I was a student of spiritual teacher Andrew for more than a decade, which included that period Andrew dubbed the "Holocaust,” around the years 2000 to 2001. This was when he was putting great pressure on his formal students in Foxhollow to rise, first the formal women, then the formal men. This is my account of that time. I wrote this in part to try to understand and make sense of what happened, and to help others who are trying to do the same.
In writing this, I made use of a technique Andrew once taught us for making sense of events of the past. At least when you begin your investigation, concentrate as much as you can on describing objectively what happened without drawing conclusions. Of course Andrew also emphasized there's nothing wrong with drawing conclusions, but if you start your investigation by making an effort just to describe what happened, you may be able to see more deeply what actually occurred. So in writing this, while I of course have come to conclusions about past events, and I'm sure they do come through in places, for the most part the most part I've attempted to stick to this dictum.
I wrote this in part to be able to explain my experience to friends and family who weren't necessarily involved with Andrew. Since such people wouldn't be familiar with some of the terminology above, I've included a glossary of terms at the end of this piece. Those not familiar with terms like "formal student" may wish to scan the glossary first.
For the men, this period began during a day we spent off the property with Andrew. At the time, he was in a deep conflict with the formal women, taking on “women’s conditioning.” I didn’t understand what was happening, except that the formal women had become unstable, neurotic, crazy. Andrew told us it was a deep “No” in response to his gentle pressure on them to begin to take on women’s conditioning, and I took his word for it.
So we invited Andrew to spend a day off the property, just him and the formal men. It was meant to give him some relief from the stress he was enduring, a chance to get away. Of course we put great energy into making this as perfect as we could, picking a location, preparing food, bringing movies, things we thought he’d like.
The next day we got a message. Andrew had appreciated the event and the energy that had gone into it, but there was something lacking. We had not asked him about the formal women, we hadn’t engaged him in what he was involved in. He appreciated the care that was put into the evening, but he was looking for us to join him in his inquiry.
This was the original signal that there was a gap between us and him, that we were called to rise up. In the beginning it was gentle but it escalated from there. Unfortunately, there’s a big gap in my memory as to how things escalated from this first gentle push to the crises that followed. Part of that may be because I didn’t go to the India retreat that year, and that’s where the pot began to boil. Andrew came back from that retreat declaring the men were guilty of an outrageous betrayal of historic proportions, comparable to figures such as Judas. He said our condition had been even more corrupt than that of the women.
The women’s sauna in the Foxhollow basement had been being used as a device to bring home to the women their corrupt condition. Now it was the men’s sauna’s turn. It was spattered with red paint representing the guru's blood, and there were portraits that were meant to bring home to us our condition, including one of us tying Andrew to a stake and burning him over a pyre of his books. Our letters were put up on the walls for all to see, mostly ridiculed, but occasionally blown up and placed prominently if someone had a positive breakthrough. Eventually, Andrew had a television placed in the sauna that played the movie “Terminator 2” on a loop, 24 hours a day. The message was that we were like the Terminator, a monster who kept doing the same thing over and over, that kept coming, no matter how much was thrown at us to try to get us to stop.
Andrew dubbed this period "the holocaust," and said he was speaking literally. In turning on him, in not rising up to his call, we were killing the arising of impersonal enlightenment, of a new consciousness. It was a crime of inconceivable magnitude. Andrew put up a quote from Ellie Wiesel concerning the holocaust, that "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all." On one occasion, we were all directed to watch a clip from Schindler's List together, one that featured violent scenes of the Nazis slaughtering Jews (I still remember the scene of the Nazis shooting children while one of them played the piano, or another of a Nazi drinking from a bottle and shooting inmates of a concentration camp dead one by one). While it wasn't said explicitly, my understanding of this was it was meant to get our consciences to respond, to get us to see what we were doing was comparable to the atrocities of the holocaust, or at the least, standing by while these atrocities occurred. I remember one of the formal men who'd come from London and had us watch the video afterwards was concerned about me, because I didn't break down into tears watching it as some of the other men did.
During this time, Andrew wrote to Ken Wilber about the tribulations he was having with his formal men, how we were resisting him. Ken Wilber wrote back with a letter commiserating with him, calling us something like, whiny babies. Andrew blew that up in the sauna for all of us to see. A day later, he put up an angry message, telling us that none of us had the guts to respond to him regarding Wilber's letter, and to spare him the usual apologies.
I remember the formal men being told Andrew had said we needed to “crack.” Individually, we needed to have a breakdown, we needed to see the horror of what we’d done and who we were, and to be so repelled at a deep visceral level that we turned back and were with him. I remember us having a meeting at one point, and the message coming back that some things we’d said were good, but what about “cracking”?
Of course the difficulty with cracking is you can’t decide to crack, you can’t will yourself to crack; that’s against the very definition of the term. But Andrew tried to put us in situations where we’d see how horrible what we were doing really was. He once had us do an exercise, where we all wrote down everything the formal men had done to betray the revolution on a huge roll of paper. I believe that was also the purpose of the cartoons in the sauna--to shock us to see what we were up to so that we would change.
We began to manifest the worst of the human condition. We'd divide into cliques, newer students versus old, or American students versus foreign, and one clique would blame the other for what was happening. I actually did gain insight into some of the awful things human beings were capable of. Just to be clear, Andrew did not approve of this at all, and repeatedly pointed out to us how horrible our condition had become that we would turn on each other like this. On the other hand, he also demanded we hold each other to a high standard, and in our deluded condition when we attempted to do the one, we'd typically do the other.
Occasionally individuals would have dramatic breakthroughs. Under that extreme pressure, it was as though the human psyche became malleable like wax, and an individual might transform, suddenly standing up straight, dignified, with a light in their eyes. I remember a European student who had turned on Andrew, who was angry with him, and who'd come all the way from Europe to Foxhollow because Andrew had demanded he speak to him personally before he left. When this student came to meet us, he was transformed. Looking at him, I thought this is what John the Baptist must have looked like. It was as though his eyes were burning, and he spoke passionately to us about nothing but Andrew, our love for Andrew that was already there, and he'd accept nothing from us but that we express the love for Andrew that was already there. We were all of us speechless. I looked at him and the fire in his eyes, and it was as though my throat didn't work.
With a few exceptions, these transformations were temporary,and more often than not the individual would fall back into their former condition; but they were no less remarkable for that. I believe nearly every one of us experienced a transformation of this sort at one point or another, if only briefly. Not usually so extreme of course, and not necessarily so devotional, but each of us got a taste of what we were capable of. Andrew was delighted whenever this happened. On one occasion, he told a formal man that for the first time, he looked like a human being to him. On the occasion of my short breakthrough, he declared, I knew there was a human being somewhere inside there. I took these events as evidence that he knew what he was doing. Now looking back, I see it more as a measure of the tremendous amount of desire and idealism there still was among us, and what human beings are capable of when they're put under immense pressure. But still, I've seen things I suspect few people have seen.
My own relatively mild breakthrough was a sudden clarity about the horrible dynamics we’d been involved in. I wrote letters about our condition, how we formed cliques blaming one another, I made reference to the biblical passage of the beam in one’s own eyes. Andrew blew them up and posted them in the sauna to show his approval.
My breakthrough lasted a short time. While I was able to remove myself from the situation and write objectively about it, I was not willing to take responsibility for what I knew personally. Around this time, Andrew had a leader interview and film each one of us. We were asked a series of questions, all in a completely neutral tone. What was the purpose of what we were up to? What was the condition of the formal men? What was each one of us doing with respect to that. I fell apart. Again, the questions were asked in a completely neutral tone, but I was full of self doubt going in, and expressed all of it, confessing my deepest self doubts, that I was fundamentally waiting for someone else to come out and lead us and save us, that I was unwilling to be the one to do it myself.
Shortly afterwards, I got a telephone call from Andrew, a nearly unheard of event (I’d barely had any personal contact with him at that time). I forget the exact words, but they were something like, “Hey, Rick, I understand you completely sold me out?” in a sneering tone. He hung up as I mouthed some feeble apology.
Again, I want to stress the interviews were done with a neutral tone. I don’t believe they were meant to trip us up; I believe the people conducting the interviews wanted us to come through. And a few of us did, speaking passionately and affirmingly of what we were involved in.
A few days later, the tv in the sauna stopped showing Terminator 2, and instead started showing the interviews we’d done. I got to see myself being completely pathetic, and I to know that all my brothers were seeing me be completely pathetic over and over again.
There was a period of time where Andrew was telling us we were not "serious." There was an occasion where we didn't have a formal meeting about something he'd brought to our attention. That day, formal women set glasses of liquor down for all the formal men wherever they happened to be working to drive the point home. On New Years eve, the whole community was brought together to watch a video, which featured a magician who was frozen in ice. We received a message from Andrew telling us he wanted to meet with him in the meditation hall that night. I was terrified. When the formal women had first been challenged, at one point Andrew had them all to do prostrations together the ice cold war of the lake. I had rationalized that to myself, telling myself it was surely done with medical oversight and great care for everyone's condition, and I'm ashamed now to say I didn't speak out when that occurred. But it terrified me. I hated taking plunges in ice cold water (even though physically, as a large man, I could bare something like that better than than some of those who'd been made to do it), and doing an hour's prostrations in ice cold water seemed unthinkable. Now that the men's condition was even more craven than the women's had been, I thought surely we'd be told to do the same, and whenever we got a message that Andrew wanted to meet with us, I thought this is it, we're going to have to do prostrations in the icy lake. That never happened. As it turned out, we as men were safe from the most extreme of Andrew’s behavior.
Instead, we went to the meditation hall. Everything was dark. As we wandered around the lights came on and the senior students and some of the formal women wearing provocative outfits came out throwing confetti and serving us trays of liquor, and crying out "Don't be serious! Don't be serious!" There were posters up of women in bikinis, and videos with a bizarre British tv show where a headmaster hit the behinds of a bunch of bent over students with a long paddle. They left, and we spent the night cleaning up the mess, and trying to come up with an appropriate response, to try to somehow show how we'd been moved by our teacher's reflection of our condition.
There was another occasion Andrew called to meet with us. This time I was sick and I couldn't go. Again, I wondered if we were going to do the prostrations in ice water. This time though, Andrew met with the men in a bar, to take with them informally about how he saw things were going. Unfortunately I missed it. It was certainly a relief, but the relief was short lived as the pressure was renewed.
As we became worse, Andrew literally came to the point he couldn’t stand the sight of us. For a while, he refused to come to the manor house. When that didn’t cause us to change, we were kicked off the manor house. We stayed in the apartments on the Foxhollow property, and could only come over to the manor house to do necessary work, and only when specifically requested. I remember once coming to the manor house to do work, and as I passed through a hall, I walked by Andrew and he gave me a look. Later I as told that someone had made a mistake, Andrew had been unhappy to see me in the manor house, and they’d be more careful in scheduling my visits in the future.
I think I can understand what Andrew was seeing when he couldn’t stand to look at us. We’d all been so close together as formal men, and now even as we were falling apart, we clung to our identity as formal men at Foxhollow and to each other. Towards the end, there was something that felt strange between us, cloying and sweet and wrong. We’d eat together, meet together, we were all we had, but at the same time it felt we were meeting together in something corrupt. We looked awful. During a retreat, Andrew had a newer student come out to tell us how awful we looked.
Andrew's explanation for what had happened was that as a collective, we formal men at Foxhollow had become corrupt. We had gotten something out of being Andrew's students, a sense of position, of importance, and now when we were challenged, we were colluding in that together to avoid his call to us. What had been positive, a sense of brotherhood, community, had become corrupt collusion. Yet despite this, Andrew felt it was important for us to come through, not just as individuals, but collectively, even as that was harder; it was hard enough taking on one's own conditioning, let alone that of a collective. That didn't lessen the importance of individuals standing up; just a few taking a stand could make it possible for us all to come through, through the operation of natural hierarchy.
During this time it was regularly conveyed to us in hopes of appealing to our conscience of how much anguish Andrew was feeling, of what we were putting him through. A lesser teacher would have compromised, with us. It was a further example of Andrew's unique purity that he would not do so, that he would hold the line with us, regardless of what it took. I did not know it at the time, But I heard later Andrew was drinking to the point where his wife was worried about him, and there were wine bottles outside his apartment.
As time passed, the language we used became increasingly messianic. There was a point where one of the formal women under Andrew’s instruction slapped one of the formal men. At the time this was a shocking event; something unheard of, at least for the formal students. We wrote some sort of card thanking her. Together with the committed and senior students, she addressed us initially mocking us. The point was that it was wrong to thank her; the person to thank was Andrew. She was only carrying out his instructions, she was in essence a vessel for his will. Others picked up this theme; when I give you feedback, it’s not really me who’s doing it, it’s Andrew. It’s Andrew, it’s all Andrew.
Andrew told us how in our betrayal, he felt as though he were losing parts of himself, parts of his body. In acting under his guidance, it was as though we’d become a part of him, and in our betrayal he was losing parts of himself. During one meeting, one of the members of the journal team was responding in a way that was pathetic, and a formal man cried out, “Andrew is losing his brains!” In retrospect it’s funny, but we took that seriously at the time.
There was a brief period where things seemed to be getting better. We spent less time in meetings and more together doing physical tasks like clearing the Foxhollow fields of sticks. We started to feel a togetherness that felt wholesome, rather than the cloying feeling of colluding in something awful we felt before.
Andrew gave us a message that we were to stand in meditation around his house. For me, this was a relatively pleasant period of the holocaust, a respite from the chaos. The messages we’d received we’re affirming, there was hope this nightmare would be over soon. Standing in meditation was certainly much more pleasant than having meetings together about our condition. Every once in a while, other students would serve us food or drink. We were cared for.
On the second night of our vigil, someone came to bring us tea. I kept my eyes downcast; for some reason I’d taken it into my head I shouldn’t look anyone else in the eyes. I accepted the tea, not looking to see who it was, and then I heard a voice, “Can’t you even look me in the eye, Rick?” I looked up. “Andrew?!?” But he was already moving on, serving tea to the formal men. There was of course a lot of power in that symbol, are teacher serving us.
The next day, we were told we had blown it. Everyone was despondent. Andrew had been sure this would work, and now he was crushed and didn’t know what to do. We were mocked; how could you just stand there while your teacher serves you tea? What were we to have done? Anything! Prostrate yourselves, throw yourselves at his feet! How could you just stand there?
There was yet another brief time where it appeared things were getting better again. There was one formal Foxhollow man among us who had in a sense been on Andrew’s side throughout most of our ordeal. He was living with us, because this was something the formal men had to take on together, but unlike us he’d come through individually, and had Andrew’s confidence, and was pulling us to come through as well. At this point, he suggested to us it made sense to make a large donation of money, as recognition of the damage we'd done and our determination to turn things around. Up until that point, he believed, our state hadn’t been stable enough where that would be appropriate, but now it would be the right thing to do. No one questioned this, even though with a little objective reflection we could have seen it was a bad idea.
We made the offer, and it was accepted, though not as gladly as we’d anticipated. Andrew expressed concern if we could do this responsibly, and emphasized we should not put the burden of book keeping on others. He did accept it though, and almost immediately it was obvious what a bad idea this was. The proposed amount was somewhere around fifteen hundred dollars a person, and most of us simply couldn’t pay, credit cards had already been maxed. We debated a system where those with more money paid more, but eventually set up a system where people made payments in installments. I don’t know how that all worked out.
Again, our seeming breakthrough turned out to be temporary, and things became worse and worse again. At one point, we were all called together, and several of the men were told to go to the Sidney Australia center. They literally left the next morning on a plane to another continent. I remember wondering to myself if I’d be willing to move to Sidney overnight if I were asked to. I didn’t know it then, but I was close to cracking, though not in the way Andrew wished.
During this period I made an effort to conform to what I thought Andrew's will was, to take a stand with my fellow students. I got a message from Andrew, what I was doing was vicious, and I knew it. At one point, two of the committed and senior students came up to me and told me very gently and lovingly that I needed to see I was a monster. They had me repeat to myself, “I am a monster.” That may have helped for a short while, though in retrospect I think that had more to do with the obvious care they had for me than the exercise itself.
At one point, Andrew had us all sitting in a circle while a message was read to us, both pointing out where each of us was fundamentally at, while exhorting us to come through. I was described as, "Aggressively self-indulgent, yet better than all of us put together."
At one point I asked for permission to bring a gift for Andrew to the front office, a frequent tool for students to try to make amends. A got a message back, he didn't want a gift, he wanted me, he wanted my surrender.
At one point, a student wrote a letter to Andrew asking to leave. Andrew called on us to ball him out. I did so, shouting at him for betraying Andrew, something I had never done before. I apologized to him for this years later.Meanwhile in meetings I tried to take a stand as Andrew had called us to, but wound up expressing something dark.
People talk about the straw that broke the camel’s back--how without realizing it, pressure can build up and up and up, and suddenly in a flash everything can change. That’s what happened for me. Things got worse and worse, but even through the most awful parts, I believed I’d come through it in the end; I wasn’t going to leave.
Then the time came we were going to have a public retreat on the Foxhollow property. The formal men got together and we decided we’d prove how serious we were by having a retreat of our own. We collected money for tents, made plans, and then it turned out that no one had run these ideas by Andrew or the senior or committed students. Andrew was incensed of course, he was appalled at the prospect of a bunch of zombies having a retreat while he was running a public one, and he told us if we did anything to disrupt the actual retreat, we’d be out.
There was nothing particularly extraordinary about this event; we'd certainly received worse feedback, made worse mistakes. But in retrospect, for me it was the straw that broke the camel's back. In that moment, something shifted in me. I walked through the looking glass. It took less than a second, and I was fully conscious of it as it happened. One moment, I was Andrew’s student first, how ever bad things got, the next moment, I was a forty year old man who’d wasted ten years of his life who had no job prospects and what the hell was I doing here?
This wasn’t just conscious; it was a deep internal shift, and while it might have been an inward choice, at the same time, I had no ability to reach deep inside myself and turn the switch back. After that point I’d sometimes try to deny it, and usually cause harm when I did, but I knew I was leaving.
Shortly afterwards, Andrew sent a message to myself and another student: “Are you waiting for me to kick you out?” Even when he never talked to us directly, Andrew seemed to know when something was going on for us.
I thought about asking to be made a lay student, even wrote a letter, but I didn’t have the guts and I called the front office asking to cancel it.
Meanwhile, our condition was as bad as ever. Andrew posted a note to us in reply to one of ours he found unsatisfactory: “Better to rule in hell?” The message was clear; in our pride we were unwilling to submit to him, preferring to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
It was shortly after this message, we were all kicked off the property. There was no time to pack, we left with nothing but whatever we had on us at the time. Leave now! While at this point, I knew in my heart it was over for me, I felt I could not leave in the middle of this crises. I couldn’t abandon my brothers now, I had to stay and do what I could until every man other than myself had returned to Foxhollow and to Andrew. And surprisingly, that’s pretty much what ended up happening.
We ended up staying in various hotels in the area, moving from one to another to try to avoid gathering attention from the local community. Occasionally we’d meet with students who were still with Andrew (many who’d come from overseas). I dreaded those meetings, as it always ended up with them shouting at us, telling us how awful we were, pushing our face into how horrible our condition became. We weren’t making any progress.
It was at this point Andrew abandoned his original goal of having us respond to him collectively. Instead, he told us, it was now between each one of us and Andrew. When any one of us felt ourselves ready, we were to return, and kneel at his house.
One by one the formal men disappeared. Usually they’d go back be accepted during the night, and be missing the next day. Eventually it dwindled down to just me and one other man. And then I was alone.
I wrote an apologetic letter telling Andrew that I was going to leave. He sent back a sarcastic reply, along the lines of he was so impressed at the gratitude I showed to everyone for everything that had been given to me.
I found a place to live for a while, a cheap place, where the collective toilet was often blocked because the alcoholic down the hall had thrown up during the night. I was in a bit of a fix, because another formal student and I had rented an office on the property to work for a third party, and I wasn’t allowed on the property. So I found some office rental space and set up my computer there. I felt a sort of emotional pain at that time that I associated with being cut off of the community I'd been a part of. It was as though existence itself was painful to me. I did do some work for Foxhollow, and came onto the property after hours. Whenever I did, I felt like I was a demon walking on holy ground.
Eventually, I left Massachusetts and moved back to California. I had a consultation with a student who managed things (and who consistently treated me and others very warmly), in which I was told EnlightenNext would pay for psychiatric help if I needed it. Considering how Andrew disparage psychiatry, this was quite something, and I assumed it had something to do with legal responsibilities.
I still accepted Andrew’s explanation of what had happened. I even became peripherally involved in California for a while. I still believed that he was an extremely rare human being, the sort that comes less than once in a generation, one who had fully surrendered to the source of life, who was pure in intention, and who was working madly to bring heaven to earth, pursuing a vision only he could fully appreciate, bringing about a shift in consciousness that might save humanity. It was years later before I began to question how real that actually was. I very much wanted it to be real. While I no longer see Andrew in the way I once did, I do believe the crises humanity finds itself in and that he was at least in part attempting to address very much real.
Glossary
Formal Student: A particular rank within the hierarchy of Andrew's students. At the time of the events recounted above, formal students were all students who'd been with Andrew for years, typically lived together, and made a formal commitment to live his teachings. We thought of this as an open ended commitment; leaving was strongly discouraged.
Serious Student: As the level of commitment of the formal students rose, and it became inappropriate for a newer student to become formal students directly, the position of "serious student": was created for students to make a formal commitment to Andrew. The goal of being a serious student was to eventually become a formal student, and typically took years.
Committed or Senior Student: These were the leaders in the hierarchy of Andrew's students. Andrew once referred to the senior students as his "partners."
Foxhollow Property:
This was a large property in Lenox MA, and the main center for Andrew's worldwide teaching work. The Foxhollow property had a manor house, where public events were typically held and offices were located. The foxhollow property also had several rental buildings, some of which the formal students lived in. In the events described above, the formal men were first kicked out of the manor house, only to come to do work, and eventually were kicked off the property altogether.
Natural Heirarchy
Andrew believed that there was a natural hierarchy of individuals based on maturity of character, amount of experience, of depth of spiritual understanding. The heirarchy of students he created was meant to reflect this natural hierarchy Also within any group, such as the formal students, there'd be a natural hierarchy, and some students would naturally take leadership roles. This was very important in Andrew's understanding of how groups worked; if just a few people who were leaders in a hierarchy took a leap, it could enable a shift within the whole group..
Men's and Women's Saunas
The foxhollow manor house Had two saunas in the basement left by the previous owners of the property, one for men and one for women. Only formal students and above would generally go down to those areas. Eventually, Andrew those areas as tools to reflect our condition to us as described in the account above.
Women's Conditioning
Andrew believed that there were aspects of the conditioning that made the call to rise up and evolve he was making more difficult. Before the events described above, Andrew directly challenged the formal women to begin to rise up and address this conditioning, resulting in events at least as extreme as what the formal men later went through.
EnlightenNext
The nonprofit organization formed to support and promote Andrew's teachings.
