Andrew Cohen is an American visionary thinker committed to the transformation of human consciousness and culture. As a critic of the extreme individualism that characterizes much of contemporary spirituality, Cohen is awakening in people around the world a purpose for living that far transcends egoism: namely, a moral obligation to wholeheartedly participate in the evolution of consciousness itself.Cohen was born in New York City in 1955. Raised as an atheist, his life was irrevocably changed by a spontaneous revelation of "cosmic consciousness" at the age of sixteen. Haunted by the experience, Cohen eventually abandoned his dream of becoming a jazz drummer and, at the age of twenty-two, began seeking spiritual enlightenment. Moving from the study of martial arts to Kriya Yoga to Buddhism, Cohen's search finally came to an end in 1986 when he met the Indian master of Advaita Vedanta H.W.L. Poonja. It was shortly after this life-transforming encounter, and with the encouragement of his guru (with whom he later parted ways philosophically), that Cohen began to teach.
For those of you who are looking for guiding principles to support you in your breakthrough to a new field of awareness the link below could be interesting. It deals with what Cohen calls the five fundamental tenets of enlightenment: clarity of intention, the law of volitionality, facing everything and avoiding nothing, the truth of impersonality, and for the sake of the whole.
http://www.andrewcohen.org/teachings/path.asp
The material in this post is abridged from the biography of Andrew Cohen:
http://www.andrewcohen.org/andrew/biography.asp
8 comments:
A little further research into who Andrew Cohen is will reveal that he's a guru accused of some very serious abuses of his followers, including collecting money under duress, slapping and other violence, and false imprisonment. For the scoop, see a blog by some of his ex-students:
http://whatenlightenment.blogspot.com/
Yes I did come across something like that earlier but one never knows what to believe because well known people are often harrassed out of envy or competitivness. In any case as in Osho's case, for me it is not the person per se I am supporting but rather the message being communicated through his words. Look at it this way: we have the right to information and then it is up to an individual to decide what makes sense and what doesn't.
Dear Umma,
You say "it is up to an individual to decide what makes sense and what doesn't".
So does it make sense to you to quote all the good stuff, and none of the bad information concerning someone who stands accused by multiple eye witness accounts of being violent with his students, of using duress to extract large donations, who restrains their freedom of leaving, and who sends a student against his wishes to visit prostitutes for several weeks?
Yes I agree that we all have a right and a need for information - but please let's have the full story. If you had come across in your research multiple stories of abuse and bad faith on the part of Cohen, why not at least point this out in your original post, and as you say, then the reader is informed and can then make an informed opinion on the matter.
Thanks
Sofyas
Hi Uma,
Thanks for your post and sharing Andrew Cohen's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. The most challenging aspect to living the spiritual life is the transformation part. Intellectual understanding and even spiritual experience is not that difficult "to get" but to actually MANIFEST the revelation or understanding, to go against the momentum of your own and our collective cultural conditioning is something all together different.
In my experience, this is not something one can do on their own. Even with constant POSITIVE pressure from a teacher, in my case Andrew Cohen, the force of resistance to change, to live up to what I myself have understood and or experienced, is nothing less than Herculean. But when I'm willing to do it something new and utterly positive is created as a result that is recognized in consciousness. And if I resist the evolutionary pressure to change, the result is ALWAYS a feeling of victimization and being "hard done by."
The fascinating thing about all of this is that it isn't personal. It's scientific. But unless one has their attention on cosmic consciousness all one can see is the perspective of the ego which is always the victim and always hard done by.
I personally have watched my own perspective on and conclusions about objective events change from moment to moment based on where I put my attention--on my own thoughts, feelings and internal experience or on the field of consciousness that all of it is arising out of. It's literally two different worlds...Heaven or Hell.
It sounds simple; of course we all want to live in Heaven don't we? Well the fact of the matter is, it's a much bigger price to pay than most of us are prepared to pay...And few of us have the humility to bear the truth of our own self infatuation in the face of the Cosmic Unknown. So inevitably when through our own will, we choose hell over heaven, instead of facing the truth of our own choices, we have to blame it on someone else.
Again this isn't personal, it's scientific. It's the current state of human development and consciousness. And if we are willing to see the whole battle of these very real forces of good and evil, heaven and hell, within the universe, and ourselves as not separate from that, the possibility for real transformation and evolution, not just on a personal level, but a cosmic one is literally possible. But that's how big the picture really is and how high the stakes really are.
So in response to Sofyas comment about "telling the whole story"...this is the cosmic context that "the story" is occurring within. And from this perspective, everything really does look different. But it takes courage to take responsibility for it all...it's much easier to be the victim. I know...I've been there!
Thanks,
Hope
Sofyas, I am planning to put in a more detailed piece about what I think where we can include the website you mention in your comment (which incidentally is open to any of our interested readers to investigate as well!) I certainly dont believe in withholding information. It's just that I'm not interested in politicising things.
Uma
to Hope:
Your whole premise of the cosmic evolutionary context of your teacher's actions is that he is a perfect instrument for the divine or the universe. Because you have benefitted from some pressure put on you by Cohen, doesn't mean his methods are always beneficial or that his motives are alway the highest in each instance he applies pressure to students. I'm sorry, but that is a scary premise because he's human and can and does make mistakes with his students. It's very dangerous for students and the teacher to believe otherwise. Look at the extremity and severity of Cohen's actions. Yet he never admits that he's made any significant mistakes, despite all the testimony of ex-students.
Hi Teresa,
You wrote: "Your whole premise of the cosmic evolutionary context of your teacher's actions is that he is a perfect instrument for the divine or the universe."
Hmmm, that’s a strong conclusion to draw about what I wrote. Personally, I’ve never assumed or thought Andrew was perfect and neither has he. He talks about striving for perfection as the goal, but not one that will ever be attained because there is no end to development in an evolutionary process. In fact, I personally have heard him say he made a mistake about something or someone. So this simply isn’t true.
You wrote: "Because you have benefitted from some pressure put on you by Cohen, doesn't mean his methods are always beneficial or that his motives are alway the highest in each instance he applies pressure to students."
Look as a formal student of Cohen’s, I’ve chosen of my own free will to participate in this evolutionary experiment. We are literally living in a laboratory of conscious development as a collective of individuals interested in and committed to evolving consciousness and culture through our own conscious engagement with Cohen’s teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment. No one ALREADY knows how to do this. There are no road maps. In fact, we are creating the road maps through our individual and collective successes and failures (and there are a lot of them!).
In creating something new in any arena of life one usually encounters MANY more failures on the path to a successful breakthrough than anything else. And only those truly committed pioneers will stick it out through the stress and despair encountered to reach the goal. Most people simply give up. And it is from that defeated perspective that they interpret the whole journey (as many ex-students of Cohen have).
But from my own experience, the truth of the matter is that when I’m willing to see all of my own personal struggles and failures as part of the whole ecstatically positive cosmic process of evolution and choose to bear the forces of ego within myself (and others), in that moment of choice I literally become a vehicle for change in the world. That’s why CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. Because the context in which we are seeing our experience creates the perspective (or lens) through which we are interpreting it (and acting from). So the question becomes are we interpreting our experience and life itself from an impersonal cosmic perspective or a very personal egoic one?
And to read more about what is really happening TODAY with Andrew Cohen and his students in the context of Evolutionary Enlightenment read some of these new blogs: mine: http://hopeful.zaadz.com/blog, Terri’s: http://terri.zaadz.com/blog, Tom’s: http://soulplex.zaadz.com/blog, Will’s: http://will.zaadz.com/blog and Andrew Cohen’s: http://www.andrewcohen.org/blog/.
Happy New Year!
Hope
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