Andrew Cohen, born 1955, USA, is a guru and spiritual teacher who has developed what he characterises as a unique path of spiritual transformation, called Evolutionary Enlightenment. He has founded an organisation called EnlightenNext, and works closely with Ken Wilber and his Integral Institute.

Cohen has also attracted attention due to his apparent ability to transmit deep spiritual realizations to others, merely from his physical proximity - the so-called 'radiance model' of enlightenment.

With this is mind, and not a little excited, on Friday 19th October 2007 the baptists hurried through the streets of London to hear Cohen give a talk in person, and attempt to get as close to him as possible.

ALAN: Well, I could tell it was going to be a freaky night by the number of synchronicities that occurred before we even got to sit down. The talk was held at Cohen's EnlighteNext headquarters in Angel, and although I was sure I'd never been to that part of London before, it turned out the baptists had held their very first meeting in a pub that just happened to be round the corner from Cohen's building. Then my ticket turned out to be number 73, which is the number of a Magus for you Qaballah fans, and upon entering the auditorium I suddenly recognised one of Cohen's little helpers – it just so happens she sits three desks away from me at the local authority where I work. What are the chances?

DUNCAN: It was billed as a talk, but we tried to get as close to him as possible - didn't we? - to see if we could pick up a bit of his darshan.

ALAN: I think a lot of people had the same idea, as the room was packed. The closest we could manage was the fifth row. This didn't seem to matter, because I'm sure I could feel a bit of darshan when Chris Parish, the Director of EnlighteNext, came on to introduce Andrew, although how much of that was down to scripting I don't know. The intro made me want to vomit, and I was interested to see if the guru would live up to Parish's praise.

If we pictured Cohen he might (rightfully) sue our arses. So, just to be clear: THIS IS NOT ANDREW COHEN!

DUNCAN: When he walked on, and for the first part of the talk, I definitely felt something. He looks pretty genial; almost slightly comical. He has a fluffy barnet of hair and a tache. All the buttons on his suit were done-up. He looks a bit stiff when we moves. But it's his eyes and face and manner that have something. You could say he's relaxed, but it goes beyond being unhurried and self-confidence. Most people, I reckon, are in a process of struggling with something in order to be doing whatever it is they're doing. Maybe they're having to deal with being tired, nervous, bored, distracted. Whatever. Cohen doesn't give that impression. He's totally there. That's what the special quality seemed to be.

ALAN: I agree. There is certainly something about him, like an irresistible attraction. (But emphatically not in a sexual sense – this man wears knitted Christmas jumpers.) I could see why he has so many followers.

DUNCAN: I felt as if I just wanted to sit and meditate in his presence. Honestly. In fact, I even thought about doing it, but decided it wasn't appropriate for the occasion. I would've looked a twat. But I felt myself being drawn into a state of heightened awareness. Oddly, after a while it centred in my throat chakra. I felt it open, and then there was a pulsing sensation and it felt as if it was rotating. That's the chakra that's all about communication, isn't it? It felt like that for most of the talk – until I started to get a bit bored later on, and my bum started to ache.

ALAN: I too felt something. At first, it was a bit like coming up on a challenging dose of entheogens, and I very much fell into the expectant 'is something happening?' state of mind peculiar to the onset of a trip. Colours suddenly seemed more vibrant, and at one point I felt like laughing for no apparent reason. Suddenly, the amazing 'pull' of Cohen disappeared, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why everyone was looking to him for something. I had to resist a strong urge to stand up and shout at the fools. Eventually, bum ache got the better of my attention too.

DUNCAN: I thought his style of address was geared to a more enthusiastic audience. He would make a point, then ask for confirmation from the audience: 'Isn't that right?'; 'That's true, isn't it?' ('No,' I felt like saying, a couple of times.) In the US I imagine this would elicit yelps of agreement. But it was a staid, Brit audience. The most he ever got was a low murmur of assent. Did it put him off? Did it bollocks...

ALAN: I was very impressed with his integrity, in the sense that I really got the impression that he came on stage with no real plan for the talk. He just seemed to say whatever he felt he should say at any given moment. Many times he would pause in his speech, look upwards or close his eyes, as if waiting for the right words to come.

DUNCAN: He also had this freaky laugh. A high-pitched cackle, like a cartoon character. It struck me how useful it is to have a laugh that sounds funny, because if your laugh makes other people laugh then it's very likely that when you're laughing someone else will start too. Which is useful in Cohen's case, because – judging from his talk – he finds things like 'cannibalism' and 'stomach cancer' side-splittingly funny.

ALAN: I must admit, I did find him funny. To go back to the trip analogy, I felt very much like I was in a group of trippers getting the giggles.

DUNCAN: The talk focussed on what he calls 'the universe project'. The resonances with Ken Wilber's writings were extremely loud and clear. In about ninety minutes, he'd told us what the meaning of life was and our role in it. 'Imagine you're God before the creation of the universe,' he said. 'You exist in infinite wholeness and nothingness. You're perfect and complete. Now, in all those infinite aeons, who's to say it doesn't occur to you to create a material universe?' But I don't know about this. Is he saying God's a crap meditator? That God's mind wandered from emptiness, and the whole universe sprang up, because God lost the plot?

ALAN: I don't think he was really saying that – in fact, I think the whole 'imagine you are God' bit was simply a set-up for the main thrust of his teaching, and he was just using this as a method for engaging the average Joe in his line of thought.

DUNCAN: 'Consider evolution,' he said, 'and all the changes in the last fourteen billion years since the Big Bang. There is direction and order in that process, so the underlying principle of the universe is consciousness. It's what drives evolution, and it's what finds its culmination in the minds of human beings.' So he wasn't asking us to imagine being God; he was telling us that we were! Not in an egoic sense, of course. But the same consciousness that is the principle of the universe arises in human beings as the means by which God becomes aware and apparent to itself. 'We created the universe,' as Cohen put it, 'in order to find ourselves.' Crikey.

ALAN: This is really old hat, and I found most of Cohen's teaching to be the result of a poor reasoning faculty. I've read his autobiography, and it's explicit that he began teaching with no technique, no model or morality. It's apparently taken him over twenty years to put his teaching together, but to be frank, I'd be embarrassed to admit that.

DUNCAN: This stuff really got my goat. Like you suggested, maybe it's just a way of explaining things to new people. Just because you can have experiences in meditation of unity with emptiness, and you can realise the underlying principle of consciousness, well, that's an experience – I can't see how it follows there's something 'out there' that has the same characteristics as the thing I experience. Whatever. I don't know. I don't see the point of speculations like this about things that can't be known. Call me a big fat Buddhist. Isn't it better to let people have experiences without forewarning them, and let them make of them what they will? An end to samsaric suffering is incentive enough to work for enlightenment, I reckon, without having to tell people they'll become God into the bargain.

ALAN: I think you might be getting too caught up in what might just be a device for his evolutionary enlightenment argument.

DUNCAN: Yeah, well... I can understand why Cohen has to do this, though. The special slant he puts on his teaching is all about direction and progress. Personal liberation is not the final end. One person's awakening affects the way God sees itself; therefore it affects the whole universe, according to Cohen. So there's a strong notion of ethical responsibility there. Purpose, progress, direction – these were words he kept using. We have to find out who we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to be doing, before we can be said to be fully liberated. It's an ethical teaching. He's interested most of all in morality.

ALAN: I couldn't agree more. However, I think this is where the whole thing falls down – he's pushing a training in morality, not a method of fundamental insight. This is all fine and dandy if you're already enlightened – after all, 'morality is the first and last teaching' and all that – but it offers no means of acquiring enlightenment without Cohen's actual presence! That might be the point, but he does equate what he calls the 'Authentic Self' with the state of enlightenment, when the 'Authentic Self' is just how he thinks an enlightened person should act! I'm sure Cohen is enlightened, but this is a classic fundamental misunderstanding of enlightenment, or what Ingram calls a limited action model of enlightenment. If enlightenment means a person must act in a certain way, why would they need a teaching to tell them how to do that?

DUNCAN: I don't doubt Cohen is enlightened either. And I reckon his is a genuine teaching that will sort people out. But he's definitely their guru, isn't he? The whole movement functions like a cult. Members have to give up possessions and a portion of their salary. If I wanted to join, they'd probably make me work full-time. I couldn't be doing with that! Is a guru-based system an equivalent to the Holy Guardian Angel for people who don't quite get it? I'd much rather surrender my ego to a dualistic representation of non-duality than have to give my cash to a material person so they can blow the lot. It seems a very expensive metaphor for what is evidently an inner process.

ALAN: A guru is the same thing as the Holy Guardian Angel, both being the embodiment of the absolute or true self, and the process is the same method of complete surrender. Especially considering what has happened since the talk. [More details soon!] I have no doubt that this is a valid technique for achieving enlightenment.

DUNCAN: We got chatting to some of Cohen's students afterwards, didn't we? Wow. They do a lot of talking. Talking to Andrew. Talking to each other. Forming special groups to talk to each other some more. It sounded a lot like psychotherapy. Sometimes they get around to meditating. It seemed to appeal to people who find the approach of constant, formal meditation too dry and substanceless.

ALAN: I found the whole thing a bit weird. For all their immediacy and constant pushing to evolve consciousness, the only thing they have to show for it are some swanky EnlighteNext buildings, and a shed load of posters with people skydiving into a galaxy.

DUNCAN: Yeah. But it was a really nice building. And having said that, I do worry about myself sometimes. Morality doesn't automatically increase with every fruition, does it? Compassion doesn't necessarily follow. Recently, I've even caught myself pressing people's buttons, just to watch the process of them getting wound up over stuff I know doesn't bother me up any longer. (Sorry, Julia.) Maybe I need a guru like Cohen to stop me joining the Nirvana Nazis.

ALAN: It's curious, because as you say, fruition doesn't equal morality, and yet Cohen's teaching is exactly the reverse – morality equals enlightenment! You don't need a guru like Cohen – you already know you're a git, you just need to stop acting like one.

DUNCAN: Talking with you, Alan, I feel nicer already. Anyway, my favourite moment was when we were chatting with the students afterwards, and one of them asked us: 'What do you practise.' And you said: 'The Western Mystery tradition. We use this concept called "The Holy Guardian Angel" that provides a full model of enlightenment.' And she said: 'Well, it's very easy to delude yourselves if you don't have a proper peer group.' Yeah, I thought, and it's very easy to sit around talking forever, without actually doing anything.

ALAN: Ha ha! Yeah, but you'd be cranky too if you'd spent two decades practising Vipassana without one fruition. No wonder Cohen blew her mind.

DUNCAN: I did feel different afterwards, which is a bit weird. I feel energised and up for stuff, and happy and confident that things are happening, moving in the right direction. I think there's a bit of truth in that 'radiance' model of enlightenment.

ALAN: Remember on the tube on the way home, when I would periodically say 'I keep thinking something's changed'? Well, it has. This is pretty shocking, and I think the whole thing is beyond the scope of this dialogue, so I'll deal with it all in a separate piece shortly.

DUNCAN: I had a dream last night that we were both hanging out in this community who had a guru who looked a bit like Timothy Leary. Like Cohen, this guru looked and acted years younger than his physical age. And I was staring at this Leary lookalike, because I thought I saw around his face scars from cosmetic surgery. But the more I looked, the more the scar faded away, until I started to think – yes – this is his genuine face. Whilst he was talking, students kept walking in front of the stage, which he'd told them repeatedly not to do. They wouldn't stop, so he picked up a stick and smacked them. But then some senior students went for him with their sticks, and started smacking him. He tried to run away, but they caught him and sat on top of him until he'd calmed down. Watching this, I was thinking: So, it's the students who run this set-up. It's just easier for them to pretend their guru is in control.

ALAN: For a dream, that contains a whole lot of reality!

DUNCAN: Are you going to go back and meditate with them on Tuesday nights?

ALAN: I might do, yeah. Worth checking out.

DUNCAN: You're hoping that girl's going to be there, aren't you?

ALAN: Erm, I have no idea what you are talking about.