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.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
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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