BOOMERITIS OF THE SPIRIT

Let's start with the culture of victimization. Truly, anyone who has been victimized (which does, in some ways, include all of us) knows that the effect is to humiliate one's spirit, to violate one's dignity as a human being. Imagine, then, the cost to the soul of clutching onto victimization—of choosing this stance for oneself. What does this say about our relationship to the sacred gift of life? And yet, I know all too well how strong is the desire to be a victim and not take responsibility for the life I have been given. When I was confronted with the demand to come to a deeper reckoning, to drop my own narcissism and participate fully in the creative force of life in communion with my spiritual sisters and brothers, I would not let go into this forward-rushing current that was carrying everyone beyond the edge of the known. A sense of a whole was emerging in the group, allowing for a fearless collective exploration of the entire gamut of the human condition as ourselves. In true boomeritis fashion, I could see the processes of my mind and the myriad ways that I was holding on. In fact, I was narcissistically fascinated by it all. Then an insidious little thought crept into consciousness: "Maybe there is something wrong with me—I am just too damaged by my past, maybe therapy could help me to find out what is holding me back." Hooking into the soft underbelly of the narcissistic ego that refuses to take responsibility for life, I gave this thought more and more weight. Pushed to choose—where did I stand?—I was willing to trade six years with my teacher and the possibility of leaping into a wholly new dimension of life for the safety of the therapist's couch and the endless exploration of everything that I already knew. It became very clear: I wanted to be a victim. Yes, there was something "wrong" with me: I wasn't willing to change. I didn't want to take responsibility for what my heart knew and recognized to be a good greater than myself. I set myself above the call to evolve that is humanity's potential salvation by collapsing into the undignified slouch of the victim.

Seeking salvation in the mirror of our minds is a boomeritis trick that allows us to not change while being endlessly involved in thinking about change as if it were the real thing. The intensely subjective self, which gives ultimate priority and authority to our thoughts and feeling states, leads to a corruption of the entire aim of spiritual life. The purpose of spiritual life, the reason to seek, is reduced to wanting to feel better. In a word: bliss. In two words: no stress. Now, while the recognition that life is suffering is what led the Buddha to his realization, Buddha's concern was humanity. The boomeritis concern is also humanity—meaning myself. Boomeritis spirituality is almost entirely concerned with the feeling states, and even the omnipotence, of the separate sense of self. The truth is subjective, remember? That means that I am the ultimate authority. I am the guide to my own awakening and to how far I have come on the spiritual path—because my progress on the path is related to the nifty spiritual experiences that I have and to how I feel. Who can tell, other than me? So, I don't need a teacher or any outside authority. And, in fact, don't all of the wisdom teachings say that my fundamental nature is Divine? Hey, I mean, we're all already enlightened, right? Well, maybe . . . but certainly not in the way that boomeritis spirituality uses such hard-won spiritual truths. The result is total self-acceptance—of the good, the bad, and the ugly in human nature—not out of some higher realization of equanimity but out of a lack of discrimination or care for anything other than one's own feelings. (You see, having to confront oneself and really change doesn't feel good and it's not easy.)

This distortion of spiritual truth by narcissism leads to a flatland spirituality, devoid of real transcendence, that is barely different from someone's life who is not on the path or doing spiritual practice. But there is one critical difference. The seeker infected with boomeritis feels good about him- or herself, and superior to others, because of having a spiritual identity and being such a spiritual person. As Wilber writes, "The essential feature... is the process of relabeling. That is, you take your present egoic state and learn to constantly relabel it as spiritual, divine, and sacred—relabel your ego as the Goddess, relabel it as the sacred Self, relabel it as the divine Web of Life.... One ends up relabeling the subtlest reaches of the ego as Divine, and that is the new spiritual paradigm." In other words, the Web of Life becomes a web of lies. This process of relabeling, and the emphasis on feeling, within boomeritis spirituality tries to turn the sacred into something that we can have and claim for our own narcissistic desires. And Wilber's point holds for far more than what we call the New Age. This relabeling of the ego and its motives as spiritual can corrupt all forms of spiritual pursuit.


BOOMERITIS & ME

For me, boomeritis set down its deepest roots in my identification with having been part of the movement for women's liberation for twenty-some years. I marched for women's rights, explored feminist consciousness-raising, researched girls' and women's development, wrote with great passion about women's predicament and the possibilities of radical transformation in women's lives. Part of what pluralism allows, for each of us, is the creation of our own personal ideology. But, in a spiritual context calling for real change, the entire realm of personal identification has to be transcended. When the current of evolutionary intimacy began to pull us toward deeper and higher levels of spiritual communion, I was faced with the very real possibility to live what I have always said I wanted most in my life—to meet other women, heart-to-heart, in liberation beyond gender. But that identity that I clung to, my narcissistic desire to see myself as "the person who cares for women," became a barbed-wire fence between me and other women. "What is working against you now, what is your enemy," a friend told me in the middle of this crisis, "is your attachment to your intelligence, your mind, and your passion, your history of believing in women's liberation. You have to let all of it go." The surface integrity that I had presented to the world as my identity cracked and blistered up like cheap linoleum. And the floor revealed beneath it was rotten. Underneath the good intentions of the caring feminist was an intense desire to avoid being like other women. Ironically, the desire to not be like other women, the desire to be the special and only one, is one of the key building blocks of woman's ego. Holding myself as superior to women, and censoring my own experience because it would have only revealed what I did not want to see about myself, not only meant that the freedom of true communion was impossible, but also kept me prisoner in the fortress of self-image, fearful of my own thoughts and impulses. I didn't want to be left simply with my experience stripped of the ideas and conclusions about myself that I had used to keep the world, and now the hearts of women, at bay. And in that, I stood against the revolutionary possibility that was the light I had followed throughout my entire life.

Now, if you tune your ear and listen carefully, beneath the desperate concern for self-image, the cry of the false victim, the relabeling of all experience as divine, the antipathy toward hierarchy and authority, beneath all the basics of boomeritis spirituality, the true boomeritis mantra sounds loud and clear: Nobody tells me what to do! We have become so well-versed in the wisdom traditions, have read so much, and have conveniently translated our egoic mind's experience into the appropriate spiritual categories—it is readily apparent how and why these powerful ideas (about me!) are such a magnet for narcissism. In fact, when laid out this way, this can be easy to see and to find even rather amusing—yes, such narcissism, what folly, ha ha. But in the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

For myself, the longer I refused to see the truth of what I was actually doing—and resided in that boomeritis state where only my feelings matter—the more apparent it became that the force in us that says Nobody tells me what to do! is actually frighteningly dangerous. The narcissistic ego is primitive—and decidedly destructive. But its pure destructiveness only became clear over the course of this crisis. At first, in meetings with my spiritual sisters where we explored the potential of evolution for women, my voice was hollow and insincere as I pretended to be on top of things, desperately trying to remain in control in a situation where we were all stepping into the unknown. Afterward, they asked me to recognize the choices I was making and urged me to experience the liberation of the truth. "It's true," they said, "the truth will set you free." From behind the hard wall of narcissistic self-protection, I paid lip service to what they said—with my strong mind I could see that it was true—but I avoided any real reckoning with what I was doing and the implications of it all. "You sound really angry," my sisters told me. "You just hate seeing that you are not perfect and that you care more right now about your self-image than you do about women's liberation." No, I'm not angry, I kept insisting with a smile that betrayed a hideous delight in my own defiance, why should I be angry when I already know that this is what I am doing, I already know what you are pointing to, I know it all. Insisting on my own sincerity and feeling intensely victimized, I experienced flashes of rage and even hatred that I chose to ignore. As I continued, refusing simply to see in myself the entirety of the human condition, my inner division became increasingly stark—at times I could feel something flying through me, a wind that bears darkness. In this division that I was insisting on preserving, I found myself sabotaging my work, ignoring simple instructions, to the point that I wondered if I was going mad. Like the female demons in the movie Devil's Advocate, my smiling, caring face began to feel like a thin veneer over a monstrous force that only wanted to rip apart all that I knew was dear and sacred. I was out of control: Nobody tells me what to do!