“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”  Sir Walter Scott

“American Guru” by William Yenner is an appallingly distorted account of life as a close student of Andrew Cohen, clearly written with the intention to publicly discredit his former Teacher. Why do I say that? Because I, and many others, who were close students and therefore experienced directly, or had knowledge of, what actually happened in the events he describes, know that there is so much of the true picture that he has omitted or twisted or blatantly lied about.

That said it is not my intention in this article to attempt to fill out the entire missing context and correct the half-truths and falsehoods that abound on very page of this book (as that would take a book in itself!). However, I do want to lay out some factual context surrounding Yenner’s central allegations that revolve around the issue of alleged financial improprieties.

Yenner’s personal beef with his former Teacher issues from his sad story of being allegedly “coerced” out of his $80,000 inheritance by Andrew, and the subsequent “gag order” that was foisted upon him once he had left, and had asked for and received, his money back. Of course this all sounds very suspect and bizarre the way Yenner tells it, but if we back up a bit and put this whole controversial debacle in the wider context from which it came, a very different picture begins to emerge than the one Yenner has chosen to paint.

In 1997, while he was a senior student, Yenner wrote an article entitled “The Tangled Web”. With this article he sought to publicly discredit his siblings whom he was convinced had cheated him out of his father’s inheritance. I was actually involved in this project as Yenner asked me to draw a caricature of his brother to include in the finished product. When his attempt to get the article published in the local newspaper of his brother’s hometown failed, he continued to pursue ways to publicly discredit him.

While Andrew initially supported Yenner in writing the article, as it did appear that he had been cheated, at a certain point he felt that Yenner was becoming obsessed with his resentment and was operating out of greed in relationship to his inheritance. This was also my experience when Yenner recruited me to draw the cartoon. Yenner was in a leadership position at the time and I found his intensity around this matter disconcerting. In his role as Yenner’s chosen spiritual mentor Andrew began putting pressure on Yenner to face into this, but was only met with resistance. Eventually, after a protracted “battle” Yenner gave his inheritance of $80,000 to EnlightenNext as a gesture of “letting go” of his attachment to money.

Yenner distorts the truth by insisting that he (and a number of other people) were coerced into giving money due to “psychological pressure”. But in the context of a Teacher/Student relationship the experience of “psychological pressure” is par for the course, the questions to ask are: why is the pressure being experienced and what is the motivation of the one who is applying it? Being resistant in the face of one’s Teacher’s reflection and demand is definitely going to entail experiencing some “psychological pressure”, have no doubt about it! Of course Yenner and others, intent on rewriting history to shore up their victimized positions, insist that that pressure was only coming from Andrew (to satisfy his own unwholesome desire for power etc.), when the whole truth is that it was also issuing from their own desire to transcend their egoic attachments or re-engage their spiritual path after proving themselves to be untrustworthy. Hence the bottom line is that it was their own free choice to give or not to give. It was only on a few very rare occasions, when a student had badly betrayed their stated commitment which had usually resulted in them leaving, and they then wanted to return as a formal student within the communal body, that a financial token of their restated commitment was strongly suggested.

To imply that Andrew’s intent was to fleece money from his students for his own ends, as Yenner does in his chapter “The Currency of Forgiveness” is simply ridiculous, and a blatant self-serving distortion. In fact, Andrew refused money that was offered by students on many occasions because he did not deem it to be an appropriate gesture. Yenner also backs up his case for corruption by insisting that the female student, who donated a large sum of money to enable EnlightenNext to purchase its World Center in Massachusetts, was also similarly coerced. But again a key piece of factual information is omitted. If that was the case then why did she write a letter to Andrew Cohen sometime after she had left the community in which she stated that, despite leaving, she had no regrets regarding the donation she had made? Just because she has since seen fit to change her mind doesn’t change that fact.

Sometime after he had given the money, at a critical juncture in the evolutionary trajectory of the student body, Yenner “fell from grace” as a leader in the community. This had disastrous consequences at the time and what followed was a protracted period of unwillingness on his part to face and transcend the obstacles to his own stated intention. Eventually Yenner decided to leave Andrew and the community and then subsequently asked for his donation back. EnlightenNext consulted with their lawyer as to the legal obligation to return it. They were told that it was almost completely unheard of for a non-profit to return a donation, and even borderline illegal for a charity to do so. Hence EnlightenNext was under NO obligation at all to return the funds. But EnlightenNext did decide to return the money on condition that William sign a 5 year contract prohibiting him from public discourse regarding Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext. There never was a “gag order” (as Yenner calls it) or, for that matter, any other court order issued. That would imply that there was some kind of order being issued by judge or jury, but that was never the case. So why did Andrew and EnlightenNext see fit to do this? Because they knew full well that Yenner would take the money (which he had no right to anyway!) and seek a very public and nasty revenge, just as he had done with his siblings. Unfortunately five years wasn’t long enough for Yenner to cool down and gain some perspective on what had happened, and so he is now finally taking his revenge…nine years later! Even after the publication of his book Yenner’s smear campaign continues. For example, he has seen fit to contact all contributors to EnlightenNext magazine and donors to EnlightenNext in an attempt to turn them against Andrew Cohen with his revelations of “the Truth”.

So in light of all this messy fall-out did Andrew make an error of judgement in how he dealt with the issue of Yenner’s money? In hindsight it is easy to say yes. But wasn’t he also in a no-win situation? I definitely think so. Yenner would have gone after Andrew publicly regardless. Should Andrew not have pressured Yenner about his obsessive resentment and attachment to money? Should he not have accepted Yenner’s inheritance as a donation to the cause that he freely had given his life to? However one might answer, the bottom line is that Andrew, as Yenner’s chosen Teacher, was doing his often thankless job: confronting unwholesome self-serving motivation in his student. Yenner, while stating his own case as one of coercion, also sees fit to omit the fact that he offered to give a significant donation three times over an eight month period. It was refused each time as it did not seem to the few individuals involved that the intent behind this offering was without misgivings.

The other “controversy” that I would like to illuminate further is an apparently open “interview” between EnlightenNext and an Israeli journalist from which Yenner draws all kinds of dubious conclusions. Again, the omission of the wider context in which the controversy occurred, enables Yenner to paint his distorted picture. A close former student who was involved with EnlightenNext at the time provided me with the following background…

EnlightenNext was asked to submit a fact verification for the editor in chief of NRG, an online portal owned by the large Israeli newspaper company Ma’ariv. These questions were submitted to determine whether a proposed article by journalist Jonathan Levy had a basis of fact. The article, as had been stated on the writer’s spiritual gossip column was positioned to discredit Andrew Cohen and his work, and the news agency wanted to confirm that what was going to be published was accurate. EnlightenNext’s lawyers advised that all responses be precise and directly respond to the questions asked. The issue at hand was representing EnlightenNext fairly and accurately in the media, and to prevent distortion, sensationalism, slander, and tabloid smears. EnlightenNext fully complied with the several sets of questions asked and offered to comment on and write a more broad response about the spiritual context of its work. But as the article was dropped, they were never given the opportunity to respond in this way.

Many of the questions asked by Levy/Ma’ariv Newspaper Company referred to specific events and individuals. They were not philosophical in nature. Because, as had previously been stated by author Levy on his online gossip column, a sensational and negative article about Andrew Cohen was being prepared, EnlightenNext understandably made every effort to conform with actual fact and common definition, not to a sensationalized caricature of its history. NRG chose not to run Levy’s article. EnlightenNext was never given a response, explanation, or description of the article or why it was not run. Sometime later, the fact verification questions, which were never intended for publication, were posted without permission from EnlightenNext, on a blog crafted by a handful of individuals on a negative campaign about Andrew Cohen and his work. Yenner then took this document and published it in his book.

Many ask, quite understandably, why did EnlightenNext answer according to the precise question and common definition and not to the general spirit of what Levy asked? The answer is simple. EnlightenNext was asked to provide factual responses. To that extent, every answer is factual. Had it been a freely conducted interview, I have no doubt EnlightenNext would have been happy to discuss other points around the questions asked, to explain why certain practices were often done, why there was a more traditional Eastern relationship to Andrew as a spiritual teacher or guru in the early years (as that was Andrew’s own lineage, as well as the spiritual background of many of his close early students), and why that evolved over time as EnlightenNext did. I have no doubt they would be happy to discuss why mantras, chanting, dips in a lake etc were practiced and taken in the spirit of time-honored Hindu and Buddhist practices. The practices, particularly in the early years of EnlightenNext, as a profound evolutionary structure was being developed, were neither misguided “crazy wisdom” nor erratic expressions of an individual ego. They were well intentioned spiritual responses, designed to support the highest aspirations of individuals deeply committed to their own spiritual evolution. In this light and to this end, all the individuals who embarked on this path were spiritual warriors, and the result of the efforts of these inspired souls can be seen as the fruits of the teaching, structure and leadership of EnlightenNext now, and in the lives of many former close students, some of whom are writing for Guru Talk.

All of the other stories that Yenner and his co-authors relate in the book are distorted in similar ways to create a very specific impression and there are a number of outright falsehoods. In the writing of “American Guru” Yenner went to great efforts to solicit former students who are now negatively disposed toward their former Teacher to contribute. Interestingly only a few of them agreed. I know for a fact that some of those solicited, who are close friends of his, refused because they did not trust his motivation. This is why a large portion of the book is made up of already published material, for example, from the previously mentioned blog. I also personally spoke to a former close student who told me that he had fallen out with Yenner after he forbade him to include his skewed interpretation of his personal story and Yenner ignored his request.

Addendum

William Yenner disputes some of the factual information presented here in a public response to this article. However, the former CEO and CFO of EnlightenNext, who witnessed the actual financial, practical details of what occurred, say otherwise. This article was carefully researched and checked for accuracy amongst many individuals.

What is most telling are the facts laid out here that Yenner does not dispute:

Yenner did seek to publicly discredit his siblings (and he went to greater lengths to do so than I have described)

Andrew did refuse to accept donations from students when he deemed them inappropriate

The woman who donated a large sum of money to enable the purchase of the Foxhollow property did write a letter saying she had no regrets sometime after she had left, regardless of the fact she has changed her mind since, i leave the question of her motivation for doing so open.

EnlightenNext was never under any obligation to return Yenners money

Yenner continues to contact contributors to EnlightenNext magazine and donors in an effort to turn them against Cohen

Yenner, while stating his own case as one of coercion, did omit the fact that he offered to give a significant donation three times over an eight month period. It was refused each time as it did not seem to the few individuals involved that the intent behind this offering was without misgivings.

The fact verification questions, which were never intended for publication, were posted without permission from EnlightenNext, on a blog crafted by a handful of individuals on a negative campaign about Andrew Cohen and his work. Yenner then took this document and published it in his book.

A number of those solicited by Yenner to contribute to his book refused because they did not trust his motivation.

Yenner ignored the request of former student who forbade him to include details of  his personal story in his book.

“11 Days at the Edge: One Man´s Spiritual Journey into Evolutionary Enlightenment”.

While Michael is not a “former close student”, as are other contributors to this site, he suggested posting this appendix here as it sheds further light on the “controversy” surrounding Andrew Cohen.

To set some context for this appendix and its inclusion in his book Michael writes:

“During the 8th day of a retreat in Montserrat Spain in 1995, after having experienced both the liberating thrill of the direct and repeated revelation and intoxication of evolutionary enlightenment, as well as the powerful surges of fear regarding what it would all mean regarding “my” life, I was hit by an explosion of ego “backlash” that was almost demonic in its dimensions. However, due to the degree of objectivity I had been able to cultivate throughout this time I was able to see through it and see it for what it was – the voice of the personal ego rebelling in the most violent way against the potential of its own diminution and ultimate dismantlement. In seeing through it I then considered the violent reaction of some former students as well as entire segments of the culture against what Andrew Cohen represented. The enclosed essay enumerates some of my impressions in the wake of that event.

The Controversy around Andrew Cohen:

Purity, Corruption and Spiritual Authority Figures

I recently read an illuminating preface to Andrew’s booklet, In Defense of the Guru Principle6 by one Professor James R. Lewis,7 a specialist in non-traditional religions who has studied religious controversies for the past fifteen years. Based on his experience he had initially concluded that Andrew’s suggestion – that he attracted so much hostility due to his insistence on spiritual purity – was off the mark. However, as he states in his short essay, “I was having difficulty putting my finger on exactly what it was…” After some incredibly negative press, Professor Lewis had initially concluded that Andrew and his community were “suffering at the hands of an irresponsible mass media more interested in exploiting sensationalism than in the less than titillating truth.”8 Wanting to sort this out for himself he decided to visit the home of Andrew and his community in Massachusetts to do a little field research.

“I was frankly impressed,” he said of his visit, adding that “not only was it clear that Andrew Cohen led a simple, unpretentious lifestyle congruent with his teachings, but I also found Cohen’s students uniformly mature, likeable and mentally alert. I had studied many spiritual movements at close range, but in all those years had never encountered a group with which I felt more comfortable.”

While at the community he spent much time speaking with students about their experiences with bad press. The biggest problem, it turned out, was less the rancorous articles freely published in a number of magazines and newspapers, but their complete inability to get their own rebuttals printed. Lewis cites one “spiritual” magazine that had written a horribly negative and one-sided article about Andrew without so much as checking the simple facts of the story, whose content they swallowed wholesale from disgruntled former students. Yet when Andrew wrote a measured rebuttal the magazine refused to print it for being “too critical,” despite the fact that they had eviscerated Andrew on the very same pages. Even the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe got in on the act, refusing to print letters to the editor from Andrew’s students. Reading of these episodes, I was reminded of an event I’d heard about in the mid-nineties when Andrew was roundly criticizing other spiritual teachers for their ethical shortcomings. At the time someone suggested to a senior editor at a major magazine touting the benefits of yoga and meditation that it might be interesting to do an article on Andrew and his teaching work, to which the editor flatly responded, “We’ll do an article on Andrew Cohen when there’s a scandal in his community.” This from a magazine claiming to be a beacon of spirituality for our post-modern culture. All were waiting for Andrew to fall. In 1994 the late Suzanne Segal, who was becoming recognized as a powerful teacher in her own right due to the publication of her extraordinary story of awakening entitled simply, Collision with the Infinite, said to Andrew, “Everybody out there is waiting for you to make a mistake.” She herself had been amazed at the controversy swirling around Andrew who, in his own words, had naively assumed, “that the spiritual world at large would welcome with open arms my unwillingness to compromise the truth for anyone. How wrong I was.”

How wrong he was indeed. Even his mother turned against him. Soon after Andrew’s awakening he had sent her a letter boldly declaring, “Andrew is dead.” He then invited her to come to India to see what had happened. Upon her arrival she immediately recognized the magnitude of her son’s transformation and when asked whether she wished him to relate to her as his mother or as his student she declared for the latter. However, when pushed, like any other student, to confront her ego she turned on him vengefully. After an ugly parting she wrote a book portraying Andrew as a dangerously deluded megalomaniac who plied the same spiritual waters as Jim Jones and David Koresh. Shortly before its publication she casually informed him that in its pages he would be cast, “as a dangerously deluded and frighteningly pathological figure whose insatiable thirst for absolute power over pathetic and weak-minded individuals is couched within the pretense of a passionate interest in the spiritual Enlightenment of humanity.”11 Moreover, she added with a conspiratorial wink, that she hoped that he wouldn’t be upset that she’d changed significant facts in order to add drama, thus making the book more saleable. Literary license and all that. “Little did I know,” Andrew later said of this event, “that even the conversation we were having at the moment would itself become, in her book, so distorted as to have no resemblance whatsoever to what was actually occurring between us.”12 In perfect alignment with this vicious and mean spirited assault, his mother called some time after the book’s publication to inquire whether or not Andrew had as yet slept with any of his students.

That the answer to that question and others like it was and continues to be a resounding “NO” has undoubtedly been an irritating source of consternation to Andrew’s angry detractors. For all their vitriol and grotesque distortion, the noteworthy truth is that during the twenty years of Andrew’s relentless push to spiritual and cultural revolution, there has never been a single scandal to compromise the stand he had taken: to become a living expression of the opposite of everything that’s wrong with the world. Yet in taking this stand Andrew ignited powerful forces that converged in incendiary fashion.

Among them was Andrew’s own understanding of the significance of enlightenment itself: “What has always intrigued me is that many people appear to be interested in the experience of love while they so often seem mysteriously able to avoid its implications…many have been drawn to me initially because of the experience of love that they have felt in my presence. And while the majority may be more than satisfied with that, for me it has never been enough. I have never been able to allow those who have come to me to settle merely for the experience of feeling better13…It is because the demand to drown and truly lose oneself in that ocean for eternity is not made often enough that so many seekers end up satisfied with being mere voyeurs of their own Self, rather than living expressions of it…The course of my life as a teacher has been defined by my continuous insistence that the experience of love and bliss is meaningless when it is not supported by a life lived with true integrity…Ironically, it is because of this that I have been the object of much controversy…[and] it is precisely this that has simultaneously attracted some and repelled others.”14 As Andrew says elsewhere, he has never “been able to divorce the experience of love from its absolute demand.”15

That demand collided with the collective inertia of the alternative spiritual culture like an asteroid crashing into earth. Fascinated with itself and content to be “voyeurs,” that culture would rise to fight tooth and nail in defense of its position, a position that put nothing on the line and vehemently affirmed the “sensitive self” in its false regency over consciousness. As Professor Lewis observes, “it began to dawn on me (after visiting Andrew’s community) that what was going on here was something other than what I had first supposed. While a number of critical pieces had appeared in the mainstream press, it was becoming increasingly evident that the real nexus of the controversy was to be found within the spiritual subculture itself. Although his critical analysis of this subculture has been couched in relatively mild terms, Cohen has breathed life into his critique by establishing a community of students who have responded to the call to awaken. Had he merely been a critical voice, or had members of the Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship (now EnlightenNext) quietly pursued enlightenment without stepping on anyone else’s toes, the response might have been different. In combination, however, the dual thrust of Cohen’s challenge fundamentally calls into question the vested interests of the ‘spiritual establishment’ – that informal network of organizations, publications and teachers who have become comfortable with something less than the goal of ultimate freedom.

“I began to see that the attention of the mainstream media had obscured the basic source of the controversy. Long after the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe will have forgotten about Andrew Cohen, the spiritual establishment will continue to attack him. This ‘establishment’ might be nothing more than an informal network of people who know people who know yet other people. In whatever way it is organized, however, it is clear that it has closed ranks against Cohen and is actively trying to discredit him. And, contrary to the conclusion I had reached in my initial evaluation, the attack has been provoked by the very reason indicated by Cohen.”16 That reason, of course, was his unyielding demand for integrity with respect to what one has realized. A small thing, it would seem, though apparently not insignificant.

The final, and I suppose root force behind this bad chemistry was that selfsame voice that had so shocked me with its vehemence and murderous aggression. “He’s crazy,” it had said, pretending to seek my rescue from the clutches of a madman. “Run for your life,” it had suggested with panicked urgency. “I’m your friend.” That traitorous voice lay submerged within the ego’s deepest structures and clearly recognized the threat to itself in Andrew. Cornered, forced to face its own exile or destruction, it attempted a powerful sleight of hand, projecting its own darkness upon the other while pretending to wear their light. It has become abundantly clear to me that the violent backlash that Andrew has suffered from much of the spiritual culture is but a collective manifestation of that very same voice. After all, ego is both individual and collective.

6 Andrew Cohen, In Defense of the Guru Principle, (Lenox, MA: What is Enlightenment Press, 1999).

7 James R. Lewis is Dean of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at the World University of America, and Senior Editor at the Center for Academic Publication. He is a world-recognized authority on non-traditional religions, and is the author of Cults in America, the authoritative Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions, and Doomsday Prophecies.

8 Cohen, In Defense of the Guru Principle, pp. xii-xvii

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 was moved to write about my many years as a student of Andrew Cohen mostly for the sake of all the many well-meaning seekers of higher consciousness and evolution who are sincerely endeavoring to know and understand more about the process of true spiritual transformation.  Having plunged deeply into an authentic path of transformation myself, I know well how confusing and challenging this twisty path can seem. But I am writing this because I am still convinced that aspiring to become a human being who is a bright, full, and consistent  expression of Love and Truth is the most important, as well as the only truly meaningful, endeavor that any of us could commit ourselves to in this lifetime.

There are many confusing aspects to this ever -fascinating spiritual journey. A great deal has been written about its challenges and pitfalls by those who have dedicated themselves to following their deepest heart’s longing.  Many of the accounts (in various blogs and books) about walking this path as Andrew Cohen’s student or disciple, have been expressed with great intensity, negativity and extreme distortion by some of his disgruntled former students. I feel strongly that what Andrew Cohen is bringing into this world towards promoting an emerging evolutionary spiritual field—a field which has deep transformative implications for the whole planet—is of great historical significance. It is for this reason that I am compelled to share my own story as Andrew’s student for over twenty years.  I still regard the many years I spent with Andrew as the most fortunate and meaningful time of my life.

I met Andrew in 1987, the very first time he came to teach in Israel.  I was 26 years old, and doing my third year of physical therapy studies. At that time I was involved with an Israeli teacher who was teaching his own version of Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. I was not looking for another teacher, and I definitely did not want a “guru”, nor did I believe that it was even possible for ordinary people in our times to become “enlightened”, whatever that meant.

On the contrary, I regarded seeking enlightenment—including my boyfriend’s practice of daily Zen meditation— as a selfish and futile endeavor which fundamentally had to do with avoiding accepting full responsibility for living in this world. I was deeply opinionated and arrogant, like nearly all of my fellow Israelis. This deeply ingrained arrogance is something that I only came to appreciate more fully, in all its deeper serious evolutionary implications, over the course of my twenty plus years as Andrew’s student.

I was completely unprepared for the seismic explosion of awakening that occurred in Andrew’s presence the very first time I sat with him. At that time he was giving three hour “Satsangs” (which means “communion with Truth”) daily, in the living room of a friend’s house. That first evening he meditated the whole time. I deeply resented having to sit still and meditate for that long. I felt denied the opportunity to ask him anything. I had only come because I felt my boyfriend had dangerously “flipped out” after having met Andrew and I felt that it was my responsibility to save him from losing his way. For about an hour, I was fiercely battling with Andrew inside my head. Then at a certain moment I suddenly recalled the Sufi stories I had read about how only the ripe student would find the true Master. They said that the true Master usually comes in disguise, and I just considered the possibility that I was being tested in this way by the sudden appearance of this young, confident, and well-dressed young man from New York.

It was at that point that I lost all sense of my body, of my surroundings, of time, and of the reasons for my being there. All familiar points of reference disappeared, and there was just empty space that could have easily lasted forever. I, as I knew myself to be, was nowhere to be found.

I had no idea how to make any sense of this experience. I was scared to death. I didn’t feel that I could trust what had happened, although I desperately needed to make sense of it. The next day I asked my closest friend from the Fourth Way group I was involved with at that time, to accompany me to Andrew’s next Satsang.  It was in the direct and laser-like fashion that Andrew answered her questions and those of other people that I was able to recognize that he was teaching something radically liberating—something I had been actually searching for myself for a very long time, and something which I hadn’t consciously known I was even looking for until then. I had suddenly fallen into something which I had believed was actually not even possible for people like myself.

This direct experience of my true nature in Andrew’s presence turned everything around for me. It was like finally coming home, deeply at peace within and oneness with everything around me. It also made effortless sense of all my previous sense of estrangement, my struggles and fears. My many personal doubts and philosophical questions about life were suddenly placed in a vast context. A deep love was unleashed, as well as a new purposefulness in which everything that I had been doing up to this point in my life completely paled in comparison.

I was compelled to follow this thread as far as I could. It is the radical nature of this liberating singularity that not only set my heart on fire back in 1987, but which continues to this day to be the anchoring principle of my life’s priorities, in all of its many different and often confusing expressions and implications.

I knew already then that engaging with a teacher like Andrew was a rare opportunity, and that he was a very serious teacher, even though he had a very small “following” at the time. I also somehow knew he truly wanted nothing from me but my freedom, although what this meant and how deeply it manifested revealed itself only gradually over time.

The Unavoidable Battle with the Post-Modern Ego

In the beginning Andrew was teaching traditional “personal enlightenment”. Most of us at that time were swept up in the strong current of our powerful awakening experiences. We found ourselves drawn to be together to share this radically new clarity and love. We came from many different countries and were of various ages and backgrounds—a truly international gathering of aspirants. I hadn’t expected this collective element of the teaching, just as Andrew hadn’t either at first. This discovery of the power of “collective consciousness” was something that grew organically.

Although he never consciously sought it, already early on Andrew came across a very significant discovery. The enlightenment experience is so delightful because you get to experience yourself beyond ego.  But Andrew observed that the unself-conscious way we were with each other was evolutionarily more significant to the world than all our personal experiences.  We used to go to “Satsang” many nights in a row. We stayed up late ecstatically exploring the Dharma together, all boundaries and separation dissolving. It truly felt like heaven on earth.  To this day I feel the bond of brotherhood and sisterhood between us goes even deeper than family ties, because we’ve all willingly engaged in this unknown experiment with all our soul and passion, knowing full well that there were never any guarantees. And yet we happily wanted to be the “guinea pigs” for this new world coming into being as us, in us, between us, despite the fact that we were hardly able to see beyond the spiritual fireworks in the way that Andrew did.

The seeds of the more impersonal evolutionary teachings were there from the beginning, but our own preparedness for humbly carrying this unlimited impersonal and collective perspective was woefully absent. It was only beginning to dawn on Andrew and the rest of us back then what a truly enormous matter it was, in fact, to really take full responsibility for our own egos and neuroses.  Since the very beginning, Andrew has never stopped repeating the warning that the deep spiritual experiences we were all enjoying, however affirming and powerful they were, were merely the beginning of this journey. What truly mattered was our own ability and willingness to live these Teachings as a full expression of our own understanding.  It became increasingly clear how deadly serious we needed to be to close the gap between what we knew was possible, and how we actually lived our lives.

It never ceases to amaze me how many times I’ve found myself arrogantly thinking that I’ve already understood this simple fact, only to realize later, usually with Andrew’s or my friends’ reflection, that if I had in fact been taking this and myself seriously, I would have stopped making the same mistakes and creating confusion and havoc for myself and others over and over again.

When I met Andrew, I didn’t know myself too well. My arrogance, stubbornness, and emotional nature were quite a challenge for everyone else—not just for me. I was with a group of very impressive people—many of whom were more serious, skilful and experienced in life and groups than I was. Even though what we were meeting in was beyond our personalities, there were differences between us. I found out pretty soon that there is very little which is more frustrating to a spoiled, post-modern narcissist like myself, than having to face into the stark fact that I was actually not God’s gift to humanity.  Nor was I even the charming, sensitive and nice person that I thought I was. Of course, such a confrontation with reality is exactly what one would gratefully embrace if one was endeavouring to free oneself from ego. And being together in such an intimate and focused environment, where ego sticks out like a thorn, is a perfect opportunity to see oneself more objectively in order to be able to move beyond one’s false ideas and limitations.

But I was much more fascinated by my own spiritual drama, and I was way more out of my comfort zone than I dared to admit. So with my stubborn Israeli determination to hold on at any cost, I clung to the romantic notion of “being in the fire of transformation.” But when it boiled down to it, well…the tough black belt karate practitioner was nowhere to be found! The truth is that for most of my years with Andrew and the community, I took a back seat at a safe distance. I didn’t stay in the fire for long enough to change in a truly fundamental way. I moved in and out of the “core” community, but I was never among Andrew’s closest students.

One of the many remarkable things about Andrew is that he is the least cynical person I have ever met. He never stopped holding my potential, and all his students’ highest potential, in view always reminding us that “Freedom Has No History.” He would be ready to re-engage at any sign of a genuine spark of interest that I would show in wanting to break free of my conditioning. He was willing to respond even after long periods during which I was lost in unbelievable depths of denial. “Playing dumb” was one of my specialties.  Many variations on this theme of the confrontation between the Spiritual Master and their disciples have been chronicled through the ages.  At first, I had even had the outrageous thought that somehow I would be different. But I found out so much the hard way.  As Andrew diligently performed the role I had asked him to play as my teacher—helping me to see my own limitations so I could transcend them—the whole business lost its romantic allure for me. I would do almost anything to “get a break.” I was willing to stoop very low in my willingness to destroy everything I cherished most. What was revealed was not the pretty picture that anyone would want to see reflected in the mirror, by any means. So I completely understand why some people backed off and decided to run away. I fell apart too, quite a few times, and also tried to run away. The only difference between me and Andrew’s negative and disgruntled former students is that, as hard as I may have tried, in all fairness at the end of the day, I cannot ever blame Andrew for my own inadequacy and lack of integrity.

Andrew’s skill as a teacher developed over time. He learned about the complexity of the human condition in his work with all of us. There was so much he was up against with many people like me who weren’t willing to take responsibility for their own ambivalence. Often in our work together, the initial incident might be something relatively small and apparently trivial—something which didn’t need to mushroom into a serious issue. But when the student resists and avoids what is being revealed about them, we all learned that everything can and does escalate way out of proportion. Andrew and others would literally spend hours considering how to best bring a person back to their senses, and only when everything else failed would more extreme measures be considered. Many of the public critical allegations of uncompassionate or “abusive behavior” made by some very disgruntled former students describe some of these intense situations without giving any context for the preceding circumstances which ultimately led to taking more extreme measures. And when this context is absent from the picture, understandably there is much that looks confusing. Just to give one very small example of my own—some time around 2004, Andrew requested that I stop writing him about myself. However, I kept finding incredible excuses not to comply with his request, although I did understand why he had me do it. So he had to stop me from communicating with him altogether. This might seem harsh or unfair if taken out of context, but given how many years he tried to help me lose interest in my own internal dramas, and how relentlessly I continued sending him lengthy personal letters, what more could he do if I wasn’t willing to play ball?

There were many different and more extreme examples that I know of, even if I wasn’t personally involved, but everything Andrew did was all done with the deepest care for our own liberation. Andrew spent countless hours carefully considering fresh ways to respond to the ever-growing and cunning resistance of the post-modern ego which we all shared.  I simply cannot accept the fact that some of my brothers and sisters, who have made public allegations against Andrew since they left, consistently leave out the context that led up to those specific situations. Instead of finding the willingness to look at their own resistant egos, they viciously blame Andrew. I can say this because I have been tempted many times to take that route myself. But between me and me, I had to face that it was my own stubbornness that actually left Andrew little choice other than having to take more and more extreme measures to try to get me to stop pretending, playing games, or whatever ego strategy I had picked up at the time. Infuriatingly, I would only be willing to cop to it all later. It was always on my terms and in my own time, not when it mattered to Andrew or to others.

Ego is literally like ONE spoiled brat; once you get to know your own nasty version of it, you know them all. And the more you understand how it operates, the higher the stakes and the more you get tested. It’s quite common nowadays to say we can’t transcend ego, especially not in this direct way; we need to ‘make friends’ with it and not be so black and white about it. As good as that might sound, from my own direct experience, it is only when under pressure that you have the shocking privilege of discovering how truly dark and one-pointed the ego’s fundamental agenda in fact is. The message comes in clear and strong that you can’t really play any games with ego, if you are serious about sustaining the liberated perspective and positivity of your deepest spiritual insight. If you ever stop taking ego seriously, before you know it, everything you knew suddenly starts feeling like a memory.  Your eyes lose their luster, your skin turns dull or gray, and you crawl back into your hole like a rat. No one and nothing can reach you.  Your teacher or your close brothers or sisters turn into your enemies, and even your own passionately stated intention can suddenly seem fake and dubious to yourself.  We all witnessed each other over the years being transformed before our very eyes—from bright-eyed and passionate people, aflame with the joyous possibility of liberation, into virtual monsters. Sometimes the denial of our own egos would build over a long period of time, and we would even see each other behaving like crazy people whom we could barely even recognize.

Transformation is such a serious business. Most people have no idea how serious it really is. In our post-modern times, it is so rare to find an authentic teacher like Andrew—a teacher who is utterly willing to risk themselves and their reputation in the unavoidable battle with their disciples’ post-modern, nasty egos.  I would not have learned to appreciate any of this if I had not experienced it directly in myself, and had the opportunity to realize the critical role of a true Teacher in helping us see through and transcend our ego’s limitations. I hope that what I have written here will help the sincere seeker of Truth to know something about not only how “deadly serious” this evolutionary work in fact is, but that such true and authentic Teachers are available now, in our own lifetime, for those who are ready to take this next step.

The True Gift of the Ego Teachings

A couple of years ago I actually got serious about living the teachings. The person who showed up was surprisingly and significantly different from what anyone had ever expected, including myself!  I would like to talk about this as I feel it has significance beyond solely my own personal ‘story’. What occurred unequivocally portrays the powerful dynamics of the Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings. My own long process shows clearly what a reasonable teacher Andrew actually is—contrary to so many distorted accounts by some of his former students—and how completely right he has been all along in the simple but implicating statement that if one truly wants to change, one will find the way to do so.

A few years ago, Andrew began to describe the miraculous and revolutionary nature of the Authentic Self that had been powerfully awakened in all of us when we met him. After the initial meeting with one’s Teacher, the clock starts ticking. Something radically new has been awakened in us, and from this point onward, we can no longer claim ignorance. The “good news” is that even if we don’t give ourselves fully to the attempt of living in full accordance with the Authentic Self, the depth of understanding and our conviction keep growing with time, so it needs no warm-up to reveal itself whenever we’re willing to surrender to its call. Although I understood this intellectually, experientially I was still mystified, and even felt victimized by the demand to rise up to be an expression of something I didn’t feel I had the capacity for.

So here I was, on one hand passionately loving these teachings and very much supporting them. On the other hand, I had never mustered the seriousness and care for the whole situation to take full responsibility for the depth of the teachings within me. I was not alone in this. There was a whole group of us, about 20 people, who had demonstrated a great deal of loyalty and passion for the teachings for many years, but who had not yet changed in the fundamental way that Andrew was calling us to.  Andrew just couldn’t give up on the potential we all had to be a much fuller expression of our own understanding.  So he decided to invest a whole year of incredible care and effort in this group, encouraging everyone to take a stand within ourselves, to step over all our internal barriers so that we could enter into a new paradigm that would benefit not only ourselves, but really our whole environment.

During that time, I showed surprising depth of understanding and leadership ability. But when it boiled down to leaving the past behind, stepping up into a different reality and taking full responsibility for myself, I did not want to do it.

I would like to slow down here to paint this out in detail, because like many people have done, it is all too easy to blame Andrew for my recoil. “You are asking too much from me!  What you want is unreasonable and humanly unattainable!” or “If you didn’t push me so hard I would most certainly come through!” In this line of thinking, I can continue to save face and convince myself of my intention to succeed at some time in the future. I can continue telling myself that these were not the right circumstances and that I still had more “stuff” to take care of before I could be accountable.  “I’m just doing the best I can. I still have the best of intentions, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.  I’m on my path. Chill man, I didn’t kill anybody, did I? I just need more time to learn to love myself. What’s the point in being so hard on myself?”

This state of affairs might sound all too reasonable to the part of ourselves that doesn’t care that much about anybody else. But how about taking a hard look at the human toll of this approach? Imagine that a person came to you seeking help with their intention to stand on their own feet, and you literally spent hundreds of hours mentoring them, patiently bearing with them throughout their steep learning curve. For years they persistently tell you how much they appreciate your guidance and trust you, promising to “get it together” and stand alone. But fundamentally after many years, nothing really changes. They only keep finding endless excuses for never quite making it, continuing to respond just enough to raise your hopes, when basically they are simply manipulating the situation so they can continue to use your energy. Although they are completely capable and intelligent and have seen and understood everything they need in order to change in a fundamental way, they are revealed to be at heart not that interested in applying everything you have so patiently taught them. Imagine also that what you are trying to create is a very important project—a project which in fact has to do with the evolution of the human race, and whose success depends on each person accepting full responsibility for themselves. And although they all insist that they deeply want to change, they only continue to drain your and everyone else’s energy—for years!  This stinks, doesn’t it?

This story is all too familiar because the post-modern ego is so close to the bone that most of us are not really even bothered by any of this. And I wasn’t disturbed by it for years either. If it weren’t for Andrew’s insistence that our situation had to change, I know for a fact that I would have continued to be an eternal taker, consuming energy and resources without much conscience. I would be no different from everyone else around me whom I usually blame for the pitiful state of the human condition. I have no doubt that I would never even have seen the lack of integrity of such a stand, because I would have been way too busy with my own rationalizations. One can only see this when one steps out of ego, which is rare. Ego simply cannot see itself, and it is never the ego that wants to change.

There are very few teachers like Andrew who have the commitment, courage, and care to take on the painful process of supporting their students’ development of conscience. This means as well that he had to be willing to personally bear the enormous resistance of the ego’s refusal to change. This is no joke. One doesn’t have the opportunity to really see one’s ego clearly in normal circumstances, although sometimes special life conditions can provide the enormous pressure which is required for these deep structures in our psyche to get revealed. In our very fortunate cases, Andrew himself, in his unwavering mirroring of our own deeper potential, accepted full responsibility for exerting the enormous amount of evolutionary tension required to make us conscious of our “post-modern ego”. And until you really see the strength of your own narcissism, eyeball-to-eyeball, you have no idea what a “tough nut” this is to crack!

A  Miraculous Shift of Perspective and Transformation.

I want to speak now about a time during the winter of 2007 at Foxhollow which was a challenging period for the women. Even though there had been significant breakthroughs in the collective development of the women, many of Andrew’s most senior women students who were expected to have the spiritual maturity to provide leadership and inspiration for the less experienced women, were painfully unavailable and unaccountable for accepting responsibility for their sisters. Also, the third EnlightenNext Israeli centre was going through another crisis of leadership, and I suddenly felt it was no longer fair to defer my responsibility for the whole situation as I had for almost 20 years.

Just as Andrew had been saying for years, once I stopped playing games, all the clarity and singularity of vision that I needed were right there. The excuses dropped and I saw with unflinching directness, from other people’s point of view, how much I had been willing to distort my own potential and ability, simply in order to avoid taking responsibility for the whole situation. All the separation and awkwardness I had always felt with others dropped away. Many people commented on how much my face had changed, and how much lighter and softer I was. But this was not my own internal experience. I kept feeling ashamed about how badly I had treated people for years—how stubborn, superior, and unyielding I had been. I saw clearly how willing I had been to lie and manipulate others to get my own way. I actually started to face the magnitude of the female ego. Up to that point I had been more than happy to leave this for the other women to face, all along distancing myself from them and maintaining my stance of superiority towards them. I began to see through their eyes how hard and undermining I had been for so long. The pain of my own thick skin and hardened heart haunted me. Suddenly, the care of so many of my sisters who had previously tried to help me,(and whom I had mostly resented for years), felt like the most incredible expression of love and support. I was deeply grateful to see this literally turn around 180 degrees. I don’t think I’ve ever really forgotten this, even when I lost sight of this liberated perspective. Since then, I can no longer go back to blaming others for my own condition the way I used to.

The most profound part is that I discovered that I wanted to bear all that I was seeing about myself. I knew I had to bear the consequences of many years of denying my conscience. My willingness to let in the truth of my own situation kept me “on the straight and narrow”. It was by far the most liberating and strengthening experience I’ve had in my life, even more than when I initially met Andrew. And it was significant because now a conscious choice needed to be made, for a greater goal, even if it was very much with Andrew’s invaluable support and care. I was and am still deeply grateful to Andrew for not giving up on me. Looking from the other side of the equation, I actually did nothing to deserve the depth of clarity and freedom I found myself experiencing. The only thing that happened was that finally, for once, I actually listened and let it in that my game was up—and that I, yes “little old imperfect me” was needed indeed. I didn’t really expect to be taken this seriously, and in spite of all this clarity about my own ego, I still had a huge amount of catching up to do on all the other more exciting aspects of the teachings. But this wasn’t a problem for anyone else, as long as I didn’t lose sight of what I was seeing and understanding.  Some rare glimpses of humility were actually made available to Israeli consciousness!

The Unforgettable Sisterhood with Women

I could hardly believe what a different world I had the great fortune to step into at that time. I had never been so thrilled to be in women’s meetings. I couldn’t believe what was going on—there was such an incredible depth, wisdom, care and passion being shared among us. At times it seemed that my heart could hardly bear the excruciating strength of love and awe I felt towards my sisters. Women I previously feared, I now came to deeply appreciate. With some of the women who were my peers in years with Andrew, I found myself losing all sense of boundaries. I finally felt that I had all the courage I ever needed to be victorious and lay down my life for the success of the new women’s liberation everywhere.

Although Andrew was totally involved with our development, we were self-organizing to a great extent. I had never seen this before in our women’s groups. Our teacher no longer needed to encourage us to be interested in our own freedom. Even the fact that we had different capacities in terms of self-expression did not hinder the natural hierarchy from expressing itself.  All the various holon (natural groupings based on the length and depth of experience with the teachings) structures made total sense. It was very beautiful to witness how a woman like me who had been with Andrew for so many years and had experienced totally different kinds of relationships with the women and with Andrew, was able to fully participate in all of this, even if my personal expression was less developed. My authentic appreciation for this remarkable shift with the women was apparently contributing to everyone’s ability, particularly the less experienced women, to stay very sober and continue to appreciate what a seriously challenging terrain we were exploring together.

It has become very clear that most of us were lacking in knowledge about the historical context of the women’s liberation movement. We had little respect for everything that women before us had gone through to bring us all to our current very fortunate place and freedoms in our society. It was also apparent that some women, mostly those who had worked more closely with Andrew on the What is Enlightenment? (now EnlightenNext) magazine, were more accustomed to using their cognitive capacities to a much greater extent than the rest of us. These women organized study groups to develop both our historical knowledge and cognitive objective discrimination which was all very thrilling.

We were preparing for the first ever women’s retreat that was making public Andrew’s many years of work with the women. It was continually humbling to recognize what a stretch this was for all of us—how much being out in the spotlight with our whole being was truly taking us into unexplored territory. Many times we had the sense that we were going against our own ‘nature’, almost against our own biology.

Having the incredible support of our sisterhood made all the difference. It was amazing to be able to be so vulnerable together. We all gained strength in seeing each other stretching to meet this challenge. Our own ongoing experience kept reinforcing Andrew’s belief that the next step for women’s liberation had to do with our ability as women to come together, leaving behind the old biological and cultural survival structures that for millennia have kept us fighting among ourselves in order to find our ‘best mate’ and preserve the status quo. We no longer needed to succumb to these primitive structures. Every day that we came together in higher support for our liberated potentials was a victory in action, truly at the edge of what was becoming possible for female consciousness at this time.

It was thrilling to simply be together to learn from everyone’s experience and knowledge, and to nurture the leadership capacities. The lack of “back-stabbing female competition” was delightfully absent from our exchanges, and we were immersed in our shared exciting project. It was a sheer joy to come together, not from the perspective of being/having a problem that needed to be fixed, but from an utterly positive recognition that we had a lot to learn, and by doing so we were literally creating “new grooves” in women’s consciousness.

I felt that my deepest dream had come true, and that I was living in heaven every day—a kind of heaven that was totally alive and thrilling. Of course, I had to continuously watch my nasty ego’s expected protests that “this cannot last” and “this is not to be trusted.” But now, renouncing my ego I no longer perceived as such a burden—it simply was a reasonable price to pay for making all this possible. And even though eventually, I did painfully succumb to my ego’s resistance, retracting my promised support of our sisterhood and shared mission for continuous evolution in that collective context, I still feel that this period of sisterhood with women in the new women’s liberation movement has permanently destroyed the deep seated cynicism and fundamental mistrust I had always felt with women, and has had an immensely positive impact on my being. I have tremendous respect and gratitude for my sisters at EnlightenNext who are continuing to push their own edge and evolve together, continuing to show what’s possible for all of us.

My commitment to the evolution of women continues now in a new context, together with my Israeli spiritual sisters, with whom I now work in two women’s circles in Israel. One of them includes some very mature, Israeli women who advocate for women’s liberation, and the other a mixed Palestinian/Israeli women circle, in which we strive to embrace as fully as we can this very new potential for women’s liberation. Glimpsing this potential would never have been possible without Andrew’s unwavering insistence over many years that we women rise up to express the beautiful and radical nature of our own deepest spiritual recognition and dare to leave behind the self imposed limitations of the women we’d known ourselves to be.

Esther Kassovicz can be contacted at esther@guru-talk.com

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

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

Is Andrew Cohen an abusive teacher whose main purpose to gain power through using his position and authority and abuse his students trust in him, as is expressed by a few ex-students who have gone public with their conclusions whether through book or blog? Or is there something else going on and, if so, what is it?

For me there were no questions as to what the answer is. This is my way of saying THANK YOU Andrew! This is an opportunity to stand up for what I know to be true and I am very grateful for this.

Is Andrew Cohen Abusive? Is he Corrupt?

Some ex-students who are very critical of Andrew do not question his positive vision: the evolution of consciousness through and as the evolution of culture in a collective body. Nor do they question his high spiritual attainment. What seems to be the main debate here are his methods when trying to achieve this goal.

Not long ago when a man beat his wife not only was he not regarded as being abusive, but it was his birth right. Historically women were treated as an object in man’s possession. I’m not saying such a man’s behaviour wasn’t in fact abusive, but I’m pointing to the fact that even the use of power, be it physical or mental, at different time in history, can be seen differently, depending on the cultural evolution of the time. My point is that when we attempt to decide if Andrew is corrupt and abusive, we need to consider the time we are living in and the cultural status quo of which we are a part. In that respect what seems reasonable exertion of power in one epoch may be viewed as “abusive” in another. But is there an ultimate truth defining when an action is not reasonable anymore and therefore abusive? Is there a universal moral code true to all times?

Another aspect I would like to explore here, (before attempting to give my own view on this debate) is the notion of “quantity”. Many of his ex-student critics don’t seem so much to be having an issue with Andrew “needing” to exert “some” pressure on individuals in order to assist them in seeing their egoic behaviour and transcending it. It is more a question of how much. At what point does exerting pressure become abusive and therefore can be seen as taking advantage of someone?

To illustrate my point I would like to look at a situation we are all so familiar with: the education of children. The first time a child behaves in ways that are “anti-social” it is the job of the parent to teach and show another way of being. Should this misbehaviour repeat itself, how does parent respond? Well, there are a variety of possible responses. Some may chose to ignore it as it is not easy ‘to take your child on’, some may be kinder than others and some may even revert to a more aggressive response. Usually the child will end up learning what an acceptable social behaviour is and change his way of being. Most of us will view this course of action as being reasonable and not necessarily abusive. It becomes abusive if:

a) the forceful action expressed towards the child is not in proportion to his misconduct

b) if the aim of the forceful action wasn’t to educate the child

c) if the forceful action repeats itself over long period of time for no apparent reason.

We all know how difficult it is for a parent to know what is “the best” way to respond. What action should I take to ensure my child will learn from his mistakes and change his behaviour? Should I be softer or tougher with the child? How “strong” should my response be? A sensitive parent will also take into consideration the particular child in question, the number of times this ‘undesirable’ conduct has repeated itself and what their previous responses to having it pointed out have been, ideally before making up his mind as to what the appropriate way to respond actually is. In any case the situation is not easy to manage and involves a complex set of circumstances, characters (child and parent alike), history and, most importantly, the purpose of what the parent is trying to achieve.

Why am I bringing ‘educating children’ to our discussion here? When an individual enters a relationship with a spiritual teacher, from a certain point of view, or at least for the first period, in many ways it is similar to a parent/child relationship as described above. The individual recognises that the teacher expresses something they would like to learn and at the same time they give the teacher the right to teach them. It is only natural that at this point both parties involved can’t know how things will evolve. Note that one of the big differences when comparing a student/teacher relationship to a parent/child relationship is that in the former the individual not only chooses to enter the relationship they also choose with whom they want this relationship – the Teacher, Guru or Master.

So is Andrew Cohen an abusive Teacher, Guru, Master? I guess, in the end, we each have to make up our own mind as to what is reasonable. We are living in a time in which self concern and narcissism has never been so emphasised. Most of us Westerners have never really suffered; I mean existential suffering like starvation, poverty, physical abuse etc. In comparison to most human beings on the planet most of us have grown up like spoiled brats believing we are the centre of the world, that the universe owes us or that we deserve to have whatever our hearts wish for! Discomfort, and in particular emotional discomfort, is not something we are familiar with. It is reasonable to expect we won’t like it, to say the least, and probably we will resist, when our chosen spiritual teacher challenges this cultural status quo in ourselves. How much pressure can the teacher exert before he is seen as being unreasonable and even abusive? As long as we also consider how much resistance was enforced upon the teacher, we will be better positioned to make up our mind.

I know that Andrew never responds light-heartedly to what is occurring around him. He always gives a lot of thought and consideration before deciding what an appropriate response is. When he tries to measure an appropriate response he considers the “misconduct” (its gravity and its impact) which will among other things depend on how long a student had been with him, what kind of behaviour he has previously expressed and for what length of time, how committed the individual says he is to the process, their cultural conditioning, and, most importantly, the “contract” he has with the student when they chose him to liberate them from the grip of their ego.

Choosing a Spiritual Teacher or Guru

It is not everyone’s cup of tea to even consider this possibility. Many who can’t even relate to it may never understand it. However if you are reading these words you are probably not one of these individuals. Be it as it may there is an element of mystery or a particular chemistry.

In my own case several months after meeting Andrew I asked to be his student. At this point Andrew was still unconvinced about me. Before “taking me on board” he wanted to make sure that

a) I was fully aware of what I was asking him, and of what the nature of this relationship was

b) that I had some understanding of what his teachings are about.

When someone becomes a student of Andrew it is because they want to and Andrew has been convinced enough that they know what they were getting involved in. He never takes someone on if he feels that they don’t understand what they are asking, or what is it that he’s trying to teach/achieve.

And so in entering this relationship we agree and trust that the only ‘job’ the teacher had to fulfil was to guide us and help us become an expression of a ‘free’ human being. More often than not, when we say that this is what we want, we cannot imagine what it will entail, as we have almost nothing from our past experience we can relate this to. It is the teacher’s job to prepare us as much as possible and lay the ground so that under pressure we won’t crumble.

Most of the years I was in Andrew’s circle, I wasn’t part of the ‘core’ formal student body, but never the less one cannot be close to him without experiencing his fierce demand that we express our highest potential. I would have been disappointed had he not pushed me to do that. It is true that his at times fierce demand could be expressed in whatever way and with whatever means necessary to “make” us, the students, live up to what we ourselves had committed our lives to—the “contract” that each one of us signed for.

This is an absolutely crucial point because when reading some of the allegations of abuse made by former students it often seems as though people were innocent. I know this is wrong and not what actually happened. Each one of us ‘signed up’ fully aware that we are entering a relationship that would challenge anything known and familiar to us. We knew, and claimed, that this is what we wanted the most.

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

I am one of Andrew Cohen’s oldest students having met him in 1986 when he had been teaching formally for only around six months. His teachings have changed enormously over the years, but the seeds for everything that have unfolded were there in the early days. My purpose in writing now is really two-fold.  I would like to write primarily about those early years to attempt to give a sense of what it means to be in a relationship with a true Guru. This is no small matter and in some ways could take a lifetime to fully express. I would also like to address the accounts given from some of Andrew’s ex-students which so glaringly omit the recognition we all had of what Andrew was taking on in us and the enormity of the task.

To get us to temporarily let go of our conditioned way of acting based on fear and desire was not difficult, but to get us to truly change, to live up to what we had experienced and knew to be true, that was a whole other story. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of time, energy and love that Andrew poured into each one of us to help us to evolve, let go and truly change.

The Real Deal

When I met Andrew in 1986, I had been very seriously involved with Vipassana Buddhist meditation for ten years. In spite of all the extensive and intensive practice that I did with many teachers starting with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and ending with Christopher Titmuss and Christina Feldman, I did not find my life more enlightened, free or sane. What I found was a desire to continually go back into retreat and meditate. I would experience a lot of peace, bliss and insight on retreat, but when it was over, I had not fundamentally changed. After ten years, I had even begun to teach meditation, but inwardly I had become disillusioned and quite lost. I found as well that this gap also existed in the teachers that I knew; in other words a gap between what they were teaching and how they were living.

When I truly met Andrew and recognized who he was (and that took awhile given my background and suspicion of gurus) it was like nothing that I had ever experienced before or since. I knew beyond a doubt that my life as I had known it was over. I had come home, a home that I had yearned for all my life. I experienced a profound trust and letting go and an intimacy with all Life; with oneself, others and with Andrew. One could call it Love, this intimacy, but it was not a personal love. Andrew was the focus for this “event” but it radiated out to all those who were around him. The intimacy and love between all of us who were with Andrew during this time was beyond anything that any of us had ever experienced and at the same time it was totally natural. From my own experience I knew for the first time what it meant to be a disciple of a true Teacher, a true Guru, and that it was like no other relationship. I would flash upon the biblical scenes of Christ and his disciples (even though I was not brought up as a Christian) and I understood what they must have felt.

When one merges into Life with this degree of trust—trust in the unknown, in that which is beyond the mind, beyond time and space—then we recognize for perhaps the first time how much mistrust and cynicism has been our on-going state and how much self-aggrandizement we have habitually indulged in. Only after meeting Andrew, did I recognize what a superior position I had taken as a spiritual seeker/meditator.

I had met many teachers before Andrew – both from the East and West, but I had never met anyone like Andrew. Besides working and meditating for two years at a Meditation Center in Western Massachusetts which was heavily focused on Vispassana Buddhist meditation, I had lived at a Zen Farm in California for about 6 months and did a number of Zen retreats in the Soto and Rinzai tradition. I had also been to Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado for two summers when the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was teaching, and I had worked at a meditation center in Wiltshire, England for a year and consequently did a year-long retreat there. During these ten years, I met many teachers, both from the East and West and from an assortment of Buddhist traditions. Fundamentally the teachers from the West were sincerely dedicated and many of the teachers who I met from the East were very impressive, but still I can say without hesitation that Andrew was different.

What was it that was and is so unique about him? For one thing I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is the Real Deal, and by that I mean that he is living what he is teaching. He is the ultimate expression of integrity in every aspect of his life. He really lives from a deep place of not knowing and at the same time always strives for perfection in everything he does.  I think it is very rare to truly live from a place of not knowing without the rigidity that often comes from being steeped in a tradition, especially when this is combined with an unusual degree of wanting to find out for oneself what is true. In a way he is a blend of the Western modern man of reason who always wants to find out what the truth is, not settling for superstition in any form, and at the same time is totally immersed in the ungraspable mystery of Life. He manifests the unchanging nature of the ground of being and simultaneously is always leaning forward, changing, learning and developing. This I had not experienced in any of my past teachers.

Another factor that has always struck me is the depth of Andrew’s simple humanity. He has so much heart, uncompromising and at the same time so very flexible, soft and full of humor. You knew that he was, and would always be, totally straight with you. This is a very rare quality and one that inspires so much trust. When I say Andrew is always straight I mean that you never feel that the important things are left unsaid. There is never any pretence, hidden agendas, or what I would call shadows; he is transparent. Andrew naturally responds very directly to life and to people. His directness is coming from a penetrating clarity and a desire for the highest to be expressed in his students. And although his teachings have changed enormously since the early years, he always responded to the aggression of the ego, to pretence, neurosis, any place in us that wants to be special, separate or hold onto a problem. Since most of us do have masks or shadows of pretence to whatever extent, at first this degree of undefended responsiveness could be very disarming, and perhaps even alarming, but no matter what one’s responses were at any given time, it fundamentally inspired such a deep trust. It also gave one “permission” in one’s contact with Andrew, perhaps for the first time in one’s life, to be that direct and straight with oneself and others.

“Not One Drop of Selfishness”

In meeting Andrew an incredible change took place in us in all directions, inner and outer, as the awakened Heart took precedence over the egoic Mind. But in spite of that, for all of us, the ego would eventually resurface and regain control. As a Guru Andrew was endlessly creative in how he worked with us in order to wake us up and help us face the truth. I remember with one close student who was very uptight and full of self-doubt, Andrew had him sit up front next to him while he was teaching in the most loving way. He was given a cup of tea. They both actually had cups of tea! And every time this man would indulge in self-doubt, he was instructed to have a sip of tea. When the man took a sip of tea, Andrew would take a sip too. It was very sweet.  Andrew was trying to help him to relax and let go and it worked!

Very early on Andrew challenged me because after everything had been revealed to me—and I had experienced more bliss, ecstatic joy and oneness of being than any human being could ever ask for—I went back into the neurotic mind that always wants more, compares and indulges in paranoia and self-doubt. When one has tasted and realized such oneness, then retreating back into the neurotic mind and all that that entails is selfish.  How one responds to such a deep realization of oneness reveals everything about our basic condition. In the Light, all the darkness and ignorance gets revealed very quickly.

I didn’t see myself as a selfish person, and from a conventional point of view, I would not have been considered selfish. I had done a lot of volunteer work with the elderly and dying for example. But in the light of the higher consciousness and higher aspiration for liberation that I was experiencing, yes, I was very selfish. And looking back now, it is quite impersonal. I am part of a whole generation of selfish people—post-modern narcissists—for whom the realm of one’s own feeling experience and the freedom to do what I want in “my” life is of utmost importance. I had always lived my life as I wanted and indulged in my emotions in a big way.

I had already known Andrew for over a year. I had been given so much – more than any human being could ever want in this life time.  Many times there was the sense that I could die now because everything was so perfect but still it wasn’t enough, I wasn’t satisfied. Rather than being grateful, I wanted more, more bliss and affirmation. Andrew responded by asking me to write him every day without one drop of selfishness. I did that for close to two weeks and at first it was a real struggle as I could only write one sentence, but by the end of those two weeks something had cracked in me and my heart opened. The heart opening was in relationship to Andrew but really our relationship to Andrew was a microcosm of our relationship to all of life, to the unknown and to limitless possibilities. When that happened, I was filled with gratitude and love and only wanted to give endlessly. In that ecstatic state, the best of us comes out and for quite a long time afterwards the heart took precedence over the mind and all its endless preoccupations.

Everything is Seen

There are so many incidences that I could relate about myself and others that illustrate how Andrew tried everything and experimented in so many ways to wake us up to what we had realized and to change. The relationship with a true Guru or Master is like no other. I had no experience of a Guru from my past and never sought a Guru. The mere idea of having a Guru was distinctly unattractive to me. Even if I had never known about the corruption of so many Gurus, I still would have found the idea totally foreign and scary. It represented a loss of independence and discrimination, the idea of being a blind follower. This is no doubt very much the cultural conditioning of the Western mind. So you can imagine it was a real turnaround for me, to meet and acknowledge Andrew as my Teacher and Guru. It really felt like a choiceless decision. It turned my life upside down in the most glorious way. I was afloat in unknown waters and life took on epic proportions.

The relationship with a Guru is based on trust and a knowing that the only thing the Guru wants is your liberation and your willingness to live your highest potential. It is said a Guru is a dispeller of darkness. Everything eventually is seen in a Guru’s presence – things about yourself that definitely don’t fit your self-image. Nothing that Andrew has ever said to me was untrue but, almost from the very beginning, it was often a shock to some degree because it did not fit my self image of the “nice, good spiritual” person who really does care.  It can be totally excruciating to hear the truth of who we are. In the conventional world this truth would never be revealed because we live in a collusion of compromise never daring to believe that anything more grand and exquisite for human beings and life could be possible. It is a precious gift to hear the truth from a true Guru. In spite of how excruciating it is, you do always know that he or she really does see you, the heights of what you are capable of and also what is in the way, the ego and all its self-deceptions. And you also always know that the Guru’s motivation is pure and that makes all the difference. It’s quite amazing to actually know that a Guru’s motivation is pure because there is so much corruption in many teachers, not all, but many. In meeting what I am calling a true Guru, you see with new eyes the glory of what is possible, a previously unimaginable goodness in life and its potential.  You see this because of the Guru’s own state, where he or she is dwelling.

The ‘Untrue” Self

When Andrew really started taking on our egos and pride, which is traditionally the greatest hindrance in the spiritual journey, and after we had been with him for quite awhile and we still weren’t changing, one of the tools that Andrew used with his older students was to give us names that epitomized our core condition, our core way of operating in the world that was based on survival and compromise; not on liberation of the self, maturity or sanity. This core condition in many ways, as I reflect upon it now, was based on our own personal conditioning and also on the collective ego, or that which is formed by our culture. I was given the name “Dizzy.” Andrew really hit the bull’s eye in terms of capturing my fundamental condition. I was horrified and ashamed. It captured my modus operandi on so many levels: the dizzy dame, dumb lady who asked stupid questions, disorganized, losing things all the time, lost in my own world of feelings and thoughts and not willing to be straight, simple, direct and transparent. This was the persona that I put out to the world when underneath there was a smart, perceptive human being who understood and saw much more than she expressed. She also was in need of a lot of development and was lazy and didn’t seem to think it was important to be organized and together in the world. She was the “sensitive” creative being who didn’t have to be that grounded and practical.

When Andrew first gave me my name, and for most of that year, I didn’t budge from a stance of embarrassment and lack of interest. The only way one can change is by beginning to get interested in really getting a full view of who we are. Andrew has always said that we can’t see ourselves objectively and this is true, but with his help and the help of others, we actually can, but we have to be individually motivated to do so. Also we cannot quickly grasp the full extent of what is being reflected as often it’s so close to us, but the important thing is to be interested. Nearing the end of that year, I did finally start getting interested and a lot got revealed in unexpected and sometimes quite mysterious ways, and by the end of the year Andrew took my name Dizzy away. It wasn’t like I had totally finished with this condition since it is so core, but I had begun to change. The “vessel” as they say in Buddhist literature has to be purified to be worthy to be a conduit of freedom and integrity and that is on-going. A lot changed for me. For a time I manifested a degree of simplicity, clarity and lack of pretence that was simply because I started to face into myself. It was in some ways quite miraculous, but it certainly was not the end of the story. The human condition, as I said earlier, is huge and it can’t be taken for granted and we can’t rest on our laurels and that is what unfortunately many of us did.

The Female Ego and True Women’s Liberation

At a certain point Andrew really starting honing in on the female collective ego.  Even though on some level we all knew about the ego and had faced into our own “personal” egos to one degree or another, this was on a whole other level; it was personal and collective. It first started to become apparent when we had so much difficulty and resistance as women to meeting together in a higher perspective. But it really showed its face when Andrew brought this fact up with us. He was met with a huge NO from all of us! It wasn’t as if we literally said “no” but on a visceral and almost preconscious level this was our collective response. We showed absolutely no interest to find out what this was about. It was so huge and so close to our skin because what Andrew was touching upon was just the tip of the iceberg.

It was the female collective ego that had been developing over centuries and, in terms of our real awareness of it, had also lain dormant for centuries. This was Big. It was like the discovery of the New World, but in this case it was about the female psyche and ego and our response was: “Don’t get near this. This is our secret”. It was a secret even from ourselves but we also did know something about it. I think we all had intimations that we weren’t really as “trusting” or “good” as we presented ourselves to be, but this had to be kept a secret. It was part of our make-up as women: the pretence, the façade, the subterfuge where appearances are more important than anything else. It was also part of our sexual power over men, the main power that we had. We could not admit to not being fundamentally “good” and, even worse, to being aggressive, mistrustful and dishonest. Maybe we could do this on a personal level but not on a collective level. Andrew started to crack into that secret and you can imagine how difficult that was. The face of female Pride reared its head up and said “You are not getting near me. No way!”  This response was visceral and on a totally irrational level. The feeling was that if we were exposed in this way, we would literally die.

For a very long time Andrew kept telling us how uninterested we were in looking into what was going on, and that in itself was devastating to our self-image of being these fundamentally “good” and caring spiritual human beings. How could we not be interested? And for a long time we really didn’t even believe it to be true. Yet, at the same time, we were terrified that it was true. We tried to carry on as before but once the “secret” was out of the box, more just started to be revealed.

For many reasons based on our biology and our past history over eons, women have developed a very complicated ego to survive in a world in which it was literally not safe. We learned to be very manipulative in order to survive. Our survival depended upon looking good, “winning the man,” being seen in a good light. Out of this conditioned core of fundamental insecurity comes a craving for affirmation. Of course men have their own particular culturally and collectively conditioned ego to deal with, but men aren’t so attached to being fundamentally “good” since that has not been so culturally valued. Also men have been out in the world in a way women have not been for centuries, and consequently have developed a much higher degree of objectivity. Women are particularly conditioned to be very feeling-based. Feelings reined supreme over rationality and objectivity. So while this is understandable in the big picture of human evolution, it made it very difficult for us as women to clearly navigate our experience together. It was almost impossible for us to trust each other when we were just with other women. Under the façade of niceness, there was a fierce unacknowledged competitiveness. Most women (and men!) have no idea that this exists. This was a huge condition that had to be faced and transcended in light of a much higher aspiration for human beings, men and women, together. We began to see that transcending these collective structures was so essential if we were going to be able to evolve and create a new awakened culture together of a whole different order.

As you can imagine cracking into the depth of this uncharted terrain was a major undertaking for Andrew. He had no idea that these deep structures that collectively bound women into a web of collusion and compromise were there, until he discovered them himself through us. He had no precedent in spiritual tradition with which to deal with this either.

Over the years there would be breakthroughs with us women which we could not sustain. We were dealing with not only the individual ego that has formed through our personal history, but with the collective ego of the female gender. The difficulty for us women was our mistrust and competitiveness, but probably the biggest obstacle to transcending this in ourselves was our prideful refusal to let go and really see our “personal” experience from an impersonal perspective.

You cannot imagine how much it took from Andrew over years and years, first to get us to acknowledge this conditioning (which was not personal but which we all took personally), and then once acknowledged and looked into, to get us to the point where we actually wanted to change. And even then it was a whole other leap to actually change. It is one thing to get one woman to transcend her condition, but it is quite another to get a collective of women to change. It was a monumental task – a huge battle – and for a long time it was not clear at all if it was going to happen. There were no guarantees. If it had been left up to us, we would have never gotten interested, period. So many of us continued to “fall” in the face of this challenge and express gross ego in the worst way and fundamentally not care. It is only because of Andrew’s relentless desire to liberate us as women that some of us did finally change and a true sisterhood has emerged in which women are expressing an authentic autonomy and interconnectedness that was unimaginable before.

For myself, as I look back now, my way of dealing with being confronted with ego, and particularly aggression which I really didn’t want to see in myself, was to project this aggression onto many of my own sisters. I became “weak,” cowering and inept which was really all a façade to cover up my own unwillingness to face myself impersonally and fully acknowledge my own aggression, lust for power and mistrust. I opted for a passive aggression where I could blame and resent others. I was a coward. A coward doesn’t stand up for herself, she doesn’t show her cards, but underneath she knows so much more. This is really an untenable position to take because it does not allow for any authenticity, any true meeting with others. This position of cowardice which I took to the extreme was also an impersonal stance with some of the women, meaning it was the same conditioned reflex that manifested in many of us. Others took a different stance, had a lot more courage, but also were often coming from wanting to be in a powerful position. In either stance, one is holding on to oneself, still wanting to have power. This was a whole dynamic that had to be seen, acknowledged and transcended, and finally it did change, but, as I keep saying, it would take an enormous degree of relentless “hammering” from Andrew before it actually did.

Projecting the Shadow

Dealing with the refusal to really face ourselves and change is an ongoing part of any genuine spiritual path. It is often what seems like an endlessly arduous task of climbing up a steep mountain with the summit shrouded in clouds. All we know is that we have to keep going or fall. Because staying on the “straight and narrow” demands such ongoing humility and relentless honesty with ourselves, we are often tempted to seek relief by projecting our “shadow” onto others, for example “my sisters are out to get me” or “Andrew is punishing me” etc.  But this projection, which can very insidiously distort the actual facts of what is occurring, is a direct result of the refusal to take responsibility for our own condition. It doesn’t take much to go there and lose true perspective on what is happening, especially in an excruciating and challenging circumstance. When this shape shift occurs we then become the “victim” and everything gets distorted very quickly, faster than the blink of an eye. The delicacy and subtlety of what we are involved in with this relationship can be so easily distorted when we are not clean with ourselves.

It is exactly the knowledge of the dynamic I have just described (and this is something that was exposed between us repeatedly) that I find so seriously omitted from the accounts of some of those who have left and still harbor so much resentment. They don’t acknowledge their own refusal to take responsibility for their shadow. From being a student of Andrew over time one does learn about this distortion that can easily happen and therefore even if one decides not to change, one really doesn’t have any excuse for not taking responsibility for ones own distorted perceptions. We were taught how to be objective and rational by a training and practice that we had all been so fortunate to receive. We also all knew very quickly after being with Andrew that what we were embarking upon was ENORMOUS—it was and is a heroic task and that is what thrilled the best part of ourselves.

This Relationship is for Life

I am not one of the core students now which means I am not part of the on-going group of students who directly receive guidance from Andrew and are now really partners with him. But one thing I know for sure: he is no longer doing battle in the way he had to do for so many years. The ego, individual and collective, is not in control anymore. It’s a major victory and what is emerging is a truly evolving transformed community of autonomous, profoundly interconnected human beings that are caring deeply about creating a new future with higher and deeper values.

Andrew is still however my teacher. This relationship is for life. To deny it would be to go against my heart and soul. I only have profound gratitude for everything that Andrew has done, not just for myself, but for the evolution of the whole human race. As long as one stays connected to Andrew, the teachings and the depth and breath of what one has realized and recognized in meeting him, then development and evolution is always possible. I feel tremendously passionate and committed to this life of the Spirit that is ever new, ever changing and ever reaching for deeper and higher values of goodness and truth. I have learned and continue to learn so much. My conviction in what is happening is unshakable and the resounding positivity that has always been the pulsating lifeblood of Andrew’s vision now makes truly significant and profound change possible for us all.

Judy Fox can be contacted at judy@guru-talk.com