William Yenner - "American Guru" Excerpts and an Update

American Guru, by William Yenner, tells the story of his time with the abusive guru, Andrew Cohen. Here is an update on the book (including some excerpts) and some thoughts from Yenner on his fellow Cohen ex-pats who have mounted a full-throated defense of their guru.

Thus appears at Integral World.

William Yenner is an engineer by training and a seeker by nature. He has studied meditation in India, lived in a Buddhist retreat center, and spent time in a commune. In this contribution specifically written for Integral World he reflects on the publication of his book American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal and Healing-former students of Andrew Cohen speak out and its reception so far. See also his website www.americanguru.net for excerpts, comments, news and reviews.

See also David Lane's review of "American Guru"

American Guru

Excerpts and an Update

William Yenner

• Introduction
  
  
• Excerpt from Chapter 3
  The Dark Side of Enlightenment
  
  
• Excerpt from Chapter 4
  The Currency of Forgiveness
  
  
• Excerpt from Chapter 11
  A Misplaced Gratitude
  
  
• Excerpt from Chapter 15
  Connecting the Dots
  

Introduction

This is, after all, a tragic situation for all concerned, including Andrew Cohen himself.

In the weeks since American Guru was published, I have been amazed by the volume and intensity of the public outpouring of defenses and rationalizations of Andrew Cohen's actions by fellow former students who lived through exactly the same experiences that I did. The two principal forums for these responses have been amazon.com and a website, guru-talk.com, created by another former student, Pete Bampton, as part of a concerted effort to rebut the implications of what I and my co-authors have presented in our book. The narrative unvaryingly articulated in these responses is that none of the events described in American Guru can be properly understood outside of a "context" that I, William Yenner, once subscribed to but have now conveniently forgotten. And more typically than not, this argument has been accompanied by "informed" attacks on my character, presumably also sanctioned by this rarefied or "missing" context, and further justified by the "nastiness" and "distortion" of my presentation of the facts, for which it is apparent that I need to be shamed, isolated and ostracized—all the familiar pedagogical techniques of the EnlightenNext community.

At the same time, most of the offended writers do not hesitate to turn this vicious "context" loose on their own supposed failings or inadequacies as a means of explaining why they were forced to terminate their participation in Andrew Cohen's revolutionary experiment in "evolution beyond ego." It seems that even after a period of years outside of Cohen's physical orbit, his influence remains a powerful factor in their assessment of their own motivations and general unworthiness as spiritual practitioners, and though my sympathy is neither solicited nor appreciated, I can't help but extend it. This is, after all, a tragic situation for all concerned, including Andrew Cohen himself, and Cohen's hovering presence in the thought processes and the very language of his still-devoted ex-students is impossible to ignore. It seems to have occurred neither to Cohen nor to his defenders that their responses—from the earliest emergence of allegations of questionable practices in the EnlightenNext community to those aired more recently in my book—have never reflected the humble self-assurance or basic decency one expects to encounter in individuals who have supposedly ventured "beyond ego."

Clearly, what these responses reflect is something other than enlightened understanding, and it is precisely this "something other than" that American Guru, however clumsily or offensively, is an attempt to uncover. I ask: How is it that these people as a group have thoroughly internalized Cohen's vocabulary and conceptual framework without any apparent benefit to their own independence or self-esteem? Of what productive use is it to a human being to introject a paradigm according to which he or she has "failed," while the one who invented it can only claim "victory" by appealing to a "higher context" that justifies anything he does? Is it inadmissible to speculate that this kind of indoctrination may be a form of cultic manipulation? I know that according to these former disciples my articulation of such questions is supposed to be a reflection of my own ego-driven delusion, but still—the facts are the facts, and no one, however passionately they defend Cohen or attack me, has so far convincingly denied them. And now, more heartbreaking than even the facts themselves, comes this unselfconscious demonstration of what it really means to be a student of Andrew Cohen, and to have imbibed his version of "consciousness and culture": submit to his control long enough and you may never again be able to believe in your own goodness, integrity or intrinsic self-worth; even after leaving, the best you can hope for is to join the ranks of the "failures," and you may never truly recover your footing again. (Bampton is thus far the first and only of such former students to suggest that the "stigma of having 'failed'" is inapplicable to those who left after the historic "surge of consciousness" of July 30, 2001—a rationalization yet to be articulated by the other, far more self-critical ex-disciples posting on his site.)

Interestingly, however, in the same period during which Andrew Cohen's reputation has been so stoutly defended by guru-talk.com's cadre of "fallen" or "unsuccessful" students, the integral community has also seen the emergence of another of Cohen's former disciples, Craig Hamilton, as a self-proclaimed "teacher" in his own right. As I implied in a footnote of American Guru, no one who knows Andrew Cohen is likely to believe he was pleased by Hamilton's surreptitious departure from Foxhollow, much less by Hamilton's own subsequent (and well-planned?) ascent to integral guruhood—but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Cohen ought to be feeling swell. As a "successful" former student, Hamilton has outdone his fellow alumni not only in his wholesale assimilation of Cohen's "teaching model" but in his astute—some might say opportunistic—emulation of his teacher's tried-and-true PR strategy of using public dialogues with famous "luminaries" as a means of enhancing his own reputation. That Hamilton was able to cultivate such relationships while selflessly "serving" as his guru's senior editor and ambassador to high-level interfaith conferences is, at least from my point of view, yet another manifestation of Cohen's less than inspiring human legacy.

In fairness, it remains to be seen whether Hamilton's "Integral Enlightenment" is a "teaching" that lives up to the great expectations he has worked so hard to inspire, or whether the key question resolved by Hamilton's heady formula—so perfectly in sync with the latest advances in cyberspace voice transmission—is how to capitalize (literally) on the hungry idealism of his audience. Of course it doesn't hurt to be convinced of the depth of one's insight and the soundness of one's ideology; yet experience has repeatedly shown that, from a potential follower's point of view, such uninhibited confidence is all the more reason to be wary. Proclamations and endorsements of a teacher's exalted status, of the depths of his wisdom, of the emergence of his voice as one that "needs to be heard," all feed the idealistic temptation to regard him as one who embodies the "advances in consciousness" most essential to the resolution of the pressing crises of our time.

At such moments, it is worth remembering that the list of spiritual leaders who have "fallen on their faces"—often with catastrophic results for their followers—is a long one indeed. In his foreword to American Guru, Stephen Batchelor suggests that things might have turned out far differently if, at the time of Andrew Cohen's "emergence" as a teacher, those who felt they had reason to question his motivations or qualifications had spoken out more forcefully. This is all the more reason to scrutinize Hamilton's account of his many years "working side by side" with Andrew Cohen; yet despite his acknowledged involvement in "trying to guide and work with [Cohen's] global body of students," Hamilton remains curiously silent on the issue of the abuses that took place under his nose (and mine) at Cohen's Foxhollow ashram. As Daniel Shaw has observed, "It would be wonderful to see...honesty and courage demonstrated by...leaders of the New Age movement. Instead of rationalizing and minimizing the extent of [Cohen's] abuses, instead of ignoring and dismissing the experiences of former followers, wouldn't it be wonderful if people like Ken Wilber, Genpo Roshi, Rupert Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra, Bernie Glassman, etc., could have the courage and the integrity to pay attention, to take up the cause of Cohen's former members, and confront Cohen publicly?” As an up-and-coming "spiritual luminary"—not to mention one who was actually there! —Craig Hamilton certainly deserves to have his name added to that list. The dangers of a "free pass" based on charisma and inspiring intentions having been borne out by history, I feel it ought to be perceived as reasonable, rather than gratuitously destructive, to raise questions about anyone representing himself as a "pioneer" of a cutting-edge spiritual discipline.

While Hamilton evaluates himself rather differently than most of his fellow former students—insinuating references to his own "awakening" into his “free preview,” to a virtual audience of nearly 700 spiritual seekers, of a 9-week "teleseminar" for which he is charging each participant $285—he shares with guru-talk.com's contributors the same abiding nostalgia for a community very different from the one I remember (a community in which abuses such as those documented in American Guru took place over a period of two decades) as well as their retrospectively rose-colored notions about the significance of what happened there. To hear Hamilton tell it:

"I lived in this vibrant global spiritual community for thirteen years with the guidance of my spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, and spent a great deal of that time really working side by side with him in trying to sort of guide and work with this global body of students who were all giving one-hundred percent of their lives to trying to evolve consciousness. And in this laboratory, which like any laboratory is kind of a specialized environment [that] allows you to see things you would never see outside...I was afforded an opportunity to see some things about the human condition that are not normally apparent....

"In this evolutionary laboratory, we had a unique opportunity...because, honestly, the conditions could not have been better. Our life was entirely organized to support our individual and collective evolution.... We spent several hours every day engaging in vibrant, powerful spiritual practice. We had direct and extraordinary spiritual guidance coming into our personal lives on a regular basis.... There I was, producing a cutting-edge spiritual magazine and spiritual events, and my entire life was consumed in this, and all this was happening in a breathtakingly beautiful place, eating healthy gourmet vegetarian food, three meals a day. It's a bit of a spiritual utopian environment in a sense, and initially I want to acknowledge that it seemed to be everything that could possibly be required to catalyze everyone's radical evolution. And the inner life of everybody there was elevated to a profound level of well-being—I mean, in this environment everybody was living in a non-ordinary state of consciousness most of the time; there was a sort of enlightened Buddha-field...that permeated the place....

"For most of us, we would say, 'If I had all that, there would no longer be anything in my way.' And so what I want to share is what we found in this environment, because you see, when all the external obstacles to change have been removed, the stark truth reveals itself, which is that when it comes to our higher self-evolution, our authentic spiritual transformation, most of us don't want to change all that much.... We don't really want to change our deep habits of being, our deep habits of relating to life.... Very few of us honestly want to let go of the familiar ways of being and behaving that we are accustomed to. And why? Because we don't want to get outside our comfort zone. There is a deep, primitive, ingrained impulse toward stasis, toward preserving the status quo....

"I was perhaps a more extreme case...than most people," Hamilton continues, "because I came into this with an incredibly strong self-image...as a deeply sincere, committed spiritual seeker.... I was a big spiritual ego, you could say.... My teacher told me early on...'Craig, you've developed a lot of capacities that have served you well in your life...but you're going to have to let go of all of that if you're going to really succeed in this work, in really waking up spiritually'...and I could feel how much I really didn't want to let go of everything I thought myself to be, and all the familiar ways of being that did allow me to navigate life.... It was years of hard work and intense soul-level trials, I would say, before things really started to break open...and this was universal for everybody in this environment, so I think what we really had to confront was that most of us self-proclaimed evolutionaries who really see ourselves as wanting to evolve consciousness through ourselves...deep down were still largely being run by some very ancient, not particularly evolutionary software....

"If we want to really engage in a process of spiritual awakening, if we want to be truly awakened human beings, there's something that we need to pay a lot more attention to than our personal conditioning, our personal psychic make-up, and that is our collective conditioning.... We have been playing a game of survival, a very primitive game in which self-preservation is really the primary drive, and we just have to get that that is all still deeply wired into us, and so changing it is a really big deal.... We have to get that it's really this deeper, primitive, survival-oriented that is what's really our obstacle...."

These are noble sentiments, all the more poignant in light of the events described in American Guru: A Story of Love, Betrayal and Healing, from which I have excerpted, below, sections of Chapters 3, 4, 11 and 15.

Read more . . .
Or follow the links at the top of the article to see excerpts from other chapters.

Tags: Integral, gurus, Spirituality, ethics, abuse, Andrew Cohen, William Yenner, American Guru, Excerpts and an Update, Integral World, Craig Hamilton, abusive gurus, EnlightenNext