Andrew Cohen

In September 2016, after over three years absence from public life, Cohen unveiled a redesigned website. This included an announcement of his intention to return to formal teaching, beginning with a retreat planned for early 2017.

In 2016, over 240 of Cohen's former students signed an online petition titled "Stop Andrew Cohen teaching again", including detailed explanations of why they believe him to be unfit to teach others.

On May 12, 2015, Cohen posted an extensive apology letter to his former students on his blog, his first writing after emerging from a two-year sabbatical. In it he wrote about the need to embrace the spiritual principle of agape, as well as eros, and expressed regret for the ways in which his lack of the former in his teaching methods hurt and alienated many former students.

On June 26, 2013, Cohen announced on his blog that he would be taking "a sabbatical for an extended period of time", after confrontational exchanges with some of his closest students, who helped Cohen to realize, as he put it, that "in spite of the depth of my awakening, my ego is still alive and well".

On May 2013, Watkins Books listed Cohen at Number 28 on their "Spiritual 100" list for 2012.

Over the years, there were many indications that Cohen's group was in difficult financial straits. In 2011 it officially ended publication of its magazine EnlightenNext. Cohen was accused of being a cult leader. As of early 2014, the EnlightenNext organization's main building on its property in Lenox, Massachusetts, which had been on the market for years, remained up for sale.

In 2001, Cohen co-formed the jazz-funk-fusion band Unfulfilled Desires, in which he played drums. The band played original compositions and standards, and performed in Europe and the United States. They released four CDs: Live at the Iron Horse (2002), Enlightened Dog (2004), Punk Funk (2008), and Plugged (2010).

Some of Cohen's former followers, including his mother, Luna Tarlo, have viewed him as a manipulative spiritual teacher. Tarlo wrote a critical book, called Mother of God, about her experience as one of his disciples. In a Psychology Today, article, published in 1998 entitled "Crimes of the Soul", Tarlo recounted how she became a disciple of her son who told her "to give way to him or their relationship would end" and forbade her "to express an opinion on anything". Tarlo said she "knew if I seriously objected to anything, I'd be kicked out" and stated that her son, formerly the "sweetest, sensitive kid, had changed into an unrecognizable tyrant."

In 1991, Cohen founded EnlightenNext magazine (under its former title, What Is Enlightenment?), which "established him as a major contemporary spiritual figure." In 2004, EnlightenNext magazine partnered with the Graduate Institute in Connecticut to offer a master's program in conscious evolution. From 2004 to 2007, Cohen served as a core faculty of that institute. The magazine stopped publishing in 2011.

Cohen was born in New York City into an upper-middle class secular Jewish family. Cohen recounts that his life was changed by a spontaneous experience of "cosmic consciousness" at the age of sixteen. At 22 years of age and after pursuing a career as a jazz musician, he began a quest to recover his earlier spiritual experience. He eventually met H. W. L. Poonja in 1986, a self-styled teacher who taught that no effort is needed to attain enlightenment "because it is merely the realisation of what one already has". At their first meeting, Cohen realized that he "had always been free". He claimed that Poonja declared him his heir so Cohen began to teach as a neo-Advaita teacher, and gathered a community around him.

Andrew Cohen (born 23 October 1955) is an American spiritual teacher, regarded by many as a cult leader.