One thing that was surprising to me in the wake of Andrew’s first apology was the discovery that Andrew actually needed us. That is something I never expected. He’d declared to all of us he’d come to the end of the path, the end of seeking, we might waver but he never would, he’d take his stand even if every last one of us abandoned him. And I believed him. I believed him even after I lost faith in him, as I began to realize what a twisted enterprise I’d been in. Even then, I assumed he’d spend the rest of his life declaring he was in the right.
That’s why the first apology was so surprising. Even when I was disillusioned with him, I never thought he’d back down. But he not only backed downed, he apologized, he admitted he was wrong. And as weak as his apology was, I’d never expected anything at all. It took every last one of his closest students to stand firm against him, but I’d always assumed he’d still be shaking his fist and taking his stand if every last one of us left. I was wrong.
And so it turns out, in the end, he needed us after all. He needed us to support him in his conviction, in his delusion, he couldn’t do it entirely on his own. In the past I’ve said he needed us to affirm him as a great spiritual teacher, and while I think that must be part of it, to be honest I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps as we looked to him to affirm are belief in the absolute, in the ultimate goodness of life, he looked to us for the same. He identified that goodness in his own perfect responses as a teacher, and so he looked to us to affirm that in himself.
I believe this is also related to why he treated so many of his students so badly. The enlightened individual, who Andrew pretended to be, needs nothing from anyone, and therefore can only give. But Andrew needed us to fulfill his delusion, and when we wouldn’t, when we couldn’t, he lashed out in rage.
It also means we were his enablers. While I don’t want to suggest this means we were equally responsible, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest he wasn’t responsible, this is, I believe, part of the picture, an aspect that’s needed to make sense of what was going on. He couldn’t do it without us, and when the last of us left, he fell apart.
Or maybe not entirely. Nothing is ever truly simple after all, and his most recent open letter suggests he’s still chugging on, there’s still a big part of his former self image he’s shoring up in spite of everything. But I never expected him to admit he was fundamentally wrong at all.
Looking back, there are other senses in which Andrew needed us. On a practical level, he needed us to produce his journal, edit his teachings, organize his retreats, and so on. These days when speaking publicly, he expresses his gratitude to his former guru and his former students, but of when I was his student, he was very explicit in saying he owed his students nothing. I think that was part of how he interpreted freedom.
And I believe he needed us on an emotional level. For me, there was a feeling of connection in living in the community, of intimacy and communication and joy. Leaving was hard; it felt like I was cutting myself off from a larger current, and it left a raw existential ache. I think many of this felt this, and I think Andrew did too. To me it seemed Andrew felt genuine anguish when someone who’d been a close student was in the doghouse, when they were withdrawn and no longer responding. Of course we were regularly told how, when some close student wasn’t coming through, how painful this was for Andrew, and it was implied we should feel compassion for him.
I still think he felt genuine anguish, even as it’s now apparent that more often than not paradoxically he was the one who’d engineered the circumstances that so pained him. Far from being a matter of the absolute, I believe his pain was stronger the more emotionally closer he was to the one involved.
At the time, Andrew taught how the enlightened teacher’s gut responses were aligned with Care for the Whole, how when they felt happy it was because the whole was benefited, and likewise they felt pain when the whole was harmed. But in practice, the teaching of Care for the Whole meant the reverse; if Andrew was happy, the whole must be happy, and if Andrew was hurt or wounded, it was the whole that was hurt. And this in turn was used to justify the cruel ways he treated errant students. What were supposed to be radical spontaneous responses out of the absolute to students’ conditions were often, in retrospect, more rightly seen as acts of an angry petulant child who’d been hurt; ironic given Andrew’s ridicule of the coddling of one’s inner child.
I have a memory of walking out the back door of the kitchen of Foxhollow to see Andrew coming up the path. This was one when of his committed students was struggling, and Andrew was upset about it. Seeing him approach, he seemed to have a troubled expression, so I asked him about it. When he said something about how it was going badly, I smiled and said, well, nothing to do but keep fighting. He smiled in return, seeming to appreciate my support.
How backwards that all seems to me now.
No comments:
Post a Comment