the master is dead

by PaoloQuaranta
the "spiritual" seeker of the modern age has a problem. once a person
seeking autoevolution would have followed a path of trials and exercises
pertaining to the cultural background he lived in, considering it as
absolute. Today you can have access to all the paths on the market, from
ancient traditions to the last next age approach, at the cost of a weekend
in agritourism, yet - if you are intellectually honest - you cannot belong
to any of them. because you cannot ignore their cultural relativity. Secret
teachings that one hundred years ago would have costed years of sacrifice
and devotion to one master are now in every bookstore, but having them
together on the shelf make them loose their power.
this is a part of a major problem. Spritual or dharma or self realisation
teching is a particoular case of education. Every form of education, from
parental to institutional, to religious education, follow a very ancient
approach, which we can call the initiatic approach. in this approach we have
an asymmetric relation, where I master\adult\teacher am inside the circle or
up the hill, have gained my status , knowledge or experience, and you
disciple\adept\pupil are outside the circle or down the hill. if you want to
get inside the circle you have to cross the line, gain the status or
experience or ability by overcoming a trial, during which you develop it. to
use a rough example, if i want to teach you to swim, i throw you in the
water. this is the model that has been used from generations of
guru-dusciple lignages for teaching traditional knowledge, and if you look
well every human institution also today follow this asymmetric
configuration.
the problem is that the initiatic model works very well in a traditional
culture, where we have a revealed truth\knowledge\law (revealed by god, the
ancients, an angel or an enlighted) which has to be preserved by a chain of
initiated, but our culture (since the invention of alphabetic writing) is no
longer traditional but cumulative: there is no more need to preserve the
knowledge because it's saved in the books, so we can add always new
knowledge,and this educational model, along the centuries, has started to
reveal his weak side. for example, the initiatic paradigm needs to consider
his cultural rapresentation of reality as absolute and written in the
natural law: the system of symbols and ethics to which it refers has to be
considered as the right ONE. sadly mankind has developed the piercing
perception of the complexity of reality. if Newton's law in the past could
have been considered the law that god had written in the nature, now it's
quite clear to anybody that is is only a model of interpretation of reality,
which, as any model, is relative to the system of symbols that it uses. from
this unavoidable relativism comes the crisis of educational agencies of
today, from family, to school, to religion. every educator, if serious, has
to start by asking himself which system of ethics\symbols\values does he
have to use to polarize the evolution of the educand, specially in a
multicultural society. and anyway, the autority of the teacher\parent\master
is questioned by the evidence of cultural relativism.
this problem is true also for that particolar form of education that is
"spiritual" education, or education to a path of autoevolution. every guru
from every tradition will tell you that he cannot teach you to meditate,
because meditation is a personal matter. he can only take you to the limit
of your inner world. from there on the path that you follow is your, and is
different for every person. but then what can he teach you to get you there?
mainly he can make two things: he can give you technics to train your mind
and fisiology, and make you learn them, as a coach would do, and he can help
you to have an "ego diet". the "death of the ego" has been used from every
religion or traditional doctrine as an explanation and justification of
their
pyramidal structure of power. meditation is a good thing. and
perception of the relativity of the self is a good thing, that can
save you from unuseful soffering. the initiatic educational model, and the
relational asymmetry of master\disciple works fine at reducing the ego of
the disciple (maybe less better to keep under control the ego of the
master),but today it has become always more inapplicable.
meditation technics, that have been kept secret for centuries (more to
obtain political power than for ineffability of the matter - the mental
state is ineffable, but not the technic), are just information, and
information is bound to be spreaded everywhere, so today technics can be
easily found on the net. maybe it would be nice to have a work of
comparation and scientific validation of them. anyway information is no
longer a matter of education. education now is only a matter of looking
after one's evolution (and by the way consider the implication of it in
scholastic education).
i said before that a path of autoevolution is a personal path. this implies,
for example, that different persons can be more performing using different
technics. but, in my opinion, it implies also something vaster, pertaining
to the origins and motivations of the traditional paths.
one person gets illuminated, or gets to a particolar state in the path of
autoevolution. seeing his state as higly desiderable, he obviously try to
get there as more people as he can (or maybe it's the people wanting to get
there) using words and actions tuned to the concrete particolar persons in
front of him at that moment. but the state is ineffable and can be
understood only by getting to it, and the people can only consider his words
and actions from outside the state, using an ordinary perspective. so they
start to interpret his words and action organizing around him a system that
defines a target, a myth, a cosmology, a moral, a social institution, and so
on. history shows that most of the "founders" of religious movements
(laotzu, buddha, s.francesco to name a few) were quite annoyed from this
process around them (at least the honest ones). people built around them a
sort of material shell coming form their unfulfilled perspective. so this is
how i consider religions: empty shells left behind the path of evolution of
great individuals. we must look at them to get examples, inspiration and
methods, but following them seems a big waste of time. experience shows that
before you get to a state, it's better not to try to figure it out nor to
talk about it. there would be just misunderstanding and false expectations
from your ego.
so the traditional initiatic educational model doesn't work anymore. we can
see its weak sides. to paraphrase nietzche, if god is dead, the master must
be dead too. we must think to a new form of education, and particulary to
that special form of adult's education that is education to meditation or
autoevolution. after having cleaned the field from the frills of the
initiatic tradition, such as mysticism, levels, inner and outer circles,
initiatic secrets, eschatologies and myths, we are left with technics and
experiences, that can be positively be understood to build symptomatology of
them. but that is the easy part. the other thing needed to have a process of
education to autoevolution is the form of relation that takes care of the
evolution of the trainee, avoiding him misinterpretation of experiences
along the path by keeping his ego under control. the initiatic guru-disciple
aymmetric relation is no more valid.
so my question to the community is: how (and firstly if) can we think of a
new form of relation between individuals motivated to autoevolution to make
them help each other in the process, sharing knowledge and experiences,
marking mistakes and and learning relativity of ego, keeping out of it EVERY
form of religious\initiatic thought (including science, by the way)? what
would theese persons pragmatically do? how would they relate each other
outside the master-disciple model? founding an institution to pursue those
aims would be falling back to the old model.