Interesting article showcasing some of the problems of modern
people
http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j22/gurup…
Breaking the Rules
The Guru and the Pandit
Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen in Dialogue
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THE CONSPIRACY OF MEDIOCRITY
KW: Let me just say that in a student who’s got a really bad
case of boomeritis—which is to say, pretty much any cultural
creative out there, all fifty million strong—the internal stance
is, “I’m holding on to my position and nobody can tell me what to
do. My state, just as it is, has the same worth as any other.” And
that stance effectively aborts any real transformation.
And so, for example, most of the people involved with what I
call Boomeritis Buddhism even deny the importance of satori or
Enlightenment or Awakening. Because that’s saying some states are
higher than others—and we shouldn’t be judgmental. But guess what?
Some states are higher. And so the entire raison d’etre of Buddhism
gets tossed out the door because it offends the pluralistic ego.
Yikes!
AC: So the whole point is that with boomeritis, real radical
transformation is against the rules.
KW: Yes. Well, it has to be.
AC: To dare to even speak about radical transformation, let
alone call other people to a higher level, is against the unstated
rules. And of course, one’s definitely going to be put in one’s
place for doing something like that. But unless the possibility of
genuine transformation is actually declared, unless one is willing
to demonstrate it publicly and to call other people to the same, no
one is even going to know that it’s possible. And then unknowingly,
everybody’s going to be participating in the conspiracy of
mediocrity.
KW: Yes, the conspiracy of mediocrity, which is basically the
conspiracy to express your ego instead of transcending it or
letting go of it. The idea is “If I can really emote and express my
self-contraction with sincerity, I’m somehow spiritual.” So then we
have a convention of the self-contractions, and that’s basically
boomeritis spirituality. It’s a problem, to put it mildly. And it’s
a concern to me that a lot of teachers actually embrace that kind
of postmodern flatland pluralism.
AC: Well, I think that part of the reason for that is that many
people are teaching now who actually have had little if any
enlightenment experience or satori themselves. And if one is a
teacher and yet has little authentic experience on which to base
one’s teaching, one is going to end up being in the kind of
position you described.
KW: I think that’s certainly part of the picture. Another part
of the picture, which concerns me even more, is that I know some
teachers who have had a very strong satori, but they still
interpret it through the mental apparatus that they have in place.
And so they interpret it through boomeritis, the mean green meme,
pluralistic flatland. And that, frankly, is extremely
unsettling.
AC: You know, over the years that I have been working with
students, I’ve seen repeatedly that people who are at different
levels of development can have a similar or even identical
spiritual experience but will interpret what the experience means
in a completely different way. And therefore it has become clear to
me that the way we interpret our experience is far more important
than the actual experience that we have.
KW: I think they’re both very, very important. And certainly the
interpretative component has an enormous hand in this. One of the
things that I’ve tried to do in various writings, as you know, is
develop a kind of matrix of various types of altered states. This
matrix has two major components. There are levels or stages of
consciousness, and there are also altered states of consciousness.
And you may experience a gross, subtle, causal, or nondual state of
consciousness, but it will inevitably be interpreted through
whatever stage of development you’re at. So developmentally, you
can be at the traditionalist level, or the modernist level, or the
postmodernist level, or the integral level, and you can have a
subtle or even nondual experience, but you’re going to interpret it
through whatever apparatus you have. So if, developmentally, you’re
at the green meme, you can have a very profound satori, but you’re
going to interpret it in pluralistic, flatland terms.
AC: Yes, and one will interpret it through one’s
self-infatuation or narcissism.
KW: That’s the downside of pluralism—narcissism—that’s the
boomeritis form, the unhealthy form. And that’s how we end up with
Boomeritis Buddhism, or it could be Boomeritis Shamanism or
Boomeritis Vedanta, et cetera.
AC: Because in whichever case, the satori or mystical
breakthrough is being used to affirm one’s own ego.
KW: Yes, alas.
AC: The spiritual experience, which ideally should be a
stepping-stone to less ego and greater transparency, can in fact be
the opposite, a catalytic event that empowers the ego, making it
even more solid—and then we end up with real enlightened
narcissism.
KW: That part to me is very disturbing, actually. And that’s why
I think Boomeritis Buddhism is the biggest internal threat to the
dharma in the West—that’s my own personal opinion. And we might as
well come clean ourselves—I don’t think any of us escapes some
degree of boomeritis. You know, I’ve got a dose of it, I think
you’ve got a dose of it, every human being who comes out of this
culture has a dose of it. The question is, how much, what can we do
about it, can we at least spot it, and is there some portion of us
that’s bigger than it? And I think that’s of course why the
student-teacher relationship is so important. Hopefully teachers
like you and me and others have to some extent recognized this
problem and moved a bit beyond it, or else we are not going to be
of much help to anybody, but are simply going to reproduce our own
boomeritis and now call it “spiritual.”
AC: That’s true. And don’t you think the real issue here is
dealing with ego? I mean, declaring ego to be the main issue in
relationship to spiritual transformation is definitely not cool if
you have boomeritis. In the East-meets-West spiritual marketplace,
more often than not, self-acceptance seems to have replaced the
goal of enlightenment, or real ego transcendence. The goal of the
spiritual path has always been radical, and very demanding—an
enormous leap beyond ego. And now suddenly it’s about accepting
ourselves the way we already are. And too often, powerful Buddhist
and Vedantic enlightenment concepts are used as techniques to
actually relieve the seeker of having to pay the price of
transformation—to relieve them of the burden of having to really
face themselves and change.
KW: I think that’s very true. It’s part of our therapeutic
culture, where we don’t make any judgments because that would hurt
egoic self-esteem, and so all we do is embrace, console, and
celebrate the personal self. Sophisticated forms of the therapeutic
culture replace “subjectivity” with an emphasis on communal
awareness or “intersubjectivity,” and now intersubjectivity has
become the main home of boomeritis. But all are variations on a
celebration of the entrenched green meme and its therapeutic
culture.
AC: So spiritual practice becomes nothing more than a form of
therapy, where self-acceptance rather than ego-transcendence is the
goal. The “practice” is being “nonjudgmental” under all
circumstances and one ends up tying oneself up in knots trying to
cultivate a dubious kind of compassion that often goes against all
common sense.
KW: Yes, what Chogyam Trungpa called “idiot compassion.” That’s
the therapeutic culture that is such a large part of boomeritis.
But again, there are positive sides to the therapeutic culture and
the green meme, and we need to honor those. Some people have low
self-esteem, they’re devastated, they’ve been abused and beaten and
all of that—of course they need to improve self-esteem. But once
you’ve done that, you need to let go of it. You really, really,
really need to let go of self and egoic self-esteem altogether. And
the problem is that therapists are basically pimps for samsara.
They want to hold onto the egoic self-contraction and make it feel
good about itself.
And yet the fundamental stance of enlightenment is: “If you feel
rotten about yourself—good! That’s the beginning of a correct
perception.”
AC: That’s right!
KW: “You should fundamentally hate yourself in order to start
moving beyond this tangled, contracted mess called you.” That is
the awakening of discriminating wisdom that opens up the
possibility of higher, wider, deeper states and stages.
You know, there’s that enigmatic statement of Christ’s in the
New Testament: “He who hateth not his own soul cannot be my
disciple.” Of course that makes perfect sense, but it is exactly
what the therapeutic society does not want to hear or allow.
And so if people come and they say, “Gee, I’m not feeling too
good about myself,” the initial response should be, “Excellent,
let’s see if we can increase that. At some point you will find that
your real Self is radically free of your small-self ego. And
therefore you have a fullness and a freedom that is true Self
esteem. But it starts by fundamentally throwing out this pitiful
small slice of reality you call your ego.”
AC: And as one goes deeper and deeper into the process of
transformation, it gradually becomes clear what a daunting foe the
ego really is, and what a poison narcissism is. We become aware of
the long shadow that ego casts over our own consciousness and over
the consciousness of others. But this is something that we’re not
going to be able to appreciate until we actually begin to
awaken.
A BACKLASH OF CYNICISM
AC: Another dimension to all this is that in the spiritual
marketplace, the strong current of antihierarchical sentiment is,
in part, fueled by the deep cynicism out there about the actual
possibility of radical transformation. And as you know, this is
largely a result of what’s occurred here in the West over the last
thirty years or so. In the seventies, a lot of people got very
excited about transformation. Many began to say, “Wow, it’s really
possible,” and they started going to gurus and doing intensive
spiritual practice. But then in the eighties and nineties, most of
the great masters, individuals who at the time were considered to
be fully enlightened, one after the other betrayed their students
through blatant abuses of power. So there has been an enormous
backlash of cynicism.
Few people are even aspiring to reach that high anymore, and one
of the reasons for this is that a lot of teachers these days are
kind of overcompensating, bending over backward to make everybody
feel comfortable by leaving no doubt that in the end they’re really
not claiming to be much more evolved than the rest of us.
KW: That’s true, and very unfortunate, I think. As we’ve been
saying, now we are all supposed to simply come to some sort of
sensitive, communal, shared self-acceptance of the
self-contraction. And if we can really come to peace with that
neurotic coil, and embrace it and hug it, then somehow that’s the
same as the enlightened state. Obviously that’s a bit of a
caricature, but that’s what a lot of these teachers actually start
to sound like.
AC: And of course, the great tragedy in all this is that the
higher dimensions of human potential are often being left out of
the picture.
KW: I’ve watched this up close. I’ve watched the human potential
movement for about thirty years. The great promise of the human
potential movement was very straightforward—there are higher human
potentials. Now the problem is that the green meme, the mean green
meme, the boomeritis version, got hold of that and said, “Wait a
minute. You’re saying there are higher potentials, so does that
mean I’m lower? Because that can’t be right.” All of a sudden it
implied a judgment, and nobody’s allowed to be higher because that
means somebody else is going to be lower. And you’re not allowed to
call anybody lower; therefore nobody’s allowed to be higher.
So the whole human potential movement got derailed and, as we’re
saying, was replaced by this therapeutic self-expression,
self-acceptance movement, which is fine as far as it goes, but
which absolutely catastrophically prevents higher transformation.
That’s exactly what happened. And what I hear you calling for is
the reawakening of this capacity and this desire to have a really
radical transformation. The reawakening of the notion that there
are higher potentials. And that means we have to awaken
discriminating awareness, start making judgments about our own
contracted state, and enter a relationship with a teacher who has
some awareness of these higher possibilities.