Ramana. Vivekananda, and Shankara - An Historical Perspective

Our old friend Kelamuni made an interesting comment on this post:

“I'm going to have to side with you on most of what you say here, though I think we can distinguish between Neo-Vedanta and Neo-Advaita. Like Ramakrishna, Ramana was not a political activist like Vivekananda. And I would have to say that there are indeed differences between the teachings of Shankara and Ramana. And the Vivekachudamani does not make for good comparison since it was not written by Shankara. There was, on the other hand, a form of self-enquiry taught by Shankara, and we find it in the Upandeshasahashri, the only authentic independent work written by Shankara. However, as you say, Shankara's enquiry is much more scripturally oriented, while Ramana's attempts to deal with experience per se. There is much that Ramana teaches that is more or less derived from Shankara, but there are also other elements that are foreign to Shankara.”

I of course enjoy it when others agree with me on something, especially someone as well-versed in the traditions as Kelamuni. His too-brief blog has some excellent papers he's written on the subject of Vivekananda and Neo-Vedanta that anyone interested in the topic ought to read. And he's right that I should have described Vivekananda as a Neo-Vedantin rather than a Neo-Advaitin, although in a sense it's Vivekananda who is responsible for the rise of Neo-Advaita, in that his Neo-Vedanta movement elevated Advaita to the center-stage of the Vedantic traditions, and in the process opened it up to its modern stature and character, which has made significant departures from the tradition mode of Advaita in Gaudapada's and Shankara's time. Ramana is of course one of the primary influences in modern Advaita, and its fair to say that even in India, it is Ramana's style of Advaita that has proved more popular than the traditional approach.

Kelamuni is right that there are some traditional precedents for the self-enquiry that Ramana taught, including within Shankara's teachings. I hope Kelamuni reads this and can forward some citations from Shankara that describe this form of self-enquiry, because I'd be very curious to read about it. I haven't tried to justify or find precedents for Ramana's self-enquiry in the traditions, but I aware of the efforts of David Godman to do just that, and he's admitted to failure. His study of the traditional sources doesn't find a clear parallel between the kind of self-enquiry Ramana taught, and any previous practice. There are certainly some similarities in the general approach, but not in the details. The Ribhu Gita perhaps has the most widely known references to self-enquiry, and that is the reason it is recited daily at Ramanashram, but the actual instructions of Ramana on the practice are not found there.

From what I do know of Shankara's approach to self-enquiry, it was indeed scripturally based, and directed towards the practice of niddidyasana, or “not this, not this”. In other words, the practitioner was directed to examine everything he considered to be “himself”, and see that none of it was actually himself. He would examine his body, his thoughts, his emotions, his life in the world, and see that none of this is “I” or “mine”. There's something quite Buddhistic about this practice, a form of annata, or the doctrine of no-self, in which one meditates on phenomenal existence with deep observational inquiry, to the point of seeing that there is no “self” in anything observed, even one's own body and mind. Seeing that no such thing exists, one is freed from the illusion of selfhood. Shankara's method may even be derived in part from Buddhist sources and influences, as it has long been inferred that his non-dual philosophy was actually a way of incorporating key aspects of Buddhism into the Vedanta, especially those aspects which Vedantic debators were unable to find good counter-arguments for, perhaps because they were true. In some ways , Advaita is an admission that these aspects of Buddhism are indeed true, and need to be acknowledged.

However, in the practice of Ramana's self-enquiry, there is no admonition to inspect phenomenal arisings of any kind, even one's own thoughts or body or relations. This is where Ramana differs from both Shankara's Advaita and the Buddhist trains of thought. In some ways, it could be said that Ramana is completing Shankara's work, which is to find a wholly Vedantic approach to transcending the dualistic ego which does not rely on the Buddhist influence and method of inspecting phenomenal existence. In fact, Ramana makes clear that he strongly opposes the entire approach of niddidysana, and also any approach which puts attention on phenomenal events, internal or external, even an enquiry which inspects them for the purpose of voiding the assumption of an interior self.

Shankara's approach of niddidyasana is considered justified because it negates all arisings, even as it inspects them, and thus leaves the practitioner with only the true Self. The idea is to negate all forms of false self, all forms of ego, such that what is left behind is only what is true, eternal, and unsullied by phenomenal appearances – the Ground or Source from which all phenomenal appearances arise. However, what Ramana criticizes in this approach is the energy and attention it gives to these phenomenal appearances, and thus he says that it ends up feeding and strengthening them, even by opposing them, and this prevents ever truly going beyond them. To him, the very act of inspecting any arising phenomena will only reinforce our attention to them, and for him, it is attention to the non-self which makes the both the egoic self and the non-self seem real and separate. So as long as one tries to discriminate between the real and the unreal, one will keep duality in place by that very act.

To Ramana, the key to transcending duality is not to entertain any dualistic approaches, and discrimination is inherently dualistic. The entire idea of discrimination is to separate two opposites, and in that sense it is the epitome of dualism. Thus, his form of recommended self-enquiry is not an exercise of phenomenal discrimination, but the abandonment of it.. This may sound strange, in that self-enquiry is usually described as a form of Jnana Yoga, as the exercise of discriminative intelligence, but in point of fact this is not how Ramana taught it, and if fact this is something he repreatedly warned against.

Ramana's form of self-enquiry dispenses with discrimination, and instead directs all attention back upon the one who might discriminate himself from objects. The question “who am I?” is not a discursive or intellectual exercise of analyzing the phenomenal mind and self, with the aim of separating the true Self from the false identification with objects. It is a literal “looking” in the direction of the self to see what is there. Rather than looking at one's body, one simply askes “to whom is this body arising?” Rather than examining one's thoughts, self-enquiry simply asks “To whom is this thought arising?” In this way, one does not engage in an act of discrimination, but only in one of knowing oneself directly. One does not intentionally separate from what is observed, one thoughts or emotions or bodily life. One simply doesn't give it any special attention. One allows it to simply continue in the background, but one's primary focus is on the self.

This takes the form of a basic asana of “feeling the sense of self”. Rather than analyzing the separate self sense in relation to its objects, one simply “feels” this core feeling of being a self. He even recommends, for beginners, simply repeating the word “I, I, I...” over and over again to help feel the sense of self more deeply and clearly. The purpose of this self-enquiry, then, is to concentrate oneself entirely in the feeling of self, to know it more and more intimately, directly, feelingly, in an experiential sense, not in an abstract sense. By becoming immersed in this feeling of self, and essentially being indifferent to everything else, one becomes naturally freed of every form of external seeking and craving. Eventually, one is able to “hold onto the 'I'-thought”, and in so doing, all other thoughts fall into line, since all thoughts proceed from the 'I'-thought. Eventually, the mind itself collapses, and falls into the heart, where it finally dies through the Grace of the true Self, and never arises again. Instead, only the Self arises in the generative form of its own Light, and all the worlds are recognized as the Self.

There are certainly aspects of this approach to realization that are contained in Shankara or other traditional teachings. One cannot fault Shankara or praise Ramana for this distinction. It remains to be seen which is the most effective approach. Certainly Shankara was teaching in a very different time, and contending with very different personal and cultural currents. His main opponents within Vedanta were the Vishishtadvaitins, Ramanuja primarily, who argued for a qualifed form of non-dualims which was, in essence merely an advanced form of dualism rather than an alternative form of non-dualism. So Shankara tended to emphasize discrimination, to try to keep these sorts of influences at bay. He wanted people who were worshiping the forms of various Gods and Goddesses to see that any form was not the true Self, but was subtly separate from the Self, and that it should be surrendered to the formless Self. This of course encountered a lot of resistance within Hinduism, which has always been devotionally based, rather than non-dual in its popular forms. And it's no surprise that Shankara's teachings, though finding a strong base of support within some parts of the monastic community, were not embraced by the general population of Hinduism, and did not become a prominent part of the Vedantic tradition for a very long time. Instead,. non-dualism remained a largely esoteric tradition, even a kind of “secret teaching” that was not widely disseminated, until the rise of the Neo-Advaitins in Vivekananda's time.

For most of the intervening years, Hinduism was defined by devotionalism, and its nod to non-dualism was purely of the qualified variety, not the pure non-dual approach. However, this also led to various forms of decay, much of which was exacerbated by the consequences of British occupation and rule. One of those consequences was the re-emergence of Brahmanical religious traditions, most of which had fallen into disfavor or simply decline over the centuries. When the British arrived in India, they found a largely disorganized people who had no central political, cultural, or religious core that they could appeal to. Instead, Hinduism was divided into thousands of sects and approaches, largely centered upon various devotional approaches to differing Gods and tribalisms. Politically, this was disadvantageous to the British, who wanted to be able to deal with only a single Hinduism, both culturally and politically, which could make the administration of India workable.

To solve this administrative problem, the British encouraged the Brahmanical classes to become the internal leaders of India, both politically and culturally. This suited the British who had their own class system that had a rough correspondence to the Hindu caste system. It also suited them to have Hinduism moved in the direction of a unified cultural sense of itself, which the Brahmanical religion could provide if it were organized around a more cohesive sense of itself. For these reasons, the Vishishtadvaitins who worshiped Krishna tended to grow and become more powerful, and other forms of Vedanta became less powerful. The British could respect this more, since their own religion was centered around a single religious figure, Jesus, and this becomes a powerful political model for organizing people. So the worship of Krishna and the various forms of Vishishtadvaita began to predominate among the emerging ruling classes within India itself, who were glad to assist and cooperate with the British occupation since it advanced their own interests.

The Neo-Vedanta and Neo-Advaita revolutions of the 19^th century can be seen in part as a reaction to this colonial influence. While Ramakrishna was in some ways a classic Krishna Bhakti, he as by no means a traditional one. Nor was he in league with the Brahmanical classes who were cooperating with British rule. Many of Ramakrishna's devotees were involved with the Brahmo Samaj, a modern political movement arguing for the regeneration of traditional Hinduism in the face of British rule. Their motives were at times contradictory, in that they both wanted to modernize Hinduism, and at the same time restore its original roots. One thing they were agreed upon was that the current form of Hinduism was corrupt, decayed, and far too weak to defeat British colonialism. So part of Vivekananda's genius was to formulate a version of Vedanta which served all these ends, even creating a unified form of Hinduism which had never really existed before, taking the British one better, but this time creating a Hinduism which could resist Birtish rule by coming together in opposition to it, rather than in support of it.

When Vivekananda began advocating for the centrality of Advaita to the Vedanta, he was not merely making a religious truth declaration, he was aiming to unify and strengthen Indian nationalism around a single cultural theme taken from its own traditions,. What better theme to unify a country around than one of universal oneness and brotherhood? In the political sense, this was sheer genius, and provided a cultural basis for the unification of the disparate branches of Hindu culture and politics in opposition to foreign occupation. It allowed India to become a modern country, one in which its inhabitants, divided throughout their history by divergent languages, religions, and interests, could identify as a people with a common sense of values and purpose

In the spiritual sense, this new emphasis on Advaita had profound effects on India's religious heritage. The traditional Advaitins, who had kept their tradition alive via monastic institutions and what was virtually an underground tradition of practice, began to find themselves in a strange situation. To a degree, they were quite happy to gain at last the prominence in Hindu culture which had generally eluded them for most of their history, but which they felt they were of course deserving of. And yet, at the same time the growing popularity of Advaita brought many non-traditional ideas into the fore which had no been there before. Vivekananda himself was not a traditional Advaitin, and never underwent any traditional education. His spiritual education was at the hands of yogic geniuses like Ramanakrishna and Pahvari Baba, not traditional Advaitins, and when he began to teach about Advaita, it was from the point of view of these non-traditional types, not the Shankaracharya maths.

In the 20^th century this pattern continued. Ramana realized the Self in 1896, right about the time that Vivekananda was at his most influential. Of course Ramana had no direct influence on Advaita for many decades, but his life in some ways epitomizes the new approach. He had zero religious training, zero knowledge of Advaita, and realized without the help of any human Guru or influence. It was only well after his realization that he began to acquire an education in the traditions, and quite naturally he did not feel that such things were necessary or even important. He focused upon a simple practice that anyone could engage, Hindu or not, and made no gestures towards the necessity of traditional Advaitic practice. It was the practice of self-enquiry that made for a non-dual approach, not the cultural or religious context in which one practiced.

In some ways, Ramana destroyed non-dualism by releasing it from its traditional roots. But in practical effect, he helped make it immensely popular. In the India of today, devotionalism is still the dominant outward cultural and religious form, but non-dualism is widely known, admired, and even practiced. Friends of mine familiar with India tell me that probably 90% of people who are interested in Advaita there are drawn to the Neo-Advaitins such as Ramana and Nisargadatta, and not the traditional maths.

One can easily say that Ramana's teaching on self-enquiry was simply a response to the needs of his time, just as Shankara's teachings were in his time. The modern age has created a whole class of people who are open to the direct, non-traditional, experientially based, feeling-oriented, yogically active approach that Ramana represents, rather than an approach. The advent of westerners has itself been responsible in many respects for this, going back to the British occupation itself and the influence of western philosophical and political thought on India. It is no surprise then that it is this form of Advaita that has proved popular in the West, as well as to a westernized India.

One cannot say which is “better” without bowing to the needs of the times in which they appear. I don't think Ramana's approach would have caught on well or been terribly effective in Shankara's time, and vice-versa. This doesn't mean that there are no inherent contradictions between the two approaches, or that one might represent an improvement over the other. My own sense is that Ramana's approach does indeed represent a deeper understanding of the non-dual process, and that Shankara's description in many ways represents the limitations of his age, which was deeply wedded to traditional scripture and fealty to the same. But one cannot pretend that Ramana is the final word on the subject either. There is always room for both greater depth and greater cultural readiness for the pure non-dual approach.

Even so, it remains interesting to me that Ramana choose a path which departs from the phenomenological approach of both Buddhism, and to a lesser extent, Shankara. One could argue that Ramana is actually restoring Advaita to a pre-Buddhist approach, even if the end result is not at all at odds with Buddhist ideas. Ramana's teaching constantly affirms that there is no individual self or ego, something which tends to contradict Vedantic dualisms and the theory of the soul or individual atma. But the process of realization, to Ramana, is directly and entirely subjective, and not oriented towards an inspection of the world. Rather, it has a highly natural relationship to the world, not trying to analyze it or adapt to it, but merely to recognize it as the Self, non-separate from top to bottom. This seems very much in alignment with the pre-Advaitic Upanishadic rishis, whose orientation was always to the Self, not to an inspection of the natural world as something to discriminate oneself from.

The Meaning of Meditatiom

An article in the Fall 2003 issue of the Buddhist periodical Tricycle, “Looking For Meaning”, by Steve Hagen, the head teacher at Learning Center in Minneapolis tries to address the issue of the meaning of meditation, and concludes that there is none, and that we should stop looking for or expecting to find any, but simply accept meditation as it is. Which would be fine, if one were to truly do that. But Hagen seems to think that this means something very mundane and ordinary, which it does not. His viewpoint is fairly common in the modern Zen tradition, not just in America, but in Japan. His ideas reflect a down-home, well-meaning, non-metaphysical, humble and common-sensical approach to Buddhism that is quite attractive to many people. Unfortunately, it's not Buddhism, because it leaves out the “buddh”, the enlightened nature of mind.

Maybe I shouldn't be getting on the case of people who are certified and trained Buddhist teachers with decades of meditation practice behind them. They probably know a lot more about meditation than I do. I just can't help wondering how this sort of thinking gets applauded and rewarded, rather than receiving a good slap on the face.

First, Hagen criticizes the search for meaning itself:

“As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, sure. Why not? We can find meaning in anything. But no matter what meaning we look for or find, it’s delusion—and the surest way to implant feelings of meaninglessness deep within our minds.”

In the first place, he confuses the issue of meaning with the issue of getting positive results/ Yet even on that score, meditation clearly does produce positive results that can be observed and repeated, just like anything else. People do tend to meditate because it produces positive results, which is why they keep coming back to it. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as one is actually intelligent about the results and the methods used to obtain them. People clearly meditate with differing intentions, and for different purposes, in order to obtain different results, and this accounts for the wide variety of meditation practices and approaches. One must simply chose the meditation practice and approach that suites one's intentions. This is fairly matter of fact, and it's why we often need some kind of instruction or assistance. We can mistakenly choose a meditation path that doesn't suite our intentions or needs or goals, thinking that it's better for us by some kind of abstract standard rather than according to our own disposition and purpose. The primary problem that people encounter in meditation comes from this kind of confusion, which is the result of our meditation practice being at cross-purposes with our intention and needs.

Hagen, however, finds something wrong with the whole idea that we might want to get results from our meditation practice:

“As long as we insist that meditation must be meaningful, we fail to understand it. We meditate with the idea that we’re going to get something from it—that it will lower our blood pressure, calm us down, or enhance our concentration. And, we believe, if we meditate long enough, and in just the right way, it might even bring us to enlightenment.”

I understand what Hagen is trying to get at, but he's confusing meditation with enlightenment itself. Enlightened people don't meditate. The only people who meditate are those who are not enlightened, and they meditate in order to hasten enlightenment. Whatever the person defines enlightenment as, there is a form of meditation that can help achieve it. If low blood pressure and a calm disposition is “enlightenment” to you, there are forms of meditation that can help you achieve that. The whole conflict Hagen is creating around the issue of “meaning” is recursive, because by definition all meanings are created by us and attached to whatever we experience. Meditation means what we want it to mean, but like a dictionary, the intended meaning and the words and actions we engage to achieve that meaning must match one another, or we lose any sense in our practice. If by “enlightenment” we mean what the Buddha meant, there are forms of meditation which can help us achieve that too, but they may not be the same ones which achieve low blood pressure and a calm disposition. On the other hand, they might do that also, even if that is not their primary intention.

In point of fact, if we meditate correctly, that practice will indeed bring us to enlightenment. That's why the Buddha taught meditation – to bring people to enlightenment. It worked for him, and he assumed it could work for others too. The history of Buddhism seems to suggest he was right. Of course, the kind of meditation that will produce enlightenment is not something we will be able to engage if that is not our true intention, even if we think it should be. So the primary mistake people make in paths of spiritual meditation is to engage in a practice that is intended for those who wish to achieve enlightenment, but in fact do not. Often, what people really want is just a simpler and saner human life that is not so distracted by the tortured desires and fantasies of the mind. Which is a laudable goal, to be sure, but it's not really the same as desiring enlightenment as Buddha taught it. It's pretty much on the level of desiring the enlightenment of low blood pressure and a calm disposition.

And it appears that this is what Hagen desires – a simple and sane human life free of the neuroses common to spiritual seekers who fantasize about enlightenment, but in fact want something of a much lesser order. So Hagen is trying to address this sort of mistake, but in doing so, he's also trying to elevate his ordinary desiring into something transcendental, which it is not. What he's saying is certainly sensible for himself and people like him, which I assume is his audience. But I'm not sure what it has to do with Buddhism.

Here he at least tries to make a connection to Buddhism:

“We have to look at the mind we bring to this practice. Though we go through the motions of sitting in meditation, generally it’s not the mind of meditation at all. It’s the mind of getting somewhere - which is obviously not the mind of enlightenment. It’s the mind of ego, the mind that seeks gain and keeps coming up short.”

Examining the mind is indeed the core of Buddhist practice, so he's right to emphasize this. It's also important to examine the mind that we bring to meditation – even though that's a little redundant, in that genuine Buddhist meditation is by definition an examination of the mind. If one were not doing that to begin with, one wouldn't be doing Buddhist meditation at all. Which, perhaps, is fairly common among Buddhists, so perhaps it's worth mentioning. But to expect that a person bring to medition a mind that is free of seeking and craving is simply absurd, since the core teaching of Buddhism is that our minds are entirely driven by craving and desiring. Hence, we can't bring any other kind of mind to meditation. The difference, if there is one, is that we are to examine this craving mind in our meditation, and not be surprised if that is what we find. To the contrary, we are to expect to find that kind of mind every time we meditate. We are even to expect to find a mind which desires to be free of desire, which craves the cessation of craving. This too is the nature of mind.

What Hagen seems to desire is to sit down and meditate without finding oneself craving or desiring, which is simply impossible until one is actually fully and truly enlightened. Until that point, we should expect nothing less than craving, desiring, and every kind of illusion. To meditate does not mean to be free of these things, it means to observe them and examine them as they are, as the very nature of our own minds. Hagen, it appears, is looking for some way around this, some way of not being a craven seeker while meditating. Unfortunately, this is exactly what he is doing. And fortunately, if he meditates properly, he will observe this and smile. One simply cannot escape craving and desiring, even by trying not to do these things. Instead, one will simply crave within the context of the mind itself without realizing it. And yet, realizing that this is what we do brings spontaneous freedom. That is the Zen of Zen meditation.

The mind is always wanting to get somewhere, and until we accept this about the mind, we can't ever be at peace with ourselves. There is no mind that is at peace. The only peace comes when we have no mind at all, when the mind is transcended. And yes, there is a meditation that accomplishes this, but it is useful only to those who truly intend this. For anyone else, it would be detrimental to their life and practice. So in that sense I can agree with Hagen that people should simply be more ordinary in their approach to meditation, since must people have very ordinary goals to begin with, if we strip away their aspirational delusions.

But anyone who has a genuine interest in Buddhism or meditation or enlightenment ought to at least be pointed towards a meditation practice that can open them to a higher possibility than the mind's recursive cravings. And I'm not sure that Hagen is doing that. His description of meditation lacks an understanding of the real nature of our problem with the mind:

“Meditation is just to be here. This can mean doing the dishes, writing a letter, driving a car, or having a conversation - if we’re fully engaged in this activity of the moment, there is no plotting or scheming or ulterior purpose. This full engagement is meditation. It doesn’t mean anything but itself.”

The problem with this concept of meditation is that “being here” has noting to do with doing the dishes, writing letters, or having conversations, and it is not achieved by fully engaging these activities without any ulterior purpose. In fact, it would be absurd to engage these activities without any ulterior purpose or goal One drives a car to get somewhere, one writes a letter with a purpose in mind, and one converses with others for reasons. One's attention is always going to be on some goal, mundane or not, otherwise one would not engage these activities at all.

Even more importantly, it's very important to realize that we are not “here” at all, if we define here as “doing the dishes, writing letters, or having conversations”. To be in the here and now has nothing to do with having one's attention on either the objects of this world, or one's apparent activities in them. In point of fact, as I've said in earlier posts, we are not really here at all, in this world, doing the things we appear to be doing. This is true on many levels, including the spiritual level of reincarnation, but also on even deeper levels, including the ultimate level of Buddh itself. There is no sense in which we, as conscious beings, are “here” in this world. In fact, telling people to fully engage in their activities in this world is a recipe for complete dissatisfaction and disappointment, because we will never be able to achieve it. Why? Because we are not here, and we never will be, hard as we might try. To simply do our ordinary activities, with our attention focused upon them, is to reinforce the primary delusions of our own minds, which are constantly looking for external referents to make us feel real.

The meditation of “doing the dishes”, or “chop wood carry water” as it is commonly expressed, is not what enlightenment is about. It's what the illusion of “being here” is about. If there's a deeper message in that kind of teaching, it's that we should merely engage these activities without ever believing in them for a second. Instead, we should “be here” in the true sense, which has nothing to do with these activities or this world. As Ramana taught, we need to learn to “Be as you are”,. But to that, we need to find out who we are. So meditation, whether sitting in silence or in the midst of action, is concerned with our real being, not our apparent activities, whether they are inside as thoughts or outside as actions.

The meditative mind is simply and truly attentive to who or what we are now, what we are actually being, not what we think we are as defined by our activities or appearance. We are not doing dishes when we do the dishes, and we are not driving the car when we are driving the car. None of this is true, none of this is genuinely “here”. The practice of meditation helps us break the spell our constant thinking and action has over us, showing us the cracks in the facade until they open up and show us what is actually going on, what is really and truly here. That is, of course, if we meditate in a fashion that intends to break this spell, rather than in one that wishes merely to calm us down and be at ease with the dream-life. And that of course is precisely what many people want, and they should meditate accordingly. But this is not what the Buddha taught, and it doesn't make sense to pretend otherwise.

The Buddha taught that the entire world, and every action within it, was merely a concept in the mind. The approach to meditation that Buddha recommended was purposed towards seeing this, with greater and greater clarity, until the whole picture was visible in one simple vision. This is what he called “right view”. When right view was achieved, all of Buddhist practice fell into place. He did not recommend some lesser practice of “fully engaging the activity of the moment:. That is the very kind of idealism that Buddha criticized and considered deluding. There is no activity other than the mind creating concepts, such as the concept of “doing dishes” or “driving the car”. So Buddhist meditation while doing the dishes is to see that this is merely a concept, an illusion, by observing the mind that creates these conceptual delusions. Strangely enough, this brings us great peace, and allows us to do the dishes without any fuss. The dishes have no meaning to us, because they aren't here at all. In the here and now, there are no dishes, and no washing of them. This makes it possible to wash dishes without any mind at all, without us doing anything.

“To look for meaning is to look for a model, a representation, an explanation, a justification for something other than this, what’s immediately at hand. Meditation is releasing whatever reasons and justifications we might have, and taking up this moment with no thought that this can or should be something other than just this.”

Hagen's problem is that he assumes that meanings are something “out there” that we look for, rather than something we attach to what we do. Certainly some people do approach the matter of meaning this way, looking for meaning rather than creating meanings as we go. The problem Hagen points to is not resolved by abandoning meaning, but by understanding where meaning comes from, that it originates in us, and we need to treat it accordingly. The meaning of meditation, therefore, is found in our own intentions when we meditate. If we meditate, we do indeed have a purpose, a meaning, we have given it. Part of what must occur in the process, therefore, is to be attentive to our own purpose, the meaning we are giving to our meditation, and thus to know our own mind. Hagen, unfortunately, suggests that he meditates without any meaning at all, that he just does it, without expecting any results. This is simply not plausible. I don't mean that Hagen is lying, but I do mean that he is simply unaware of his own reasons for meditating, or has become so convinced that the best meditation is not to have any purpose in meditating, that he's spend his years meditating erasing his own footprints. But this doesn't fool anyone except oneself. It's certainly not a path to recommend to others, unless that happens to be their goal.

“Just this” is a wonderful goal, but it's not what Hagen thinks it is. “Just this” is not the world of appearances that the mind is embracing, and it will never achieve “just this” by the methods of meditation Hagen advocates, which is a kind of purposeless relaxation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if one wants to know “just this”, it requires a profound impulse, an overwhelming deisre to be free of all illusion, both mundane and supernatural. As Nisargadatta once said when someone asked him how to overcome desire, the problem is that our desires are too small. We only want a little bit here and there, when we should really desire hugely. Likewise, Shirdi Sai Baba, when asked how he realized, replied, “Sheer desire”.

The desire to be free of desire can mistakenly manifest as an intentional abandonment of desire itself, producing a kind of quietude and stillness that is certainly enjoyable and sane. But this is not the path of enlightenment. The true path of enlightenment is one that observes how profoundly desiring we are, at every level, and that we cannot escape this, even when we try and appear to succeed at some level. We have to understand that while we cannot ever fully embrace the world, or fully “do the dishes”, or “drive the car”, because we are not of this world, we can indeed embrace the mind of desire fully, because that is what we are. To meditate, to observe the mind, to know the nature of the mind, is to see that desire and craving is all the ego is, and to embrace meditation means to become overwhelmed with desire, even the desire to be free of desire, the impulse to know who we are, what we are, where we are, why we are here, what our real purpose and meaning is.

We have to become so consumed by this desire that it burns up every other kind of craving, every object of desire, and every form of meditation. True meditation is to be burned up in desire, not to calmly do the dishes. One does the dishes knowing that doing dishes is never going to fulfill our desires one way or the other, and so one achieves a kind of relaxation and acceptance in relation to all the things of this world. This is what renunciation means. One is not embracing doing dishes, one is renouncing them, and the whole world, because one sees that they cannot possibly fulfill our true desire. By becoming concentrated in desire itself, we become dispassionate. The mind becomes a single force, without an object. And in that concentration, we are able to observe the mind as it is, as a concept without any foundation in reality. We, ourselves, are seen as without any foundation. That is the meditation that produces enlightenment.

Of course, it's only for those who really want it. Knowing what we want is often harder than gettng what we want.

The Integral Movement Is A Lot Like Hollywood: Nobody Knows Anything

I was browsing through the Integral Options Cafe again (one of my favorite reads on the Internet), and I came across an intelligently considered if somewhat saddening article by Roger Walsh, "The State of the Integral Enterprise", about the difficulties the "Integral Movement" is having gaining mainstream acceptance. The article has since been removed at the request of The Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, where it was originally published, but is available here at their site. Walsh tries to walk through all the various pitfalls and problems that he sees in the Integral Movement, and tries to offer a number of sound recommendations for overcoming them, presuming that if this is done the Integral Movement will steadily grow into the mainstream culture of the world, as he seems to think it naturally should. Unfortunately, he is perhaps too close to the movement to see that the problem is much bigger and probably far more insurmountable than he imagines, in some ways precisely because he sees this goal as desirable in the first place, and also necessary for both the movement, and the world.

Reading the article reminded me of one of the great books on Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman, one of the best screenwriters of the 1960's and 70's, the writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All The President's Men, among many other great movies, both of which he won Academy Awards for. In his book he returns time and time again to the single, insurmountable truth he describes as the core of the entire movie industry, which all must bow to or face humiliation - "Nobody knows anything". By which he meant, nobody in the entire movie industry knows what will make a movie successful, and what will not. Instead, the industry is run by people who try to pretend that they know what they are doing, who spend a lot of time trying to convince people that they know what they are doing, who build up resumes and sales pitches and sure-fire ideas about how to make successful movies, but in the end, none of them actually know what they are doing. And that is why Hollywood's business side is often even funnier than it's comedies - the entire industry is a charade, a pastiche, a wild shot in the dark.

One could say the same thing about popular religion, and especially popular modern movements in non-traditional religion. Nobody knows why, of all the crazy religious cults around the Roman world, it was Christianity that emerged to dominate the western world. Why not Mithraism? Why not Apollonious of Tyana? Okay, Christians will certainly give a solid answer - it's because Jesus was the one and only true Son of God, that's why. But not everyone quite buys that explanation. Likewise, why did this tiny desert religion of Mohammed come out of nowhere and become so powerful and widespread? Why, of all the crazy 19th century religious cults, did Mormonism become so successful? Why is Scientology so much bigger than most of its competitors? Well, one can always come up with historical explanations after the fact, but that's like explaining why Star Wars was such a huge success. Having the benefit of knowing that it was a indeed a huge success, one can easily explain why it was inevitable. And yet, it certainly didn't look that way when it was first made. No one thought it was anything but a silly idea from a young director that was worth throwing some money at, because who knows? That's how Hollywood works: nobody knows anything, so they're willing to try just about anything. If something clicks, we call the people who did it "geniuses", and we think they know what they are doing. But soon enogh they make some clunker that shows they didn't really know much of anything at all. And so the industry rises and fall by retrospective appreciation.

And the same is true of Ken Wilber's "Integral Movement", or any other novel, non-traditional religious or philosophical set of ideas. The real problem with the Integral Movement is the same as everything else in the non-traditional world of yet-to-be established religion and philosophy, which like a low-rent Hollywood, is filled with endless ranks of people trying to convince other people that they know what they are talking about, all to hide the simple and obvious core truth that "nobody knows anything".

It's one of the ironies of Wilber's movement that he has tried to be the ultimate "knower", the smartest smart-ass kid on the block who's read every book in the universe and evolved theories to contain them all in a single narrative - and all for nought, because in the business he's chosen to go into, no one knows anything, including him. I know Wilber might feel insulted by this, or perhaps if you catch him on a good day amused, but it's simply true - he doesn't know what will make a movement "successful" any more than anyone else, any more than the producers of Ishtar knew any less than George Lucas in Star Wars (if anyone doubts this, I invite them to watch, if they dare, any of the last three movies in the Star Wars sextet). I know Wilber has spent a lot of time working with hugely successful self-help dudes like Tony Robbins, who has made centamillions at least from his own dubious "movement", but frankly, he might as well hang out with Mormons. He's not going to learn how to make his "Integral Movement" into an actual movement by trying to package it into someone else's model. Nor is there any guarantee that if he does it his own way it's going to succeed in any larger sense either.

The truth is, no one really knows why some religious or philosophical movements succeed, except through Monday Morning Quarterbacking. We have to simply point out the obvious - some people just get lucky. Of course, it helps if you're a great self-promoter, like Tony Robbins, who could probably have mass-marketed the Hale-Bopp cult on late-night infomercials if he'd been so inclined. But even Tony Robbins happened to come along at the right time with the right set of ideas that just happened to take off - and even then, it's not as if the world is converting to "The Giant Within" any time soon. He found a niche market, exploited it, and made a killing. Many others with equal talent and equally good or bad ideas have tried to do the same, and failed. There were thousands of prophets in the Middle East at the time of Jesus, and we like to think that Jesus succeeded because he was the best of the lot, but there's no guarantee of that at all.

Some of the very greatest realizers are never known at all. They live in jungles and are only spotted on rare occasions. Papaji often said that he met only two fully enlightened people in his life - one was Ramana Maharshi, who has of course become famous the world over, and the other was a wild man who stepped out of the jungles of south India one day while Papaji happened to be walking by, wandered around for a few minutes, and then disappeared just as quickly, never to be seen again. One can perhaps only describe the difference in their outward "success" as a simple matter of karma. As Ramana often said, unless something is destined to happen, it won't matter how hard you try to make it happen, it never will happen. Likewise, if something is destined to happen, you can't stop it from happening no matter how hard you try. We of course don't know what is destined and what is not, but one has to recognize that something like the Integral Movement is probably just not destined to amount to much more than it already has, no matter how hard its dedicated followers try to make it "go mainstream".

Of course, I don't know anything either, and yet even though none of us know anything about this whole religion business, we can at least try our best to evaluate the "talent", and see what has the best prospects for success, and what seems unlikely to prosper. One thing we can't count on is quality, of course. Just as in Hollywood, quality films tend, if anything, to underperform, and usually have a fairly low ceiling for success, past which they rarely go. Citizen Kane was a commercial flop, and the atrocious late Star Wars sequels were huge money makers. Even Ramana Maharshi is a flop compared to the likes of Joseph Smith.

Even in the world of psychology and philosophy, what catches on and what fades away is hard to predict. Freud's theories took the world by storm, and revolutionized not just psychology, but almost every aspect of social thought. And yet, today, his psychoanalytic movement is virtually dead, and viewed as a failure even within psychology. Certainly some of his basic ideas have endured and proved immensely influential, but not in the form he originally conceived of them. He played a starring role in the evolution of 20th century thought, not just among scholastics, but in the mainstream culture itself, and the effects of the waves he unleashed are still washing over us. In large part, that was because of the timing of his ideas - they happened to coincide with a great awakening of the culture itself to sexuality and self-awareness. Others have had similar ideas before, but they did not catch on because the time was simply not right. And likewise, when the time passed by, Freud was cast aside like the seaweed from last night's high tide.

So the question is, do Wilber's ideas, and those of the "Integral Movement", really capture the mood and needs of our time? Well, they have certainly tried to do that. But this is perhaps the biggest problem with the Integral Movement. It is so self-consciously obsessed with trying to catch the mood and needs of the times, that it's like an overproduced pop-song, created by someone more concerned with engineering a hit than with plumbing its author's own emotional depths. At it's worst, it resembles the latest boy band, stepping through all the "right" hip-hop moves, but trying hard as can be to achieve "cutting edge" status, and simply falling flat from the vanity of the effort. The desperate, cloying quality of the Integral Movement in all its failing iterations resembles nothing so much as all those wannabe American Idol contestants trying to hit the notes, trying to fulfill their dream, trying so hard to please, striking all the right poses, but simply lacking the chops to sing a real song.

When the Integral Movement, and Wilber, do sing well, it's not necessarily the kind of music people want to hear. One can get bitter and nasty about that, blaming the public for not appreciating just how brilliant its ideas are, feeling unappreciated and unloved, and somehow trying to figure out a way to make people like them, but this just doesn't work. You can't make people appreciate something they don't want. The fact is, Wilber's Integral Movement is probably never going to catch on beyond the rather small sub-culture that has already developed around it. Most "movements" are lucky to get even that far, so one has to credit Wilber for at least that much. But if these folks are going to get upset because he isn't recognized as the Second Coming (or anything remotely similar) they are in for a lifetime of disappointment.

Let's face it, first off, the Integral Movement is predominantly an elitist intellectual movement that is destined to remain unattractive and uninteresting to anyone who is not specifically geared towards exactly this kind of thing. It requires a huge investment of intellectual time and energy to become even remotely conversant in its ideas, and even then, one could hardly begin to explain what those ideas are. Wilber himself dismisses critics who haven't spent years and years carefully reading every line of his works, and following its development step by step through countless iterations. Whether that's a valid defense against criticism, it's an insurmountable barrier to common appreciation. Who can possibly adopt a viewpoint, even casually, that is so inscrutably obscure?

Another great insight William Goldman offered in his book was the notion that if you couldn't describe the central point of your screenplay in twenty-five words or less, it was never going to work. The mechanics of human story-telling require a concentrated, easily understandable core message, and if that core is not there, it won't be communicated. Likewise, Goldman thought, if the writer doesn't have enough of a grasp of his story to summarize it that succinctly, he won't be able to write the story. He will ramble on endlessly, never quite getting to the point. (Sound familiar?) Wilber of course suffers from that very problem. He writes endlessly on countless topics, but he doesn't have a core message that can be easily explained in a single terse sentence. He's a fox, not a hedgehog, and foxes are simply incapable of achieving popular, mainstream acceptance, because they don't fully know what their point is to begin with. They have a million ideas about a million topics, the are brilliant in their ability to synthesize and correlate ideas, but they cannot for the life of the create a coherent message. The hedgehog, on the other hand, has just one great idea, and all he does is repeat this same idea, looking at it from every angle, but always keeping that one idea in view. In that way, he hammers away at that core insight until it hits home, and if it finds a receptive audience, it takes off like wildfire.

Wilber simply cannot do that. It's not his character or his destiny. And for that reason, the "Integral Movement" isn't actually a movement, because it has no center, and no core message, and it isn't going anywhere. It has graphs and charts and bullet points and tons of footnotes, but it hasn't got a central gospel. AQAL is not a message. At best, it's a map that is supposed to get you to the core of things, but one never actually gets there, and so the core message never materializes.

Goldman used Christianity as his best historical example of how to tell a story simply and concisely, because the authors of the Gospels knew precisely what their message was. Their twenty-five word summation of Christianity is the essential Creed of the Apostles, found in John 3:16.

"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but gain everlasting life."

Twenty-four simple words, and yet the whole of Christianity is contained in that brief message. Everything that has come before and since points back to this simple Gospel, and if anything can intelligently be said about why Christianity succeeded so well over the centuries it is because of this internal coherence in its message.

Can Wilber or the Integral Movement be said to contain so powerful and precise a message for anyone to hear? I don't think so. Perhaps I'm not familiar enough with the movement, but on the other hand, that shouldn't make a difference. If there were a core message to it, wouldn't it be obvious even to those outside its confines, especially to those people? I'd suggest there is no core message. Instead, there is a wide array of many messages, many viewpoints, many interesting things to think about or consider, all of which can serve to stimulate one's thinking, but none of which leads to any single answer or direction. Which is all fine and good to some degree, but it's not how movements, large or small, gain traction. A movement has to have a specific vector of force, otherwise it simply falls to the ground and is stepped over by those who have a real goal in mind.

The Integral Movement as it now stands is primarily a critical appreciation of a large set of ideas, rather than a focused concentration upon any one idea. In fact, it seems philosophically opposed to the very idea of concentrating on any one idea, for fear that this would create an imbalance of some kind. It has a map it points to , the AQAL, but this is neither a simple message or even a single narrative. It's a complex pattern of ideas that has no actual core to it, merely a way of categorizing and balancing different ideas, each of which could go off in any number of directions. One can say that's useful, or not, but one can't pretend that one can make an actual movement out of it. So instead the Integral Movement tends to default to personalities, primarily that of Wilber himself. He doesn't like this, and tries time and again to focus on AQAL, but this is essentially hopeless. No one can focus on AQAL, because it isn't a single idea, it isn't even a coherent set of ideas, it's merely a way of saying "don't focus on anything", which is self-defeating if your goal is to create a wide cultural and intellectual movement. People need to focus on something if they are going to create a movement. If there's no specific goal to focus on, they turn to the personality of the leader, and focus on that. Which is why the Integral Movement always seems to come back to Wilber himself and his own personality. It's inevitable given the nature of his ideas, which have no real direction, except to revolve around himself. And thus his followers allow their attention to revolve around Wilber himself, rather than on his ideas, which isn't the case in a real intellectual "movement".

Ramana Maharshi had just one thing to say, and he said it over and over again to almost everyone who came to him: "Ask yourself, 'who am I?'" He elaborated a bit on this, but essentially all his elaborations came back to the same point, this inspection of the "I". You can say that this isn't the kind of message that most people are going to appreciate, but it has the virtue of being incredibly simple and to the point, and hence, at least within the world of esoteric spirituality, his ideas have real staying power, and the ability to generate a "movement" of some kind. Whether that ever grows into a mainstream movement is hard to say, and was certainly neither his concern nor his intention. He only cared whether the person he was speaking to got the point. He wasn't trying to create a religion, or a movement, or a business. He had no seminars to give, no lectures to prepare, not practices to monitor, just this simple directive. And that's why it holds together and succeeds, regardless of the numbers of people who start thinking this way.

With Wilber, there is simply no equivalent to the messages of Christianity or Ramana Maharshi. There is simply a call to be intellectually critical and strive for some kind of "integrated" goal, but this goal is never defined, never described, and never actually realized by anyone. It's just a process for thinking critically, and that's not the kind of thing a movement can ever be based on. Perhaps, if one thinks critically long enough, one might come up with a central truth that has real force to it, but this simply hasn't happened yet in the Integral Movement, and if it hasn't happened yet, it likely never will. That's what the Buddha did. He sat under the Bodhi tree, and he thought critically about everything in his experience, until he achieved enlightenment. Once he did that, he didn't go around merely telling people to think critically, he told them what he'd discovered in the process of thinking critically. He told them about nirvana, and the Four Noble truths, which are simple enough that all four can be summarized in less than twenty five words: "Life is Suffering, suffering has a cause, the cause is craving, and there's a way to end this craving, the Noble-Eightfold Path." That prescription is about as simple as can be, and it explains why so many people have become Buddhists over the years.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the Integral Movement hasn't even figured out what it's supposed to be, much less what its core message is. Is it a religion? Is it a philosophy? Is it an educational process? Is it a self-help course? Is it a spiritual path? Is it a way to enlightenment? Is it a formula for solving problems? What? You can't say all of these, you have to choose something that actually defines it, if you want it to spread. But it doesn't want to do that, because it seems not to want to define itself. It likes staying vague and general and doesn't want to make any actual promises. But unless it defines itself, it will never gain much movement or appeal, except to people who are themselves not well defined.

The biggest problem of course is this central concern and motive that the Integral Movement must somehow move, grow, expand, gain mainstream cred, etc. Why should anyone care about these, even those who practice it? Why should Wilber care? It reveals a kind of deep insecurity in one's ideas, that one would need large numbers of people to accept them in order to feel good about it all. It's not as if having these ideas has made some huge difference in anyone's life. There are no enlightened Integralists out there, no stunning examples of human or spiritual giants who have emerged from the Integral Movement. After all, that's how these things tend to grow - by creating human role models for people to emulate.

One can hardly emulate Wilber, after all, nor would most people want to. Most people can't spend their life in a room full of books, nor would they wish to. Nor would that even be a good idea. It's not even clear that it's been a good idea for Wilbur. Very few people want to follow the ideas developed by a guy who has spent his lifetime in rooms full of books. It's not terribly appealing, and it doesn't even make a lot of sense. Wilber is useful for people who like books, and like critically appreciating books, but don't have time to read them all. Wilber's even said that he reads all these books so his friends don't have to. But the very idea that one is going to get great wisdom from reading books is simply foolishness written in scholastic hubris.

One does not get much more than a few pointers from books. That makes them useful, but insufficient. Even the greatest scriptures can do no more than point one in the right direction. Even a great teacher like Ramana Maharshi can do no more than point, and serve as an inspiring influence. One of my favorite lines in all his books is this very simple directive about the practice of self-enquiry:

That trustworthy vichara [self-enquiry] exists neither in book learning nor in learning from others, but only in one's own sense of "I"

The great message of Ramana was that one must find the truth in oneself, by oneself, as oneself. There is no great book that will do it for you, no map of consciousness you can use to find this out, no lectures or seminars or coaching that will do it for you, no magazine subscriptions, no workshops and integral business models that can do it, nothing but the examination of one's own self. As Buddha said, be a light unto yourself, and a refuge unto yourself as well. This is not the grounds for a movement, it is grounds for stillness. In that stillness, all concerns for movement drop away. What develops, will develop. For Buddha, a whole tradition developed, spontaneously, focused on this core practice of still self-examination. But Wilber is no Buddha, no Ramana, and not even a Tony Robbins. Those who are interested in his ideas, in whatever process of integration they can get going, should do just hat, and not be worried about what other people are doing, or whether it catches on or not.

One of the things Walsh mentions in his article is a tendency among Integralists to become egotistical about their level or stage or path, and he argues that they should let these concerns go. Which is good advice. The problem, of course, is that what attracts many people to Wilber's ideas in the first place is the notion of being at the "cutting edge" of religion and philosophy - in other words, being ahead of everyone else. So it's no wonder that it encourages a competitive attitude, a need to constantly improve oneself to stay ahead of others, to move through stages and levels and views to get to the very top of the pack, so as to always remain "on the cutting edge". It's no wonder that those in the movement tend to look down on those not in it, and to think of themselves as superior to the masses, and yet envious of those who do appeal to the masses.

There's a love-hate relationship with the rest of the world, and a desire to convert it in order to relieve the tension of one's own insecurity. This is something I'm very familiar with from my years in Adidam, which if anything was worse than the Integral movement in trying to establish itself as the greatest spiritual movement in the world. It's a common characteristic of most cults, which always position themselves above the rest, as the leading force of spirituality or wisdom or whatever their fantasy might be. And it's one of the things about the Integral Movement which puts it in the cult category, particularly among those most closely involved with the actual institutions it has created. This too becomes an obstacle to its own growth, in that people are quite naturally turned off by cults, except for those rare individuals who see cults as an opportunity to advance themselves in a small pond situation, and once established there, to expand that pond to include the whole world, thus making them one of the leaders of the world, rather than a mere nobody within it.

The mainstream world isn't much interested in cults, or in adopting cults as a guide for living. It usually works the other way around. The mainstream doesn't want to be turned into a cult. Instead, it wants to turn cults into mainstream appendages - in other words, indistinguishable from whatever movement the mainstream is already headed towards. In that sense, the worst thing that can ever happen to a cult is to become mainstream - it loses all its unique features when it becomes mainstream, and instead is merely a servant to the purposes of the mainstream.

This is the perpetual problem with Christianity since the time of Constantine. It has always been, at core, a very private and even individualistic religion, a contemplative relationship between oneself and one's God, and shared with those around one to be sure, but never compromised in the process. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, however, it lost that esoteric and highly personal nature, and became a huge institution, a worldly empire, a business, in other worlds. In the process, it lost much of what was precious to it. Jesus never sought such a thing, nor did his followers, but it fell into their lap when Constantine converted, and it's been a disaster ever since.

Why Wilber or the Integral Movement would want to become part of the mainstream is beyond me, except that it may not have any core ideas or principles to begin with, that it would fear losing or compromising. Instead, it wants to become a business model, a money-making enterprise, a Tony Robbins infomercial for the alt-religion crowd, in order to distract itself from its lack of core values, and a core purpose. What is revealed in this "movement" is something very similar to what one finds in Adidam, in other messianic or missionary cults, in almost every "movement" no matter how idealistic - the will to power, to enlarge oneself, to take over neighboring territory, to gain lebensraum, to convert others to one's own viewpoint, to externalize one's own internal sense of self, to make it "real" in the exterior world, through the act of converting others to one's views.

Wilbur's ideas, whatever AQAL might try to suggest, are his own interior personal notions. Sharing them with others is a way to exteriorize them, in order to create the illusion that they are real, that they apply to the world outside his own interior mind. If enough people adopt them, they begin to seem real, rather than just subjective notions of his own. Because the external world is what people are accustomed to thinking of as real, whereas our interior worlds are viewed as unreal, merely subjective, and thus doubted, it is common for people to try to impose their internal ideas onto the external world. Our own internal ideas are a constant source of doubt to us, because we are often not sure they are real until others begin to adopt them and affirm them.

So the common solution to our internal insecurity and sense of unreality is to convert others to think as we do. If others around us think as we do, it makes us feel better about ourselves. It makes us feel real. The ego needs this kind of external affirmation, because all it has are thoughts, ideas, notions, subjective feelings, and these seem deeply insubstantial to us until they externalized. So we feel a deep need not only to express ourselves to others, but to have other people express the same thoughts and feelings to us. This is called the human condition, and we all suffer from it to one degree or another. I, too, in my small way writing on this blog am motivated by these insecurities. I try to remain aware of that and keep some perspective about myself. But we are all vulnerable to these doubts and impulses, so long as we protect the subjective world of our own ego. It's best, therefore, if we simply understand this about ourselves, and minimize the degree to which we try to make our own ideas seem real.

I'd suggest that the Integral Movement do the same. Keep it small and personal, in other words. Don't try to expand and externalize one's insecurities on a global scale, trying to get the mainstream to reflect back to you your own inner thoughts in order to make them real to you, to make yourself seem real to you. Use such things as a way to actually inspect that inner insecurity and take it apart, rather than build it into a mass movement of some kind. Don't make it into a business, make it into a very personal matter within your own lives. If it works on the personal level for you, fine, others may begin to notice and it will catch on. If it doesn't, that's fine too.

The problem, of course, comes in when you've actually staked your livelihood on creating a "movement" of some kind out of these externalized insecurities. Then we have people who not only need widespread acceptance for psychological and egoic reasons, they also need it for monetary reasons, to pay the rent and eat. Then you get the kinds of complicated corrupting forces that combine both conceptual insecurity and material greed, and that's a recipe for disaster. It doesn't matter at that point how strongly one tries to maintain one's integrity, it is bound to fail. One just may not know it. And those around you who are committed to and trapped within the same dynamic will also not know it, and they won't tell you what has happened. This is how movements become deranged and derailed, and end up cults without intending to, even trying hard to avoid that fate.

As mentioned long ago in an earlier series of posts about Adidam, Papaji used to say, when asked about abusive Gurus, "This is the Kali Yuga, everyone gets the Guru they deserve". The same could be said about any kind of teacher or movement. We all get the teachings we deserve, what our karmas have laid out for us. Some get Ken Wilber, or some other integral movement teacher. If large numbers of people began to adopt AQAL and Wilber's ideas, it wouldn't mean that it had succeeded, it would only mean that this is how their karmas got played out. There will always be something the mainstream of the world latches onto, and there's not much difference in any of them, so long as we are driven by these internal insecurities that demand that we make them seem real by exteriorization. In the end, that project always fails, and the internal insecurity brings whatever we've created down. Every movement ends up failing for this reason. This cycle just goes round and round in this world, with no signs of stopping, unless we address the interior insecurity at the heart of it. That insecurity is the ego itself, which deep down knows that it is unreal, and thus is constantly insecure and driven to try to create the illusion of its own existence in the exterior world, so that it will feel real.

Until we face down our own egos, this will never end. It really makes no difference if the exterior form created is in the image of Jesus or AQAL or Wilber or Adi Da, it's no use to us at all to have everyone around us adopting our viewpoint, it's only of use for keeping our own illusions alive and thriving. And that isn't something we should aspire to. It's something we should inspect and see the error of our ways in, and repent from.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that no one should write or talk about their ideas and views. I have no objection to Wilber writing books and making a healthy living doing so. But to make that into a business, a movement, with an agenda and a whole money-making institutional culture behind it, is a big mistake. In my view, Wilber should simply end this entire Integral Institute and every associated enterprise, and just do what he does best, which is read books and write about them and have lots of friends who do the same. Anything real that comes out of his writings is simply going to occur organically, and naturally, and on the strictly personal level. not according to some business plan. Real human cultures and cultural movements don't occur by design. They happen spontaneously and unexpectedly. Any social movement that happens by design is just boring and conventional and as meaningless as a corporate logo.