Soul’s Code

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21^st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation’

For two years, Byron Katie was so maniacally depressed she rarely got out of bed. A mother of two boys and a teen-aged girl in Bakersfield, CA and an alcoholic, she ended up in a local halfway house. When Katie awoke one morning to find a cockroach crawling up her foot, she had an out-of-nowhere epiphany. “All my rage, all the thoughts that had been troubling me, my whole world, was gone,” she recalls. “The only thing that existed was awareness. I was seeing without concepts, without thoughts or a story. There was no me. The foot and the cockroach weren’t outside me. There was no outside or inside.”

During the two decades since that halfway-house psychic makeover, Katie has drawn audiences in the thousands to lectures and workshops, for which she typically charges no fee, offering others the same experience. To both experts and lay people alike she appears to live in an elevated psychological state utterly free of internal conflict, akin to a yogi or a lama. Katie herself claims that she does not even see herself as a spiritual person. “I don’t know anything about that,” says Katie. “I’m just someone who knows the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.”

POST-MODERN MYSTICS

Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business. But Katie, now 63, is in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition she is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred. Their work, if you want to call it that, isn’t wholey cribbed from Indian gurus or apprenticeships in Asian monasteries but forged in a homegrown fashion in the crucible of contemporary America – sometimes as a result of frustration with oriental traditions. Alongside Katie, these self-schooled spiritual masters include Oregon-based Catherine Ingram (pictured above), Santa Fe’s Pamela Wilson (below), and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee.

They represent an implicit indictment of the legion of vendors from the human potential movement who appear on Oprah’s show, or who fill the pages of Common Ground. Those services are New Age brands that explicitly pitch self-improvement, and promise to fill in the ego’s deficits. But Katie, Ingram and the others undermine the very notion of self-enhancement through spiritual seeking. In fact, they take direct aim at the personality’s hegemony over reality, and advance a counter-intuitive proposition that the act of thinking itself is an inherently contaminating phenomenon. The mind is a terrible thing to waste, the age-old adage goes. To the new female mystics, the mind is simply a terrible thing.

Contrast the highly Cartesian approach of the medical experts in HBO’s Addiction with, say, the non-dualistic diagnosis of addiction offered by three spiritual teachers we’ve posted about during the past couple of weeks. HBO probably deemed this kind of examination too challenging for its mainstream audience:

Don’t misinterpret stillness with going off to sleep, or the kind of stillness you might have after a few drinks. You might drift off a bit, you can’t remember your problems so you might feel a little bit better. People sometimes drink to get rid of, for a little while, the torture of their mind telling them what their problems are. So they drink, and for a moment they don’t remember their problems. But of course there’s a price to pay because there’s a lowering of consciousness. So you go lower towards the vegetable realm.

• Eckhart Tolle, Living the Liberated Life and Dealing With the Pain Body

There is no such thing as an addiction to an object; there is only attachment to the uninvestigated concept arising in the moment.

If you think alcohol makes you sick or confused or angry, then when you drink it, it’s as if you’re drinking your own disease. You’re meeting alcohol where it is, and it does exactly what you know it will do. And if you believe that you really want to keep drinking, just notice what it does to you. There’s no pity in it. There’s no victim in it. And eventually there’s no fun in it — only a hangover.

• Byron Katie, chapter 11, Loving What Is

Byron Katie is a post-modern mystic = someone who has realized an elevated state, and done so in the maelstrom of contemporary American society — incubated totally outside of organized religion, essentially by spontaneous combustion.

With the release of her third book, A Thousand Names for Joy, Katie receives standing ovations usually reserved for rock stars as she tours U.S. cities. But this isn’t an Oprah-ego personality cult. This material is challenging stuff — not feel-good, ratings-boosting melodrama.

An excerpt from the new book: Here is Katie’s way for un-plugging from the pain of 9/11, an American drama that lives in us with the power of a group induction or spell:

I read an interview with a well-known Buddhist teacher in which he described how appalled and devastated he felt while watching the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While this reaction is very popular, it is not the reaction of an open mind and heart. It has nothing to do with compassion.

A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’

In this series, we introduce some of the leading lights of the sage sex, and their teachings

Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been women and the teachers men; From Jesus to Gurdjieff and Rumi to Ramana Maharshi, enlightenment has been a male-dominated business. But figures like Byron Katie are in the vanguard of an astonishing advent in the mystical tradition: she is a leading light in a scattered coterie of women who have propounded a radical, new esoteric spirituality and seem to have leap-frogged ahead of male counterparts in the pursuit of the sacred.

Their work, if you want to call it that, isn’t wholly cribbed from Indian gurus or apprenticeships in Asian monasteries but forged in a homegrown fashion in the crucible of the modern, over-caffeinated, high-tech West – sometimes as a result of frustration with oriental traditions. Alongside Katie, these self-schooled spiritual masters include Oregon-based Catherine Ingram, Santa Fe’s Pamela Wilson, and Calgary, Alberta-based Karen McPhee (pictured above).

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