Andrew Chen India Scandal Tiru Tiruvannamalai Maharshi Pilgrim Punters Scamsters Risk Search Engine Optimization SEO Due Diligence

There are ways for a scandal ridden guru to bury the past to low Google ratings and instead, use a new name and online marketing methods to shove his or her new website to the top ratings of Google.

The only way to find out if a spiritual teacher has something to hide and is burying his or her sordid past deep down in the low bottom Google ratings is you have to engage in that greatest of sins: negative thinking.

That means using pessimistic search terms that will catch hold and bring up onto your google page any material that the guru has been trying to hide.

For Andrew Cohen ere are some search terms to utilize that will give a more complete range of citations covering his entire career.

Tarlo van der Braak Yenner Marlowe Be Scofield Blacker O'Neill Paint Finger Michelle Surgeon Cruel Laughter Horgan

Think this is a horrible thing to do? Suppose you need your car fixed and they recommend you a mechanic. Would it be horrible to look up the person up on Yelp?
This is called due diligence.


Many of us go to India expecting wisdom, wonders, wellness.

India. Roll that word around. Its luminous.

Most persons are aware that India is full of scams, and that many times one
will fall ill there while one's belly adjusts to the local biome. Travel guides to India warn that female travelers risk sexual harassment and non stop staring.

To travel to India means Accepting Risk and (for girls and woman) means accepting boundry violations and brutish behavior one would never tolerate at home.

There have been stories in the news about atrocious attacks, as in gang rapes and murders, of women and girls in India.

Next, it takes time, money effort to get there.

To travel to India means Accepting Risk and Great Expense.

So people who go to India are already a pre-selected group.

You arrive, jet lagged. You are shocked by the poverty. You are off balance.

Then you get a heavy dose of Indian spiritualies which teach that your perceptions are illusion.

If you become surrounded by spiritual tourists in Tiru (aka Tiruvannamalai) you
are affected by their group mindset.

(Nope, you can have a Ph.D from Harvard and be street smart all you want. To be human is to be a social mammal and we are influenceable. Its more empowering to recognize this and be very selective of the company you keep -- and know that Tiru is now a hang out for zillions of scamsters who are capitalizing on Ramana Maharshi's reputation. Pilgrim towns are sleaze pits.

And you, dear pilgrims, are the punters.)

So Tiru is the perfect place for a disgraced guru to resurrect his or her career.

To the siddhis of Public Relations let us add the Siddhi of SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

How I Unknowingly Joined a Dangerous Sect

[news.yahoo.com]

It’s like our whole society needs to be vaccinated against the guru virus. That would stop this sort of thing from spreading around.

I’d be interested in her take on what caused the blissful initial six weeks, and what happened after they were over.

Persons who were in three different cults (International Church of Christ, Andrew Cohen's EnlightenNext and One Taste tell their stories. Andrew Cohen is Story #2)

What makes these so valuable is each person describes the complex mixture of good and bad that attracted them to the group, bonded them deeply to the group and its leaders, and led to considerable sunk costs before they realized they needed to leave.


THREE FORMER CULT MEMBERS ON WHAT IT TOOK FOR THEM TO FINALLY BREAK FREE

[melmagazine.com]

This person, interestingly, has no hard feelings toward Cohen and mentions nothing of the ghastly cruelties others endured from him. Yet Cohen's despotism began to grate.

Quote

A part of me that was being suppressed was starting to feel too suppressed. Any time Andrew’s authority was challenged, he’d turn people against those challenging him. He was really good at that. If anybody stood up to him he’d say, “That must be ego,” and he got people to turn on the person. This was all in the context of spiritual evolution, so we had to trust him fully.

How it ended was, there was a group of senior men — Andrew was coming down on one of them, and they all refused to turn on him. They held. This is actually one of the more significant things that’s happened with cults, because they were able to break through the ultimate cult dynamic, which is seeing the emperor has no clothes. I wouldn’t say Andrew is a charlatan or a fake — I’m still friends with him — but there’s an element of that. He didn’t want to give up power or release control. He was infantilizing them. But they held formation, and when they did that, it broke the cult dynamic. It was incredible.

The minute I found out about this standoff, there was something in me that thought, Oh my God, there’s a way to get out. It wasn’t a fully formed thought, but it was an impulse in me. There was this whole element to the group that I loved: Friendship, the practices. And there was this other element that was tired of putting up with shit, day in and day out. There was no future in it.

Until then, if anyone ever thought about leaving, the ultimate consequence was that you’d lose all your friends. Your entire support structure would turn on you overnight, and you’d be a lost sheep drifting around in the world. Most of us had turned our back on family and friends to some degree already, so you’d have nothing. But when the community fell apart, everyone realized that wouldn’t be a consequence, so what started as a trickle soon became a raging flood. The news of that conflict broke in May 2013, and by June, we were all out. A community that had been around for 22 years was gone in three weeks.

This man got involved through a pre-existing relationship with someone he loved and trusted:

Quote

We went on our honeymoon in India to meet my ex-wife’s guru. We lived in that ashram for two months, and right down the road, there was a center for Andrew Cohen. We’d study in the mornings, and in the afternoon go over to Andrew Cohen’s center and read magazines and watch videos. My ex-wife was a lot more serious than I was. If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have opened myself to it, but I didn’t want to lose her. I trusted her, and eventually, it grew on me. After a couple years, we went all in and moved into the community in the Berkshires, called Foxhollow. I got a job working for the magazine, and we lived in the community for about eight years.

What it was like at first:

Quote

I think a lot of people are looking for something to give themselves to, and that was me. I always wanted to make my life count and give something to the world, and that’s what this gave me.

I had some unbelievable spiritual experiences. Whatever you believe a spiritual experience to be — some people believe it’s basically like taking LSD, or you’re connecting to a higher power, pulling back the veils of an individuating self and merging with God — I had a lot of those experiences and they were very powerful. They permanently broke something in me in a positive way. I always had an existential itch to scratch when I was young: I always wanted to know more, my place, and I don’t have that anymore. Those are very positive things that came out of it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/12/2022 09:05PM by corboy.

Keywords
Andrew Cohen
Sam Harris
Jamie Wheal


FROM SPIRITUAL GURU TO THE DEATH OF A CULT: ANDREW COHEN’S UNTOLD STORY

Jamie Wheal May 17, 2022

--Neurohacker Collective--

Quote

. Jamie Wheal: Welcome to a new episode of Homegrown Humans, where I get to chat with Andrew Cohen, a one time spiritual teacher with a global reach, the founding editor of the pioneering magazine "What is Enlightenment" and I would say a bad boy of the spiritual circuit who had a fall from grace in the last decade. Who is now returning tentatively to public life. Who last year had an in-depth conversation with our buddy Sam Harris and has reached out after the writing of "Recapture the Rapture" to express some of his resonance and affinity with some of the topics in that book specifically; I'm imagining the ethical cult building and ethical culture sections towards the end....

[neurohacker.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/30/2022 02:34AM by corboy.

Just watched "How I created a cult" and find Andrew partially reflective on his project of 27 years, but he appears to externalize some of the responsibility and seems to lack a true "waking up" to the horror of his actions.
Instead of the $800k going to an endowment at Harvard which still reflects his ego-mania, why not disbursed to his members and returned to them!

My question is... was he made into an agent by his "guru" in India. Was part of his behavior and actions actually an extension of his guru even though he collected the adoration towards himself?

He appears to have some collapse in self-observation and critical thinking, so I ask this.

I just watched the full documentary "How I created a Cult" - available for free now on Youtube. It blew my mind actually. Andrew Cohen appears mainly unrepentant and very creepy in a spangled floral vest.

It's hard to know what to make of him. He seems devoid of emotion when he talks about things which should elicit emotion. I think he intellectualizes his bad behavior in order to distance himself from it. The documentary inspired me to to take a look online at the infamous 'A List' of Cohen's misdemeanors - and it's an extensive list.

Take a look - [www.integralworld.net]

The most bizarre thing for me was this accusation:

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."

But all the accusations were disturbing, including acts of physical violence and emotional abuse of an excessively cruel nature.

It's difficult to reconcile Cohen's presentation in the documentary with the description of him made here at the beginning of this discussion by a former student. To quote the student Martin Gifford:

At the lecture, I had mixed feelings about Cohen. On one hand, I literally thought he was mentally ill. He had a weird cackling laugh that burst out at inappropriate moments, his sentences trailed off unfinished, he gazed into space, and he stammered with excitement as a new point came to mind. “Cracked” is the word that came to mind. On the other hand, I was excited that he was talking about changing the world and shaking up the dull spiritual scene.

Cohen doesn't seem "cracked" now, he does seem calculated though. It's a very odd person who wants to be in a documentary that shows him in such a bad light - maybe he got paid for it? Did he need money that badly?
Anyway, he's still out there recruiting new victims. See - www.andrewcohen.com

My guess is that he is either a malignant narcissist or a sociopath, but you would need a qualified psychiatrist for a confirmed diagnosis.