Awake in This Life

Over at Salon, Steve Paulson writes about biologist Stuart Kauffman’s new approach to God in his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred”.

[Kauffman] seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

He goes on to poke holes in the reductionist, or flatland approach, as Ken Wilber has spent so many pages doing.

It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Here’s where it gets a little sticky for me. With all due respect for Dr. Kauffman and his attempts to realign spirituality into something more relevant, I worry that he’s confusing the Universe’s creativity with creativity’s source. That source, or Source, literally has “no thing” to it, and yet it gives birth to “some thing” in every moment. The agentic value of all somethings isn’t deniable, nor is agency separate from the Source. But agency isn’t God. The Source of agency, on the other hand, gets us closer to the substrate of all things that spontaneously bridges Itself with and into all things as a divine and messy creativity… in each moment.

Bows to Andrew Sullivan for the heads up.

Last month, Psychology Today printed Jay Dixit’s worthwhile read entitled, The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment.

Life unfolds in the present. But so often, we let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved and unseized, and squandering the precious seconds of our lives as we worry about the future and ruminate about what’s past. “We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence,” says Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace.

Making an interesting observation, Andrew Sullivan links to the final two paragraphs in Michael Miller’s Newsweek article,  Sad Brain, Happy Brain.

Earlier this year the Annals of Neurology published an article by Sam Harris and colleagues exploring what happens in the brain when people are in the act of either believing or disbelieving. In an accompanying editorial, Oliver Sachs and Joy Hirsch underscored the significance of what the researchers found. Belief and disbelief activated different regions of the brain. But in the brain, all belief reactions looked the same, whether the stimulus was relatively neutral: an equation like 2 6 8=16, or emotionally charged: “A Personal God exists, just as the Bible describes.”

By putting a big religious idea next to a small math equation, some readers might think the researchers intend to glibly dismiss it. But a discovery about brain function does not imply a value judgment. And understanding the reality of the natural world—how the brain works—shouldn’t muddle the big questions about human experience.

Miller’s points are great except that he begins his piece with a misplaced Cartesian axiom, suggesting that the brain and the mind are in fact one in the same. Are they?

Perhaps we should be asking researchers different questions. What is mind? Where is mind? What is aware of mind?

It’s good to be back after weeks of being still.

Communicating either with those not familiar with the Path or with those who reject it outright can be challenging. Unconsciousness is just about the most contagious ailment that humans carry, but Awakening doesn’t depend on another’s ability to share each step with us along the Path. Rather, Awakening can only ever depend on our ability to relate to our own experiences, regardless of who is involved or in what state they might be. Sometimes, the challenge of another’s unconsciousness is exactly what our practice needs in order to keep us on our toes. Meeting up with another’s contracted self is a great opportunity for us to actively practice openness. We do this like we would with any circumstance: we meet and communicate without greed or aversion from a place of total relaxation. This meeting and communication offers whomever or whatever we encounter both our full presence and the spontaneous compassion that comes with it. But as this encounter is going on, we need to be aware of the intention behind our communication. Are we really trying to hear the other person, or are we trying to manipulate him into changing something about himself? Are we really trying to see the other person as he is, or are we trying to get something from him? If there is any move on our part to achieve a particular outcome from our meeting, our words and actions become reflections of resistance, and we miss the opportunity to Awaken with the other person.

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Whenever relationships are discussed in the context of spiritual practice, most of the questions concern unhealthy attachment. Whether we are conscious of it or not, dysfunction continually offers the ego a place to hide. For example, the ego would much rather attach itself to the known quantity of bad relationships than deal with the unknown aspects of healthy ones. Healthy relationships built on compassion require profound surrender, and surrender is something that the ego will do anything to avoid. The small self simply wants to be in charge of everything and everybody for all time. Surrender is the opposite of this impulse. But healthy relationships require space on the dance floor where absolute familiarity is jettisoned for a never-ending exploration of what is completely unfamiliar. Ego will resist this lack of control and begin to act from its typically defensive position. Threats to its control generate resistance, and activity that arises from resistance to what is will both inflict and perpetuate pain. Once pain arises the ego will start to move in any way that it can so as to evade, or worse, sabotage the experience.

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Among the richest areas for practice is relationship. Many of us, whether we are in a committed relationship or not, tend to have our connections with people inform most if not all of what we do. Romantic relationships, work relationships, as well as friendships and family relationships, can pull us from a Big Self expanse back into a small self contraction with amazing speed. They can also open us in the other direction if we know how to let them help us evolve into deeper levels of consciousness.

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Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions; they have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.

—Eihei Dogen

Too often, people think that solving the world’s problems is based on conquering the earth rather than touching the earth, touching ground.

—Chogyam Trungpa

By showing grace to you, by my own power, I have revealed to you my highest form.

—Bhagavad Gita

If we source our sense of being from the Witness instead of the ego, our action as well as our orientation in the world changes. This change occurs largely because our surrender to what is offers each of us a profound clarity in any circumstance we might find ourselves. This clarity works to connect us to our Ultimate Life, and in the process we become much less attached to our contracted sense of self. This flowering of deep openness allows us to see something profound. Openness to the Oneness of Spirit supports our recognition that the many is also equally representative of Spirit. Compassion is truly seeing that the multiplicity of Spirit is reflected in each and every thing in the Universe.

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At some point on the Path, we find that we are in an unsettling place where our minds begin to realize that they don’t have the capacity to take us any further. It’s as if the small self has been busy extending a board over the side of the ship of consciousness, but at some critical point the small self suddenly recognizes that it is the one who must walk this plank. This realization is devastating to the small self, and yet the reality of deep spiritual work is that Awakening to what is forever beyond the small self can’t be understood by the small self. Stillness helps us have the experience that points us directly toward this Knowing. This Knowing is an infinite opening of wisdom rather than a contracted compartmentalization of intellect. It’s not a conceptual understanding, but instead a readiness for the spiritual bloom that comes from a radically different relationship to our conventional circumstances. Unfortunately for many of us who are deeply interested in the intellectual aspects of spiritual work, Knowing this flowering blossom has nothing to do with an intellectual or mental connection to anything. Rather, this precious bloom has to do with letting go of everything even remotely related to the mind.

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When the Eighth Sense reveals itself from the tenderness of the Ninth Sense, we give our experience over to what we might call a “conscious awareness.” We have previously called this Knowing. Using the capital “K” implies that it is an unattached version of recognition, far different from the regular, attached, egoic, lower case “k” knowing that categorizes, compartmentalizes, and evaluates our experiences. Knowing is consciously sourced from the Ninth Sense, and the Witness is nothing other than an unattached Knower. The “attached knower,” on the other hand, may simply be seen as the ego. So while the Witness and the ego are not separate, it’s critical to recognize that they are not the same. Because the Witness can observe the activity of ego, it is always beyond ego’s limitations and actions.

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Just as the Eighth Sense is the felt sense of Awareness that is the Source of all things, it is also our ever-so-slightly contracted sense of this primordial Source. When we put our Witness to use, we see that it is the Awakened space that welcomes the very arising of all things. On the other hand, this Eighth Sense is not a thing at all. Calling it “ours” doesn’t express its true nature. Still, even though language can get in the way here, we do our best to give it a name in order to talk about it and point out that this Eighth Sense is the most fundamental link to the totally expansive, impersonal, singularity of Awakened Emptiness.

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Another way to refer to the Witness is to call it our “Eighth Sense.” By this I mean that we have our five senses of our physical experience: those of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Then, in our mental experience, we have our thoughts, which can be counted as our sixth sense. Unlike the Western idea that suggests the sixth sense is some supernatural representation of insight, Eastern cultures soberly suggest that our sixth sense simply encompasses the activities of mind such as thinking, emotions, opinions, intuition, and the like. For our purposes here, we will look at the sixth sense as an Eastern culture might. But we can notice another aspect of our mental experience once we see that all of our mental activity exists and is bound by something truly fundamental. No thoughts, emotions, opinions, or intuition could ever exist without the container of time. Without past and future, there would be no sixth sense therefore, we can call this perception of time, of past and future, our seventh sense.

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If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

—William Blake

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

—Empedocles

As the audience, or Witness, of the illusory and repetitious charade of ego on the Stage of Mind, we suddenly have an empowering choice offered to each of us in every single situation that we might encounter. In this choice we always uncover a chance in each moment to surrender any and all forms of attachment. Wisdom comes from our ability to watch without judgment and therefore see through the various levels of our clinging until we are confronted with the profoundly obvious Truth that every thing that can be conceived is merely a ripple in the totally unified, oceanic expression of Emptiness. Truly seeing that all things are an expression of this Oneness is wisdom.

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Lift the stone and you will find me; cleave the wood and I am there.

—Jesus Christ

He who knows himself, knows God.

—Muhammad

Presence shows itself most often as a simple expression of full awareness. Almost everyone has had the pleasure of being in the vicinity of people who carry with them a certain magnetism that can’t easily be described. There’s just something about them. More often than not, this kind of energetic authority is seen by the ego as charisma, or what a Hindu practitioner might call shakti. Regardless of its name, any being that embodies this presence radiates a certain clarity that we can’t seem to ignore. It’s like when I’m watching my cat stalking something in the backyard and I can’t take my eyes away from what he’s doing. The same applies to any of us if we are fully engaged in what we are doing. If, at any point in time, we are resting in deep attention, it will always have the potential of pulling mysteriously at a part of anyone else nearby. Especially when we stalk things in our backyard.

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