NEO-ADVAITINS ANONYMOUS

“Work, family, busy schedules, relationships: all seemed to sabotage simplicity. . . . The situation was the same everywhere. The realization was incredibly easy; living it was the challenge.”
The Translucent Revolution, pp. 3-4

These days, we're all used to seeing Deepak Chopra's winning smile peeking out at us from the checkout lane of our local Stop & Shop. Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God and James Redfield's Celestine Prophecy seem to be pretty ubiquitous too—archetypes of spiritual-but-not-religious Americana. Still, despite their omnipresence, and despite whatever degree of spiritual merit they actually do possess, they can't quite prepare one for encountering a treatise about authentic “nondual” enlightenment for sale right next to the Twinkies and the Ho-Hos.

I'm referring to The Power of Now. Published a few years ago, but just recently released in paperback, German mystic Eckhart Tolle's lucid and accessible exegesis on the highest of spiritual attainments has sold over two million copies (sales that were due, in no small part, to Oprah Winfrey's 2002 televised endorsement of the book as one she has read eight times and keeps on her bedside table). The endless popularity of New Age and self-help books notwithstanding, these figures are surprising because Tolle's mystical manifesto is popularizing and conveying a level of spiritual depth that has typically remained inaccessible to all but a chosen few. In fact, with its constant emphasis on transcending the “egoic mind” and powerful transmission of the awakened state of timeless presence, The Power of Now is like pop spirituality on steroids. Yet it is also merely the most visible book in a genre that over the past decade, has been working harder than ever to bring enlightenment down from the mountaintop of esoteric traditions like Zen and Sufism and cast it free into the secular mainstream.

Discarding the dogma of the past, stripping mysticism of its religious and ritualistic trappings, the authors of these new books about enlightenment—people like Byron Katie, Satyam Nadeen, and Gangaji—stand united in their claim that the true nature of reality is an “open secret,” available to anyone bold enough to take a good look at the world beyond the alluring sheen of the conceptual mind, right here and right now. And if we do look, what will we see? Why, they say, nothing other than reality as it actually is: a vast oneness—or, more properly, a nonduality—that has been variously called God, Spirit, the Self, the Absolute, Nirvana, Consciousness, Emptiness, or the Ground of Being.

Seeing themselves at the lead of this primarily Western mystical reformation are the assorted men and women known, loosely, as the Neo-Advaitins. A nonsectarian derivation of the ancient Hindu sect of Advaita (“nondual”) Vedanta, the Neo-Advaitins are a strange breed, transcending time and place, ritual and tradition, class and creed. A Neo-Advaitin could be your neighbor, your gardener, or your favorite bartender, peacefully going about his or her business while remaining half-submerged in the primordial Ground of Being, and you'd never be the wiser. Indeed, the ability of Neo-Advaitins to blend seamlessly into everyday life is one of their most distinguishing features. While it's true that some have chosen to stand out from the crowd by taking on the role of spiritual teacher, adopting the name of a Hindu god or an Indian river, or spending years sitting on the same park bench every day, the majority clearly prefer to lead nondescript, ordinary lives, just like you and me. There's only one crucial difference: the Neo-Advaitins act fully in accord with the one enlightened truth—the experiential recognition that God is all there is—while the rest of us go about our business in a disconnected daze.

At least, that's the ideal.

With the recent publication of The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World, by Arjuna Ardagh, the hard truth about Neo-Advaita may finally have been revealed.

NOTES FROM THE NONDUAL UNDERGROUND

The Translucent Revolution, p. 4

Arjuna Ardagh was a successful Seattle-based hypnotherapist before becoming a popular teacher of the Neo-Advaitin way. In 1991, after two decades of spiritual seeking—including many years as a student of the controversial guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a.k.a. Osho)—he experienced a “radical awakening” to his true, nondual Self with the aid of his second Indian guru, the Advaita Vedanta master H.W.L. Poonja. Returning to the West Coast of America after spending a year in the company of his teacher, Ardagh started offering satsang, or “communion in the truth,” to roomfuls of spiritual seekers multiple times a week. But over the next few years, he began to realize that merely experiencing the truth of Neo-Advaita wasn't necessarily sufficient to transform a person's life in any fundamental way at all—including his own.

“I found myself and my friends in an interesting predicament,” he writes in his 1998 manual of personal transformation, Relaxing into Clear Seeing. “Having seen the perfection underlying all apparent imperfection, there is no turning back. You cannot unsee what has been seen. . . . Yet for almost everyone I know there has appeared to be some coming and going, some deep, invisible mechanism that pulls consciousness back into separation, desire, suffering, and time.” Along with the apparent instability of their spiritual attainments, Ardagh and some of his fellow Neo-Advaitins began to confess that their conscience had been pricked by certain aspects of their outer lives that didn't reflect their inner realizations of universal oneness. “I was fortunate to have many deep and honest friends who also played the role of 'spiritual teacher,'” he writes in The Translucent Revolution. “These teachers were respected, successful, and of immense service to many people. Yet, like their students, they were challenged by the gap between the teaching and its embodiment in their daily lives.”

So, faced with such a predicament, staring squarely at the disturbing divide between one's spiritual understanding and one's actions in everyday life, what is a good Neo-Advaitin to do?

In As It Is: The Open Secret to Living an Awakened Life, Neo-Advaitin Tony Parsons writes: “A great deal of confusion has been generated . . . concerning the need to overcome the ego, the mind, thoughts, etc., and none of it is relevant. . . . If any of these things are active, then they will be active regardless of the idea that you can have any influence on their manifestation. When awakening happens, then everything is seen as absolutely fine just the way it is.” And Neo-Advaitin Steven Harrison explains in Getting to Where You Are: “There is no inner and outer. There is no engaged spirituality. . . . There is nothing to engage that is outside the movement of our own conceptualization. And there is no place to stand from which to engage this constant flow of interpretation. Thought has divided the world. Conveniently the problem is out there, or in there, but not here, now.”

In other words, the Neo-Advaitin solution to the question of a gap between one's knowledge and one's actions is essentially: Don't worry, be happy! For the Neo-Advaitin is never puzzled, troubled, or at a loss for words. Holding steadfast to a vision of reality that transcends the “flow of interpretation” generated by the rational, thinking mind, the Neo-Advaitin sees all things clearly, and all is understood. The thoughts and actions of the “human monkey,” whatever they may be, are enjoyed with a smile and a wink—as nothing but the empty dance of the one infinite Consciousness that alone is real. Any ideas about a separation between one's words and deeds, any gnawing sense that one is living in a state of deepening hypocrisy, are seen merely as dualistic thoughts and feelings—and therefore perfectly irrelevant in light of the nondual truth. “Once awakening happens,” Parsons assures us, “it is seen that there is no such thing as right or wrong.”

But Arjuna Ardagh doesn't buy it anymore. Not all of it, at least. Breaking ranks with the Neo-Advaitin army of thought-free wisdom, Ardagh, through his Living Essence Foundation, is pioneering a new kind of spirituality—one that strives to integrate the revelation of nondual simplicity with all of the natural complexities and challenges of our very human lives. And if the 170 similarly minded teachers and theorists interviewed for his 500-page Translucent Revolution are any indication, he is by no means alone in this quest.

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.

Transformation Hesitation

“As soon as we have to say no to something, we develop a point of view. As soon as we say black but not white [or] good and not evil . . . we've split our otherwise undivided universe into this and not that and chosen one over the other. . . . Like cutting a melon in two, we choose to keep one half and push the other half away.”

The Translucent Revolution, pp. 96–97

In a state of meditative absorption in the transcendent nondual Self, reality is directly realized to be a seamless whole, eternally perfect and complete. There's no time, there's no mind, and so there's nothing much going on. But from the normal, relative self's perspective, there are plenty of things happening all the time, with the mind racing and the clock ticking as we strive to navigate the vicissitudes of the human experience in the midst of an ever-changing world. How to integrate these two very different dimensions of our experience into a singular expression of human wholeness seems to be exactly what Ardagh is pointing us to. That is “translucence.” As he himself suggests, it's something that most Neo-Advaitins—by valuing the absolute over the relative in their one-sided “homogenous goo of Oneness”—would never even consider. There's only one slight problem: the “translucent” alternative doesn't stray that far from “homogenous goo” either. In fact, for the past few decades, ever since the mysticism of the East started making friends with the pop psychology of the West, the postmodern spiritual world has been struggling to find a way to integrate the timeless realization of enlightenment with the process of human development in a way that doesn't simply dissolve one side of the equation in favor of the other. Hence, from a certain point of view, Ardagh's Translucent Revolution is merely the most recent in a series of attempts to create a palatable blend of the absolute and the relative. And like many of its innumerable predecessors, it succeeds in primarily one regard: by making clear (albeit unintentionally) that the merging of nondual consciousness with postmodern relativism could arguably be the greatest obstacle yet to the continued evolution of contemporary spirituality. Why? Because, interestingly enough, the universal egalitarianism of the sensitive self and the universal oneness of the nondual Self just so happen to present strikingly similar relationships to the everyday world—ones that are comfortably numb to dualities, differences, and opposites of any kind. And whenever you have a sensitive self as the human vehicle for the nondual Self, the combined neutrality of those two selves will inevitably flatten all potentially meaningful distinctions and value judgments into the ground.

Lest they take a “position” in life or maintain a critical stance of some kind, sensitive selves typically do whatever they can to remain firmly in the neutral zone of inoffensive ambiguity. With their sophisticated postmodern cognition wisely perceiving the relativity of all opposites—how light shades into darkness or how “up” could not exist without “down”—sensitive selves choose to abide in the gray areas of life, vocally opposed to sharp distinctions and judgments of any kind. Moreover, once they have a deep spiritual experience, they find themselves newly empowered in their hazy relationship to life by their realization of the absolute Self—which, being the foundation of absolutely everything, takes no relationship to any particular thing. The Self makes no judgments; the Self makes no distinctions; the Self has no preferences. And if we wish to be translucent, according to Ardagh, then obviously neither should we.

“As we get older, we polarize everything,” he warns. “We start to say this is acceptable and that's unacceptable. We inhibit the natural flow of energy in our lives.” Only by freeing ourselves, more and more, of our dualistic judgments, distinctions, and preferences will our transcendent, impersonal Self be able to “continuously marinate the personal and to become ever more embodied . . . [an] endless process of evolution and transformation [called] 'translucence.'”

Thus conflating the divine indifference of the absolute Self with the friendly nonjudgment of the sensitive self, the well-intentioned nondual relativist commits a major metaphysical error. It is a confusion of levels of reality, dimensions of ontology—a haphazard merger between the absolute and the relative, the unmanifest and the manifest, being and becoming, emptiness and form. Rather than recognizing fully the difference between these two distinct sides of the coin called Reality and striving to understand the mysterious connection between them, the philosophy of nondual relativism lazily blurs the lines. In the name of “compassion,” its extreme manifestations even whitewash all dualities and opposites—including all of the multidimensional complexity of the human condition—into nondual oblivion.

For instance, in his chapter on “translucent relating,” Ardagh explains how we can learn to make “judgments” while still remaining true to the revelation of the nondual Self—or, at least, without offending anyone (remaining true to the sensitive self). “It really does not matter if you make judgments,” he writes, “as long as they are inclusive rather than rejecting. Tell your friends that they are lazy or stupid, and you risk losing the friendship. Tell them, 'You are so lazy, just like me,' and you may invite empathy. As we call back judgment, we are calling back the fragmented parts of the psyche we have evicted. . . . When we have called back our judgments, our feedback is free of 'othering'—making it all about another rather than ourselves—and only then can it be received.” (His other examples of calling back judgment include: “He is so arrogant—just like me,” “The Dalai Lama is so wise—just like me,” and “You aren't really listening to me—just like me.”)

Clearly, true translucents—or nondual relativists—are sweet and generous people, going out of their way to make sure that not a single soul is offended and all are embraced. (Just like me.) But could the very saccharinity that makes a nondual relativist so spiritually reassuring also be surreptitiously sedating the soul of everyone he or she encounters? By immediately “calling back” all criticisms or judgments, the nondual relativist virtually guarantees that he or she abides perpetually in flatland, the spiritual ice rink of the sensitive selves. Liberated from the responsibility of ever having to challenge another, the nondual relativist revels in human relationships that remain smoothly uninspiring. Any impulses to rise up, to change and grow to a higher level of spiritual integrity, are happily nullified on the spot. Flatland reigns, and the sensitive self is soothed. And the real reason behind all this is that the sensitive self is acknowledged, by the nondual relativist and the Neo-Advaitin alike, to be pretty much perfect just as he or she is (beyond the unnecessary flow of critical thinking generated by the time-bound psyche). Never mind that Ardagh's book is peppered with injunctions to help us to “change” and “grow” and “evolve”; when it comes down to it, it seems that the perspective of a nondual relativist never rises more than a few inches from the ground.

Indeed, if there is a central tenet to the translucent revolution, it is the conviction that apart from the deluded views of Iago-consciousness, all human beings are the same perfect Self, essentially equal in every way. Beyond the mind, beyond belief, there can be no meaningful distinctions between oneself and anyone else. Elucidating this egalitarian ideal in his chapter on parenting, Ardagh, the father of two sons, writes: “Translucent parenting means to see our utter incompetence to teach anyone anything useful at all. Don't follow me, I'm lost.” The eternal and infinite Self Absolute, as the only certain truth in this relativistic world, will somehow take care of the complexity of the human predicament all by itself. We need only get out of the way in order to let it shine through.

Our Translucent Future

The Translucent Revolution, p. 5

Where is this all headed? What kind of a world is Arjuna Ardagh really envisioning? In the last chapter of The Translucent Revolution, he considers three potential near-future scenarios for a world on the brink of catastrophic collapse due to the insidious effects of Iago-consciousness everywhere, including: 1) “total annihilation”; 2) “global crisis”; and 3) “the miracle.” In the first, the “damage to the environment, the continuing violence fueled by blind fundamentalism, the disparities of our economic system are all so great, and the number and effect of translucents is so small, that we are heading for extinction within our lifetime.” In the second, “we survive” but Western civilization has crumbled, and the world is in a state of chaotic disorder, with translucents braving plagues of suffering and despair through “a very flexible sense of humor.” And in the third scenario, “the translucent paradigm is already well in place,” and no matter what happens, the situation will “only fuel the global awakening.” Ardagh doesn't favor one scenario over any other but concludes that, whatever happens, cultivating our translucence is the only way we will ever defeat the Iago mind within and without. That may be true, but given what I now know of translucency, I think it's only fair to share a fourth vision of the future that seems the most attuned to the facts at hand.

Imagine: coming over the endlessly flat horizon, waving white flags against a clear blue sky, the translucent revolution marches toward the Iago battalions, determined to unleash a few million friendly blows to humankind's perennial adversary. Despite the natural flow of their collective gait, every translucent soldier marches to his or her own cadence, singing his or her own favorite tune. Some wear boots, some wear sandals, and even though all are dressed exactly as they please, there is no religious paraphernalia to be seen. Finally approaching the vicious Iago ranks, the translucents begin to laugh—first a few, then rippling out more and more—after suddenly realizing the familiar mistake they've made. How could they have fallen, again, for the foolish belief in opposites, for the ridiculous story of “others”? Sitting upon the empty ground, they playfully nudge each other back and forth, smiling into each other's eyes. At first, they don't notice as the Iago forces descend upon them, and when they finally do wake up to the carnage all around, they can't quite take it seriously enough to do anything about it. Hours later, sadly, the translucent revolution is no more. Stepping over the remains of its softly luminous foe, the Iago army marches in tight formation toward the horizon, looking forward to many future victories in a world too kind to care.