Will Andrew Cohen never go away? Sure will...

Interesting how a mean-spirited attack on Andrew Cohen (by me) in response to a mildly positive blog-posting by someone I’ve never heard of, can lead back to a re-evaluation of my time with Andrew and the five years since I left.

What was positive about the experience?

Without doubt the discipline (which I’ve mostly discarded in my spiritual life at least, but then my lack of spiritual discipline has made some relaxed space in which God can do His work).

Without doubt the experience of enlightened communication. When human beings come together with their focus and intent on what can be created between and beyond them something incredible can happen. EC as taught by Chris Parrish in the context of EE, talks of communication beyond ego, which in EE is synonymous with beyond the personal. Yet, I’ve come in my re-Christianized perspective, to believe that the image in which we are created is personal (God is personal) and the purpose and goal of spiritual growth is the divinization of the personal and the creation of the interpersonal. Andrew put a stop to EC because it was a successful practice that created an authentic free space in which he had no authority. So what would happen if EC was practiced with the engagement of the personal, not with the goal of going beyond ego, but of transforming (divinizing) the personal? What happened with EC at its most powerful, I described as a kind of Pentecost. Spirit manifest between people. How might that be brought to bear in personal transformation.

What was negative?

The absolute denial of the personal.

The absolute denial of doubt and the obsession with certainty. The systematic suppression of anything that even remotely contradicted Andrew. Interesting that a teaching that is supposed to be about creating the new is so obsessive about squashing doubt in its practitioners. (Grapple with your doubt, be ferocious with your doubt. Pull everything apart, look through the cracks, under the blankets, The abuse.

The abuse.

The abuse. You haven’t lived till you see a bunch of otherwise mature and intelligent people fall over themselves trying to please a guru who might turn on them at any time. The guru’s love is ALWAYS conditional on the student earning it. All that waiting about, in hallways, in streets, in stairwells, with groups of students waiting for the precious audience with the guru. And Andrew was ALWAYS late for meetings with his students, and always the threat that it MIGHT NOT HAPPEN. The obsessive assumption of blame for ANY FAILURE by the student. A teacher with so many failed students might be thought not to be a great teacher, but in this teaching (like in all good cults) the teacher is perfect and the students self-flagellating.

The lies – the private ridicule of Deepak Chopra – the public adulation. Amy Edelstein’s denial that Andrew ever asked students to prostrate themselves to his picture, when not one minute of practice was ever done without his blessing. I could go on, but hardly seems worthwhile.

On balance not much to say for Andrew. Hard to believe that after 25 years as absolute ruler that he's really changing his ways. The senior students are the same people who grappled their way to the top in the years of abuse. They've learned everything they know from Andrew, what are they going to do different?

I would still love to engage in EC again, but can't imagine doing it with Andrew's students (even if they were allowed to). But God's there every day now, not dependent on the will of the guru. With God there every day, there's less need to seek after those peak experiences (though they are awfully fun). Religion needs to evolve, and the evolution is in progress, just how do we engage with God in that evolution?

Coin flipping for eternity

Essentially flipped a coin (the universal decision maker) to see if God is God, creator of heaven on Earth. Seems like a totally absurd way to decide anything, but this conviction I have that Christ is the center, no matter how absurd it may feel at times to the rational mind, is after all a conviction that persists.

If God is, and if the God who exists is Cause and Creator, then there must be a way of understanding the world as it actually is and how it came to be this way that explains why God lets it be this way. And if God is powerless over how the world actually is, if he just put the universe in motion and has to hope with the rest of us that things will turn out OK, then what use is there in having a God?

If God is, and the world is the way that it actually is because humanity is in rebellion against God, then God’s sovereignty is preserved. The eschatological hope of unmediated relationship with God, includes the eschatological promise that all that is not in relationship with God will be done away with. That is the hope that justice will be done.

And if God is, how do we know about him? General vs special revelation all over again. General revelation leads you to the point at which you can say that there is some kind of order to the universe, some apparent intelligence or design. Or it might lead you to the point at which you say that the order in the universe is self-generating, and the tendency to order must be balanced with the tendency to entropy. All a meaningless ordering and disordering of essentially empty matter and energy. God’s just a reassuring emotional coping mechanism for living beings in the middle of all this.

General revelation essentially leads us nowhere fast. In pre-modern times it led categorically to belief, in modern times to atheism, in post-modern times to uncertainty. So if general revelation can never be the deciding factor are we left with the promise of continuing post-modern discomfort with certainty, a perpetual unresolved openness? If we turn instead to special revelation, we’re faced with Babel, that fundamental confusion of competing voices that’s been with humanity since the dawn of language.

Do we just need to pick a religion and go with it? Keep in mind that our particular religion (determined by culture, birth, accidents all) is just one possible? Or having picked, believe that God put us down in our particular place so that we could have all the accidents of birth etc lead us to the True Religion? How do you explain the Mormons? How do you get to Truth through special revelation? Can religion ever be anything more than an endless stream of questions?

So coin flipping for an answer from God to prove his existence. Coin flipping for eternity. 4 yeses out of 7 to prove that God is God and Jesus is his only Son. Out of 7 because we're in the middle of Stanley Cup playoffs. 4 because 3 in a row could be just chance (but let's face it 1,000,000 in a row could be just chance, just a very very small chance). What number between 3 and infinity would satisfy? Absurd and serious at the same time. From here on in, just bracket the question of is it True? Just live as if I have my answer and enjoy the comfort of salvation.