Many people on the journey to find the truth find themselves renouncing or condemning the world as they see all the suffering and challenges in the world. This is the start of renouncing path. This is started by questioning the world around us and why there is so much darkness and suffering. This is our journey to find the light in ourselves and in the world.  Joseph Campbell would say this is the first 4 steps of the 8 steps of the spiritual journey. People on this journey often times found themselves in the Monastic tradition or on the renunciate ascetic path in their bid to find the truth our God. Many people spend their entire lives on this journey, however we are in the midst of two fold path that is causing the withering of that path. The first is that the western lifestyle is influencing cultures around the world and enticing many young people into the contents of material world and thus many of these ancient renunciate paths are no longer finding the young generations to carry the teachings forward. This has sparked many of these traditions to release their hidden teachings to those who are seeking. Those who are seeking deeper truths are often times those who have experienced the emptiness of materialism which often times comes about after our basic needs are met from the advancements of materialism. Unfortunately many people suppress those empty feelings with various addictions, be it material, alcohol, food, or the many other ways we cover up our depression from this emptiness. This is when many of the Westerners start their deeper search. However many people are finding that finding the truth for ourselves is not enough for the current state of the world as it hurdles in unsustainable directions due to that Materialistic addiction. People finding solutions to the world’s problems and integrating them with our lives and our divine understandings are critical at this time as renunciation won’t solve humanities major problems and thus why renunciation is no longer an ends but only a means to find the truth to transform the world. These are the last 3 steps of Joseph Campbell’s  Hero’s Journey as he identifies in culture around the world and this is the next synthesis, that of divinity into our daily lives.

We in the west have such a skepticism in general which has come with our recently found awareness of physical science which has trumped the subtle sciences of our long history on a large scale. Rightfully so we have walked away from those subtle sciences that religions so consciously promote as they often times have been used for manipulation of the masses since at least Roman Times, when Christianity was adopted as the state religion (this is not to say Christianity is bad, its just having the discernment to recognize what pieces were designed to take away our power for empirical purposes and what pieces are perpetuated to help us awaken to our perfect and imperfect selves on the journey back to oneness with all and the conquering of separation and duality). These techniques were then viciously adopted by the many European empires centuries later to destroy and conquer many civilizations around the world. Fortunately due to the grass roots nature of Eastern Philosophies (and the misunderstood teachings of great teachers like Jesus or Moses),  ones that are continuously debated as a science of peace and harmony which causes a continual evolution of spirituality, they have created a much more participatory evolution and sometimes spawn new religions when new paradigms of operating on planet earth are needed.  It is more of a University of subtle energy that is there to train and create PhD’d masters of these subtle energies who debate and contribute to the evolution of the awareness of these energies than a religion that is there to create devotees and power structures. The challenge the west has had working with eastern philosophies is that we are either too skeptical or too wounded from years of Advertising and Religions telling us “we aren’t worthy” and thus makes it difficult for a student to achieve the highest in the face of master. Buddhism tends to work for westerners because it starts at the most basic level of understanding subtle energies and works up from there. Adi Shankara Charya brought forth that energy could be transferred from teacher to student without the student having to building up their own awareness of subtle energy from ground zero, which is one piece why India is no longer Buddhist. The challenge the westerner has with that is either, their mind is highly skeptical which blocks the energy from being transferred, or two, they haven’t been trained properly to receive and handle the energy the teacher is trying to give them and thus reject it or can’t handle it or lastly, they carry forth the “I’m not worthy”piece that came from these old European and Roman Empirical pieces as well as modern advertising that were used to break people and get them to step into alignment with the hierarchy. The last piece often times creates the “cult of the Guru”, because students don’t try to ask harder questions and learn from the teacher, which is a result of either weak students or weak teachers. One great story of this juxtaposition is a story from Dhyanyogiji’s Biography where a Buddhist monk and Neem Karoli Baba are sitting with a group of students in front of them. The students ask both of them to teach them how to meditate so the Buddhist monk begins with the most basic foundation of Pranayam or breath work. When it comes time for Neem Karoli Baba to teach he just taps a student on the head and the student goes into instant samadhi or bliss state, this is what Adi Shankara Charya was teaching and many hidden ancient Indian texts teach.

The Challenge for westerners is to recognize that we participate in these subtle energies everyday on many levels. This is most egregiously demonstrated through the manipulation of mass media and our communities that become walking media tools as we fall into “Competing with the Joneses”. The challenge for the east is to share and demonstrate how critical it is to master these subtle energies for the betterment of humanity. A good juxtaposition of how we engage in these processes is how we’ve all been convinced that agreeing on the meaning of red lights and green lights creates a more harmonious society where as advertising has created many successful business “cults” that don’t better society. A glaringly obvious example of this manipulation to create “cults” that fly against logic is the Cola Wars (although cola doesn’t really help better society, but its a good example of how marketing manipulates our personal judgement, just as a bad guru or religion can do). Marketing studies show that people prefer Pepsi, but due to Coca Cola’s Marketing juggernaut through manipulating the minds of the public, Coca Cola has successfully created a cult that always beats out Pepsi despite peoples personal judgments. This is working on subtle energies that keep us operating in the lower chakras, primarily the first three that work with base line survival (first chakra), reproduction (second chakra) and self empowerment (third chakra). It is critical to start to develop cultural solutions that can help us step up into the higher 4 chakras so that we can truly start to create a more balanced society and planet that respects the operating principles of planet earth. These four higher chakras focus on Love, Truth, clear vision and direct connection the higher source or God one might say.

So the Challenge is, how do we rise up out of doubt so as to step into this subtle world that operates around us every day without our awareness? That is a critical piece that a real spiritual journey will teach you.