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FOREWOOD

WHY I PUBLISHED SPIRITUAL TRANSMISSION

Spiritual transmission is the deeply personal mechanism that enlivens and empowers the relationship between spiritual teachers and students; as such, it is one of the most important aspects of the spiritual path. And yet it is also one of the most overlooked subjects of contemporary spiritual literature. When I say overlooked, I mean that objective treatments of the subject are rare. There are indeed many books that espouse the need for such relationships, but in the main, they are sectarian in nature, coming from specific traditions and recommending specific gurus and teachings.

Part of the subject’s importance lies in the sheer numbers of people whose lives have been impacted powerfully by such relationships. Starting in the 1960s, the West experienced an explosion of spiritual teachers and teachings, coming primarily from the East which was complemented by a groundswell of development in Western teachings and teachers borrowing heavily from Eastern religions. As far as I know, there has never been a scientific study attempting to quantify just how many people became involved in spiritual teachings of this ilk. But, based on the sheer number of spiritual teachers and the fact that many of them have had thousands of students, there is good reason to believe that they have numbered in the millions.

Relationships between students and their spiritual teachers were, and are, by and large, lifelong relationships. Once forged, they are difficult to break completely. Ask students of spiritual teachers just how significant those relationships are to them, and more often than not, you will hear that their relationship to their teacher is the most important and primary relationship in their life. And yet, in hindsight, it’s become apparent that many of the relationships that flourished in the 1960s and beyond wound up ending badly, often mired in controversy over issues of abuse of power.

My own life was similarly impacted. I became a devoted spiritual seeker during my first year in college. I read voluminously on the subject and went to see and listen to every spiritual teacher I could find. Spiritual seeking became the pivot around which the rest of my life revolved. I came to believe that spiritual enlightenment and liberation was the answer of answers—that all of the many forms of suffering from which I desperately wished to escape could be alleviated with the attainment of this singular goal. Indeed, that seemed to be the promise of such teachings—at least to my young mind.

At the age of twenty-two, I married an emotionally unbalanced woman. I thought I could help her—particularly through the spiritual teachings in which I was then immersed. She became increasingly mentally ill and refused all psychotherapy, believing it to be inferior and even adverse to spiritual teachings. She herself became intensely involved with the teaching that only love was real, and that the material world in which we lived was an illusion based on our refusal to love unconditionally. This belief, combined with her illness, which was later diagnosed as borderline personality disorder exacerbated by alcoholism, created suffering upon suffering for both of us. And yet, the more deeply she sank into her illness, the more strongly I held to my belief that the answer lay in spiritual attainment.

Because of her belief in the unreality of the material world, my wife increasingly refrained from gainful employment. In this way, she became ever more dependent upon me for the basic demands of life. So while her illness in many ways deepened my commitment to the spiritual path, it also limited my ability to make the kind of commitments often called for in spiritual life. At the same time, I began to fear for her life if I were to divorce her. Suicide had entered our lexicon. I felt stuck on the horns of a moral dilemma that I lacked the wherewithal to resolve by myself. What kept me going for many years were the spiritual experiences often delivered at the hands of powerful teachers. And yet, I couldn’t help but notice that while these experiences helped me to cope with a difficult marriage, they seemed unable to touch the deeper roots of the suffering in which my wife and I were trapped.

My last teacher was Andrew Cohen. I met him in 1993 while on a bookselling trip to Portland, Oregon. He was a compelling teacher. Not only was he able to transmit higher states of awareness (simply by talking), but he was also surrounded by highly intelligent students from all around the world, many of whom had given up their previous lives, marriages and careers to be with him. What became apparent over a period of time was that the real action was to be found by living in his community, which would have meant leaving my wife, since she was unwilling to devote herself to Andrew’s teaching in that way. Eventually we worked out an arrangement whereby we were living separately, and so, slowly but surely, I was able to make my way into the communal living that had become the still unpublished cornerstone of Andrew’s teaching.

By 1999, I was living in a communal house near Boston, where Andrew had opened a new center. But aspects of communal living began to grate on me. I came to feel that we students, and our “enlightenment,” were secondary to what I perceived as “empire building” by Andrew. I was disturbed by the amount of labor we were required to put into the new center, all of which was unpaid, and I was distressed by the way many of the students mimicked the way Andrew talked and dressed. This struck me as a sign of immaturity and proof of the absence of independent thought, which seemed inimical to spiritual enlightenment as I had come to understand it.

A few months in, I came down with the flu and stayed in bed for about a week recovering. During that time, I read Mariana Caplan’s first edition of Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment. Even though Andrew Cohen was put forth in the book as an exemplar of someone who had “gone all the way,” the book brought to the surface many of the doubts that had been brewing within me. So I wrote Andrew a letter expressing my doubts, hoping that he would address them directly. Instead, he had a senior student phone me at the house where I was living to deliver a message over the loudspeaker so that my housemates could hear what was said. The gist of the message was that my doubts were an expression of ego, and that I could either get with the program and put those doubts aside, or leave—that very night. I felt viscerally that my ego was on the chopping block, so to speak, but I also couldn’t help but feel that were my ego to be decimated it would simply be replaced by an even bigger ego—Andrew’s. I decided to keep my own ego intact and, indeed, left that night, explaining to my housemates that I couldn’t abide by a spiritual system that didn’t allow for doubts.

Leaving a spiritual teacher and teaching is a painful thing to do, perhaps even more so when the student has been abused in some way by the teacher. In the case of Andrew’s community, I had seen that when other students left, they often became an object of scorn for Andrew and the other students. But the real pain comes from the fact that once a spiritual teaching is deeply absorbed by the student, it becomes the filter through which the student understands their life experience. Sans the interpretive filter of the teaching, you no longer have a way to make sense of your experience. What becomes necessary is some new way to parse your experience with the teaching and the teacher—and your own life.

For me, that new way came via the editing of a book submitted to my then-new book publishing company from a former student of Andrew’s—André van der Braak, who had written a memoir of his years as Andrew’s student. André’s book became Enlightenment Blues: My Years with an American Guru. This was André’s first book, and it was written in his second language, since he is Dutch, so the editorial process went on for months, during which time I not only had the opportunity to straighten out some of André’s English, but my own mind as well. What we (or at least I in my editing) aimed for with the book was to deliver a homeopathic dose of anger to other struggling students of Andrew Cohen—just enough to liberate them, but not so much as to put them off the spiritual path altogether.

While working on Enlightenment Blues, I began to research widely into other spiritual communities with prominent and charismatic teachers or gurus and to find out what had happened to students who left. There were a lot of them! Many of these former students had established online groups where they could support each other; explore what had happened to them. I became aware of how endemic this kind of spiritual circumstance was—and yet, within the field of spiritual literature, it was only described in either personal spiritual memoirs or frankly negative treatises on gurus, the best known of which at that time was Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad’s The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power.

Some thirteen years passed between my publishing of Enlightenment Blues and Amir Friemann approaching me with the manuscript that you now hold in your hands, Spiritual Transmission. What is notable about Amir is that even though he also went through a painful breakup with his own spiritual teacher—also Andrew Cohen—he never soured on the notion and necessity of the spiritual guru. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to have soured on Andrew. Instead, Amir recognizes and focuses on the genuine need for spiritual transmission by awakened teachers, which he sets out to better understand by spending countless hours interviewing spiritual teachers and their students. Amir brings a truly open mind and considerable skill as an interviewer to some of the most significant spiritual questions—and teachers—of our time.

Spiritual Transmission contains never-before-published interviews with well-known spiritual teachers and thinkers, which are enhanced by the reflections of their own students, as well as by Amir’s own extensive experience as a student and seeker. He refrains from hasty conclusions, sometimes to the point where I questioned (to myself) whether he valued the question over the answer. But if, at times, that frustrated me as an editor/publisher who wanted to make a book, Amir always struck me as a devoted journalist of the spirit. While I feel sure this book will not contain his last thoughts on the subject, I do consider it a definitive work on the subject, due in no small measure to Ken Wilber’s extraordinary afterword which contains the seeds of a new understanding of spiritual transmission that is sorely needed today. Through the combination of Amir’s thoughts and interviews and Ken Wilber’s afterword, I have come to a better understanding of the trajectory of my own life, particularly the limits, as well as the promise, of the spiritual relationship to the guru, and why gurus—and our own lives with them—so often go astray. It is my hope that you, the reader, like me, will find useful guidance here.

–PAUL COHEN

PUBLISHER, MONKFISH BOOK PUBLISHING COMPANY

RHINEBECK, NEW YORK

JUNE 2018