Emperor's New Clothes?

A Letter from Ed McDougal

I lived in Andrew's community for almost ten years, first in Cambridge and Marin county, then, more recently at Foxhollow. This blog has helped me compare the ups and downs of my experiences with those of others who were also there.

After an absence of five years, I wrote Andrew that I had overcome certain reservations I had previously expressed to him about his teachings. The upshot was that he eventually decided I could move to Foxhollow. I was very glad. Like many others, I had glimpsed the impersonal enlightened perspective as a result of contact with Andrew. It now seemed particularly in reach because of an enlightenment experience that had taken place a year or so after I left Marin that impressed me deeply. I wanted to live permanently in and from that perspective.

I was not successful. No doubt this is owing in part to reasons having to do with my personal makeup. But I also believe no small part was played by the way I handled a particular situation that arose with Andrew after my arrival at Foxhollow. I wanted to speak to him about the spontaneous experience that occurred some years earlier, when suddenly for several hours I didn’t know who or where I was, yet managed to accomplish several physically and mentally demanding tasks, even while being completely distracted by the unfamiliarity of familiar surroundings.

When I tried to discuss this with Andrew, I was given to understand that it would be inappropriate and unnecessary to do so. I did not insist, reasoning that the enlightened perspective, as Andrew teaches, is a matter of freedom in relation to all experience, even enlightened experience, and that dwelling on the past is counter-productive.

I now think that I was mistaken. I ought to have insisted on speaking about this, and in failing to do so, I failed myself. If I had received confirmation that I was on the right track, and had been given more than just a taste of the real thing, it might have gone far toward establishing the base of self-confidence so necessary in the kind of solitary struggle with the ego in which we were all engaged. I was aware that Andrew's own remarkable increase in self-confidence after he met his teacher coincided with just such a communication. As Andrew wrote to his mother and brother:

"When I told him [H.W.L.Poonja] in detail about the spontaneous awakening I had when I was sixteen he told me that at that moment I had experienced all there was to experience, and he said that if I had had a teacher or someone whom I could have talked to about it, a man of knowledge—then my work would have been over then. Much of what I understood then has [since] returned." (My Master Is Myself, p.39)

Since then, of course, Andrew's interests have taken a different direction. Which brings me to a third factor in the mix, crucial during the time I was at Foxhollow—what I think of as Andrew’s “one size fits all” approach to enlightenment. This may well be the result of the increasing emphasis in his teachings on the biggest possible picture of reality, involving an expanding universe, a noosphere, memes, and the inter-subjectivity of consciousness. Impersonal enlightenment has clearly become less important to Andrew than what he now regards as an evolutionary step beyond that, toward the collective discovery and generation of a kind of emerging group intelligence that can be applied to the cultural, social and political problems of our times.

Obviously some of these problems are extremely urgent. But I have seen little evidence that collective intelligence generated by groups at Foxhollow or elsewhere is having an actual effect on the problems it is meant to address, or even, secondarily, that the lives of individuals who are making group efforts have changed so as to make the impersonal perspective more permanent among them.

Andrew once told me and a group of fellow retreatants at Foxhollow that I was "completely oblivious to what’s going on here." Perhaps he is right. And perhaps more time is needed to tell if what is admittedly an experiment is bearing fruit. It would be worse than disappointing to conclude that what we have here is a case of emperor's new clothes.