My manual for psychological and spiritual growth, the Three Stages of Awakening, has caused some confusion... or perhaps revealed some. The model states that we have to work through our personal material, open up to the heart of authenticity and compassion, and from this solid base enter spiritual life seriously, if we are inclined. This is a rough summary. I have left out many details (see my books, especially Your Essential Self and the forthcoming Human Awakening). Now some people are noticing that this model doesn't fit them and so questioning whether the model is valid.

This reminds us of the old Jewish tailor story where a man goes to a famous New York tailor to have a suit made for him. When he tries on the suit it doesn't fit at all. The tailor then adjusts the man's body and posture, insisting the suit is fine; it's simply how the man is standing, and if he stands in the contorted way the tailor suggests, the suit fits perfectly!

I am not trying to get you to fit my model. On the contrary I suggest that you don't try fitting any model but your own unique one. I myself don't fit my own model. When you write books on psycho-spiritual growth of necessity you have to generalize. This means that you tend toward addressing readers in their "every(wo)man" guise, because you are talking to the general world population. Many of us don't fit this profile. We are unconventional, unpredictable, and unusual.

Nonetheless, the Three Stages of Awakening may serve as a manual and provide a clarifying model. It may help you to understand if not yourself then others. It may help you to empathize, resonate, and be compassionate.

In particular, the issue of awakening or spiritual breakthrough is thought by some to challenge my model. If you have spiritual experiences and yet you have not fully processed the psychological baggage from your early childhood what should you do? Return from your awakening to psychological work or forsake the psychology and reside in your awakening?

My answer is this: Either is possible; either may work. There can be no hard and fast rule about this. However if you are not sure because your life is somewhat confused or unhappy; if there is still bewilderment, uncertainty, and neurosis, then in all likelihood I advise you to return to psychological work to clear the ground and provide a firm base for your awakening. If, however, you are able to let go and truly relinquish attachments to your early life, and processing is no longer necessary, pass on... pass on and over it all, be free and joyful, and live the fruits of your present awakening.

The first of these is the most likely course. People today are psychologically complex; much more complex than the ancient Indian mind was for example. Therefore we need new manuals—manuals like my books Your Essential Self and Human Awakening to instruct, clarify, and show how much we have to deal with in order to awaken. We must prepare the ground and work for a strong foundation. For those few who hear the call and whose destiny is spiritual even before the psychological work is completed, flicker happily between the two worlds and teach others out of your uniqueness. You are the totality of life itself, one with God, one with Consciousness. There is no seeking and no search, for you are already here.

BLOG entry #30

You must learn to not be enslaved by your mind. When your mind produces a desire, a fulfillment, an outcome, you move toward it. If you don't move toward it physically you move toward it mentally, energetically, or emotionally.

You are enslaved by thought, enslaved by the ego, enslaved by desire.

Instead of reacting to desire, try being with desire. Simply roll it around without acting on it or resisting it. Watch carefully what happens in you physically, emotionally, energetically, mentally, spiritually. Watch very carefully indeed and ask yourself what is the nature of desire, what is it really at its very essence.

When you have fathomed this you have fathomed the source of the ego-self, the stunted growth of past reference and fear itself. When you have fathomed it you have gone to the substance of bondage so that the road to liberation is laid before you.

BLOG entry #29

Some spiritual teachers criticize others and some are tolerant and accepting. Everything in the realms of space and time is subject to distinction, to diversity and variety. This is the condition of the relative world -- an enormous spread of uniqueness. Not one human identical to any other, not one tree exactly the same as another, not even a single sand grain that is not unique and individual.

Spiritual teachers will not -- do not -- come out with the same methods and teachings for spiritual life. There is always diversity. This diversity does not have to be compared and contrasted with another in a competition of appraisal and judgment. The ways may not even be equally valid. However, they may all be helpful and acceptable to others.

The mind of pure intention and love conveys you along a road, a path to lighten your suffering, to increase your wisdom and your emptiness. Lessen, lessen, lessen -- the true way is the way of loss.

Much has been made of this business of transcending samsara, of combating the ego, of working with fear and desire. For some this is an incremental progressive path of sustaining loss in the material world and therefore "gain" in spiritual realms -- over time.

But for others the transformation is instantaneous. How is it possible that something that takes so long can be granted instantaneously in another case?

It depends on the thickness, the density of delusion. There is another place, a place of purity, compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, and contentment. It may contrast acutely with your present state. You may not be able to see, experience, or even believe in it while you are in your present state, bound by delusion. Yet for others, this has never not been the case. For the Truth is a constant. Therefore there is, in the strict sense, no journey to it at all. No progressive practice or incremental growth or development applies to something that exists and is closer to you than your very self.

Reality surrounds you. In the source-less field of Truth happiness and contentment, the urge toward devotional and non-conditional compassion and awareness, pervades the experience-less domain of the Divine.

Stop now! As you lessen thoughts, feelings, worries, planning, and awareness of the physical and energetic bodies, allow your consciousness to extend in all directions to the very outer reaches of time and space. Allow yourself to take in and merge together with all that ever was, is, and will be... beyond space, beyond time, beyond the feeling of being a self even. You are it: you are the totality.

BLOG entry #28

Thinking is the separation and division of the world. It is synonymous and continuous with the ego-I, the self-sense and inherent in thought is judgment, evaluation, prejudice, and preference.

The heart embraces and welcomes. It does not divide or separate. Everything is dissolved in the heart, drowned in love and healing and forgiveness.

We have been trained in the ways of thought. Thinking is inherent and emphasized in our education, in the news media and entertainment, in our family relationships and professional lives. Thinking has been considered superior to feeling; intellect over emotions.

The self-sense or ego comes from a fundamental need or requirement of early life. That requirement is to become someone, an identifiable form or vehicle for the spirit and the soul through life. However, the vehicle becomes an end in itself. We are so proud and so attached to the vehicle we have forgotten what is it meant for and what it conveys.

The source of all violence and cruelty, war and conflict, meanness and greed, hate and blame is the self-identification. Without ego and self-identification we understand our deep resonance and connection with all creation -- the birds, the trees, animal life, and people of other nationalities, races, and religions. Without the fundamental self idea there is no division, no separation. Cultivated wisely and thoroughly, peace, cooperation, and tolerance can only come about through the deep understanding of ourselves beyond the vehicle state. The vehicle is merely the vehicle when the honored guest arrives in a vehicle you receive the guest considerately, with joy and welcome, with enquiries for their welfare and their present needs. You make them comfortable, you open your door, you set the table for refreshments. You do not merely clean their car!

What if humanity, each human individually, looked deeply into the creation of their ego-vehicle and explored thoroughly the conditions of early life through which their vehicle was a necessary construct for survival? What if each individual learned to forsake their sense of interpretation and thinking mind, evaluation and judging mind, and instead emphasized the heart, the well-spring of wholeness, well-being, and forgiveness, peace, tranquility, and contentment? What if instead of listening to politicians, church leaders, nationalistic factions, unrest and evil in the world, bigotry and prejudice, atrocities, and inhuman behavior, we withdrew to the very source of ourselves, one by one individually, and filled with a joyful responsibility for ourselves and the well/being of all others?

What if through relinquishing the self-sense we realized that we all are Consciousness, all God, all Satchitananda, Brahman, the Cosmic Buddha, the Great Spirit... with no separation, no division, no difference at all?

BLOG entry #27

This week I saw one of those glittery videos of smiling happy people singing the praises of a handsome young spiritual teacher and asserting his transforming qualities and authentic transmission. The overall message seemed to be exclusivity and you'd be a fool not to be here. It's not difficult to edit up the message to emphasize this kind of thing – positivity, if you're not here you're a fool kind of idea. Everyone is so handsome and beautiful, the clothes they wear are so comfortable, flowing, and sensual, the palm trees wafting in the gentle warm breeze... well, you get the picture.

Funny thing was that back in the 1980s (violins here to denote those halcyon times he keeps going on about... in his old age), we did a video or two and one in particular comes to mind, stirred by this lush video I saw this week.

We brought a guy called Elmer in to shoot a workshop – some exchanges, pieces of individual work with me, some group process – to capture the ambience and the atmosphere of what at that time was just about still a novelty of sorts: the consciousness-raising therapy group. Somewhere around the middle of this four-hour presentation of uncut footage Elmer had had the urge to interview the participants. Intoxicated by new awareness and in touch with their bodyminds, emotions, and spiritual energies they parade before his camera to tell him how great it all is, how wonderful psycho-spiritual therapy is, and how incredible I am.

Now it would not be a hard task to edit this into the glowing video style of polished presentation I saw this week. Some of these participants I still know after nearly thirty years. We have grown and lived together, learned from each other, and transformed and changed according to our various tendencies.

In contrast perhaps, one of the participants interviewed in the video I saw last week has fallen out with her spiritual teacher and courageously written a BLOG revealing that she has moved on (although not why she has). I find this interesting. Glowing, transported with delight, and bathing in the teacher's light one minute and off along the spiritual highway the next. The truth is that it's not hard to be transported, impressed with dazzling smiles and energetic enthusiasm for a weekend, a week, or even a month of a special event, especially when it is a special spiritual happening. But when you get back to your "ordinary" life and you suffer the comedown, the depression that corresponds to the elation, that is the time we want to see the real video, isn't it? When the suffering begins again is when the reality of the teaching may be shown.

Authentic spiritual teaching is not materialistic, either in the sense of getting you the objects you want in your life, like cars, money, and relationships. But neither is it materialistic in the sense of making you merely temporarily happy or elated. Much of the psycho-spiritual journey is hard work, grueling, and it is, as I often point out, characterized by loss, loss, and more loss.

This isn't to say that there isn't happiness along the way. Joy and elation are very much a part of the unfolding journey... as is angst, desolation, and despair. But something in me feels averse to these portrayals of quasi-bliss. Isn't there something cheap and demeaning about these commercial characterizations of supposed spirituality, something deceptive and manipulative? Don't they presuppose a kind of gullibility in us, as if we are just looking for a fix, a bright, sensual, exotic location with mystical, ritualistic overtones? Aren't we being fooled into believing that the handsome teacher in the lush location with the fawning devotees is somehow the real deal?

Perhaps I am just a bit too long in the tooth now. I have seen this kind of thing come and go. Bhagwan, Andrew Cohen, Ramesh Balsekar, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, and a plethora of lesser gurus. Each of us could have and some of us have gone for the lush presentation, enticing seekers to us, seducing the spiritually needy into acquiescence. The seduction of enlightenment and the seeker's complete inability to reach, understand, interpret, or envision it, puts a great deal of power in the hands of the spiritual teacher.

Since how far back we don't know, but surely a very long way, the taking of power over the seeker has been practiced; it is certainly prevalent, perhaps commonplace. We notice too that, as time passes, trespasses are forgiven. For example, it appears to be alright now that Neem Karoli Baba (Ram Dass's guru Maharajji) slept with female disciples and/or assaulted them physically, that Osho acted in ways that have made others sex criminals, that Muktananda had impotent cursory sex with a long line of disciples, that Drukpa Kunley initiated female disciples through sexual intercourse, and Zen Master Ikkyu wrote poetry from his experiences of "sipping a beautiful woman's love juices."

We may doubt the veracity of some of these claims, but it is surely impossible to doubt them all. We might not be clear about the morality when the enlightened master asserts that his "transmission" comes through the introduction of his sexual organ into a young woman's vagina. We may make a distinction between say a disc jockey raping a teenage girl and being vilified and a Tibetan Lama doing the same thing and being lauded.

We are speaking here of the desire body. If the enlightened state requires some abstinence or abandonment of desire, then what do we make of these so-called enlightened beings who surreptitiously proceed to satiate their lust?

Romance, sex, and good looks abound in the implied or actual promises made about spirituality. After all sex and the spirit are either end of the human energy system from the root chakra to the crown chakra. This presentation that I saw reminded me of our gullibility, of our superficiality, and it made me sick at heart. Instead of scrubbed clean people gushing over their handsome guru, how about images of genuine tenderness of human connection and intimacy, compassion, unselfconscious beauty, and images which are not so very obviously intended to manipulate and seduce?

Inherent in this kind of presentation is disappointment. The vagaries, the ordeal, the tests and trials of the spiritual path are truly so very horrible, challenging, and momentous that showing this much frothiness is tantamount to misrepresentation. I abhor the hypocrisy of it and the appeal to the lowest aspects of human energy and aspiration.

BLOG entry #26