Open Enlightenment

5 Ways in Which Andrew Cohen’s Teaching is Wrong

I have no doubt that Andrew Cohen experienced enlightenment in 1986, simply because a few years ago I experienced a ‘transmission’ effect, or what I prefer to call intersubjective enlightenment, twice in his presence when attending a couple of his public talks (I’d had numerous partial awakenings before then during my personal practice, which is why I believe the intersubjective enlightenment occurred at all, and both ‘transmissions’ eventually faded. This occurred a year or so before my ‘full’ enlightenment). There is also a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest this kind of phenomenon happens a lot around Cohen.

However, I’m convinced Cohen has no real understanding of how he experienced enlightenment, or why some people have a peak or partial awakening in his presence. I believe Cohen’s understanding and teaching of enlightenment have both suffered greatly as a result of the ignorance and lack of integrity of his ex-guru, Poonjaji. At the moment of enlightenment, and the aftermath that follows, a great deal of time and care needs to be taken to ensure that the experience is understood and integrated in the most honest, sane and healthiest way possible; what you don’t need is a supposed ‘master’ telling you that he has been waiting for you his entire life and so can now retire, that you will be bigger than the Buddha, that you will create a ‘revolution amongst the young’, and that you are fit to teach by virtue of the experience alone.

If, at the time, Cohen had access to a good teacher who didn’t feel the need to set him up as some infallible guru, things might have worked out very differently and a good deal of suffering might have been spared Cohen, his family and followers.

This piece is not aimed at Cohen personally, but at his teaching, how it inaccurately describes enlightenment and how that misunderstanding may have come into being; I believe our collective understanding of enlightenment is more important than what we personally think of any man professing ideas about the phenomenon.

My understanding of Cohen’s teaching is taken from andrewcohen.org; his books Living Enlightenment, In Defense of the Guru Principle, and A Story of an Awakening; attending two of his talks on Evolutionary Enlightenment; and Enlightenment Blues and American Guru, written by two ex-students.

Here are five ways in which I believe Andrew Cohen’s teaching is inaccurate, unhelpful and misguided:

1. Impersonal is not the same thing as Kosmocentric

Cohen describes his teaching as Impersonal Enlightenment. By this he means that every single event in a person’s life can be seen from an impersonal perspective, and this is both the view afforded by enlightenment, and the perspective we must adopt if we are to experience enlightenment permanently.

However, enlightenment is not the realisation of impersonality, which is just the other half of the personal (where one is, you will most assuredly find the other). Enlightenment is the inclusive transcendence of everything that has gone before, both the personal and impersonal alike.

And the emphasis I want to make here is that the event is inclusive, not destructive, dismissive or repressive. What is recognised at enlightenment I like to call Original Nature, and the personal viewpoint is just as much Original Nature as the Buddha, George W. Bush or the Number 73 bus to Islington. The realisation of enlightenment is that only Original Nature is; and so the personal is just as much Original Nature as anything else.

Cohen further aligns the Impersonal with his ‘fifth tenet’ of evolutionary enlightenment, which he calls For the Sake of the Whole:

The movement of spiritual awakening is part and parcel of the cosmic process of development, and the purpose of enlightenment is ultimately to bring the light of awakened consciousness to the process itself.

Is the personal not a part of this process too? Is the ‘whole’ not whole enough to include the self and the ego?

Developmental psychologists describe the process of moral growth in three stages: egocentric, when we are concerned only about ourselves; ethnocentric, when our concern grows to include our family/tribe/nation; and worldcentric, when we are concerned with the welfare of all human beings. Ken Wilber, Cohen’s friend and collaborator, adds a further stage called kosmocentric, which is concern for all things manifest and unmanifest, or what we might call the perspective of enlightenment. Usually, spiritual development facilitates this moral development, which is why the Axial Age traditions all profess universal compassion as the bedrock of authentic spirituality.

Just as enlightenment is inclusively transcendent of what went before, so too is each stage of moral development, with ethnocentrism transcending but including egocentrism, and worldcentrism transcending but including ethnocentrism, and so on. Wilber describes pathology as a failure to integrate and honour a preceding stage of development; and so in Wilber’s terms, Cohen’s view of a kosmocentric process that does not integrate and honour the personal, but in fact attempts to suppress or destroy it, is in fact a pathological moral development.

2. Judgement only begets judgement, not transformation

Cohen’s ‘ultimate spiritual practice’ is his third tenet of evolutionary enlightenment, Face Everything and Avoid Nothing.

This almost sounds like genuine spiritual practice, in the sense that compassion, openness and awareness is brought to bear on any phenomena that may be encountered, especially the often buried psychological and emotional material that informs current behaviour. But ‘face’ does not mean ‘accept’, and ‘everything’ only refers to the activity of the ego.

For many years the only ‘spiritual exercise’ that Cohen prescribed was the forming of groups where the apparent egotistical faults of each student would be discussed and the person in question would be berated for failing so miserably, which sometimes lasted for many hours. In order to overcome the ego, the student would have to apologise in earnest, promise to change, and – if the reports of his ex-students (including three former editors of EnlightenNext magazine) are to be believed – donate a large sum of money to make amends. This led to an anxiety-ridden, back-stabbing, paranoid, cold and financially-strapped sangha, where an individual would be terrified of falling out of favour and being ‘sent away’ by Andrew. It’s hard to see how any spiritual development might have occurred.

Ignorant, greedy, and hateful behaviour has its roots in the belief in a subject, and the often unconscious, non-verbal and unquestioned beliefs about the self and reality that have been adopted from very early on in life. It takes a great deal of personal exploration and care to discover these hidden beliefs about the self and reality – even after enlightenment –  and a great deal more patience, time and compassion before our behaviour changes to a personal expression of the perspective of enlightenment: open, free, compassionate and curious.

Judgements about the subject only further enforce the idea of the subject, and do nothing to mitigate the already existing judgements buried deep within the psyche. We only act out of selflessness when we have no reason to chase or avoid anything, and so it is only by bringing compassion to bear on what we are chasing or avoiding that we cease to act ‘egotistically’.

Compassion – first and foremost for the self – is genuine spiritual practice; enforcing judgement upon your students can only be the result of an inability to bring compassion to your own ego first.

3. Romantic relationships are not a hindrance to awakening

Due to Cohen’s confusion of the impersonal with the kosmocentric, he believes that all aspects of life must be engaged without engendering personal attachment. For Cohen, romance is a major obstacle on the road to enlightenment, and his teaching has evolved from enforced celibacy on his students, to enforced sexual relationships where any romantic attachment must be suppressed.

(Of course, celibacy has been a common practice amongst dedicated seekers for millennia, as an aid in reducing distraction from the spiritual life. I think this approach is fundamentally flawed and misguided, which is a topic for a whole other post.)

As I have already touched on above, the personal domain is a healthy and necessary part of the greater kosmocentric vision; and it is completely possible to experience enlightenment and remain habitually attached to all manner of worldy things at a personal level (consider the great number of gurus who certainly appeared fully realised, but who have had affairs with students, abused drugs and alcohol and revelled in messianic fantasy).

My own personal experience is testament to this: I fell head over heels in love with my wife a year before my enlightenment, and our relationship played a major role in my spiritual development. My friend Duncan Barford had been in a ten year relationship at the time of his enlightenment, and I don’t know of one single person who has experienced enlightenment or is making genuine spiritual progress (as outlined by models of the territory from many traditions, including Buddhism) who is not in a committed and loving relationship.

It is again ironic that Ken Wilber also testifies in Grace and Grit to the fundamental role his deeply romantic relationship to his wife played in his spiritual progress. Perhaps Cohen should actually familiarise himself with Wilber’s work sometime?

4. God does not need our help

Cohen firmly believes that ‘God’ – the creative principle that created the universe and drives evolution – needs our help to manifest its greatest desire, which is ‘to emerge’:

http://www.andrewcohen.org/quote/?quote=114

Although I would agree to some extent with the notion that ‘God’ is becoming aware of its self through the manifest universe, it most certainly does not need our help in order to emerge. For 14 billion years the universe has managed to get along just fine without human consciousness; and furthermore, as humans we are part and parcel of the process of the universe, not separate from it, and this includes the desire for enlightenment and our spiritual development.

Everything is Original Nature, from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs to the ignorant ape who has never heard of enlightenment to the actual event of enlightenment and the resulting fully realised human being. At what point is Original Nature not unfolding as Original Nature? At what point is Original Nature missing from the universe, requiring our personal intervention in order to help the universe along?

Isn’t it a little bit narcissistic to believe that the fulfilment of God’s greatest desire rests on our decision to pursue ‘evolutionary enlightenment’?

5. Enlightenment is not the end in personal development

Cohen prescribes the adherence to five tenets in order to experience enlightenment, and he believes the same five tenets describe the state of enlightenment itself. However, whereas it requires great effort and integrity on the part of the seeker in order to reach lasting enlightenment, the person who is already ‘fully enlightened’ expresses the five tenets effortlessly. In other words, Cohen believes that enlightenment spells the end of personal, spiritual practice and development.

What Cohen doesn’t realise is that understanding, wisdom and virtuous action do not come part and parcel with enlightenment, regardless of whether it is permanent or not.

A ‘fully enlightened’ human being is just a human being who has recognised Original Nature. The recognition has absolutely no bearing on the person’s intelligence, teaching ability or integrity. This is why spiritual practice is not just a means to enlightenment, but an end in itself; and how much more important is it for the person post-enlightenment, considering the possible implications of misunderstanding enlightenment for the person’s ego, behaviour and the culture that may grow around him or her?

I’m convinced that it is this belief in the conference of perfection through realisation that has led to Cohen’s pathological brand of enlightenment, and his inability to recognise the workings of his own overblown ego, visible to everyone else but himself and his followers. If you were told that you were perfected, without ego and ready to teach – in the midst of the profound, life-changing event of enlightenment – by someone you believe is also perfect, and then great numbers of the best and the brightest of the spiritual scene begin to treat you as if you were indeed perfected and without ego, hanging on your every word and showering you with gifts, how likely is it that you would attribute any of your thoughts, beliefs or actions to something you and everyone else is certain no longer exists? With a heavy investment in the egoless model, and re-enforced by group behaviour and shared bliss states, it doesn’t seem quite so puzzling how a guru and his followers can spend a lot of time feeding the guru’s ego, only to suffer as a result without ever realising exactly what the problem is.

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