Andrew Cohen

Bio & resources

I found myself in an amusing position while I was working closely with the youngest member of our editorial team during the research and writing of her feature on the Kabbalah Centre. Maura O'Connor is a bright, twenty-two-year-old Irish-American woman, and after several months of intensive study, she spent many hours patiently enlightening me, a forty-nine-year-old Jewish man, about the extraordinary history and cosmology of Kabbalah, the mystical or “secret” teachings of Judaism. Brought up in New York City as a secular Jew, I couldn't help but marvel at the hilarious irony of the scene. A young goy, a girl, of all people, educating me about a teaching traditionally reserved for Jewish men over forty!

I also worked extensively with another of our young editors, Ross Robertson, a twenty-nine-year-old recent graduate of the writing program at Naropa University, who wrote our feature on the Celestine Prophecy movie. Ross got to spend three days on the set in Florida with the cast and crew during the making of the film, soaking up the generosity of James Redfield and his colleagues. After his return, he and I spent a lot of time together discussing his research into the fascinating history of nontraditional spirituality and the New Age, in preparation for the writing of his piece. Both Maura and Ross are young and inexperienced, so I knew that I would have to devote a significant amount of time to helping them grapple with the enormous challenge of writing a feature article that not only conveys relevant information, but also expresses a depth of perspective that will compel the reader to think in new ways.

Predictably, both of my young colleagues hit a wall in themselves when faced with having to stretch beyond their previous achievements in order to meet my demands for depth in their writing. What was most interesting and incredibly ironic about their predicament was that while they were both trying to address the lack of depth in secular American culture and the search for it in popular forms of spirituality, they were themselves confronted with their own tendencies to be glib and superficial. As Ross himself describes so candidly in his piece, “we are hungry for depth at the same time that we relentlessly avoid it.” Indeed, I had to struggle with these two young Americans to get them to dig deep enough in themselves to find access to some real authenticity.

And this is, I believe, our great challenge as a culture—to liberate our hearts and minds from the two-dimensional, homogenized, superficial picture of the human experience that we are not only embedded in but deeply attached to. With this magazine, we are trying, in our own small way, to help penetrate our collective malaise and awaken a passion for depth, authenticity, and meaning. There is no greater pleasure in life than to meet another beyond the layers of falsehood and pretense, where our raison d'etre is no longer something we have to search for, but is suddenly the very ground we are standing on.