In order to realize freedom from the tyranny of one’s own ego one has to practice going beyond egotism as a matter of course. In fact this is required for ordinary maturation, for becoming a grown-up. One has to establish within oneself the capacity for doing what the ego doesn’t want to do in service of a greater good (in Koestler’s terminology, to balance the assertive function of the holon with the integrative). In order to ground this counter-egoic activity as a principle of your being you must take it up consciously and willingly and submit yourself to it until it reveals its secret. This is the principle of a spiritual sadhana. The function of the guru is to provide a context for this activity of self-surrender moving into Self-realization. The mysterious power or shakti associated with this is not of the guru, but is of Guru, the active emanation of the Self in whose field or emanation the relationship with the guru functions.

In order to fulfill this process of becoming fully human one must consciously undergo the transformative process of self-submission and be purified of the egoic tendency to contract into self-centredness as the default characteristic of one’s relationship to everything and everybody.

This simple evolution is as ‘natural’ a stage of unfolding as is the passage from infancy to childhood and from childhood to adolescence, but there are obstacles to its healthy unfolding. In the journey from the tentative self structure of the infant to the autonomy of a socially actualized grown-up, to the self-transcendent realization of a buddha there are hazards a-plenty that we may encounter. Not least of these is the nature of our environment. In the narcissistic and reactive and godless society we have constructed we have removed the cultural context for the fulfillment of this evolution. Where is that ‘greater’, in service to which we bow? In a world abstracted of Divinity to what do we lower the mast of ego? A political ideology? Government? The Corporation? The ‘powers that be’?

We have blinded ourselves to our natural human destiny and substituted a darker one when we divorce culture from its source in the Divine.

In saying ‘God is dead’ we have perverted the natural order of being. Like the Existentialists we find ourselves in a meaningless wasteland of our own devising. In devaluing anything deeper than our own socio-biology we find ourselves in an existential cul-de-sac. Nothing can be bowed to any more because all bowing is an unseemly subservience.

Whilst Europe’s philosophers wrung their hands over this, a less picky mentality was manufacturing product. In this newfound existential freedom, the wonderful adolescent freedom of not having to bow to anyone or anything, we entered the Age of Freedom. We discovered that we had freedom of choice. But it is a bogus freedom. We found that we could choose between Pepsi and Coke.

We have been sold a bill of goods. We consume product . . . and this has become our freedom. The more product we consume, the more we demonstrate our freedom.

We discovered sexual freedom. We discovered every freedom, except that of freedom from our own narcissism.

One could imagine the logical endpoint of this as a planet of endless desires being endlessly satisfied by some infinite means of production. The endless satisfying of endless desiring.

It recalls the old joke of the newly deceased who finds himself in the next realm with his every whim being immediately satisfied as soon as it is expressed. After weeks of cycling through every possible mode of desiring, and having consumed every pleasurable experience he can envisage he begins to feel jaded, and notices that the underlying dissatisfaction and boredom is returning. He turns to the otherworldly being who has been feeding his fantasies and peevishly complains that this is no more satisfying than his life on earth. “I may as well be in Hell,” he complains.

“Where did you think you were?” replies his host.

Of course there is also the freedom to exploit and manipulate the game itself. To make a killing by launching and branding ‘Freedom’. To become a ‘player’.

While the philosophers of the last century wrestled impotently with the exact nature of the utopia that was about to be realized, and worried whether human society could cope with the inevitable surfeit of leisure that technology was about to usher in, we actually find ourselves in a world of engineered scarcity and a growing rift between the exploiters and the exploited.

Partly this is because there is, literally as well as philosophically, nowhere to go in such a world of unbridled material consumption. Without a deeper consciousness, without a deeper apprehension of our condition, there can only be masters and slaves and perpetual dreams of winning the lottery. Without consciously coming to terms with what human nature is altogether, the sacred as well as the profane, we will only use our freedoms to manufacture dystopias.

Dreams of freedom will never be realized if the dreamers stay locked in their dreams. Dreams of freedom can never be realized because those who break free will only replicate the oppression of the others, and certainly in the eyes of those others. A few will break free and join the ranks of the elite, but there too they will only discover a disappointing unfreedom.

In saying ‘God is dead’ we have perverted the natural order of being. In defining human society in terms of economics, power relations, resource management and so on, we delimit the discussion of human possibility to a language of ‘have’ and ‘have not’. In the hierarchy of human needs this level of material fulfillment is necessary but not sufficient for a healthy society. It does not in itself fulfill or satisfy the human condition, as can well be seen by observing the startling ills of our ‘affluent society’.

There are those with power and those without power. Haves and have-nots. Exploiters and exploited. Masters and slaves. Bosses and workers. We are not moving towards a world of freedoms for all, but a world of gated communities and drones.

We are capable of better but that is what we have created. That is what we have created because that is the outer reflection of our psychic state of alienation from our source.

We cannot in effect kill or remove the divine context of existence, we can only veil ourselves from it and so lose our conscious connection to it. The Sacred does not thereby go away. But in temporal terms it may as well have.

Despite the best intentions of the best hearts and minds among us this managing of egos – what we call government – is like herding cats if we do not include the deeper context.

The Sacred remains to be realized in every heart and mind if the heart and mind are sincerely turned towards it. But we must do this as grown-ups, from a place of individuation.

If our hearts are turned toward the light but from a place of emotional and psychological immaturity, without self-understanding, our minds will instead build substitutes, shimmering chimeras of the light. Our egos will create false gods and false paths that will end up betraying us. We will erect idols, projected reflections of our egoic aspirations, all of which will themselves fail. This is the delusional compulsion that fuels messianic movements of every kind, the mass adulation of a collective projected onto an icon, a symbol, a hero, a ‘boss’. All of this must ultimately fail because it is the distortion of the Truth.

Only the deepest truths will endure through all of this madness and even these can only be a reflection, in the end. But these reflections can sustain our deepening enlightenment because they reflect that in us which transcends and survives. However benighted and confused humanity may become we cannot be divorced from the divine ground. We are of it. We are it. We can spasm into our darkness and lose our connection to the light in our pain and our fear. We can function in exile and alienation. We can even choose to walk down paths of darkness . . . and human darkness can be very dark indeed. And there is a Darkness beyond that even. But all darkness is measured against light and ‘at the end of the day’ light is what is. Not darkness.

This can be proposed. But it can also be discovered.

This is what awakening reveals, the ground condition, consciousness itself, out of which all dualities emerge and on which all dualities are an ever-shifting patina, a play of light and dark.

‘Guru’ means ‘light out of dark’ or the ‘light from the dark’. Real Guru is the principle of enlightenment itself operative in consciousness, operative in the cosmos.

This also can be proposed. But this also can also be discovered.

One can never really be separate from the Divine but the unconscious foundation of every ego is this very illusion of separateness. Until this is seen through in a blessed moment of deeper consciousness the logic of the veil and its projected worlds must necessarily prevail.

Guru is the God-given means whereby the delusions of one’s ego are revealed to one, and also the God-given context for the self-surrender of all such unconscious patterning. It is not simply that Guru is not absent from our every moment. Once the veils are removed and the ‘worlds’ have become illumined, Guru is All That Is.

And ‘we’ are That.

This is the understanding. This is the sadhana. These are the facts.

What remains is the conscious realization of this, and this is down to you and me.