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.



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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.