Open Enlightenment

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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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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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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Insanity and Awakening

How do we know that people who declare themselves ‘enlightened’ or ‘awakened’ aren’t simply dupes of mental illness?

A common symptom of schizophrenia, for example, is the delusion that we are the messiah or ‘special’ in some other sense that enables us to see into reality in a way that others cannot. So, to draw the conclusion that those who regard themselves as ‘awakened’ may have lost their sanity seems understandable.

However, a person’s mental life is only an issue when expressed in a way that poses a problem to someone. I sit next to a guy at work who believes the world is only six thousand years old. This strikes me as bizarre, considering that his only evidence is the Bible, but it doesn’t pose a big enough problem to himself or anyone else to prompt an intervention. If he decided to stop washing because he knew the world was ending soon, however, then it would probably be a different story.

Mental illness is as mental illness does; it’s never a question only of ideas and individual experience, but always also a question of behaviour and degree. Experiencing awakening is one thing. Telling everyone and setting up a blog is another. Setting up a commercial organisation to teach others is another thing still. In each case there’s the same idea that one has awakened, but it’s the behaviour that results from the idea which calls down a diagnosis to the degree that it poses a problem to others.

In our culture harbouring wacky ideas isn’t a big deal, whereas acting on them or living according to them certainly can be. So too is waving them in other people’s faces. This is the boundary between being ‘eccentric’ and ‘insane’. Eccentricity is tolerable, but attempting to influence the lives of others is overstepping the mark.

My first point, then, is that only ideas which lead to problematic behaviour will be regarded by our culture as ‘ill’. In most cases, someone who experiences awakening will not manifest any untoward behaviour at all. Indeed, most feel happier than they were before and just get on with their lives. They are therefore functioning healthily.

However, the fact remains that messianic ideas feature in mental illness regardless of whether the sufferer acts on them. We still must deal with the question of whether believing oneself to have awakened, or to have gained a special insight into the nature of reality, is not in itself pathological.

The causes of mental illness is a hot topic that I don’t want to get entangled in. I propose to focus on the notion of illness instead. In all instances of disease what we see is rarely the cause itself but its symptoms in the organism. The symptoms of a disease are the attempt of the organism to heal. For instance, the mucus that runs down our nose when we have a cold is not the virus or the action of the virus, but the reaction of our body (inflammation of blood vessels) in its attempt to deal with the infection.

If mental illness is truly an illness, then the delusions of the mentally ill are symptoms. Regardless of what we suppose the cause of the illness (genetic, environmental, spiritual, etc.), the symptoms that arise in the body-mind are an attempt to cope with that cause. So if a runny nose helps combat a cold, what is the benefit to a mentally ill person of the delusion that they are the messiah?

There are two possibilities. We’ve left aside the question of exactly what is attacking or threatening to attack, but we’re presuming that because this is illness then it’s an agent of disease, and because this is mental illness then the ‘site’ of the attack is the mind or that which exerts an effect on the mind. In this event, a delusional idea can help in one of two ways: it can either change our sense of self, or it can change our sense of reality.

In other words, when something threatens our mental balance we can adapt to it by (1) making ourselves a different person from the one to whom the threat applies; or (2) reshaping reality in a way that implies there is no threat.

As an example, let’s say the attack is from a psychological source: a strong feeling of insecurity and inferiority. If I go down route 1, then I might develop psychosomatic illnesses that limit my range of activity. I become an ‘invalid’ who can no longer be expected to achieve the sort of things I formerly demanded of myself. So, by changing the sense of who I am through psychosomatic illness, I’ve side-stepped the threat.

A trip down route 2 would be very different. Here, I would simply re-write reality and insist that regardless of appearances I am the new messiah. Everything that happens in my world confirms this: the TV newsreader is talking about me; car registration plates in the street contain hidden kabbalistic messages proclaiming who I am in reality. Again, the threat is side-stepped, but this time by re-writing the external world in a way that ensures the spectre of psychological inferiority never arises.

What we have here is also an illustration of the difference between the two classical branches of mental illness: neurosis and psychosis. In neurosis, reality is left untouched, but the sense of self is re-written. The clinical picture is one of anxiety and misery. In psychosis the self is unhindered, but the space in which it attempts to run free is bought by re-organising reality. The clinical picture is delusion and a loss of boundaries and relationships. Just as in physical disease, symptoms of mental illness are attempts at healing but they are often not solutions. In fact, symptoms can frequently become problems in themselves. Often, it’s not really the disease that kills us but our symptoms.

The Freudian model of neurosis.

To return to our main question, the person who claims they have awakened could indeed be manifesting a neurotic or psychotic symptom. Yet the concept of awakening relates to the standard model of mental illness in a very intriguing way. The person who has awakened talks about their experience in a manner that suggests they have arrived at a new understanding of their identity by gaining an accurate perception of reality. If that were true then both self and reality would have undergone a change. So if this is a symptom, is it neurotic or psychotic – a change to the self, or a change to reality? Evidently it is both. Or maybe neither.

The Freudian model of psychosis.

The classical line between neurosis and psychosis (Freud, 1924), although still observed within the field of mental health today, in practice has proved difficult to draw. Psychiatry has since recognised numerous ‘borderline’ forms of mental disorder that do not sit easily within either psychosis or neurosis. (An example is the fairly recent discovery of ‘personality disorders’.)

This is only to be expected, since the division between neurosis and psychosis rests upon a supposed duality between reality and the self. Ask someone to define the self and you’ll often get an answer along the lines of ‘it’s that which perceives reality’, whereas common definitions of reality often evoke ‘that which continues the way it is when I’m not around’. Yet even logic dictates it cannot be as simple as this, because unless we suppose it somehow stands outside, then the self must be included in reality; and unless we suppose things would seem the same if we had no mind or body, then reality must be regarded as arising from the self.

If awakening doesn’t fit the standard models of mental illness it’s because it hits that model right in its weak spot. The person who has experienced awakening claims to have seen through precisely the dualism which separates reality and the self.

The difference between awakening and mental illness is summed up graphically in an account cited by Ken Wilber of the meeting between Baba Ram Dass and an institutionalised schizophrenic. Ram Dass says:

‘Do you think you’re Christ? the Christ in pure consciousness?’ He says, ‘Yes.’ I say, ‘Well, I think I am too.’ And he looks at me and he says, ‘No, you don’t understand.’ I say, ‘That’s why they lock you up, you see.’ (Wilber 1996: 178)

The ill person makes himself a messiah by preserving his sense of self at the cost of re-writing reality. Because the aim is to preserve the self then there is no room in his reality for more than one messiah. When Ram Dass says ‘I’m Christ too’ the ill person cannot admit this, because it would threaten the sense of identity he is fighting to preserve.

Although Ram Dass, by saying he thinks he too is Christ, appears on the surface as nutty as the guy he’s talking to, the crucial difference is that the world of the awakened person accommodates everyone as the Christ. The world of awakening is more expansive because the awakened person, by seeing through the duality of self and reality, has surrendered each to the other. The Christ is the one who recognises his or her true nature as inseparable from reality (‘I and the Father are one’ [John 10: 30]) and therefore the Christ is not limited to any individual – although many Christians might have something different to say about this, of course!

Some who claim to have experienced awakening are no doubt mentally ill, but in that case their ideas are symptoms. As we have seen, a symptom is an attempt by the organism to heal itself, which is often never completely effective, and so there will usually be other signs that alert us to the presence of disease. In the case cited above, the patient’s refusal to admit that anyone else was like him betrays the symptomatic nature of his ideas and had indeed led to his isolation and incarceration.

When we look closer at the nature of awakening and the models used to demarcate mental illness we see that the models rely on a dualism between reality and the self, whereas awakening claims to have undone precisely this duality. In the light of awakening, the model of mental illness itself appears mentally ill in its insistence on sustaining a duality that creates the phenomena it seeks to describe. Fundamentally, this is why Sigmund Freud was led to his famous quip that the aim of therapy is ‘replacing neurotic suffering with ordinary human misery’, because whilst there is a supposed separation between self and reality then suffering is inevitable. Contrast this with the Buddha’s bold promise of an end to suffering, when self and reality are surrendered into the other at the moment of awakening.

References

Ken Wilber (1996). The Atman Project. Second edition. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

Sigmund Freud (1924). ‘Neurosis and Psychosis’. In: The Pelican Freud Library, volume 10. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

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Discrimination

According to the Western magical tradition, ordinarily we live in Malkuth (Hebrew, ‘The Kingdom’), which is the emanation of Creation furthest removed from the Godhead. To some, this is a cause of major concern; to the rest of us, an assurance we have seats closest to the silliest, weirdest, most diverse and fucked-up stuff that could possibly be allowed to happen.

Each emanation of the Creation has an associated virtue and a vice. In Malkuth the vice to watch out for is avarice or inertia – which makes sense, because there’s so much to distract our attention down here it’s easy to get swept up into things and not let them go. The virtue offered by Malkuth, however, is discrimination. To many this might sound so politically incorrect that we ought to avoid it as well. But no, it’s good to discriminate.

The answer to the Zen koan, 'Where is this?'

Sometimes in comments on this website there’s a tendency toward views such as, ‘It’s all the same thing,’ or, ‘There’s no real dichotomy.’ Sometimes it gets boiled down even further into, ‘All you have to do is watch the breath,’ or even, ‘There’s no need for any questions. Just be.’

When I hear myself sounding like this I check if I’ve fallen into the vice of inertia through neglecting to maintain discrimination. The old saying that ignorance is bliss is presumably also true the other way around. Luckily, when we feel bliss creeping up, we can always stamp it out by discriminating.

It is never bad to think ‘too much’ about enlightenment, spiritual development, or anything else. Go on: think, think, think, question, question, question, doubt, reason, theorise and ponder! Enjoy! Only we must take care not to think wrongly.

Do you really think that thinking will make the Absolute wither and fall away like a raisin that slipped between our fingers down the back of the sofa? Who’s the one with an inflated view of their own thinking: the one who uses thought freely whenever and however, or the one who refrains from doing so, because he or she believes their thinking is so damned awesome it could actually stand between them and the Truth? No, it was not thinking that ever prevented someone from realising something.

What is thinking anyway? Those who have decided it’s ‘bad’ are the least likely to take a good look at it. Many assume that everything which happens in the mind is thought, but the mind is a bizarre zoo of alien animals. Thoughts are only a single species among the creatures that live there. In learning the appearance and habits of the beasts of this internal zoo, discrimination proves itself a virtue.

So let’s think about thinking. Here’s a puzzle: if I’m asked to think of a mountain, how do I know it’s that mountain I’m thinking of and not another?

If this sounds a stupid question, consider if I’d been asked to imagine rather than think. If someone asked me to imagine Mount Everest, say, it’s possible I might have summoned to mind an image of Mount Fuji instead. Or even if someone had asked me to summon my personal memories of my trip to Everest (supposing I’d been), it’s still possible that something might slip into those memories that actually happened the time I went to Fuji, not Everest, or that perhaps never actually happened anywhere at all.

Where imagination and memory are concerned then what we imagine or remember may turn out not to be what we supposed they were. But this is never so with thinking, because when we think then by definition we know what we mean. Thought is self-evident. We cannot think five and discover later that we were actually thinking four. I cannot think about discrimination only to discover later that I was actually thinking about cat food. Thinking is unique among the other processes of our mind in the way it offers self-evidency. Mental images, signs and memories are not self-evident to us in the way our thoughts are. Thinking is the only means by which self-evidency arises.

This makes thinking special and precious indeed. For sure, thoughts can lead us astray from what’s true into what’s irrelevant and false. But without first knowing what we mean – without self-evidency, in other words – then neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’ even gets off the ground.

Mnt. Everest or Mnt. Fuji? Images can mislead. Yet our thoughts afford phenomenological sufficiency.

There is something profoundly human, profoundly mysterious about thinking. We cannot get to the bottom of thinking, but I suspect this is because that for human beings it doesn’t have one. I often feel very pleased with myself going around telling people, ‘There is no self; there is just Emptiness,’ but the inconvenient fact remains that it still looks very strongly to me as if I’m the one having these thoughts at this moment, and that no one else will know unless I go to the bother of blogging them.

I strongly suspect that it is the mysterious process by which thinking creates self-evidency that is also at the root of how the world is full of individual human minds. The notion of a separate self can be exposed as an illusion. The notion of a separate mind, however, endures beyond enlightenment because – although there is no self – minds are individual.

Maybe Descartes shouldn’t have written ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but, ‘I think, therefore I individualize.’

There is no evidence for a self, but there is certainly evidence for the mind: thinking. But to say that thinking makes us individual doesn’t imply there is anything extra ‘doing’ it. Thinking arises spontaneously in human beings; we don’t need and there is not in us anything required to ‘do’ it. Anyone who tries to stop their thoughts learns quickly that it can’t be done. The mind thinks like the lungs breathe.

To reject thought is a flight away from the mind and spirit toward (odd as it might seem at first) the self. But think about it: to cast off thought, the means by which the world becomes self-evident, is to try to opt for something that isn’t here already. It is to trade reality for fantasy. Many suppose that if thinking would stop there could be transcendent peace, but this is the peace of mindlessness. Drink ten pints of beer or chug a couple of valium to produce a similar if less skilful effect.

To find peace through thinking requires discrimination. Pin down thinking to see it for what it is and isn’t. We wouldn’t ever set it aside, once it stands revealed to us as the root of our mysterious individuality, and a uniquely human means of making and changing the world.

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Everything I’ve Discovered (So Far) About Karma and Past Lives

I’ve been doing some work around discovering supposed information concerning my past lives. I’ve written-up elsewhere the methods used and the results obtained, but here I’d like to try to present some of the philosophical issues I’ve encountered concerning the issues of karma and past lives.

The only writer on this topic that I’ve consciously engaged with is Rudolf Steiner, for whom I have a lot of respect. What follows are my own lines of argument extending from Steiner’s ideas. I don’t know where or if the same or similar ideas have been expressed, so if you happen to know I’d be delighted to hear!

* * *

Karma is the answer to a question. It’s missing the point to ask whether karma ‘really exists’. You could ask the same thing about electrons, for instance. Whether electrons ‘exist’ or are ‘real’ is immaterial with respect to the questions that the concept of an electron answers.

The questions answered by karma and past lives concern causality at the level of human life. Rudolf Steiner (2004: 11-26) makes some interesting points on what it means to ask this question at this level, but I’m going to elaborate and extend his argument a lot in what follows.

Steiner suggests that to discover the causes of minerals we need look no further than the geological and chemical forces that determine the mineral world. However, taking a step up the chain of being, plants are open biological systems; to determine why a plant is the way it is we must consider factors such as the external environment and weather – we must take into account space, is how Steiner puts it. With regard to animals, genetics and inheritance comes into play; we look for the cause of an animal in time. But at this point surely (we’d say) genetics plays just as important a role in the understanding of plants? Not quite. Find the causes of a particular plant and these apply to the whole species at any time. But we can’t grasp the causes of a particular animal unless we account for its individual instance, its unique expression of genes in a single organism.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)

As we step up each level of the chain of being, the features of the lower levels apply. (‘Transcend and include’ as Ken Wilber’s mantra goes.) To grasp the causes of the human being, then, we take into account the chemical level (matter), the environmental level (space) and the genetic level (time). But we must also address the level that is unique to humanity: the conscious sense of self-awareness. To grasp causes at this level, Steiner tells us, we must consider the influence of past lives.

I’ll try to account for why by coming at the issue from the perspective of a problem that affects only human beings: mental health. The issue of mental health is a major concern for human beings (although we live currently in an age that likes desperately to pretend this is not the case). When an animal exhibits distress, the causes will be found in its environment. In a human being this isn’t necessarily so. Imagine a traumatic incident in the street – quite probably someone nearby is badly psychologically affected by it, but just as likely another person standing the same distance away recovers from the psychological impact quickly and easily. What is this crucial difference between them? The field of mental health epitomises the complete chaos and uncertainty that surrounds our attempts to answer what constitutes our status as individual beings. In the attempt to formulate appropriate mental health treatments, every kind of answer has been proposed: behaviourism, surgical and pharmaceutical interventions, evolutionary psychology, psychodynamic pychotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, humanist counselling, spiritual therapies, etc. Each of these offers a completely different model of what it is that makes a person unique. These schools of thinking come in and out of fashion seemingly depending on the dominant political views and technologies available at the time. Some have argued it is purely culture that shapes our definitions of what it means to be human, healthy and sane. Yet what is ‘culture’ other than the influence of the dead upon the living? What produces culture other than the karma of previous human lives?

All the forms of psychology mentioned above are sets of ideas distracting us from their own nature as karma. They are not simply answers to the question of what it means to be human but also expressions of it. Any or all of them can provide a solution in certain circumstances, but none of them stands outside the flow of karma. Every view, every idea is a voice in the mind speaking from the dead, from past lives. It is in this sense that the causes of human destiny at the level of the human lie in karma and oblige us to consider past lives.

It is common for people currently to attempt to trace karmic occurrences to genetic predisposition. This might be suitable in the case of animals, but not for human beings. Something vital will be left out of account because although a human personality may indeed be a mixture of given traits, it also consists of reactions to and accommodations of those traits. It is common to insist that these also are simply further inherited predispositions, in which case this line of argument leads to an extreme form of genetic determinism. But suppose, for instance, I inherit my father’s angry temper (supposing this is possible, genetically speaking); it doesn’t mean I must express or deal with my temper in the same way that my father did. Education plays a dominant role also in the development of the human personality, so much so that not even the most hardened genetic determinist would advocate that we should do away with it. Once again: what is education other than the transmitted messages of past lives?

Previous incarnations must be admitted if we are to grasp the causative agents of human actions and destiny. But in what sense are these past lives ‘mine’? The paradoxical answer is that, of course, they’re not, which is precisely what enables them to exert an influence on me. Because I am human and therefore individual, other human individualities can have an effect on me. If I were not individual as a human being, then there could be no other human individualities to shape my existence, and nothing in me anyway that was open to being shaped. Rocks and plants and animals are exactly like this: they have nothing to teach or learn from other members of their type. Human life, on the other hand, is unthinkable without mutuals causation between us. The lives and personalities of the dead are by definition embedded in every human life, so a past life is ‘mine’ to the extent it has an effect on me. Without an effect there is no connection. Whether I remember a past life or not is immaterial, because it has an effect in either case. Only if I want to understand my karma is it necessary to recognise consciously a past life.

Although from here it’s now possible to see how past lives affect the current life and our destiny, we are still left with a problem concerning individuality. Karma from a past life could conceivably impact on more than one future incarnation. Are each of these future incarnations justified therefore in viewing the previous one as ‘theirs’? Is everyone born into Western culture, for example, to some extent a reincarnation of Newton, Shakespeare or Christ?

This would only be the case if we supposed that karma constituted a ‘self’ or defined our individuality. Karma may be the determining factor in how our destiny is lived out, but that is not the same as saying that karma is what does the living. The human individuality that returns to earth in each instance of a human being is, paradoxically, the same in each different person’s case – or else they would not be human. Any idea we attempt to form to grasp this individuality is itself karmic and immediately produces effects. Yet, as we’ve seen, our human individuality is that which contends with effects and is not defined by them, otherwise it would not be individual. Neither can it be considered an ‘essence’ or a ‘thing’ that is transferred between lives, because this too would be to impose a form and make determinable what is supposedly, in its nature as an individual, non-determined.

The karma of Newton, Shakespeare and Christ affects us, yet we are not those effects. We are the unconditioned consciousness that makes more karma in contending with those effects. Human consciousness itself is not to be found anywhere in the stream of karma that issues from the evolutionary development of human life.

Consciousness and karma are distinct so that each of us, as a unique instance of the same, is freely engaged in limiting itself.

If all human consciousness throughout time were an orchestra playing a symphony, then the individual life would be a musical theme, and karma would be the performance of each theme on a musical instrument.

The themes arise because, as human beings, we’re musicians; it’s what we do. Some themes are continuations on a theme that came before, but this isn’t necessarily because the new theme sounds exactly the same. In fact, it might be wildly different in its structure or mood, or played upon a different instrument, but what would make it obviously a return of the previous theme depends upon the composition, the demands and rules of the music itself. What never changes is the theme’s arising, and its having a responsiveness or relationship to the context in which it expresses itself (through harmony, discord, counterpoint – or whatever) – but this which remains constant is never included in the performance, it isn’t even audible, and it certainly isn’t the theme itself, whose very nature is to adapt, change and sound distinct in each recurrence.

In the same way that music is composed by linking different themes through what in itself remains invariant and silent, so the contrasting natures of karma and consciousness admit the possibility of individual consciousness repeatedly returning, yet expressing its karma differently on each occasion.

It seems doubtful that the process of its return demands recognition in everyday consciousness, just as a composer doesn’t need to be aware in detail of the factors that make a piece sound ‘right’ (or not). In fact, this is an issue for the performer, the person who must deal with what the composer has sent their way. If we can recognise and understand our karma through our relationship to past lives, then we can try to inhabit fully and make the very best of the current life, in the same way that the performer tries to make the very best music by drawing on both their understanding of the composer’s intention and a mastery of their instrument.

Reference

Rudolf Steiner (2004). Karmic Relationships, volume 1. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press. See particularly the first lecture in this volume, which was given at Dornach, Switzerland, on 16th February, 1924.

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Announcement

Readers of this site may have noticed I’ve been quiet for a while. This is because I’ve spent some time reviewing what I’ve written here so far. It’s not been an easy decision to make, but I’ve now decided that I have not experienced enlightenment after all.

This may come as a shock to some readers, and I hope you will accept my sincere apologies if you feel I have misled you over the previous months. In particular I would like to apologise to our critics on this site, who have kindly been pointing out what has only become obvious to me very recently. If only I’d had the intelligence to recognise the compassion and truth in what they have been telling me all along, this would have saved a lot of uncertainty.

It was looking back and reviewing the content of what I’ve written here that finally brought home to me the truth that not only have I not experienced enlightenment, but I am indeed very wide of the mark of ever doing so. My writing now strikes me as shallow and lacking seriousness. There is too much humour and levity in its tone for someone who has truly had the kind of experiences I once believed that I had had, and too little humility and quietness.

I’m not sure where I go from here. For now I think it’s important to keep the material I’ve written as a potent warning to others seekers on the path against being misled in the way that I have misled myself over the previous months.

I hope this date proves a major turning point in the recognition of what’s true and what’s not.

[Note: That 'date' was April 1st and this post was, of course, my April Fool joke. But hopefully this prank has raised some interesting points for discussion in the comments thread.]

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The Room

I’m not fond of the word ‘enlightenment’ and would prefer something like Nishida Kitaro‘s expression that is translated as ‘religious consciousness’. This would make it clear that what we’re talking about is not a personal attainment but a way of seeing that beings us into alignment with the Absolute. However, its disadvantage is that ‘religious consciousness’ still sounds like a state of mind. And – of course – it contains the endemically misunderstood word ‘religion’. But its biggest disadvantage of all is that if I talked about ‘religious consciousness’ then people might think, ‘Oh, that’s what he means. I thought for a moment he was talking about enlightenment, but of course that would be ridiculous!’

You have to experience enlightenment to know what it means. Someone who says that enlightenment is ‘boundless compassion’ probably hasn’t experienced it, although they may have experienced boundless compassion. Someone who says enlightenment is ‘a perfectly still and tranquil mind’ probably hasn’t experienced it, although they may have experienced a perfectly still and tranquil mind. It sounds stupid to say it, but only a person who has experienced enlightenment has experienced enlightenment, rather than what they suppose the effects of enlightenment to be. If a person who hasn’t experienced enlightenment experienced enlightenment, the discovery that it’s only the realisation of the Absolute (and not any of Its relative effects) would probably disappoint them, because it takes someone who has experienced enlightenment to appreciate what enlightenment is.

So what the hell is it, then?

Well, imagine that there is a room and the room is a metaphor for your experience. In the room are furnishings and objects and these are your experiences. While they are in the room they are part of your awareness. Yet the person who has experienced enlightenment sees how the removal of everything from the room is not the absence of experience, but the experience of absence. The person who has experienced enlightenment can see how the emptiness of the room is what enables things to appear inside it. These things include the person who has experienced enlightenment, who recognises himself as something that can appear in the room because the room is empty. The person who has experienced enlightenment sees how the room appears simply the way it already is, because it’s so empty that even he isn’t in it.

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The Gesture

What is ‘understanding’?

Forget those theories of the brain making a picture to itself of the world, and that picture playing the role of truth, and its manufacture constituting the act of understanding. Forget that tedious dualist crap, because it’s clueless and will make you miserable.

We don’t learn a foreign language by learning correspondences between words, but by immersion in the culture where it is spoken. We learn Chinese only by becoming, to the extent we can, Chinese ourselves.

Understanding is not a representation in the mind or brain but a penetration of consciousness by the thing understood. There’s a French proverb, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, which translates as ‘to understand all is to forgive all’. Understanding is a surrender of self, indistinguishable in many respects from compassion and love.

The world of spirit opens when we recognise our perception of the rose is a part of the rose, not a part of or a picture in our mind. No great artist ever painted a picture of anything. Instead they let the thing into themselves, accommodated it, aligned themselves with it, were penetrated by it. This is seeing.

So how do we learn to see?

Vipassana meditation is one method. Boiling it down to a single mental gesture, I’d sum it up as this: include.

Next time you’re in the meditation hall, listen out for people getting it wrong. Fidgeting is the sound of failure. We go wrong when we react to discomfort; instead include the experience of discomfort into awareness.

Snoring is another sign. Deal with sleepiness by including the experience of sleepiness into awareness. This may involve actually falling asleep – as long as you include the experience of that too, which you can, once you get good at it.

Sighing is a common but subtle sign. The person who sighs has noticed their attention has wandered. They rouse themselves from this ‘break’ and the sigh is a token of steeling themselves for setting off again. But steeling the self is just another word for ego contraction. The vital thing is not to oppose the break with fresh resolve, but to include the break and the lack of resolve into awareness.

If we include the break then we won’t feel the need to sigh, because the constriction of the ego will not have been consolidated, only noted.

When distracting thoughts or strong emotions arise, include them. Do not react, but include them. Or if you react, include into awareness your reaction. Include, include, include.

Make a special effort to include particularly anything that pretends it can’t be included: such as moments of complete unconsciousness, or that sense of a detached, watching self. These are only what they seem to be. Just include that seeming. Any impression or part-impression of them that you can grasp, just include that, and you will have done more than enough. Sooner than you think, understanding will come.

This gesture leads to understanding because this gesture is understanding. Understanding is this letting in, this surrender of self. There is not a picture of reality in your mind, and no need for one. Your mind is in reality. So open it up now please – for Fuck’s sake – and awaken!

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