Elizabeth Debold: Spiritual Boomeritis



Ken Wilber in front (Kanzeon Zen Center)

The literary talents of Elizabeth Debold would have allowed her to aptly review Ken Wilber’s Boomeritis without so much as a glance in the mirror.  Instead, Debold courageously chose to personalize said review with a close look at how Boomeritis is gnawing away at her own heart and soul. 

In her EnlightenNext article titled Boomeritis & Me: Not Just a Book Review, Debold presents Wilber’s definition of Boomeritis:  “pluralism infected by narcissim.”  She then explains that Boomers were the first “major generation in history” to develop a capacity 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.”

So far so good…  But along with this appreciation of others came an intense preoccupation with self.  The somewhat “We” generations became predominantly “Me” generations as Boomers passed their narcissism along to Generations X and Y.  However, all is not lost.  Wilber points out that if Boomers could only get over themselves, a quantum leap of consciousness awaits.  Debold therefore asks this pivotal question:  “… which do we trust more, our

survival-conditioned minds, or the evolutionary flow of life itself?”  Debold further explains that this choice is essentially a spiritual one “because it concerns our deepest understanding of who we are and what life is about.”

According to Debold, some signs of being too bogged down in the survival-conditioned mind (and thus too

narcissistic when it comes to spirituality) are the following:  a “Nobody tells me what to do!” type of attitude; a modernist belief in “the omnipotence of reason and the mind”; the reducing of Truth to “our own personal, subjective experience”; a victim-type mentality (which has spawned a multitude of support groups); spiritual one-upmanship; plus a belief that transcendental bliss is the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey.

Resources

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j22/debold.asp?page=4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomeritis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y

Copyright February 28, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved