Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:

Here in the afternoon of the New Age, there is much talk about self-development and self-improvement.  We've been hearing about it for years - since the Eastern spiritual philosophies and practices began filtering into this country from Asia and the Middle East.  Of course these teachings were immediately commingled with the Western conceptual syntax, including nascent and maturing psychoanalytical ideas and Western philosophical thought and religion - particularly the various strains of Protestantism, whose most notable feature is accomplishment on the earthly plane; after all, heaven is on the other side of the great divide.  In other words, while we're here, we work.

When imported into a society that has diametrically opposite underpinnings, the esoteric teachings that are part of the fabric of Eastern societies - Yogis in India, Sufis in Central Asia and Arabia, Zen Buddhists in East Asia, and Dzogchen in Tibet - are easily distorted.  Our culture is all about the individual; the cultures of the East are about collective, communal responsibility.  In the East, practitioners are revered and respected; they are supported by the rest of society because it is commonly understood that all the initiates' study and practice are for the good of all, not just the betterment of the few who undertake particular practices.

In the West, traditions of self-development are commonly employed in the same way we use drugs, psychotherapy, education.  These are all means of self-improvement - polishing the persona, the character we call "me" with its attendant characteristics, attributes, accomplishments and failures.  This is what Chogyam Trungpa speaks about in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism:

"According to the Buddhist tradition, the spiritual path is the process of cutting through our confusion, of uncovering the awakened state of mind.... So it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather burning out the confusions which obstruct it.... If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product, dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution."

The essence of the Eastern approach to spiritual development is that each person already possesses what he or she seeks.  Self-development is not a matter of acquiring anything new, or even modifying what we are, but rather uncovering a native state of "awakeness" that is already present beneath all the clouds of confusion of our ordinary mind.  The emphasis is not on improving oneself, for what is seen as "self" is illusory - it is only the play of thoughts, feelings, sensations, habits and tendencies that are the ever-shifting phenomena of our person.  According to the Eastern standpoint, the real Self is deeper than all that activity.  It is that in a person that is simply aware, awake, watching, and that is one with all.  Identify with that, the Eastern traditions say, and you are enlightened.

Inevitably the New Age approach is to use the Eastern practices to obscure the reality that we have nothing solid in us.  We use the "spiritual" techniques to coalesce a stability that isn't there, thus invoking, in the words of one modern mystic, "The Inner-Evil-God-Self-Calming."  "Experience continually threatens to reveal our transitoriness to us," Trungpa continues, "so we continually struggle to cover up any possibility of discovering our real condition."

When we transplant meditation and other practice techniques of the East into our cultural context of compulsive accomplishment and identification with everything but consciousness itself, they become instruments for polishing the ego rather than a means of transcendence.  What we call "spirituality" becomes just another materialistic undertaking, in which we add to the catalog of egoic attributes that "I am a spiritual person."  The absurdity of this is obvious to everyone but us Westerners, who are obliged to acquire ever-more inner and outer baggage in a vain attempt to thwart death.

Says Adi Da Samraj: "Particularly because you are Westerners, you have a sort of dogged interest in perpetuating the egoic state in every moment.  The psycho-physical personality is tenaciously reinforced in the state of consciousness to which you have become habituated.  No other influences have interrupted the flow of egoity in your acculturation as Westerners.  Westerners do not have time for Enlightenment.  They generally think of Enlightenment as they think of all the goods of the ego and the pleasures of the manifest self.  They view Enlightenment as a big pleasure, one of the delights of the manifest being.  For the Westerner, Enlightenment is built upon the conditional self, pursued by the conditional self, and conceived as a state or object of the conditional self, whereas in fact Enlightenment has nothing to do with the conditional self.  No 'one' is Enlightened.  In Enlightenment there is no individuality, no separate person, no separate anything.  The manifest conditions of existence may continue to arise, but they are utterly recognizable, they have no binding power, they are tacitly recognized to be merely apparent or unnecessary."

- Jason Stern