'Holy Sh*t, We’re in a Cult!'

well I never thought that I would talk about a my next revolutionary enlightenment never again and so I certainly was not planning on returning to Fox Hollow it wasn't so much fear or worried that I would suddenly relive everything but it was more a sense of weirdness like it was just weird to go back Andrew Cohen calls his teaching evolutionary enlightenment this new understanding of spiritual awakening redefines the pre-modern notion of enlightenment for the modern world it was really powerful I had started to have powerful spiritual experiences like the kind of mind blowing textbook stuff and and it was like this is what I'd been looking for my whole life in evolutionary enlightenment there's no the goal is not to get out of the the universe the huh goal is not to escape from the universe the goal is to get into the process I read one of his books it had this huge impact on me it kind of hit me in this way that sort of started to burn and caught fire inside and I just came up to Andrew after his talk and told him that when I looked into his eyes I was looking into eternity there was just like this power that I felt emanating from him we are lost in this small-minded self-centered and hell life experience in which our experience of what it means to be alive is so partial and so small and so minimal it's almost impossible to imagine how small it is I first got involved in light next in 2005 I was 23 at the time I had just in a workshop with a guy named Don Beck who knows Andrew and I actually seen ads of Andrews retreats where he was sitting up literally on a pedestal surrounded by you know 100 or 200 people all looking up at him and again all of that just screamed cult to me and I remember I made a pact to myself silently that I would never become a student of Andrew Cohen's because it just seemed like a pathetic life to spend all of your waking hours following another person people who are awake to what I call the evolutionary impulse are alive with the thrill of existence an hour and a half after Andrews talk I basically had a kind of blowout what you typically call a mystical experience and Andrew was the only person I could attribute it to Sam would be a perfect recruit for this kind of group intelligent hard-working attractive preferably now why would Sam drop everything and follow nobody ever said hey where do I find the cult in the yellow pages how can I join we had kind of a I guess I guess you could call it kind of a Romeo and Juliet cult version story how we met because we we both we both entered the community in other relationships we both got involved because our ex her ex-husband and my ex-wife both got interested and we sort of followed them in and then we each got each of our partners left they left the community they were kind of forced out and so we had to choose between that relationship and in this whole thing the whole buzz was that there was this American code Andrew Cohen that was an Indian it apparently become enlightened I just figured how could somebody from New York get enlightened and for some reason I thought I should I shouldn't judge I should actually go check him out and at that time Andrew Ward jeans and a t-shirt we just sit and meditate for hours and also I felt like I started to understand the meaning of life in a cosmic sense I I remember the most powerful experience being that I saw that the language of the cosmos was one language and it was a language of love so everybody familiar with the I phrase the burden of existence do you know what it means woe is me and it was so powerful that that sort of recognition that I did basically pledge allegiance to Andrew really really in the end enlightened X was founded by spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen in 1988 its core teaching of evolutionary enlightenment was designed to allow people to experience spiritual enlightenment while also embracing a more modern lifestyle in 1996 we moved to a property called Fox Hollow located in the Berkshire mountain range of Western Massachusetts at its peak and might next had close to a thousand followers with communities and centers around the world experts in this field are careful about what we call cults because it's a very subjective term one man's cult is another man's religion so I prefer to speak about groups in which there's a high degree of control manipulation coercion exploitation and abuse and enlighten next is notorious for those characteristics you know people think of the Hell's Gate cult the people who drank the kool-aid and all committed suicide or they think of the people in Jonestown the Waco some cults met that description but not all of them and the one we were in was full of really interesting really fired up really intelligent really headstrong people in many ways and light next embrace the modern world I had my own company that I was running with a couple of people here we're basically providing marketing services to corporations and startups but it was funny because you know we would meditate for for two hours I would make my breakfast our office was at the apartment buildings right here and you know I'd be making phone calls to Fortune 500 companies trying to close business knowing that in 45 minutes I would have a meeting about a spiritual crisis that I was in there's this very strange mixture of you know business by day and super intensive spiritual development by night and morning when you get to about I don't know 20 miles outside the property you start to feel yourself overcome by some type of hypnotic state and your whole perspective changes this was the house that I lived in it was called fullness we used to call it the celibate icebox because it got freezing in that room and the three of us who lived in there were all celibate I chose to be celibate but it was considered mandatory one would either be celibate or in a committed relationship so when I first moved here this is where we would do all of our meditation this was called the Blue Room so I've spent hundreds if not thousands of hours of meditation just in this room everybody actually had a photo of andrew in their room and the idea was that you're you're keeping the guru front and center which means that you're keeping God front and center at all times and and people would often prostrate to a picture of Andrew because it means that they're being humble and they're they're prostrating in the face of God so you'd say to be free is to know nothing and then you go like that you'd have a pad underneath you and he say to be free is to be no one to be free is to have nothing every morning people would maybe do 400 of those and then some people over a period of time would actually do a hundred thousand of those well it began when I met my own spiritual teacher in India in 1986 and had a spiritual realization and it was as a result of that miracle I started teaching and sharing what he had conveyed to me with other people and many them became my followers almost immediately it was quite a dramatic unfolding so enlightened next was the organization that developed as a result of all these people gathering around me as I traveled in in light next there the the philosophy was a mixture or a blend of the traditional Eastern enlightenment with the Western understanding and scientific discovery of evolution and it was a very future-oriented very creative endeavor embrace philosophy you know it was a it was the real it was about trying to realize the utopian dream utopian aspiration when it takes the form of a group with a leader on a mission who's you know who may have stated goals that are very grandiose but whose actual goal is just nothing but self aggrandizement that begins to look like a cult for a long time I was convinced that if I was if I felt something strongly at a level my intuition I would tend to think that it was what I was feeling which was object was an objective truth and often it was especially in the early years but later on some of my own feelings were just personal feelings that might have just come from my ego and might it not have had anything to do with any kind of objective reality but might have had to do with personal preferences or fears or desires or other things like that at one point I got the job within the community of choosing the movies that Andrew would watch when he was flying on international teaching trips I would spend I don't know ten hours during the week preparing the movies that he should watch and I would give him trailers and descriptions why I thought he should like it if I suggested a movie that he didn't like I'd get in trouble and I'd have to go I'd have to stop everything I was doing and go to the store and buy hundreds of dollars worth of flowers and spend long periods of time writing letters of apology and gift baskets and buying fruits and talking to my spiritual peers and them helping me sort of find the ways in which my perspective was lacking I'm not that I probably did that six seven times over a period of three years with different movies just about movies it's very hard for me to be objective because I was I became a spiritual leader when I was thirty years old but to be in a position to inspire people to a vision that they were that they felt drawn to that they wanted to actualize was thrilling but it's also it's also precarious and dangerous and I made a lot of mistakes when you leave the group your dissociation breaks other people have called it snapping the person that you were is still there and starts to come back the person that you made yourself into for the leader is also still lingering but that person starts to feel like you know house of cards it's you start to realize that that isn't you know it was it was like popcorn you could just see it people would people would get it and they would and and they would just pop and all of a sudden they were just like oh my god I'm out of here and people were they'd find out about it and a day later they they'd be telling Andrew that he was not their teacher anymore and they were leaving and and you know goodbye you know it's got to feel similar to someone coming out of prison or he was like you were kind of entering the world again for the first time and everything was amazing the group fell apart because I think my authority it's at a certain point was being questioned after the crash I lost all my confidence and I was quite a mess in a wreck for the better part of two years began to find my feet about a year ago and that was because I began to accept responsibility for the fact that I was the one who was at the cause of this terrible calamity when I realized it was really really a cult it was when it all broke down we all started to realize that things were probably at least getting shaken up that we said holy [ __ ] were in a cult and we've been in a cult this whole time and it's not the joke that we used to make like haha yeah we're in a cult but it's a good cult like this is actually a cult I have been spending most of my time traveling around the world visiting with former students and reaching out to them especially people who feel they've been hurt and doing spiritual retreats myself I'm fully immersed in this process I don't have any other life I don't feel fleeced I don't really feel conned I don't feel like I made this you know huge judgment error you know the experience that I had when I saw Andrew and continued to was really powerful and it was life-changing was I looking for it no do I think I needed to be so involved for all eight years probably not but at the same time I don't really know and and and at this point I'm at least I'm trying to but I think to a reasonable degree I'm okay with just not knowing could it if what I don't know I'd like to think but I maybe but then as soon as you create a group like that you isolate yourself and then what good to humanity is that if you isolate yourself sometimes I'm nervous to see people but there is something that we've shared that I don't know how to explain and it's not that I've got close to other people but there's something we shared and I don't know how to explain that I mean sometimes I just think why didn't we question things we're intelligent you know and that will always haunt me you

Channel: The Atlantic

Views: 1,855,764

Rating: 4.7491045 out of 5

Keywords: The Atlantic, cult, spiritual, religion, Andrew Cohen, EnlightenNext, documentary, guru, awakening, meditation, Remarkable People

Id: X3ess8txBX0

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Alice_B_Tokeless]

"We're all gonna be celibate....except me, bring on the young women"

-Every cult leader

[u/[deleted]]

Huh.

[u/Shinylittlelamp]

Worth a watch - Thanks OP.

[u/shakerLife]

This is definitely unique among the cult stories I've heard about, in that the leader himself seems to be (kind of) admitting that he was wrong about the whole thing... though possibly, his attitude of contrition is just an act, and he's still hoping to reconstitute the cult or start a new one at some future time.

[u/Chinese_Lollipop_Man]

Creed Bratton on cults.

[u/Ann_Fetamine]

So many cults go down the exact same trajectory. I have to wonder if the leaders are always power-hungry evil narcissists from Day 1 or do they become that way over time as they gain followers? To say they were always evil narcissists implies that they planned to abuse people from the beginning, when I don't always know if that's the case. Maybe it is. I genuinely wonder. Some appear to grow more evil after picking up a drug/alcohol problem (Jim Jones, Roch Theriault).

And for some reason, the power trip always includes sexual stuff. Bizarre, controlling sexual stuff. Why? If I started a cult, it would be about taking your money. Unless every member was a supermodel which is highly unlikely.

[u/ChronicleKeeper]

Saving for later

[u/miraoister]

I also posted this in /r/atheism so if you want a 'spiritual' discussion go there!

[u/polishgravy]

Holy shit, those people are gullible.