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Enlightenment is about truth. It’s not about becoming a better or happier person. It’s not about personal growth or spiritual evolution. An accurate ad for enlightenment would make the toughest marine blanche. There is no higher stakes game in this world or any other, in this dimension or any other. The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it. In the simplest of terms, enlightenment is impersonal, whereas what is commonly peddled as enlightenment is personal in the extreme.
—jed mckenna, spiritual enlightenment: the damnedest thing
It is undeniable the state of the world is in chaos.
In the rapid technological prowess and innovation of the twenty-first century, leading a life in tune with the sacred can be an arduous task: our current day-to-day routine is a product of centuries of industrial expansion; our unchecked rate of growth has exploited the earth’s resources and natural habitats; it is becoming increasingly more obvious to the scientific community that we have disrupted the balance our planet has previously maintained in order to sustain the conditions of life for millions of years; and through this exploitation and abuse at our hands, we have disintegrated our connection to the natural world and, in turn, ourselves.
Conversely, our technological progress has developed a global culture of unity and awareness the likes of which has never been seen in recorded history. If I wish, I can have a close friendship with a citizen of Pakistan, I can purchase wares from a market in Bolivia, and I can keep track of the on-ground tactics of a revolution in Egypt—all without ever leaving my home. The interconnectedness of our communications has exceeded the limits of science fiction. So, in the context of our continued abuse toward the planet and ourselves, we have to ask ourselves, why are we doing this? And what can we do to make it better?
Dagara medicine man Malidoma Patrice Somé writes, “I have come to suspect that in the absence of ritual, the soul runs out of its real nourishment, and all kinds of social problems then ensue.… I suggest that the road to correcting ills goes through the challenging path of ritual.” 3 I also assert that transcendence, through some means of ritualized connection with the sacred, is the way our collective psyche can try to surpass these gluttonous addictions pervading our society. This is the aim of the shamanic Qabalah, a field guide to assist fellow psychonauts (astronauts of the psyche) through the process of initiation via the Great Work.
Gary Lachman is the former guitarist for the rock band Blondie, now turned mystic scholar. He is convinced we are indeed here to be stewards not only of the earth but of the entire universe itself. In his book The Caretakers of the Cosmos, he outlines the duality of human existence as shown in various mystical traditions throughout history (Gnosticism, Hermeticism, etc.) and asserts that, taken together, these traditions present a path forward in the human predicament:
I believe that nature, the world, the cosmos, separated us off from itself in order for it to become conscious of itself through us. It is in this way, through our own increasing consciousness, that the work of creation is completed, or at least carried on. Drawing on the work of different “participatory” thinkers, it is my belief that our evolutionary task now is to regain an experience of participation and all that it entails, without losing our independence as conscious egos, capable of free will and creative action, something our ancestors, more at one with the cosmos, lacked. Our task, then, is to become more conscious, not less, which means facing the sense of separation from the world firmly, and getting through it.4
But what exactly does being “more conscious” mean? That answer, I believe, can be found in the process of initiation. It can only be explored to be known.
Getting Started
I was sitting in a circle of people. It was a spiritual gathering, a workshop centered on self-transformation and what have you. We were taking turns one by one to introduce ourselves and share the state or county where we were from.
The first woman stood, covered in beads and tattoos, bells jingling off her hemp dress as she rose.
“My name is Priestess Ishtar Blue Feather Woman, and I’m from Atlantis.”
Actually, her name was Maggie Smith, and she was from downtown. But her creative opening remarks inspired everyone else in the group. Light bulbs sprung over their heads all throughout the circle, a Fourth of July spectacle of compulsive, lemming rapture. The next person stood, a guy in dreadlocks with a t-shirt that stated proudly in bubblegum letters, “Spiritual Gangster.”
“My name is Bear Claw, and I’m from, um….” He thought about it for a little bit, a childish grin on his face. “Orion’s Belt … hehe, yeah!”
Everyone laughed. The next person stood, and it continued.
“My name is White Buffalo Seeker, and I’m from Jupiter.”
“My name is Star Child, and I’m from Dimension X.”
“My name is Standing Tall Man, and I’m from the Pleiades.”
And on and on it went, everyone getting more and more creative with their fictionalized names and origins, until the group came to me.
“My name is Daniel Moler, and I’m from Olathe, Kansas.”
They all kept smiling, but there were no more giggles. They were the kinds of smiles painted on forcefully to keep a composure of calm, but underneath their flow had been interrupted. I’d been a killjoy. I wasn’t trying to be. I was actually just being me. That was who I am; I was just introducing myself, rather than an invented or channeled persona from a previous, assumed lifetime. The point of an introduction was to get to know the people you were in circle with. This was a workshop on self-transformation; it was time to get real. I didn’t have a sense of who anyone was from their super-identities. Plus, to be honest, I did want to make a point …
I’ve heard numerous times from seekers in alternative spirituality and transformational communities that they are dissatisfied with the world. That is indeed why they want to transform, because they are dissatisfied with their current state of being. But too often I interact with others who are so uncomfortable in their skin they even make comments like, “I wonder if there was some mistake when I was sent to this planet” or “Just waiting for my star relatives to pick me up.” Coupled with the ornamental introductions from above, often I get to the place where I just want to ask them:
“Why do you keep disassociating yourselves from the earth?”
Why are we discarding the lineage of being children of the earth? It’s the same situation in fundamentalist religious institutions. I grew up in a Christian church, and I was taught from an early age that God created the earth, and then we were created from God. The Christian creation myth (like other creation stories) denotes that we were basically plucked out of the sky and placed here on the planet as a sort of test of our mettle. Almost as if we are alien to the earth!
But I believe in science—in reality—even though I am a highly spiritual person. To harken to our Terra heritage, we literally grew out of the earth. Starting in the seas, we began as cellular organisms that evolved into multicellular organisms, which eventually ended in us walking out of the primordial waters to become sentient beings on the land. Again, literally, the earth is our mother. This is not an abstract or metaphorical concept. It is as real as the oxygen we breathe.
We should not want to be from anywhere else. We should be proud of our heritage. This is who we are: earth-beings having an earthly experience.
I understand the disenchantment with being human, though. Frankly, we live in a shitty world right now, a world we ourselves have created. At the moment, there are mass-shootings and mass-bombings happening all around the globe. There is unprecedented environmental devastation putting pressure on our lives, and nobody wants to do what it takes to change the course. Roughly 80 percent of the world is in poverty. The list goes on and on, and for some it goes on all too long until the point where all our fragile brains can do is shut down. But none of this is Earth Mother’s fault. Don’t disown her.
We must have our resolve. And we must do something about this. Part of the problem of wanting to effect change is that there is too much to do. We become overwhelmed and lose sight of what we can do, because we can’t do everything. Wisdom teachers around the world agree, though, echoing the popular statement attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
But Gandhi didn’t actually say that. What he said was simplified and turned into a meme that’s easy to copy and paste onto a tweet for a motivational uplift. What Gandhi actually said was this: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” 5
This statement—actually an esoteric commentary—has been co-opted into an exoteric pretext for a form of religious exploitation pervading our modern culture. It has been taken literally, instead of mystically, to promote a commercialized narrative that seeks to secularize true spiritual seeking into a success-oriented pyramid scheme.
Former Zen monk Mu Soeng is now an author and program director at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts. Soeng is a critic of what he calls the “happiness industry” pervading Buddhism, but also our entire culture of spiritual and social media. He states that the overlaps between the happiness industry and spirituality have forced religions—including Buddhism—into traffickers of bliss. Consequently, a spiritual path can no longer be legitimate unless it caters to the benefit of people’s happiness.
Soeng continues his analysis of happiness-seeking belief systems as something separate from the liberation or illumination sought after in mysticism. America especially has adopted religion in general to be the basis of a manifest-destiny mindset inherent in all Western life, from the smallest of daily banalities to the gaining of favor from on high. It’s almost as if religion has turned into a principle of self-gratification, that God itself is invested in the minutiae of every person’s innate desires. Soeng explains, “Throughout history, all popular religions … have sought to convey a prosperity gospel through faith in one deity or another. What’s distinctive about the prosperity gospel in America is that it fits into a distinctly American narrative about happiness starting with what Max Weber has called ‘the spirit of Protestant Ethic.’ This is the Calvinistic idea that God rewards prosperity to those who work hard.” 6
So, in effect, we have developed a spiritual culture that is based on materialism. Our store shelves and TV commercials are filled to the brim with prosperity evangelists like Joel Osteen and advertisements selling us the next big thing on better health and better financial success … all to reach the goal of your dreams! But what is most disconcerting about all of this—whether or not you are okay with the consumer merits of such an ethic pervading our society—is that our material success has nothing at all to do with having a spiritual life.
The universe (God) only cares for one’s material gain as much as the human body cares about the individual success of a single cell in the whole of the entire organism. We, as human beings, care little for the personal desires of every single cell inside of our bodies, as long as it serves its function for the whole of the body. Likewise, that is the function of the mystical path, a true spiritual life. It is the path of the cell, of a function, to serve the needs of the greater whole of the body of the earth, and thus the universe.
One of the greater twentieth-century philosophers of the mystery traditions, Manly P. Hall addresses this notion of service that makes up the life of a mystic in his book The Mystical Christ. In this treatise of mysticism, he writes, “To cultivate the attributes of spirituality in order to satisfy frustrated ambitions or to make an otherwise useless life appear useful is to invite disaster; yet religion [or any spiritual system] has always served as an outlet for the neurotic. The halt, the lame, and the blind have always demanded the consolation of their faith, but have contributed little of strength and integrity to the sects which they have joined. In mysticism it is what we give and not what we gain that determines spiritual progress.” 7
Inherent in the notion of mysticism is the quality of sacrifice: one’s entire life is surrendered to the mysteries of the universe, rather than just Sundays. In any case, if indeed the religious life assumes God is a personality—with personality enough to be jealous of false gods (which are, by that logic, not even real)—then the spiritual life, and most especially the mystical one, is about having a relationship with that personality. If I were to have a relationship with my wife by making every decision in accordance with what I can acquire for my own gain from her, then what kind of relationship is that? If I ask for this and ask for that, she would be willing to give at first because of her love for me, but at what point does she begin to hold back because of lack of reciprocation? What about the giving? What about decisions that are actually of mutual benefit, not just mine or hers alone?
Our spiritual culture is a capitalist one. We need to stop cultivating spiritual practices that promote the acquisition of “stuff,” of “things.” We seek “liberation,” we seek “success,” and we seek “abundance,” among other things. However, just as I am not in relationship with my wife to get things from her but am in relationship with her for the sake of relationship, why then can we not be in relationship with God for the sake of just being in relationship? Why must we have some deep, ulterior motive for having belief, for having faith? Must we always have some sort of gain?
Recheck yourself, because you have just convinced yourself that you have no ulterior motive. But look deeper. You do.
When Gandhi said “this is the divine mystery supreme,” he was not talking about some exclusive secret that is concealed from the common person. Every mystic versed in the symbology of the mysteries understands exactly what he means here. Gandhi is saying the only thing you do have control over is the temple that is you. Your body, and less so even the physical vehicle and more so the mental and emotional capacities. Our power resides within.
As was stated by one of the greatest mystics ever known, Yeshua, the Christ, in the Gospel of Thomas: “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.” 8 He is, of course, not speaking of literal poverty in terms of financial success.
There is a mystical substance known to the ancient alchemists, whispered in legends and written about in arcane tomes, called the philosopher’s stone. This stone was said to have such great power that it could bestow eternal life and enlightenment and turn base metals into gold. One can imagine a king’s reaction to such a feat! As faux chemists were tasked by their leaders to spend years and years toiling away in laboratories and traveling the globe in search of such a lucrative object, the authentic alchemists knew that the philosopher’s stone was a symbol. It was never a physical thing to be found or formed, but a spiritual, mental, and emotional process to be developed and matured.
In alchemy, there is a Latin phrase—Visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem—which reveals that one must visit the interior of the earth, purified, in order to find the stone. This means we must delve deep within ourselves, become redeemed, to achieve the attainment sought by philosophers and mystics through the ages.
We do not fly into the stars or take flights of fancy to find the stone, in order to live a life of spiritual virtue. No, we delve into the depths of the earth. We go inward, to the truth of who we are. We are children of the earth—let us not forget that, ever.
3. Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community (Portland, OR: Swan/Raven & Company, 1993), 121.
4. Gary Lachman, The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished Universe (Edinburgh, UK: Floris Books, 2013), 27.
5. Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 3 (Ahmedabad, India: Navajivan Trust, 1960), 241.
6. Mu Soeng, “Worldly Happiness/Buddhist Happiness,” Parabola 41, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 48.
7. Manly P. Hall, The Mystical Christ: Religion as a Personal Spiritual Experience (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society, 1951), 86–87.
8. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds., The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of Mystical Wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Boston: Shambhala, 2009), 3:7–10.