The time for en-dark-enment…decolonising the Spiritual Path

There’s one word, more than any other, that demonstrates how we in the west have misunderstood, misinterpreted, homogenised and appropriated Eastern Spirituality - 

enlightenment

This begins with the Buddha - the name itself classically is referred to as the enlightened one.

This is a very subtle misinterpretation, with great consequences.

The idea that we might become enlightened leads to the question - “what are we lightening ourselves of?” And the answer has become:

the world’s troubles, our own suffering, each other’s suffering.

Enlightenment has been the foundation of meditation & practice that takes us “up and out” of the body, into the realm of consciousness beyond the body, beyond the world - beyond our suffering - into a state of union or non-duality that renounces the nature of being - the nature of aliveness, and of nature itself. In fact the idea is that the World, and life, is merely an illusion. This model of Spiritual practice is closely linked to Vedantic Philosophy, that includes Brahmacharya, or the renouncing of desire for worldly pleasures and human instincts. 

The Western idea that the goal of Spiritual practice is all love and light and peacefulness is the basis of what has now become widely known as Spiritual Bypass, and is the foundation of the homogenised coffee table book idea of Eastern Spirituality. Unfortunately this is what many "yoga leaders" are now leaning into to counter the collective call for justice and equity that is being heard around the world right now, with the astonishing ignorance to create slogans like "dharmic lives matter".

Taking a closer look at enlightenment, the word Buddha, comes from the root word bodh which is understood to mean awakened, or awakened intellect. This means that the Buddha is the awakened one, not the enlightened one. If we tie this together with a basic understanding of the teachings, we know that the Buddha is asking us to awaken to the suffering in life, to stop trying to avoid, bypass or out-manoeuvre suffering, but to fully accept it, not only as life, but as the path to true freedom. Of course there are many differing schools within Buddhism too, but this fundamental teaching remains a common thread.

In Yogic teachings this has played out as the non-dual path taking a massive fork - one road leading to advaita Vedanta (the up and out enlightenment model), and the other leading to advaita Tantra (embodied awakening to tangible reality)

So many Yoga teachers don’t understand the difference between advaita Vedanta and advaita Tantra, as what they have been taught is a watered down version of the two together. This has now become a very strange blend of - get into your body (Tantra) with these acrobatic aerobic exercises, and then sit in meditation (if you are lucky!) or spend 3 minutes in savasana to go out of your body, and out of your suffering, into a blissful place (Vedanta).

Taking responsibility as practitioners & teachers of Yoga, means understanding and honouring the philosophy at the foundation of your practice, and the importance of recognising that it isn’t as simple as one path to bliss. 

The world is calling us all now to truly awaken to the damage and suffering our mindset of superiority and separation to nature has caused. To truly sit in the discomfort and darkness of uncertainty, to be with suffering, to truly listen and to allow that darkness to not simply be the absence of light, but to feel its aliveness, its hope.

The calling is to surrender to this collective initiation into the compost, so that we might be made new again in the darkness, and to let endarkenment be the teacher in the new world - a world that seeks freedom for all, not just freedom for a privileged few.