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BOOMERITIS BASICS

The roots of boomeritis go back several hundred years in cultural history. About four hundred years ago, human beings at the forefront of consciousness development looked away from God and began to look in the mirror. This marked the end of the traditional era, during which the world's great religions—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam—were founded and flowered. We tried to create a loophole in our contract with the Divine. This was the distinguishing move of the modern age, when humankind—led by the West—tore itself away from traditional structures of earthly and spiritual authority and began to develop a self-based authority of reason, science, and the mind. We quested for knowledge, sought independence, and created, particularly in the West, an unparalleled prosperity through technological innovation, developing a middle class insulated from the pressures of physical survival. But in the process, we diminished and destroyed the role of the sacred in human life, thereby reducing ourselves to material, rather than spiritual, beings. We denied our debt to an intelligence or force far beyond ourselves. We created Flatland—a world devoid of depth and transcendence. Now as we hurtle through a postmodern world that is changing faster than we can imagine, the modernist belief in the omnipotence of reason and the mind is proving to be an illusion. The pluralism of cultures, races, and perspectives has raised questions of rights and truth. We advocated for equality and, in the process, made Truth into truths—our different experiences of life became the ground for equal and, therefore, relative truths. Reducing Truth to our own personal, subjective experience made pluralism, as Wilber says, "a supermagnet for narcissism." This is the spiritual dilemma of boomeritis: we've allowed our creative minds to rob the Divine of Truth and put our subjective experience in its place. The loophole has turned out to be a noose.

Of course, being smart postmodern types, we already know that the spiritual dimension is missing from Western culture. That's why so many of us have stepped onto the spiritual path or cultivated forms of living that arise from care or concern for the welfare of the oppressed. We've collected the great wisdom teachings from the entire world and turned inward to contemplate our deeper nature. Okay, great. But where deeper are we looking? I vividly remember a conversation with my own spiritual teacher when I was clearly holding myself back from a new momentum that was occurring in the larger body of students. In our life together here, in this laboratory of evolution, the demand is to individually and collectively surrender to the evolutionary impulse. Leaning toward a perfect union between the one and the many, both in our work and in direct collective investigation, a dynamic positivity and unlimited possibility open up when each participant brings him- or herself fully to this exploration beyond the known. I was refusing to participate in an authentic way. "You have no idea what it is that I am teaching," my teacher told me. "You have no idea what is going on here, what it is that I am trying to do. Everything that you know is conceptual—it's all concepts and it isn't real." He was right. I had grabbed with my mind and conceptualized the very real experience of something thrillingly and terrifyingly new that was emerging among us. I thought I knew, and that placed me in a conceptual universe that is a false and sterile parallel to the reality that was being created and shared. I was stopping transformation by creating my own truth, something personal, out of the experience. This is the boomeritis gap, the division between a highly developed intellect and the fear-based self-protection where we often actually reside. Too often, when we think we're going deeper, we end up in a subjective mind-maze of concepts and personal experience. In other words, we're looking at what we know—which means that we are only looking at ourselves in a narcissistic mirror.

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. And Wilber makes very clear what the implications are of this subjective, or personal, turn on boomers' approach to the world. Rejecting both the traditionalists' God and the absolutist principles of scientific reasoning, the pluralistic mind leaves us only with our own inner, subjective experience as authority, as the ground for truth and action. Pretty frightening when you think of all of the mental and emotional debris that passes through us constantly! As Wilber explains, a number of "principles" of boomeritis pluralism flow from this subjective stance:

		Truth, then, being grounded in subjective experience, can only be relative.
		There are no grounds for judging another—because what they are doing might be "right for them."
		Hierarchy, or placing anyone's experience or authority above another's (especially one's own) experience, is a violation of what is true (that truth is only relative).
		The only way to determine what is good and true is by how it makes one feel; therefore, if something hurts one's feelings, then one has been wronged.

Ironically, the result has been a creepy cultural etiquette of niceness. When the only truth is what we feel, then hurting someone's feelings becomes a violation of truth, an affront to what is held holy—ourselves. The ground between us, the space for coming together, becomes a minefield. Locked in the righteous truth of our own personal, subjective world, we step lightly, cautiously, and pretend with each other. This emphasis on subjective experience doesn't lead to a culture of strong individuals who express the authority of their own experience—instead, the connection to one's true subjective experience erodes under the pretense of perfectly-kind-people personas.

Pluralists' fight for the rights of those excluded from modernism's promise has led, yes, to an empowerment and an opening of opportunity for so many. But at the same time, it has unwittingly created a climate where any aggrieved sensitive self can call his or her hurt feelings a personal foul, claim victim status, and seek redress in court (or at least demand health insurance coverage). A hallmark of narcissism is the inability to take responsibility, the intense need to find someone else to blame for one's problems. "The real tragedy" in all this, as Wilber notes, is that actual victims' "genuine grievances are trivialized by victim chic." While Wilber lays out how far we have gone to avoid responsibility—a man with a 60-inch waist suing the airlines for discrimination because he can't get his butt in the seats, the lawsuit against McDonald's because the take-out coffee was too hot, the endless support groups for every real and imagined trauma—his emphasis is on how deeply boomeritis has reached into Western culture. But my question is: what does this mean for the life of the spirit?