When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva

Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global non-profit EnlightenNext and its award-winning publication EnlightenNext magazine. After the collapse of EnlightenNext in 2013, Cohen took several years off from public teaching. In 2020, he and a group of collaborators launched Manifest Nirvana, a sanctuary for deep transformation, where 21st- century spiritual explorers and integral pioneers will find their home. The author of several books, including Evolutionary Enlightenment, he lives in India. Hans Plasqui is a writer, scholar, and spiritual practitioner who has studied with several teachers, including Saniel Bonder, Terry Patten, and Ken Wilber. He has specialized in Wilber’s Integral Theory, which he studied at JFK University. The author of Sincerity Uncompromised, he lives in Belgium.

• Forewordby Allan Combs, Ph.D. Prologue: My Fall from GracePART 1 The Rise and Fall of Our Spiritual Community1 Overnight Guru 2 A Radical Heart 3 The Ecstatic Urgency of Evolution 4 A Higher We Emerges 5 Dark Release 6 Two Hands Are All You Need 7 Let My Heart Be Broken 8 Awakening to the Truth of Suffering PART 2 Exploring the Spirituality of Tomorrow9 The Owl of Minerva Flies Only at Dusk 10 Death of the Mythic Guru 11 When Shadow Meets the Bodhisattva Impulse12 Why EnlightenNext Collapsed and the Narrative Reversed 13 Triple Gem IntegralEpilogue Acknowledgments Appendix: An Open Letter to My Former Students Notes

“Can one actually experience evolution? Or must it remain a scientific abstraction that can be mathematically modeled and genetically mapped but never really known as such? Moreover, and deeper still, do these Darwinian and genetic processes emerge from some deeper ground that is not in space and time at all? If so, how might these two levels of Becoming and Being be related, embraced, and practiced? Perhaps most importantly of all, are there moral pitfalls and problems awaiting us here? The present book is a most rare one--the story of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of a major modern guru by the guru himself. Andrew Cohen tells his story in these pages and explains both what went very, very right and very, very wrong. He takes responsibility for what happened and relates it to his own pride, authoritarianism, shaming techniques, and the traditional hierarchical role of the perfect mythical guru, but he also confesses those deeper evolutionary forces and absolute truths that have shone through his own Indian guru, himself as guru, and his gifted students all along. Here is an honest, open struggle through therapy, psychedelics, suffering, and further teaching--never perfect, never done, always frayed, and yet somehow also transcendent and true. We need this book. We need this Andrew Cohen. We need this evolution.”