All About ME
People of a certain age will probably remember the Esalen movement of Big Sur, California. For those whose memories might fail them (or who simply want to forget), Esalen was a part of the larger self-actualization movement that clogged the decade of the Seventies like sludge. It was the sepia afterglow of the exhausted Enlightenment project, where the emancipated human person is unburdened by the nooses of religion, morality, nationality, custom, or even gender to finally be all that they wanted to be. It is what Philip Reiff called the “unencumbered self,” or Rousseau’s “noble savage” who roams the world like some free-floating energy burst, unmoored to anything except whimsy. It was the Hiroshima of Western culture, whose radioactive fallout we yet breathe.
Esalen was ground zero of this societal detonation. It took the eccentric ivory tower theories of Maslow and Rogers and transformed them into digestible spoonfuls of countercultural toxin fitted for the hoi-polloi. Remember the anarchic novels of Herman Hesse and the subversive poetry of Alan Ginsburg? Esalen was Hesse and Ginsburg for dummies. Alas, Esalen is celebrating the 50th Anniversary at their idyllic headquarters perched along that storied Pacific coastline, with a fat cultural victory under its belt. Know Esalen or not, still you bump into it all around you.
Look no farther than Occupy Wall Street. If you’re wondering about the cause of its loathing for all that is good, true, and rational (read Christianity) – blame the runoff of Esalen. Every time you listen to some Hollywood cipher step forward to accept an award and say “I thank the Universe,” there’s Esalen. Each time you watch a chic unmarried Hollywood couple purchasing their seventh (or so) “adopted” third-world child as a symbolic raised fist against Western (read Christian) Civilization, there’s Esalen. When you find your child returning home from school boasting identity as a “citizen of the world,” you’re looking at the long smoke tail of Esalen. Judge for yourself as you listen to Miguel Angel Vergara, a Mayan shaman, speaking rhapsodically about the return of Kukulkan, the snake deity, who will inaugurate a new age of spiritual enlightenment in 2012:
The cosmos is talking to us – we need to listen, Kukulkan shines in the infinite. Kukulkan is the sacred energy beating in every atom. Kukulkan is the feathered Serpent living in your heart forever.
NYT, 20 August 2012
Even though Kukulkan might not be on the tip of your tongue each day, it doesn’t mean the Spirit of Esalen is not breathing down your neck. Esalen has served the purpose of relativizing all truth and downsizing the superiority of Western Civilization (read Christianity). You might not worship Kukulkan, but Esalen has made you afraid to criticize him. Part of that entrenched Spirit of Esalen has imposed the taboo of even suggesting that Kukulkan might be inferior to Christ. After Esalen such a commonsense judgment is not merely gauche, it is downright evil. Post-Esalen America sees such judgements of truth as reeking of bigotry. Esalen has rendered common sense mute and neutered the nobility of Christianity, consigning it to an embarrassing backwater for the shallow and uneducated. Wasn’t it some prominent Post-Esalen cultural figure who, recently referring to such unreconstructed types, remarked that “they cling to their guns and their religion”? The contempt is palpable and the ruin wrought by the Esalen elite and its disparate acolytes is on clear display.
Esalen popularized the now well-worn (though still powerfully attractive) stupidity, “spiritual but not religious”. This fatuous slogan has become so ubiquitous that you can even hear it intoned in schoolyards and sandboxes. Of course, it is amazingly protean. After all, to have “spirituality” simply means to possess a spiritual soul, with powers of intellect an will, guaranteeing no particular outcome, good or bad. As Balzac remarked, “each man’s soul is capable of becoming either a sewer or a sanctuary”. Any firmly held conviction can become one’s “spirituality”. As a form it is indeterminate enough to carry any content: Roman pagans were “spiritual”; Druids were “spiritual”; Persian Zoroastrians were “spiritual”; and so were Epicurean hedonists, as well as Aztec high priests ripping out the hearts of men and hurling them skyward to Huitzilopochtli, their sun god. Being “spiritual” leads nowhere except to the cul de sac of the unbounded Imperial Self, tethered to nothing but its own rationalizations. Being “spiritual” is nothing more than fidelity to self; and to God, only when convenient.
It is a perilous enterprise, and terribly unsettling, when we find its laissez faire relativism creeping into the highest reaches of our culture. Alarm is in order when we find it manifestly enshrined in the highest court of our land, as when the majority of the Supreme Court wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992). The Esalen elan was lurking about almost a century before its appearance when Walt Whitman fulsomely lauds its spirit in Leaves of Grass, “Nothing, not God/ Is greater to one/ than one’s self is”.
Most tragically, it took very little time for Esalen’s roots to set themselves securely in Roman Catholicism. Its unmistakable mark is a neuralgia to any set truth or dogma: antinomianism writ large. It is a frame of mind that evacuates the concept of God of any traditional meaning and the utilizes it as an effective vehicle for self-expression. Some know it by the name New Age, but it is hardly new. Its roots snake far back into the mists of ancient religious history: Hinduism, Buddhism, Manicheanism, Gnosticism, and Albigensianism. One need only reread Monsignor Ronald Knox’s magisterial Enthusiasm to appreciate the full range of this error’s reach. When Esalen speaks of “spirituality” it is really referring to the ego in all its self-enclosed splendor. To Esalen, and its Catholic variants, one becomes fully “spiritual” when the summum bonum is no longer God, but the self, and personal contentment usurps individual sacrifice. In the Esalen lexicon the truly “spiritual” person is the one who manages to snap all the links to societal/religious expectations, norms, and laws. The self then exists in a blessed stillness, loosed from the racket of moral obligation, and fulfilling all the fancies of the liberated self. The self swoons on an apotheosis high: “God” is within Me: “God” is Me Happy. Chesterton saw this monstrousness of the airbrushed atheism when he wrote:
Of all the horrible religions, the most horrible is the worship of the god within… that Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones will worship Jones.
It is distressing to observe that the past forty years of much Catholic talk about “spirituality” has been this veiled Esalen spirit. Finding oneself has replaced finding God’s Holy will; listening to the Holy Spirit has been corrupted into carefully listening to your inner voice. Saving your soul is never mentioned in the new Catholic “spiritual growth” lingo (or in Catholic preaching, for that matter), for the growth they’re preaching has nothing to do with saving your soul. The inexhaustible treasure of the lives and teachings of the Saints is a dead letter except to spin them to some Esalen purpose.
Tis a thousand pities that the most prominent order of women religious were gutted by this decadent ideology of egoism, shamefully exhibited in recent days by the LCWR’s bitter conflicts with the Holy See. If you were to dig deeply under the layers of this past half century of our religious orders, you would find the sediments of Esalen ideology, like the traces of some meteoric strike that left all these orders ghosts of their former selves. This alien ideology has settled like some virus in the once robust religious bodies of the Catholic Church.
The Franciscans, for instance. This venerable Order, in so many places, has subverted their founder’s intentions by insisting that their solitary “charism” is the “fraternity” of the friars. But what that fraternity is fraternal about is never mentioned. For it is to tolerate and affirm the “brother” no matter his thoughts or actions. Alone forbidden is a judgement upon the “brother”. So much for Saint Francis’s utter submission to the mind of the Church and the devotion of his Stigmatized body to the Passion of Christ. Similarly for the Jesuits. They have twisted the crystalline intentions of their founder Saint Ignatius into gauzy pronunciamentos on standing with the dispossessed of the world and “discerning” their roles in an ever-changing global community. Gone is ad maiorem Dei gloriam, to say nothing of the absolute obedience to the Church which was the bedrock and taproot of the Society of Jesus’ founding genius (in fact, the fourth vow of the Jesuit priest is obedience to the Roman Pontiff, whom Saint Ignatius taught they must obey “like corpses”). These two Orders, whose priests once strode the world like spiritual Titans, now lie supine like some drugged adolescent. Where once their orotund voices announced the name of Christ the King down the corridors of the world, they now intentionally stunt their voices, pathetically mumbling only the drivel of the age.
Man flourishes with holiness, not “spirituality”. It is man’s sanctification that God wills, not his self-affirmation. It is not looking inside that will bring man happiness, but looking outside to the Cross. Is it not self-realization that lets man soar to heaven, only self-forgetfulness. Yes, the ancient Greeks did exhort us to “know thyself”, but only so that our self-knowledge would startle us into admitting how small we are when we are content with being “me”.
Falling on our knees before the crucifix is the way to bliss. In our Holy religion alone does Christ send His Holy Spirit. In that enveloping fire of the Paraclete alone are men forged into that unique and privileged blessing called spiritual.
Latin Mass Magazine | 2014
[ Image credit: Christ on Throne, Copyright Jon Stulich Photo 2021 ]
