Cohen

** WARNING GURU ABUSE TRIGGER **

"You know, sometimes I feel like God." ~ Andrew Cohen said privately to Luna Tarlo (Andrew Cohen’s mother) in her book, "Mother of God". (They have since reconciled.)

“… I had only been in his company (Poonja-ji) for five minutes when the most extraordinary thing happened: It suddenly dawned on me that I had never been unfree…For three weeks I spent all day and every day in the company of this great Teacher… When I was about to leave… he boldly announced that when I left him something big was going to happen to me. Afterwards he burst out laughing in the most uproarious way… almost immediately an inner alchemical process began in my soul that swept me to another dimension. When I realized what was happening, I simultaneously understood who he really was… He was a portal to the infinite…

But this gradually changed. I slowly came to notice that the Master wasn’t as perfect as I had originally believed him to be. I began to see that this man had the familiar issues, quirks, and conditioned tendencies that all human beings do. In addition, he wasn’t always honest. This was unbearable for me to see. I felt deeply let down. Because of this, over time I stopped seeing the Master. The one who had given me so much was now just a man. That’s all I could see. He knew this and felt betrayed.

Seeing his flawed humanity I began to judge him. My attention was now on his flaws, not his extraordinary gifts. In the worst way I forgot who he was and what he had so generously given. He wasn’t perfect, and neither was I. As I started to doubt him, he started to doubt me and we eventually lost touch with the deepest part of each other.In retrospect I see that precisely because he gave me so much, I expected him to be perfect – no less than a saint. In fact, I felt he owed me that! It seemed self-evident that because he was so powerfully enlightened, he would also be a living God. But he wasn’t, and I just couldn’t bear it. Because of this I eventually turned against him, the man who had given me everything…in my youthful arrogance I determined that I would be the one to bridge that divide; in me that gap would not exist. After 27 years of trying, I failed in a dramatic way…”
~ Andrew Cohen, 04/04/2017

“The following is a list of categories of (alleged) abuses committed over the years against students by Andrew Cohen and the EnlightenNext community…

I.     Physical Abuse…
II.    Financial Exploitation…
III.   Violation of Sexual and Reproductive Rights and Privacy, and Interference with Family and Personal Relationships…
IV.  Emotional and Psychological Abuse and Ostracizing…
V.    Denying and Discouraging Students’ Freedom to Leave the Community…"

"...You admit that you saw people as “a means to an end” and “lost sight of their humanity”. This insight is of such a magnitude that all the five tenets need to be re-examined. It is therefore more than reasonable for you to question the integrity and coherence of your teaching, which you obviously don’t. Here are some hints:

1) The second tenant (“everything is volitional”) has an absolute quality. How is that possible if you admit that people are humans, presumably with human flaws? And is this coherent with an evolutionary worldview? And by the way, you are not proving this tenant yourself either since you seem generally perplexed at how/why the Collapse came about.

2) The fourth tenant (“everything is impersonal/process perspective”) and the fifth tenant (“care for the whole”): what do these mean from your new insight of seeing people as humans rather than evolutionary conduits.

3) The lack of humanity described above was embedded in the structure of the community of students. For example, you gave impunity to some people in the leadership (which I’ve commented about at one of Terry Patten’s dialogue and at the WhatNext Facebook group), and you dumped others, in order to preserve your position of authority. Since the structure was intimately informed by the teaching and vice versa, both need to be examined concurrently.

I would suggest you just drop it all. Drop your defiance and need to prove yourself. Drop your ambition and lust for recognition. Trust that that which is True will not be lost. There are other less glorious ways you could prove that “gurus can change”, than getting back in the old seat on the podium. I can understand that the teaching, your life’s work, is the buoy that you won’t let go of, but right now, you are actually making a mockery of it since you are not living it yourself.

If you can allow your heart to open and allow it to cry, perhaps you would find that you can reach people that you cannot reach now and that you have more true friends than you thought. At this point you should seek out people who express the deepest humanity, not who praise you the most.

Love, Mattias O"

Andrew Cohen is the author of, ‘In Defense of the Guru Principle.’

“On June 26, 2013, Cohen announced on his blog that he would be taking "a sabbatical for an extended period of time", after confrontational exchanges with some of his closest students, who helped Cohen to realize, as he put it, that "in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well". On May 12, 2015, Cohen posted an extensive apology letter to his former students on his blog, his first writing after emerging from a two-year sabbatical. In it he wrote about the need to embrace the spiritual principle of agape, as well as eros, and expressed regret for the ways in which his lack of the former in his teaching methods hurt and alienated many former students. In September 2016, after over three years absence from public life, Cohen unveiled a redesigned website. This included an announcement of his intention to return to formal teaching, beginning with a retreat planned for early 2017.”~ Wikipedia

"Tarlo recounts how she did not feel enlightened after both Poonjaji and Andrew both said she was. Once she had been set up with this knowledge, her struggle was to make sense of it, and she had only her son as a guide. It was a conundrum she could not easily dismiss. Her break came after she and a few other Cohenites dared to meet the irascible Indian teacher, U.G. Krishnamurti (no relation to J. Krishnamurti). U.G. convinced them that they did not need a teacher. It was the nudge Tarlo needed to stall her ambivalence long enough to feel free of her son’s control."