It appears that he is sincere and trying to help the world. Also, before he met his master, Andrew had been involved in martial arts and yoga. Also he was born in New York. I grew up in Philadelphia, but I was born in New York since my mother was teaching ballet at Julliards school of performing arts. I wish him the best of luck. Here is (Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia about him). To see where he says that he doubted whether he was enlightened or had attained enlightenment click on the link on the second paragraph of this blog by Andrew, where it says (read this interview) and see page 3 of 15 of this PDF file.
Since it is common for people to never experience the flow experience to the infinite degree, it is easy for someone who does experience it, to think that it is enlightenment. Andrew says that people think that enlightenment is the end of the journey when it is the beginning of the journey. I am calling the end of that journey enlightenment. This is the point when a person has everything that they have ever been looking for. They no longer need anything for themselves except the body's basic needs.
I have read and own a 650 page book called The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions (© 1997) by Andrew Rawlinson. It has lots of crazy stuff in it. It has several pages on Andrew Cohen. It also tells about Paul Twitchell who created Eckankar with tens of thousands of followers. It teaches a meditation on inner light and music (Surat Shabd Yoga). The inner music is also known as anahat nadam in India (means unstruck sound), celestial music, celestial sound, soundless sound, unstruck music and other terms. Mr. Twitchell learned surat shabd yoga from Kirpal Singh who learned it from Sawan Singh.
The book tells how Paul Twitchell wrote a book called The Flute of God that was originally published in Orion Magazine in 1966. In that book he referred to masters Meher Baba, Shri Kirpal Singh and Guru Nanak who were real people that existed in the physical world. An internet search tells a lot about them. Then his book was published by Eckankar's own Illustrated Way Press in 1970 and the names were changed to nonexistent people like Fubbi Quantz, Sudar Singh and Rebazar Tarz leading to him being the 971st Eck master.
JOHN-ROGER Hinkens was the founder of MSIA which is pronounced messiah. He is also the co-founder of Insight Personal Growth Seminars which deals with self-improvement and improvement in dealing with other people. MSIA also teaches meditation on inner light and music. John-Roger was in Eckankar but denies that Paul Twitchell was his master. John-Roger says that his master came to him in the spiritual world. He said that this master was Rebazar Tarz which is someone that Twitchell had invented. Then later John-Roger saw a picture of Sawan Singh and said that it was actually Sawan Singh that he met in the spiritual world, not Rebazar Tarz.
There is a New York Times Bestseller book, The Heart of the Soul (2001). On page 233 it says "Eating is sacred" a few times. Now I am not talking about the writers of this book, but about this statement. If eating is sacred, then the fattest people would be the holiest people. Also this would mean that excreting waste is sacred since one thing causes the other. Would this also mean that not eating (fasting) is not sacred? Moses fasted for 40 days before receiving the Commandments from God. Jesus fasted for 40 days before preaching or performing any miracles.
This book also says "romantic attraction is the experience of locating a savior." I strongly disagree with this. There is an incredibly deep thing that can happen between 2 people. It can be the most powerful thing in a person's life. I could go into examples but for most people in our society, they would be stretching the limits of acceptance and understanding. Once I told my brother about a coincidence and said that some people would credit that as a divine occurrence. My brother said that it was just a coincidence. Then I gave him another bigger coincidence that happened with a woman I met. So he could have just repeated that it was a coincidence but his response was "Now that is really strange."
They recognize this closeness between two people in Scientology. It is said about the meditation that I do that it acts like a mirror so that you can see yourself. When it comes to someone that you are in love with and they are also in love with you, your energy going out can hit this person and be reflected back onto you like a mirror. To put it in another way, you can see yourself in the eyes of this other person by the way they look at you.
An Objective View of Dianetics and Scientology
The founder of Scientology considered himself an enlightened person. I am not a Scientologist but have a very thorough understanding of the above since I love to read books. It started out as Dianetics. They wanted to design psychology the right way without using drugs, electroshock and cutting out a part of the brain (lobotomies). They would focus only on the therapy. They found that some people would show signs of stress when remembering a trauma. They would go over these traumas until there was no more stress while recalling them. They created an electrical device similar to a lie detector to help them find these areas of stress.
As far as time perception goes (mentioned on the other page), by removing the internal stress associated with traumas they could release the attention units that were trapped in the past so they could return to the present. A classic spiritual book from the 70s was called Be Here Now. This is very similar to therapy in psychology. They would do this until all the traumatic events were no longer stressful to the person. So they would deal with the past so people could be more in the present. With all these events cleared of stress, the person was called a clear.
Everything up to this point is normal as far as Western thought goes. But here is where it gets strange. People would come to L. Ron Hubbard and say that people would remember something happening on a date before they were born. Since L.R.H. knew this was impossible, he would tell them to just ignore it. After many times of this happening with him, he decided to play around and let them tell what happened. But he found that when people would go over these past life events, they would have more improvement than with events in this lifetime.
This is how Scientology came about which not only dealt with this life, but past lives. They found that the clear needed to go over traumatic events from past lives also. They even found events that happened to mankind on a massive scale. This is what some of the sites that are against scientology talk about. Past lives is accepted by people in the East. But it has become especially heinous to believe in it in the West. "Especially heinous" is what they say in the introduction to the show, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Heinous means hatefully or shockingly evil.
Also in Dianetics they only focus on bad events in your past similar to psychology. They do not look at the good events. So over time this can have a depressing effect on the person focusing on all these bad events. So Scientology focuses on bringing attention units into the present without having to focus on bad events. Oprah Winfry is promoting a book by Eckard Tolle. It teaches that the way people can be happier is by being in the present. So you could say that the goal of all of them is to get people to be happier by being in the present. Recently they have created positive psychology that deals with this (see webpage, Finding Happiness/Enlightenment).
Also Dianetics/Scientology has found that when people go past words that they do not understand, it can cause them to have great difficulty in understanding a subject. So you could say that looking up words in the dictionary is practicing Scientology. Note that that there is a Harvard trained psychiatrist named Brian Weiss, M.D. that has people go over events that happened in past lives. He has written books about this like Many Lives, Many Masters; Eliminating Stress, Finding Inner Peace and Meditation. I understand people not liking their practice being compared to another. They want to believe that they are the only one that came up with the idea.
There is a difference between the teachings of Scientology and Scientologists. Both are against shock therapy and medications (drugs). They had Tom Cruise on TV being interviewed about this. He said that drugs are not the ideal way to deal with mental issues. Some people do not like the way Scientologists are very aggressive at promoting it. This does agree with the teachings. It is very similar to what Christians believe. It is like they feel that whatever it takes is OK since you are dealing with a person's immortal soul.
I think both the above groups need to have more respect for a person's free will and their right to choose. An Indian scripture, Bhagavad Gita, teaches that it is better to make your own wrong decision than to follow someone else and make a right decision. By following your own wrong choice, you can learn from your mistakes. Many words have more than one meaning and looking it up in the dictionary can show you the meanings. If you look up self-esteem, you see that self-esteem(1) is good and self-esteem(2) is bad.
With all these people thinking so highly of themselves and being so aggressive, I would call this ego(1). The ego in psychology is ego(3). This ego(1) can create lots of problems. One of the most famous people with a big ego(1), who thought he was helping to make the world a better place, was Adolf Hitler. Having a big ego(1) is not the way to get people to like you. True humility and humbleness are qualities that people like.
The founder of Scientology was very much against smoking, drinking and alcohol. But many Scientologists smoke and believe that is totally fine since they are Scientologists. Also I have seen alcohol being served at Scientology events. Even though they believe that it is OK to smoke, they do not admit that the only reason that they are doing it is that they are addicted to it. They do not see that they have an addiction. Famous Scientologists include Clint Eastwood who was a mayor (do not know if he still is), Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley and John Travolta.
I was reading about a woman in Scientology that got to a very high level called OT 5(V). She kept having problems on this level and no one could help her with it. She asked around and others were doing well with on this same level. So she quit because it was not working for her. No one is trying to get rich from Scientology. You can get rich from acting like Tom Cruise is doing. The money that is generated from it, is to keep it working and to spread it to other people.
Also they use the money to make everything as workable as possible. Recently (like 2008) they have published all new materials correcting many mistakes that were made in the past. People are now able to go through these materials at a much quicker rate and they have a much better understanding of it. People getting in it now, will have a much easier time than the people using it in the past.
It does work better than psychology psychotherapy. Unlike psychologists and psychiatrists, Scientologists are strongly against taking drugs (medications). Drugs suppress symptoms. This is why research has found that people taking Prozac, who were never violent, can go on killing sprees. I think that these drugs for mental problems is the major cause of killing sprees that people go on.
There are meetings for drug addicts called Narcotics Anonymous. They do not consider smoking cigarettes a drug addiction since they have people dealing with very strong drugs like cocaine and heroine. But nicotine, that is in tobacco, is a narcotic so I consider people smoking to be drug addicts. Of course this includes the Scientologists that smoke.
Scientology does have a physical purification program using a sauna to cause a lot of sweating to get toxins and drugs out of the body. I heard that a lot of these were given free to the people working around ground zero. I know a cocaine addict who would go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
I saw him on the day he stopped smoking. He would drive the day shift on a cab and I would drive the night shift. On this day that he stopped smoking, he was drooling like a dug and was incoherent. So apparently smoking had a strong effect on him. The nicotine is a stimulant. But people feel relaxed from smoking since the carbon monoxide numbs the brain. See the webpage Natural Cures II, for help to stop smoking.
Ignoring the effects on physical health, alcohol is a legal drug. It used to be an illegal drug. It makes people less relaxed and so more stressed out and less happy. Drugs cause a slingshot effect. You get a long term effect to the opposite of the short term effect. This is due to homeostasis. My 1,900 page Mosby Medical Dictionary defines homeostasis as: "[Gk, homoios + stasis, standing still] a relative constancy in the internal environment of the body, naturally maintained by the adaptive responses that promote healthy survival. Various sensing, feedback, and control mechanisms function to effect this steady state."
Whatever effect the drug has on the body, the body produces an opposite effect to balance it out. If you have no trouble getting to sleep, then take sleeping pills every night for a week and then try to get to sleep without them. So whatever pleasurable effect the alcohol has temporarily, it has the opposite effect on you permanently. This is the same with all drugs. You can take drugs to make you high, but then the body produces an opposite effect on you. If you do things like exercise, yoga and meditation then your body produces its own chemicals to make you feel good.
To repeat it, unlike psychology and psychiatry, Scientology is against using drugs. L.R.H. is against smoking and drinking. He did say that alcohol is good for preserving dead animals. In More Natural Cures Revealed, Kevin Trudeau says "The facts are clear, drugs, both prescription and non-prescription, do not make you healthier, they make you sicker. Drug companies are not interested in your health. Drug companies only want you to buy and use more drugs. If you want to cure yourself of any disease you have and remain healthy, you must eliminate all non-prescription and prescription drugs."
What is Heaven Like
I saw on a forum that a Christian was asking about heaven. Since the bible does not describe this, each Christian gave an answer of what they imagined that heaven would be like. The person asked if his wife will be there with him and will he be able to have sex with her. Also he asked if he could eat in heaven and what will it be like there. A woman once asked if she could read in heaven since she likes to read. If she could, what books would they have?
In the new testament they talk about heaven and hell like it is a well known thing. So where did this come from? Before Jesus was born, the official religion of the Persian Empire was Zoroastrianism. This empire included all of the Middle East and part of Europe including all of Italy. Zoroaster taught that if you do more good than bad, then you go to heaven. If you do more bad than good, then you go to hell.
So people are concerned about giving up their favorite things in life. Say you had a choice when you got to heaven. On one hand you could accept what heaven is or you could create your own heaven just as you want it. Also you could change it at any time in case you do not like what you created. I do not know what you would pick but the real heaven is much more incredible than anything you can imagine.
There is no time, space, size, shape or quantity there so your mind cannot imagine it. There is no quantity like 5,000 people since there is only one thing which is a oneness. The thing that is there is feeling. Try to imagine all the greatest feelings you have ever had coming together and all the best feelings that everyone has ever had coming together in one place. It feels like total contentment, perfect peace, pure joy, limitless happiness and endless love. When you feel it, you know that is what you have always wanted to feel or experience.
Now how can I know this if I am still alive? It is because you can feel or experience heaven while alive.
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