Andrew Cohen's Integrity of Soul

At long last, my spiritual teacher and editor-in-chief, Andrew Cohen, has written a response to the small but noisy group of ex-students who have been trying for the past couple of years to tear him down.  He'd been advised by a number of people to ignore them and not provide more fuel for their raging egos to feed upon, but it's come to a point where not responding is beginning to lend their tired rantings more weight than they justly deserve. 

Why are these ex-students so upset?  Well, to put it very bluntly, because they probably didn't care enough about the evolution of human consciousness to give what it takes to get over themselves.  In my six-plus years as a student of Andrew's, I've seen it happen numerous times.  People hit a wall in themselves, in their own spiritual and psychological development, and they either muster up the kind of integrity, strength of character, and sheer love and heart it takes to transcend ego--or they don't.  Some admit that it's simply more than they'd anticipated (despite Andrew's constant insistence that there couldn't be anything more challenging in life than pursuing ego death), and either step down or decide to leave and maybe pursue other, less demanding spiritual paths, amicably.  And others can't bear to admit their own resistance to surrendering their attachment to ego and leave in a bitter rage.  It's probably intense and hard to fathom without witnessing such things yourself, no doubt. But this particular terrain always has been intense. Jesus was nailed to a cross for it.  Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for it (three times over).  And countless others have paid the price, in the most extreme ways, for daring to take their love of God and Truth to its logical conclusion: nonduality, or the seamless merging of the soul in its mysterious Source.  And the only obstacle to nonduality is, and always has been, the illusory, mind-made, separate sense of self: the ego.

What's more, in Andrew's teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, enlightened, nondual freedom is just the basis for a renewed, impassioned, wholehearted engagement with Life in all its ceaselessly evolving glory.  Dying to the ego is just the beginning, in other words, for an ongoing process of conscious evolution, both in the individual and collectively with others, in order to transform (not transcend) the world and remodel it in the eternal image of our true Self.  And the fact is, not everyone is sincerely interested enough in that radical possibility to literally give everything for it, no matter what it takes.

Personally, ever since I realized at age 16 that life wasn't even worth living if I didn't know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the whole point of it all is, or what we're even doing here, I've never doubted for more than brief flickers that there is nothing else to live for than the wholehearted pursuit of that sacred Truth.  That's not to say that I haven't been continually challenged as a student of Andrew, that I haven't come against walls in myself and even, momentarily, contemplated leaving and going back to the unconscious, aimless life I'd been so desperate to escape in the first place--but the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment tells you exactly what to do in moments like these. You ask yourself, "Do I want to be Free more than anything else?" and then, after facing everything and taking your entire life into account, in the biggest possible context, you make your choice...

I remember very clearly about four years ago, when one of Andrew's top senior students--who'd been by Andrew's side for maybe 11 or 12 years, and was becoming a teacher of Evolutionary Enlightenment himself--met with four of us young, twentysomething students, who had just recently moved to the main EnlightenNext center in Lenox, Mass.  At one point during the meeting, which was a weekly check-in to see how things were going, he looked me in the eye and said, "This is about cultivating integrity of soul."  That struck me deeply, and I knew it was true; the pursuit of that level of spiritual integrity is exactly what motivated me in my search for a teacher.  It's why I very consciously chose Andrew Cohen, out of all other candidates out there.  His integrity, contrary to what his detractors would have one believe, is rock solid.  Even the fact that he criticized other teachers and gurus, in his books, for not upholding the same standard of spiritual and ethical purity that they asked for in their own students was always impressive to me, because you can't do that unless you've got some damn reliable integrity yourself to back it up--at least not with any degree of sanity, rationality, or honesty.  And Andrew Cohen, to my discerning eye (after all, I was trying to find a spiritual master to offer the evolution of my very soul to), had all of those qualities in spades.

So it's always seemed ironic (and humbling) that the aforementioned senior student who devoted himself to Andrew for over a decade, and knew full well what was required to succeed--and keep evolving--in this extraordinary spiritual context, would declare that it's about "integrity of soul" and then sell his own soul short when Andrew demanded that he start living that same kind of integrity himself.  He didn't just leave, with self-respect, dignity, and humility in the face of the true extent and nature of the ego; no, he split and then became one of Andrew's most vocal, raging detractors on the internet.  And he joined the ranks of those who, at the very least, continue to help the evolution of consciousness by serving as public examples of what not to aspire toward in life...

For everyone out there who's read some of his (and others') bitter, cynical diatribes, please consider: You're only getting from those individuals one half (at most) of a very big and complex picture.  And for what it's worth, in my life as a student of Andrew Cohen and as an editor of his magazine, What Is Enlightenment?, I spend hours with him, almost every single day, and I've seen him in just about every possible context and situation conceivable--and he's never done anything, nor have I ever heard of him doing anything (including all the extremely taken-out-of-context "claims" of impropriety his detractors espouse), that has caused me to doubt, even one bit, the adamantine integrity of soul that I sensed in him when I first had the karmic fortune to stumble upon his work so many years ago.  Yes, it's hard for us postmodern relativists to believe that such a thing is even possible--especially with so little evidence from other spiritual authorities to support it--but that's precisely what makes him the rare, remarkable human being he is. 

As Andrew has often observed: "Authenticity is even more powerful than enlightened consciousness."

Thanks for reading.

Tom

p.s. Check out Andrew's "Declaration of Integrity" here to get the real story...