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Transcript of The Heart of Christ Consciousness - Integral...
The Heart of Christ Consciousness
by Ken Wilber
Hello, everybody, and thank all of you so much for being here with
us. I hope that this will be a really special event for all of us. I think it will
be!
Now, hopefully you all got a chance to see the paper, “INTEGRAL
CHRISTIANITY—Preliminary Overview,” which I trust wasn’t as boring as
the title. But it’s a quick summary of the Integral Framework that is the
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backbone of an Integral Christianity, and so with luck it gave you a general
understanding of just what it is that we’re trying to do here, and what you
can expect to get out of this gathering. Now before I go any further, let me
apologize for reading this. I usually don’t do that, but there are several
specific items I want to make sure that I cover, and so I’ve jotted them
down. So please bear with me on this, and again, I do apologize.
The Preliminary Overview hopefully gave you a sense of the Integral
Framework and its major elements—quadrants, levels, lines, states, and
types. And as really boring as all that can sound, I trust that you could start
to get a sense of how important those elements really are, especially when
we are creating the actual maps and guidelines that we will use to make
sense of our entire lives, maps that we will actually be using to navigate the
various territories we will run into during our stay on this planet—this is
important stuff. That paper particularly focused on quadrants, and their
simplified form as “the Big Three”—the perspectives of I, we, and it. The
paper also stressed “levels,” or the 6-to-8 major levels or structures of
Growing Up, and how this applies directly to spirituality. And it ended by
promising to walk all of us, at this gathering, through some of the more
important—some of the highest—states in the path of Waking Up, or the
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Great Liberation. And that’s what we’re going to do right now—directly
experience some of these highest states of Waking Up.
* * *
So we said that the path of Growing Up in the spiritual line was
growth in the path of a spiritual intelligence, or how we think and talk about
Spirit; whereas the path of Waking Up was a series of direct spiritual
experiences, of how we immediately experience Spirit.
If we look at these direct spiritual experiences, from the numerous
traditions throughout history, we find that there are often a very similar set
of states that are described by the world’s great meditative and
contemplative traditions. So in that Overview paper we briefly described the
6-to-8 major structures of consciousness in Growing Up, so now we’ll be
looking at the 4 or 5 major states of consciousness in Waking Up.
Structures are hidden maps and interpretive grids, like grammar, that govern
how we experience reality; and states are immediate and direct experiences
themselves.
So, for example, Tibetan Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, some forms
of Neoplatonism, and several other prominent mystical schools give 5 major
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states of consciousness, and these 5 major states become the 5 major stages
of meditation—that is, the 5 major stages of development in the practice of
meditation. So with these 5 major states, only the first and lowest one starts
out fully awake and fully in consciousness—the other 4, even though
present, are not fully realized or fully entered in Wakefulness, and that is
what happens with meditation, that’s what meditation is for.
You’ll see what I mean as I now list them—these 5 major states of
consciousness are said to be: the waking state (also called the gross state,
with its gross physical energies); the dream state (also called the subtle state,
with its many subtle energies); the deep dreamless formless state (also called
the causal state); and then turiya (which is simply Sanskrit for “the
fourth”—as in, the 4th major state of consciousness, which is what this one
is, after, of course, the first three states, the gross, subtle, and causal—and
this 4th state is said to be a state of pure Witnessing, pure Awareness, or the
pure Observing Self, the True Self or Real Self); and then the last and
highest state, turiyatita (which simply means “beyond turiya,” or “beyond
the 4th,” so…beyond the Witness, and it’s beyond the Witness because it’s
the union of the Witness with absolutely everything that is witnessed—the
total union of subject and object—resulting in a “unity consciousness” or a
“nondual awareness,” a pure Oneness. Now again, these might sound a little
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theoretical—but we’ll be doing some direct experiential exercises so that
you can experience these directly for yourself in just a moment).
So at birth, everybody is awake and aware in the first state, and so it is
specifically called “the waking state.” And the actual aim of meditation
(although in many Western approaches to meditation such as mindfulness,
this part is never really mentioned, but still) the actual aim of meditation is
to take Awareness or Wakefulness, and have it move through all 5 states—to
that state of ultimate oneness or unity consciousness or nondual Awakening
or Enlightenment. Now you can be in virtually any state and have a peak
experience of a higher state; but the real point in meditation is to
permanently move Awareness or Wakefulness through all of these states so
that all of them have entered consciousness or entered Awareness, and
deliver up their incredible secrets to your own awareness. At the very
highest state, that of nondual unity consciousness, you will realize that your
real identity is one with Spirit and one with absolutely every single thing
now arising in your awareness (in fact, one with everything in the universe).
And this state of oneness, you will also realize, you have always
actually been aware of, you just didn’t notice it. Now that sounds a little
strange, but it’s behind all the seemingly paradoxical statements of the
mystical traditions the world over about how the goal is always already
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present; that you are moving through a “gateless gate”’; that Enlightenment
is {quote} “unattainable” because you already have it; that people wishing
for spiritual realization are like people standing neck deep in water and
crying out in thirst; that your realization is a pure product of Grace (and
Grace means “no effort needed” to be saved)—in other words, there’s
nothing you yourself can do about it, it’s already given to you; your
realization is really just a recognition, a remembering of something you’ve
always known. Zen masters say they are {quote} “selling water by the
river.” It’s the true meaning of Christ’s atonement (or “at-one-ment”) which
is said to have fully removed the barrier of original sin for all humans (and
“original sin” is simply the self-contraction—that’s the first sin, and the
beginning of all other sin and separation and duality and suffering). The old
Adam introduced the self-contraction—sin and separation and fragmentation
and duality (which all humans inherited—all humans are born with the
self-contraction); and the new Adam—Christ—introduces one’s True
Nature, one’s original Face, one’s Supreme Identity with ultimate Spirit
itself, which erases original sin for everybody and is given for Free, as a
product of pure Grace.
But if we’re still under the illusion of being the self-contraction—and
it is an illusion, which means it isn’t real, it doesn’t actually exist—but if we
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imagine so, we have to undergo its death and resurrection—and that is
what’s Jesus of Nazareth himself had to do—dying on the cross to being a
mortal Jesus the Nazarene and being reborn and resurrected as his own
Christ-consciousness, timeless and eternal, spaceless and all-pervading. So
note that the Catholic church maintains—for reasons it doesn’t seem itself to
fully understand—but it maintains that all one has to do to be re-instated in
this resurrected state of oneness is undergo baptism—it doesn’t matter if the
priest performing the baptism really understands what it means, and it
doesn’t matter if the person being baptized really understands it—it works in
any event, and it works because what it is removing isn’t really there to
begin with. It can’t fail because the job is always already accomplished.
This is what Zen means by “the gateless gate”—you work really hard, you
meditate, you have your first big satori or Enlightenment experience—you
walk through that gate of Awakening—and then you turn around and look
back for the gate, and you see it isn’t there, and never was.
It’s paradoxical, but that’s only because of what has to happen in
order for Spirit to really manifest a world—in order to do so, Spirit has to
forget that it is Spirit, or else the world would still just be a self-realizing
Spirit, no real difference. For this world to really be different from Spirit in
some sense, then in the world itself Spirit has to forget that it is Spirit. It’s
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like as a child if you tried to play a game with yourself—I’m sure most of
you tried to do this at some point, maybe you tried to play checkers with
yourself. But it doesn’t really work, does it?, because you always know
what moves both players will make, because you’re playing both sides; in
order for it to really work, you would have to forget what at least one player
is doing—you would have to forget that you are you, when you play the
other side, so you wouldn’t know what moves you were making as your own
opponent, and so there would be an actual game. Same with Spirit creating
this world—in order for it to work, Spirit has to forget who and what it is,
has to forget that it is Spirit itself doing this. This is what the Eastern
traditions mean when they say the manifest universe is the lila of Spirit—
“lila” literally means play, game, sport—and in order for it to really work,
Spirit has to forget. This forgetting—this amnesia—is what “dis-members”
Spirit into a multitude of apparently separate, fragmented, isolated bits and
pieces and things; and this dis-memberment—the illusory separation or
dismembering of the One into the Many—is overcome when we
“re-member” or “re-collect”—bring back together again—our true Nature,
which is ultimate Spirit itself. This is why Christ said, in the central ritual of
all of Christianity—the communion, the eating of the body and drinking of
the blood of Jesus Christ—{quote} “Do this in re-membrance of me.”
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Re…membering..., overcoming dis-membering; or re-collection,
recollection, remembering what we once knew, and what we still are, but
forgot. Because, even though Spirit pretends to forget itself, it is still Spirit,
and it is still fully, completely, wholly present right now—how could the
Absolute actually disappear or go away? It’s play, it’s a game, it’s not real.
There is, and always will be, only Spirit. And in practical terms, that means
that you, just as you are right now, are actually one with God. Right now.
And if we don’t remember that, then it’s death and resurrection for us.
But again, the result is already guaranteed because it’s already fully
accomplished and fully present; in the Christian version, it’s fully given by
Grace, nothing you have to do. But this is the paradox of liberation, the
Catch-22 of Enlightenment—you’re already Enlightened, so seeking it just
presumes you’re not, thus pushing Enlightenment away—hence to seek to be
Enlightened is to prevent real Enlightenment—so you can have it, unless
you want it, then you can’t. As the Taoists put it, “If in the Tao [the T-A-O],
If in the Tao there is any training, the completion of that training marks the
destruction of the Tao”—in other words, there’s nothing you can do to get it,
and your very trying pushes it away (to seek Spirit absolutely assumes that
you are not now Spirit, so it just re-enforces the initial illusion—the
presumption of separation from Spirit—all spiritual seeking rests on that
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presumption—that false, illusory presumption); but, the Taoists continue, “If
there is no training in the Tao, one remains an ignoramus”—you still have to
try in order to realize the futility of all effort. As Blake said, “The fool who
persists in his folly becomes wise”—and spiritual seeking is the grandest
folly of all—it’s us seeking and chasing after what we already are right
now—it’s chasing after the chaser—it’s like running after our feet.
So if “the fool who persists in his or her folly becomes wise,” spiritual
seeking just speeds up the folly. If you think the Earth really is flat (if you
think you really aren’t Enlightened), then get in your ship and start sailing as
fast as you can, and when you realize that you are never going to fall off,
you’ll realize the Earth isn’t flat—when you realize you will NEVER attain
Spirit, you’ll realize, you’ll re-member, that you can’t attain Spirit because
you already ARE Spirit. You can’t attain Spirit just like you can’t attain
your feet.
And this all goes back to what Spirit has to do in order to create the
world of relationships and multiplicity in the first place. In order for each
sentient being to be able to play the Kosmic game of checkers, each sentient
being has to forget that it is Spirit—and so bang!... here we all are. What,
me? I’m Spirit? (You’ll directly see what this means in just a moment when
we move to those experiential exercises.)
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In the Overview paper, we saw that people like James Fowler found
that virtually everybody in their own growing up, grows up through the same
basic 6-to-8 major stages in spiritual intelligence (and again, “spiritual
intelligence” is one of the multiple intelligences or developmental lines that
move through these same 6-to-8 developmental levels. These multiple
intelligences, as most of you have heard, include things like cognitive
intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, aesthetic
intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and so on; and as different as they all are,
they all move through these same basic 6-to-8 structures or levels of
development—in one version, archaic to magic to mythic to rational to
pluralistic to integral; and those stages can be condensed to egocentric
[archaic and magic], ethnocentric [mythic], worldcentric [rational and
pluralistic], and Kosmocentric [integral and higher]). That’s Growing Up in
any of our developmental lines, or multiple intelligences, or structure-stages
of consciousness (including the spiritual line or spiritual intelligence).
Now, in a very similar fashion regarding states and Waking Up,
researchers such as the brilliant Daniel P. Brown have found that all the
major meditation systems that they have looked at move through the same
basic 4-or-5 major states (not structures, states—structures are intelligences
or patterns of interpretation or ways of thinking about something—but states
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are direct experiences, immediate awareness—not thinking about
experience, but direct experience itself—spiritual experience, not spiritual
intelligence—Waking Up, not Growing Up. States are like the actual words
we use and experience, and structures are like the hidden grammar tying
them all together. Again, both are equally and crucially important, yet both
of these paths have never been combined and used together—ever; so what
we’re doing here is a bit of a historical first, and an important part of any
truly integral spirituality or Integral Christianity).
So back to Dan Brown and these 4-or-5 major states in Waking Up.
Dan calls moving from gross to subtle the stage of “Awareness”; moving
from subtle to causal is the stage of “Awareness itself”; moving from causal
into turiya or pure Witnessing is the stage of “boundless changeless
Awareness” (and we’ll do some experiences for that); and the last stage,
nondual unity, he calls Awakened Nondual Awareness (and we’ll do some
experiences for that). These are just examples of the standard stages (the
state-stages) in the path of Waking Up. Thus Evelyn Underhill, in her
classic book Mysticism, maintains that all mystics go through the same 4 or
5 major stages—from gross purification to subtle illumination to
causal/{slash}witnessing dark night and infinite Abyss, to final unity
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consciousness (or nondual awareness). And she found stages similar to
these in every major mystic she examined.
But remember—and this is the central point—pretty much any one of
those stages of Waking Up (gross, subtle, causal, witnessing, and unity
consciousness) can be experienced at virtually any stage of Growing Up
(magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or integral)—those two developmental
paths are relatively independent—so those two factors have to be kept firmly
in mind. Thus, we all have two different components to our spirituality—
one is the ways that we can Grow Up in spiritual intelligence, and the other
is the ways that we can Wake Up in direct spiritual experience—and they’re
both important because we will interpret our Waking Up experience
according to the stage of Growing Up we are at. That’s the crucial recent
discovery—and we’ll continue to see exactly what that means.
So it’s not enough to just become Enlightened if you’re stuck at a
mythic-literal stage of Growing Up—you’ll just be stuck in a state of
ethnocentric oneness. So both of those paths are important. We might
summarize this by saying that we want to experience our highest state of
consciousness in Waking Up (namely, nondual unity consciousness) but
from at least the worldcentric stage or higher of our Growing Up. Both of
those are crucial. In fact, the world really doesn’t need more Enlightened
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people at an ethnocentric stage—that’s not going to help. In many ways it
will hurt. We all know fairly Enlightened teachers who are nonetheless
sexist to some degree, or racist, homophobic, authoritarian, domineering
hierarchical, xenophobic, fundamentalist, sometimes power driven,
sometimes money obsessed; we’ve even recently discovered several highly
respected Zen Masters who turned out to be rampant sexual predators—all
of these represent ethnocentric or even egocentric levels of Growing Up in
various lines, even though these teachers were fully awakened to
Enlightened unity awareness and were highly acknowledged for that fact and
highly respected for it. And now, finally, we have a theory that can explain
that fairly common occurrence—and so we know we can do something
about it as well—namely, include both Growing Up and Waking Up.
This is a monumental change in our understanding of spirituality—
these two different paths. We can, for the first time, understand how
religion and spirituality can be both the greatest boon humankind has ever
known—a source of genuine love and insight and wisdom—and the greatest
cause of suffering and murder and homicide the world has ever seen. And
we can start, also for the first time, to make sure those scales tip in our favor.
This has never happened.
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So finally, let’s now walk through some of these higher states—as
direct experiences. Now the first three stages—waking, dreaming, deep
sleep—or gross, subtle, causal—are actual states of consciousness—that is,
you can enter them, stay a while, and leave, or not enter some of them at all,
at least not in consciousness. But various meditation paths work with
moving your Awareness through them so that you enter all of them in
consciousness—so that dreams become lucid dreams and deep formless
sleep becomes tacitly conscious. Now those are important, but it can take
months or even several years to do that in some cases. And in any event,
they are not the highest states to which you have access. The highest
states—and these are also the ones responsible for your Awakening or
Enlightenment or Great Liberation—are the last two states—Witnessing and
unity consciousness (turiya and turiyatita)—and those are said to be
ever-present (that “gateless gate”), which means all of us have access to
those right now. In fact, both of those states are fully present and fully
functioning—and you already know them, right now—this is indeed the
gateless gate—and you’ll see this in just a moment. So let’s have a look at
those.
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What I’m doing here are called “pointing out instructions”—I’m
merely going to point to something that is already there in your awareness,
that is already present, and I’ll keep pointing until you see it.
So let’s start with turiya, the 4th state, Witnessing awareness,
boundless changeless Awareness. (Sounds good, doesn’t it?) But start by
simply becoming aware of yourself—just, pay attention to what you call
“yourself,” notice “yourself”—and then silently begin describing yourself.
You might say to yourself, for instance, “My name is so and so, I’m this old,
I’m this tall, I weigh this much, my hair is this color, my skin is this color, I
work at this job, I have this education, I’m in relationship with so-and-so,
we’ve been together this many years, I am (or am not) married, I like these
kinds of books, these kinds of music, these kinds of movies, I enjoy sports
like basketball and football, I like shopping, especially for shoes and
handbags, my favorite vacation spot is…,” and so on and so on. But just
really become aware of this self of yours, really see it as objectively as you
can, get a good idea about what it is, feel it as intensely as you can.
But then notice that when you do that, there really are 2 different
selves involved here. The first is the self you were describing, your
everyday, conventional, object self, sometimes called the ego; in general,
your separate-self sense, the self-contraction, the self you can see and feel,
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the self you were describing. But then there is the Self—capital “S”—that is
doing the describing, doing the looking and the observing—this is the
Witness Self, the Observing Self, the pure Seer. And the pure Seer cannot
be seen—the Seer can no more see itself than a tongue could taste itself or
an eye could see itself—it’s something doing the Seeing, not something that
can be seen. So begin to feel into this Seer, this Witness. And as you do so,
notice that you won’t see anything in particular—if you see anything, that’s
just another object, another thing seen, it’s not the real Seer, the true
Witness. So what is this Seer that cannot itself be seen? What is that?
As you look for this Seer, you won’t find any specific object; all you
will start to notice is a feeling of vast Freedom, of Release, of Spaciousness,
of Openness. The attitude of the Seer or the Witness is: “I see the
mountain, but I am not the mountain. I have sensations, but I am not those
sensations. I have desires, but I am not those desires. I have feelings, but I
am not those feelings. I have thoughts, but I am not those thoughts. I am
the pure Witness, pure Awareness, the pure Seer of all of those things seen.”
You are pure Awareness, you are not any of the contents of Awareness.
You are the Seer, not anything seen. Patanjali, the founder of Yoga, said
that {quote} “Ignorance (non-Enlightenment) is the identification of the Seer
with the instruments of seeing.” And that’s right—we confuse our pure
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Seeing Awareness with some contents of Awareness, with some thing that
can be seen or heard or touched or felt. And so our pure Awareness, which
is pure infinite Freedom, slips into bondage with those things that it
identifies with. Awareness—the Witness, the Seer—is itself a vast, pure,
open, clear, empty Freedom or Spaciousness, not bound to any thing or
event, and not identified with any thing or event. It is what the mystics call
“neti, neti”—it is not this, not that.
Listen to St. Dionysius, in a sense the founder of all Christian
metaphysics—and I assure you, he means this literally—and just listen to
this—this is the very core of Christ-consciousness—he is talking about the
highest Self that is one with Spirit—that Spirit is {quote} “neither a soul, nor
a mind, nor an object of knowledge… neither is it reason, nor thought, nor is
it utterable or knowable; neither is it number, order, greatness, littleness,
equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does it stand or move,
nor is it quiescent; neither has it power, nor is power, nor light; neither does
it live, nor is life; neither is it being, nor everlastingness, nor time…, nor
wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness..;. nor any other
thing known to us.” Now that’s neti, neti!—not this, not that, but pure
Freedom from ALL of that.
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Now think of all the ways you described yourself at the start of this
exercise—those items are not really what you are; they are all exactly what
you are not. Those are what your ego is, not what your True Self is, or your
Highest Self or Real Self or Christ Self or Buddhanature. We are indeed
victims of a vast case of mistaken identity—we have identified our True
Self, our pure Awareness, with a bunch of little objects, things that can be
seen or known or felt or touched, and not their Seer, their real Self. And this
little self is born, and its stays a while, it suffers a lot, and then it dies. And
that’s our typical life as ego, as the self-contraction, as the separate-self
sense. And the joke is, it’s not even a real self or real subject—it’s just a
bunch of objects, of things that can be seen, it’s not a real self or subject—
you can see it as an object! Rather, Zen Master Shibayama calls the Real
Self {quote} “Absolute Subjectivity”—the pure Subject, the pure Seer, the
pure and highest Self, which is not an object, not a phenomenon, not
anything seen. Of course, technically, the mystics—and Master
Shibayama—would deny even that term (“Absolute Subjectivity”)—as soon
as we see it and think it, it’s just another object, another thing that we are
not. Rather, resting in this pure Witnessing Awareness, all that we know or
feel, to put it metaphorically, is this sense of vast Freedom, of transparent
Openness, of pure Spaciousness. “I have sensations, but am not those
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sensations; I am Free of them. I have desires but am not those desires; I am
Free of them. I have thoughts but am not those thoughts; I am Free of
them.” Pure, infinite, Freedom; the Great Liberation.
And you can probably start to see that, whether you were aware of it
or not, this Witness has always been present as whatever awareness you
had—there was this Witness already there doing the real looking—and
further, this Witness already lives in eternity. Now, to see this, we have to
get the real meaning of “eternity” first. It does not mean “living forever” or
“living in everlasting time”—it means living in a moment without time, or
living in the timeless Now. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, {quote} “If we take
eternity to mean not everlasting temporal duration but a moment without
time, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the Present.”
And the Present, the timeless Now, is the only thing the Witness
actually ever knows. We think of the past and the present and the future as
if they are all real things strung out on a line. And in order to {quote} “be
here now” or “live in the Now,” we are supposed to focus on the present
moment and not pay any attention to the past or the future. That’s actually
done quite often as a real practice. But in fact, we are always and only
aware of the Present moment, the timeless Now—we don’t have to do
anything to get in touch with it. Again, this is ALREADY accomplished.
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Just think of anything in the past. What you are actually aware of is a
thought, and that thought is occurring in the Now moment. When that past
actually occurred, it was also just a Now moment. Likewise, think of any
possible future—what you are actually aware of is a thought, and that
thought is also occurring in the present Now moment. If that future ever
occurs, it will be a real Now moment, too. The only thing that you—that
your Witness—is ever aware of is a timeless, ongoing, endless Now
moment. The Witness is always living in the Now, always living in eternity.
The timeless Now is not hard to attain, it is impossible to avoid. Eternity is
not something you’re going to discover tomorrow; it’s something you’re
already drenched in right Now, with no effort whatsoever required. What
else are you aware of but right Now?
There’s a famous Zen koan that says, “Show me your Original Face
[which means, your Real Self—your Original Self, your True Self], Show
me your Original Face, the Face you had before your parents were born.” A
Self you had before your parents were born? Now Zen means that
literally—it most definitely is not symbolic or some sort of metaphor. And
that’s all they really mean—your Real Self, this ever-present Seer or
Witness, is only aware of a timeless eternity, which exists before any
temporal stream unfolds and starts parading by in front of it. So of course
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this timeless Now exists before anything that unfolds in the linear stream of
time, including before your parents showed up in time.
This is exactly Christ’s {quote} “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Think
about that statement—that’s exactly his Original Face, isn’t it? It’s amazing,
and it’s true for each and every one of us. This present I AMness—the very
feeling of being you before you identify with something, just your pure
beingness, your pure I AMness, the simple feeling of being, right here, right
now—you’re aware of that, yes?—your simple present Awareness, whatever
it is—that simple, ever-present feeling of I AMness is the pure Seer, the true
Witness, Absolute Subjectivity, your Real Self, your Original Face, your
Buddhanature, your true Christ-consciousness. But it’s so close (as Meister
Eckhart put it, “God is closer to me than I am to myself”), but it’s so close to
us, that we quickly overlook it and start identifying with all these little finite
objects and things—this body, this thought, this possession, this desire, this
relationship—and pretty soon, all we are, are these convoluted networks of
finite objects, things, and events, and we have completely forgotten who we
are before we are anything—which is this pure I AMness, living in the
timeless, eternal Now, radically Free and totally Liberated. That is who and
what we always are—we are, that is, always a perfect Christ-consciousness,
and that consciousness is one with the reality or Spirit of this entire universe
23
(“I and the Father/Mother are one”). And we have to die to an identification
with the self-contraction, or the illusion of the little seen-self, in order to be
reborn as that which we always already truly are—this pure Awareness that,
before Abraham was, I AM. (“Before Abraham was, I AM”—Can you say
that?)
There is an area of your awareness, right now, that directly realizes
this pure I AMness that is just pure I AMness, not I AM this, or I AM Ken
or John or Mary or Angie; just I AMness, not I AM a teacher, I AM a
doctor, I AM a waitress, I AM a dishwasher—just the pure simple feeling of
Being, exactly what you are aware of right now—EXACTLY what you are
aware of right now, this pure I AMness, this simple feeling of Being, before
it is anything else—before the Seer has identified with something seen—
PURE Freedom.
This I AMness is always there (just like what it is aware of, is always
the timeless Now); it’s a constant, unchanging Presence—{quote}
“boundless changeless Awareness,” right? You probably can’t remember
what you were doing at this time a week ago; but you can be sure I AMness
was there. You probably can’t remember what you were doing a month ago,
but you know I AMness was there. You likely can’t remember what you
were doing a year ago, or a decade ago…, or a century ago, or a millennium
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ago, or even before the Big Bang—but I AMness was there, because it never
enters that stream of time—it is the timeless moment, not some event in
time—there’s no before or after for it, just an endless Present. And that is
why this is the Self you had before your parents were born, before the
universe was born; this is why this Self is Unborn (meaning never entered
the stream of time), and why it is Undying (and therefore never leaving the
stream of time, either). It is your one, true, unchanging, unperturbed, True
and Real Self, your Original Face, your genuine Christ-consciousness, your
true and infinite Condition, before you went and identified it with all sorts of
dopey, small, finite, born and dying, pain-inducing, suffering-filled, itty bitty
identities—exactly what you are not. And all of those mistaken identifies
have to be literally died to on your own cross—you have to fully and
seriously let go of them, dis-identify with them, and resurrect your one,
True, ever-present, pure Spirit of the Supreme Identity, your real Being and
Supreme Self, which you have never been without, although you have tried
hard to forget it on many occasions. And you cannot attain this, any more
than you can attain your feet or acquire your lungs—you already fully
possess this and you know you are aware of this—you can only recognize it,
acknowledge it, see it when it is pointed out, and meet it with that long lost
“Aha! I know you! How could I ever have forgotten!” It’s fully present,
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100% present, right now—Spirit is looking through your eyes, hearing with
your ears, feeling with your fingers, touching with your skin, speaking with
your voice, thinking with your mind. How could you not see this right
now?!? Whatever is arising—good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, pleasure
or pain, light or dark, happy or sad—every single thing and event is arising
in your all-encompassing Field of Awareness, your perfectly accepting
Mirror-Mind, the pure I AMness that loves and welcomes it all. This is who
and what you really are. This is a real Christ-consciousness, embracing the
entire universe arising as perfectly reflected within you, with open and
loving arms.
Now I could give hundreds of quotes from the mystics around the
world about how this I AMness is one with Spirit living in eternity. But we
are truly fortunate to have with us this weekend the superb spiritual teacher
Adyashanti, who is specifically transmitted in the Zen tradition, but who also
has found a profound connection with Christianity and the Jesus story, so let
me quote from him:
When we look back over the arc of our lives, from the time we
were born to the present moment, each of us can touch upon that
intuition that there’s something about us that is unchanged.
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Throughout all of the ups and downs and changes of life, something is
now as it ever was. To touch upon this is… to experience eternity
within.
Throughout the hole trajectory from birth to childhood to
adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only
physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something
remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal
within…. When we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of
what’s the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of
divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter
and brighter in our lives.
I believe that the character and presence of Jesus has something
very important to show us in this regard—that each one of us is the
son or daughter of God…. This is the perennial mystic revelation of
awakening to our true nature, at one with the divine. The Jesus story
is a means of activating the living presence of our being, so that we
realize that each one of us is the son or daughter of the living God.
And in the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic Gospels, Christ says:
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“I am the light above everything. I am everything. Everything
came forth from me, and everything reached me.”
Now, to see this part of Christ-consciousness—the “I am everything”
and “Everything came forth from me”—we need to move on to what is said
to be an even higher state than the Witness—in fact, the highest state, that of
pure unity consciousness, or more technically, nondual awakened awareness.
This is also something ever-present but almost always overlooked. And so
let’s see if we can’t remember this.
Start by picking out an object 10 or 20 or 30 feet in front of you—a
table, a person in a chair, a computer, a picture on the wall—or if you’re
listening to this on a recording, then maybe a tree, a building, a parked car,
anything like that. Then get in the position of the pure Witness (“I have
feelings but am not those feelings; I have thoughts but am not those
thoughts”). Then focus on this object, “feel” this object; then feel the Seer,
feel the Looker, feel the Witness or Observing Self. Then slowly let the
sense… of… being… a… Looker… disappear—and let only the awareness
of the object remain (that is, just the main object and the other objects
surrounding it—let just those objects remain). Just focus on the object—
there is just the object—it is self-existing, arising on its own, existing on its
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own. Let that object fill your awareness—there is not a Looker looking at
this object, there is only this object, filling your Field of Awareness. Where
you thought the Looker or Seer was, is only this object arising. If you try to
feel your Looker or your Seer, right where that feeling used to be, you
actually find just this object, self-existing, self-arising. So the Looker
slowly disappears, and its place is fully taken by just the object (and its
surrounding objects)—those alone remain in Awareness, filling Awareness,
with no Looker of them—just the objects, self-arising, on their own. You are
completely gone, and there is just “all this” arising, moment to moment.
Douglas Harding has a wonderful exercise for realizing this, called
“on having no head.” Start by noticing that you really don’t have a head—or
anyway, you certainly can’t see your head. All you can see is two fleshy
blobs—your nose—and then a huge empty space. While you’re noticing
that empty space, if you also notice the object, you’ll see that the object is
arising right in that empty space, right where you thought your head was.
That object is actually directly in the space where you used to believe your
head was. That object is just sitting right between your shoulders, right in
the space of your head. There is not a world of objects out there and then
the world in here on this side of my face; actually, all of the world’s objects
are arising on this side of my face, right where my head used to be. All of
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those objects “out there,” in other words, are actually arising within me.
The entire universe is arising within my own being. There is no separation
between me and the world—the entire world is arising right where my head
used to be. There’s no space between what is arising and what I am—I
directly AM everything that’s arising—I AM one with everything…. It’s all
arising within me…. I am not in this room; this room is in me (is in my
awareness, on this side of my face—is directly touching me, is within me).
In other words, there are not two worlds; there is not a world out there
and a world in here; there is only one world, and it’s all arising directly
within me… touching me. This intense oneness of me and everything is
unity consciousness, and you can probably see that it is always occurring, it
is ever-present, whether we realize it or not….
Trungpa Rinpoche was asked what Enlightenment felt like. And he
replied, “The sky turns into a big blue pancake and falls on your head.”
That’s kind of funny, but it’s exactly right. The sky, which seemed to be
“out there,” is actually sitting right on your shoulders, right where your head
used to be—it’s {quote} “fallen” on your head. The sky is so close you can
taste it, you are truly one with it. Zen says {quote} “Drink the Pacific Ocean
in a single gulp”—and that’s the easiest thing in the world to do when you
and the ocean are one. The entire universe is arising within your being—and
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you are that, all of that—all of this. You’re not really a subject looking at
objects, there are just objects arising within you, moment to moment. It’s
not Subjectivity, it’s Suchness, or Thusness, or Is-ness, the pure present
Now-moment-reality as it’s arising in its pure Is-ness, its immediate
Suchness, its not-two-ness. You can stand back and Witness this moment,
but then you have to separate this single oneness-feeling of Suchness into
two feelings—the subject in here and the objects out there. But when all the
objects are arising in here, on this side of my face, within me, then there’s no
in here and no out there, there is just the moment-to-moment arising of
things as they are, things in their nondual radiant Suchness, and they are all
arising within me, and I can feel EVERYTHNG within me, just as it is—and
then there’s no within and no without, just moment-to-moment THIS-ness, a
self-feeling oneness. Not subject and object, not Self and Other, just a self-
feeling oneness, a self-existing isness.
Becoming this timeless oneness is a thing that mystical Christianity
can help us with, particularly because of its emphasis on Love. And this is
one of the things I’d particularly like to emphasize about Christianity,
including an Integral Christianity—and that is its stress on the importance of
Love. Christ said, “A new commandment I bring you—to love each other as
I have loved you.” Or the famous, “Love your enemies as yourself.”
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Because Love is simply the emotional side of the state of being one. When
we love somebody—really love them—we feel a special closeness, a unity, a
oneness, with them. Even when we say something like, “I love ice cream,”
what does that mean? It means I want to eat the ice cream—I directly want
to be one with it!
So, many people can get into the Witness or 4th state fairly easily; and
that’s good. But they often have a harder time really getting into the 5th
state, the headless, nondual, unified state of oneness. But the whole point of
describing God as Love is to emphasize that God is the power that drives
unions, that drives oneness—a drive often called Eros. The power that
drives quarks together into atoms, atoms together into molecules, molecules
together into cells, cells together into organisms… and all the way to the
human organism, where it then drives egocentric into a wider ethnocentric,
and ethnocentric into worldcentric, and worldcentric into Kosmocentric—all
driven by this universal power of Loving Oneness, or Spirit-in-action.
So you can apply this Love directly by getting in the stance of the
Witness, and then begin by starting to call the Witness (and telling yourself
that it is) {quote} “the feeling Witness”—thus, when I Witness that table,
I’m actually feeling it in awareness; it’s a feeling-awareness. So see
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everything you Witness as actually being a feeling-Witnessing. Feel
yourself actually touching everything you are Witnessing.
Then the next step: when the Witness feels an object, in reality it is
becoming one with that object—it’s a direct touching, embracing, enfolding,
enwrapping—it’s a loving/touching. So start calling it “the Loving
Witness.” Realize that everything you are seeing right now is actually
something that, in your deepest core, you Love. That’s how it gets in your
awareness in the first place—in order to be aware of it, you have to include
it, you have to embrace it, you have to enfold it—you have to Love it, in a
really primary way.
So it’s relatively easy to get into the Witness, so fine; then start
realizing that everything you are Witnessing is actually a
Loving-Witnessing. When you Witness anything—even your enemies—you
are touching it, you are embracing it in awareness, you are enwrapping it,
you are Loving it—and that’s a capital “L” love, which loves absolutely and
all-inclusively everything (including hate and fear and evil and nastiness)—
{quote} “I the Lord make the light to fall on the good and the bad alike, I the
Lord do all these things.” And likewise I, the Supreme Self and Suchness,
extend my Love to the good and the bad alike, I the True Self do all these
things.” This is often called “the Mirror-Mind”—it accepts absolutely
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everything it reflects, with no judgments, no rejections, no grasping, no
holding on.
And so this pure all-inclusive Witnessing awareness is replaced with a
pure all-inclusive Loving awareness (still Witnessing, but as it actually
dissolves into a Loving and merging with everything witnessed), a
touching/loving/oneness with everything it is aware of. And, indeed, when
you really Love something, you become one with it. You give your whole
heart and mind and body and soul to that thing—and so the Witness, which
tends to be unemotional, distancing, detached, unconcerned, slowly shifts
into a field of warm, Loving, feeling-awareness, with the entire universe
enfolded in your loving awareness, the entire universe arising WITHIN
YOU (right where your head used to be, in a pure Loving oneness).
You Are All of This, with not a single thing or process or event or
image or sensation whatsoever left out. If pain arises, pain is allowed to
arise in this Loving/oneness awareness. If thoughts arise, thoughts are
allowed to arise in this Loving/oneness awareness. If the egoic
self-contraction arises, the self-contraction is allowed to arise in this
Loving/oneness awareness. If fear arises, fear is allowed; if depression,
depression is allowed. There is nothing—not a single thing whatsoever,
anywhere, anytime—that I, the Lord, turn my back on, because in reality I
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have created every single thing and event that exists—the good and the bad
alike, the true and the false alike, pleasure and pain, happy and sad, up and
down, in and out, awakened and ignorant. My entire being is one Radiant
Field of Loving Awareness or pure Oneness—and the more things I include
in that Field, the more Loving I become—with, finally, the entire universe
arising within me—literally, the entire universe arising within my being—in
that Field of all-embracing Loving Awareness.
So we want to get into the stance of the Witness, and then realize that
everything we are Witnessing is something our Awareness is directly
touching; and to directly touch and embrace means to Love, to directly and
wholeheartedly Love. The very feeling of the Witness ever more and more
slides into a feeling of warm, overflowing, unconditional Love/oneness—the
Witness is touching everything, the Loving-Witness unconditionally Loving
everything, and in so doing, becoming directly one with everything—
literally, EVERYTHING, with not a single object, no exceptions, left out.
This suddenly recenters our whole Awareness in direct relationship with,
and oneness with, the entire Kosmos, and as I Witness all of that, then slide
into a radical Love/Unity with absolutely all of that, then my Awareness and
the entire Kosmos suddenly click into a resonant oneness, and the entire
realm of all Reality aligns itself perfectly within my own pure Being. And at
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that point, as Christ said, “It is finished.” I have become One and fully
Whole; the Kosmos has become One and Fully Whole—and they are the
same Oneness. This is a radical, unsurpassable, hallowed state of ultimate
Holiness—that is, ultimate Loving Wholeness—and the perfect deliverance
of all things and events and beings. And take off your shoes and bow in
reverence, for this is Holy Ground.
In the various spiritual Traditions, there are many supremely high
qualities that are identified with saguna Brahman—that is, Brahman with
qualities, Brahman or Spirit as it begins to manifest as this world and starts
to take on characteristics (from its pure formless unqualifiable state of
Emptiness, or nirguna Brahman). But around the world, these supremely
divine qualities have included things like Being, Consciousness,
Compassion, Bliss or Joy, Forgiveness, and Love. Love is indeed connected
primarily with the Christian tradition, and represents one of its relatively
unique contributions to the World’s Great Traditions (just as all different
schools have some sort of unique items they bring to the integral table). And
notice that Love, for example, is quite different from Compassion.
Buddhism emphasizes compassion, which is great. But compassion applies
only to things you can feel sorry for; whereas Love also embraces those
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things you can be happy about and celebrate. So if somebody loses a job,
then you can have compassion for that. But if somebody inherits a million
dollars, you don’t say, Oh, I’m so sorry, I have so much compassion for that
person. But you can love their getting the million dollars; you can also bring
a loving understanding toward their catastrophes and disasters. Love is the
all-applicable solvent for moving separation and isolation to oneness and
unity, and thus it can heal any wounds of fragmentation, isolation, and
brokenness.
Thus, Love is one of the most potent paths for moving from the
separate self to a pure Oneness and unity consciousness. And that includes
moving from the highest, subtlest form of separate self—which is the
Witness itself—moving from that to the nondual state of Suchness or pure
Thusness. So, as a practice, throughout the day, spontaneously recall the
difference between the small seen self and the Supreme Self, the pure Seer,
the true Witness, and rest as that Witness. So a move from the ego to the
Witness of the ego (and all other objects, as well). This move will allow you
to let go of, to dis-identify with, any negatives—any fear, anxiety,
depression, agitation—that you are feeling; your pure I AMness is “not this,
not that,” a pure Freedom from all phenomena.
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Then slowly start recognizing the feeling of Witnessing as being a
feeling of all-embracing, warm Love. Allow yourself to Love the world, and
absolutely everything in it, and melt into a Loving Oneness, with the entire
world, which is arising exactly where your head used to be, so that this
moment becomes not a twoness-experience—out there and in here—but just
a singleness-experience—this present moment-to-moment Thusness of
everything arising as a self-feeling oneness.
Now there are things in the world that are indeed good, and things that
are bad—and we don’t forget those distinctions, and we don’t stop operating
on them. We work to increase the good (in any form), and decrease the bad
(in any form). But now we’re talking, not about relative truth, but about
ultimate truth, absolute truth—which is the Ground of Being of everything
that exists, good and bad alike. And one of the reasons more people don’t
realize their true Being and ultimate Condition is that they can’t imagine
accepting the bad in their life. They can’t imagine a state of 100%
Acceptance, of total Loving Oneness or Singleness. They can’t imagine a
level of ultimate reality where Mother Teresa and Adolph Hitler are both
equally embraced, and both equally Loved—capital “L.” So they can’t see
an absolute Ground of All Being that is the Source, Condition, and Suchness
of every single thing and event in the entire Kosmos—and thus they can
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discover neither their own highest True Self nor the Suchness and Condition
of the entire universe. They remain locked in the realm of separation,
isolation, judgment, ranking, picking and choosing.
The oldest Zen poem in existence begins, “The perfect Way is without
difficulty, except it avoids picking and choosing.” Any choice—such as
between good and bad—means picking this thing and not that thing—and so
you’re locked out of an EVERYTHING MIND (as Chris Grosso calls it)
right in that first step. And being locked out of Everything Mind, all that
you do after that will get it wrong.
Picking and choosing is the second step we make, and it’s a very
important step—but only if we have taken the first step first correctly, and
realized—and become directly one with—the Suchness, the Is-ness, of
absolutely everything that is arising. Because everything has emerged from
some place—and it emerged from pure Source, pure Emptiness, pure
unqualifiable Spirit, pure creative Nothingness, just as the Big Bang did, just
as each moment right now does; as Schelling put it, straight out of pure
Nothing arises Something—and not just part of Something comes from
Spirit—ALL of it comes from Spirit. Where else would it come from? You
think God went, “Okay, finished Mother Teresa, good going if I say so
myself, and… Adolph?—where on earth did that guy come from? Glad I
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had nothing to do with that.” Uh-uh. It ALL comes from the ultimate
Source, Goal, and Ground of All Being—and that also means, from your
own highest Self, and your own purest Suchness, now and now and now.
And so before you start deciding what is good and what is bad, what should
be done and what should be avoided, whom you should admire and whom
you should despise—before any of that, Love it All, accept it All. It’s in
your Awareness, and anything IN your Awareness is being enfolded,
enwrapped, Loved by your primary Awareness—so step into that Love. As
Mother Teresa herself put it, “Love until it hurts.” Love your neighbors as
yourself, love your enemies as yourself, love each other as yourself, love
those chairs as yourself, love those rocks as yourself—and that’s “the love
that moves the sun and other stars.”
Think of it as the Total Painting of All That Is. Every painting has
dark and light spots, peaks and valleys, ups and downs, ins and outs. But if
we just want to be aware of the light parts, and get rid of all the dark parts—
and we actually do that—all that will be left are a bunch of light parts, and
the painting will look like a polar bear in a snow storm in the Arctic—it’s
pretty much all gone, featureless. Rather, everything—without exception—
that is arising right now is a crucial part of the Total Painting of All That
Is—the dark spots just as much as the light spots.
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Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t work to improve the world—
you should. But that’s the second step we take, the step of picking and
choosing. But the first step, the crucial step, is to be fully aware of the Total
Painting—absolutely every brush stroke, every light and dark and good and
bad and pleasant and unpleasant and up and down of the Total Painting.
Don’t turn away from anything—rule #1, Don’t turn away from anything; let
awareness cover absolutely everything that is arising.
Most of us have some thing—no matter how small—that is just too
uncomfortable, or too painful, or too embarrassing, or too frightening, or
something—and so we turn our awareness away from it; we look away,
however briefly; and thus we move away. But our job is to start by
accepting it all… and thus becoming aware of it all, aware of the Total
Painting of All That Is—no looking away, no turning away, no moving
away. Let it All in. Witness it all equally—the pure Mirror-Mind. And we
do that by realizing the Witness is already doing that—it’s already aware of
all of this—just notice that and drop into it, rest as what it is already doing.
And your second job is to then drop out of it—that is, drop the
Witness, drop the Looker, drop the sense of being a subjective Self, and
become One with the Total Painting of All That Is. It’s all arising right
where your head used to be, within you—the entire universe arising within
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your own being, your pure Loving Awareness… of pure Oneness… with the
Total Painting of All That Is. That is your ultimate Condition, your pure
Suchness or Thusness or Ground of All Being. And this is your resurrected
Awareness. Move from ego (or seen-self) to the Witnessing Self (or pure
Seer) to nondual Suchness (or the oneness of the Seer with everything
seen)—ego to Self to Suchness. And as Nagarjuna would say, Suchness is
neither self, nor not-self, nor both, nor neither… but the simple Thusness,
the naked Isness, of this timeless Present to this timeless Present to this
timeless Present, no inside or outside, just the pure Suchness of this Now
moment arising as a singleness, arising as One Taste, right where your head
used to be.
Put your mind in your heart, and let the whole world in. It’s a warm
world. But this isn’t sentimental New-Age love—that loves feelings and
hates logic and rationality, or loves sensitive people and loathes hard asses,
or loves its own view of the world and scowls at all others. If one thing is
left out of my mirror-mind Awareness, I don’t have true Love, fundamental
Love. One thing, literally, and I don’t have the Total Painting—and then I
can neither Witness the Total Painting, nor become One with it. Through
what might be called our Primordial Avoidance, we look away, we turn
away, we move away—we avoid; the self-contraction is doing this
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avoidance right now (and if you’re aware of the self-contraction, you’re
aware of this sensation of avoiding). And with this avoiding, we’ve missed
the mark, which is the original meaning of the word “sin” (“to miss the
mark”). The mark is 100% Acceptance, total Loving Oneness.
It really is like the reflections of objects in a mirror—and all of us
have been identifying with just one or two of the reflections, whereas what
we want … is to identify with the mirror itself, with the source itself. And
as long as we are not including some reflections, even just one of them, we
can’t actually fall into the real condition of the mirror. It’s truly all or
nothing. Most of the time, it’s been nothing—we have missed our true
Identity and real Condition as Source and Suchness—we have turned away,
looked away, moved away, from some item in the Total Painting. There’s
some sort of Primordial Avoidance. But now, with absolutely totally
inclusive Loving-Awareness, with 100% Acceptance of All That Is, we can
indeed include it ALL, truly ALL, right now, just as it is.
And so, right now, even if the self-contraction is involved in
Primordial Avoidance—and it is looking away, turning away, moving
away—our prior Loving Awareness can directly be aware of that
self-contraction—you can be directly aware of the self-contraction, and thus
fundamentally Free of it—and this is already happening; the self-contraction
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is simply another thing arising in the ever-present Field of Loving
Awareness of the Total Painting of All That Is. And that Loving Awareness
is indeed ever-present; it’s your own headless Awareness, your oneness
Awareness, right now, even if the self-contraction is part of the Total
Painting—let it; just be one with everything else as well. Ego to Self to
Suchness.
Pure Love means unity consciousness means EVERYTHING Mind.
Once you have slotted into that pure Oneness, then you can start making
your judgments and creating your rankings and firing up your particular
values. But do so from the Ground of ALL Being, and not just some picking
and choosing you prefer. Rather, it’s Godhead’s preferences, which means
“I the Lord make the Light to fall on the good and the bad alike,” and not
just “I, Mr. or Ms. So-and-so, make the love to fall on just this and this, and
not that or that.” That primordial avoidance keeps the world separated and
fragmented and broken, and it keeps us separated and fragmented… and
broken. Or more accurately, keeps us in the illusion that we are separated
and fragmented and broken. That gateless gate—which means fully given
by Grace (which means, no effort required at all) is the state we’re here to
remember.
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And let me repeat: the crucial step here is to recognize that, right now,
it’s already happening, all of it—exactly the way you are right now is
exactly, already it. Every single thing that is happening right now is exactly
the way it should be happening—already. You are already living precisely
in the timeless Now moment; you are living in eternity. You already have a
no-head Awareness, directly one with everything that is arising
moment-to-moment, in a state of pure Loving Oneness. There is not a single
thing—not the smallest thing—that you need to do to make any of this
happen, because it’s already actually happening. That’s the ultimate
message of the mystics worldwide. That’s exactly the sin, the illusion, that
Christ died to remove for all of us
—and by the way, it worked.
Now, let me make a brief comment about True Self, Unique Self, and
nondual Suchness. Many of you have heard of the notion (emphasized by
Marc Gafni, myself, and others) that our True Self, one with Spirit, is not a
mere no-self blank, but a Unique Self one with Spirit and one with the All.
And that’s true. Even if every one of us in this room were totally
enlightened—so that we were all deeply aware of the one True Self and pure
Spirit of the entire Kosmos, nonetheless each of us would differ in at least
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one way—all of us sitting here in this room would see this room and
everybody in it from a different angle, a different perspective, a different
view—and a view radically unique for each of us. So the only time that the
Witness, that the True Self, that I AMness is the radically same Self in all of
us is when we are in a state of formless, pure, unmanifest absorption (with
no objects or phenomena at all arising). There are no objects arising, and
thus no awareness-of anything, just pure Awareness, what the Nirvana Sutra
calls mahatman, the Great Self, the True Self. And that’s correct. But as
soon as any object arises whatsoever, as soon as any sort of world or
universe or Kosmos arises, that True Self sees that object through the
particular bodymind of each individual (via a gross, subtle, or causal body),
and thus, while perfectly remaining the True Self, it also becomes a Unique
True Self for every individual alive (or dead in the bardo, too, for that
matter). So pure I AMness, the pure Witness, the True Self, even though it
is itself, at its highest, empty of any qualities or characteristics at all, it still
has a unique perspective of and on this world. So your I AMness is both the
one and only single Spirit and Source of this entire world, AND it is an I
AMness that is uniquely yours. It’s what makes you you, this radically and
fundamentally different perspective that you and you alone have, even if it is
the one and only Spirit of the Kosmos looking through that perspective. So
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as you sit back and rest in the Witness, as you rest as I AMness, and allow
the Total Painting of All That Is to fully arise in your field of Awareness,
this pure You-ness is a radically unique You-ness that is also the one and
only Spirit of the entire world. And every sentient being can say that. So
what you have always felt inwardly as that unchanging and ultimate you-
ness is exactly this True Self, this pure I AMness, shining as your Unique
Self.
Now, when you move from turiya to turiyatita, or from the Witness to
unity consciousness, the last vestiges of feeling any sort of self-sense
completely vanish. There is not the self in here versus the world out there—
there is not even the True Self or Unique Self or Supreme Self left, standing
back and Witnessing the entire World—there is only the entire World, but
this World is felt as your own ultimate and radical identity—the Seer and the
seen become one, Self and Other become totally one, you become headless,
and the entire universe is arising within your own being. There is no sense
or feeling of a Self of any sort standing back and witnessing. There is just
the present moment in whatever realm—gross, subtle, causal, emptiness,
nondual—just that moment arising…, and it feels itself, unity experiences
unity, or more technically, nonduality experiences nonduality—subject does
not experience object, rather one taste experiences one taste. There is just all
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of this, and nobody looking at it; just it, just suchness, just isness. The Self
of any sort has collapsed into Suchness. This is not a Unique Self but a
Unique Suchness. You simply cannot find the feeling of anything like a
separate self anywhere, not even a Supreme Self or Ultimate Self. There is
not a Self looking at phenomena, there is only the sum total of all
phenomena is looking at itself, experiencing itself, and you simply feel, not
like a separate Looker or Watcher, but simply all of this as it is arising, just
like this, just as it is, just in its suchness—again, in whatever realm, one taste
experiencing one taste.
This is why, in Daniel P. Brown’s research, this stage of the
Witness—which he calls, remember, “boundless changeless awareness”—is
marked by the last remnant of illusion, which he calls “individuality,” and
that individuality vanishes when you move to next and highest stage, that of
nondual awakened awareness. You see, the Witness or Pure Self or Unique
Self is itself very subtly dualistic; it is the very beginning of the subject
versus object duality—it is Absolute Subjectivity, to be sure, but still a
Subjectivity separate from objects, a Self separate from Other, and thus
fundamentally dualistic (so it does have at least this characteristic, which is
what prevents it from being pure nirguna or unqualifiable Spirit). It is the
highest state that we can get into in this manifest realm, but it is also the last
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and highest barrier to pure nonduality, pure Thusness or Suchness or real
Spirit. Thus, any sense of selfness, even Supreme Selfness, simply vanishes
into the ongoing Present moment, which contains the entire universe within
your ultimate Being—and you do not witness any of that, you simply are
that. Self has collapsed into Suchness; turiya into turiyatita; Absolute
Subjectivity into subject-object oneness (or nonduality); pure
Self-versus-Other into pure Self-Other Oneness, which allows both Self and
Other to arise, but identifies with neither, but rather with their prior,
nondual, unifying Ground.
So this doesn’t mean the Witness—the pure Seer and True Self or
Unique Self—this doesn’t mean that is a bad thing—not at all. Remember,
it is the highest state in the entire dualistic or manifest world—and being the
Witness, or discovering your Unique Self, is certainly better than being the
ego (of the gross realm) or the soul (of the subtle realm) or the Higher Self
(of the causal realm). This is your Highest Self, an inherent radiance of God
or pure Spirit itself. It’s just that you don’t want to stop there, high as that
is. There is a further step you want to take. Zen says you’re at the top of a
100-foot flagpole, and yet you must take one more step. What do you do?
Hmmm?
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Basically, you solve this koan or riddle when you realize the next step
is already taken, it’s already done, you’ve already accomplished it. You are
always already without a head; always already one with everything that is
arising; always already living in the pure Now moment and thus always
already living in eternity; the entire universe is always already arising within
your own true Being. And you know this whenever you feel this
ever-present sense of I AMness pop into embracing and being one with the
entire world arising in front of you right now. Just bam! And you ARE this,
all of this, right here, right now, and forever, endlessly, in this timeless Now.
You’ve already stepped off the 100-foot pole.
So, how can we summarize this gateless gate situation? Several steps:
ego to Self (capital “S”) to Suchness. First, recognize the difference
between your relative conventional self, the separate-self sense, the
self-contraction, the seen self, on the one hand; and, on the other, the real
Self, the Seer, your Unique Self, the pure Witness. The pure Witness lives
in the timeless Now moment, and it is aware of the Total Painting of All
That Is. And the Total Painting means THE TOTAL PAINTING—
absolutely every single thing and event is allowed to arise, just as it is, right
now, moment to moment. And the Witness is simply aware of all of it, with
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no exceptions whatsoever—the Mirror-Mind, the Everything Mind, it turns
away from nothing, it avoids nothing, it chases after nothing. The small self,
the separate-self sense, always has something that it won’t look at—some
thing, image, sensation, event, some something that is just too painful, or too
uncomfortable, or too embarrassing, or too something, and so in this
moment it looks away, it turns away, it moves away—and it’s doing that,
right now, in some fashion—it’s contracting against something in the total
moment, right now—it’s not in a state of 100% Acceptance—and you can
feel it as the self-contraction, the seen-self—and thus contracting, it gets
caught in the world of separation, fragmentation, suffering, pain, sin, and
duality. But the Witness lets it ALL in; the Witness meets each moment
with 100% Acceptance—all-embracing Acceptance of the Total Painting of
All That Is. And you don’t have to work for this; the Witness is already
doing this, right now, all of it, perfectly—you make no effort to see all these
sights arising, you make no effort to hear all these sounds, you make no
effort to have constant sensations, it is all spontaneously and without any
effort occurring right now. All you have to do is rest as that evenly
Witnessing Awareness, which is already existing and already doing that
perfectly—it’s already happening, just notice that Witnessing and then rest
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as that—rest as that boundless, changeless, pure I AMness, the still point in
the center of the cyclone.
And the Witness can do this because the Witness is not any single
thing that it is being aware of—it is totally dis-identified with all that is—
pure nonattachment, nonseeking, nongrasping—pure boundless changeless
Awareness in radical infinite Freedom. The Seer cannot be seen, and
anything seen is not the Seer. The Seer, the Witness, is neti, neti—not this,
not that. Remember the quote from St. Dionysius: it is not Spirit, it is not
demonic, it is not good, it’s not bad; it’s not divine, not sacred, it’s not
profane, either; it’s not knowable or unknowable, not high or low, in or out,
light or dark, not utterable nor nonutterable, not anything that can be known
or seen or felt or touched, it’s not awakened nor ignorant, it’s not big nor
small, heavy nor light, not all-pervading, not timeless, not infinite, not
eternal—it’s none of those, and it’s not their absence, either—it’s radically,
radically unqualifiable—and that means, nothing can be said about it—
including that statement.
This is why resting in the Witness is called by Christian mystics
{quote} “the cloud of unknowing”—it’s a pure Witnessing free of all
identification with anything arising (but technically, that statement, too,
would be denied); St. Dionysius called it {quote} “divine ignorance”; Zen
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calls it “don’t know mind.” The entire Buddhist notion of Emptiness is built
on this. As the founder of that school of Buddhism, the philosopher-sage
genius Nagarjuna, put it, “You cannot say that Reality is Being, nor Not-
Being, nor both, nor neither”—and for “Being” you could say “spirit” or
“Gaia” or “Self” or “implicate order” or “oneness” or “unity consciousness”
or “infinite” or “eternal”—it is not any of those, nor not those, nor both, nor
neither. You get the radically nothingness of it? It is radically Empty of all
qualities (including that one). Your own pure Witnessing right now is empty
of all of those—the Witnessing itself. All of those are concepts, and
concepts only make sense in terms of their opposites—infinite vs. finite,
sacred vs. profane, enlightened vs. ignorant, formless vs. form, spirit vs.
matter—but Reality has no opposite. As Wittgenstein put it, it cannot be
said, but it can be shown. That is, you cannot define or conceptualize or
think or categorize ultimate Reality, but you can directly realize it or
immediately experience it. And that is what practices, like these pointing
out instructions, are meant to do—directly point to that which cannot be
characterized without falling into dualism, which is exactly what it is not—
although that, too, would be denied as a mere statement, and becomes true
only when you directly experience it with pure mirror-mind Awareness.
(And even “experience” is not a great word for this, because all experience
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has a beginning and an end, and usually a subject and an object, and this
Realization has none of that.)
The closest you can get to this pure Seer or true Witness or Real Self
is metaphorically saying that it is simply a feeling of radical Freedom from
everything, a pure Spaciousness or pure Presence in which everything arises
moment to moment, with not a single thing left out, or turned away from, or
moved away from, or looked away from—a 100% Acceptance of the Total
Painting of All That Is, exactly as it is arising right now, and right now, and
right now. But that is not true as a mere statement—even though it is trying
to point beyond dualism, it is itself just a bunch of dualistic concepts. So it
becomes real only when directly experienced or directly realized—beyond
any mere words—by directly resting in this Witnessing Awareness itself (do
that, and you know what it is; describe that, and it’s just mere words). But
then, this spiritual experience is like any experience—all experience, not just
spiritual experience, but ALL experience is ineffable: no experience is
describable in words—listening to Bach music, eating a piece of cake,
watching a sunset, making love, jogging through the park—none of those
can perfectly be described in words, so why should spiritual experience be
any different? So all of the words we use to describe these states are just
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pointers, feeble attempts to point to the moon—just don’t mistake the finger
for the moon.
So falling into the Witness or pure I AMness is metaphorically also
called the Great Liberation; or Moksha—Freedom. It is to directly discover
and fully realize your Unique Self, which is Unborn and Undying Real
Self—unborn, because it never enters the stream of time but exists only in
the timeless Now; and Undying, because having never entered the stream of
time, it never exits, either—it is neither born nor dies in time. It is rather
ever-present—it is the simple feeling of Being that you have right now, the
simple feeling of I AMness that is perfectly present right now, moment to
moment to moment—and you don’t have to do a thing to gain that I
AMness, that simple feeling of Presence that you are perfectly aware of right
now—perfectly. You’re aware of this right now, yes? And this I AMness—
Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I AM”; or the Psalms, “Be still and know
that I AM God”; or when God itself said “Tell them I-AM-that-I-AM has
sent you.” That simple feeling of ever-present I AMness—that immediate—
that absolutely present right now—feeling is indeed said to be one’s
Supreme Identity, an Identity with pure Spirit itself, so that it is, ultimately,
God itself who is looking through your eyes right now, and hearing with
your ears, and touching with your skin. Pure, spaceless or infinite, timeless
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or eternal, true and unblemished Spirit—as a direct realization, not
conceptualization and not even as a typical experience, which has a
beginning in time—this realization is something that is already in your
awareness right now and always has been—a realization that occurs when
you rest as the radically pure Witness, the pure Seer, which cannot be seen
but is doing the Seeing, and is… itself… --that pure Witnessing itself—is not
a thing or event or known or unknown entity, but (metaphorically) the pure
empty Space, the pure Freedom, the pure Awareness in which all of those
items arise—in which the entire world is arising right now—you are that
pure mirror-mind Awareness, and not a single content of that Awareness.
The pure, clear, empty, open, spacious, infinite Expanse, Freedom, or
Spaciousness in which this entire world is arising—the pure, boundless,
changeless, unforced, effortless, transparent I AMness or pure Witness,
radically Free of absolutely Everything—just a pure open empty
Spaciousness or Awareness in which all of this is arising moment to
moment. The first step—from ego to Self—is recognizing and realizing
that. And welcome to your True Self, your Unique Self.
Then the next step of this “gateless gate”—moving from Self to
Suchness—is, while resting in the pure Witness or pure Looker, allow the
feeling of being a set-apart Looker-at-things to simply dissolve into ALL of
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those things. There is not a world out there and a world in here—there is
just one world, and it is arising on this side of your face, within you, exactly
where your head used to be. The reason you are not any single thing or
event in the universe—neti, neti—is because you are every single thing and
event in the universe, equally. You are the ENTIRE world. You are not
only aware of, you are one with, the Total Painting of All That Is. You don’t
see the mountain, you are the mountain. You don’t hear the rain, you are the
rain. You don’t watch the clouds, you are the clouds. You don’t feel the
earth, you are the earth. You certainly are not in this room, this room is in
you. (See that?)
You are the simple Suchness or Thusness or Isness of everything
arising in this moment, everything without any exceptions at all. And this
means that primary level of reality where every single thing and event in the
universe is equally accepted and allowed—from Mother Teresa to Adolph
Hitler to the KKK to the neo-Nazis to Jesus Christ to Gautama Buddha to
Joseph Stalin—the Ground of All Being is the Ground of ALL Being. So
you dissolve into the entire universe as the entire universe arises within you,
on this side of your face, exactly where your head used to be, and there is no
separation between you and the entire world—you can taste the sky, it is that
close; you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, it’s sitting on your
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shoulders. There is no separation, no space, between the Seer and the
seen—the sky has turned into a big blue pancake and fallen on your head.
You ARE ALL of this—the Total Painting of All That Is—and when you
feel yourself, on this deepest level, that is all that you really feel—namely,
ALL of This. This is your real Self and true Suchness. It includes your ego;
it just also includes everything else that’s arising, no distinction. “The
Perfect Way is without difficulty, except it avoids picking and choosing.”
And a wonderful connecting link between the Witness and this state
of unity consciousness is Love, pure Loving Oneness. So as you are resting
as the Witness, letting in the Total Painting of All That Is, radically
Accepting 100% of everything that is arising right now—then feel that
Witnessing Awareness as a Loving Awareness, a Loving Oneness. The
distancing of the Witness is replaced with the intimacy of a One Taste, an
all-pervading taste of Loving Oneness. Allow yourself to Love it all, “the
love that moves the sun and other stars.”
Zen calls this shift {quote} “the bottom of the bucket breaks”—
because the sense of there being a “bottom” or a “back” to your
Awareness—that is, the sense of there being a Looker, a Watcher, a
Witness—just collapses into everything witnessed, the bottom breaks into a
pure Oneness, a pure nondual unity consciousness. If you feel into this
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carefully, wherever you think there is a Looker, there is simply something
being looked at—and then the entire sense of there being a subject and an
object collapses into One Taste. Wherever you think there is a subject,
including an Absolute Subject, there is just a series of objects, and you ARE
those objects, they are arising within you; you and them are one, a pure
loving oneness.
And this Loving Oneness is unfolding in this timeless Now, to this
timeless Now, to this timeless Now. As Erwin Schroedinger, the cofounder
of modern quantum mechanics, put it, “The Present is the only thing that has
no end.” The entire universe is arising within you in a timeless eternity—
and this is your Ultimate Condition and true Suchness.
So, is the “gateless gate” really there? Yes and no. Yes, there is a
gate, in the relative sense that, even though you are always already this
Loving Eternal Oneness, you can indeed, in an illusory fashion, forget this,
or deny it, or ignore it. And therefore, as the Taoists put it, “If there is no
training at all, then one remains an ignoramus.” In almost all cases, each of
us needs at least some pointing out instructions, some spiritual practice, in
order to re-member and re-cognize and re-collect our True Condition. But
one of the first things that we see when we finally walk through this gateless
gate is that the gate isn’t really there—in reality, we were always living in
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this state of eternal Oneness, and our Awareness was always only aware of
the timeless Now and that True Condition. The illusory world, as illusion,
never really happened—even though we dreamt, imagined, that it did—
which is actually, and simply, what Spirit itself did in order to create this
manifest universe in the first place. It had to forget that it was Spirit, even
though, of course, it actually remained Spirit and the forgetting was just a
dream, just an illusion, just a game.
Imagine you were pure Consciousness—you were 100% conscious 24
hours a day, and one of your days was a thousand ordinary years. After
billions and billions of years of that, maybe you get a little tired of that, yes?
So you might decide, “I know, I’ll drop this constant Consciousness, and I’ll
pass out—I’ll fall asleep, I’ll dream entirely different worlds, and I won’t
know it’s me doing it until I wake up.” And so you fall asleep, and sleep for
8 hours, and in that dream state you have some wonderful experiences and
sometimes some really frightening experiences. You wake up, and you’re
like, “Wow, that was wild. It was certainly different! I’m going to do that
again.” And so you each night for many years you sleep, and you dream.
Sometimes you dream of wonderful events—having fame or fortune or
being in orgies or traveling various worlds; and sometimes the events are
horrible—people starving, being tortured and killed, their bodies ravaged by
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unspeakable illnesses and endless suffering. But the waking-up part is so
good, you keep doing it. And then finally one day you make a huge
decision. Instead of going to sleep for just 8 hours, you’ll go to sleep and…
you won’t put an end-limit on how long you sleep. And…. here we all are.
Dreaming away….
But this is why the stories of the realized God-men or God-women
throughout history are always so paradoxical. I mean, doesn’t it strike you
as just a little funny that, if Christ is the one and only Son of God, there is
actually ever any doubt that things will turn out okay for him? And this is
particularly a weird situation if you are a fundamentalist Christian, and only
Jesus is allowed to be the Son of God. Your job, as a believing Christian, is
to follow Jesus’s example as perfectly as possible, but you don’t get to be
the Son or Daughter of God—you’re just you, yet you’re supposed to act
exactly like somebody whose Dad was the Father of the entire universe. It’s
crazy, it’s insane—as many fundamentalists are. But the mystics are
virtually unanimous that the real message of Jesus is that we are ALL the
sons and daughters of God—as Meister Echkart put it, “The Father gives
birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth—me, his
Son and the same Son.” The same Christ-consciousness, exactly. But it’s
all a joke, it’s a game, it’s an illusion. Ultimately, the gateless gate isn’t
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there—but we can only see that by passing through the illusion of the gate to
begin with. Christ, the Son of God, still had to die on the cross. Could that
be any grosser, or any more telling?
So that’s the paradox of liberation. In reality, we are always already
liberated, but we have managed to get in a position where that is not totally
obvious to us, and thus, even though {quote} “if there is any training in the
Tao, the completion of that training marks the destruction of the Tao,”
nonetheless, {quote} “if there is no training, one remains an ignoramus.”
So the final word is: work hard as hard as you can in order to
accomplish something that does not need to be done. And I hope these
pointing out instructions have helped you, at least a little bit, along that
unnecessary journey. A journey whose goal is too simple to believe, too
close to be grasped, too present to be accomplished, too Now to be attained.
Okay, it’s time for me to begin winding this down. And you all have
been great to hang in there for all of this. I really hope it hasn’t been too
dreary. There’s only one last point I’d like to make. We’ve briefly
discussed it earlier, but I’d like to end with it. It’s not enough merely to be
traditionally Enlightened or to have reached a stable nondual unity
consciousness—although that Waking Up is clearly absolutely important.
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But think back—when you were in your headless nondual unity state (the
highest state-stage development in Waking Up)—or if you’re still in it—
simply notice that you can be at almost any level of structure-stage
development (that is, any level of Growing Up)—you could be in that
headless unity state and be at magic, or mythic, or rational, or pluralistic, or
integral—and yet you would still have this sense of being one with your
world. But again, if your world only included up to, say, mythic-literal,
there are still “over your head” the entire realms of the rational world, the
pluralistic world, the integral world and higher. You will remain
ethnocentric, and thus actually of limited help with the wicked problems of
human solidarity, ending war, joining into group harmony, acting on global
issues including global warming, global poverty, global epidemics, and other
worldcentric problems, as well as advancing genuine world peace across the
board—you might, in fact, attempt to prevent some of them, because they
help everybody and not just your group or sex or race or belief system or
nationality or particular spiritual path. Enlightenment on its own does not
help—it must be accompanied by increased levels of development in
Growing Up. Love of course is central—but there is egocentric love,
ethnocentric love (Nazis loved their families), worldcentric love, and
Kosmocentric love. Just saying, “All you need is love” is categorically
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useless and often just wrong. Just how inclusive you can be depends on
your level of Growing Up, not just Waking Up. The unity consciousness
itself depends on Waking Up; just how many are in the unity depends on
Growing Up. Waking Up is given to us, free and ever-present, and we
should never forget that or proceed without that realization; but Growing Up
we have to work for—and we shouldn’t forget that, either. States are free;
structures are earned.
Both of those are crucial—and this is certainly a major item we would
want to leave you with from this exquisite gathering of integral souls,
looking at Christianity. Christianity is now the world’s largest religion—as
we noted, 1 out of 3 people on the planet buy some version of this religion
(and usually, of course, it’s a mythic-literal version). But this is one of the
single most important points that individuals, concerned with how to help
the world move forward, should put right at the top of their list of important
items. Because we can certainly say that without getting the major Great
Religious Traditions into a place where they can help implement the
conveyor belt (from egocentric to ethnocentric, and then beyond that to
worldcentric and Kosmocentric), then whether they are actually helping or
actually hurting humanity can be answered in a not very positive fashion,
I’m afraid to say.
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This gives individuals—who want to see spirituality play a genuine
role in the coming transformation—this gives them a real course of action
that might actually make a real difference. But without acting from this
more integral and inclusive view—including both Waking Up and Growing
Up—then the deeply ambivalent, even harmful, impact of religion on the
world remains most likely. In its ethnocentric and lower forms, religion has
indeed been—and remains—the greatest source of war, torture, and murder
in humankind’s history; it’s time to help move it to those levels where it can
become what it has always been to its greatest saints and sages—the single
strongest source of an infinite, radiant, all-embracing Awareness,
Consciousness, and Love, the love that really does move the sun and other
stars. “Let this consciousness be in you that was in Christ Jesus, that we all
may be one….” Now, finally, with Integral Spirituality, we have a much
better idea of how to do that….
Thank you!