I remember when I first met Andrew in Santa Cruz. I remember the relief I felt, the gratitude I felt, when the existential doubts that plagued me then fell away. It was years later that I became seriously involved with Andrew as a student. But that first meeting was enough for me to get on with my life, to get over my stagnation. I applied to graduate school. If that had been the extent of my involvement with Andrew, I believe I would feel gratitude towards him to this day (though I’d be baffled at what later happened).
There is, I believe, an aspect to reality that is beautiful, that we cannot help but love. When one somehow becomes aware of this, there is a spontaneous choiceless arising of gratitude, and a desire to serve what one has realized. I have experienced this a few times. The first was with Andrew.
I still don’t understand how, but Andrew had a talent where somehow some of those around him awakened to this aspect of being. The problem is that he exploited this. He used it to attach people to himself. He told us he was the perfect representative of what we had realized, and that to surrender to him was to surrender to it. He told us he had a vision of what was possible that only he understood, and that to get there we had to unconditionally trust him, even as he lead us into what seemed to be a senseless hell. He took that which is most sacred and used it to persuade us to submit ourselves to him, and then subjected us to the hell of his own mind. This is a spiritual crime.
I can’t tell you how angry I became when I realized this. There was a period of a few days where I was so filled with rage that it seemed to me that the world itself, that being itself, was filled with rage. Over time I was able to work through it. The important part came when I realized Andrew was never the man I thought he was. He was never the selfless enlightened servant of being. And he wasn’t a conscious betrayer of the sacred either. He was a sick deluded narcissistic man who, as awful as his actions were, was to be pitied. My anger faded when I realized the man I was angry with never existed.
Finally, there is a teaching Andrew gave. He said something like, every aspect of reality has to make sense on its own terms. The spiritual aspect, the ethical aspect, and the practical aspect each have to make sense when taken separately. And when the spiritual aspect is used to justify what happens in the ethical aspect, both are corrupted.
