Education Quote by Andrew Cohen

There is a velvet-gloved power move embedded in Cohen's phrasing: "rare privilege" sounds humble, but it quietly crowns the speaker with an almost supernatural access pass. The line flatters the audience while elevating the teacher. If you are one of the "many human beings", you are implicitly deep enough to have a "soul" worth examining; if you are the teacher, you are the examiner, licensed to see what others cannot.

The intent is less about spirituality as inner work and more about authority as intimacy. "Look deeply" borrows the language of compassion, but the image is clinical: inspection, penetration, a gaze that travels past consent and past ordinary social boundaries. The rhetorical trick is the collective sweep of "at the same time" - it upgrades one-on-one pastoral care into a kind of spiritual omniscience, the teacher as a high-bandwidth conduit to truth.

Context matters because Andrew Cohen's public legacy is entangled with debates about charismatic leadership, devotion, and abuse of power in guru-centered communities. Read through that lens, the sentence functions like a mission statement for a hierarchy: students become transparent, the teacher becomes the arbiter of what's real inside them. Even the word "extraordinary" is doing reputational work, pre-emptively framing scrutiny as envy or small-mindedness.

What makes it land is its emotional bait: people long to be seen. Cohen offers that longing a stage-lit version of itself, then positions the teacher as the only one who can deliver it.