The Spirituality of Initiation

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Section 1: The Spirituality of Separation

Chapter 1: I once was found

The first step in the process of initiation for a man is separation. Indigenous peoples all over the world separated their young initiates, boys ready for the ordeal of manhood, from their hearth, their home, their village. They were separated from father, mothers, relatives of any degree. They were separated from all that was familiar.

This separation was both symbolic and concrete. To become a new man, the elders forced an initiate to leave the boy behind. This meant leaving boy psychology behind with its dependence on comfort and rules. I have written about this psychology in depth in a previous book. This separation also meant leaving boy spirituality behind, with its dependence on a theoretical moral and metaphysical reality defined by others.

The sudden loss of boyhood was expected, yet still a shock and a deep pain. Some never recovered from the shock. Some recoiled from the pain, seeking comfort in the certainty of others, in the village rules. Others used the shock to find their path to manhood, which to a native American or an Aborigine or a native African was also their lifetime spiritual path. This path was always found outside the village.

Boy Spirituality

In the modern village, religion espouses boy spirituality. This is not a negative comment. Religion can have a strong place in the spiritual growth of a man. If a religion can see itself as a preparation for a larger spiritual quest, that religion will understand the wisdom of separation, even from itself. If not, religion can keep a boy from becoming a man.

Preparation for the spiritual quest is crucial. In indigenous cultures the elders had the duty to prepare boys for the spiritual ordeal they would go through. Elders would teach boys the history of their people, mainly through creation myth and moral story. This history would always include the experience of the people with their gods and ancestors. The people would invariably be created by gods and given a mission by the gods of carrying on the original creative intent. Boys were taught the elder's understanding of their evolving purpose, the elder's understanding of the spiritual path of their people.

Elders also nurtured in boys the strength to deal with spiritual matters. Elders taught strength through discipline. Discipline was taught through the expectation of obedience. The word discipline comes from the word disciple, or follower. Boys were expected to follow elders and obey them. This was part of the preparation for their initiation into man spirituality.

Obedience is a religious word, as well as a village word. For a boy growing in the psychospiritual life, obedience is a good thing. To have a right and wrong, and to learn to have the discipline and strength to follow the right, is a necessary stage in a man's development. Psychologist's call the ability to choose what one sees as right ego strength. The village is the place to develop ego strength, for the village is the place of the ego. Religion does a fine job of teaching what is "good" and nurturing in a man the strength to choose it. Most scientific studies of the positive value of religion will point toward the morality of religious people. Religious people are good citizens, doing good as the village defines it.

Ego strength allows a boy to choose the good even in the face of pain. This strength allows a boy to move away or separate from what is merely comfortable, because of a higher good. The emergence of the ego starts the process of a boy making conscious choices. This emergence enables a boy to understand the value of a higher purpose. The emergence of the ego ultimately allows for separation from boy psychology.

Practicing obedience is a way to develop ego strength. Practicing discipline means learning to have the strength to follow someone else's values, on the way to learning about living out values. A disciple is a learner. Discipline keeps a boy on the difficult path of learning.

In the modern village religion promotes both ego strength and spiritual discipline, as well as understanding of their ancestral spiritual heritage. However, boys are not considered ready to experience life beyond the village, sometimes for as long as they live. This is how religion can be stuck in boy spirituality.

Protection

Religion also protects a naive person from being overwhelmed by spiritual choices. An overwhelmed ego shuts down. An overwhelmed man usually regresses to being a boy again. An overwhelmed boy turns back desperately to the comfort of depending on a father or a mother to make even simple choices for him.

Carl Jung, in his book Psychology and Religion, speaks of religion as a protection from the terror of facing the spiritual life and spiritual questions directly. There is an Old testament, Torah belief that one who faces God directly will die. Elders, like Old Testament believers, were also continually concerned that initiates were prepared enough for the terrors and challenges of their ordeal. If an elder misjudged, an initiate might not survive his initiation. On some archetypal level there is a wisdom that knows that spiritual initiation is of life and death seriousness, and too much of the life force can cause death. Religion protects a boy from these Lord of the Flies' situations.

Jung saw religion as a mediator between the unprepared ego and the existential questions lurking in a person's own unconscious. Looked at psychologically, Jung saw a huge psychic power, with a strength and a wisdom beyond personal ego control, residing in the unconscious of all human beings. For Jung, facing the power of the unconscious was facing the power of what seemed a Godlike force within. Jung couldn't prove scientifically there was a God, though he later admitted to believing in one. He felt he proved that men act as if there are the footprints of a higher power deep in the unconscious of all people. Jung felt that all the most important questions were religious questions, questions of the meaning of life and death, questions of personal life path. And all the answers that gave the most peace resided in the collective unconscious of us all. He called mankind homo religiosus because every person deep inside had an instinctive religious feeling and world view. All people acted instinctively as if there were a God with answers residing deep within.

Jung saw religion as mediating between the frail individual and the enormity of the forces of the unconscious bombarding a person with life and death questions. He saw religion as a transformer, like stepping down a 220 volt life force to a 110 volt boy circuit. He saw rituals and rules as a protection against psychic breakdown or mass hysteria. He saw creed or dogma as a temporary substitute for the wisdom deep within the unconscious. He saw religion as a bulwark against the unconscious acting out of the dark side of the human psyche.

In the modern village religion is necessary because there seems to be few ways that a person can face the spiritual challenge that Jung outlines, few ways that a man can be prepared to go through spiritual initiation. Religion, as a psychological bulwark, is necessary for those judged not to have the strength to endure spiritual initiation, or those yet unprepared to face that ordeal. For a modern culture, religion can also be a moral bulwark and protection against the chaos of amoral boy egos running an elderless village.

Modern Boy

Modern man has no cultural path of spiritual initiation. Religion most often stops short of initiation. Either religion identifies itself totally with the spiritual path, so there is no need for separation, or it sees that most men are not capable of initiation. Religion then acts like the false elder who convinces the boy to stay in the village. This is not a malicious consciousness. This is the result of a culture that does not understand or promote spiritual elders, does not understand the meaning in the wilderness. So modern man is stuck at home, emotionally and spiritually, without a true elder to guide him. Modern man is a misnomer. The name should be modern boy. Religion becomes his spirituality.

The modern village has a stake is keeping a man unconscious, with religion its unwitting accomplice. Consciousness involves separation from the village and the village reality. Unwise matriarchs and patriarchs cannot afford this separation. One reason is that a modern village lives off the energy of those who are unconscious. An uninitiated man or woman does not have a direct, unblocked spiritual connection to the life force, that river of life, that is both without and within. So uninitiated men and women in power, I call them dark matriarchs and patriarchs, live off the energy and limited life force of those they convince to stay in the village. Boys are useful to the village in the same way that legal immigrants and illegal aliens are useful to the American system. They provide relatively cheap, obedient, pliable labor. Patriarchs have not grown past ego needs or ego desires. The village is their life. Boys are needed to keep the village going.

Any group without a sustaining and healthy spirituality, promoted by elders who have walked far along a spiritual path, will cling to its own survival as its highest spiritual good. This dependency won't come out in words, only in actions, because it is an unconscious process. This is one of the basic laws of large group dynamics. In other words, in a spiritually uninitiated group its members have to live off the life force of each other, rather than from a direct connection to the life force itself. Members of the group gradually suck each other dry, while at the same time desperately holding the group together. Often one man or woman comes to represent the survival of the whole group. If he or she is obeyed the group feels safe. In this way loyalty and obedience become the highest good. Separation, as a form of disloyalty, becomes the greatest evil because it is perceived as leading to the disintegration of the group. Patriarchs need boys and boys need patriarchs in this desolate scenario of limited life force.

This law of group dynamics can, in this case, also be seen in family dynamics. A healthy family will prepare a boy go into the world as an independent emotional and spiritual being. This family will not expect a payback for all the energy and time they gave that boy. They will celebrate his accomplishments, his life path. Parents will have a life force independent of their children, and a life path that will gradually diverge from the boy as he becomes a man. The man owes this family nothing and is grateful to them for everything. Parents don't expect the son to continually look back. He repays his family and community by giving his life energy to the next generation, most often as a father and elder.

In an unhealthy family a boy is seen as either the servant or the savior of the family. In either case, the family needs the boy and expects that the boy will use his life energy to serve the family. The boy will be expected to keep the family intact, meaning primarily father and mother, and any accomplishments of the boy will be attributed to the family. This family doesn't like change. It expects a boy to carry on a tradition, to duplicate the family story. This family expects that the apple will not fall far from the tree. A boy will be seen as disloyal if he wants to strike out on his own. He is seen as good if he gives his life force to the previous generation, bad and ungrateful, sometimes evil, if he strays too far from the family tree.

In fact, evil is most often a village word. It is the religious word borrowed most often by the modern village to keep boys from becoming men. If a patriarch can control the evil agenda, as they say in politics, he can control a man or a group. In the modern village, evil usually means anything that is opposed to the patriarch, be it President, Bishop, CEO, General. Religion becomes another victim of the negative group dynamics of survival, along with the village. If a cleric believes that his religious institution is the only way to God, then his institution must survive or all is spiritually lost. In this way the religious institution becomes the highest spiritual good, just as in the modern village the survival of the village becomes the highest good. Those that separate become evil. Survival fears make for strange bedfellows.

In the desperate marriage of religion and secular culture of the modern village, modern cultural norms gradually become moral goods. Politics gets raised to religion. Laws become commandments. Consensus reality becomes the only good. The job of the modern boy is to accept the prevailing mass consciousness of what is good and evil and to become a good boy. Evil becomes whatever is countercultural. Religion codifies this evil. Religion and culture marry because they both have the same unconscious goal of keeping a boy from separating and disturbing the status quo.

Leaving the village will always be seen as a betrayal by the modern religious village. The modern village will often view the initiatory separation of a man as anything from a terrible evil to simply moral weakness. The labels range from unpatriotic to irreligious to disloyal, disloyal being another word for disobedient. Turning a wonderful song around, those on the initiatory spiritual path once were found, but now are lost.

Consciousness

The modern village teaches a great deal of discipline and obedience. The modern village teaches little consciousness. The village expects an emerging man to unconsciously follow the moral laws of a boy the rest of his life. Religion is the repository and guardian of these moral laws. The modern village is the totality of reality for the unconscious boy.

Consciousness is where psychology and spirituality intersect. Both stress going within to find answers. Both stress the need for choices that go beyond unconscious cultural norms. Both recognize motivations that do not always fit the goals of the culture. Both yearn to find a reality beyond the village. This is why initiation is a psychospiritual journey.

Consciousness and awareness is where religion and spirituality separate. Consciousness is the force that drives a man from the safety of the village to the terror of the wilderness. In indigenous peoples the elders held this consciousness until initiates found it for themselves. Elders knew that boys had to separate from the village and its laws. Elders created separation, physically and psychologically and even spiritually. Elders threw boys into the wilderness where they had to find a new morality based on their own experience. Beyond the village was the place of ordeal, the heart of initiation, the place of a new consciousness. As Thomas Merton, monk and mystic, talked of the desert fathers, "They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand."

Elders protected a boy's consciousness as it emerged, just as religion does today. But then elders withdrew their protection. Initiates would find their own experience of the divine or die in the process. Initiates would become conscious of the divine within and without, or die trying. They would face this terror because life was not worth living without this direct awareness. Elders then celebrated this consciousness as a new manifestation to the whole village of the divine. Each initiate found God anew, not just for themselves, but for the whole village. Elders then let go of their demand for discipline and their need for a disciple. An initiated man, by virtue of his consciousness of the divine, became an equal of the elder, and the hope of the continuing spiritual tradition of the village. Each successful initiate widened the spiritual consciousness of the whole village.

As we will see, modern man still has an elder within who continually pushes him toward psychospiritual initiation. This elder is pushing him toward consciousness of the need for choice, separation, and personal understanding of his spiritual mission within the human spiritual tradition.

The Tree

The Bible story in Genesis of the garden of Eden, in one of many interpretations, can illustrate the tension between obedience and consciousness, religion and spirituality. The story also points out how patriarchs have no interest in consciousness or spirituality.

The Genesis myth is a myth of cosmology, as are all creation myths. Cosmological myths like the Genesis myth strive to help a person find his authentic place in the universe. They try to explain, from the accumulated wisdom of ancestors, the ultimate values and purpose of each individual life as well as the common life of the community. These are the myths that elders of all indigenous have always taught.

In the Genesis story. Adam and Eve are told to enjoy the garden of Eden and all its beauty and fruits. There were trees of all kinds there, and God spoke of giving them access to all the fruit they wanted, except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the fruit of the tree of life. Adam and Eve partook of all the fruit they were allowed to eat. They lived comfortably, without needing to work, for fruit trees need little tending. They don't need to be planted every year. Their fruit seemed to magically appear. Their fruit literally seemed a gift from God, as fruit must have seemed to indigenous peoples from earliest times.

Adam and Eve also lived without shame. They could live without shame as long as they were obedient. They could not commit "sin" as long as they were obedient. They lived in a blissful state of unconscious amorality.

The story goes that the serpent tempted Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. His temptation promised Eve to be like God, if she ate. God is described as someone who knows good and evil, and is immortal. Eve eats of the tree and convinces Adam to do the same. They have made a conscious choice not in accordance with God. They feel shame. They have disobeyed.

God is angry. Strangely his anger is because Adam "has become one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil." To keep Adam from becoming more like God, eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal, God banishes Adam and Eve from the garden.

In this story, the tree of good and evil can be looked on as consciousness, the ability to have a choice beyond obedience, the ability to choose based an inner awareness rather than outer rules. One cannot choose good unless there is evil. It is interesting that God in this story is primarily described as someone who has consciousness, this knowledge of good and evil. You would think that God would want to share that part of his Godhead. However, this patriarchal God does not want to give his children choices. He is a jealous God who wants obedience more than love. For love requires choice. He gives life, yet he withholds the tree of life. He makes man in his image, yet he refuses to let him be Godlike.

God banishes humanity from the garden as the price of consciousness, the price of disobedience. Now man has to toil and suffer the pain of choice. Humanity is thrown from unconscious bliss into the world of potential consciousness and freedom. Some accounts of this story, for there are many in cultures throughout the Middle East, talk of God having the choice of forgiving the transgression and causing them to forget, lapsing back into unconsciousness and bliss. But God leaves their consciousness untouched.

Looked at from one side, this is a patriarchal God who uses humanity as a kind of plaything for his amusement. This is a jealous God who does not want to share his power, nor allow his creatures to find power or happiness elsewhere. This is a God who needs respect, who can't stand to be out of control. This is a God who abhors freedom.

In this interpretation, the garden is like the modern, patriarchal village. In this cosmology obedience is the highest moral law. Someone else, usually a patriarch who acts godlike, always knows what is best. Consciousness is praised, then disallowed. Choice leads only to sin and shame. Beyond the village is pain and punishment, not enlightenment. Heaven, like the garden, is unconsciousness.

It is this interpretation that tends to militate against consciousness, and a higher moral choice. This interpretation also militates against a spirituality of separation from an elder's authority. I believe that this is the god that is now made in the image of the culture.

I believe there are other interpretations of this story that involve a paradoxical God who wants both consciousness and obedience. Yet every man must find his own God. For that, he must be willing to separate.

Myth

This is the time to talk more of myth. For I will be referring to myth often is this book. A myth is a story that has many levels of meaning and truth at the same time. Contrary to common opinion, myth does not mean untrue or unreal. As Brother David Stendl-Rast points out, "myth is realer than real." Others have described myth as "the lie that reveals the truth." Myth has been used by all cultures to explain the spiritual story of its people.

An example is this same Genesis myth. This story can have multiple meanings. Another interpretation of the Genesis myth could be as follows. God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to test their humility and obedience. The tree could represent a false knowledge and power, a power that is not sacred but only secular. This could be worldly power that starts a man thinking he has wisdom and power that is beyond him. This is the illusion of having supernatural powers, especially in service of his own ego. This is the illusion of being able to create a world based on one's own image. As the Bible says of the serpent's temptation, '"you will be like gods."

This interpretation of the Bible would describe the Greek notion of hubris. The Greeks believed that when a man started acting as a god, taking on himself the behaviors and attitudes of a divinity, the gods would be angry and jealous. They would not be mocked. This pride was called hubris. Invariably the gods would call on Nemesis to destroy the man who would be a god. This is the idea behind the saying that pride comes before the fall. In psychological terms, this taking on of such importance by the ego is called inflation. The secular term egotistical comes from the same idea. This type of inflation is the opposite of spirituality. This is the ego only serving itself. As one commentary puts it, "This is a claim to complete moral independence by which man (sic.) refuses to recognize his status as a created being."

In this interpretation the young, emerging ego needs confidence and certainty through a kind of reinforcement that the village matriarchs and patriarchs can give. Rules and commandments give this certainty on the way to building ego confidence. Religion, then, is a needed bulwark against hubris, while also a container for the emerging ego to grow.

To understand myth is to understand that both of the above interpretations can be true. And there are still others, as I have mentioned, that also have a spiritual truth. The acceptance of many levels of truth leads to mystery and spirituality, rather than creed and religion. This is the paradox of wilderness spirituality. This is the spiritual paradox of myth.

Myth and Consciousness

Consciousness allows a person to see many levels of truth at the same time. Spirituality, like the elder within, continually pushes a man towards deeper and more paradoxical ways of experiencing himself and the god within. His life is like a myth, always opening up new meanings, always broadening his view of the breadth and sacredness of life. He sees the life within as containing boundless mystery and a multitude of levels of truth because this life is connected to the great Mystery.

Religion tends to stay at one level of truth and get stuck there because of group survival issues and human nature. The fear that many religions create also attracts a regressive, subtle darkness, a regressive and active unconsciousness, that I will speak of later.

Maybe this unconscious religious instinct that believes that the great mass of humanity is not ready for spiritual initiation is realistic. Maybe religion is the only bulwark against chaos. Maybe the priest and the mullah and the rabbi know best. (Yet I know a good number of clerics who yearn for their flocks to find their own spirituality). Or maybe, some religions were the right thing for the cultures and time when they were created, but now they have not evolved as far as humanity has.

It is clear to me that most of the power that keeps a man in a kind of bondage is an unconscious power. There is more malaise here than malice. Most patriarchs of church or state sincerely believe their message, blind to how their actions belie their words. They do not see that obedience beyond a certain point does not lead to freedom or salvation. They do not see how belief in a creed does not necessarily lead to truth but often to unconsciousness. They do not see that doing good does not necessarily lead to God.

If religion were seen more like a myth, religion might find its place. For the great myths, creation myths, aim to help a man understand his place in a spiritual universe. Myth isn't truth in itself. Myth points toward many truths. Religion, like myth, points toward a truth that is always bigger and more mysterious than religious understanding. Any religion that believes its understanding, its creed, its buildings must survive, in order for the path to god to be accessed, is succumbing to hubris, and opening itself to darkness. This is a stuck religion. This is a religion espousing boy spirituality.

In the Genesis myth, the tree of life may have been there before the Genesis God. The tree of life, like the river of life, is a mythic symbol of a life force greater than our limited knowledge of God. The patriarchal god of Genesis could be god limited by the beliefs of boy spirituality. I believe the tree of life, included in so many creation myths, can only be found beyond the village, when a boy is separated and lost and alone and desperate. The tree of life can only be found in the wilderness.

The mystics of most religions understand this paradox of allowing lostness before the answers can be found. Mystics understand spiritual initiation. This is why mystics, and their mystery schools, have either been persecuted or marginalized by most religions over the centuries. It is often the mystic's understanding of a religion that has protected the essence of that religion's message, just as elders of the past have protected their own people's spirituality. Mystics and elders understand separation. Religions are threatened by it.

A religion that understands and accepts the truth of separation is a wise religion indeed. A religion that encourages separation is even wiser. This is an amazing religion. This is a religion that espouses amazing grace.

Previous chapters of Spirituality Of Initiation are archived here.

My previous book, Toward Manhood, is archived here.