Living truth

Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to--then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are--your anger, your brutality, your violence, your despair, the agony and sorrow you live in. In the understanding of all of this is the truth, and you can understand it only if you know to look at those things in your life.

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known (1969)

For the past few years, I have been aware of Jiddu Krishnamurti, but I never felt that it was time to dive into his works. It seems that it is finally time, so I am proceeding slowly and gladly. He is challenging and refreshing, and requires time to really flesh out what he is saying. What strikes me most about him is how little he refers to traditional religious or philosophical systems, sages, or saints, and the importance he places on one's own individual approach to truth.

The above passage reminded me of the viewpoint offered by the "new physics" in the first decades of the twentieth century. The traditional scientific attitude of an objective subject observing, objectively, processes in nature, gave way to the discovery that, at deeper levels of physics, the foundation of objective truth in our culture, what is being observed is affected by the observer (summarized in mathematical terms as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). Ken Wilber summarizes (from The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977)):

The quantum revolution was so cataclysmic because it attacked not one or two conclusions of classical physics but its very cornerstone, the foundation upon which the whole edifice was erected, and that was the subject-object dualism. That which was Real was supposed to be that which could be objectively observed and measured, yet these "ultimate realities" could not themselves be totally observed or measured under any circumstances, and that is, to say the least, a sloppy form of Reality. . . . As Sullivan put it, "We cannot observe the course of nature without disturbing it" . . . It was abundantly clear to these physicists that objective measurement and verification could no longer be the mark of absolute reality, because the measured object could never be completely separated from the measuring subject--the measured and the measurer, the verified and the verifier, at this level, are one and the same.

 The assumption that underlay the Cartesian and Newtonian scientific models, that objective nature was waiting to be analyzed, discovered, and "figured out" by human subjects is akin to the assumption Krishnamurti is exposing above, that truth is somehow stable or static, and is able to be discovered or sought, as if it were separate from the one discovering and the one seeking.

"The Worm's Waking"

This is how a human being can change:
there's a worm addicted to eating
grape leaves.
Suddenly. He wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he's no longer
a worm.
He's the entire vineyard,
and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn't need
to devour.

--Rumi

Emancipatory writing

I am re-reading Ken Wilber's One Taste, a "philosophical journal," he kept during the year of 1997. The format of the book, I realized as I began reading, is very similar to the format of this blog, especially in the content, which Wilber describes as "ideas that orbit the sun of the perennial philosophy (or the common core of the world's great wisdom traditions)."

One topic he discusses early on is emancipatory writing--writing, whether theoretical, spiritual, literary, etc. that helps to liberate the reader from a range of subtle ills, like feelings of meaninglessness, shallowness, narrow-minded-ness, the list goes on. In an entry on the life of the late novelist Christopher Isherwood, himself a liberator for Wilber, he lists similar figures like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Thomas Mann (all of whom were connected with the Los Angeles branch of the Vedanta Society in the mid-20th century.

Reading Wilber himself has been and still is liberating, for many reasons. An important one is that he has provided me, and many others, with a theoretical framework of the world's knowledge and experience that is profoundly embracing. In the words of Jack Crittenden, in his lucid foreword to Wilber's Eye of Spirit (1997):

The general idea [of Wilber's philosophical system] is straightforward. It is not which theorist is right and which is wrong. His idea is that everyone is basically right, and he wants to figure out how that can be so. "I don't believe," Wilber says, "that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error. So instead of asking which approach is right and which is wrong, we assume each approach is true but partial, and then try to figure out how to fit these partial truths together, how to integrate them--not how to pick one and get rid of the others."

Philosophy's true purpose is to improve one's way of living, and the philosophical attitude Wilber adopts has improved not only my critical and theoretical capacities, but my everyday living. Taking the attitude that "everyone is right" has opened me up to the world in so many ways, and has instilled in me a commitment to finding the truth in every voice, no matter how offensive or inferior I consider a particular perspective or point of view. It also supports my conviction that truth can be found in human voices from anywhere and anywhen, from the ancients to today. Conversely, and this is important for me because my critical faculties have always been on the weak side, I am able to criticize in a more penetrating manner, by acknowledging that every perspective is partial. So from this fundamental attitude, Wilber has outlined a vast yet cogent system in his books, from 1977 to the present, and each one I read further opens my mind and soul, and liberates me in ways that I sometimes don't even think about consciously, but which I notice after reading and digesting his works.

Digestion, pt. 2

Some additional thoughts related to this post:

From Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness (1977):

Freud built his entire psychoanalytic system around . . . the insight that men and women have needs or motivations of which they are unconscious. Now because these needs or instincts are unconscious, we are not fully aware of them, and thus we can never act upon them to gain satisfaction. In short, humans don't know what they want; their real desires are unconscious and therefore never adequately satisfied. Neuroses and "mental illness" result, just as if you were completely unconscious of your desire to eat, you would never know you were hungry, and consequently you would never eat, which would indeed make you quite ill. Now this is a superlative idea, the essence of which has been confirmed again and again in clinical observations. The problem, however, is that although everybody agrees that humans have unconscious needs, nobody agrees as to what these needs are.

1.  Again, the usefulness of comparing the psychology to physiology--the mechanisms of hunger, in this case. I often think that the typical human situation is that one's physiology operates fairly harmoniously--one's body generally knows how to digest, and one can correctly interpret the body's signals when there is a problem with digestion--but one's psychology lacks this smoothness and integrity. The various forms of psychotherapy can be seen as seeking this wholeness, bringing one's psyche to the same attunement as one's muscular or digestive systems.

2. The importance of interpretation. When my stomach growls and my head feels light, I know that I am hungry. How do I know? I interpret my body's signals accurately. The system works properly--signal leads to correct interpretation leads to corresponding action (feeding myself). The process is more complex with the psyche (as Wilber points out, there are many opinions as to what our needs are), and the wide range of pathologies are often connected with some glitch in the process of interpreting signals from the psyche. Again, the process of projection, as I mentioned briefly here. A feeling of intense envy is the signal, but my interpretation is one of contempt for the people I envy, so the corresponding action is a disdain for those people, and a feeling of dissatisfaction (just as if I were hungry but I chose to go for a walk instead of feeding myself). The envy is unsatisfied, and my contempt remains and worsens, eventually leading to an increasingly negative psychological state.

Where is my soul?

"As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed)."

--quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945), perhaps Gautama Buddha?

One view of the ego

The conventional "self" or "person" is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real "me" than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future, and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is!

--Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957)

Spiritual experiments

Nothing in our every-day experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly nothing in our every-day experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when the mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in its external behavior, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life, these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfill certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid.

--Aldous Huxley, Introduction to The Perennial Philosophy (1962)

Huxley's analogy between discovering the nature of water and the nature of the human being seems far-fetched at first, but upon further reflection his point is well taken.

1. This is a useful analogy for the idea that just because something is not revealed or apparent in the ordinary state of consciousness does not mean that it is false or invalid.

2. Also useful in understanding the many ways of altering consciousness that have been used for religious purposes--fasting, chanting, asceticism, drumming, meditating, etc.

3. He also notes an important connection between science and religion--the empirical validity of certain "experiments" that lead to a certain knowledge of the human being. Ken Wilber discusses this in detail, particularly in The Marriage of Soul and Sense: Integrating Science and Religion. The principle is that the scientific method is not just applicable to physical science, or even psychological science. It is applicable to spiritual matters, in that humans have developed empirically verifiable methods (not unlike the methods necessary to deduce that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen) over time to discover or realize the true nature of the human being.

The office and the servant

After reading Ram Dass' exuberant set of lectures, The Only Dance There Is, I decided to check out his guide to meditation, Journey of Awakening, before jumping into his classic Be Here Now. Within the first few pages, I was struck by the following passage:

We may ask how we could survive without our ego. Don't worry--it doesn't disappear. We can learn to venture beyond it, though. The ego is there, as our servant. Our room is there. We can always go in and use it like an office when we need to be efficient. But the door can be left open so that we can always walk out.

The ego is something that I (as an ego) think about a lot, and there are many different ways to describe it and interpret it. But this one in particular really illuminated something for me--the possibility of developing to a point where I could use my rationally reflecting, problem-solving, chattering ego, to step into the office to do some work, when I wanted to, and to leave it aside when I didn't want to be chattering away in my own head. It reminds me of what you sometimes hear Zen masters say: when you are eating, eat, when you are walking, walk. When I first encountered this image, I thought it impossible. How I could just stop thinking? But the point seems to be not that I stop thinking, but that I can use this particular kind of thinking as a tool or servant, rather than as my given way of experiencing the world.

I practice this now in different situations. Today while riding the subway, I told my ego-thinking that we could resume taking care of the issues that were pressing at my head when we got to work, but for now, we are meditating and those thoughts are going to pass just as the stations are through the windows of the train. It was fascinating watching myself try to keep restarting different trains of thought, only to be shuffled along. I enjoy this practice very much, so perhaps I will be able to step aside from the "office" with greater ease as the practice deepens.

Organizing experience

“To experience is to organize the given.”

--D.M. Orange (quoted in Judith Blackstone’s Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process (2007))

I think a lot about the relationship and intersection between the subjective and the objective. For example, it has been noted that modern Western culture places a premium on objectivity, as far as “truth” is concerned, but that other cultures place different emphasis on subjectivity and objectivity. I read about a traditional culture that practiced a ritualized sharing of dreams, with the goal of providing guidance and knowledge for the community. Dreams, of course, are highly subjective phenomena, yet they are consulted in some cultures for guidance for the entire community.

The statement above is a succinct summary of one relationship between the subjective and the objective. A person’s subjective experience is the act of the organizing what is objectively given. This given may be perceived as belonging to the world “out there,” such as the perception of a painting, or “in here,” such as the perception of an emotion. Either way, the resulting experience is a particular method of organizing whatever is perceived. “Organizing” implies interpretation within a particular context. This context may be linguistic (organizing a particular combination of symbols, syntactically and semantically), cultural (perceiving a certain act as taboo, for example), personal, etc. 

One of the strongest forces in subjective organizing is language. We rely on language, and the particular manner of organization that our native tongue adopts has a huge influence on our own organizing. So much has been written about this, but for now I will just point out that the experience of the “I” as a subject and something in the “world” as an object is supported and exacerbated by certain languages, like English, more than others.

As psychologist Charles Tart has noted, one’s everyday state of consciousness is much more arbitrary than we would assume. It is a particular form of organization, aiming for physical survival and psychological sanity, but dictated by many assumptions (from culture, from language, from parents and friends, from the accumulation of past personal experience) about the way the world, the given, should be organized, approached, and interpreted.

There are obviously many aspects to subjective organization, but I can focus here on the dimension of rigidity/flexibility. Lao Tzu, among others, noted that the flexible branch does not break—the rigid one does. In Judith Blackstone’s Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process, it is noted that certain kinds of psychopathology are characterized by a ridigity in one’s organization of experience, often unconscious, that not only blinds the person to other, more flexible ways of organizing but leads to painful psychological symptoms—i.e. the breaking of the branch. This is central to the psychology of fixations, obsessions, neuroses, etc. The therapeutic process relies on uncovering the source and purpose of the rigidity; then the particular organizing process can be expanded into a more flexible approach to the particular experience, or alternate ways of organizing can be discovered. As I noted above, the source of the rigid response may be informed by many factors, including one’s culture, linguistic system, or religious upbringing, each of which constitutes a set of assumptions and judgments that underlie the person’s own psychological makeup. 

A basic example is a projection. If the way I am accustomed to interpreting or organizing my feelings of intense envy is by labeling them as unbecoming or even unnatural, or pretending that I don't feel them, then I will repress them and then condemn people who represent the lifestyle I envy. The "given" is the envy, though it should be understood that the presence of such feelings is not a simple matter of "appearing" in my consciousness. In fact, part of the process of re-organizing may involve, once I have accepted the envy as my own, discovering the source and purpose of the envy, the source of the "given," in order to understand how best to interpret it. Also, part of the "given-ness" of the envy may be that I perceive it as outside of me, my ego, when in fact I need to bring it inside and accept that it is my envy. I reorganize my experience of the envy by recognizing that the envy is itself an organization of other givens--namely, the emotions I feel when I see people living the lifestyle that I want.

Imagine you are a tree

Imagine you are a tree. You have been growing steadily from seed through sapling through mature tree, and all this time you have been under the impression that you are moving. You are moving upwards towards the sky, then outwards with your branches. But at one point you are up and out enough to look down at the base of your trunk and see the roots firmly planted in the earth. You are confused—haven’t I been moving? You mean, I’m stuck here? And then you turn around and look at all the other plants around you, stuck in the ground, immobile. This is a turning point.

Alan Watts: “By the same law of reversed effort, we discover the ‘infinite’ and the ‘absolute,’ not by straining to escape from the finite and relative world, but by the complete acceptance of its limitations.” (Wisdom of Insecurity, p. 27)

At the realization that you are immobile, you have a choice—to accept it or not. You can’t change it. Sorry. You just can’t. So you are either going to identify then with the highest twig on the tree and say “Well, I’ll just keep going higher and higher, and no one’s going to tell me otherwise.” Or you can keep moving up and out, while still accepting that you’re not actually going anywhere. This is a parallel to the development of the human ego, if we are to accept the convention of the ego. The ego wants to uproot itself and walk. It wants to be infinite, unlimited. But it cannot be. It just can’t. It is simply part of a much larger organism, that is firmly planted in the earth. The ego's limitations are intrinsic to its existence. But there is more to the human organism than the ego.

The rest of the tree is like the unconscious—both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (see Ken Wilber's Up From Eden)—and the attitude towards this trunk of the tree can become one of love, because it is me. I am simply an outgrowth of it—my ego is simply the tip of one tiny twig among billions. And to think that I have the degree of control over my/the life that I am used to thinking I have, is to believe that the twig is controlling the tree.

The ego is not infinite and boundless. It is inherently concerned with itself, because it does not want to die (Some would point to the fear of death as an impetus for the ego's creation in the first place--an entity that need not die because it can survive the body, in memory, artistic output, etc.). The ego can only do so much, but it certainly cannot, no matter how hard it tries, lift itself out of the ground.

It is significant that the moment I mentioned above is a turning point. Before this point, it is necessary for the twig to separate from the branch and follow its own path determinedly, believing that it is much more important and self-directed than it actually is.

And the really hard part for me is looking at another person and overriding the usual sensation that they are a separate person (as a twig may interpret looking at another twig a few feet away) with the remembrance ("Do this in remembrance of Me") that the other person and myself are both outgrowths of the same tree.

The body and the present moment

I am constantly seeking ways to cultivate the ability of living in the present. In one sense this is paradoxical, as we are always in the present moment; but we are probably familiar with the difficulty of this way of living, and how it seems to elude one’s efforts to live in this way. I have received helpful instruction from different writers—Alan Watts (particularly his Wisdom of Insecurity), Ram Dass, Maurice Nicoll, and others. Philosopher Ken Wilber, in his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), provides some insight into this issue. Before giving an example, I will quickly introduce his fundamental distinction between two "modes of knowing." As he points out, many philosophical, psychological, and religious traditions have noted these two distinct approaches to the world, but here is a succinct description from the psychologist William James: 

There are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. Although such things as the white paper before your eyes can be known intuitively, most of the things we know, the tigers now in India, for example, or the scholastic system of philosophy, are known only representatively or symbolically. 

For example, the only way to "know" truly what an apple tastes like, is to taste it. No amount of words (symbols) no matter how skillfully or poetically combined, can truly convey the experience of tasting an apple. Both modes of knowing, of course, have their purpose, but it is important to note that the rational mind is fundamentally occupied with symbolic/representative knowledge. And it is the opinion of many religious traditions that there is a significant difference between "knowing" the Ultimate Reality through symbols, and knowing it nondually, immediately, and without representation.

So, in describing the present moment, Wilber discusses what he terms organismic awareness, which is opposed to the awareness of the conscious ego, which uses the symbolic/linear mode of knowing:

Organismic awareness is what we--on the Ego Level--ordinarily, but clumsily, refer to as seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. But in its very purest form, this "sensual awareness" is non-symbolic, non-conceptual, momentary consciousness. Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only--you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past [italics mine]. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch, or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is necessarily spaceless. Just as organismic awareness knows no past or future, it knows no inside or outside, no self or other.

In other words, the body as conscious organism only lives in the present. Though I won't discuss it here, there are many examples of the body holding "traces" of the past, which can be uncovered in certain psychosomatic therapies like Rolfing. But the body still retains these traces in the present. It becomes clear that the mind is largely responsible for the sensation most of us feel in our daily life, of not being fully present HERE, but occupied with issues of the past and the future. And it is that same mind that can be trained to rest more completely in the present.

Digestion

I have been practicing lately treating my mind as I do my digestive system. My conscious mind, my ego, is involved in the process of eating up to the point of swallowing the food—I plan when to eat, choose what to eat (and this choice is partly influenced by previous communication with the rest of my body). But once I have swallowed, my conscious mind can do very little. My body takes over. And this is for good reason—my conscious mind is not designed to accomplish the intricacies of the digestive system (okay villi, now do your thing, now you secrete some gastric juices, move this here, now here, etc.). In a similar way I am beginning to treat the flow of experience in the same way—as a constant process of, mainly unconscious, digestion. And this alleviates, for me, so much worry. Am I doing the right thing? Am I processing this experience properly? Am I reflecting enough? Just as my digestive system knows much more what to do with my food than my ego does, my Self, my bodymind, knows much more what to do with any experience that passes through me. It knows how to extract what is good and to eliminate what is bad. And different experiences take different time to digest. But again, my body knows what to do as far as digestion goes. And when it is unhappy about something, it communicates that to me through pain, indigestion, nausea, etc. Emotional states, in particular, I have begun to treat this way. Emotions can move through me, as everything must move through me. And even in the darkest emotional states, my Self is extracting what it needs to extract and eliminate what it needs to eliminate.

Reading provides a clear illustration of this process. There was a point right after I graduated college when I read much of Ken Wilber’s oeuvre, and I noticed after devouring several of his dense books that I would feel different in the weeks following. I would reflect on them consciously, but not to a great extent. I would still think about a lot of other things. But I noticed that as my conscious mind read and understood the long strings of words, they would vanish into my larger Mind, and go to work on tensions and issues that I was often unaware of, and largely apart from my control. In other words, my conscious mind would do the work of selecting the book, focusing attention on the text and trying to understand it, similar to the process of arriving at a meal, but after swallowing word after word, the substance of the text would be digested by processes largely untouched by my conscious mind. And any conscious reflection on the texts would come naturally—I never felt a need to remind myself or force myself to reflect. It would be as natural as the passage of food through my gut.

Conscious, rational reflection has its place, and reading Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion has offered much insight into the relation between reflection and the emotions. And I am treating rational reflection more and more as a tool, instead of my master or the best way to handle a situation. Reflection has its limitations just like anything else.

In meditation lately this has been my goal--to place my conscious, rational mode of thinking more in the position of a servant, rather than the master (terminology introduced to me through reading Ram Dass). My rational mind is usually on autopilot, and even when I don't feel like reflecting, it just keeps finding more and more things to think about. But, as it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, and this applies particularly to my rational mind. The more I direct my meditation towards this end, the better I am able to use rational reflection as a tool.

Ideas as tools

“…for everyone thinks, and only can think, from the ideas he possesses.”

--Maurice Nicoll, The Mark

Because thinking is both a conscious and unconscious act, the ideas that we think with can be both conscious and unconscious. Unconscious ideas, or beliefs, are usually called assumptions.

Ideas can be likened to tools. Different tools are suited to different tasks. If we are faced with a river to cross, would we rather have a raft or a hammer? Thus the importance of introducing new concepts, to be grasped and used consciously. The process of acquiring conscious concepts.

But we can also become aware of, and remove if necessary, unconscious assumptions. For, faced with the river, we may need to leave behind the ropes that helped us climb the mountain a few miles back as much as we need to build a raft. Also, different ideas are useful for different situations, and we are always faced with new situations (though, perhaps Nietzsche would say that we are faced with similar patterns of situations, in his idea of eternal return). This is why ideas cannot always be clung to, especially as life constantly carries us into new situations.

Schumacher and assumptions

In Guide for the Perplexed, Schumacher quotes scientist G.N.M. Tyrrell's book Grades of Significance (1931):

A book, we will suppose, has fallen into the hands of intelligent beings who know nothing of what writing and printing mean, but they are accustomed to dealing with the external relationships of things. They try to find out the "laws" of the book, which for them mean the principles governing the order in which the letters are arranged. . . . They will think they have discovered the laws of the book when they have formulated certain rules governing the external relationships of the letters. That each word and each sentence expresses a meaning will never dawn [what interesting choice of word, dawn--as in the light of recognition] on them because their background of thought is made up of concepts which deal only with external relationships, and explanation to them means solving the puzzle of these external relationships. . . . Their methods will never reach the grade [of significance] which contains the idea of meanings.

(What interesting choice of word, "dawn"--as in the light of recognition)

Schumacher's comments:

The intelligent beings of Tyrrell’s allegory lacked adaequatio with regard to the book because they based themselves on the assumption that the ‘external relationships of the letters’ were all that mattered. They were what we should call scientific materialists, whose faith is that objective reality [i.e. anything that can be an object of knowledge] is limited to that which can be actually observed and who are ruled by a methodical aversion to the recognition of higher levels or grades of significance.

Important here, the role of assumption. Assumptions create walls or boundaries, or foundations, which can be useful in apprehending knowledge, but these boundaries can also clog, as it were, certain organs or parts of organs, limiting the capability of reception. It as if one put in earplugs and tried to listen to music—the experience, the reception, would be diminished. Certain assumptions can accomplish this limitation, such as the one Schumacher discusses here, the assumption of the scientific materialists.

I have experienced this emotionally. First recognizing and then removing certain assumptions about experience has altered my ability to receive certain experiences, and often the power and force with which the experience can enter me. And I have changed destructive emotional habits by recognizing and altering their underlying assumptions. Assumptions, beliefs, presuppositions can also be likened to the contraction or relaxation of muscles—whether it is the esophagus or the anus, the state of muscle tension can determine the receptivity of the cavity, and the receptivity to experience. Of course, the matter is rarely as simple as this "tube" analogy--our beliefs and assumptions contort and structure our subjective worlds in quite complex ways. But an example: if I assume that I am somehow intellectually superior than someone speaking to me, an assumption I have made many times in my life, than I am not going to receive what they have to say nearly as openly or fully as if I assumed that we are on the same level.

But still, life often forces itself down our throats. We each have a degree of control over what we “eat,” but we will all face things that we don’t want to swallow, but are forced down. In these situations, we may try to spit it back up (denial). But we can open our throats (often through removing certain assumptions), and let the experience run its course. This is an inward process, in reaction to an outward experience.

In hardly be taken as an unreasonable act of faith when people accept the testimony of prophets, sages, and saints who, in different languages but with virtually one voice, declare that the book of this world is not merely a colored shape but an expression of meaning; that there are Levels of Being above that of humanity; and that man can reach these higher levels provided he allows his reason to be guided by faith.

P.D. Ouspensky, in his Tertium Organum, gives an example of a candle and a coin. To a two-dimensional creature (and I recognize the possibility that as a human, there are higher dimensions than the one I routinely move around in), a candle and a coin both appear as circles. The creature cannot see the three-dimensional extension, cannot see the different appearance of these two objects, and further cannot deduce the meaning of these two objects, as it is defined by humans.

The physical senses are designed to accomplish certain tasks, but there are aspects of reality that they are not designed to apprehend. In a similar way, ordinary waking consciousness is designed to accomplish certain tasks, but not others. This is a fundamental law—the more refined and sophisticated an instrument is, the more narrow its focus.

The physical senses are designed to distinguish—that is, to recognize differences, to classify. The evolutionary advantage is obvious. In order to move around successfully in the world, to survive, we need to be able to distinguish between helps and harms, safeties and dangers. Science as we know it today is a technique born from the observations provided by the senses and takes as its fundamental assumption the distinctness of everything in the physical world. It deals, essentially, with surfaces. And on the surface, everything appears distinct. And nothing possesses meaning at this level, because meaning accompanies the recognition of relationship, and the inner dimensions of the world. Meaning is provided by the interior of the organism, from the most basic level of recognizing a plant as food, to seeing the face of God. For example, just because we have ears does not mean we can hear music. Our ears are designed to hear, or distinguish, sound. But music is composed of a complex web of relationships, and our ears alone cannot hear relationships. Most of us possess some capacity to hear music when we are born, and this capacity can be cultivated and developed.

The transpersonal vision

What are the limits of religious emotion, of the capabilities of human consciousness, even of aesthetic perception? How often do we impose limits on ourselves? What are saints and sages but humans pushing the limits of certain potentials of service and wisdom? Transpersonal psychology interests me very much because of its concern with certain "outer" limits of human experience. One of the founders of the transpersonal movement, Anthony Sutich, summarizes the field in the first issue of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, from the spring of 1969:

TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY is the title given to an emerging force in the psychology field by a group of psychologists and professional men and women from other fields who are interested in those ultimate human capacities and potentialities that have no systematic place in positivistic or behavioristic theory (“first force”), classical psychoanalytic theory (“second force”), or humanistic psychology (“third force”). The emerging Transpersonal Psychology (“fourth force”) is concerned specifically with the empirical, scientific study of, and responsible implementation of the findings relevant to, becoming, individual and species-wide meta-needs, ultimate values, unitive consciousness, peak experiences, B-values, ecstasy, mystical experience, awe, being, self-actualization, essence, bliss, wonder, ultimate meaning, transcendence of the self, spirit, oneness, cosmic awareness, individual and species-wide synergy, maximal interpersonal encounter, sacralization of everyday life, transcendental phenomena, cosmic self-humor and playfulness, maximal sensory awareness, responsiveness and expression, and related concepts, experiences, and activities. As a definition, this formulation is to be understood as subject to optional individual or group interpretations, either wholly or in part, with regard to the acceptance of its content ans essentially naturalistic, theistic, supernaturalistic, or any other designated classification.

Adaequatio

One of my foundation texts is E.F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed, which I think I found through reading Ken Wilber.

First, here is his introduction to the idea of adaequatio (adequateness):

What enables man to know anything at all about the world around him? 'Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object,' said Plotinus (died A.D. 270). Nothing can be known without there being an appropriate 'instrument' in the makeup of the knower. This is the Great Truth of 'adaequatio' (adequateness), which defines knowledge as adaequatio rei et intellectus--the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.

A simple example is language. If I don't know Spanish, I am not adequate to understand the meaning of something written in Spanish. Similarly, most humans can perceive music, not just sound, because they have the capacity, they are adequate to receive the meaning of this particular organization of sound. Lower animals probably cannot hear music, though they may very well be able to hear the sounds.

Schumacher’s exposition of the concept of adaequatio jives perfectly with the idea that there is no ultimate distinction between subject and object, between me and the world. If me reading the page is actually the page reading itself, then the meaning of the page’s words can only be registered by a human, who is adequate to register that meaning. The page can still be seen by an animal, but the meaning will not be registered. But the page-animal interface constitutes its own experience, while the page-human interface constitutes another experience, that is richer because of the greater depth of the human’s capabilities as a conscious instrument. Meaning is created by relationship, and this relationship requires both the human subject and the page object. They are inseparable, as far as the meaning is concerned.

The fascinating thing is that the universe is composed of endless meaning. Humans will never run out of meaning to experience—it is a matter of developing the proper "organs" (or capacities, whether intellectual, artistic, social, religious, etc.) to experience such meaning. It seems to make more sense to assume that the universe is perfect and complete as far as meaning is concerned, and that the human is incomplete, constantly developing the faculties to discern and register different parts of the universe.

It follows from this truth that any systematic neglect or restriction in the use of our organs of cognition must inevitably have the effect of making the world appear less meaningful, rich, interesting, and so on than it actually is. The opposite is equally true: the use of organs of cognition which for one reason or another normally lie dormant, and their systematic development and perfection, enable us to discover new meaning, new riches, new interests—facets of the world which had previously been inaccessible to us.

See, the world exists in its entirety right now. But humans are limited by time, space, and the individual limitations of different streams of development (moral, aesthetic, creative, spiritual, etc.) On the path of contemplation, boredom is a sign that certain “organs of cognition” need further development, to access another level of the world’s ever-present meaning. These limitations exist for a reason, however, to perfectly harmonize and create the conditions of human existence. Existence is created by limitations, everywhere in the universe. God is the only “thing” that has no limitations, and thus is beyond existence. Everything else is finite manifestation, and the conditions of their existence is a result of their limitations, just as a window is created by the bricks around it. Once the limitations are in place, the existing creature, whether it is an emotion or a rock or a human being is free to act within its limitations.

At the higher levels, the very ideas of prediction and control become increasingly objectionable and even absurd. The theologian, who strives to obtain knowledge of Levels of Being above the human, does not for a moment think of prediction, control, or manipulation [the usual province of science]. All he seeks is understanding. He would be shocked by predictabilities. Anything predictable can be so only on account of its ‘fixed nature,’ and the higher the Level of Being, the less is the fixity and the greater the plasticity of nature [note: the notoriously fluid nature of psychic life, emotions, etc.]. ‘With God all things are possible,’ but the freedom of action of a hydrogen atom is exceedingly limited. The sciences of inanimate matter—physics, chemistry, and astronomy—can therefore achieve virtually perfect power of prediction; they can, in fact, be completed and finalized, once and for all, as is claimed to be the case with mechanics.

The Great Chain of Being can be interpreted as an ordering of forms of limitation. Thinking of it in linear terms is easy to grasp, but also misleading at a certain point, for there are many, many forms of limitation. But generally speaking matter is the most limited form of finite manifestation; its very fundamentality, however, depends upon its “severe” limitations. For human beings, are composed of matter, and necessarily so.

“Only a perfectly clean instrument can obtain a perfectly clear picture.” The clearer the organ the more distinct its object.

Phases

“In 1970, while conducting thirty students around the world for an academic year to study cultures on location, I availed myself of my professional friendship with a distinguished philosopher at the University of Madras, T.M.P. Mahadevan, to ask him to speak to my students. I felt awkward about the invitation for I assigned him an impossible topic, to explain to neophytes in one short morning how Indian philosophy differs from Western philosophy. I needn’t have been concerned, for he rose to the occasion effortlessly. Beginning with a sentence that I remember verbatim for the scope it covered, he said, matter-of-factly: 'Indian philosophy differs from Western in that Western philosophers philosophize from a single state of consciousness, the waking state, whereas India philosophizes from them all.' From that arresting beginning, he went on to explain that India sees waking conscious [sic] as one state among four, the other three being the dream state, the state of dreamless sleep, and a final state that is so far from our waking consciousness that it is referred to simply as 'the fourth.'"

---Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals

"Anthropologists divide cultures into monophasic and polyphasic. Most of the world’s cultures, including shamanic ones, are polyphasic, meaning that they recognize and utilize multiple states of consciousness, such as dreams and meditative contemplative states. Polyphasic societies value and cultivate these states, honor those who master them, and derive much of their understanding from them of the mind, humankind, and the cosmos.

"By contrast, monophasic cultures - of which the modern Western world is the prime example - recognize very few healthy alternate states of consciousness and derive their view of reality almost exclusively from the usual waking condition. These societies give little credence to alternate states and may denigrate those who explore them, especially if they involve drug use. People reared within monophasic blinders can have great difficulty recognizing unfamiliar states, let alone their healing or spiritual potentials."

---Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., The World of Shamanism: New Views of an Ancient Tradition

Thinking about this from several angles.

First, Mahadevan's statement about the West is not only true of its philosophy, for the most part, but also of its science. It cannot be denied that the modern West excels in scientific inquiry, and it seems reasonable to connect this scientific supremacy with its commitment to the state of consciousness in which this scientific progress has been worked out. Science is the modern West's cornerstone of knowledge and truth, just as Christian doctrine was the cornerstone for the medieval West. That the modern West is remarkably monophasic, as far as its philosophy and science is concerned, is understandable, however, given the equally remarkable status of its sciences. It took many years of refinement and precision in order to reach the sophistication and technological applicability of our sciences; in the long development towards greater objectivity, altered states of consciousness, which require training and cultivation just like inductive reasoning, must have presented a great challenge. Not to our society's attitudes towards altered states catalyzed by certain drugs.

But all of this is to say that although the modern West could benefit from taking seriously other states of consciousness--with many applications in psychology, religion, and philosophy--the West still does have its rich scientific tradition from which to draw, particularly in cutting through the delusions and illusions that altered states can encourage. And science itself is not incompatible with altered states--science is identified by a method, not a state of consciousness (namely, our ordinary waking state). Charles Tart in particular has advocated for the development of "state-specific" sciences, applying rigor and discrimination to the often hazy and overly subjective altered states.

New levels

"The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at."

-- Albert Einstein (quoted in Ram Dass' The Only Dance There Is)

Possession

The reason why it is fruitless to try to possess anything is because anything that is possessed, i.e. taken for one’s own, is removed from the stream, and deprived of its life. Of course, the very desire to possess is itself part of the stream—there is no escaping (the Tao). But there is a difference between the tension, and unhappiness, created by the constant belief in one’s ability to possess things and identifying, instead, with the Tao and seeing that this is impossible. It’s like the difference between one man knowing it is impossible to lift a house with his bare hands, and another man trying for hours on end to try to lift it. Neither man will lift the house, but the first man will be much happier, in a certain sense. But perhaps nature intends for some people to learn the hard way. There is certainly something to be said for learning things the hard way.

Anything that you think you possess, you are going to have to give up eventually.

Ideas are easily possessed—we are rarely taught growing up that everything we have ever been taught is more akin to a ferry, a vehicle, than a tenet or law. A vehicle can move, a law cannot. There are too many contexts and levels in the world for any idea or statement or belief to encompass the entire truth. And the world is always changing and moving, thus requiring the mobility of vehicles. Words are far, far too limited. When we travel to a foreign country for the first time, we ride an airplane along a route we have never taken before, and when we land, we exit the plane. We don’t stay in the plane or try to take it with us. And if we go somewhere else, we go through the same process. The “vehicles” of Buddhism are aptly named: Mahayana (big vehicle) and Hinayana (little vehicle). Certain forms of Buddhism, particularly Zen, understand that nothing, not even the most divinely inspired theology or philosophy, escapes the fact of being simply a vessel to take one from side of things to another side. When you reach the other side, you need to get out of the vessel. And getting out of the vessel does not mean renouncing everything you learned in that vessel—that would be the equivalent of sailing backwards. Leaving the vessel is simply recognizing that you need to be open, unfettered, in continuing the journey, not expecting for the boat you used to cross the river to be helpful in scaling the mountain ahead of you. How much more encumbered will you be dragging your boat across the field!

The process of unlearning is equally as important as the process of learning. And just as we need clothes and houses to shelter us from the world, we develop psychological clothes and shelters. And this is of course necessary. We are much more capable of movement, of exploration, when we have shelter to return to, to rest upon, to take refuge. Julian Marias points to this fact in his discussion of the origins of our word “problem.” He points to the Greek verb from which the word is derived, which refers to a “jutting out,” like a wall. He points out that a wall is not always necessarily a problem, or an obstacle. It is only an obstacle when one desires to go beyond it, when it is in someone’s path. A wall, Marias says, can also be a shelter. By extension we can say that any philosophical concept can be an obstacle to one person, and a shelter to another, depending on where they are and where they want to go. Going back to the necessity of learning and unlearning—sometimes we need to shed and release—concepts, beliefs, assumptions—in order to climb a mountain, and sometimes we need to stock up to travel to the Arctic.

“The use of analogy is like boiling an egg; if boiled too long it will explode. The important thing is to boil for just long enough—and then eat the egg.”

---Alan Watts, The Supreme Identity (1950)


(more thoughts here)

Eyes and ears

"For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears."

---Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (1962)

I am a musician, so I naturally like metaphors that refer to sound (concordance, harmonization, etc.) I think think about this quote frequently, and not just with regard to connecting science and religion (it seems that today we are much closer to the concordance Watts speaks of than in 1962). When I encounter differing worldviews and opinions, whether on the cultural scale or the personal scale, I return to this image of the world as one body; and just as our ears and eyes do not fight with each other over who is right, but work together to present a richer, more complex manifestation of the world, this is my goal wherever I can spot discordancy. At least I'd like it to be.

I also take this attitude towards my psyche. I assume that my psyche is not nearly as harmonious as the rest of my body (even though the psyche is not separate from the body), that there are many conflicting I's running around, and so I seek the same concordance the rest of my body possesses--each part knowing its function and status. A lot of G.I. Gurdjieff's work speaks to this process of psychological harmonization.

Part of this process is understanding the purpose of many parts of my psyche, particularly the ones that I perceive as negative. I am still perplexed by a lot of what goes on in my mind, and I think part of this confusion is an ignorance of purpose. Robert Solomon's book on emotions, The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion, has been an enormous aid to sorting out the purpose of my emotions, and has helped me uncover and distinguish certain emotions that were buried beneath other emotions, which are especially troubling to me. I've recently become aware of how much envy I have been holding onto for years, mainly unaware. I remember a similar breakthrough with shame about a year ago.

Yes, discovering the purpose of something in my psyche helps enormously in harmonization (or integration, or Jung's term "individuation").

Ossification

"Spiritual growth depends upon ceasing to cling to any form of life for security. Forms are not contrary to the Spirit, but it is their nature to die; their transiency is their very life, and a permanent form would be a monstrosity—a finite thing aping God.

"The Spirit uses forms, and reveals itself through them, for which reason they are both wonderful and necessary. But they are not exempt from the simplest law of life—that, like every other living thing, to grasp them is to strangle and kill them. To preserve them in death is to cling to corruption."

---Alan Watts, In My Own Way

"Without a continual infusion of spiritual food you end up with what we would call a religion. The spiritual urge--the need to be part of your whole self--cannot be repressed any more than the sexual urge. But the expression of it always, inevitably--and I say that without any ill will--gets ossified. Inflexible bones lead to further inflexibility."

--James Fadiman, Higher Wisdom

First: what is the relationship between what Fadiman calls the spiritual urge and the sexual urge? My working hypothesis is that they are one, or at least intimately related. Both are characterized by the desire to merge with, to identify with, something outside of oneself; spiritually, with the Ultimate Reality, sexually, with another human. Even the orgasm itself, whether achieved with another person or by oneself, is a distinct alteration of consciousness--for a brief period, one cascades with ecstasy. It can be likened to being struck by lightning, being shot alive by a force much greater than oneself. It is telling that many reports of mystical experience, of spiritual ecstasy, use sexual metaphors. (see Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Theresa below)

What is lust?

Second: Both authors highlight the importance of keeping Spirit "alive" in one's life by continually renewing its expression. Spirit, of course, never dies--but we can become rigid and ossified, restricting it from coursing through us and our lives. Religion, for all of its insights into the nature of spiritual experience, can become ossified, but not necessarily. And if it is assumed, as I assume, that sexuality and spirituality are two poles of the same thing (visually conceived as the root chakra and the crown chakra), both religion and sex can be profound sources of contact with Spirit. Throughout one's life the ways in which the "urges" will be expressed will change, with good reason--to explore and celebrate the infinite variety of the play of Spirit itself.

Emotional structures

I'm almost finished with philosopher Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (1977). I feel like I did as I neared the end of Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality--I will undoubtedly read this book again, or at least return to many passages, as it is so full of new ideas and perspectives for me; and that it is providing me with a framework that I have already started to use in my life to great success. Emotions have long confused me, and Solomon has provided me with some fresh understanding. With each emotion he discusses, he has shown me something I never noticed or considered in approaching that emotion in my life. I intend to write about the book from several angles, but I can start off with this.

Solomon's basic thesis is this: "An emotion is a basic judgment about our Selves and our place in the world, the projection of the values and ideals, structures and mythologies, according to which we live and through which we experience our lives" (185). Essentially, he contrasts this view of emotion with what he calls the "Myth of the Passions," which is our traditional and common sense view of the emotions as "irrational," "just feelings," "pressures to be released," "intrusions," "obstacles to reason," and perhaps most importantly, "out of our control." He argues that we create our emotions, habitually, over time, as judgments that constitute our subjective world. They are intimately connected with our beliefs, opinions, and reasoning. In his model, emotions have their own logic and are inherently rational, with the primary goal of contributing to our dignity and self-esteem (but they are not all equally rational--some are "life-denying" like resentment, others are "life-affirming" like love). Even emotions that are inherently interpersonal, like love or admiration, include a strategy to maximize our self-esteem, even if we are also trying to maximize the self-esteem and welfare of someone else, like a loved one or a friend. Emotions are also the structures of our world--they hold it together and create for us meaning and significance. And, a point that he emphasizes constantly, we are responsible for them, for they are our own creation, whether consciously or not. Again, the theory is complex, but these are some of the basic points. 

 I'd also like to introduce a term Solomon coins, which is useful in discussing the subjectivity of emotions: surreality, from the French ("reality plus"). Surreality refers to the “reality” that is created by subjectivity, in particular human subjectivity, in contrast to “The Reality” which is the objective world. Surreality is my world, reality is the world. Surreality is “reality plus” because it is infused with the particular beliefs, habits, and emotions of the individual to create meaning and significance within the objective world. Everyone lives within their own surreality (and surrealities can be and are shared intersubjectively; a culture is a shared surreality; so is a family, and so is any human relationship), and that is their perspective on the world. Solomon argues that this perspective is constituted fundamentally of our emotions, along with our beliefs, concepts, etc.

So...

Regarding the discussion here, I'd like to return to the relationship between philosophical "problems" and the notions of obstacles, shelters, and structures. I wrote about Marías' "pointing out that something--a situation, a concept, an attitude--is only a problem if it is perceived as an obstacle." I gave the example of someone's religious beliefs providing a shelter, a structure, for their subjective world, their surreality. Religious belief is deeply entwined with emotion (faith and worship in particular), and, as Solomon argues, emotions constitute the structures of our world. For many people, faith and worship are two of the strongest, most definitive emotions of their lives, and thus are fundamental structures of their surrealities, along with the relationship with God that accompanies the emotions. Similarly, the depth of love people can reach in matrimony provides similar foundation and structure. 

Solomon argues that each emotion has its own inherent logic and structure, but each holds the same goal: the maximization of dignity and self-esteem. Consider anger: "The key to anger is its judgment of indictment and accusation. Anger is a judgment of personal offense. . . . Its judgmental nature is thus the most explicit of the emotions, with oneself as the court in which indictment and argument, verdict and sentence (but not necessarily the carrying out of the sentence), are all explicit. Anger is usually direct and explicit in its projection of our personal values and expectations on the world. Anger, whether expressed or not, is our insistence upon our ideals, even when that insistence is based far more on self-assertiveness or obstinacy than on any commitment to the ideals as such." Thus anger constitutes a particular judgment of someone else's action, which involves a perceived personal offense on the part of the angered party. It is clear how its "logic" is related to the goal, if we agree with Solomon, of maximizing dignity and self-esteem. We are offended because someone has violated one of our ideals, whether it is a "universal" moral ideal or a personal one. 

Things start to get interesting when we consider the fact that anger often serves the purpose of reminding us of what we believe to be true, like "I deserve to treated with respect," and can even reinforce our beliefs and ideals. This is also apparent when anger is protracted over long periods of time, like months or years. We sometimes describe the process of "holding on" to anger, or referring to it as "deep-seated." Why do we hold on? Sometimes, we want or need to hold on because this a fundamental structure of our surreality, and we may not even realize that we are holding onto it. 

Consider hatred. One of the many fascinating aspects of the book is Solomon's emphasis on the "mythology" of the different emotions. Hatred is a good example. We are familiar with the notion of one's "nemesis," from superhero comics for example. Hatred is a fundamental aspect of the nemesis relationship, but we often, paradoxically, witness a sort of "necessity" to the relationship, as if one party wouldn't be quite the same if it were not for the intense hatred of the other. The relationships in superhero comics sometimes turn on this often humorous paradox, almost likening hatred to a certain form of love. The peculiarity of the nemesis relationship is itself a structure. Solomon points to several of its aspects: mutual responsibility between the two haters ("You can't really hate someone who is indifferent to you (rather resent him)"); mutual respect (very apparent in superhero mythology); and, surprisingly, intimacy. Often, two people who are antagonists possess a certain intimacy with each other, which can account for their mutual respect. They know what the other is capable of. 

Back to the idea of a structure/shelter/obstacle. We sometimes say things like "I live in fear of . . ." or "He is harboring resentment towards . . ." or we feel stuck in certain emotional habits. The language here is telling--we often conceive of emotions in these terms. Returning to Marías, he points out the ambiguity of the structures that are composed of our concepts and beliefs--taking on the form of shelters or obstacles depending on everything else that is going on in our lives. This ambiguity is mirrored in our emotional structures, which, again, are not as separate from the structures created by our beliefs and opinions as we might assume--someone's deep-seated anger (which usually turns into resentment) may feel both like a shelter, allowing one to condemn a certain person with the "magisterial" (to use Solomon's term) authority that anger confers, safe within the confines of the resentment. But the shelter can also feel like a prison.

(There is an interesting connection between these ideas I'm playing around with and the mystical accounts of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa, both of whom describe their mystical journeys with God in terms of physical structures like houses, castles, and rooms.) Also, the ambiguity can be seen in the inadequacy of the "positive/negative" view of the emotions.

There is also the matter of emotional and psychological defensiveness, which can be likened to a particular kind of structure--a fortress. Defensiveness and its opposite, intimacy, are two subjects of interest in Solomon's book.

What interests me about the connection between Marias' idea and Solomon's ideas are the mechanisms of surreality--how our subjective worlds are created, built, structured, and the roles played by emotions, beliefs, opinions, assumptions (e.g. Charles Tart), prejudices, etc. This is something I'd like to keep fleshing out.