From Spiritual Teacher to Cult Leader _ How I Created a Cult

When I heard him speak, it completely blew me out of the water and was more life-changing than any experience that I had ever had, ever. I went into this crazy cosmic state. I'd never experienced anything like it since I was 16 years old and I took LSD. Andrew was very charismatic, that really resonated with me and I moved into a group home with other students. Old people, young people, middle-aged people, there were people from all over the world it seemed. We gave up our volition, we gave up our complete trust to Andrew. When people tried to leave, we tried to prevent them from doing so. They've done 25 years. They dedicated their lives to it. They've been all celibate, shaved their heads. They've been doing millions of hours of meditation, prostrations, extraordinary acts of spiritual dedication and commitment. These guys are masters, and yet they're being treated like children. Anything that we did was bad, was our own fault. Anything that was good wasn't us doing. People were financially strapped because they were following him, they were supporting his dream, they were doing everything for him. Sometimes those responses were a spiritual extortion in the form of $10,000 checks. He went from waking everyone up and then behind the scenes he was impatient, hardcore, cussing, swearing, irreverent, he became a completely different person. Things had gotten much worse and were going in a trend that sounded really dangerous to me. Andrew had the doctor go to him and say Andrew is going to take you up on this finger amputation. I remember shaking with such intensity that you felt like your teeth were going to break. Her skin turned blue. Her jaw locked up. She couldn't move. All she could do was cling to the edge. They all agreed they needed to confront Andrew and that Andrew had to be stopped. This thing might fall apart. All of a sudden we started to feel this taste of freedom. Maybe this can all end. This, I'm out. I have been dealing with this bullshit for so many years. He was the guide to my deepest experiences and the person who caused the most pain. We've always been joking about being part of a cult, but no, we're really part of a cult. Like, like a cult cult. Like a check off every single box cult. He totally does revel in the sense of public humiliation. I would never wish this kind of experience on anyone. I'm going to send you to your shop. What is your role? I'm Andrew Cohen, and I'm a spiritual teacher. I never had confidence in myself for psychological reasons related to my early childhood, but I never had confidence that I could do anything particular well. But the only thing that I had confidence in is that I knew that once I made up my mind that that's what I wanted to do, is to become an enlightened person. I knew that it was going to happen. It's kind of the only thing in my life that I had deep confidence in. And, um... And so by the time I met my teacher, I'd been on the path for about, you know, eight years. But I was deadly serious. I really meant business. And at that particular point in my life, I'd given up everything. I had nothing to go back to, and I didn't want to have anything to go back to. And I was determined to succeed no matter what. My agenda when I met my teacher was to become enlightened. No, I was deadly serious. My guru H.W. Alpanji was an old man who was a direct disciple of the great Ramana Maharshi. He was very unknown. People didn't know about him, but he was extraordinary. Three weeks after meeting my teacher, you know, I underwent this quite dramatic metaphysical ordeal, this transformational process, and there was a kind of spiritual authority that was just present. He said to me explicitly and directly, I want you to accept responsibility for the work. I've taught you everything I have to teach. You know it all now. And And then he was very specific about what he said next, which is important considering how the whole story has unfolded. He said, I don't want you to rely on me for anything. I want you to stand on your own two feet. When Andrew met his teacher Punja, Punja told him he was a completely enlightened being, he would create a big revolution. Andrew believed that and I think Andrew concluded at that point that the thing to do was not to question. He couldn't say that, you know, he was the perfectly enlightened being because that breaks the rules, but he could never doubt it either. And he always had to act as though that were true. Never doubt. I know that gave him power. I mean, think about how much power that would give you if you just stopped doubting yourself, right? Look at Donald Trump, you know, don't doubt yourself. That's a powerful thing to do. And there's a lot of virtue to that because a lot of the doubts that you have are unfounded. So if you don't doubt yourself, you're going to create a momentum. But there's also a lot of danger in that. My teacher was one of the most enlightened people on the planet, is my conviction. His position was the very much traditional position of Advaita Vedanta, which is that the world is unreal, the world is a dream, the world is an illusion. The only thing that's real is consciousness. That which has no beginning and that which has no end and that which has never been born and that which is never going to die is the only thing that's real. There's nothing I could see that I'd done in this life to earn the wisdom that I suddenly had access to, or to earn the knowledge that suddenly was just flowing through me. It was all a miracle. So it was like the Buddha had come to town. Remember when Jesus walked through towns and these fishermen would leave their families, and that was it. And when the Buddha walked through town, the men would leave their wives and children to live the homeless life. That was the force and the energy that was coming through me, and that's how people were responding. And I was like, this is unbelievable. It was the ultimate thrill. But people were following me around. I wasn't telling people to follow me. And it wasn't really what I wanted. But people would follow me from place to place, from city to city. They just kept showing up. We were all thinking, this is what happened around the Buddha. This is what happened around Jesus. That's literally what it felt like. And I still think that that's what it feels like. We got involved in a Buddhist meditation practice for a few years. And a friend of mine told me there was this new teacher in town named Andrew Cohen. Andrew was very charismatic, he was very convincing, he was very passionate, he was very confident. And then what he was speaking about was, you know, realize your own absolute free condition that's here and now, it's your nature, you know, your nature is freedom, and that really resonated with me, and I believed that it was the sure sign that I was going to become You know, enlightened, you know. Amazing person. Within a couple of months, it led to the breakdown of my marriage. My wife at the time came a few times and didn't want to be involved, and I was determined to continue with what was happening in the talks with Andrew, the satsangs, as we called them. Our marriage ended, and I moved into a group home with other students, members of the sangha, as we called it. And so that was the beginning of a 13-year, you know, my 13-year involvement. People saw him, Andrew, as an enlightened being, as some people thought of him as the Buddha. And I'm not exaggerating in that. And so worshipful. Certainly, you know, respect is great, but it was more of someone who you wouldn't even consider questioning. And that's what he demanded. I didn't have a spiritual path until I met Andrew Cohen. So I was married. I had a teaching degree. I had two small children. I didn't have a spiritual path or a religious background. I had been seeing a homeopath for a while. And then he gave me the address of where Andrew was teaching. My first encounter with him was people, there were probably 17 people sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking at an empty chair and a long period of waiting, which I found really uncomfortable because I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what people, why people were waiting, why nobody was talking. Eventually, Andrew came in and my initial experience was of great discomfort and I saw him as being brash or arrogant or there was something there was something tough about him which I recognized at first sight and he then asked us all to sit quietly for a while and somewhere in there that took me into a spontaneous meditation which was my first experience of meditation of any sort and it was very extraordinary. And then with it, my relationship to the Andrew Kern sitting there also shifted. So it was a totally sort of life-changing moment. I left the room and for about six weeks, my experience was radically different. I remember a sort of lifting of anxiety, discomfort, fear, self-consciousness. It was all like it was just sort of lifted away. Sometimes talking about these spiritual experiences can sound a bit woo-woo to people, right? But I definitely had pretty quickly some kind of a powerful spiritual experience with Andrew Cohn that really did show me a sense of the immediacy, the immediate presence of awakening. I became quite convinced that Andrew Cohn had something very powerful to offer. I was still a bit intoxicated. It was a new life. I had had this big spiritual opening. So I was happy and a little high, perhaps. There was no promiscuous sex. There was, as far as I could tell, no drinking or drugs. The financial situation seemed pretty clean. It was all donation-based and so on and so forth. I was, you know, inspired by that. That's when I knew that whatever a guru was is what I obviously was because of the power. of the effect I was having on people. I was getting fed this, you're different, you're special, you're on a whole other level. And of course it was true. People would get jobs wherever we went to survive just so we could continue to stay together to live this thing. And that was part of what was so outrageous about what we were sharing. The Europeans came, they, for the most part, didn't have work. Some of them. There were the painters and the window washers, the guys were... I don't think the women started cleaning houses yet, but it was impressive. It was seriously impressive. This woman came with four kids, little. Everything revolved around him. At first, I thought it made sense to me in a certain way. I was his first personal assistant, so I spent a lot of time with him. He saw himself as God. I think that that really is the lens that you have to see it through. How can somebody start to eat before God comes? You can't, in his eyes, that's, and that's, it's true of absolutely everything. I think it's hard for people who never knew Andrew personally, who didn't spend time with him. You don't know if you just see him in the teachings and sometimes in a meeting or you don't know the degree of self-centeredness. From the very beginning when I became a guru, everything I needed was looked after and taken care of. I really didn't have to, I almost didn't have to do anything for myself. I was looked after and all my needs were taken care of. My wife looking after my clothes and taking care of organizing our trips and organizing our flight tickets to all my meals being prepared at people. were honored to be able to cook for me because they were cooking for the most important person in their life. So it gave them great joy, great satisfaction, and gave them a lot of pleasure to serve me. All of my needs were provided. Everybody loved me. Everybody was falling in love with me. People adored me. And I was being given an opportunity every night to share the ultimate secret of existence with earnest seekers. And through that sharing, we all went to heaven over and over and over again. And the joy and the ecstasy And the ecstasy. I felt like I was the luckiest person in the world, I wasn't oblivious to it, and we were all so lucky because we would look at what we were all experiencing. But I think it's dangerous, you know, for a young mind to be able to resist. It's okay for that all to be true, but buying into it or believing it or identifying with that can become a real problem. Originally my question was I was wondering about the people who, your students or your... Or maybe me. Well, I presume... Don't make that, don't presume anything. Especially about me. That's how people often get into trouble, where they come to spiritual teachers and they say, well, he or her, whoever it is, them, but everybody else. If you're interested in my teaching, I'm the person, I'm the one who, at least at this point in the stage of the game, you should be the most curious about. You shouldn't assume anything about me. I make my people be a total fake. You have no idea. There's no way of being sure. Maybe I'm making all this up. You wouldn't be the first to know. That's right. Thank you. As we were staying in California and the community was developing, and as a teacher, Andrew was more involved in our lives, he really wanted us to change. He really wanted us to be free and to find out where that freedom would take us. for much bigger purposes than what we could even imagine at the time. There was a sense of idealism that was driving the whole thing. We were really going to help the world. We were going to be a city on the hill, so to speak. We were going to show people how to live in harmony and peace and authenticity and that any sacrifice was justified. One of the beautiful things in that community, which I'll say is that, Which also was very attractive at the time. ...is that the community was old people, young people, middle-aged people. There were people from all over the world, it seemed. I mean, not, you know, it was mainly white people, but they were, you know, there were Europeans, Dutch, English, Italians, Germans. Many Europeans, some Australians, people from New Zealand, people from all over the world. I had never known people from all over the world. It soon became the case that most of my friends were not from the United States. And I think part of what drew me was that It seemed that we had access to a kind of spiritual realization that was universal, that cut across cultural boundaries, boundaries of age, language, background, that somehow we were possibly discovering the essence of mystical experience, the essence of Thank you. non-dual or mystical spirituality. That was not tied to any particular tradition or culture. And that seemed quite amazing to be exploring that together. I started going on some of the retreats. One teaching I remember was his, it doesn't matter what you think, it doesn't matter what you feel, all that matters is what you do. And I found that very profoundly interesting. And I felt that at the time it freed me, to a degree, from my own obsession. with my own mind and the contents of my own mind. He was trying to bring about the awakening of a new consciousness, a collection, a collective consciousness. This is something big. This was not just what... You have to understand, this is something that no one else was doing, according to him. This is like an evolutionary event. This is something that could literally change the course of humanity. I started to realize that everybody's got to do the work, no matter how powerful these experiences are. So a lot of them didn't really even know how to meditate outside of the context of sitting with me. So I started telling people that they needed to meditate and I started to eventually give people practices. There was a growing spiritual practice that kind of helped focus it in meditation. And then over the years he assigned other practices that were more prostrations or chanting, things like that. There was also fasting, having a shaved head. The purpose was to help the student face their own ego, face their own shadow. I think there were some positive results of that, but notice that I used the word some. It's interesting because looking back, there were signs of authoritarianism and overreaching and crossing personal boundaries right from the beginning. One of the first things I noticed is there were all these young. Vibrant, attractive people, and yet men and women, and they're all living in houses together and everything, and yet as far as I could see, there was maybe five relationships in a community of like a hundred people. There were almost no functional relationships in Andrew's teachings. The men and the women were living in different parts of the world who were married to each other, and they saw each other three times a year for a weekend. I didn't know any intact family that had children. And people were. had given up their careers, their families, their autonomy, and had come to Andrew without conditions. Sometimes in the name of idealism, people do horrible things, right? We had a paradigm of the guru. That once you make a relationship with a guru, and if that guru or spiritual teacher gives you some kind of transmission or realization or powerful spiritual experience, and you accept them as your teacher, then you're obligated to obey them. You're obligated to submit to them. That's part of that paradigm. Pretty quickly, Andrew recommended that I take celibacy vows. Shaved my head and everything. And unlike with some people, it wasn't because I had explicitly done anything wrong. I wasn't being punished. Just that by habit, I was very flirtatious. Then I was flirting and women were responding and it was creating ripples and it was uncomfortable. And Andrew didn't want that to be happening. So he took me out of commission, so to speak, right? I was just imitating Buddhist monks and Hindu monks. When they renounced the world, and renouncing the world was renouncing sex, sexuality for a period of time, I had people shave their heads. I wasn't aware of the fact, do you realize what you're doing in the middle of Western culture, in the middle of Northern California, you're going to look like a weird cult. So I didn't really even think about things like that. It's hard for me to imagine now. But it made it start to look more and more weird, more and more like the kind of people you want to stay away from. We'd make the comment, did everybody seem so happy here? Everybody seemed so friendly. And I think a lot of it was. party line. It's a hard thing to understand because we loved our community. We were really good. We were good together. We were friends. Loving friends. And people from that era of my life are still my friends. But I would have to say there is a growing fanaticism and a growing lockstep, closed-minded insistence on You know, this is the way you have to do it and this is how we live. Alienation from family and friends and even one's career and so it became increasingly a cult, increasingly isolated. A very troubling time for many of us I would say. He was shaking everything up in people and some of that was good and profound and a lot of it was not. That's what led to my Saying to my husband, you're on your own, this relationship is not good enough. I'd seen a potential for something greater and turned him away. Power, domination and control, which happens in most spiritual cults, was not what we were doing. I was convinced it had nothing to do with this. It had to do with grown individuals making free choices and living according to shared agreements that made perfect sense, that were very rational and that were spiritually inspired. But the fact is that the typical structures of power, domination, and control that happen in all spiritual cults and very intense spiritual groups were exactly what we were in the midst of. People weren't really allowed to have their own opinions. They weren't really allowed to make their own choices. I mean, it's awful to say, and it's painful for me to think back to all this, but it's just really true. He did a retreat, Andrew. In India, it's a two-week retreat, which is not all meditation. It's a combination of talks that Andrew would give and discussion groups and meditation. So it was a sort of full-spectrum type of retreat, and it blew my mind. I had been seeking for a long time, but I had never had that kind of deep spiritual experience. And it hit me like a ton of bricks on that first retreat. In a way it bonded me to him. It's kind of like an instant experience of, okay, well, this spiritual experience is wrapped up in this teacher, in this thing with this person. And that's the moment where one gives oneself over and says, Andrew, I'm ready. I've checked you out. I've checked out the teachings. I've checked out the world around you that you've created as an expression of who you are. The community is an expression of who Andrew is. And it all lines up for me. Andrew had a view that there's this perfect jewel called the teachings. Our job as students, the entire project was to really learn how the teachings work and to learn it so well that they replace our operating system in our own minds. It's really to become a living expression of these things called the teachings. A big part of our practice Which came from me originally was grouping together people who appeared to be at similar levels of capacity and development. Because I was trying to liberate the spiritual potential. There was a hierarchy that was established of people who were formal students. I was definitely trying to be a good student and prove myself within that system. And also trying to look as if I was happy and enjoying it because that was the expectation. There were weekly men's meetings, the men and the women met separately, where we talked about how we were with the teachings. And I was horrible at those. I spent most of those trying to make the effort to say something, trying to come up with something to say. Just kind of, you know, and maybe I'd manage a sentence or two. It was agonizing. There was this, you know, people taking positions and, you know, and criticizing other people in ways, you know, even I could see at the time were not helpful. A really important element of it was giving critical feedback and reflection to someone who the group didn't think was living up to those, you know, those qualities, those teaching principles. It could become real browbeating, real... Um, like interrogation of a suspect and people were put under enormous pressure and in my opinion it wasn't helpful at all. But we all participated in it and it had, it certainly had a kind of momentum of its own. It's a tall order to be under that kind of pressure in front of people who are interrogating you and probably challenging you on something that was kind of embarrassing or you didn't feel like it was your best quality probably. But it wasn't easy to be gracious in the presence of it and I think at times it was truly harmful, I think, what some people were subjected to. It was like a sort of ongoing group therapy session without any safety nets or structure. It was quite common for people to go into catastrophic states of survival, particularly in meetings. Please don't say anything. You obviously don't trust me. Everything that Andrew has proved to me for a year and a half. It's like, it's not. No, it's called spit. You spit. You spit in my face already a few times tonight. You have no idea what it is to be involved with a real teacher. You have no respect. You have no, there's no dignity in your behavior, Lynn. I really mean, you don't have any idea who you're dealing with here. The point is, it doesn't matter where you're at, Lynn. You take a stand. You're either with us or you're not. I don't care where you're at, how you feel, or what you think. I don't really care, but it doesn't matter. Jesus Christ, Lynne, what is the matter with you? So we're all sitting in a loft in meditation for, I don't know, eight or nine hours a day. Andrew comes in and he looks around for one woman and spots her. And he attacks her for being, I don't know, selfish and useless and uncommitted and pathetic. And it is a devastating, personal, vicious attack. I mean, she leaves, she leaves the retreat. None of us know where, you know, there's nobody, nobody is going to be taking care of her. So she basically just disappears. Andrew was always critical of me in particular, I think, because I think he certainly saw me as somebody who was addicted to the experience and was not particularly interested in the real evolution. I was asked to leave the house, which is a house, a very nice house of about six families, I think, at the time. And I remember that at first they said I could have a few days in order to find somewhere to live. And then the leader of the house noticed that I was looking relieved, and he was so outraged that I would be relieved to be leaving instead of mortified that I had to leave immediately. But I didn't have anywhere to live. The worst moment was finding myself homeless with my two kids. Looking back, as much as I was pulled to the vision that Andrew was presenting us with and that I felt in my own life had been a guiding thread, I was terrified. I was terrified of letting go of me in a very fundamental way. And so my journey through the years in California was as rocky as it could be. And my life was... tough because I had young kids and every time I crashed I'd have to leave a house and live on my own but I would have to leave a house where people were seriously engaging with the teachings in a way that I was proving I wasn't interested willing able stubborn whatever there's many ways to describe it and so my poor kids got slept around from house to house I think they can They can tell you they lived in 13 houses or something in Marin County while, during those years in California. It was hard for them, and I don't think I was very aware of how hard it was for them because I was more focused on how lucky they were to live in Andrew's world, which I still feel they were, but on a very practical and real level. When you're young, you like to have some roots, and even though the moves there weren't huge, Um, they were the ones carrying the boxes for their mom and again and again and again and they could feel that people didn't respect me and it bothered them and they didn't like it. One of the kids in the community counted that he had moved 26 times in a 10-year period. I didn't create stability or security that was adequate. Not security of place or even in parenting style. I'm aware of those stories of people who came home to find all their stuff on the sidewalk or they're not nice you know it wasn't respectful to another human being no matter what was going on in our context and you know it's a dark mark against the way we live together. There were threads of experiences which were liberating which was one of the reasons we stayed but that doesn't alter The context of something which was fundamentally very, very harmful for enormous numbers of people, justified by a lie ultimately. The lie being the belief that Andrew Cohen was without a shadow, that he was perfect. And there was also the guru system itself within which we're saying, this person represents my highest self. This person represents the best that I am and what I aspire to be, and surrender to that person is my way through. I can see it now is that it was a phenomenally destructive authoritarian regime. I made some grave mistakes in my teaching methodology and one was I had a one size fits all approach. I wanted and expected everybody who said yes to me to be willing to kind of make the highest leap. It wasn't, what's obvious to me now is that everybody doesn't have the same capacity nor does everybody have the same level of interest. It doesn't mean they don't care about the thing itself. And so this put way too much pressure on some people who weren't ready or prepared to meet it and I think some people suffered terribly as a result which I feel very badly about because that was really my fault I should have handled. I should have handled that situation very differently because really they came to me for guidance in the way I was seeing it then. Everything was too black and white, it was one size fits all and what we were doing was very challenging from the very beginning. It ended up leaving too many people in an impossible predicament. I feel very bad about that. What was happening then is, and this happens in a lot of spiritual groups and cults, people who are utterly committed to the group process and to the group work, To find their intimate personal choices become part of public scrutiny and from where the position I stand in now, way too much part of public scrutiny, but that was what we'd all surrender to. That's what we'd given up to. I mean, in retrospect, I understand that I was invested in seeing myself as without flaw, as being the perfect guru, as being stainless and sinless and shadowless. It was a part of what I actually used to teach. You know, being able to cast no reflection and very eloquent and poetic ways of speaking about a level of transparency that I thought I had realized and I thought that I was teaching from. I'm going to take questions, but all the questions are to be about me. Yes. Okay. I think your position in the spiritual world is in many ways unique, both in terms of your uncompromisingness, and also I think your ambition of what you want to accomplish, you know, the magnitude of what you hope to accomplish. Right. And, you know, I think that that's... Because of that, in people's eyes, you're a repository of both a lot of hope and a lot of fear. Right. That's right. All right. But I'm wondering what your own experience of that is. My own personal experience. Your own personal experience of that is, and also if you ever wonder why this mantle or burden has been placed on your shoulders in a certain way. I never wonder why me, I never wonder why me, first of all I'm doubtless, I'm doubtless about what I'm doing, and I'm doubtless about the truth of it, and because of that, there's something in me that's unwavering, no matter how I feel, so that's the bottom line, and that doesn't change. Andrew had very quickly decided he'd made a horrible mistake. Moving to Marin, and Marin was spiritually dead. It's not where it was happening from. We had to go back to the East Coast. That's where it could really happen. And so he was working very hard to find a center where we could all live together, where we wouldn't be fragmented in all these separate houses like we were here, which really wasn't very natural, but we could kind of live together as monks in a single building or a single property or something like that. It started with Andrew's enthusiasm that having an ashram where it would be our own home would lead to all of the great developments that we haven't been able to do so far. And he really wanted this to happen. He really, really wanted this to happen. People were very excited about it. There were other centers by that time in the world. There was a center in London, a center in Amsterdam, and other centers, but we didn't have our own in the very place where I lived, and it felt like we needed a mother center. We needed our own. Home, really. And because I was very much rejecting the spiritual, what I felt was a very superficial spiritual marketplace, superficial crass marketplace in California, I wanted to go back to the East Coast where I felt people were more real, more authentic. And so we began to look for a place on the East Coast, and eventually we found a property in western Massachusetts. If I had not gotten more involved with Andrew, if I had not... Asked to become a formal student of Andrew, my experience would have been very positive. It's only because of what happened afterwards that I don't. We purchased the Fox Hollow property for 2.8 million dollars. Fox Hollow was such an intense atmosphere. It was like being in a spiritual tornado because the pressure was so high. Andrew told a woman to come and slap me in the face. We did prostrations in the lake, plunging beneath the surface of the water, chanting, face everything and avoid nothing. She was afraid for her life. But she also told me that she believed that if she died, that could only be just. Because of her betrayal of Andrew. He made the sauna into this place of horror. He called that the Holocaust. They even would make these huge photos of my eyes, put them up on the ceiling. And then each day people would go down to see what was the latest addition to this Holocaust hell museum. It felt like Nazi Germany. I'm not kidding. I actually understand what happened in Nazi Germany because there was a collective collusion in denial. You're taking way too much ----. The Kool-Aid isn't tasting as good as it used to. This was actually orchestrated by one man in a form that looks exactly like a cult. It was a very lonely, lonely place. And it meant that you couldn't trust anyone. You couldn't trust anyone. You couldn't even trust your spouse. Because nothing, nothing could be just held between people. There were no secrets. And it backfired.