Tom Huston

Today’s question: In a secular culture where everything is relative, and even many spiritual teachers tell us we’re perfectly okay just as we are, what’s a poor seeker of spiritual evolution to do?

I recently read an interesting essay by spiritual teacher and executive coach Robert Rabbin in which he rakes two popular American spiritual teachers over the coals for clinging to the ancient, outmoded mystical Hindu philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta. As regular readers of WIE will know, I tend to be highly critical of Advaita myself, so when Rabbin’s essay turned up in my inbox one day, I was duly intrigued. Delving into the fall from grace of Advaita gurus Eli Jaxon-Bear, 60, and his wife, Gangaji, 65—who, last October, went public with an admission that Eli had engaged in a three-year affair with a student half his age—Rabbin held nothing back in his assault on their spiritual philosophy. Indeed, he even launched a volley of verbal napalm on the great Advaita master Ramana Maharshi while he was at it. I quote:

The transcendent ideal of spiritual attainment is flawed. It is an incomplete, distorted picture of who we are. Ramana Maharshi . . . did not go far enough on his journey of self-discovery. He only went away; he didn’t come back. And we, in our hunger for truth, peace, and meaning, have come to mistake going away as the ideal. Ramana Maharshi needed to come back into a full, robust, sensual, sexual, passionate embodiment of that silence. We should not make his mistake.

You’ve got to hand it to the guy. I’ve never seen anyone with the cojones to criticize Ramana, perhaps the most universally revered Indian sage of the twentieth century. And Rabbin doesn’t stop there. He goes on to write, “I would be more interested in what the Buddha might have said had he returned to the palace and become king. He, too, went away; and he, too, didn’t come back.” Now the gloves are off, but Rabbin defends his stance well:

I don’t know why we have traded away our human beingness for transcendent ideals. . . . We love the idea that we are emptiness, or silence, or pure consciousness. We are these things, but not exclusively. . . . That’s the hard part: to integrate enormous endlessness with our daily life. . . .If we are going to ascend, then let us remember to descend. If we are going to travel to otherworldly realms, let’s not forget to come back to the kitchen where we eat.

That isn’t the most inspiring example, perhaps, but he has a point. And it’s a good one. At a time when humanity needs conscious, awakened individuals to renounce mystical navel-gazing and truly engage, actively helping our struggling world like never before, it’s hard to argue with what he’s calling us to. “We cannot live as pure consciousness,” he reminds us, “except in this body, in this world, with each other.”

Rabbin is pointing to what numerous contemporary spiritual teachers believe to be the cutting edge of mystical spirituality—namely, learning to integrate our deepest realizations of transcendent Being with our ordinary, everyday, fully human lives. And how do they propose we do that? Simple: by accepting ourselves, warts and all, exactly as we are. “I suggest we get real, not ideal,” Rabbin says. In other words, let’s put an end to spiritual pretense in all its forms; let’s stop avoiding the actual nitty-gritty condition of our lives in a naïve attempt to chain our humanity to unreachable ideals of purity and transcendence. Relating this back to the Eli Jaxon-Bear affair, Rabbin writes:

I don’t think Eli is flawed, and I don’t think he should stop teaching. In fact, I believe only now is he qualified to teach, now that Toto has shown us the man behind the curtain. . . . Eli’s humanity is not the flaw; the flaw is a teaching that forces us to live in shadows and carry secrets.

He does seem to be on to something here. In this day and age, a teaching of spiritual enlightenment that doesn’t strive to make sense out of every dimension of our complicated postmodern lives doesn’t really seem worth pursuing. Besides, we already tried taking the transcendent path back in the sixties (“Be here now,” anyone?). And as Eli and Gangaji are apparently finding out the hard way, it still doesn’t work.

Yet as sensible as this new grounded, in-the-world approach to spiritual enlightenment seems, I can’t help wondering if what Rabbin is proposing can really be considered “spiritual” in the first place. He says it’s time to “get real, not ideal” and laments that we have “traded away our human beingness for transcendent ideals.” But what does that really mean? What is authentic spirituality—or enlightenment, for that matter—if not a personal commitment to a transcendent ideal? And what is the spiritual value of “human beingness” without any such ideals?

Granted, it’s important that we don’t whitewash the real complexities of life by identifying solely with that which is pure, immutable, and transcendent. But couldn’t Rabbin be edging too far on the other side of the razor by suggesting that it’s better to identify primarily with that which is basically mundane? I mean, I can’t speak for him, but coming “back to the kitchen where we eat” isn’t what gets me up and motivated to do three hours of spiritual practice in the morning (although it is usually enough to get me out of bed). No, what gets me going is the innate, mysterious compulsion to rise up, to change, to grow, to mature, to develop, to evolve, and to otherwise transform my oh-so-less-than-ideal human self. Who knows where it comes from? Or where it’s ultimately aiming? But if that experience of inspiration doesn’t prove—to anyone who’s felt it—that spirituality is inseparable from “transcendent ideals,” I don’t know what can.

Of course, I’m not the only one who feels that inner urgency. And it’s strangely reassuring to know that Eli and Gangaji, at least, are starting to feel it as well. Sort of.

The January/February 2007 issue of Spirituality & Health features a two-page article about Eli’s affair. The first page is devoted to the story of how Gangaji and Eli are changing, growing, and “sharing their pain and truth” in dealing with their relationship crisis; the second, to a series of exercises created by the duo called “Tools for Conscious Couples,” which has reportedly helped the couple become “united as never before.” Apparently, they’re beginning to realize that there are some basic human issues that simply abiding in the Absolute could never resolve.

Now, I’m sure Rabbin would be very glad to see that the Advaitins are finally coming around. But the recent publication of that article adds a new level of subtlety to all this, making me wonder if Rabbin’s new enlightenment is actually even that different from Eli and Gangaji’s transcendent Advaita path in the end. Because, ironically, it seems that whether we prefer traditional self-transcendence (Advaita) or postmodern self-acceptance (“I don’t think Eli is flawed”), the resulting spiritual lifestyle is essentially the same: The human self remains fundamentally unaffected by spiritual awakening, either ignored as it is or embraced as it is, but never evolved from what it is into something radically new.

And call me idealistic, but when I think of aspiring toward spiritual enlightenment, a state of profound and perpetual transformation is honestly the only thing I have in mind.

Tom Huston has been an editor at What Is Enlightenment? since 2003. He is a founding member of Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute and a full-time student of Andrew Cohen’s teachings of Evolutionary Enlightenment.