In2-MeC

Antwerp, Belgium
16 May 2003

More about Andre van der Braak

As I mentioned yesterday, Andre van der Braak, with whom I did a program at the University of Amsterdam, will shortly publish a book entitled Enlightenment Blues. By referring to the info on a press release he gave me about his book, I was able to do a little Internet research. Like the program I did with him, what I found out was interesting and amusing.

Andre presents himself as a former disciple of an American Advaitist guru. The guru is named in the press release as Andrew Cohen, someone I'd never heard of before. But I found quite a bit about him on the Net. See, for example, www.johnhorgan.org/work7.htm.

Andrew Cohen is certainly no traditional Advaitist, although he claims to have realized that all is one. He comes in no sampradayic line. Cohen claims he received "enlightenment" from an Indian guru, but later on he rejected that teacher as being himself imperfectly enlightened. That Indian guru in turn claimed to be a disciple of Ramana Maharishi, who died in 1950. Ramana Maharishi is a well-known impersonalist, but he is not of the sampradaya of Sankaracarya. And as it turns out, Ramana Maharishi apparently had no disciples, at least none that he instructed to become gurus after him.

One thing Andre van der Braak said in his talk was, "What I know is that I don't know. " I found that Andrew Cohen makes the same claim for himself. Yes, Mayavadi philosophy as understood, practiced and preached by the Cohens and van der Braaks of this world is quite amusing. First they accept gurus who are not gurus, learn from them that to know is to not know, and then they reject their gurus as unenlightened. Then they go on to make a name for themselves by preaching what they learned: to know is to not know.

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