Open Enlightenment

Direct vs. Developmental Awakening

In this video response I explore the extreme examples of both direct and developmental views of enlightenment.

Note: I mention some traditions, but not all sub-sets or lineages within those traditions ascribe to the same direct or developmental view that I discuss.

Direct vs. Developmental Awakening from Alan Chapman on Vimeo.

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The Dirty Little Secret of Awakening

There is something wrong with the Dharma.

A sickness is festering, unchecked, in the shadows of the great Saints, Sages and Prophets. Its symptoms include the countless examples of psychological, physical, and sexual abuses visited upon students and devotees by gurus, the financial exploitation, corruption, fraud, murder and drug abuse perpetrated by teachers from both the East and West, the political infighting evident in every major lineage and school, the outright failure of many traditions in producing awakened practitioners, the reluctance of genuinely awakened individuals in coming forward and openly discussing enlightenment, and the casual racism, sexism, fascism and homophobia still found in ‘spiritual culture’.

Ironically, all of this is the result of an endeavour to uphold the highest standards of morality.

Gestation

It’s been just over nine months since my final awakening, and I’ve recently become aware of how easily I became infected with the sickness, and since beginning to teach, the potential for just how severe the symptoms could become.

Since beginning this blog last year, we’ve been visited by a number of individuals who are so badly infected by the sickness that their only chance of recovery – if any – is a Dharma lobotomy. I expect that what I’m going to write here is probably going to attract more of this type, and probably with further accusations of my awakening being anything but genuine or full (see how many times you can spot something that can’t possibly mean I’m enlightened). But if the Dharma is ever going to recover, someone has to bite the bullet and expose the Dirty Little Secret no one wishes to address.

Early detection

Post-awakening is just as much a learning curve as pre-awakening. For a couple of months after my awakening, I felt like I had been emptied out. I was effortlessly present, blissed out, calm and contented. I had of course experienced something similar with my peak and partial awakenings, and so I knew that this state wouldn’t last forever.

So what had permanently changed?

Although many gurus speak about the eradication of the ego or the self, I already knew pre-awakening that many genuine teachers found this model inaccurate and misleading; and my experience confirmed this. I still had an ego, a self or personality; but it did seem as if the subject/object divide had disappeared for good, and had been replaced by wholeness or completion at a fundamental level. So that must be it: I was no longer a subject!

And the sickness had slipped in by simply changing its name.

Diagnosis

We can readily identify the sickness by considering perhaps the most essential (no pun intended) concept of Buddhism: No-Self.

According to Buddhism, No-Self is one of the three characteristics evident in all phenomena, including human beings. If we observe a sensation close enough, we can see that it has no ‘essence’, despite the fact we readily assume all subjects and objects to possess such a quality.

What this has come to mean, however, is the idea that if we believe or act as though we possess a self, say by performing any actions that can be considered ‘selfish’ or ‘egotistical’, then we are acting from a place of ignorance.

Ergo, the enlightened person must be completely selfless.

In my own case, if I am no longer a subject, that means I must act as if I no longer have the concerns that a subject possesses, no? Which, for all intents and purposes, is exactly the same thing as believing I am selfless.

Furthermore, as I am awakened, I cannot possibly act with selfish, egotistical or ‘ignorant’ intent.  My motivations must always be pure then!

Now stick me in a room, surround me by devotees who also behave as if I am infallibly selfless and pure, and watch as I play out every whim unburdened by conscience (‘My devotees bitch and moan when I force them to practice for 48hrs straight/give me their inheritance for my Open Enlightenment centre/play out my sexual fantasies. Of course, they wouldn’t complain if they were awakened like me; I need to make them work harder/give me more money/perform more interesting sexual feats, more often!’).

The abusive guru and the gullible devotee is but one of the many symptoms of the Ignorant Bliss of Selflessness (IBS).

The Dirty Little Secret

The awful truth about awakening (and this has taken me a while to really understand with a degree of clarity) is that the self, ego, personality and even the subject don’t go anywhere, which means that selfish, egotistical, personal and subjective behaviour all remain. If you are greedy, angry and homophobic before awakening, chances are you’ll still be greedy, angry and homophobic afterwards.

If we define awakening as the recognition of our original nature, we can say that the awakened person is simply aware that all phenomenon is original nature; this includes all of the neuroses, issues, and prejudices that come with being a human being. This does not mean the self, ego, personality or subject are eradicated; they are simply seen as perfect, whole and complete. (Get over it.)

Or, to speak in Buddhist terms, No Self does not mean there is no self, but that the self is empty, along with everything else (including your ego, personality, issues, psychosis, facial ticks…and even emptiness itself!).

Perhaps if the concept of Empty Self replaced that of No Self we might go some way to inhibiting the spread of the Ignorant Bliss of Selflessness.

Further Symptoms

With selflessness as the yard stick for awakening, it should come as no surprise that:

• Many Dharma practitioners deny and suppress their angry, greedy, lustful, attached, ignorant, anxious, weird, disturbed, restless, unhappy, sad, mad, bad and selfish emotions, thoughts and behaviours, only to have these unwanted and unloved aspects of themselves play out while the practitioner remains oblivious and ignorant to the fact, and usually within a Sangha or group of similarly deluded hypocrites, where everyone pretends they’re the most ‘enlightened’ people on the planet!
• Many awakened practitioners mistakenly believe they are not awakened because they are evidently not selfless.
• Many schools and lineages of enlightenment will not tolerate discussion of awakening for fear of being accused of displaying pride or attachment, resulting in many genuinely awakened practitioners remaining silent about the phenomenon for fear of expulsion/exclusion.
• By denying their prejudices even exist, the racism, sexism, fascism and homophobia (and even heterophobia!) of many practitioners are left unchecked and unaddressed within the ‘spiritual’ community.
• By investing in a poor model of awakening based on the ideal of selflessness, the mainstay of the Dharma community is catastrophically failing in facilitating awakening in themselves and others. The vows of many traditions and lineages have become nothing but a joke.

Treatment

Thankfully, treatment is free and available to everyone, and recovery is fast and virtually guaranteed.

The treatment is three fold:

1). Be honest with yourself and everyone else, even if you’ve invested a lot of time and energy in a certain worldview, tradition or identity that encourages the Ignorant Bliss of Selflessness. If you really care about awakening, show some integrity.

2). Now that you can consciously accept the existence of your ego and issues, you should address them. Sociopath? Have some therapy! Full of hate? Explore the nature and possible root cause of your anger! Proud? Make your competitiveness work for the cause by becoming the best awakened teacher the world has ever seen!

3).Take a sitting session for a minimum of half an hour once a day. While it is true that just before and after awakening selflessness and compassion (amongst other wonderful attributes) spontaneously arise, which positively transform the world like nothing else can, this kind of ‘perfect meditation’ passes; it is therefore down to a daily practice to foster the natural expression of openness, compassion, freedom, wholeness, peace, generosity and selflessness that demonstrates our original nature. Whether awakened or not, enlightenment must be practiced in order that we transform the world; sitting is one such method.

It should be noted that despite everything I’ve said, enlightenment does have a profound effect on a person, and it can change his or her behaviour in a very profound sense; but exactly how and to what degree appears to vary with each individual. I like to think that enlightenment doesn’t produce the perfect human being, but it does produce a better one.

Right, let’s have it

Come on then: just how unenlightened am I?

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The 4th Turning

The Buddha turned the Wheel of the Dharma three times:

In the 3rd Century BCE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the first time and created Theravada, a renunciatory and monastic approach, with an emphasis on the Four Noble Truths and the Three Characteristics.

In the 1st Century CE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the second time and created Mahayana, the Way of the Bodhisattva, with an emphasis on Emptiness and Compassion.

In the 7th Century CE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the third time and created Vajrayana, the tantric route to enlightenment, with an emphasis on the essential Buddha-nature of all things.

Over the many centuries since the last turning, the Dharma has spread to the West and the world has undergone globalization. We live in a very different society and culture to the one the Buddha was familiar with almost 2 and half millennia ago, and many of the old ways of living the Dharma are no longer relevant to a human living in the 21st Century.

As a community of spiritual practitioners it is up to us to recognise that we are participating in the turning of the Wheel of the Dharma for a 4th time, as we explore and investigate what it means to live the Dharma in the 21st Century, and seek to answer such questions as:

What is the best way of approaching enlightenment and how do we make the Dharma accessible and relevant?

Is monasticism no longer appropriate or even necessary to seriously engaging with the Dharma?

What role does sexuality and romance play in spiritual development?

How is social media transforming spiritual culture and community?

What would Buddha look like as a millennial, awakened human being?

As part of the 4^th Turning, I’m endeavouring to establish a monthly meeting of like-minded souls in order to discuss all of these questions and much more.

The first group meeting happened on Sunday, 29^th Novemember 2009, at the wonderful Royal Academy of Arts in London. Out of the 15 or so members of the google group, 5 showed up, and what a pleasure it was to meet them!

Rohan of 21awake introduced us to his Hear and Now project, a contemporary and accessible guided meditation scheme for practitioners on the go. An innovative and promising endeavour!

Interest was shown in a weekly satsang/sitting group that I will organise to take place in a fortnight.

Stay tuned for the date/time of the next 4^th Turning meeting, and come and join the revolution! (Alternatively, set up a group in your area!)

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Buddhist Geeks

Buddhist Geeks is a cutting-edge Dharma podcast hosted by my good friend Vince Horn. Since 2007 the Buddhist Geeks have interviewed many leading authors, teachers and entrepreneurs in the field of Buddhism, covering diverse topics from the future of Buddhism in the West to the possible Buddha nature of the internet. Here are some of my favourites:

Episode 138: Reflections on 21st Century Dharma

Episode 133: Erik Curren: The Buddhist Politician

Episode 122: The Evolution of the Mind and Life Dialogues

Episode 112: Vajrayana in Plain English

Episode 62: Reverberations from The Shamatha Project

Remarkably, Buddhist Geeks is produced on a part-time basis, and is offered for free.

If you are serious about 21^st Century Dharma, then you need to get serious about Buddhist Geeks. Please consider supporting this amazing project: become a micro-patron.

In the future, Vince hopes to offer a digital magazine, and a TED style BuddhaDharma 2.0 conference. I can’t believe how lucky we are!

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Shinzen Young

Shinzen Young is one of those rare Buddhist teachers who actually teach enlightenment. You can find his website here, and here’s a whole bunch of great videos .

Thanks to OE reader C4Chaos for the link to this wonderfully frank and in-depth discussion of Shinzen’s approach to teaching enlightenment. Shinzen is the real deal: a bone fide spiritual authority (in the sense that he has experienced everything he talks about) who accurately describes the territory and gives a great overview of what to expect, even after enlightenment, which is very rare indeed.

I’m not sure that I would agree with Shinzen that the first experience of enlightenment permanently does away with the notion of the self, because in my experience the final stage of enlightenment – what Shinzen calls the 4^th stage in the interview – involves the dropping of something fundamental that is not touched by the peak and partial awakening stages beforehand, which is why it remains permanent. (It’s the difference between Adyashanti’s ‘awakening’ and ‘liberation’.) But this is splitting hairs really; his model of four stages is useful and accurate, as I’m sure a lot of Ingram fans would agree.

However, Shinzen doesn’t make the mistake of putting all of his eggs in one basket by only recognising a gradual process of stages, and marginalizing anyone else’s experience that doesn’t fit this model (something I’ve only just recently learned this year); progress with enlightenment can be unnoticeable for a long time, and for some people there may not have been a before or after at all. I think a lot of ‘practical Buddhists’ could learn a lot from this man.

Shinzen has certainly helped in disabusing me of the idea that after enlightenment there is nothing left to learn on the subject, and if I could have him as my teacher, I certainly would.

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10 ideas I’ve changed my mind about since becoming enlightened

Here are ten ideas I’ve changed my mind about since my enlightenment in March 2009:

1. The arrogance of psychological development

According to the Integral crowd, pluralism allowed us for the first time in history to recognise the existence of many perspectives. This puts the postmodernist at an advantage to any of the lower stages of psychological development, but at the cost of a narcissism based on moral superiority. Postmodernists can be infuriatingly patronising.

Due to the extreme equality of all values and viewpoints held by the postmodernist, any genuinely new perspective to develop after postmodernism must inescapably reintroduce the concepts of hierarchy, progress and values; the very same concepts championed by modernism. And so it is not uncommon for the post-postmodernist (or integralist) to be mistaken for a modernist by the postmodernist, and the sadly predictable patronising ensues (which is doubly frustrating when you’re more than familiar with postmodernism).

I’ve been on the wrong end of a patronising postmodernist a few times, and I’ve been so enranged and sickened by his or her unexamined smugness, that I’ve responded by informing them that, actually, I’m at a level of development above and beyond theirs, and so they’re just incapable of understanding me. Ha!

In other words, I’ve been arrogant and patronising myself. Rather than seeing this behaviour as inherently postmodern, I’m convinced the integral or spiral dynamics model of psychological development actually promotes arrogance. If this is the case, I don”t believe spiral dynamics is the best tool with which to approach the problems of any given perspective, or a profitable lens with which to view each other.

There is an assumption in the Integral view that developmental stages are in themselves arrogant and patronising, when in truth only humans have that honour.

2. Occultists need to be convinced that magick is about enlightenment

I’ve spent the last few years trying to rehabilitate magick as the Western tradition of enlightenment. I used to think magick was important in this respect, but I was missing the point. The Great Work has never been about the tradition of magick itself, and persisting in trying to convince occultists and everyone else of what magick is really about ultimately has nothing to do with enlightenment.

I always assumed magick was important for the Great Work; when in reality, enlightenment is not bound to any tradition whatsoever. Isn’t it time for a Western tradition accessible to a majority – instead of a minority – living in the 21^st Century?

3. Magick is different to other traditions of enlightenment

Reading contemporary Western Buddhist literature can easily lead to a very narrow expectation of the type and variety of meditative results; when compared to the reported interactions with non-human intelligences, dreams, oracles, visions and synchronicities of magick, a dry meditative practice can seem like a very boring path to enlightenment.

In the past I’ve emphasised the difference between magick and other less ‘exciting’ traditions, which carries with it the assumption that a straight up insight practice doesn’t engender the same variety and type of experience as, say, invoking the Holy Guardian Angel.

But this assumption has no basis in reality; after all, it is the process of enlightenment that is the root of the vast diversity of mystical and magical events, not any single technique or tradition. Perhaps it would be to everyones benefit if magicians talked more about the developmental stages of spiritual development, and Buddhists more regularly described their meetings with spirits, the occurrence of life-changing visions and the development of psychic powers.

4. Ritual and meditation are demonstrably synonymous

I’ve tried many times over the course of three years to show how the practice of ritual can lead to the same process of insight as straight-up meditation. The assumption here is that a technical explanation for how the two seemingly separate acts both engender the same result is directly related to helping others reach enlightenment; but it isn’t. (This is also tied up with convincing others that magick is an enlightenment tradition, as discussed above.)

So I’ve ditched the comparative, specific tradition-related practical approach that attempts to prove a technical synonymity, in favour of a simple symbol that helps to explain enlightenment on its own terms. It proves nothing, but I’m pretty sure it’s helpful.

5. Enlightenment is a science

Personal verification of the promise of enlightenment is to be expected of a genuine, spiritual practice. In order to stress my conviction in the reality of enlightenment (and magick), in the past I have jumped on the ‘deep science’ bandwagon and tried to argue that enlightenment is an injunction that brings forth data that can be verified by peers, thus making it a bone fide science.

But exactly how is arguing whether or not enlightenment is a science (in a specialised sense of the word that only a philosopher might be familiar with) in any way related to a). personally getting enlightened or b). helping others get enlightened? Is it not enough to say enlightenment requires no belief or blind faith, just the will to verify its reality for yourself?

God knows, I am not a scientist in the accepted sense of the word, and neither are the majority of people I know who have actively engaged with enlightenment. Of the scientists I do know, it wasn’t any notion of performing ‘deep science’ in order to prove anything that made them decide to take up insight practice or draw a circle on the floor in order to summon a spirit.

Attempting to prove that enlightenment is a science, as if this is necessary before we might delude ourselves, is simply ridiculous and missing the point.

6. The virtue of the language of the Relative and the Absolute

For me, enlightenment has always been about answering questions such as ‘why am I here?’ and ‘what is the true nature of reality?’ I think these are questions worth asking, and I strongly believe enlightenment provides the answers.

With so much extreme postmodernism floating around, especially within contemporary occult culture, any notion of pursuing the Big Questions required a reactionary language with which to discuss them. Absolute relativity is a myth completely divorced from reality, and it leaves the inquisitive lost in a sea of meaningless perspectives in a universe inherently devoid of value. It was necessary to re-introduce the idea of the Absolute itself, something outside of the individual, but that could be discovered by it. The language of the relative and the absolute has proved useful as a means of navigating away from the insanity of radical postmodernism.

However, such language is inescapably dualistic, and by this I mean it fosters a conceptual divide that doesn’t really exist. And if Absolute Relativity is a myth, why should we entertain the Relatively Absolute into the bargain? Furthermore, talk of the absolute only reinforces the human propensity to invest in the One Correct Answer or a Unified Theory of Everything. I fail to see how this is profitable.

I believe there is a much more beneficial way to approaching enlightenment that doesn’t require first challenging postmodernism, and then erecting a conceptual divide between enlightenment and everything else. I hope to post further developments in this direction in the near future, whilst resolutely refusing to try and prove anything, resolve contradictions or create the One Mighty and Complete System that Accounts for Everything.

7. Morality, psychology and insight are three separate lines of development

Daniel Ingram’s masterpiece Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha provided me with a pure insight model, divorced from the fantasies of many of the models of enlightenment taught by so many Buddhist traditions.

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory showed me how development in insight can help the progression through the psychological stages of Spiral Dynamics, but that it was perfectly possible to be enlightened at the Traditional stage as it was to be at the Integral stage.

As a non-Buddhist, and being particularly inclined to Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, I wrote off the Buddha’s training in morality as just another example of religious dogma.

But my experience of the process of enlightenment has demonstrated that a). a pure insight model is impossible, b). enlightenment has its own unique psychological development and c). its own unique moral development too.

The ‘discarded’ models of enlightenment certainly require revisiting (I will be writing something up soon), and I hope in the future there will be some research into the psychological effects of enlightenment, with the creation of an accurate psychological developmental model specifically related to enlightenment. I’ve begun to address Enlightened Ethics, which I plan to develop into a method of conscious integration.

8. Enlightenment is not a matter for hard science

While I still believe it is absolutely wonderful that enlightenment is a personal, direct experience that must be verified and understood first hand, thereby invalidating any idea of a priesthood or church, I can no longer believe in strictly relegating hard science to the physical world, and enlightenment to the spiritual level of experience alone, based on the assumption that one has no business with the other. After all, in the final analysis enlightenment has nothing to do with the spiritual level of experience either. The freedom of enlightenment has demonstrated to me firsthand that my identity is not bound up in any of the levels of the Great Chain of Being, and so I no longer have an aversion to discussing the physiology of the enlightened brain for fear of becoming a materialist reductionist.

In fact, I wholeheartedly wish to encourage the notion that enlightenment is a question for science. Not because I believe enlightenment is nothing but a product of the brain, but because I believe the brain must necessarily demonstrate a correlate with the enlightened experience. My identity and perspective on the world is so radically different than it was beforehand that I find it hard to believe my brain is still the same as it was pre-enlightenment. The great thing is, there is still no real research in this area (yes, there have been studies of meditators brains and so on, but there is no reason to assume the test subjects were enlightened or even engaged with the process).

I’m really excited by what might be discovered by hard science in the realm of enlightenment. If only I had money to invest!

9. The Goal mentality

For three and a half years I had one goal in mind, and for three and a half years I struggled to practice the methods of enlightenment correctly and at the right volume in order to ensure success. And when I reached the goal, this investment had negative consequences in the form of frustration, helplessness and fear. Yes: immediately after enlightenment, I had a really shitty time. (I’ll go into this at a later date.)

Of course, early on I learned that after the first peak experience of enlightenment it isn’t you that ‘does’ the process of enlightenment, but the process that ‘does’ you. But I never consciously integrated this experience – I wasn’t even aware that I could or should! – and I persisted in re-enforcing a habit based on the belief that I must chase a goal that I would eventually achieve through my own doing (and the sooner, the better!).

So what happens when you suddenly gain the ability to see every deeply held false opinion you have about yourself and reality for what they are? What happens when you can suddenly and clearly perceive that virtually your entire being is habitually dedicated to a behaviour and way of thinking that is based on an incorrect assumption?

Just because you are enlightened, it doesn’t mean the habits and behaviours based on ignorance disappear over night. They must be replaced by new, enlightened behaviours.

In terms of enlightenment, the goal mentality sets you up for a big fall. While it is very important to realise that both a daily practice of active transcendence and a willing participation is required to attain the very real event of enlightenment, this should not translate to a gung-ho balls-to-the-wall chase for awakening. Such an attitude belongs to the beginner who has not yet had the personal insight – granted by the process of enlightenment – of realising there is much more to reality than the whims of the ego. It appears that without a conscious integration of this insight, the participant is left with a lot of pain and a good deal of work to do post-enlightenment.

10. Maps are always useful

I have personally found maps very useful in my development, as have many of my friends. I used to think everyone should be armed with as many maps and models as they could find, until I met a raw beginner who, ascribing to the goal mentality, had tied themselves up in knots trying to figure out where they ‘were’. Exactly how the headache and expended energy used in trying to find a resolution to this problem were helpful in his achieving enlightenment escapes me (as it turns out, he was slowly but surely making good progress, almost in despite of ‘where’ he thought he was at).

I came across maps just near the end of my first cycle through the stages of insight, and so I already had a good deal of the basic spiritual experiences under my belt. It was a simple question of aligning my experiences with a model to see what fit, and it wasn’t long before I could accurately judge my position. But would I have found maps and models as useful as a beginner with absolutely no experience whatsoever? Would I have memorised the language of the maps and frantically applied them to every little intellectually ‘insight’ or physical peculiarity that might arise during meditation, ending up wondering if i had just landed Naïve Enlightenment or if I was close to the end of the process by experiencing enlightenment in real time?

I can’t be sure, but what I am sure of is that models aren’t always good for everyone all of the time.

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The Diamond

Enlightenment is not an idea.

Do you believe Taoism is about Taoism, even when Laozi wrote ‘The Tao-Path is not the All-Tao. The Name is not the Thing named.’?

Do you believe Buddhism is about Buddhism, even when the Buddha taught the emptiness of all things?

Do you believe Philosophy is about Philosophy, even when Proclus reasoned the One that cannot be hypothesized?

Do you believe Sufism is about Sufism, even when Mohammed said ‘Allah, the One, independent and besought of all, He begets not nor is He begotten, and there is none like unto Him.’?

Do you believe Advaita is about Advaita, even when Shankara argued ‘Brahman is the only truth’?

Do you believe Magick is about Magick, even when Crowley proclaimed ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!’?

To those who cannot see past ideas, all of these teachers and teachings appear contradictory and exclusive, each promoting their own absolute dogma at the expense of the others.

Yet how many teachers of enlightenment have taught that their teaching alone is true?

For those who cannot see past ideas, one facet amongst an infinite number is taken to be the whole diamond; and the discovery of the truth of another facet is taken to mean the existence of two diamonds, not One.

Yet how many teachers of enlightenment have taught the existence of many enlightenments, or that enlightenment can mean many things?

Unable to see past ideas, and conditioned to find the One Correct Answer, the beginner – seeing many facets of the diamond – cannot help but doubt if he has found the right teaching, to the extent he will either endlessly flirt with one tradition after another, or combat his uncertainty by convincing himself of the shortcomings of any method but the one chosen. The reflection of one facet is held superior to the reflections of the others because not only does conditioning demand it, but the practitioner has not yet seen the diamond personally.

But even the enlightened human may be guilty of persisting in the ignorance of trying to find the One Correct Answer, despite possessing the knowledge that the absolute truth is not an idea. When this happens, the enlightened human forgets the diamond all together when concerning himself with but one facet, and yet having knowledge of the diamond, will struggle in vein to raise up an amalgamation of various reflections to the status of the diamond itself. When this happens, the enlightened human may even deny the existence of the diamond by claiming only reflection exists. For such a confused human, enlightenment is not understood as knowledge of the Tao, Emptiness, the One, Allah, ‘not-two’; the illusion that the absolute is differentiated persists, almost as if enlightenment had never occurred. Of what use is enlightenment to such an individual if it is not or cannot be lived?

Can you admire the reflection of one facet without taking it for the whole diamond?

Can you appreciate the existence of many facets without denying the existence of the diamond itself?

Can you appreciate that no facet is the diamond itself, no matter how glorious, comprehensive or reasonably sound its reflection?

Can you hold within your gaze each and every facet, in all their relatively diverse, contradictory and paradoxical beauty, without trying to resolve them in to a single reflection?

Can you see past all reflections to the diamond itself?

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