A very excellent piece I have read in recent times which compels me to share .Normally views pertaining to personal salvation is strictly private and personal.Also it is highly individual oriented as dictated by each person`s temperament,faith and understanding.This particualr piece is in a manner of speaking very striking.It sort of is reconciliatory and yet provoking.It enables a person to pursue what suits him the best and yet challenges him to question and look more intensely.It is reinforcing and at the same time seeds thoughts on doubts of effectiveness .That makes it interesting and useful both for it is well said that in matter of salvation it is not as much important to be in comfort zone as much as to be in churning mode.Comfort has lulling effect whereas questioning challenges to seek new frontiers.Restlessnes leads to rest not laziness.
Translative(traditional/ritual based) religion has its place in society with deep significance for it also provides with good code of conduct to its collective members and also provides calmness and peace to its practioners.It may be superficial or deceptive but it can be genuine too.Sacredness and profanity co exist and thus sacredness cannot be jettisioned just because there is a lurking danger of profanity just as airplanes neednot be stopped as air accidents could happen.So far so good.Arguements can also be made there can be one Buddha in thousand years and so there can be one one Mirabai in thousand years,Hence translative or transformative the probability of attaining holy heights leave aside complete enlightenment is .00000000000000001 .
Western writers have a good knack of putting across .For instance what ken wilber says is not new to easterners and scriptures are abound with dual vs nondual path .Dwait/adwait or gross vs existential nothingness.
Its a choice to be made.Opinions will always be divided on whther it is ladder type situation,meaning gradual climbing step by step or whther it is now and here.
Read article below
A Spirituality That Transforms
Hal Blacker, consulting editor of What is Enlightenment?, has described the topic
of this special issue of the magazine in the following way (although this repeats
statements made elsewhere in this issue, it is nonetheless worth quoting at length, simply
because of its eloquence, straightforwardness, and unerring good sense):
We intend to explore a sensitive question, but one which needs to be
addressed--the superficiality which pervades so much of the current spiritual
exploration and discourse in the West, particularly in the United States. All too
often, in the translation of the mystical traditions from the East (and elsewhere)
into the American idiom, their profound depth is flattened out, their radical
demand is diluted, and their potential for revolutionary transformation is
squelched. How this occurs often seems to be subtle, since the words of the
teachings are often the same. Yet through an apparent sleight of hand involving,
perhaps, their context and therefore ultimately their meaning, the message of the
greatest teachings often seems to become transmuted from the roar of the fire of
liberation into something more closely resembling the soothing burble of a
California hot tub. While there are exceptions, the radical implications of the
greatest teachings are thereby often lost. We wish to investigate this dilution of
spirituality in the West, and inquire into its causes and consequences.
Copyright © 2006 Ken Wilber. All Rights Reserved.
I would like to take that statement and unpack its basic points, commenting on
them as best I can, because taken together, those points highlight the very heart and soul
of a crisis in American spirituality.
Translation Versus Transformation
In a series of books (e.g., A Sociable God, Up from Eden, and The Eye of Spirit), I
have tried to show that religion itself has always performed two very important, but very
different, functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it
offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals and revivals that, taken
together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the
level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it
deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the
self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self
believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then
the self, it is fervently believed, will be "saved"--either now in the glory of being
God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an after-life that insures eternal wonderment.
But two, religion has also served--in a usually very, very small minority--the
function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not
fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it--not consolation but devastation, not
entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but
revolution--in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical
transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.
There are several different ways that we can state these two important functions
of religion. The first function--that of creating meaning for the self--is a type of
horizontal movement; the second function--that of transcending the self--is a type of
vertical movement (higher or deeper, depending on your metaphor). The first I have
named translation; the second, transformation.
With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality.
The self is given a new belief--perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness
instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic. The self then learns to translate
its world and its being in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm,
and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish
the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self.
But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged,
witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or
subject) is given a new way to think about the world (or objects); but with radical
transformation, the self itself is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by its throat and
literally throttled to death.
Put it one last way: with horizontal translation--which is by far the most prevalent,
wide-spread, and widely-shared function of religion--the self is, at least temporarily,
made happy in its grasping, made content in its enslavement, made complacent in the
face of the screaming terror that is in fact its innermost condition. With translation, the
self goes sleepy into the world, stumbles numbed and near-sighted into the nightmare of
samsara, is given a map laced with morphine with which to face the world. And this,
indeed, is the common condition of a religious humanity, precisely the condition that the
radical or transformative spiritual realizers have come to challenge and to finally undo.
For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the
believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter
of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made
content; the self is made toast.
Now, although I have obviously been favoring transformation and belittling
translation, the fact is that, on the whole, both of these functions are incredibly important
and altogether indispensable. Individuals are not, for the most part, born enlightened.
They are born in a world of sin and suffering, hope and fear, desire and despair. They are
born as a self ready and eager to contract; a self rife with hunger, thirst, tears and terror.
And they begin, quite early on, to learn various ways to translate their world, to make
sense of it, to give meaning to it, and to defend themselves against the terror and the
torture never lurking far beneath the happy surface of the separate self.
And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere translation and
find an authentic transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely necessary
and crucial function for the greater part of our lives. Those who cannot translate
adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis
or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense--the boundaries between the self and
the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but
breakdown; not transcendence but disaster.
But at some point in our maturation process, translation itself, no matter how
adequate or confident, simply ceases to console. No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no
new myths, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new belief for the
self, but the transcendence of the self altogether, is the only path that avails.
Still, the number of individuals who are ready for such a path is, always has been,
and likely always will be, a very small minority. For most people, any sort of religious
belief will fall instead into the category of consolation: it will be a new horizontal
translation that fashions some sort of meaning in the midst of the monstrous world. And
religion has always served, for the most part, this first function, and served it well.
I therefore also use the word legitimacy to describe this first function (the
horizontal translation and creation of meaning for the separate self). And much of
religion's important service is to provide legitimacy to the self--legitimacy to its beliefs,
its paradigms, its worldviews, and its way in the world. This function of religion to
provide a legitimacy for the self and its beliefs--no matter how temporary, relative,
nontransformative, or illusory--has nonetheless been the single greatest and most
important function of the world's religious traditions. The capacity of a religion to
provide horizontal meaning, legitimacy, and sanction for the self and its beliefs--that
function of religion has historically been the single greatest "social glue" that any culture
has.
And one does not tamper easily, or lightly, with the basic glue that holds societies
together. Because more often than not, when that glue dissolves--when that translation
dissolves--the result, as we were saying, is not breakthrough but breakdown, not
liberation but social chaos. (We will return to this crucial point in a moment.)
Where translative religion offers legitimacy, transformative religion offers
authenticity. For those few individuals who are ready--that is, sick with the suffering of
the separate self, and no longer able to embrace the legitimate worldview--then a
transformative opening to true authenticity, true enlightenment, true liberation, calls more
and more insistently. And, depending upon your capacity for suffering, you will sooner
or later answer the call of authenticity, of transformation, of liberation on the lost horizon
of infinity.
Transformative spirituality does not seek to bolster or legitimate any present
worldview at all, but rather to provide true authenticity by shattering what the world takes
as legitimate. Legitimate consciousness is sanctioned by the consensus, adopted by the
herd mentality, embraced by the culture and the counter-culture both, promoted by the
separate self as the way to make sense of this world. But authentic consciousness quickly
shakes all of that off of its back, and settles instead into a glance that sees only a radiant
infinity in the heart of all souls, and breathes into its lungs only the atmosphere of an
eternity too simple to believe.
Transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, is therefore revolutionary. It
does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it
shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.
And those facts lead to several conclusions.
Who Actually Wants to Transform?
It is a fairly common belief that the East is simply awash in transformative and
authentic spirituality, but that the West--both historically and in today's "new age"--has
nothing much more than various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate and
therefore tepid spirituality. And while there is some truth to that, the actual situation is
much gloomier, for both the East and the West alike.
First, although it is generally true that the East has produced a greater number of
authentic realizers, nonetheless, the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is
engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and always has been, pitifully small. I
once asked Katigiri Roshi, with whom I had my first breakthrough (hopefully, not a
breakdown), how many truly great Ch'an and Zen masters there have historically been.
Without hesitating, he said "Maybe one thousand altogether." I asked another Zen master
how many truly enlightened--deeply enlightened--Japanese Zen masters there were alive
today, and he said "Not more than a dozen."
Let us simply assume, for the sake of argument, that those are vaguely accurate
answers. Run the numbers. Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the
course of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that only one thousand
out of one billion had graduated into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those
of you without a calculator, that's 0.0000001 of the total population.
And that means, unmistakably, that the rest of the population were (and are)
involved in, at best, various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate religion:
they were involved in magical practices, mythical beliefs, egoic petitionary prayer,
magical rituals, and so on--in other words, translative ways to give meaning to the
separate self, a translative function that was, as we were saying, the major social glue of
the Chinese (and all other) cultures to date.
Thus, without in any way belittling the truly stunning contributions of the glorious
Eastern traditions, the point is fairly straightforward: radical transformative spirituality is
extremely rare, anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world. (The numbers for the
West are even more depressing. I rest my case.)
So, although we can very rightly lament the very few number of individuals in the
West who are today involved in a truly authentic and radically transformative spiritual
realization, let us not make the false argument of claiming that it has otherwise been
dramatically different in earlier times or in different cultures. It has on occasion been a
little better than we see here, now, in the West, but the fact remains: authentic spirituality
is an incredibly rare bird, anywhere, at any time, at any place. So let us start from the
unarguable fact that vertical, transformative, authentic spirituality is one of the most
precious jewels in the entire human tradition--precisely because, like all precious jewels,
it is incredibly rare.
Second, even though you and I might deeply believe that the most important
function we can perform is to offer authentic transformative spirituality, the fact is, much
of what we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality into the world, is
actually to offer more benign and helpful modes of translation. In other words, even if
we ourselves are practicing, or offering, authentic transformative spirituality, nonetheless
much of what we must first do is provide most people with a more adequate way to
translate their condition. We must start with helpful translations, before we can
effectively offer authentic transformations.
The reason is that if translation is too quickly, or too abruptly, or too ineptly taken
away from an individual (or a culture), the result, once again, is not breakthrough but
breakdown, not release but collapse. Let me give two quick examples here.
When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a great (though controversial) Tibetan
master, first came to this country, he was renown for always saying, when asked the
meaning of Vajrayana, "There is only Ati." In other words, there is only the enlightened
mind wherever you look. The ego, samsara, maya and illusion--all of them do not have
to be gotten rid of, because none of them actually exist: There is only Ati, there is only
Spirit, there is only God, there is only nondual Consciousness anywhere in existence.
Virtually nobody got it--nobody was ready for this radical and authentic
realization of always-already truth--and so Trungpa eventually introduced a whole series
of "lesser" practices leading up to this radical and ultimate "no practice." He introduced
the Nine Yanas as the foundation of practice--in other words, he introduced nine stages or
levels of practice, culminating in the ultimate "no practice" of always-already Ati.
Many of these practices were simply translative, and some were what we might
call "lesser transformative" practices: miniature transformations that made the bodymind
more susceptible to radical, already-accomplished enlightenment. These translative and
lesser practices issued forth in the "perfect practice" of no-practice--or the radical,
instantaneous, authentic realization that, from the very beginning, there is only Ati. So
even though ultimate transformation was the prior goal and ever-present ground, Trungpa
had to introduce translative and lesser practices in order to prepare people for the
obviousness of what is.
Exactly the same thing happened with Adi Da, another influential (and equally
controversial) adept (although this time, American-born). He originally taught nothing
but "the path of understanding": not a way to attain enlightenment, but an inquiry into
why you want to attain enlightenment in the first place. The very desire to seek
enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the
very search for enlightenment prevents it. The "perfect practice" is therefore not to
search for enlightenment, but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously
seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek
forever is to miss the point forever. You always already ARE enlightened Spirit, and
therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit. You can no more attain Spirit than you
can attain your feet or acquire your lungs.
Nobody got it. And so Adi Da, exactly like Trungpa, introduced a whole series of
translative and lesser transformative practices--seven stages of practice, in fact--leading
up to the point that you could dispense with seeking altogether, there to stand open to the
always-already truth of your own eternal and timeless condition, which was completely
and totally present from the start, but which was brutally ignored in the frenzied desire to
seek.
Now, whatever you might think of those two Adepts, the fact remains: they
performed perhaps the first two great experiments in this country on how to introduce the
notion that "There is only Ati"--there is only Spirit--and thus seeking Spirit is exactly that
which prevents realization. And they both found that, however much we might be alive
to Ati, alive to the radical transformative truth of this moment, nonetheless translative
and lesser transformative practices are almost always a prerequisite for that final and
ultimate transformation.
My second point, then, is that in addition to offering authentic and radical
transformation, we must still be sensitive to, and caring of, the numerous beneficial
modes of lesser and translative practices. This more generous stance therefore calls for
an "integral approach" to overall transformation, an approach that honors and
incorporates many lesser transformative and translative practices--covering the physical,
emotional, mental, cultural, and communal aspects of the human being--in preparation
for, and as an expression of, the ultimate transformation into the always already present
state.
And so, even as we rightly criticize merely translative religion (and all the lesser
forms of transformation), let us also realize that an integral approach to spirituality
combines the best of horizontal and vertical, translative and transformative, legitimate
and authentic--and thus let us focus our efforts on a balanced and sane overview of the
human situation.
Wisdom and Compassion
But isn't this view of mine terribly elitist? Good heavens, I hope so. When you
go to a basketball game, do you want to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball?
When you listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money in order to hear? Me or
Bruce Springsteen? When you read great literature, who would you rather spend an
evening reading, me or Tolstoy? When you pay sixty-four million dollars for a painting,
will that be a painting by me or by Van Gogh?
All excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence as well. But
spiritual excellence is an elitism to which all are invited. We go first to the great
masters--to Padmasambhava, to St. Teresa of Avila, to Gautama Buddha, to Lady
Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara, Sri Ramana Maharshi,
Bodhidharma, Garab Dorje. But their message is always the same: let this consciousness
be in you which is in me. You start elitist, always; you end up egalitarian, always.
But in between, there is the angry wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all
of us, keep our eye on the radical and ultimate transformative goal. And so any sort of
integral or authentic spirituality will also, always, involve a critical, intense, and
occasionally polemical shout from the transformative camp to the merely translative
camp.
If we use the percentages of Chinese Ch'an as a simple blanket example, this
means that if 0.0000001 of the population is actually involved in genuine or authentic
spirituality, then .99999999 of the population is involved in nontransformative,
nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal belief systems. And that means, yes, that
the vast, vast majority of "spiritual seekers" in this country (as elsewhere) are involved in
much less than authentic occasions. It has always been so; it is still so now. This country
is no exception.
But in today's America, this is much more disturbing, because this vast majority
of horizontal spiritual adherents often claim to be representing the leading edge of
spiritual transformation, the "new paradigm" that will change the world, the "great
transformation" of which they are the vanguard. But more often than not, they are not
deeply transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively translative--they do not
offer effective means to utterly dismantle the self, but merely ways for the self to think
differently. Not ways to transform, but merely new ways to translate. In fact, what most
of them offer is not a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang or
shikan-taza or yoga. What most of them offer is simply the suggestion: read my book on
the new paradigm. This is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.
Thus, the authentic spiritual camps have the heart and soul of the great
transformative traditions, and yet they will always do two things at once: appreciate and
engage the lesser and translative practices (upon which their own successes usually
depend), but also issue a thundering shout from the heart that translation alone is not
enough.
And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated
their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from the
heart--perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and
angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakeable public
example--but authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must
speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your
headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble
through your veins and rattle those around you.
Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding
your true estate. You don't want to upset others because you don't want to upset your
self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.
Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a
terrible burden: Those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the
obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You
were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to
others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have
seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry
wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must.
And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is
no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might
be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn't matter. What
does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking
your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the
reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that
will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery--either
way--and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage
you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.
The vulgar world is already shouting, and with such a raucous rancor that truer
voices can scarcely be heard at all. The materialistic world is already full of
advertisements and allure, screams of enticement and cries of commerce, wails of
welcome and whoops of come hither. I don't mean to be harsh here, and we must honor
all lesser engagements. Nonetheless, you must have noticed that the word "soul" is now
the hottest item in the title of book sales--but all "soul" really means, in most of these
books, is simply the ego in drag. "Soul" has come to denote, in this feeding frenzy of
translative grasping, not that which is timeless in you but that which most loudly thrashes
around in time, and thus "care of the soul" incomprehensibly means nothing much more
than focusing intensely on your ardently separate self. Likewise, "Spiritual" is on
everybody's lips, but usually all it really means is any intense egoic feeling, just as
"Heart" has come to mean any sincere sentiment of the self-contraction.
All of this, truly, is just the same ole translative game, dressed up and gone to
town. And even that would be more than acceptable were it not for the alarming fact that
all of that translative jockeying is aggressively called "transformation," when all it is, of
course, is a new series of frisky translations. In other words, there seems to be, alas, a
deep hypocrisy hidden in the game of taking any new translation and calling it the great
transformation. And the world at large--East or West, North or South--is, and always has
been, for the most part, perfectly deaf to this calamity.
And so: given the measure of your own authentic realization, you were actually
thinking about gently whispering into the ear of that near-deaf world? No, my friend, you
must shout. Shout from the heart of what you have seen, shout however you can.
But not indiscriminately. Let us proceed carefully with this transformative shout.
Let small pockets of radically transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality, focus
their efforts, and transform their students. And let these pockets slowly, carefully,
responsibly, humbly, begin to spread their influence, embracing an absolute tolerance for
all views, but attempting nonetheless to advocate a true and authentic and integral
spirituality--by example, by radiance, by obvious release, by unmistakable liberation. Let
those pockets of transformation gently persuade the world and its reluctant selves, and
challenge their legitimacy, and challenge their limiting translations, and offer an
awakening in the face of the numbness that haunts the world at large.
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