It’s Superman
It’s Superman
By the visual media and a selective if not perverted use of science, new consciousness patterns were introduced into the West just four decades ago when Transcendental Meditation (TM) made its first foray onto Western soil. The lead voices at that time caught the West on the turn culturally, and the result was a fork in the road in Western spirituality. As innocuous as it seemed then, it has redefined spirituality for Western culture so that a whole new way of thinking about ultimate reality has emerged. The Eastern gurus arrived in large numbers, using terminology that sounded scientific but, when challenged, became “just metaphors.” I will deal with three of these gurus and their specific teachings later.
These meditation experts offered a systematized teaching that could plumb the depths of the subconscious and enumerate several states of consciousness. And while scientists talked of dimensions far beyond the three we know, spiritualists jumped into the narrative with a meditation technique that was actually more of a psychological theory of the spirit, though it was asserted as an exact science. Starting from the crassness of the material world, their theories led to a spiritual journey that progressed through different stages of meditation to a state of dreamless sleep and, ultimately, to attaining a transcending sense of cosmic consciousness where the pilgrim became one with the universe. The biggest challenge, then, was to make what was momentary, normative: to breathe one’s way into a relaxed consciousness.
To be sure, we were told again and again that TM was not a religion; it was merely what sages have taught for centuries, nothing more than a method to awaken the dormant divinity within each one of us. It was continually reemphasized that one did not have to change their religion in order to participate in this spirituality. The magical potion in these meditative techniques was not a spinning top, as in Inception, but the taming of the spinning mind. And as a culture, we entered the brave new world of self where everything is viewed through individual, tailor-made lenses. At the same time that we were on the cusp of technological advances, our high-paced lives and stress were tearing us apart inside. How and where could we experience both technology and spirituality? The best of Western technological advances combined with the best of Eastern ancient divinizing techniques made for the inception of a nirvanic world where we could become the new avatars.