Andrew Cohen (spiritual teacher)
Andrew Cohen (born October 23, 1955) is an American spiritual teacher. He is an author, former editor of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, and founder of the global spiritual community EnlightenNext, which dissolved in 2013. Biography and beliefs Cohen was born in New York City into an upper-middle class secular Jewish family. Cohen recounts that his life was changed by a spontaneous experience of "cosmic consciousness" at the age of sixteen. At 22 years of age and after pursuing a career as a jazz musician, he began a quest to recover his earlier spiritual experience. He eventually met H. W. L. Poonja in 1986, a student of Ramana Maharshi, who taught that no mind effort is needed to attain enlightenment "because it is merely the realisation of what one already has". At their first meeting, Cohen realized that he "had always been free". He claimed that Poonja declared him his heir, so Cohen began to teach as a neo-Advaita teacher, and gathered a community around him. However Cohen only spent a short time in the presence of H. W. L. Poonja, who later claimed never to have given Cohen permission to give spiritual teachings. Within a few years, Cohen considered that