Awake in This Life

In a recent blog post by Andrew Cohen, he rightly asserts a point so often misappropriated in alternative spiritual circles:

Consciousness doesn’t exist or work in mysterious ways outside of or away from the innermost depths of our individual and collective selves.

In other words, while consciousness is mysterious in the way it unfolds past the mind, it shouldn’t be conflated with pre-rational fairy tales. It’s all right here in front of us.

At the same time, all of us, especially teachers, can unwittingly set up structures that allow the mind to cling, thus blocking the natural expression of enlightenment. This is especially true when an adherence to sins of the past, or salvation in the future, colors spiritual teaching since it puts the ego into the driver’s seat of the process of awakening. Consider his final line:

The more we not only awaken to that fact but take responsibility for it, the more quickly this world will become the paradise that we all long for in our most inspired moments.

Here, here. But let us all co-create the future by loosening the grip we keep on the fairy tails of the past as well as those fairy tails of times yet to come. When teaching people to “become” without first teaching them to just “be” a massive impediment is created thus blocking an authentic approach to what the mind can only refer to as “paradise”.

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.

I admit that I was transfixed by the Olympics last night. It was amazing to watch Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt do the impossible.

But I Tivo’d Rick Warren’s interview with Obama and McCain last night and upon my early morning review, and then listening to the Sunday Morning TV Gab, I came away with an interesting mix of feelings.

First of all, I’m interested in how many Americans are truly interested in the depth of a candidates religious convictions and what this might or might not imply.

Further, what does it say about a person running for office if they cling to the ideas that support a mythic god?

Then, to what extent, and in what capacity, should those of us who don’t cling to a mythic god care about what the candidates said last night?

Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe writes well about the event, as does Andrew Sullivan.

I’ve enjoyed the controversy surrounding the Ken Wilber camp over the past few years. Some people worship Wilber, others can neither tolerate his personality nor his work. Situations like this breed attachment and attachment always leads to interesting situations.

As far as I’m concerned, Wilber has had a significant impact on both the pedagogy and curricular content of what I do as a teacher. And while, like the rest of us, he has had his difficulties, I don’t feel it’s my place to offer any judgement about the man. I do think, however, that thoughtfully considering some aspects of the debate surrounding him will serve practitioners well.

Here are two points of interest:

First, a video critique offered by Frank Visser (thanks ~C4Chaos), then a follow-up by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens.

This proves it… meditation would be good for Judge Judy.

An earthquake rocked L.A. yesterday, fortunately causing little damage. It managed to scare the usually unflappable Judge Judy, but a group of monks meditating at a Thai temple were unfazed.

Aloha from Kauai.

I’m sitting here doing a little reading on the net while my wife and daughter sleep away an eventful day of helicopter riding and playing at the beach. We also walked into a shop that specialized in Buddhist paraphernalia. Everything you might need to get your practice off on a traditional footing. I commented to my wife how far away I felt from all the stuff. Just give me a cushion. And yet it was so beautiful. Then my baby daughter pulled a fan off the shelf that had the Heart Sutra inscribed on it. One side Japanese, one side English. I put it back in its place. My daughter protested. My wife laughed and I had a bit of a flashback to my morning routine as a monk. 

All the chanting seemed like such a goofy thing to do, and yet I was always thrilled at the last line of the Heart Sutra: gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!

Loosely translated this means: gone, gone, gone beyond, gone way beyond, may Enlightenment be so! 

Indeed. May it be so for each of us. And may each of us also see that the Witness isn’t the end of it all. In fact, Ken Wilber suggests in a recent post on Integral Naked that Dainin Katagiri Roshi told him:

… the Witness is the last stand of the ego.

This point couldn’t be more important to those who’ve been on the cushion a while. The Witness, or what I’ve called the Eighth Sense, and Wilber cites as the Hindu term turiya, is fundamental in any process of Awakening. But it isn’t the final stop. In fact, the Witness can recognize itself as an ever-so-slight contraction of our personal realm of consciousness since even in the experience of seasoned practitioners, the Witness can still flirt with the edges of egoic grasping. 

I write about this in Awake in This Life:

More than a feeling, a sense, or an intuition, the Ninth Sense is the fundamental quality of the entire Mountain of Spirit as well as its climbers. It is the exact Awareness in which all experience, including the Witness, arises and falls. It is the essential, impersonal, quality of feelings, sensations, and intuition, just like light is the essential, impersonal, quality of any image we might see projected on a movie screen.

I go on further:

Whatever name we choose to point to this awakened spaciousness that is infinitely inside and outside of all things, it is never anything other than the awakened totality, the Deep Singularity, of everything all the time. It is always available to us in each breath, at each tragedy, at each of our kids’ successes and failures, at each of our lonely moments, in darkness, and in the inextinguishable, blinding light of the expansive and clear Truth of Being.

The Ninth Sense is Spirit, and it expresses itself in everything and in every way as everything and every way.

This Ninth Sense, or what the Hindu tradition calls turiyatita is shows itself as that which is beyond turiya, beyond the Witness. At the realization of the Ninth Sense the Witness and all that is witnessed begin to merge. Put simply, the Ninth Sense is beyond the experiences of our five gross bodily senses (taste, touch, sight, smell, and sound), as well as our two subtle mental senses (thoughts, and time), as well as our causal experiences of simple witnessing awareness. 

Wilber suggests that the recognition of the Ninth Sense shows up like this:

… rather than having an experience, all you’ll sense is a vast sense of freedom.  Freedom from objects, freedom from experiences, freedom from time.  Whatever it is that you experience, that is precisely what you are not. 

And in this freedom, you push, but without pushing; you rest, but without resting; you cleave, but without cleaving.  There is the sense of consciousness, but without an object,  of emptiness—though empty of that, too.  The way is neti, neti: not this, not that.  You will never reach a moment of time that is it.  For it is something that is always already there. 

May it be so.

In this Holons article, Brother David and Ken Wilber discuss how Integral panentheism brings new life to traditional Christian practices and doctrine, such as gratefulness, prayer, and the Holy Trinity, while also offering a stable foundation for truly inter-religious conversations in the modern and post-modern worlds.

I am a little concerned that so many people who have discovered the One simply eradicate their sense of the Many, or consider it unimportant….

- Br. David Steindl Rast