Enlightenment Is a Secret: Teachings of Liberation [Paperback]

Andrew Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1995

This collection of dialogues and excerpts taken from Andrew Cohen's teachings, is a manual for personal liberation. It explores every question crucial to the spiritual quest in a deeply illuminating way. Love, renunciation, surrender, humility, detachment, the mind, spiritual practice and many other topics are addressed with a clarity so powerful that it constantly challenges the reader to go further and further. It is one of the most original expressions of awakened understanding by western teacher in our time - a book for endless study and contemplation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Enlightenment Is a Secret helps to demystify the meaning of Enlightenment while simultaneously conveying the mystery and immediacy of true Enlightened understanding. These short excerpts answer fundamental questions that arise on the spiritual quest and challenge the many widely held beliefs about Enlightenment in a unique and powerful way. It inspires the reader to come to the end of the search through the direct discovery and realization of the Enlightened perspective. -- Arizona Networking News, Jan/Feb 1993

Enlightenment Is a Secret is a collection of dialogues taken from the teachings of Andrew Cohen. It illuminates the subject with fresh and incisive clarity, communicating the essence of his subtle understanding with powerful immediacy. It is a passionate revelation from an awakened heart guiding and challenging the sincere seeker through the most noble journey that any human being can undertake. -- Many Hands, Fall 1992

Cohen pinpoints the fundamental issues that arise on one's spiritual quest. Each page contains a short Q&A interchange or a short teaching or aphorism in Cohen's no nonsense style. About surrender, he shares, "Surrender has nothing to do with reminding yourself every moment to let go. Surrender is the result of realizing that you were never attached to anything at any moment." Or "Everybody Wants to Get Enlightened, but Nobody Wants to Change." -- NAPRA ReView, Winter 1992

Upon opening this book I recognized immediately that I was reading something deeply resonant within my own core. "This guy's got something," I thought to myself. Set up in question and answer format generously spaced on each page, the book could be easily, although not quickly, digested. The clarity of intensity of Andrew's writing certainly rings true. The immediacy of these revelations pierce straight through our layer of doubt and confusion to illuminate the truth and awaken the heart. And so is each page of Enlightenment Is a Secret filled with one spiritual jolt after another. The effect is both unsettling and powerful. It is the compassionate transmission of these unfathomable truths which is only the work of masters and gurus and Divine Beloveds. --Spirit of Change, Fall 1992

From the Publisher

Enlightenment Is a Secret consists of excerpts from teachings Andrew gave between the years 1986 and 1990, which have all been finally selected, arranged and edited by Andrew himself. In the hands of anyone open to be touched by the Unknown, Enlightenment Is a Secret brings us immediately to the very edge of our understanding, opening up a boundless vista before us. Since its publication in 1991, this flawless and unadorned transmission of the enlightened vision has awakened in thousands of seekers across the world an immediate recognition of an unthinkable possibility. Every page of this remarkable book reverberates with a transcendent emptiness. Every word echoes the sacred Mystery out of which it was conceived. Stripped away from the familiar reference points of spiritual tradition, time and practice, its utterly authentic and deeply penetrating expression of liberated understanding plunges the reader into a direct contemplation of the possibility of Liberation here and now, evoking in an open heart the whispering of a deep knowing beyond the mind. Absolutely mystical in nature, Enlightenment Is a Secret is simultaneously utterly pragmatic, illuminating with astonishing clarity a subject that for many has been shrouded in mystery and superstition. It is a complete guide through the perilous territory of the spiritual journey and it addresses with extraordinary insight and in a vast and impersonal context, all of the essential aspects of spiritual life. It is in fact a blueprint of Awakening, of Goal and Path, constantly meeting in very real terms the dichotomy between our potential for enlightenment and the complex and divided nature of our very human condition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: EnlightenNext Inc.; 2 edition (November 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883929083
• ISBN-13: 978-1883929084
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #697,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global nonprofit EnlightenNext and its award-winning publication EnlightenNext magazine. His original teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment redefines spiritual awakening within the context of cosmic evolution and highlights a new understanding of God or Spirit as the creative impulse toward change in both self and culture. After a transformative meeting with the renowned Advaita Vedanta master H.W.L. Poonja in 1986, Cohen began teaching internationally and almost immediately started reshaping the larger cultural conversation about the purpose and significance of enlightenment in our time. He founded EnlightenNext magazine almost twenty years ago as a forum for serious spiritual and philosophical inquiry, and has since become known for his unique capacity to foster culture-changing dialogues among leading thinkers from a wide array of traditions and disciplines. 

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Permanent Liberation from egoic insanity, here and now, May 12, 2001

By 

Tom Huston (Lenox, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enlightenment Is a Secret: Teachings of Liberation (Paperback)

In late December 1998, after many months of intensive shopping around for the perfect enlightened teacher to help lead me out of this agonizing dream of ignorance, I was standing in a Borders bookstore in Tacoma, Washington, looking in the Eastern Philosophy/Religion shelves, when I turned around and noticed an unusual orange book gleaming from the New Age shelves. Expecting nothing but New Age drivel under the name of "Enlightenment," but ever curious, I picked up the book, read the excerpt on the back cover . . . and knew immediately that I had stumbled onto something extremely profound.

Unlike the vast majority of modern American teachings of nondual enlightenment, Andrew's approach transcends mindless "dualistic nonduality" by recognizing absolutely perfectly that Maya and Reality, Samsara and Nirvana, Form and Emptiness are really not separate in any way at all--and that doesn't mean that one haphazardly cancels out the other. All is Consciousness, yes, but that absolute Truth does _not_ translate into relative existence. Rather, it completely obliterates it! Teachers of nonduality who fail to grasp this point--who fail to see that perfect middle place wherein Samsara and Reality seamlessly merge--are teaching a rather dualistic view of the nondual. A teaching of Absolute Nonduality, however, would not make a firm distinction between the relative and the absolute, earth and heaven, the human being and God. It would not espouse that human beings are nothing but conditioned body-mind machines, with no real volition behind one's actions, while the real self is a distinct and passive witness of this activity (and therefore one claims no moral accountability for the body-mind's actions). No, an Absolute Nonduality would see that there is an absolute realm of pure Emptiness with no distinctions, and a relative realm of name and form with many distinctions--and it would see how to perfectly integrate the two, _not_ by mindlessly trying to turn the relative world into the nondual (which is impossible and always ends up sounding absurd), but by finding a way of standing firmly grounded in the abyss of nonduality and _bringing that vision of Wholeness into the world of relativity_, speaking to it in its own terms, with its own logic, but always communicating something far deeper.

Andrew Cohen succeeds amazingly well in this sacred task, and this particular text of his illuminates spiritual mysteries like none I've ever encountered. It's a crystal-clear road map to the Awakening from our dream of separation, time, and mind-identification, always speaking straight to the Heart, from the Heart, but with the thoroughly razor-sharp discrimination of a classic Zen master. "Pierce the illusion of separation," he says. "Realize and know the timeless. Know the presence of the uncreated. . . . Separation is only an idea, pure imagination." His passionate urgency is a constant reminder of the depth and seriousness of this pursuit into the true nature of existence, and fortunately for us, the same passion has inspired a truly complete teaching that easily eliminates all obstacles along one's path. With passages on the mechanical nature of the mind, the horrendous problem of doubt, the meaning and practice of surrender, and just about every other situation every seeker eventually contends with, there's truly nothing significant left out. There are a few pithy lines about doubt, for instance, which can help one cut through what is perhaps the most cumbersome obstacle of all in the spiritual quest. "Doubt is mechanically produced by the ego," he explains, "and has nothing to do with discrimination. . . . Discrimination makes you strong, doubt makes you weak. At times when your heart knows something is right, often the mind will doubt the heart. This can make progress very difficult." Armed with the razor sword of penetrating discrimination in one hand and the shield of one's clarity of intention in the other, how can an enemy even as deceptive as Satan, our friendly neighborhood ego, stand in our way? It is an absurdly bizarre mystery that anything is happening at all, that any of this even _exists_, and so very few people in this world seem even remotely aware of that overwhelming mystery--but the weapons Andrew arms us with make clear that even that depressing, lonely fact is ultimately the play of our own egoic mind, easily cut through, even as it tries to stave us off and preclude entry to our only real home.

And when we succeed in finding that home, what shall we do? Shall we find ourselves utterly cut off and alone in a blissful nothingness, detachedly observing this world of suffering and ignorance from a space far away, and then decide to stay there, to the best of our ability, until the seamless dance of light stops playing on the movie screen of our self? Or shall we choose, with all our heart, and with a profound fascination for a mystery that knows no bounds, to perfect ourselves until it becomes an effortless act to abide as the movie screen of awareness--that blissful nothingness--while simultaneously identifying with the substance and scenarios of the movie itself?

To be fully manifest _and_ fully unmanifest, fully engaged in this world but not of it--completely personal and impersonal at the same time--without in any way denying the limitless potentials of either side of the Whole: that is the true import of the nondual dharma, and it is something Andrew manages to convey in this and other books, through always direct and practical teachings, absolutely perfectly. If unconditional Freedom and the exhilarating thrill of absolute Life is what you know you're after, then look no further, because samsara ends where this book begins, and no serious seeker could be disappointed with a perfect gem like this.

28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book completely changed my life--literally!, March 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Enlightenment Is a Secret: Teachings of Liberation (Paperback)

I first read this book 5 years ago, and still read bits and pieces of it often. I came across it at a time when I was ardently searching the spiritual landscape for something that made sense of the yearning I felt inside me. I devoured this book in 2 days, hardly understanding a word of it, and yet feeling like the answers to every unformed question in my heart had been revealed to me.

The book is set up in short, one-page teachings from Andrew Cohen. Some are dialogues between him and others.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is seeking, who is trying to find their way on the spiritual path. The depth of Andrew Cohen's understanding not only of the path's goal, but also of all the pitfalls and detours along the way, has saved me what I can only imagine would be lifetimes of work.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Meditative, March 6, 2003

By 

Paul Henry (Bay City, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enlightenment Is a Secret: Teachings of Liberation (Paperback)

As a person who has bought and read thousands of books, I think that this may be the last book I'll ever need. Andrew challanges the reader, rather forcefully, to climb to the mountain top and then.....take that next step. The book is set with each page being the subject of a days/weeks meditation.