NDEs, Consciousness and John Wren Lewis

[Guest guest]

Posted below is a very small snippet of the works freely available on

the Net by JWL. Having read the passages long ago from different

sources then the Google alert that was sent to my email today, I was

upon receiving it today freshly reminded as to why my interest in

John's profound experiences and unquestioned ability to forge moving

explications of his current state,is aroused to higher and higher

levels of delight. I anxiously await his upcoming Book, " 9:15 to

Nirvana " previously discussed with Pat O. in this forum.Please enjoy.

......bob

 

Unblocking a malfunction in consciousness

John Wren-Lewis

 

As a follow-on to the review above, here are adapted extracts from an

article in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (Vol. 26, Number

2, 1994) entitled 'Aftereffects of Near-Death Experience: A survival

mechanism hypothesis' (subs. US$24; editorial address 345 California

Avenue, Suite No. 1, Palo Alto, California 94306); followed by

extracts from an article in GGnosis Magazine (Winter 1995)

entitled 'Gnosis: Goal or Ground?' (subs. US$35 from PO Box 14217,

San Francisco, California 94114).

 

Over the past few years some researchers have begun to turn their

attention to the remarkable effects of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

in this life. NDEs almost always leave the experiencers freer,

happier people than they've ever before dreamed possible.

 

Moreover, while this new-found capacity for joy in living seems to

drive all NDE-ers to use religious language in trying to do it

justice, it doesn't necessarily involve any particular conviction

that the soul is going to survive the body's death. It's more like a

basic shift in consciousness whereby life in each moment becomes so

vivid that anxiety about future survival, in the body or out of it,

simply ceases to be important.

 

The hypothesis I've come up with is that the block which cuts off so-

called normal human consciousness from its roots in that other,

impersonal consciousness, is some kind of inflation or hyperactivity

of the psychological survival-system. Exactly how or when this

originated in the history of our species I have no idea, and at

present don't propose to speculate. But the effect of this hyper-

defensiveness is to focus individual consciousness so rigidly on the

business of securing its own future that the underlying universal

consciousness, with its every-present-moment happiness, peace and

wonder, gets shut out. The only satisfaction allowed into awareness

is that which comes from meeting the needs (or supposed needs) of the

individual body-mind, while pain becomes wholly negative suffering

instead of a life-enhancing signal. And this basic malfunction is

epitomised in the fact that dying, which in nature is simply part of

life's great flow (or of that secondary game called individual

manifestation), becomes the object of ultimate fear and horror, with

all the catastrophic psycho-social consequences to which Ernest

Becker and others have directed attention (Becker, 1973).

 

Close encounter with death is able to break this whole spell because

the survival-mechanism gives up at this point which I'm sure is why

the Tibetan Book of the Dead Evans-Wentz, 1960) calls the dying-

moment a time of special grace when Nirvana can suddenly become

apparent to anyone. And this is why some who return from the brink of

death have been privileged to come back knowing what consciousness

really is - knowledge which, once acquired, enables the survival-

mechanisms to resume functioning without their former hyperactivity.

I've observed that, since Thailand, my feeling about death, my own

included, is that, although I still intend to avoid it as long as

possible in life's secondary game and still mourn the loss of

friends, it has in itself a very special kind of beauty, like the

dying leaves of autumn, whose splendour we are allowed to see in

ordinary consciousness because our minds don't associate it with the

ultimate taboo. A corollary of this changed attitude to death has

been the discovery that ageing, including even its more obvious decay-

aspects, has become interesting rather than depressing or disgusting.

 

The big question now, of course, is whether there are less drastic

(and less haphazard) means by which the spell of separated selfhood

can be lifted before the moment of death, and I hope my research may

eventually shed some light on this. For while there are mystical

traditions the world over which offer 'paths to higher

consciousness', it doesn't seem to me that any of them has a very

encouraging success rate in bringing about the kind of liberation

which NDEs can bring immediately to anyone, high or low, good or bad,

believing or unbelieving, trained or untrained. In fact, my studies

of these traditions, ancient and modern alike, suggest that while

there are almost always valuable insights to be gained from them,

they all get bogged down in their own basic idea of a 'path', which

inevitably suggests that 'higher consciousness' is a goal to be

achieved, thereby reinforcing that very preoccupation with one's

personal future which is the cause of all the trouble Wren-Lewis,

1991).

 

My experience, and that of NDE-ers generally, suggests that

liberation isn't at all a matter of taking 'the long voyage Home'. It

simply means waking up to the consciousness which is already the

basis of our very existence, but is, as G. K. Chesterton used to put

it, so large and close and obvious that it escapes notice. What I

suspect we need is not any kind of path or discipline, but a

collection of tricks or devices for catching the Dark at the corner

of the eye, as it were, and learning how to spot its just-waiting-to-

be-seen presence, combined with strategies for stopping the

hyperactive survival-programmes from immediately explaining the

perception away. D. E. Harding's exercises for discovering one's own

essential 'headlessness' are the best ideas I've yet come across for

the first half of this process, but, by his own admission, most

people 'get it but simply don't believe it' (Harding, 1961, 1988,

1990, 1992) this, I suspect, is precisely evidence of the survival-

program at work, and in my view there is no more important task

facing transpersonal psychology than research into techniques for

circumventing this fundamental malfunction in humanity's 'software'.

 

[Continuing with adapted extracts from Gnosis Magazine:]

 

It feels quintessentially natural that personal consciousness should

be aware of its own Ground, while my first 59-odd years of so-

called 'normal' consciousness, in ignorance of that Ground, now seem

like a kind of waking dream. It was as if I'd been entranced from

birth into a collective nightmare of separate individuals struggling

in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction, and significance.

 

Indeed the more I investigate, the more convinced I become that

iconoclastic mystics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti were right in

asserting that at the very idea of a spiritual path is necessarily

self-defeating, because it does the one thing that has to be undone

if there is to be awakening to eternity: it concentrates attention

firmly on 'futurity'. Paths and disciplines make gnosis a goal, when

in fact it is already the ground of all knowing, including 'sinful'

time-bound knowing.

 

I know from first-hand experience that the 'joy beyond joy' is

greater than the wildest imaginations of a consciousness bogged down

in time. But I can also see that the very impulse to seek the joy of

eternity is a Catch-22, because seeking itself implies a

preoccupation with time, which is precisely what drives eternity out

of awareness.

 

So what to do? One thing I learned in my former profession of science

was the right kind of lateral thinking can often bring liberation

from Catch-22 situations, provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full

starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations

beyond experience. This is the exploration to which my life is now

dedicated. It's a research project in which anyone who's interested

can join.

 

I'll end with a couple of cautionary hints.

 

First, beware of philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a

framework of growth or evolution, which I believe are the great

modern idols. Both are important phenomena of eternity's time-

theatre, but as paradigms they're old hat, hangovers from the age of

empire-building and the work ethic.

 

The 'I want it now' attitude, so often deplored by spiritual pundits

as a twentieth-century sin, is in my view a very healthy sign that we

are beginning to be disillusioned with time-entrapment. A truly

mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutionary, paradigm of lila,

divine play for Its own sake, where any purposes along the line of

time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that

is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing

the instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all

manifestation, irrespective of whether, from the purely human

standpoint, the manifestation is creative or destructive, growing or

withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading out.

 

My second warning is to mind your language, for the words we use are

often hooks that catch us into time-entrapment. For example, when we

use the term 'self' with a small 's' to describe individual

personhood, and 'Self' with a capital 'S' for the fullness of God-

consciousness, the notion of the one gradually expanding into the

other becomes almost inescapable, again concentrating attention along

the time line. Mystical liberation, by contrast, is the sudden

discovery that even the meanest self is already a focus of the

Infinite Aliveness that is beyond any kind of selfhood.

 

Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to

spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that

seems interesting - which is what the Buddha urged a long time ago,

though not too many of his followers have ever taken that part of his

teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern movements alike may

be very valuable as databases for new adventures, but to treat them

as authorities to be obeyed is not only 'unscientific' - it seems to

go against the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is

apparently the name of the time game.

 

I suspect gnosis comes as 'grace' because there are as many different

forms of it as there are people. Yet because we're all in this

together, sharing experience is integral to its fullness. Whatever

experiments you make, share your 'failures', your hints and guesses,

and your awakening too if it happens, with warts-and-all honesty,

because 'everything that lives is holy'.

 

Professor John Wren-Lewis, 1/22 Cliffbrook Parade, Clovelly NSW 2031,

Australia.