Open Enlightenment

Do you have a question about enlightenment?

Ask Alan from Alan Chapman on Vimeo.

Any questions can be raised in the comments below.

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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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The End of Open Enlightenment?

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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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