“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

At a young age, around 13 years old, I discovered what it was like to live free of fundamental confusion, self-consciousness and neurotic self-concern. In that I discovered my ‘natural self’, as I thought of it at the time. For an extended period I was living a different life, very different. I had been freed up, unburdened by a lot of unnecessary, conscious and unconscious self-imposed life-denying restrictions. I realised that up until that point in time, I had only been living at something like 10% of who I could be. I had discovered a part of myself that has an inherent integrity and an independent moral sensitivity. I discovered spontaneity of being, clarity of mind and a confidence in Life. The quality of every relationship that I had and the connection with other people was dramatically different. There was a joyous liberated intimacy always available that previously I had no idea existed. Somehow I had been shocked into letting go of my ideas and investments in my own future and I started to discover a sense of purpose in being alive of a kind I had never experienced before.

As instantaneously as it occurred, after a few months, one day I found myself back in the ‘unnatural way of being’. This was a return to an awkward, confused, self-conscious, neurotically self-concerned and lethargic situation. Not only that, for some reason I was not just back in the ‘old way of being’ but I was back there with a vengeance. Also it was clear in my experience that this was not a neutral event; there was something that felt unwholesome about this apparent backward movement. This was obviously very confusing and at the time I could not understand why on earth it happened.

After this initial ‘breakthrough’; how to recreate the phenomena where I would find once again my ‘natural self’ was my ongoing preoccupation. As a young boy, I would have spontaneous recurrences of this ‘different state’ of being from time to time. Over the years as I grew up, I read many self-help books, went to various ‘New Age’ group sessions and for a couple of extended periods of time, did some therapy. Though some of these things felt helpful to some extent, I realised what I was interested in was in a different ballpark altogether.

There was a point where I connected the experience of this freed up sense of self to ’spirituality’. Then it was a matter of a number of months of checking out all kinds of spiritual activities, books and techniques until I went to a talk by Andrew Cohen. Though at that time I had no idea what a Spiritual Teacher was or even that Andrew Cohen was such a person. There were a number of things that he said that evening that made it clear that he was not only speaking about the awakened Freedom that I had experienced, but that he was a complete expression of it.

After about a year of being very involved with like minded people in London who where very fired up about these new spiritual teachings, I took the opportunity to make a formal commitment as a student of Andrew Cohen. As soon as I did this it gave me a great boost in confidence in that deeper part of myself that I had for so long had so much trouble trying to constantly re-discover. Also along with this I became aware of an inherent responsibility. Responsibility for what? For Life itself!

Though my initial time as a student I actually did not have that much direct contact with Andrew Cohen but it was nonetheless very powerful. With a renewed confidence in the best part of myself and with ongoing and close relationships based on integrity, commitment and ongoing development with many of the other students in London, this was very supportive environment. I found that I was going from strength to strength and was finding a deeper and deeper experience and confidence in the fact that fundamentally everything is already more than OK. I had an ongoing clarity of perception that was quite profound and was developing a passion for what is true and right that was starting to take me by surprise. There was a certain awakening of what I can only describe as a ‘big care’. This is where you discover a burning forceful passion in yourself that cares very deeply about what it means to be ‘here’. In retrospect I can see that something was starting to shift inside me at a very deep level where I was beginning to genuinely care more about Life itself than I cared about my own personal life. At this point I decided it was too much; I did not want to care that much. Of course anyone interested in the spiritual life will hear that it is all about ‘letting go’, ‘surrender’ and ‘giving up the personal agenda’ and that is true. I was starting to find out what that really meant, and it had nothing to do with what I ever imagined. How could it? There was a majesty, power and glory that I came directly into contact with that could never be imagined or known beforehand. But I decided, for me at that point, It was too powerful, too all consuming.

This is only the beginning of a very full story. Essentially after deciding to cool off from this miraculous process that was just starting to get going, I found myself in an awkward and unusual situation. It was very similar to the uncomfortable experiences I had as a young boy; though this time I had gone a lot deeper and had a lot more understanding and of course I was now an adult. There is no way around it; this kind of situation is not good at all. At this point I became a lot more vulnerable to all the forces within and without that resist any sign of positive evolutionary transformation. Because I had genuinely begun to make at least some real progress in transcending the status quo of my conditioning and begun to get a sustained hint of what Freedom beyond the confines of the separate isolated self is, these forces began to become very apparent.

For an extended period of time I found I was being bombarded by doubt. It was ongoing for days, weeks and months; a very intense experience of doubt, doubt, doubt. It is a doubt that arises specifically in light of awakening to this absolute positivity of existence. To choose to believe in that doubt would be to deny what has been discovered and all the implications inherent in that. There was an overwhelming temptation to fully embrace this doubt; because resisting it was like unrelenting torture. I was aware how if I completely gave in to this doubt my life would take a very different route. Not that this was the first time, but I was already in a pretty unwholesome state having turned away from the direct path because it was too challenging. I could see that if I gave in to this doubt at this point, I could really get in to some serious dark negativity as some other former students have done who turned against their highest and deepest understanding, and even Andrew himself. That whole period of time was very ‘touch and go’ for me, but despite being unsteady in myself I was determined not to take that route.

One of the things that Andrew Cohen would say to his students, and he would very often say it in public Teachings, is that if one is not willing to wholeheartedly give oneself to the spiritual life then the other alternative is to devote oneself wholeheartedly to doing good in the world. So a few years after meeting Andrew Cohen, along with a few friends who had also been students, I decided to take option two. This turned out to be a remarkable period of time. We chose environmental work which we all felt very passionate about. We really wanted to contribute in a big way and make a difference. Very soon we were completely active with a number of environmental issues in connection with some of the most prominent national and international environmental groups.

Before meeting Andrew Cohen it had never occurred to me to actually do anything that could contribute to the good of the World despite always having empathy for environmental and social issues. So this was definitely breaking boundaries. I found in myself a serious interest, care and passion for the environment and for ‘the world’, to a degree that I never had before. For my friends and I the environmental work was the priority, everything revolved around that. It wasn’t a sideline or just something we did in our ‘spare time’. We met a lot people who genuinely cared enough to do something about our environment and about social justice. We also had a lot of experience working with others to ‘make a difference’. It became immediately apparent that working together for the greater good in this situation looked very different from our experience of coming together for the greater good in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It really hit home for all of us how we had knowledge and experience of a completely different order of being together. We knew of a level of trust, intimacy and, most importantly, an enormous creative potential that can become available between people. And now being much more engaged ‘in the world’ it was obvious that this was a very rare knowledge – and it was desperately needed.

When I had decided to ‘do good in the world’ I did it with a completely open agenda. I had no fixed ideas where it would lead or any fixed amount of time I planned to do it for. It was a very full time and I was involved in a number of ‘high brow’ activities. After about two and a half years though, almost out of the blue I took the opportunity to once again be in a formally committed Teacher / student relationship with Andrew Cohen.

For the last two and a half years I had been very engaged with the environmental work. I was very much ‘out there on the street’ – literally – doing all kinds of activities. This included basic information tables for the public, street theatre, helping to organise events and also involvement in various types of peaceful group demonstrations from about five people to at times over a hundred thousand, engagement with local and national press, organising and at times running various environmental interest groups and also the occasional involvement in high profile media events. The result of many of these activities would have their own ‘waking up’ effect, especially the high risk, high profile events that got headline national and also international media coverage, where I knew we were ‘making waves’ to a significant degree. I had met and been involved with many inspiring individuals. I had to constantly ‘stretch’ myself to do something I hadn’t done before or to make waves so that something that really needed to happen would happen. This was all happening of course in our current secular cultural context in which the profound potential that lies (for many people) just below the surface is hardly known about and where the spiritual dimension of being a human being is not recognised as being real. So it was a great joy and relief to once again take the step to live a committed life in the context of the ever-evolving Teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. There was a remarkable resurgence of this deeper and miraculous part of the self; now clearly identified in these Teachings as the ‘Authentic Self’. It was clear that things had evolved and developed since I had last been so involved. In clear comparison to the environmental work that I had been doing, I could see the difference between working hard to fix problems, or at best make positive changes in the current cultural paradigm, to effectively creating a completely new World that’s such a radical step beyond what has been before. They are two very different movements and intentions. Obviously the World being the way it is currently both are needed – in big measures!

Marc Pell

As a student of Andrew Cohen’s I spent six years in a formal celibacy practice that transformed me into a sane human being. Having grown up in Los Angeles in the 1970’s, I had had a very “liberal” education on sex. Though I didn’t feel at home as a “valley girl”, in many respects that is indeed what I was. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were driving forces in LA culture, and in my peer group it was anathema to reach your Sweet Sixteen still, well, ‘sweet and innocent’. This sexually charged environment was reinforced by my experience as an only child of a single mother with nearly no male family members, which left me feeling starved for male attention. And then there was my first high school job working as a cashier in a large men’s clothiers, and needless to say, my Sweet Sixteen was right on schedule!

Following high school and months of solo travel, I attended a very progressive California University. In those days at the University of California Santa Cruz, the co-eds studied naked in a big meadow next to our co-ed apartments, and women strutted around campus unselfconsciously topless. Though this was the end of the 70’s, in Santa Cruz the free love era of the 60’s lived on. I had relationships, but they tended to be brief, dramatic, or a combination of both. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself at the time, the whole arena of sexual relationships was empty and traumatic.

At the age of 31 I met Andrew Cohen while traveling in India. Though I was pursuing spiritual teachings, I wasn’t looking for a spiritual teacher… but when I heard Andrew speak I knew that he was the embodied answer to the authenticity and integrity I had longed for since childhood. He immediately clued in to my excessively sensual relationship to life and suggested celibacy to me early on. It was a shocking notion to me, and not something I was readily willing to consider. As unsatisfying as my sexual relationships ultimately tended to be, my identity as a woman was completely tied up with my sense of sexual power.  I still believed that someday I’d find “the one” who would make me happy, despite the rather clocklike recurrence of bad endings. It just seemed so “unnatural” to give up sex.

I remember a very significant conversation I had with Andrew, about six months after I’d moved into one of the group houses in Marin County, where Andrew lived and taught. I had just returned from a cross-country sales trip for my fledgling business, and was frustrated with myself for having succumbed to a meaningless one-night stand. I went to speak with Andrew and ask to become celibate, as by this point I felt the only way I was going to gain control over myself would be to more or less lock myself away in this formal practice. (In those days, celibate practitioners in Andrew’s community shaved their heads to reinforce the renunciation and to take time out from the “image” game, and I felt that this would effectively curtail my ability to play the field.) Andrew’s response to me was completely thoughtful and caring. He told me that renunciation was not something one could impose on oneself, that I would never succeed that way, but that I should just start to pay attention to what was driving me—what was motivating my choices. This advice was a watershed for me. I started to get in touch with a variety of psychological motivations that actually had nothing to do with sex. No wonder I wasn’t getting what I really wanted – I hadn’t even been straight with myself about what I was really after! And then I started to see how conditioned and unfree I truly was. When sexual impulses arose, I had such a limited range of responses. I acted like a robot—quite predictable—a pawn of biological forces. The longing to have the freedom to respond as a whole human being and not just as a woman with an out of control libido, led me to a genuine desire to take time out from the whole arena of sexuality.

What makes Andrew one of the most powerful teachers and guides for this practice is his own deep inquiry and exploration into the topic of sexuality, as well as his profound integrity.  I seriously doubt that there are many communities (if any) – spiritual or otherwise, that have had more sexual integrity than EnlightenNext. In more than 20 years there has been almost no sexual corruption among Andrew’s students whatsoever, and that is only due to Andrew’s lead. He has spoken often about the overwhelming power of the sexual impulse, about how much humility one must have in the face of it, and of the tremendous benefit of taking time out to gain perspective. One need only look to the number of enlightened teachers in the 20^th Century who were brought to their knees by indulging in inappropriate sexual relations with their students. And the Catholic Church is the latest example. There is simply so much cynicism in the world today because people have not seriously looked into the whole arena of sexuality for themselves.

I never dreamed I’d spend a full six years as a formal celibate, and honestly, most of the time it was extremely challenging. We discovered, surprisingly, that women struggle much more in the practice than men do. Men may believe that if they don’t have sex they’ll die, but once they committed to the practice, they had more integrity than the women. Andrew was often stunned that the women would continue to dress immodestly, or that our conversations in celibacy meetings would be anything but “cool” in relationship to this hot topic, or that we would blatantly break the practice by satisfying ourselves.  He wouldn’t hesitate to berate us quite sharply… always with a view to the fact that this practice, when taken absolutely seriously, could have the power to enlighten. And there was no sense in doing the practice if one wasn’t making every effort to act with integrity.

In my time as a celibate we never really embraced the true renunciate life as Andrew envisioned it, free from wanting and gender identity. Nonetheless, the practice of renunciation (because it definitely required practice) strengthened me more than any other spiritual practice I’ve done before or since. It gave me a core of self-respect where there had been none, and has truly afforded me a liberated response to the sexual impulse rather than the robotic and conditioned response I described before. It gave me backbone and humility. Now I can’t imagine a life where I had’t had the opportunity to experience the liberating power of renunciation.

There is so much to be said about the freedom that comes from ceasing to identify with sexual power, and how much confidence is gained by learning to sit still through the fires of desire and rest in coolness. Andrew always said that celibacy and relationship should ultimately be one and the same practice, and after three years in a wonderful relationship, I now understand what Andrew was always pointing to. Gone is the attraction to drama and destructive passion, and in its place are trust, care, and the freedom from needing another person to “complete” me.

While I ultimately decided to leave Andrew’s formal community a couple of years ago, this practice lives in me, and it often occurs to me that if I had not met Andrew and learned the beauty of celibacy, I would most likely have been destined to repeat the mistakes of my mother, grandmother, aunts and friends, victimized by the ferocity of the sexual impulse, instead of living a liberated relationship to it.

“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 am writing this article because of my past involvement with EnlightenNext and Andrew Cohen.  Although I left the inner core of students a few years ago, I was part of the evolution of Cohen’s teachings and organization for more than 10 years. When I heard that some of his former students were speaking out publicly in a negative way about their time as Andrew’s students, I felt compelled to share my own experience. I want to tell my story not only because  I feel  that  a number of ex-students have misrepresented and even distorted the facts of their time with Andrew, but also  because I feel strongly that they have betrayed their own experience with a Teacher whom they chose freely. I also believe that they are tearing down a possibility and potential that they themselves freely gave their lives to, had experienced deeply, and then later denied. 

These are friends with whom I shared intimately in the depths of real spiritual life, a life which is fundamentally about testifying to the utter goodness of life and defeating the cynicism which is so pervasive in all of us–through our willingness to manifest something deeply positive. And while I do not want to go into possible details of Andrew having made mistakes (he has never claimed to be perfect), these possible mistakes pale in the face of the magnitude of Andrew’s vision, and how much he has already accomplished since he began teaching. It is my intention and hope that sharing my own experience will contribute to a more balanced picture of what it meant/means to be involved with Andrew Cohen and EnlightenNext.

Today I run a productivity and cost consultancy out of Massachusetts, USA and NRW, Germany. I am married to my wife of nearly 25 years and am the proud father of two children who are close to graduating from college. And while I am not at this point in any formal relationship with Andrew Cohen or EnlightenNext, I am deeply grateful for the guidance I received. I have no doubt that my time as a student of Andrew catalyzed a change in me as a person and expanded my view on life in ways that are undeniably profound. In fact these changes still continue to amaze me.

The Beginning

Pretty much from my early teens I was deeply interested in the meaning of life. When many years later I attended my first Vipassana retreat with Goenka in India, I felt I had found what I was looking for all my life – a simple yet effective way to begin to purify myself of ego. After many retreats and ten years of consistent meditation practice, I came to realize, as my teacher at that time put it, that enlightenment could be several lifetimes away. The first thing I  heard about Andrew Cohen was that he was clearly and boldly pronouncing that Enlightenment was possible NOW, if one only wanted it badly enough. I became his student not long after meeting him for the first time in Amsterdam I spent more than ten years in his formal body of students, both in Germany where I started a center with my wife and a few friends, as well as in the United States. A few years ago, after a long period of struggle, Andrew asked me to leave his core body of students. While this request did not come as a surprise, it was both a shock and a relief. I have remained close to the community, and still continue to support Andrew’s work in various ways.

I met Andrew after I came across his first book, “My Master is My Self”. This book convinced me beyond any doubt that this man was what I considered to be “fully enlightened”. Since my Vipassana teacher had honestly declared himself not to be enlightened, I had looked at quite a few others teachers such as   Ramana Maharshi and Osho. While I would have loved to have met the former, I was not that interested in getting involved with the latter. For my taste, I found that a lot of Osho’s behavior was questionable, and not a good example of how I believe enlightenment should look in the world. Enlightenment for me was THE goal to attain, THE way to live, another possibility, something the East had come to discover two thousand years ago as Nirvana, Samadhi or whatever the name, a reality that needed to be rediscovered and which offered so much more than the materialistic values of the world that I had grown up in.

When I first met Andrew, I was surprised to find someone who was apparently very much like me and my age. He looked like a “regular guy”, married, with no extravagant or outlandish behaviors, and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.  If you were to meet him on the road, you would have never guessed that he was “enlightened”. And meeting him on the road is exactly what actually happened to me months later when I traveled to my first retreat with him in India. I was on my way from the airport to the Old Delhi main station for the train to Bodhgaya when I ran into Andrew in front of the station. He was waiting there for some of his friends and students who had just discovered that the train to Bodhgaya was delayed for some hours. We all decided to stay over in a nearby hotel.  Since it was New Year’s Eve, Andrew invited me to have dinner together with everybody and celebrate. Can you imagine how thrilled I was about this start of my trip?!

And so while in one way Andrew could not have been more “normal”, being on his retreat for nearly two weeks in Bodhgaya revealed an altogether different side of him that had nothing to do with the “guy from next door”. By the end of the retreat, I was convinced that I was sitting at the feet of a 21st century Buddha! He had not only rediscovered enlightenment here and now, but as his own teachings continued to evolve through his own ongoing inquiry, he also was developing the teaching of what he now calls “evolutionary enlightenment”. This enlightenment teaching is not about transcending life, which is the goal of traditional spiritual teachings. Instead, Andrew was emphasizing the importance of immersing oneself fully in life and actually becoming one with the life process itself. And this oneness with the life process I found was continuously and consistently revealing itself through Andrew’s own simplicity, clarity, joie de vivre, and ceaseless creativity. His inquiry into the big questions of life was just too compelling to not get excited about. He has consistently continued to demonstrate over and over to me up until today, through his own integrity, something that I sensed from the first moment I met him – that LIFE IS GOOD and profoundly significant.

One of the things that struck me most strongly on this first of many retreats with Andrew was the humanness and accessibility of Andrew himself as well as that of his senior students. This was very different from the Vipassana world that I had been involved in before. And the other thing was Andrew himself, his view and vision were so bright and my soul was deeply yearning for what he was expressing and representing. At the same time he made it very clear that this perspective was something that I could manifest in the same way that he was doing, and that he wanted me to become an expression of that same perspective. His example and his demand to continue to stretch and evolve, which were both simultaneously present, created a certain tension. I began to understand this tension to be an “evolutionary tension”, a force inside oneself that pulls one to ones highest potential.

Before I left the retreat, I invited Andrew to come and teach in Germany. After two weeks of being immersed in his perspective and teachings, I found myself to be deeply in awe of this person I felt so fortunate to have met.  So I was shaking in my boots when I invited him to come to Germany. Looking back, this was the beginning of my life in a spiritual community. Or should I say our life, because my wife got equally excited about Andrew.  It did not take long for both of us, including our two children, to become more deeply involved in these “revolutionary” Teachings.

The Unknown Side of Enlightenment

It was an enormous matter to organize a teaching trip for Andrew. There was so much to take into account, and it was something new for me to discuss so many details of the process with others. We had to find a suitable teaching venue as well as a place to stay for Andrew and the students travelling with him. We had to spread the word, invite people, the press, etc.  Fortunately, Andrew sent one of his close German students over to Germany to assist us. With her help, the first teaching in Germany was a big success!

One of the things I remember and was proud about was how amazed Andrew was by how many Germans showed up to hear him teach. From then on I invited Andrew to come to Germany twice every year. My wife and I also continued to join his longer retreats in India and Switzerland. We got very excited about starting a center in Germany, and soon became part of Andrew’s formal body of students. By then we had moved out of our cozy house in the countryside and had moved with our two children to the city of Cologne, living together with other students of Andrew in a community. This was quite a dramatic shift from our pretty bourgeois and insular life style.

Being a student of Andrew’s is a  deeply challenging matter, as one enters into his world with the intention of becoming “free”—which means transcending ego conditioning. And while Andrew gives everybody a lot of space to find their way, he also expects to see results in his students after they have engaged in his teachings for a while and lived together with others who are striving for the same thing.

Was I prepared for what was going to come? No, but I definitely learned that one of Andrew’s sayings is certainly true: “It is not enough until it is too much”.  Being a student of Andrew means being ready and willing to confront oneself in the deepest way.  It means seeing that one is not separate from the ONE that is the source of everything, and also facing into that part of oneself that is unwilling to submit to that recognition of the ONE. And it also about our willingness to do whatever needs to be done to move beyond the grip of the ego, and  to express the deepest truth of who one has discovered oneself to be.

While obviously I had signed up to be a formal student of Andrew because I considered him to be enlightened, I also knew that the question which was most intriguing to Andrew was the relationship between the “one and the many” –how does the deepest spiritual realization that there is only ONE translate into the world of time and space? How is enlightenment expressed in today’s world? How do I live my highest inspirations and revelations in today’s ever confusing world of multiplicity and materialism? And we, his formal body of students, were the “real time laboratory” for discovering and manifesting an answer to that question.

Out of our responses to his teaching, Andrew very early on began to recognize that the enlightenment of the individual was not really the goal of his vision. He started to see that something much more explosive, engaging and creative was being expressed through people coming together in the pursuit of enlightenment.  This mystery that manifested through a group of people with the same shared intention was in fact far more interesting and significant than “personal enlightenment”. This was something that was unlimited and completely new as far as we could tell. We discovered that the liberation of the individual was a by-product of the emergence of unity as it was expressed through the many, when they were inquiring together into the source and meaning of LIFE, with vulnerability and transparency.

As Andrew’s translator, when I drove him to the teaching evenings in Germany and picked him up afterwards, we spoke quite a bit about the significance of his teachings and the potential we both saw for Germany. Both of us had reservations about Germany, although we could not have come from more different backgrounds. Andrew as a Jew, although with a secular upbringing, understandably had reservations about Germany and the Germans. Initially he couldn’t imagine coming here to teach. I myself, after travelling fairly extensively around the world, had developed a certain distaste for being German. I had come to view my compatriots as superior, often insensitive to the feelings and lifestyles of foreigners, and more than happy to complain about the things that were not functioning like they did in Germany (i.e. as they should!). Among other things, the Germans made the best cars in the world. I had learned that Germany was the country of poets and thinkers.  And yet we had little relationship to our not-so-recent past which I, like many other Germans, was more than happy to avoid. At home we rarely spoke about the war. And in my high school, despite several outspoken attempts by our teacher, we never managed to learn much about the horrors of the Holocaust, which was always like the “elephant in the living room”.

Our little community in Cologne was thriving. We generated quite a lot of interest in Andrew’s teachings, and spread the word into many German cities. We were quite happy and satisfied “doing our thing”. What soon became obvious though was that we all had strong ideas about how to do things best, and had little to no inclination to take advice or guidance from others. We continued along with scant acknowledgment of the inner struggles that we were facing.  It slowly became apparent that we had more difficulties than the other non-German students in exploring the unknown parts of our experience. To make a long story short, the contours of the German conditioning began to emerge in a way that was increasingly difficult to ignore. Part of this conditioning had to do with a total lack of awareness about what we as a people had done under the Nazi regime to “others”, particularly the Jews.

Although I personally had nothing to do with the holocaust, what has become increasingly clear for me over time is how strongly the atrocities of my parents’ generation have impacted my life.  I became aware of the fact that we did not talk about the holocaust at home.  It was never a topic in school (many of my teachers had been soldiers), and we never spoke about the holocaust in public without automatically feeling bad and guilty about it. This mix of superiority, avoidance, and guilt about one of the most horrible crimes of humanity was always silently in the air. I started breathing it like everybody else when I was born, and it became part of my personality.

When community members from other centers around the world would come to Germany I was always thrilled when they were impressed by the German technology, the slick cars and the like. But I did not like it so much when they told me how unfriendly or even hostile they were treated at a bakery if they could not speak much German. I have come to see that as a “good German” you have to function. And if you don’t, well sorry but you have a problem! Being human or being a “mensch”, the paradoxical Yiddish word which means a “good human being”, doesn’t mean anything as long as you do not function!

Given our long heritage of thinkers and scientists I knew that we Germans are highly intellectual. When Andrew first mentioned that we are in fact very emotional, I could hardly relate to his comment. To my surprise I am finding more and more proof of how emotional we actually all are. After ten years of living in the US and getting familiar with the American way, I am often shocked by the intensity of simple German interactions, especially if things are getting out of control. We are emotionally so intertwined with our conviction of “being right” and our need to be in control, that the “Hi man, relax” approach of the American character seems both outlandish and refreshing at the same time.

Did I ever expect to go into questions like these when I signed up to become enlightened? Did I ever expect to uncover my own conditioning to such an extent? And then to be asked to leave it behind and go beyond all of it – to be true to my heart and embrace other human beings in raw vulnerability? I don’t think so. I just wanted to feel good and be free. I was ready to change to some extent. But change in a fundamental way? Change what I considered to be “me”? Forget it! It took a lot of pressure for me to start looking at what was being exposed about myself, and even more to begin to take responsibility for it. I became proof of one of Andrew’s favorite sayings – “Everybody wants to be enlightened, but nobody wants to change”.

While compared to the average German I was pretty beyond the norm, having traveled to India many times and having left a well paid job at one of the most successful firms in the country in exchange for a community life in America. But I was still the “typical German” in Andrew’s community. And looking back I can see how German I was and still am.

Can There Be A Guru After The Fuhrer?

While this is quite a provocative question, I do think it is a crucial one, and not only for Germans. Because deeply trusting anyone or anything is a profoundly challenging matter for all of us.

A Guru, according to the Upanishads is the “dispeller of darkness”. The Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5 says: “The syllable ‘gu’ means shadows, and the syllable ‘ru’, he who disperses them”. Because of the power to disperse darkness, the Guru is thus named. The Upanishads further elaborate that “in the presence of a true Guru, knowledge flourishes, sorrow diminishes, joy wells up without any reason, and abundance dawns”.

To make the sacred relationship between the Guru and the disciple work, the student needs to be obedient. “Obedience”, as declared by Sri Swami Sivananda, “to the Guru is better than reverence. Obedience is a precious virtue, because if you try to develop the virtue of obedience, the ego, the arch-enemy on the path of Self-realisation, slowly gets rooted out. Only the disciple who obeys his Guru can have command over his lower self. Obedience should be very practical, whole-hearted, and actively persevering. True obedience to Guru neither procrastinates nor questions. A hypocritical disciple obeys his Guru from fear. The true disciple obeys his Guru with pure love, for love’s sake.”

That is an incredible and profound statement that is probably difficult to understand in a materialistic world. I got excited by the idea of obedience to Guru, practiced it for several years, and clearly experienced the flourishing of Knowledge, sorrow diminishing, joy welling up without any reason (what a revelation for a German control freak!), and limitless abundance dawning. And yet, after many years with my Guru, I reached the limit of my willingness to obey. That part in me that wants to have it his way wasn’t willing to go any further. Oftentimes I wondered whether coming from a cultural background in which a whole nation has trusted a devil (Hitler), and continuously avoided the truth of its history,  makes it more challenging to give oneself over to an outside authority. Are we ready to TRUST at all?

I want to use my father’s story as an example to illustrate the cultural backdrop in which Hitler operated. My father was born in 1924 as the second son of an upper class engineer who was the CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company. His youth was quite happy, and he has fond memories of his time as a Pimpf, (the beginning rank in the Nazi regime) and the first years of Hitler Youth. Why? Because the Nazis had actually set up a great environment of camaraderie, care, fun, and training to move these young people into their net. Would my father as a young adolescent have ever claimed to be a Nazi? Surely not. Was he aware of the ambitions of Hitler as a 10 year old? The answer would have to be no again.

When the opportunity arose to be present at a parade in Düsseldorf where Hitler was going to show up, he was part of a group which was waiting to see Hitler ride by. So he was standing there with the other “Pimpf”, waiting for the Fuhrer to show up. When Hitler got close to my dad, who was strongly short sighted, he took of his glasses! He believed that one should look at a God-like person like Adolf Hitler only with the naked eye.  The consequence was that he did not even see a thing when Hitler drove by in his open car!

My father was seventeen when he was drawn into the army to serve Hitler’s vision. He was sent to the Russian front. When after three days of travelling in the cattle wagon on the train, he and his comrades made it to the Ukraine in the middle of the night. They had to walk through a swamp area that had just been the center of heavy fighting. His first memories of getting out of the train were of walking through the swamp and hearing the screams of wounded soldiers, friends and foes alike, whose cries had to be ignored.

I have only tried once to find out how he felt about this at the time, but as is often the case you do not get too much of a response from people who have lived through such extreme times. My father was more than lucky a few times, and survived the war. It was only as a POW in England that he found out about the atrocities the Germans and his Fuhrer had committed. And only then was his belief in the Fuhrer and the system completely devastated. He felt betrayed and robbed of his youth.

Why am I going into such detail with this story? Because like my father, there were millions of Germans who had believed in Hitler, and later felt betrayed by the Fuhrer. These people had given themselves over to Hitler and the system to a degree that is very difficult to relate to. And as the little incident with my dad and his glasses indicates, Hitler was revered as being much more than a “regular guy”. Many people had altars in their homes, and were willing to support the philosophers and thinkers who were the architects of the Nazi regime in being the perpetrators of the most inhuman crimes in history to date.

After reading a great number of books about Hitler, the war, and the Holocaust, I have come to understand that Hitler was obsessed with a vision. His vision was of a world which would be dominated by the superior Aryan race that was ruling over the “lower species” of their fellow humans. And to that end he was willing to wreak havoc around the world. My father is an intelligent man with ideals. Should he have seen what was coming?

Like the Guru, Hitler demanded complete obedience from his followers. As history revealed, far too many Germans subscribed to the Fuhrer’s ideas and were willing to bring unbearable suffering to millions of people. Many of the war criminals who were executed in the Nuremberg trials showed no remorse for what they had done. Very few were ready to take full responsibility for their deeds. Most were still relishing in the perceived glory of the Fuhrer’s vision, utterly unwilling to look starkly at the naked and horrible truths. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein… and the list goes on and on.

We are living in a time where corrupt political leaders have severely compromised the trust that has been given them by their people.  Do we even consider politicians to be trustworthy? And if we turn to religious leaders, does it look any better? The church has been fighting one scandal after the other.  And once the ice of silence and compromise has been broken, nearly every day new horror stories of child abuse and sexual escapades surface in the news.

In wise foresight,  the German Catholic Church long ago started to allocate a certain budget to cover child support for their “slightly too liberal” clergy. And while the collapse of such an old institution might seem understandable for the generation of the sixties, the falling from grace of eastern teachers and gurus who brought the ancient wisdom from the East to the West has been all the more disappointing for the Baby Boomers: Amrit Desai, Rajneesh, even the highly revered Yogananda or Swami Muktananda are just a few names of those who have not been able or willing to live up to the standard they were apparently setting for the world. The financial gurus who have pushed the whole world to the brink of collapse are the most recent ones to participate in creating a world that seems to have lost its values. Somehow understandably, most of us, either consciously or unconsciously, have drawn the conclusion that you cannot trust a leader – that the era and time of leaders and Gurus is gone. So can there be a Guru after the Fuhrer? Is anybody still willing to be obedient to a Guru???

I have already related much of my story about my time with my Guru, Andrew Cohen. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met Andrew and to have been accepted as his student. Few people these days have the privilege to work with a true Guru. What makes it so extraordinary? It is a relationship rooted in the unmanifest. The goal is for the Guru to help the student to transcend his ego, become free and become a manifestation of the source of LIFE. It is a sacred relationship that has two parts to it. The Guru has to prove their worthiness of being a Guru, and the student has to prove their worthiness in being ready to obey the Guru. Andrew always demanded from his students that they were fully aware of the seriousness of what they were getting into. In my own experience with Andrew, I can only say that he has always been a true Guru. In fact, throughout my entire time as his student I have only become more aware of the incredible integrity of this man,  and the heavy price he has been willing to pay for this job. Andrew also has a vision that is unique amongst Gurus that I am aware of: the vision of creating an enlightened culture through the emergence of a miraculous potential that he calls “intersubjective nonduality”— this means the direct experience of oneness in a context of relatedness.

So both the Guru and the Fuhrer have a vision, and they both demand obedience. And usually both have very charismatic personalities as well as the ability to get people excited about their vision. This was one of the first things that struck me with Andrew: How much he was willing to support that unknown part in ourselves that recognizes the perfection of LIFE, over and over again, in spite of all the doubt and weakness that we as students were offering him. And in the same way the Fuhrer had an incredible ability to draw people into his negativity – he managed over and over again to convince his followers to stick to this vision and to his orders, even when they had come to the conclusion that it did not make any sense anymore to continue fighting, and when the enemy had been too strong or the losses too grave to make it worthwhile. There were heart-wrenching situations in which loyal generals were ready to face Hitler and tell him the truth of what was actually happening in the battle field. Yet every single time a meeting like this took place, the generals emerged from the meeting once again convinced by the Führer to return to continue a battle which had already been lost.

Being obedient to a leader such as the Fuhrer obviously yields completely different results than being obedient to a Guru. In a materialistic world, the vision of the Guru always seems more vague than the hard cut “truths” of a Fuhrer. The Guru always pulls you towards utter positivity into the Oneness of LIFE, while the Fuhrer – always appealing to the negative part in us – thrives on the separation and destruction of what is good and sacred. They are both expressions of fundamental forces of the universe.  Looking at this in the most simplistic way, they are the “angel and the devil” of our childhood picture books. But good and evil are real forces and it is up to us to make the distinction.

These days, amongst long-term students and many former close students of Andrew Cohen, I am witnessing a transformation that is as remarkable as it is humbling. The people I have been sharing my life with for a more than a decade and who were initially just as arrogant and selfish as myself, have grown into protagonists for an enlightened culture in their own right and with their own unique expression. Being in touch with any of them always reinforces in me the most fundamental lessons I learned from Andrew: that LIFE is good, that genuine transformation and evolution is possible and that everything matters. To me this is an extraordinary testimony to the fact that it is not only still possible, but essential to trust, and that there can be a Guru after the Fuhrer. If one is lucky enough to find a true Guru and is willing to pay the price for transformation – the results are glorious!

As a postscript, my father, after his devastating wartime experience, interestingly enough returned to his religious roots. He is now, in his mid-eighties, following a calling to write a book about his belief in God that is being published soon.

Eb Schmidt can be contacted at eb.schmidt@gmx.net

I met Andrew Cohen in 1986, in Devon, England. Within days of beginning to attend what Andrew was then calling satsang, I was immersed, dissolved, and overwhelmed by a depth of living realization and a magnitude and singularity of Love that I had never dreamed was possible. It was the beginning of the most important relationship of my life, a relationship that I was both utterly unprepared for and had sought for with all my heart for most of my conscious existence. But to backtrack…

At the time I met Andrew I was deeply involved with the Buddhist/Vipassana community and had been since I was 19, when I did my first 10-day retreat at the Insight Meditation center in Barre, Massachusetts. It was there that I first fell deeply in love with the teachings of the Buddha, and later met Christopher Titmus with whom I developed a mentor/student relationship and friendship. It was he who encouraged me to deepen my practice by going to Wales for his annual month-long summer silent retreat; which I did the summer I turned 21. Afterward, he encouraged me strongly to go to India for his winter retreat in Bodh Gaya, with the goal of perhaps going afterward to Thailand to ordain, as he had many years before.

The time between the Welsh retreat and when I left for India (after finishing Art College in 1984) only served to deepen my conviction that the path of meditation and spiritual study was what I felt deeply called to. I left for England in December of 1983 to meet Christopher in London to travel with him to India to begin my studies. I didn’t know what was going to follow, but I had no timeline or plans to return to the US.

The time in India was life-changing (far more to do with the timeless power of mother India herself than almost anything I could have found on a month’s retreat) leaving me shaken and questioning how it was that I had been given so much for so long- something until going to India I had never questioned in any way. At the end of the retreat Christopher asked me to move to Devon to help him run a mediation retreat house that he and his partner Christina had founded. I accepted, and after taking some time to travel I returned to England to live and work the following spring.

I adored England, and felt deeply at home. I enjoyed my work for Gaia House, and my reconnection with many of the others who were in the Vipassana community, many of whom I had met first on the retreat in Wales and were on the board of Gaia House.

During this time Christopher began a community at Sharpham House, a nearby Manor house who’s owner offered the to nursery wing (an amazing space) for Christopher’s students to live in and use to offer classes and weekend retreats. It was there that I moved, just after word of an American’s enlightenment began to hit the shores of this pastoral world.

I’m not sure I can even convey what a shock even these rumors were. All that I had learned since 19 was that one’s duty was to “one’s practice” and developing equanimity. Enlightenment was utterly out of the question, off the charts, arrogant in the extreme to even wish for. That was the Buddha, and perhaps a few sages like Ramana Maharshi, or Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. That an American, just a few years older than me…well it was both utterly inconceivable and like a flare, lit up the landscape of assumptions and structures that none of in the Vipassana community had ever questioned. Little did I know that this was a wavelet, a fractal of the tsunami that Andrew was to bring with him and that I was to be immersed in for the next 23 years.

Very shortly after Andrew landed in Totnes, Devon (on the invitation of Murray Feldman who had introduced him to HWL Poonja) he began teaching in the living room of Murray and his wife Shanti’s cottage every night and taught there for about a month, if memory serves. In spite of the fact that the cottage was – no exaggeration – at the top of the drive to Sharpham House where I was living with others from Christopher’s community, I found myself very divided and did not go. I could not, however, insulate myself from the currents, rumors, and tremors that were shaking this formerly sleepy Buddhist community that I had left America to be part of…Stories of profound meditation and spontaneous awakenings of great depth; in many cases happening to people with no prior history with meditation or even any religious tradition.

The gatherings in the cottage living room quickly outgrew the space as more and more people came for satsang. So Andrew, Alka, Orly, Brad, and the others that had come with him from Rishikesh, decided to rent another larger cottage a few miles down the road. It was at this point that my boyfriend, Steve, decided that he needed to see what all the ruckus was about…not a small thing for someone on the board of the local Buddhist meditation center (that I also had managed) and with even longer ties than me with its main teacher and founder Christopher Titmus.

Steve went to satsang one night, and came back amazed and filled with stories and encouragement. He went again and shortly afterward arranged to speak with Andrew privately. He came back from that meeting profoundly affected and with no doubt that Andrew was a true Guru.

At this point, in spite of all my fears of spiritual authorities I felt I had to see for myself what was going on under my nose. Andrew seemed to be awakening revelations that I had read about in the sutras and “I am That”. But, after many years of Vipassana meditation and retreats, these accounts honestly did not in any way seem plausible to me.

But I was wrong. In a packed, stuffy Devonshire cottage living room, full of the smells of wet wool, wellies and smoke from the fire, strangers and friends sat crammed together or perched on the window sills or out in the hall. Into this crush, night after night, Andrew would descend from his room upstairs in jeans and a t-shirt. Some nights he would just sit in meditation, in the overstuffed green chair that he used every night, and the room would be enveloped in a profundity of living silence that I had never, ever experienced before. Other nights he would speak or answer questions, and when he spoke with others it was as if he was answering my most secret unasked questions.

One night, several weeks after I began coming I was held up and arrived late. The only seat left was an old wooden rocking chair set out of the line of sight, at the very back of the room in an alcove under the stairs. Because I could not see Andrew easily, I closed my eyes to listen to him speak. As I listened I fell more deeply into a timeless space of  no-thought than Iever had before. The next thing I knew, Steve was shaking me to leave. Satsang had been over for perhaps an hour, and I had had no idea, in spite of being surrounded by dozens of talking people drinking tea. Deeply disoriented, I knew I had to get home to where I could be quiet again, because I knew I would be able to “keep it together” for only a minimal amount of time. Keep what together, and for what, I had no idea but I would soon find out.

As soon as I got home, I lay down on my bed. Almost right away, I left my body, the first and only time this has happened to me. I could see it on the bed below lying next to Steve, but felt no fear, only relief, excitement and awe. In the bizarre nature of such things, it seemed like I went up to the top far corner of my bedroom ceiling where both a doorway and the being who guarded the door awaited me. Whenever I try to remember what this being looked like I can only remember light, and get the image of an angel from one of the early 15th century paintings of the annunciation. Strange, but there you are. There were no words, but there was communication – of joy, love and of great welcome. I was allowed to pass. As I entered the vast field or space I was aware of countless other beings in a sea of light, and a boundless wash of Love that was not mine and not theirs – but was all of us, and was also profoundly more than all and any of us…more vast and beautiful than can possibly be described. It was into that Love and perfect Joy that I disappeared as all individuation vanished. And I knew then, beyond any doubt that my truest Self was this Love, but that it was also the final nature and Truth at the center and bottom of everything, seen and unseen.

I was stunned and more than a little shaken by what had happened when I woke the next day. But I never had a moments doubt that what I had seen and felt was real, however extraordinary and hard to explain. A few days later I had the opportunity to tell Andrew about it. He pulled me aside to talk privately, and then left for a moment to return with a picture of Ramana Maharshi. “You do know” he said, “that this man’s experience and yours are one and the same?” This completely stopped me – I held Ramana in awe. I had traveled almost the length of India in second-class train carriages a few years before to spend time at his ashram. I had also had a deep experience while meditating at his tomb prior to leaving Arunachala – so in this world there was probably no-one I would have been less inclined to place myself in the same sentence with. However, as Andrew said these words, I saw, and even more importantly, knew something even more deeply. It was that this Love was my True Self it was also THE True Self, and so in that deepest place, the most (and only) real place, I was the same as Ramana, and that also, in this, Andrew and I were no different…and even more than that, we were One – that his truest heart and mine were the same. This lasted the merest sliver of a second, but seemed forever. In the next moment I saw the vast implications of that truth on every level…the total surrender, care and big-hearted abandonment of my personal history that I also knew in that moment would have to be given. And in the next heartbeat I utterly rejected it.

In all fairness, I have to confess here to the benefit of 23 years of hindsight and probing compressed into this last sentence. At the time, all I was aware of was the barest flicker of recognition, followed by a tsunami of “me?? Ramana??? Who on earth is he kidding? Doesn’t he know what a neurotic young/American/woman/mess I am?” And then I pulled back in what seemed to me to be confusion.

The reason I am emphasizing now something that happened at the very beginning of my relationship with Andrew is because I now know that these events set the stage for everything that has come since, both profoundly good and extraordinarily difficult. In that moment, the moment of showing me my True Self, Andrew became my Teacher, my Guru. And in that he also became the one who would accept no less of me than he knew I was capable of – a fight of wills that would at times be very painful for both of us. After this event I became more and more immersed in Andrew’s teachings, ultimately leaving Devon and moving back to the states to be Andrew’s student.

Shortly after the time above Andrew taught in Amsterdam for the first time. Then he went to Rome, Israel, and beyond as people who had met him invited him. More and more, the joy of being with others who were experiencing the same extraordinary Freedom became the focus of all of our lives. Also, at the same time (as has been recounted elsewhere on Guru Talk) Andrew began to see that direct and unequivocal experiences of the divine source were not enough for most of us – even those who viewed him as their Teacher – to surrender the ego and live in true service of love and unity, no matter what we had seen or said.

So, the following arc of the years – leaving England to return to the States to settle in Cambridge, then out to Marin, California where we were for eight years, and then finding and settling in Foxhollow in Lenox, Mass…were all woven through with trips, Teachings, and Retreats in India, Europe, Australia and beyond, with the continuous evolution of his understanding of the human condition. This was fueled by his struggles with all of us (myself emphatically included!) to live up to what he knew we knew and to be willing to come together in trust, care and interest in the Truth. The trouble being that the Truth also includes the facts of the closer than close conditioning of gender, culture, and self image and personal history…and on his repeated demand to truly lean into these issues with a big heart I also fought Andrew tooth and claw for many years, while sure I was doing everything possible.

My point is – as all scripture says – the ego is a tricky, slippery, nasty bastard! So, as its sworn enemy, Andrew did resort to strong tactics at times. But – and this is crucial- he only did this with intelligent, self-determined adults who had sworn directly to him that this was their life and they didn’t want kid gloves!

I must also confess that much of what has become controversial in later years I did not see, as my own form of stark refusal was to pretend I had no memory of what I knew and was utterly unable to do more than serve in the kitchen…with a few illuminating exceptions. But (and I can see clearly now why) my and our refusal to transform, at its worst, made Andrew exhausted, angry and despairing. And so the years were very, very up and down, with what seemed at times more down than up. Yet even during the hardest times we were learning and things did change and evolve. But they never, ever would have without the pressure Andrew had to bring to bear – to his own distress.

It’s important also to see that all of this was against the reverse curve of Andrew needing more and more authentic conviction and humility from his students, not less. With some, this was occurring, but they were few. For myself, four years ago after a particularly difficult retreat and follow-up, I decided to no longer be part of Andrews’ community…that I had to find another way forward.

In the midst of a particularly difficult time for Andrew’s female students, I left. I found a light-filled apartment not far from my work, and settled in for the winter depressingly convinced that I had wasted the bulk of my life and all my youth (I was then 48) on a bitter failure. Six months later, a lifeline came from a totally unexpected quarter. Two of Andrew’s closest male students had begun a conversation that resulted in a realization that Andrew’s community as a whole had almost no respect or appreciation for its beginnings and that this was something that needed addressing. So, with the greatest trepidation I and others who had met Andrew in the first few years began speaking with them about this. The effect was astounding. Whole chunks of my experience that I had taken totally personally began to be seen from a much bigger perspective. And even, perhaps more important, I realized that that which had led me to Andrew was still totally alive and that none of it had been a waste…and that the mystery, possibility and journey was there for me to engage with now and in going forward.

As a result of these conversations a number of us decided to meet in Israel and to have a retreat together in En Gedi on the Dead Sea to speak further. It was an amazing gathering, with a wide range of Andrew’s current and ex-students…all of whom had been his students for 20 years or more. From right at the beginning, as we walked and spoke in that amazing landscape there was a depth of Presence and a releasing, an up surging of Love and connection to the ineffable that, shortly before, I had thought I would never experience again. There was also a gradual healing over those days, and a deepening understanding of the magnitude of the forces that are at play around any true teacher of Enlightenment…Evolutionary transfromation is a messy business and the biggest of hearts is needed. And even more than that, the Mystery is always a Mystery…and it wasn’t over yet! A facet of this is the strength of connection and care between so many of us that have been Andrew’s students. This was, for many of us, re-booted by our time in En Gedi and has only gone from strength to strength since and continues to expand.

I came back to Boston that spring with the renewed heart and passion to ask myself anew how to live my life with integrity and purpose. And, with my history with Andrew fully in the picture, to begin to find out what was the right path for me outside of the formal community of EnlightenNext. Again, to my surprise, the answers were not long in coming.

Standing doing dishes one day I had a vision. It was of me, but not in any recognizable form. Rather, it was of a soul-map, showing very clearly the areas that were developed and those that were not. Not surprisingly, perhaps, my area of dignified mature engagement with the world was weak, as was my area of human vulnerability and love. Again, not surprising as I had not been in a romantic/sexual relationship for over 17 years (and even then it had hardly been my forte!)

Having been offered guidance, I decided it only made sense to follow the thread. After a lot of thought and research I decided to go to Graduate School, to deepen and solidify the dignity and self-reliance that Andrew had very specifically asked me to cultivate so many years before. And I also decided to take the risk of a relationship that presented itself at that time…something that would have been inconceivable only months before.

Now, two and a half years later, the pursuit of my MS is going very well, and is nearing its completion. The initial relationship was not so successful, but showed me in many ways how much I had grown and how much Andrew’s teachings were part of me. And, perhaps even more important, that in the face of the resulting emotional turmoil, I re-discovered how they were indeed the truest bedrock of sanity, goodness and love imaginable – and in no way the abstractions I’d been making them for so long. It was also then that I began to have many “aha” moments…”Oh that’s why Andrew said that”, “Oh that’s why Andrew so wanted women to be independent” “Oh that’s why the Five Tenets are the foundation for living a liberated life. They actually are! They just are, Period!” …All this, after 22 years!! There were many moments I’ve also felt like Homer Simpson (Duh!) and like sending Andrew a telegram. “Dear Andrew, I get it. I’m very sorry for being such a total idiot. Love, Kate”

In a way I did send that telegram. I’ve stayed in touch with Andrew and the more independent and authentic my inquiry became, the closer we have become. And at a certain point I realized that we had never been this close, except perhaps right at the beginning. Not because of anything Andrew had done, but because (at least in part) I was finally growing up as he had asked me to do for so many years…and in that I was beginning to realize the fact my responsibility for everything he has taught me.

A year ago I decided not to be a coward, and gave love (small l) another chance. And amazingly, in spite of all my ideas that pretty much anyone would run upon hearing the story above, I have met and fallen in love with a wonderful man on a search of his own. One that had taken him though the seminary rather than the more Eastern route, but the difference has proven immaterial.

So…much happened for me both within and outside Andrew’s formal community. But none of it has happened outside my relationship with Andrew and what he is bringing to the world. How my part in all of this will continue to unfold is unknown, but possibilities and goodness are beyond doubt. I look forward to what is next with a very full heart!

Kate Fleming can be contacted at kfleming333@gmail.com

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

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

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

Dave Reid