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 or play the embedded clip below...
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I enjoyed the scene where the saddhu was brandishing a sword with his genitals! This outrageous display contrasted with the stiff expression of the well-coiffed Cohen. The hair-sprayed guru struck me as very uptight for someone who is teaching about becoming one with the force of life.
In meeting hundreds of teachers, they all express humility, humor, cheer, relaxation, and no need to be special. I fail to find any of these qualities manifesting in the mustachioed Cohen. As you watch him approaching in one of the shots, his rigid manner, gold vest, blow-dried hair, and well-groomed humdinger stood out like a sore thumb.
I liked the shot when you dipped in Mother Ganga, Tom. Maybe the "Bad Boy" should follow your lead, loosen up his flashy golden vest, and take a purifying dunk himself!
And the idea that Andrew Cohen doesn't respect India couldn't be further from the truth. One of his first introductions to mysticism in his early 20s was "Autobiography of a Yogi." He then studied the works of Gopi Krishna. One of his first gurus was an Indian teaching in America, a kriya yoga master named Swami Paramahansa Hariharananda. Andrew eventually traveled to India and spent three years meditating there. His wife is an Indian woman from Mumbai. After his awakening through the grace of Advaita Vedanta master H.W.L. Poonja (a student of Sri Ramana Maharshi), he brought his Western students to Bodhgaya and Rishikesh year after year. But he eventually discovered that Western knowledge *also* had something to contribute to our understanding of humanity. A higher synthesis was needed--a marriage between the radical mystical depth and wisdom of the East and the scientific breakthroughs of the West.
Also, we've explored Vedanta in depth and interviewed numerous Advaita masters over the past 18 years in the pages of EnlightenNext magazine. Have a look: http://enlightennext.org/magazine (you could search "India" or "Vedanta" in the search box there). To state that we don't respect, or understand, Indian spirituality is simply untrue.
I find this statement from Hamsa Soham to be well worth contemplating: "Cohen states that God created the world out of nothing--a Western concept totally foreign to Vedanta."
I may have a thickly calloused butt from decades of sitting at the feet of many enlightened masters and still have nothing insightful to add to any conversation about god or the nature of existence.
The concept of a creator god is fraught with contradiction and binds the imagination to the flat and limited line of time. If the predicate of one's inference is suspect then any proceeding logical thought is suspect.
Tom, perhaps you might address this issue in your next comment?
That is not the spiritual process. The essential spiritual process is to help a person to transcend the limitations of the physical...
For the common public it's very important that we redefine spirituality, not as somebody's teaching. This is not somebody's teaching, this is not a method, this is not a technique.
This is a state of being where there is a distinction between who you are, and what you have gathered...Whatever you gather can be yours, but it can never be you. But right now you are getting lost in what is yours, but never touching the dimension that is really you. So spiritual process is touching that dimension which is not gathered from outside, but which is you, essentially you."--Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev in the Sacred Awakening Series teleseminar with Stephen Dinan from the Shift Network.
While traveling can make our conditioning rather transparent , that work can be done without going to another country.
Ultimately, those that have ventured far and wide across our globe have later found the trekking to be useless, because the actual teacher is as close as the next perceivable interval in your breath, heartbeat, footstep, or thought.
Yes, there are those who find themselves born into extraordinarily negative or dense conditions and find themselves compelled to improve their physical situation, but that is a different thing. Its a subtle point I'm trying to make here, and no one will be less surprised than I if what I've said is misinterpreted. BUt this is a starting point.
AND, thank you Meandering mushroom.....you stated the case plainly and precisely with words that I have used myself on many occasions . Today you saved me some additional typing as I took the long winded route, having found it helpful to extrapolate just a bit to make things more accessible and understandable. :)
Andrew would do better helping the unfortunate for a while.
I was frankly embarrassed by his questions....No wonder the yogis were frequently stimulated to amusement.
The path that leads to enlightenment requires the seeker to take mindful steps not giant leaps of intellect.
I realize that a mind, even in desiring for things to be different, IS what is being manifested and therefore falls within the "perfection" the swami was suggesting; but I sense the subtle (and often explicit) assumption on the part of so-called "spiritual seekers" and their "spiritual teachers" that everyone should share their dissatisfaction with things-as-they-are, with I-as-I-am is a fundamental issue that remains unexamined and usually unresolved in the reports and teachings.
An interesting issue, no?
I’m glad you came back more enlightened.
There are sacred lands elsewhere too, and holy places.
I encourage people to travel and experience the richness of other cultures.
Is it necessary for spiritual development? I think not.
I suppose my garden is neither sacred nor holy.
Yet, for me, it is a place to clear my mind of material concerns.
Spiritual peace will be found within, no need to seek out sacred or holy places.
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.
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.
You make a powerful point about creating a similar momentum that is authentic to our western culture and not a throwback to earlier times (and free from new-age weirdness, of course :-). Just seeing what it takes for a deep sense of Spirit being higher to take root in my own moment-to-moment consciousness... I have an appreciation for what a big task that truly is.
There is no enlightenment outside of this moment ~ and no where to go and
Nothing other to be than who and what you are right now.
To define enlightenment or any spiritual state as a goal outside of this moment
Is to condemn one's self to the prison of the very ego one is wishing to transcend.
There is also, however, a dimension of enlightenment that DOES have to do with time, with change, with becoming. It's when we recognize that bringing heaven to earth in very real, practical ways *is* our highest aspiration. And it feels very different from Being... while at the same time not being separate at all.
It's this dimension that my comment was addressing: the desire to change culture, starting from within, as my own consciousness is not separate or apart from the culture I want to change.