False-Independence as an Obstacle to Interconnection & Wholeness
Reflecting on narcissism in trendy “spirituality” as an obstacle to meaningful relationships that nurture genuine spiritual awakening and wholeness
All Glory to Sri Guru and Sri Gauranaga
Namaste! While exploring New Age teachings circa 2015, both in-person with local community and online through various articles, I assimilated lessons by constantly writing plans for an imaginary lifestyle brand called “BeU.” At that time, I hadn’t fully digested the colloquial wisdom of “If you want to change the world, change yourself,” and for whatever reason, my instinct was to want to change a world that I didn’t feel comfortable in. Briefly referring to old BeU notes helps reflect on my impression of spirituality after being influenced by New Age teachings and before encountering Krishna consciousness. The BeU mission was:
“To maximize the collective human potential through the cultivation of individuality, community, and well-being.
Individuality: Recognize the true nature of the individual as not only a piece of God, but the potential to become a fully realized God.
Collective: Once people have awakened to their light, they will be able to become the ultimate form of their piece of the human puzzle. We will unite as a race and as a collective consciousness through the philosophy of Ubuntu.
Well-being: In order to Uplift together, we must all create an inner environment that is pristine. This involves proper exercise and nutrition, maintenance and expression of mental health and capabilities, spiritual awakening, and emotional balance and understanding.”
Looking back at this material 10 years later, the most startling aspect of my previous perspective was thinking that finite individuals can become God. This kind of glaring misconception is one of the pitfalls of New Age “spirituality,” promoting the idea of abstract oneness without a systematic and coherent philosophical foundation. I found that New Age teachings often consisted of a patchwork of piecemeal knowledge taken from contemplative traditions from around the world. Speaking from personal experience, seekers caught up in this increasingly trendy culture can become fixated on self-aggrandizement, to the point where becoming God seems plausible. At first glance, the above aims appear positive, but despite being well-intentioned, they were based on a deeply flawed conception of the self as an independent actor/agent. In addition to postulating the concept of becoming God, I believed that physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being were products of individual effort, and that a collective was simply an aggregate of individuals who chose to coexist. From the self-aggrandizing or self-centered perspective, the value of the collective (family, friends, community, team, etc) is judged by the extent to which an individual is surrounded by people who nurture their self-importance. These misconceptions would gradually be cleared as I associated with devotees, especially my Guru, His Holiness Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, PhD, who taught me a higher conception of the nuanced dynamic between individual and collective. By his grace, I was rescued from drowning in the ocean of material existence.
Beyond Interconnectedness
During my sophomore year at Stockton University, Professor Evonne Kruger made an unexpected, yet profoundly simple, impression on my worldview. One day, she set aside an entire class period in Business and Sustainability just to watch the movie Mindwalk. At the time, the philosophical depth of the movie was probably 80% lost on me. However, it did leave one very significant impression: that everything is interconnected, i.e., nothing exists in isolation. “No man is an island,” as one of the characters said, quoting John Donne. While the deeper significance of this realization wouldn’t become clear until I encountered Madhava Puri Maharaja’s teachings, this movie provided me with an intuitive ‘aha’ moment.
Two years later, while researching other perspectives of life, I encountered the African philosophy of Ubuntu through a story of an anthropologist challenging village children to compete in a race for a delicious reward. Rather than one victor besting everyone else and selfishly securing the sweets, the kids naturally joined hands, ran across the finish line together, and shared the reward. When the anthropologist questioned their behavior, pointing out that one person could have taken all the sweets for themself, one child replied, “Ubuntu: how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?” Perhaps feeding off of my ‘aha’ moment with Mindwalk, Ubuntu deeply resonated with me. When I used to write about BeU, the name “BeU” was a wordplay hinting at becoming one’s true self (“be you”) while also meaning cultivating healthy and respectful relations with others (“Be Ubuntu”). Interestingly, as relevant to the ongoing work of the Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute, scholars have noted the intersubjective emphasis of Ubuntu as similar to G.W.F. Hegel’s nuanced explanation of self-consciousness. Upon writing this post, I discovered that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu championed the Ubuntu philosophy, as expressed in his short essay “Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community,” quoted below.
“IN OUR AFRICAN weltanschauung, our worldview, we have something called ubuntu. In Xhosa, we say, ‘Umntu ngumtu ngabantu.’ This expression is very difficult to render in English, but we could translate it by saying, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ We need other human beings for us to learn how to be human, for none of us comes fully formed into the world. We would not know how to talk, to walk, to think, to eat as human beings unless we learned how to do these things from other human beings. For us, the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.
Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours. It says, not as Descartes did, ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather, ‘I am because I belong.’ I need other human beings in order to be human. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity. We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.
I have gifts that you don’t have, and you have gifts that I don’t have. We are different in order to know our need of each other. To be human is to be dependent.
:: Desmond Mpilo Tutu, ‘Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community’, in God is Not A Christian (Rider 2011). E-book.
In many ways, the feeling of interconnectedness with other spiritual seekers fueled my journey with the Sacred Circle community, as mentioned in last week’s post, and my more recent experiences in yoga, as explained below.
Finding Wholeness
As discussed in the previous post, my Lakota vision quest culminated in committing to pursuing Vedic wisdom. My heart was more attracted to the yogic path because the Vedic worldview accommodated and contextualized all the various experiences that I encountered: it gave scope for being disillusioned by the material world and mundane activities, provided a consistent detailed account of embodied consciousness throughout nature, and culminated in a robust theological framework that not only encompassed all of this, but further offered a systematic approach for cultivating transcendental consciousness of the Divine through daily activity utilizing the senses. As I’d learn from my Guru, the most coherent and fulfilling conception of self is one that contextualizes the interconnectedness of individuals within the universal wholeness of Divinity — a perspective I hadn’t previously encountered.
Initially, this yogic path unfolded through vigorous practice of the yoga postures (the asanas of Ashtanga yoga) in a community with ties to the Krishna consciousness movement. My cousin brought me to these local yoga classes held in a home owned by Adam and Joey (Acyutananda Das and Daya Devi Dasi) — students of Mahayogi Gokulacandra Das. Adam and Joey were a sweet couple who shared generously with members of the community. I learned a lot about asana practice from Adam, and he even encouraged my trip to India in 2019. Through continued association with this Gokul Yoga NJ community, I eventually befriended Scott. He invited me to the Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute, a nonprofit educational center teaching Bhakti-yoga, i.e. Krishna consciousness. This is when I first met my dear Gurudev, Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja. It’s necessary to acknowledge my eternal gratitude and appreciation for Scott, who selflessly took an interest in me and felt that I should make contact with Madhava Puri Maharaja. Due to Scott’s capacity for being an instrument of the will of Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, I’m now leading a more fulfilling life than I could’ve ever imagined, by gradually surrendering to my constitutional position as an insignificant instrument of Krishna’s divine will.
Even after learning about Vedic wisdom, such as Ayurveda, and practicing many hours of yoga asanas, I was still consumed by the misconceived independence of the false ego (ahamkara). The video below was taken seven years ago as a self-reflective exercise, one month before I spontaneously moved in to live with my Guru. In the video, I’m absorbed in a self-centered point of reference and oblivious to any higher power that might be pulling the strings, upon which I’m helplessly dependent. This video encapsulates the farthest I could go on a “spiritual” journey without the shelter and mercy of my Guru. Looking back on it now, I can only repeat Srila Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s prayer: “My path is very difficult. I am blind, and my feet are slipping again and again. Therefore, may the saints help me by granting me the stick of their mercy as my support.”
Almost immediately after meeting Madhava Puri Maharaja, I developed exclusive dedication to the path of Bhakti (the yoga of love and devotion). Maharaja invited me to his bhajan kutir for a weekend Bhagavad-gita retreat. After observing my sincere enthusiasm for Bhakti and hankering for deeper practice, while graciously overlooking my numerous disqualifications, Maharaja invited me to live with him as a personal assistant. Only after accepting this transcendental opportunity did my consciousness start to evolve beyond the false ego. In a deeply personal way, Madhava Puri Maharaja helped me integrate with the whole of reality through practicing the limbs of devotion, such as hearing transcendental subjects from Vedic literature, chanting the Holy Names, and remembering the glories of Radha and Krishna.
Maharaja taught me that true spirituality entails knowing the science of Spirit, which begins with self-inquiry. He further guided me to the teachings of Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, which explain that individual finite souls are the marginal potency of the universal infinite Supreme Spirit. The finite individuals’ consciousness can be absorbed in the external energy of Spirit, the plane of exploitation, where illusory notions of the self give rise to struggle through competitively asserting independence and possessiveness, or Spirit’s internal energy, the plane of dedication, where the finite soul’s intrinsic relation of self-surrendered loving devotional service to Supreme Spirit is nurtured and flourishes in eternal knowledge and bliss. Sripad Madhava Puri Maharaja likens this to being on a beach, which is the margin between the dry shallow land (material plane of exploitation) and the refreshing deep ocean (spiritual plane of dedication).
In verses 2.9.2-3, the ancient Vedic scripture Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam explains that:
bahu-rūpa ivābhāti māyayā bahu-rūpayā
ramamāṇo guṇeṣv asyā mamāham iti manyateyarhi vāva mahimni sve parasmin kāla-māyayoḥ
rameta gata-sammohas tyaktvodāste tadobhayam“The illusioned living entity appears in so many forms offered by the external energy of the Lord. While enjoying in the modes of material nature, the encaged living entity misconceives, thinking in terms of ‘I’ and ‘mine.’
As soon as the living entity becomes situated in his constitutional glory and begins to enjoy the transcendence beyond time and material energy, he at once gives up the two misconceptions of life [I and mine] and thus becomes fully manifested as the pure self.”
The emphasis that Bhakti-yoga places on our constitutional position being one of service to Krishna makes sense. In the material world, we’re always either serving our individual interests or those of the collective family/society of which we’re part. These Bhakti teachings say that this propensity for service is fundamental to the soul, and that when someone finally desires fulfillment and wholeness beyond the false ego and mundane collective, service must be directed to the universal platform with the help of a qualified Guru. This conception is more advanced than abstract notions of becoming identical to God. As parts of God, we are of the same spiritual quality as Krishna. But, as finite entities who depend on His infinite mercy, we are quantitatively much smaller. Thus, Gaudiya Vaishnavas comprehend the relationship between Krishna and the individual jiva souls as one of an identity of identity and difference (achintya bhedabheda tattva).
Sri Krishna Sharanam Mamah
The above video is trimmed from this full recording of sadhu-sanga with Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, PhD, at the Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute’s original 20 Nassau St office on August 10, 2019. More sadhu-sanga recordings are available here.
