Spiritual teachers are recognized as such precisely because they do transcend the personal domain of selfhood, and from that seat of being offer advice and guidance about how human suffering is always connected to personal-based ego states. That this teacher offers something different is part of the picture he wants to paint for you.
According to all spiritual teachers and teachings, past and present, there are only three main paths to salvation in the West or enlightenment in the East leading to the abatement of human suffering:
- Blame the individual ego as sinful or impedimentary to our better soul nature, as do Western religions;
- Expand ego into universalized impersonal forms of love, as Hindu-based Eastern teachings do;
- Realize ego’s fundamental essential illusory, unreal nature as the ultimate rejection of the personal, as do Zen and other Nondual-based teachings of Buddhism.
The foundational premise underlying each of these is that ego or personal individualized selfhood and its modes of desire and selfish attachments is the source of all human suffering and the impediment to a spiritual life and so must be atoned for, universalized, or nondualized.
Its essential nature
What if none of those premises and the orientations based upon them have ever been true?
What if instead of vilifying ego or personal selfhood as impedimentary to Spirit or enlightenment, we realized its essential nature is emotive, and as such, is the sacred and inviolate foundational unit of human consciousness and has always been capable of directly linking us to Spirit and enlightened states, and not blocking access?
Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam would become obsolete; all communistic-socialistic-collectivistic-theocratic-autocratic societies, cultures and governmental forms would collapse; because psychology has never understood the essentiality of emotions in human ego activity and only offers cosmetic behavioral or attitudinal shifts, psychology and psychiatry would wither off the vine of human change; and all philosophical guidance that offer non-emotive-based models for human change at the level of ego, would have to be discarded.
Ego-selfhood
This article, written by a spiritual teacher unashamed of and emotively resonant with his personal individualized ego-selfhood, offers that only an emotionally immature ego, not the ego itself, and only wound-based forms of desire, not desire itself, drive our suffering.
No spiritual teacher, past or present, has ever understood how the lack of this distinction has caused all religious, spiritual, philosophical and psychological paradigms, as well as all the cultural and societal institutions they metaphysically support, to mislead humanity into deep confusion about the nature of ego-based selfhood and its true natural linkage to spiritual maturity.
This teacher offers a world-view called Theohumanity, which has the capacity to bring the world into a new Bright Age, out of all Dark Age-based religions East and West and Dim Age teachings of psychology and empiricism since the Renaissance. Theohumanity holds that our root nature as spiritual beings having human expression is Love. But even though spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught this, they never realized that truth’s deepest ramification: that because Love Itself is emotive, this makes our essential nature as human beings emotive. This would mean that “I feel, therefore I am” is the existential foundation of this truth.
Yet, an “I feel, therefore I am” orientation, which would radically change virtually every aspect of our human life, has never been offered before at the level of metaphysics applicable to real world human scenarios. How this could have been missed all these centuries at the same time so many believe Love is the essence of everything, speaks to deep and enduring blind spots inherent in all of our Dark Age-based spiritual paradigms?
Emotional beings
Theohumanity offers that we are emotional beings first, willful beings second, mental beings third, and physical beings fourth, and that further, our primary emotive essence is an aspect of our innate soulfulness made of Love. It is only because our primary essence as Love in our humanity has always been in emotionally immature expression that use of Will causes so much suffering in our species. When we live from emotionally immature bases for Will, we can only either willfully over-indulge the self by acting narcissistically and hedonistically, or under-indulge it by acting altruistically and transcendentally.
After healing through an “I feel, therefore I am” dharmic path to a state of ego-based emotive maturity, we are able to inhabit personal selfhood both non-narcissistically and non-altruistically in all moments. Our species has never been taught by any philosophical, religious or enlightened teacher or teaching how ego-based selfhood is inhabitable both non-narcissistically and non-altruistically. Never having been taught this is possible, we polarize to ways of living that make an either/or out of these two orientations toward human life.
But the two are not opposites: they have always been malformed conjoined twins born from the same kinds of unconscious arrested states of emotional development of their original authors and representatives over the millennia, no matter how gifted or enlightened.
It is only and ever an emotionally immature ego in teachers and followers that behaves in hedonistic/narcissistic or altruistic/transcendental ways. That means all past and present Nondual enlightened teachers and teachings in Buddhist traditions represent a devolution, not an evolution of human consciousness, because Buddhist-based enlightenment never touches the deep emotional immaturity in teachers responsible for all the abusive, egotistic and cultic behaviors of enlightened teachers over the ages and in so many examples in the modern day.
Only radically deconstructing the ego through the dharma of Theohumanity and discovering its hidden wounds and bases for all of our intentions and behaviors will yield up any real result. Spiritual work alone, East or West, will only lead us to states of spiritual attainment, not states of spiritual maturity, because it never questions why the agent seeking spiritual landscapes seeks them in the first place, by default as a means to unconsciously avoid dealing with the burdens of ego-based life.
None of us are qualified to do any kind of spiritual work in learning about the paradoxical mysteries of life in all of its dimensional complexities within which our human lives uncoil until we prioritize and address the spirituality inherent in eg0-based healing work, which is no less spiritual than any other activity aimed at the heavens or Ground of Being.
Theohumanity is based within an “I feel, therefore I am” worldview and its attendant dharma of emotive maturity. No one has ever realized that human authenticity and human emotion are inextricably linked. Only when human authenticity is linked to real states of emotional maturity, and only when real states of emotional maturity are linked to the emotional primacy of our being over the mental and the physical, and all of our suffering processed as such, will we as individuals and a species realize how those two linkages inevitably connect us directly to Spirit.
In that sense, an emotionally mature human being embodies many of the characteristics claimed by Eastern and Western religions and spiritualities as saintly or enlightened. S/he does this with none of the anti-human, altruistic or transcendental medicines mistakenly assumed are cures for what ails the heart of humankind. From a Bright Age perspective, a global-wide state of deep and abiding emotive immaturity has always been the cause of our suffering, not original sin, original ignorance, original universality or original illusion.
The reason an emotionally mature being embodies what are called spiritual behaviors is because emotional maturity is the only gate that allows one’s deeper soulfulness to osmose through personality forms into healthy expressions of Love for self and other. In that way, via emotional body enlightenment and maturity, the soul naturally expresses with behaviors that represent a universal moral code that leads to both self-love and love-service to others as it resonates with the Divine Being context within which it tells its stories to itself and others.
The Bright Age
The Bright Age thus categorically rejects the Dark Age assumption that a spiritual teacher is someone who has atoned for, transcended, universalized or enlightened beyond the personal domains of consciousness. A Bright Age spiritual teacher has first inhabited, healed and completed the personal domains of consciousness such that both over- and under- self-attachments and self-identifications have been healed away, and has secondly healed existential fears associated with access to both Nondual- and Love Presence-based Aspects of Divine Being.
This happens in Theohumanity by:
- Learning to heal the terror of being, enlightening the Emotional body, which leads to an emotively mature state of Personhood;
- Enlightening the Mental body by healing the terror of not-being, allowing access to the Nondual Aspect of Divine Being and creating the not-state of sagehood;
- Enlightening the Will Body by healing the terror of non-being, allowing access to the Universal and Personal Love-bases of Divine Being, which creates the state of sainthood.
Enlightening the Emotional Body, Mental Body, and Will Body through the dharma of Theohumanity all in one lifetime creates enheartenment, the ultimate state of consciousness available to human beings.
Mistaken assumptions
What this all means is that all current spiritual teachers, East or West, based as they are in mistaken Dark Age metaphysical assumptions about ego, and universalized, transcendentalized, or altruized their way to their attainments, leave behind acres of unconscious attachments and identifications buried beneath the pseudo-enlightened states championed by Buddhism and the “Holiness” states extolled by both exoteric and esoteric religions of all kinds.
In that way, this teacher unapologetically criticizes both Dark and Dim Age viewpoints as an expression of his abiding Love for all human beings. That criticism and abiding love would not seem to go together, or be expressed by a spiritual teacher, is only a product of Dark and Dim Sage conditioning. This teacher has no neurotic need to judge, narcissicize or superiorize, but Dark and Dim Age conditioning about self, not-self, God and soul, and all the institutions they undergird keep human consciousness mired in suffering loops that have never been recognized.
As such, this teacher wants humanity to finally find a better way.
A new paradigm shift will only take root in the hearts and minds of human beings when the old paradigms that precede it end. Unless they do, the new seed falls on rocky soil and will never blossom. Without exception in our history, the old refuses to die quietly, and most often ignores, ridicules, rejects and sometimes persecutes the teachers and followers of the new. Theohumanity wishes to hasten the passing of the old so our world can move to a future based in the new, and so points to a world where our old paradigms are seen to be relics of an earlier age of both benign innocent ignorance and malignant, deliberate misuse of power and influence.
It’s time a spiritual teacher and teaching says “no” to the status quo of our outworn religious and spiritual worlds and shows how Love can only be served when: ego is first seen as emotive in essence; when healing existential fear replaces transcendence of ego; and when ego is recognized as the human fractal of soul that links us to deeper Aspects of Divine Being.
Only then are we able to discover emoto-spiritually mature destinations that are based in, and as, our essential nature of Love, the deepest emotive expression of all.
Indigenous spiritual paths are much more accepting and even celebrating of the emotions than are the traditions Barron cites. In Hawaiian shamanism (Huna), the emotional component is essential to any healing/manifestation process. In addition, the new Energy Psychology approaches work directly with healing the emotional body so that it can function more naturally and healthfully.
I welcome Barron’s pointing out that the “spiritual” position of negating the emotional part of our natures is fundamentally wrong–and, I would add, unsustainable. Although he didn’t point out the related fallacy that puts sexuality in the “bad” category, I would like to add that, too. We have many aspects, and we want all of them to be healthy!
Tantra is another spiritual path that works deeply with the body.
WOW! WOW! WOW! It sounds like you really know what you are writing about! Yet, you are digging so deeply into the details of the “Ego” that you struggle to see the forest, because of all the trees in the way!
Then you also make these statements of absoluteness!
LIKE: According to all spiritual teachers and teachings, past and present, there are only three main paths to salvation in the West or enlightenment in the East leading to the abatement of human suffering:
ALL teachers past and present? Obviously you have grouped and categorized without meeting everyone of them! So your assumptive conclusions are not prove-able!
The one statement you made I can almost totally agree with: “As such, this teacher wants humanity to finally find a better way.”
Actually humanity will not find a better way. Yet through this accelerated evolutionary shift/process currently taking place, there are thousands of personal “Ah Ha” moments all across this planet as well as throughout this expansive universe the Human Earth Experiment is totally integrated within.
It is all about timing and individualized preparedness! You can’t make a tree produce fruit, unless it is pollinated then it is possible! Until you begin to understand what is taking place within the “Big Picture”, the little picture you wrote about in this article will never make sense!
It is all about “ENERGY”! What it creates, how it engages, why it flows, when it controls and when owns, how it works, how it challenges, why it shows up when it shows up in the little picture, can all be understood when the Big Picture is understood more completely!
From what I observe, you have intellectually complicated the subject!
Some how you appear to believe Human’s have had abilities to move away from the old paradigm and move towards a new paradigm. The physical world we live and breathe within, has been effected and influenced by the unseen realms in ways, you don’t and will never find in the readings of old teachers and teachings!
All interactive levels of this universe and the interactive ways it works is extremely complicated. I recognized you have been in the flow of creating the EBE, yet not entirely on your own, as I can energetically feel the energy that has flowed to you to encourage you to initiate the EBE endeavor.
But there is more to Emotion, the Body and even Enlightenment than you have yet discovered. It all comes back to “ENERGY”. Emotion is an energy! The human body is energy! Even enlightenment is energy! Frustration is energy! Belief’s and even belief structures are energy! Everything is energy! When understanding is simplified, energy in any form then can be seen through the perspective of the Big Picture!!
Congratulations…..you have taken some nice steps forward in your understanding and sharing with others! But I AM, not like any other teacher or encourager of others! So I would appreciate your rephrasing your absolute statements, and suggest that according to most all teachers have believed!!!!
Have Your Self and awesome day!!
I AM
Ricki Lee Schuster
Barron is on a quest to be the only right guru — but his philosophy is DEEPLY flawed. We are not emotional beings first. We are embodied nondual spirits experiencing conscious awareness in dual spacetime. Our emotions/feelings are a product of evolutionary survival based pre-programming, if you will, and are as perceptively warped as our thoughts are steeped in archaic cultural languaging. The only truth is a fleeting awareness beyond language and knowledge. His EBE and all the rest of it is just another quasi-academic attempt to get at something well beyond the realm of knowing. Barron is as much an egotistical mesianic blow hard as he accuses everyone else of being. Other than, of course, Buddah and Christ, both of whom he fancies himself related to, or reincarnated from. I have personally found him immature, paranoid and vindictive. I like some of his ideas qua ideas, but his lack of dialogical availability, and cloaked behind a very small band of loyal devotees, he is not worth pursuing other than as a brief curiosity and an exercise in laughable self-masturbation. Werner Erhard he is not. A self-possessed western writer with eastern disdain, Barron is just another guru wannabe without the chops to admit his grandiose failings. Other than that, he is just an asshole.