Gregg Lahood, a transpersonal psychologist I had the opportunity to contact during my last lecture tour in Australia, has paid us a visit in Chiang Mai, and this was the occasion for some fascinating conversations on spiritual authoritarianism.
I would like to share one of the texts found on his website, dealing with the link between that and the internal subjective process of ‘spiritual projection’.
Text (slightly edited):
“A problem associated with some Western spiritual aspirants doing action research is the potential for unaware spiritual projection onto spiritually ‘ranked’ trans/personal ‘objects’. Eastern mystical traditions dominate by ranking their own aspired states over others and Christianity (as is well known) is steeped in spiritual imperialism. Many people in the wider ‘New Age’ proliferation (a movement subtly flavored with Christian and Asian mystical authoritarianism) and among Western spiritual seekers in general may have unawarely internalized such ideas.
This can lead to the habitual and distorted displacing of our own spiritual lights, charisma and internal authority onto idealized sages, gurus, paths, ways, texts (channeled or otherwise), traditions, places, masters (ascended or otherwise), or even onto Eastern trans/personal objects such as ‘non-dualism’ masquerading as the ultimate spiritual authority in every direction (Heron 1998). Furthermore a growing interest in embodied spirituality and the sensitivities of the human body and environment as the locus of spiritual knowledge, following the feminist valorization of sensuality and the erotic, contest the notion that Eastern ‘enlightenment’ precepts are paradigmatic for all spiritual endeavors.
For example, in pan-Hindu traditions such as Advaita Vedanta the small self (body and person) is mostly only talked about long enough to denigrate it and reject its ontological and empirical status. The self (small s) is at best assimilated to a theological construct (which is granted ontological status), or in other words, the person is identified with a metaphysical Self (big S) with no mortal remains. As Agehananda Bharati points out, “The self as a basis for such important human achievements as scholarship, artistic skill etc … are totally ignored in Indian philosophical texts” (1985:189).
The following description of a practitioner’s experience with the Advaita Vedanta teacher Poonja (cited in Judith Blackstone 2006) speaks to the disembodiment validated in satsang practices:
Papaji’s words were heard but there was no one left to whom he could address them. The speaking and the hearing were occurring as one single, impersonal event (Blackstone, 2006, p. 27).
Following His Master’s Voice, the practitioners, who must reproduce the master’s disembodied impersonal Self (big S), strive to reject their embodied (and potentially divine) personhood in the name of enlightenment and mystical participation with the Master (and his appeal to tradition). It is possible that this kind of impersonal non-dualism may cast a long and conflicted shadow (after Jung) into the practitioner’s psyche through the Master’s and student’s unaware participation in projective identification (a psychoanalytic term). This can cause the practitioner to unconsciously identify with the Master’s disowned and conflicted body and personhood (and the meaning attributed to them in Eastern traditions i.e. illusion) and fall into a kind of self-loathing which in turn dictates further compulsive strivings in dissociation.
More recently Jurgen Kremer used the term ‘projective identification’ with regard to Ken Wilber’s evolutionary hierarchical non-dualism suggesting that “we need to ban the concept of progress in descriptions of evolution in consciousness and civilizations, because they are entirely Eurocentric” (1996, 46). Kremer feels that projective identification may be an apt term for describing the psycho-emotional process of colonization. He suggests that “other people are made to feel the highly conflicted and split-off material dominant cultures inject into them, so they feel and experience it as their own…as self hatred” (1996: 46).
It might be overstating the point to suggest that something like this happens to all Western adherents of non-dual traditions; however, it is worth raising the question in the name of truly liberated spiritual inquiry. Action research methods such as co-operative inquiry combining radical critical subjectivity, emotional intelligence, and the ability to handle projective processes might be the only way to freely explore these questions outside of a tradition’s genealogy of power and hierarchy of charisma (free questioning of authority is usually interpreted by the authoritarian tradition as an egoic lack of humility – a conversion tactic).
Thus in contrast to authoritarian traditions, collaborative inquiry and holotropic breathwork among charismatic peers engaged in their embodied spiritual life, ‘decolonizing’ their ‘indigenous’ selves (after Kremer 2003) and busy retracting their spiritual projections, and discharging the pain and grief associated with spiritual oppression, reduces the potential for psychic splitting. And enables peer collaborators to freely inquire into the charismatic power relations ‘between’ any two or more people (without defaulting to internalized external authority) in the spirit of personal flourishing and trans/personal flowering.”