Andrew Cohen gets excited
Jan. 19th, 2006 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iamomI've long been a fan of selected teachings from Andrew Cohen. I say "selected" because quite a bit of his stuff doesn't resonate with me. I used to subscribe to his magazine, but after awhile I found him tiresome. I dug certain aspects of the lengthy dialogues he'd have with Ken Wilber, but the rest of it started to leave me cold.
Some folks might not know that his first career choice was a jazz drummer, and he spent some time studying at Boston's Berklee College of Music. At some point in his studies, I believe he had a bit of a spiritual/existential crisis which eventually led to his self-professed awakening, and he abandoned music for spiritual teaching. He has picked up his drumsticks again though, and my mom recently sent me this link on Cohen's site describing a recent gig they had in Boston. From there, I checked out the band's website, Unfulfilled Desires, and listened to a few more clips. The genre is jazz-rock fusion, and while that kind of music can be good if done well, I don't really dig what his band does. Nor do I think that Cohen has any real groove on the drums.
The point of this entry, however, is to point out this November 2005 post in Cohen's blog about some breakthroughs that some of his students have recently experienced. I point it out here because I found it kind of conceited in tone. He appears to take full credit for the breakthroughs himself, and then when I read further, I just didn't find myself inspired by the accounts. From his blog entry:
Some folks might not know that his first career choice was a jazz drummer, and he spent some time studying at Boston's Berklee College of Music. At some point in his studies, I believe he had a bit of a spiritual/existential crisis which eventually led to his self-professed awakening, and he abandoned music for spiritual teaching. He has picked up his drumsticks again though, and my mom recently sent me this link on Cohen's site describing a recent gig they had in Boston. From there, I checked out the band's website, Unfulfilled Desires, and listened to a few more clips. The genre is jazz-rock fusion, and while that kind of music can be good if done well, I don't really dig what his band does. Nor do I think that Cohen has any real groove on the drums.
The point of this entry, however, is to point out this November 2005 post in Cohen's blog about some breakthroughs that some of his students have recently experienced. I point it out here because I found it kind of conceited in tone. He appears to take full credit for the breakthroughs himself, and then when I read further, I just didn't find myself inspired by the accounts. From his blog entry:
A monumental shift has occurred in my teaching work over the last few weeks. Many of my students (after nearly twenty years of effort on my part) have finally, as crazy as it sounds, started to directly experience and express the very essence of what this teaching points to—a goal that until now I’ve seen only in the eye of my own mind and in rare, temporary bursts of collective enlightened consciousness.Maybe I'm just being jaded. And I have to admit that Cohen himself has lost most benefit of the doubt from me since I read a tell-all account of how awful it is to work in Cohen's inner circle from a former Cohen insider named Andre van der Braak. (Van der Braak's book is called Enlightenment Blues (amazon.com | amazon.ca), and it describes in detail what a megalomaniac Cohen is in his teaching and management approach.) Anyway, I hope everything is hunky-dory with that whole scene in Lenox, but I remained a bit unconvinced.
[...]
This culminated last weekend in a large gathering of my students from around the world at the EnlightenNext Center, in which for the first time I publicly declared this victory. In a full day of talks and dialogues, I described the evolution and development of my own teaching and philosophy over the last twenty years—what it has taken to get to this point, the level of integrity and authenticity demanded in the individual soul to sustain it, the deep structures of the human ego that I’ve unearthed in my battle to bring this into being, and the thrilling implications for our individual and collective future. Above and beyond anything else, what I tried to make clear was that this is not the end—it is only the beginning . . .
