The Translucent Revolution
How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World
By Arjuna Ardagh
There is a growing phenomenon happening throughout the world, a gentle but profound revolution in human consciousness. It is something that has been experienced directly by millions of everyday people from all walks of life and the numbers continue to multiply exponentially. The breakthroughs they have experienced are startlingly similar and are marked by a new sense of well-being, increased joy in life, diminished fear, and a natural impulse to serve and contribute to the world in a real way.
For more than a decade, author Arjuna Ardagh has studied this worldwide advance in human consciousness marked by what he calls “translucents”—individuals who have undergone a spiritual awakening deeply enough that it has permanently transformed their relationship to themselves and to reality while allowing them to remain involved in ordinary life. According to conservative estimates, millions have shifted in this way, and while the breakthrough moments themselves don’t guarantee sustained transformation, their increased frequency is remarkable.
The Translucent Revolution draws on the author’s dialogues with thousands of writers, teachers, and workshop participants around the world who have been touched by a radical awakening, and whose lives emanate translucence. Ardagh blends observation, anecdote, and research, including commentaries from leading pioneers in the field of human consciousness like Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Byron Katie, and Jean Houston, to offer simple, concrete strategies for cultivating a translucent way of life. The Translucent Revolution offers a blueprint for positive change and an optimistic perspective on these uncertain times, as the following excerpts illustrate.
• • • • •
Robert had it all: the beach house in Malibu, the latest SUV, designer clothes, the right connections. He also had a small drinking problem, and a few personal difficulties to resolve at home. He had made his money in California real estate, and when the market crashed in the late eighties, so did Robert. He went from a net worth of millions to bankruptcy. He lost the house, many of his friends, and his confidence. By 1992 he was thinking about killing himself.
Late one evening, he was out taking a walk. He stopped and stood motionless, his mood blacker than the night. He had a thought, a simple thought. “I am finished,” his mind announced.
He still has trouble explaining what happened next.
“I was overcome by a sense of relief,” he reports. “A sudden feeling of inexpressible freedom. I even began to laugh out loud. My body was filled with happiness, as if I was suddenly getting a joke I’d been missing. For the first time I was feeling really good for no reason at all. I was totally here, in this moment. I could feel the trees around me, and hear the sounds without having to listen to thoughts telling me things needed to be different in some way. Everything was being experienced, but the “me” was gone.
He went home and made love with his wife for the first time in seven months.
Later, Robert described his experience to a friend, a student of Eastern philosophies and meditation practices. Robert’s epiphany, it seemed, had an obscure eastern name. But his friend warned him it would pass, that he had tasted a fleeting glimpse of a state only great yogis could attain.
“It didn’t pass, though,” Robert says today. “I still have ups and downs, of course. Things still come up with my wife. My back still aches when it rains. But this mysterious sense of well-being I found that night, this feeling of lightness for no reason, has stayed with me for more than ten years. I couldn’t get rid of it if I tried. In fact, it only seems to grow deeper and deeper. It is not happening to me, it is who I am.”
A similar thing happened to Mary, while she was working the early shift at a vegetable-canning factory. Stephan was driving on the freeway, while Jacquelyn’s awakening came in a hospital, after she gave birth to her third child. Michael went through a similar shift serving an eighty-seven-month prison sentence in a cell with thirty-two other inmates, and Douglas was hiking in the Himalayas. Some have come to this awakening through contact with a teacher, some from entering the depths of despair and coming out the other side. Some have woken up after years of meditation. For others this awakening has come out of the blue, for no apparent reason at all.
Steve started to practice Zen meditation when he was nineteen. He loved to sit in silence. Although he had many big openings, brief tastes of silence, a voice would always say, “This isn’t it, keep going.” One night, getting ready for bed, he said to himself, “I’m ready.” He was newly married, very happy in every area of his life. He didn’t even know what it meant, just, “I’m ready.” He went to sleep.
“I woke up in the morning and sat to meditate. I heard the sound of a bird outside. The question spontaneously arose, ‘Who hears that sound?’ It wasn’t a question of my mind. It was as if something questioned itself. I’d never heard such a question. It just spoke itself. ‘Who hears that sound?’”
As soon as the question spoke itself, everything turned upside down and inside out. I was the bird, I was the hearing, and I was the sound. I was all just one thing. All of a sudden there was no more reason to sit, of course. I hopped up. ‘I wonder if I am also the stove?’ I asked myself. So I walked out into the living room and I looked at the stove. ‘I’ll be damned, I’m the stove, too!’ I realized. And so it went. Like a child, very innocent. I didn’t feel ‘Wow I’ve arrived, I’ve got it, I’m enlightened.’ None of that was in my mind. It was just the recognition.
“I opened the bedroom door. Annie was sleeping. And it was the same. ‘There I am, I am sleeping.’ And then there was the experience of love. I am that, too. I am that love. It was just a childlike investigation of ‘I am everything,’ but in a very innocent way. In no way spiritual, and in no way holy. In no way hierarchical, just very, very humbling.
“About a half an hour later, there was a further waking up, even out of that oneness. There was an awareness of … who knows what? There is something, or nothing, that exists when even an experience of oneness disappeared. Something that remains ever awake.”
Over the last twelve years, I have spoken to thousands of people who have had similar moments of a shift of consciousness. These moments have changed who they know themselves to be and the nature of the world around them. While some are notable teachers and writers, the majority are ordinary people leading everyday lives. These breakthrough moments may or may not lead to a sustained transformation, but their increased frequency is remarkable.
We will call such a shift in awareness a “radical awakening.” It is the moment when you taste reality outside the limiting confines of the mind, when you know yourself to be limitless, much bigger than, yet containing the body, beyond birth and death, eternally free. Despite the activity of thought and feeling, you know yourself to be the silence experiencing that movement. It is the moment when you can intuit the real potential of life, free from the incessant mental machinery of complaint and ambition. A radical awakening often releases a tidal wave of creativity and generosity of spirit, a natural impulse to serve and contribute. In these moments, we know that love is who we are, not something we sometimes feel.
Such an acute glimpse of freedom from the mind is a huge moment. We realize that almost all our suffering is caused by our addiction to untested beliefs. We can, at least temporarily, let go of our preoccupation with fear and desire and have direct contact with what is real, what is present. A radical awakening rips the veil of our preoccupation with a personal life, often so much that we acquire ongoing access to reality as peaceful and infinite, even in the midst of external noise.
Stephan was driving on the freeway when the veil lifted: “Suddenly everything shifted. I was this vast expanse of space, ‘Stephan’ was in this space; infinitely expanded. Energy was rushing through the body. I had never had powerful energy experiences before. It was a feeling of tremendous empowerment. Everything since then has been contained in that awakening. That initial moment was like a seed. Everything else has grown from that. In the last twelve years it has been like I’ve been catching up to that awakening and fully experiencing it. There is just this present moment with nobody here. Now it is no longer an experience; it just is, ordinary.”
Webster’s
dictionary defines translucent as “letting light pass through, but
not transparent.” A transparent object, like a clean sheet of glass,
is almost invisible. You see everything through a transparent object as
if it were not there at all. An opaque object, on the other hand, blocks
light completely. A translucent object allows light to pass through, but
diffusely, while maintaining its form and texture. Objects on the other
side cannot be clearly distinguished. A crystal is translucent. So is
a sculpture of frosted glass: if the sun were to shine on it from behind,
you would see the light passing through the sculpture, and it would appear
to be glowing from the inside.Translucent people also appear to glow from
the inside. They have access to their deepest nature as peaceful, limitless,
free, unchanging, and at the same time they remain fully involved in the
events of their personal lives. Thoughts, fears, and desires still come
and go; life is still characterized by temporary trials, misfortunes,
and stress. But the personal story is no longer opaque: it is now capable
of reflecting something deeper, more luminous and abiding, that can shine
through it.
Contemporary translucents defy many of the spiritual concepts we have inherited from religious traditions. The thousands of people I have spoken to in researching this book are not recluses. They play vigorously in their relationships with others, their work, their creativity, and their political and environmental causes, but they play to play more than to win. Translucents display an above-average generosity of spirit. Giving to other people and to the environment replaces habits based in lack, desire, and need. Above all, translucents have a humorous and often irreverent relationship to their personal life, beliefs, and identity.
Translucents do not fit established pigeonholes. They generally don’t follow one particular teacher, teaching, or group, although many have in their past. They are not “spiritual” in any way that can be obviously recognized through lifestyle choices. As a group they display as wide a variety of occupations, appearance, and educational and cultural backgrounds as humanity itself. They generally don’t identify themselves as “enlightened” or as having attained anything, and they are also not trying to become enlightened. They are not overly materialistic or spiritually cynical. Translucents are not uniformly vegetarians, political liberals, religious zealots, new age hippies, or self-improvement junkies. And they don’t all wear Birkenstocks.
As we deepen in translucence, we discover another dimension of our relationship to identity. It begins with the absolute acceptance of things as they are, of all our strange quirks and addictions. Once we recognize everything to be fine as it is, we can relax even more deeply. We can feel, within each moment, an evolutionary impulse to steer life in a more artful, loving, open way. It is a surrendering, a discovery of the urge inherent within life to endlessly expand its expression of the mystery in form.
Life is not a static event. It is a river of endless evolution. Look over your shoulder a few billion years. Once there was just a bunch of atoms. Look at how they have evolved into trees and rivers and rocks and sentient beings—at how life has transformed into this unimaginable, miraculous sentient being with the capacity to be aware of its own source. Within this huge evolutionary process, the birth, awakening, relative translucence, and eventual death of any specific individual is a very small, fleeting event.
Andrew Cohen speaks eloquently about collective evolution: “In the urge to become, there is a directionality toward higher and higher levels of integration. When human beings awaken to this and begin to emotionally care, not only about themselves, but also about this larger context, the largest context that there is, then their response becomes one with the God principle itself.”
Cohen calls this recognition “impersonal enlightenment” and sees it as the next essential evolutionary stage of human life. In what he calls “premodern, traditional models of enlightenment” the goal was to just “get up and out of here”:
“Their concept of time was cyclical—the idea was that we are on a merry-go-round that is going around and around for eternity. They hadn’t yet discovered the deep time developmental context that we’re all a part of. This knowledge is relatively recent, only three hundred years old. The fact is, we’re not on a merry-go-round; we are the product of 14 billion years of evolutionary development. Human beings have only existed for about sixty thousand years, and only very, very recently have we awakened to the evolutionary context of our emergence. We are living in such an exciting time!”
The moment of radical awakening is a part of this developmental process. And the very recognition that we are in a collective developmental process is in itself another huge shift, one that transforms the individual as well as the collective process itself. Cohen continues: “You realize that part of what you are is an individual human being that has been born in a particular time in history. On a personal, emotional, psychological, and physical level, you have a personal history. From the larger perspective, you are actually part of a 14-billion-year process of development.”
As human beings, we are predisposed to become exclusively focused on “my” life. It is all that most of us will ever think about. Even when we have developed a higher degree of translucence, there still often remains a natural and inevitable interest in “my” liberation, “my” enlight-enment, “my” spiritual experience. This is natural and good; without that predisposition, no one would even have the interest to mature and evolve.
When sperm are released during sex, every single spermatozoon is focused on reaching the egg and fertilizing it. Either one, or none, of them will be successful. The eventual outcome may be a human birth and the continuation of the evolutionary process. Out of the countless billions of sperm ejaculated out of a male body in one life, only a very few will realize their potential to become human beings. But in order for that to occur, it is vital that every little ambitious fella rush like crazy to reach that egg every time. Almost all will die and disappear. The impulse to reach the egg is, we could say, the micro-motive, human birth is the macro-motive, and the evolution and continuation of human life is the meta-motive that lies beyond both.
In the same way, however profound our awakening, however deeply lived our translucence, it is highly likely that in a few hundred years no one will remember how enlightened or unenlightened any of us was, or if we even existed at all. Our personal lives, our spiritual journey, is the micro-motive, while the evolution of life is the meta-motive. Each human story is like a tiny grain of sand in an hourglass, irrelevant and dispensable in itself, but an essential part of the bigger picture of evolution. Everything living is carried in this evolutionary current, and everything is, to some degree or other, causing that evolution to occur. Cohen asks:
“Do the actions we take, the choices we make, express the fact that we know we are a part of this process? Does this process itself, at a certain point in evolutionary development, actually begin to depend upon my own conscious participation in it? At this point there is an imperative to begin to be responsible for the process itself through one’s own incarnation in the biggest possible way, rather than living for oneself the way that most people do.”
As Cohen points out, awareness of the evolutionary context is quite recent in human development. It takes the very peaks of human maturity to grasp that ultimately your or my awakening, translucence, and eventual death are a tiny part of a much bigger and more important process. As long as we are preoccupied with our own identity, that very preoccupation will keep the idea of a separate me locked in place, and will prevent genuine realization. As soon as we realize the bigger context of collective evolution, our attention shifts from “me” to that process itself, and our realization of the timeless and formless deepens.
Cohen sees that simply by pursuing this awareness of the collective evolutionary process, people pass through an enormous transformation. He calls it the “authentic self” awakening. Not only do people return to an awareness of their natural state, but they also realize that the way they live is actually very significant: it is evolution in action, here and here and here. There is no evolutionary process happening outside of how you and I live every moment: “When you truly, deeply, profoundly recognize that your human experience is not really a personal journey,” says Cohen, “and it’s not a personal drama, your relationship to it changes in a way that’s very profound. The individual is transformed and becomes a different person as a result. They have a profoundly different relationship to what it means to be a human being, living in the world.”
With this awareness, we return to paying attention to how we live, how we relate, to the things we say and the choices we make. We pay attention to these things not to improve ourselves, not to fix a problem or achieve a goal, but because the larger current of collective evolution demands it.
Excerpted from The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You are Waking Up and Changing the World. Copyright © 2005 by Arjuna Ardagh. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, 800-972-6657 ext. 52 or www.newworldlibrary.com.
Arjuna Ardagh
is the founder of the Living Essence Foundation in Nevada City, California,
a nonprofit church dedicated to the awakening of consciousness within the
context of ordinary life. In addition to The Translucent Revolution (New World
Library) he is the author of Relaxing into Clear Seeing, How About Now, and
The Last Laugh (a novel). Since the age of fourteen, when he began practicing
meditation and yoga, he has had a passionate interest in spiritual awakening.
After earning a master’s degree from Cambridge University Ardagh devoted
himself completely to the call he felt inside himself and studied and lived
with a number of great spiritual teachers. In 1991 he returned to India for
a period of prolonged meditation and met H. W. L. Poonjaji, a direct devotee
of the great sage Ramana Maharshi, with whom he went through a radical shift
of perspective. He began to share this awakened view with other people at
Poonjaji’s request. Contact him at arjuna@translucents.org; www.translucents.
org or call 1-888-VASTNESS.
February/March 2006
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Books in Brief
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Adjuna Ardagh
The Translucent Revolution
