Where do we find ourselves? Where do we find our Self? Where do we stand in the individual spiritual search? Where so we stand at all?
Two Steams of Spirituality
There are currently two school of inner growth and spirituality.
The first aims to bring happiness, success and fulfilment through the healing arts. Often this involves liberating a person from patterns, habits, traumas and damaging attachments in order to heal the “person”. Such an approach is reflected in the very word “healing”, which suggests that the person is broken, that it can be repaired, preserved or sustained.
The second stream of modern spirituality comes from the premise that person-hood itself is nothing other than a configuration of trauma-based attachments, identifications, patterns and habits. Therefore, this stream, today found most popularized through the nonduality movements, aims to liberate us from person-hood itself, through the windows of perception and into a space that both precedes and survives mental programs, identification and attachment.
Nothing New, Always New
This split is as old as history, reflected through all religions in the rift between the healers and the mystics, or between those that attempt to institutionalize spiritual teaching through the founding of religions or organizations, and those that seek to transcend or liberate individuals from both individual and collective identifications.
How much freedom can be gained from the struggle to become the ultimate “someone”, the unique individual, empowered and all-healed? Witness the birth of the meta-ego: identified with the light, often co-dependent on a field of bliss generated by a chosen spiritual teacher, secretly competitive and only half happy.
On the other hand, how much freedom can be gained from the struggle to become the ultimate “no-one”, non-identified, non-attached and non-engaged with the very flesh and blood substance of being here? Observe the arrival of the meta-anti-ego: whip-lashing from life and responsibility through the pornification of a person-breaking experience, and bitterly repeating and dictating this experience to the “others” that could not be “other ” if the advertised freedom had been truly attained.
In no time and with a contraction of space, spiritual inspiration can fall into power-based schools and institutions postulating under feigned equality. In no time, and with a total loss of space, competition, cruelty, self-obsession, jealousy and arrogance raise their (now so “spiritual”) claws.
From the healing arts to the world of nonduality; from the fulfilled everything of the Someone, through the emptiness of the Noone, a deafening message is sounding through the acoustic deaf-spot.
It is not about being Someone. It is not about being No-one. It is about being ONE. The undeniable fact of unity.
The awakening of the 21st century Western individual
“Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else.” – Krishnamurti
Beyond undeniable mortality and vulnerability to random disease and the inevitable suffering of life-blows, there are currently seven billion people on the planet and a kind of miracle is occurring. This miracle is the emergence of the individual.
Individuality no longer has to be caught in a polarity with conformity to social or religious norms. It is no longer defined by belonging to any particular tribe or country. It is still (and always will be) amorphous, transient, unstable and unable to locate. Yet, there is a shift to a middle way, in which it is possible to be free of the “person” while healing the “person”; through which the healing of the person entails the liberation from the person; through which freedom means the freedom to be here as someone, but that within a someone that is in no way separate, definitive or identified as having anything to do with the source of who we are.
The “nondual” individual, will find himself or herself sooner or later in pain. Sooner or later, they will seek healing from the pain that binds them, in order to be free even of the absolute grip of person-hood. If they do not do this, life will break the person until they find that they were always, already free.
The healers, sooner or later, will find that their healing of the person is an endless job, transferring one contracted identification onto the next, swapping the drive of the ego for the drive to catch the ego of the teacher. Sooner of later, life will bring them to a space where the healing of the “person” fails and they begin to understand that they were always, already healed.
Across the planet, a multitude of “people” are awakening from the trance of who they believed themselves to be, and a multitude more are being born that way. Through work with good teachers or bad, they come to a space where the gut of individual responsibility or responsivity, produces a natural and transient emanation of personhood which is of service to the whole, with which the unity becomes increasingly seamless. They do not depend on authorities. They do not depend on the appreciation or acclaim of others.
Above all, they are not afraid. The age of possession and fear; the age of belief in the supremacy of separation is passing.
These are the ones that will one day march in my region, Jew, Moslem and Christian, will march in peace – fearless, and in affirmation of the greatest prize of all – standing as a human being, here, awake, unpossessed and free.
Can you hear this call of freedom as it resonates through each individual, transient cell of these transient bodies of earth? Will you take space to surrender into it?
