Foreword by Ken Wilber

f o r e w o r d when il comes to spiritual teachers, there are those who are safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are. And may Isuggest?: choose your teachers carefully. If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words of solace, find yourself aNice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort. But if you want Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the fire of passionate Infinity, then, Ipromise you: find yourself aRude Boy or aNasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in asecond and hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born, who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very well be on the path to your own Original Face. foreword xiii Most of us, Isuspect, prefer our spiritual teachers to be of the Nice-Guy variety. Soft, comforting, non-threatening, a source of succor for aworn and weary soul, asafe harbor in the samsaric storm. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; spirituality comes in all sorts of flavors, and Ihave known some awfully Nice Guys. But if the flavor tends toward Enlightenment instead of consolation, if it drifts away from soothing dreams toward actually waking up, if it rumbles toward aGod realization and not egoic fortification, then that demands abrutal, shocking death: aliteral death of your separate self, apainful, frightening, horrifying dissolution— amiraculous extinction you will actually witness as you expand into the boundless, formless, radical Truth that will pervade your every cell and drench your being to the core and expand what you thought was your self until it embraces the distant galaxies. For only on the other side of death lies Spirit, only on the other side of egoic slaughter lies the Good and the True and the Beautiful. “You will come in due course to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist,” as the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi constantly reminded us. Your true glory lies on the other side of your death, and who will show you that? Not the Nice Guys and not the Good Girls. They don’t want to hurt your feelings. They don’t want to upset you. They are here to whisper sweet nothings in your ear and place consolation prizes in the outstretched hand of the self¬ contraction, balm for awar-torn weary ego, techniques to prop it up in its constant battle with the world of otherness. In asense, it’s very easy being aNice-Guy teacher: no muss, xiv living enlightenment no fuss, no wrestling with egoic resistance and exhausting confrontation. Be nice to the ego, pat it on the hack, have it count its breaths, hum afew mantras. Rude Boys know better. They are not here to console but to shatter, not to comfort but to demolish. They are uncompro¬ mising, brutal, laser-like. They are in your face until you rec¬ ognize your Original Face—and they simply will not back off, they will not back down, they will not let up until you let go— radically, fully, completely, unhesitatingly. They live as Com¬ passion— real compassion, not idiot compassion—and real compassion uses asword more often than asweet. They deeply offend the ego (and the greater the offense, the bigger the ego). They are alive as Truth, they are everywhere confronted with egos, and they choose the former uncompromisingly. Fritz Peris, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, used to say that nobody comes to atherapist to get better (although they always say they do); they really come to perfect their neu¬ rosis. Just so, nobody comes to aspiritual teacher to get Enlightenment (although everybody claims they do); rather, they come to aspiritual teacher to learn more subtle and sophisticated egoic games—in this case, the game of “Look at me being really spiritual.” After all, what is it in you that brings you to aspiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the Spirit in you, since that is already enlightened and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to ateacher: you want to see your¬ self in the presence of the spiritual game, you want to meet yourself tomorrow as arealized being—in plain language, you want your ego to continue into aspiritual paradise. foreword xv And what’s apoor teacher to do, confronted with such egoic cunning? Everybody who comes to aspiritual teacher comes egoically motivated. And teachers have two choices in the face of this onslaught of the separate selves, this confer¬ ence of the self-contractions: they can play to the audience, or they can blow the entire building up. Andrew Cohen is aRude Boy. He is not here to offer com¬ fort; he is here to tear you into approximately athousand pieces...so that Infinity can reassemble you. Freedom can replace imprisonment, Fullness can outshine fear. And that simply will not happen if all you want is consolation, sooth¬ ing prayers, ruffle-free platitudes, “It will all be okay.” Well, it will not be okay if you want Enlightenment. It will, in fact, be hell, and only Rude Boys are rude enough to tell you that, and to show you that—if you can stand the rudeness, stay in the fire, burn clean as Infinity and radiate as the stars. Every deeply enlightened teacher 1have known has been aRude Boy or Nasty Girl. The original Rude Boys were, of course, the great Zen masters, who, when faced with yet another ego claiming to want Enlightenment, would get a huge stick and whack the aspirant right between the eyes. And that was just the beginning, that was the easy part; things got nastier fast—but at the other end of that brutality lay ever-present Realization, ashocking jolting death of the self and the radiant resurrection of infinite Spirit as your very own true nature: if you could stand the heat. Rude Boys are on your case in the worst way, they breathe fire, eat hot coals, will roast your ass in ascreaming second and fry your ego before you knew what hit it: undo your xvi living enlightenment self-contracting fear and sizzle your well-honed defenses: if you can stand the heat. Ihave often heard Nice-Guy teachers say that Andrew Cohen is rude, and Ithink, “You don’t know the half of it.” I have often heard it said that Andrew is difficult, offending, edgy, and Ithink, “Thank God.” In fact, virtually every criti¬ cism Ihave ever heard of Andrew is avariation on, “He’s very rude, don’t you think?” And 1smile the biggest smile you can imagine. If it weren’t for the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God Realization, Spirit would be arare visitor in this strange l a n d . Andrew’s magazine What Is Enlightenment?, for example, is the only magazine Iknow that is deeply, truly, outra¬ geously Rude: which is to say, the only magazine asking the hard questions, slaughtering the sacred cows, and dealing with the Truth no matter what the consequences. The maga¬ zine is expressive of the very rudeness necessary to shatter egoic complacency, acomplacency sick and thick, cloying, suffocating, drowning in its own self-smugness. You do well to be deeply offended by Andrew; he is, indeed, damn rude. So, can you stand the heat? Or would you like more soft and consoling words of comfort, more consolation prizes for an Enlightenment that will continue to elude you? Would you like apat on the back, or are you ready to be skinned and fried? May Isuggest this? If you can stand the heat, you will indeed come to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist, where the self-contraction has uncoiled in the vast expanse of all space, where your separate self has been roasted and replaced by infinity resplendent—a radical foreword xvii Release much too obvious to see, much loo simple to believe, much too near to be attained—and your real Self will quietly but surely announce its Presence as it calmly embraces the entire universe and swallows galaxies whole. In short, if you are ready to recognize your own Original Face, if you are capable of standing in the very middle of a raging fire that will melt your Fleart and open it to eternity, then you have come to the right place. In the following pages you will see that Andrew Cohen is aRude Boy who acts with uncompromising integrity, an integrity that shows compas¬ sion to your real Self and avery big stick to your ego. If you can stand the heat, then enter the real kitchen of your own soul, where you will find nothing other than the radiant God of the entire cosmos. For it is radiant Spirit that is looking out from your eyes right now, speaking with your tongue right now, reading the words on this very page, right now. Your real Self is glorious Spirit in this and every moment, and it takes avery, very Rude Boy to point that out and to stay in your face until you recognize your own Original Face, shining even here and now. - K e n W i l b e r Boulder, Colorado xviii living enlightenment