Open Enlightenment

Building a New Tradition: Part 3

Relevant links:

Governance

Cohousing (also see the UK Cohousing Network)

Holacracy

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Building a New Tradition: Part 2

Relevant links:

Commune movement

The Farm

Stephen Gaskin

Guru

G.I. Gurdjieff

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Building a New Tradition: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

A week ago I was fortunate enough to be joined in my flat by Vinay Gupta, inventor of the Hexayurt, founder of the Bucky Ghandi Design Institution, editor of The Future We Deserve, and state-failure guru, where we explored the various aspects of organisation and infrastructure necessary to develop my ideas for a new enlightenment tradition.

I video’d the conversation using my Flip HD, which has a narrow focus so you’ll have to excuse my head being partially in shot, and after ruthlessly editing down the talk I can now present the best bits in a 20 minute video.

I know what you’re thinking: without some violence, tits or CGI to hold your attention, you’re going to find it difficult to concentrate for that long. And that’s why I’ve also cut the film up into small bite size chunks, the first of which you will find below the full length film. I intend to post a new segment (of which there are 3 more) over the coming days (it might also make for a more structured conversation around the points made in each segment).

So if you’re feeling brave (or you’re particularly interested in this topic) here’s the full thing:

Building a New Tradition: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta from Alan Chapman on Vimeo.

Alternatively, here’s Part 1:

Relevant links (for part 1):

Lahiri Mahasaya

Earth ships (one example of off grid sustainable living)

Right livelihood

Note: In the video, we touch upon stepping away from a ‘corrupt economic system’. It should be emphasised that this is not a knee jerk and all too common reaction within the ‘spiritual scene’ to money in and of itself; rather, the current economic model or system is what is being called in to question and rejected wholesale. I’m all in favour of investigating initiatives such as the Totnes Pound or even a Resource Based Economy, but exploring alternatives such as these are a natural conclusion if we take a mindful approach to money, our behaviour and the consequences of our spending seriously. Check out Hokai Sobol talking about this topic over at Buddhist Geeks.

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Alone With Ghosts

Fancy a change from your usual meditation practice? Give this a try:

He who practices sadhana is supposed to go at night to a deserted house, a mountaintop, or a cemetery. There he must sit astride a corpse that has been laid on its belly, facing north. He must draw on the corpse’s back a graphic symbol (yantra), usually an inverted triangle, representing Shakti. At this point he evokes elementary forces by reciting mantras and by projecting prana in the corpse with the purpose of animating it… If the rite is successful, this force actually manifests itself in the corpse, whose head will then spin around and speak to the apprentice. The apprentice must be able to impose his will right away on the ‘ghost.’ This practice is considered terrifying and most dangerous. [1]

Maybe it’s not so easy in modern times to dig up a fresh corpse as it may once have been. But suppose that wasn’t the case and you had the means – are you up for it?

Even supposing the head doesn’t turn around and speak (which I imagine is quite likely), this would still be probably one of the most frightening experiences of your life. Even to reach the point where you had proved to yourself the spell didn’t work, you would have to master a massive whack of fear that it just might.

And if the corpse actually did turn around and speak? Well, then you’d have to master a whole whack more…

On Halloween this year I’ll be doing my own version of this ritual. I’ve arranged to spend the night all alone and in the dark in a very haunted place: The Old Police Cells Museum, in the basement of Brighton Town Hall.

Some of the cells have been renovated and turned into a museum, but the remainder are still derelict. They were in use throughout the 19th century, right up until the 1960s. A police chief was murdered there in the 1840s, and who knows how many poor souls died or languished down there in misery. No wonder the place has a reputation for being vigorously haunted.

I’ve wondered for a while about making a point of facing my fear and doing something like this, so I’ve decided to collect sponsorship for the challenge. The proceeds will be split between the museum and the local branch of a national mental health charity, Mind.

I’ll have a night-vision camera for company, but I’m not planning a ‘paranormal investigation’. Instead, I want to see how good my meditation skills are at dealing with fear.

I recently read an account by a paranormal investigator of his most frightening moment. He fled from a house after being physically attacked by a poltergeist:

As I stood in the back garden I contemplated my future in paranormal research. I thought I had been in acceptance that such phenomena existed but apparently not. I had been fooling myself! This was all a bit too real for me… [2]

Fear and reality go hand-in-hand. We can’t fear something unless it becomes real; fear of something that isn’t real we instead call ‘worry’ or ‘anxiety’, whereas – as in the example above – the more real something becomes (especially when it hasn’t quite been recognised before) then the more incredibly, mind-blowingly scary it suddenly is.

But where is ‘real’ when we look at it in our experience? A sensation of reality involves things becoming vivid and impactful. Yet if things are not vivid or impactful, is our experience therefore less or only partially real?

I don’t think so. If it were, then we couldn’t recognise non-vivid experiences as being real – and yet we do. Also, the opposite couldn’t happen either: an experience such as travelling at speed would never cease to be vivid – but of course, over time it does.

Reality is not a concrete quality that experiences do or don’t have, but a description of our relationship to experience. In sensations of threat, awe or powerlessness the causes of these feelings spring into vivid relief as being ‘out there’ and a strong sense of reality is initiated. But this feeling of reality is just the flip-side of the sense of self; generally, the less there is of self, the more reality – and vice versa. But the fact we can recognise and shift between either implies that both are there, bound up in each other. It’s the habit of drawing a dividing-line in different places that makes some experiences feel more real than others.

Now, I’m not saying that being punched in the back by a poltergeist didn’t happen to the paranormal investigator, or wasn’t real, or that he was chicken. But although you can change your circumstances (by running into the garden, for instance) there’s never anywhere to hide from experience. Everything in experience is always how it seems, whether that means things feel vague, or else that things are far too weird or vivid to bear. Fear is what arises when we assume we can somehow hide from experience. If we remain accepting of experience then fear will not arise – and if it does, then we should accept that too.

I’d say it wasn’t quite the case that our paranormal investigator didn’t believe poltergeists were real; he did, I’m sure, but it was the experience of being punched by one that drove him into the garden. Who can say they wouldn’t have reacted the same?

Will I be able to spend a night in haunted cells without cacking my pants? I doubt it. It’s going to take every gramme of willpower to keep me down there. Hopefully, the even worse prospect of letting down my sponsors will keep me standing firm(ish). But if I’m able to make use of them, there should be plenty of opportunities to work with my fear.

I’ve set up a new blog for this project, with more information, a diary of the build-up to the event, and various observations on the paranormal. Drop by if you’re interested – and wish me luck!

References

[1] Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992), p. 96.

[2] Steve Mera, ‘The Invisible Assailant’, Paranormal Magazine, 50 (August 2010), p. 51.

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How to experience enlightenment

How to experience enlightenment from Alan Chapman on Vimeo.

Better late than never, eh? Videos should be more frequent from now on.

My last video transformed the blog into a forum, and amongst many other terrible accusations thrown my way I was rather confusingly compared to Andrew Cohen. Let’s see where this one takes us…

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Everything I’ve Discovered (So Far) About The Astral, Etheric and Physical

In the Western esoteric tradition we have the concepts of the physical, the etheric and the astral, which can be roughly defined by the common-language terms: ‘body’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’.

These represent three planes of existence across which human experience is organised. In Buddhism there are the similar concepts of the three kayas (or ‘bodies’): nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya and dharmakaya, but these don’t map quite so tidily onto body, soul and spirit.

Nirmanakaya is perhaps equivalent to ‘physical’, but sambhogakaya embraces both ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, etheric and astral. Dharmakaya, meanwhile, is a term unique to Buddhism: it represents the plane of experience (or the ‘body’) made available to an enlightened being by his or her realisation of emptiness. There is no simple, single equivalent for this term that I’m aware of within western esotericism.

All of these terms cause confusion and uncertainty – at least within western esotericism, where the most common problem is the difficulty distinguishing between the etheric and the astral. There is another rough correspondence that can help clear this up to a certain extent, the correspondence of etheric and astral with (respectively) emotion and thought, but it’s often difficult to separate our feelings from our thoughts in practice, because both appear similarly ‘mental’ in contrast to physical sensations.

Another common issue is that these concepts are treated as if that’s all they were – just concepts. In fact, they are planes of experience and concepts belong to only one of those planes of experience – the astral. So if we treat these ideas simply as ideas, we limit ourselves to a single plane.

To understand them better, surely it would help if we could find them within our experience and take a direct look at the contrasting roles they play in organising the form that experience takes.

Where are they?

I’ve noticed how, in meditation, there are certain limits imposed on understanding. The greatest of these is the realisation of emptiness, beyond which human understanding is unable to penetrate.

Because emptiness cannot be reduced to a concept, this does not mean that it cannot play any part in human life. It can, but it requires development of the dharmakaya (i.e. the experience of enlightenment) in order for us to participate in those experiences.

What have here is a limit imposed by something that seems to cut across our experience, yet in which – at the same time – we also participate. The realisation of emptiness enables us to see at once how we are cut off from the absolute (because we are relative beings), and yet also how we particpate in the absolute as relative expressions of it.

Development of the dharamkaya usually entails dedicated practice and may not arise naturally. The astral, etheric and physical bodies, in contrast, are available to everyone as given. These too share the characteristic of cutting across or imposing a limit on our experience, yet at the same time providing a new plane of existence in which we can participate.

The astral

In a recent article on the nature of thinking, I pointed out how thoughts are unique in mental life in that we can take it as given that when we are thinking of a certain thing then we are truly thinking of that and not of anything else. Thought is self-validating in the way that if we think of the number five, then we know it is actually five that we are thinking of, and that we cannot be thinking of four or six.

This is in fact a limitation on our experience, but we are so accustomed to it we rarely notice. The self-validating nature of thoughts is what can seduce us into mistaking them for something solid or real. Yet this self-validating aspect is also what allows thinking because, to think, what arises must be limited to what it seems to be.

This limitation marks the entry to the astral: things take on a definite individuality and meaning. And if a thing has a meaning, then symbolisation of that thing also becomes possible. The astral realm is the realm of self-validating, self-sufficient, meaningful and symbolic things.

Compare thinking with dreaming, for instance. Or compare thinking with not thinking at all. Look at thinking in meditation, and it’s possible to see how thinking entails restraint on the mind, yet opens up the possibility of a new kind of participation in experience. By limiting the mind we gain the ability to think.

It begins to become apparent how a human being is a creature whose experience is structured, but this organisation is what gives us a paradoxical freedom. By being made by this structure to think, we acquire the freedom of thought.

The etheric

The etheric is more difficult to notice, but it can be found within our experience at the level of what the Buddhists call ‘formations’. These are raw impressions of things. When the mind is still we can catch them appearing – or, rather, catch the mind assuming the posture that lends them their form.

A formation is raw ‘mind stuff’. It’s like a kind of eddy or whorl or lattice of amalgamated sensations and impressions.

Imagine holding a lump of ice in your hand. Imagine the complex packet of impressions that will arise: cold, smooth, stinging, sharp, angular, dense, slippery, wet, hard… That ‘packet’, overall, assumes a certain form. That form is ‘ice’ in the mind. Poets and artists are very often people who are particularly sensitive to this level of experience.

In meditation we meet a limit when we attempt to probe why a certain appearance assumes the form that it does. There is no answer; things assume their form because if they assumed another then they would be something else.

The form that things take in the mind is arbitrary, in that we have no control or insight into how things appear. But once again this apparent limitation confers a higher freedom. The form things take is imposed, yet this imposition enables us to recognise individual things. The etheric is where form and individuality become possible. We enter a world of separate-seeming things, because of the mind’s inflexibility in the way it presents impressions.

The etheric is the level of form, individuality and immediate experience. It includes feelings and emotions, because these are unreflective responses – they arise, and whatever their cause they are just the way they are. (Unlike thoughts, which progress, develop and spawn corollaries.) Psychic phenomena and morphic resonance are also at this level, because this is where the instances of things are plucked from the flux in which, otherwise, everything is joined.

The physical

The physical is perhaps the most counterintuitive of all the levels because, contrary to the consensus view, it’s the level to which we have least access. In fact, we have no direct sensory access to this level at all.

The physical world comes at us through the body. Let’s suppose we see something, or we feel a touch on our arm – do we experience this sensation in the arm or eye? No. Instead, we somehow experience it as coming from ‘out there’ and arriving ‘in here’. Furthermore, it comes to us not simply as a sensation but it always pertains to something.

We can experience physical sensations only because they are mediated up to us through the etheric and astral levels. They have a form, a meaning, and are experienced via the mind. If a physical sensation had no feelings or thoughts associated with it, then what would be left? If we were truly to have direct access to the physical world then our experience of it would have to be unmediated, and in that case we could no longer maintain a difference between our body and any other physical object.

In meditation we can meet the limit that defines this level if we turn our attention to the qualities presented by experience. For instance, say we experience a sensation of heat: does the sensation of heat that arises actually possess the quality of hotness?

It’s perplexing and counterintuitive at first, but looking closely we see that no, it doesn’t. And the same applies to all physical sensations. The sensation of heat that arises in us is not itself hot; the sensation of wetness that arises is not itself wet; the sensation of greenness that arises (and this is the hardest one, perhaps) is not green. To put it in the terms of orthodox vipassana, we might say that although, of course, greenness is green, yet this thing that arises as my sensation of greenness has its own characteristics: impermanent, insufficient, devoid of any essence. If we look closely and hard enough we can clearly see how the sensation of greenness itself is not the same thing as the quality of being green that it conveys.

The raw experience of greenness is on the etheric level, and the recognition of greenness is on the astral. The physical, meanwhile, is inhabited by the sensation of qualities, but these sensations do not themselves possess those qualities; they are representatives of them.

The astral, etheric and physical are like linings of a spacesuit that every human must wear in order to experience life on earth. The physical is the outermost layer of the spacesuit, a membrane where impressions from the outside world indeed are transformed into precisely that – impressions. If they weren’t impressions, but we had direct access to the physical, this would not be a spacesuit supporting a human life.

The limit that prevents us from direct access to the physical, but confronts us with representations instead, therefore grants us the paradoxical freedom of experience itself.

Materialists and scientists often claim that they deal with physical reality. In fact, they deal almost exclusively with the astral level, which is the domain of meaning and truth. If there were direct access to the physical world there wouldn’t be any need for theories. Yet it wouldn’t be possible for theories to be disproved and more truthful models to be discovered. It is always models and theories that are disproved on the astral level of experience, with no immediate connection to physical reality.

Unnecessary

Specific recognition of these levels is unnecessary for the experience of enlightenment to occur. Astral, etheric and physical (or ‘meaning’, ‘form’ and ‘quality’ as we might also paraphrase them) are components of human experience. But experience itself (no matter what level) has certain characteristics. Earlier I mentioned the three characteristics of the vipassana meditation tradition: impermanence, insufficiency and lack of essence. You could describe these characteristics in other ways, but however you cut it, the experience of enlightenment will depend on realising those characteristics for yourself, leading to a depth of insight that can be applied on each and every level.

Take a plane

To find the astral investigate: How do I know that I am really thinking this and not something else?

To find the etheric investigate: What form does an impression take and why not another?

To find the physical investigate: Does a sensation possess the quality that it conveys?

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Occult Experiments in the Home

This post is a shameless plug for my book on magick and the paranormal, Occult Experiments in the Home, which has recently been published.

The connection between paranormal phenomena, spirituality and enlightenment is a topic that has long been close to my heart. I never suspected that a childhood fascination with ghosts, UFOs and tarot cards would lead me to a serious engagement with Buddhism, meditation and the nature of reality.

Intuitively we recognise certain experiences as ‘paranormal’, yet the apparent causes of these experiences contradict rationality. Magick, meanwhile, is a set of practices that set out on purpose to bypass rationality, in order to shape experience according to the magician’s will. Magick – in other words – is a means of creating the paranormal.

Take any of the paranormal reality shows that are quite common on television these days. It’s pretty obvious that the presenters of these shows are hyping up situations in order to create the very type of experiences they supposedly set out to ‘investigate’. If only these shows weren’t so constrained by the demands of the entertainment industry, we’d see quite clearly that they are contemporary examples of magick in action.

Yet magick has uses that far exceed television shows. Magick intervenes directly in the processes that create reality. What we experience as reality is not seamless and given, but the product of a linked chain of processes. In Buddhism this chain is called ‘dependent origination‘ and is the subject of highly detailed exposition. For the purposes of practical magick, however, a far simpler model usually suffices: desire shapes belief, which shapes perception, which shapes reality.

For many magicians, reshaping reality is the extent of their practice and many of them end up spending their lives simply and repeatedly bending reality in order to realise their desires. But magick takes its place among the world’s genuine spiritual traditions when its principles are applied to desire itself, and to the notion of the self that we suppose is the source of those desires.

Every magician gains clear and first-hand experience of how reality is a construct, amenable to desire, but few take the logical next step to examine how desire and self are merely constructs too. One means of arriving at this understanding is meditation. In this way, every act of meditation is also an act of magick.

All the major spiritual traditions employ some form of meditation, and also some form of magick as well. Christianity, for instance, uses prayer as the basis of meditation, and various rituals – such as the Eucharist – to invoke the presence of God through magical means. The classic Buddhist texts on meditation, Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, also include extensive discussion on cultivation of siddhis or ‘supernormal abilities’. Evidently, meditation and magick are inseparable. You cannot realise what reality truly is (or – rather – isn’t) without realising at the same time the extent to which it can be bent, manipulated and taken apart.

Every meditator practises magick and every person who has experienced enlightenment is a magician.

Magick can be a fast-track to enlightenment – or, at least, a valuable catalyst to the process, because it demonstrates so vividly to the practitioner the utterly fabricated nature of reality. Whenever we bypass or bend reality with magick, a paranormal experience is the result. A paranormal experience is the strongest possible assurance of and motivation toward the realisation that reality is all made up.

The spiritual traditions differ markedly in their attitudes towards the usefulness of the paranormal. Western magick, of course, places it right up front: first, take reality apart; next, the self. But the risk here is that we have so much fun bending the world to our desires that we never bother to look very hard at what we suppose is doing the bending.

Other traditions ban their students from any reality-bending altogether, until they’ve made headway first in understanding the nature of the self. The risk here is that by denying them access to magick, students never have the powerful experiences that can propel them over the hump of over-conceptualisation and give them the motivation and understanding required to examine the self effectively.

The paranormal plays an integral, subtle but easily overlooked role in the development of authentic spirituality. This is the basic theme I develop in the book and trace through a variety of types of paranormal experience. If this appeals to you, then I hope you might give it a look.

It’s available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, or from wherever you prefer to buy books.

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Being Ordinary Interview: Life, the Universe and Everything

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Being Ordinary‘s Tom Buckley-Houston. Tom has done a wonderful job in editing down our very long discussion into a listenable interview. Although I talk about some of things I already touch on in this video, we end up discussing a diverse range of topics including astronauts, direct vs developmental paths and even the future of the human species. Check it out here!

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Before, During and After Awakening

Q: What was it like before, during and after enlightenment? – Chris Marti, Jackson, Ceri, plus many more OE readers…

Before, During and After Awakening from Alan Chapman on Vimeo.

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God Does Not Exist: Some Thoughts on Anselm’s Ontological Proof

Obviously, God doesn’t exist. But this is not to be mistaken for a statement of atheism, because consider: if God did exist then, like everything that exists, It would be inside the universe and part of the creation rather than creative.

If God existed It would have characteristics, in which case other things would be comparable with It. Many of the problems of orthodox religion, such as how God can be omnipotent or good, given the presence of evil in the world, are created by naively attributing characteristics or existence to God.

Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) ontological proof of the existence of God is an example of this error. God, argues Anselm, is by nature perfect, in which case It must possess the characteristic of existence else It would be lacking something (i.e. existence). Thus God, being by nature perfect, therefore must exist [1].

There’s nothing more human than wanting to bring God closer and make It ‘real’, but therein lies the source of Anselm’s error. A human being exists. To remove our existence is to take away all our characteristics. Without existence we cannot be a self, and the self is that which needs to exist. However, self is transcended when our dependence on existence is recognised and we understand how the self (unlike God) subsists only in things as a creation and is not itself creative. In other words, we draw closer to God on realising how the self does not exist.

Anselm Of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Anselm recognised that God is ‘perfect’, dependent on nothing, absolute, but his argument attempts to draw down God rather than encouraging us in the necessity to rise to It. God’s perfection is neither threatened nor completed by the possession of existence, because the instant that something exists it becomes dependent, contingent, relative to all things.

The absolute Itself does not lack or require existence because existence is the producer of lack, the basis of the need in things to assume an appearance of self.

The Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking (1911–1994) devised a parody of Anselm’s argument, which uses similar premises to arrive at the opposite conclusion: the non-existence of God. It goes like this:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore, God does not exist.

Rather than a joke or parody, I consider this a good working description of the nature of the divine.

Note

[1] Here’s a translation of Anselm’s argument in full from chapter two of his Proslogion:

[W]e believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God? But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak – a being than which nothing greater can be conceived – understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist. For it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, another to understand that the object exists. For when a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding be he does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, he both has it in his understanding and he understands that it exists, because he has made it. Hence even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly, that than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater. Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

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