For about 30 years, G and I had the experience of engaging in discussions with Edgar Assoun, G's father. He was a realised human being, a man who had gone through the stages of human development armed only with his own passionate interest, and arrived at a point where he lived according to a vision of human existence which accorded deeply with that of the sages of our time – J. Krishnamurti, C. Castaneda, Alan Watts, Nisargadatta, to name a few of the spiritual writers whose works we read and digested together, as well as some of the more scientific writers such as David Bohm, Gregory Bateson and Fritjof Kapra. Not to suggest that we talked mostly about books. For the larger part of the discussions, which often took a whole afternoon at a time, and were sustained more or less regularly, perhaps once every two or three weeks except when we were living overseas, Edgar would start with some little point that had attracted his interest, maybe a recent encounter from his and his wife Charlette's life, or recounted by us, and develop that into an extraordinary expose of human psychology and the existential drama of the human condition. He had a vision which he said was guided by Universal Intelligence, and which therefore was not bound by the personal, and there was never a time when the strength of this vision faltered. He swept us with him into his vision, and we spent many afternoons in what you could call a state of transcendence of our normal ego-based existence, where the individual and the personal were left behind, and we were able to share that thrilling communion.
Two months before he died, Edgar told us he did not want to see us any more – he formally broke off relations, saying we needed to make an in-depth review of the way we had been conducting the relationship over those 30 years.
Since that moment, which will be two years ago in a few days, G and I have variously and together struggled to come to terms with that rupture in a way that allows us to be at peace with ourselves. There were other complications, painful for both of us but especially for G, in the unfolding of our relationship with G's mother Charlette, and all or some of this may find it's place in this blog at some stage. But for now, I want to share a way of understanding the relationship and breakup with Edgar which came to me in the course of reading Ken Wilber's The Atman Project the other day.
In this book, Wilber described the unfolding of the individual consciousness through the normal stages of development from birth through to the egoic level ( i.e. the stage reached by most adults in our society) and then beyond to the transpersonal levels. The first stage beyond the egoic he calls the level of the centaur: 'the great mythological being with animal body and human mind existing in a perfect state of at-one-ment.'
He comments later
It is very rare, given the 'level' of present-day society, for any individual to evolve past the mature ego stage. Because the average mode of the self sense in society at large seems to be early, middle or late egoic, then past that point the force of society as 'pacer of transformation' tends to drop off. Thus, individuals who grow beyond the egoic stages have to do so either on their own exceptional talents or through special professional assistance. By the latter, I do not mean a 'doctor for mental illness' [read: psychiatrist] but a guide for self-actualisation: in general, the existential-humanistic therapist (and beyond that, the spiritual Masters).
Now for the part I've been leading up to:
The job of the humanistic therapist (who, as we saw, tends to address the centauric realms) is to help the consenting ego begin its transformation-upward to the centaur level itself. And this means that the centaur-level therapist will start by giving the individual a new way to translate*reality. The therapist will pit his existential translations against the client's egoic … translations until the ego can transform* as centaur. That is, the therapist acts as a pacer of transformation, replacing the now 'fizzled out' forces of the society and the parents. The therapist strategically frustrates and disrupts the old egoic translations …, while encouraging and teaching the new and higher centauric translations. When the client can genuinely and freely adopt the new centaur translations, then transformation is more-or-less complete, and 'therapy' is for most purposes over.
… True transformation – on any level – is not a form of brain-washing, hypnosis, or propaganda. It is rather a form of emergence, of remembrance, of recollection. The therapist, in translating reality from the centaur level elicits the same level of self in the client (if all goes well, that is). The therapist engages the language of the client's higher self, and lives that language or form to the client until the client lives it himself. The therapist simply assists in the emergence (via remembrance) of the centauric level from the ground-unconscious.
Now there could be some debate over whether Edgar was undertaking the role of therapist – he would have rejected that because of the dependence that is implied – but in practical terms he was our 'spiritual master', and however he wished to define the relationship, he was definitely (as demonstrated at virtually every encounter) working from a higher level of reality than ours, and he obviously lived that level, it was not mere theory. So apart from the term 'therapist', our relationship largely conformed to the description described in the passage above. Virtually every incident or encounter which arose he was able to frame in terms of the trans-egoic vision that he lived by – that is, he translated reality from the centaur level and elicited the same level of self in us; his vision was continually adapting to and embracing the events of the world as they presented themselves. He was extraordinarily sensitive to the dualistic nature of language, as well as language's nuances and its multi-layered character, so it's more than slightly appropriate to say that he engaged the language of our higher selves, and lived that language.
This might seem like a rather complicated description of our relationship with this exceptional man, but the point of it is that it leads me to a comprehension of what went wrong, and led to him severing the relationship. Basically, the problem was that we were too attached to our egoic world to shift with him. He continually held out an invitation, demonstrated the state, and repeatedly carried us with him into that state, but we rigidly insisted on translating events and the relationship into the language of our (seemingly) safer, more secure world view. The last time we visited, Charlette was sick, and Edgar was overwhelmed with work in the house and in the garden, and on top of all that had embarked on installing a rainwater tank by himself, and we took it as an opportunity to be as supportive as we could: G took over the kitchen, I helped Edgar working on the rainwater tank, we did everything we could to help. We even did this with good heart, in our way. But Edgar, while he recognised the value of matters that belong in the practical world, was fundamentally not interested in that as the main focus of his existence. In Wilber's classic depiction of personal evolution from one stage to the other, he had disidentified from the egoic level of living, had transcended it, and then was able to include it in his life, without being subject to its limitations and sufferings. As far as he was concerned, he was only interested in maintaining a relationship at the level he lived at, and he had virtually unlimited energy for sharing that with us.
It should be obvious by now that we did not exactly refuse to participate in the world he introduced us to – we shared it again and again. But the fact is that while we were able to share that state, we were not ready, for whatever reason, to shift to that level as a normal day-to-day way of life. (This is Wilber's state-stage distinction: we accessed the state, but it did not stabilise to become the stage we lived at.) After each marvellous encounter, there were many, and they were truly marvellous, we would slip back to our habitual ego-worlds, re-adopt our tired values, our compensations and substitute gratifications which, we persuaded ourselves, made our small 's' selves a tolerable, even comfortable, place to live.
So this leads me to a position where I could risk a tentative statement of where I would like to go with this Practice that I keep talking about. I would like to go to the point where I can enter a state of living that is beyond the egoic, undergo an actual transformation to that stage of development, so that it becomes my base point, my point of reference, my 'ordinary' daily framework. In fact I can say from my experience of living the state, that the possibilities that one can live in that state are enormous, it is an indescribably richer way of living, and it is the only way to go past the suffering that is built into the egoic realm, the suffering that is inevitable when we accept a life that is perpetually constrained to substitute gratifications, the constant fear of losing ground, of death.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Perspectives
To put this blog in (yet) another perspective, it could be called a dedication to the person who made the biggest single contribution to my personal and spiritual development - Edgar Assoun, who was also my father-in-law.
Through some 30 years, the dialogues we had with him inspired us (wife Gigi and myself) opened our minds, gave us breathtaking visions into the grandeur, the tragedy and the comedy of the human adventure, including our own and his and his wife Charlette's own particular versions. He also knew exactly the point to touch, the conciliatory angle to open us to in the face of the crises which on more than one occasion seemed to be leading Gigi and me to a break-up.
Since some time before Edgar's death in 2007 and up to very recently, we had been more or less stagnating in terms of self-discovery and personal development. Our respective stubbornnesses had locked us into a position where we listened to Edgar's talks without engaging. At times he said 'you'll realise what I was talking about when I'm gone,' and we wondered what he meant. The blog is my attempt to consciously commit to a deep intent to penetrate by my own efforts that world which he showed me. Guidance may be sought, but if I accept it I will be responsible for choosing the source, and when and for how long I will accept it. I will stake everything on my own discoveries, I'll take on the task which for years I passively accepted being presented through Edgar's unique personal vision.
Certain among my (two or three, optimistically) readers might be getting impatient with my continually coming back to definitions and redefinitions of what this blog is about. Well, I'm unrepentant. I hope this repeated exposition of what I'm on about will have the effect of gradually clarifying the focus of my underlying message. And that I will slowly come around to my realising this for myself. The message is the discovery and articulation of myself, and like a sculptor carving a figure out of an enormous block of stone, the figure or the message will slowly appear after hundreds of hammer taps on the chisel. Or it's rather like an existential novel, say one by Milan Kundera or Robert Musil, where the writer hovers around his theme, comes back to it and embroiders it through the various exploits of the main character or characters, gradually evolving his vision of the state or view he is dealing with. I don't have the patience or the discipline and self-conviction to launch into writing a novel, but I have come to thinking that the blog format permits me to do the same thing through repeated postings.
Through some 30 years, the dialogues we had with him inspired us (wife Gigi and myself) opened our minds, gave us breathtaking visions into the grandeur, the tragedy and the comedy of the human adventure, including our own and his and his wife Charlette's own particular versions. He also knew exactly the point to touch, the conciliatory angle to open us to in the face of the crises which on more than one occasion seemed to be leading Gigi and me to a break-up.
Since some time before Edgar's death in 2007 and up to very recently, we had been more or less stagnating in terms of self-discovery and personal development. Our respective stubbornnesses had locked us into a position where we listened to Edgar's talks without engaging. At times he said 'you'll realise what I was talking about when I'm gone,' and we wondered what he meant. The blog is my attempt to consciously commit to a deep intent to penetrate by my own efforts that world which he showed me. Guidance may be sought, but if I accept it I will be responsible for choosing the source, and when and for how long I will accept it. I will stake everything on my own discoveries, I'll take on the task which for years I passively accepted being presented through Edgar's unique personal vision.
Certain among my (two or three, optimistically) readers might be getting impatient with my continually coming back to definitions and redefinitions of what this blog is about. Well, I'm unrepentant. I hope this repeated exposition of what I'm on about will have the effect of gradually clarifying the focus of my underlying message. And that I will slowly come around to my realising this for myself. The message is the discovery and articulation of myself, and like a sculptor carving a figure out of an enormous block of stone, the figure or the message will slowly appear after hundreds of hammer taps on the chisel. Or it's rather like an existential novel, say one by Milan Kundera or Robert Musil, where the writer hovers around his theme, comes back to it and embroiders it through the various exploits of the main character or characters, gradually evolving his vision of the state or view he is dealing with. I don't have the patience or the discipline and self-conviction to launch into writing a novel, but I have come to thinking that the blog format permits me to do the same thing through repeated postings.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Still defining
What is this blog about?
This is an attempt to define the challenge of taking responsibility for my life. Usually this means things like developing one's career, taking care of one's health, eating correctly, meeting one's family commitments, etc. It does not usually include taking responsibility for the level and scope of one's consciousness. That is a task of a completely different order. Even attempting to define and describe the parameters of one's consciousness is an extremely slippery undertaking, (about 12 on a slipperiness scale of 1 – 10), but surely if one wants to take responsibility for one's consciousness, one has to start by defining it. It's slippery in two ways: First, who is doing the defining? It can only be one's consciousness that's doing the defining, so one encounters the problem of how consciousness can define consciousness. For normal everyday consciousness, this task is completely alien. Normal everyday consciousness just takes itself for granted, in other words it is completely unconscious of itself. [If I knew more philosophy, I fear that such a venture would be instantly dismissed as logically impossible, but rather than engaging in discussing its possibility or impossibility, I'll shelve the question for now, and see if I can't come up with something useful as I go on.] The second way it's slippery is that consciousness, by its very structure, has an inbuilt resistance to being pinned down to any sort of limits. You may, reader, ask how such resistance occurs, surely consciousness knows what it knows, and not knowing what it doesn't know it just isn't bothered by it. Well I say it's not that simple – consciousness has all sorts of complexes and anxieties about what it doesn't know, as well as some of the things it does know. Take the whole category of things I assume – how do you class that in my consciousness? For example I go to take my car keys from the car-key hook, but they are not there. The thought that springs to mind immediately is: Oh, Gigi (my wife) must have taken them. But when I ask her it turns out she didn't take them – I left them in the pocket of the trousers I was wearing last time I drove the car. So that was an idea that was created by consciousness for convenience sake. No grounding in reality. And that is a quite trivial example of how consciousness can be self-serving, self-deluding and sneaky.
So I'll finish this short post with the simple definition of consciousness: everything I think, feel, or am aware of through sensory perception, while pointing out that that's just the very top molecule on the Mount Everest of internal and hidden complexity which consciousness is. And the attempt to unravel and simplify some of that complexity, in a way which makes sense intuitively and logically, is a large part of what this blog will be about.
This is an attempt to define the challenge of taking responsibility for my life. Usually this means things like developing one's career, taking care of one's health, eating correctly, meeting one's family commitments, etc. It does not usually include taking responsibility for the level and scope of one's consciousness. That is a task of a completely different order. Even attempting to define and describe the parameters of one's consciousness is an extremely slippery undertaking, (about 12 on a slipperiness scale of 1 – 10), but surely if one wants to take responsibility for one's consciousness, one has to start by defining it. It's slippery in two ways: First, who is doing the defining? It can only be one's consciousness that's doing the defining, so one encounters the problem of how consciousness can define consciousness. For normal everyday consciousness, this task is completely alien. Normal everyday consciousness just takes itself for granted, in other words it is completely unconscious of itself. [If I knew more philosophy, I fear that such a venture would be instantly dismissed as logically impossible, but rather than engaging in discussing its possibility or impossibility, I'll shelve the question for now, and see if I can't come up with something useful as I go on.] The second way it's slippery is that consciousness, by its very structure, has an inbuilt resistance to being pinned down to any sort of limits. You may, reader, ask how such resistance occurs, surely consciousness knows what it knows, and not knowing what it doesn't know it just isn't bothered by it. Well I say it's not that simple – consciousness has all sorts of complexes and anxieties about what it doesn't know, as well as some of the things it does know. Take the whole category of things I assume – how do you class that in my consciousness? For example I go to take my car keys from the car-key hook, but they are not there. The thought that springs to mind immediately is: Oh, Gigi (my wife) must have taken them. But when I ask her it turns out she didn't take them – I left them in the pocket of the trousers I was wearing last time I drove the car. So that was an idea that was created by consciousness for convenience sake. No grounding in reality. And that is a quite trivial example of how consciousness can be self-serving, self-deluding and sneaky.
So I'll finish this short post with the simple definition of consciousness: everything I think, feel, or am aware of through sensory perception, while pointing out that that's just the very top molecule on the Mount Everest of internal and hidden complexity which consciousness is. And the attempt to unravel and simplify some of that complexity, in a way which makes sense intuitively and logically, is a large part of what this blog will be about.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Where are we going?
I'd better get the measure of that 'Norman Einstein' book critiquing Wilber and and decide on my response. Don't like to admit it, but I've got a lot riding on the Ken Wilber legacy. To he or she who says 'You're lost if you rely on hoping,' I reply 'I'm not just hoping, I'm walking my talk, putting my money where my mouth is. And what specifically are you doing to confront your issues?'
But my initial impression is that Geoffrey D Falk, the writer of the 'Norman Einstein' book, is coming from a sceptical-academic angle. This gives him the freedom to home in on factual details which, he argues, do not stand up, but also gets him out of any responsibility to look at what Ken Wilber offers overall. For example, Wilber has made a broad synthesis of just about all the 'contemplative traditions' and religions of the world, east and west, and drawn out similar patterns from among them. This venture doesn't lend itself to hard-nosed research, in fact what could research-based science say at all about the different stages of psychospiritual development that an individual goes through as they evolve through the 'normal' stages and perhaps into the stages beyond that? So Norman Einstein's critique is, to this extent at least, beside the point.
Further investigation is warranted.
******************
Meditating this morning was tough. It may be hard to see why sitting for half an hour counting your breaths could be tough, but it is. First the brain rebels, and goes off on any plausible pretext to amuse itself thinking, thinking, thinking. Then the body gets restless, and one is drawn strongly to getting up, going somewhere else, doing something, anything but this. Resistance is occurring. Then (back to the mind) questions plague the brain: why am I doing this? What am I expecting to get out of it? What difference can this make to my mind? Or any other part of me? How can I bear such boredom? How soon can I look at my watch again? Resistance is still occurring. What is this going to change in my life?
Anyway, by the time I got through it I was exhausted and lay down and rested for twenty minutes.
At breakfast we talked about the film we watched last night – 'Entre les murs', or 'The Class'. It gave a horrifying glimpse of life in a Paris secondary school. A dysfunctional system, where teachers have a fuzzy humanitarian outlook and secure jobs, but are completely overwhelmed, practically and intellectually, by the situation. Faced by a rising tide of behaviour problems, they devote staff meeting time to consideration of a points system to manage discipline, then after ten minutes of indecisive exchange of opinions, the principal closes off the topic and takes them on to working out what to do about the staff room coffee machine. In class the main character, French teacher Francois puts up a heroic struggle in the face of defiance, apathy, jaw-droppingly poor background levels, and succeeds in getting a level of interest from his unpromising class of 14 year-olds. A particularly disruptive girl loudly accuses him of victimising the class problem boy, triggering an angry and insulting outburst from the boy in question, who then gets up and storms out, swinging his bag as he goes and inadvertently bumping another girl on the eyebrow, causing loss of blood.
Then in the morning news I read of the millions (something like 50 million if I remember right) of working poor in the US who work long hours without earning enough to feed themselves or their families, going to bed, getting up in the morning, going to work hungry and staying hungry all day. Eggs a luxury, meat an exotic rarity, only the cheapest, most bodiless bread affordable. Semi-permanent starvation. And they're the ones with jobs.
And then the article with video of the people who went to watch the police at an environmental demonstration in the UK, who took some photos and asked a policeman to give his number, who were then thrown on ground, stood on, handcuffed, legs tied, taken away and left in jail for four days, without being allowed to contact solicitors or make a phone call.
And the point of all this bad news? The deterioration of our societies continues apace, perhaps accelerating. This is the world we live in. Where does this end? When we look around at this as older people, we see it sliding into catastrophe, but there's a feeling that having left the workforce we are not altogether relevant – it will go on with or without our input. Younger people don't often offer a comment, perhaps the trend is too alarming for them.
But while the slide goes inexorably on, there's another trend happening at the same time: the gentle revolution of people who are realising the self-destructive course the world is on, and taking action in the only arena where we have significant choice – the arena of the self. And this is one of the things the meditation is about. At first sight it seems ludicrous to hold that my personal development will make any difference in the world at large. How could it? It can be a very complex issue to get into, because any answer, even the terms of any answer, is likely to be contentious.
One way of looking at this would be to put it in the developmental terms offered by spiral dynamics. In this approach, humanity, societies and individuals all go through the same stages of development in the same unchangeable sequence. The stages can be labelled in different ways, but the relevant stage/labels at this point are individual-egocentric, ethnocentric, and world-centric. First I'll ask you to allow that the monstrous inequalities in society arise from greed, and that the fascist tendencies of our governments and their appointed authorities are about protecting the privileges of the status quo, i.e. the current inequalities. Going on from there, it's not difficult to reason that the greed and the privilege-guarding are the products of an egocentric mental stage, along the lines of: I'll wring all the possible advantage from the system that I can, and it's all for me. … That's hardly altruism.
Now, the description of the stages of development of societies is something that has been documented and in broad terms agreed upon by a number of sociologists and other researchers. Wilber related that developmental scale to the stages of personal spiritual development described by the ancient eastern traditions, and correlated it with the intellectual-emotional stages set out by the likes of Piaget in the west.
The point we're getting to, is that at the world-centric stage of emotional, social or psychospiritual development, a person is not going to be motivated primarily by greed. It can't work that way. Any lurking critics may at this point want to challenge the whole concept of people or societies developing to any 'world-centric' stage as an item on a fuzzy-wuzzy new-age 'wish list for the world'. Well, on the one hand, there exist people who approach life on the basis of living with their share of resources, and on the basis of social equity, and these people are observable. And the character and outlooks of more spiritually advanced human beings have been recorded in various places around the world, and those recorded are just those that are known about, there's no reason to think that there weren't others.
I'm getting bogged down trying to provide a hard-edged irrefutable case for my point of view. And this is leading me into a corner, because once I start referring to the growing trend for people to develop to the world-centric stage, half my readers or more are going to drown me out with their jeers, or just move on to check their emails. I'll brave that risk, and just say that there is a trend going that way, you just have to look at the popularity of people like Ekhart Tolle (Ekhart even being further popularised by Oprah Winfrey!), Ken Wilber, and a whole raft of others, to see that there's a thirst for a new kind of paradigm for living, and that it's growing, and more and more people are seeing that we can't go on the way we are going and the only way to change it is to change ourselves.
PHEW, THAT WASN'T EASY! Much more like that and no-one will read this.
Perhaps I should leave the justifying at that for today, except for one small further angle that has occurred to me over the last day or so. That is simply that there are dimensions of human existence which I am not living, at least consciously, and I want to explore all the possibilities available to me, consciously. They say that we are living all the states all the time, but that our ego-bound consciousness won't let us realise this. So I'm making the commitment do what it takes to bring it to consciousness, or to remember it.
But my initial impression is that Geoffrey D Falk, the writer of the 'Norman Einstein' book, is coming from a sceptical-academic angle. This gives him the freedom to home in on factual details which, he argues, do not stand up, but also gets him out of any responsibility to look at what Ken Wilber offers overall. For example, Wilber has made a broad synthesis of just about all the 'contemplative traditions' and religions of the world, east and west, and drawn out similar patterns from among them. This venture doesn't lend itself to hard-nosed research, in fact what could research-based science say at all about the different stages of psychospiritual development that an individual goes through as they evolve through the 'normal' stages and perhaps into the stages beyond that? So Norman Einstein's critique is, to this extent at least, beside the point.
Further investigation is warranted.
******************
Meditating this morning was tough. It may be hard to see why sitting for half an hour counting your breaths could be tough, but it is. First the brain rebels, and goes off on any plausible pretext to amuse itself thinking, thinking, thinking. Then the body gets restless, and one is drawn strongly to getting up, going somewhere else, doing something, anything but this. Resistance is occurring. Then (back to the mind) questions plague the brain: why am I doing this? What am I expecting to get out of it? What difference can this make to my mind? Or any other part of me? How can I bear such boredom? How soon can I look at my watch again? Resistance is still occurring. What is this going to change in my life?
Anyway, by the time I got through it I was exhausted and lay down and rested for twenty minutes.
At breakfast we talked about the film we watched last night – 'Entre les murs', or 'The Class'. It gave a horrifying glimpse of life in a Paris secondary school. A dysfunctional system, where teachers have a fuzzy humanitarian outlook and secure jobs, but are completely overwhelmed, practically and intellectually, by the situation. Faced by a rising tide of behaviour problems, they devote staff meeting time to consideration of a points system to manage discipline, then after ten minutes of indecisive exchange of opinions, the principal closes off the topic and takes them on to working out what to do about the staff room coffee machine. In class the main character, French teacher Francois puts up a heroic struggle in the face of defiance, apathy, jaw-droppingly poor background levels, and succeeds in getting a level of interest from his unpromising class of 14 year-olds. A particularly disruptive girl loudly accuses him of victimising the class problem boy, triggering an angry and insulting outburst from the boy in question, who then gets up and storms out, swinging his bag as he goes and inadvertently bumping another girl on the eyebrow, causing loss of blood.
Then in the morning news I read of the millions (something like 50 million if I remember right) of working poor in the US who work long hours without earning enough to feed themselves or their families, going to bed, getting up in the morning, going to work hungry and staying hungry all day. Eggs a luxury, meat an exotic rarity, only the cheapest, most bodiless bread affordable. Semi-permanent starvation. And they're the ones with jobs.
And then the article with video of the people who went to watch the police at an environmental demonstration in the UK, who took some photos and asked a policeman to give his number, who were then thrown on ground, stood on, handcuffed, legs tied, taken away and left in jail for four days, without being allowed to contact solicitors or make a phone call.
And the point of all this bad news? The deterioration of our societies continues apace, perhaps accelerating. This is the world we live in. Where does this end? When we look around at this as older people, we see it sliding into catastrophe, but there's a feeling that having left the workforce we are not altogether relevant – it will go on with or without our input. Younger people don't often offer a comment, perhaps the trend is too alarming for them.
But while the slide goes inexorably on, there's another trend happening at the same time: the gentle revolution of people who are realising the self-destructive course the world is on, and taking action in the only arena where we have significant choice – the arena of the self. And this is one of the things the meditation is about. At first sight it seems ludicrous to hold that my personal development will make any difference in the world at large. How could it? It can be a very complex issue to get into, because any answer, even the terms of any answer, is likely to be contentious.
One way of looking at this would be to put it in the developmental terms offered by spiral dynamics. In this approach, humanity, societies and individuals all go through the same stages of development in the same unchangeable sequence. The stages can be labelled in different ways, but the relevant stage/labels at this point are individual-egocentric, ethnocentric, and world-centric. First I'll ask you to allow that the monstrous inequalities in society arise from greed, and that the fascist tendencies of our governments and their appointed authorities are about protecting the privileges of the status quo, i.e. the current inequalities. Going on from there, it's not difficult to reason that the greed and the privilege-guarding are the products of an egocentric mental stage, along the lines of: I'll wring all the possible advantage from the system that I can, and it's all for me. … That's hardly altruism.
Now, the description of the stages of development of societies is something that has been documented and in broad terms agreed upon by a number of sociologists and other researchers. Wilber related that developmental scale to the stages of personal spiritual development described by the ancient eastern traditions, and correlated it with the intellectual-emotional stages set out by the likes of Piaget in the west.
The point we're getting to, is that at the world-centric stage of emotional, social or psychospiritual development, a person is not going to be motivated primarily by greed. It can't work that way. Any lurking critics may at this point want to challenge the whole concept of people or societies developing to any 'world-centric' stage as an item on a fuzzy-wuzzy new-age 'wish list for the world'. Well, on the one hand, there exist people who approach life on the basis of living with their share of resources, and on the basis of social equity, and these people are observable. And the character and outlooks of more spiritually advanced human beings have been recorded in various places around the world, and those recorded are just those that are known about, there's no reason to think that there weren't others.
I'm getting bogged down trying to provide a hard-edged irrefutable case for my point of view. And this is leading me into a corner, because once I start referring to the growing trend for people to develop to the world-centric stage, half my readers or more are going to drown me out with their jeers, or just move on to check their emails. I'll brave that risk, and just say that there is a trend going that way, you just have to look at the popularity of people like Ekhart Tolle (Ekhart even being further popularised by Oprah Winfrey!), Ken Wilber, and a whole raft of others, to see that there's a thirst for a new kind of paradigm for living, and that it's growing, and more and more people are seeing that we can't go on the way we are going and the only way to change it is to change ourselves.
PHEW, THAT WASN'T EASY! Much more like that and no-one will read this.
Perhaps I should leave the justifying at that for today, except for one small further angle that has occurred to me over the last day or so. That is simply that there are dimensions of human existence which I am not living, at least consciously, and I want to explore all the possibilities available to me, consciously. They say that we are living all the states all the time, but that our ego-bound consciousness won't let us realise this. So I'm making the commitment do what it takes to bring it to consciousness, or to remember it.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Seeing I
Case in point: a glimpse of the problem
Here's another way of looking at the issue: I was out in the shed using the rainy period to attempt again to work out how to operate the grease gun. About as mundane as you could get – and what's more I still haven't worked out how to use the !#@*&! thing. But it crossed my mind as I thought about my new blog, that the illusive state that I am seeking (yes, the quest is fraught with contradictions) is not unknown to me at all. I've experienced it many times, but it was always assisted, whether by personal interventions, or structured programs such as NLP and linguistics studies. But the problem is not only that I don't seem to be able to access that state by myself, on a daily basis, but that in my ordinary workaday state of consciousness I find it hard even to believe that another state exists. My daily world seems so complete without it, and is self-encapsulating to a point where I can't see the need for another state, or only feel a need that is shallow enough to be gratified with taking a rest, having the evening drink, watching a nice film or a police mystery on TV, that sort of thing. And yet this daily state gets boring, and in the end feels hollow. I don't feel fully alive (… although that is so subjective that it doesn't mean much). If I say I want something more, the Buddhists will talk about the illusion that we live and about desire equating with suffering. But I've known a richer, heartier state, and I know that some people live like that. So, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I'm allowing myself to set out to find that realm where such a way of living is natural. Of course, many will tell me I'm already there, but I went off the track somewhere, and I can't find my way back, yet.
************
It's time I gave you a better account of what this blog is going to be about. So far I've set out a few parameters, whys and wherefores, hopes and fears, but what is this new Practice that I'm on about? Well, it's simply this: After years of being told by all the awakened people I know or that I've read that there is absolutely nothing that you can do to change yourself, open yourself up etc, I've come across a different point of view. It started when I listened to the audio book of Ken Wilber's 'A Brief History of Everything', which in turn led me back to reading the same author's 'The Atman Project', which has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for 20 years. Basically the deal is this: we are as living creatures programmed to evolve. To look at the highest examples of what the human creature can evolve to, there are recorded examples of people like Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tsu and others. If you look at the whole world of living creatures, you can see that they have all evolved to be where they are. So Wilber treats it as axiomatic that we are all designed to evolve. This doesn't necessarily mean that all human beings do evolve – most humans stop at a certain point, and then stay at the point they've reached. (It's also possible, in the cases where one meets a major accident in their development, to regress, and actually slip back to an earlier level.) But by and large, the program and the deepest need is to develop stage by stage throughout our lives. This raises a host of questions, and I'll try to cover the most obvious ones as we go along. The two questions that first jumped out at me were: 1) if we are all made to evolve, why isn't everyone developed to be a buddha? And 2) can I do anything by myself to favour my own development?
The reason everyone doesn't turn out to be a buddha, is that our societies evolve through more or less the same stages as those which mark the progress of an individual. Most of us will evolve to roughly the same level as that of the particular society we live in, and more specifically to the level of our subculture, family, immediate group of contacts etc. There's a kind of magnetism which will draw an individual up to the level of his or her surroundings, and equally will tend to pull him or her back if they stray above that level. Anyway that's the brief answer.
To the question of whether I can do anything by myself to favour my development, the short answer is yes, if I apply myself to it. Of course I am just repeating this, at this stage. I haven't been through the mill and put it to the proof for myself. It's just that the argument which I have taken on I find to be persuasive, and anyway, the only way to prove it or disprove it is the try it experimentally and see where it leads me. That's really the only satisfactory way to answer this question, and I'm not inclined to engage in debates about whether it is true or not unless someone has the personal experience on which to base his or her argument. I know it is very fashionable these days to discount any and all theories by saying that they are just arising from cultural relativity, and that as such they are limited, and only a construct of the mind of the person speaking in any case. That argument often arrives at a kind of nihilism, where anyone who takes any position gets their position deconstructed, but the person doing the deconstructing usually doesn't offer to deconstruct their own position – resulting argument: what you are saying is a culturally relative mental construct, but what I am saying is value free, because I am aware of the danger of cultural relativity and therefore avoiding it.
Here's another way of looking at the issue: I was out in the shed using the rainy period to attempt again to work out how to operate the grease gun. About as mundane as you could get – and what's more I still haven't worked out how to use the !#@*&! thing. But it crossed my mind as I thought about my new blog, that the illusive state that I am seeking (yes, the quest is fraught with contradictions) is not unknown to me at all. I've experienced it many times, but it was always assisted, whether by personal interventions, or structured programs such as NLP and linguistics studies. But the problem is not only that I don't seem to be able to access that state by myself, on a daily basis, but that in my ordinary workaday state of consciousness I find it hard even to believe that another state exists. My daily world seems so complete without it, and is self-encapsulating to a point where I can't see the need for another state, or only feel a need that is shallow enough to be gratified with taking a rest, having the evening drink, watching a nice film or a police mystery on TV, that sort of thing. And yet this daily state gets boring, and in the end feels hollow. I don't feel fully alive (… although that is so subjective that it doesn't mean much). If I say I want something more, the Buddhists will talk about the illusion that we live and about desire equating with suffering. But I've known a richer, heartier state, and I know that some people live like that. So, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I'm allowing myself to set out to find that realm where such a way of living is natural. Of course, many will tell me I'm already there, but I went off the track somewhere, and I can't find my way back, yet.
************
It's time I gave you a better account of what this blog is going to be about. So far I've set out a few parameters, whys and wherefores, hopes and fears, but what is this new Practice that I'm on about? Well, it's simply this: After years of being told by all the awakened people I know or that I've read that there is absolutely nothing that you can do to change yourself, open yourself up etc, I've come across a different point of view. It started when I listened to the audio book of Ken Wilber's 'A Brief History of Everything', which in turn led me back to reading the same author's 'The Atman Project', which has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read for 20 years. Basically the deal is this: we are as living creatures programmed to evolve. To look at the highest examples of what the human creature can evolve to, there are recorded examples of people like Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tsu and others. If you look at the whole world of living creatures, you can see that they have all evolved to be where they are. So Wilber treats it as axiomatic that we are all designed to evolve. This doesn't necessarily mean that all human beings do evolve – most humans stop at a certain point, and then stay at the point they've reached. (It's also possible, in the cases where one meets a major accident in their development, to regress, and actually slip back to an earlier level.) But by and large, the program and the deepest need is to develop stage by stage throughout our lives. This raises a host of questions, and I'll try to cover the most obvious ones as we go along. The two questions that first jumped out at me were: 1) if we are all made to evolve, why isn't everyone developed to be a buddha? And 2) can I do anything by myself to favour my own development?
The reason everyone doesn't turn out to be a buddha, is that our societies evolve through more or less the same stages as those which mark the progress of an individual. Most of us will evolve to roughly the same level as that of the particular society we live in, and more specifically to the level of our subculture, family, immediate group of contacts etc. There's a kind of magnetism which will draw an individual up to the level of his or her surroundings, and equally will tend to pull him or her back if they stray above that level. Anyway that's the brief answer.
To the question of whether I can do anything by myself to favour my development, the short answer is yes, if I apply myself to it. Of course I am just repeating this, at this stage. I haven't been through the mill and put it to the proof for myself. It's just that the argument which I have taken on I find to be persuasive, and anyway, the only way to prove it or disprove it is the try it experimentally and see where it leads me. That's really the only satisfactory way to answer this question, and I'm not inclined to engage in debates about whether it is true or not unless someone has the personal experience on which to base his or her argument. I know it is very fashionable these days to discount any and all theories by saying that they are just arising from cultural relativity, and that as such they are limited, and only a construct of the mind of the person speaking in any case. That argument often arrives at a kind of nihilism, where anyone who takes any position gets their position deconstructed, but the person doing the deconstructing usually doesn't offer to deconstruct their own position – resulting argument: what you are saying is a culturally relative mental construct, but what I am saying is value free, because I am aware of the danger of cultural relativity and therefore avoiding it.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Why blog it?
The first reason for blogging is that just by prompting me to keep a record of what I am doing, the plan and the progress, the discoveries, setbacks, etc, it will all be brought to a firmer level of consciousness. Just doing it (the otherwise admirable counsel of Nike) is lacking in that one risks floating through different states, perhaps even wonderful states, and then landing back where one started without being able to say with any confidence if one has actually been anywhere, if one imagined it all, if anything has changed, or if one has just had a pleasant dream of which one can't remember much.
This is one of the issues that undertaking a course of Practice aims to deal with. It's quite possible to have peak experiences that arise from any or all of: a stimulating discussion, a workshop led by a charismatic trainer, a beautiful experience in nature, a wonderful love-making session, even a really good book, a good joint with some transcendent music. These peak experiences always seem to evaporate when one comes back to normal life, and habitual reality takes over again. The problem, as explained by Ken Wilber and cohorts, is that we live at the level of personal evolution we've reached, and while in certain circumstances we might access states associated with a higher level of evolution, our normal level of existence is the level we will automatically slip back to when the circumstances revert to normal.
So blogging is a way of firming all that up, and a tool which will remind us, and convince us, of our potential to live at a higher level of consciousness – whatever that may mean – and believing it is, speculatively, one small step closer to making it a reality.
Another reason for blogging, is that it connects our psychospiritual program and pathway, if any, into our social context. This again reinforces the whole program, but it also opens up the possibility of exchange, of getting and responding to feedback, and thus it has the potential of enriching and broadening the whole process.
Result hoped for
I would like to interest people enough to start some sort of informal network where people share ideas, discoveries, good books, as well as personal comment and feedback. After all, and I would propose this as a general starting point, we are all subject to the same frustrating feeling of impotence when we bump up against our own personal limitations. I would even advance that the person who does NOT experience this frustration is the person who is so taken with his or her gratifications and compensations that they don't even notice where their epistemology is contradictory, where it is failing them and offering a poor substitute for a sense of inner richness and peace. There, there's my assertion for the day – all brickbats and rotten eggs accepted (just don't flatter me).
Dangers of blogging
A thunderous step to expose ones most secret fears and concealments in public.
Risk of just not being interesting enough to engage anybody's readership – my tendency to over-elaborate and get long-winded.
My own interest may wane, leaving it in the abandoned projects category (a graveyard of wild ideas which I prefer to forget altogether).
The first reason for blogging is that just by prompting me to keep a record of what I am doing, the plan and the progress, the discoveries, setbacks, etc, it will all be brought to a firmer level of consciousness. Just doing it (the otherwise admirable counsel of Nike) is lacking in that one risks floating through different states, perhaps even wonderful states, and then landing back where one started without being able to say with any confidence if one has actually been anywhere, if one imagined it all, if anything has changed, or if one has just had a pleasant dream of which one can't remember much.
This is one of the issues that undertaking a course of Practice aims to deal with. It's quite possible to have peak experiences that arise from any or all of: a stimulating discussion, a workshop led by a charismatic trainer, a beautiful experience in nature, a wonderful love-making session, even a really good book, a good joint with some transcendent music. These peak experiences always seem to evaporate when one comes back to normal life, and habitual reality takes over again. The problem, as explained by Ken Wilber and cohorts, is that we live at the level of personal evolution we've reached, and while in certain circumstances we might access states associated with a higher level of evolution, our normal level of existence is the level we will automatically slip back to when the circumstances revert to normal.
So blogging is a way of firming all that up, and a tool which will remind us, and convince us, of our potential to live at a higher level of consciousness – whatever that may mean – and believing it is, speculatively, one small step closer to making it a reality.
Another reason for blogging, is that it connects our psychospiritual program and pathway, if any, into our social context. This again reinforces the whole program, but it also opens up the possibility of exchange, of getting and responding to feedback, and thus it has the potential of enriching and broadening the whole process.
Result hoped for
I would like to interest people enough to start some sort of informal network where people share ideas, discoveries, good books, as well as personal comment and feedback. After all, and I would propose this as a general starting point, we are all subject to the same frustrating feeling of impotence when we bump up against our own personal limitations. I would even advance that the person who does NOT experience this frustration is the person who is so taken with his or her gratifications and compensations that they don't even notice where their epistemology is contradictory, where it is failing them and offering a poor substitute for a sense of inner richness and peace. There, there's my assertion for the day – all brickbats and rotten eggs accepted (just don't flatter me).
Dangers of blogging
A thunderous step to expose ones most secret fears and concealments in public.
Risk of just not being interesting enough to engage anybody's readership – my tendency to over-elaborate and get long-winded.
My own interest may wane, leaving it in the abandoned projects category (a graveyard of wild ideas which I prefer to forget altogether).
18/06/09
The Seeing I
A new venture:
A record of my latest attempt to advance my spiritual and psychological development. What that actually means will I hope become clear as I go on.
A last ditch attempt to make some sense of my life, on my own terms, for myself, off my own bat, before it's too late.
The sun shines through the storm clouds, and suddenly there's a burst of hope where there was none.
What it's all about:
For as long as I can remember, things, beyond a certain daily humdrum level, don't add up.
OK, I had a job I more or less enjoyed, I was somewhere between not bad and quite good at most of the things I took on, I've always been able to manage and enjoyed practical things like working with my hands and small building projects.
So what is there to complain about?
I've always had the feeling that there was more to life, or there should be, and I've been exposed to certain influences (which I'll talk more about later on) which let me know quite certainly that there was much more happening than I was attempting to deal with. You could call it the spiritual level, a certain psychological level, the level of a vision of life that is the result of one's own insights, not someone else's.
This need has motivated a general search that has seen me plough into language studies, psychotherapy, linguistics, the personal development model called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not to mention other extra-curricular activities such as playing jazz, practising qi-gong, and other minor engagements, and then too a whole range of reading covering certain 'relevant' literary authors, and other writers offering their particular map of human existence. I should also mention discussions over some thirty years with Edgar Assoun, whom I will simply describe here as a realised human being, and last but far from least daily or weekly discussions with my wife Gigi, who has managed all along to insist on a level of down-to-earth realism (as opposed to intellectualism), which has helped me get a focus where what I read about is actually geared to how I live in practice. Or at least she has challenged me to try. And lastly there were times when chemical support helped i.e. grass.
The Seeing I
A new venture:
A record of my latest attempt to advance my spiritual and psychological development. What that actually means will I hope become clear as I go on.
A last ditch attempt to make some sense of my life, on my own terms, for myself, off my own bat, before it's too late.
The sun shines through the storm clouds, and suddenly there's a burst of hope where there was none.
What it's all about:
For as long as I can remember, things, beyond a certain daily humdrum level, don't add up.
OK, I had a job I more or less enjoyed, I was somewhere between not bad and quite good at most of the things I took on, I've always been able to manage and enjoyed practical things like working with my hands and small building projects.
So what is there to complain about?
I've always had the feeling that there was more to life, or there should be, and I've been exposed to certain influences (which I'll talk more about later on) which let me know quite certainly that there was much more happening than I was attempting to deal with. You could call it the spiritual level, a certain psychological level, the level of a vision of life that is the result of one's own insights, not someone else's.
This need has motivated a general search that has seen me plough into language studies, psychotherapy, linguistics, the personal development model called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not to mention other extra-curricular activities such as playing jazz, practising qi-gong, and other minor engagements, and then too a whole range of reading covering certain 'relevant' literary authors, and other writers offering their particular map of human existence. I should also mention discussions over some thirty years with Edgar Assoun, whom I will simply describe here as a realised human being, and last but far from least daily or weekly discussions with my wife Gigi, who has managed all along to insist on a level of down-to-earth realism (as opposed to intellectualism), which has helped me get a focus where what I read about is actually geared to how I live in practice. Or at least she has challenged me to try. And lastly there were times when chemical support helped i.e. grass.
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