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
In the past, we have viewed expert and ignorant in whatever sphere—teacher and student, priest and supplicant, coach and athlete, parent and child—as discrete entities with a specific causal relationship. Experts were active and powerful—their task to lead; their polar components, non-experts, filled a passive role—their task to follow. I would suggest that the truth has always been larger and more interesting than this. But we couldn’t know it, for it would have made reality too big, greater than our capacity to handle it.
–CHARLES M. JOHNSTON, NECESSARY WISDOM: MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW CULTURAL MATURITY
THE WHAT, WHY AND HOW OF THIS BOOK
Nearly seven years after I broke off my twenty-one-year relationship with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen—by far the most significant, intense, challenging and rewarding relationship of my adult life—I decided to create this book. It has since taken me hundreds of hours of interviews with teachers and students, who helped me cast light on the spiritual teacher-student relationship; that was followed by perhaps thousands of hours of reading, editing, contemplation and writing. I’m pleased to present you with my findings, humble though they may be, regarding the paradoxical nature of that relationship. I write in the hope that we, students and teachers alike, can begin to come to better grips with the meaning of our relationship with each other.
The interviews and stories you are about to read are deeply personal in nature. Such is the subject matter itself. The questions I have sought to elucidate in this book are the very ones that I myself have struggled with all these years.
JULY 1987
JERUSALEM
In the summer of 1987, I was twenty-nine years old, finishing up my fifth year of medical studies at the Hadassah Medical School and my fourth year of Chinese medicine studies at a private school. And I was in total turmoil about my life. The turmoil had to do with Andrew Cohen.
He was an ordinary-looking Jewish-American kid from New York, which is how I fondly thought of him, even though he was only three years my elder. My experience of sitting every evening with Andrew and a small group of people in a friend’s living room in Jerusalem—listening to him answer people’s questions about enlightenment, liberation, timelessness and the absolute reality with utter simplicity and directness, as well as having my own personal revelatory conversations with him—was catalyzing a tectonic shift in me.
I had caught the bug of seeking spiritual liberation when I was sixteen, but I had always been suspicious and even hostile toward the idea of becoming the student of any spiritual teacher. That seemed to me a sure recipe for spiritual slavery—the very opposite of what I was looking for. Although I had lived for two years with a delightfully free-spirited Zen master in Japan, who I spoke of as my teacher, and I intended to go back to meditate with him after I completed my studies, I never considered him as my Teacher. But there I was, contemplating the possibility that in Andrew I had met my Teacher, and it was driving me crazy. How could I know if he was my true Teacher? How could anyone know? What did Teacher even mean?
On a warm July morning, the upheaval I was experiencing grew so intense that once I arrived at the hospital, I couldn’t imagine joining my team at the surgery department. We were to study anesthesia that day. But I needed to figure out my relationship with Andrew first, I told myself, and without further delay. My life depended on it. But how could I know? My mind seemed completely useless in the face of my questions. I walked back and forth on the hospital lawn in an agitated state for what felt like hours. Then, in despair I thought: I should try to have a nap; maybe the answer would come to me in my sleep. I lay down under a tree, but the heat, the flies and my agitation made it a hopeless attempt. “I give up,” I thought. “I might as well join my team and use the rest of the day for studying.” I started to get up, but just as I was halfway to standing I was catapulted into a state of unitive consciousness.
I have no idea how long I was in that state, for I had no perception of “I” nor of time. It seems to me that if somebody had been standing next to me with a stopwatch, they would have measured only a few seconds, but I was in a “dimension” or an “existential state” in which a fraction of a second and eternity are one and the same. I cannot use the words “experience” or “knowing” for it, because “experience” and
