A Declaration of Integrity

About seven years ago, I was giving a talk at a bookstore in Seattle. Afterwards, while signing books, I was taken aback when an unassuming young man came up to me, shook my hand, and said, quite unselfconsciously, with a smile on his face: “Andrew, it’s really nice to finally have the chance to meet you. I’d always been told that you were the devil.”

There’s something uniquely disconcerting about the dawning realization that countless people you have never met are holding an image of you that doesn’t even remotely resemble reality. It’s a strange predicament that I’ve lived with almost from the day I became a teacher of enlightenment. Indeed, from the very beginning, people have responded to me in extreme ways. I’ve always been the kind of teacher who evokes reverence and respect from some, and suspicion and hatred from others. In recent years, however, this polarization has become more extreme, due in large part to the dedicated efforts of a small group of former students who seem to have made it their life mission to create and spread a negative picture of who I am, in a couple of books and in online forums.

I know many people have wondered why I have not responded sooner to all of this. To be honest, I simply didn’t know how to even start. Everything I was being accused of was so absurdly misrepresented and taken so far out of context, so obviously designed only to malign me and my work and cause doubt about my integrity, that I was reduced to a two-dimensional caricature of a cultural stereotype: the “charismatic and corrupt guru.” The motives of my detractors appeared so transparent that I thought they would be obvious to others, and I naively concluded that there was no point in responding. Besides, it just felt beneath my dignity to do so. I was wrong. I have now, obviously belatedly, come to understand that my lack of response is being considered by some as an admission of guilt or wrongdoing, or even worse, as a lack of integrity in itself. Respected friends had advised me: “Let your work speak for itself.” I had hoped that anybody with the eyes to see would easily recognize that the ever-evolving creativity, rationality, and open-mindedness of my teaching and my magazine, together with the confidence, joie de vivre, and open-heartedness expressed by my students consistently over a long period of time, just didn’t jibe with the bizarre picture my detractors were trying to paint. But it seems that the time has come for me to speak out more directly and set the record straight.

Almost from the very beginning of my teaching career, over twenty years ago, people have responded to me in extreme ways. I have been perceived by some to be a dangerous character, possessed of unusual charisma and spiritual energy that could seduce the weak-minded and innocent seeker to abandon all common sense, objectivity, autonomy, and self-respect and become one of his helpless minions—soul-ravaged and mind-controlled. I’ve been branded a pathological narcissist who never recovered from his childhood traumas and unhealthy relationship with his mother and as a result was using his power position as spiritually enlightened guru to dominate and control others in order to compensate for his lack of self-esteem.

On the other hand, there have been those (some of whom are now, ironically, my worst detractors) who hailed me as a spiritual hero, a 21st-century Buddha, a true revolutionary and spiritual activist whose unwillingness to compromise the standards of his own teaching, even in his most intimate and important relationships, was an expression of an unusual degree of courage and a rare commitment to the highest.

I guess it goes with the territory: to be a guru in a postmodern context one has to be either crazy or very courageous—neither of which are characteristics I find it easy to relate to. More than anything else, I’ve always aspired to be an authentic human being, and that’s why the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, as far as I’m concerned, was a few years ago, after a teaching in North Carolina, when the gentleman who had driven me to the airport told me: “Andrew, you are a real mensch. Even if you weren’t enlightened, I’d still want to be your friend.”

In fact, it has been my unwavering commitment to authenticity, transparency, and integrity that has been both the thing that has attracted so many to me, and that which others find the most threatening. It has always bewildered me that I have been accused of lacking integrity, when in fact it is my integrity that makes me such a challenging teacher.

I learned long ago that most people understand “enlightenment” to simply mean the attainment of higher states of consciousness and the capacity to transmit those states to others. Many falsely assume that the attainment of those higher states means that the enlightened individual is morally evolved and has reached a high level of personal integrity, even though endless tales of corruption and abuse of power by apparently enlightened individuals over the last thirty years have proved that that is definitely not necessarily the case. It is well known by anyone who has followed my adventures in the spiritual world that the first ten years of my teaching career were spent in large part dealing with and endlessly scrutinizing this issue in my public discourses and dialogues, in the pages of the magazine I created for this very reason, as well as in discussions with my students and most intimate friends.

My own teacher, guru, and spiritual master, Sri H.W.L. Poonja, made the human complexity of spiritual attainment all too clear to me. Like few others, he could directly transmit the boundless freedom and nondual bliss and radiance of the ground of all being with a mere glance. And at the same time, he could look you straight in the eye and tell you a bald-faced lie without even a flicker of conscience. Our eventual parting of the ways was one of a series of extremely painful, emotionally shattering breakups that I’ve experienced because of my unwillingness to compromise my own integrity. I think, in the end, it’s been that unwillingness to compromise that has, over time, led to the picture created by several former students, including even my own mother, that I am some kind of strange aberration—a two-dimensional tyrant who somehow inexplicably attracts people to him like a magnet and at the same time, for no apparent reason, sadistically torments them. I think the reason they have succeeded, to some degree, in tarnishing my reputation is that they have deliberately evoked a stereotype that is such easy emotional bait in a cultural climate that is hypersensitive to any notion of hierarchy and is understandably suspicious of spiritual authority.

I have always been very public about the fact that I am a guru in the true sense of the word, at a time when, ironically, that title can be used respectably in just about any field except spirituality. As far as I’m concerned, any spiritual teacher worth his or her salt, any true guru, is someone who is sincerely endeavoring to pull people not only to a higher state of consciousness but also to a higher stage of development—to literally raise their center of gravity up the spiral of human evolution. But in our postmodern culture, the notion of anything “higher” than the individual and his or her “sensitive self” is treated with suspicion or contempt. As a matter of fact, especially in spiritual circles, pluralism is revered and seen as the very expression of spiritual development: “All is one and in the eyes of God, we are all equal and perfect just as we are . . .” Any challenge to the inherent perfection of the narcissistic self sense is seen as the ultimate threat to the biggest illusion in town. And it is! And therefore, so am I . . .

My spiritual fire, my passion for God, love, and truth, has always been, from the very beginning, not only a call to let go of the mind and time in order to experience the inherent fullness and perfection of the ground of all being, but also, and even more importantly, it has been a call for a real spiritual revolution—a call to rise up, to transform, to give oneself wholeheartedly to the ecstatic compulsion to evolve for the sake of life itself. That revolutionary call to go all the way has been, I think, what has attracted people to me and what has defined my brand of enlightenment for a very long time. I also think it’s what’s gotten all but the most serious and committed into deeper water than they were prepared to swim in.