Tom Huston is an associate editor of Andrew Cohen's EnlightenNext magazine, and a follower of the "American Guru." He is one of the EnlightenNext people blogging occasionally at Huffington Post.
To say I am not a fan of Cohen is an understatement. But I do not have any issues with those who have chosen to follow him and his teachings. So I have enjoyed having a brief exchange with Tom in the comments of a blog post he put up on his trip to India with Cohen.
Tom's original post is followed by my comments and his (mine in red, Tom is in blue).
To privilege the idea that "Spirit is higher and more important than anything else" is faulty logic at best, and just as reductionist as scientific materialism at worst. Even the Buddha rejected the notion that spirit is more important than or separate from everything else in the universe. The same mentality that privileges spirit as higher than everything else allowed the development and perpetuation of the Indian caste system.Spirit Is Higher (VIDEO)
Last month I embarked on the greatest trip of my 29-year-old life, heading to the magical and mystical country where so much of humankind's connection to Spirit has been nourished for millennia: Mother India.Although I had been on the spiritual path since I was 16, when I first scrawled the desperate existential plea "WHAT AM I??!?!!!" onto a piece of notebook paper while sitting in class one morning at my suburban Seattle high school, I'd somehow failed to make the pilgrimage that countless Western seekers before me had pursued since the 60s. Even most of my spiritually inclined friends had ventured to the sacred subcontinent, returning with captivating tales of the wild adventures they experienced there. But for various reasons, my chance had never come--until last month, when my wife and I had the good fortune to accompany our spiritual teacher, American guru Andrew Cohen, on his first trip to India since 2005.
Soon after arriving in New Delhi, we took a train up to the ancient holy town of Rishikesh, where Andrew would be sharing his teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment at the Sivananda Ashram and the 2010 International Yoga Festival. Standing on the banks of the Ganges River in the warm midday sun, just half a mile upstream from the now-abandoned ashram where Paul, John, George, and Ringo explored the finer points of the Maharishi's transcendental philosophy in early 1968 (while also writing most of the White Album), I suddenly understood why so many Westerners have flocked here in droves. Looking downriver, I saw numerous spiritual monasteries, or ashrams, lining both sides of the holy Ganga. In front of one of them, the vibrant and elaborately decorated Parmarth Niketan, a beautiful 12-foot-high statue of Hinduism's principal god, Lord Shiva, hovered over the rushing waters on a raised platform jutting out from the shore. Beside me, swamis clad in orange robes--a color symbolizing the fire of renunciation--knelt by the river, filling jugs of holy water to use in ceremonial pujas to the gods.
Breathing in deeply the fresh Himalayan air, feeling a subtle meditative current that seemed to be flowing through me with the rhythm of the river, I marveled at the realization that I was standing on sacred ground. I was in the midst of a place, in the midst of an entire culture, where no one could even imagine denying the reality of the Divine.
I had never experienced anything like it before. It was a confirmation and validation of something deep within me--a sense of possibility, of potential--that I didn't even realize had been in doubt. In that moment, and growing ever stronger in the days that followed, I felt my soul inwardly falling to its knees. Here, in Mother India, was a society in which the intuition I'd been seriously pursuing since I was a teen--the sense that Spirit is higher and more important than anything else--was simply taken for granted. Here the idea of following a spiritual teacher--a guru--didn't result in raised eyebrows and quips about purple-robed Kool-Aid rituals. Here the serious aspiration toward spiritual enlightenment, of longing to realize God through direct mystical experience, was treated with the utmost respect. Here there was nothing to defend, nothing to be embarrassed about. Here, on the banks of the Ganga with my teacher, my wife, and a few of my other spiritual comrades, I had never felt more free.
Remarking on this to Andrew as we walked along the river at night, he agreed that there was no place like India to feel your spiritual aspirations so powerfully buoyed by the culture at large. It was in India, 24 years ago yesterday, in fact--on March 25, 1986--that Andrew had met his own guru, an Indian mystic named H.W.L. Poonja, and found himself catapulted headlong into a radical awakening that transformed his life. And as we spoke about the powerful effect that India's spiritual culture has on one's consciousness, Andrew reiterated the fundamental mission of our organization, EnlightenNext, and our magazine of the same name. Through our own small but not insignificant efforts, he said, we're trying to help infuse our scientifically sophisticated, postmodern, secular Western culture with the same living truth that is felt so palpably in a traditional religious culture like India's--the truth that Spirit is higher, the truth that Spirit is the point toward which this miraculous universe evolves.
Having seen through the limitations of traditional religious beliefs, and appalled by the irrationality of contemporary new-age spirituality, I, like so many of my postmodern peers, seem to be poised on the edge of humanity's spiritual yearning, reaching for something new. But if it's true of the guiding intuition we each feel in our own soul, then I think it's true of the 21st-century global society we are currently creating together as well: Only when our compass is pointed due north will we really find our way.
To see a short film we made about this trip to India, click here.
To be in India is to recognize both the rich spiritual traditions AND the destructive superstitions, the horrible inequality, and the degradation of the environment. They all are connected and inseparable.
Human beings are biopsychosocial creatures, embedded in a temporal environment - yes, with spirit. We are all of these things, and to suggest one is more important than the rest is reduce the complexity of humanity in its fullness.
It's illogical to say that X, which is the creator of Y, therefore exists prior to Y?In order to say "that X, which is the creator of Y, therefore exists prior to Y," one must prove the existence of X as separate from Y - can't be done. This is the fatal flaw in the Cohen/Wilber model of spiritual growth - there is a built-in contradiction that requires faith just as much as any authoritarian religion.
Even though Spirit logically transcends its creation, I don't see Spirit as being ultimately separate from its multidimensional, bio-psycho-social-spiritual creation--because what could it have created all of that out of other than itself? There is nothing but Spirit.At the same time, I think there is an active force of Spirit moving through its apparent manifestation, which is the spiritual or evolutionary impulse itself--and that's the longing for transcendence, spiritual freedom, and higher consciousness that those of us awake to it feel moving in our own souls, tugging at our own hearts. It compels us to reach higher, to push farther, to go further, to aspire to be the best possible people we can be. So when I say "Spirit is higher," that's what I mean. It means recognizing that aspiring for the highest potential we can intuit within ourselves really is _higher_ and _better_ than resigning oneself to being an aimless schmuck, which I certainly was content to be for far too many years. :)
Cohen & Wilber give much greater preference to the vertical ( your X, which = transcendence) than to the horizontal (your Y, which = translation), and this is the foundation of their teachings.
Yet X and Y are one and the same - not either/or, but both/and - to see it any other way is the dismiss crucial parts of experience just as other traditions have done - nothing integral about that view.
Hi, William. Thanks for your reply. I did acknowledge in my comment that X is ultimately Y. So we've got to make subtle distinctions here... We could use the traditional ocean vs. its waves metaphor, where the ocean represents the unmanifest Absolute and the waves represent the manifest, relative universe.Thank you, Tom, I appreciate the dialogue.
In states of deep meditative absorption you can see that the ocean transcends its waves. In those depths, there is *only* the ocean, and the waves don't register as having any inherent reality at all. This can lead to a traditional "transcendent" bias, which exists in most forms of Indian mysticism, and can result in a callous disregard of the world of waves (as you pointed out).
But in evolutionary nonduality, you embrace the fact that the waves really *are* the ocean (it’s all the same water), and you begin to notice that the waves aren’t just arising on the surface aimlessly. Instead, there's a subtle current leading the waves in the same general direction--towards higher, fuller, better, and more inclusive waves. And when you align with that evolutionary current, you can begin to "surf” the waves, as Wilber puts it, and help steer them all in that increasingly positive and creative direction. So in this, the Absolute is experienced as both the deep stillness of the ocean itself AND as the energetic current that is creating all the waves. Both of these dimensions of the ocean are real, both are important, and both “transcend” any particular wave.
I used to hold beliefs similar to your own, influenced in large part by Vedanta and Wilber's interpretation of Dzogchen Buddhism. However, the more time I spent in meditation, the more it seemed that all these nondual states were little more than mental games.
The idea of consciousness (nondual or otherwise) as "god," while initially appealing, is little more than another form of anthropomorphism. There is little difference in this view from Thomas Aquinas's view of god as "esse ipsum," Being itself. Both views raise human notions to the status of divine truth.
So I returned to the Buddha's basic teaching: embrace suffering fully and completely in this very moment.
When we do that, and I mean really do it, not just pay lip service to the idea, but pay "calm, unflinching attention to whatever impacts the organism, be it the song of a lark or the scream of a child, the bubbling of a playful idea or a twinge in the lower back" (Stephen Batchelor), we notice things come and we notice them go. Over time, we begin to see into and through the mindless babbling of the ego, right here and right now, and we then see the self as a narrative thread, not as reality.
When we can face and embrace suffering (mine, yours, everyone's) in this very immediate and direct way, the thin line between me and not-me disappears. With that opening, I become filled with empathy for others, knowing we are all one being, right here and right now. I am free from the binding of ego's needs and wants. This is what the Buddha taught, and it is available to all of us in every moment.
If we can embrace this mindfulness of suffering, and practice it daily until it becomes our way of relating to the world, we find that craving (attachment) fades away. And when we no longer crave, we cease to suffer. Suffering = pain X resistance (= craving "not-pain"). If we stop resisting our pain (in all its varied forms) we cease to suffer.
In that moment when resistance/attachment ceases, we experience the nonduality you mention - right here in our daily lives. We become free from the compulsion to act on cravings and attachments, and this cessation of craving is what the Buddha meant by his teachings on Nirvana.
Maybe we are talking about the same thing in different language. Your path is vertical (spirit), my path is horizontal (empathy) - but we both want to be free from ego's demands. However, I do not want to crush/destroy the ego (since I need it to go to work today), but merely be free to work and live outside of its demands.
This is the exchange so far - I am hoping Tom will reply to this last comment.
I think these are the kinds of conversations we need to be having in the "spiritual" community of the web. There are a lot of different ways to get to the same idea in my opinion.
Until I began commenting on Tom's post, I had not realized that my position had switched from one of transcendence (as advocated by Wilber and the Integral Spirituality movement) to one of immanence (as advocated by Stephen Batchelor, based on the original teachings of the Buddha, and also as advocated by Jesus [the Kingdom of God is here]).
Here is a basic definition of immanence from Wikipedia:
My position of immanence is in opposition to Tom's position of transcendence, but it's really Buddhism as opposed to Vedanta - two different paths to the same experience of nonduality?Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere - "to remain within" - refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence, which hold that some divine being or essence manifests in and through all aspects of the material world. It is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the non-spiritual, and often contrasts the idea of transcendence.
Immanence is generally associated with mysticism and mystical sects, but most religions have elements of both immanent and transcendent belief in their doctrines. Major faiths commonly devote significant philosophical efforts to explaining the relationship between immanence and transcendence, but these efforts run the gamut from casting immanence as a characteristic of a transcendent God (common in Abrahamic faiths) to subsuming transcendent 'personal' gods in a greater immanent being (Hindu Brahman) to approaching the question of transcendence as something which can only be answered through an appraisal of immanence (Buddhism, and some philosophical perspectives).
Bill,
ReplyDeleteGood dialog, thanks for posting.
I think Batchelor's take on the Buddha misses the teaching of the Unconditional. I think this is a general mistake that infects much of Theravadin Buddhism so it's not him per se though I think he's making the same mistake.
Namely that the key is the dropping of the self over-emphasized to no self. No self really means no separate self and therefore neither self nor no-self.
Relatedly, as to your point that Vedanta (and various other traditions like Thomistic theology) are
equating a human construct with the Ultimate, I would say that is a danger but not correct when properly understood.
In other words, for Dionysius the Areopagite you only come to say what The Ultimate (or whatever we call it) is after you have said what it is not--to clear the mental conceptualization.
So to say Consciousness (a term preferred in the East) or Love (as in Christianity) is only "Super-essentially" so according to Dionysius. It is true as metaphor but not in anyway we experience or can understood by the rational mind.
It is better he would say to first announce, It is Not Consciousness. It is NOT Love.
Then it is Love or Consciousness as Unconditional Consciousness or Love, which is to say beyond our mental understanding.
But "understood" or "experienced" in a trans-mental moment. An identity (more important I think than the state) that "knows" in a non-knowing way.
I don't think it's a transcendence v. immanence thing as both traditions have both. So much as it is really a (relative) question of whether form is evolving. Both sides agree that form is formless, the two are not two nor yet one. They are non-unitary, non-dual.
The disagreement, such as there is one, I think is whether the form is wanting to go somewhere.
In Christian theology this is the teaching that Kingdom is already but not yet. Already we could cover in your terms immanence (though I would say classic nonduality) and not yet means form has not yet universally and fully manifested (in the four quadrants if you like) the truth of its nature.
A point covered in your response vis a vis the paradoxes of India.
Hope that makes sense.
William, your last response to Tom is clear and inspiring. It also happens to be beautifully written!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this. Resonates with much of my own experience.
P.S. I love that line, which I first heard from Shinzen Young... Suffering = pain x resistance.