What happened with our spiritual master?

For about 30 years, G and I had the experience of engaging in discussions with Edgar Assoun, G's father. He was a realised human being, a man who had gone through the stages of human development armed only with his own passionate interest, and arrived at a point where he lived according to a vision of human existence which accorded deeply with that of the sages of our time – J. Krishnamurti, C. Castaneda, Alan Watts, Nisargadatta, to name a few of the spiritual writers whose works we read and digested together, as well as some of the more scientific writers such as David Bohm, Gregory Bateson and Fritjof Kapra. Not to suggest that we talked mostly about books. For the larger part of the discussions, which often took a whole afternoon at a time, and were sustained more or less regularly, perhaps once every two or three weeks except when we were living overseas, Edgar would start with some little point that had attracted his interest, maybe a recent encounter from his and his wife Charlette's life, or recounted by us, and develop that into an extraordinary expose of human psychology and the existential drama of the human condition. He had a vision which he said was guided by Universal Intelligence, and which therefore was not bound by the personal, and there was never a time when the strength of this vision faltered. He swept us with him into his vision, and we spent many afternoons in what you could call a state of transcendence of our normal ego-based existence, where the individual and the personal were left behind, and we were able to share that thrilling communion.


Two months before he died, Edgar told us he did not want to see us any more – he formally broke off relations, saying we needed to make an in-depth review of the way we had been conducting the relationship over those 30 years.


Since that moment, which will be two years ago in a few days, G and I have variously and together struggled to come to terms with that rupture in a way that allows us to be at peace with ourselves. There were other complications, painful for both of us but especially for G, in the unfolding of our relationship with G's mother Charlette, and all or some of this may find it's place in this blog at some stage. But for now, I want to share a way of understanding the relationship and breakup with Edgar which came to me in the course of reading Ken Wilber's The Atman Project the other day.


In this book, Wilber described the unfolding of the individual consciousness through the normal stages of development from birth through to the egoic level ( i.e. the stage reached by most adults in our society) and then beyond to the transpersonal levels. The first stage beyond the egoic he calls the level of the centaur: 'the great mythological being with animal body and human mind existing in a perfect state of at-one-ment.'


He comments later


It is very rare, given the 'level' of present-day society, for any individual to evolve past the mature ego stage. Because the average mode of the self sense in society at large seems to be early, middle or late egoic, then past that point the force of society as 'pacer of transformation' tends to drop off. Thus, individuals who grow beyond the egoic stages have to do so either on their own exceptional talents or through special professional assistance. By the latter, I do not mean a 'doctor for mental illness' [read: psychiatrist] but a guide for self-actualisation: in general, the existential-humanistic therapist (and beyond that, the spiritual Masters).


Now for the part I've been leading up to:


The job of the humanistic therapist (who, as we saw, tends to address the centauric realms) is to help the consenting ego begin its transformation-upward to the centaur level itself. And this means that the centaur-level therapist will start by giving the individual a new way to translate*reality. The therapist will pit his existential translations against the client's egoic … translations until the ego can transform* as centaur. That is, the therapist acts as a pacer of transformation, replacing the now 'fizzled out' forces of the society and the parents. The therapist strategically frustrates and disrupts the old egoic translations …, while encouraging and teaching the new and higher centauric translations. When the client can genuinely and freely adopt the new centaur translations, then transformation is more-or-less complete, and 'therapy' is for most purposes over.


… True transformation – on any level – is not a form of brain-washing, hypnosis, or propaganda. It is rather a form of emergence, of remembrance, of recollection. The therapist, in translating reality from the centaur level elicits the same level of self in the client (if all goes well, that is). The therapist engages the language of the client's higher self, and lives that language or form to the client until the client lives it himself. The therapist simply assists in the emergence (via remembrance) of the centauric level from the ground-unconscious.


Now there could be some debate over whether Edgar was undertaking the role of therapist – he would have rejected that because of the dependence that is implied – but in practical terms he was our 'spiritual master', and however he wished to define the relationship, he was definitely (as demonstrated at virtually every encounter) working from a higher level of reality than ours, and he obviously lived that level, it was not mere theory. So apart from the term 'therapist', our relationship largely conformed to the description described in the passage above. Virtually every incident or encounter which arose he was able to frame in terms of the trans-egoic vision that he lived by – that is, he translated reality from the centaur level and elicited the same level of self in us; his vision was continually adapting to and embracing the events of the world as they presented themselves. He was extraordinarily sensitive to the dualistic nature of language, as well as language's nuances and its multi-layered character, so it's more than slightly appropriate to say that he engaged the language of our higher selves, and lived that language.


This might seem like a rather complicated description of our relationship with this exceptional man, but the point of it is that it leads me to a comprehension of what went wrong, and led to him severing the relationship. Basically, the problem was that we were too attached to our egoic world to shift with him. He continually held out an invitation, demonstrated the state, and repeatedly carried us with him into that state, but we rigidly insisted on translating events and the relationship into the language of our (seemingly) safer, more secure world view. The last time we visited, Charlette was sick, and Edgar was overwhelmed with work in the house and in the garden, and on top of all that had embarked on installing a rainwater tank by himself, and we took it as an opportunity to be as supportive as we could: G took over the kitchen, I helped Edgar working on the rainwater tank, we did everything we could to help. We even did this with good heart, in our way. But Edgar, while he recognised the value of matters that belong in the practical world, was fundamentally not interested in that as the main focus of his existence. In Wilber's classic depiction of personal evolution from one stage to the other, he had disidentified from the egoic level of living, had transcended it, and then was able to include it in his life, without being subject to its limitations and sufferings. As far as he was concerned, he was only interested in maintaining a relationship at the level he lived at, and he had virtually unlimited energy for sharing that with us.


It should be obvious by now that we did not exactly refuse to participate in the world he introduced us to – we shared it again and again. But the fact is that while we were able to share that state, we were not ready, for whatever reason, to shift to that level as a normal day-to-day way of life. (This is Wilber's state-stage distinction: we accessed the state, but it did not stabilise to become the stage we lived at.) After each marvellous encounter, there were many, and they were truly marvellous, we would slip back to our habitual ego-worlds, re-adopt our tired values, our compensations and substitute gratifications which, we persuaded ourselves, made our small 's' selves a tolerable, even comfortable, place to live.


So this leads me to a position where I could risk a tentative statement of where I would like to go with this Practice that I keep talking about. I would like to go to the point where I can enter a state of living that is beyond the egoic, undergo an actual transformation to that stage of development, so that it becomes my base point, my point of reference, my 'ordinary' daily framework. In fact I can say from my experience of living the state, that the possibilities that one can live in that state are enormous, it is an indescribably richer way of living, and it is the only way to go past the suffering that is built into the egoic realm, the suffering that is inevitable when we accept a life that is perpetually constrained to substitute gratifications, the constant fear of losing ground, of death.