Theohumanity, an entirely new emoteric spiritual paradigm founded by Daniel Barron who was enlightened in the strict Zen tradition, offers an explanation for the distortion in Buddhism. He offers, in Enheartenment, that true Buddhistic enlightenment is not about achieving a state or transcending an illusory ego, but rather that it's about healing the fear of ego-death through rigorous self-inquiry and meditation practice where the point is to find the meditator, and experience the terror of how that person cannot be found. But that the meditator cannot be experienced does not mean it does not exist, only that it cannot be experienced in that domain. The path is to encounter and heal the fear that is uncovered in this process and to lose the self-identifications that cover over and prevent us from feeling and then healing this fear.
If this is so, then the distortions in Buddhism and its offshoots have been that its followers have used access to levels of nonduality to feel better, rather than healing the fear that causes them to suffer in the first place. Enlightenment to the nondual has never been about feeling good, because that would be seeking something 'good' and not 'bad' and therefore a dualistic pursuit. Again, the good feelings are a by-product along the way, but are not to be attached to. That neo-transcendental teachers claim to be unattached and yet seek to cultivate and maintain this bliss-state, often using the word "vigilance" to describe the effort, is a contradiction and irony of tragic proportions. It is the fundamental and extremely subtle false god of neo-transcendental teachings: attachment to non-attachment.
This distortion is equivalent to the elevation of Yeshua to God status, the seeking of heaven, or believing that killing infidels will earn you seventy-two virgins when you get to paradise. It reframes current transcendental practices as spiritual drugs, as its users use the sexy and hip self-image of seeker-hood and medicate with the very real spiritual states they're attaining, but with fundamentally unhealthy and avoidant motivations that will sadly cycle them in their suffering rather than healing it. All of this comes from an original misunderstanding of the reason to seek Buddhistic enlightenment in the first place. It's not a way to have a more relaxed lifestyle, to experience bliss, to alleviate suffering, to reduce conflict, or to create world peace.
As offered in Barron's Enheartenment, Buddhistic mental body enlightenment is not about obliterating the mischievous ego that is the source of all of our problems, it is about healing the fear of its loss by coming face to face with the very real reality that in the mental body domain there is no "I" experiencing anything, but rather that experience has us. This awakening is a terrifying process of deconstructing a false sense of relating to self and everything else. And so it is understandable that some would have concluded through such experiences that there is no self, but it is only that it feels as if there is no self and there is a critical difference. Further, the oneness bliss state is a side effect on the way to this awakening as the deconstruction of differences between self and other melt away. Fixating on it as a goal, even if the practicioner is consciously unaware of having any goals, is our emotional defense mechanism's way of feeling the good feelings and not having to approach the terrifying fear of ego death. It is neither the ultimate destination, nor the Ultimate Reality, nor the goal of transcendental enlightenment practice. Identifying it as any of these things will only keep you further from What It Actually Is and keep you hooked into an addiction cycle as you innocently and unconsciously medicate your emotional pain held in the emotional body of your very real Self.
Because of this, neo-transcendental methodologies that offer any kind of good feeling state as the reward for all your hard work are distorted at their foundations, and in the bigger picture can be damaging to individuals who practice it. This is because the high of the bliss-state is so powerful it can be used to numb out acreages of suffering that Buddhistic practice is simply not designed to address. Remember that psychology and serious attention to the inner workings of individual self only began about one hundred years ago. Buddhism far predates even the basic recognition of the importance of Self. In the absence of effective methods to address emotional based suffering, the use of Buddhistic enlightenment practice to transcend our emotional wounding has been understandable for the last 2500 years, but it is time now that we recognize that it has profound limitations. Not only are exceedingly few people enlightened, but those who are display play-outs of untouched emotional wounding as already discussed.
Daniel Barron, as part of his paradigm of Theohumanity, created a rigorous practice called Emotional Body Enlightenment which he offers is a necessary pre-requisite before beginning nondual practice. The depth and breadth of this paradigm cannot be covered here, but suffice it to say that there exists in earth today a way of healing our emotional wounding so that we can healthily approach nonduality that brings us deeper into our humanity, without transcending it.
Some Buddhistically influenced people may read this article and say its author is inflammatory, unmindful, and that we all need to work toward understanding each other peacefully. It is perhaps unfortunate that rarely do significant advancements in the evolution of consciousness happen without conflict. But conflict is creative as long as enemies are not made. New world-views always create great disagreement as was the case with Yeshua, Muhammad, Moses, Galileo, Gandhi, etc. Even the teachings of Siddhartha Gotama Buddha challenged other teachings at the time so deeply that he was subject to murder attempts. The founder of Buddhism was as much a revolutionary as the other prophets throughout history and not the bliss-suffused, dispassionate character that has become the archetype of the modern neo-Buddhist. This leads us to the most basic contradiction inherent in Buddhism today: if the Buddha had been a Buddhist, there would never have been Buddhism. Gotama was a man of passion! That this contradiction has been apparently overlooked is a testament to both the power and the misguidedness of transcendence. With it, you can let go of anything that doesn't work for you, without having to examine your criteria for what does or doesn't work, or look at what might be your unconscious motivation for transcending it in the first place, because there is allegedly no You.
In summary, what is needed now is a model that allows us to not only easily see through the distortions we have inherited from the teachers before us, but a process by which we can actually embody undistorted living. Only by shedding the false gods to which we cling to medicate our suffering will we be able to abide with the Living God Itself. Such a model is now offered by Daniel Barron and the paradigm of Theohumanity. Only by healing our emotional based suffering, the reason we had to grab on in the first place, will we be able to exist without these false gods. Muhammad said, "There is no God but God" and many teachers have agreed, but no spiritual teacher in our history until now has offered an actual process that is specifically designed to heal the reason we needed false gods in the first place and lovingly burn to the ground all the false aspects of ourselves in service of the spring loaded truth and Love of our Authentic Self below. To the degree we exist as a false self, we can only experience a false god. What if the time of belief- and transcendence-based spirituality rooted in negativization of the Self could finally be over? It is only our false selves that has been the problem, not the Self itself, and only because we've not understood how to heal them.
What if we are not pathetic human beings here to escape to a "higher" spiritual experience, but are spiritual beings who have incarnated here to have a human experience? Our humanity is divine in itself and neither needs to be saved nor transcended, both of which recapitulate the invalidation of our emotional humanity from childhood and perpetuate our suffering. As long as we bring our personal pain to the doorstep of some Aspect of God, be that the bliss of oneness, the Absolute, Essence, the Merciful Allah, Christ the Savior, Yahweh, etc. we will be avoiding what is our (and not God's) responsibility to heal. Until we do this, our experience of the Divine will always be distorted by our need for It to carry our pain like the parents we never had, and it is this distortion, this false godification, that is the root of millennia of spiritually justified insanity that we as a species can no longer endure. How many more must be killed in the name of God before we realize that this must always be a false god?
As an intrinsic element of Theohumanity, Daniel Barron's Emotional Body Enlightenment practice is the first dharma to offer an emotional healing process inside a spiritual paradigm, Theohumanity, that can metaphysically and experientially reconcile the existence of individual Self, Nonduality, and the Living Maker. It offers a process to lovingly deconstruct the false self that is the creator of our false gods, but it is not to be believed in. Those who are called to experience it will determine for themselves what is true.
Mark Shapiro is a Certified EBE Facilitator and lives in Ashland, OR. For more information visit www.theohumanity.org or email mark@theohumanity.org This article may be reprinted only in its entirety and may not be edited.
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