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Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions
This is the definitive and complete book about a phenomenon which did not exist a hundred years ago, but is now growing rapidly and dramatically changing Western culture -- the rise of Western (mostly American) teachers, who fill the role of guru or master.
A few books have appeared on some narrow aspects of this astounding phenomenon; this is the first book to survey the entire field. Encyclopedic in its scope, The Book of Enlightened Masters includes biographical essays on 140 spiritual teachers, giving their life stories and an account of their teachings. Yet it is also a user-friendly introduction, with a survey of the teachers and their teachings, a historical narrative of how and when the movement developed, and an evaluation of the issues raised by it.
A century ago, there were no Western masters-no Westerners who were, for instance, Hindu swamis, Zen roshis, or Sufi sheikhs. Now there are many such teachers, with millions of followers. Starting from scratch, the West has produced its own spiritual teachers in traditions that until recently were utterly alien. And in the last quarter-century, a number of independent teachers have appeared, who belong to no single identifiable tradition.
The Western masters have not merely transplanted the Eastern spiritual traditions to the West, they have transformed these traditions by their distinctively Western innovative, entrepreneurial, and combining elements from previously unconnected Eastern traditions.
The new teachers are changing Western culture by making available a view of the human condition which is new in the West but very attractive to large and growing numbers of Westerners, an approach Dr. Rawlinson calls"spiritual psychology". Spiritual psychology holds that human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications, that consciousness can be changed by spiritual practice, and that there are enlightened masters who have done this and can teach others.
A few books have appeared on some narrow aspects of this astounding phenomenon; this is the first book to survey the entire field. Encyclopedic in its scope, The Book of Enlightened Masters includes biographical essays on 140 spiritual teachers, giving their life stories and an account of their teachings. Yet it is also a user-friendly introduction, with a survey of the teachers and their teachings, a historical narrative of how and when the movement developed, and an evaluation of the issues raised by it.
A century ago, there were no Western masters-no Westerners who were, for instance, Hindu swamis, Zen roshis, or Sufi sheikhs. Now there are many such teachers, with millions of followers. Starting from scratch, the West has produced its own spiritual teachers in traditions that until recently were utterly alien. And in the last quarter-century, a number of independent teachers have appeared, who belong to no single identifiable tradition.
The Western masters have not merely transplanted the Eastern spiritual traditions to the West, they have transformed these traditions by their distinctively Western innovative, entrepreneurial, and combining elements from previously unconnected Eastern traditions.
The new teachers are changing Western culture by making available a view of the human condition which is new in the West but very attractive to large and growing numbers of Westerners, an approach Dr. Rawlinson calls"spiritual psychology". Spiritual psychology holds that human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications, that consciousness can be changed by spiritual practice, and that there are enlightened masters who have done this and can teach others.
650 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 13, 2023
This book tracks down about every Guru in the West and their associations and how to get a hold of them if they’re still around.
There are moments on earth when Esoteric School manifests among groups (the Inklings next door to Ouspensky’s school all coming from Yeats and Blavatsky crowds around Kensington) for a flash somewhere on the planet in time then fades away: The Merry Pranksters, Gould, Essalen in this case here (yeah, infiltrated now such groups in the far west with gov co-op’s we know now and those who corrupted the A team’s punch quickly but there was the real deal then too). This shows that. Chemistry then was just an ad minister to all that shining white light, so to speak - never the key component.
But see, before Lennon brought Hinduism to the West teaching fellow musicians TM of ascended masters (see Al Jardine’s latest admission) and then the world…Leary was coming to the Beatles and many before Leary coming to him from groups Gurdjieff planted causing a psychic explosion in the west (Lord Sinclair Pentland’s friendship with Casteneda and C. with Morrison) stuff as deep for a moment as the first disciples of Christ. But this stuff gets lost like quicksilver flowing through a miners hands unsure at night. “There is an equal and opposite force on this earth dismantling in mimic the original force” blah blah…anyways,
here’s a quote from this book: “geezer, which more exactly means ‘a difficult old man,’ is a corruption of guiser, an archaic word for ‘actor’ - that is, someone who disguises himself.” [p. 287...and we know there are two meanings to “Actor” too]
For some reason as you get closer to the “truth” of things...more gets zany surrounding it as well. Truth feels inside a thicket of tall rows then lost in an esoteric jungle.
You have to split hairs to find the thread and this book does a great job of it. It snapshots a 1. different true movement going on sideways to all 2. power play and all kinds of: 3. imaginative fluff that formed out immediately around both (confusing all three).
It gives you all three but let’s you pick what is what. It is that, and shows you how all three work, not just one in this authors perspective.
This new movement he shows going on though...reverberating back from the West having come from an East now largely unknown - and forgotten (because the East is becoming too Westernized in a McDonald’s happy land way) - I’m sure did have all kinds of crack pot gurus that sunk people down into their crevasses. He doesn’t skip over that. It is a precarious experiment and many go soured.
But you feel this in this work too: it is a larger swing to things beyond our stale, hangman age right now - as this author shows in a “not-just -hee-hee” scholastic or over-exuberant, self deluded, zany “frozen-chosen-apologist-for-it” way.
He’s pretty unbiased and sharp (right down the middle of being neither of these).
That, I feel, is the main point one feels. It is a rip-tide movement he points at beneath the surface of all the recent cresting shenanigans going on politically.
And hopefully it and not the little waves at this time will just simply rise its own rogue wave up and completely obfuscate all previous tally whacking upon our present sweet little “ocean of “truths” surface. [doubtful we get the New Age out of the shallow Zanies and into some deep waters beyond the political poles of mere low magnetism.]
Our generations attempt at spirituality - even if rising underneath indomitably slowly a bit at a time - is still so small and will pass like the others, it was too slow and now has gone wrong, but here is a closer picture of it for the moment it was, and all the actors, guisers, closer to the root hard drive (before it goes to the cpu of the next thing). May a different sort of Easternism - that equally arose in the west authentically for a moment - keep rising and prevail over the earth by time of our distant future, bless these for trying.
This book shows all that and it is easy to read between the spread out lines of it and see.
There are moments on earth when Esoteric School manifests among groups (the Inklings next door to Ouspensky’s school all coming from Yeats and Blavatsky crowds around Kensington) for a flash somewhere on the planet in time then fades away: The Merry Pranksters, Gould, Essalen in this case here (yeah, infiltrated now such groups in the far west with gov co-op’s we know now and those who corrupted the A team’s punch quickly but there was the real deal then too). This shows that. Chemistry then was just an ad minister to all that shining white light, so to speak - never the key component.
But see, before Lennon brought Hinduism to the West teaching fellow musicians TM of ascended masters (see Al Jardine’s latest admission) and then the world…Leary was coming to the Beatles and many before Leary coming to him from groups Gurdjieff planted causing a psychic explosion in the west (Lord Sinclair Pentland’s friendship with Casteneda and C. with Morrison) stuff as deep for a moment as the first disciples of Christ. But this stuff gets lost like quicksilver flowing through a miners hands unsure at night. “There is an equal and opposite force on this earth dismantling in mimic the original force” blah blah…anyways,
here’s a quote from this book: “geezer, which more exactly means ‘a difficult old man,’ is a corruption of guiser, an archaic word for ‘actor’ - that is, someone who disguises himself.” [p. 287...and we know there are two meanings to “Actor” too]
For some reason as you get closer to the “truth” of things...more gets zany surrounding it as well. Truth feels inside a thicket of tall rows then lost in an esoteric jungle.
You have to split hairs to find the thread and this book does a great job of it. It snapshots a 1. different true movement going on sideways to all 2. power play and all kinds of: 3. imaginative fluff that formed out immediately around both (confusing all three).
It gives you all three but let’s you pick what is what. It is that, and shows you how all three work, not just one in this authors perspective.
This new movement he shows going on though...reverberating back from the West having come from an East now largely unknown - and forgotten (because the East is becoming too Westernized in a McDonald’s happy land way) - I’m sure did have all kinds of crack pot gurus that sunk people down into their crevasses. He doesn’t skip over that. It is a precarious experiment and many go soured.
But you feel this in this work too: it is a larger swing to things beyond our stale, hangman age right now - as this author shows in a “not-just -hee-hee” scholastic or over-exuberant, self deluded, zany “frozen-chosen-apologist-for-it” way.
He’s pretty unbiased and sharp (right down the middle of being neither of these).
That, I feel, is the main point one feels. It is a rip-tide movement he points at beneath the surface of all the recent cresting shenanigans going on politically.
And hopefully it and not the little waves at this time will just simply rise its own rogue wave up and completely obfuscate all previous tally whacking upon our present sweet little “ocean of “truths” surface. [doubtful we get the New Age out of the shallow Zanies and into some deep waters beyond the political poles of mere low magnetism.]
Our generations attempt at spirituality - even if rising underneath indomitably slowly a bit at a time - is still so small and will pass like the others, it was too slow and now has gone wrong, but here is a closer picture of it for the moment it was, and all the actors, guisers, closer to the root hard drive (before it goes to the cpu of the next thing). May a different sort of Easternism - that equally arose in the west authentically for a moment - keep rising and prevail over the earth by time of our distant future, bless these for trying.
This book shows all that and it is easy to read between the spread out lines of it and see.
December 8, 2011
This 650 page book takes a scholarly approach to profiling the Eastern and Western teachers and gurus who brought Eastern thought (Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and New Age thought) to the West. It includes in-depth profiles of individuals including the books and people that influenced them and who they studied under. It describes the differences between the different branches and traditions of each Eastern religion, includes charts outlining the lineages, features a model of experiential comparative religion and highlights the different elements of spiritual psychology. According to the book, four principles of this Eastern thought are changing the way the West views the human condition:
1. Human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications
2. Consciousness can be transformed by spiritual practices
3. There are gurus/masters/teachers who have done this, and
4. They can help others to do the same by some form of transmission
The book profiles more than 175 individuals, including Ananda Maitreya, Cohen, Gurdjieff, Kamala, Krishnamurti, Kriyananda/Walters, Meher Baba, Prophet, Ramana Maharshi, Ram Das, Watts and Yogananda. This is a fascinating reference work, especially for people who have been influenced by these individuals.
1. Human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications
2. Consciousness can be transformed by spiritual practices
3. There are gurus/masters/teachers who have done this, and
4. They can help others to do the same by some form of transmission
The book profiles more than 175 individuals, including Ananda Maitreya, Cohen, Gurdjieff, Kamala, Krishnamurti, Kriyananda/Walters, Meher Baba, Prophet, Ramana Maharshi, Ram Das, Watts and Yogananda. This is a fascinating reference work, especially for people who have been influenced by these individuals.
December 23, 2022
Western Charlatans in Eastern Traditions
I'm surprised how much I enjoy this book, much more so than I expected. It's not perfect or complete but it is educational and entertaining. My main disappointment is that it is now over 20 years old and so not up to date. I also think the title "Enlightened Masters" must be a tongue in cheek comment by the author since his droll sense of humor does shine through in many entries. A more accurate title would have been 'Western Charlatans in Eastern Traditions', although Rawlinson is probably quite right in his assessment that many of these masters (and their followers) considered themselves "enlightened".
It's a vast topic to be sure, and so easy to omit some obviously relevant gurus (such as Jerry Garcia and Daevid Allen!), and as other's have complained, there is an obvious disparity here between the serious (think very serious vipassana) and the silly (think Lobsang Rampa and Da Free John), but having them all together makes perfect sense (as it's all part of a continuum). I'm sure there was a need to limit the size, but it's a shame there are some major omissions - such a CG Jung, RA Wilson, and Henry Corbin, and the more recent teachers Peter Brown, James Low, Ken McLeod, Keith Dowman and Tsultrim Allione.
To clarify, when I say this is a book chronicling charlatans this isn’t to say it is a book of fakes, although there are surely some included, but that playing these roles to transmit esoteric teachings/wisdom/experience is the Nature of the Universe (for us all). Some of these teachers are obviously playing a serious or silly role while others are truly sublime – or rather are teachers that reveal and embody the actual; a spontaneous union of the serious, the silly and the sublime in some complex and perfect mix. Perhaps the best, most powerful example of this found in these pages is that of Gurdjieff;
“This is a teaching on a very large scale – the scale of objective consciousness. It has little place for the individual in the restricted, sentimental sense that that term is used in our modern, rationalistic society: the importance of my ideas or feelings. These are habitual and mechanical, and therefore more or less worthless. Rather, one has a certain obligation to a higher reality. And the higher reality – the intelligent universe – has an obligation to us: to wake us up by whatever means it can. And one of these ways is by means of a teacher.
“We see, then, that we can only understand what a teacher is doing if we take into account both sides of Gurdjieff’s teaching: the psychological and the cosmological. And this affects our assessment of Gurdjieff himself. From the psychological side, he was clearly someone who saw it as his duty to wake people up – something he could do because he could act freely, independently of external influences. This was often not very pleasant for them. But by the same token, he subjected himself to conditions that would keep him on his toes. From the cosmological side he had a certain task to perform, whether he like it or not, and whether it was successful or not.” (p. 290)
Overall, a fun and sometimes fascination collection of characters are described here. I just wish it could be updated, and issued with a similarly revealing compendium and comparison of the original (source) teachers of the East. 4+ stars.
I'm surprised how much I enjoy this book, much more so than I expected. It's not perfect or complete but it is educational and entertaining. My main disappointment is that it is now over 20 years old and so not up to date. I also think the title "Enlightened Masters" must be a tongue in cheek comment by the author since his droll sense of humor does shine through in many entries. A more accurate title would have been 'Western Charlatans in Eastern Traditions', although Rawlinson is probably quite right in his assessment that many of these masters (and their followers) considered themselves "enlightened".
It's a vast topic to be sure, and so easy to omit some obviously relevant gurus (such as Jerry Garcia and Daevid Allen!), and as other's have complained, there is an obvious disparity here between the serious (think very serious vipassana) and the silly (think Lobsang Rampa and Da Free John), but having them all together makes perfect sense (as it's all part of a continuum). I'm sure there was a need to limit the size, but it's a shame there are some major omissions - such a CG Jung, RA Wilson, and Henry Corbin, and the more recent teachers Peter Brown, James Low, Ken McLeod, Keith Dowman and Tsultrim Allione.
To clarify, when I say this is a book chronicling charlatans this isn’t to say it is a book of fakes, although there are surely some included, but that playing these roles to transmit esoteric teachings/wisdom/experience is the Nature of the Universe (for us all). Some of these teachers are obviously playing a serious or silly role while others are truly sublime – or rather are teachers that reveal and embody the actual; a spontaneous union of the serious, the silly and the sublime in some complex and perfect mix. Perhaps the best, most powerful example of this found in these pages is that of Gurdjieff;
“This is a teaching on a very large scale – the scale of objective consciousness. It has little place for the individual in the restricted, sentimental sense that that term is used in our modern, rationalistic society: the importance of my ideas or feelings. These are habitual and mechanical, and therefore more or less worthless. Rather, one has a certain obligation to a higher reality. And the higher reality – the intelligent universe – has an obligation to us: to wake us up by whatever means it can. And one of these ways is by means of a teacher.
“We see, then, that we can only understand what a teacher is doing if we take into account both sides of Gurdjieff’s teaching: the psychological and the cosmological. And this affects our assessment of Gurdjieff himself. From the psychological side, he was clearly someone who saw it as his duty to wake people up – something he could do because he could act freely, independently of external influences. This was often not very pleasant for them. But by the same token, he subjected himself to conditions that would keep him on his toes. From the cosmological side he had a certain task to perform, whether he like it or not, and whether it was successful or not.” (p. 290)
Overall, a fun and sometimes fascination collection of characters are described here. I just wish it could be updated, and issued with a similarly revealing compendium and comparison of the original (source) teachers of the East. 4+ stars.
July 14, 2007
This really is a fun book. Really!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews