THE “A” LIST: A Catalog of Trauma and Abuse
The following is a list of categories
of abuses committed over the years against students by Andrew Cohen and the EnlightenNext community, with selected representative examples. All of these
acts have been reported, verified and corroborated by first-person witnesses.
Most have been documented in three published books written by critical former
students—Mother of God by Luna
Tarlo (Andrew Cohen’s mother), American
Guru by William Yenner and Enlightenment
Bluesby Andre van der Braak—and on a blog by former students, What Enlightenment??! This
list is by no means exhaustive. Many other reprehensible acts, both subtle and
gross, have been documented and, as former students are finding their power and
their voices, more are emerging every day. This list is only a summary
reference. It fairly represents the kind of abuses that frequently occurred in
the EnlightenNext community, often justified under the rubric of acts of “crazy
wisdom” designed to destroy “ego.” It is hoped that this list will aide former
students in coming to terms with their history and trauma, and that it will
serve as a warning and wake-up call to those who are currently engaged with
Andrew Cohen, EnlightenNext, “Evolutionary Enlightenment” or its teachers,
spin-offs and associates, and those who are considering engaging with
them in the future. [We acknowledge and appreciate that some of the senior students of Cohen mentioned here may have played a role in recent events leading to Cohen stepping down from leadership of EnlightenNext, either temporarily or permanently. Yet, as of publication of this summary of abuses, none have publicly disassociated themselves from Cohen or disavowed the abuse of students documented here or their support of and participation in it in the past.] It is also hoped that this list may provide food for contemplation
for Andrew Cohen himself and inspiration for his reform and remediation.
In the title of this list, “A” is for Andrew Cohen, for abuses
committed by Cohen and his organization, and for long overdue meaningful apologies and reparations.
I.
Physical Abuse
1.
Hitting,
slapping, punching of students by Andrew Cohen and other students at Cohen's command.
At times a group of men were ordered by Andrew Cohen to corner and attack
fellow students and at times men were ordered to restrain a man while Cohen hit
him.
2.
Having women repeatedly do
full-immersion prostrations in a freezing cold lake in New England in the
autumn (on EnlightenNext’s Foxhollow premises) as penance for perceived faults
and “women’s conditioning,” some to the point of hypothermia, delirium and unconsciousness.
Some women had to be rescued or helped from the lake, and some developed
illnesses afterwards. Some women were berated and ordered to repeat their
attempts to complete a required number of prostrations despite having become
delirious or suffering hypothermia. No medical care was provided for women who
passed out, suffered hypothermia or became ill, even though there was a doctor
in the community and on the Foxhollow premises.
3.
Having
students pour buckets of paint over the head of a former student who was
helping to work on the Foxhollow EnlightenNext premises, as a form of
punishment and humiliation.
II.
Financial Exploitation
4.
Using
repeated group and individual pressure tactics on a student who Andrew Cohen
knew to be psychologically vulnerable, in order to induce her to contribute
approximately $2,000,000 for the purchase of the Foxhollow compound in Lenox,
Massachusetts, the headquarters and residence of Cohen and the EnlightenNext
community. Soon after meeting this student, Cohen had elicited from her that
she had a trust fund and was in intensive psychotherapy four times per week,
and persuaded her to cease her psychotherapeutic treatment.
5.
In
preparation for the move to Foxhollow, Andrew Cohen required every Marin
County, California student (where his major center of operations was at the
time) to contribute $1,000 for every year they had been a student (up to
$5,000), telling them that those who did not comply “would never set foot on
the Foxhollow property.”
6.
In
preparation for the move to the Foxhollow EnlightenNext Center, students were
required to make a full disclosure of their finances to Cohen and the
organization, and to undergo financial “counseling” as to how they would
support themselves and the community after the move. In at least one reported
case, a student was encouraged to lie to his parents in order to receive
financial support so that he could pay rent to the organization after moving to
Foxhollow.
7.
Frequently and repeatedly charging students
"fines" of thousands of dollars for what Cohen considered to be
various infractions, failures or slights. Ordering these students to pay these
amounts or to leave their homes at his Foxhollow center or be banished from the
spiritual community.
8.
Inducing
a number of students to give Cohen or his organization their inheritances or
obtain advances from their families of their expected inheritances in order to
turn the funds over to Cohen or EnlightenNext.
9.
Using
in excess of $500,000 in funds contributed to EnlightenNext to build and expand
accommodations just for Cohen, including extra offices, a music studio and a
yoga practice room.
10. Requiring students to provide Cohen
with elaborate and expensive gifts, flowers and engage in various other forms
of penance in order to apologize for perceived failures, wrongs or slights.
11. Imposing demands of long hours of work
and labor for Cohen’s organization that made it impossible for students to earn
a living and support themselves, often forcing students to incur thousands of
dollars of debt.
12. Requiring a student to sign a
confidentiality agreement prohibiting him from publicly criticizing Cohen or
the community for a period of five years after leaving, as a condition of
returning an inheritance contributed under Cohen’s pressure.
III.
Violation of Sexual and Reproductive Rights
and Privacy, and Interference with Family and Personal Relationships
13. Requiring a student to visit
prostitutes repeatedly over a several week period and to provide detailed faxed
reports on these visits to Cohen, despite the student strongly expressing his
strong disgust and emotional trauma over having to do this and daily begging
Cohen to be allowed to stop. Witnesses saw Cohen reading and listening to the
reports of the prostitute visits with great interest, enjoying and laughing at
them.
14. Pressuring women to have tubal ligations (have their “tubes tied”) so that they could not conceive children. Encouraging men to have vasectomies. Actively discouraging the having of children by women and couples. Requiring some women to commit to having no children as a condition of being a student of Cohen. As a result of having made a commitment to having no children, as required by Cohen as a prerequisite for becoming a student, one woman had an abortion when she became pregnant. Many women refrained from having children, in some cases past the age to become pregnant, to their later regret.
15. Requiring some parents to live
separately from their young children, sometimes in other countries and for long
periods of time; actively discouraging parents from giving their children
ordinary love, time, attention and priority in their lives or spending holidays
and free time with them; sometimes advising parents to slap their young
children.
16. Directly ordering the break up of
numerous couples and families.
17. Exercising direct and complete control
over students’ decisions regarding sexuality and relationships, including
whether the student would be celibate or in a relationship, with whom the
student could have a relationship, if and when students should end a
relationship or marriage, and whether married couples or students currently in
a relationship could have sex with their partner.
18. Ordering a student to tell his young
daughter about her mother's (his wife's) long past infidelity, traumatizing the
daughter and contributing to her alienation from her father and to alienation
between her parents.
19. Directly giving harsh and critical
messages to children in the community, including, in one instance, telling a
thirteen year old daughter of students that she was “a little bitch now and
soon you're going to be a big bitch.”
20. Telling a student she was a bad mother
and threatening to have authorities take away her child.
21. Questioning students’ sexual
orientation, whether homosexual or heterosexual. In one instance, forcing a
heterosexual male student to spend an entire retreat questioning his sexual
orientation because Cohen was mistakenly convinced he was really homosexual.
IV.
Emotional and Psychological Abuse and Ostracizing
22. Ordering a student who is a physician
to simulate the amputation of the finger of another student who had sworn,
under pressure, that he would cut off his finger if he failed to complete a
writing project. This simulation included full preparation of the student for
the amputation by the doctor and the doctor’s readying of surgical knives and
only ceased just before actual amputation. As a result, the student was
emotionally traumatized and soon thereafter fled Cohen's residential center,
Foxhollow.
23. Yelling at a student whose husband had
just committed suicide, calling the husband a “loser” and telling her that she
should be happy to be rid of him.
24. Having a senior student telephone and
loudly and harshly criticize at length an elderly and infirm former formal
woman student (Caroline Franklyn) for a misperceived slight to Cohen, telling
her that Cohen was furious at her for her failure to “admit her sin” and that
she would “die a miserable old woman.” Her health deteriorated alarmingly
soon after this event, and within approximately a week she was dying in the
hospital. Cohen failed to offer any communication to the woman of sympathy,
support or forgiveness after her concerned family requested this until it was
too late, as the woman had by then become unconscious. She died eleven days
after her verbal scourging by the senior student. Cohen’s acts in this regard
are considered by her family and others to be a direct cause of her decline and
death.
25. On multiple occasions, criticizing,
disparaging and finding fault in students who were suffering bereavement at the
death of family and loved ones. For example, on one occasion, having the
community harangue and yell at a student who was grieving the death of half of
her family--the death of her sister, followed thirty days later by her father's
death-- for “betraying Andrew” when she was grief-stricken and therefore unable
to be as enthusiastic about Cohen's visit to Israel as was expected. When the
student went abroad to look after her sister’s affairs, having students pile
all of her belongings on the street, where most were stolen before the student
could return to rescue them.
26. Ordering students to spend hours and
days in a former sauna, and in a basement area of the EnlightenNext Center.
These areas had been decorated with students’ letters splotched with red paint,
representing "the guru's blood," and with cartoons of students who
had left Cohen depicted as demons falling off cliffs and causing destruction.
Students with whom Cohen was unhappy were characterized as having injured him
and “spilled his blood.”
27. Frequently and repeatedly disparaging
and criticizing women for their “conditioning” and resistance to him. Having
female students repeatedly and at length contemplate disturbing cartoons
depicting sexually predatory, violent and sado-masochistic acts, including one
of a student eviscerating Cohen. This was supposed to be either a
punishment or cure for "female conditioning."
28. Requiring a student to move her office
to a room in the Foxhollow basement that was painted red and decorated with a
cartoon of her as a devil, and requiring her to spend many hours working there.
29. Isolating students for long periods of
time in their apartments at Foxhollow, allowing them to leave only to work.
30. Ordering a student to have his newer
luxury Saab crushed because he was too “attached” to it.
31. The frequent use of abusive, profane,
shaming, jeering and insulting language by Cohen toward students, and the
subjecting of students to public humiliation and shunning.
32. In small private groups of close
students, Cohen frequently insulting attendees at public forums who he had
behaved warmly toward in public, by calling them “fat,” “stupid,” “useless,” “disgusting”
and other disparaging terms, and encouraging close students to do the same.
33. Giving students insulting, demeaning
and humiliating names (e.g. “Dizzy,” “Mad Dog,” “Vacance,” “Raging Bull,” “Q
the Clown,” “Mephisto,” etc.) and requiring the exclusive use of these names in
the community.
34. Requiring students to shave their heads
and take on celibacy vows as penance for perceived faults.
35. Threatening and enforcing
excommunication and ejection of students from the EnlightenNext Center and from
their homes, often without warning and, at times, late at night.
36. Revealing students’ confidences
disclosed to Cohen to other students, including confidences of an intimate and
sexual nature.
37. Depriving students of sleep to the
point of exhaustion, often for years.
38. Depriving students of ordinary
friendship and emotional support, frequently turning the entire community
against individual students and prohibiting them from speaking, touching or
having other contact with them.
39. Creating such psychological pressure on
students that numerous students secretly fled the community, some at night, and
many hiding and having little or no contact with other students or former students
for years.
V.
Denying and Discouraging Students’ Freedom
to Leave the Community
40. Holding and withholding students’
passports, credit cards and car keys so that they could not leave community
premises.
41. Posting guards outside a students’
bedroom so that he could not leave, forcing him to secretly exit through a
window at night and flee.
42. Having a student who was trained in the Dutch
equivalent of the military special or commando forces threaten another student
with serious physical injury should he ever leave Andrew Cohen, telling the
student that if he ever left Cohen, “no matter where you are on the planet, I
will find you and break every bone in your body.”
43. Subjecting students who expressed their
wish to leave the community, or to lessen their involvement with the community,
to lengthy interrogation, haranguing, meetings and coercive discouragement from
leaving or lessening their involvement.
44. Having students track down other
students who left the community, bringing or attempting to bring them back.
45. Having students write disparaging and
insulting letters to students who chose to leave the community.
46. Andrew Cohen repeatedly telling
students that if they left the community it would be the equivalent of “literally
committing spiritual suicide” and that they “can never escape me” as “I am
their direct connection to the Absolute.”
47. Repeatedly telling students that there
were no valid spiritual teachers other than Cohen or valid spiritual paths
other than his, and that if they left him their lives would be meaningless and
hellish.
48. Cohen, when among close students,
ridiculing, laughing at, insulting and dismissing other teachers, public
associates and peers, such as Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama (“an idiot”), Don
Beck (“a disgusting old man”), Craig Hamilton (“a big baby”), Ken Wilber (“a
huge narcissist”), Michael Beckwith and Barbara Marx Hubbard (“they just don’t
get it”) and various members of the Integral community, such as
David Deida, Terry Patten and others, and encouraging close students to do the
same.
49. Disparaging and expressing extreme
anger and hatred by Cohen toward students who left him; labeling such students
as devils, traitors and “losers” and often “disappearing” them, denying their
contributions and the years of labor they had given him and his community.
50. Discouraging students who leave from having
any contact with other students who had left, labeling those who left as “losers”
and “the shadow sangha.”
As a result of abuse suffered in the community, many former
students experienced trauma, depression, disorientation, loss of connection to
spirituality in any form, and the need for psychotherapeutic treatment after
leaving Cohen’s community. Numerous former students are still struggling to
come to terms with their experience in Cohen’s community, sometimes a decade or
more after leaving.
[version 2.1-6/11/14 (numbering; minor factual correction; student names removed from intro)
v. 2.2-1/10/15 (revised #14)
[version 2.1-6/11/14 (numbering; minor factual correction; student names removed from intro)
v. 2.2-1/10/15 (revised #14)
Labels: abuse, Andrew Cohen, Craig Hamilton, EnlightenNext, evolutionary enlightenment, Foxhollow, guru, Integral, Ken Wilber
posted by Hal at
11:33 AM
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