The guru Adi Da invites his devotees to ‘Give me your attention’ (meaning love). He also criticizes more conventional forms of relationship with terms like ‘cult of pairs’, I wonder if - at this stage of our evolution as Westerners - Adi Da is barking up the wrong river. Certainly he is presenting the traditional idea that the relationship with the guru is the liberating principle, and that the form of relationship required, that of self-surrender, is the supreme way of self-transcendence and heart-realization. This suggests that while the relationship with the guru is the liberating one, all other forms of relationship are ‘cultic’, that is: egoic, narcissistic and co-dependent. This may be true in principle, may be true as a basis for sadhana even, may be accurate in most cases, but as a statement it is open to being misconstrued as well as misapplied. In a traditional Eastern culture where the relationship with the guru is revered and honoured and has been faithfully passed down through the centuries the requirement that one’s relationship with the guru be central to one’s life is already strongly understood. The suggestion that, in its inherently divine function, it is necessarily deeper and more important than any other relationship is naturally supported by the Eastern mentality. In the West the very opposite is the case. Adi Da may be expressing a cosmic truth, but in the West it is heard as a social and religious heresy. The transmission of the heart-shakti may be powerful but the social transmission of ego-bondage is more than its equal. To be fair, Adi Da also tirelessly criticized his devotees for the co-dependencies they brought to their relationship with him. He had no choice other than to do that. What the guru is calling for is an esoteric trans-egoic heart-communion, not a cultic dependency. Unfortunately, cultic dependency is what Adi Da for the most part got.

If we take from his words the suggestion that real heart-communion can only be found with the guru, and elsewhere only degenerate forms of love are possible, we might indeed conclude that ‘pairing’ is one of the things to be avoided if genuine heart-realization is our aim.

In fact it is ‘cultism’ that is to be avoided, something more generally associated with ‘the cult of gurus’ than with ‘the cult of pairs’. On the other hand co-dependency is more often associated with pairs. In actuality it is the very same quality of enmeshed and toxic relatedness that bedevils the connection in either case. Co-dependent relationships involve co-dependent mentalities, and this makes itself evident soon enough whether it is in the family sphere, the romantic, the social, or the religious . . . In any relational setting this co-dependent mentality creates the familiar factionalism of in-groups and cliques, of jealousies and jockeying for position. It is a scenario so familiar as to characterize just about every human collective endeavour. (And if we could observe our inner selves clearly we would find the same types of conflictedness being acted out within our own internal ‘body politic’; it is not merely in the collective).

The relationship with the guru is liberating then, but not if we infect it with our patterns of psychological and emotional enmeshment. However, in submitting ourselves to the relationship it is indeed these patterns of enmeshment that are brought out in us by the shakti-process. Thus in a true sadhana we cannot ‘win’. Indeed it is via this heightening of our attachments and dependencies that this fundamental recognition can dawn. Out of this sobering vision true liberation can happen.

Nothing can really be done about egoism as a collective phenomenon as it simply reflects a certain stage of psychological evolution, one that cannot be by-passed or skipped. Perhaps in some ideally evolved spiritual community all individuals would have outgrown their co-dependencies – certainly one can imagine such a possibility – but since in practice spiritual communities are evolving in nature rather than evolved, they are as susceptible as any community, perhaps more so since the spiritual process is always at work bringing the dark impulses up and into the light.

Nonetheless, a truly spiritual community is intended as an antidote to egoic madness, and so we could at least imagine that the communities gathered around great realizers would somehow mirror the purity of this. In practice this is rarely the case. In fact the dramas surrounding the teacher often have an archetypal character to them, a systematic ordeal of tests and revelations and synchronicities. There seems to be a certain inevitability about this, looking back through the history of spiritual movements, and particularly so when the heart-process is involved.

In the heart-process the sadhana is to engage the non-egoic communion of the heart – or satsang - and so enter unconditional love or union with the Beloved, rather than to collapse reactively into fear and intrigue and personal ambition. But fear and intrigue and ambition is more often than not what is thrown up in the attempt since fear and intrigue and ambition are the building blocks of our self-structure.

Nor is the communion of the heart in itself the sign of a healthy psychological condition, whether in the individual or in the collective.

The capacity to heart-commune, to the point of union, takes forms – particularly in the collective – that open the individual to transcendent occasions, but can also expose the individual to violations of the soul.

The capacity to melt in the heart-field of the guru is only a goose-step away from Nazism, as Jung might have pointed out, if this bond is not also allied with discernment. A child-like naivety that trusts and gives of itself too easily is touching and beautiful in a child, whose protection is assured by parental vigilance, but this is out of balance in an adult in whom a healthy internalized vigilance has not been established. The reason why the heart is typically so defended in the first place is that it has been exposed to so many woundings. Every individual emerges tentatively through the ordeals of infancy and childhood and must eventually be exposed to the darker forces of the cosmos. Not least of these is the conscious encounter with one’s own biological condition. The transition through puberty and adolescence is itself an encounter with threatening energies in which we can easily get into trouble before ever being exposed to truly ‘bad influences’. Every individual must weather these storms and hopefully grows as a result, but there is also the possibility that through these negative encounters we become arrested. The legacy of trauma can lay dormant for decades like a land-mine in the psyche waiting to erupt. It is only through a clear-eyed self-knowledge and a psychological integration of these shadow elements that we can healthily open ourselves to the energies we meet during periods of spiritual opening.

The kind of bhakti-trance encouraged in mass spiritual gatherings, whether in the East or in the West, have a power to them, but they provide a fertile ground for all the seeds of darkness that lay undealt with in the participant’s soul. The arm-waving ecstatic trance-communions that take place around charismatic figures, whether in a southern congregation or a rock’n’roll stadium are powerful phenomena but are no guarantee of goodness. They act as magnifiers of whatever is being fed into them. It was partly as a result of Jung’s exposure to the mass-phenomenon of Nazism that he was so insistent on ‘individuation’ as the road to spiritual wholeness. A wounded and embittered Germany in the 1930s was ripe for the kind of mass psychosis that was only possible because of the Germans’ susceptibility to a charismatic leader to whom they could surrender their autonomy. Whether the bitter unhealed wounds and darkness in the German soul created a Hitler or whether the traumas of Hitler’s own past shaped the German psyche, or whether some darker force altogether was at work (which is my own view, as well as that of Jung and Aurobindo) the capacity of ordinary Germans to open themselves uncritically to what became a hellacious mass-psychosis is reason enough to be discerning about such a collective power and its influence. Jung was insistent in his warnings about the suggestibility of the ‘mass-man’.

It cannot be by the power of communion alone that we enter the heart-domain. We must also be sovereign individuals. We must be capable of ego-transcending love and at the same time we must be street-smart.

Thus it is that it is exactly these unhealed, unintegrated elements that are coughed up by the heart-transmission. And thus it is that a spiritual community is not heaven, as each person who has entered one discovers.

Unless we stand as free and authentic beings in our own skin we cannot but create a cult out of the heart-impulse. The spiritually empowered relationship with the Beloved constellates our unassimilated tendencies and we go right ahead and manifest the same neurotic patterns in our spiritual life as we have in our ‘unspiritual’ life. We recreate the same co-dependent relationships in the heart-field as we have in our family.

But with one significant difference. Now these patterns of enmeshment are being created autonomously as a divine eruption, and despite ourselves, as a cleansing. Our automaticities in the face of love are flushed to the surface of consciousness . . . not so that we can regress into their compulsive patterns, but so that we can finally outgrow them.

Thus in the relationship with the guru we find ourselves compulsively playing out the patterns of our unfreedom. Once they were our protection, now these patterns have become the very source of our suffering.

The sadhana, the yoga of this, is to see them clearly and release them. To feel the stress and pain of our attachments to the ego with all its avoidances and preferences, and to replace these narcissistic needs with love, or service of the Heart.

In the East, serving the Heart and serving the guru would be seen as one and the same impulse, but to a Western mentality it is the opposite, there is a built-in resistance even in the notion of serving the guru.

Nonetheless, self-transcending service of the Heart remains the universal principle of spiritual activity. It is for this reason that the guru must be – and must be seen to be – himself thoroughly self-surrendered in the Heart.

Then in bowing one is not surrendering oneself to a person – which to Western eyes must be either an act of shame or a pathology – but one is bowing to the self-surrendered life, conjoining and dedicating oneself to the liberating principle as embodied in the life and example of the guru.

This just might be possible, even for a Westerner.

As Roshi Kapleau discovered when he began teaching, the hardest thing for Americans to do was to bow . . . until Roshi pointed out that they were in fact bowing to their own True Nature . . . This they could then cheerfully do.

This is the principle that is unavoidable for heart-realization: the necessity of bowing, or – in Roshi’s words – of lowering the mast of ego.

When I came to Zen I was ready to bow. I bowed unreservedly and without resistance. Thanks to LSD I knew how things were in the cosmos. But it certainly helped that Roshi bowed alongside us, all of us, teacher and students, bowing together to the Buddha.

When I observed other Eastern traditions, and their rituals and hierarchies of obeisance, particularly as played out with the guru, I found them quaint and faintly irrelevant, but in fact there is a very great deal of power in the gesture of self-surrender, and there is a need to take very seriously this act and what it signifies.

Roshi Kapleau himself came into conflict with the Japanese Zen hierarchy in his attempt to solve his koan of ‘What is American Zen?’ - how to turn the Dharma wheel so that Westerners could genuinely awaken to the Buddha’s enlightenment while remaining authentic in their own Western skin.

I think he solved it. Without introjecting the cultural proclivities of the East he conveyed a profoundly self-surrendered and yet thoroughly Western realization. The impulse to bow and to self-surrender went hand-in-hand with a politically engaged and egalitarian ethos that his community as a whole seemed to embody.

In the Buddhist tradition there is the notion of ‘taking refuge’ in the lineage of realizers. In other Eastern traditions also the lineage of transmission is important, and particularly when there is shakti-transmission. Part of our own legacy as Westerners is that we have no idea what we are setting in place when we open ourselves to such a spiritual transmission.

What then, as Westerners little disposed towards devotional hierarchy and authority, do we need to assimilate about this phenomenon of the guru? And about the difference between ‘a guru’ and ‘Guru’? Are we suggesting, because Existence in its ‘explicate and implicate order’ is both psychoid and holographic and conscious, that if we truly suspend disbelief and grant the guru the possibility of embodying the Divine Self then together these factors can actually combine to ‘make it so’. And then by this sleight of hand we are ourselves somehow transduced into a similar state of Grace.

And if that were possible, would it not also be possible that if we were to truly suspend our disbelief and allow a stray cat the dignity of embodying the Divine Self then this would equally ‘make it so’. Is the cat not also a Buddha . . . ?

And so why then – to express the sentiment not far from the lips of every western ego - do we need a guru?

Could not a devotee equally bow to snails and mosquitos?

What about a bag of sugar? A box of nails? A discarded cigarette butt?

And what about a mad genocidal dictator like Adolf Hitler?

If everything is Buddha, should we not then bow to everything?

This is a koan.

It also happened to be the first test that the Goddess threw at me. There in the power spot, a force pressing my head toward the ground . . . what could I be induced to bow to?

Or more to the point . . . what would I not bow to?

No map or formula will avail when we find ourselves in this terrain. It is only in the live and living moment that we will find ourselves to be either free or bound, fluid or frozen.

If existence in its ‘explicate and implicate order’ is both psychoid and holographic in nature and if we suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves the freedom, not so much of embodying the Divine Self as of forgetting ‘self’ altogether, then how will we respond in the ever-present unfolding now?

With self forgotten is there Buddha or Guru outside us?

In the words of Hakuin Zenji, there is . . .

“Nothing outside us, nothing we lack, and this earth where we stand is the pure lotus land, and this very body, the body of Buddha.”

If this is the deepest understanding, what then of the Guru Principle? Why did Ramana Maharshi, of all modern sages the one most revered in Zen, say that a guru is needed?

Let us say that the sadhana of a ‘devotee’ is to come into perfect heart-union with the Heart Itself through the expedient of heart-union with one who is in union with the Heart. This is the ancient significance of the guru/devotee relationship, and it seems to be a ‘natural’ concept to the Indian mind. Being English and working-class, it is not a path I could have ever consciously chosen. Nonetheless, there I was eventually, after a succession of fortuitous events and despite inauspicious beginnings, diagrammatically exploded in the field of the Awakened Heart. Once in that field, all manner of other not particularly English realities revealed themselves.

In this heart-field the whole process is a matter of Grace. The infusion of Grace turns the heart of the ‘devotee’ toward the Beloved. In its attractive power this Grace is felt as a deepening Love. To the conscious mind the Grace comes as a growing clarity and Light. From the egocentric position of the ‘me’ this Grace is felt as a confronting ordeal, a threat from which it recoils.

In the cosmic hierarchies depicted in the spiritual traditions the tension of this – of light and dark, of love and its obstacles – generates the heavens and hells, angels and demons, distributed in all directions throughout all of the realms. Into all these various realms are born supposedly separate beings who presumably awake one day to find themselves equipped with adaptive organismic instrumentality – a range of impulses and counter-impulses in relation to their environment. Characteristic of this human condition is that we evolve self-conscious ‘selfs’, each apparently enjoying the exercise of free will and choice.

At any rate we enjoy the appearance and feeling of free will. A deterministic physics would dictate that in fact there is no such thing. This is a centuries-old argument that follows with apparently cast-iron logic from a mechanistic understanding of human functioning. If we are indeed making conscious choices then this conscious sense of ‘choosing’ must have some intentional agency to it. It must be more than a mere involuntary ‘spasm’. Let us set aside for the moment the easily demonstrated fact that many of our choices are in fact ‘caused’ by unconscious factors, but focusing on those instances - if any there be - where we truly do consciously choose, we define that choice as issuing from some combination of causal factors within the self . . . some privately experienced constellation of internal processes combining data from within and without and involving such things as options, deliberation, reflection and so on. These causative factors that come together to form the sense of free will must themselves have prior causes in the flow of cause and effect, and so on back through time. And since nothing occurs without a cause, everything that is to occur is already fully pre-determined by the entire set of factors currently in existence and stretching back through history. In other words, everything is by definition already pre-determined and so there can be no such thing as free will or choice in the sense that humans imagine it. In a world of cause and effect the belief in free will is an illusion. All future events are already causally determined. This is the deterministic argument and the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will would seem to follow if space, time and causality are universals and consciousness is their by-product. But not otherwise.

If on the contrary all human functioning and all things have their origin and indeed partly inhabit an all-pervading, implicate order or ‘unborn’ consciousness outside of space-time, then all beings are in some sense ‘free’ no matter how ‘free’ or ‘unfree’ they may appear on the surface, whether to themselves or to others.

Thus, lost as they seem to be in this cosmic vastness, all conscious selves are in fact only ‘lost’ in their own minds, in the conception of their own separateness. Inner torment may be minimal to non-existent in the simpler creatures, existing as they do in an Eden of instinct (although we cannot know this for sure because each is also of God, or Buddha). But what we do know is that we humans cognize ourselves as ‘selves’ . . . and each ‘self’ finds itself as an amalgam of conflicting impulses. Thrown out of the Garden, tormented by our separateness, our ‘self’ yearns for but is unable to fully realize the state of unitive peaceful being it somehow senses is out there ‘somehow, somewhere’.

And so this call to realize union is actually the song of our heart, always calling to us no matter how far we have strayed in our alienation.

We do seem to have strayed far . . . and it seems that we must. But have we really strayed? Or are we just fulfilling our remit as humans?

To fully incarnate, to come into our wholeness we must fully realize these human bodies we inhabit. And as such we must come into a fully realized autonomy. We must fulfill the ‘egoic’ impulse to self-actualize. Otherwise we remain forever children.

The ‘must’ of this, the obligation of it, is the wellspring of Eros that flows through our being, demanding expression. Over the course of a life most individuals succeed in damping this down so as not to disturb the collective torpor of their familial and societal milieu. ‘The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation’ as Thoreau noted. We are not as a general rule encouraged to grow to our full human and spiritual potential, but to ‘fit in’.

This requirement to ‘fit in’ to family and culture would not be so problematic if our family and culture were themselves adapted to cosmic reality. If our social environment itself expressed a deep harmony with the form of reality then we could mature through the stages of our life in a purposeful and creative relationship with our cultural surroundings. At every stage we would be naturally educated and brought into a deeper and deeper realization of our true being.

However, because cultures and societies are everywhere immature and in conflict with these deeper truths, because there is no ‘enlightened society’ except perhaps in small pockets here and there, we must grow in a creative tension and opposition to our culture if we wish to be true to our own deepest nature.

If we ‘fit in’ to our society, we will almost certainly betray ourselves. And as has been often pointed out, it is those individuals who do not betray themselves to whom we look to create society at its best.

Those realized beings, such as a Jesus or a Gautama, no longer ‘fit in’ to anything but to the underlying truth of cosmic reality itself. Over and over such individuals shed the bonds of convention and break the moulds of their cultural surroundings. And then a new culture is formed that is naturally moved to ‘fit in’ or bow to what they embody. Not because they have imposed their dominion through the exercise of power, like a Caesar or a Hitler, but because they represent the true human, the archetype of wholeness in every heart.

It is to this that the human heart bows, as they themselves bowed, and there is a great spiritual power in such bowing.

But when human individuals demand obeisance from others through the exercise of oppression, intimidation or manipulation, then conversely there is a great spiritual power in not bowing.

This is the cosmic context in which the human spirit must grow, or falter.

At first our attempts at autonomy, our pre-adolescent and adolescent flights, are essentially childish in their reactivity. If we are to mature into adulthood we must outgrow our enmeshment with parental forces. And this also includes our equally enmeshed and deluded relationship with God, which similarly mirrors the stage of our emotional and relational capacity. The God of our childhood is a parental God and so we typically create a relationship with God that mirrors or compensates for the self we formed with our parents. If we are to mature into the spiritual life we must necessarily outgrow these dependent and counter-dependent stances of childhood and adolescence, formed in the crucible of our particular upbringing, and mature into free humans in the cosmos. We must grow up, in other words.

This seems like a simple matter, but the attainment of a mature self-sense, of a strong and autonomous egoity is no easy accomplishment, particularly if our growing up has been negatively affected by difficulties of karma and upbringing.

To attain to this maturity is to finally recognize that we are both independent and dependent. No longer need we cling in some deluded or compulsive or exaggerated manner to the deluded attitudes that come from one pole or the other.

In a word, it is to be responsible.

It is to take responsibility - moment to moment - for our life.

In our material embodiment we are completely dependent on the circumstances of our environment. We need oxygen, sustenance, a healthy constitution and so on. We are completely dependent on the gross physical forces of Nature – of gravity, heat and light from the sun - but we are also dependent on the societal and cultural factors of our time and location. Beyond that we are dependent on less visible realities, such as the hidden influence of psyches and beings and ‘winds’ from the subtle plains, right through to our dependence on the Great Divine Reality itself. We inhabit this stupendous holographic cosmos and are bound by its laws, which determine and delimit what is and what is not possible on every level of our apparent manifestation.

The matter of evolving into spiritual realization could be described as a deepening and strengthening and refining of our capacity to engage ‘bodily’ with existence. And this involves a deeper and deeper capacity to say Yes and to say No with discernment.

We must be able to bow to the Divine whilst not bowing to oppression and dominion. We must be able to say ‘no’ to manipulation and seduction without saying ‘no’ to Love.

When we have become distorted and wounded our responses become rigid and compulsive, and these are the patterns that an emerging spirituality must address. But this also must be addressed if we are simply to mature into being a grown-up.

When we meet Guru - in the real and esoteric sense - this engagement necessarily comes to the fore.

We cannot realize our destiny in the Light without becoming fully apprised of our natural embodiment, which means that we must fully taste all the aspects of our human unfolding, including the full recognition of our existential aloneness.

Paradoxically, it is only after fully experiencing our aloneness, and fully exercising our autonomy, that we can inhabit our full humanness in God. We must understand this ‘darkness’ within us to be capable of the Light.

The realization of the unitive condition is the fundamental Way of all the enlightenment traditions. In the heart traditions the ‘guru’ is in perfect service of Guru to the point of non-separation. Thus it is the sadhana of the guru to serve the devotee. As the devotee’s service and communion become perfected, so the devotee deepens through self-transcendence into the same principle. This connectivity becomes the lineage of the heart-transmission, a movement of love which, just as electricity is charged by a magnetic field, is conducted through the medium of the heart-field, the whole esoteric network of it sourced in the Divine.

While a buddha can meditate in solitude in a cave, in the heart transmission the ‘cave’ is the heart-field and so solitude is never without this connectivity and conductivity. The sadhana of self-surrender is always in the context of this heart attraction to the Beloved.

The transmission of love through this heart-field is a purifying fire, sourced in the satchitananda of the Heart, and the sadhana of everyone involved is the conversion of the body-mind to perfect service - to the point of union - in the flow of heart-shakti.

However, if the lineage becomes corrupted, then the transmission can become corrupted. Indeed, such corruption is not so much an ‘if’ as a ‘when’ . . . for the whole process is itself a purifying fire and it is exactly these elements of inner corruption that the Heart must purify. This is the heat of the heart-sadhana. The turning away of one’s own heart from the Heart in all its forms must be brought into the Light. This is the significance and the etymology of ‘Guru’ (which literally means dark into light). The shakti-force is the active ingredient that flushes the darkness to the surface and the darkness is the very tendency – of egocentricity over love – that everywhere casts its shadow in the heart preventing the realization of the Heart.

Everything in the world of form is this play of light and dark . . . and ‘Guru’ is the universal never-ceasing principle of enlightenment alive in all realms.

This is what we’re dealing with.