To my blog
© Mushin J. Schilling, Berlin 2006, 2009
In a dream
I speak with an enlightened spiritual teacher. He sits opposite from me.
I see him darkly against the back light of a panorama window opening to
a harbor – on the shining horizon the ocean is melting blue into the sky.
He stands
for what I call vertical spirituality: the development from the
lowest to the highest, from egotism to the transcendent finally opening
out into the realization of awakening, enlightenment or merging with the
divine. A way expressed in all traditional and most modern orientations,
a way making the mystic and spiritual richness accessible over the centuries
and millennia, probably even co-creating them.
Me, I’m
a bit out of balance because for the first time I can’t close my eyes anymore
to the suffering caused by this vertical teaching; a teaching I have been
following consistently for decades – with a bit of a distance these last
two years. Maybe that’s why my eyes now open to its discrepancies… and
then, vertical spirituality is all to easily seduced by the authoritarian
temptation.
Because
we see each others hearts he knows what I am speaking about and he can
feel my troubles.
Vertical Spirituality and the Suffering it Causes
Let’s start with two examples for the suffering recently caused by vertical
spirituality:
Ken Wilber is an intelligent theoretician of spirituality and also an enlightened
practitioner living what he speaks and writes about. If you’ve read his diary-like
book „One Taste”[1] you know that he has indeed
realized the level of consciousness that he describes in his books as the
highest.
All right then: June 8, 2006 Ken Wilber throws up a appalling rant against
his critics on his weblog.[2] He hardly engages the arguments
of these critics but rather attacks their character, personality and even
names a few names. Well, you could say, as I did at first, „Not very elegant
to spread this out in public on the internet, using such degrading language,
but maybe even the enlightened have to blow their top once in a while. It’s
all very human.”
But a few days later a second post of Wilber appears in his blog[3] in which he doesn’t offer any
conciliatory explanation but declares his public rant to be a test case,
also totally overreacting to the generally moderate responses to his outburst
that now appear all over the internet („You hate us…, you hate Wilber….”).
In his post he uses some of the classical arguments that play an important
and generally accepted role in vertical spirituality:
The first argument is really impossible to beat. Can we really understand where these – in this case Wilber’s hard – words are coming from? No, not if we assume that enlightened or awakened beings are higher developed than we are. What’s more, we don’t have a right to judge them, because only those who have reached the enlightened level can really understand and appreciate what the awakened ones do and why. But those who still attach to an ego – even if only very lightly – would act presumptuously. So those who criticize enlightened beings actually show just how caught up and entangled they still are.[5]
The second argument is also impossible to counter as long as the first one
is considered to be true. To illustrate I will now give a second example.
Let’s imagine that I am a close disciple of the enlightened teacher and founder
of the „What’s Enlightenment?” magazine Andrew Cohen.[6] He sends me to one of his students,
X., whom – for reasons that I can’t understand, of course – I am to slap
hard in his face. (This seems to be common practice in his communities; it
has not been repudiated, on the contrary it is being defended fervently using
the first argument I mention above.)[7] So, being a good disciple and
trusting my master I give X. a good whacking. And because X. now looks angrily
at me I say, „You’re being angry with me only goes to shows how big your
shadow still is, and that you project it onto me instead of looking at it
and working with it – you still have a long way to go, for sure.”
And it is true: The pain, the humiliation and the anger are a part of X’s
consciousness, they are part of his shadow. As long as he doesn’t attend
to it but rather projects it onto me he didn’t learn one of the basic lessons
of vertical spirituality. But if instead he accepts my interpretation of
his plight he will feel that his double humiliation is part of overcoming
his ego, and he will perceive his immense feeling of powerlessness as surrender.
This is exactly the argument Wilber uses when he declares his public abuse
to be a test.
And Wilber also states the third argument quite clearly: „So
this and the previous blog were meant, in part, to make this [our
shadow projecting] obvious, so that it could at least start to
be worked with, by individuals who are sincere about their own healing
and growth.” [Bold type by Wilber] So his verbal injuries are there
to help us, he says, out of compassion – not idiot compassion, of course!
Or to put it another way: Now we know how serious we are about our healing
and growth, because if we aren’t we will object against his rant…
Ken Wilber is not naive, he knows what all this is about. I have chosen the
above example for ‘shadow projection’ because Wilber says in his introduction
to Andrew Cohen’s book „Living Enlightenment”[8]: „Andrew Cohen is a Rude Boy… Rude Boys … are not here
to console but to shatter, not to comfort but to demolish. … They are uncompromising,
brutal, laser-like… They deeply offend the ego....He [Cohen] is not here to offer comfort;
he is here to tear you into approximately a thousand pieces...so that Infinity
can reassemble you, Freedom can replace imprisonment, Fullness can outshine
fear.”[9] In
short: If Wilber abuses his critics and his good pal Cohen „uncompromising,
brutal, laser-like” beats or has his disciples whacked by others, than
that is only for the best: out of love, not idiot-compassion.
Spiritual Violence
Wilber, who is a proponent of what he calls ‘integral
spirituality’, teaches us in the same foreword that this rudeness belongs
to the basics of spiritual development: „Every deeply enlightened teacher
I have known has been a Rude Boy or Nasty Girl. The original Rude Boys
were, of course, the great Zen masters, who, when faced with yet another
ego claiming to want Enlightenment, would get a huge stick and whack the
aspirant right between the eyes. And that was just the beginning, that
was the easy part; things got nastier fast—but at the other end of that
brutality lay ever-present Realization, a shocking jolting death of the
self and the radiant resurrection of infinite Spirit as your very own true
nature.”
I don’t know how many Zen-aspirants got a „whack … right between the
eyes”, legitimized by the teaching, of course. It must have been quite
a lot in the more than 1500 years of Zen-Buddhism. „I once asked Katagiri Roshi, with whom I had
my first break-through” tells Ken Wilber in his book „One Taste”, „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”
Somehow it must have eluded Wilber that for hundred thousands „things got nastier fast” whereas just very, very few found or stumbled upon „ever-present
Realization”. Does the enlightened goal sanctify these rude, even violent
means in the view of this „most brilliant thinker of modern times”? Apparently
yes. And he is not alone in this regard because every teaching that abases
the ego, the I, the person to elevate the transpersonal, selfless or absolute
does exactly this, even if often not with so much violence. This teaching
model is fundamental to vertical spirituality: The highest – and therefore
the one that has realized it – is above and beyond all and the unenlightened
person is below and beneath it.
In human social life this cannot but lead to feudalistic, patriarchal, authoritarian
structures unless strong and conscious action is undertaken to counteract
this massive drift. Steering free of this tendency seems to be necessary
for another reason: in the modern media world in which „the highest happiness” or „the
highest self-realisation” have to court for attention and market shares this
drift goes in the direction of narcissism and even megalomania[10] especially
if the person concerned is believed to be enlightened, egoless and/or divine.
I know that he regards himself as being one with the absolute, the non-dual, the highest; as someone who as an egoless being cannot be narcissistic. He is truly a man of integrity, and I am sure that he wants the best for his students and mankind as a whole. And I feel his wonderful charisma, his clear, light and loving aura.
But what he sees in my heart touches him. It looks as if he could see there that next to the pure, radiating, transcendent being – the one – there is the manifold and diversity, the becoming and the unfolding. He sees that if he just identifies with one turning it into the highest he is withdrawing from the manifold and abases it – in himself and in others.
Almost all vertical spiritualities East and West have something in common,
and that is not what they regard as being the highest. What is highest
and who has actually realized it and in what measure is not agreed upon
at all. One has to read one’s sources very selectively if one is, for instance,
to assert that Zen-Buddhist Kensho and the union with the divine that Meister
Eckhardt is speaking about is one and the same state.
These teachings rather have something else in common: body, world and person
or I are regarded as a hindrance and an illusion both, and women, of course,
are leading one astray and away from the lofty goal. But even if the enmity
against body, world and women is not so widespread in the West anymore, the
conception of the I and its mind as obstacle and illusion is cherished far
and wide. This idea in combination with the teaching of an egoless enlightenment
or awakening as the highest human possibility has a dire consequence: the
human being as a person, an individual I is not sacrosanct – indefeasible – anymore.
The individual and his or her unique ego (Latin for “I am”) are not entitled
to be and regarded as a real and living other anymore. Both the other and
the I are now labeled to be an obstructive illusion, and thus in practice
they are denied and nullified. Thus, in the name of spirituality the person
is robbed of what makes it resilient, creative, determined and autonomous,
unique, changeable, revolutionary, compassionate with individuals, caring,
self responsible in word and deed.
And now just what the vertical spirituality is seeking to undermine and eliminate
is what we need so hard in present times, it seems to me.
Vertical spirituality and its patriarchal teachings stem from feudalistic times in which its enmity towards the body, the world and women is rooted as well. People having enlightening experiences in former times in which the source of being and existence revealed itself were interpreted according to the social order of those days, and just as the king, emperor or Caesar was enthroned over the world so the highest, absolute transcendent was enthroned over all matter and non-matter. Vertical spirituality expounded an ascending way reaching from the animal-human, worldly, lower realms towards the divine or non-dual highest state or level. This way was not only a hierarchy of values but also one of spiritual position and power. The „transcendent self”, the „enlightened one”, the „divine” is enthroned at the top of a chain of command and causation – sometimes called ‘the great chain of being’ – far above and beyond the body, the world, the person and I and always also the feminine. If one follows this teaching today than one does, surely with the best of intentions, reproduce a feudalistic patriarchal structure in which mind, ego, corporeality etc. in many ways is veiled, suppressed, reduced to illusions, meditated away or nullified. The idea that one could see their dignity or dignify mind, ego, world, body etc. doesn’t appear at all.
Cooperative Spirituality
To overcome vertical spirituality – which
is a necessity in my eyes – we have to do just that: recognize the dignity
of people, states and phenomena exactly how they appear. This is an essential
element of the necessary renewal of spirituality that I am proposing here,
and that I am actually already experimenting with in my life, seminars
and the community I live in.
Vertical spirituality proposes that only the man who has realized the highest
stages sees everything as it really is; everyone else sees filtered, illusionary
and distorted realities – illusions. This point of view is neither true nor
is it helpful. Our spiritual forefathers didn’t know what has been shown
by modern physics time and again: the observer and what is being observed
is inseparably connected. Modern psychology moreover shows that our upbringing
and culture have an irreducible influence on how we see things. What we see
and recognize is always also a co-production between the observer/participant,
his or her state of consciousness and what he meets. There is no spiritual
reality separate from us somewhere inside us or out there.
Vertical spirituality didn’t only teach that the transcendent was above and
beyond all but also that there is the immanent, inherent in everyone and
all. But in practice and life only transcendence is being activated: one
goes for the highest and the lower has to fade and die. But if not only in
teaching but in practice the immanent would be taken serious the highest
in all and everyone would be recognized, respected and even revered. Nobody
would be beyond or above anyone else no matter what conscious or developmental
level he or she inhabits. Everything that appears comes into being in a meeting,
the immanent being its womb. Reality as it appears to us is always a creation
of all participants who partake in it, and this is so regardless of
how we position its levels.
We look at one another. He
has widened his view and taken me in with the manifold I bring. Yes, he
can even embrace the rebellious in me that is chipping away at the vertical
spirituality so vehemently. He sees now that this didn’t originate with
the conviction that it is false or because I’m against hierarchies and
authorities but because I cannot steer clear of the suffering it causes
in a social and worldly context anymore.
He now also sees that I actually appreciate vertical spirituality: the experiences
of which these teaching speak are still helpful, healing and a cause of bliss,
but the language in which it is put and the ways it proposes are authoritarian
and patriarchal. It is these confining perspectives on spirituality that
my rebellion wants to do away with.
Our spiritual emancipation is also about
trusting again our own eyes, heart and belly and to honour them by lending
them our voice – to faithfully render what we experience.
We need teachings that allow us to meet our selves and our experiences – just
as they come into being – openly and with respect. Because whatever we regard
as the highest has lent its authority from us. In cooperative spirituality
this knowledge helps us to cherish an intelligent and loving exchange of
these experiences and voices between people on the manifold levels of spiritual
recognition.
Therefore genuine meetings are another essential element of this spirituality;
meetings in which we open to the other and his or her experience without
bias and without reducing him or her to some position on the ladder of spiritual
development. Because however much anyone has developed their talents and
consciousness, their spirit, head, heart and belly, exchanging what’s essential
is always a factual possibility – What did you experience? How did the
experience come about? How do you value it, and which role does it play in
your life? Etc. This can then be further looked at cooperatively and
intersubjectively in conversation and practice This form of spirituality
cherishes communication in which one can at long last be vulnerable as one’s
counterpart doesn’t put him or herself above or below us. A meeting and communication
in which one can, unprotected by preconceived teachings, explore countless
dimensions of one’s spirituality. Cooperative spirituality is of the whole
body, it is autonomous, collaborative and communicative.
All this has been found true in my practice so far. I have discovered in my work as spiritual facilitator that it is not necessary to use the old model of vertical spirituality so that fulfilling, healing and wholesome experiences are possible and likely: this goes – so far – from ‚telepathic intuitions’ and mystical visions to divine rapture, from perceiving energies, presences and disembodied beings, one’s own body in totally new ways, to the transparent sense of being one with all. My experiments with cooperative spirituality show it to open a gate to spiritual richness, it contributes to the wholeness of the individual and it shows creative ways to tackle questions that concern all of humanity in this day and age.
So after saying good bye to the vertical perspective a new spirituality is unfolding that I would, for the time being, characterize thus:
In my dream I rise. In our presence the omnipresent meets, and we know that the ocean doesn’t only unite with the sky at the horizon but in all our hearts as well.