E4: Western Seekers of Eastern Enlightenment

Western Seekers of Eastern Enlightenment

Everyone is eventually confronted by the great mystery of their very own conscious existence, but the importance of our conscious existence is initially overshadowed by another priority that must be considered first. Our conscious existence is embedded in an elaborate combination of things including our own physical bodies that makeup the world of things around us. Establishing some measure of rapport with this physical world must be considered a first priority to simply engage in the basic aspects of survival. The extraordinary fact of conscious existence is not even immediately recognized by most as a specific matter requiring consideration. That consideration comes later.

Our preoccupation with the physical world is further complicated by the more superficial matters of being happy and content in the context of living in this external physical world. An elaborate array of feelings are generated in our conscious existence by physical sensations originating from contact with objects in this surrounding physical world. These sensations when properly chosen entice this intangible happiness and contentment out of the two sensation extremes of pleasure and pain. Initially, it seems that this surrounding physical world is the source of both our survival and our quest to be happy and content.

These two separate and distinct things, our conscious existence and the quest to be elaborate combination of things in the surrounding physical world, are the core components of the great human conundrum of life. No one is immune to the effects of this conundrum, and it is impossible to ignore. At a minimum, a sufficient understanding of our immediate surroundings is required to survive the many challenges that our very existence forces us to face, but ultimately beyond simple survival, our conscious existence’s nagging anticipation to be happy and content is what keeps forcing us to deal with this human conundrum.

A common approach to the most puzzling of these questions is to defer considering them in our initial rush to be blindly engaged in this great celebration of life. Such is the case with the whole matter of our conscious existence. Most don’t consider this for years. Some don’t consider it until they are near death. The key to really understanding the human conundrum is to recognize early on that there exists two different but interconnecting pieces of 1) a physical world with its pleasure and pain and 2) a conscious existence with its desire to be happy and content. These two things need to be considered together to be successful in life.

The choice to subsist on knowing only what is needed to just get by seems sufficient in one’s early years, but as time passes and the trials of life beset us, the answers to these more difficult questions become a greater priority. Eventually, everyone wants more than just the bare-bones survival this basic understanding of these immediate surroundings is able to support. They also want to be happy and content, and they eventually realize more knowledge enables this better quality of life.

The concepts of meditation and yoga are commonly understood in a casual way by pretty much everyone in Western culture today, but that was most certainly not the case prior to the arrival of Vivekananda at the Chicago 1893 Parliament of World Religions. Vivekananda was a charismatic Indian monk who ended up spending about three years in the West before returning to his native India. During that time he wrote four books that introduced Westerners to the classic yogic pathways and established a series of Vedanta Societies to promote the study and practice of one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy called Vedanta.

Vivekananda was the first, but he most certainly was not the last. In 1920, Yogananda arrived in Boston, and after making the West his home, established the world headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. Much later in 1959, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made the first of many trips to the West as part of a global effort to spread his Transcendental Meditation program. Initially he attracted only small numbers of grown-up middle-class seekers, but when TM caught on among students and the Beatles followed him to India, Maharishi became a counterculture icon.

These three spiritual leaders in particular and some other less well known ones brought this concept of enlightenment to very receptive Western audiences and left a lasting impression on Western culture. They each created a layer of trained intermediaries to support the seekers they had established, and these trained intermediaries actively solicited new seekers onto the path in lieu of direct access to the primary guru. In their wake, they left many new seekers looking for this Eastern vision of spiritual enlightenment.

There are three different Eastern spiritual traditions that describe this state of enlightenment, and in each of these traditions, there are many slightly different specific interpretations of approach to reach this common goal of enlightenment. But across all the three religious traditions and all the variations that exist in each of these traditions, there are only two recognized self-discovery paths to enlightenment. One path is the traditionally understood way of the ascetic, but the other path is structured around a typical householder who is simultaneously engaged in the pursuit of both spiritual and regular worldly activities.

Those who choose the path of the ascetic withdraw from the world to contemplate and meditate as they aspire for their one and only goal of attaining a state of enlightenment. The ascetic renounces all worldly things at the onset of their search. They live their lives withdrawn in seclusion denying all worldly things beyond the bare minimum required to survive. It is a hard and difficult path that is right only for the very select few who are so inclined to pursue it.

The other path of householders engaged in worldly activities is reputed to be the more noble of the two paths because the householder seeker is a productive member of society in additional to being a spiritual aspirant. In fact, the classic tale of enlightenment in the Bhagavad Gita describes the enlightenment of Arjuna who is a man actively engaged in the pursuit of war. The warrior Arjuna received his enlightenment from Krishna as he is surveying his impending enemy and the battlefield that he is about to engage. Instead of the ascetic who withdraws from the world, Arjuna actually received his enlightenment just prior to going to war.

On the path of action, the seeker does not withdraw from the world to pursue enlightenment. Seekers on the path of action create a balanced lifestyle that integrates a system of regular contemplation and meditation into their ongoing activities of living a life and contributing to society. Those on the path of action renounce worldly things by internally eliminating over time their tendencies to become attached to worldly things. As they progress, they can own worldly things without developing binding attachments to them.

All seekers soon come to realize that no matter whether they have chosen the path of the ascetic or to actively be engaged in life, their actual pursuit of this enlightenment is a path that can only be tread alone. On the path of action, they might find themselves in the company of many other people. Some of the other people may actually be sympathetic to their spiritual journey, but none of them can can actually directly engage one’s solitary spiritual journey because it is a path of self-discovery that can only be traversed alone.

There are two possible outcomes from a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment via these Eastern technologies. The most common scenario is a life filled with the peace and fullness that comes from the regular practice of meditation and the slow but steady forward progress without actually reaching the goal of enlightenment in that lifetime. The individual’s unfinished journey will eventually through the process of transmigration of consciousness start a new life and continue the process until full spiritual enlightenment is finally attained.

Alternately, the one who aspires to know given the right conditions will forge ahead and complete the journey of discovery on their own to actually reach the state of enlightenment during the course of their lifetime. In these very rare cases, these pioneering seekers are largely left to their own devices without direct access to a guru. Their seeking experience becomes something of an improvised enlightenment experiment wherein they are left with the responsibility to address all the gaps in methodology and interpretation of results.