Last week, on October 15th, Tom Steininger and I held a follow up conversation to our October 5th Beyond Awakening dialogue, “My Guru Experiment: Twenty Years with Andrew Cohen”. We discussed what did and didn’t happen during that first dialogue and went into a deeper exploration of the intricate paradoxes surrounding the evolutionary experiments in the community of students of Andrew Cohen.
Tom requested this follow up because he wanted to share more of his own story and offer a more personal account of his experience during his twenty years with Andrew.
In addition to telling us how he had been served by the white-hot intense demands that produced some extraordinary advancements in consciousness, he also said there were four times when he had decided to leave Andrew and EnlightenNext. He described two of those occasions. He decided to leave once because of what he perceived as “inhuman” ways of being with each other in the community in Cologne, and another time during the Iraq war, when he was repulsed what he felt was a kind of group-think in support of the war from Andrew and the Foxhollow community.
Some people had asked for an explanation of the vague word “abuse” so I explained that Andrew’s own awakening had been dramatic and radical, and that it had given him a sense of zeal for transcendence, and for the unqualified commitment it required, and that he had trusted this absolutely. So he became impatient, even scornful with whatever stood in the way. And he saw that powerful insights and breakthroughs were sometimes catalyzed by intense demands. So he leaned in to create transformational crises. He even articulated a principle of his work that spiritual progress is served by “evolutionary tension” which he embraced to the point of a general failure of empathy for human limitations, even gradual time-anchored change. When people resisted, Andrew almost always ignored their anguish and turned up the heat.
And at times he took this to extremes. This occurred especially during one particular period leading up to July 30, 2001, when a collective crisis had led to a collective breakthrough among many students, expressed by a “volcanic surge of spiritual illumination” among a whole group that many regard as one of the crowning achievements of his teaching innovations regarding collective consciousness and evolutionary spirituality.
Andrew stood unmoving for his demands, and he got results, but he didn’t listen to people’s cries of pain. Many students left (and many stayed) after seemingly cruel, cultic, even bizarre forms of pressure. And since then, students have shared their stories in blogs and books, and have charged him with a long list of misbehaviors, including physical abuse, financial exploitation, interference with family and personal relationships, violation of sexual and reproductive rights and privacy, emotional and psychological abuse and ostracizing students, and denying and discouraging students’ freedom to leave the community.
Tom acknowledged all this, and he admitted he agreed with some of this critique, even though he is still committed to the utopian purposes behind all the extremes.
Importantly, he clarified that, counter-intuitively, the “abuse” was not what had caused the collapse of the worldwide EnlightenNext community. In his view, the collapse had been caused because of the key way in which Andrew’s work had succeeded. His senior students had awakened together enough to become his peers, but he was unable to receive feedback and submit to the higher collective intersubjective awakening he had helped to catalyze. And the leadership couldn’t come together to wrest control of EnlightenNext from him and correct for his mistakes.
We also considered an important question about the fact that Andrew contrasted the authentic self with the ego in a binary, black and white, “either or” fashion. Was this false dichotomy at the root of the harm, abuse, and dehumanization of people? Acknowledging that this was indeed a key factor, Tom also pointed out that it was also a source of some of the tremendous value in the EnlightenNext experiment — the transformative power of directly facing the challenge to choose real changes. I agreed with the key points made by both the questioner and Tom, and suggested that perhaps there’s a greater “both/and” that includes both sides of this enduring polarity.
We managed to address a number of the comments and questions that came in subsequent to the first dialogue. There has been quite a lot of passion, energy, and thoughtful exchange generated around both dialogues.
And during our discussion, comments continued to arrrive. I felt it was important to address comments that Tom seemed emotionally removed from the ways in which he had supported something that was hurting people. People seemed to be wanting to hear a more embodied, emotional response, not just an intellectual acknowledgement of mistakes. I tried to make it more vivid for Tom by saying “If there is a real trail of blood and you have some of it on your hands, I think some people are wanting to see some tears.”
Tom responded honestly, acknowledging his typological difficulty in speaking emotionally on a public call— and he spoke about how he feels implicated in the patterns of abuse, while at the same time feeling a necessity to stand strongly in his commitment to the positive evolutionary, utopian core that EnlightenNext’s work was about.
I also thought it important to expose my own process of self-questioning with regard to Andrew. In the past, I’ve publicly defended Andrew’s students and community because I believed (and still do) that there was tremendous psycho-spiritual capital invested that became coherent around him, and that his students became a fierce and important cultural force, a counterforce to the apathy, mediocrity, abstraction, and other limiting attitudes and assumptions that pervade conventional culture (the “Consensus Trance”) and even much of spiritual and integral culture. And yet it is clear to me now that there was a more critical failure of compassion on the part of Andrew and the whole EnlightenNext community than I had realized. And it must be understood, processed, and purified.
A great deal can be learned and taken forward from the EnlightenNext experiment, but that progress requires going beyond both rigid ideals and deconstructive cynicism. It ultimately requires love more than anything else, love from a fully broken heart, perhaps in a way that Andrew hasn’t yet been able to completely embody. Still, as the experiment has shown, the bottom line is love. In my opinion, that love has to extend to everyone who cares about evolutionary spirituality and collective awakening, to everyone who gave their lives and energy to EnlightenNext, to everyone who feels damaged, and even to Andrew himself.
And yet, it was important for me to acknowledge that I can’t claim to have clean hands, that my defense of Andrew’s evolutionary innovations may have influenced some individuals to get into or remain in a dynamic with unhealthy dimensions that might have adversely impacted them. And I confessed that I’ve been taking that to heart.
Another listener’s question we addressed was around which aspects of Tom’s experience with Andrew had been retained, and which had been discarded. Tom stated that the core of what he retains is the principle of higher intersubjectivity. Dialogue is at the core of his current work, including collaboration with individuals committed to dharmas and practices that differ from his own. But he’s still valuing the need to aspire to a “utopian” ideal, as EnlightenNext aspired to that “Higher We” in order to most fully advance and develop, all the while holding respectful space for the world as it is, and people as they are.
Believe it or not, there was much, much more. This blog post just touches on a few highlights of the conversation.
I hope you’ll listen to the recording to access the depth of this discussion and consider this contribution to what is really just one step in an extended process of healing and ever deepening levels of understanding.
Announcement
Last Sunday, I was joined by Tom Steininger for a conversation entitled “My Guru Experiment: Twenty Years with Andrew Cohen.” It was an edgy and timely dialogue, coming a year after the collapse of the global EnlightenNext network, and while Andrew Cohen is still on sabbatical to understand the lessons of that collapse and reckon with his shortcomings as a teacher and leader.
I confess that I felt a bit nervous about this dialogue. There is such fierce polarization and passion surrounding any discussion of Andrew Cohen, with both appreciators and critics arrayed in a wide spectrum of sometimes fierce positions. Some former students say their lives have been wonderfully transformed by their work with Andrew. Thousands of people, including many who were never Andrew’s students, feel like their understanding of spirituality has deepened and grown, aided by the distinctions he’s made, particularly his innovations regarding evolutionary spirituality and collective enlightenment. And there are many who are outraged by his harsh methods and lack of care for his students’ humanity, some who say that they’ve been traumatized and victimized by their experiences with him. But for many reasons, I felt it was important to wade into these waters and open up the beginnings of what I think is an important, larger conversation.
I knew that it would be hard to adequately presence the many paradoxes and nuances at play, and that the limitations of that attempt would, on one end, provoke accusations of being an apologist and enabling abuse; or on the other end, be a cop out, and carelessly devalue everything associated with Andrew Cohen and his teaching, essentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So I didn’t feel ready until now. But I finally felt ready to plunge ahead.
And so did Tom Steininger. He is uniquely capable of walking the knife’s edge of this important discussion. He was a longtime close and senior student of Andrew’s, the leader of EnlightenNext Germany, and the senior editor of the German-language version of Cohen’s magazine, What Is Enlightenment and then EnlightenNext. He is also a thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated original thinker who is currently in his own process of a deep, self-critical inquiry, holding the tension of having experienced and witnessed profound and authentic spiritual growth and innovation with Andrew, while examining ways in which he may have colluded in the damaging mistakes that Andrew, and the culture around him, made. Not only that, he’s been a key leader in forging several trans-lineage evolutionary spiritual collaboratives that beautifully transcend cultism.
What does Tom mean by his “Guru Experiment”? During our dialogue, he explained that in part he wanted to experiment by finding someone who could challenge him to realize something absolute, something truly far beyond himself, beyond his “arrogance.” He felt that there was something authentic and real about Andrew, who was radical in a very unusual way.
Tom’s experiment involved making a choice to trust someone else more than he trusted himself and to surrender his own perspectives to something he sensed was higher. And it worked. His surrender created enough leverage to pull him beyond insidiously subtle ego dynamics. When the guru relationship works well, it can be a powerful function, completely based on trust.
And yet such trust can also be dangerous.
When I wrote my blog post “Are You in a Cult?” I suggested that everyone in the whole world is in a cult, subject to a whole matrix of limiting attitudes and assumptions that researcher Charles Tart described as “the Consensus Trance.” To break from this trance, I think there needs to be room for bold, challenging experiments, such as surrender to a guru. And yet there’s a serious potential for people to be damaged by pathological dynamics when they’ve surrendered their own will to that of a guru.
I recounted that I’d heard that Andrew had told his students to “strangle your inner child in its crib”, which exemplifies the kind of harshness that I believe contributed to the breakdown of Enlightenment Next. Tom acknowledged this, and yet pointed out that there are enlightened masters who have used harsh methods in their teaching, but have come from the right place.
He believes the issue is the motivation for that harshness. According to Tom, there were things that Andrew did that did not come from the right place; and this at least partially accounts for the controversies and harm that have resulted.
Tom suggested that in order to understand Andrew’s strengths and failings, you have to consider both his theoretical orientation and his personal motivations. Like Ken Wilber and Don Beck, Andrew launched a powerful critique of postmodern relativism. But Tom says this was done in flawed way in that it was just an antithesis to postmodern relativism, without integrating important postmodern values. In addition, on many occasions Andrew demonstrated a profound lack of caring for the personal souls of his students, and that was damaging. This, according to Tom, is part of what precipitated the crisis at EnlightenNext.
But the critiques of Andrew are only half the story. The headline is that Tom continues to feel that much of what he had dedicated his life to as a student of Andrew Cohen was valid, and thus he has learned from the lessons of the crisis, but he and many colleagues in the German-speaking world have continued to work on behalf of the evolution of consciousness and culture, in just the ways their “Guru Experiment” set in motion. These higher values remain primary in his life and I deeply respect this higher commitment.
Ultimately, Tom feels that his “experiment” was really about coming together with other human beings to go beyond ego, to collectively realize a Higher We. This intention is still central to Tom’s life and work. I pointed out that this is almost the opposite of the dharma that matured him into what he is doing now, He is bringing people together in ways that are profoundly respectful of everyone concerned. Instead of brutally confronting the ego, Tom is creating compassionate, collaborative containers.
Tom agrees. He observes something important — that the evolutionary unfolding of Oneness, what Andrew would call “Eros”, is an inherently dialogical process. Thus the true evolutionary integral process is not a philosophy or a theory, but a conversation. He says, “the unfolding of consciousness is always bigger than my voice, and what we create only has value as a contribution to something bigger than ourselves. The classic mistake of any cult is thinking ‘we are it.’”
I pointed out that Andrew Cohen is on his own journey, and I wish him well. To what degree he will metabolize a deep transformation of his heart remains to be seen. On one hand, he’s shown tremendous clarity, courage, intelligence and self-transcending capacity in the past. On the other, this crisis asks something tremendously difficult and entirely different.
We had only begun our conversation when we ran out of time. So our conversation was alive, edgy, and yet incomplete. When we talked afterwards, Tom asked me, and I agreed, to hold a follow-up conversation “about the conversation” which we’ve scheduled for October 15th. For details, click here.
But this first public conversation has opened up a larger, very thoughtful dialogue. And there’s more; our conversation ranged more widely than I can recount in this space. I invite you to listen to the full recording here