Comment to Soulful Toz Books that have Healed Me Video

Hi Laura.  I hope you and little Kitty Moon are doing well. I have an observation that came to mind in the aftermath of watching your recent video.  I looked up the reviews of Adyashanti’s “The End of Your World”, which you discussed, and that lead me into this huge New Age cat fight about exactly what constitutes ‘enlightenment’.  It’s a familiar debate.  There is no consensus.

Perhaps the greatest philosopher in regards to Enlightenment Theory, Aurobindo, muddied the waters more than anyone.  Back in college about 40 years ago I read his books.  I was a philosophy student back then and was smarter than a lot of people, but eventually I got to the point where I simply could no longer follow all of his fine distinctions between all the various discrete levels of enlightenment (and now I find myself ashamed that I did not confess as much to my Academic Advisor at the time.  Now I realize that Aurobindo’s continuous elaborations, may have sourced from a psycho-dysfunctional compulsion which could have borne some scrutiny, and that my objective should not have been to ‘understand’ Aurobindo but instead to present the hypothesis that his elaborations defied comprehension and merely indicated that much of Indian Philosophy may owe more to active conceptual imagination then to any intellectual or scientific rigor.  But I was much younger then… ).

 

Out in the grass roots of actual New Age People from the various Organizations, there was some agreement about who was actually enlightened – Ramakrishna (1836 – 1886), Ramana Mahaharshi (1879 – 1950), Sai Baba of Shirdi (? – 1918), Meher Baba (1894 – 1969), but little agreement regarding most of the other semi-big second magnitude names in the enlightenment constellation.  I myself was affected with such skepticism.  For instance, I myself was sort of marginalized even within the Kundalini Organization that initiated me into the Kundalini because I wouldn’t even dream of supposing that my own Guru was in any great degree ‘enlightened’ (and I myself wondered about the delusions of all the other members.  Were they meeting with and talking with the same Guru I was?  Yes, I had great respect for him, but this Guy was no World Messiah.  After a while I suspected that it is a form of self-aggrandizement, to claim that one’s personal Guru is the greatest of all Gurus).  There is also the case in which I found no recent philosopher more fascinating and accessible than Swami Vivekananda, while at the same time concluding that he was too coherent and intellectual to be enlightened

 

You know, incidentally, that Vivekananda did more than anybody to open up the West to Indian and Yogic ideas and traditions, but it was Yogananda, who took up a kind of Vivekananda-esque business plan, that has the dubious distinction and demonstrating that a ‘rock star’ fortune could be made in being a popular marketable ‘guru’.  This all lead to the marketization of the New Age Movement.  Yes, one might suppose it a good thing that the colossal forces of Capitalism could help in advancing an enlightened perspective, but at the same time, we must wonder how much actual ‘enlightened perspective’ can actually get through such a market-based popular opinion based set of dollars and cents filters.  Then we have what troubles me the most, and that is the insularity of what we can call the New Age Echo Chamber where there is nobody, and I am talking about all of the “experts”, who seems to be expected to demonstrate the truth of any assertion, but only needs to show that some previous New Age expert-author had said the same thing before.  So all the New Age Truths simply circle back upon themselves, solipsistic tautologies, with new assertions anchoring their support upon older assertions.   For instance, in regards to the Kundalini, everybody is still parroting Charles W. Leadbeater’s pamphlet, “The Chakras”, but the guy was never more than a hack who had had the luck to be swept up in the skirts of Madame Blavatsky, who had been the first and still the best fraud in the New Age Tradition and had carried the Theosophical Society on her broad shoulders.    But now whenever anybody has an awakening in their Kundalini and reads anything from the New Age Echo Chamber, then all their own personal and genuine observations get derailed as they attempt to make their personal truth line up with the effectively authoritarian and settled dogma of what the chakras are officially defined to be … all sourcing back to that pamphlet that Leadbeater had probably jotted out on some vacant afternoon, being pressed into a momentary fit of activity because he had already spent the last advance from his publisher and needed to submit something new before he could beg the next advance.  So our experiences of the chakras are mostly guided by our expectations, inclusive of what colors from the visible spectrum we should expect to see (!?! And why should we expect any light to be ‘visible’?) as well as ‘seed sounds’ that correspond to Sanskrit magic words, but whose pronunciation varies across India depending upon the various local patois, whereby these archetypal sounds don’t necessarily sound the same from one village to the next, but they become uniform in the West where we only have Leadbeater’s seemingly inspired word to go by (and why should energetic Sounds come across as linguistic syllables?  Wouldn’t they be more buzzy and electrical, like different tones from a keyboard synthesizer?).   I even remember nonsense from my hero Vivekananda who published a translation of Patanjali which presented detailed techniques and methodologies on how to levitate or become as hard as granite.  I myself would have been embarrassed to reproduce such a book unless I could fly the manuscript to the publisher and then break down his door with my rock-hard fist in order to get it on his desk.  As it was Vivekananda seemed only to present Patanjali, to any discerning reader, as the most time honored crank of Hindu-Vedantic Tradition.   And Vivekananda was usually very careful intellectually.  This only shows the ingrained tendency, and accepted tradition, for Spiritualists and Eastern Philosophers to think it sufficient only to quote some previous quote in lieu of any actual demonstration of validity for the ideas they present. 

 

This troubling observation was one of the reasons why I found your advent upon the scene so promising.  This is because your insights into the Kundalini could be understood to be sourced out of an unbiased and unprejudiced purity of raw personal awareness.   Well, that lasted a while, and your early videos should be archived and chronicled as being uniquely genuine.  But now, as you make more and more social connections within the new age business community (those making money and those who want to make money) you will find yourself walking and talking just like everybody else.  Where I would tend to see any difference between what you say and what Everyone Else says as a kind of proof that YOU are genuine, you are likely to see it the other way around, and then , following the herd instinct, conform in order to fit in.  You would fail… you apparently are failing… to see that that would strip you of any significance you might have had.  The World could only count on one more bird in the already vast and growing flock of vain, useless, self-seeking market-driven predatory parrots.    And you are not alone, though you do stand out from the crowd as seeming to have more of a golden diamond center.   If you track other recent Video ‘Comets’ who had started by reporting enlightenment or enlightening experiences, they tend to track along the same trajectory.   The genuine experiences drop away and we soon just have somebody else spouting astrology¹, declaiming about crystals and then flipping through decks of tarot cards.  And what does the World gain by all this New Age enlightenment?  The World is on the brink of disaster, and the New Age seems intent only upon simply stroking and preening their ‘more enlightened than thou’ egos.  If the New Age will not eventually manifest as a Collective Political Social and Economic Movement, aimed at forging and founding the first Enlightened Civilization, then it will merely continue on registering as an annoying distraction, a drain of talent and a showcase for the vanity of snot, intellectually vacant  dilettantes.   Ofcourse, Laura, you are a smart girl and I suppose you’ll soon enough realize as much.  And you are still young enough to do something about it when you do finally arrive at that realization.       

 

¹ Yes, I would willingly believe in the validity of the Astrological Assumptions, whatever they are, if I could first find any two astrologers who independently agree upon the significance of the very same celestial-planetary alignments while being able to present congruent quantitative analyses for their findings.  This problem of noticeable inconsistency in what is presented as a System was also noticed by the Medieval Monarchs who began to be suspicious of patronizing astrologers who could never seem to sing the same songs under the same stars.  Then of course we all must wonder why the night skies did not rain blood-red meteors, comets collide, and Mars appear to swallow Venus on the day that Adolf Hitler was born.  Certainly if the Constellations can’t presage the most World Shaking Events, then how could we expect the stars to be moved by the fate of the infinitesimal bugs that are the normal people that pay the Astrologers fees?