|
December 2006
The TAT Forum
Essays, poems, opinions and humor on seeking
and finding answers to your deepest life-questions
The Early Teachings of Richard Rose
by Mike Gegenheimer
When you are drawn into a spiritual search, it can be an interest in a peripheral question which has first caught your eye; or a perception about life which gives you a seemingly special insight; or a trauma or death which turns the head and leads to sincere questioning.
Whatever the cause, the first steps, if pursued, will bring results. It is a like the line from the book 1984: "One plus one equals two, and all else follows."
Early meetings with Richard Rose often started with a rapport session to get peoples' heads in the room. Then conversation would begin, typically around a topic ... "What is your chief feature?" "How do you define love?" "What is thought?"
Questioning followed, sometimes called "confrontation." But, the person's answer was not as important as having them become aware of their thinking or unrecognized beliefs; or how their mind functioned -- the purpose of confrontation is to know the mind.
Rose was so skilled that often meetings were like living poetry. On the rare weeks he was absent in the early days of the group, we would try hard to hit the right balance, sometimes succeeding, sometimes being ineffective or, alternately, too harsh. But, we persisted. During each of the early meetings, Rose would review the Albigen System.
"First thing you have to do is get your head on straight," Rose would remark. "If you are drinking or doing dope -- stop." "You have to get your house in order, physically and mentally, before you can begin."
Out would come the stories of the "man number one," physical animal man and the experience that might raise him to "man number two," the emotional man. Then he would describe the experience of man number two as he conquers his emotions to become intellectual "man number three." And then he would describe the eureka of man number three as he becomes the philosophical "man number four."
All of this engendered some questions, some discussion. And the principle of retreating from untruth was explained.
…And the conversation would continue. Rose would speak of the three-fold path, and begin the explanation found in The Albigen Papers about this path of action. "There are certain laws of human effort…" leading to the discussion of the law of the ladder, the contractor's law, the law of love, and so on, found in The Albigen Papers.
Then Rose would turn to the description of the "Maximum Reversal Technique": develop the intuition, build curiosity into desire, and "retraverse the projected ray." We all variously began taking action. The latter instruction concerning "retraversing the projected ray" was always puzzling. But, in retrospect, the various aspects of our effort lead us in that direction.
Then the sense of momentum began to be felt by many who sensed their heads were clearer, their energy higher. Things began to happen in the group.
The discussion of celibacy made sense; and the cumulative effect of various practices proved out Rose's guidelines as each in his own way made progress.
Private rapport sittings were instituted among the more serious members of the group, and Rose helped sort out the sub-groups of members according to his sense of their compatibility in rapport.
As people began to free themselves from various hang-ups and vices, some fell back into their traps; some left the group freer than before, but following some other wrinkle of obsession. But, those that remained, and there were a few more each year, became more sensitive and grew in understanding without, perhaps, realizing it.
People continued to benefit from the tension of confrontation sessions and from the "betweenness" of rapport sessions, which created the leaps and shocks that helped advance the understanding of their minds and awareness.
Some events were more remarkable than others were, but all served to demonstrate that group action could be of benefit to its members. The more remarkable events demonstrated direct mind contact, and not only the possibility, but the reality of transmission of mind. Other events demonstrated the existence of adverse forces.
As the group matured slightly, Rose handed over group meetings to monitors, and he began to speak more widely and began working on subsequent books.
These additional efforts expanded on some themes and captured new topics. But let's look again at the early teachings.
Unlike a college professor, Rose was a true teacher who lived the subject matter of which he spoke. He did not just learn it, practice it and speak authoritatively -- he lived it and became the Truth.
He exemplified what he taught -- he walked what he talked. Over the years the direction he pointed was consistent and the same -- to look inside, to go within. We were like kids learning soccer skills, generally knowing why, but not seeing the whole field.
So let's talk through some of the basics. The three-fold path. In The Albigen Papers Rose speaks of the three-fold path -- the Way, the Truth and the Life -- and compares the Christian and Buddhist descriptions of the path. But, more than repeating these words, he inspired us to engage in activities, along the Way, towards the Truth (actually retreating from untruth), living the Life of brotherhood … Confrontation, meditation, spontaneous rapport sittings, and eventually planned rapport sessions … we began with his help to apply the best practices. In some ways, intuitively recognizing what we were doing, but "not seeing the whole field."
The Maximum Reversal Technique
This is described in the eighth chapter of The Albigen Papers and also in his book on Energy Transmutation, Between-ness and Transmission. It has three aspects:
- Developing curiosity into desire;
- Developing the intuition -- the finite mind becomes less finite;
- Consciously retraversing the projected ray.
Rose emphasized that, in practicing these, one cannot postulate the Truth beforehand. One can only retreat from untruth, and accept that which is.
Developing curiosity into desire. We began taking action. Based on our initial interests, we began working together, building vectors of action, which lead to more action. Meetings, posters, book stuffers, campus lectures, the Ashram, meditation, confrontation, rapport … we began living a life more consistent with that of a seeker. And when you commit yourself to know the Truth and act on that commitment, you begin to feel momentum. You retreat from the manifestly absurd attitudes, drop petty egos, review past traumas in meditation … you feel momentum and understand the meaning of a vector … away from untruth. Your curiosity builds into a desire to know more. And ultimately to become the Truth.
Developing the intuition. Rose often stated a quote from a religious philosopher, "The finite mind will never perceive the infinite," but he added, "The finite mind can become less finite.…"
In the group meetings -- confrontation meetings -- Rose seemed to know our thoughts and motivations before we did. He knew the reasoning (and rationalizations) he was hearing before we did. And when we began confronting each other, we developed rapport, personal insights into each other, into ourselves, and began to understand the reasoning in our thinking. But individuals all have different blocks and hang-ups. And this is where the specific teaching outside the general text occurred -- from Richard Rose and from each other. And the purpose was not to drive ourselves to a belief … the purpose was to challenge our thinking; to know the mind. Richard reminded us when we became too heavy handed, "the purpose of confrontation is to know the mind."
And following Richard's advice, the practice of celibacy and avoidance of dissipation improved the intuition. When one closes the doors, others open. The impact manifested itself clearly, personally, and in group settings.
Consciously retraverse the project ray. This was a point that Richard spoke of less directly, indicating it was understood when looking back … and so it is. In Introduction to the Albigen System (an audio CD of a lecture), he hits on this point when describing one of the four attributes of a true Zen system -- "direct pointing at the soul of man" -- and notes that when looking inside, observation of one's thought occurs from a point along the ray.
In later years, Rose stated the basic elements needed for spiritual effort in others words, but always the three elements of the maximum reversal technique can be seen in them.
In one conversation, Richard noted that if there was no Albigen System, to find an answer all that was needed was to be celibate and engage in intense self-psychoanalysis until the mind stops. In Dave Gold's book, After the Absolute (p.89), he quotes Rose saying: "Three things are necessary: desire, energy and commitment."
In these early days of the group, Rose was there, actively engaged with us in practicing the Way of seeking; the Life of brotherhood; with the Truth as our objective.
The Self as an Obstacle
By now, this may seem to many to be obvious, but at the time, at the outset, this was not the problem many saw in front of themselves. But once you begin to seek, you recognize the fallibility of your perceptions, your mind, and your faulty sense of reasoning. The relative mind and its states of mind, egos and urges is the battlefield. Rose describes this poetically in the first of The Books of the Relative, found in Carillon (his book of poetry). It begins: "My name is legion, but I have but one Lord. I am an army standing against myself, and for the dust of my flourishes I cannot see my Lord." That writing goes on to describe the battle against the self -- the retreat from untruth -- you experience as you challenge your egos, observe and reject erroneous thinking and its causes. Until what remains? "I am the beginning and the end. I am the bowman, the arrow , and the victim. I am the way. I am the path. I am the Ladder…. I speak and thou hearest Me not. I am the Truth. I am the Love. And as I promised, I and thou are one…. I am the voice of silence. I am the joy and the sorrow. I am the beginning and the end. Be still and know I am the discernment."
When I first read this, I felt, "how anti-climactic to say, 'I am the discernment.'" But as you read the Psychology of the Observer (another of Rose's books), and engage in this work, this may become more meaningful to you.
But this is not a history lesson. The Albigen System provides means to accelerate efforts. Simply begin to act.
- Take your inspiration, your interest, and develop it into desire for Truth; develop it into a commitment to yourself.
- Seek to use your intuition, work with others. It does not require Rose; employ best practices with others.
- Retreat from less truthful activities in your life -- question why you do the things you do and drop the ridiculous.
Tension will develop; so will a sense of momentum. You need to build the energy and momentum in a direction -- retreat from untruth -- with a "determination greater than death."
From a presentation given at the April 2006 TAT conference "What Is Spiritual Action?" See the April 2006 conference page for DVD information.
|
|
The Dead, by Billy Collins
"The dead are always looking down on us, they say...."
We contacted the University of Pittsburgh Press, which controls permission to display the poem, to ask if they would forego their fee for a non-profit use, but we didn't hear back from them. So we've put links here to several animated versions that are currently available on the web:
Click here for a Flash animation of Billy Collins reading his poem (click twice on target site's start button), or
click here for a QuickTime version (takes a little while to buffer),
or click here for a Google animation (quicker but not as good quality).
The print versions that were available on the web seem to have disappeared.
Billy Collins is professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and America's Poet Laureate for 2001.
|
Is What You See Real?
by Art Ticknor
|
In the January 2006 issue of the Dana Foundation's newsletter "Brain in the News," there was an article about Esref Armagan, a 52-year-old Turkish man who has been blind since birth. Armagan "has never seen a coffee cup, a toothbrush, an elephant, or a tree-lined street, but he can draw them each, from any perspective, with or without shadows depending on the time of day.... Though [he] has never had an art lesson, the streets he paints stretch into the distance as converging parallel lines." Harvard researchers, the article reported, found to their amazement when doing brain scans: "Esref's visual cortex lit up during the drawing tasks as if he were actually seeing."
You may think you see with your eyes. Buddha (c. 500 BC) knew differently: "The eyes seeing forms is equivalent to blindness; the ears hearing sounds is equivalent to deafness." Foyan, a Ch'an master who lived about 600 years after Buddha, told his students: "You are always in the light, and yet do not know it, even with your eyes open." Why? What were they talking about? The view, we could say, from inside the cosmic egg.
What is spiritual action, and what's the relation of action to realization, to awakening? Beliefs are what keep us trapped, asleep and dreaming in the cosmic egg. The first step to realization -- primary spiritual action -- involves getting some perspective or detachment from those beliefs
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of my heroes as a young man. One of the buildings he designed was the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The main part of the museum is an open space, like a cylinder whose wall is canted outward as it goes up. There's an ascending ramp from the main floor that spirals up along the wall, with paintings hung on the wall, to your right as you ascend the ramp.
Suppose you went to the Guggenheim as a child with your parents or on a school outing and, upon entry, a conveyor belt carried everyone shoulder-to-shoulder along that outer wall up the spiral -- with your nose no more than an inch or two from the paintings. You wouldn't get much of a perspective, would you. Getting perspective requires that you stand back from what you're observing. Some ways to encourage this:
- Clear some space in your life:
- Do a media fast -- eliminate Internet surfing, TV, video games, magazines, newspapers, books, movies, music, etc. other than that strictly required for school or work, for a defined period (one week, for example).
- Spend a scheduled period of time alone each day without the typical distractions. Use it for introspection -- gain clarity as to your life-objective and roadblocks.
- Do a solitary retreat once or twice a year, where you devote a weekend, a week, a month to getting a break from the daily routine and finding renewed inspiration for what's supremely important.
- Eliminate habits that cloud the mind.
- Introspect the mind -- watch without judging. Implement self-inquiry: Why am I doing what I'm doing? What is my innermost desire? Who is living and facing death? etc.
- Clear up the subject-object confusion. "You are never that which is seen."
- Allow your mind to recognize/remember its connection to something bigger than itself -- find the mental umbilical cord that connects you to your source.
Finding the umbilical cord and following it Home is on the "feeling side" of the mind. Music keys into the longing for many people, and a piece of music that is able to ring the longing bell for many people is the Largo from Dvorak's 9th (New World) Symphony. Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, was so moved by it that he took it along on that mission, Apollo 11.
At the 2006 TAT spring conference, one of the participants with a beautiful voice sang the following lyrics to the Largo melody:
GOING HOME, CLOSE YOUR EYES
lyrics by Art Ticknor to the Largo
from Dvorak's New World Symphony
|
I.
If you feel lost
and torn apart
from the source of love,
look for it,
it's not hard,
you fit it like a glove.
|
|
II.
Where is home?
Where is home?
Neither here nor far,
not in front,
not behind,
not on a distant star.
|
|
III.
Close your eyes,
close your eyes,
listen to this well:
you and I
are not two,
this is where you dwell.
|
IV.
If you feel lost
and torn apart
from the source of love,
look for it,
it's not hard,
you fit it like a glove.
|
|
V.
You're the path,
yes, you're the path:
whatever does this mean?
Where am I?
Not here nor there
but somewhere in-between.
|
|
VI.
Close your eyes,
close your eyes,
listen to this well:
you and I are not two,
this is where you dwell....
this is where you dwell....
yes, this is where you dwell.
|
Those words may express a message from your inner self.
|
THE DARKNESS OF GOD: A Personal Report on Consciousness
Transformation Through an Encounter with Death, by John Wren-Lewis
This article describes a radical and lasting change of consciousness
that has overtaken the author as a result of nearly dying by
poisoning in 1983. The initial experience lacked almost all the
dramatic features that have attracted popular attention in the many
accounts of "near-death experiences" appearing over the past decade
such as "out-of-body" travel, passage through a tunnel, review of
earlier life, or encounter with apparently supernatural entities. It
was more in the nature of a dissolution into a Nirvanic or
void-state of undifferentiated aliveness, but it produced a major
and apparently permanent awareness-shift far beyond the emotional
reorientations that are commonly reported to follow close encounters
with death. The change seems to correspond closely with traditional
religious descriptions of mystical "awakening" to experiential unity
with the essence of all being, from which viewpoint the mystical
perception of reality is seen as simple normal consciousness rather
than an "altered state," while so-called ordinary consciousness is
recognized to be a clouded condition wherein awareness has become
bogged down in an illusion of separate selfhood confronting an alien
environment. This change of viewpoint represents a complete
antithesis to the author's prior religious background, which
involved total skepticism of all mystical claims and of near-death
experience reports.
The overall experience provides independent confirmation to the
change of direction that was becoming apparent, unbeknownst to the
author, in the main body of research on near-death experiences
(NDEs) in the early 1980s. Interest was being focused on the changes
of consciousness that undeniably sometimes occur in
crisis-situations, as phenomena of great scientific and human
interest in their own right, rather than on inevitably contentious
arguments about whether or not NDEs provide glimpses of another
world beyond the grave. By viewing NDE phenomena in this new
perspective, the author is able to suggest a possible psychodynamic
mechanism underlying the clouding of everyday consciousness and, on
this basis, to propose guidelines for future research towards less
drastic means of inducing "awakening."
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you, which
shall be the darkness of god. - T.S. Eliot
"Deathbed visions" have occupied a prominent place in popular lore
from time immemorial, but during the past decade, reports of strange
and apparently religious experiences accompanying close encounters
with death have for the first time become the subject of serious
scientific study. In prescientific cultures, such reports tended to
become so quickly incorporated into the prevailing dogmatic or
mythological thought-patterns that the separation of experiential
fact from wishful fancy or didactic elaboration was virtually
impossible: Who can say, for instance, how much of the story of
Nachekita's visit to the kingdom of death in the Katha Upanishad, or
of Plato's story of Er, or of Dante's Divine Comedy, sprang from any
kind of mystical experience, and how much from intellectual
invention designed to make philosophical points? It seems to have
been necessary for our culture to pass through a period of total
skepticism before the subject could be studied in a fashion that
established a solid factual basis for such stories; even though the
majority of medical and scientific opinion probably remains
skeptical about whether or not these "near-death experiences" have
any religious or metaphysical significance, there is now no serious
doubt that they occur (Lundahl, 1982). According to a recent poll
reported by George Gallup, Jr., in the book Adventures in
Immortality, probably many millions of people -- 5% of the adult
population (if not more) in North America -- have had such an
experience (Gallup, 1982). The phenomenon has indeed achieved the
ultimate dignity of being initialized to NDE, and there is a highly
respectable International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS)
based at the University of Connecticut, publishing a first-rate
scientific journal, Anabiosis. (See References for particulars.)
Journalists have not been slow to make capital out of this
development. This usually takes the form of sensational claims that,
thanks to modern medical advances, more and more people are nowadays
being snatched back from the very jaws of death and are giving
reliable testimony of having glimpsed the hitherto undiscovered
country; the idea has even been made the subject of a movie titled
Beyond and Back. And sensationalism notwithstanding, this could be
considered a legitimate, if over-dramatic, extrapolation from the
way the subject was approached by the first major pioneer
investigator, American psychologist Raymond Moody, in his now
best-selling book Life After Life (Moody, 1975). This inevitably
provoked skeptical counterattack along three main lines: (1) if
resuscitation occurs, it is surely arguable that clinical death
never really occurred whatever the dearth of vital signs; (2) the
common features of the accounts, which for Moody and other early
investigators seemed so impressive, actually pale into
insignificance when set against the wide differences; and (c)
similar "religious" experiences have been reported by people in
other kinds of stressful conditions where there is no question of
clinical death, for example, when life seems to be threatened by a
fall over a high cliff, or by a vehicle bearing down at great speed,
yet the accident is completely averted by landing on unexpectedly
soft snow or by the vehicle swerving at the last second (Noyes &
Kletti, 1976). Skeptics argue that such considerations make
hallucination a much more likely explanation of NDEs than any kind
of "glimpse Beyond" -- and an especially strong reaction along these
lines has come from the psychiatric community concerned with care
for the dying and bereaved, who suspect that behind all the fuss
about NDEs lies their old bęte noir, the escapist impulse to deny
the reality of death.
In the past few years, however, an important change of emphasis has
taken place amongst near-death researchers that renders all such
skeptical considerations largely irrelevant. The specific content of
NDEs, while undeniably interesting, tends now to be seen as
secondary; primary significance is given to the unquestionable fact
that a close encounter with death, whether clinically or only in a
life-threatening situation, seems to produce in many cases a
remarkable change of consciousness, which is worthy of study in its
own right, and which, on any reasonable reckoning, is highly
significant for our estimates about what kind of creature the human
being is. In fact, psychologist Kenneth Ring, founder of IANDS and
author of the first major scientific study of NDEs (1980), concludes
in his new book Heading towards Omega (1984) that NDE studies are
now emerging as a new and important subsection of the more general
study of mystical and religious consciousness in the tradition of
investigators such as William James (1958), R. M. Bucke (1923), and
Sir Alister Hardy (1981). One might add that this makes the subject
very much the business of humanistic psychology and, on that
premise, I submit here an account of my own NDE in 1983, which
pointed very clearly in the direction of Ring's conclusion long
before his book came out and before I had read any of the NDE
literature seriously. (A cursory glance at Moody's book had left me
with very much the skeptical view outlined above.)
My NDE was much less dramatic in content than many that have hit
headlines. I had no "out-of-body" vision of myself supposedly dead
in the hospital, nor any clairvoyant perception of the medical staff
discussing whether their emergency treatment had come too late to
save me. I was given no overview of my life and no experience of
hurtling through a dark tunnel to a heavenly realm beyond. I saw no
unearthly landscape, celestial light, or marvelous colors, heard no
angelic music, and met no deceased relatives or supernatural figures
telling me to go back to my body because my work on earth wasn't
done yet. On the other hand the aftereffects of the experience were
dramatic indeed, and I have yet to read of anything quite like them
in the NDE literature. The experience has remained with me ever
since, not just as a changed attitude to life, however radical, but
as a totally altered state of consciousness that has what I can only
call eternal quality right here and now, so that I no longer worry
about what happens after death.
To start, however, with the material facts -- I had just emerged
unscathed from a year in the Malaysian jungle with my wife, dream
psychologist Ann Faraday, seeking to establish the truth or
otherwise of reports about a special dream-culture amongst the Senoi
tribe quoted in her books (Faraday, 1973, 1976; for our findings,
see Faraday & Wren-Lewis, 1984). After a rest on the beaches of Ko
Samui off the east coast of Thailand, we embarked on a long-distance
bus to Phukett on the west coast. We knew nothing then of reports in
the international press about thieves plying travelers with drugged
sweets or drinks before making off with their wallets and luggage
while they dozed, or of the sensational case where one pathological
killer poisoned a whole coachload of people (Neville & Clarke,
1979). We heard one or two rumors, but having experienced nothing
but generosity from everyone we'd met so far, we discounted these as
scaremongering tales spread by hippies who'd eaten too many of the
magic mushrooms that are on sale everywhere in Thai resorts. We had
no suspicion whatever of the nice, well-dressed young man who helped
us with our luggage and then, on this crowded vehicle in broad
daylight, offered us Cadbury's toffees. They tasted distinctly
musty, but I sucked on to the (literally) bitter end out of
politeness; Ann, less inhibited, spat hers out; thanks to this I am
now alive to tell the tale, for that particular thief evidently went
in for injecting his toffees with overdoses and, had we both dozed
off, we would have slept our way into eternity.
When the young man saw Ann wasn't eating her sweet, he realized his
plans were foiled and left the bus hastily at the next stop (the
last before we set off across country), just as I was beginning to
feel drowsy. When my head dropped on my chest and I began to drool,
Ann grasped what had happened but felt there was nothing to do now
but let me sleep it off, so she stretched me out on the seat with a
sleeping bag under my head. After a while, however, as the bus
plunged on into the countryside, she noticed with alarm that I was
going blue around the lips and had no detectable pulse. With
difficulty, she persuaded the driver to stop (he thought I was
drunk) and, after some hassle, managed to get me back to Surat Thani
hospital by hitching a ride in a van. The doctors were not at a
hopeful of saving me but made the optimistic assumption that my
total lack of response to deep pain was due to the drug (they
suspected morphine, which is very cheap in Thailand) rather than to
imminent death, and they plied me with oxygen and antidotes by
intravenous drip. It was about 7 hours before I showed any evidence
of coming around, and they decided to put us up for the night in a
private room.
It was some hours later still before I really surfaced to find
someone asking if I wanted supper. For some time after that, I was
so occupied getting in touch with what had been going on, I just
didn't think about anything else; it was only after everyone else
was asleep that I began to wonder why that rather shoddy hospital
room seemed transcendentally beautiful. My first thought was, "Hey,
is this why people get hooked on morphine?" But second thoughts told
me that after all this time any drug effects should have worn off (a
conclusion since confirmed by pharmacological experts). What is
more, I had taken part in extensive research on psychedelic drugs in
England in the late 1960s (Wren-Lewis, 1971) and had some
extraordinary experiences, including an apparently transcendental
experience of blissful white light under LSD, but my experience in
the Surat Thani hospital room was nothing like that. It was
altogether calmer, without any perceptual distortion, yet at the
same time far more impressive. I began to wonder if I'd had some
kind of "Moody" experience while "out," so I tried a technique that
Ann and I have sometimes found useful when we wake up knowing we
have just had a vivid dream but cannot get back any details.
I lay on the bed, relaxed, and began to take myself back in
imagination, in a series of steps, right to the point of coming
round. "Here I am, lying on this bed, with someone asking if I want
supper; here I am, just before that, becoming aware of someone
shaking my arm; here I am, before that again, with my eyes closed,
and...." Often this process brings back the dream one has
forgotten, but what came back this time was nothing like a
remembered dream. What came back flooding back was an experience
that in some extraordinary way had been with me ever since I came
around without my realizing it. It was as if I'd come out of the
deepest darkness I had ever known, which was somehow still there right
behind my eyes.
One of the NDEs reported to Kenneth Ring (1980) was from a woman who
said she had been enveloped in "a very peaceful blackness ... a
soft, velvet blackness," and I know just what she meant -- but I feel
the need to say something stronger to do justice to my experience. A
phrase that has since come to mind occurs in an ancient alchemical
text; we now know that alchemy was concerned more with psychological
and spiritual changes than chemical ones, and in one old book it is
said that there occurs a point in the transformation where the
operator "falls into the black sun" and experiences "a palpable
absence of light" (an interesting psychological anticipation of
"black holes"?). The darkness I experienced was in some
extraordinary way radiant, and I cannot help thinking of the poem
Night by Henry Vaughan, with its strange line: "There is in God,
some say, a deep but dazzling darkness."
I am not trying to push any particular theological or metaphysical
conclusions when I use the word "God" here. On the contrary, my
readings in theology and metaphysics in earlier years never conjured
up to my mind anything remotely like this experience. I am simply
saying that since the experience, Vaughan's line and a whole host of
other statements made by mystics in all religious traditions seem to
make sense as word-straining attempts to describe the strange state
in which I found myself; for instance: the Hebrew poet's cry in
Psalm 139 that "the night shineth as the day," or Mohammed's
statement that he experienced "the Night of Power," or the assertion
of St. John of the Cross that he encountered God as "a dark cloud
illumining the night." I am even led to wonder if similar
experiences, rather than mere cosmological speculation, underlie
references to "cosmic darkness" in some of the world's primordial
creation-stories such as the "darkness on the face of the deep" in
Genesis or the "darkness at first by darkness hidden" in the Rig
Veda, or Te Po, the "first night" of the Maori creation story. I
wonder if the Hebrew story came straight out of the experience of
Abraham when he "fell into a deep sleep" at sunset and "lo, a dread
and great darkness fell upon him" (Genesis 15:12).
Most stories about-near-death experiences mention darkness only as a
prelude to some greater experience of light, usually the famous dark
tunnel. Now of course, I can't say categorically that I didn't
experience going through a tunnel -- I simply don't remember any
transition into the darkness -- the only thing I recall before that was
feeling drowsy on the bus. But I can say that it would seem utterly
silly to think of the darkness, as I experienced it, as an
intermediate state to anything else at all, for it seemed utterly
complete. One of the rare exceptions to the rule in the near-death
stories occurs in Raymond Moody's Life after Life, where a man
reports a darkness "so deep and impenetrable that I could see
absolutely nothing, but this was the most wonderful, worry-free
experience you can imagine." I, too, felt utterly secure in my
darkness, knowing that all life's struggles were over and I had
"come home" to a state beyond all danger, where I no longer needed
or wanted anything because everything I could possibly want or need
was already mine. That shining darkness seemed to contain everything
that ever was or could be, all space and all time, and yet it
contained nothing at all, for the very word "thing" implies separate
entities, whereas what I experienced was an utterly simple
being-ness without any kind of separation -- the very essence, it
seemed, of aliveness, prior to any individual living beings. Another
paradoxical expression, this time from Eastern mysticism, seems the
only one that is remotely adequate -- "the living Void," an idea echoed
in Christian mysticism by Meister Eckhart's description of the
Godhead as "empty, as though it were not," or in Jacob Boehme's
reference to the deity as "a suprasensual abyss" (Eckhart, 1981;
Boehme, 1970).
Another man reported to Raymond Moody that he found himself "just
floating and tumbling through space," and then added, "I was so
taken up with this void that I just didn't think of anything else."
The idea that a void could possibly be interesting would have seemed
nonsense to me before, but it now makes total sense. In fact, the
state I am trying to describe seems to defy all ordinary canons of
logic, and my deepest resonance is to Buddha's classic description
of Nirvana, which simply piles one contradiction upon another:
Monks, there exists that condition wherein is neither earth nor
water nor fire nor air; wherein is neither the sphere of infinite
space nor of infinite consciousness nor of nothingness nor of
neither-consciousness-nor-unconsciousness; where there is neither
this world nor a world beyond nor both together nor moon-and-sun.
Thence, monks, I declare there is no coming to birth; thither is
no going; therein is no duration; thence is no falling; there is
no arising. It is not something fixed, it moves not on. That
indeed is the end of ill. (Pali Canon, 1968)
And even "the end of ill" has to be contradicted too if I am to do
justice to my experience, for it was in no way merely negative. It
was indeed "a worry-free experience," "a very peaceful blackness,"
but there was nothing at all lifeless about it; it was "the peace of
God that passeth understanding." Words like bliss or joy are equally
inadequate, for they are far too limited, which I think must be why
the Katha Upanishad says that when its young hero Nachekita went to
the kingdom of death he discovered a new kind of Self, the Universal
Self, Brahman, who is "effulgent Being, joy beyond joy" (Hume,
1974).
Here again I must emphasize that I am not trying to push any
metaphysical idea about a place or realm in which the soul survives
after death. In purely medical terms I certainly came very close
indeed to dying, but from what the doctors told me, I have no reason
to suppose that I actually crossed the border of "clinical death,"
as is alleged in some NDE reports. And, subjectively, my experience
was not of leaving the body, or of going into an apparently heavenly
realm: It was not of going anywhere, but more like everywhere having
somehow become present to me, or, more precisely, of somehow
becoming present to consciousness without there being any more "me"
to be conscious. And that is why I can so immediately identify with
young Nachekita in the Upanishad: In that nirvanic condition there
was aliveness or awareness, and, therefore, in terms of human logic,
I have to say that there must have been some kind of Self, but the
self of John with his personal history had ceased to be, finished.
And I don't mean that my former life was forgotten -- rather, I had
the sense that all personal histories, mine and my friends' and
those of all who have ever lived or will ever live, were now
recognized as mere incidents in an infinite Aliveness that is beyond
all history, beyond all space-time limitation. I feel -- and feeling is
what this is all about -- that had I chosen to do so I could have
reviewed my whole life, as many people have done in near-death
experiences, or conversed with my long-dead relatives, or said hello
to "angels, archangels and the whole company of heaven," but in that
shining dark there was no desire for such separate experiences,
since All was already present.
Skeptical psychologists and psychoanalysts often try to explain away
near-death experiences by the theory that the mind conjures up
fantasies of heaven in a desperate attempt to avoid the imminent
prospect of its own extinction. I used to believe something like
that myself, for although I was not an atheist, my Christian beliefs
were of a very liberal-humanist-modernist kind, and I dismissed all
mysticism as neurotic escape from life (Wren-Lewis, 1966). My
experience completely shattered this whole line of thought, for it
was utterly unlike any fantasies I have ever had of heaven, either
in childhood (when my religious ideas were of the crudest possible
Jesus-in-white-robes type derived from Sunday-school pictures) or in
adult life, when I was repelled by the whole idea of Nirvana as I
then understood it. But more important even than that is the fact
that what I experienced was, quite precisely, the extinction of
individual selfhood that the mind is supposed to find too terrifying
to face. I think I have been privileged to have the experience
promised by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz, 1957) -- that
the approach to physical death provides an opportunity for the
ordinary limited self to "die," to give up grasping its little
separated identity, whereupon the discovery takes place that selves
are not separate, but simply manifestations of the only real
Selfhood, infinite Aliveness. My guess now would be that all
religious "fantasies," as the skeptics call them with some
justification, and even those palpable visions of heaven that
psychologists have to explain as hallucinations, are the mind's
attempts to put pictures to its intuitions or occasional glimpses of
this universal Aliveness underlying all individual existence, which
in itself is beyond all picturing and all theological theories.
What makes me so convinced of this is that the nirvanic bliss was
not just something I glimpsed once, while I was (from the doctors'
points of view) unconscious: I brought it back with me when (from
the doctors' viewpoints) I "came round," and I have had it with me
ever since. Words and logic come under greater strain than ever when
I try to describe the process of "coming back"; indeed that very
expression is misleading from any other viewpoint than the purely
clinical one, for as I said at the beginning, when I "clicked back"
to the darkness by using the dream recall exercise, I found it was
still right there with me at the back of my consciousness, as it
were, and had been all along without my focusing the fact. And
subjectively, I am up against something that makes no sense in terms
of ordinary logic when I say that I came or moved out of a state
where there is no time, for how can there be movement without time?
In fact, I again find myself faced with a logical difficulty that
occurs in the doctrines of all religious, the problem of trying to
say how anything but God can ever exist if God is everything, as
"God" must be by definition, and how time can ever get started when
the very notion of "start" implies time. I used to think these were
abstract metaphysical problems and probably meaningless
word-juggling; now I feel sure those doctrines were originally
attempts to express just the kind of impossible transition I went
through from Nirvana to the rebirth of John.
So I can only say that it seemed as if the impossible happened, and
a movement took place in eternity, which is beyond all movement. In
the Jewish Kabbalah, (Schaya, 1973) it is said that the en sof, the
Limitless, created (or creates, for this is beyond time) a space
within itself so that limited being can also exist. In the
Taittiriya Upanishad (Hume, 1974) it is said that Brahman changed
from the pure Unmanifest to the Manifest (though of course there is
nothing Other than Brahman for Brahman to manifest to!) To coin my
own phrase, it was as if the personal me "budded out" from that
eternity of shining dark, without ceasing to be the shining
dark -- which I suppose is what Hindu theology is trying to express by
its famous statement that the Atman, the individual self, is
identical with Brahman, the universal self.
From The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences (TASTE), edited by Dr. Charles T. Tart, Submission No. 00051, Submitter No. 00048, Posted: June 14, 2000. To be continued in the January 2007 TAT Forum, along with the TASTE editor's introduction and Wren-Lewis's reference material....
|
Poems by Shawn Nevins
|
|
"Pittsfield"
Why would the name of a long-vanished town
ring within my mind?
Turning and forming visions
of a man who worked the land and raised children
that drifted away like dandelion seeds -
rising and remembering long ago roots.
*
How can each moment
be infinitely deep, yet moving;
changing, yet not advancing;
simply becoming anew?
Best to stop there,
at the tipping point inside your self
where death and life, despair and hope,
threaten to pull open the gates of heaven.
*
I would not wait another day,
if I were you.
Without a word for "want,"
what is left?
*
A barred owl is deep in the woods.
"Who, who, who,
who cooks for you," he calls.
That's not really hearing, though.
That's translation.
There is language and there is hearing.
That which is heard, fills you entirely
and everyone knows empty vessels don't talk.
What can we do, but stand by a wild woods
with the sound of eternity ringing in our ears?
*
An interior pilgrimage:
startled by the striking realization of mortality,
cradling hands fall away;
the cocoon of self opens,
though fear tries to hide the truth - emptiness.
Later, you will laugh.
*
"Jars of Glass"
Where is cold light reflected by glass?
Filled with winter cuttings
- once green reminders of place and potential -
what container am I?
There are edges of clarity
- clear glass -
inside of us.
And through all,
a borderless field of light.
|
The Prayer of Looking
by Bob Fergeson
This commentary was written originally as a letter in response to the following question: "So, can the collective of impulse and energy called ego be 'tenderized' somewhat so as to allow it to get out of the way long enough for unending abiding in It? Or should I just get on with trying to learn how to get on the hamster wheel, serve others, and hope that the house suddenly and abruptly collapses on itself?"
Your question implies an either/or dichotomy, with the choice being one or the other of two states of mind. The answer is simpler: just look. To use the attention to observe. To find out for yourself, by observing yourself; an attentive listening. The end is found in self-inquiry, a questioning, rather than deduction. This questioning is not conceptual or thought based, but is a function of the attention. It is a feeling, found through intuition. You look without ideas, a functional "doing" of your listening attention. Whenever you question in this manner, you will notice there is no longer a problem.
This looking can happen very quickly and easily, but is soon lost. As soon as the experience is logged in memory and added to the ego's inventory, the mind will jump back in, steal the attention once again and declare, "Oh yea, I know all about this, now I've got the answer." As soon as the mind revels in patting itself on the back with what a good job it's done, we're back in the same old problem, the old dissonance and angst; the duality of the conceptual mind. So the answer is, again, to go back to true self-inquiry, to question, to look. To point the attention and look, while simultaneously lining the attention up with our source. Once you've felt this and know how it works, the answer lies in practice. Whenever the mind comes up and bothers you, and you begin to slip back into identification, question, look, and listen. If you keep this up, once you've found the trick of it and place value on it, value above the conceptual problem/solution trap of the mind, you'll again see what you really are, in the moment, rather than as a function of memory and ego. This questioning attention, when practiced and eventually turned within, will take you home. Everything will line up; there is no longer a problem. You are connected with your source, and there are no more questions as far as identity is concerned.
When the mind jumps in and steals the reins after the experience of seeing, what you have is a separation from yourself. You're lost in the mind again, looking outward for answers and identity in your experiences. This is what is talked about when it is said that the experiencer is the product or creation of experience. It is of itself not real. It is a reaction to a reaction pattern. When we have begun to see and admit this, we simply refer back, again and again, to questioning, a listening attention.
This could be called a form of prayer. We pray to, and have faith in, our intuition. We're turning our attention back within to something we may have faith in but we can't really see. This nameless something or nothing, sometimes called the dazzling dark, a primal ground we sense behind or within us, has no image or form. When we are connected to this formless Is-ness, and then again turn our attention outwards, we are lined up. "Life is real only then, when 'I Am.'" - Gurdjieff
When this attention is as a double arrow, one pointed within, one without, we are connected with our source and bypass the personality or response pattern, the experiencer. We now witness experience directly. This form of prayer needs to be practiced in every moment, as often as we can remember.
So keep questioning, keep this prayer of attention going. Practice it whenever and wherever you can, as often as possible. You'll find it does not interfere with action or your day-to-day life, but it will interfere with the mind, its fantasies and endless problems.
See Bob's web sites The Mystic Missal, the Photo Site, and The Listening Attention
.
|
|
Humor from Winston Churchill...
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
"If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised."
"When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened."
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
Lady Nancy Astor: "Winston, if you were my husband, I'd poison your tea."
Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it."
|
Reader Commentary:
(We appreciate hearing from you.)
|
Sign up for our e-mail alert that will let you know when new issues are published. Contact the Forum for questions, comments or submissions.
Want to help? Your donation of $1 or more will support the continuation of the Forum and other services that the TAT Foundation provides. TAT is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit educational organization and qualifies to receive tax-deductible contributions. Or, download this .pdf TAT Forum flyer and post it at coffee shops, bookstores, and other meeting places in your town, to let others know about the Forum.
|
Richard Rose |
Quotes |
Books & Tapes |
Albigen System |
TAT Foundation
Best Sites on the Web |
TAT Current Events |
TAT Forum |
Spiritual Gatherings |
Retreat Centers
TAT Journal Archive |
What is Meditation? |
Forum index |
Site search |
Home page
|
