The translucent revolution and basic moral intuition

Sometimes ideas to write something in the blog strike me like a lightning. You know, you suddenly have a vision; and there is a certain drive in the back of your head to make this vision real—right away, without hesitation, otherwise the idea will haunt you. There is nothing to wait, there is only the quiet meeting between the Idea and you. You are like an antenna that catches a signal from the dreamy frequencies. Aleksei Tolstoy wrote about the process of creativity in a poem: "Vainly, o Artist, you think you're the one who's creating…" To say that this creation or that inspired writing is something that I did single-handedly feels the same as to say that a fisherman created the fish that he just caught. That's just bollocks. (This, however, is not the same as saying that the artist bears no responsibility for what he or she expresses in the work of art and how it is done. Neither it means that the flow of creative impulse is not affected by the individual's structure of consciousness and cultural background.)

My blog is entitled "dreams of translucence." This is partially a tribute to Arjuna Ardagh's book The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World (2005). Despite the fact that the book's subtitle has a new-agey ultrapositivish smell, and I am very far from being fond of the entire New Age movement (of course, some savvy guys are there, but what I mean is the worst case of it, with magical thinking, mentally-invented narcissistic spirituality, "I—and no one else—create my own reality"-attitude, and retarded common sense), this is a nice attempt to showcase the notion that there is a growing population of individuals in the world whose life was significantly influenced by profound spiritual glances, peak & plateau experiences and transpersonal states of consciousness. The other reason is that I simply like the word translucent, how it sounds, and what meaning it has. Ardagh provides the following definition for the term:

Translucent n. 1. an individual who has undergone a spiritual awakening deeply enough that it has permanently transformed their relationship to themselves and to reality, while allowing them to remain involved in ordinary life in a process which is evolutionary and endless. 2. an individual with a glowing appearance, as though light were passing through. adj. an individual or object that exhibits translucence.

Translucence n. 1. the quality or state of being translucent.

The Translucent Revolution tries to convey an important message, it is well-written and inspiring. It seems that the weakest part of the book, however, is that most of the so-called translucents mentioned there are not actually ordinary people like you and me working in the field of common world action, they are people who earn their money by playing the role of spiritual teachers, giving seminars, leading retreats, and writing books—you can rarely hear a story of a brilliant scientist who underwent transpersonal transformation and now works on transforming her field from within or of a businessman who brought his company to a success and greater good through implementing the practical injunctions he learned in the process of spiritual growth or of a politician who openly tells the story of his or her maturation towards genuine spiritual insights. All you can hear is the same old story, over and over again, as if it were an endless Groundhog Day:  

There was a young man named John;
In honest business a fortune he won.
 Upon meeting the God
 He left all he had
And became the bestselling author who writes tons of books, teaches seminars, and does nothing good to actually benefit humanity.

Very few of the individuals described in the book are actually the people who support their life by transcending but including the conventional ways of living and doing business in their own field. The story is terrifyingly monotone: a person who was or was not successful in his or her ordinary life has a spiritual experience, leaves the job and starts teaching seminars, writing books, and eventually earning money by consulting other people in terms of his or her spiritual insights—or, we can state it differently, by trying to persuade those who are willing to pay into their own system of beliefs and life style, with the latter being a life style of a preacher. 

Mark Tourevski was one of the first to point this out to me; and I find it a valid and important criticism. During virtually hundreds of hours of our dialogues we have been analyzing the current situation in the field of spiritual transformation, transformative seminars,  experiential workshops in transpersonal psychology, coaching and consulting and how it helps ordinary lives and businesses in terms of healthy transformation toward deeper dimensions of meaning-making and being-in-the-world. We knew that there is profound wisdom in this entire human potential movement; and yet we were discussing the basics of how to integrate this wisdom with the healthy transcending-but-including growth. And, actually, we came to some very disturbing conclusions. 

We were struck by the fact how difficult it actually was to find a case of a healthy and genuine spiritual transformation with a person who successfully used spiritual insights to benefit his or her current path (not to flee from it), to successfully transform business (not to ruin it), to apply the principles he or she learned on seminars to current life without escaping from the reality of  conventional business, family, and the cruel world at large. Especially in the USA, there is a huge industry of "spiritual transformation," where myriads of teachers, consultants, coaches, and alternative therapies ask for serious investments; and yet the cases of successful and healthy transformation which did not lead a client to a financial collapse or a divorce or becoming a coach or a teacher her- or himself and rather helped him or her to transcend towards novelty but healthily include the old are extremely rare. The sad truth is that sometimes a very talented professional leaves the field and starts to live carelessly teaching and writing books that  almost anyone can write while the real wisdom that the world needs is applying the collected insights to the very field he or she has left. One needs to bring the profound discoveries and meanings one has learned to the very place one is trying to escape. To these very mundane people, co-workers, friends, and relatives that are around you. I believe it is simply not enough just to run from the world to, say, an ashram in India if that means dissociating from the shared reality…

And we are not mentioning the fact that such huge amounts of spiritual/transformative "truth" being sold on the market is dubious itself. Everyone can have a transpersonal insight of various sort, but at the moment very few are actually qualified to take responsibility to teach others. Sometimes you can see people going nuts during their "meetings with God" and thinking that they are now fully enlightened and can teach. But it usually takes many years and even decades of careful work and studying to master any discipline to become a pro. And, furthermore, the process of transformation, growing, and maturation itself is very tough, it can provoke profound crises in one's own life, the crises of which most of the teachers are being silent; is that because they are afraid that if they were truthful enough  about the dangers of transformation many people would ignore their books and seminars?

For me the basic questions in this field are those of ethics and standards of efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy (for a very useful definition of this triad see Torbert et al., 2004). Nowadays it is simply not enough to claim that your approach, be it spiritual, psychological, organizational, coaching, etc., works; you have to provide some evidence, some standards to test your claims. One has to adopt a post-metaphysical framework towards his or her own action-inquiry. Such a framework posits that it is not enough just to offer your service on the market and see if anyone buys it; otherwise, it looks like the good old American "there's a sucker born every minute." Are you truthful to yourself and others about what responsibilities you take and what effects it will have on the client? What are the explicit and implicit agreements that you as, for example, a consultant or a teacher propose in your service? What are your motifs? Ask yourself, "Is what I do for a living sincere, truth-based, and morally good?"

Any violation of basic moral intuition can be disastrous, for it would undermine both the depth and the span of the actions you undertake in collaboration with others. (Large-scale consequences of such a violation can be a topic for a separate blog post which I am not ready to write yet.)