“The real function of a Guru is to insult you”

Chogyam Trungpa

“The guru cuts a strange figure in the eyes of society. Indeed, the functional condition of the Divine contradicts all conventional standards. The cherished notions of the world are pointed out as delusions by the guru. The truth of existence is so potently simple that once you understand it, it seems totally unreasonable not to expect everyone to acknowledge your obvious grasp of the Divine process that is life. What does happen when you express this simple clarity? Not only are you not lauded, you are ostracized, vilified and attacked. The world does not take very kindly to the guru, because the awakened one is a living challenge to convention itself.”

Lee Lozowick

“Teachers can be very cruel. It is because they want only the good of the disciple. That nothing should remain the same, no impurity, no obstacle. Is the doctor not cruel when he takes the knife and cuts the abcess?…A good Teacher obeys a law of which the world knows nothing and it is the nature of the fire to burn or consume.”

Radha Mohan Lal, a Hindu Sufi Sheikh, Guru of Irina Tweedie

“Only if one sincerely wants to free more than anything else will we have access to the spiritual heart within us that will alone have the power to recognize the Guru Principle as nothing more than the call of one’s own True Self? If that is not the case, the Guru Principle will be seen for what it is but from the perspective of the ego, which means—it will be seen as our worst enemy.

Andrew Cohen. In Defense of the Guru Principle

An American Guru: The Real Deal

Meeting one’s Guru or Master is a Mystery. It is a date with destiny. Those who are lucky enough to stumble upon this seismic encounter may never be the same again. In that meeting one experiences, suddenly or gradually, an ecstatic release into the limitless singularity and depth of one’s True Self. The time-bound stream of the separate self sense is mysteriously overwhelmed by a vast rushing river of intoxicating freedom and fullness welling forth from the fount of Creation Itself as Oneself. But that spontaneous breakthrough into a vast new universe of being and knowing is usually only the beginning. If the impact of this spiritual baptism is profound, one may find oneself overwhelmed by a transcendent Roar surging up from the unfathomable depths of that Revelation that demands one thing and one thing only: Surrender.

Saying YES to that transcendent Roar is the most sacred movement that can occur in a human soul. While most seekers are happy enough to take a thrilling dip in that Mystery and afterwards return to shore to bask in the knowledge, bliss and awe engendered by the experience, it is another thing altogether to willingly dive in and allow one’s life to be reconfigured by Its unknowable agenda. When I met Andrew Cohen he would liken this leap to jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute!

If one would answer that call and would then choose to enter into a committed relationship with the Guru or Master who had been the catalyst for such an Awakening, then one is choosing to enter into a radical context of relationship unlike any other in which the laws and mores of the “conventional” world do not necessarily apply. This is well documented through the ages from sutras about the Buddha breaking up families, to Tibetan tales of the merciless Marpa and his long-suffering disciple Milarepa, to numerous Zen masters wielding big sticks, to that irreverent table-turning maverick called Jesus who said “Let the dead bury the dead” and “I have come not to bring peace but a sword” amongst other provocative statements, to the wild abandon of Ramakrishna, to the crazy-wise Cossack Gurdiejff, on down to Awakeners of recent times like Lee Lozowick, Adi Da, Barry Long, Chogyam Trungpa etc. Getting involved with a Guru (if they are a Revolutionary and not a Saint) is usually a thrilling and dangerous business because true Gurus are usually controversial, utterly original and very politically incorrect characters. Why? Because they are surrendered conduits for the uncontainable fire and force of Absolute Love and Truth and hence they cannot and will not be contained!

A genuine Guru or Master is only interested in the literal transformation of his students (meaning their motivation is pure), and indeed they are choicelessly surrendered to their function as “dispellers of darkness”. That means their task is to expose and dismantle, without compromise, the structures of ego that inhibit the emergence of a liberated transformed human being. In all but very rare cases, this entails profound “psychic surgery”. This delicate operation will usually cover a long period of time and is almost always an ordeal of epic proportions encompassing extremes of ecstasy and agony (for both Guru and student) that are difficult for anyone to understand who hasn’t ventured into such terrain.

Teachers and seekers walk a path that at times can look like severe and unwarranted hardship to outside eyes. But all these renunciates and aspirants were courageous souls who wanted to traverse great distances in their inner terrain as quickly as possible. What makes this process possible is a deeply heartfelt and mind-transcending trust in the Guru. This bond is not something that can be explained. It simply IS and is tacitly known by both Guru and student.

When I chose to become a student of Andrew Cohen, I knew I was entering into a relationship like no other, precisely because ultimately there wasn’t “an other” involved. I was embarking on the most profound relationship I had ever had with another human being and yet there was, and is, nothing really “personal” about it at all. As the journey unfolded I relished the fact that Andrew was so passionate and uncompromising, as all his students did. Indeed, Andrew’s absolute insistence that radical transformation was possible here and now lifted me, and my newfound spiritual brothers and sisters, into an entirely different orbit from the swamp of post-modern pluralism that surrounded us. As Adi Da said: “Dead gurus don’t kick ass”. And boy did Andrew kick ass! We had stumbled upon the REAL thing! We loved him for it (and now some who loved him for it hate him for it). We loved the fact that he carved the prevailing spiritual mainstream flatland fodder into pieces—“feel good, release and relax”, “just do the practice”, “you’re ok, and I’m ok”, “have kindness and compassion for yourself and each other” etc. This man breathed sacred fire and so did we!

Andrew never said it was going to be easy. In fact he always said the opposite. The profound spontaneous revelations of Enlightenment, Unity, and Bliss that overwhelmed so many of us during our initial association with, and ongoing surrender to, Andrew as our Teacher, were easy—mysterious Gifts of Grace. However, embracing the developmental task of purification and transformation in alignment with the accelerating penetration of our deepest understanding, was another thing altogether. As Andrew always said “Everybody wants to get Enlightened, but nobody wants to change”. I wanted Enlightenment and in meeting Andrew I “got it”, (or rather the “I” that wanted anything at all dissolved into ecstatic union with the ungraspable, all-pervading It!), so in that sense my seeking ended because there was clearly nowhere else to go. But I, along with many of my brothers and sisters who chose to give our lives to the Revolution in consciousness that was spontaneously occurring around Andrew, soon discovered that that mind-shattering and heart-exploding revelation was only the beginning. It was a launch-pad, a rite of passage, an initiation into a spiritual odyssey the like of which we could have never previously imagined.

“Ego death is not a game” Andrew told us repeatedly. “It is never enough until it is too much” he would say over and over, night after night, to those who came to his teachings. He always said the task of genuine spiritual transformation was the most demanding task that anyone could ever undertake. Why? Because it would demand that we give everything for it. And we all, including those who now publicly seek to discredit Andrew, said a resounding YES to that awesome challenge with all the ecstasy and terror that it evoked in us.

The Hard Way

I think I can safely say that, for those of us who got deeply involved with Andrew Cohen, we all eventually found out the hard way that our egos didn’t want anything to do with our stated intention to be Free. We found out that our egos (or one could say the Western post-modern ego) were bigger, more insidious and devious in their survival strategies than we could ever have imagined. In fact our precious self images as sincere spiritual aspirants were hung, drawn and quartered many times over! There is a reason why the words humiliation and humility have the same root and genuine spiritual evolution, especially in such an intensely focused communal context, demanded eating plenty of humble pie!

However, there were times when that humility, or even simple interest, in facing our obstructions and conditioning was nowhere to be found. Andrew was sometimes faced with massive and seemingly intractable resistance to his demand that we engage with the challenge of transformation in accordance with the depth of our revelations and understanding. In these instances, he would try everything he could, in all manner of creative ways, to catalyse genuine evolution in us. But when nothing else was working in the face of a prolonged impasse, whether on an individual or collective scale, Andrew would at times be forced to exert enormous pressure.

Some ex-students, have gone on public record to claim that these instances of enormous pressure were “abusive”. They claim that they arose from Andrews’s impure motivation (vindictiveness, malice etc) and he is hence guilty of “abuse of power”. But the truth is that, in every case that I am aware of, they rewrite and distort the context of what was occurring in those highly charged situations when something sacred in terms of the evolution of consciousness was at stake, whether with themselves individually or amongst a group of us collectively.

And I don’t use the word “sacred” lightly. We live in a relativist, individualistic, anti-hierarchical culture in which nothing is really sacred anymore. Let’s face it, us post moderns are culturally conditioned to answer to no one but ourselves. That is why business and fitness gurus are hip but spiritual gurus are anathema to our cultural sensibilities. But some of us were lucky enough to stumble upon something inconceivable. The significance of what Andrew awakened in us went far beyond ourselves and was and is sacred and it brought us to our knees. Why? Because the implications of the continuum of shared revelation we were immersed in stretched far, far beyond our personal freedom. In its glory we recognized an overwhelming sense of meaning and purpose for human incarnation: to cease to live for our own sake and become a human conduit for the evolution of consciousness itself. This is not “Enlightenment” in the traditional sense and it is something that cannot be fully understood unless one has experienced it for oneself.

When I met Andrew in 1992 he had already begun to make a distinction between “Personal Enlightenment” and what he then called “Impersonal Enlightenment”. The metaphor he used then to describe the difference was by comparing a burning match with a forest fire. As Andrew’s own understanding has evolved through his ongoing experience with his students, so has the teaching continued to develop and Andrew now calls this phenomenon “Evolutionary Enlightenment”. And indeed, as our shared adventure unfolded, it became clear that not only did we not have any reference points for this in our post-modern culture, neither did we find any in the spiritual traditions of the past or the “East meets West” spiritual approaches of our own time. We, along with Andrew, were, as far as we could tell, pioneers leaning into the edge of undiscovered country. At the best of times this awareness was a doubtless living reality in our own experience. And because of that, despite the imperfections, struggles and pathologies that may have been playing out at any given time, there was always the tangible sense of the thrill of the unknown and the call of the as-yet-unmanifest future vibrating in the air.

We were attracted to Andrew because he pushed the edge, and hence we all knew at times we needed a big push! Hence it was tacitly understood that strong measures may be appropriate in the efforts to actualize the sacred potential we experienced, even when we didn’t always understand them ourselves. Why was this tacitly understood? Because something higher and deeper than the concerns, and limited understanding, of our post-modern “sensitive selves” was always at stake. This is what it means to trust the Teacher (and this is why even his most bitter detractors remained students for 10-15 years). This is also what it means to have a hope of transcending the existing structures of the self. And this is, and was, a very risky and dangerous business for all of us and for Andrew. We were all willing participants in a momentous evolutionary experiment, and we didn’t have any maps.

Evolution is a Messy Business

Evolution is a messy process. So anybody who really wants to make the effort to strive for something new is going to have to be willing to make mistakes, take wrong turns, even to fail, but never give up. The simple truth is this: if not failing is more important to you than genuinely succeeding, you’re never going to make it. If you really want to succeed, you have to have the big heart, heroic will, tenacity, courage, and commitment to fearlessly engage with the evolutionary process until something profound, mysterious, and extraordinary happens that cannot be undone.

Andrew Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment

True Teachers or Gurus are not technicians. They do not prescribe a practice. They are not seeking “followers”. They do not follow a known path. They are not bringers of peace and harmony. They are bringers of confrontation and upheaval. They are improvisational wizards, magnetic strange attractors, even geniuses, constantly and spontaneously weaving a visceral self illuminating context for Freedom, Love and Truth. In their freeform dance of creation and destruction they expose, frustrate and dismantle their student’s tendency to associate Awakening with any fixed idea or self image. The proverbial rug is always being pulled out from under one’s feet. Their passionate insistence that inner revelation must result in genuine transformation burns with a sacrificial fire that finds its mark in a sincere heart. The stripping away of falsehood and illusion is by turns ecstatic and excruciating. It is an awe-inspiring process of dying while living and being reborn over and over again. This is what Self-Realization means. This is what it means to burn karma.

Through my 13 years as a formal student, during which I often worked very closely with Andrew Cohen, there is one thing about which I had, and still have, no doubt. Andrew’s motivation as a man surrendered to the “Guru Principle” was, and is, and always will be, to reveal and release our deepest potential as human beings, and to reveal and break the ego that will always resist that emergence in the individual/collective psyche. Andrew revealed both my deepest potential as a liberated human being and the structure of my own ego in spades. For that I will always be profoundly grateful, for in being willing to face the totality of what he revealed to me I have discovered a freedom, pure passion and purpose for being alive that I could never have previously dreamed of.

But purity of motivation in a Guru still has to meet with the impurity in the student, and often for the worse. Place that already supremely challenging dynamic in a collective context infused with tremendous urgency, in which the evolution of the collective is always deemed to be more important than that of the individual, and you have an immensely challenging multidimensional crucible of spiritual transformation.

Genuine spiritual evolution under the tutelage a true Guru can be a messy business for even a sincere individual. Just think of Irina Tweedie in “Daughter of Fire” for example. Her uncompromising Guru could be deemed as guilty of similar humiliating “abuses” to those now claimed by some former students of Andrew Cohen. So it follows that genuine spiritual evolution involving a collective matrix of aspirants can be far messier. But that doesn’t mean that the Guru’s real or imagined flaws should be the first thing held to account for the messes! Where we should look first is the mess of ferocious pride and self-deception that is the human condition.

Betrayal

Some who were close students of Andrew Cohen for many years have publicly complained of being “betrayed” by him. But who really betrayed whom and what was it exactly that was betrayed? These are profound and delicate questions that, I believe, will raise different answers in conjunction with the questioner’s willingness to embrace an all-inclusive picture.

Even if some former students appear to have legitimate complaints about some instances of their once beloved Guru’s behaviour, does this amount to his wholesale “betrayal” of them? What are they also choosing to betray by not embracing the full picture of who Andrew is, what he revealed to them and the totality of the cosmic forces at play in any given situation, especially involving themselves? Or, put another way, is there a “log in their own eye” that is causing them to magnify the “specks” that they perceive in their former Guru into “logs” that recast their Guru into an “abusive monster” and their years of dedicated service to a spiritual cause as entrapment in a brainwashed cult? I would like to offer some reflections on this whole matter of betrayal…

The temptation to betray the revealed truth is a very real and present danger in relationship with the Guru/Teacher/Master. A genuine Teacher is only interested in destroying our attachment to the illusion of separate existence. He has no interest whatsoever in maintaining a special personal relationship based on anything other than the Truth. The separate self sense or personality has absolutely nothing to gain from such a liaison. When the chips are down and one finds oneself suddenly baulking at the Teacher’s reflection and demand, this can be very, very hard to bear indeed.

Trust in the Guru sometimes means living with an extreme situation that doesn’t feel right, and which one doesn’t always fully understand. After all if we thought that we could see and transcend every self-image and conditioned structure that was in our way, we wouldn’t have sought out and surrendered to the Guru in the first place, would we? There can be times when it is very easy and tempting to view the Guru as an inhuman, power-tripping, abusive character. Why? Because he doesn’t appear to care one iota about me at all! In fact he only seems intent on scolding me, humiliating me, ostracizing me and breaking me down with excruciating relentlessness and total disregard for my personal suffering, period!

It is the student’s responsibility first and foremost in these situations to trust their freely chosen Guru/Teacher/Master more than the fury of their mind and emotions. That means remaining true to what was obvious to them when they were most receptive and grounded, i.e. that beyond any doubt My Master is my Self and his only concern is my Liberation. But while this is simple to say, maintaining this thread of connection to the Guru amidst the storms of spiralling doubt and narcissistic rage can be an immensely challenging matter.

I can testify to the truth of this as I have experienced both holding onto and letting go of that thread many times. When I chose to let go of that thread, I either ran away or withdrew my trust to such an extent that I was barely participating in the Work anymore. Thus I was no longer maintaining any receptivity to absorb its lessons and benefits. Focusing on the Guru’s real or imagined flaws, as opposed to one’s own fully felt and revealed flaws, especially when they are being excruciatingly exposed in the heat of the moment, is just one more way to avoid doing the real Work that one came to the Guru to do. But unfortunately giving oneself over to the allure of betrayal is all too easy for a wounded ego—and especially an angry wounded ego. And once one would cross that line in the self, it is like walking through the looking glass.

As soon as any seed of doubt or suspicion or mistrust regarding the Guru is held as an unquestioned truth and solidified, the ego can, oh so insidiously and deviously, begin raising the drawbridge and sealing its defences. Now it has bedrock on which to build its toxic edifice. The ego seals its defences with denial or repression. It is the nature of denial or repression to be invisible. Something that is repressed or denied can’t reveal itself to us because we would then be forced to see its workings and the repression or denial would be dispelled. So not only does repression or denial aim to repress and deny, it aims at repressing and denying the very act of repression or denial itself! Hence the most telling manner in which repression or denial manifests is in the sin of omission.

In the context under investigation here, this means that the Guru’s once loved uncompromising stance and actions of creative compassion are now subjected to a “new” perspective—a flatland kangaroo court whose impenetrable logic stems from the boiling cauldron of resentment filtered through readopted relativistic post-modern cultural perspectives. How dare he do that to me!

Making a virtue out of its newfound independence from perceived spiritual slavery to the corrupt Guru/Teacher and gathering whatever evidence it can to support its counterfeit authority, the no-longer-caged ego righteously rewrites what has been done. The whole story of involvement is “expertly” re-contextualized. “Liberated” from the grips of a power-hungry Master and the brainwashed acquiescence of the “cult” mind, the devious ego exults in its self-proclaimed objectivity and rampant deconstruction. The Teacher is publicly blamed for “abuse of power” by wounded egos offering reality checks for naive seekers who may be tempted to enter into such a dangerous liaison. But this critiquing is as far from genuine truth as is opinion…

To the degree that we are not surrendered to Love and Truth, we will betray. We will make a fine art out of rationalizing our irresponsibility and disease of conscience. We will morph half-truths into truths. We will splice, edit and distort the reels of memory to collage our self-affirming picture. Betrayal is what we do when we are estranged from the deepest revealed truths that nonetheless remain silently simmering in the depths of our soul. Betrayal is what we do when we are seeking power over that which brought us to our knees in surrender, that melted and annihilated us with its radiant divine glory, that flung open a door to hitherto unimagined infinite possibilities. Only then can we stab what has nourished us, violate what was held most dear, and kill the Buddha on the road. Not with the sword of wisdom but with the sword of wounded pride.

Where Should We Point The Finger?

I don’t regard Andrew Cohen as a flawless Guru and neither has he proclaimed himself to be “perfect”. I think in hindsight he has made some errors of judgement along the way, especially in some very challenging situations in which he was overwhelmingly frustrated by the stubborn resistance of his students, but I hold any conclusions I have come to lightly because the picture is always multi-dimensional and complex. I also have witnessed Andrew expressing regret at a revealed error of judgement, and seeking input from his close students in some challenging junctures. The main point I wish to make here is that errors of judgement or “mistakes” do not necessarily equate to “impure motivation”. Andrew’s detractors are often harping on about how he will not admit any mistakes, but they are doing that in a context of insisting these perceived “mistakes” validate their assumption of impure motive on Andrew’s part. In my humble opinion, given the awe-inspiring nature of the calling and the complexity of the human condition, especially in a collective context, I think that making some errors of judgement is inevitable. And I believe also that many people who have left Andrew bearing the scars of their own refusal to change, now question his fundamental motive as Teacher from a place of very dubious motivation in themselves.

While I can’t say that there is nothing in their accounts that may speak of legitimate criticism of Andrew, although most of it is completely distorted, what I can definitely say is that there is so much that is painfully omitted. And the most glaring omission is their unwillingness to point the finger at themselves. Despite whatever perceived truth they are convinced of in their criticisms of Andrew, this unwillingness clearly undermines the integrity of their arguments and cuts to core of what I believe is motivating most of their critiques.

A sophisticated ego can manipulate, deconstruct, and squeeze the sacred lifeblood out of anything, and still come out looking squeaky clean and rational. Nowhere in their often eloquent critiques of Andrew and his methods do they mention the demon of ego they were faced with in themselves, which in most cases ultimately led to their undignified departure. For example, one of Andrew’s most vocal and vitriolic critics, Hal Blacker, (who left before all the so-called “abuses” his website catalogues even took place!), was given the name “Raging Bull” by his once beloved Guru to help him face the enormity and destructiveness of his own anger, because he refused to do so!  Others who have publicly come out against Andrew were given the names “Mephisto”, “Vacance” and “Integrity” (and not because he had a lot of it!). These names were given as spiritual practices to help the individual face into their core egoic structure and not to “brand” or punish his students. Will you find him/them acknowledging, let alone sincerely grappling with, that side of the picture, which may have been informing his/their own desire to publicly discredit Andrew Cohen? I’m afraid not. There are many more variations on theme…

American Guru

The latest variation on the theme has been the book “American Guru” by William Yenner, in which the “sin of omission” or blatant distortion runs rife through every page. 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” (Yenner has now removed the website from the web so no link anymore!). The article sought to publicly discredit his siblings whom he was convinced had cheated him out of his 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 including having the article printed and delivered to every house in this brothers neighbourhood (do we see a pattern here?).

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. He was in a leadership position at the time and I found his intensity around this matter disconcerting. In his role as  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 others) were coerced into giving money due to “psychological pressure”. But again, in the context of a Teacher/Student relationship the experience of “psychological pressure” is par for the course. The question to ask is why is the pressure being experienced and what is the motivation of the one applying it? Being resistant in the face of the Teacher´s reflection and demand is definitely going to entail experiencing some “psychological pressure”, no doubt about it! Of course, Yenner and others, intent on rewriting history to shore up their victimized positions, insist that the pressure was only coming from Andrew, 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 occassions, 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 is simply ridiculous. 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 backs up his case for corruption further 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 the said student write a letter to Andrew Cohen sometime after she had left the community stating that, despite leaving, she had no regrets regarding the donation? She may have changed her mind since (distorting the facts in the process to suit her change) but that doesn´t change this fact.

Sometime after having given the money, and at a critical juncture in the evoutionary 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 contributors to EnlightenNext magazine and donors to EnlightenNext in an attempt to turn them against Andrew Cohen with his revelations of “the Truth”. Oh what a tangled web indeed!

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 “sin of omission” applies in spades here as no context is given as to why the questions were answered in the way that they were. 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.

Some may ask, quite understandably, why did EnlightenNext answer according to the precise question 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 write for his book. 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 previously published material, for example from the aforementioned 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 interpretation of his own story and Yenner ignored his request.

Context is Everything

So for all their seemingly sincere grappling with Andrew’s perceived “abuse of power”, one won’t find former student critics attempting to embrace the issues of their own revealed shortcomings and destructive urges, or the whole truth of why they ultimately left Andrew. Why? Because then they would have to, at the very least, put a big question mark around the conclusions that they are choosing to come to now, and be willing to look squarely at their own motives for going public with them. As long as they can convince themselves that they are “doing the world a service” by publicly sharing their partial, one-dimensional negative conclusions, they can avoid facing into the more unsavoury motivations.

Most, it seems to me, who take the position of Andrew being “abusive” and hence themselves or others as the “wounded”, are speaking from a very limited and very personal point of view which is profoundly lacking in the vast impersonal, evolutionary context in which everything occurred (and continues to occur!). And, of course, once one leaves and steps out of the highly-charged living context of the guru/disciple relationship and looks at that “kick-ass” behaviour (which was only a very small part of a very big picture) from the perspective of “conventional” post-modern spiritual morality at best or an angry wounded ego at worst, then of course much of it appears outrageous, abusive, even insane. How dare he do that to me!

So were there transpersonal, maybe even sacred, dimensions of meaning and significance that many of them were experientially in touch with at the time that they would rather now forget, or simply don’t realise they have forgotten (denial denies the fact of denial), because those dimensions cannot be held in the mind if they are no longer alive within one’s own being? Andrew constantly reminded us that the gross cannot remember the subtle. And yes much of what they now label as gross “abuse” was occurring within a very, very subtle and, I daresay, sacred context.

Andrew always said that “Context is Everything”. All of us students who ventured in deep with Andrew know how easily and how repeatedly we lost the context even when we were there! Despite being experientially convinced over and over again, with Andrew bending over backwards to help us get over conditioned structures, with brothers and sisters doing all they could to illuminate and support our evolutionary pathway, with spiritual practices designed to assist us through the stormy seas of spiritual crisis, still, all of us, at one time or another (and usually a lot more than once!), refused to embrace the bigger context that would set ourselves, and everybody else, including our Teacher, FREE!

So given that fact shouldn’t we have a lot of humility for how easy it is to lose that context once we choose to leave? Of course everyone wants to feel good about themselves and why they chose to leave. The self-image of the “sincere spiritual person” for all its “may all beings be happy” schmaltz is usually revealed, when challenged, to be yet another shiny mask of the demon that will do anything it can in order to survive intact and unthreatened. The temptation to skew, distort and rewrite history to even a small degree is almost overwhelming, especially when something was revealed that challenges all the ideas and image one had about oneself. I have seen this play out in myself so many times.

Calling the Dragon out of the Cave

On one of those pivotal occasions when the formal male body of students was collectively locked into a visceral NO to his uncompromising call to evolve beyond our present structures, I remember Andrew Cohen saying: “Either I am messing people up or there is something so positive coming out of me that it brings the devil out of you”.

When we were with him those of us who were very committed knew that the latter was true, because we experienced it firsthand in ourselves, and that includes those who have now turned against Andrew. The living breathing presence of a true Guru will call the dragon out of the cave in a way that no spiritual experience or practice or technique ever can. The Guru is like a mirror that forces a living, breathing confrontation in real time. The ego, which previously may have blended in innocuously with other aspects of the personality, now finds itself revealed and cornered in stark relief. The unanimous impersonal response to this exposure is visceral terror and/or narcissistic rage.

Once we have acknowledged the nature of the force of ego in ourselves and understood its agenda the path of purification becomes truly the proverbial “razors edge” and more excruciatingly black and white the further we go. Not because we now have to “kill” the ego but because we can now, through the power of conscious choice, cage the ego and choose for, what Andrew Cohen calls, the Authentic Self. This was, and is, a profound part of the “good news” of Andrew Cohen’s Liberation teaching. He taught us how to discriminate and take responsibility for all of who we are. He showed us, and convinced us experientially, that we didn’t have to be abiding in an unbroken state of “Enlightenment” (or any particular state for that matter) to be Free! He showed us how, if we were truly giving everything, the Path and the Goal were fused as One.

Once we “knew the score”, meaning we had fundamentally seen and understood the inner foe we were up against (and granted there are endless degrees of subtlety to this), and we had proven our stated intention over several years of involvement, Andrew would push us very hard, if needed, to live up to what we knew was possible from our own experience. Many weren’t up for that and ultimately left, feeling emotionally and psychologically exhausted as a result of that pressure and so may have ended up feeling very “messed up”. But does that mean it was Andrew’s intention to cause harm? Does it mean that the Guru is to be blamed for this result? The question that those who accuse Andrew Cohen of abuses of power never convincingly answer is: what would he have gotten out of that? Some will say he was a narcissistic megalomaniac gleefully relishing his “absolute power” over us, but these people have just gone off the rails into extreme denial and distortion. The truth is that in those instances Andrew was taking us at our stated intention and playing hardball, when nothing else was gleaning sustained results. So why did Andrew play hardball? Because he cared so deeply about actualizing the sacred potential he saw in the eye of his intuition. In fact he cared so deeply that he would risk everything for it.

It is easy to say in retrospect that “playing hardball” didn’t work, wasn’t appropriate or backfired in some cases, and that may be true or it may be false, depending largely on subjective interpretation. But how could Andrew, or any Master who is an authentic expression of the Uncontainable for that matter, have known for sure beforehand what the result of playing hardball would be in any given situation? And hadn’t we all given him our trust, usually over many years, for a reason? And hadn’t we all witnessed in ourselves and others profoundly liberating results as a result of Andrew’s pressure? And just what part of the self is it that, even years later, still wants to engage in endless nitpicking and cry foul? Fair enough if one wants to engage in this kind of inquiry with fellow ex-students, but what part of the self is it that feels compelled to influence the wider world with their one-sided negative conclusions?

I would say in my experience, (and I know many others who would say the same), that whatever Andrew was challenging in us (definitely me!) in his sometimes radically rude no-holds-barred manner, eventually revealed itself to be individual/collective resistance, often on a deeply embedded and very insidious scale – that is if and when we had the eyes, mind and heart to transcend our “sensitive” post-modern selves and see it. But spiritual physics being what it is, that is always a big IF.

While in retrospect one can engage in “what if” speculation about how certain individual and collective challenges may have been navigated differently, and therefore question various aspects of Andrew’s (or our own, yes we made plenty of “mistakes” too!) methodology, the fact is that those of us who became committed formal students signed up for a supremely challenging and unknown path. While some may argue that “mistakes” were made, I have no doubt that Andrew would not have achieved the remarkable results that he has, and continues to, if he hadn’t taken us at our word and played hardball at some very crucial junctures in the game, both individually and collectively. It is just the way it is. True spiritual evolution is very hard won. And we, and Andrew, all learned that the hard way. We didn’t choose a Saint as our Guru, we chose a groundbreaking Revolutionary and the ground he was breaking was us. The experience of being broken so that new ground for human evolutionary potential could emerge was, for us and for Andrew, agonizing and ecstatic, glorious and terrifying, utterly challenging and utterly liberating. And, believe me, utterly Real.

Dark Night Early Dawn 1999-2001

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 true 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 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 the formal body of students 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 close 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, what has now been conveniently deemed, “abusive behaviour” of ones formerly beloved Guru. Authentic healing can only occur by embracing and embodying the whole picture (which may include criticism and may require something to “be healed”) and that picture is very BIG and getting bigger all the time. But because Yenner and company are not willing to embrace a bigger picture than their own grievances and hence are in denial of so much of their own deepest experience (that caused them to remain students for 10-15 years!), they are still angry enough to fight this fight so intensely even many years after they’ve left. Why haven’t they really moved on? And why are their sentiments so strong when there is no actual, irrefutable, factual “scandal” to speak of?

These are intriguing questions in light of how many obviously self-serving, corrupt gurus have generated far less venom.  While Andrew is greatly respected amongst many of today’s most prominent spiritual luminaries and visionaries, he does not have, and has never had, a particularly large following. And in contrast to some of the past few decades’ prominent spiritual leaders, there have not been any financial or sexual improprieties—nothing at all that would constitute any sort of wholesale “scandal” that would cause his students and associates to leave him behind in disillusionment. But despite this  he has already had three books (and one blog) written about him by some former students in an attempt to assassinate his character.

So what does this reveal? Might it have something to do with: “There is something so positive coming out of me that it brings the devil out of you”? Might it have to do with the penetrating depth and revolutionary magnitude of what Andrew awakens in those who get close to him? The brighter the Light, the more it calls forth the Dark. We all knew and experienced this little known spiritual law firsthand. For all of their dramatic impact, somehow the cries of “he told me to jump in a cold lake,” or “he had a cartoon caricature of me drawn,” or “he threw me out until I was ready to be serious,” or even, “he had my best friend slap me in the face when I was being a jerk,”  just aren’t the stuff of scandal in a true Guru/Student relationship, even if they might offend our more egalitarian post-modern sensibilities.

I can almost hear the uncontainable laughter of the old Zen masters, big sticks in hand, echoing through the ages…oh how pathetically “sensitive” our post-modern egos have become!

Abuse of Power or Acts of Outrageous Love?

So to clarify what I think is the most important issue: was Andrews’s intention to “humiliate and abuse” the individual as a whole at any given time when he was using forceful means, or was it to “humiliate and abuse” a very specific part of the individual that was, in that instance, not only running the show, but obstructing the emergence of something “higher”? When one is no longer in living contact with the intensity of the guru/student confrontation, then it can be very easy to blur that distinction. “He he went on a tirade about me saying I was a hopeless case, he said I was evil and going to the devil, he ostracised me…” etc. What part of the self feels “abused” when it looks back on those cases and what part of the self is now feeling “wounded”?

I ask everyone reading this to appreciate that I am one who received what Andrew Cohen’s detractors now call “abuse”, as much as any of my peers, and more than most. I was a recipient of alleged physical “abuse” (which I will illuminate below) and yes I was slapped once by Andrew himself (an extremely rare event!) when I was locked in a stubborn cycle of victimized resistance, and this shocking act completely snapped me out of it and I immediately recognized it as an act of pure compassion! Some alleged verbal “abuse” came my way when I drove Andrew to distraction with my entrenched selfishness and lack of courage (anger and frustration are not always expressions of ego!). I was given the name “Cas” as in Casual for a while to help me break through my “core” condition of casual arrogance, and I will never forget the sweetness with which Andrew did that as he put his arm around me and announced to all present that the new name was “impermanent” (some of the detractors would now say I was “branded” in a vindictive manner!). And also the sweetness with which he told me one day that the name was no longer appropriate and I was called Pete again. I was told to take a dip in the cold lake and even the river Ganges, while on retreat in Rishikesh, when I was locked in tamasic inertia, all very bracing and invigorating stuff I have to say which did me the world of good! In fact I now put myself through this “abusive” ritual every morning by diving into a freezing cold mountain stream below my house, what a great way to WAKE UP! Or am I a screwed up masochist?

While many of these measures were definitely shocking, challenging and unpleasant, I  have no doubt that Andrew was coming from a place of uncompromising love and concern for my own liberation and the release of the potential that he saw in me. I know for a fact that he had far more concern for that than I did in my self-centred casualness and arrogance. Why do I know that? Because of the result in my own being and from the love with which he embraced me whenever I came through to the other side.

Let me illustrate with an example from my own experience that I think clarifies this very charged, controversial and misunderstood terrain a great deal. As a caveat I firstly want to say that what I am going to share here could be deemed far more “abusive”, in my opinion, than anything that Andrew’s detractors are complaining about. What follows is a brief account of what they allege is “physical abuse”. Let me make clear that this was a very rare event that only happened to me and is in no way typical of Andrew´s methods.

First some background…. I had been a formal student of Andrew for 6 years. I was a passionate, bright individual (still am I hope!) and when I stood firmly in the depth of my own awakened Self I could have a positive impact on people and clearly had a lot to give. But the problem was that that didn’t happen with any consistency. Why? Because I was also a chronically weak and selfish individual to such a degree that whenever Andrew or my peers would seriously challenge me to consistently live up to my potential, I would crumble.

Thus a pattern asserted itself over time as I would seesaw between eventually settling into casual arrogance (when I wasn’t being challenged) and plummeting into pathetic weakness (when I was!) without any consistent ground in-between. The ground “in-between” that Andrew was endeavouring to get me to cultivate and stand in would be based on that most elusive and hard-won spiritual virtue, humility, and hence be free from the taint of ego. While this was a very impersonal pattern of conditioning that got revealed in some form in many of his male students, I was an extreme case and was going nowhere fast! Andrew had made it very clear over a long period of time that he was getting increasingly frustrated with my lack of genuine interest and backbone in the face of his demand, especially when I had the potential to be a positive force in our collective evolutionary experiment. So we had effectively reached a stalemate. Yet I was still professing my commitment to spiritual life under Andrew´s guidance.

So one day Andrew took a big risk with me. He had several of my brothers jump me and rough me up. Although they did this in a way that ensured I was not seriously hurt, I was definitely shaken. I was told that this would happen every evening in our locker room. While I knew full well why this was happening (Andrew was now playing hardball!), I immediately crumbled into fear and doubt. Lying in bed the following night, feeling rather sore and profoundly sorry for myself, I was very tempted to pack my bag and leave. But despite the intensity of what I was going through, at that point my trust in Andrew did not break. Somewhere I knew it was I that had to break for this impasse to yield any positive liberating result, although I didn’t know what that meant or how it would look.

For the next two days when my brothers would take me down to the locker room I would simply roll up into a ball to protect myself and absorb their blows. Again I want to emphasise they were very careful not to hurt me in any serious way. I was in lock down and I would not even meet their eyes. This was very intense and challenging for all of them as well as for me. Once more my pathos and pride meant I was going nowhere fast and the pressure within and without was growing to unbearable proportions… Then after a few days of this, and feeling rather sore and sorry for myself, I went down to the locker room and found only two of my more muscle-bound brothers down there. They told me to take off my shirt and lie face down on the bench. I was definitely scared, caught off guard, and didn’t know what was happening. To my shock and surprise they then proceeded to give me a massage. But this was no ordinary massage! With extreme delicacy they rubbed globs of skin cream with their fingertips into my back and shoulders murmuring things like, “ah very soft and slow, does that feel nice, we don’t want to hurt you now do we?…” Believe me, despite the obvious humour of the event, this was the most excruciatingly humiliating moment of my life! My pride burned up and it brought me to a point of desperation in which something broke inside. I leapt off the bench, turned to face them and said “ok let’s fight!” and we proceeded to have a very spirited scrap, not that I stood a chance of winning against these guys! What I miraculously discovered then was a joyous abandon, passion and strength in fighting (in this case literally) for my own freedom, which of course delighted my brothers as we were now together as one effectively vanquishing my pathetic ego.

This catalyzed a very liberating shift for me at the time. Somehow this whole ordeal hit a fault line in my personality and a door opened. I found myself experiencing a dignity and strength born of humility that I had not known before. I will never forget Andrew seeing me after this had occurred with a big smile on his face, his eyes beaming. He gathered a few of my brothers to his side and said to them, “Do you see there is something completely different in him?” He then walked up to me and gave me a warm hug and said, “Good Man!” Was this a man motivated by spite, malice and vindictiveness?

A few days later I told a visiting Dutch fellow student about what had happened, while we were out running together one sunny day. I remember I was feeling so strong, liberated and empty of self I felt like I was running on air! He left Andrew and the community soon after and this event was completely distorted out of context (along with everything else!) in his book “Enlightenment Blues”.

I think my personal story here raises a lot of impersonal questions about how we choose to interpret such extreme actions in a Teacher/Student relationship. If I had left Andrew in the midst of that event would I have been justified in feeling I had been “abused”? Most would probably say yes. Would I have found ammunition to convince myself that Andrew wanted to vent his frustration by vindictively hurting me and hence conclude that his motive was “impure”, and maybe even feel moved to publicly “reveal the truth” about this “corrupt” guru? If I had been inclined in that direction, I am sure I could have found some righteous indignation in that! And what of the result, does the “end” (very liberating in this case) justify the “means”? And what of the motivation? Abuse of Power or an Act of Outrageous Love?

So why is it that I, who have been subject to all of that, do not think of myself in the least “wounded” and not in the camp of those calling Andrew “abusive”—but, on the contrary, am profoundly grateful for the tough treatment he meted out to me at crucial times and am able, as well, to forgive him for the very rare times that he may have made a “mistake”? Is it because I am some weak, deluded character who is too afraid to “see the truth” about my Teacher’s aberrant ways? Or is it because I know I was a very tough case to crack and that I would be a far more weak, arrogant, deluded, self-satisfied and self centred man today if it had been otherwise? Is it because I know (as I daresay we all did) that Andrew has a very challenging and dangerous job and I personally don’t demand that he be absolutely perfect given what he is taking on and given that he found himself surrounded by people like myself who were attracted to him because he pushed the edge? And I want to emphasise that this tough treatment was a very small part of my overall experience with Andrew as my Teacher.

What I am saying is that starting from the assumption of “abuse”, as so many of the ex-student detractors (very conveniently) do, limits the parameters of the inquiry. Everything is viewed through an already skewed lens that rejects any information that does not fit its mould. The ego, as we all painfully learned over and over again (but many not nearly enough apparently), is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. The ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. The ego confuses half-truths with truths. The ego cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. The ego cannot recall or see a context that transcends and includes itself. And finally, as those of us who ventured in deep discovered without exception, when push comes to shove, the ego will not lay down and give up without a fight, and a big one at that! And, it has to be said, the truth is that all of Andrew Cohen’s most vocal critics left in the middle of that fight, having failed to come through whatever challenge was up for them at the time, period (regardless of however they want to spin their story now). You will find no real heartfelt humility, no sincere grappling with this side of the story in their indictments. What you will find instead is a one-dimensional distortion of events, so that they can successfully and oh so rationally, project the demon that they didn’t want to face and transcend in themselves onto their formerly beloved Master. Oh what a tangled web indeed!

So is it possible that intense pressure, humiliation and even a physical ordeal (I repeat, used only on a few very rare occasions) can not only arrive at love and freedom, but even be coming from a place of love and freedom in a Teacher/Student context? I have to say yes definitely because that has been true in my own experience. Does it mean that the application of intense pressure is always going to result in skilful means? No not necessarily, but I will say this: I don’t think any Guru/Teacher/Master, including Andrew Cohen, can necessarily know beforehand what any individual’s response to enormous pressure is going to be. That is a risk the Guru (and the student) is always taking, and why it is almost always a messy business to some degree. This is also why, as Andrew has always said, “spiritual evolution is not a game”. I can look back and see where I said YES and NO in those circumstances, and Andrew was always consistent, I wasn’t. Often the biggest and most liberating YESES came on the heels of the most intense and so-called “abusive” pressure. Then of course, the strong treatment was understood in a context of profound freedom and gratitude. Go figure!

Onward and Upward

Obviously Andrew is taking a bold stand as a Guru in a post-modern spiritual world that instinctively hates hierarchy and is mired in political correctness. Becoming a close student requires obedience and surrender; otherwise the dynamic of the relationship can never truly do its job. However, while there is a clear hierarchy in place in the relationship, it is a gross distortion to portray Andrew as a power-hungry dictator demanding blind allegiance. He repeatedly said to us that he wasn’t interested in having “followers” but wanted “partners”. And granted, becoming a true partner with Andrew is a very tall order indeed! But the truth is that he now does have a core group of true partners, and his fundamental battle has been won in the hearts of many in the wider arc of his influence. So it is a new dawn and a new day, and evolutionary enlightenment is here to stay!

And there is a lot more to Andrew Cohen as a Teacher than the tough uncompromising “Rude Boy” that some now caricature him as. The depth of Andrews care for spiritual awakening and evolution is the most profound and moving quality I have ever experienced in another human being. For example, I have witnessed him agonizing helplessly for months in a row (to the point where he could hardly sleep) over how to deal with an intractable impasse with his female students. I have witnessed him questioning over and over, both with myself and others, whether he was doing the right thing or whether he was missing something. I have witnessed countless times when he displayed a disarming vulnerability, innocence, generosity and heartfelt care for me and many of my brothers and sisters, even in the midst of great personal challenges. This man only ever appeared “inhuman” or “unloving” to our egos and when we stepped into the limitless field of the Authentic Self, he met us there with open arms and a Love that defies conception.

My hope in writing all of the above is not to make a case for Andrew Cohen as being “perfect” or beyond criticism (I know he doesn’t feel that way about himself either) but to show that there is far more to the picture than meets the eye, if you are reading about him through the interpretations of negative former students. The story of the phenomenon called Andrew Cohen and all he has, and is catalyzing, has been, and is, a constantly evolving one. One has to reach ever higher and suspend ones “personal” perspective to have a hope of glimpsing the whole picture. For it is only in that ever spiralling upward impersonal context that many of the challenges and complexities can be fully understood. That doesn’t mean we should discount or not question the failures, mistakes and pathologies that may have played out, for we all have a lot to learn from the rare depth of our hard-won experience. But those things will be found in some form in any genuine communal experiment in human evolution when it is charting new territory.

The obstacles to human beings truly coming together beyond ego are daunting and very real. Anyone who thinks this is not the case simply does not know what they are talking about and does not know what the ego really is. When one does know what it is and what it is capable of, one then understands why we are in such an evolutionary crisis as a race. Everyone who was originally inspired by Andrews’ vision, and who committed themselves to his tutelage and joined the collective endeavour for however long, played a significant role in the wider arc of this evolutionary trajectory. This is a trajectory which reaches far beyond any individual’s liberation or personal story and beyond Andrew Cohen himself. And to the degree that any of us, wherever we are, are endeavouring to be true to all we know in our hearts, we are all part of that vast unfolding of consciousness—forever seeking and finding its glorious emergent destiny now and now and now.

*****************************************************************************************************************************

Addendum regarding  “American Guru”:

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.

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 a former student who forbade him to include details of  his personal story in his book.

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

“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” (there used to be a link here to the article but Yenner has since removed it from the 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, including having the article printed as a leaflet and delivered to every house in his brother´s neighborhood.

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 his greed and excessive resentment, 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 and distort the truth by insisting that she was coerced, 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 take such extreme measures with Yenner? Because they knew full well that he 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 judgment 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 Andrew and 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 many 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 Yenner to include his skewed interpretation of his personal story in his book. 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.

EnlightenNext was never under any obligation to return Yenners money

Yenner continues to contact contributors to EnlightenNext magazine and donors in an obsessive 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