When we think of creating new rites of passage, we must remember that we are in the midst of the greatest rite of passage of all time, and we are in urgent danger of failing to pass. Failure will mean the end of life, as we know it, on Planet Earth. Of course, so will success.

We cannot design rites that will help us through this ultimate level of passage, unless we ourselves have gone through the passage. But in this Mother of all rites of passage we are all on our own. No guides to the next level exist. The established religions have lost their authority and power. New religious movements may help a few people, but usually they are based on far too limited a vision of the Real, and easily become corrupted into egoic power trips.

The lack of authentic and relevant rites of passage is an essential component of the rite of passage in which we are now struggling. We must begin our effort to understand our situation by recognizing that the world is a school for souls, and the current world scenario is the final exam for us at our present level of consciousness development. The exam itself is meant to raise our consciousness to the next level.

We are now in the perilous passage between one Kalpa and another, the end of one planetary cycle of time (Plato called it the Great Year) and the beginning of the next. It is the moment in which humans must pass from ego-consciousness to an infinitely higher level and kind of consciousness that is so new it has no name. In earlier times, we could have called it God-consciousness in some cultures, or Buddha-consciousness or Emptiness or the Tao, for example, in others. But because of our current splintered and multi-religious social context, no single term resonates with accurate meaning for everyone, and those old terms carry too much obsolete baggage, and not enough reference to the interdimensional quantum world in which we now know we dwell. Perhaps the most common denominator for what we must attain would be Liberated Consciousness.

When it is said that the world itself is a school, that means, as with any education process, we are constantly facing tests, which are minor or major rites of passage, in every pedagogical encounter. In this macromulticosmic school, we can recognize seven different types of rites of passage. Let us briefly look at each of these.

The types of rites are the following: social, karmic, inherent, intersubjective, shamanic-yogic, cosmic, and trans-cosmic.

It is only at the social level that we entertain the illusion that we can design rites of passage for others. In traditional tribal societies, there were rites for puberty, as well as other important life passages. And though we have lost such communal coherence, we still have many secular forms of such rites today. In fact, many types of recreational activity are felt to be rites of passage. Most Hollywood films, for example, are designed as vicarious rites of passage. People who want their own physical version of an ordeal can take ropes courses, or bungee jump or parachute out of airplanes; some join fight clubs, or do many other dangerous things to enact a socially acceptable yet private rite of passage. Even going on a date can be a dangerous rite of passage these days.  

Some traditional rites of passage have become obsolete. The bar mitzvah rite obviously no longer brings a boy into manhood. Neither does the quincena, the celebration of the fifteenth birthday, popular in Hispanic cultures. Joining the army is a very serious rite of passage. But its intention is only to take one from childhood to manhood, not beyond. And the version of manhood one learns in an army is utterly counterproductive to the attainment of higher consciousness.

Moreover, since gays, as well as women, are now allowed to serve openly in the military in many countries, the army’s own traditional concept of manhood has been blurred. Its macho definition of manhood is not-gay and not-feminine. So an army that regularizes those two forms of otherness creates anxiety in those who feel lacking in their manhood. It is not that women or gays should not be allowed to serve in armies (and yes, of course, in a healthy world, there would not be armies of any kind). But we must recognize that since we have deregulated our notions of manhood and womanhood in the West (which is one of the issues that anger many traditional non-Western cultures), our military rites of passage no longer function as they were originally designed. This creates yet more frustration and tension that threaten the functioning of those institutions.

Those who seek rites that are more relevant to the need for opening consciousness to a new and deeper level will choose different sorts of adventures, including such major mind-altering events as taking ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle; or going on a long fasting and meditation retreat; or one can choose to walk out alone into unknown desolate territory, pursuing a vision quest in the desert. All these classical and modern variants of the social rite of passage may be effective in their aim. But generally they stop short of bringing about the radical shift to a new octave of consciousness that the world process is now demanding of us all.

The second type of rite of passage is karmic. This type is unique to each of us, and by definition beyond our control. An event such as an auto accident or an illness can be a transformative event. Many people are undergoing non-ordinary karmic events such as out-of-body and aborted-death experiences that result in quantum shifts in consciousness. Alien abduction events are also in this category.

The third type of rite of passage is inherent. These are the seven great rites of passage that are essential to the nature of being human. Though inherent, our societies today are destroying the power of these rites of passage through the corruption of the integrity of both natural and spiritual conditions:

1.    Birth—the first great challenge. The pre-born being must struggle alone through the birth canal and out into the world. Unfortunately, many women are taking that rite of passage away from the child by opting for medically unnecessary caesarian delivery.
2.    School—the challenge of socialization. Nowadays, this happens too soon (by putting the child in daycare) because the parents have to work. And worse, the school systems today do not generally provide for the kind of character development that forms healthy ego empowerment, and that encourages the ideal of development of consciousness beyond the ego.
3.    Puberty—the sexuation challenge. Because our society today is itself confused about appropriate sexual norms, gender identity, and the role of sex in spiritual development, people enter biological adulthood without resolving their confusions about sex.
4.    Adult identity crisis—the challenge of choosing a life path. The current social system co-opts people into choosing a path without heart, simply in order to avoid unemployment. As the global financial crisis reaches its abyssal endpoint, resulting in social collapse, ordinary life will become impossible. Those who are still deciding whether to go to university or have children should be aware that normal life patterns will soon end and emergency conditions will ensue. We should respond prior to the cataclysm, not afterward.
5.    Mid-life transformation crisis—the challenge of shifting from the horizontal dharma of worldly success to the vertical dharma of attaining transcendent illumination and liberation. Our current society does not recognize the soul’s yearning for ecstatic union with the Supreme Being, and fails to support this passage.
6.    The Spiritual Summit—the challenge of dissolving ego. To achieve fulfillment of the vertical dharma, we need to create more spiritual communities, ashrams, refuges and retreat centers where people can come to complete their metamorphosis. We need to train more spiritual guides. Psychotherapy and conventional religion have failed to meet this need. Our culture has systematically destroyed its monasteries and spiritual communities, and replaced them with casinos, theme parks, and other tourist traps.
7.    The Journey Beyond—the challenge of facing death. Traditional cultures offered training and guidance for the journey beyond mortal life. Texts such as the Book of the Dead (both the Egyptian and Tibetan versions) and other mystical literature offered maps and mantras for approaching the Great Light. Today, such guidance and blessing is ridiculed and eliminated from most hospitals and homes for the elderly. We die without benefit of spiritual assistance.

The next type of rite of passage is in the realm of intersubjectivity. These are passages to ever-deeper levels of psycho-spiritual intimacy. Our culture has snuffed out much of the desire for such deepening through valorizing only physical intimacy. The growth of friendships has also been stunted.  Many people no longer read serious literature, in which intersubjective relationships are explored and psychological maturity is modeled. Instead, young people are seduced into spending their time on superficial social networking sites like facebook, not to mention the pornographic sites that so damage the development of the capacity for healthy intimacy in sexual relationships.

The deepest relationships offered by this culture occur in the offices of psychoanalysts. But these relationships are only open to the few who can afford them, and are still stigmatized as something only intended for those who are psychologically disturbed. Nor are psychoanalysts trained to accompany you beyond the limits of a healthy ego. Spiritual guides who can offer deeper levels of recognition and dialogue are few and far between. Most of the religious traditions do not train their priests, rabbis, roshis, mullahs, or swamis to engage in profound healing dialogue. There is such a hunger for spiritual recognition that people will stand in long lines to get a hug from a guru like Ammachi, or a smile from the Dalai Lama. But such moments will not substitute for having someone with profound wisdom, compassion, and interpersonal skill willing to listen deeply to you while you struggle to sort out and express the inchoate feelings in your heart. Having an ongoing relationship of that kind will produce many moments of exquisite self-discovery, a perpetual rite of passage that can accelerate spiritual development more than any other means.

The next type of rite of passage is the shamanic-yogic type. This is an advanced and optional type of passage, one that leads not only to higher consciousness, but also to the gaining of skills to guide others to such attainments. The shamanic-yogic path generally involves passing through a number of levels, beginning with initiation, and proceeding through discipleship, which usually involves taking vows of austerity, simplicity, integrity, and purity of life. The next level of passage would be the attainment of samadhi, or kensho, or some other equivalent of a moment of grace, shaktipat, or divine illumination. This is usually followed by admission into a higher level of vows, religious status, and training as a guide, as well as the opportunity to do more profound spiritual research into the most esoteric attainments hinted at as being possible on the path. There is usually another rite of passage to the highest level of renunciation, or sannyas, and the conferring of recognition as a full teacher. Of course, the real inner passage is into liberation from the ego, called jivan mukti by yogis.

The next type of passage, the cosmic rite, occurs only at certain cusps in planetary development, such as the end of a Kalpa, which is happening now. This involves preparing our species for initiation into the greater cosmic community. For this reason, many extraterrestrial species are visiting this planet. Some are here to assist in our evolution to the next level of interplanetary citizenship. Others have come to usurp this planetary real estate for their own purposes, and we will have to prove ourselves worthy to defend our cosmic right to stewardship of the affairs of Gaia. In the course of this passage, we must let go of our identification with a single species and recognize our unity with all forms of consciousness in the cosmos. We will also have to break through the veil of material illusion into quantum consciousness.

There is a movement of transhumanists, led by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, that maintains we are evolving through technology toward the ability to download consciousness into robotic forms and other artifacts of artificial intelligence, both cyberspace virtual realities and material cyborg extensions of our egoic personalities. But it is far more likely that we will develop psycho-technologies that make both personality and external technology itself obsolete, as we learn to swarm into shape-shifting superorganisms and convert zero point energies into living light forms that can be manifested at any point in the cosmos.

Finally, we are in the midst of a yet higher type of passage: the ultimate trans-cosmic rite of passage. The portals are opening to interdimensional realities, to elementals and other subtle entities, to parallel universes, to celestial realms of immortal beings, and ultimately to Anuttara, the unsurpassable Godhead, the Absolute.

All these types and levels of rites of passage are all occurring simultaneously, because we are also undergoing the most extraordinary rite of passage of all, through the veil of time into the timeless, the eternal Now. This passage appears phenomenally as a vortex in which time is accelerating to a climactic singularity, the ineluctable destination that Terence McKenna called the Transcendental Object at the End of Time. But of course It is both Object and ultimate Subject, and yet also neither. No words, no paradigms, no parameters can describe the endpoint of this transfinite trip we are on, the most astonishing rite of passage ever designed. The advice of the Buddha still stands: Let go of all attachments, surrender to the flow and to the mercy of the Absolute, and enjoy the glory of this ecstatic ride into the Heart of the Great Mystery!

Namaste,
Shunyamurti