In the early 1930s, the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel spent six years with a Zen master in Japan who taught Zen through archery. When the Zen master prepared to shoot the bow, he waited until “it” breathed him. At that point, “it” shot the bow. The bow used in Zen archery requires the strength of the strongest man to bend it at all, and the bow is held above the head, arms almost straight up, making leverage difficult. When “it” breathes the master and bends the bow, however, the master’s muscles remain loose and flaccid. (At night the master could sink the arrow into the bull’s-eye at sixty paces in a darkened hall, and split that arrow with another.)1
An action that can move us from within, without our muscular input, is paradoxical and largely unbelievable. That such a force then fuses, in effect, the archer, his bow, the arrow, and target into a single, synchronous event is even more paradoxical. But paradox, as we have seen, is the threshold of truth, the boundary between logical sets. The boundary can only be crossed by a suspension of one logic and the adoption of another. In Chapter 10, I discussed the general principle of complementarity in quantum physics. We can observe either the wave aspects of an event, the non-localized form of energy, or the particle form of the event, the localized form of energy. Both are needed to explain the event completely, yet the states are mutually exclusive. David Bohm and yogic psychology consider both states an aspect of a single consciousness. Consciousness can display itself as localized or non-localized energy. Localized energy, as matter, is a restricted energy. Non-local energy is unrestricted. The issue is, What is the dynamic between? David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake propose that non-localized energy has within it the implications of the form that will be assumed when the energy localizes. I presented a case for these modes of energy and causation as translations of our triune brain structure. Only from the realm of insight-intelligence, from which these energies spring, are they fused into their single unity. The bonding function is that overall unity.
The Zen master with whom Eugen Herrigel studied used to take a student’s bow, hold it, wait for it to breathe him, and use the bow in this fashion for a time. And for a time thereafter the bow would respond for the student as it did for the teacher, without the student’s muscular action. This gave the student some toehold, at least, in a logic quite outside our ordinary biological reference. The purpose of the teacher is to give us this experience of the bridge between localized and non-localized consciousness, that we may begin the construction of a new, non-localized logic. Leaping logical gaps is the function of bonding, and bonding is the function of the teacher. With the concrete experience of the bow bending without muscular action, the student can open to the abstract possibilities.
A perfect example of the model-and-bonding function is the mother at birth. A bond between mother and child is established in utero and re-established and reinforced at birth through the mother’s physical and emotional nurturing. She provides the infant with the impetus for his own potential to unfold. She is, in effect, the bridge between localized and non-localized fields. Bonding is not an afterthought, like a rope thrown in to tie up a package. Bonding is the unifying force of creativity itself, which keeps nucleus and electron in their atomic pattern; holds Bohm’s quantum energies in their unity; is the force of the stimulus-response function through which our blueprint for intelligence unfolds; and acts within us to assure infant, parent, family, earth, social, and spiritual union. Bonding cuts across and overrides all states of consciousness or energy fields. The bond, which exists in each of the stages through which we move, acts as the bridge spanning the logical threshold separating each stage. For the bond to manifest, however, it must be presented graphically, through a tangible, flesh-and-blood model, to act as the stimulus for our blueprint’s response.
The goal of the post-biological period is to move beyond the biological, to free ourselves of dependency on it. As we move up in development, the paradox increases, the stakes are higher, the need for a model more critical. But to move beyond the biological is a paradox of major proportions, since we have only biological patterns of conception and perception to work with. As Herrigel found, all he had was his functional sensory-motor system, his muscles and bones, to bend that bow. Without the teacher who can represent both states at once, who can demonstrate the dynamic of leaping the paradox, we are largely helpless. Herrigel could have stood holding that bow for many a year to no avail. He continually tried intellectually to figure out and, in effect, synthesize the leap. Only the true teacher can break this evolutionary compulsion and lead us to that point of allowing integration into that non-localized realm through bonding.
Counterfeits of spiritual development abound, and beneath all counterfeits one finds a sub-stratum, a hidden agenda of concern over the biological system. The point of the spiritual venture is to get beyond the biological. The realm beyond the biological encompasses the biological but not the other way around. Winning the biological game has nothing to do with surpassing it. Perfecting ourselves physically and mentally, according to our intellectual notions of perfection, has nothing to do with the real goal. Nor has bringing about some paradisaical kingdom on earth.
Jesus commented that it was better to be crippled, blind, and maimed in body but in the Kingdom within, than be physically whole and outside that Kingdom. Referring to a famous man, he said: “Among men born of woman there is none greater than he, but the least of those in the Kingdom are greater.” Perfection according to our cultural criteria plays no part in the ultimate game. The goal lies within ourselves and nothing in the entire visible world—other than another person who has achieved that goal—has anything to do with, or offers the slightest hint toward, that inner goal or its attainment. There are no grand strategies available to our intellect by which the ultimate goal is reached, though culture creates an endless stream of counterfeits, all promising an intellectual dominance over the spirit. Castaneda’s Don Juan warned that once you are on a path, it is difficult to get off. The more powerful the path (and some of the martial arts, for instance, are powerful paths), the more powerful this holding effect. For one is altered in brain/mind and changed by one’s path, even when it is a path we are making. All paths are creative ventures, and in creating or re-creating a path we are conceptually restructured to some extent.
The positive aspect of all this is that we need no credentials to enter into the reversal procedure leading to spirit. As with Zen, no virtue, accomplishment, skill, or talent gained in the world of folly has anything to do with the path to the Self. The surprise turnabout of expectation is that the path unfolds only by a sole concentration on the goal. We have no access even to the game rules, for they are generated from that Self we would achieve. The Self we pursue instructs us in the only pursuit by which that Self can be attained.2 Each movement along the path opens for us only as we make that movement, with our eyes on the goal.
“There are those who would take the Kingdom by storm,” Jesus commented, and they do so by intellectually devised strategems. Perhaps they succeed at their game, but it is their game and the self they attain is but an enhancement of the intellectual ego, a counterfeit of the real, another subset to spin about in the orbit of cosmic junk. The move toward maturation begins when a willing student meets a true teacher, and the only requirement is the student’s willingness. The only requirement of true teachers is that they have achieved that mature state.
One can enter the new development blind and crippled since no physical criteria apply. Nor does entry into the new development mean that physical and mental failings will necessarily be remedied. The higher integral structure integrates the lower, according to that higher logic. The highest integration can cut through all enculturation and restructure our system as needed. But what is needed? Nothing we can think of in our enculturated state. If we could think those needs out they would be available intellectually.
Therapy is a great illusion. Whatever patching up is needed will be done by the Kundalini Shakti, the intelligence that leads to the Self. Kundalini can skip grades. She employs a Knight’s move, skipping over our logical syllogisms with ease and repairing whatever needs to be repaired to move us along on our path.
Few statements have been so puzzling as Jesus’ command: “Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” We are perfect at any moment of our lives in which we are oriented toward the Self. Perfection is that orientation. No matter that our childhood has been horrible or our career a bust. All dysfunctions in our biological state may be meaningless in regard to the path. To stop and supposedly perfect some aspect of our system is to position that aspect as our goal—and at that point we lose perfection.
Lesser teachers busy themselves with elaborate schools through which they display their erudition and intellectual skills. Elaborate schema are laid out by which we engineer our paths. The egos of both teacher and student love this eclectic play, for these are endless delaying games, in which inflation of ego is interpreted as spiritual superiority. We come up with continual systems for perfecting ourselves, but the Self is already perfect. Until identified with that state, however, we can have no notion of what perfection means.
My teacher Muktananda came into the kitchen of the ashram one day to fry dosas (a kind of pancake in which various fillings are rolled, making the shape of a dosa important: The more perfectly round, or at least oval, the better). A whole bunch of dosas could be fried at once on the huge ashram griddle, and Muktananda took the pan of dosa mix and began to throw ladles full of batter out in grand fashion. The results were awful. No two dosas were anything alike; their shapes ran the gamut of ink-blot catastrophes. We cringed. Baba was a master cook, had taught his cooks to do dosas perfectly, yet at each monstrosity he threw out, he said, “Ah! Perfect, perfect.”
Slowly his lesson registered on us. We were those dosas, the monstrosities and messes, the misshapen enculturated and unsane figures which he was to somehow roll into a new shape and fill with new life. And what he was telling us was that he saw us as what we really were: perfect. The perfect dosa, the perfect human, is the creative process within us, the “Father in heaven,” a blueprint of possibility for our beings. By filling in that blueprint with the content of our lives, an infinite number of shapes must unfold. And this infinite variety of shapes is precisely what the play of consciousness is all about.
The play of consciousness is stochastic, to use Gregory Bateson’s term.3Nature makes available an infinite possibility, in which anything and everything can and is going to happen. She operates by profusion, and a certain random, chance element underlies everything. Nature has, however, within her random potential, a clear objective. (Jesus referred to a broad way that leads to destruction, and a narrow gate that leads to the Self.) The only requirement of the ultimate game, the movement to the Self, is the option itself; and, opting for that Self, I am immediately turned toward that path. I believe that the major limitation of my earlier book, Magical Child, was to propose that some hypothetically perfect upbringing would alone give a true maturation and full humanity, that we would then come into our true power. And I saw in various paranormal experience indications of that power.
Whose criteria should we use for the perfect Magical Child? Whose curriculum? No matter how we tried, at each stage we would leave out an untouched mass of potential, and be “imperfect.” Any stage of development has meaning only as it is integrated into a higher structure of meaning and in turn supports that higher structure. The entire Piagetian stage of development has value only as the platform for the next stage, the spiritual journey. For the physical stage to be successful, it must be integrated into and support the spiritual. Any other use is an alignment with our inevitable physical death. The final goal is the only criterion: Development must be in line with our ultimate goal. With the ultimate goal as the criterion, each stage will unfold as needed for us to stay in line with that goal. The goal has its agenda, and creates that which is necessary to achieve that goal, and, in the stochastic play of consciousness, the goal never repeats itself. Each of us is our own curriculum.
The parent of that “perfect child” is one aligned with the path toward the Self. If the parent has, as his own personal model, the true teacher, the representative of that final state, then the child automatically has that ultimate model as the underlying structure on which that child’s life and learning will be based. Within that framework anything can happen (everything always does happen), and the system will work perfectly. The content and information of our experience are always expendable, of use only as a means of developing ability. And the ability gained in our childhood and adolescence is the ability to enter onto the path of post-biological development. A life that mirrors the model of that teacher who is in that state of the Self is always unique and perfect.
Here the issue of bonding or attachment comes into focus. The attached ego cannot make itself available to the teacher but must, automatically, through the non-conscious survival drive within, try to incorporate the teaching into the ego system. The logic of this is unassailable, too, because we desire enlightenment; we set about incorporating it into our system as we have been trained to do. Yet this will not work because all the power, information, experience, and possibility ever available from the realm of our three brains and our minds can never add up to the fourth realm, the Self. We cannot incorporate the path to the goal, for that goal does not exist. The goal is not a commodity, information, practice, content, conceptual material, or a product to be thought about; it is an empty category for us until given content, and we give it content by our response to it. We cannot respond to an empty category, but only to something tangible, which leaves us in a double bind that only the teacher can break.
We naturally respond to the concept of having a goal; we conceptualize some image of the probabilities of what the goal should be; we convert our imagery into a blueprint of the goal and immediately set about filling in our blueprint with our own content. We thereby create a self-fulfilling tape-loop effect of real delusion. We create a novel synthesis of our folly, then wonder why our world crashes down on us in ever greater ruins.
I have already explored how we replicate culture and the double bind we face in the resulting dysfunctions. I have outlined how we are driven by our survival instincts to maintain the integrity of our egos; how, since nature cannot program for failure, our intellect rationalizes protection of our egos in its dysfunctional state. Only a force outside this tape-loop can break our deadlock. Should the Self within our hearts directly rise within us (as it does continually) to break through to us, its signals are incorporated into the tape-loop effect and selectively screened or interpreted to maintain integrity of our system as it is, and we will never be aware of all this defensive action. We manipulate the imagery unconsciously, in spite of ourselves. Dysfunction lies in the identity with the intellect as it is: a one-way mirror reflecting on its own thought about its own material world, picked up and echoed throughout the supportive systems of the brain. Once this self-replicating tape-loop makes one error, the error itself must then self-replicate. When this happens on a broad cultural level, the power of that error is immense.
The only way out of such dysfunction is to bypass the dysfunctional system completely. Our survival system, interpreting this as tantamount to loss of integrity, will not allow this, but will bring about a rationalization to avoid it. Our intellectual minds are only a reflector and receptor of brain function, yet we think our one-way mirror of mind can integrate our three facets of brain, our physical, emotional, and intellectual modes, into a unit of wholeness. (The new-consciousness movements centered on this fallacy.) We cannot take three separate physical objects, put them in front of a mirror, and expect the mirror to fuse those three into a single unit. The only possibility of integrating the fragmented ego comes from the Self, presented to us in tangible form: the teacher in flesh and blood who cannot be rationalized or manipulated, but who forces the issue and compels a decision.
The biggest problem of spiritual development is to shift us from attachment behavior to a bonded state. Once the bond with the Self is firm, integration takes place as a natural, progressive development paralleling our earlier development in general outline. To wean us from attachment behavior the teacher follows a fairly standard procedure. First, he gives Shaktipat, an infusion into us of the creative power of the Self. When the teacher gives Shaktipat he infuses into us the Shakti from his own integration into the Self, and stimulates our own Shakti within us. The teacher arouses our Kundalini by lending us his power much as the mother lends the infant her power at birth until the infant can generate his own.
The teacher’s own power, infused into our system, bonds us with the teacher and our Self, and immediately begins the restructuring of our conceptual system. David Bohm said that insight could push thought out of the way and remove dysfunctions in the brain. This is a major part of the teacher’s job. Once the Kundalini is awakened and active, by this initial move of the teacher’s, that power continues the job of transformation. Given the stimulus, the response is automatic and assured.
Originally I thought that Shaktipat was a once-for-all event, that once the Kundalini was awakened the job was done. Since my early days in Siddha yoga I have found that Shaktipat can be an ongoing procedure, a continued renewal of the stimulus. At birth the infant imprints to a face pattern if given that pattern at the required distance for the required period; we also found that the infant needed a continual return to and restimulus by that model if development was to be rapid and thorough. In Bond of Power I wrote of several Shaktipat experiences with Muktananda, both my own and others’. Each experience of Shaktipat clears away more mental debris and widens our concepts, as the teacher guides the Kundalini.
Earlier in this book I mentioned the two particles of energy that, once part of a closed system, mirrored each other regardless of time and space. I used this example from Bell’s theorem to demonstrate how bonding works. Once I had met my teacher, our bond held outside time and space. It did not matter that we were on opposite sides of the globe, because he was in constant contact, within the logic of the bonding process, with me. If I got seriously out of line with my goal (which I certainly did), he clobbered me on the spot in unmistakable ways. The gap between error and correction closes when we are in alignment with the teacher.
Another function of the teacher is to give the student a direct sensory experience of the goal, according to the student’s capacity to conceptualize, or transfer the imagery involved. Just as the Zen master uses the student’s bow in order to give the student the experience of what the bow does when “it” breathes the student, so the teacher gives the student an experience of the teacher’s own state within whatever capacity the student has to receive.
In my four years with Muktananda I had many meditation and Shaktipat experiences—sensory, visual experiences of other states of consciousness. In each case these were teaching experiences and a particular lesson was involved (for example, in my being taken out of my body each morning those five consecutives times). The lesson of this was direct, clear, and unmistakable. Further, such a lesson expanded my conceptual framework. Even the most non-ordinary sort of perceptual experiences, such as the Nada, the Amrit, the breathtaking visual ventures, were clear lessons in the play of consciousness; each in turn expanded my consciousness. Many of the experiences, though subtle, related directly to my ordinary physical orientation and greatly enhanced it. My ordinary perceptions were being stretched into new dimensions, which changed my responses to my ordinary world, giving me more flexibility and freedom than I had known.
In each case, I thought these events were experiences of the Self. This was not correct but all right, for they were so exhilarating that they stirred me on in my spiritual practice. In 1983, under Muktananda’s successor, Gurudev Nityananda, I had an ongoing series of experiences from his Shaktipat, which were essentially causal by nature, not subtle, as though my four years with Muktananda had been only preparatory to being able to handle straight causal function as itself. (Earlier I briefly described my various limbs levitating during meditation, following Gurudev’s Shaktipat.) These experiences also translated through my physical system or related to it in some way. So all my experiences in yoga to this point had been from the standpoint of my usual physical state extending out into unusual states. None of this was an experience of the Self within me from the vantage point of that Self.
A year later I received Shaktipat from Baba’s other successor, Gurumayi. Following this I experienced, so far as I can tell in retrospect, an experience of that fourth realm itself, as itself. It was qualitatively discontinuous with anything in my life and without physical points of reference—and so non-reportable. I came out of that state realizing that everything in my experience up to that point had again been only preliminary, a clearing of debris and building of enough foundation that I could undergo a brief exposure to the goal. And it came as a surprise to me that possibly only then, from that point, was a path actually opening within me; only then was development (as opposed to mere remedial work) ready to begin. I had experienced a possibility of rebirth, but with the real gestation yet to take place. The notion of rebirth has suffered from a bit of casual misinterpretation and over-simplification. At rebirth one is born into a new conceptual system ready for a developmental process that is as long and involved as was our original development from our first infancy.
The state of the Self is creation itself. The experience of that state is an experience of creation. To receive the experience is to enter into the creation of it. Again, one does not perceive God; God is the act of perception. The entry we make into creation is contingent on the nature of our teacher (who is mother, father, and midwife to the new state), the teacher’s lineage or tradition, and one’s own history. The teacher gives us a concrete experience of that state of creation, but it is our state, not the teacher’s. We are the dynamic between teacher as stimulus and our Self as response.
To try to patch up our background through therapy or other means is pointless since the Self cannot be brought about by additions to the three modes of our brain and mind. Our total concentration must be on the goal, and that means the teacher and teaching. With our attention on the goal, the Kundalini patches as needed for movement to that goal. The teacher’s job is to wean us from our identification with our physical, emotional, and intellectual developments and reidentify with the universal or causal fields out of which these conceptual processes grew. The teacher must move us beyond our sensual natures; not because our sensual natures are bad (we can hardly do without them), but because they are limited. An archetypal field of sensuality, limitless and awesome, awaits us.
In the same way, we must be weaned from our childish emotions, our esthetics of like and dislike that were so vital to our early development and around which our structure of ego was built. Again, this process is necessary not because our esthetics are bad but because they are divisive and crippling to further development. (This is not easy. To treat all sensory experience as equal I tell my body that the hot shower and cold shower are just relative states, but I have a difficult time telling my soul that the strange wailing of a Hindu woman singing bhajans is equal to Bach’s B Minor Mass. My esthetic snobbery dies hard.) The emotion of pure love awaits us beyond our primitive likes and dislikes, and an ecstatic esthetic experience lies ahead.
Our teacher must finally wean us from our intellects, the lifeblood of our egos. Then we can open to pure intelligence, and the power of not-doing, which is the subject of the last chapter of this book. And through all these weanings and experiences beyond the biological, we prepare for the final weaning, from our identity as a limited ego, a separated self, to the realization of being the Self, from which we were never really separated at all.
Without the teacher we sense the nature of such moves and unconsciously try to incorporate the movements back into our ego identity. Little by little the teacher tightens the bond and weakens our attachment. This teacher principle, this model function, is built into the life system. We have been subject to it from our very beginnings. At each stage of development we are subject to the character and nature of our models; life provides us—or tries to—with an ongoing series of teachers as needed by each stage. The society without the proper model of a teacher aligned to the Self is unnatural and illogical; it becomes psychotic and self-destructive. Intellect estranged from intelligence grows increasingly illogical and, finally, insane. Can you think of anything more illogical than one hundred thousand nuclear warheads when a mere one thousand will destroy life on earth?
Some fifteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine wrote that there was never a time in the history of man when that which is called the Christ was not among us. The teacher is an ongoing principle, a functional part of us, and the bond of the creative process. In the Christian Gospels Jesus is referred to as one of a long line of teachers (rabbis). He referred to himself that way, and continually pointed beyond himself to the teacher principle on which his life was based. “Before Abraham was, I am,” he stated. He promised that after his death he would return to his followers within their own generation. He was even more explicit in the Gnostic Gospels, where he not only promised that soon after his death he would return in another form, as another teacher, but said, in the greatest statement ever made about this teacher principle: “I am always becoming what you have need of me to be.”
The teacher appears, generation after generation, as we have need of him to be, in flesh-and-blood form. The teacher meets us where we are, as we are ready, able, and willing to be met. He or she appears on behalf of our post-biological development, since learning takes place from direct encounter. Theophany, an “appearance of the God,” is an integral part of human experience; each true teacher is a theophany. Theophany is, as well, a way of initiating the role of the teacher where no model exists within a culture. Theophany takes place sporadically as our Shakti searches for chances to display the goal in tangible form. My favorite story of a theophany is contemporary, from the anthropologist Adolf Jensen. I used the example in my book Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, and do so again because I see it now in a richer light. Jensen’s report comes from an Apinaye hunter of one of the Ge tribes of eastern Brazil. The hunter reported:
I was hunting near the sources of the Botica Creek. All along the journey there I had been agitated and was constantly startled without knowing why.
Suddenly I saw him standing under the drooping branches of a big steppe tree. He was standing there erect. His club was braced against the ground beside him, his hand he held on the hilt. He was tall and light-skinned, and his hair nearly descended to the ground behind him. His whole body was painted and on the outer side of his legs were broad red stripes. His eyes were exactly like two stars. He was very handsome.
I recognized at once that it was he. Then I lost all my courage. My hair stood on end, and my knees were trembling. I put my gun aside, for I thought to myself that I should have to address him. But I could not utter a sound because he was looking at me unwaveringly. Then I lowered my head in order to get hold of myself and stood thus for a long time. When I had grown somewhat calmer, I raised my head. He was still standing and looking at me. Then I pulled myself together and walked several steps toward him, then I could not go any farther for my knees gave way. I again remained standing for a long time. Then I lowered my head, and tried again to regain composure. When I raised my eyes again, he had already turned away and was slowly walking through the steppes.
Then I grew very sad.4
He always appears as we have need of him to be: to the hunter, as the perfect hunter. And he confronted the Apinaye with that perfection. He was, of course, the hunter’s own projected Self, concretized and made real. The Apinaye was terrified, as we would be, for the address he knows he must make to the God will apparently mean his own end as he has known himself. The hunter speaks for each of us, since, though the God appears as we have need of him to be, we instinctively try to convert that God to what we want him to be. The biological will to survive paralyzes us, and we try to incorporate the spiritual into our physical state. Attachment behavior seems built in. I suspect that could the hunter have made the confrontation, he would have returned to his people inwardly transformed. Integrated into his Self, he would have then acted as the catalytic agent by which a new dimension of consciousness could have opened within his people. He would have become the Teacher.
The hunter’s integration would have resulted in that society’s movement toward transcendence, not toward our notions of civilization. They would not necessarily have built better guns for hunting or exploiting neighbors, nor created an abstract alphabet to read our enlightening newspapers. We do not get beyond the biological block into the freedom of spirit through our jetcraft, rocketry, sciences, algebras, or quantum physics, nor literacy competency tests and college degrees. The Self exists within us and has its own criteria. The Apinaye might have ended as a society based on certain dances around a fire through which a coiled serpent unfolded from their spine, moved up, and carried them into realms beyond all bombs and dioxins, bulldozers and asphalt. Evolution’s statistical play of consciousness may have won in that remote sector, quietly and unannounced.
In a culture such as ours, with no tangible teachers, we remain in our spiritual natures like that twenty-two-year-old woman found tied in an attic: vegetable, mindless, and lost. People complain of a poor quality of leadership today, but from where do we draw our leaders? How can those in darkness bring light? When we look to the world of folly for our leaders we get only fools, and we deserve no better. We can, in the privacy of our own being, at least, look elsewhere for our own private leadership, and we will always find it.
Saint Simeon, in the eleventh century, wrote that the saints of history are “linked together and united by the bond of the Holy Spirit. . . . Those who appear from generation to generation, following the saints who preceded them . . . become linked with their predecessors and . . . filled with the same light. In such a sequence all of them together form a kind of golden chain, each saint being a separate link in this chain . . . which has its strength in God and can hardly be broken.”
Simeon goes on: “A man who does not express desire to link himself to the latest of the saints in time in all love and humility, owing to a certain distrust . . . will never be linked with the preceding saints and will not be admitted to their succession, even though he thinks he possesses all possible faith and love for God and for all his saints. He will be cast out of their midst, as one who refused to take humbly the place allotted to him by God before all time, and to link himself to that latest saint in time as God had disposed.”5
Always the focus is on the flesh-and-blood model, the representative of the Self here among us. In the West this practical fact has long been lost to politics and enculturation, but in some parts of the world this lineage has been maintained. In Bond of Power I pointed out that genius never arises in a desert but out of conditions of great ferment and activity. To a society of people who have power, power is given, along every line.
India, in spite of its collapse into chaos following centuries of foreign domination, rape, and pillage, has somehow maintained a deep stratum of genuine spiritual investment. In the vast countryside, where foreign influence is less marked than in those cesspool cities of which we hear so much, lies an astonishing depth of spiritual power. The relation of God and human runs to the core of the basic Indian village society. Even if much of it is empty formalism, this too has been imprinted for thousands of years and is an unbroken heritage. Enormous reserves of spiritual power remain, fed both by the devotion of common people and by a surprisingly large number of fully realized individuals, people who have achieved the highest state.
India produces a steady stream of these religious geniuses, great beings who arise from her soil because they find the proper nutrients for full spiritual growth. That India does not match our technological standards is beside the point. The heart of spiritual power on this globe is probably India, today as always. India has always given us Siddhas, great beings who have broken the deadlock of the biological block and achieved the highest transcendence. And today, in an historic shift, perhaps a last-chance gambit by the spirit, teachers again beckon to us from India, again offer to bring us back to sanity. The wise men from the East have traditionally come to the West, and now that the chaos of the West is sweeping the East, a true crisis impends. “I am always becoming what you have need of me to be” was the promise made, and it is always being kept for those with ears to hear and eyes to see. Our need today is an exemplar, a model of who we really are. Such models are among us, and offer us our only avenue to that change we must undergo. I see small chance of the change necessary for us taking place on a broad enough scale to stem the tide. But each of us must work individually, in the inner privacy of our lives, to make ourselves available to the only change that counts.