Mariana Caplan

I can’t remember if someone posted this article on Facebook, or if I just came across it through one of many avenues where I find interesting, and sometimes not-so-interesting, articles. But this particular one, 10 Spiritually Transmitted Diseases, caught my eye, and fancy, immediately. After reading, and agreeing with such notions as “faux spirituality” and “the chosen-people complex”, I looked more closely at the picture of the author.

“Hmm, must of read one of her books in school,” I thought, both the name and the photo familiar. I clicked on the author bio page and read that Mariana Caplan lived in the Bay Area, Marin in fact, which is the last place I had settled before leaving California. Finally, it hit me – I had met her one day at a funky bookstore in downtown Fairfax through a mutual friend. I had also taken yoga classes with her.

And I had known that she wrote the play, “Zen Boyfriends”, which had swept at least the Bay Area’s new age contingent into a frenzy the year before. But I had no idea she was the author of so many spiritual books, including Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, Halfway Up the Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment, and Do You Need a Guru?: Understanding the Student–Teacher Relationship in an Era of False Prophets.Holy crap, I’d been rubbing headstands with a serious spiritual author.

I contacted Mariana because I had more questions for her after reading the piece. She kindly agreed to a phone chat, so we weaved our way through the sounds of my overheating computer and a couple of hangups on Skype to talk about her take on spiritual bypassing.

The Interview

I asked her about her website, “Real Spirituality”, which I think is a good indicator of what she believes and teaches. A few of the categorizations she defines include “Fast-Food Spirituality”, Mass Production of Spiritual Teachers, and Spiritual Pride.

I wanted to know, did she think we’ve taken spirituality and commodified it just like we do everything else? Here’s what she had to say:

“For Halfway Up the Mountain, I went around the world to interview the teachers who were most respected on the subject of premature claims to enlightenment. I was talking to Joan Halifax, who teaches Zen to guys on death row, and she said, ‘To me, when people act more enlightened than they are it’s kinda like when you’re a little girl and you went in your mom’s closet and played dress-up. I think it’s kind of cute.’”

There is a process of maturation on the path. Yoga is a prime example – you don’t have to look very hard to see commodification. At the same time, Rumi has a quote about ‘fools gold exists because there’s real gold’, and a lot of people will go after the fool’s gold and less people are going to go for the real gold. Because the real gold requires mining, and you’ll get dirty, and you’ll go to uncomfortable places, and you work tirelessly, often for no response and no payoff.

Spirituality is massively commodified, but the same time, the deeper spirituality is there for the taking. In Eyes Wide Open, I talk about the practice being cultivating discernment. It’s not just something you can just go to a weekend class and learn – discernment requires study of path and traditions, and the pitfalls; it requires experience, making a lot of mistakes; it requires wanting truth more than we want spirituality to make us feel comfortable or feel better. On the path, self-honesty is cultivated.”

So I wondered, how do we go about not falling into the ego traps inevitably involved with deepening our spiritual practice?

“Patanjali, who is the person Yoga Sutras are credited to, says that ‘discernment is the crown jewel of the spiritual path. The individual who possesses discernment has the power to pierce through falsity at every level of experience.’ People who are on the path, who are sincere and committed, will move forward, and time and maturation will happen. When the path opens up is that it’s not what we imagined it would be or hoped it would be, but it’s real. It’s truthful, it’s life.”

Caplan talks about Group Mind as a spiritual affliction that I relate in some ways to being human. It definitely goes beyond spirituality to just about every facet of life. It struck me as something that is some ways, is inherent within us – our wish to belong, somehow, within our culture and society, even if this is on the fringe.

So how in the world do we “delve” deep into a particular spiritual practice and still remain at least in some form or fashion, individuals?

Photo: rajkumar1220

“I know a lot about this because lived on an ashram for many years, which was beautiful and wonderful, and healthy in the spectrum of things. At the same time, it is such a pervasive tendency. I interviewed a man who was a lineage holder for a teacher in France, who was mature and highly independent. But after 10 years of studying with his teacher, he noticed he would put his right hand in his back right pocket with his thumb out in the exact way his teacher would. He was very independent from his teacher, and still this happened.

When I was young, traveling with my teacher in early years, we would visit with all of these different spiritual groups and I’d notice they all dress like their teacher. Same haircut, Same energy. Finally, it dawned on me and I looked at my teacher and said, ‘is that how we are too?’ And he nodded, yep.

We have to be intentional about our spiritual choices. I write a lot about psychology in my books, since people don’t get stuck because of meditation or because of dharma. You stay with those things and they will progress. They are clean and uncomplicated. Where people get stuck and where all the scandals and downfalls and spiritual materialism happens on the level of psychology, particularly for westerns.

It’s a fatal mistake to leave out psychological work even though from the non-dual spiritual perspective you’ll get every good argument of why that should be done.

Looking at the family or origin is also important. I appeared independent minded at the ashram because when I was growing up, I was the rebel in the family. So I was challenging at the ashram, but not because I was so enlightened and independent. It was because this was my family role.”

Her thoughts led me to ask: should people do therapy before going down spiritual path?

“My understanding at this point is that there really is as many paths as there are people, so we really can’t say. Sometimes you stumble into the teacher and you get introduced into spiritual worlds that you need to go with, and then you get the rug pulled out from under you in relationship or once you have a child. Some people will do the psychological work for years and then step into the spiritual realm.

In a perfect world, everyone would read some foundational books at the beginning of the spiritual path, like Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala Library). We all need some instruction, not just “follow this shaman.” Instruction on how to walk the path diligently is necessary.

Hopefully, we become softer and wiser and more integrated and useful to other people as we stumble along the path.

I recently spoke with Jai Uttal, who had visited India with his family, and he commented that the people in this Indian ashram they went to were practicing not for themselves, but for others. He saw how much we in the West practice for our own deeper happiness and awareness, but still for ourselves, and the distinction between practicing for the self and practicing for others and life and service.”

Finally, I asked her to tell me more about the play, Zen Boyfriends, which I had unfortunately had to miss, but heard rave reviews about. The play is about what the title makes it out to be – a plethora of spiritually-minded men of different varietals. I wondered what she got out of the process of writing about those relationships, and was there any conclusion that she came to about things like warning signs, when to jump ship, and how much the experiences taught her about herself?

Photo: austinevan

“Zen boyfriends originally came from Tricycle magazine about 10 years before. It was one of those pieces that just didn’t want to die. A couple of years ago, a music teacher in Oregon contacted me and asked if he could convert it to a musical, and I said yes.

The theme of the work is spiritual bypassing – the use of spiritual paths, practices and teachings in order to get around psychological issues, self-esteem; a shaky sense of self. It’s an important spiritual principle, but was made into comedy. After I saw the play in Oregon, I asked if we could produce it in the Bay. Of course, I changed it up and added a few more characters from over the years.

The reception was absolutely beautiful. We sold-out every show, and we saw that it struck a cord. So many people knew what I was talking about. Of course, it was a parody – it was exaggerated. I combined different men I dated and had known into these over-the-top characters – polyamorous yoga teacher; rigid Zen practitioner who maintained silence at breakfast and couldn’t even say good morning to his girlfriend because it would screw up the delta waves activated during sleep. Shaman animal rights guy who was up on the top of his van, chanting the names of endangered species on the highway where no one could hear him. The humor was disarming. And on a practical level, it lets us laugh at ourselves.

I tried to be done with spiritual men. I asked myself the questions, thought ‘maybe i shouldn’t be with a spiritual guy because it’ll be less complicated’. But then not I wasn’t satisfied and went back to another spiritual guy.

I laughed every time we rehearsed. There’s something to be said about befriending your suffering.

For more information on Mariana, check out her website.

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