrew and all of us, those few close students of Andrew’s from my generation that did find the courage and integrity to make this leap, were joined by a new generation that have a much greater respect and maturity than most of us ever did. And as a result Andrew now has a core of students who have created a foundation in which real development beyond ego is occurring.

Where I thankfully completely part company with Andrew’s detractors however, is in their position on Andrew himself. Over the years I have been on the giving and particularly receiving end of what they like to call Andrew’s “abuses of power”, more than most—if not anyone. Except that I have never seen them that way. From my perspective these were all, albeit sometimes desperate, attempts by Andrew to reach our conscience. Andrew made no pretension that he cared about our egos, because to him they were the only obstacle to everything we were all trying to achieve; but he cared in a way that I found a constant confrontation with my own lack of care, for the best part of us. I have some idea of how much of Andrew’s time and energy has been spent agonizing over all of us over the years, especially his closest students. I certainly know how much he has tried in every conceivable way that only he could, to get me personally to change; you can’t imagine the half of it. It has never ceased to amaze me the outrageous personal risks he has been prepared to take again and again to reach out to the best part of us. I truly believe this is because he so valued each one of us; far more than we ever valued ourselves, in the right way.

The bottom line is that I have never been able to get past the fact that Andrew has always been right about the important things, especially when it comes to his judgment of his students. I know from my own experience and all my brothers and sisters who have lived this life will concur, that there is nothing more enraging to the ego than to be unmasked and naked before the truth. This is the place where all the toxicity of Andrew’s detractors comes from. But the point is this is what we signed up for and Andrew has only been doing his job and doing it far better than most of us ever wished he had.

The fact is whatever I have been through personally, is nothing compared with what others, Andrew more than anyone, have been through because of me. You can say I am just an insane sycophant/masochist if you want. It’s an easy way to go. But consider what I am saying and a lot begins to make sense. The Andrew I know could not be further from the lunatic that his detractors portray. And they will never be able to adequately explain what it was that made so many people, including themselves, go through so much for so long to be with him.

So why did we? It was because of who he was and is—miraculously in our darkest moment, a real spiritual Master for our times—with the love, the passion, the courage and the soul strength needed to take on the densest egos the world has ever seen, and not compromise his vision! And the intensity of the reaction of the naysayers to him only proves how deeply Andrew lives in their souls, as he has no choice but to, because of their choice.

None of us were deeply serious about the spiritual life when we met Andrew. We didn’t even know what it meant, because how many people do we know that do? But Andrew made us serious. He inspired all of us to reach for the absolute highest with our lives and not settle for anything less. Most of all he inspired us, through his own example, to want to be victorious in the greatest battle there is, the battle with ourselves—only so we could become fit vehicles for the greatest mission there could ever be: to create a new world in the image of Spirit—together.

Would we have ever gotten even close to such an outrageously positive and desperately needed leap in the evolution of consciousness without him?

Steve Brett can be contacted at steve@guru-talk.com

I met Andrew when I was 25 years old through a school friend whom I respected a lot. I was studying accountancy in Israel. He had then been a student of Andrew for two years and even though I thought one day he might return to ‘being normal’ (leaving behind his spiritual teacher), I appreciated some of the views he shared with me regarding the true nature of thoughts and feelings, which later I learned were coming from his association with Andrew. At the time I didn’t know if I wanted to meet Andrew because of these views, which I found compellingly interesting, or whether I was just looking for a way to get close to my ex-first boyfriend again!

The first time I met Andrew I didn’t like him as a person; he seemed to be overly confident and laughing at people, yet the little I did understand of his talk (I never heard of Enlightenment before, nor did I know of meditation or anything ‘spiritual’), made a lot of sense to me. In fact I had reached some of the same conclusions myself. So I decided to stick around his students and started visiting the centre in Tel-Aviv on a weekly basis.

I always found these meetings very interesting, not so much because of Andrew, the teacher, but because these were intelligent individuals who were looking into/investigating life in a serious and meaningful way. I enjoyed their company and found our discussions and thoughts provoking.  I always wanted to know ‘why’: why are things the way they are, why am I here, what is the purpose of it all? I wanted to understand Life. This was a drive in me for as long as I remember. Here I found other people with whom I could explore some of these questions.

Six months later, January 1995, I joined them on a retreat held in India. I was meant to come back after one week for accounting exams but ended up postponing my return as I couldn’t leave behind what I then recognised as being the most important and meaningful experience I have ever had. By the end of the retreat I knew ‘this is what I was looking for’ even though I didn’t consciously know that I was even looking for anything.

What is the ‘this’ that I’m referring to? What did I find that I was so convinced of? Purpose, depth, common sense, my whole life falling into place like never before. Beyond the thrill and excitement I had experienced, I found a deep place inside myself that ‘knew’ that I could relax into on a deep level to the extent that, when I went back home, people commented that I had changed. I wasn’t aware of a change but people around me said I was emanating a depth that was very unlike the character I was up until this point. Clearly something significant had happened during the retreat.

Indeed that retreat was a turning point in my life, after which nothing was ever the same. I embarked on a journey that would end up taking me much further than I had, or ever could have, anticipated.

How Did I Change as a Result of Meeting Andrew?

I am grateful about so many things Andrew gave, the list is endless and it seems impossible to summarize everything in few words. Every aspect of my life has been influenced for the better. For example, the degree to which I know myself, my inner strength, my relationships with others (family, friends, work colleagues) and more. One thing I can say for sure, every bit of time I spend with Andrew and EnlightenNext was worth it and more. If tomorrow my children (not that I have any) were to tell me that they would like to engage with Andrew, I will support them 100%.

My years with Andrew were and still are the most beautiful part of my life and I am so grateful to him for everything he gave me and everything he taught me. A big part of who I am today is a result of his doing. Andrew ‘introduced’ me to who I am beyond the body. He deconstructed me and reconstructed me anew. Was I brainwashed? If yes then it was very successful as it sure doesn’t feel that way! He ‘gave’ us the experience of the spiritual dimension of life as ourselves and he taught us how to live in this world embracing this realisation and taking responsibility for it.

Being with Andrew one learns through direct experience about the forces of the universe in the most scientific and human (not cold) way.  The privilege of learning about human evolution, not as a object but as oneself being the subject, is the most delicate/dangerous experience. It is like playing with fire and the results have huge implications.

There are many ways to describe what is it that Andrew is teaching, one way of putting it is that he is teaching a perspective. When I joined Andrew’s community I had never asked myself what is most important to me in life. This was one of the first questions I was asked (by Andrew) to answer for myself. It was a very important moment in my life, to consciously realise from within what was the most important thing in life. I experienced it as a drive to grow, to learn, to evolve, to be conscious, not for my sake but for the sake of Life itself. This recognition was the anchor for what would follow and established the context in which I made choices. What do I mean by ‘context’? The clearer one is about what is important in one’s life the more a straight line can be walked. That line becomes your guide, your reference point. Any decision that is made is ‘checked’ against that. Will it, whatever ‘it’ is, take me closer to being more conscious and serving the evolution of the whole? From a certain perspective life becomes easier to live, because one is more aware of what is important and one is clear about what one wants. Andrew taught us to think in a ‘different way’ by asking us to come to terms with questions like this. He gave us the tools to live a truly spiritual life in today’s material, narcissistic world.

Before I met Andrew I didn’t know that I was seeking. In meeting him I became aware that I had found what I was unconsciously looking for. After a few years of being with Andrew, going on long retreats, living with other students of his and immersing myself in the pursuit of Self knowledge, I came to recognize that I wasn’t a seeker anymore – I was a “finder”. I can never be lost again. What does that mean? I have seen through my own eyes (not the physical ones) that LIFE is who I am, and LIFE is always becoming ever-new. Even though the future appears to be known, it really isn’t. I always related to LIFE as something I needed to adapt to, as if ‘it’ already existed and I had to learn how to survive within it. When I realised that nothing is already there and that I am a free agent who can consciously contribute to the process of LIFE, because that is who I am, it scared me to death and thrilled my soul at the same time! This is THE most exciting and liberating discovery Andrew opened my eyes to see – I am not a victim of circumstances but an actual player in the big drama of Life & Evolution. Andrew takes it even further by saying that the Life process is in fact depending upon us, as awakening humans, to consciously guide it. Humans are the vehicle through which Life can see itself and grow and evolve. To engage with our fellow human beings in this awareness of who we are in the biggest sense is the most thrilling and deeply satisfying experience one can have.

Andrew gave us the experience of direct seeing: seeing that I (in the egoic sense) am not the centre of the universe. In that he awakened in me the most beautiful and profound human experience – humility.

Rivka Attal can be contacted at free.bird@live.co.uk

I think it is significant that most ex-students who have chosen to publicly portray Andrew Cohen as a dangerous and abusive Guru, left before (and have heard from hearsay), or during, the period around 1999-2001, when all of the women formal students, and then later the men, went through a collective “dark night of the soul” ordeal of epic proportions.

Why do I say this? Because almost all of the “controversial” events that Andrew’s detractors take issue with occurred during this very specific time period, for example, the “slappings”, dips in the lake, “abusive” cartoons (drawn by myself!), alleged “coercion” of donations when students left and wanted to return etc… This is a very important fact because the way they write intends to create the impression that Andrew was and is employing these kinds of extreme “kick ass” measures all the time. This is simply not true and creates a distorted picture of who Andrew is and how he works with his students.

However, this period was and is very significant because it marks a watershed in the evolutionary trajectory of the whole radical endeavour that we formal and committed students chose to be a part of. This is because Andrew began to push for a literal collective shift in our centre of gravity up the spiral of evolutionary transformation. While truly extraordinary miracles of individual and collective awakening had already occurred relative to anything any of us had experienced in our lives, Andrew saw a potential on the horizon that far transcended where most of us were very content to settle. This radical potential had to do with birthing Evolutionary Enlightenment in real time as a collective emergence. But while the teachings that pointed to this possibility lit us all up with inspired passion, we usually confused what we thought was its emergence with our own experience of higher states (which came and went as all states do). Also we couldn’t clearly see the conditioned structures that were inhibiting this emergence, especially the culturally conditioned collective structures. Compared to what all of us know about this dimension of the Western post-modern ego now, we knew very little about it then.

It is important to bear this in mind because we were already living relatively extraordinary spiritual lives. We just did not see now self-satisfied we had become; we felt we were already “doing it”. As a result of this Andrew had to draw a line in the sand and go to battle. The forces of collective resistance that Andrew confronted in us as he resolved to actualize this potential were immense and far exceeded in scale what any of us, including Andrew, could have imagined (see articles The Birth of Evolutionary Enlightenment and Meeting your Match at a Soul-Level for a more in-depth description of this phenomenon).

I can well understand how challenging and confusing it was for those that did leave during this period, because I left myself firmly in the grip of my reeling ego. If I had not found the passion and courage to return I can imagine that I would have found it very confusing and challenging to make sense out of the totality of my experience. The stakes were very high and for a long time during this Dark Night there did not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. There were junctures were it appeared that our evolutionary experiment might ultimately fail, that Heaven had slipped from our grasp, and many of us sank into caverns of despair and numb indifference that were quite simply Hell on earth, and still make us shudder whenever we recall them.

This was a period when Andrew literally had to risk everything to stand alone for the highest potential he saw, in the face of enormous resistance from almost all of his students, and for this he has been relentlessly attacked. Convinced of their moral high ground, for which of course they have the support of the individualistic, egalitarian values of the prevailing post-modern spiritual subculture, these former students are united in their conviction that his stand was TOO MUCH! But Andrew did always say, that when it comes to true spiritual liberation and evolution, “it is never enough until it is TOO MUCH” And boy, did we, and he, find out what that really meant!

Those who now publicly claim that some of Andrew’s extreme methods (which were outrageously creative and extremely challenging but never seriously endangered anyone) during that period were “abusive” see fit to omit a very important truth: that real, profound, unprecedented breakthroughs were made both amongst the men and the women on the other side of this collective “Dark Night”. The men were able to build on this and carry it forward over time. For the women the results were perhaps less linear but ultimately equally positive. For all the men there at the time, and many of the women I know, these collective breakthroughs were undeniably real, and shatteringly so. And I will never forget how, in the light of the radically impersonal and cosmically expansive consciousness engulfing us, the enormity of the relentless collective resistance we had all been embedded in, became object rather than subject. We were looking at it as one perceiver and we were on the other side inhabiting an utterly new being, new context and a vast and mysterious intelligence that was both who we were and far, far transcended what we could comprehend. I know for a fact that all the men had a tacit understanding of why Andrew had taken the extreme measures he had, why this would have never happened by itself, and of how the implications of that monumental “battle” stretched far beyond us and Andrew himself. And that is why we all went down to Andrew’s house in silence in the middle of the night after this explosion of consciousness had emerged between us and prostrated on the ground outside his house as he slept. It was the only appropriate response. I remember lying there with my nose in the dirt saying out loud once and then over and over to myself “Thank You, Andrew”. We all lay there in the night silence for a long time. That was the most real prostration I ever did in my life (and, believe me, I did 1000´s!).

Would these extraordinary individual/collective breakthroughs have occurred without Andrew, at times, applying relentless pressure and what many now deem “abusive” behaviour? I have no doubt not. Was the nature of what revealed itself on the other side of that ordeal sacred beyond measure? Absolutely yes. Did it mark a beachhead from which the evolution of consciousness has continued to unfold? Yes I have no doubt. Why do I say that? Because that revelation/emergence is living and breathing in both current and many former students in a way that it simply never was before. And, by the way, it was us and not Andrew who first said this was “New”.

The Tipping Point

It is hard to put into words the nature of the “shift” that occurred in the zeitgeist of the community after this period. I can only say it was vast, profound and immensely powerful, and that it had to do with the evolution of consciousness itself. No individual could hold or grasp it in any way. After that period access to a new matrix of awakened consciousness and collective intelligence was remarkably much more available to anyone who had a sincere interest. This phenomenon has continued, and I don’t just mean amongst present and former students of Andrew Cohen. This was, and is, a real and astonishing non local phenomenon. For example, people who had never even met Andrew or been exposed to his teachings would walk off the street into an EnlightenNext centre for an “enlightened communication” group and be swept into an experiential depth of inquiry and self-discovery in a way that clearly could not have occurred previously. The later generation students who came after us simply did not have to go through the same battles with embedded conditioned structures that we had to “access” this miraculous evolutionary potential; it was as if consciousness itself had “speeded up”!

When I look back on it now, the explosion that began on the night of July 30^th 2001, and that continued to flare forth unabated like an erupting volcano for several weeks, was a collective initiation into a new matrix of human evolutionary potential. It was as if a rocket had broken through the gravitational field of the collective post-modern ego and suddenly a new orbit or higher octave of spiritual power and perspective was miraculously available to those who had sincere interest, passion and receptivity.

A memory from the beginning of the Dark Night period just came back to me very vividly as I am writing this. The pressure was really starting to build and Andrew was pushing all of us men in a very challenging way, and we were all starting to fragment. He had recently told us in a meeting that “the Revolution hadn’t happened yet” (this is year 2000) and that he was going to have to force it because none of us knew what he was pointing to.

A group of us men were outside Andrew’s house in the snow. Andrew came by and gathered us all into a huddle like a rugby scrum, so our noses were almost touching. He began to implore us to hang in there with him and spoke in a highly charged, volcanic, prophetic way about what he saw in the eye of his intuition. As we huddled together in the falling snow, he said

“If enough of you can bear witness to this and stand firm, even in the midst of enormous pressure, then a gate will open through you all that will make something available to others in such a way that they will not have to go through everything you have. What will happen then I have no idea but it will be explosive in its impact…”

We were all stunned and bewildered, barely having any real sense of what Andrew was talking about. I clearly remember one of Andrew’s closest senior students (who is now one of his most bitter detractors) saying in a hushed, reverent tone in the silence of our huddle in the snow after Andrew walked away, “My God, who is Andrew Cohen?”

Well that gate did open about 9 months later, even if some were not there to bear witness to it.

I mention all of the above because I think it is the main reason why almost all of us who have left Andrew and the formal “core” body of students after this period have a completely different perspective on the so-called “abuses”. Why? Because we experienced the individual and collective victory of evolutionary enlightenment on the other side and hence we know the true nature of Andrew’s intent and motivation.

This is also why so many of us are not living under the stigma of having “failed” in our evolutionary experiment regardless of the reasons we chose to leave but, on the contrary, are living lives of passion, fearlessness and commitment to evolving consciousness and culture in the many varied contexts in which we now find ourselves. The door to Evolutionary Enlightenment once opened can never be closed, although it can be denied. Hence there is an ever-dawning recognition amongst many “former students” who are endeavouring to embrace the entirety of their experience right up to the present moment that they are all part of an ever-changing and ever-expanding “movement” that reaches far beyond our shared history as students of Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext.

Evolution moves in mysterious ways. When the totality of our experience is being embraced and nothing is being denied, when we are no longer holding onto grievances,  fixed conclusions about who we are, who Andrew Cohen is and what is possible now, then all boundaries and fixed positions break down and dissolve in the liberating surge of the Authentic Self . Thus Happy Endings and New Beginnings abound! That is how the real Healing happens in an evolutionary context, leaving everyone unburdened by the past and united on the edge of the possible. Authentic healing does not occur by licking ones wounds and “coming to terms” with the “abusive behaviour” of ones formerly beloved Guru. Authentic healing can only occur by embracing and embodying the whole picture (which may include criticism) and that picture is very BIG and getting bigger all the time.

So, with all this said, one of my hopes in writing this is that some of those that did leave during this time, and have seen fit to “blame” their Guru for “abuses of power”, may find, at the very least, the willingness to make room for a more all-inclusive picture of the evolutionary adventure of which they were part. The nature of who Andrew is, and what he was/is teaching, meant that our individual evolution was always inextricably interwoven with the evolution of the collective. And during this period, whatever the specific ups and downs of our own individual path, we were halfway through a cycle of major surgery on a collective scale. If one left halfway through the operation then there is no way one could see or fully understand this. Whether we knew it or not we were all cells in a greater organism that was going through an evolutionary metamorphosis. Why is this important? Because if we can glimpse the enormity of this perspective and let it percolate through our being we may be shocked to discover a context that has the power to not only wash away the pain and confusion of the past, but reveal the overwhelming and living Truth of radical, impersonal, evolutionary enlightenment what we all had the audacity and passion to reach for.

Pete Bampton can be contacted at pete.bampton@gmail.com

A Leap of Logic

I currently work as an IT specialist in the health insurance industry. It’s not a particularly inspiring profession. In fact these days, with all the debate about health care going on in America, I sometimes feel like I’m working against progress. Most people I know well think it’s a strange choice of trade for someone who studied philosophy at Yale and spent fifteen years as a close student of spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen. And I agree.

I’ve learned many lessons at work but I’m eager to do something more with my life. The large corporate environment is a different world than the one I was trained to be in. It has different values and different rules. You feel like you’re plugged into a machine rather than contributing anything of value to the world. I can survive quite well there, but I don’t think I can ever excel. I just don’t believe in it that much.

After giving so much of my energy, time, and resources to furthering Andrew’s cause and helping to develop a dimension of the human experience that few people can actually relate to, it’s easy to feel rather empty handed in a world that is occupied with other things. In fact it’s tempting to question what all the drama of spiritual work was really about. If I follow this line of thought it takes me down some dark alleys. But it’s important to shed some light there.

The thinking starts something like this: I couldn’t let go enough to embrace the life that I discovered with my teacher. Something was missing. Maybe I didn’t have the depth of experience I needed, maybe when it came down to it, I just didn’t have the interest or the intention, but in the end I just didn’t trust what was happening to me enough to continue. Though it’s not innocent, this position is perhaps tenable. That is, if I leave it here. One doesn’t have to look very far to find a reason why we might find it hard to trust the great wave of passion, insecurity, love, and fear that unfolds in us on the spiritual journey. Anyone who has set foot in this territory for real knows what I’m talking about. But many people do not leave it here. That is to say, many spiritual seekers do not accept responsibility for their own lack of faith in the challenging process of spiritual development.

Instead, they are compelled to find reasons why they turned away from their ideals. They need a reason why they didn’t trust what was happening to them. They need something to wrap it with, something to help them integrate the trauma that is the very nature of spiritual experience. Rather than honor its magnitude, this Great Unravelling of who we think we are, they replace the complexity of the spiritual journey with something smaller, something they can more easily understand. They begin to nourish their doubts. Perhaps their teacher didn’t provide the depth of experience they needed to endure their trials, or maybe others made it too difficult, or maybe the whole situation was somehow lacking in integrity. Instead of living with the fact that they just couldn’t trust Life as much as it demanded, they insist, usually self-righteously, that they were asked to trust something that was fundamentally untrustworthy.

There is an obvious leap of logic in this response. It goes like this: we didn’t become the heroic soul that we wanted to become. Therefore, our Teacher or Guru must not be the Master we thought he was, so we should find faults in him that justify why we didn’t change all that much. How about this instead? Maybe we didn’t become the heroic soul that we wanted to become, because we aren’t really that heroic.

It’s amazing how alluring the victim logic is when who we think we are suddenly comes into question. We can spend the better part of our youthful energy believing our life to be profoundly significant. Then suddenly our self-image is challenged and before you know what has happened you aren’t the rock star of your own dream anymore. The spotlights turn off, the house lights turn on, and you’re left with a shattered sense of self in a world that smells like cigarettes and stale beer.

When our self-image is challenged in this way, what happens next depends on how big our heart is. We know now that the idea that we had of ourselves is false, but we haven’t figured out how to be in the world without it. We don’t know how to relate to others, how to respond to life as it hurtles its challenges toward us. Because of the inherent insecurity in this position, it’s difficult not to move impulsively away from it.

There is, I would suggest, a very big-hearted response to this experience, certainly bigger than fighting against the truth that has been revealed to us, and possibly bigger than struggling the rest of our lives to become what we thought we once were. Painful as our experience may be, it is of course still possible to trust.

Rags to Riches

Before I met Andrew I had already had a stark look at the difference between who I thought I was and the reality of my actual life. Eight years before I met Andrew, I had graduated from college, a smart, ambitious, young man. Straight out of school, I started a successful non-profit job training business for inner-city kids. I was very idealistic. I wanted to change the world and I was convinced I could play a part in that change. But things became more difficult than I had expected. The reality of running a business started to land, and my idealistic dreams were challenged. Ultimately I didn’t have the interest to stick it out. So I began to look for something more meaningful than a politically correct life.

An old friend from high school showed up at my door. She had just had a near death experience and had a deep spiritual understanding at the time. She and I always shared a curiosity about the deeper meaning of life. We also shared a sense of abandon and wanted to break the mold. So I took the risk and got together with her. We set off to find a world that was different than the one that we had been handed. We were very close and deeply committed to each other. We got married because it seemed like the right thing to do. But we were very naïve and like many who have walked this path before us, we entered the dark and painful labyrinth of confusing emotional demons that lurk behind the closed doors of so many relationships. Before we knew how bad things could get, we were in too deep.

For many reasons that we did not fully understand, my wife was tormented by issues of mistrust. She would often flip from being very generous and kind to very angry and suspicious. She would turn on me with fierce intensity. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. I wasn’t always innocent of her accusations but their intensity far outweighed the offence. I could tell when these episodes were about to occur, but I couldn’t do anything to avoid them. After several years, I started to fight back against my growing self-doubt, and my anger began to destroy us both.

I began to wake up from this nightmare about five years into it. We had had a particularly bad fight, it was the middle of the night and I had sped off in the car, not knowing if I was going to come back. I was really losing it. I had no control of my anger anymore. Inside me was a well of rage that had no bottom and it scared the hell out of me. It was clear that this marriage was not working, but I simply had no room in myself for that fact. It was also clear that I couldn’t endure the fighting anymore. I parked in a remote spot in the road and in the pitch dark began screaming at Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, every great saint I could think of, demanding some answers. I don’t think you could call it prayer exactly, it certainly wasn’t pretty, but in hind sight I think I got someone’s attention.

I heard Andrew speak for the first time about a year later. I was studying to be an engineer and had managed to keep it together fairly well in school, but by this time my personal life was in pretty bad shape. Isolated, frightened, and confused, I heard something in Andrew’s words that I had not considered before. Who I am, he said, is not my mind. When I look back on it, this realization made all the difference in the world.

In my first private conversation with Andrew, still struggling to understand what was happening to me, I told him that I was afraid I was joining a cult. I remember how straight his response was, “In a way, that’s what this is, a charismatic teacher and a group of passionate followers.” He was clearly unfazed by what people thought of him and the implication was that I had to make up my own mind whether it was positive or not. From behind my reservations I told him about my life, not sure if I wanted to hear his response. Years later he would often refer to how crazy I was at that time, but from that first meeting, out of the goodness of his heart and simply because I continued to express the interest, he started to help me put the pieces back together.

I had never had a spiritual teacher before. I had no experience of Enlightenment teachings to speak of. Like most people with my background I was deeply suspicious of the whole scene. But I knew the Truth when I heard it and I knew that somehow I had stumbled upon something extraordinary, a truly awakened man with a powerful ability to communicate his experience. Few people are blessed with such an opportunity; fewer still recognize it as such. I don’t know why, but I did recognize it. I knew that if I could hang in there, this man could show me how to be sane in a world that had gone very wrong.

Some people say that they trusted Andrew almost immediately when they met him. My wife certainly did. She had no doubt from the start that Andrew was for real. For others, like me, it took more time. Andrew would encourage new people to really check him out before getting too close. He knew what he was asking of people and he knew this relationship wasn’t for everybody. The profound trust that I have in Andrew now is something that I gained through the hard work of renouncing my doubts, keeping my eyes open, and taking the risk to stay with it. Trust comes from seeing the results. If a Teacher’s sole intention really is to free your spirit from your limited self then in the end the whole journey is about trusting him enough to follow him off the edge of what you think you know and who you think you are.

You could say I followed Andrew off that edge but then clawed my way back up the cliff to have a second thought. As deep as my trust is in him as a Teacher and a human being, I haven’t trusted him enough to take me further than that. This is just a fact that I have to face everyday, but what should I conclude from it? Is this fundamental lack of trust there because of something he is doing or something I am doing? The whole firestorm around spiritual teachers and Gurus, Andrew included, comes down to this question.

If you haven’t been in the heat of a relationship with a spiritual Teacher or Guru then you really cannot understand the depth of this question. When one would-be follower asked Jesus if he could go home to bury his father before continuing with the quest, Jesus supposedly said “Follow me now! Let the dead bury the dead.” It’s an outrageous thing to say. Think about it. What would it take to trust a teaching like this? And could anyone outside the context of that relationship be expected to understand where Jesus was coming from? The whole point of getting into a relationship with a true spiritual Teacher or Guru is to be challenged like this. So only those of us who have really been close to the flame can weigh in on this question of whether it was ourselves or Andrew who broke the trust in our relationship with him. And it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. In your heart of hearts you already know the answer.

After two years attending community events and living in close proximity to Andrew’s community of students, things had started to improve, but it was obvious to both my wife and I that our relationship had too much baggage in it to support our intention to get closer to this inspired group of people. We split up and I moved in with nine other men and women who were aspiring students. After years of isolation in my personal drama, I started to experience the very real joy of communion and it was like breathing air again. Over the next fifteen years these men and women, along with fifty or sixty others around the world, became my spiritual brothers and sisters on a journey into the depths of the human spirit that I could not have even dreamed up.

I had done a lot of yoga over the years and I knew that Andrew was interested in yoga as well. When the right time came along, I found the courage to ask him if he’d like to do yoga together. He was delighted. And from that day forward I was very fortunate to practice with him. Being a student of Andrew’s was one thing, but actually doing practice with my teacher, just the two of us, was something many seekers only dream of. Andrew viewed yoga as a physical practice, but he took it very seriously. He had me put a sign on the wall in his practice room that said, “We only do Yoga here. Nothing personal will interfere with the practice of Yoga in this room.” I stuck to the rules and pushed myself as hard as I dared. We usually didn’t speak about anything other than our workouts, but a lot got communicated. He had one of the most intense yoga practices I have ever come across, and it was all I could do to keep up with him. Though he was far, far ahead of me, he welcomed me into this part of his life and poured his care and attention on my every move. I was determined to stay with him even if it meant going to extremes.

Over many years he not only reshaped my body, but through his ever-present guidance he gave me much needed perspective on my overactive mind. In time he introduced me to the brave woman that I would later marry and with whom I now share a very wholesome life. He also helped my first wife deal with her emotional instability, which against all odds, allowed us to maintain a close friendship. Basically when I add it all up, over the course of fifteen years, Andrew rebuilt my life from the ground up. But even this speaks only to the personal side of my relationship with him. As a formal student of his ever evolving teaching and a passionate participant in the on-going experiment of his community of students, I was immersed for years, 24/7, in a tremendous revelation of truth and communion. Given the condition I was in when I met Andrew, by any standard, I have been blessed beyond measure that he chose to take me under his wing.

I often think about this when I hear people speak about the unfair treatment that they received under Andrew’s tutelage. The basic gist of their complaint is that Andrew made mistakes and screwed up their lives. I look at my own experience and wonder. What kind of a monster would I have become, what kind of damage would I have done in the name of my own pride had I not met this man? I’m definitely not the enlightened one that I thought I wanted to be, but thanks to Andrew I’m not the arrogant hothead that I was before I started to do battle with reality either. And as a result I’m now free to pursue a constructive, creative life that can give back to the world the enormous amount that I have been given. For most people in my shoes, this is a far cry from failure, and who knows what is yet to emerge from this journey.

The Illusion of Continuity

Still, I sometimes find myself thinking that had I not met Andrew, that I should have been able to accomplish something more with my life. These moments of discontent come, I think, from the erroneous assumption that who I am now is who I was eighteen years ago, and had I not made the choice to follow my heart in the direction of this spiritual teaching I would have more to show for my life. This is clearly false. Who I was then, and what I was interested in, was so different from what I am today. It’s beyond comparison. Many of the choices I was making at the time I met Andrew were in actual fact very destructive. It’s very hard to let this in. But it’s crucial that we do. Because it is this kind of thinking that generates much of the bitterness and disillusionment around spiritual teachers and the spiritual endeavor. If we cannot see how much we’ve changed over the years then the years don’t end up meaning very much.

Part of the problem is that change in this dimension of our experience is very difficult to measure. If we have gathered a lot of possessions, earned a lot of money, built a large family, or achieved some position of stature over the years, then change is very easy to see. Let’s face it. If Andrew was regularly producing world leaders, scholars, and statesmen from his spiritual community would anybody be questioning his methods? No doubt some would say these kinds of achievements are signs of real progress and if we are learning anything at all in the spiritual dimension, then something like this should be evident. But I’m not sure this is true. Spiritual development changes our fundamental values. Typically these new values are not aligned with the culture from which they emerge. In fact they are more likely a radical departure from the values of that culture. It takes time for new values to take hold at a cultural level. If we achieve anything of value to our culture through spiritual development it will most likely be because we have found a way to communicate what we’ve learned into a language that others can understand.

Of course this requires that we recognize and understand for ourselves what has changed in us. Ironically, because of the nature of internal development at this level, it’s actually very easy to miss what is changing in us. I think there are several good reasons for this.

First, in the spiritual dimension we’re dealing with something that is almost too close to perceive, closer than anything we could want in the world, closer than anything we could even think of. We’re trying to develop that which perceives, the Subject itself. It’s easy to think you know the perceiver in yourself. But that idea of yourself is not the perceiver, it’s just another idea, a perception. In spiritual development, because what we are developing is where we are perceiving from, it’s hard to get any distance on what we are engaged with, hard even to detect change, and easy to doubt that we’re developing anything at all. Because of the ineffability of the spiritual dimension, there are real challenges to seeing spiritual experience in a developmental context.

Second, the recognition of truth is experienced as something that exists already. When something happens to catalyze a realization, we don’t find it outside ourselves. We find it inside ourselves, in our own deepest experience, and it feels like we are recognizing something that we already knew to be true. When I first met Andrew, I was struck more by his courage than by the truth of his words. To be sure, what he was speaking about was deep and powerful and it made me look with new eyes on myself and the world, but it wasn’t exactly new information. In a very deep place in myself I knew it already to be true. I was stunned by how much courage and conviction it must take to respond to the world from that depth, but I wasn’t surprised that that depth existed. Most of us interact on such superficial levels. The few times we embrace depth in our lives are usually those moments we cannot control. Even though we know this to be true, we pretend otherwise. It takes someone who is actually living from that depth to break through this pretense. They don’t actually tell us anything we don’t already know. They just show us that it is possible to live true to that which we do already know. It’s easy to convince yourself in moments of authentic revelation that you are just listening to a part of yourself that you don’t normally listen to. And in this way you could believe that nothing in you really changed. In a way you are right. What was there all along finally surfaced. But the fact that you are hearing it is enormously significant and speaks to the depth and clarity of the experience that revealed it to you.

Third, this sense in spiritual experience that nothing in us has fundamentally changed is supported by something far less enlightened in our experience: the continuity of our sense of self. Throughout our lives, no matter what happens, a part of our attention rarely leaves this fundamental sense of self. Even in the midst of a profound upheaval in our experience, we rarely take our inner eye off who we think we are. Because of this, we have the illusion that we are the same self all the time no matter how much we are in fact changing. Even though we may be expressing something profoundly different from one moment, one day, and one year to the next, we still think that who we are deep down is the same. This illusion of continuity gives us something to hang onto through all kinds of change, positive and negative. But this sense of self is false. It’s not who we really are, and it’s usually profoundly limited. It’s a set of ideas that we overlay atop all of our experience. The spiritual Teacher’s role is to get us to let this false sense of self go and become more interested in expressing what is underneath it. His job is to destroy the static idea of who we think we are and free up the dynamic energy of who we really are. And who we really are is something that trusts life absolutely and is profoundly free to change and develop. Needless to say, it takes an extraordinary person and a profound degree of trust to let the false sense of self go. Why? Because this sense of self is who we think we are. When it goes, we no longer exist in the way we did before.

Collective Emergence

One of my deepest realizations as a student of Andrew’s was an experience I had in discussion with a small group of my spiritual brothers. I had participated in hundreds of discussion groups over the years. Some were just a chore. Many were difficult and full of fear and reservation. Some were very inspiring. But the most exciting groups were those that resulted in new spiritual insights that I could apply to my life. And I appreciated them for this reason.

I was aware however that Andrew not only encouraged these groups; he staked his whole teaching on them. He insisted from very early on in his teaching career that when a group of people came together with a shared intention to leave their egos behind and explore their mutual experience, something extraordinary could happen. I was intrigued by his interest in these groups, but other than insight and spiritual realization, I couldn’t imagine what could “happen” from a group of people simply talking together. And I often thought that a good walk in the woods would do more to inspire me than another discussion group.

But this particular discussion showed me first hand what Andrew had been pointing to for so long. As we began speaking, I had a familiar sense of making the effort to listen hard to my own experience and to filter out the more dubious responses. This was now second nature to me. Then I had the experience of disorientation, also familiar, when I had to strain hard to pay attention and really hear the points that others were making, to follow them as they started to describe their own insights and immediate experience. And then something altogether different happened. I felt the whole effort transform into a compelling interest, as if I had entered a completely different field of consciousness altogether.

One by one, each of us in the group started to describe the same experience. We were amazed as this rarefied consciousness started to reveal the profound unity of All That Is. In this revelation, before our fully conscious experience, we could see the sense of who we thought we were falling away into insignificance. One member of the group was having difficulty letting go into this new perspective, and it was revealing to see him struggle to ‘know’ what we were talking about. It was the first time I had seen the ego, this false sense of self, objectively. I felt a deep sense of care and compassion for my friend as he fought with his limiting ideas. It was clear that the rest of us were no longer looking at each other from different perspectives. There was no separation between us, and no separation between us and the entire matrix of experience we call the world. In fact we were describing the very same inner experience, a single “inter-subjective” experience, not as outside observers, but as if we were something else looking from the inside out. What we were exploring seemed to be a whole new inner dimension of consciousness. Something none of us had heard about from other teachings or from traditional spiritual literature.

The little understanding we had of this experience was from Andrew himself. When he first recognized what was happening between his students and later started to cultivate this collective emergence very few, maybe none of us, had any idea what he was talking about. We were inspired by what he was pointing to, we knew that something powerful was happening to us, but we had no understanding of it. Just being together in this elevated context was thrilling, but we were not yet conscious of what it was that was emerging between us. My experience in this discussion group was the first time I recognized the real potential that Andrew had been pointing to, and I was stunned by how truly radical it was.

But then it was over. As the discussion ended, I found myself suddenly back in “my” life again, looking out at the world from within a limited sense of self. I was very moved by what had just happened, but I remember thinking to myself, “What good is this really?” What use is it to any of us if we depend on the group to make this happen? Clearly I cannot take this with me. I cannot even experience it as an individual. What can we possibly accomplish in this world if all we can do is talk in groups? Ironically, after such a powerful spiritual experience, an affirmation of everything that my Teacher had been teaching for years, I started to slowly pull away from his community. Why? I think because it was finally clear to the part of me that wanted to be someone special that I would never be able to walk around with this realization on my own. I could never have it or own it in any way. It couldn’t even fully emerge in me, it could only fully emerge in a collective. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a member of a collective teasing out this ephemeral realization. I had bigger things to do. I had more to offer than this.

It’s important to be clear that like many of my peers I had been through an enormous amount to get to this point. I wasn’t just rejecting something that I had experimented with for two or three years, I had devoted my life to this teaching, renounced my graduate education, my career, and all kinds of worldly interests to prove that what I heard in Andrew’s teaching was true and had real significance for the world. For me to turn my back and walk away from this effort (it actually took many months before I actually left) was radically destructive to everything I had believed in for fifteen years.

It is not uncommon to recoil from spiritual realization in this way. In fact one learns to expect this kind of reaction when something big like this happens. Why then did I not question this response? Apparently I trusted something more firmly than that to which I had devoted my life. More than the depth of my personal experience, the current of communion, the promise of revolutionary change, or the wisdom of my Teacher, I believed in my own self.

To be clear, I have not turned away from Andrew’s teaching, but I have certainly hesitated to embrace it. When I began to recognize that the spiritual development I was pursuing was dependent on a collective environment, I balked. At the time it felt like a tremendous limitation on my own autonomy. In fact it was not. Andrew has always said the experience of this new dimension of consciousness is not only supportive of an individual’s autonomy, it is actually dependent on it. Without each of the individuals in a collective being true to their own experience, it cannot happen. But the kind of autonomy that Andrew is pointing to has nothing to do with the false sense of self that I carry around with me all day. In fact my incessant defense of this illusion and its right to exist is at odds with this new emergence of consciousness and because of this it acts as an obstacle to something very positive happening in this world. This, of course, is what Andrew has been trying to communicate for twenty-three years. With the hundreds of students that have been attracted to his teaching over the years, he has been trying to prove that something extraordinary lies beyond the personal sense of self.

The fact that this new emergence of collective consciousness has actually happened not just once or twice but over and over again now, changes everything. At the very least it reframes everything that we all suffered through to make it happen. With this new empirical evidence, you might say, we have verified a hypothesis that Andrew put on the table twenty years ago. What he has proven, certainly to all of us who experienced it, is that it is possible for those of us who are not enlightened—that is those of us who are still very much attached to who we think we are—to drop our fascination with ourselves long enough to allow a radically different reality to reveal itself in our collective experience. This revelation changes our understanding of who we are, our understanding of what consciousness is, and our understanding of what spiritual development is all about.

In our post-modern world with the understanding we have gained from psychology and the new insights that have emerged out the phenomenological study of consciousness, human beings have become overwhelmed by the vast interior spaces that have opened up in their experience of themselves. While this has exploded our experience of life and perhaps led to a re-awakening of spiritual interests, it has also made us aware of how relative our perspective is and how difficult it is to point to anything truly absolute in our experience. Without an absolute dimension in our experience, without something solid to hold onto, many of us have turned to our sense of self for stability and in this we have become dysfunctional, overly self-conscious, and narcissistic. Clearly the next step for human development is to find a way to go beyond this over-involvement with ourselves. The post post-modern world, the world that is beginning to emerge in consciousness today, is one in which human beings can be fully aware of these interior dimensions, their most ecstatic heights and deepest darkest corners, without being fundamentally twisted up and inhibited by them. Any spiritual teaching in a post post-modern world will have to show us how to be deeply informed by our internal experience of consciousness but fundamentally undistracted by it, aware of the many dimensions of ourselves but fully engaged with the world and other people in a way that expresses profound sanity and creativity. I truly believe this is the world Andrew is trying to introduce to us all.

Facing a New Frontier

But our attachment to the illusion of a separate personal self is a powerful one. When you are convinced that who you are deep down is never going to change, no matter how much you actually experience, you will always return to who you think you are. This, I think, is one of the fundamental reasons why former students turn against Andrew and what he is trying to give to the world. And there are definitely some who are intent on destroying him and what he has tried to create.

If your false sense of self really is an idea of some heroic character, for example, who is going to change the world through some inspired act, (and if you’re a boomer like me this probably is a part of who you think you are), out of your pride you will eventually do something stupid and destructive. In a close intentional spiritual community there’s a good chance others will witness that act and begin to treat you differently. Even with this evidence to the contrary, if your pride is not broken, you will continue to believe that deep down you are still that heroic character in spite of it all. If you don’t get the respect you think you deserve, you will feel deeply insecure and begin to resent the people that have imposed that painful experience on you. Rather than endure this challenge to your false idea of yourself, you will probably change the environment you live in to preserve that idea of yourself.

As long as we have an ego, it just works this way. If it ends here, if we can admit that we just don’t want to let go of our sense of self even though we know it now to be false, even potentially destructive, then I want to suggest that even this is a tolerable outcome as long as we continue to face the facts and take responsibility for our decision. It’s not a morally defensible position because we do in fact know better, but it’s tolerable because it maintains the potential for change that Andrew revealed in us all. Clearly, for all but the rarest of souls, it’s inevitable. Who knows what will come of our efforts if we do not deny what we know to be true and keep the possibility of radical change open?

But if, in the face of our own cowardice, we shut down, and try to justify our dubious behavior by destroying the people who observed it, then we have indeed crossed a line. This kind of response is difficult to witness in any human being much less a spiritual brother or sister, because not only is it morally repugnant, it’s like watching someone throwing their life away. Even so, it’s important for us to understand the deep survival motivations that elicit this kind of response, because we must never assume that we are not capable of crossing the same line ourselves.

Many of us who have participated in Andrew’s teaching over the years have a deep understanding of the profound possibilities for human development that he is pointing to. It is an integral part of our own experience. We continue to have a connection to our spiritual brothers and sisters and can testify to the bond that holds us together. But still we struggle to embrace our deepest experience of life and in our hesitation we face the same dilemma that those who have turned against Andrew have faced. Standing before an ever-expanding world, a world that just got a lot bigger because of what we helped to manifest, we are forced to reckon with the Life process itself. I came across this quote by Bishop Spong years ago and offer it here to emphasize this point.

“On each level of our life, after crossing each new frontier, we build for ourselves a security system. We live in that system until, like the darkness of the womb or the shell of a cocoon, it binds our potential and is no longer able to contain our life. Then we must choose whether to accept those limits and die to what we can become, or to leave that secure place behind and cross another frontier. Life grows and expands only as long as we are able to cross from one level to the next.

Finally, there comes, for many of us, a new frontier that we are unwilling to cross. A new insight, a new truth, a new vision of reality challenges our previous view of life, and we discover that to cross that frontier is too painful. Our being is not secure enough to give up our previous support network. So we say no and, closing the door, we refuse to walk into that new arena. At that moment our human potential begins to decline. Our world has touched the edges of its final limits. We settle down to live within these hardening, if not yet permanent, boundaries on our being.
Once we have said no to a vision, we are never the same. For when we see a frontier that we have refused to cross or a truth that we have declined to embrace, the security of our life is threatened. What we have decided to be is judged by that which we refused to entertain or take into our lives.”

-Bishop John Shelby Spong, This Hebrew Lord

The truth of these words cuts deep. They force anyone to take stock of their lives. Have I reached the final limits of my life’s expansion? Have I settled down to live within boundaries? Am I rejecting that which revealed my limitations, or have I stepped beyond the restrictive “limits” of spiritual community and begun to explore new territory?

Only time will tell. But perhaps there is a way to engage with this picture that we have yet to explore, a way that does not deny our deepest experience but recognizes our limitations in relation to it. The struggle to embrace the new has always been part of the new. Spiritual revelation in its many forms has always been a glimpse of what is to come, a visit from the future, something we must ever strive to meet in our worldly lives. It has always inspired us to expand our boundaries and be more than we are now. Who knows how long we will struggle with that which we have realized? And to what new horizon will we be called beyond what we know now? This ever-present confrontation between what we are now and what we have been called to become seems to be the very nature of the spiritual endeavor, indeed of life itself. As long as we do not harden ourselves to this confrontation, as long as we let that which we have realized create its evolutionary tension in us, then even in our hesitation we are participating in the Life process. This realization, if we let it work in us, has to have an effect. If this new emergence in consciousness is in fact where Life itself is headed, then anyone who has faith in the Life process is eventually going to trust it with an open heart. In that trust, sooner or later we will all be swept away.

Stuart Dunbar can be reached at stuart@guru-talk.com