JWL: Unblocking a Malfunction in Consciousness

[Guest guest]

Unblocking a malfunction in consciousness by 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 Gnosis 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 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 timetheatre,

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'.

John Wren-Lewis