How could you have stayed with him for so long

This is a response to a letter someone wrote me, that I thought others might find of interest.

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You ask,

"The people in the sanga were some of the finest, most intelligent, sweetest, wonderful people I have ever met. Yet for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would stick around for this torture and abuse done to you by a man who had gone mad with power, power which was given to him from everyone's deep love for him no less."

On one level, I think the answer is painfully simple. As human beings we are more subject to conditioning than we like to think. Andrew gave positive reinforcement when people thought along the lines he wished, and negative reinforcement when they did not.

And of course Andrew had available what may be the most powerful form of positive reinforcement for a human being; he was able to give them spiritual experiences. Andrew could say something to me seemingly inconsequential, and I would be stunned. I would feel relief from existential doubts, I could barely even speak except to say, "Thank you. . .thank you very much." The primary feeling I felt was gratitude. And in that state, it's very difficult to entertain cynical thoughts along the lines of, what is this guy getting out of this? There is an innocence in that state which Andrew took full advantage of.

I remember, early on in Satsang, well before I was a student, I had a conversation with Andrew, and at the end, I said "Thank you." Andrew responded something like, "No, Thank you! You keep coming here and being happy, and I want all my students to look at this man as an example." Oh, I was beaming after that, it felt so good. It didn't even occur to me to question. Why had he used me to shame his students in that way? He'd been on their case for something, as an outsider I didn't know what, but oh what a put down to publicly compare them to a character like me, one who wasn't even a student. I didn't know it at the time, but this was my first example of how Andrew would use one group to shame or manipulate another. And of course it was powerful positive feedback for me, roping me further in.

Over time, in gross and subtle ways, Andrew would encourage his students to identify what we'd experienced on those occasions with him. He was the source of it. He told us our relationship to the truth was not any different than our relationship with him. And while we all know we're not supposed to identify that which is realized in such experiences with any relative entity, don't create idols, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, and so on, as human beings its difficult for most of us to do this. We want something concrete to identify it with, whether it be a doctrine, a tradition, or a person. And this is very dangerous, for once we take that step, anything perceived as an attack on that doctrine, tradition, or person, isn't perceived as merely an attack on a doctrine, tradition, or person, but upon the most precious think there is.

In my own case, looking back, I fell for something called, "The Lord or Lunatic Argument." This is an argument used by some Christians. It basically runs, some people deny Jesus is God, while affirming he was a great moral teacher. But this position is untenable, because Jesus said he was God, and a person who wasn't God but said they were God must be either a lunatic or a liar, and a lunatic or a liar cannot be a great moral teacher. Therefore, you must make a choice; either Jesus is a lunatic or a liar or God, you cannot hold that he was merely a great moral teacher.

So, when I met Andrew, while I didn't understand all the dharma he taught, the parts I did understand made sense to me. I had the sense he'd gone far beyond where I had gone, that he was speaking from experience, and of course he had an extraordinary gift of transmission. So when he began to communicate, in gross and subtle ways, that he believed himself to be a completely awakened being, the dustless mirror, one who was so pure they were incapable of causing suffering through ignorance, I believed him. The very outrageousness of the claim made it more believable to me, because if it wasn't true, then he was the most monumentally arrogant person I'd ever met, and how could that be true given my experience of him?

This leads into another theme. Andrew encouraged new seekers to give him "the benefit of the doubt." Most of us upon first meeting with Andrew were unaware of his past, unaware of what he did with his students behind closed doors. We might have a sense something strange happened, that some student was under pressure, but we didn't know the details. Or, as another example, when I first met Andrew, there was something about his mannerisms that seemed off to me. It seemed to me he was short with people, he was rude to people, he was sneering at him. This purely an instinctive reaction, I couldn’t really justify it.

So Andrew would ask newer people to give him the benefit of the doubt. He asked people to focus on what he was telling them, on their experiences with him, and to set aside doubts. Perhaps you’d heard strange stories about his students going threw crises or being put under pressure? Well, that was his advanced work, you did not have the context to appreciate what was going on, and it wasn’t relevant to you anyways as you weren’t his student. If what he was saying to you made sense on its own, that should be enough. Or if you were having niggles or feelings or suspicions, again he wasn’t asking for your surrender, at least not yet, give him the benefit of the doubt.

That seemed entirely reasonable to me at the time. After all, when I was a student in school, and a math teacher said something that made no sense to me, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. They knew much more than I did, it seemed much more reasonable to assume I didn’t understand them than that they didn’t know what they were talking about. But of course, this was hopefully a temporary measure. Some day in the future I hoped to understand what they were saying for myself. But in the mean time, it was reasonable to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But the thing with Andrew was there was never an end to giving the benefit of the doubt. There was never a point where we found out what happened and could conclude, ahhh, it makes sense to me now. What tended to happen instead as were brought closer to the inner circles was we discovered even more shocking things than before, and we had to give more benefit of the doubt not less. We became experts, deeply skilled at giving Andrew the benefit of the doubt.

I remember how the early part of this process evolved in me. When I first met Andrew, there was something that grated about him to me. He seemed rude and disrespectful to me, though I couldn’t justify these feelings, and so dismissed them. Very early on, this stopped. Overnight, he seemed perfectly reasonable, even loving to me. What I had taken to be rudeness now seemed just to be a blunt way of expressing himself, one perhaps due to his innocent nature. At the time I thought I was seeing him more clearly. Now, I believe I was seeing him more as he wished to be seen. This happened at a very deep level, pre-thought, on the level of my immediate emotional intuitions.

The direction to give him the benefit of the doubt shifted as we became students and that was no longer appropriate. It turned into a teaching on the world of ego and the world of enlightenment being two parallel lines that never meet. The line of ego couldn’t understand that of enlightenment, and for the line of enlightenment, ego was unreal. And therefore, it was imperative to stay in the line of enlightenment. We all knew what the truth was, there was no need to question. And questioning was playing with demons, playing with ego. A split second of doubt could land one in the hell of ego. And the further one advanced in the teachings, the further it became imperative to take this stand. And part of taking this stand, standing in this line, looking at everything from the perspective we’d been taught, was the experience of an extraordinary sweet intimacy between us. As someone who’d never been part of a spiritual community before, I’d never felt anything like it. Questioning falling out of that line and into what Andrew insisted was hell was very painful. When I finally did leave, I felt such a deep ache, a sense of loss.

You write, “I think that people were like drug addicts, doing anything for the bliss of Andrew praising them.” While there is certainly truth to this, I also think it’s not entirely fair. Andrew also appealed to peoples’ highest ideals. There was a point after I left Andrew, but before I’d questioned him, that I became aware of the danger humanity is in, how we’re recklessly treating the environment and our resources, and I became terrified. It seemed clear to me humanity was on a path to destruction. And then I read a copy of the journal, which talked about how people could come together in a objective view that transcended any individual. I read that, and thought that’s it; that’s the answer to the crises humanity is in. At that time, I knew I could never be a student of Andrew’s the way I’d been before, but I still wanted to support him. I became a lay student in the center in California.

And until I was able to question that ideal, or at least the notion Andrew was the solution to that problem, I was blind. I read whatenlightenment, casually admittedly, but enough to be aware of some of the horrible things that had happened. Not that I didn’t know plenty of things that were horrible enough before. But it just didn’t impact me. Perhaps Andrew made mistakes, I could see the critics were coming from what seemed a valid point of view, but it didn’t impact me. Because they were leaving out the context of what this was all for.

But then the moment I questioned that ideal, the illusion fell apart. I began to question critically whether what was happening at Foxhollow was what I should have expected if what Andrew said was true. I quickly saw it wasn’t. And my eyes were opened, and my conscience awoke from its long slumber. So that’s another reason it was difficult to free myself from Andrew. It involved questioning one of my highest hopes, one of my highest ideals.

There’s no obvious reason why it should work this way. It’s just my observation it does. Why couldn’t I be impacted by the horror of what happened while still holding onto the ideal? It just doesn’t work that way. Evidently, at a deep level I was not aware of, my conscience was shut off if it seemed to threaten that ideal. There’s been a long argument between former students about the baby and the bath water. Some of us have been accused of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, forsaking the high ideals we embraced in our anger towards Andrew and the abuse we endured. But in my experience, you have to throw out the baby. Only then do things start to become clear.

This is why, when I spoke to Andrew, I told him the most important thing he could do was to let go of that story of a spiritual breakthrough that occurred, literally cosmic in its signficance. He was still holding onto it, insisting to me that yes he’d made mistakes, he’d done horrible things, but at the same time something extraordinary had occurred and both of these facts were true.

Moving on, you say you don’t understand how a group of sensitive thoughtful people could have stuck around Andrew, could have endured the torture both to them and to each other. The reason it seems incomprehensible is because you’re focusing on the end of a process rather than the beginning. It took at least months, usually years before we were conditioned enough that we would endure such nightmarish treatment. And this was in an environment where Andrew had complete control, where everyone around us was supporting him.

So instead of asking how could we have stood for that outrageous behavior, instead ask the question, how could we have taken that first step? How could we have given Andrew the benefit of the doubt? How could we have trusted him, before who he was and the horrors that were to come were revealed? From what you write, it sounds like you can understand that, you may have been tempted to take that step yourself. And if you do understand that, then you understand everything. Once one takes that first step, at a deep level a critical faculty is shut off. It’s a seemingly small thing at first. It may take years to build on that, to produce people who will see nothing wrong with a teacher who treats his students as less than human. But once that first step is taken, the rest is almost inevitable. It’s like knocking down the first domino in a long long line.

And that’s why secrecy has been Andrew’s best friend. That’s why, if an organization is going to give Andrew a public platform, the least they should do is tell those attending about Andrew’s past before they meet him. And not just vague generalities about him being a demanding teacher who may have gone too far, but specifics. If you tell them later, after they’ve become seriously involved with Andrew, they will probably not care.

Finally, I highly recommend Marlowe Sand’s book, “Promises and Paradise: Chronicles of My Life with a Self-Declared, Modern-Day Buddha.” She describes as well as anyone I know what it was like on a day to day basis to be a student of Andrew’s, the mechanics of how he persuaded to transfer their devotion to what they’d realized in the experiences he’d engendered to him, and why someone would stay with him for so long.