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…

To Be Continued…

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

Andrew Cohen, Feb. 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unavoidable Battle with the Post-Modern Ego

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The True Gift of the Ego Teachings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A  Miraculous Shift of Perspective and Transformation.

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

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

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

The Unforgettable Sisterhood with Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rod Stanbrook can be contacted at rod9948@gmail.com

Recently I have “reconnected” with Andrew through attending a retreat in Tuscany, Italy in July this year. I knew that Andrew’s teachings had evolved considerably as I am a subscriber to the EnlightenNext magazine, but not until I was in the retreat did I really become aware of how much had changed.

Leading up to the decision to go on the retreat I had become familiar with a blog site where some ex-students (many of whom I had known in the past) were critical of Andrew. To be honest I was horrified at some of their reports, and it certainly undermined my confidence in Andrew and the community. However, I knew in the deepest part of my being that, no matter what I was reading, my own experience with Andrew was real and had never left me.

In the time between I had met various teachers, gone on other retreats etc….but could not “replace” that which I already knew. I am really grateful for having been advised of this blog because, as Pete Bampton so clearly states: the CONTEXT in which everything happened and happens is so important.

Having recently re-read Irene Tweedie’s “Chasm of Fire”, her account of her time with her Guru, it reinforced for me just how serious a step it is when one enters into a relationship with a true Teacher. To be honest I am only now fully appreciating how big it is, for example at one challenging point her Guru says:

“To reach the goal you have to be turned inside out, burned with the fire of love so that nothing will remain but ashes and from the ashes will resurrect the new being, very unlike the previous one. Only then can there be real Creation. For this process is destruction, creation and love…

So a big THANK YOU to all contributors for sharing your stories and experience. They have really has assisted me in understanding more about the relationship with a teacher such as Andrew and how in our post-modern world at this point in time, so much is misunderstood.

With much Gratitude & Love,

Jude

By Eva Schuster

I would like to begin telling my story about my work over nineteen years as a student of Andrew Cohen by describing a public retreat with Andrew in Massachusetts in February of 2008 which I, and a number of other students and friends attended. This retreat began with many of us speaking about the values we had inherited from our various cultural backgrounds. When it was my turn to speak about my own childhood values as a young German girl, I described a picture of extreme nihilism, a picture without God and without hope. What I was sharing about this bleak terrain of post-war German values was received with a stillness and almost reverence for the intensity of this conditioning. Everyone in the room knew the power of the dark forces in the universe that define one end of the human experience. The other end of this spectrum was the reason that we had all gathered together in this room in the first place—in stark contrast to the darkness of our own human conditioning, we had all been initiated into the glory of the Absolute through our initial meeting with our Teacher. We had all been deeply immersed in the stillness of the unmanifest dimension of pure potentiality and we were all beginning to recognize its manifestation as the evolutionary impulse through our own human hearts and minds.

I have now been a student of Andrew’s for 20 years—the major part of my life, although I am not currently a formal Core student. I was the fourth or fifth German student to become interested in Andrew’s teaching. We were a clear minority in this group of about 120 to 150 students who had gathered around Andrew by the time I met him. My initial meeting with Andrew resulted, after five days, in an extraordinary and powerful enlightenment experience which shook me to the core. My heart was aflame with the desire to join this exciting movement which was springing up around this young Teacher. About three weeks after I met Andrew, a voice from within me said quietly but firmly: “This will liberate Germany.” It was a shock to me because my idea about being German was not that we needed to be liberated, but that we needed to be punished. But strangely, I also knew that the voice that I had heard was the voice of the Absolute, and that what it said was true.

I soon became part of Andrew’s student body. One night we had the good fortune to go out for a meal with our Teacher. At one point he grabbed my arm and said that he couldn’t see himself ever going to Germany because it was “too heavy”. But as time went on, we met more Germans who were beginning to get interested in what Andrew was teaching. There was an immediate and strong bond among us Germans and we all began to feel an urgency to bring Andrew’s teachings to Germany. We first translated various texts into German, and then Andrew’s second book “Enlightenment is a Secret”. Finally in 1992 we arranged for a teaching tour to Cologne, Germany. Andrew spoke in front of a substantial group of people. The topic of the evening was “The Crisis of Trust”. It was hard to tell how much impact this teaching had on the audience, but it was enough to establish an initial tunnel into the dense fortress of German conditioning.

In 1995, six of us German students established the first center in Germany, and we began our experiment in trying to live the Teachings together. We plunged in to something new and unknown together. Very quickly, it became obvious that ‘The Germans’ were a particular group. During this period, Andrew would frequently speak about what he was learning about cultural conditioning from his own students, as well as from travelling and teaching widely around the world. He was constantly helping us to bring into the light so many “hidden” forces and conditioned ways of being which we had unknowingly absorbed without question. He helped us to see that the difficulties we were experiencing in finding real stability in freedom were because we were still bound by these unseen forces, forces which had varying degrees of strength as well as different forms and styles for all of us depending on our own particular cultural backgrounds. His work at that time was to help us all to see that what we were all struggling with was in no way personal or “bad”, but that these forces are utterly impersonal and shared collectively.

Slowly, and with a great deal of resistance, we began to become a little bit interested in trying to discover what, in fact, it was that we had inherited from our cultural forefathers. What was that story that they told us that we implicitly believed? We were trying to discover a story that did not want to be told—a story that had been in fact effectively suppressed by mutual consent for a long time now. It was rough going to even get an initial whiff of the depth of our own darkness. For us Germans, that conditioning gradually revealed itself to be a fierce stance in superiority, expressed as a profound lack of humanity. If we would hurt people in the way we responded to them, or if we would act out of a need for control and for power, we were utterly unable to connect with the effects of our actions on a human level. It was as if we’d all been implanted with a mechanism which effectively cut us off from our conscience to an extreme degree.

Our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our lives were in fact quite superficial. We all carried on being “competent” and “on top of it”, and trying to look like we had good manners. Our sense of self and our understanding of life was divided into a black and white pattern that made it impossible for us and others to change and grow. We were effectively stuck. Our work with Andrew, which extended over a period of many years, was fundamentally about moving an enormous number of large and very heavy boulders (which we were even refusing to acknowledge were there!) out of the road, so that we could move forward. In fact, a lot of the time this work felt very much like were engaged in something more intense and challenging even than physical road work—emotionally it was as if we were picking against very hard rock with crude instruments in the dark—and for a very long time. The resistance was way beyond anything any of us had anticipated.

We had no idea about who we were, and knew hardly anything about our own history. It was amazing how effectively cut off all of us were. Believe it or not, we all had hardly any knowledge of what had happened during the holocaust. And not only that, we also had tremendous resistance to finding out any of the hard truths about our collective history. We did not want to know. The unspoken law of silence, in which we all had grown up, was the tacitly agreed upon rule we were continuing to live out now in our lives together— even fifty years after the holocaust. With the encouragement of a senior student of Andrew’s, who spent untold hours with us in an attempt to help us face our shared past, we finally began to at least glance sidelong at our own worst fears and long-held, darkest secrets. We watched many BBC documentaries and read books. We had many, many talks about the Third Reich. Some of us had to confront our own parents’ participation in, and support of, Hitler’s movement. We began to turn over some old and dirty rocks we’d never had the courage to look under before. During this time we, for the first time in our lives, saw what we as Germans had done to others. But despite this massive and relentless effort to help us to begin to look at, allow, and integrate these painful aspects of our own impersonal conditioning (the ones of course that we feared and hated the most), we most often stonewalled these fairly consistent attempts by our Teacher to get through to us. It seemed nearly impossible for us to find any truly human responses to the horror of what we were seeing.

There were plenty of examples of cold, inhuman behavior between us. It was clear to all of us that we had almost no connection to the rest of the community in the other countries. But none of us at that time could even begin to find the humility required to let down our guard even briefly, so that we could begin to let in a bigger picture—a picture where the dark and negative forces in the human condition could be seen clearly and objectively without fear, with the simultaneous knowledge that fundamental goodness is an even more powerful force. We would not go there. We would not even go near there for what seemed like a very long time. But slowly over time, some of us began to open up to some degree, overwhelmed by the ongoing evidence of the love and unrelenting care that our friends showered upon us. Fundamentally though, nothing had really shifted yet. The biggest obstacle we were all facing was our individual and collective superiority that we were deeply holding onto in our relationship to our own Teacher. We German students were in a stand-off against our own Teacher—a Jew!

Late in 1999 when Andrew was on a teaching tour through Europe, he spent a week with us in the center in Cologne. As he listened to our experience in order to try to find out what was really going on with us he realized that for all of us, the mere fact of “being German” was the deepest identification of self that we clung to more fiercely than anything. Our identification as Germans was even deeper than our gender identification as man or woman. Andrew told us that we were his students first and Germans second. He reminded us of the profound freedom we had all experienced in finding and choosing him as our Teacher—he reminded us as well of that period during which we were all catapulted into a full and beautiful expression of our own potential, displaying a full flowering of what we all must learn to stably manifest for the sake, not only of ourselves, but for the entire race. We met with Andrew every day during this week, and we continued meeting as well with each other. I understood at some point that I had to get to a deeper level than where I was. And that if I refused this radical effort of Andrew’s might well end up being nothing but a futile exercise. I had no emotional connection to the wall of pride and self-protection that was inhibiting me from letting go—none. But I knew that I had to leave myself behind in order to see with different eyes.

I decided to listen deeply to another non-German student as he described what it felt like to be on the receiving end of our conditioning. At that moment something profound happened: I came to experience that state of mind that would make it possible to feel right about sending Jewish people to a concentration camp. I became aware of the sense of righteousness and superiority that I had never been outside of. I had a dream that night of being a guard or officer rounding up Jews to send them to the concentration camp. In my state of mind I was completely confident about my actions; I felt that the Jews were weak, and that they deserved to be sent to the camps. When I woke up, I knew that the choice to be a Nazi was possible for me, and for any human being.

Something must have happened to my German brothers and sisters as well at that time. Our next meetings were different. We began to look under the surface and to unravel what was really going on between us. Some of our defenses began to crumble. It was not pretty what we were looking at—in fact it was horrendous. But the difference was it was the truth—the painful and ugly truth. And at long last we were starting to let it in. From this first beginning a lot still needed to happen, but there was a significant break-through at this time. During the following year, Andrew felt that it would be best for us to leave Germany. Because the intense German conditioning was all around us, he felt that we would not be able to change in a fundamental way if we stayed in Germany. He felt that the benefit of being with other students in other countries would allow us to see a different human response to life, one which would enable us to embrace sanity and liberation.

It was hard for us to leave the center in Germany behind, and hard to face the fact that we had failed to transmit a liberated perspective which would attract others to join us in living the teachings of evolutionary enlightenment. The truth is that it really made no difference whether we were inside the center or outside on the street. We had all been in massive denial of the immensity and strength of our own conditioned responses and deeply held convictions. But we continued to publish the What Is Enlightenment? (now EnlightenNext) magazine in German. We had been doing this for two or three years now. We felt that with the magazine, a thread of the Teaching would still be alive in our country, and that maybe even more might be possible in the future.

In 2001, after most of us had left the community, a new chapter of the Teachings in Germany started. This chapter was called “collaboration”. A spiritually-inclined publishing house offered their support in helping us print and distribute the magazine. One member of our German brotherhood started to work together with the publisher/editor of an anthroposophical magazine. Two years later three members of our old group stepped up to the plate. We moved back to Germany to start an office for the magazine and a small center. This time the center activities were spread around the country. The three center leaders were travelling a lot and we all felt the promise of a new beginning. The fundamental difference, which is the difference, is that through this incredibly profound and long struggle to find wholeness in ourselves we are finally discovering as well the way to surrender to our Teacher. We can at last see and understand that surrendering to one’s Teacher is in fact the same as fully opening to and embracing all aspects of oneself as The Self. An impersonal perspective on our German conditioning has been awakened in us, and we are no longer intimidated by our past. We are freed from our immense pride which had manifested as self-protection, invulnerability, denial and superiority. A fundamental trust in life and human nature has begun to emerge. And best of all, a beautiful expression of human vulnerability (the very notion of which had once been abhorrent to all of us), has begun to flower among us. We, those proud and arrogant and superior ones, have joined the human race!

It must be said that not all the members of our group made it through to the other side. But we all know that the fundamental denial of our collective cultural past had been broken and a greater humanity has been liberated. It is stunning for me to even contemplate how much has shifted in all of us and to let in the enormity of Andrew’s own vision and mission. At this point in time, the Teachings are thriving in Germany. Andrew truly enjoys teaching there! Because we have finally made this fundamental shift in own relationship to our conditioning, the new people who are coming to the teachings today don’t have to go everything that we did. We were the early “guinea pigs”, those pioneers who got selected to do this initial work. We have learned that it is possible to “break the gene code” by breaking it in ourselves and allowing something new to flow through. And that is always what Andrew wanted to do—his vision was to ultimately establish a field of trust and perspective where evolution could happen freely, unencumbered by the walls of collective and individual ego. It is with a deep sense of awe, amazement and gratitude that I can say that those early words I heard spoken internally so many years ago in my early days with Andrew—”This will liberate Germany”—are really coming true in my own lifetime. None of us can say that it has not been a long and a rocky trail. But instead of those heavily barricaded and superior humans we Germans had been frozen into being, we are now mysteriously discovering so much we’d never imagined possible. Now we can finally begin to acknowledge the enormity and great significance of Andrew’s vision. This vision came to him very early on and it is a clear vision of the emergence of a new species of human—a human who finally knows that whatever we’ve learned in the past can and must all be ultimately sloughed off and left behind. In this ultimate liberation for all of us from our past, Germans and Jews, as well as all of the many warring tribes and peoples throughout human history, can ultimately lay down all of their arms and allow some new, fresh and beautiful ways of living, creating, and loving together to manifest through and as us.

Eva Schuster can be contacted at evaschus@gmail.com