Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen is an American spiritual teacher and the founder of Evolutionary Enlightenment, a teaching that reframes awakening not as a withdrawal from the world but as conscious participation in the creative process of cosmic evolution.

After a sudden awakening experience in 1986 under the Advaita master H.W.L. Poonja (Papaji), Cohen began teaching, and over the following decades developed a synthesis of classical nondual realization (rest in pure, impersonal consciousness) with a developmental, evolutionary worldview drawn in part from his long public dialogues with integral philosopher Ken Wilber.

He founded the organization EnlightenNext and its magazine What Is Enlightenment? (later EnlightenNext), and set out his mature teaching in Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening (2011), organized around what he calls the “Five Tenets.” Cohen’s distinctive move is to hold two poles together: the ground of being (the timeless, empty, free dimension reached in deep meditation) and the evolutionary impulse (the restless creative drive that, in his account, is consciousness pushing to become more).

He names the awakened expression of that impulse the “Authentic Self,” distinguished from the fear-based, separate “ego.” His place in the Atlas is as a contemporary nondual teacher who explicitly bolts classical emptiness onto a forward-leaning, purpose-and-becoming orientation, sitting near Wilber’s integral stream and in conversation with the wider “evolutionary spirituality” milieu.

It should be noted neutrally and briefly that in 2013 EnlightenNext disbanded after senior students and board members confronted Cohen over allegations about his conduct as a teacher and the gap between his teaching and his behavior; he stepped down, took an extended sabbatical, and subsequently made public apologies (notably in 2015) acknowledging that his ego had remained active and that his actions had caused harm.

The teaching ideas catalogued here are assessed on their own terms, independent of that history.