You Say You Want a Revolution?

n. 1. an individual who has undergone a spiritual awakening deeply enough that it has permanently transformed their relationship to themselves and to reality, while allowing them to remain involved in ordinary life in a process which is evolutionary and endless.

The Translucent Revolution, p. 51

According to the numerous voices quoted on every page of The Translucent Revolution—which became a bestseller within just ten days of its release this past summer—there is a massive spiritual awakening happening right now among the most unlikely of individuals, in the most unlikely of places, all over the world. And if Ardagh's presentation is accurate, it would appear that as a result of this widespread revelation, a new class of Post-Neo-Advaita mystics has finally arrived.

Dubbed “translucents” by Ardagh, these new harbingers of spiritual liberation are, like the Neo-Advaitins, potentially everywhere among us. In fact, if you've ever had a spiritual experience or penetrated beyond the veil of duality into a glimpse of the nondual Self, you too may be a “budding translucent” without even knowing it. “Along with hundreds of writers and teachers,” Ardagh writes, “I've checked with dentists, hairdressers, housewives, and hoboes. I've asked politicians, drug dealers, and my tax consultant. I regularly ask whoever is sitting next to me on the plane. All over the world, from every imaginable background and system of belief, people report the trance of separation being broken.”

So what, exactly, are the characteristics of translucence? In the words of Ardagh:

Translucent people . . . have access to their deepest nature as peaceful, limitless, free, unchanging, and at the same time they remain fully involved in the events of their personal lives. . . . They play vigorously in their relationships with others, their work, their creativity, and their political and environmental causes, but they play to play more than to win. . . . They generally don't follow one particular teacher, teaching, or group, although many have in their past. . . . They generally don't identify themselves as “enlightened” or as having attained anything, and they are also not trying to become enlightened. . . . The word translucent refers to the degree of embodiment of a realization, not to what has been realized. Hence it is a relative term, like interesting, inspiring, boring, or idiotic.

Translucents, in other words, are those spiritual-but-not-religious individuals who have, at least to some degree, resolved the mystery of how to manifest the truth of nonduality in their daily lives. But Ardagh didn't begin the translucence phenomenon, he merely named it; for more than a decade, he studied the qualities of an emerging spiritual subculture that now numbers, according to Ardagh's interview with sociologist Paul Ray, “somewhere between one and two million people in the United States,” with a similar quantity in Europe. Ardagh elaborates: “Duane Elgin, another sociologist, has come to similar conclusions and is even more optimistic in his estimates. If researchers like Ray and Elgin are right, this is very significant and good news. It is this shift, in these kinds of numbers, to which every spiritual tradition has aspired.”

But before we release the confetti and break out the champagne, let's take a closer look at the contours of this “translucent revolution.” When did it begin? Where is it going? And just how revolutionary is it, anyway?

Flatland: Home of the Sensitive Selves

The Translucent Revolution, p. 40

Few would contest that the 1960s was a revolutionary decade, exploding with idealistic passion at every turn. With the en masse rebellion against the authoritarian status quo—represented by everything from the civil rights movement to animal rights, feminism, Vietnam War protests, and a truly remarkable indulgence in sex, drugs, and rock and roll—the events of that era changed the world forever. And they did so at the only level at which profound and lasting sociocultural change has ever occurred: the level of human consciousness.

The Boomer mind (aided, naturally, by LSD and Eastern philosophy) stretched itself toward a vision of humanity's higher potentials, which ushered an entirely new perspective into the Western world. Transcending the dogmatic strictures of premodern thought and dismissing the rigid, mechanistic simplicity of modernity, the Boomers cemented into our collective consciousness the postmodern worldview. This worldview, which defines all “liberal” and “progressive” thinking today, arises from a level of consciousness marked by an impressive capacity to consider multiple perspectives at once. Relativism, pluralism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism are among its many names, and in its extreme manifestations, it has also been called “flatland”—crushing, as only it can, all hierarchical distinctions and potentially offensive value judgments in the name of a compassionate and universal equality.

At its peak, this new consciousness was believed by many to represent the dawning of a “new age,” and in some ways that hopeful intuition has proved true. Over the past forty years, the postmodern worldview—and the social world it spawned—has given individual human beings more personal freedoms than any other sociocultural context in history. But at the same time, its emphasis on individual rights has resulted in an unprecedented fragmentation of traditional moral values, agreed-upon truths, and shared spiritual ideals. “Your truth/my truth” has become the clichéd but accurate refrain of our depth-deprived culture, as we all go about our lives with our own unique personalized belief systems, values, and identities in tow—bathed, as cultural critic Thomas de Zengotita puts it, in a “psychic sauna” of self-reflective multimedia and secure in the bubble of our easy isolation. Because of the self-obsessed and overinflated bubbles in which most people do abide, the typical postmodern citizen has often been described as a “sensitive self”: someone unusually respectful of the rights of others, yet easily offended, frequently victimized, and in constant need of affirmation to boost his or her self-esteem.

It is within this postmodern cultural climate, for better or worse, that The Translucent Revolution has arrived.

The Varieties of Postmodern Experience

The Translucent Revolution, p. 165

The Translucent Revolution obviously owes much to the sixties revolution, and seems to be the latest heir to at least two of the sixties' most enduring pop-cultural lineages: one that began with Thomas Anthony Harris's self-help megaseller I'm OK–You're OK and the other with Ram Dass's spiritual classic Be Here Now. Like Be Here Now, Ardagh's book skillfully points us back to our already-liberated Self beyond time, mind, and duality. And like I'm OK–You're OK, it epitomizes the postmodern worldview—unfortunately, even to the point of supporting the ultrarelativistic condition known as flatland and therefore catering effusively to the postmodern sensitive self.

Ardagh's essential premise is that human beings can transform in profound ways: first by awakening to our eternally perfect Self beyond the conditioned mind and body and then by continually cracking the hard shell of “Iago” (his Shakespeare-inspired term for the nasty and manipulative human ego) in order to allow that Self to shine with increasing brightness through more and more facets of our lives. We can learn to do this through various translucence-cultivating “Nudges” and “Try It Yourself” exercises that appear at the end of nearly every chapter. Surprisingly, however, the vast majority of these techniques are simply strategies of the kind one would expect to find in any postmodern self-help book, aimed to aid us in becoming kinder to others (and ourselves) while still accepting all of our personality quirks as perfectly fine just as they are. Believing that any motivation to transform the personality could only ever come from Iago—the narcissistic, false sense of self—Ardagh says, “Nudging . . . is more of an art form than a kind of psychotherapy. Feeling our personality to be essentially unfixable, we abandon any serious effort to improve it and instead recycle the parts to create art. Nudging is not for the 'me' but rather a way to loosen and melt this sense of separate 'me' so that inherent translucence can glow more brightly.”

But that's just the tip of The Translucent Revolution's sensitive-self-help iceberg. Consider, also, its many encouragements to “welcome your lost children [i.e., feelings] back home” while whispering “a quiet 'yes' under your breath”; or the detailed discussions of how we can learn to discover “real celebration of another”; or the endlessly soothing quality that pervades much of the text, particularly when it comes to dealing with the Iago within in order to become more translucent (“It is our family, friends, students, coworkers, even our cat, rabbits, and pet rats who help nudge us back into translucence every day. We ask them to. By the time you are done reading this book you will have many nudging games to play. . . . But puhleeze don't get too holy about it. We've all done that ad nauseam”).

Now, nudging games are all well and good, especially once the family pet gets involved, but before we play, can we at least agree on what the goal is? As Ardagh's treatise progresses through major chapters on translucent relationships, sex, parenting, art, education, business, health care, and religion, his conception of what “translucence” means gets increasingly broad and vague. While it initially indicates the tricky union of nondual simplicity with our messy human lives (“individual translucence”), it later ends up meaning little more than the ideal version of postmodern culture itself—the padded playground of the sensitive selves—freed from the corrupting influence of Iago (“collective translucence”). To Ardagh, a translucent world would be, in effect, a postmodern world purged of its more unsavory blemishes (including those bothersome remnants of premodern religion and modern capitalism—at least as we know them today). And because Ardagh fails to clearly distinguish any stages or levels of development in consciousness and society—such as premodern, modern, and postmodern—he doesn't seem to perceive the possibility of a radical transformation beyond the postmodern sensitive self, as though human beings have always been this way or will never progress any further.