Synopsis
Translucence is bringing about a gentle yet profound revolution in human consciousness. Millions of people from all walks of life are experiencing a deep change in awareness, an experience marked by a new sense of well-being, and increasing joy in life, a diminishing of fear - including fear of death - and a natural impulse to serve the world in a real way. This book describes this awakening and offers readers opportunities to cultivate and encourage translucence in their own lives.

There’s a lot to say about this book and I imagine there will be a full discussion emerging soon. For me, it just seemed PRACTICAL, a look at what lived presence or spirituality can look like when it comes down off the mountain top. I doubt it will be any surprise to those of you who know me at all that I find the masculine spiritual tradition remote and isolating. This books talks about an engaged, active, thoughtful and thoroughly meaningful involvement in life. Not a rejection of or separation from the world at large. It’s involved, present and playful.

As the book progresses, it plays a game of debunking spiritual myths. I think I cheered at almost every one of them, and blushed occasionally as I recognised how far some of them had entered my own assumptions along the way, at least for a time. What a blessed relief to be rid of so much dead wieght! More thoughts on some of these later, perhaps, but here’s the list.

Ardagh’s Spiritual Myth’s List

1. After a spiritual awakening, there is no more ego and personality traits disappear completely. What remains is just a homogenous oneness with everything.
2. Awake people are not identified with the personality and therefore have no interest in changing it.
3. Awake people have no sense of a separate doer. Therefore they do not initiate action, but sit quietly doing nothing and wait for things to happen by themselves.
4. People who are awake do not have feelings, particularly "negative" ones like anger, fear, jealousy or greed. Instead, they are always calm, in an unchanging state, feeling an unbroken oneness with everything.
5. You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.
6. Awakened people do not need anything from anyone. They do not have relationships, since they feel oneness with everything.
7. It does not matter what you say or do. Once you are enlightened, every action, even lying or manipulating is spontaneously for the good of all beings.
8. After an awakening there is only peace and harmony with everyone, with no need to do anything. Translucent relationships are always harmonious.
9. Sex is an event of the lower chakras. Awakened people have transcended sex. Sexual energy completely disappears with awakening.
10. Awake people automatically have open and flowing sex, without the need for any practice.
11. Having children is a distraction to spiritual life. Like Buddha, Jesus and all the great masters, you must choose between family life and spiritual freedom.
12. After an awakening, all the negative influences from your family will dissolve through divine grace. You will spontaneously know how to be a perfect partner.
13. Awakened people are naturally creative. Great art flows through them spontaneously, without any need for formal training or skills.
14. Spiritually awake people would have no need to paint, write poetry, or make music; those are all just activities of the restless mind.
15. After a spiritual awakening there is no need to learn anything; you already are everything.
16. Business and spirituality are two separate arenas of life; it’s inappropriate and embarrassing to mix the two.
17. After any kind of spiritual awakening, money will flow easily and effortlessly into your life, with little or no effort.
18. Money corrupts. Anyone with real spiritual integrity should not be concerned with money, success or the world.
19. Awakened people are always in perfect health; they never get sick.
20. Those awake to their real nature have spontaneous healing powers. Like Jesus, they can cause the sick to rise up and walk.
21. After an awakening, no-one needs psychotherapy; there is no ego and no personal life remaining.
22. Awakened people are beyond attachment to the body. They have no care if it lives or dies.
23. After a spiritual awakening, there is no more need for religion. All churches are just for sheep to blindly follow rules.
24. Only very few people in all history have ever known real spiritual experience. The rest of us must be content with a contact high.
25. There is a specific state, in the future, that you can aspire to, where evolution is complete. Then you will flatline and nothing will ever happen again. Till then, you know nothing.
26. Spiritual people are beyond the mundane activities of the world; they re just one with what is. Politics and activism are dirty and ignorant.
27. Everything is happening on its own. There is nothing you can do, and no doer anyway. Nostradamus said there would be a big war, followed by two thousand years of peace. The Mayans support this, and so did the tea leaves in ,my cup this morning. Involvement in the ways of the world is just interfering with the divine plan.
28. We are entering a golden age; all we have to do is to mediatate and to love each other and chant Om and the world’s problems will evaporate automatically.
29. Capitalists and big corporations are evil. We need an armed insurrection; we can overthrow the oppressors, and the enlightened ones will rule supreme. The worls can only be changed through militant political insurrection.

Liz

Reading the first couple chapters of the book was interesting for me.  I had a kind of "recognition" that used to be with me fairly regularly some years ago -- an awareness of the field of experience without being identified with an observer, and a feeling as if my body and thoughts had the same transparency -- and it came back to me while reading those chapters, not just as a memory but as a kind of "stirring" again.  That is not my usual experience these days, however, so it was interesting to have that reawakened (however faintly) just by reading a number of clear pointings.

I am enjoying the book overall, though some of it strikes me as a little idealistic and over-generalized.  I'll withhold these kinds of opinions for now, as I'm still in the first third of the book.

Kunsang, I'm curious what rubbed you the wrong way or let you down in the conference you attended.

Best wishes,

Balder

I am half way through "The Translucent Revolution" and I am finding it...boring.


The information is good, but basic. I don't claim to have mastered what it is saying , to be practicing all of it or to have "arrived" as a translucent. I feel I could better spend my time with something else, even though Ken Wilber did the forward. Does this "lifestyle" represent a new generation that has truely transcended the baby boomers? Its important that the Integral "movement" is being articulated in a way that anyone can grasp, and that's a good thing about this book.


I find it interesting that Ken Wilber did the forward, not Eckhart Tolle. This book has another first, a book where Ken Wilber's writing and quotes from Eckhart Tolle share the same binding under the same title. 

In the "Who's Who" section, the author mentions Eckhart Tolle and Andrew Cohen, but not Ken Wilber.

 Perhaps this is rather opaque of me, am I not being translucent enough? (I hate having high expectations, then not living up to standards. This is the new "in crowd? Be there or be square?)

Dan