When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva

After his very public fall from grace in 2013, renowned spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen vanished from view and underwent a dark night of the soul. After years of intense introspection and soul-searching, Cohen shares his insights into the failure of his organisation EnlightenNext, including his own responsibility for its downfall, as well as a new vision for modern spirituality based on the wisdom of the lessons he learned.

The author details his spiritual initiation, his rapid rise to guruhood, the explosive growth of his spiritual community worldwide, and then--right at the height of its spiritual and creative emergence--its dramatic collapse, which left his students lost, bitter, angry, and confused. He shares his gripping spiritual odyssey from the heights of illumination, down into the existential ashes of failed aspirations, to the underworld of inner darkness, and back again into the light.

Building upon the lessons he learned, including the need to deal thoroughly with one’s own shadow, Cohen explains the necessity of the guru in spiritual practice, while also exposing the dysfunctions of the traditional guru-disciple model. He shares insights from his discussions with spiritual leaders, including Ken Wilber, Diane Musho Hamilton, Doshin Roshi, Jeffrey Kripal, and Patricia Albere, revealing how the issues he faced are profoundly relevant to the spiritual community as a whole. He also shares how his teachings have evolved and sheds light on the art of communicating beyond ego and unleashing the co-creative power of our shared collective intelligence--the key to initiating enlightened change in this world in crisis.

“Can one actually experience evolution? Or must it remain a scientific abstraction that can be mathematically modeled and genetically mapped but never really known as such? Moreover, and deeper still, do these Darwinian and genetic processes emerge from some deeper ground that is not in space and time at all? If so, how might these two levels of Becoming and Being be related, embraced, and practiced? Perhaps most importantly of all, are there moral pitfalls and problems awaiting us here? The present book is a most rare one--the story of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of a major modern guru by the guru himself. Andrew Cohen tells his story in these pages and explains both what went very, very right and very, very wrong. He takes responsibility for what happened and relates it to his own pride, authoritarianism, shaming techniques, and the traditional hierarchical role of the perfect mythical guru, but he also confesses those deeper evolutionary forces and absolute truths that have shone through his own Indian guru, himself as guru, and his gifted students all along. Here is an honest, open struggle through therapy, psychedelics, suffering, and further teaching--never perfect, never done, always frayed, and yet somehow also transcendent and true. We need this book. We need this Andrew Cohen. We need this evolution.”

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