In Defence of the Solitary Practitioner and Self-initiation

A debate has long raged among spiritual seekers of all kinds between those who believe initiation is only possible by induction into a specific group, under the tutelage of a master, and those who believe that an individual through his or her own efforts and studies may become an adept on their own. The former is the traditionalist position held by, among many others, René Guénon and esotericists such as Dion Fortune. The latter is the modernist position held by Julius Evola and a huge swathe of people ranging from Rudolf Steiner to rank New Age types. I largely hold the modern position. You may have heard me quip before now that being a “postmodern traditionalist” means that one can read Evola and still enjoy watching Seinfeld. In this article I’ll attempt to go beyond this shorthand to explain my view in more depth. In so doing, I outline Four Blinds of both organised religions and initiatory orders and my Three Reasons for following the path of the solo practitioner.

First, a few reminders. To be a perennial traditionalist is to accept the absolute primordial metaphysical truth of a world beyond the material that we call “divine”. In this view, all world religions are local and particular understandings of this one overarching Truth. The differences between religions are held to be superficial since an esoteric understanding of each of them can see, for example, that Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao-Tze, and whoever else has been historically exalted by organised religion, were pointing to the same single capital “T” Truth. Those who are enlightened, even if they belong to such a religion, could not be upset by such a statement — you shall know them by their fruits! They correctly would have no time for one who gets caught up by doctrine, dogma, insistence that his is the “only way”, that his God is the only one and so on. These are the trappings of the exoteric religions intended for the maintenance of peasant law and order. It is held that most normal people are unable to process or understand the mysteries: at best it would wash over them, at worst it results in folk superstition, or else fear, bigotry, persecution and so on. The peasant requires the relatively simple moral laws, narratives and tales of exoteric religions, and the relatively straightforward business of being shuffled into congregations for rituals directed by priests.

René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon

These exoteric religions are seen as largely being emptied of their true meaning, power and purpose. What Arnold Toynbee called the “temporal institution” becomes its own set of blinds. Hence, in the modern world, the church would be the very last place the serious seeker would go to find spiritual enlightenment. Here, I identify Four Blinds: first, when the mundane business of the day-to-day running of the church — keeping the lights on, fixing the leaky roof, bringing in enough money etc — supersede its primary function of connecting worshippers with the divine. This is the Material Blind. Second, when believers become bogged down in codes, laws, processes, catechisms, doctrines, internal organisational politics and so on, what they are engaged in is no longer the search for transcendence but mundane politics. Hierarchies and ranks mean nothing if they do not all translate into spiritual enlightenment. All too often people get caught up in defending the particular institution over the transcendent Truth. This is the Political Blind. Third, when a text is taken as sacred, believers seek to gain authority and “one up” each other by quoting the scripture. I posit that no one ever in history has got closer to God by playing Bible Pokémon, arguably the worst and most annoying pursuit ever invented. The sort of person who delights in quoting chapter and verse would derive just as much petty delight in quoting The Laws of Cricket. This is the Scriptural Blind. Fourth, when believers harden their stances such that they become rigid zealotry, they unwittingly close off both themselves and others from embodying their higher selves. The zealot does not realise how his dogmatic evangelising is quite literally repulsive to almost all who encounter him. We can call this The Dogmatic Blind. Again, while these may all be effective methods for keeping law and order among the peasantry or else for convincing them to die in battle for a government, if the goal is spiritual enlightenment, they are dead ends.

While perennial traditionalism inherited this elitist view of the world religions as they stand today, it (somewhat paradoxically) insists that adherents must pick a specific tradition to follow. Hence those seriously seeking the deeper esoteric path have two basic choices, either:

1. To join an esoteric “inner” version of one of the religions, for example, Sufi Islam (this is what Guénon actually did) or a Christian mystic sect.

2. To join the lodge of a secret society of some sort (both Guénon and Evola dabbled in this in their early years).

The issue is, as both Guénon and Evola argued in various places, that many such orders — like the exoteric churches and temples of the world religions — have become corrupted. This led Guénon to look to the East, which is why he became a Sufi in Egypt, and Evola to advocate for self-initiation as a second-best alternative.

I shall now outline some of my own views in my Three Reasons for preferring self-initiation: the Postmodern Reason, the Practical Reason, and the Personal Reason. First, if we are truly to “Ride the Tiger” we must come to a radical acceptance of the world as we find it today. The primordial Truth must, in some sense, meet us where we are. I grew up in a postmodern age, one which was somewhat comfortable with intertextuality and borrowing from here and there, whether in pop songs, Tarantino movies, video games, fusion cooking, or whatever else. I was born after the various transgressions of the 1960s had already largely played themselves out. Something that had once been at the level of occult secrets such as Aleister Crowley’s Aeon of Horus had already been reduced to the level of a pop song (“The Age of Aquarius” by The 5th Dimension) 13 years before I came into the world. Yet, the primordial Truth does not stop being true because I played Nintendo and went to McDonalds as a kid. Viewed from this perspective, we can see easily that Guénon and Evola were men from a different time, born in 1886 and 1898 respectively. This, no doubt conditions their attitudes to various things as well as my own. For example, in my view, they were both too purist in their strident criticism and rejection of syncretism. If there is a single primordial Truth, then some degree of blending from distinct sources should not be a problem so long as they are pointed in the right direction. Now, perhaps because I know what it is to play Warioware, Inc or to eat at a trendy Korean “fast food” restaurant in New York, I think nothing of picking up a technique from a Taoist or a Buddhist or a Hindu — if it works, it works.

To be clear I am not saying Guénon and Evola are “outdated” and therefore wrong, I am saying that the spirit of our age lends itself more easily to syncretism than theirs did. Besides, some aspect of this thinking must already be present in Guénon and Evola as they both wrote books on Yoga, Zen and so on.  Did Guénon suddenly forget Vedanta when he became a Sufi? Did Evola strictly only “do magic” for a period, “do Yoga” for a period, and “do Buddhism” for a period? One suspects they retained their experiences and skills progressively. For these reasons, their attacks on syncretism have always struck me as being confusing and even hypocritical. In fairness, what they were attacking was the worst excesses of arbitrary blending one might see in, say, Madame Blavatsky. Guénon made a distinction between principled “synthesis” and unprincipled “syncretism”. But aside from this, as I have said, an informed and directed taking from here and there comes easily and naturally to those of us born in the postmodern age: it is not incongruous to us to see a yoga class in the park or to think of a Catholic woman who practices Buddhist-style meditations to keep herself calm. Some of those who fall afoul of the Four Blinds may stridently condemn both, but almost everyone else would roll their eyes at such chastisers as posturing ninnies. This is the Postmodern Reason.

Second, the history of secret societies and initiatory orders shows a story of in-fighting, ego battles, and eventual collapse or disintegration as they fall to the same blinds that dog exoteric religions. In fact, the move to establish any order automatically invites the Four Blinds I have outlined: Material, Political, Scriptural and Dogmatic. Any history of secret orders will provide you with many examples of all four. It is true that the history of self-initiation also provides many examples of failure and, in effect, all we are saying is that “people are fallible” or that “any order will only be as good as its masters”. However, I argue that owing to the complications and realities of organisation (see: *any* organisation), the initiatory order is almost *guaranteed* to fail while the solitary practitioner at least has a chance of success, even if it is slim. One may object that some orders have persisted for centuries — certain Masonic lodges, and so on — but the mere fact of survival does not prove spiritual success. Guenon had found almost every such order in France to have been corrupted by the 1930s. Let us remind ourselves too that the Church of England has “survived” with a Pride flag draped on its walls as worshippers sang muffled 70s soft rock versions of hymns behind Covid masks.

Let us now imagine a situation where the self-initiate shoots and fails, along the way our solitary practitioner would have picked up some degree of discipline, insight, wisdom and a glimpse at their higher self in all but the most hopeless of cases. The situation of the failed initiate into an order may not live to tell such a happy tale given the history of abuses, dramas, manipulations, traumas and so on that seem to go hand-in-hand with cults and human organisations more generally. To me, the whole host of inevitable problems that result from the simple fact of having to deal with other people in a situation with power dynamics greatly outweighs the supposed drawbacks of solitary practice. It is said that working in a group enhances energy and power. It is said others will keep you focused and honest. It is said that the structure of peer pressure will greatly increase your chances of actually completing your training. It is said that without a master to provide guidance, the student will become too easily distracted and misled or succumb to self-delusion. All these things may be true, and yet these concerns pale in comparison to the issues that arise from organisation, not least the Four Blinds which can be observed in practically every order that we know about. If we define “success” as the production of an enlightened adept, let us suppose that the initiate into the order and self-initiate have roughly equal failure rates. Now, because of the lack of reliable external checks and the guidance of a master, we must increase the failure rate for the self-initiate. This is the advantage of the order. However, the Four Blinds force us to increase the failure rate of the order-initiate by an even greater amount. This is the advantage of the solo practitioner. This rough calculation is how I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. I will call this the Practical Reason.

Third, the person who is able to overcome their lower self to embody their higher self, or in other words to achieve some degree of alignment with the divine, can be said to be a sovereign individual. This is Evola’s differentiated man; others have given it different names including self-actualisation. Knowing that this is the destination, each person must, in a sense, construct their own map to reach it. A great many books have been written on this topic, whether theoretical (as in helping to map the terrain) or practical (as in providing specific methods and techniques to travel certain parts of it). I have devised my own system for categorising them which means something to me because it makes sense to me. Thus, this library becomes a living guide because every aspect of its curation is designed with specific purposes in mind en route to the final destination. If you set yourself on a path guided by a repository of accumulated wisdom and you deviate from it, you only let yourself down. In the absence of anyone looking over their shoulder, the solo practitioner must keep themselves honest. One could, I suppose, attempt to personify the library as an Obi-wan-like Force Ghost or to imagine God or perhaps an angel disappointed at you, but whatever happens, the buck is going to stop with you. Principles like radical honesty, absolute responsibility, relying on structure rather than willpower, embodying the virtues (while losing the vices), the keeping of journals and so on can help (as I’ve outlined on my Academic Agent Mindset channel), but there is no sugar-coating that it’s a long and lonely road requiring significant reserves of inner strength. However, there is a certain joy that one can take in the discovery and learning process, in the creativity of devising and adapting your own systems, in the fulfilment (in the Aristotelian eudaimonic  sense) of achieving milestones and objectives or acquiring skills, and in the sense of meaning and purpose provided by having a mission. It is not that all this is invented from whole cloth, it is all based on specific teachings from specific traditions, but in a manner that is best suited to my own needs and tastes. This requires the development of discernment and a certain trust in one’s own judgment.

This is also not, as has often been the case in New Ageism or other modern systems, a set of cope justifications for a modern degenerate lifestyle or set of political preferences. If your path demands no discipline or self-transformation on your part, you can be sure that it’s a false one. Spiritual practices cannot grow from the rotten foundations of politics. This is easily seen, for example, in the goddess cult or witches’ coven that serves as a thin veneer for radical feminism. It is just as easily seen in pagan revivalist movements that are cover for petty nationalisms. I’d suggest no one has ever achieved self-actualisation in spiritual orders that have a political root. Again, critical discernment and judgement as well as uncompromising honesty with yourself are necessary and, since people are fallible, the failure rate at this alone will be high.  One must be ever-vigilant against cope in all its hidden forms. As a general rule of thumb: anything with which the unmodified egoic self is fine and unchallenged by is the territory of cope. It just so happens my spiritual practice exalts scholars who run YouTube channels with exactly my political views, what are the chances! The internet is full of men and women creating their own Mary Sue practices and once you see that for what it is, it should become easier to discern what is and is not cope.

Many of these elements just outlined — especially the discovery process and creative process — would not be present if one was narrowly following a single teacher within a discrete order. It makes sense to me that the sovereign individual would take responsibility for their own training. I would concede that much of this may come down to personality type: I would likely feel bored or become disillusioned following one master, which are the classic fail conditions for initiatory orders. The things I outlined help keep things alive and real for me, and this sense helps maintain follow through. When one faces obstacles — which will definitely arise — the challenge of coming up with my own solutions staves off any discouragement. In short, I have a predilection for figuring things out myself that would, one suspects, come into conflict with any mentor. From academia, I know these qualities made me both a brilliant and frustrating student for various teachers. Did they teach me anything or did I teach myself? I’ve always suspected that all proper learning of any kind is self-directed and that the best teachers are those that make you realise that. But if that truly is the case, then self-initiation becomes a more realistic prospect. All this I will call The Personal Reason.

To recap, in this essay I have outlined Four Blinds that plague both organised religion and esoteric initiatory orders:

1. The Material Blind, when material concerns of mundane temporal organisation supersede the spiritual mission.

2. The Political Blind, when internal rules, ranks, hierarchies and matters of organisation supersede the spiritual mission.

3. The Scriptural Blind, when knowledge of a sacred text substitutes for and hampers spiritual enlightenment.

4. The Dogmatic Blind, when zealotry and repulsive evangelism impede spiritual enlightenment.

I have argued that the path of the solo practitioner while still fraught with its own pitfalls such as the risk of ego inflation, self-delusion, and so on, can more reliably avoid these specific blinds. I further posited Three Reasons for my own chosen path:

1. The Postmodern Reason, which argues that the path of self-initiation is acutely fitting for the current age, which has foregrounded a certain eclecticism.

2. The Practical Reason, which argues that human organisations will inevitably fall to the Four Blinds.

3. The Personal Reason, which argues that for me personally, the path of self-initiation is the one that will be most fulfilling and have the greatest prospect of success.

I share all this only to give courage and strength to others who wish to follow this most difficult and often lonely of paths.