Translation Versus Transformation
In a series of books (e.g., A Sociable God, Up from Eden, and
The Eye of Spirit), I have tried to show that religion
itself has always performed two very important, but very
different, functions. One, it acts as a way of creating
meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories
and tales and narratives and rituals and revivals that,
taken together, help the separate self make sense of,
and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This function of religion does not usually or necessarily
change the level of consciousness in a person; it does
not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver
a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether.
Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends
the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self
believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers,
or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently
believed, will be "saved"--either now in the glory of
being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an after-life
that insures eternal wonderment.
But two, religion has also served--in a usually very, very small
minority--the function of radical transformation and liberation.
This function of religion does not fortify the separate
self, but utterly shatters it--not consolation but devastation,
not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion,
not comfort but revolution--in short, not a conventional
bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation
and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness
itself.
There are several different ways that we can state these two
important functions of religion. The first function--that
of creating meaning for the self--is a type of horizontal
movement; the second function--that of transcending the
self--is a type of vertical movement (higher or deeper,
depending on your metaphor). The first I have named translation;
the second, transformation. With translation, the self
is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality.
The self is given a new belief--perhaps holistic instead
of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps
relational instead of analytic. The self then learns to
translate its world and its being in the terms of this
new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new
and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily,
to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart
of the separate self.
But with transformation, the very process of translation itself
is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled.
With typical translation, the self (or subject) is given
a new way to think about the world (or objects); but with
radical transformation, the self itself is inquired into,
looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled
to death.
Put it one last way: with horizontal translation--which is by
far the most prevalent, wide-spread, and widely-shared
function of religion--the self is, at least temporarily,
made happy in its grasping, made content in its enslavement,
made complacent in the face of the screaming terror that
is in fact its innermost condition. With translation,
the self goes sleepy into the world, stumbles numbed and
near-sighted into the nightmare of samsara, is given a
map laced with morphine with which to face the world.
And this, indeed, is the common condition of a religious
humanity, precisely the condition that the radical or
transformative spiritual realizers have come to challenge
and to finally undo.
For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of
the death of the believer; not a matter of translating
the world but of transforming the world; not a matter
of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other
side of death. The self is not made content; the self
is made toast.
Now, although I have obviously been favoring transformation and
belittling translation, the fact is that, on the whole,
both of these functions are incredibly important and altogether
indispensable. Individuals are not, for the most part,
born enlightened. They are born in a world of sin and
suffering, hope and fear, desire and despair. They are
born as a self ready and eager to contract; a self rife
with hunger, thirst, tears and terror. And they begin,
quite early on, to learn various ways to translate their
world, to make sense of it, to give meaning to it, and
to defend themselves against the terror and the torture
never lurking far beneath the happy surface of the separate
self.
And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere
translation and find an authentic transformation, nonetheless
translation itself is an absolutely necessary and crucial
function for the greater part of our lives. Those who
cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity
and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even
psychosis: the world ceases to make sense--the boundaries
between the self and the world are not transcended but
instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but
breakdown; not transcendence but disaster. But at some
point in our maturation process, translation itself, no
matter how adequate or confident, simply ceases to console.
No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no new myths, no new
ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new
belief for the self, but the transcendence of the self
altogether, is the only path that avails.
Still, the number of individuals who are ready for such a path
is, always has been, and likely always will be, a very
small minority. For most people, any sort of religious
belief will fall instead into the category of consolation:
it will be a new horizontal translation that fashions
some sort of meaning in the midst of the monstrous world.
And religion has always served, for the most part, this
first function, and served it well. I therefore also use
the word legitimacy to describe this first function (the
horizontal translation and creation of meaning for the
separate self). And much of religion's important service
is to provide legitimacy to the self--legitimacy to its
beliefs, its paradigms, its worldviews, and its way in
the world. This function of religion to provide a legitimacy
for the self and its beliefs--no matter how temporary,
relative, nontransformative, or illusory--has nonetheless
been the single greatest and most important function of
the world's religious traditions. The capacity of a religion
to provide horizontal meaning, legitimacy, and sanction
for the self and its beliefs--that function of religion
has historically been the single greatest "social glue"
that any culture has.
And one does not tamper easily, or lightly, with the basic glue
that holds societies together. Because more often than
not, when that glue dissolves--when that translation dissolves--the
result, as we were saying, is not breakthrough but breakdown,
not liberation but social chaos. (We will return to this
crucial point in a moment.) Where translative religion
offers legitimacy, transformative religion offers authenticity.
For those few individuals who are ready--that is, sick
with the suffering of the separate self, and no longer
able to embrace the legitimate worldview--then a transformative
opening to true authenticity, true enlightenment, true
liberation, calls more and more insistently. And, depending
upon your capacity for suffering, you will sooner or later
answer the call of authenticity, of transformation, of
liberation on the lost horizon of infinity.
Transformative spirituality does not seek to bolster or legitimate
any present worldview at all, but rather to provide true
authenticity by shattering what the world takes as legitimate.
Legitimate consciousness is sanctioned by the consensus,
adopted by the herd mentality, embraced by the culture
and the counter-culture both, promoted by the separate
self as the way to make sense of this world. But authentic
consciousness quickly shakes all of that off of its back,
and settles instead into a glance that sees only a radiant
infinity in the heart of all souls, and breathes into
its lungs only the atmosphere of an eternity too simple
to believe. Transformative spirituality, authentic spirituality,
is therefore revolutionary. It does not legitimate the
world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world,
it shatters it. And it does not render the self content,
it renders it undone. And those facts lead to several
conclusions.
Who Actually Wants to Transform?
It is a fairly common belief that the East is simply awash in
transformative and authentic spirituality, but that the
West--both historically and in today's "new age"--has
nothing much more than various types of horizontal, translative,
merely legitimate and therefore tepid spirituality. And
while there is some truth to that, the actual situation
is much gloomier, for both the East and the West alike.
First, although it is generally true that the East has produced
a greater number of authentic realizers, nonetheless,
the actual percentage of the Eastern population that is
engaged in authentic transformative spirituality is, and
always has been, pitifully small. I once asked Katigiri
Roshi, with whom I had my first breakthrough (hopefully,
not a breakdown), how many truly great Ch'an and Zen masters
there have historically been. Without hesitating, he said
"Maybe one thousand altogether." I asked another Zen master
how many truly enlightened--deeply enlightened--Japanese
Zen masters there were alive today, and he said "Not more
than a dozen."
Let us simply assume, for the sake of argument, that those are
vaguely accurate answers. Run the numbers. Even if we
say there were only one billion Chinese over the course
of its history (an extremely low estimate), that still
means that only one thousand out of one billion had graduated
into an authentic, transformative spirituality. For those
of you without a calculator, that's 0.0000001 of the total
population. And that means, unmistakably, that the rest
of the population were (and are) involved in, at best,
various types of horizontal, translative, merely legitimate
religion: they were involved in magical practices, mythical
beliefs, egoic petitionary prayer, magical rituals, and
so on--in other words, translative ways to give meaning
to the separate self, a translative function that was,
as we were saying, the major social glue of the Chinese
(and all other) cultures to date. Thus, without in any
way belittling the truly stunning contributions of the
glorious Eastern traditions, the point is fairly straightforward:
radical transformative spirituality is extremely rare,
anywhere in history, and anywhere in the world. (The numbers
for the West are even more depressing. I rest my case.)
So, although we can very rightly lament the very few number
of individuals in the West who are today involved in a
truly authentic and radically transformative spiritual
realization, let us not make the false argument of claiming
that it has otherwise been dramatically different in earlier
times or in different cultures. It has on occasion been
a little better than we see here, now, in the West, but
the fact remains: authentic spirituality is an incredibly
rare bird, anywhere, at any time, at any place. So
let us start from the unarguable fact that vertical, transformative,
authentic spirituality is one of the most precious jewels
in the entire human tradition--precisely because, like
all precious jewels, it is incredibly rare.
Second, even though you and I might deeply believe that the most
important function we can perform is to offer authentic
transformative spirituality, the fact is, much of what
we have to do, in our capacity to bring decent spirituality
into the world, is actually to offer more benign and helpful
modes of translation. In other words, even if we ourselves
are practicing, or offering, authentic transformative
spirituality, nonetheless much of what we must first do
is provide most people with a more adequate way to translate
their condition. We must start with helpful translations,
before we can effectively offer authentic transformations.
The reason is that if translation is too quickly, or too
abruptly, or too ineptly taken away from an individual
(or a culture), the result, once again, is not breakthrough
but breakdown, not release but collapse. Let me give two
quick examples here. When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a
great (though controversial) Tibetan master, first came
to this country, he was renown for always saying, when
asked the meaning of Vajrayana, "There is only Ati."
In other words, there is only the enlightened mind wherever you
look. The ego, samsara, maya and illusion--all of them
do not have to be gotten rid of, because none of them
actually exist: There is only Ati, there is only Spirit,
there is only God, there is only nondual Consciousness
anywhere in existence. Virtually nobody got it--nobody
was ready for this radical and authentic realization of
always-already truth--and so Trungpa eventually introduced
a whole series of "lesser" practices leading up to this
radical and ultimate "no practice." He introduced the
Nine Yanas as the foundation of practice--in other words,
he introduced nine stages or levels of practice, culminating
in the ultimate "no practice" of always-already Ati. Many
of these practices were simply translative, and some were
what we might call "lesser transformative" practices:
miniature transformations that made the bodymind more
susceptible to radical, already-accomplished enlightenment.
These translative and lesser practices issued forth in
the "perfect practice" of no-practice--or the radical,
instantaneous, authentic realization that, from the very
beginning, there is only Ati. So even though ultimate
transformation was the prior goal and ever-present ground,
Trungpa had to introduce translative and lesser practices
in order to prepare people for the obviousness of what
is.
Exactly the same thing happened with Adi Da, another influential
(and equally controversial) adept (although this time,
American-born). He originally taught nothing but "the
path of understanding": not a way to attain enlightenment,
but an inquiry into why you want to attain enlightenment
in the first place. The very desire to seek enlightenment
is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego
itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents
it. The "perfect practice" is therefore not to search
for enlightenment, but to inquire into the motive for
seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the
present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to
seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always
already ARE enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek
Spirit is simply to deny Spirit. You can no more attain
Spirit than you can attain your feet or acquire your lungs.
Nobody got it. And so Adi Da, exactly like Trungpa, introduced
a whole series of translative and lesser transformative
practices--seven stages of practice, in fact--leading
up to the point that you could dispense with seeking altogether,
there to stand open to the always-already truth of your
own eternal and timeless condition, which was completely
and totally present from the start, but which was brutally
ignored in the frenzied desire to seek.
Now, whatever you might think of those two Adepts, the fact remains:
they performed perhaps the first two great experiments
in this country on how to introduce the notion that "There
is only Ati"--there is only Spirit--and thus seeking Spirit
is exactly that which prevents realization. And they both
found that, however much we might be alive to Ati, alive
to the radical transformative truth of this moment, nonetheless
translative and lesser transformative practices are almost
always a prerequisite for that final and ultimate transformation.
My second point, then, is that in addition to offering authentic
and radical transformation, we must still be sensitive
to, and caring of, the numerous beneficial modes of lesser
and translative practices. This more generous stance therefore
calls for an "integral approach" to overall transformation,
an approach that honors and incorporates many lesser transformative
and translative practices--covering the physical, emotional,
mental, cultural, and communal aspects of the human being--in
preparation for, and as an expression of, the ultimate
transformation into the always already present state.
And so, even as we rightly criticize merely translative religion
(and all the lesser forms of transformation), let us also
realize that an integral approach to spirituality combines
the best of horizontal and vertical, translative and transformative,
legitimate and authentic--and thus let us focus our efforts
on a balanced and sane overview of the human situation.
Wisdom and Compassion
But isn't this view of mine terribly elitist? Good heavens, I
hope so. When you go to a basketball game, do you want
to see me or Michael Jordan play basketball? When you
listen to pop music, who are you willing to pay money
in order to hear? Me or Bruce Springsteen? When you read
great literature, who would you rather spend an evening
reading, me or Tolstoy? When you pay sixty-four million
dollars for a painting, will that be a painting by me
or by Van Gogh?
All excellence is elitist. And that includes spiritual excellence
as well. But spiritual excellence is an elitism to which
all are invited. We go first to the great masters--to
Padmasambhava, to St. Teresa of Avila, to Gautama Buddha,
to Lady Tsogyal, to Emerson, Eckhart, Maimonides, Shankara,
Sri Ramana Maharshi, Bodhidharma, Garab Dorje. But their
message is always the same: let this consciousness be
in you which is in me. You start elitist, always; you
end up egalitarian, always. But in between, there is the
angry wisdom that shouts from the heart: we must, all
of us, keep our eye on the radical and ultimate transformative
goal. And so any sort of integral or authentic spirituality
will also, always, involve a critical, intense, and occasionally
polemical shout from the transformative camp to the merely
translative camp.
If we use the percentages of Chinese Ch'an as a simple blanket
example, this means that if 0.0000001 of the population
is actually involved in genuine or authentic spirituality,
then .99999999 of the population is involved in nontransformative,
nonauthentic, merely translative or horizontal belief
systems. And that means, yes, that the vast, vast majority
of "spiritual seekers" in this country (as elsewhere)
are involved in much less than authentic occasions. It
has always been so; it is still so now. This country is
no exception.
But in today's America, this is much more disturbing, because
this vast majority of horizontal spiritual adherents often
claim to be representing the leading edge of spiritual
transformation, the "new paradigm" that will change the
world, the "great transformation" of which they are the
vanguard. But more often than not, they are not deeply
transformative at all; they are merely but aggressively
translative--they do not offer effective means to utterly
dismantle the self, but merely ways for the self to think
differently. Not ways to transform, but merely new ways
to translate. In fact, what most of them offer is not
a practice or a series of practices; not sadhana or satsang
or shikan-taza or yoga. What most of them offer is simply
the suggestion: read my book on the new paradigm. This
is deeply disturbed, and deeply disturbing.
Thus, the authentic spiritual camps have the heart and soul of
the great transformative traditions, and yet they will
always do two things at once: appreciate and engage the
lesser and translative practices (upon which their own
successes usually depend), but also issue a thundering
shout from the heart that translation alone is not enough.
And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation
has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle
with the profound moral obligation to shout from the heart--perhaps
quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps
with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and
careful analysis; perhaps by unshakeable public example--but
authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and
duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability,
and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights
into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical
realization rumble through your veins and rattle those
around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying
your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate.
You don't want to upset others because you don't want
to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste
of a bad infinity.
Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of
depth carries a terrible burden: Those who are allowed
to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation
to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that
is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under
the agreement that you would communicate it to others
(that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow).
And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak
out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry
wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out
you must.
And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because
in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that
you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right
in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that
doesn't matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely
reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your
vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another,
finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you
are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion
that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty
to promote that discovery--either way--and therefore it
is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion
and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout,
in whatever way you can.
The vulgar world is already shouting, and with such a raucous
rancor that truer voices can scarcely be heard at all.
The materialistic world is already full of advertisements
and allure, screams of enticement and cries of commerce,
wails of welcome and whoops of come hither. I don't mean
to be harsh here, and we must honor all lesser engagements.
Nonetheless, you must have noticed that the word "soul"
is now the hottest item in the title of book sales--but
all "soul" really means, in most of these books, is simply
the ego in drag. "Soul" has come to denote, in this feeding
frenzy of translative grasping, not that which is timeless
in you but that which most loudly thrashes around in time,
and thus "care of the soul" incomprehensibly means nothing
much more than focusing intensely on your ardently separate
self. Likewise, "Spiritual" is on everybody's lips, but
usually all it really means is any intense egoic feeling,
just as "Heart" has come to mean any sincere sentiment
of the self-contraction.
All of this, truly, is just the same old translative game, dressed
up and gone to town. And even that would be more than
acceptable were it not for the alarming fact that all
of that translative jockeying is aggressively called "transformation,"
when all it is, of course, is a new series of frisky translations.
In other words, there seems to be, alas, a deep hypocrisy
hidden in the game of taking any new translation and calling
it the great transformation. And the world at large--East
or West, North or South--is, and always has been, for
the most part, perfectly deaf to this calamity. And so:
given the measure of your own authentic realization, you
were actually thinking about gently whispering into the
ear of that near-deaf world? No, my friend, you must shout.
Shout from the heart of what you have seen, shout however
you can.
But not indiscriminately. Let us proceed carefully with this
transformative shout. Let small pockets of radically transformative
spirituality, authentic spirituality, focus their efforts,
and transform their students. And let these pockets slowly,
carefully, responsibly, humbly, begin to spread their
influence, embracing an absolute tolerance for all views,
but attempting nonetheless to advocate a true and authentic
and integral spirituality--by example, by radiance, by
obvious release, by unmistakable liberation. Let those
pockets of transformation gently persuade the world and
its reluctant selves, and challenge their legitimacy,
and challenge their limiting translations, and offer an
awakening in the face of the numbness that haunts the
world at large.
Let it start right here, right now, with us--with you and with
me--and with our commitment to breathe into infinity until
infinity alone is the only statement that the world will
recognize. Let a radical realization shine from our faces,
and roar from our hearts, and thunder from our brains--this
simple fact, this obvious fact: that you, in the very
immediateness of your present awareness, are in fact the
entire world, in all its frost and fever, in all its glories
and its grace, in all its triumphs and its tears. You
do not see the sun, you are the sun; you do not hear the
rain, you are the rain; you do not feel the earth, you
are the earth. And in that simple, clear, unmistakable
regard, translation has ceased in all domains, and you
have transformed into the very Heart of the Kosmos itself--and
there, right there, very simply, very quietly, it is all
undone. Wonder and remorse will then be alien to you,
and self and others will be alien to you, and outside
and inside will have no meaning at all. And in an obvious
shock of recognition--where my Master is my Self, and
that Self is the Kosmos at large, and the Kosmos is my
Soul--you will walk very gently into the fog of this world,
and transform it entirely by doing nothing at all.
And then, and then, and only then--you will finally, clearly,
carefully and with compassion, write on the tombstone
of a self that never even existed: There is only Ati.
Copyright 1996, 1997, Shambhala Publications. All
rights reserved.
VISIT KEN WILBER's website: http://wilber.shambhala.com/
(This article appears on http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/asem29kw.html)
