Spiritual Choices

Exerpts from Spiritual Choices-The Problem of Recognizing Authentic Paths to Inner Transformation


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Detachment is accorded great importance in many systems of spiritual practice. However, what is practiced as "detachment" in the contemporary American context frequently represents the ego defense mechanisms of dissociation and repression, the splitting-off and "burial" of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.

Whereas true detachment is an aspect of real transcendence of the opposites of experience (pleasure and pain, success and failure), pseudo-detachment is merely a psychological coping device, and the confusion of the two - again, the mistaking of a psychological maneuver for an attribute of transcendent consciousness - is another example of the misinterpretation of spiritual teachings.

There are many specific forms of the confusion of detachment with dissociation and repression; here we consider two that illustrate how this confusion serves culturally dictated themes.

First is the confusion of detachment with indifference to the suffering of others, rationalized by interpreting suffering in terms of karmic laws; those who are suffering have, like all people, merited or "chosen" the conditions in which they find themselves, are themselves causing it, and will eventually learn to transcend or give up that causation and allow themselves to become happy and successful; but the process of first choosing and then giving up suffering is part of their karmic education, and is good for them in the long run.

Therefore, enlightened people who observe others suffering have no moral or spiritual obligation to help relieve them of it. In fact, it would be detrimental to them to do so. This form of pseudo-detachment fosters callousness and indifference to the people with whom one is competing. It is a cultural adaptation to the capitalist competitive environment.

The detachment of the fully enlightened master who perceives the karmic dynamics directly is different. The master never withdraws from participating in the suffering of those whom he or she is viewing. Whenever possible the master aids in the resolution of the karmic dilemmas in which the sufferer is stuck. The master's genuine detachment allows full involvement in all circumstances, and the master's transcendent view of the situation and altruistic participation in it resolves the apparent contrast between detachment and active benevolence. The follower who allows thoughts about karma to serve as the rationale for indifference to the sufferings of his or her fellows is practicing an epistemological sleight of hand by claiming an existential point of view which is not, in fact, authentic for him or her.

The follower's own consciousness is still heavily conditioned by pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. An honest orientation would involve concern and empathy for the suffering of others and, while accepting suffering as a result of karma, would view karmic determination as a process that one is not yet able to fully understand or apply to the problem of suffering.

The (integral) aspirant should, in response to honest feelings, work to relieve the suffering of others while continuing efforts to understand both suffering and karmic determinism, but should not claim more understanding on the basis of a (univocal) grasp of the words (of the spiritual teachings) than his or her existential condition warrants. Only when karmic determinism permeates the followers apprehension of his or her situation should he or she view others primarily through this lens.

Detachment can also be confused with a particular kind of indifference to ones personal situation. In this case the pseudo-detachment involves "living in the moment" and adjusting to any material situation, in the same apparent way that a master does. One is "detached" from self-concern and gives up trying to play or organize life in the temporal, material, rational fashion. This strategy legitimizes cultural alienation, and it attempts to avoid the anxiety inherent in conventional responsibilities and commitments. It readily masquerades as detachment from worldly ambition and money, and as "living in the present". But this reaction against commitment does not represent "being in the present" in a mystical sense.

For one who has not attained transcendent reality, pretended indifference to personal circumstances involves the repression of appropriate, real concerns. The resulting despair and insecurity require further repression, often achieved through immersion in increasingly intense experience such as various kinds of conflict (political causes, rebellion against authority figures), alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, or violence - all to avoid the emotional difficulty of having to master the practical skills of a material and social world in which one feels alienated. But real self-concerns cannot be disowned or transcended by rendering them unconscious. They must consciously be considered if they are to be eventually transcended.

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The freedom of the genuine master appears closely linked to his detachment, which remains unshaken in every material situation because of his inner contact with the source of all satisfaction. Seen through limited sensibilities, the radical detachment of the authentic master may be translated into the belief that the master is happy and satisfied because he or she can control or have power over material circumstances and arrange them to a preferred pattern.

This interpretation implies that a measure of the disciple's spiritual development is his or her ability to achieve vocational preferences and make money - an identification of spiritual virtue with worldly status, but in a different way than in the "Protestant ethic," which stresses material and emotional asceticism as instrumental to success.

The confusion of detachment with potency involves the attempt to control circumstances by dropping all judgment and practicing an open, "detached" attention. In a way, this is a variation on the approach to going beyond good and evil: one suspends judgment of good or bad as an aid to improving perception of the actual situation and acquires control over it by initially giving in, by yielding and blending harmoniously rather than attempting to impose one's will or judgment. Only then does one see how to exert force or influence and change the situation.

Thus in the confusion of detachment with potent attachment, there is a relative degree of detachment in service of basic aims to which one is nevertheless attached. The fallacy lies not in the procedure itself - as an elegant modus operandi, it has its charms - but in the idea that any of this constitutes the true detachment of spiritual transcendence. True detachment means unshakable inner poise in the midst of the most intense action and in the face of the gravest disasters. It requires a profound transcendence of self-interest, which is not true of the procedure of harmonious efficacy described above.

Moreover, in blending with a material situation which happens to be degraded, one easily becomes degraded oneself, and ones supposed mastery over the situation may be pure illusion. Such mastery or control can be a disguised or deluded surrender to ones base self, reminiscent of what Freud described as rationalization and Marx described as false consciousness, an opiate, an agent of alienation. "Detachment" in service of potent attachment becomes a new way of rationalizing participation in an alienating, competitive social milieu - again, adaptation rather than transcendence, the basic dualistic fallacy.

From the introduction-

As a specific example of how the cultural change has altered attitudes and colors our view of spiritual involvement, let us consider the particular issue of authority. Until recently paternalism (and now more commonly in the 21^st century maternalism) was the dominant style of authority in Western industrialized countries. Paternalism operates within the success ethic, a framework in which one's position in the status system is taken as indicative of one's degree of moral virtue. Individuals grant authority to people who are higher up in the system's hierarchy (21^st century maternalism in the West also seems to follow the same pattern).

Because they assume that the attitude of higher-ups toward those lower in status is benevolent, they regard higher-ups as similar to benevolent fathers (or mothers) to whom obedience is owed and from whom, if they are obedient, will come benevolent attention to their well-being. This hierarchical status system is objective in the sense that it operates accordingly to well-defined criteria, known to all concerned, which state who has authority relative to whom, and who is, and who is not, owed obedience by whom.

In contrast to the scheme of paternalist (and maternalist) authority, autonomous authority develops within a subjectivist or existential value system. Here it is assumed that people generate their own sense of the meaning of things. Objective authority cannot exist in such a value system since meaning has become subjective. An implicit assumption about what is meaningful does, however, inform this framework: that it is meaningful to find meaning, to create and sustain a sense of meaningfulness of one's own existence.

And so people come to value not their position within the status system, but their capacity to find meaning in life and to give their own style of being in the world integrity and internal coherence. The social status system is now based upon shifting impressions of a persons capacity to be self-sufficient - not to need or be dependent upon other people to tell one the meaning of things, but rather to find meanings within one's own holistic, inner process. The bottom line is that people gain authority in their own interactions with others to the extent that they seem autonomous and free from the need for other people.

The shift from paternalistic (and maternalistic) to autonomous authority has been occurring for a long time, first in artistic and intellectual circles, followed by dissemination into the popular value system in ever-widening circles, until finally, in the 1960s, there came a critical transition, and what had been the perspective of small subcultures became a mass perspective, and continues to be so. Spiritual seeking in the new religions occurs within the context of this societal shift from paternalistic to autonomous authority, and in many groups the seeking is largely a search for that capacity to find meaning autonomously, within one's own experience, rather than having meaning conferred externally.

Yet in practice autonomous authority is often extremely shallow and based upon nothing more than one's choice to act as if one had it. In its shallow versions, the striving for autonomous authority involves group members in a game of continuous oneupmanship, with each individual trying to appear less needy and impressively to have "gotten one's act together." This leads to a sense of isolation and a feeling that people cannot be open and honest about their uncertainties, human frailties, emotional needs, and woes - in short, about their present state of development, with all its limitations. People need some way of relating to a source of knowing that goes beyond what they already possess, and they need to be open about that need.

The issue then becomes how people can admit to having that healthy need and seek help without opening themselves up to manipulation and exploitation by those who are merely pretending to have achieved genuine autonoumous authority. In other words, the seekers dilemma is how to continue to develop autonomous authority and to get help from someone who has a greater degree of truly autonomous authority than does the seeker. The seeker has to sail between the Scylla of groups in which the search for autonomous authority is believed futile and is therefore relinquished in favor of group identity and submission to paternalistic authoritarianism, and the Charybdis of groups in which members are educated in the simulation of real autonomy, generating not autonomy but aloofness, atomistic individualism, and existential isolation.

How does a seeker recognize and search out assistance from someone who has become truly autonomous by realizing his or her own ultimate self or being? For that is the state of true, radical autonomy, which achieves both independence and benevolence toward the seeker without paternalism (or maternalism), without requiring the seeker to define himself as "one-down" in order to merit the helping relationship. The authentic spiritual master supports the seekers development toward attaining the same real autonomy the master enjoys. Our shifting cultural images of autonomy, however, more often than not are shallow caricatures that fail to have any vital relation to this true autonomy. Compared to these caricatures, the process of attaining genuine autonomy with the help of an authentic spiritual master can seem to lead in quite the wrong direction.

The cultural transition from positivist-objectivist-collectivist ways of determining the meanings of things to holist-subjectivist-individualist ways involves an epistemological revolution, a qualitative change in how we know. The new, epistemological individualist world-view plus the new spiritually pluralistic environment have produced a new salvation dilemma, namely, that of finding one's own spiritual path, subjectivistically, from amongst a wide range of psychospiritual systems, strategies, and personalities.

The new salvational dilemma has been put into bold relief by a steady sequence of problematic developments - first the rise of psychedelic utopianism with its mistaken reliance on hallucinogenic drugs to produce a personal and social world of love and freedom; then the dramatic eruption of leadership pathology in groups such as the San Francisco Psychosythesis group, Synanon, and the People's Temple; plus ongoing controversies over the methods of est, Scientology, Reverend Moon, Guru Maharaji, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, to name a few. The distinctive problems of the epistemologically individualist world-view have emerged in a wide range of groups, some of which have been particularly problematic or controversial.