I am beginning to see the same spiritual faces over and over again.
They come to me in the mail and over the internet, as promotions for workshops, mind body conferences, books and tapes. I must be on just the right lists for someone like me.
And I was reminded of the implications of such an in-crowd as I picked up the fine new Deepak Chopra book, Life After Death. The opening chapter is preceded by nearly 60 testimonials from scientists, academics, writers and speakers on the growing consciousness workshop circuit.
Deepak has included this preface, not to promote his book, but in order to acknowledge this loose association of writers, scientists and saints. Mr. Chopra is the most graceful and articulate of movers in this movement. And it is likely that he has brought us such a list of notables in order to help build the critical mass of leadership required to tilt the planet onto a sane and viable path.
Doing this is the sacred responsibility of every knowing soul. Yet still. The idea of a rising class of spiritual notables scares me. The notion of insiders and associations of any kind are as troubling to me as I’m sure they are to many of those who find themselves on such a list. Insiders, associations, institutes and clubs can become a big part of the problem. Rather than expand consciousness, after a while, such solidarity at the center can begin to freeze even nonconventional wisdom in place. Systemic change, quantum physicists tell us, is generated not from its center but from its edge.
In my more ambitious youth I found myself similarly anointed in the rather specialized field of communications where I made my living. I spoke at conferences, consulted, wrote articles and in no time found myself in that most perplexing of situations for someone engaged in the pursuit of authentic wisdom – I had become an expert.
I found myself spreading my standard litany of expertise in the mornings while rambling around at night in places I don’t even want to talk about, trying to figure out what in the world was really going on. It was then that I knew I had to change fields.
Informal and ad hoc groups like the one formed by the familiar names in Deepak’s preface give me pause even as they individually enlighten me. Now I’ve been working on myself for a while, but a spiritual initiate’s quest for authoritative second-hand knowledge can not be underestimated – so those truly on the spiritual path have the obligation, I think, to debunk the myth of their expertise. They can do this by staying away from one another for a while or occasionally doing something entirely irresponsible and hopefully “outrageous.”
“Burning Man is probably a better model for world change than a conference in the Capitol.”
I think the operative words here are “doing” and “outrageous.” Which is why Burning Man is probably a better model for world change than a conference in the Capitol – one of which was actually held last month.
This was a conference to help establish a Department of Peace in Washington DC, a grand idea if ever there was one. This could be earth-shaking, but it didn’t look so from my perch near the Venice Beach. The conference featured mostly familiar spiritual luminaries and was structured with workshops, congressional office visits and lectures on the science of peace building. On paper at least, it looked more like a meeting of the New Hampshire Dept. of Health (Marianne Williamson not withstanding) than an event to alter the course of the nation through advanced spiritual practices and a re-jiggering of the war machine (Deepak was a part of this conference, the man’s generosity knows no bounds). But I don’t know if a meeting in the Capitol with group visits with lawmakers will turn our lives around. True spiritual work, I’m told, will knock your socks off. And it usually comes about when you’ve got nothing to hold on to, not even each other.
Maybe one of the reasons there isn’t a massive peace movement right now is because of the epidemic of associations, affinity groups, email chains and inward-looking list serves. These are places where people of the same mind are often endlessly updating one another but rarely taking a hand to tiller or heart.
I’m afraid these loose affiliations of intelligent and compassionate people will really get out of hand. They can grow into organizations and then become really dangerous. They lose their spark and fervor, become expert meeting planners and email exchangers – but totally miss the mark of real action. It happens to the best of us – to all of us, it’s hard not to do.
But I have to stop going to consciousness workshops. Many are affirmative, intelligent and wonderfully uplifting but by events’ end felt just a little too comforting, mutually supportive and co-creationist special. Some seem less like revolution-a-brewing and more like a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Scientists and Saints. Give me a drink.
Speaking of which, spiritual growth is not about purity. It is to become more conscious, on all levels. It is not enough to be speaking to one another, or attempting to keep our personal performance pure. Expanded consciousness embraces all of it. Everything. And especially the forbidden territory. Vedic Scholar and Ayurvedic physician Robert Svoboda talks about his nights in graveyards with a bottle of bourbon sitting on a corpse, oh yes this, too. I rarely see Dr. Svoboda anymore, even at a yoga conferences.
In fact, I rarely see the names of any outlanders, rabble rousers, poets or inhibitors of the fringe sitting on the dais answering questions. Where, for example is Stuart Wilde? Stuart is a much-published spiritual jouster (The Quickening and other books) who operates simultaneously in at least three planes of reality and has a sometimes loopy but often insightful newsletter that on occasion borders on the insane. He approaches spirituality from all levels and probably knows more about the U.S. budget than my senator. Let’s put him on the panel. System change is dependent on integrating from the systems’ edge and other systems. It depends on misfits, gate-crashers and cross-fertilizers who have made their mark.
In the end it seems every association, formal or informal, is as much about protection as it is about promotion. Bruce Lipton (renegade cellular biologist, I didn’t see him on Deepak’s list…hmmmm) tells us that at a cellular level an organism only has two actions: expansion outward toward growth or inward for protection.
“A spiritual initiate’s quest for authoritative secondhand knowledge cannot be underestimated.”
For there to be a revolution in thought on a grand scale, it will have to begin outside the organization chart, the workshop or the prevailing wisdom. 9/11 almost forced us to this paradigm shifting brink, but we were eventually thrown backward into protection, tit-for-tat and the primeval mess we find ourselves in now in Iraq. Next.
More Brownian motion from the edge please. This is where, in other fields, astrophysicists bump into financiers and digital nerds to create technological miracles – actual revolution. And this is where our spiritual leaders need to be taking us – to the edge. Once you’re on the inside you’re cooked.
Deepak’s new book, by the way, Life After Death, it’s out there, the man just keeps turning corners. The first half of the book is a sacred tale that has more to do with Vedanta, the ancient Indian philosophy aka the Path to Freedom, than the meaning of life at a bio-chemical level, about which he so often writes.
It’s as though Dr. Chopra has left his legions behind and given up trying to convince his readers through quantum physics or even pedestrian scientific facts. Be good, he says, God bless, this is a myth. And this myth speaks the truth, these are the facts. (The second half of the book called “The Burden of Proof ” goes on to give the science, in case anyone still needs it.)
He writes a lot about taking a creative leap and changing our conventional notions. Take the conventional notion of heaven, by which “Heaven is an endpoint…all transformation stops. Souls lounge around in a blessed state that sounds, frankly, like eternal assisted living. Why should consciousness become inert?”, he asks.
Same can be said for this life. The true spiritual path will never let you hang on when you become a member of the club.
Bob Belinoff is a healthcare consultant and a documentary filmmaker.
Bob@digitalworkshop.com, www.publichealthzoom.com
