A Vicious Circle

As a former student of Andrew's, it's a great challenge to make sense of what one has been a part of, all the moreso because the one fellow who made it all happen is no longer interested in the investigation. It's a confusing situation, and reasonable people can come down in all sorts of positions. I think there ought to be space for widely varying different views. What follows is a description of what is purely my own attempt to make sense of it all, to understand what happened. While I try to support it with concrete details, the conclusions are to varying degrees speculative, especially towards the end.

At one point during that period Andrew dubbed "the holocaust," I was inspired to write letters to Andrew that contained my insights into the dynamics of the formal men. I wrote how we would split, one group rising to scape goat and denounce another, taking a position and becoming arrogant. The newer students would confront the older students, then the foreign students would confront the Foxhollow students, coming not from compassion or desire for liberation, but a raw struggle for survival. At the time I said I had an insight into what made things like the McCarthy hearings or even the Salem witch trials possible, because what we were doing was based on the same dynamics. I was immediately lavished with positive feedback. While he didn't actually talk to me, Andrew took my letters and enlarged them, posting them in the sauna for all the men to see. One of the committed men spoke with me, telling they were relieved one of us got it. I was told Andrew declared, "i knew there was a human being underneath there!" My elevation was short lived, of course, my own self doubt brought me down soon after, but for a short while I was very much affirmed.

And yet, in retrospect, a very important part of the picture was missing from my letters, something obvious in retrospect, and yet something at the time I was blind to. I only realized it years later, when I heard how in the last years Andrew's closest students had challenged him, and in response, Andrew had manipulated the student body, trying rise up one then another faction of students to bring them down.

What was missing from my letters was the fundamental source of our division, why we were all involved in a struggle for survival, so willing to turn on one another, to seek out a weekly scape goat. Andrew himself was orchestrating it. It was he who demanded that the newer students took on the older students, or the foreign students the Foxhollow students. And if a group didn't take another group on in a way that satisfied him, he'd yell at them, don't you care about your brothers? Don't you care about what we're doing here? This should have been obvious at the time, but of course I rationalized it. I reasoned that when Andrew told us to take each other on, of course he wanted us to do it the right way, the selfless way, the evolutionary way, and it was our own small minded selfish natures that it almost always seemed to go wrong. But in retrospect, it's obvious he was orchestrating the very chaos he was horrified by.

Understanding this also helped me understand what happened to me in my last weeks as his student. I began becoming arrogant, I took positions, I yelled at another student, something I'd never done before. Andrew was horrified. He had me repeat to myself over and over, "I'm a monster, I'm a monster," he told me "What you're doing is vicious and you know it." And yet in retrospect I realize I was acting that way, because I was doing my damnedest to do what Andrew seemed to want. I was doing my damnedest to trust him and not my own judgement, to take on my brothers, to take a stand for the truth as Andrew saw it. And it brought out the worst in me. Soon after, it broke me, and though I didn't really know the reason why I knew I had to leave.

I believe now that Andrew was a deeply divided individual. I believe he really was horrified by the dynamics that were manifesting between us, by the aggression we inflicted on one another, even as he orchestrated all these things himself. And I think it has something to do both with both his view of enlightenment and the nature of his enlightenment.
Early on, Andrew spoke often about doubt. Doubt was the enemy. He devoted a section of Enlightenment is a Secret to the subject of doubt, comparing it to poison, saying it could make you forget everything in a billionth of a second. I was confused by this teaching at the time, and never could make sense of it; doubt seemed to me a necessary tool against self deception, and I couldn't understand how it could be a fundamentally bad thing. In retrospect, I wish I'd paid much more attention to these doubts. Of course Andrew insisted on his students always giving him the benefit of the doubt. Superficially, this seemed reasonable. After all, if strange things seemed to be happening around one's teacher, but one didn't know the details, and his teachings seemed sound, wouldn't it make sense to suspend judgement, to give the teacher of the benefit of the doubt, until one learned more? But of course when one did learn more, one was required to give more benefit of the doubt, as the reality inevitably turned out to be even more extreme than the rumors one had heard. One kept having to give more, and more, and more. Ultimately, it was no longer just giving the benefit of the doubt, as Andrew taught that the enlightened and deluded conditions were two parallel lines that never meet, and one could choose one or the other. It wasn't a matter of reason, it was a matter of choice, where the wrong choice could instantly land one in hell.

As to the nature of his enlightenment, in one of the teachings I remember Andrew spoke about how the enlightened individual is always moving forward, always responding, always staying one step ahead of the ego. If you stop, the ego catches up with you and declares, "I'm here!" but if you keep moving, keep spontaneously responding, it's always one step behind.

In light of this, I think Andrew did somehow manage to cultivate an unusual state of mind, a sort of doubtless state. In this state, he somehow managed to cut himself off from a certain part of himself, that part of a person that brings them up short, that makes them slow down and stop, that makes their stomach tighten, that makes them think, "I think I've done something wrong." Somehow he cultivated a state where he was always moving, always responding, and by never facing into doubt, he thought he'd freed himself from it. He thought he'd freed himself from karma, from ignorance. And it did bring him, I think, a certain measure of freedom. It certainly brought up a mountain of self confidence. And when we shared in that confidence in Andrew's condition, we also shared in that sense of freedom ourselves.
But of course it was built on a lie. Just because he was outrunning his doubts, didn't mean Andrew's ego wasn't expressing himself in the manifest world, that it wasn't visible in the fruits of his actions. But of course the nature of his understanding and his condition demanded that he never look back, that he keep moving forward, keep responding never doubting. One of the worst sins a student could commit was causing Andrew to doubt himself. And in an expression and a violation of the third tenet, there grew a huge wave in the rear view mirror of Andrew's vision growing every larger that he could never acknowledge. And the more Andrew denied the ego in himself, the more he necessarily saw it in other people. I remember once being told it was difficult to live with Andrew, because he could only bear living with the purest of his students, that the expression of ego was unbearable to him. That should have told me something was deeply wrong.

And of course as a group, we were an expression and a reflection of both our teacher's condition and his teaching. In our passion, our idealism, and in our pride and our division, in almost everything we reflected back Andrew's condition to himself. As bizarre as it may seem, I think we became collectively a giant mirror for our teacher. And when we necessarily reflected what was rather than what he wanted to be, when we failed to express the amazing impersonal revolution he was convinced it was his destiny to bring about, but instead manifested a very divided dog-eat-dog human condition, he lashed out in horror and anger, creating even more chaos that was then reflected back to him in an ever escalating vicious circle.

As a small example of this, there was a point where the formal men were all individually interviewed on camera, asked a series of questions in a neutral manner, about what Andrew was trying to do, what our condition was, what our part in it was. In that interview I collapsed. I expressed my worst self doubts. I confessed I was fundamentally waiting for someone else to take a stand, to lead so I could follow, that I was unwilling to take that stand myself. I got a call back from Andrew soon after. I hadn't even heard his voice for months. He told me something like, hey Rick, I heard you completely sold me out? Then cackled at me and hung up the phone.

Now in retrospect, with all this in mind, I wonder, did I unwittingly reveal an aspect of Andrew's own condition to him? He was, after all, fundamentally waiting for his students to do the work for him. There was little true direction, just bizarre exercises no one could fathom the point of, and the demand to come through, and by coming through to affirm the perfection of the teachings and himself as a teacher. When eventually his students demanded of him that he begin to grapple with what we had struggled with, he let everything fall apart without even trying. Was the reason Andrew lashed out at me was that I had, how ever unwittingly, reflected an aspect of himself to himself? On a side note, I do wonder wistfully what a true teacher could have done with my confession. I had, how ever pathetically, revealed my worst fears. What could a true teacher have done with that,one unconcerned with their own ego, one who's teaching consisted of more than just insisting one had to muscle through and express enlightenment and any inquiry of deeper motives was merely an expression of doubt?

Again, I believe Andrew was genuinely horrified by the condition he was seeing, even as he was orchestrating it himself. The more we revealed his condition to him, the more he had to deny it, to run from it, until he was declaring he was expressing something so beautiful it brought the devil out of us. Eventually, I think something in Andrew shifted. He gave up insisting on first the formal women then the formal men coming through collectively in the way he envisioned, and instead had everyone meditate together, eventually declaring a break through. But there was something new in some of his writing, something cloying, sickly, and fake in his blog post "Over the rainbow" about how happy he was and about the amazing transformation that had occurred, or with his spiritual reconciliation with his guru, or his bizarre letter written from the view point of his dog to Anastasi about how wonderful things were. When I first met Andrew, there was a down to earth quality to him, a tell-it-like-it-is quality, a frankness I admired. Of course later I realized this wasn't always so admirable. Nevertheless, there had been a genuine quality to him that was lost. At least that is how things seem to me now.