Face Off — Chandigarh

Slight and solemn, 43-year-old Andrew Cohen looks like your average tourist on a holiday to India in the quest of the Taj. Sipping minera...

Slight and solemn, 43-year-old Andrew Cohen looks like your average tourist on a holiday to India in the quest of the Taj. Sipping mineral water at the Hyatt as he flips through a copy of Vanity Fair, he looks anything but a New Age guru who can give Deepak Chopra a run for his money. Ask him what’s new or different about his offering to the world, and he’s flummoxed. “Not everyone (guru, mentor, or guide) is saying the same thing, you know,” he says vaguely. You ask him to clarify. He can’t.

Cohen would rather talk about his initiation into spirituality by way of a “spontaneous experience” that he had at the age of 16. This vision, to be followed by another six years later, was all it took to banish forever the atheist in him.

“Unexpectedly one night, it became apparent to me that the entire universe and everything in it is made up of one intelligence, that there was no such thing as death, and that the essence of everything was overwhelming love,” he explains. Overwhelmed’ seems to be his favourite word: “So overwhelmed was I with the experience that I found myself drenched in my own tears once it ended.”

Not only did Cohen turn spiritual, but he did so with a vengeance. No, he did not do a Buddha and renounce the world to attain nirvana. Instead, he decided to show the misguided millions the sure and short path to moksha from the air-conditioned comfort of his nine centres across the world, the newest branch of his Moksha Foundation being in Rishikesh.

That’s good going for someone who set out to seek spirituality not so long ago in 1986 from religious and philosophical books on the subject. “I did yoga, studied Buddhism, the Upanishads, Judaism … before I decided to speak about spiritual realisation to the rest of the world,” he says. Cohen read all this religious books in English, of course, since he does not know any other language. But he’s confident he hasn’t lost any of the essence of the words of the great teachers in translation. “I speak from my own experience and translations are enough to increase my understanding of spirituality,” he says.

With many books, and a bi-annual magazine titled What Is Enlightenment? — “the best spiritual magazine in the world,” he claims Cohen has come a long way since he gave up training to be a drummer and became a global guru with a “sizeable” following. Nine centres spread his message of love and his magazine sells 30,000 copies in the US alone. And with six books (which he dictates to his flock) published in India, and others in Germany, Holland and France, apart from the inspirational booklets that his own Moksha Press keeps churning out with admirable regularity, Cohen has his hands full.

“I travel a lot holding workshops and giving lectures all over the world,” says Cohen. “Moksha Foundation also organises retreats, like the two-week international retreat we held at Rishikesh recently.” These retreats are a mix of meditation, talks and dialogue, and give the participants “a deep and fulfilling experience on the nature of life.”

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Helping him in his spiritual mission is his wife Alka, the girl from Mumbai whom he met at a meditation course at Bodh Gaya in 1984, and married “some time in ’86 or ’87.” Not only does she share his interests, but helps him by “looking after me, and doing various other things.” And looking after his needs must be a full-time job, for the couple have had “no time for kids.”

Now on the fag end of his India tour, Cohen is all set to leave for home base Massachusetts, where he spends about five months each year, teaching and preaching. Those who have missed his talk at the India Habitat Centre last month needn’t fret. He spends some six weeks in India every winter, so he’ll be back with some more nuggets of spirituality next year. Those who can’t wait till then, can always pick up one of his books of wisdom from the neighbourhood bookstore.