I am a boomer. Blooming right in the middle of the boomer era—born in 1955—and still booming strong. I have been part of one paradigm-busting, revolutionary movement after another since I came of age in the early seventies.(I even coauthored a book called Mother Daughter Revolution, about how mothers can change the future by changing the way they raise girls.) I know that whatever I'm involved in has the potential to entirely transform the world as we know it, to free us from the untold horrors of, well, you name it—patriarchy, racism, class oppression. Why? Because I'm a boomer, and boomers are going to change the world. And isn't it just perfect boomer style that I've also found a spiritual path that is evolutionary, revolutionary, and designed to change the world? Of course, I never really thought of myself as a boomer until I read Ken Wilber's Boomeritis (Shambhala Publications, 2002), his scathing and often hilarious indictment of boomer hubris. (That's probably another sign of being a boomer—being too unique to be part of something as mundane as a generation.) Reading Boomeritis brought me face-to-face with the inheritance of my generation, with my own boomeritis. Boomeritis is not only, as Wilber makes clear, a barrier to our collective cultural evolution but, like an ebola virus of consciousness, it kills the possibility of any real individual spiritual transformation from the inside out. And I know something up close and personal about boomeritis: I have quite a case.

So, what is boomeritis? First of all, it isn't just something for those of us born during the boomer years, 1946-1964. According to Wilber, “Boomeritis is simply pluralism infected with narcissism.” Sounds relatively harmless. Pluralism, simply defined, is our current social reality, where diverse racial, ethnic, and religious groups mix within one culture. However, Wilber is referring to something more specific—the intellectual capacity that emerges from that social reality: the ability to appreciate differences, to understand the ways that diverse cultures construct reality, and to fashion an identity, or self, that goes beyond one's family and culture of origin. Boomers do happen to have a particular and, of course, unique historical role in this development. As he writes, “The Boomers, to their great credit, were the first major generation in history to develop [this capacity]. That's a very important point….The Boomers moved beyond the [previous cultural stages of] traditionalism and … scientific modernism … and pioneered a postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural understanding…. And that is exactly why the Boomers spearheaded civil rights, ecological concerns, feminism, and multicultural diversity. That is the 'high' part of the mixture, the truly impressive part of the Boomer generation and the explosive revolutions of the sixties….” These revolutions, as partial as they have been, changed forever our sense of human possibility and refashioned the contours of human identity.

And the low part? The narcissism, naturally. Wilber is certainly not the only one who has noticed—how could one not?!—that the boomer generation, which unself-consciously and even proudly wears the appellation “the Me generation,” is more than a bit stuck on itself—and has left something sticky on the generations that have followed. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Robert Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart have beautifully and poignantly documented how self-involved and isolated we are. Concerned critics have despaired at how this inflated self-involvement has ripped the social fabric and, grasping to bring order to the chaos created by this unparalleled selfishness, they have often, futilely, called for a return to traditional values. Yet these problems can never be solved by looking backward. The world is changing at warp speed. There is no way back nor is there a “back” to go to. Wilber does what no other critic of the cultural scene has done: he not only elaborates in agonizing detail the corrosive effects of “that strange mixture of very high cognitive capacity… infected with rather low emotional narcissism,” but he places it within an evolutionary context and, in so doing, points to a possibility for humanity beyond boomeritis. The solution to boomer narcissism cannot come from looking to the past but only in realizing the demand of the future. Wilber confronts us with how critical the present moment actually is—because beyond the social fragmentation aggravated by boomer self-absorption is the potential for a more holistic, integral future.

Beyond boomeritis, Wilber shows us, is a quantum leap in consciousness that the boomer generation and its irony-clad children, Gen X and Y, are preventing. Using Don Beck and Christopher Cowan's spiral of development [see page 108] as an evolutionary blueprint, Wilber shows us what this leap is all about and why it is so critical that boomers get over themselves. All of cultural development up to this point has been fundamentally concerned with survival, starting hundreds of thousands of years ago with our most meager physical survival. Through the course of human history, human consciousness has developed more sophisticated strategies for survival—both internally (psychologically) and externally (technologically). Up until now, Beck and Cowan explain, human consciousness development has been about the elaboration of different, and increasingly complex, strategies for protecting an increasingly complex self within an increasingly complex world. In other words, human development has been about one form of narcissism after another, one way to keep the self intact after another. The utter perniciousness of boomer narcissism lies in its insidious sophistication—and the fact that right beyond it lies the possibility of a radically different relationship to life that is not driven by physical or psychological survival fears. Taking this leap will give us a new way to respond to the persistent problems that have plagued humanity and have brought us to the edge of destruction—the degradation of the biosphere, incessant warring between different human tribes, overpopulation, and starvation, to name a few. In the brilliant light of what is possible, boomeritis is aggressively anti-evolutionary.

This leap beyond boomeritis is clearly no mean feat. The context, consequences, and cost are enormous—which is what is inspiring about this unique moment in the human drama. We actually have the choice to participate in evolution: which do we trust more, our survival-conditioned minds or the evolutionary flow of life itself? This choice is essential, spiritual, because it concerns our deepest understanding of who we are and what life is about. Wilber documents all of the devious ways that boomers have placed our own narcissism-driven minds at the center of the universe—choosing self-preservation through an unrelenting hubris rather than taking the risk to align ourselves with evolution. Narcissism, as Wilber explains, is a multifaceted survival strategy designed to preserve the psychological self in its separation from the rest of life: Boomeritis divides the soul: a desperately narcissistic reliance on the sophistication and comprehension of one's mind over the force of life that animates our hearts. And this division destroys the possibility of the spiritual transformation that our collective evolution demands.

“Very interesting, so true of many others, but not me—why, I'm a very spiritual person!” would be a classic “I'm-a-special-case” boomer response to all of this. (Well, at the risk of being boomeritisly self-referential, look at me: I am even an editor of this well-known spiritual magazine, but, boy, do I have boomeritis.) Boomeritis is bigger and runs deeper than one can imagine. In fact, separating out the spiritual from “other” aspects of life and fashioning an identity as a “spiritual” person are both classic forms of boomeritis. You see, while boomers have actually sought for something beyond the materialist gains of the Second World War generation, and have done much to revitalize spirituality in the West, the stain of materialism—of wanting to have, to hold on to something for ourselves—has sullied much of boomer spirituality, draining the sacred from the realm of the spirit. Boomeritis is the materialist takeover of the spiritual for the sake of narcissistic gratification. In the following pages, I want to share with you what I've learned about just how deeply boomeritis works as a force against the evolutionary call from the future and how it has infected so much of the contemporary spiritual world.

BOOMERITIS BASICS

The roots of boomeritis go back several hundred years in cultural history. About four hundred years ago, human beings at the forefront of consciousness development looked away from God and began to look in the mirror. This marked the end of the traditional era, during which the world's great religions—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam—were founded and flowered. We tried to create a loophole in our contract with the Divine. This was the distinguishing move of the modern age, when humankind—led by the West—tore itself away from traditional structures of earthly and spiritual authority and began to develop a self-based authority of reason, science, and the mind. We quested for knowledge, sought independence, and created, particularly in the West, an unparalleled prosperity through technological innovation, developing a middle class insulated from the pressures of physical survival. But in the process, we diminished and destroyed the role of the sacred in human life, thereby reducing ourselves to material, rather than spiritual, beings. We denied our debt to an intelligence or force far beyond ourselves. We created Flatland—a world devoid of depth and transcendence. Now as we hurtle through a postmodern world that is changing faster than we can imagine, the modernist belief in the omnipotence of reason and the mind is proving to be an illusion. The pluralism of cultures, races, and perspectives has raised questions of rights and truth. We advocated for equality and, in the process, made Truth into truths—our different experiences of life became the ground for equal and, therefore, relative truths. Reducing Truth to our own personal, subjective experience made pluralism, as Wilber says, “a supermagnet for narcissism.” This is the spiritual dilemma of boomeritis: we've allowed our creative minds to rob the Divine of Truth and put our subjective experience in its place. The loophole has turned out to be a noose.

Of course, being smart postmodern types, we already know that the spiritual dimension is missing from Western culture. That's why so many of us have stepped onto the spiritual path or cultivated forms of living that arise from care or concern for the welfare of the oppressed. We've collected the great wisdom teachings from the entire world and turned inward to contemplate our deeper nature. Okay, great. But where deeper are we looking? I vividly remember a conversation with my own spiritual teacher when I was clearly holding myself back from a new momentum that was occurring in the larger body of students. In our life together here, in this laboratory of evolution, the demand is to individually and collectively surrender to the evolutionary impulse. Leaning toward a perfect union between the one and the many, both in our work and in direct collective investigation, a dynamic positivity and unlimited possibility open up when each participant brings him- or herself fully to this exploration beyond the known. I was refusing to participate in an authentic way. “You have no idea what it is that I am teaching,” my teacher told me. “You have no idea what is going on here, what it is that I am trying to do. Everything that you know is conceptual—it's all concepts and it isn't real.” He was right. I had grabbed with my mind and conceptualized the very real experience of something thrillingly and terrifyingly new that was emerging among us. I thought I knew, and that placed me in a conceptual universe that is a false and sterile parallel to the reality that was being created and shared. I was stopping transformation by creating my own truth, something personal, out of the experience. This is the boomeritis gap, the division between a highly developed intellect and the fear-based self-protection where we often actually reside. Too often, when we think we're going deeper, we end up in a subjective mind-maze of concepts and personal experience. In other words, we're looking at what we know—which means that we are only looking at ourselves in a narcissistic mirror.

The postmodern self is a deeply subjective self. And Wilber makes very clear what the implications are of this subjective, or personal, turn on boomers' approach to the world. Rejecting both the traditionalists' God and the absolutist principles of scientific reasoning, the pluralistic mind leaves us only with our own inner, subjective experience as authority, as the ground for truth and action. Pretty frightening when you think of all of the mental and emotional debris that passes through us constantly! As Wilber explains, a number of “principles” of boomeritis pluralism flow from this subjective stance:

		Truth, then, being grounded in subjective experience, can only be relative.
		There are no grounds for judging another—because what they are doing might be “right for them.”
		Hierarchy, or placing anyone's experience or authority above another's (especially one's own) experience, is a violation of what is true (that truth is only relative).
		The only way to determine what is good and true is by how it makes one feel; therefore, if something hurts one's feelings, then one has been wronged.

Ironically, the result has been a creepy cultural etiquette of niceness. When the only truth is what we feel, then hurting someone's feelings becomes a violation of truth, an affront to what is held holy—ourselves. The ground between us, the space for coming together, becomes a minefield. Locked in the righteous truth of our own personal, subjective world, we step lightly, cautiously, and pretend with each other. This emphasis on subjective experience doesn't lead to a culture of strong individuals who express the authority of their own experience—instead, the connection to one's true subjective experience erodes under the pretense of perfectly-kind-people personas.

Pluralists' fight for the rights of those excluded from modernism's promise has led, yes, to an empowerment and an opening of opportunity for so many. But at the same time, it has unwittingly created a climate where any aggrieved sensitive self can call his or her hurt feelings a personal foul, claim victim status, and seek redress in court (or at least demand health insurance coverage). A hallmark of narcissism is the inability to take responsibility, the intense need to find someone else to blame for one's problems. “The real tragedy” in all this, as Wilber notes, is that actual victims' “genuine grievances are trivialized by victim chic.” While Wilber lays out how far we have gone to avoid responsibility—a man with a 60-inch waist suing the airlines for discrimination because he can't get his butt in the seats, the lawsuit against McDonald's because the take-out coffee was too hot, the endless support groups for every real and imagined trauma—his emphasis is on how deeply boomeritis has reached into Western culture. But my question is: what does this mean for the life of the spirit?

BOOMERITIS OF THE SPIRIT

Let's start with the culture of victimization. Truly, anyone who has been victimized (which does, in some ways, include all of us) knows that the effect is to humiliate one's spirit, to violate one's dignity as a human being. Imagine, then, the cost to the soul of clutching onto victimization—of choosing this stance for oneself. What does this say about our relationship to the sacred gift of life? And yet, I know all too well how strong is the desire to be a victim and not take responsibility for the life I have been given. When I was confronted with the demand to come to a deeper reckoning, to drop my own narcissism and participate fully in the creative force of life in communion with my spiritual sisters and brothers, I would not let go into this forward-rushing current that was carrying everyone beyond the edge of the known. A sense of a whole was emerging in the group, allowing for a fearless collective exploration of the entire gamut of the human condition as ourselves. In true boomeritis fashion, I could see the processes of my mind and the myriad ways that I was holding on. In fact, I was narcissistically fascinated by it all. Then an insidious little thought crept into consciousness: “Maybe there is something wrong with me—I am just too damaged by my past, maybe therapy could help me to find out what is holding me back.” Hooking into the soft underbelly of the narcissistic ego that refuses to take responsibility for life, I gave this thought more and more weight. Pushed to choose—where did I stand?—I was willing to trade six years with my teacher and the possibility of leaping into a wholly new dimension of life for the safety of the therapist's couch and the endless exploration of everything that I already knew. It became very clear: I wanted to be a victim. Yes, there was something “wrong” with me: I wasn't willing to change. I didn't want to take responsibility for what my heart knew and recognized to be a good greater than myself. I set myself above the call to evolve that is humanity's potential salvation by collapsing into the undignified slouch of the victim.

Seeking salvation in the mirror of our minds is a boomeritis trick that allows us to not change while being endlessly involved in thinking about change as if it were the real thing. The intensely subjective self, which gives ultimate priority and authority to our thoughts and feeling states, leads to a corruption of the entire aim of spiritual life. The purpose of spiritual life, the reason to seek, is reduced to wanting to feel better. In a word: bliss. In two words: no stress. Now, while the recognition that life is suffering is what led the Buddha to his realization, Buddha's concern was humanity. The boomeritis concern is also humanity—meaning myself. Boomeritis spirituality is almost entirely concerned with the feeling states, and even the omnipotence, of the separate sense of self. The truth is subjective, remember? That means that I am the ultimate authority. I am the guide to my own awakening and to how far I have come on the spiritual path—because my progress on the path is related to the nifty spiritual experiences that I have and to how I feel. Who can tell, other than me? So, I don't need a teacher or any outside authority. And, in fact, don't all of the wisdom teachings say that my fundamental nature is Divine? Hey, I mean, we're all already enlightened, right? Well, maybe … but certainly not in the way that boomeritis spirituality uses such hard-won spiritual truths. The result is total self-acceptance—of the good, the bad, and the ugly in human nature—not out of some higher realization of equanimity but out of a lack of discrimination or care for anything other than one's own feelings. (You see, having to confront oneself and really change doesn't feel good and it's not easy.)

This distortion of spiritual truth by narcissism leads to a flatland spirituality, devoid of real transcendence, that is barely different from someone's life who is not on the path or doing spiritual practice. But there is one critical difference. The seeker infected with boomeritis feels good about him- or herself, and superior to others, because of having a spiritual identity and being such a spiritual person. As Wilber writes, “The essential feature… is the process of relabeling. That is, you take your present egoic state and learn to constantly relabel it as spiritual, divine, and sacred—relabel your ego as the Goddess, relabel it as the sacred Self, relabel it as the divine Web of Life…. One ends up relabeling the subtlest reaches of the ego as Divine, and that is the new spiritual paradigm.” In other words, the Web of Life becomes a web of lies. This process of relabeling, and the emphasis on feeling, within boomeritis spirituality tries to turn the sacred into something that we can have and claim for our own narcissistic desires. And Wilber's point holds for far more than what we call the New Age. This relabeling of the ego and its motives as spiritual can corrupt all forms of spiritual pursuit.


BOOMERITIS & ME

For me, boomeritis set down its deepest roots in my identification with having been part of the movement for women's liberation for twenty-some years. I marched for women's rights, explored feminist consciousness-raising, researched girls' and women's development, wrote with great passion about women's predicament and the possibilities of radical transformation in women's lives. Part of what pluralism allows, for each of us, is the creation of our own personal ideology. But, in a spiritual context calling for real change, the entire realm of personal identification has to be transcended. When the current of evolutionary intimacy began to pull us toward deeper and higher levels of spiritual communion, I was faced with the very real possibility to live what I have always said I wanted most in my life—to meet other women, heart-to-heart, in liberation beyond gender. But that identity that I clung to, my narcissistic desire to see myself as “the person who cares for women,” became a barbed-wire fence between me and other women. “What is working against you now, what is your enemy,” a friend told me in the middle of this crisis, “is your attachment to your intelligence, your mind, and your passion, your history of believing in women's liberation. You have to let all of it go.” The surface integrity that I had presented to the world as my identity cracked and blistered up like cheap linoleum. And the floor revealed beneath it was rotten. Underneath the good intentions of the caring feminist was an intense desire to avoid being like other women. Ironically, the desire to not be like other women, the desire to be the special and only one, is one of the key building blocks of woman's ego. Holding myself as superior to women, and censoring my own experience because it would have only revealed what I did not want to see about myself, not only meant that the freedom of true communion was impossible, but also kept me prisoner in the fortress of self-image, fearful of my own thoughts and impulses. I didn't want to be left simply with my experience stripped of the ideas and conclusions about myself that I had used to keep the world, and now the hearts of women, at bay. And in that, I stood against the revolutionary possibility that was the light I had followed throughout my entire life.

Now, if you tune your ear and listen carefully, beneath the desperate concern for self-image, the cry of the false victim, the relabeling of all experience as divine, the antipathy toward hierarchy and authority, beneath all the basics of boomeritis spirituality, the true boomeritis mantra sounds loud and clear: Nobody tells me what to do! We have become so well-versed in the wisdom traditions, have read so much, and have conveniently translated our egoic mind's experience into the appropriate spiritual categories—it is readily apparent how and why these powerful ideas (about me!) are such a magnet for narcissism. In fact, when laid out this way, this can be easy to see and to find even rather amusing—yes, such narcissism, what folly, ha ha. But in the context of a world careening out of control precisely because we are so out of control, this is actually no joke. Narcissism is a force in us, built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human history, which must be renounced in order to make the evolutionary leap to a new way of being. It is a willful, and aggressive, denial of the creative force of the universe, whether we call it the Divine or God or what you will. This core motivation—Nobody tells me what to do!—sounds like the peevish rant of a two-year-old, which it is, but it is not harmless when it provides us with an excuse not to care beyond ourselves, destroys the true nobility of the spiritual quest and the imperative to reach for the highest in human potential, or justifies the rage of the innumerable sensitive selves who feel victimized in contemporary culture.

For myself, the longer I refused to see the truth of what I was actually doing—and resided in that boomeritis state where only my feelings matter—the more apparent it became that the force in us that says Nobody tells me what to do! is actually frighteningly dangerous. The narcissistic ego is primitive—and decidedly destructive. But its pure destructiveness only became clear over the course of this crisis. At first, in meetings with my spiritual sisters where we explored the potential of evolution for women, my voice was hollow and insincere as I pretended to be on top of things, desperately trying to remain in control in a situation where we were all stepping into the unknown. Afterward, they asked me to recognize the choices I was making and urged me to experience the liberation of the truth. “It's true,” they said, “the truth will set you free.” From behind the hard wall of narcissistic self-protection, I paid lip service to what they said—with my strong mind I could see that it was true—but I avoided any real reckoning with what I was doing and the implications of it all. “You sound really angry,” my sisters told me. “You just hate seeing that you are not perfect and that you care more right now about your self-image than you do about women's liberation.” No, I'm not angry, I kept insisting with a smile that betrayed a hideous delight in my own defiance, why should I be angry when I already know that this is what I am doing, I already know what you are pointing to, I know it all. Insisting on my own sincerity and feeling intensely victimized, I experienced flashes of rage and even hatred that I chose to ignore. As I continued, refusing simply to see in myself the entirety of the human condition, my inner division became increasingly stark—at times I could feel something flying through me, a wind that bears darkness. In this division that I was insisting on preserving, I found myself sabotaging my work, ignoring simple instructions, to the point that I wondered if I was going mad. Like the female demons in the movie Devil's Advocate, my smiling, caring face began to feel like a thin veneer over a monstrous force that only wanted to rip apart all that I knew was dear and sacred. I was out of control: Nobody tells me what to do!

But it didn't stop there (as if that wasn't enough) because, when unleashed, the powerful force of narcissistic lust only wants to continue its course of annihilation. The momentum that I had allowed this force to generate was accelerating. Rapidly moving beyond the capacity to feel, I was losing my heart and connection with all that I loved. I was numb. And I didn't care about anything; I couldn't even care about my own life. “It's ego!” a friend nearly shouted at me. “It's ego, and all it wants is to numb you out, to cut you off from everything you care about, from your own heart. It wants to kill the you that cares.” I knew this was true. Deep within this force is a violence against love that is completely blind in its destructive rage. It scared me. I knew I had to stop. Boomeritis was killing me. Something had to change in me—fast.

The deepest dangers of boomeritis are only revealed when we actually begin to take seriously the evolutionary demand of real transformation. Only then does the contrast between the call of the spirit to evolve and the force of narcissism become starkly clear. Only then is it possible to see that the narcissistic ego-mind's use of the sacred to create a safe, known world and positive identity is an act of deep corruption in our motivation for seeking. My crisis came from having to know—to know who I am, to know where I am, and, finally, to know that I am a good person and therefore I am better and smarter than everyone—and taking all that I experienced for my own self-reflection. This is the double whammy of boomeritis: the highly developed mind covering the low narcissism. The end result is nihilism. Emptying the sacred of its depth, life becomes flat, meaningless, and devoid of the possibility for real transformation. Turning the untouchable and ineffable mystery of life itself into material for our own gratification, we gut the sacred, and our lives, of meaning, in order to create something to hang on to in the face of how vast and truly unknown it all is. “We know by the year about 2020, the greatest disabling phenomenon for the health of the human race will be depression,” says Dr. Max Bennett, world-renowned neurologist from the University of Sydney. “Not cancer, not heart disease, but depression.” We have not become the Prozac nation for nothing; we've become the Prozac nation for nihilism. Boomeritis leaves us in a world of spiritual pretense that robs the sacred of its power and goodness by trying to make it serve us and our personal need for control.

The truth is actually the complete opposite: we exist to serve the sacred, and deeper meaning and purpose can only come from this recognition. My spiritual teacher has written, “What would you do if you realized it was all up to you? What would you do if suddenly you realized that the entire evolution of the whole human race rested on your shoulders alone? What would you do?” My heart has always been pulled by these questions—perhaps because mine is the heart of a paradigm-busting boomer—and they have also left me reeling: it's just too big! But, actually, life itself is that big. Yours and mine.

The narcissistic rage that I gave myself to when I refused to surrender is enormous. While its violent intensity is hidden from view until we find ourselves up against the wall, the mess that the world is in—even the everyday mess of relationship and disorder and wastefulness—comes from one choice after another made from that same narcissism that wants only for itself and doesn't care about the consequences. But the force of evolution, of life, is even more enormous. For fifteen billion years this force has been moving toward this moment of consciousness where we are now able to choose our fate and that of this world. In contemplating these questions, the very real immensity of life and of the fact that I am here, living in a twenty-first century laboratory of the spirit, exploring the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, opens up a different perspective, another consciousness somehow above or beyond the ego-mind with its ceaseless need to know. Like exercising an unused muscle, I cannot hold this perspective for very long—but I understand deeply that it is always there. And in the clarity of this perspective, I can see that I have taken the call of the spirit, the universal pull of evolution, entirely personally, when it simply is as it is—an obligation that comes with the extraordinary virtue of our human birth. Stepping out of the confines of my particular life to see it in the light of our collective evolution, the movement of the stream of life creates a radically different context for making choices. To act from this, from the biggest possible truth of what it means to be human and alive now, holds a revolutionary possibility that takes us beyond boomeritis into what may, in fact, end up being a truly paradigm-busting transformation for all of humanity. And that would make any boomer's heart truly sing.

~~~

Quotations from: Ken Wilber, Boomeritis, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 2002, pp. 35, 36, 44, 178, 338; “What Buddhists Know about Science,” by Daithí Ó hAnluain, www.wired.com/news; Andrew Cohen, Freedom Has No History, Moksha Press, Lenox, MA, 1997, p. 101.