LIVING ENLIGHTENMENT: A Call for Evolution Beyond Ego

Good student of Eastern mysticism that he is, Cohen is one-pointed in his concentration. All his work, including a dozen books, focuses on the teaching of enlightenment, which he also calls liberation. He does not give enough attention to the elaborate context of teachings, and teachers, from which he comes; much of the meat has been sliced away to expose a stark inner core. The result is a slender book that explains enlightenment at a conceptual level, promises a reward, warns of difficulties and speaks conversationally to Westerners. Another quirky teacher in a tradition replete with them, Cohen is a guru who is a slayer of gurus and other sacred cows. The book's Q&A format reinforces his authority, but it's also irksome that the voice posing the questions is unidentified yet personalized, serving ultimately as a straw man (asking, for example, "Everything you're saying seems to make sense, but why do I still feel so strongly that I need more time?"). Readers may feel as though they are caught in a closed sophistic system, where elements that appear to be argued are actually already assumed. The book's vocabulary after a while tends to sound limited and hyperbolic: "perfect," "profound," "revolutionary" and "absolute" begin to have familiar rings. A foreword by philosopher Ken Wilber adds fuel to the somewhat fevered rhetoric. Abstract and passionate, invoking the transcendent and tangible and free with paradox, Cohen is hard to argue with. Certainly consistent, his work is either intriguing in its simplicity or too elliptical for a beginner. (June 15)