Beware Andrew Cohen is now trying for a come back

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Latest development…Andrew Cohen is currently attempting to re-launch his career as a spiritual teacher with a speaking engagement at the “Forum for the Evolution of Consciousness”, an effort opposed (for obvious reasons) by many of those who were abused by Cohen as recently as three years ago …as more details become available they will be posted here.

Forum for the Evolution of Consciousness

[www.evolutionconscience.com]

Where things currently stand:

1. The Relaunch(es)
Cohen went on sabbatical in 2013, purportedly “to become a better man”—having discovered that, like his comparatively unenlightened followers, he, too, had “an ego.” He issued his first of two public apologies. He then departed for India, and wasn’t heard from (or about) for the next two years.

When he returned to the U.S. following his two-year “sabbatical” (a term that itself indicated an intention to resume “teaching” at some point), there were rumors about his potential re-emergence as a “thought leader,” if not a wholesale “relaunch” of his guru career. He issued his second public apology“, and began an “apology tour” that entailed visiting several former students while avoiding former members of his inner circle (and others) from whom he knew he could expect the harshest criticism.

As part of Cohen’s rehabilitation campaign, he now claimed that his role and authority had been undermined by his former core group of students, who, he also claimed, had closed down EnlightenNext without his knowledge or approval while he was on his “sabbatical.”

Meanwhile, several leaders in Cohen’s organization, some of whom during the course of Enlightennext’s final years had begun their own careers as authors and seminar leaders (some independently and some under the wing of EnlightenNext), had been gradually emerging from Cohen’s shadow. (See “Baby Andrews,” below.)

This has led to widespread suspicion that Cohen’s “abdication” might actually have been the result of a coordinated putsch by those emerging leaders who had begun to regard Cohen’s authoritarian ways as an impediment to their own professional ambitions. There were potential careers to be made, and money to be “earned.”

Some members of this former leadership group posted public complaints about how much they had sacrificed for the sake of “the Revolution” only to find themselves in middle age with no track record outside of Cohen’s orbit, which made for embarrassingly thin resumés.

2. The Money

The local non-profit legal entities of EnlightenNext, both in London and the U.S. (the Foxhollow estate in Lenox, MA) have been forced to acknowledge that their stated missions are defunct and to determine what to do with their substantial assets, invested almost entirely in real estate.

EnlightenNext London sold its Centre (for approximately $4 million) and has spent the past couple of years in a decision-making process regarding how to allocate these funds.

At Foxhollow, real estate holdings (once worth $7 million according to previous EnlightenNext financial statements) have been liquidated in pieces, and all having been sold at this point.

Per the latest publicly available financial report, “EnlightenNext EIN: 22-2951275? reports in its most recent report of 2014, income of $507 and assets of about $1.5 million. According to Massachusetts Law, a charity that ceases operations must donate its remaining assets to another charity with similar goals, failing which its remaining funds must be turned over to the state. Meanwhile, EnlightenNext’s U.S. Board of Directors has issued no communications regarding its intentions with respect to the distribution of its funds on hand.

3. Baby Andrews

Former members may have a variety of reasons for not wanting to accept that Andrew Cohen’s organization was a sham, and they may employ elaborate mental strategies to avoid doing so, but failing to recognize pathology for what it is has to make their lives more difficult at some crucial level, usually in ways they may not be even slightly aware of. (In many cases, of course, this lack of awareness is precisely the point.)

Ultimately, though, an important event in the unfolding of this kind of pathology is that some people become sufficiently immunized against its euphemistic overtures (and their own rationalizations) to be able to recognize it for what it is. It’s a matter of being the canary in the coal mine, or of being able to see all the way through the emperor’s new clothes.

People like Jeff Carreira, Craig Hamilton, and Pete Bampton, on the other hand, who have chosen out of personal expediency to avoid accepting responsibility for their part in the debacle that was EnlightenNext, continue to portray themselves as enlightened purveyors of salvation through “higher consciousness” to a species they condescendingly regard as frozen in its collective adolescence.

The obvious irony here is that their so-called “evolutionary worldview” was nurtured in an alarmingly dysfunctional environment.

But these slick new “spiritual teachers,” with their free webinars and early-bird discounts, would rather have a career than a conscience to show for the endless hours they spent enduring, enabling and perpetrating emotional abuse (and worse) during their much-touted decades of “transformative spiritual practice” in a “living laboratory of spiritual evolution.”

Because this kind of self-deluding hypocrisy can’t fail to leave its imprint on the new “communities” and “collectives” that such individuals have in turn attracted and gathered about them, it’s important for all concerned to know more about their backgrounds, and to think carefully about what their prospective or existing followers may be getting themselves into.

I’m not (necessarily) suggesting that these self-appointed “leaders” have nothing to offer, but at the very least they owe their customers an honest admission of the nature of their past participation in EnlightenNext, regardless of its potential to diminish their aura of authority or their bottom line. Their unwillingness to own up to the more questionable aspects of their “apprenticeship” is an indication that what they’re offering people is at best an attractive illusion and at worst a form of self-serving manipulation that merely extends the tentacles of Andrew Cohen’s unfortunate legacy.