Buddha at the Gas Pump

Andrew Cohen (1955–2025) was a spiritual teacher and the founder of EnlightenNext, an organization associated with his teaching of “Evolutionary Enlightenment.” He was a student of H. W. L. Poonja and wrote several books, including My Master Is My Self and Evolutionary Enlightenment.
I interviewed Andrew in July 2012. Soon afterward, serious accounts emerged from former students describing a harmful and coercive culture within EnlightenNext. In light of those accounts, I removed this interview from the BatGap site.
I have decided to restore it following Andrew’s death, not as an endorsement or a minimization of the harm experienced by former members, but because he appeared to make sincere efforts in later years to confront his behavior and change. These included therapy, ayahuasca work, a willingness to take ordinary jobs when necessary, and participation in the candid documentary How I Created a Cult, which includes difficult testimony from former members and is far from flattering to him.
This interview is being made available as a historical record. As always, viewers are encouraged to exercise discernment and form their own conclusions.
Books by Andrew Cohen:
My Master Is My Self
Enlightenment Is a Secret
An Unconditional Relationship to Life
Freedom Has No History 
Embracing Heaven & Earth
Living Enlightenment
Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path for Spiritual Awakening 
Interview conducted 7/14/2012

Narcissism, Cult Recovery, Spiritual Awakening, and Discernment
Mark Vicente is an author, speaker, and award-winning Writer/Director/Producer from Johannesburg, South Africa. Taking his first photograph at age four, he worked his way up through the ranks of the camera department, shooting a number of anti-apartheid films in the 1980s before relocating to Hollywood.
Because of the atrocities in his native South Africa, he found himself propelled to question fundamental assumptions at a young age: beliefs about human behavior, morality, cosmology, existentialism and mysticism. Unifying his love of science, philosophy and filmmaking, his dream of creating cinema to inspire and provoke thought emerged with the creation of “What the BLEEP Do We Know?!”
Later, deeply moved by the violence consuming Mexico, Mark released “Encender el Corazon,” a film about the kidnapping epidemic there and one community’s courage in standing up to the cartels. It was a bittersweet victory. While the film touched many people deeply, it was by association supporting the criminal enterprise NXIVM. Mark made the difficult decision to pull the film from distribution and, with a small band of whistleblowers, exposed NXIVM’s criminal behavior, resulting in multiple arrests and prosecutions. This journey is captured in the HBO Documentary Series “The Vow.”
He has since developed a passionate interest in exposing the coercive, duplicitous environments of high-control groups. His feature documentary “Narcissists’ Playbook,” examining malignant narcissism through self-confessed, self-aware narcissists, juxtaposed with testimony from victims, survivors, scientists, and mental health professionals, has now been released. He is also developing “Inst@Guru,” a series examining the rise of predatory self-help culture in the social media age, centered on Dutch social media guru Bentinho Massaro.
Websites:
markvicente.com
Narcissist’s Playbook
Bonnie Piesse is an Australian/American actress, singer-songwriter and soul alignment and manifestation coach. She’s best known for her roles in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and was recently seen in My Favorite Girlfriend alongside Tyler Johnson and Michael Nouri. As a singer-songwriter, her music has been featured in film and TV including Miss Arizona, HBO’s The Vow (in which she was also a subject), and CW’s Life Unexpected. Through her business, Your Quantum Life, Bonnie helps soul-led leaders remember who they really are and step into authentic expression and embodiment.
Website: bonniepiesse.com

bax (or baxishta if he’s feeling uppity) does not consider himself fully awakened, but knows for sure that he’s recognized glimpses of the self.  He says this puts him in an awkward position and insists on starting off with this apology,
if what i’ve seen is true
then i’m a hypocrite
every time i speak about it
no better than the man who
having awoken briefly from his dream
rushes back to tell his friends what he saw
“you’re all in my mind”
he  informs  them
and they laugh at him twice
once for being obviously wrong
and once for being right
and therefore talking to himself
my only defense is that
even hypochondriacs do get sick
and even hypocrites do awaken briefly
bax’s motto is “self is solid”, and he considers himself a student of Ramana Maharshi, whose favorite description of the self was “a dense mass of self-knowledge”.  He considers himself a post-new age thinker, and feels that most of what is discussed today goes only halfway to Shankara’s great ‘three laws of self-knowledge’.  Specifically, much is said about consciousness but not very much about the self itSelf.

Leela Muse is a nonduality guide whose YouTube work explores the life‑affirming process of spiritual awakening and profoundly unowned, ordinary life. Through contemplative dialogues, she emphasizes the art of noticing, radical honesty, and open curiosity, validating the lived experience of seekers while gently challenging assumptions about what awakening is supposed to look like.

Leela joins Buddha at the Gas Pump to talk about spiritual awakening, the myths that surround it, and what integration actually looks like in ordinary life. Leela shares her journey from a fundamentalist Christian childhood and years of psychological suffering to an initial awakening experience inspired by Eckhart Tolle, and how that opened into an ongoing, ever-deepening exploration of non-duality.

Rick and Leela cover why duality isn't a mistake but simply how non-duality shows up, why emotions and fear don't disappear after awakening, the danger of spiritual bypassing, and why "no self" is a beginning rather than an end point. They also dig into several common myths about enlightenment, including the idea that awakening is a permanent special state, that a person can "become" enlightened, and that understanding concepts is the same as realization.

Seeing the Aura - A New Understanding of the Human Energy Field
Keith is a teacher, author and healing practitioner with expertise in the human energy field, contemplative science and the healing arts. Initially, Keith used meditation as a vehicle to understand and refine subtle states of consciousness. Over the following decade he studied movement, breathwork, bodywork, energy work and other disparate disciplines. During this intensive period, Keith had a series of breakthrough experiences enabling him to see the aura with remarkable clarity.

He founded Field Dynamics in 2018 to help individuals with their personal growth and as a platform to exemplify the potential of energy healing. His first book, Radical Reality: How Seeing the Aura Reveals Who & What We Are, is an exploration of how the human energy field informs our understanding of the mind-body connection, consciousness and reality itself.