Translation Versus
Transformation
In a series of books (e.g., A
Sociable God, Up
from Eden, and The
Eye of Spirit), I have tried to show that religion itself has
always performed two very important, but very different, functions.
One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it
offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals and
revivals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of,
and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This
function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the
level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical
transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the
separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies
the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the
separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the
prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently
believed, will be “saved” – either now in the glory of
being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an after-life that insures
eternal wonderment.
But two, religion has also served – in
a usually very, very small minority – the function of radical
transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not
fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it – not consolation
but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but
explosion, not comfort but revolution – in short, not a conventional
bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and
transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.
There are several different ways that
we can state these two important functions of religion. The first
function – that of creating meaning for the self – is a type of
horizontal movement; the second function – that of transcending the
self – is a type of vertical movement (higher or deeper, depending
on your metaphor). The first I have named translation; the second,
transformation.
With translation, the self is simply
given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a
new belief – perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps
forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of
analytic. The self then learns to translate its world and its being
in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and
this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to
alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the
separate self.
But with transformation, the very
process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined,
and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or
subject) is given a new way to think about the world (or objects);
but with radical transformation, the self itself is inquired into,
looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled to death.
Put it one last way: with horizontal
translation – which is by far the most prevalent, wide-spread, and
widely-shared function of religion – the self is, at least
temporarily, made happy in its grasping, made content in its
enslavement, made complacent in the face of the screaming terror
that is in fact its innermost condition. With translation, the self
goes sleepy into the world, stumbles numbed and near-sighted into
the nightmare of samsara,
is given a map laced with morphine with which to face the world. And
this, indeed, is the common condition of a religious humanity,
precisely the condition that the radical or transformative spiritual realizers have come to
challenge and to finally undo.
For authentic transformation is not a
matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of
translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of
finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death.
The self is not made content; the self is made toast.
Now, although I have obviously been
favoring transformation and belittling translation, the fact is
that, on the whole, both of these functions are incredibly important
and altogether indispensable. Individuals are not, for the most
part, born enlightened. They are born in a world of sin and
suffering, hope and fear, desire and despair. They are born as a
self ready and eager to contract; a self rife with hunger, thirst,
tears and terror. And they begin, quite early on, to learn various
ways to translate their world, to make sense of it, to give meaning
to it, and to defend themselves against the terror and the torture
never lurking far beneath the happy surface of the separate self.
And as much as we, as you and I, might
wish to transcend mere translation and find an authentic
transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely
necessary and crucial function for the greater part of our lives.
Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of
integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even
psychosis: the world ceases to make sense – the boundaries between
the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to
crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence
but disaster.
But at some point in our maturation
process, translation itself, no matter how adequate or confident,
simply ceases to console. No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no new
myths, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new
belief for the self, but the transcendence of the self altogether,
is the only path that avails.
Still, the number of individuals who
are ready for such a path is, always has been, and likely always
will be, a very small minority. For most people, any sort of
religious belief will fall instead into the category of consolation:
it will be a new horizontal translation that fashions some sort of
meaning in the midst of the monstrous world. And religion has always
served, for the most part, this first function, and served it well.
I therefore also use the word
legitimacy to describe this first function (the horizontal
translation and creation of meaning for the separate self). And much
of religion ’s important service is to provide legitimacy to the self
– legitimacy to its beliefs, its paradigms, its worldviews, and its
way in the world. This function of religion to provide a legitimacy
for the self and its beliefs – no matter how temporary, relative,
non-transformative, or illusory – has nonetheless been the single
greatest and most important function of the world ’s religious
traditions. The capacity of a religion to provide horizontal
meaning, legitimacy, and sanction for the self and its beliefs –
that function of religion has historically been the single greatest
“social glue” that any culture has.
And one does not tamper easily, or
lightly, with the basic glue that holds societies together. Because
more often than not, when that glue dissolves – when that
translation dissolves – the result, as we were saying, is not
breakthrough but breakdown, not liberation but social chaos. (We
will return to this crucial point in a moment.)
Where translative religion offers
legitimacy, transformative religion offers authenticity. For those
few individuals who are ready – that is, sick with the suffering of
the separate self, and no longer able to embrace the legitimate
worldview – then a transformative opening to true authenticity, true
enlightenment, true liberation, calls more and more insistently.
And, depending upon your capacity for suffering, you will sooner or
later answer the call of authenticity, of transformation, of
liberation on the lost horizon of infinity.
Transformative spirituality does not
seek to bolster or legitimate any present worldview at all, but
rather to provide true authenticity by shattering what the world
takes as legitimate. Legitimate consciousness is sanctioned by the
consensus, adopted by the herd mentality, embraced by the culture
and the counter-culture both, promoted by the separate self as the
way to make sense of this world. But authentic consciousness quickly
shakes all of that off of its back, and settles instead into a
glance that sees only a radiant infinity in the heart of all souls,
and breathes into its lungs only the atmosphere of an eternity too
simple to believe.
Transformative spirituality, authentic
spirituality, is therefore revolutionary. It does not legitimate the
world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it
shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it
undone.
And those facts lead to several
conclusions.
Who Actually Wants to Transform?
It is a fairly common belief that the
East is simply awash in transformative and authentic spirituality,
but that the West – both historically and in today ’s “new
age” – has nothing much more than various types of horizontal,
translative, merely legitimate and therefore tepid spirituality. And
while there is some truth to that, the actual situation is much
gloomier, for both the East and the West alike.
First, although it is generally true
that the East has produced a greater number of authentic realizers,
nonetheless, the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is
engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and always has
been, pitifully small. I once asked Katigiri Roshi, with whom I had my
first breakthrough (hopefully, not a breakdown), how many truly
great Ch ’an and Zen masters there have
historically been. Without hesitating, he said “Maybe one
thousand altogether.” I asked another Zen master how many truly
enlightened – deeply enlightened – Japanese Zen masters there were
alive today, and he said “Not more than a dozen.”
Let us simply assume, for the sake of
argument, that those are vaguely accurate answers. Run the numbers.
Even if we say there were only one billion Chinese over the course
of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still means that
only one thousand out of one billion had graduated into an
authentic, transformative spirituality. For those of you without a
calculator, that ’s 0.0000001 of the total population.
And that means, unmistakably, that the
rest of the population were (and are) involved in, at best, various
types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate religion: they
were involved in magical practices, mythical beliefs, egoic
petitionary prayer, magical rituals, and so on – in other words,
translative ways to give meaning to the separate self, a translative
function that was, as we were saying, the major social glue of the
Chinese (and all other) cultures to date.
Thus, without in any way belittling the
truly stunning contributions of the glorious Eastern traditions, the
point is fairly straightforward: radical transformative spirituality
is extremely rare, anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world.
(The numbers for the West are even more depressing. I rest my case.)
So, although we can very rightly lament
the very few number of individuals in the West who are today
involved in a truly authentic and radically transformative spiritual
realization, let us not make the false argument of claiming that it
has otherwise been dramatically different in earlier times or in
different cultures. It has on occasion been a little better than we
see here, now, in the West, but the fact remains: authentic
spirituality is an incredibly rare bird, anywhere, at any time, at
any place. So let us start from the unarguable fact that vertical,
transformative, authentic spirituality is one of the most precious
jewels in the entire human tradition – precisely because, like all
precious jewels, it is incredibly rare.
Second, even though you and I might
deeply believe that the most important function we can perform is to
offer authentic transformative spirituality, the fact is, much of
what we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality
into the world, is actually to offer more benign and helpful modes
of translation. In other words, even if we ourselves are practicing,
or offering, authentic transformative spirituality, nonetheless much
of what we must first do is provide most people with a more adequate
way to translate their condition. We must start with helpful
translations, before we can effectively offer authentic
transformations.
The reason is that if translation is
too quickly, or too abruptly, or too ineptly taken away from an
individual (or a culture), the result, once again, is not
breakthrough but breakdown, not release but collapse. Let me give
two quick examples here.
When Chogyam
Trungpa Rinpoche,
a great (though controversial) Tibetan master, first came to this
country, he was renown for always saying, when asked the meaning of Vajrayana,
“There is only Ati.” In other words, there is only the
enlightened mind wherever you look. The ego, samsara, maya and illusion – all
of them do not have to be gotten rid of, because none of them
actually exist: There is only Ati, there is only Spirit, there is
only God, there is only nondual Consciousness anywhere in existence.
Virtually nobody got it – nobody was
ready for this radical and authentic realization of always-already
truth – and so Trungpa eventually introduced a whole series of
“lesser” practices leading up to this radical and ultimate
“no practice”. He introduced the Nine Yanas as the foundation of
practice – in other words, he introduced nine stages or levels of
practice, culminating in the ultimate “no practice” of
always-already Ati.
Many of these practices were simply
translative, and some were what we might call “lesser
transformative” practices: miniature transformations that made
the bodymind more susceptible to radical, already-accomplished
enlightenment. These translative and lesser practices issued forth
in the “perfect practice” of no-practice – or the radical,
instantaneous, authentic realization that, from the very beginning,
there is only Ati. So even though ultimate transformation was the
prior goal and ever-present ground, Trungpa had to introduce
translative and lesser practices in order to prepare people for the
obviousness of what is.
Exactly the same thing happened with Adi Da, another
influential (and equally controversial) adept (although this time,
American-born). He originally taught nothing but “the path of
understanding”: not a way to attain enlightenment, but an
inquiry into why you want to attain enlightenment in the first
place. The very desire to seek enlightenment is in fact nothing but
the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search
for enlightenment prevents it. The “perfect practice” is
therefore not to search for enlightenment, but to inquire into the
motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the
present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever
is to miss the point forever. You always already ARE enlightened
Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit. You
can no more attain Spirit than you can attain your feet or acquire
your lungs.
Nobody got it. And so Adi Da, exactly
like Trungpa, introduced a whole series of translative and lesser
transformative practices – seven stages of practice, in fact –
leading up to the point that you could dispense with seeking
altogether, there to stand open to the always-already truth of your
own eternal and timeless condition, which was completely and totally
present from the start, but which was brutally ignored in the
frenzied desire to seek.
Now, whatever you might think of those
two Adepts, the fact remains: they performed perhaps the first two
great experiments in this country on how to introduce the notion
that “There is only Ati” – there is only Spirit – and thus
seeking Spirit is exactly that which prevents realization. And they
both found that, however much we might be alive to Ati, alive to the
radical transformative truth of this moment, nonetheless translative
and lesser transformative practices are almost always a prerequisite
for that final and ultimate transformation.
My second point, then, is that in
addition to offering authentic and radical transformation, we must
still be sensitive to, and caring of, the numerous beneficial modes
of lesser and translative practices. This more generous stance
therefore calls for an “integral approach” to overall
transformation, an approach that honors and incorporates many lesser
transformative and translative practices – covering the physical,
emotional, mental, cultural, and communal aspects of the human being
– in preparation for, and as an expression of, the ultimate
transformation into the always already present state.
And so, even as we rightly criticize
merely translative religion (and all the lesser forms of
transformation), let us also realize that an integral approach to
spirituality combines the best of horizontal and vertical,
translative and transformative, legitimate and authentic – and thus
let us focus our efforts on a balanced and sane overview of the
human situation.
Wisdom and Compassion
But isn ’t this view of mine terribly
elitist? Good heavens, I hope so. When you go to a basketball game,
do you want to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball? When you
listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money in order to
hear? Me or Bruce Springsteen? When you read great literature, who
would you rather spend an evening reading, me or Tolstoy? When you
pay sixty-four million dollars for a painting, will that be a
painting by me or by Van Gogh?
All excellence is elitist. And that
includes spiritual excellence as well. But spiritual excellence is
an elitism to which all are invited. We go first to the great
masters – to Padmasambhava,
to St. Teresa of Avila, to Gautama Buddha,
to Lady Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bodhidharma, Garab
Dorje. But their message is always the same: let this
consciousness be in you which is in me. You start elitist, always;
you end up egalitarian, always.
But in between, there is the angry
wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all of us, keep our eye
on the radical and ultimate transformative goal. And so any sort of
integral or authentic spirituality will also, always, involve a
critical, intense, and occasionally polemical shout from the
transformative camp to the merely translative camp.
If we use the percentages of Chinese
Ch ’an as a simple blanket example, this means that if 0.0000001 of
the population is actually involved in genuine or authentic
spirituality, then .99999999 of the population is involved in
nontransformative, nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal
belief systems. And that means, yes, that the vast, vast majority of
“spiritual seekers” in this country (as elsewhere) are
involved in much less than authentic occasions. It has always been
so; it is still so now. This country is no exception.
But in today ’s America, this is much
more disturbing, because this vast majority of horizontal spiritual
adherents often claim to be representing the leading edge of
spiritual transformation, the “new paradigm” that will
change the world, the “great transformation” of which they
are the vanguard. But more often than not, they are not deeply
transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively translative
– they do not offer effective means to utterly dismantle the self,
but merely ways for the self to think differently. Not ways to
transform, but merely new ways to translate. In fact, what most of
them offer is not a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang or shikan-taza or yoga. What most of them
offer is simply the suggestion: read my book on the new paradigm.
This is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.
Thus, the authentic spiritual camps
have the heart and soul of the great transformative traditions, and
yet they will always do two things at once: appreciate and engage
the lesser and translative practices (upon which their own successes
usually depend), but also issue a thundering shout from the heart
that translation alone is not enough.
And therefore, all of those for whom
authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I
believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from
the heart – perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance;
perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and
careful analysis; perhaps by unshakeable public example – but
authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you
must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual
tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You
must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and
rattle those around you.
Alas, if you fail to do so, you are
betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate.
You don ’t want to upset others because you don ’t want to upset your
self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.
Because, you see, the alarming fact is
that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: Those who
are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to
communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain.
You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would
communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And
therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out
with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with
skillful means, but speak out you must.
This is truly a terrible burden, a
horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity.
The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be
right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that
doesn ’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely
reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with
passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the
reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it
is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is
your duty to promote that discovery – either way – and therefore it
is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage
you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.
The vulgar world is already shouting,
and with such a raucous rancor that truer voices can scarcely be
heard at all. The materialistic world is already full of
advertisements and allure, screams of enticement and cries of
commerce, wails of welcome and whoops of come hither. I don ’t mean
to be harsh here, and we must honor all lesser engagements.
Nonetheless, you must have noticed that the word “soul” is
now the hottest item in the title of book sales – but all
“soul” really means, in most of these books, is simply the
ego in drag. “Soul” has come to denote, in this feeding
frenzy of translative grasping, not that which is timeless in you
but that which most loudly thrashes around in time, and thus
“care of the soul” incomprehensibly means nothing much
more than focusing intensely on your ardently separate self.
Likewise, “Spiritual” is on everybody ’s lips, but usually
all it really means is any intense egoic feeling, just as
“Heart” has come to mean any sincere sentiment of the
self-contraction.
All of this, truly, is just the same
old translative game, dressed up and gone to town. And even that
would be more than acceptable were it not for the alarming fact that
all of that translative jockeying is aggressively called
“transformation”, when all it is, of course, is a new
series of frisky translations. In other words, there seems to be,
alas, a deep hypocrisy hidden in the game of taking any new
translation and calling it the great transformation. And the world
at large – East or West, North or South – is, and always has been,
for the most part, perfectly deaf to this calamity.
And so, given the measure of your own
authentic realization, you were actually thinking about gently
whispering into the ear of that near-deaf world? No, my friend, you
must shout. Shout from the heart of what you have seen, shout
however you can.
But not indiscriminately. Let us
proceed carefully with this transformative shout. Let small pockets
of radically transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality,
focus their efforts, and transform their students. And let these
pockets slowly, carefully, responsibly, humbly, begin to spread
their influence, embracing an absolute tolerance for all views, but
attempting nonetheless to advocate a true and authentic and integral
spirituality – by example, by radiance, by obvious release, by
unmistakable liberation. Let those pockets of transformation gently
persuade the world and its reluctant selves, and challenge their
legitimacy, and challenge their limiting translations, and offer an
awakening in the face of the numbness that haunts the world at
large.
Let it start right here, right now,
with us – with you and with me – and with our commitment to breathe
into infinity until infinity alone is the only statement that the
world will recognize. Let a radical realization shine from our
faces, and roar from our hearts, and thunder from our brains – this
simple fact, this obvious fact: that you, in the very immediateness
of your present awareness, are in fact the entire world, in all its
frost and fever, in all its glories and its grace, in all its
triumphs and its tears. You do not see the sun, you are the sun; you
do not hear the rain, you are the rain; you do not feel the earth,
you are the earth. And in that simple, clear, unmistakable regard,
translation has ceased in all domains, and you have transformed into
the very Heart of the Kosmos itself – and there, right there, very
simply, very quietly, it is all undone.
Wonder and remorse will then be alien
to you, and self and others will be alien to you, and outside and
inside will have no meaning at all. And in that obvious shock of
recognition – where my Master is my Self, and that Self is the
Kosmos at large, and the Kosmos is my Soul – you will walk very
gently into the fog of this world, and transform it entirely by
doing nothing at all.
And then, and then, and only then – you
will finally, clearly, carefully and with compassion, write on the
tombstone of a self that never even existed: There is only Ati.
----
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