Europe behind and jump into the unknown in Amherst, burning up together in the fire of enlightenment.
2
YOU HAVE TO CHANGE
Everybody wants to be enlightened but nobody wants to change.
-Andrew Cohen
2.1. Amherst
Amherst, the small town in the middle of Massachusetts, home to five colleges including Smith, Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts, is also an area where many western Buddhists live. Nearby, in the small town of Barre, is the prominent Insight Meditation Society where famous American Buddhist teachers such as Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield teach. Andrew has been invited to teach in Amherst by a middle-aged American named Jacob who had been a Buddhist monk in Asia for six years, and had been meditating for twenty when he met Andrew, a meeting which has turned his life upside down just as it has mine.
In May 1988, with a few thousand dollars in my pocket, I fly there on a one-way ticket. Sarah stays in Amsterdam for another month to make some more money. There are about a hundred students in Amherst by the time I arrive. The college students have gone for the summer, so we live in the big fraternity houses in groups of ten or more. After Sarah arrives, she and I live with eight others in a house called The Yellow House. We settle into the familiar rhythm that we know so well from Devon.
Andrew gives satsang almost every evening in the living room of his large house. During the days we go to the beach, or for walks, or out for coffee with each other. We are from all parts of the world, and the most important thing that connects us is Andrew, his teachings, and the community that we are starting to form together. And that’s mostly what we talk about. What did Andrew speak about last night? Who’s been invited to cook for Andrew? The letters we write to him are another inexhaustible topic of conversation. Night after night we have powerful experiences of oneness and intimacy in satsang. They powerfully confirm for us that the revolution is under way. Although we live in different houses spread out over Amherst, it feels like we live in a single ashram. The town is ours. We are high on enlightenment all the time. To live in such ecstatic abandonment, with nothing to hold on to, is thrilling and terrifying at the same time.
As it turns out, the very insecurity and vulnerability of such a way of life seems to be too much to bear for some of us. I hear an unsettling story about Jacob. He is no longer there when I arrive. He apparently had a falling out with Andrew and left. From what I hear, Jacob was having doubts about Andrew and having difficulty surrendering. His ego must have come back in and pulled him back into familiar territory. It’s a reminder to us all how important it is to have clarity of intention and to guard the precious realization of enlightenment against the poison of our mind.
And indeed living together with so many people from different countries and cultural backgrounds is not as easy as we expected, especially in this situation where the future is so completely open-ended. No one, including Andrew, knows where this is going. We have to trust and surrender. Although at the deepest level we feel everything is perfect, at the more mundane level of living together, some problems begin to develop. We find that in spite of our newly found recognition and celebration of enlightenment, most of us still behave in less than enlightened ways. For Andrew this is unacceptable. “Once you’ve realized the truth,” he says, “you have to live up to it.” So, no more neuroses, no more selfishness, no more temper tantrums. Get your act together. Andrew encourages us to have house meetings where we can come together and evaluate how we are doing.
In this way, Andrew’s message begins to change. He still speaks about clarity of intention as the way to enlightenment, but he also begins to speak now about the need to make clear choices in day-to-day life, choices that will keep our enlightened state free from obstacles, such as attachments and conditioned patterns. And that could mean making very different choices than we have been making, whether out of psychological habit, laziness, or simple ignorance. Andrew calls this ‘the law of volitionality’. It means total responsibility at all times. We are always free to choose, so we are also always responsible and accountable for what we choose. He starts to emphasize the need to change, which means letting go of the old conditioned tendencies and no longer acting out of them.
Having to change? I’m still utterly happy; nothing could be more perfect than it is now. So what needs to change? When I met Andrew I was profoundly relieved that I could be done with my Buddhist self-improvement program, meditating hours every day, inching my way towards final enlightenment, chipping away at my ego with every minute of meditation. There was no thrill there, no revolution, only spinning your wheels, one part of yourself trying to improve the other part. Andrew’s message had been, nothing has to change, everything is perfect as it is, just realize this and surrender to it deeply and all your problems will be over. Your whole life will be over. So what is all this talk about having to change now? From what I’ve heard, Andrew’s own teacher Poonja never speaks about having to change. Is Andrew going back to a Buddhist approach?
I share my concerns with Andrew in satsang.
“Oh well,” he says, “it’s not such a big deal. It’s like housekeeping, taking care of business, cleaning up some old karma.”
“But I thought enlightenment meant the end of all the old karma, the end of the road?”
“Well, yes, if you’re lucky. That’s how it happened for me. But apparently it’s not that way for everybody. It’s not like that with most of you, or so it seems, unfortunately. So then you just do what you have to do. You take responsibility for all the karma that’s still there.”
“But isn’t that what I was doing as a Buddhist?”
“No, it’s very different. Then you all the time felt that something was wrong, something was missing. Now you know for sure that nothing is wrong, and nothing is missing. And that should give you all the energy and the passion you need to change where you have to change.”
“But what happened then with enlightenment being no limitation?”
“Well, there still is no limitation. We can all change at any moment. It doesn’t have to take time. You don’t need to do years of therapy, or meditate for years. You can just decide to change, like this!” Andrew snaps his fingers.
“Just by wanting to change, you mean?”
“Yes, but also by recognizing that everything is volitional. You always have a choice! You can always choose to do the right thing, and not to do the wrong thing. We know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once you’ve realized enlightenment, you can no longer plead ignorance. You can’t say any longer what people usually say, “Well, I just didn’t know any better.”
“So by changing do we get more enlightened then?”
“No! Absolutely not. You see, enlightenment is not some gradual process in time. It’s there, in a flash, when you realize it. It’s an eternal reality beyond time and space that we can dip into at any time. You only need to have the guts to see your neuroses for what they are and take a leap beyond them into the unknown. Otherwise, what good would enlightenment be? If it doesn’t lead to a beautiful human being, what’s the point? You can’t say ‘that’s just the way that I am.’ You have to change. It’s a moral obligation to life, to the cosmos itself. You have to align yourself with the standard of enlightenment.”
But the standard of enlightenment proves to be difficult to meet. One by one, Andrew’s housemates have to leave his house because they don’t meet the standard. Kathy, an English girl who knew Andrew personally before his enlightenment, has to leave because she can be opinionated and have a bad temper. Alan, a fragile former hippie from New Zealand, has to leave because he is too fearful and insecure. Harry at this time is also living with Andrew. He tells me what it’s like to live with Andrew in the house. “It’s very intense,” he says. “Because Andrew is immersed in enlightenment he can’t bear any selfishness or impurity around him. Around Andrew all those kinds of impurities come ruthlessly to light, and you have to be prepared to give them up. You have to be willing all the time to dare to reach beyond your limits.” When Harry tells me these things, I’m