Why the Age of the Guru is Over
By Charles Eisenstein
For a few decades now, it seems, humanity has been on the
verge of a breakthrough in collective consciousness. Perhaps it was the Hippies
in the 60s who saw it first. To them, it was crystal clear that the
consciousness revolution would sweep all before it, that within a few years'
time such institutions as government, money, marriage, and school would become
obsolete. Forty years later, their vision has not come to pass and,
superficially at least, the defining institutions of our civilization are more powerful,
more encompassing than ever. Nonetheless, to many of us much of the time, and
to most of us at least once in a while, the breakthrough in consciousness the
Hippies foretold seems imminent still.
Perhaps it seems imminent because, in those peak experiences
when we know the true potential of our humanity, the true vastness of our
minds, and the love that is the default state of existence, it seems so obvious
that we have returned to our birthright and recovered our original estate. It
could be a near-death experience that brings us there, a psychedelic
experience, a moment in nature, giving birth, making love; it could be a
religious experience, or come through a dream, music, or meditation; it can also
be awakened through psychological work, a transformational seminar, even a
book. Usually, though, the high does not last.
I've had many such experiences where I think, "Nothing
will ever be the same again," but after a few days or weeks, I notice that
I must struggle to maintain the realized state I'd been in. What was once
effortless and self-evident becomes the subject of reminders and practices. The
"old normal" encroaches, until I am back where I started, and the
state that had felt so true and obvious becomes a mere memory. I can try to
repeat the experience, but as with a drug, the second high is a little less
intense than the first, and the return to baseline more rapid. Eventually I
come to doubt: maybe the experience was a drug, an excursion away from reality
and not, as I'd believed, something more real than the world I've come to
accept. For some people, that voice swells in volume until it becomes a
deafening tumult of despair. Before the experience, there was at least hope,
but having entered paradise and been ejected, what is there now to live for?
So it was on a cultural level, that after the enlightenment
and exuberant expectations of the sixties, much of the counterculture turned to
the hedonism and consumption of the Me Decade. What a sense of betrayal we
felt, as the psychedelic revolution gave way to the War on Drugs, as the Clean
Air Act gave way to Ronald Reagan and James Watt ("Trees pollute more than
people do.")
Happily, whether on a personal or collective level, the
despair can never be complete, for the ember of the awakening experience lives
on inextinguishable in our hearts. However deep the despair to which we may
descend, we carry a first-hand knowledge written into our cells that there is
more than Just This. Even if we know not how to return to that more beautiful
world, we know it exists. This knowledge lives independently of beliefs,
The purpose of this essay is to describe a paradigm of
mutual care that can carry us across the threshold between worlds.
We did glimpse a more beautiful world in the 1960s, but the
old normal wasn't finished yet. The story had not yet been told to its
fullness. Therefore, we could not abide in the new reality; the pull of the old
was too strong. To be sure, there were many individual exceptions; to this day
there are unregenerate hippies living in the interstices of our realm, as
invisible to us as the Taoist immortals of legend, holding the template of the
next world until such time as we are ready for it. But for the most part, after
the sixties people returned to the world they'd left behind, and followed it
indeed to new extremes.
Forty years later, that world is falling apart at an accelerating
rate. The stories that undergird our civilization are crumbling. Two are
primary: the story of the self, and the story of the people. The first is the
discrete, separate self, a Cartesian mote of consciousness looking out onto an
objective universe of soulless masses and impersonal, deterministic forces. In
biology, the separate self manifests as the paradigm of the selfish gene
seeking to maximize its reproductive self-interest; in economics, it is homo
economicus, who seeks to maximize rational self-interest as measured by money.
In psychology, it is the skin-encapsulated ego; in religion, the soul encased
in flesh but separate from it. Such a
self is naturally in opposition to all other beings, whose interests are
indifferent to or at odds with its own. Spiritual teachings based on this story
of self, then, tell us we must try very hard to rise above nature, to conquer
our biological and economic drive to maximize self-interest at the expense of
other beings.
Externalized, this war against the self manifests as the
second defining story of civilization, the story of the people that I call
"ascent", that says that humanity's destiny is to overcome and
transcend nature. It perfectly complements the story of self, elevating the
mental over the physical, the ideal over the concrete, and spirit over the
body.
In describing these myths, I use the word "story"
in a special sense, as an unconscious narrative that makes meaning of the
world, that assigns roles to human beings, that explains the nature of life,
the world, and the purpose of human existence, and that coordinates human
activity. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. We are approaching
the end of ours, of the stories upon which our civilization is built. To the
extent those stories are no longer true for you, you do not feel like a full
participant in this civilization.
They are becoming untrue for more and more of us, as the
world built upon them falls apart. How can we believe in the conquest of
nature, when because of our actions the ecological basis of civilization is
threatened? How can we believe any more that the final triumph over disease is
just around the corner, or an age of leisure, or space vacations, or a
perfectly just society, if only we extend the realm of control just a bit
further? And how can we believe any longer in the paradise of the separate
self, independent of all, beholden to no one, financially secure, when we see
first hand the alienation, the despair, the starvation for community that makes
that paradise a hell? When depression, addiction, suicide, and family breakdown
strike even the winners of the war of all against all?
Whether on a personal or collective level, we are
discovering that the stories of separation are untrue. What we do unto the
other, inescapably visits ourselves as well in some form. As that becomes
increasingly obvious, a new story of self and story of the people becomes
accessible to us. I have written of these in other essays, among them Money and
the Turning of the Age, Rituals for Lover Earth, Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the
Ecology of Health, and in greater depth in The Ascent of Humanity. The new
story of self is the connected self, the self of interbeingness. The new story
of the people is one of cocreative partnership with Lover Earth. They ring true
in our hearts, we see them on the horizon, but we do not yet live yet in these
new stories. It is hard to, when the institutions and habits of the old world
still surround us.
Poised as we are at the transition between worlds, and
traveling, many of us, back and forth between them, we need a way to enter the
new one, learn to live in it, and be able to abide there. We need, in other
words, a midwife. The birth metaphor is perhaps imperfect, since we are
undergoing not a single, final expulsion, but a series of brief experiences of
a more radiant world in which we have been unable to stay. How can we stay? How
can we fully establish ourselves in a radically different way of thinking,
relating, and being? Make no mistake: this revolution goes far beyond the
acceptance of an idea. To know and embody as an experiential, lived, enacted
reality the truth of interbeingness, to live in the spirit of the gift as
appropriate to each relationship, to absolutely trust one's divinity and that
of others, to know in every fiber of one's being, "I art Thou," and
to navigate this knowledge with appropriate boundaries, constitutes a
fundamental revolution in human beingness. Moreover, though we have entered the
new territory, we lack models and maps to live in it. We need guidance, we need
sacred teachings. But who are to be our teachers, when all is new?
To be sure, we have inherited teachings and models for the
new world, both from visionaries who saw through the stories of separation
centuries ago, and from tribes who avoided civilization long enough to transmit
their knowledge to us. Much of this knowledge has been distorted through the
lens of separation, but as the new stories come into focus, we can discern
their original intent. For example, the usual formulation of the Golden Rule,
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is a moral
injunction that we hear as yet another version of the dictum, born of the
separation of spirit and matter: "Try hard to be nice." It is a standard
of behavior, something we must overcome our natural selfishness to attain. From
the perspective of the connected self, though, the Golden Rule changes form to
become not a rule but a reminder: "As you do unto others, so you are doing
unto yourself." The intent of its original articulator is recovered.
Similarly, the Boddhisatva Vow, "I will not enter
Nirvana myself until all sentient beings have entered Nirvana," lands on
us as the ultimate self-sacrifice, a heroic and magnanimous vow beyond the
reach of ordinary people. For the connected self of "I art Thou,"
however, it is merely a distorted articulation of a simple fact that we might
call the Boddhisatva Realization: "It is impossible to abide in Nirvana
alone. If any sentient being is left out of it, then part of me is left out of
it." Only someone under the delusion that he is a discrete, separate soul
would imagine otherwise.
Enlightening as these teachings might be, mere information
is not enough. As many spiritual traditions recognize, a living teacher, a
guru, is necessary to bring the teachings to life in their unique application
to each individual. We need something from beyond our old selves, someone to
illuminate our blind spots, to humble our conceit, to show us the love we
didn't know we had within us. This presents a problem today, because the age of
the guru is manifestly over.
No human being can hold the guru energy in post-modern
society. This is old news - the age of the guru has been over for at least
thirty years. In the 1960s and 70s, any number of masters came to America from
the East and, absent the cultural structures that traditionally kept them in an
insulated realm, succumbed one after another to scandals involving money, sex,
and power. The same thing happened as well to many of the gurus who remained in
the East, as even their traditional structures crumbled under the onslaught of
Western cultural warfare and the money economy. In the past, to even access a
guru you had to make a journey and to some extent leave the old normal behind.
Now, gurus were interfacing directly with the old normal. No journey was
necessary to receive a mantra; soon all that was necessary was money. This
interface was perilous to guru and seeker alike.
The gurus that did not fall found ways to maintain their
exclusion from a story of the world that would drag them into it. Some, like
Neem Karoli Baba (died 1973), took the simple expedient of dying. Others
retired or disappeared. After the 1970s, anyone who got into the guru business
was quickly corrupted; the wiser ones stayed away, preferring to act as
teachers, mentors, spiritual friends. Human consciousness was approaching, on a
mass level, the template that had been prepared, in insulated, secret lineages
and remote sanctuaries, for thousands of years. Millions were ready for what
only a select few were prepared in the past. The gurus through the ages had
finally succeeded: they had awoken an energy of a magnitude no single human
being could contain. For those who
tried, the uncontainable energy inevitably emerged in subterranean ways as
shadow and scandal, and their followers learned not only the lessons of their
teachings, but also the lessons of their failures.
The difficulty, then, is that we are ready as never before
for a guru, yet no single human being is capable of taking on that role. Whence
are we to obtain that spiritual midwifery, "someone to illuminate our
blind spots, to humble our conceit, to show us the love we didn't know we had
within us"? What can bring to the masses what hidden lineages and gurus
once brought to a select few? To answer that question, let us follow the
trajectory of spiritual teachings after the 1970s.
What followed the demise of the guru was a new age of
spiritual independence. Its motto might have been, "All that you need is
within you." People trusted their own inner guru, their guidance. The
spiritual teachers of this period were just that, teachers not gurus, not
accorded a different category of being, but a kind of spiritual friend, a more
experienced colleague. It was a time of self-improvement and doing your own
spiritual work. The goal was a kind of self-sufficiency. We sought to eradicate
negativity from our minds and take full responsibility for our lives. We worked
on forgiveness. We sought to "manifest" health, wealth, and romance
through the power of positive thinking. We resonated with teachings like,
"Change yourself, change your beliefs, and reality will change along with
it. All the power is within you; each person is a self-sufficient creator of
his or her own reality." We sought to liberate ourselves from victim
mentality, the belief that our happiness depends on the choices of others.
Sure, we wanted to attract good relationships into our lives, but we didn't
need anyone.
Though I am writing in the past tense, I don't mean to
denigrate the beliefs I describe, nor even to say they are not true. They were
true, and there is truth in them still. They are not the whole truth though, as
many people are now starting to realize. For having reached the pinnacle of
spiritual independence, they want something more.
A participant at one of my retreats put it like this:
"I really do have it all. I run my own wellness center, I live in a
beautiful house with a view of the mountains, I have manifested financial
abundance, I have a fabulous relationship with my wife, who is my partner on
the spiritual path. We've done the most amazing retreats, the most powerful
transformational workshops, had deep experiences of altered consciousness,
states of samadhi, experiences of kundalini... But this is no longer enough.
There is something else, a next step, and I'm not sure what it is. It's not
that I'm unhappy - I have a lot of peace, joy, and contentment in my life - but
I know there is a next step."
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