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 “knowing” require a split between the knower (the subject, “I”) and the known (the object of experience or knowing), and in the state I experienced that day outside the hospital in Jerusalem, there was no such split.
In that fraction of a second, the very foundation of my being seemed to shift. When I found myself back in the world of self and time, I knew that Andrew had always been and would always be my Teacher, and that somehow I had always known that.
I stumbled to the phone booth at the hospital entrance and called the house where Andrew was staying.
“Hello,” he answered in his now familiar voice.
“Andrew?” I said, “This is Andrew. I mean, hi, Andrew, this is Amir.” I couldn’t think straight.
“I’m yours,” I said.
I could feel Andrew smiling on the other end.
“I knew that since we first met,” he replied. “Why don’t you come over and tell me what happened?”
SEPTEMBER 15, 1987
TOTNES, UNITED KINGDOM
A few days after completing my end-of-year exams in medical school I flew over to the U.K., and was warmly welcomed into one of the sangha (Sanskrit for community) houses of Andrew’s students in Totnes, a town in England’s picturesque South Devon region, where Andrew was staying.
A few weeks after arriving in Totnes, I spent one evening after satsang (Sanskrit for being in the company of a guru) with Andrew and the people who were living with him. The next day I received a message from him that he wanted to talk with me, so I went over to his house. As we sat together in the living room, Andrew laid out for me the full picture of my psycho-spiritual makeup. He said that on the one hand, he found me an exceptionally warm, trusting, serious and committed man, and felt a deep connection with me; but on the other hand, he felt a heavy presence of ego in me, and he and the other people with him had been very aware of it during our meeting the night before. He said it was rare to have these two extremes co-existing in the same person. Then he said: “You want to become as light as a feather, and this may take a few years. I suggest that you forget any plans you may have other than being with me. Think