Impersonal Enlightenment

Impersonal Enlightenment jDy that February in Kathmandu, I had been teaching for five years and had met thousands of seekers after Truth. Over those years, I discovered something that shocked me. I became aware of the fact that most individuals who were actively seeking for spiritual liberation tended to do so in a way that was profoundly self-centered. For most seekers, spiritual longing and experience was fundamentally a personal matter. It appeared, in fact, that in the end many spiritual seekers were not all that different from those who were not on a spiritual path, in the sense that they seemed for the most part to be as self-centered as everyone else. This self-preoccupation in spiritual seekers usually took the form of a very narrow-minded and self-centered relationship with enlightenment. In general, it seemed that the path of spiritual liberation was pursued in a way that emphasized the emancipation of the individual rather than the human race as a whole. Over time, 1 had come to see that the desire for enlight- Impersonal Enli\:}itcnmcnt enmenl was (ar more than a personal matter. 1 began lo rec- ognize that that desire was the expression of an impersonal, evolutionary impulse in the race as a whole that manifested itself in the individual as a yearning for transcendence, a longing for the experience of deep and profound wholeness. Some individuals experienced the movement of this evolu- tionary impulse with great intensity, others experienced this impulse in a milder form and in some it was not experienced at all. Too many who became aware of the movement of this impulse in themselves tended to overpersonalize its signifi- cance, and in so doing often obscured the impersonal nature of its essence. Because of this, the larger implications of the discovery of that impulse, which always pointed to the evo- lution of the race as a whole, often remained unrecognized. This had a profound impact on me as a teacher and ulti- mately completely transformed my message. Indeed, that the individual's desire for awakening could never exist in isolation became the very foundation of my teaching. It was at this point that 1 began to call all approaches to enlightenment that stressed the awakening of the individ- ual alone Personal Enlightenment and all approaches in which the awakening of the individual could never be separated from the awakening of ihc race as a whole Impersonal Enlightenment. An Umomhtional Relationship to Ll/t