Entries tagged as ‘Andrew Cohen’
Now that I have outlined some thoughts about Romanticism I want to go back and explore what I do think that Andrew Cohen might have gotten from William James. I do believe that Andrew Cohen picked up something from his reading of William James, but I don’t believe that you can reasonably place his work in the tradition of the Pragmatists. I do believe that there is an American spiritual lineage and an argument can be made for Cohen’s inclusion in it. That is the lineage of American Romanticism.
Romanticism as I have previously discussed has German and English roots. Although it is a loosely defined literary, philosophical and spiritual tradition, I do believe that there are three primary elements of American Romanticism that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, to William James’ philosophy and then to Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment. These elements are:
- A critique of scientific materialism and determinism
- The belief in natural creative forces beyond our ordinary awareness that can be embodied by a realized self
- The conviction that the development of the self is the highest human purpose
These fundamental principles can be seen strongly in the original American Romantics – the New England Transcendentalists. And although William James was a scientifically trained modernist, the ideas of Emerson, his godfather seemed in the end to have lodged themselves deep in the heart of James’ thinking as well. Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment are also characterized by these fundamental ideas.
My research into American philosophy began six years ago when I read some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings and found that his spiritual teachings bore an uncanny resemblance to the teachings of Andrew Cohen. As I read more of Emerson and then William James I saw that there was a thread that ran through their thinking that connected them to Andrew Cohen. I now recognize it as the line of American Romanticism. All three critiqued scientific materialism and determinism. All three believed in a creative reality beyond our ordinary awareness. And perhaps most importantly all three believed that we actually choose who we become and that self-development is the ultimate purpose of human life.
The following quotation from William James’ first and arguably his greatest work “The Principles of Psychology” convey his belief in the human ability to self create.
“The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man’s entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? — his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become.”
This sentiment would have been well received by Emerson and it is also reflected in these words from Andrew Cohen.
“…in the end, you are always choosing to be the person that you are. You are making conscious and unconscious choices in every moment that determine what actions you will take and what impact you will have on the world around you.”
And so I feel confident that at least in a broad and loose sense I can place Andrew Cohen in an American tradition of Romantic thinkers.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James
From my reading of William James I believe that his moral attitude, stemming from his insistence that ideas and actions are intimately connected, might be the most unique and significant thing that Andrew Cohen picked up from reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience” as a teenager in the midst of a spontaneous spiritual awakening. The entire attitude of James’ book reflects his belief that the value of a spiritual experience can only be determined by how it affects the way that we live. The experience and the affect it has on how we live are one in the same thing. This exact attitude, perhaps picked up from James years early, was to prove pivotal during a challenging turning point in Andrew Cohen’s career as a spiritual teacher.
Andrew Cohen’s life as a spiritual teacher began in 1986 with a re-awakening of the original spiritual experience that he had had years earlier. This event occurred during a brief conversation with Cohen’s own last spiritual teacher, the late H.W.L. Poonja. During this interchange Poonja made the simple statement “You don’t have to make any effort to be free.” And upon hearing these words something happen to Cohen that he describes as follows:
“His words penetrated very deeply. I turned and looked into the courtyard outside his (Poonja’s) room and inside myself all I saw was a river – in that instant I realized that I had always been free. I saw clearly that I could never have been other than free and that any idea or concept of bondage had always ever been and could only ever be completely illusory.”
Soon after Andrew Cohen found himself surround by a small group of people wanting to be his student, and his career as a spiritual teacher had launched. For some time his life seemed like a “fairy tale.” He was teaching in the Indian style and having a deep impact on many people that came to see him. He was teaching a variation of Advaita Vedanta as he had been taught by his teacher. Advaita Vedanta is a Hindu enlightenment teaching that revolves around the immediate recognition that our fundamental nature is already free. In this tradition only the false notion that we are not free keeps us from realizing our own perfect liberation here and now. Someone like Andrew Cohen who had such unwavering confidence and conviction in this reality was able to bring other people to the same profound awakening in themselves.
After some time however Cohen began to find that he was having philosophical difficulties with what he was teaching and these difficulties were occurring on moral grounds. In the view of traditional Advaita Vedanta ultimate reality is seen as absolute Unity, total Oneness and the experience of this “non-duality” is enlightenment. From the moment of this enlightenment the aspirant is taught that the world of multiplicity is an illusion and as long as they never doubt the reality of oneness nothing that happens in the illusory world matters at all.
Andrew Cohen began to teach differently; in fact his teaching took a decidedly Pragmatic turn. Cohen didn’t accept that the experience of enlightenment could be divorced from the effects of our actions in the world. In fact, like James, he believed that the ultimate value of our spiritual experience could only be measured in its positive impact on the way that we actually lived. His teaching became something other than the Advaita Vedanta that he had been taught. By the time I met Andrew Cohen in 1992 he was already emphasizing action over experience. In fact I remember on one of the first nights that I saw him teach he exclaimed “What you do is who you are! That is the realization of Enlightenment.” Now that is as Jamesian a statement of truth as you are likely ever to find.
This abrupt turn in Andrew Cohen’s teaching work eventually led to a different direction and placed him on a new path that was to lead over time to the development of what he now calls Evolutionary Enlightenment: a spiritual teaching that recognizes the liberation of the human spirit as a potential platform for profound active participation in an evolutionary process that can bring about a new stage in human consciousness.
I think though that to better understand the origins of Andew Cohen’s work (and also James for that matter) we have to turn our attention to Romanticism.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, William James
Andrew Cohen’s spiritual life began at the age of 16 when he experienced a spiritual experience spontaneously during a conversation with his mother. He later described that during this experience he was “completely overwhelmed and intoxicated by Love and struck by a sense of awe and wonder that was impossible to describe.” From that revelation he “suddenly knew without any doubt that there was no such thing as death and that life itself had no beginning and no end… life was intimately connected and inseparable. It became clear that there was no such thing as individuality separate from that one Self that was all of life. The glory and majesty in the cosmic unity that was revealing itself to me was completely overwhelming”
After this experience the young Andrew Cohen asked everyone he could about the experience that had occurred to him and no one he found seemed to be able to help him. In his autobiography Cohen states that at the time of his spontaneous spiritual awakening as a teenager he was reading his first spiritual book, William James’ classic of comparative religious study “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and it was only this book that gave him “some understanding” of his experience.
As I stated in my last post I don’t believe that James was the most directly influential force on the development of Andrew Cohen’s evolutionary philosophy, although I do think James might have had some influence on Cohen’s evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary philosophy is the explicit and implicit context of James’ work and the American character has certainly been predisposed to the idea of evolution for many reasons that we have explored here. Still, James’ Varieties of Religious Experience has minimal direct reference to evolution, so how might that book have influenced Andrew Cohen?
My desire to understand how the ideas of William James might have had shaped the development of Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment has been partially fueling my own interest in American Philosophy for the past few years. I have come to believe that there are several critical influences that Cohen could have received directly from James at a vulnerable moment in his spiritual life. One of these was certainly an exposure to the idea that spiritual awakening is part of a cosmic process of evolution. In particular Andrew Cohen may have been exposed to the idea of “cosmic consciousness” through James’ book.
Cosmic Consciousness is a term that was coined by the Canadian Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke in his 1901 book entitled Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In that book Bucke proposes that experiences of this type represent the next stage in human consciousness. He contends that the occurrence of them is increasing with time showing that this new possibility is becoming closer at hand.
In his book, Bucke describes this state of consciousness as follows.
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is… a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe…Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination… To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense… With these come, what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”
Bucke was an adventurous soul in more ways than one. As a young man he left the backwoods of Canada and spent 5 years living in and traveling through the wilderness of the American northwest. It became a death defying ordeal on several occasions and in the end resulted in the amputation of one of his feet completely and the other one partially due to frostbite.
Later after having finished his education to become a doctor Bucke claimed to have been brought to an experience of Cosmic Consciousness himself after reading poetry by the English Romantics and the American poet Walt Whitman. After that Bucke became what you could call a spiritual devotee of Whitman (although Whitman was reluctant about the role of spiritual teacher). He eventually met Whitman in person, spent a summer with the great poet and wrote Whitman’s biography.
Cohen’s description of his own experience certainly matches the description that Bucke provides and Cohen’s exposure to Bucke would have come through the reading of James at the time of his awakening. I wonder if reading James’ powerful book, full of rich and detailed descriptions of experiences of deep spiritual awakening, catalyzed Cohen’s experience as well as helped him to interpret it afterward.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Maurice Bucke, William James
Evolutionary Enlightenment is the spiritual teaching that has been developed by Andrew Cohen over more than two decades. That teaching has grown to include an evolutionary cosmology that very closely resembles that held collectively by the American Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Did Andrew Cohen get his evolutionary view from these great thinkers? Not directly.
Cohen, similar to Peirce, describes the evolution of the universe as beginning from a state of pure emptiness, perfect potentiality prior to manifestation. He goes on to outline a possibility for personal and cultural conscious evolution that is in many ways reminiscent of Peirce, James and Dewey. Cohen wasn’t aware of the work of Peirce or Dewey during the majority of the time that he was outlining and teaching Evolutionary Enlightenment. He was familiar with William James’ work on religious experience, but I don’t believe that Cohen’s evolutionary cosmology would have come from James, although reading James might have helped predispose him to such a perspective.
Cohen’s teaching has had some overt evolutionary perspective from the very start of his teaching career. “Self-realization is evolution” was a statement that he made in some of his earliest writing. One of Cohen’s early influences that did bring an evolutionary perspective to him was the Indian Spiritual Master, Gopi Krishna. Gopi Krishna was a Hindu teacher who taught the awakening of inner human energies known as Kundalini. Gopi Krishna’s teaching was unconventional in that he taught Kundalini in an evolutionary context and claimed that these energies were the energy of evolution. As a young seeker Andrew Cohen was very inspired by Gopi Krishna and his evolutionary view.
Gopi Krishna certainly planted an evolutionary seed in Andrew Cohen’s mind, and yet it is unlikely that he was the source of what was to become a cosmologically based evolutionary spirituality. The influences that brought that out in Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment came later in his teaching career in the form of three American teachers that all had a strong evolutionary perspective.
The first of these teachers was Michael Murphy. Murphy had been a disciple of the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual successor, The Mother. Aurobindo and the Mother taught in India and developed a profound Evolutionary Spirituality that is one of the most important precursors to the Evolutionary Spirituality that is growing in popularity today. Michael Murphy brought this evolutionary perspective back with him to the United States and, as one of the most prominent figures in the human potential movement, co-founded Esalen a Spiritual center in California known for its blend of Eastern and Western practices.
Another of Andrew Cohen’s evolutionary influences was cosmologist Brian Swimme. Swimme’s view of cosmic evolution was very influenced by the writings of Catholic Priest and Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin, like Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, is one of the most significant early pioneers of Evolutionary Spirituality. He is perhaps best known for his use of the phrase “Noosphere” to describe the thinking layer of the Earth. His description of the evolution of the cosmos towards some final “Omega Point” is a breathtaking vision of spiritual cosmic evolution.
The last, and perhaps most important, evolutionary influence on Andrew Cohen was his close association with Ken Wilber. It is with Ken Wilber that some connection to the evolutionary perspective of the American Pragmatists can be seen. Wilber was influenced in his work to some degree by all three of the founding Pragmatists, although he praises Charles Sanders Peirce most strongly. The evolutionary philosophy that Andrew Cohen created as part of his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment reflects many of the evolutionary ideas of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, and these ideas in turn reflect many of the ideas of the early Pragmatists.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Brian Swimme, Gopi Krishna, Ken Wilber, Kundalini, Michael Murphy, Sri Aurobindo, The Mother
October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment
Before continuing with our fascinating discussion I wanted, in the interest of transparency, to tell a little more about my interest in American Philosophy.
The last decades of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in progressive and evolution thinking in both academic as well as popular philosophy. The author Louis Menand in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club attributes this resurgence of progressive, forward-looking thought to the ending of the cold war and links it back to the classic American philosophy of . Today this line of thinking can be found in the increasingly popular literature of Evolutionary Spirituality. Some of the most prominent contemporary proponents of this philosophy are the recently deceased Pragmatismbut enormously influential Fr. Thomas Berry, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, the futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, the author Ken Wilber and my own spiritual mentor Andrew Cohen.
I first encountered Andrew Cohen in November of 1992 when I saw him speak in Cambridge,Massachusetts. At the time he was teaching a somewhat westernized version of an Eastern Enlightenment tradition called Advaita Vedanta. I left his talk intrigued, but honestly feeling that I had not understood anything of what he was saying. I was inspired enough, however, to pick up a copy of his book Enlightenment is Secret and my imagination was soon captivated by the message that I was reading in it. As I understood it, Cohen’s message was devastatingly simple and profound; if you truly want to be free there is nothing in this world that can stop you! What Cohen was pointing to was the deep sense that most of us have of being victimized by the experience of life. We feel burdened by our emotional and psychological experience and often see our ability to make choices as being severely limited by circumstances, social roles and responsibilities, and our personal inadequacies. This sense of limitation, according to Cohen, was an illusion. It was, in fact, a stance, a position that we were freely choosing to adopt in relationship to the complexity of human life. And because it was a position that we were choosing to take, we could just as easily stop choosing it. That was the mysterious key to liberating the human spirit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this notion revolved around one of the central themes that had developed through the history of American Philosophy; the question of freewill and creative potential.
After reading and rereading Cohen’s book I finally had the chance to see him speak again. This time I was determined to walk away with at least some understanding of what he was saying so I resolved to ask him a question about what I was thinking. “I believe what you are writing and speaking about is true.” I stated, “But, where do I find the faith to follow that path and know that everything is going to turn out OK?” I asked. His answer was as devastating simple and direct as his teaching. “Who says everything is going to turn out OK?” he questioned in response and then continued. “If you knew that everything was going to turn out OK you wouldn’t need any faith.” He went on to speak about the nature of risk and human life, but I had already gotten the answer to my question and although it wasn’t necessarily the answer that I had wanted it was the answer that I was looking for. Again, I had no way of knowing it, but my question about faith and Cohen’s implied instance that human life was a risk was also a central theme in American Philosophy. It was, in fact, the central question that propelled the entire career of America’s great psychologist philosopher William James.
In the year’s since my early encounter with Andrew Cohen his teaching has grown and developed enormously. What began as a plea for personal liberation became increasingly couched in an evolutionary philosophy that always considered the liberation of the individual in the context of their power to affect the development of our world. Again this line of thought is in many ways the central organizing notion that unifies the great tradition of American Philosophy. Over the past few years I have read and studied some of the historical development of American thought and have been continually strengthened to learn that the teaching that Andrew Cohen calls Evolutionary Enlightenment is very directly connected to the development of philosophy in America.
Two of the main roots of American Philosophy rushed into this nation during the period of colonization from two streams of thinking that had burst into being during the age of reason. One of these came directly from the scientific revolution of the European Enlightenment that was painting a picture of a world governed not by god, but by natural law. At the same time the Protestant Reformation was removing power from a church that it saw as an unnecessary obstacle to and direct access to the divine. These two lines of thought found their way into the American mind where they were shaped by the utopian ideals and challenges of colonization. The American mind began to take shape in the decades during and after the war for independence and finally came into its own during the cultural and spiritual movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists of Concord. The next generation of thinkers were the first American professional philosophers and they created the greatest original American contribution to world philosophy; Pragmatism.
Pragmatism was an evolutionary philosophy that flourished during the early decades of the 20th century as modernism peaked in American culture. After the great depression and two world wars the progressive spirit of modernisms was called into question by many and Pragmatism and the progressive spirit from which it came was temporarily submerged beneath the post-modernist philosophies and social movements of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The resurgence of interest in Evolutionary Spirituality today is perhaps a second look at the evolutionary thinking at the heart of American philosophy and a chance to recreate Pragmatism in light of the many lessons learned through the 20th Century.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Evolutionary Enlightenment, Ken Wilber, Pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism, William James
It is perhaps not surprising that all of the popular contemporary forms of evolutionary spirituality are engaged with the same ethical question that Peirce, James and Dewey attempted to answer. Does the reality of evolution affect the way human beings should live? This question arises naturally with the introduction of an evolutionary worldview that sees the universe as one continuous event, with human beings both growing out of that event and also affecting its further development. Many of those who are so enamored with doctrines of evolutionary spirituality might be surprised to find the ideas they cherish so closely mirrored in the evolutionary metaphysics conceived of by the early Pragmatists a century ago.
For instance, Ken Wilber in his writings describes the evolution of the interior and the exterior of the universe as always occurring simultaneously; where the interior of the universe is consciousness, and the exterior is the physical world of the senses. The universe evolves with the emergence of successive new forms, for example atoms become molecules, which become cells, which become organisms. With every newly emergent external form that arises in the universe Wilber insists that there must be a corresponding new depth of consciousness being plumbed. Wilber reintroduced the Greek spelling of Kosmos, using a “K” in his writings because he felt that the word “Cosmos,” as it was generally used, was limited to only the physical part of the universe, and left out the interior dimension of consciousness. Wilber’s conception of an integrated and unified Kosmos that evolves simultaneously internally and externally is clearly aligned with the work of the early Pragmatists. 19
Another example where this inner and outer continuity resurfaces in contemporary evolutionary spirituality is in Andrew Cohen’s conception of Evolutionary Enlightenment. Cohen initially upheld the unity of inner and outer in his teaching by insisting that what we believe to be true is always most clearly expressed through how we act. Cohen began his career teaching a traditional form of Eastern Spirituality, but broke with that tradition on pragmatic grounds. Cohen insisted, in opposition to his own teacher, the Indian sage HWL Poonja, that if the Eastern notion of enlightenment was to mean anything, it could not be merely an inner experience of peace, bliss and detachment. Enlightenment, whatever it was internally, had to manifest as enlightened action in the world. Cohen, like Emerson and James before him, held that the human ability to choose and act was the defining characteristic of being human. He describes the human being as a “choosing faculty,” and maintains that the choice to evolve is the best way to define goodness in an evolving universe; and that inertia is the best description of evil.
Barbara Marx Hubbard, whose book, Conscious Evolution, is one of the seminal works in the modern movement of evolutionary spirituality, also describes an integrated evolution towards greater unity reminiscent of the earlier works of Peirce, James and Dewey. Her vision of our evolutionary future involves a global merging of individual human beings into a greater societal whole. In her book she writes:
We see the earth herself as a whole system. We are being integrated into one interactive, interfeeling body by the same force of evolution that drew atom to atom and cell to cell. Every tendency in us toward greater wholeness, unity and connectedness is reinforced by nature’s tendency toward holism. Integration is inherent in the process of evolution.
If we examine the writings of other modern leaders in the evolutionary spirituality movement we will find many elements of classical American philosophy that have found new expressions. Why is it that the tradition of American Philosophy appears to garner so little recognition from those inspired by these ideas? One reason might be that the very utilitarian streak that characterizes American Philosophy also makes most Americans disinterested in philosophical history. I believe another reason for this lack of recognition has to do with the cultural shifts that removed Pragmatism from the public eye in the middle decades of the twentieth century. After this dormant period, the philosophy of Pragmatism began to resurface in academic circles in the 1980s and it seems that the progressive mood that led to this resurgence of academic interest in Pragmatism might also be generating the surge of popular interest in evolutionary spirituality today.
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Tagged: Andrew Cohen, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ken Wilber, Pragmatism
