The World’s Greatest Unpublished Spiritual Book
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Not that that the targets of human scapegoating are in any way confined to the great alone. To the contrary, as Adi Da makes clear in his final philosophical and spiritual masterwork, The Aletheon, scapegoating is the subtext of virtually every kind of egoic or conventional knowledge. Enlarging upon the famous dictum of one of the ur-texts of Vedantic Hinduism, the Brihadaranyka Upanishad, in which it is said that “Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises” , any and every thing that appears to be objective to us, whether interpersonal or otherwise, is inevitably subject to our fearful ego’s underlying imperative of control:
Ordinary human “knowing” seeks to control (or enclose) its “object”, because the human ego is fearful of being controlled by the “object”—no matter what the “object” is. Ordinary human “knowing” tries to “get the secrets” of the any “object”, so that the “object” can be brought under control (and, at last, destroyed).
Thus, ordinary human “knowing” is the “scapegoat-method”—of enclosing, controlling, and (at last) destroying the “other”. That universally evident “method” pervades the entire human “world”. Indeed, the “scapegoat-ritual” is the fundamental act of human beings—unless it is transcended in and by means of the process of Divine Self-Realization of Reality Itself.
This tendency becomes most extreme when we come before great spiritual Realizers. Instead of displaying the humility, vulnerability, and need that is our heart’s natural response to their presence, we struggle to assert ourselves. Human history amply bears out C.G. Jung’s observation that “the Self is always a defeat for the ego”. Or, to state the matter in Adi Da’s more pointed formulation, “The ego is at war with its own Help.” Our typical solution to this dilemma is to deprive the teacher and his or her teachings of their necessary bite. We would prefer a comforting, consoling pseudo-spirituality. Although the living spirit does indeed nurture us, we cannot truly receive its sustenance at any real depth without first undergoing a fiery ordeal of suffering and sacrifice. Any truly authentic spiritual teacher must be the instrument of a disillusionment no one gladly endures. Thus, while Buddhism has become something of a fashionable religion in recent years, how many of us engage his dharma with the respectful seriousness implied by Gautama Buddha’s famous simile of the lion?:
Now, monks, whatever animals hear the sound of the roaring of the lion, king of beasts, for the most part they are afraid: they fall to quaking and trembling. Those that dwell in holes seek them: water-dwellers make for the water: forest-dwellers enter the forest: birds mount into the air. (Anguttara-Nikaya)
Although it is rarely noted these days, from the above alone we should not be surprised that Gautama Buddha himself endured several assassination attempts. Likewise, after he confessed his own oneness with God and dared to offer common people his spiritual baptism, Jesus of Nazareth was duly crucified under color of law (“We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God.” John 19:7). Similarly, because he dares to openly proclaim and then, by offering his transcendental spiritual Grace to all who would avail themselves of It, to actually manifest his own Identity as the “First Room” of Conscious Light, the Avataric Sage Raymond Darling must also be put away—and, finally, done away with.
There is a reason why this pattern of abusing spiritual adepts seems to have become especially acute in our time. In the first edition of his autobiography, The Knee of Listening, Adi Da noted that creativity is “the idol of the West”—an observation amply born out by the past few decade’s worth of motivational speakers. In itself, creative activity is of course a natural, inherent, unproblematic feature of human existence. As with so many other true things, however, when creativity becomes a gospel unto itself we can be sure it has already been subverted to the ego’s agenda. In the edition of The Knee of Listening referenced above, he helps us understand how and why we become so beguiled by compelling but false images of truth:
Narcissus is an idol of creativity, of source.
He is the solar plexus.
He waits outside the heart.
The image he sees in the water is his own heart.
Thus, he sacrifices his heart to it.
The water is his own mind, the plane of all images.He is the reduction of the world to the form of his own separate person.
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