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….
September 30th, 2004 at 6:48 pm
Sad, and very true. =(
October 2nd, 2004 at 12:14 pm
I would argue that the same thing is happening in the Wilber meetup groups. Andrew Cohen basically calls that kind of get-together a complete waste of time where nothing really happens - nobody changes.
Bob (bobyu at yahoo dot com)
October 2nd, 2004 at 1:21 pm
Couldn’t really speak for the Wilber Meet-Up groups, as I haven’t been to any of them. Have you, and has Cohen?
No doubt that that can happen in any circle, including Wilber and Cohen’s cirlces.
November 16th, 2004 at 8:49 pm
You say, “I can’t tell you how true this seems to be in some buddhist circles.”
Can you offer a specific example of a known modern Buddhist teacher who you think is infected with the “disease” of “boomeritis Buddhism”?
November 20th, 2004 at 8:53 pm
Hi Anonymous,
When I said, “I can’t tell you how true this seems to be in some Buddhist circles,” I am mainly referring to the participants of these buddhist circles, or the “sangha members” rather then the teachers.
That is not to say that some teachers don’t show this kind of tendency, but for the most part the teachers I’ve studied with seem to have a greater depth and breadth then what I’m pointing to as Boomeritis Buddhism…
An interesting thing when pointing out “Boomeritis” is that someone can easily be pointing at Boomertis from a stance of Boomeritis themselves (something I’ve been guilty of myself). The other thing being that if I am at an “integral” wave of understanding and I haven’t yet seen a level or wave above that (because it hasn’t emerged yet in myself), then I will easily confuse anything that looks like the previous wave (in this example ‘green’) with that higher stage, when it is obviously much different.
My main point of this post is that in some ‘buddhist circles’ the people that tend to want to be a part of these communities are involved, not to transcend their egoic identifications, but to subtly raise their ego to a place where it can’t be touched. They arm themselves with Buddhist jargon, go to silent retreats and talk the entire time, brag about how many years they’ve been practicing, who they’ve studied with, and how much ‘knowledge’ they have with other retreatants (this is a real-life example from the retreat I just got back from). Narcissism at it’s most clever.