The Guru and The Shadow

Summary

Andrew Cohen, a humbled and repentant spiritual leader, shares his story of meeting the shadow of the Guru and discusses the future of Gurus in the post-post-modern age.

Abstract

The webpage content discusses the story of Andrew Cohen, a spiritual leader who admits his failures and blind spots while defending the Guru principle. Cohen has written a new book titled "The Shadow and the Bodhisattva" where he reflects on his experiences and the concept of the Guru in the modern world. The text explores the traditional role of the Guru in various religious communities and their ability to awaken their disciples. It also touches upon the prevalence of pseudo-gurus and the tyranny associated with them. The author shares their experience of conversing with Cohen and observes his transformation into a more humble and human figure. The article concludes by contemplating the existence of healthy Gurus in today's world and expressing hope for Cohen's future.

Bullet points

Andrew Cohen is a humbled and repentant spiritual leader who shares his story of meeting the shadow of the Guru.
Cohen has written a new book titled "The Shadow and the Bodhisattva" where he reflects on his experiences and the concept of the Guru.
The traditional role of the Guru is explored, highlighting their ability to awaken disciples in various religious communities.
The prevalence of pseudo-gurus and tyranny associated with them is discussed.
The author shares their experience of conversing with Cohen and observes his transformation into a more humble and human figure.
The article contemplates the existence of healthy Gurus in today's world and expresses hope for Cohen's future.

Reflections on my conversation with Andrew Cohen

Most Gurus wouldn’t admit to having started a cult. Imagine Osho apologising for creating his cult in Oregon, where his students practised actual bio-terrorism! Impossible to conceive of!

But Andrew Cohen is different — a humbled and repentant Guru, which may seem like a contradiction in terms. In any case, Cohen’s harrowing story of meeting the shadow of the Guru is compelling. And in our merciless world of cancel culture, I think it deserves to be told.

Cohen has written a new book entitled “The Shadow and the Bodhisattva” — it could have been called The shadow and the Guru. While he clearly admits his failures and blind spots, he also defends his achievements and the Guru principle in general. A word without great spiritual masters — and access to a vertical dimension — is a postmodern flatland. And Cohen asks the question: what does the Guru look like in the post-post-modern age?

A Guru is, to modern sensibilities, a sociopath, a sexual or emotional predator, a marketing genius and/or a demonic arch-manipulator. And today, the amount of fallen Gurus, especially due to sex and power abuse, is as numerous as grains of sand on the bottom of the Ganges. However, Cohen’s sins, unlike most disgraced Gurus, are not sexual but in a perceived ‘purity’.

Cohen tells us he ‘believed he had no shadow’; he had absolute confidence in his own revolutionary purity — he could do no wrong. Cohen created a worldwide enlightenment organisation and a new style of religiosity, which was the cutting-edge spiritual clique, ten years ago. But, to make a long story short, his community went down in flames, and so did he. His recent return has been a painful and hard-won process — a journey to hell and back — of becoming humble and acknowledging his mistakes.

In defence of the tradition where Cohen me his own guru, the traditional Indian Guru is no different from the Taoist sage, the Zen Roshi, the Jewish Tzadik, the Orthodox Starets, the Sufi Tariqa, the list goes on and on — these were the embodied spiritual leaders of various religious communities. They are characterised by their spiritual genius, wisdom, and uncanny ability to awaken their disciples, often in radical and unconventional ways. The Guru functioned to transmit confidence and spiritual enlightenment to the worthy disciple.

Then the guru became a four-letter word in the techno-utopian hippy culture of California, which created a norm of sociopathy and pseudo-gurus. Today there are gurus everywhere, promising love and light and transcendence, and more often than not, bland new-age platitudes or at worst Kool-aid. Andrew Cohen was different in that his students constituted an intelligentsia, and he was more clean-cut, earnest and direct than some of the other disgraced Gurus.

Gurus are pretty common in one way or another. If we look honestly, most people are involved in cults and gurus, secular and religious. Even a marriage can be a cult with a Guru — a cult of two, with one supreme authority. While most people don’t respect Gurus, they still bow to presidents, celebrities, experts, and ultimate authorities of all sorts. We want a daddy figure, and then we want to kill the daddy figure. Psychoanalysis 101.

Furthermore, it can be observed that reverence for the Guru or wise man is at an all-time low. And this is for a good reason. We have seen tyranny in all its forms — both aggressive and passive-aggressive — both the tyrannical father of fascism and the devouring mother of cancel culture — which are two sides of the same coin. Tyranny is characterised by its lack of mercy, forgiveness, love, and forbearance. And putting an ‘ideal’ above any person.

So for a while, Andrew Cohen was an idealistic Guru of cutting-edge spirituality — he was quite unapproachable from my point of view. I can relate to him much better today, and I enjoyed my conversation with him very much. He has a trembling, hesitant quality that he never had before, and he is infinitely more human. Of course, his mission remains unchanged; only his human suffering has brought him down to earth.

Is there a healthy kind of Guru today — or should we just throw away the word with all its notorious implications? I would say let’s look at real exemplary Gurus. The great tantric Gurus, for instance, were extremely earthy and embodied. They were, paradoxically, characterised by the inability to be seduced by convention or good opinion of any kind.

Gurus, in the positive sense, come in different forms and shapes and sizes and I’ve met a few in my wanderings. I’ve met a truly great Guru who could be mistaken as a redneck deplorable if you couldn’t see past the disguise. Some Gurus are cool, and some are dorky. Some are Jewish doctors, or mechanics, or poets; some are scientists, some are forest yogis, some are full of charisma, and some you wouldn’t recognise on the street. The ones that were the most deeply human and yet completely uncannily beyond the human norm at the same time were the ones that I love the best. There is a paradox at the centre of the Guru principle at its best, a dizzying combination of the high and the low.

I’m hoping that the future of Andrew Cohen will continue to go in that direction. I wish him and his students all the best of luck!

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