I’m so happy and relieved to read your accounts on Guru Talk. To hear so many stories from former close students who actually “remember” like I do who Andrew Cohen is, what the community is and what the context of it all is, despite leaving – is pretty amazing and deeply reassuring. My heart was literally pounding reading name after name of people I hold dear.

Until now, every public account I heard from former students was almost universally negative–very negative, given what being with Andrew was and is really all about! I’ve never felt as awful inside as when, after doing “battle” for some months as a virtually lone voice with former students (who I knew very well) that were posting all their dubious negative interpretations online, I finally started to hear the vague far away voices of doubt.

I have continued to enjoy listening to Andrew and be profoundly awed reading about the emergence of evolutionary enlightenment that has become a living reality around him, but Guru Talk really and truly hits home for me. Thank you so much for starting it, and contributing to it.

Dave Reid

We learned about ego, our human conditioning, as an impersonal force. We learned about the impersonal force of Truth and Love. We where faced with Heaven and Hell. What could ever have been more exciting? We learned that Heaven and Hell existed inside our very own dubious characters. The perfect mirror of Andrew’s grace unfolded our tightly guarded egos to their core, and believe me, the ego is rotten to the centre. Anyone trying to keep even the slightest part of their ego intact would be illumined by Andrew’s very bright headlights! Stark naked in the light of truth we all just had to hold up our hands and give up…or run for cover. There was no escaping.

Once we see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing for our ego to claim, there is no more fear because, as Janis Joplin sang; Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. This makes us honest and suddenly we can ask ourselves what we really want. And as we know, what we want is what we do now because that is what we are choosing. Can we then still take a stance that encompasses the biggest possible vision of truth, of all that has been revealed to us, after leaving Andrew? Yes of course we can! Not denying our own condition and our own choices and their respective results is a must start. Then we still can align our motives and intentions, our dreams and our hopes, our reality and our work, our vision and our understanding, to our clearest understanding of this world and its future. Andrew’s Five Tenets spring to mind, do you want to be Free? For the sake of the Whole? At one point in my relationship with Andrew I knew in order to do what Andrew wanted and what I myself wanted, I had to take the same stand as Andrew did. Never can I allow myself to have a lesser standard. And how true I or anyone is, to their own Self is seen in relationship; how proud or humble we are, how arrogant or how loving we are etc… Together then, something New can emerge. If we want it enough, if we care enough, if we love enough… Mission impossible, it may seem, but Love and Truth conquer where all else fails. Fall down seven times, get up eight. And thanks to Andrew the world is a better place, and thanks to Andrew, it is POSSIBLE, together.

Bjorn Saw

When I returned home to Seattle and spoke to my employers about the retreat I’d just been on, they immediately became “worried about me” and pointed me to the blogs against Andrew written by some of his former students. For about two days straight, I read through all of them. At a soul level, I can honestly say, those were the darkest hours I will ever meet. Not so much because I began to doubt Andrew, but because I seriously began to doubt my own spiritual insight that I knew had culminated in meeting Andrew, and the deeper stream of intuition I had been following that led me to him.

Over the course of reading those blogs, I moved into the aspect of myself that has no access to anything higher, deeper or more meaningful than all that I have been conditioned to believe is true by this secular/materialistic culture. It is the part of me that denies the miracles I have witnessed because they demand that I change to meet their goodness. If there is a capacity for evil in me, I found it on that day as I faced turning away from my own heart’s deepest longing.

But thankfully it just so happened that I had signed up to participate in a global meditation sit with Andrew’s student body the next day. I think we called it a World Wide Meditation Intensive or something like that. It was a Saturday and I’d committed to sitting for four hours, excited at the time by going deeply into the thrill of unbound consciousness with so many people from around the world. But that excitement had more than dissipated, in fact I had never felt so bad. It was a kind of pain that makes me understand the mythology of Christianity in a very direct way – the temptation to turn away from God, the enticement of it, and the hell realm of the soul’s eternal torment that results. In truth, I had turned away, or part of me had. But I sat down to meditate anyway as I’d said I would.

At first, I was aware of nothing but the pain of loss, disappointment, and utter heartache. Slowly, however, the realm of meditation I had come to know and love engulfed me: No one to be, nothing to hold on to, just timeless bliss inherent with unknowable possibility. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point after sitting for quite a while, the truth of what I had been experiencing, the real challenge of the spiritual life, and the choice I had to make came before me like a line drawn in the sand. I understood then the harsh reality of a force against Spirit that exists in all of us if we give it power, and that so often we encourage and support it in each other in the guise of care and protection. It is true, we are often ignorant of how much damage it does, and most are not to be blamed. My employers, for instance, likely were concerned for my well being, but are wholly ignorant of the cultural conditioning that drove their response.

Three and a half years later, I am living at the EnlightenNext World Center in Lenox, MA and hope to become a core student of Andrew’s. He is much more careful and moves slowly in letting people become his student precisely because of the people who were once in my position – passionately testifying their undying commitment to evolve spiritually under his guidance – yet turned against it and betrayed him in the end. For me, those insane blogs brought to light something that I needed to see in myself, and in culture at large. But, mostly, they must be stood against in an attempt to redeem what they undermine in all who read them, something that is already so fragile in most of us. That is the spiritual confidence that I can, We can, make a new and better world based on enlightened values.

So, thank you again for starting this blog!

Much love,

Meg