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Why We Need a New Vision
by Peter Holleran
We need a new vision precisely because a new vision is already in the making! Ever since pioneers like Swami Vivekananda, Paramhansa Yogananda, Paul Brunton (PB), and Sri Aurobindo, as well as early movements such as New-Thought, I AM, and Theosophy, and the modern influx of Zen masters, Indian gurus, and Tibetan lamas to the West, the many old teachings have been in the process of restoration, upgrading, and adaptation to the ever-evolving needs and maturity of humanity. Some think it may all happen ‘tomorrow’, but we are in the midst of an unprecedented change that will likely take hundreds of years. Yet global intercommunication on a massive scale has brought the ancient spiritual heritage of mankind to everyone with access to a computer, and the many doctrines, confusing, contrasting, and often contradictory, are being explored, analyzed, compared and formulated into some kind of consistency by many involved in a great and necessary work.
In the deepest sense there cannot be a 'new spirituality', as spirit in its most transcendent aspect is beyond time. At that level we can expect that the essence of spirituality will remain the same. Yet human comprehension and embodiment of spirit and the spiritual path is part of relative existence and is subject to change and evolution. It is on this level that we can speak of a new spirituality. This tendency in the realm of spirituality is reaching new levels given the times in which we live when, perhaps more than ever before, we are all to some extent being exposed to the tremendous richness of our planets diverse spiritual traditions and teachers. A great deal of what explorers of 'new spirituality' consider as new is often to be found already existing in the ancient teachings. There is a danger in becoming concerned with innovation and newness for its own sake - one effect of which can be ignoring of devaluing tradition paths rather than mining their great richness and wisdom as a foundation for further development. Why 're-invent the wheel'? one might ask.
Yet, amazingly, there remain those who would throw the baby out with the bath water, saying, why bother even retaining the old at all?
"In these enlightened times we should know better than to read this stuff." - Tony Parsons (1)
And a quote whose author's name will remain anonymous:
"Papaji's message is simplicity itself. Nothing to attain anew, only a thin veil to be removed. he is totally revolutionary in this. The traditional paths of seeking the truth all seem so laborious and painstaking...maybe in 10 or 20 years or so or at the moment of death we will realize who we are all along? So why not wake up now! Why waste time? We do not need to "seek" the truth anymore. We have matured beyond complicated rules and rituals, grown out of meditation, prayer and superstition. Mankind has done enough of this. It is clearly time for something totally simple, something that can be grasped equally by all people from all walks of life...After all, we are all consciousness itself, inseparable, undivided. One throbbing beingness! It is time for us to wake up and roar this from the rooftops." (2)
The late Dennis Waite has this to say about the above:
"This is nonsense. The truth has always been the truth and this was undoubtedly better understood in the past than in this materialistic and egotistical age so that what is said there ought to be valued more, not less." (3)
To which I whole-heartedly concur. The above quotes are full of such naivete, buzz-words, and spiritual slogans it would take another article to fully discuss. Here is the problem. The spiritual life is hard. It is not the fault of the path, it is the 'fault' of samsara. It is a complex, difficult labyrinth, and it takes time and effort and grace to be liberated from it - not that we are going anywhere! So, a part of all of us rebels against this truth, and has our tantrums, dismayed that it is so hard. And so we have a crop of teachers in every generation that are happy to tell us that they have discovered something unknown before, a loop hole, and that it is actually very easy. They appeal to the part of us that is tired, in despair, and frustrated. Wouldn't it be nice.
Still, there is no denying that two of the important things for our time, both coming out of the democratic West, is the positive affirmation of the inherent divine selfhood of the individual, as well as the emergence of new forms of wisdom-teaching and practice. They, however, must be balanced with the equally important one of becoming familiar with the collected wisdom inherited through the sacrifices of so many great souls of the past. Self-reliance, as Emerson said, is a supremely important quality, but so is the complementary one of making the best use of what the sages have brought to us through centuries of blood-sweat, and tears. How to even understand what we are experiencing, and at the same time overcome provincialism, without at least a modicum of verification from the collective wisdom and teachers of the human race? Yet as Anthony Damiani said:
"There's a whole new civilization coming out, and we're in the throes of its birth. And in that agony and in that turmoil we're going to have to forge a philosophy which is going to be representative of us and not of some people who lived five thousand years ago." (4)
And:
"Plotinus even delivers a warning, and he says [in The Enneads] that we must
TEACH OUR SOULS....So right there he's warning us that we must have the
correct doctrine, or we will misunderstand the experiences that we have...If you
can ask an intelligent question, that shows that you already understand. To
formulate a question precisely is already quite a feat of knowledge."
For instance, leaving out the religious level of simple beliefs, rites and rituals, which more often than not have been warring, brother against brother, in spite of the fact that each religion is part of the multi-faceted diamond of Truth, the more esoteric spiritual teachings themselves also vary greatly, and, as much as many would like to claim, they do not all say the same thing. Even the oft-quoted 'God is within you' is not universally held! Some say 'go within', yet some say 'the Divine descends'; some say 'go up', others, 'go down', while yet still others maintain that there is 'nothing to be attained'. Some say the body-mind needs transformation, others say it doesn't, being nothing but a thought. Some have it both ways, saying that once you know it is just a thought, then a greater divine transfiguration begins. Some say the ego doesn't exist, others that it must be killed, and still others that it must be embraced. Many talk about coming into body, practicing an 'integral' path, or healing the 'spirit-matter split' - using new language suggesting that such a thing has never been done before. Is there any way to make sense out of all of these views? That is the task of our generation and many generations to come. Meanwhile, know that there have always been many great ones working both 'in the trenches' and behind the scenes to assist us in our endeavor. As PB wrote:
"Whatever were the motives which dictated the exclusive reservation of ultimate wisdom in former centuries and the extraordinary precautions which were taken to keep it from the larger world, we must now reckon on the dominant fact that humanity lives today in a cultural environment which has changed tremendously. The old ideas have lost their weight among educated folk - except for individuals here and there - and this general decay has passed by reflex action among the masses, albeit to a lesser extant. Whether in religion or science, politics or society, economics or ethics, the story of prodigious storm which has shaken the thoughts of men to their foundations is the same. The time indeed is transitional. In this momentous period when the ethical fate of mankind is at stake because the religious sanctions of morality have broken down, it is essential that something should arise to take their place. This is the supreme and significant fact which has forced the hands of those who hold this wisdom in their possession, which has compelled them to begin this historically unique disclosure of it, and which illustrates the saying that the night is darkest just before dawn. This is the dangerous situation which broke down an age-old policy and necessitated a new one whose sublime consequences to future generations we can now but dimly visage." (5)
Disregarding the possibility of vastly earlier cycles of time, with Golden Ages, and such as depicted in legend and mythology, there has been a fairly consistent progressive development of spirituality in historical terms. This has been outlined in great detail by philosopher Ken Wilber and others. In the remote past we basically had only forms of shamanism, which at its best, sensed an underlying unity with nature and cosmos, but also tended to be fairly dualistic. Human individuality was still submerged in a semi-conscious union with nature. Then, at least five thousand years ago, in Vedic India, a new philosophical spirit arose that was based more in mind. It was also part of a global transition from a matriarchal culture to a patriarchal one. This seeked to uncover a pure, underlying essence behind or 'above' everything, and was pursued yogically as a process of inversion, ultimately internal samadhi. Less mature forms of this included extreme asceticism and world negation. Then, around the time of the Buddha (and not only in India, but China (Lao Tse) and elsewhere), the trend began to reintegrate this discovery of a transcendent reality behind everything into our human nature and lives. The first millenium A.D. ushered in the advent of Christ, a turning point that recognized the incarnation of the divine in life and an increasing emphasis on a vision that considered it to be deeper to see the spirit in everything, and, also, the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, with the following of a middle path between extremes, the 'emptiness' teachings of Nagarjuna, the advaita of Sankara, and various tantric paths (not only Buddhist and Hindu, but similar developments elsewhere), where there was a profound shift towards integration with the body, desire, sexuality, emotion, nature and the feminine. All of these were generally nondual traditions actualizing further expressions of the implications of nondual realization. Modern emergent spirituality will take this another step, but it is still essentially the working out of a global 'satori' that happened a long time ago! The early stages of this emergent vision thus reveal a nondual core, but were still approached in a dualistic context, because of cultural isolation and the dominance of mainstream religions. And by the sixth century A.D. the cross-fertilization of higher teachings from Asia to the Near East was on the wane, and largely forgotten there, and in the West, generally until the nineteenth century.
The larger implications of what nondualism really means, therefore, began when spirituality started to realize this nonduality within human existence and nature, rather than negating it to seek a purely transcendent form of spirit. To some extent the evolutionary progression of Buddhism itself from Hinayana to Mahayana to Vajrayana mirrored these three proto-nondual stages, although much more integration will take place as cross-cultural pollination continues and also as less 'monarchical' and feudalistic' new forms emerge in the West and eventually the globe.
The integration of a more complete understanding in all teachings is ongoing today, and the need even for the historically developed progression of a two-stage model of first inversion and then reintegration with the world is being seen by some as no longer entirely necessary in its more extreme forms. PB wrote:
"Chandrakirti, a Mahayana Buddhist guru, said,"We teach the illusion of existence only as antidote to the obstinate belief of common mankind in the existence of this world"...The real truth is that both world and self exists in consciousness, that they are nothing else than Consciousness itself." (6)
The name of the game for today is 'incarnational spirituality', a form, in essence, non-dualistic, that honors Being in all its forms with no need to escape the gravitational field of the earth, so to speak, into brittle asceticism or avoidance, or other dissociative forms of spirituality.
Thus, the roots of what is unfolding today were there before, in each religion and spiritual teaching, although not worked out culturally to its highest degree. The something new that is happening today is, to some extent, largely a cultural event; it is not that the great traditions were wrong or totally incomplete. They just were not widely available to the masses, nor was their essence clarified except for a very few. What is new is that more people are figuring out what this all means and working slowing towards making sense of all of the distinctions, a process that will further integrate humanity and transform culture and civilization. This new context helps us to penetrate more deeply into the universal essence of spirituality, beyond the secondary forms of culture and tradition, and to synthesize a more comprehensive vision that meets the needs of our times. For instance, the principle of nonduality emerged over two thousand years ago, but it continues to unfold in more comprehensive ways. There have been deeply, integrally, tantrically, nondually realized individuals in the past, so the basic realization is not itself new. But since the essential view of traditional religion and culture has not been this type of spirituality, the core vision of most civilizations has remained dualistic, emphasizing splits between God and Creation, inner and outer, male and female, humanity and nature.
We now have the situation where if a person has been involved in some of the older, less nondual forms in this or recent lives, and then has insights or encounters a teaching that seems more nondual, he might tend to think that this is a new realization. Even Sri Aurobindo started to acknowledge towards the end of his life that what he and the Mother had discovered wasn't new as an individual realization, but would be new as a collective expression. That seems closer to the truth, notwithstanding the fact that his version of such a realization may not even have been the most developed version compared to others that had already been around for a long time. So, in many cases, some historical practitioners and traditions have already more or less addressed these things. It is not particularly new. Yet, for other lineages and teachings it certainly is 'new' - not in the total collection of world spirituality, but to them. So it is legitimate to notice and identify these differences, and make changes to align them to what has already been revealed. Some newer teachers spend much time declaring what is radically original about what they are saying, but is there really a new realization of spirituality, or is it mostly integrating a long-existing understanding more broadly within humanity at large? The latter is most likely the case, but that is still no insignificant task. The realization may be much the same, but its articulation is evolving and such a development is necessary as the intelligence of mankind evolves its understanding.
Yet, our task is to distill what really is true, and what really works, and not to burden humanity with forms and practices that are not the most effective anymore. We cannot move back to what was in vogue five thousand, five hundred, or even thirty or fifty years ago. The spiritual map is changing rapidly. It seems that many people incarnating now and in recent years do not require, to a significant degree, the amount of tangential preparation that seekers did even in the 1960's or 1970's. So not only is a new vision apropo, but a new dharma or teaching as well. And not a new dharma that is the product of one mind, the dispensation of one great individual or avatar, but of a growing collective of awakened beings democratically working together, something that has never been done before.
Certainly, we stand on the shoulders of many great beings of the past. Every truly genuine tradition has made its contribution to the total world spiritual dharma: Mahayana Buddhism, for instance, with the doctrine of 'emptiness' and that of the bodhisattva ideal; Sant Mat, with the importance and value of the Shabda-Brahman or eternal sound and the grace of the Satguru; Sufism as the path of the Heart; Hinduism for its cosmologies and yogas, Christianity with its emphasis on love and sacrifice and the descent of the Logos, Dzogchen and Advaita with their pointing to the ever-present non-dual primordial state, Tantrism for its seamless unity of the Unmanifest-Manifest, Spirit and Body. No doubt there is truth in all of the existing views, but so far no one tradition has embraced all of them in a comprehensive doctrine.
However, there is much brush to clear up. There still remain arguments within each tradition. For example, there are three main forms of Vedanta: advaita, vashistadvata, and dvaita - even dvaita-advaita, each very different. [What if, however, all four are simultaneously correct and inseparable in a higher synthesis? What if truth is beyond duality and non-duality?] Similarly, people are still arguing over what Christ taught: some say non-dualism, others say Surat Shabd Yoga, still others Kriya Yoga. Further, did Buddha actually mean there was absolutely no 'individual' self? Is the Absolute, or the 'Self', so absolute that there are no eternal distinctions within it, as Plato and Plotinus argued to the contrary?
There are three ways of looking at this. One, there are different approaches both for different people, and at different times in their development; two, there is an life-positive emergent spirituality that David Spangler first mentioned years ago emphasizing 'personhood and incarnation'; and three, there is a truth that includes and transcends all of these perspectives. All of this is what we suggest and speculate may gradually take shape over time, perhaps much time.
There have been many signs and attempts to revamp the existing terminologies. The teachings may be the same, but the expressions are changing. One of the first to do so was PB, ground-breaking researcher and disseminator of a mass of the world’s wisdom teaching into a new, accessible form which he chose to be called by the name 'Philosophy' (7), raised to its former greatness (meaning 'the love, investigation - and articulation - of truth,' or in Sanskrit, Dars'anam, or Vicara Sastram, 'the thinking consideration and inquiry into the fundamental nature of things'), with his use of the concepts Mentalism, Overself, World-Mind, and Mind (8), excluding nothing, including a divine individuality within the whole. He wrote:
"Because Mind has always and universally existed so has its associated aspect, Energy, or Life-Force. And because Mind connotes meaning and creates purpose, my life has a meaning and a purpose linked with the Universe's; it is neither empty nor alone."
"One need not seek out those unscalable heights for which the saints thirst, however much the purification of thought, feeling and deed the philosophers welcome. Whoever understands Mentalism will also understand why."
"The oriental notion that escape from life is escape from bondage is an opinion which admittedly has its point, but is not cared for in the mentalist outlook. Instead, a divine order, a meaning-purpose, replaces it."
While having recognized that there is an Energy aspect of Mind, which would not preclude an Iswara or Creator-God aspect of the Absolute - with all that that implies, including a multi-levelled cosmos with a creative vibratory emanation, or 'Om', "Shabd', Logos, or Divine Idea as variously named in different traditions - he calls us back to the fundamental perspective, that all arises in and as the One Mind or Being-Consciousness:
"The Theosophic doctrine that the physical world is an externalization of an astral plane or even the higher Platonic doctrine that it crystalizes a world of divine ideation is given to beginners as a help to give them a crude grasp, a first step towards the theory that the world is an idea, until they are mentally developed. When their mind is mature they are then told to discard the astral plane theory and told the pure truth that all existence is idea...He may now begin to realize that all the theosophical teachings (9) about the seven principles of man, the five tattvas (cosmic forces), and prakriti (root matter) are teachings given to beginners who are unable to grasp the great truth that all these are merely ideas and that Mind alone is what he should seek to know. H.P. Blavatsky gave these teachings because she knew that the nineteenth century West was not metaphysically minded but rather scientifically inclined and science in those days was horribly materialistic. What else could she do but give out these lower grade teachings? She herself writes in one of her books that she has given only three or four turns of the key to the lock of universal mystery. The time has come in the mid-twentieth century to give the remaining turns which will make known the higher philosophical truth for which mankind is now better prepared." (10)
This entails a new way of perceiving things, but doesn't mean that the relative experiential aspects of reality are to be dismissed, only better understood. In spite of the above necessary quote, PB also taught an emanationist theory of creation, thus paradoxically pointing towards a more complete actualization of non-duality from within relativity; that is to say, the inclusion of both 'siva' (awareness) and 'shakti' (energy) teachings as two aspects of a greater whole. All great traditions, for instance, including Sant Mat, Kriya Yoga, Dzogchen, Vajrayana Buddhism, and even Vedanta, emphasize both of these aspects, as well as (at least) a two-stage process of basic realization. One, where the practitioner purifies the gross and subtle instruments, to break fixation with body and world-identification, both to better be able to contemplate a higher reality, usually considered to be consciousness by itself, and, ultimately, to be of better capacity to serve humanity, and second - which, as PB reminds us, is more and more to be practiced simultaneously with the first - is the more direct examination of and identification with fundamental, absolute truth that includes everything that may have been negated in the first phase. Thus, in Tibetan Buddhism, the preliminaries of cultivation of the virtues, as well as forms of yoga, are the basis, actual or implied, for the 'mind-only' teachings. Similarly, in Hinduism, Patanjali (yoga) and Sankara (knowledge) cannot be placed in water-tight compartments, but are complementary aspects of one ancient path. It is no surprise, then, that greats like Sankara and Nagarjuna were not just sages but adepts at yogi and tantra as well. People are thus also surprised to hear that Paramhansa Yogananda did not just teach experiential Kriya yoga, but all the forms of yoga, as well as Vedantic self-inquiry and the need to work on eradicating both a false view of the self and a mistaken division between the material and the spiritual. The public and private dissemination of his teachings were different for different people. Seeds were being sown with books like "Autobiography of a Yogi," to a West fascinated by experience. One of his chief early disciples, Sister Gyanamata, however, who practiced yoga but whose path was chiefly that of knowledge, was said by Yogananda himself to have achieved realization through that route and by grace. When she asked him near the end of her life for nirvikalpa samadhi, he told her, "You don't need that. When you reach the palace, why do you want to go into the garden anymore?" (11) He also said, "The simple thought that you are not free keeps you from being free. Samadhi is not something one needs to acquire. One has it already." (12) And it was Yogananda that sent the late Robert Adams to see Ramana Maharshi. Yogananda was an important pioneer who revealed as much of truth as he was able and commissioned to do in his time.
There was also the Cypriote master Daskalos' renovation of esoteric Christianity with the terms 'Autarchy' and 'Be-ness', a Multiplicity-within-Unity, which ('Be-ness'), seemed to be a move on his part away from a triangular trinity and more like a One with and beyond a polarity of Christ-Logos and Holy Spirit, similar to the Hindu Siva-Shakti. There is the term integral 'Holarchy,' reflecting nonduality and a relative hierarchy of 'nested spheres' of intelligences, each higher including the junior, all within complete perfection. There is 'dual non-dualism', 'enlightened duality', and 'beyond duality and nonduality'. There is, in general, an integration of more 'Shiva-like' 'awareness' teachings such as advaita with 'Shakti'-oriented bhakti or yoga paths. The collision of eastern teachers with western students is inevitably causing a new synthesis to evolve, free of all superstitious accretions. This is true of all such interminglings. But this is just the beginnings of something new emerging. All of these, with their new forms of languaging seem to be based on an understanding, not only of the needs of the western psyche (and increasingly a global 'westernized' psyche) - wounded with a lot of shadow material, and and also a greater emphasis on individuation, in which traditional world-denying visions are increasingly inappropriate - but also on a recognition or feeling that man as a composite of Human-Spirit-Consciousness is a paradoxical totality of limitless Being within limitation, and that to some extent that is his fundamental situation, while alive at any rate, regardless of his level of enlightenment. As Anthony Damiani once said, 'when all is said and done, we have to become human.'
John Welwood writes:
"There needs to be a dialogue between the traditional Eastern model of liberation and surrender and the Western model of individuation, where individuality is seen to have important value. Conscious discipleship in the West might include the recognition that individuality is not just some flaw or obstacle or resistance to the teachings,but rather that it can be a vehicle for embodying the teachings more fully. If individual development is valued as part of the spiritual path, then it can be transformed and brought to a higher octave...Spiritual teachings always talk about the Absolute - the mystery of the Absolute, the mystery of the Divine. But equally mysterious is the individual person." (13)
PB had many more things to say on the need for a new, global spiritual vision:
“Those who have not taken the precaution to study other teachings, other ideas, other experiences, and other revelations, but only the views of their own favoured teacher, may have learned the worst and not the best...Each seer gets hold of some facet of truth and contributes that to the world-stock. None of these teachers tells, or seems able to tell, the whole story. Each gives out all he can - a fragment of it. The hour is at hand when they should be joined together, when a synthesis of truth should be made from all of them...We may fully sympathize with a standpoint and yet we need not hesitate to utter certain criticisms of it. How else can a just view be gotten?”
"Philosophy criticizes any approach to truth which arrogates to itself the privilege of being the only path to enlightenment. For in practice philosophy makes use of any and every one needed."
“The old Oriental idea is to be lost in the Infinite. The new Occidental ideal is to be in tune with the Infinite...The teaching is thus both an inheritance from the past and a precursor of the future.”
“It is perhaps the amplitude and symmetry of the philosophic approach which make it so completely satisfying. For this is the only approach which honours reason and appreciates beauty, cultivates intuition and respects mystical experience, fosters reverence and teaches true prayer, enjoins action and promotes morality. It is the spiritual life fully grown.”
"Philosophy does not dwell on the subject of nonduality. These are metaphysicians aplenty who will discuss or teach it for those who want to learn or listen. Philosophers neither support nor deny the doctrine. Here they are closer to Buddhism than to Hinduism."
"The Advaitin who declares that as such he has no point of view, has already adopted one by calling himself an Advaitin and by rejecting every other point of view as being dualistic. A human philosophy is neither dualistic alone nor nondualistic alone."
“The esoteric meaning of the star is "Philosophic Man," that is, one who has travelled the complete fivefold path and brought its results into proper balance. This path consists of religious veneration, mystical meditation, rational reflection, moral re-education, and altruistic service. The esoteric meaning of the circle, when situated within the very centre of the star, is the Divine Overself-atom within the human heart.” (14)
Actually, the vision of PB was paradoxically two-fold, absolute and relative. While on earth:
"We must look for eternity in the present moment now, and not in some far off afterlife. We must seek for infinity here, in this place, and not in a psychic world beyond the physical body."
And also:
"We need always remember that all this experience which a human undergoes is relative to time and place and must pass away. To what? To that higher order of the universe where we are with God as higher creatures." (15)
It is without a doubt that all the religions of the world will continue to maintain their separate identities for many centuries to come. But it is also certain that members of different faiths will gradually come to be more tolerant of each other, then grow to appreciate what other traditions have to offer, assimilating more and more of each other into the other, so that as each matures, becoming more inclusive, more encompassing, until the differences look less and less. This may take thousands of years, but it seems inevitable, especially since it is already happening! On one very important level, the emergence of a new, more comprehensive, modern and planetary spirituality is emerging through a process of integration and cross-fertilization as the various world cultures and spiritualities interrelate. Evolving social and political changes combine with influences from science, philosophy, psychology and other fields to foster a context for deepening and expanding our understanding and expression of the spiritual life.
For example, people of different ethnicities move to the United States. At first they are intent on maintaining their national identities, but then they gradually assimilate into being citizens, especially later generations, so that they are less rigidly holding to their past. Yogananda mentioned years ago that, according to Sri Yukteswar in The Holy Science, we have been in the ascending phase of the Dwapara Yuga since 1700 A.D., and no longer in the Kali Yuga as commonly presumed, and his mission was to make Self-realization a household word for coming generations, while teaching the oneness of all religions, but especially the teachings of Krishna and Christ. He said that there was a lot of 'cross-incarnation' taking place, with Americans and Europeans taking birth in India, and Indians taking birth in America and Europe. With the world more interconnected than ever before, the whole planet is becoming a big melting pot, so that integration is inevitable, and the world is uniting in a 'Dwapara Yuga consciousness'. (16) Not to mention that people's views of spirituality are maturing to less exoteric, dogmatic, sectarian forms. There is more questioning and experimenting in the personal, subjective realm. Then there is the influence of science and psychology: modern physics, fractals, chaos theory, transpersonal psychology, positive psychology, integralism, parapsychology research, NDE research, and the like.
Also, more and more people around the world are choosing not to identify with a specific traditions, but rather to integrate elements from various sources. The world many envision will become a large planetary spiritual university with many departments, strong empowerment of individuality, a more scientific and investigatory spirit, non-hierarchical, networking, and nondogmatic. Although a university has a common foundation of vision and administration, it has many departments, professors, a creative spirit. The world spiritual community will grow into the same thing over time. More and more people will continue to and increasingly have experiences such as going into higher worlds or dimensions and finding the leaders of the world religions all to be part of the same community of teachers, gurus, masters and saviours. People will all look back in a thousand years with the perspective that the times we live in now were but the barest beginnings of all of this, and it will seem like the Dark Ages to them.
Despite much of the silliness, immaturity, and delusion that goes under the name "New Age", one cannot deny that something is happening today to a degree that was not capable of happening before. Many people report having visions of what is unfolding in the world right now. The message is that we are in a planetary dark night just before the emergence of the light. It may take a few more centuries to transition, with a great deal of suffering in the meantime. But the nucleus of the new is already making its appearance. There are, however, no illusions of an immediate great change. As PB wrote:
"No philosopher will go out of his way to deprive others of a faith which is important to their life or destroy their trust in a teaching of a religion which gives them moral support. To do so would be to harm them, and weaken their higher purposes: it would lead directly to cynicism or materialism or despair."
"The deeper truths of philosophy are idol-smashing, and that reason, among others, has rendered it advisable to keep them hidden way like the most precious gems. To the undeveloped, unprepared mind they are at least disturbing, at most, alarming."
"If formerly the hidden teaching was kept strictly secret, there were excellent reasons for this prohibition. But today these reasons have lost a part of their validity. Therefore a part of the ban has been broken and some of it revealed, but not the most important part. This latter remains as before, to be communicated only orally and only privately to the tested few."
Nevertheless, he predicted several decades ago that:
"A jealously guarded hidden teaching far more advanced and complicated than the present one will be revealed by its custodians before this century closes. But when this does occur, the revelation will only extend and not displace the foundation for it which is given in these pages." (17)
Well, the end of that century has come and gone, and the reader must decide if such a prediction has come true or not. Certainly it has in part. Who, for instance, in the 1950's would ever have imagined having someone like Eckhart Tolle on the Oprah show, seen by millions if not billions of viewers? So during the difficult phase we are still in we all need to sustain and feed the core vision of individual and collective awakening. We all must become human adepts and avatars, in mutual support. The day of the great Godman appears over.
The Dalai Lama once said that he thought it was good to have all the different traditions present, to suit all the different sorts of people, and that may be the best for right now. It is the traditional advice for one to 'dig in one well' deeply enough if he wants to find water. However, he also said, “I believe deeply that we must find, all of us together, a new spirituality.” Sant Kirpal Singh held great importance in bringing all the faiths together, way back in the 1970's, through the World Fellowship of Religions and Human Unity Conferences he inaugurated, and it is not unlikely that something new and holistic will eventually fuse and emerge from their midst. Whatever form it takes will not be a 'top-down' structure, but must be a natural, organic development, with an emphasis on the unique individual, not the collective - as it is already doing. Chogyam Trungpa once remarked that it would be very difficult to start a new tradition. One might say that evolution or the World-Idea itself will more or less have to force its creation. So while the existing traditions have been around for thousands of years, and it is likely that they will still be here in five hundred more, but who really knows - things may speed up faster than one might imagine. A lot of dogmatic craziness is in its death pangs; if we survive global-crisis, then maybe just another few centuries to pull us out of the dark ages.
Some contributors make very valid and important points, but still in some ways look towards the past. As David Frawley writes, in "The Need For a New Indic School of Thought":
“What India needs is the creation of a new Indic school of thought that is dynamic and assertive in the modern global context – one that can challenge Western civilization not merely in regard to the details of history or culture, but also relative to fundamental principles of life, humanity and consciousness. This requires a revival or renaissance in the Indic tradition and its great spiritual systems of Yoga, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Jainism, and also in its political, artistic and scientific traditions. Modern science and technology can arguably be more humanely employed according to Indic or Dharmic values than according to Western religious exclusivity and commercial greed.”
“The world today needs a critique of "modern civilization" from an Indic or Dharmic perspective, an interpretation of capitalism, socialism, communism, Christianity and Islam from a tradition that is much older, deeper and closer to the spirit in both man and nature. These Western ideologies are failing to address the spiritual needs of humanity and are incapable of creating a world order that transcends dogmatism or exclusivism.”
“Those of us who are part of the Indic school of thought should emphasize such a greater debate and not get caught in the details of issues already formulated according to the biases of Western civilization. This debate should examine the right structure for society and the real forward direction for history and evolution. We must raise fundamental questions. Is the current Western materialistic view of history valid at all, or are there spiritual forces at work in the world that go beyond all these? Can we understand our history through outer approaches like archaeology, linguistics or genetics, or is a higher consciousness or more intuitive view required as well? Are the records of our ancient sages to be rejected so lightly, whenever we think they do not agree with our views?”
“The real issue of the Vedas, India's oldest tradition, is not how these texts might fit into the current model of history as promoted by the Western school of thought, tracing the development of civilization through outward material advances. It is how the existence of such an ancient tradition of rishis, knowers of cosmic consciousness, shows a higher spiritual humanity from which we have arisen and whose legacy we can reclaim.” (18)
Some have warned of a “Hindu fundamentalism” that is every bit as exclusive as any other form of religiosity. Indeed, there are organizations dedicated to such a cause. But even in India this is in the minority, and the clock will not be turned back. The noble Vedic civilization must be appreciated, but it will adapt and emerge in a new form. The best in all of these traditions will survive and the worst, the shadow elements, will be eliminated.
One way this change may manifest is that first the major religions will each resort to their fundamental, essential, esoteric roots: 'primitive' Christianity, Caballistic Judaism, Sanatana Dharma Hinduism, Sufic Islam, and so forth. The robes, turbans, rites, rituals, adornments will fall away, eventually. Ritual worship is fine, and much of the outer splendour and regality allowed by some teachers is only meant to create the sense of the sacredness of the dharma, not for personal enrichment. Sri Nisargadatta himself held daily pujas and chanting, as it directs the mind Godwards when done with feeling and basic understanding of its meaning. It helps sacralize the world. One of the things lacking in modern society, particularly in the West, is the lack of a ritualistic, initiatory culture which older civilizations still possess. Rituals are deeply associated with myths, and like ‘myths’ are complex and multi-layered weaving together heroic deeds and divine miracles, and, through powerful symbols, imprint a set of values on the mind of a people. Ritual becomes inseparable from people’s customs and traditions. The essence is what matters, not the absolute truth, as long as it lives and works in the minds it has shaped. All have fulfilled and still fulfill social, cultural and spiritual functions. Our modern mind cannot easily grasp the role and impact of myths and ritual in ancient or traditional societies, whether Greek or Indian. Today’s societies have been de-ritualized, in the process depopulating our inner worlds. The very word ‘myth’, which originally meant ‘word’ or ‘speech’ in Greek (much like the Sanskrit vak), has come to evoke a web of lies, a concocted fable or a collective delusion. Take the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the 'fall' of man. It has a deep esoteric significance, but lost in exoteric forms of religion. (19) We needn’t throw all such stories away, it is, rather, necessary to understand and preserve their true meanings. Meanwhile the modern consciousness and mentality and its needs are changing, and new, more universal forms will evolve. Exclusive religious and spiritual views, created before global intercommunication and the worldwide spread of knowledge, will be synthesized or eliminated as new, organically emerging teachings take form.
A basic issue being explored at length is and will continue to be a working towards an integration of the two most basic, and often apparently conflicting, spiritual visions - the 'nondual' and the theistic or 'enlightened dualistic' visions. The synthesis of these two main schools or approaches is an important impetus behind much of my own writing. What, for instance, is the relationship between this ‘Christ-Consciousness’, the Logos, and non-duality? What is the interelationship between meditation and self-inquiry? Should I choose Mahayana Buddhism, or a fast-track route like Dzogchen or advaita? What about the newer tantric or 'direct' paths of self-inquiry? Are they as direct and as non-dual as they seem, or are they more versions of dissociative mind-only 'siva'-oriented approaches that fail to satisfy the needs of modern man? What is essential to communicate is that this is not an either/or matter, and, that there is a natural ordering of stages in the paths. Yet, unfortunately, not only is there already such a natural ordering of stages within most of the major traditions, but there have come to be whole paths made up of one or the other aspect alone. And frequently what happens is, that “one puts off for later what must be done first, or he does first what must be done later,” in the hope of having the ‘best practice,’ forgetting that the best practice is the one which one is actually capable of doing in the present moment. The emerging spirituality must either address these issues or start from scratch, with help from those who are already doing so.
Another, rather esoteric problem has always been that even great masters have difficulty translating for us what they 'know' while in their higher self into what they know when in their physical bodies, and are also burdened by their own tradition in terms of what they can or not say, both of these accounting for what oftentimes seems like rather silly ideas within a main body of sound doctrine (20). But there is also what might be called a 'virus' infecting many lineages, especially some of the biggest ones, where some gurus still argue that only they possess the jagatguru or world teacher, the highest masters, or the only way, and many other provincial views and partial doctrines. I am sure every sincere seeker can come up with numerous examples of these, and they need not be spelled out here. This sort of thing, somewhat to be expected in the religious sphere, in the spiritual arena must surely die a timely death. Then the great comingling of a new planetary spirituality may be born, in an even more evolved fashion than it once was hundreds of millenia ago (according to ancient legends when the world was as one).
Already, the message of peace is in the air.
The word for the primordial Buddha who is the essence of the Dharmayaya, or Ultimate Reality, the True Nature of all things, is Samantabhadra. Translated that means the "ALL GOOD." Surely, that is the kind of God who is in charge of our world, composed as it is of all things great and small. This is the Blessed Hope the scriptures speak of.
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Closing thought
“No matter how many traditions you go into and study, you’re going to have to, sooner or later, reason the whole thing out. You’re going to have to do it for yourself. There are no two ways about it. When you understand why even the sages themselves - when they come out of the void - disagree in their statements, you’ll see what I am talking about...In my mind there’s no doubt that something like this could happen: Let us say that you come back in four, five hundred years. There won’t be Vedanta. There won’t be Buddhism. There won’t be Platonism. All these traditional philosophies and religions will have diisappeared. Nonetheless, if a person has taught himself to think deeply about these matters and reflect, and has understood them within himself, it won’t matter to him. It won’t matter, because he knows that God can’t be grasped through any graven images, whether it’s a statue made of stone or a statue made of words. He knows that he’s got to find Him within himself, in the impalpable Spirit that is his own mind.” - Anthony Damiani (21)
Footnotes
1. Tony Parsons, "The Divine Misconception: Traditional Advaita (Oneness) versus Neo-Advaita", April 2005 (www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/trad_neo/neo_parsons.htm)
2. Paula Marvelly, The Teachers of One: Living Advaita, Conversations on the Nature of Non-duality (Watkins Publishing, 2002)
3. Dennis Waite, Back to the Truth: 5000 Years of Advaita (Winchester, UK, O Books, p. 179
4. Anthony Damiani, Living Wisdom (Burdett, New York: Larson Publications, Inc., 1996), p. 55
5. Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton (Burdett, New York: Larson Publications, 1988), Vol. 13, Part 2, 2.8
6. Ibid, Part 4, 5.135
7. “Now genuine wisdom, being in its highest phase the fruit of a transcendental insight, is sublimely dateless and unchangeable. Yet its mode of expression is necessarily dated and may therefore change. Perhaps this pioneering attempt to fill the term "philosophy" with a content which combines ancient tradition with modern innovation will help the few who are sick of intellectual intolerances that masquerade as spiritual insight. Perhaps it may free such broader souls from the need of adopting a separative standpoint with all the frictions, prejudices, egotisms, and hatreds which go with it, and afford them an intellectual basis for practising a profound compassion for all alike. It is as natural for those reared on limited conceptions of life to limit their faith and loyalty to a particular group or a particular area of this planet as it is natural for those reared on philosophic truth to widen their vision and service into world-comprehension and world-fellowship. The philosopher's larger and nobler vision refuses to establish a separate group consciousness for himself and for those who think as he does. Hence he refuses to establish a new cult, a new association, or a new label. To him the oneness of mankind is a fact and not a fable. He is always conscious of the fact that he is a citizen of the world-community. While acknowledging the place and need of lesser loyalties for unphilosophical persons, he cannot outrage truth by confining his own self solely to such loyalties.”
"Why this eagerness to separate ourselves from the rest of mankind and collect into a sect, to wear a new label that proclaims difference and division? The more we believe in the oneness of life, the less we ought to herd ourselves behind barriers. To add a new cult to the existing list is to multiply the causes of human division and thence of human strife. Let those of us who can do so be done with this seeking of ever-new disunity, this fostering of ever-fresh prejudices, and let those who cannot do so keep it at least as an ideal--however remote and however far-off its attainment may seem--for after all it is ultimate direction and not immediate position that matters most. The democratic abolishment of class status and exclusive groups, which will be a distinctive feature of the coming age, should also show itself in the circles of mystical and philosophic students. If they have any superiority over others, let them display it by a superiority of conduct grounded in a diviner consciousness. Nevertheless, with all the best will in the world to refrain from starting a new group, the distinctive character of their conduct and the unique character of their outlook will, of themselves, mark out the followers of such teaching. Therefore whatever metaphysical unity with others may be perceived and whatever inward willingness to identify interests with them may be felt, some kind of practical indication of its goal and outward particularization of its path will necessarily and inescapably arise of their own accord. And I do not know of any better or broader name with which to mark those who pursue this quest than to say that they are students of philosophy." Brunton, op. cit., Vol. 13, Part 2, 1.18
8. PB's Terms and Teachings
9. A brief and colorful inside history of early theosophy
10. Brunton, op. cit., Vol. 13, Part 3, 3.68, 5.2, 28, 30, 3.3
11. Roy Eugene Davis, Paramahansa Yogananda As I Knew Him (New Delhi, India: Full Circle Publishing, 2006), p. 61
12. Swami Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters), Conversations with Yogananda (Nevada City, California: Crystal Clarity Publishers, 2004), 367
13. John Welwood, in Mariana Caplan, The Guru Question (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc., 2011), p. 321, 326-327
14. Brunton, op. cit., Vol. 13, Part 4, 1.506, 1.508, 1.518; Part 2, 1.1, 1.23, 1.477, 1.478
15. Ibid, Part 1, 4.216, 1.55
16. Kriyananda, op. cit., p. 222-223
17. Brunton, op. cit., Vol. 13, Part 2, 2.250-251, 174, 64
18. David Frawley, "The Need For a New Indic School of Thought"
19. For much more on this see The Idea of Man
20. Scare Tactics
21. Anthony Damiani, Living Wisdom (Burdett, New York: Larson Publications, 1996), p. 172, 174-175
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