My first introduction to the idea of plurilism run rampant, was in a book aptly named Boomeritis. The basic premise of Boomeritis is that at a certain point in people’s development, they begin to see the world with more compassion and sensitivity (not everyone makes it this far in their development obviously, so this is actually a fairly advanced understanding). This usually leads to an intuitive understanding that there is an equality which unites all human beings. Even though this is a noble view, it can end up creating a situation where no one can challenge my ego, because everything and everyone is equal (usually a confusion between the Absolute (which indeed transcends all boundaries) and the idea of Relative equality). Ken Wilber writes about how this impacts the way profound spiritual experiences are interpreted in many spiritual circles (specifically Buddhist circles):
the person then interprets Buddhism—or simply his or her own spiritual experiences—to mean that authentic spirituality must be anti-hierarchical, relativistic, primarily a matter of participatory sharing, focused on caring dialogue, a democratic jettisoning of any ranking between teacher and student (‘the sangha is the buddha’), denying any grading and judging, encouraging a multiplicity and diversity of equally valid truths, asserting a plurality of spiritual ultimates, de-emphasizing enlightenment since any ‘higher’ states might marginalize somebody, seeing the spiritual teacher as merely an egalitarian friend with whom we walk the nonhierarchical spiritual path, hand in hand as equals, dispensing with intense discipline and denying that awakening is anything other than doing the laundry with some sort of awareness…. [Sidebar H: Boomeritis Buddhism]
I can’t tell you how true this seems to be in some buddhist circles. The problem is that people can spend (and probably do spend) decades making very little progress in their practice, wallowing in their personal “stuff”, having spiritual experience here and there and interpreting them through a framework which can never quite actualize it’s vision….
