11 Days at the Edge

11 Days at the Edge: One man’s spiritual journey into evolutionary enlightenment

If you are curious about what happens at an Andrew Cohen retreat, then Michael Wombacher’s book is a must read. The author sandwiches the substance of the eleven days experience between Note, Introduction, Prologue and seven Appendices. At his suggestion in the Note, I read every Appendix thoroughly and I did this before digesting his intimate report about the retreat experience. That approach gave me a good idea about the author’s worldview from the outset. Another clue as to the book’s context is the publisher Findhorn Press. Since 1972 Findhorn Foundation has been an atypical New Age organization with a history of promoting transformative modalities for super-human spirituality and psychic potential.[1] At the time in the summer of 2005 retreat described in 11 Days, the author had followed Cohen as a guru for twelve years. My guess is that today (2008) Wombacher is around 50 years old. He runs a successful business as a dog trainer.[2]

When I read 11 Days it was with some cynicism. I have been familiar with Cohen since he emerged in the 1990s as an up-and-coming spiritual teacher and with his magazine, What Is Enlightenment? (Renamed recently as EnlightenNext: The Magazine for Evolutionaries). You should be aware that I reviewed, favorably, two books that critically expose Cohen: The Mother of God by Luna Tarlo (1997), Cohen’s one-time disciple and his mom, and Enlightenment Blues: My years with an American guru by Andre Van der Braak (2003).[3] I have had personal discussions with Luna since I wrote that review. Van der Braak spent eleven years in pursuit of enlightenment under Cohen’s influence and broke away unhappy with the overall results despite some valued moments. Wombacher addresses these and other critical publications in Appendix 6 with dismissive arguments.[4] One Cohen devotee calls these opposing voices the anti-Cohen cult.[5]

This book covers in detail, day by day in chapters 1 - 11, what 240 people experienced in their “work” with Cohen in 2005. They gathered outside of Barcelona, Spain at Montserrat, a beautiful though touristy setting for a retreat. It had been the location of a Christian monastic tradition for a millennium. The sacred connection was not lost on Wombacher. There they pursued what Cohen calls the Authentic Self in the context of cosmic “evolutionary enlightenment.” The author was among a select group of 90 seekers that Cohen directed to follow a “silent” regimen. That meant daily rituals of chanting, meditating and eating quietly with no eye contact with others. The only talk allowed among the 90 was to Cohen during the 4 or 5 hours over two periods that the guru taught and led group discussions each “17 hour” day. Wombacher was already familiar with Cohen’s approach so he was prepared for the intensity and sleep deprivation. His first retreat with Cohen was in 1996 with 300 others in India.

Wombacher talks about how he struggled for some years after he first met Cohen as he was already devoted to another guru. A self-proclaimed seeker since his early adult years, Wombacher explored many New Age, Eastern and Christian paths before settling in with Peter Steward [actually, Stuart Perrin]* for a decade. Steward was a successful businessman who studied with Rudi, an early Western teacher of the Siddha Yoga of Swamis Nityananda and Muktananda. Rudi or Swami Rudrananda was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn as Albert Rudolf (1928-1973). Rudi taught primarily in New York a peculiar form of karma yoga that demanded complete submission and in some cases helping to run his businesses. (I met several of Rudi’s devotees after he died. They all described him as “enlightened” but he could be a harsh taskmaster).

Significantly, Rudolf studied for five years with a group aligned with the Fourth Way teaching of Gurdjieff (died 1949) and later with an obscure movement that attracted Gurdjieff followers called Subud. Steward was one of many disciples who formed splinter groups after Rudi died after a plane crash. Despite his indebtedness to Steward, Wombacher became increasingly disturbed with that guru’s “narcissism” that included “tantric” sex with female students and a need for popular recognition. Caught in the proverbial “house divided” dilemma of serving two masters, he opted for Andrew Cohen’s more rigorous, even ruthless, approach to consciousness as a “rational” path that takes seriously the human role in cosmic evolution.

Why Andrew Cohen? The short answer to that is because Andrew Cohen says so and a significant cult following believes in him as the focal point of a new paradigm for cosmic evolution. Wombacher has come to accept Cohen as perhaps the most tuned-in teacher of the coming race of elite human beings. In Cohen’s words during Day 5 of the retreat, “That’s the evolution of consciousness. That’s the next evolutionary step for our race” (226). 11 Days is a tediously described exposition of the process that paying seekers go through to engage, absorb and accept this new paradigm that claims to be both rational as well as necessary. If we want to answer the big questions of Who am I and Why am I here then Cohen’s teaching will get you there—if one has complete faith in the process. Having complete faith means submission to Cohen’s insistent direction. To live this process fully you can live at a commune at Foxhollow in Massachusetts or practice through other networks set up by the Cohen movement. If you accept the Cohen hierarchy, then you will see that there are some seasoned devotees who are the “pioneers” or trailblazers higher up the evolutionary ladder than you.

Wombacher sees this as more than just another New Age teleology. He sees the latter as usually based on vague notions of a conscious Universe with which we are “one” or some giddy idea grafted from Advaita or Eastern non-dualism. Cohen teaches against many New Age and mystical paths that emphasize enlightenment/nirvana as the end game. For Cohen, the meditating Buddhas must get off their asses and walk with “God” or, in his words, get with the “will” of the Absolute intention of the evolving universe as represented by the Authentic Self. Not that meditation is wrong or even discarded in Cohen’s approach. Indeed, the retreatants spent a good many hours a day sitting on their butts meditating on whatever Cohen highlighted for that day’s teaching. But the purpose of meditation is to enter pure consciousness, transcend the ego and finally to grasp the self as both there and not there, as both one and the many, as both nothing and everything, and finally as creating or co-creating the next stage in evolution.

After attentively reading Wombacher’s testament, there is nothing I see in Cohen’s teaching philosophy, clumsy as it is, that the average mystic from any tradition cannot handle. Mystics live through transcending paradoxes in “clouds of unknowing” and meditating in the Ground of Being wherein there are no paradoxes. What is so strange is that Cohen’s followers seem to think that they are all onto something entirely new. Why? Wombacher, quoting Cohen, writes: “So what these higher levels are continues to develop over time. The highest levels ten thousand years ago are not the highest levels now because consciousness has evolved and is still evolving” (408). A new Sadguru or cutting edge Avatar is cutting the edge for the most cutting edge group on the planet.

Wombacher has to believe that Cohen’s devotees are enlightened enough to see how evolved Andrew is. He has to because Cohen says that there is no other way. Those too much in the ego will either not recognize Cohen for what he is or worse, they might persecute him for being so arrogant. The corollary for someone like me is that this apparently naked Emperor really has clothes on but I am too dull-witted to see the clothes. But is he entirely naked? Well, no, not really. Cohen’s teaching wardrobe borrows from the modernist and post-modernist New Age boutiques. His favorite pundit from this milieu is Ken Wilber who, lately, has shared interviews on stage with Cohen as well as appeared in Cohen’s magazine.[6]

Wilber was a driving force in the Transpersonal Psychology movement. He has his own organization called Integral Institute.[7] More importantly, Wilber was once a devotee of the controversial Adi Da (Frank Jones, a.k.a. Da Free John:1939-2008). Adi Da as a young seeker was in total submission, by his own account, for four years to Rudi. Wombacher references Wilber often in relation to Cohen’s teaching. Also, our author seems to have a particular reverence for Rudi’s enlightened status and his rude treatment of devotees. If these folks are “evolving” one has to wonder from what they are evolving. Wombacher quotes Cohen several times saying “Context is everything” (e.g. 90, 481). If context is everything, then we might consider Cohen’s similarities to Rudi’s sometimes harsh teaching style.

Another way of looking at Cohen’s effort is through the reactionary movements that both opposed and co-opted scientific discoveries, especially since the 19^th Century. Occult and mind “sciences” re-emerged in Theosophical societies and New Thought groups that continue into the 21^st Century. In the old days, alchemy, astrology, and pharmacology were a blend of what we today see as mythology, science fact and psychology. As science refined and defined effective means for human technology, psychology and medicine the metaphysical concerns seemed extraneous. Religious orthodoxies as well as folk religions rebelled in many ways and we still see remnants of this rebellion in Creation Science and in mental healing in charismatic prayer churches and occult and New Thought groups. The New Age Movement has been partially an effort to both incorporate science and override it with magic laws and formulas. Affirmations and mantras or decrees, if precisely done, are supposed to work much like applying a scientific formula in an experiment. The Summit Lighthouse group calls it the “Science of the Spoken Word.”

Cohen incorporates Big Bang theory in his teaching about a rational approach to consciousness. Wombacher describes this approach in his “Epilogue: Heading Home.” If the Big Bang emerged from a singularity that emerged from the Ground of Being that is essentially “nothing” (because it existed only as a potential) then all consciousness emerged from that very process and “evolved” with “it” or what resulted from the Big Bang. As far as we know, human consciousness today is the pinnacle or purpose of evolution but it continues to evolve. So, Cohen’s idea is to enter into the essence of that consciousness not only as a self but as one with all selves.[8] Wombacher says it helps to understand this through Jung’s collective unconscious and Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields (345). At the same time one has to enter into the subjective flow of the Authentic Self that is one with the Absolute. (If you recognize something from Vedanta here, you are not far off, but do not expect to find elegance or scope in Cohen’s self-directed teaching).

In my view with an eye on practical science, Wombacher and other Cohen devotees blow it big time with the Big Bang connection.[9] Religion as ideas and morals might guide science in its goals and effects but religion is not equipped to do science. No amount of “evolutionary enlightenment” or EE workshop experience and insight will change that. Wombacher, despite his total commitment to EE is not going to change my life or yours as much as Einstein’s E=mc squared did. He will do more good for me by training my dog. Human beings are not responsible for cosmic evolution as Cohen’s 11-Day retreat would have it (406-410).

“What we are calling God, which is the energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process and that’s driving it right now, figures it out as we do.” (409)

“It’s 2005 and the Authentic Self is just now awakening to itself. So this is the bare emergence of this kind of [paradigm] shift and therefore, in a very profound sense, we have to be pioneers of this emergent potential.” (341)

The very notion of Cohen as leader of an elite evolutionary force that all of humanity depends on speaks of an incredible grandiosity.

Wombacher is not crazy if by crazy we mean psychotic though he appears to entertain delusions about his guru, but what about the guru? And, are Cohen’s most successful, highly functional students merely those capable of sustaining strikingly incompatible realities? What about those many that could not sustain it? Were they merely weak or did they eventually become more reality-based and truly enlightened about Cohen? Wombacher opts for calling the dropouts too egocentric or not ready for the Big Bang’s god. Our author convinces himself throughout his up and down struggles over the 11 days that Cohen is brilliant in the way his teaching knifes through ego resistance. In the end, Wombacher wants to totally submit to the cause, he sees no ethical way out, and he wonders how this all important teaching might be implemented even to children as they grow up. He is ready to not only change global consciousness but create it as well.

The beauty of it all is how Cohen manages to sort of get out of the way and allow the Absolute to do its work. In actuality, the students are mostly left to themselves in chanting, in deep meditation and away from Cohen’s personal interactions. Students seemed to spontaneously arrive at deep insights and even achieve group symbioses that approach ecstasy toward the last few days. If they do not they have only themselves to blame—Cohen, after all, is the enlightened One and a-head of all of them and he’s trying his best. But trying his best at what?

Wombacher’s struggles came to a threshold of doubt in one mysterious event that caught him completely by surprise. This happened on Day 8 while he was cleaning up in a meeting room. “Then, suddenly and without the slightest warning a black voice shot forth from some interior darkness, honed with the bloody edge of a guillotine. It proclaimed in a diabolical rage, “He’s crazy.” This was no idle ripple of the mind but a furious howl from somewhere deep within myself. If there was a devil and he had a voice then surely this was it” (347). The “voice” raged about Cohen being a madman who predicted his followers were “space beings five thousand years from now.” Wombacher, a seasoned seeker, withstood the “attack” from within as any serious devotee might in any cult. He applied his considerable intelligence to the task of rationalizing the “demon” away the way so many cult members do. I do not make that last statement idly. While in my devotional stage with Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s cult back in 1979 I had a profound “attack” from that very demon of doubt. Since my career as an exit counselor began at the end of 1980, I have heard powerful testimonies from many hundreds of ex-cult members who had evil experiences to easily match Wombacher’s. In any case, here is how Wombacher resolved his dilemma:

“I considered for a moment the ethical gymnastics I would have to perform were I to heed this angry voice and turn my back on all that had been given me. Were I to go down that road, yet preserve my spiritual self-image, that precious crown of ego, I would have, at all costs, to place upon Andrew the mantle of the demon so that I might be relieved of its burden. I shuddered at this twisted bargain under whose auspices light is cast as darkness and darkness is cast as light.” (348)

“Thinking about this it was immediately obvious why some who had been deeply involved with Andrew and had, for one reason or another, parted from the teaching went to such extraordinary lengths to vilify him in as public and relentless a manner as possible. Such tactics were required for the individuals involved to make the case, first to themselves and then to others, that Andrew was a monster; then they could deny the monster in themselves.” (348)

Wombacher was caught in every totalist cult member’s false dilemma and did not see it. The devil he produced offered only a totally dismissive path thus mirroring Cohen’s totally submissive one. It is the simplistic all or nothing slogan that every high school football coach uses to motivate players—leave it all out on the field; if you do not, you are a failure. But evolutionary enlightenment is not a game with rules for both sides, with a beginning and an end when all players gather together and shake hands. In a game we learn from our opponent. EE is a total boot camp where we train to kill the enemy (the false ego in ourselves and others) and it is not a metaphor. By characterizing the doubting voice in self and others as the devil, Wombacher imagines that every ex-member that vilifies Cohen is somehow demon-possessed. This mental arrangement makes it nearly impossible for him to grasp valid and valuable criticism.

To reinforce his post-modern, intelligent sensibility, Wombacher goes to the opinion of academia. He goes to James R. Lewis, a noted “cult apologist” with a long history of little sympathy for ex-member narratives, to make the case that the anti-Cohen cult must be wrong.

“I was frankly impressed,” he [Lewis] said of his visit, adding that “not only was it clear that Andrew Cohen led a simple, unpretentious lifestyle congruent with his teachings, but I also found Cohen’s students uniformly mature, likable and mentally alert. I had studied many spiritual movements at close range, but in all those years had never encountered a group with which I felt more comfortable.” (493)

Consider what I wrote in a review of a 1994 study co-edited by James Lewis about the controversial Church Universal and Triumphant while it was still run by Elizabeth Prophet:

'After the judge blocked his testimony, Lewis maintained contact with CUT. “I persuaded the Church that they would benefit by having a whole group of academics study them.” (CUT xi) CUT agreed. An organization that once included Lewis among its members, The Association of World Academics for Religious Education (AWARE) allegedly funded “transportation and any other costs” for the study. CUT “provided room and board” for a group of scholars who visited the Church ranch in the summer of 1993. (p.xi) Lewis states that this book represents a preliminary report. The authors plan a longer volume. He summarizes the chapters, then goes on to report that CUT members were “likable” and “intelligent.” Lewis compares CUT to any religious community or corporation when discussing CUT’s mistakes and “occasional abuses.....If one is looking for a less pleasant side of any such movement, it is always possible to find it ... [CUT] has suffered from what might be called ‘middle management problems.’” (p. xiii) CUT’s “Messenger,” Elizabeth Clare Prophet, also known as Mother, impressed Lewis favorably. He suggests that “middle managers,” not Mother, were responsible for abuses of power in “most instances.”'[10]

There are a host of parallels between Wombacher’s experience at Cohen retreats and mine at three CUT retreats but with a quarter century difference. Ironically, the wonderful couple that introduced me to Liz Prophet’s CUT in 1975 had been staunch students under Rudi until he died in 1973. They felt far more fulfilled spiritually by the CUT teachings than anything that happened around Rudi. One would have thought they would have “graduated” to Adi Da or Muktananda. Go figure. Who knows if Wombacher will see it as I do in the next quarter century but it is clear to me in teaching style, content and context, not to mention personality, Andy Cohen and Liz Prophet have a lot in common. Just ask James Lewis. Or, you can ask me…

By parallel I mean, of course, in line with or like or the same as. Let me offer a few examples regarding the style, content and context I mentioned.

1. Liz Prophet’s teaching style included a heavy, inappropriate use of conjunctive adverbs, especially therefore and thus as if one statement has a causal relationship with the next. In this way Prophet could mimic rational discourse enough to fool a host of true believers (she had over 15,000 at one time) that she was saying something entirely rational. Cohen’s favored, overused conjunctive adverbs are so and now. Just opening the book at random, for example to 248-249, I scan about 10 to 12 uses of so and now. Cohen like Prophet applies conjunctive adverbs to highly abstract psycho-spiritual teachings that students find ways to rationalize. As a result, to them, Cohen sounds rational! Throughout Wombacher’s book we find hundreds of instances of the group or individual students agreeing with Cohen after he indicates a connection.

““So even if there’s still an attraction to the ego it won’t be as hard to let go of it because now you’re on the other side. Do you see the point?” “I do.” “Now the problem with us is that because of the narcissism we don’t like to struggle and we’re not willing to suffer and that’s the problem. So you see, if you understand this then it helps to understand a lot about how human beings evolve or don’t evolve and why and why not.”…. “Now, wanting it more than anything else is not a feeling, it’s an action. A feeling is an experience; an action is a whole other thing. So the first tenet of the teaching, ‘clarity of intention,’ means I want to be free more than anything else so consciousness can evolve through me. It’s very simple. But it’s the ‘more than anything else’ that’s the challenging part of it. Does everybody understand that?” “A quiet affirmative murmur moved through the room.” (248-249)

2. The content of Cohen’s teaching identifies a progressive evolution of consciousness with evolution since the big bang. Cohen, as I mentioned above, views his group on the cutting edge of “our race.” Prophet’s Summit Lighthouse foundation myth says we all come the “Great Central Sun” and that the “Teaching” is a “progressive revelation” for the “Christed ones” (her followers) bringing in the new race of humans with higher consciousness.[11] Both Cohen and Prophet benefit from the Secret Doctrine of H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) that describes humans evolving through “root races.” Blavatsky based some of her metaphysical speculation on the novels of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) especially the Rosicrucian inspired Zanoni (1842) and The Coming Race (1871).

On Day 10 Cohen taught, reiterating the quote above from 409: “…God, this Energy and Intelligence that initiated the creative process, figures it out as we do.” “So this is like climbing a mountain that doesn’t end.” “Exactly right” (410).

Precisely Prophet, as in Elizabeth. She, with her second husband, Mark Prophet, wrote the New Age “everlasting gospel,” Climb the Highest Mountain in 1973 for their cult following. The “mountain” was “the path of the higher self” which, in Prophet’s Teaching was symbolic of great effort that each “chela” must apply to earn ascension. Through ascension we evolve, by our own effort, through more and more levels until we approach the Central Sun or root and crown of experience. The important thing to remember here is that we earn our way and not that we arrive at some “peak” to stay in heaven. Cohen emphasizes a process of great effort that never seems to end, yet Wombacher contradicts this notion in the very last sentence of Appendix 7 regarding psychedelic experience. This is technically the last page of the book: “It was as Andrew has said: glimpsing heaven was one thing: taking up residence there was something else altogether. That had to be worked for and earned” (498). So, there is a peak after all in evolutionary enlightenment!

3. I indicated context for both Cohen and Prophet above in Blavatsky who also strove to not merely align with Darwin’s then new theory of evolution but to use it to launch a new occult science. Though Cohen may not consciously or directly borrow from Blavatsky he nevertheless inherits her legacy. Cohen, whether he likes it or not, is just another New Age guru with a teaching twist and all New Agelings owe a huge debt to Madame Blavatsky. Cohen, to be sure, has stripped Blavatsky and Prophet of ascended masters and sky gods, of reincarnation and magical spells, but what remains is essential Blavatsky theosophy. The chanting of passages from Sri Andrew’s teaching during retreats easily qualifies as doing the requisite hours of decrees before Prophet spoke at her retreats. Cohen extends the essential theosophy of Blavatsky and Prophet with his impersonal, detached Absolute.

Set in the matrix of New Age teaching that one must purge and purify oneself before one can purify the world, Cohen follows the same alchemical psychology of self-transmutation inherent in Prophet’s teaching and in so many self-transformation cults including Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and Rudi’s group. Cohen puts it this way: “Now, the answers aren’t as obvious as you may think because the evolution of consciousness is the journey from the gross to the subtle. Do you understand that.” “Yes” (406-7).

“But one cannot be too dependent upon a truly enlightened person, Cohen said, exasperated. “The more attached you get to a person like that, the more free, literally, you become.” Cohen derided the importance that people in general, and westerners in particular, give to independence. He had begun slapping the table to emphasize points. “Look,” he said forcefully. “Anybody”—Slap!—“who wants to be free is going to have to bend his knee.” The mind “must surrender!” Slap! “However that happens, it doesn't really matter, as long as it happens.” Liberation cannot occur until the ego, the “root of all evil,” is obliterated.”[12]

Or, as Wombacher relates on page 474: “In fact, the resistance [Andrew] encountered from many of his own students was ferocious as was Andrew’s response to the resistance. “There’s blood all over these walls,” he’d once confessed in somber reference to the embattled history of the walls within which our retreat as well as our advance to the frontiers of consciousness had played itself out. People had bled. Many had left.” Wombacher goes on to seek sympathy for Andrew who also “bled” yet “stood his ground, suspended over that abyss of dubious certainty shared by both visionaries and madmen. And he kept up the pressure.”

How subtle is that! The end justifies the means? Llull, Dee, and Newton would hide their sacred crucibles in horror.

I had to re-read Wombacher’s encounter with a Cohen student named Gerard who is also a talented mentalist. Mentalism is form of stage magic.[13] Gerard performed card tricks and mind reading for Wombacher in front of other students familiar with Gerard’s act. Wombacher was apparently clueless to this form of stage magic. Gerard’s friends laughed hilariously when Wombacher looked stunned after seeing cards move without anyone touching them and when Gerard read his mind about an old friend named Rocky. “‘How the hell…’ I said nothing further for some time, my face flushed with disbelief. Everyone was laughing…We went on for some time until…Gerard wrapped up his performance. As we headed back to our seats together I said to him, “I get it now. Not Tricks.” “Right,” he smiled.” (453)

Right? What was right about this? If mentalists like Gerard believe they have psychic power, so what. They could be either lying or just fooling themselves by misinterpreting data. Impressing credulous seekers like our author is not proof.

So, what is the remedy for a seeker who wants what Cohen appears to fail to deliver? We can speculate about that but Wombacher truly believes that with Andrew’s guidance and the realization of the Authentic Self a student will somehow raise up to a “level” that instinctively knows the right thing to do. He or she would genuinely fulfill and exceed Buddha’s wheel or Eight Fold Path of “right” behaviors. As I said, we are free to speculate but in my estimation the old religions have covered this territory of enlightenment and sanctity well. Cohen struggles to re-invent the wheel of enlightenment by invoking evolution like other flawed New Age leaders who feel a need to out-pace science. In my opinion, 11 Days at the Edge offers as many reasons to not follow Cohen as it is an apologetic for his teaching. It all depends on just how enlightened the reader is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findhorn_Foundation

[2] http://doggonegood.org/

[3] http://icsahome.com/infoserv_bookreviews/bkrev_enlightenmentblues.htm

http://icsahome.com/infoserv_bookreviews/bkrev_motherofgod.htm

[4] I got the impression that Wombacher views critics of Cohen as agents of the individual and collective “ego.” (Ego has a pejorative connotation in the Cohen teaching as it has among most New Age pundits. Ego is dualistic, selfish, and in denial about itself as limiting the divine expression).

[5] http://whatenlightenment.blogspot.com/

http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/2006/12/cohens-best-come-back-to-haunt-him.html

[6] See “The Pundit and the Guru” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTb2kp9Y4Is

[7] http://integralinstitute.org/

[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69naEQ7YGbA&feature=related

[9] Consider Father Georges Lemaître, the mathematician and Catholic priest considered by scientists as the “father” of the Big Bang theory. Lemaître convinced Einstein that the universe was not static but is expanding. He also carefully argued against confusing his theory with creation myths. Even the popes had to back off from this bogus claim that somehow science had “proved” that God created the world out of nothing. Here’s a passage by John Farrell (2005) from The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology:

“His own pope, in essence, had just stepped over the line, publicly expressing the view that Lemaître’s expanding model of the universe, his primeval atom theory, offered virtual proof that the creation story in the Book of Genesis was now substantiated by science. This drove Lemaître crazy, and from this point to the end of his life, he felt the incident—a true gaffe—had confirmed the suspicions of many scientific colleagues…that the big bang theory was justifiably suspect because Lemaître’s faith rather than physics had inspired the theory of the expansion of the universe from its origin in a super-dense state.”[9]

In any case, as spiritual folks hip to Eastern jargon about Self-realization say, “I Am That” or Tat Tvam Asi (that thou art) where That is emptiness, the Void, sunyata, I AM that I AM, or Brahman. Sometimes Wombacher quotes Cohen as using “God” in place of the non-dualist That. This tossed salad approach to world religion is not so bad if one is merely looking for comparisons to help locate a point of view—after all, the ineffable may be the ineffable but context is everything! The line gets crossed, as Lemaître insisted, when invoking non-religious proofs to validate a religious (a.k.a. spiritual) claim. For example, recall how many New Age aura readers nearly wet their pants with excitement when the flawed Kirlian photography system was replaced by human electromagnetic field or EMF research (e.g. by Dr. Valerie Hunt of UCLA). Ah, now they had “proof” of auras from science! The moisture dries up however once it sinks in that the new science of EMF erases the claims of psychic powers by aura readers. If New Age gurus would refrain from violating scientific principles, there would not be this inherent false dichotomy (science = spirituality) posing as non-dualism or “oneness” with ultimate reality in their teachings. My advice is to stick to the myths and the aesthetics of it all and work it out with strong ethical codes.

[10] http://home.dejazzd.com/jszimhart/CUT_melton_lewis.htm

James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, Editors (1994) Church Universal and Triumphant In Scholarly Perspective (Syzygy: Journal of Alternative Religion and Culture)

[11] http://www.summitlighthouse.org/AscendedMasterGlossary.html

[12] “The Myth of the Totally Enlightened Guru” http://www.johnhorgan.org/work27.htm

[13]Mentalism developed long ago but was popularized in the modern era by magicians like the Amazing Kreskin. I first encountered Kreskin in Atlantic City in 1972 when he was doing his show in front of a thousand people. He wowed most of the people with his ring-linking tricks and mind reading abilities. He almost fooled me until I caught him cheating. I will not say here how I knew (magician’s code) but he definitely did not read my mind about Mandrake. Oh, what the hell—here’s how he did it. He cleverly read it off a scrap of paper hidden in his pocket. I wrote Mandrake on that scrap that he grabbed from me when he ran up and down the aisle interacting with others who wrote down their words. A half hour into the show he did his mind-reading act never looking at scraps of paper! After impressing two others concentrating on their word, Mandrake was the third word he read and I stood up. I focused intently on my black cat, Mandrake, but all Kreskin could come up with was the cartoon strip that so influenced him as a kid. I sat down not saying that he got it wrong. “Wow” went the audience.

Fast forward to a skeptic convention I attended in the late 1980s in San Francisco where stage magic and hypnotic suggestion were thoroughly discussed by scholars and professional magicians. Kreskin was one of the speakers. He insisted that some of his act was “real” which meant he incorporated psychic powers. Professional mentalists in the audience challenged him, calling him a charlatan. They knew.