from another friend of Light still shining

[Guest guest]

from an extraordinary Friend:

 

The Dazzling Dark

A Near-Death Experience Opens the Door to a

PERMANENT TRANSFORMATION

 

by: Prof. John Wren-Lewis

 

Sydney Australia

 

 

 

 

 

Some, if we believe what they tell us, are born with God

consciousness. Some struggle to achieve it by strenuous spiritual

practice, though by all accounts the success rate isn't (and never has

been) encouraging. I had God consciousness thrust upon me in 1983, my

sixtieth year, without working for it, desiring it, or even believing

in it, and this has understandably given me a somewhat unusual

perspective on the whole matter. In particular, I wonder if discipline

isn't altogether counterproductive in this context and the idea of

spiritual growth totally mistaken.

 

Before I had my experience, I was a Freud-style skeptic about all

things mystical. I wouldn't have called myself an atheist or

materialist; in fact I'd published extensively on the need for a

religious world view appropriate to a humanity that has " come of age "

in the scientific and technological area.(1) But I emphasized that

such a faith would have to be essentially positivistic, focused on the

human potential for creative change, which I believed could become as

effective in the social realm as it has been in the physical realm. I

even believed it possible that the creative human personality might

eventually discover technologies for transcending mortality, but I saw

mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due to failure of nerve

in the creative struggle.(2)

 

What happened in 1983 could be classified technically as a near-death

experience (NDE), though it lacked any of the dramatic visionary

features that tend to dominate both journalistic and scholarly NDE

accounts.(3) As I lay in a hospital bed in Thailand, after eating a

poisoned candy given me by a would-be thief on a long-distance bus,

there were some hours when the medical staff thought I'd gone beyond

recall. But I had no out-of-body vision of what was going on, no

review of my life, no passage down a dark tunnel to a heavenly light

or landscape, and no encounter with celestial beings or deceased

relatives telling me to go back because my work on earth was not yet

done. And although I'd lost all fear of death when eventually

resuscitated, this had (and has) nothing to do with believing I have

an immortal soul that will survive death.

 

On the contrary, it has everything to do with a dimension of aliveness

here and now which makes the notion of separate survival a very

secondary matter, in this world or any other. In fact it makes each

present instant so utterly satisfying that even the success or failure

of creative activity becomes relatively unimportant. In other words,

I've been liberated from what William Blake called obsession with

" futurity, " which, until it happened, I used to consider a

psychological impossibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten

years now this liberation has made the conduct of practical life more

rather than less efficient, precisely because time consciousness isn't

overshadowed by " anxious thought for the morrow. "

 

I didn't even notice the change straightaway. My mind was too busy

catching up on why I was in a hospital at night, with a policeman

sitting at the foot of the bed, when the last thing I could remember

was feeling drowsy on the bus in the early morning and settling down

for a comfortable snooze on what was scheduled to be a seven-hour

journey across the jungle-covered mountains. I'd suspected nothing,

because the donor of the candy—a charming and well-dressed young man

who'd been very helpful with our luggage—had left the bus some miles

back. With hindsight, I guess he decided that retreat was the order of

the day when he saw that my partner, dream psychologist Dr. Ann

Faraday,(4) wasn't eating the candy he'd given her. (Ann's heroic

rescue, when I started turning blue and the bus driver insisted I was

just drunk, is quite a story in its own right, but not the point here.)(5)

 

The fact that I'd undergone a radical consciousness shift began to

become apparent only after everyone had settled down for the night and

I was left awake, feeling as if I'd had enough sleep to last a

lifetime. By stages I became aware that when I'd awakened a few hours

earlier, it hadn't been from a state of ordinary unconsciousness at

all. It was as if I'd emerged freshly made (complete with all the

memories that constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness

that was somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness

or " pure consciousness " that had no separation within it, and

therefore no space or time.

 

There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity. In fact the

sense of a " stop in time " was so absolute that I'm now convinced I

really did die, if only for a few seconds or fractions of a second,

and was literally " resurrected " by the medical team, though there were

no brain-wave monitors to provide objective confirmation. And if my

conviction is correct, it actually counts against rather than for the

claim so often made by near-death researchers that personal

consciousness can exist apart from the brain. My impression is that my

personal consciousness was actually " snuffed out " (the root meaning,

according to some scholars, of the word " nirvana " ) and then recreated

by a kind of focusing-down from the infinite eternity of that radiant

dark pure consciousness. An old nursery rhyme conveys it better than

any high philosophy:

 

Where did you come from, baby dear?

Out of Everywhere into here.

 

 

 

Moreover that wonderful " eternal life of everywhere " was still there,

right behind my eyes—or more accurately, at the back of my

head—continually recreating my whole personal body-mind consciousness

afresh, instant by instant, now! and now! and now! That's no mere

metaphor for a vague sensation; it was so palpably real that I put my

hand up to probe the back of my skull, half wondering if the doctors

had sawn part of it away to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn't in

the least a feeling of being damaged; it was more like having had a

cataract taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and

myself properly for the first time—for that lovely dark radiance

seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy.

 

I felt like exclaiming, " Of course! That's absolutely right! " and

applauding every single thing with tears of gratitude—not just the now

sleeping Ann and the small jar of flowers the nurse had placed by the

bedside, but also the ominous stains on the bed sheets, the ancient

paint peeling off the walls, the far from hygienic smell of the

toilet, the coughs and groans of other patients, and even the

traumatized condition of my body. From the recesses of my memory

emerged that statement at the beginning of the book of Genesis about

God observing everything " he " had made and finding it very good. In

the past I'd treated these words as mere romantic poetry, referring

only to conventionally grand things like sunsets and conveniently

ignoring what ordinary human consciousness calls illness or ugliness.

Now all the judgments of goodness or badness which the human mind

necessarily has to make in its activities along the line of time were

contextualized in the perspective of that other dimension I can only

call eternity, which loves all the productions of time regardless.

 

It was mind-blowing even then, when I was taking for granted that this

had to be a jumbo-sized " mystical experience " visited on me, of all

people, as a kind of cosmic joke, from which I must quite soon " return

to normal. " I envisaged making public recantation of my antimystical

views and joining the formerly despised ranks of spiritual seekers.

Because my skeptical bias had been recreated along with the rest of my

memories, I toyed with the possibility that I might simply be

suffering some aftereffect of the poison, which the doctors had

diagnosed as probably being a heavy dose of morphine laced with

cocaine. I didn't really believe this, however, because there was no

trace of the " trippy " feeling that was always present when I took part

in a long series of officially sponsored experiments with high-dosage

psychedelics back in the late 1960s.

 

Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the following

days, weeks, months, and years, any ordinary kind of drug explanation

was obviously ruled out. Moreover my bewilderment was intensified as I

discovered how all kinds of " negative " human experiences became

marvels of creation when experienced by the Dazzling Dark. To convey

even a fraction of what life is like with eternity consciousness would

take a whole book and I'm currently in the last stages of writing one.

It must suffice here to illustrate two features that have most

impressed me and others who know me, notably Ann.

 

First, if there were a section in the Guinness Book of Records for

cowardice about physical pain, I would be sure of a place there. But

with eternity consciousness, pain becomes simply a warning signal

which, once heeded (irrespective of whether a physical remedy is

available), becomes simply an interesting sensation, another of

nature's wonders. The Buddha's distinction between pain and suffering,

which I used to think was equivocation, is now a common experience for

me. And second, my erstwhile spectacular dream life has been replaced,

on most nights, by a state which I can only call " conscious sleep, "

where I'm fully asleep yet distantly aware of lying in bed. It is as

if the Dark has withdrawn its game of " John Wren-Lewising " to a

nonactive level where the satisfaction of simply being is totally

unrelated to doing.(6)

 

The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the most

extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn't

feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural that

personal consciousness should be aware of its own Ground, while my

first fifty-nine 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.

 

Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened

life, because the rest of the world is still taking the separation

state for granted, and my own " resurrected " mind still contains

programs based on the assumptions of that state. So in the early days

I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual seeker in the hope

of finding help. It came as a real disappointment to find that no one

I consulted, either in person or through books, had a clue, because

ancient traditions and modern movements alike take for granted that

the kind of eternity consciousness I'm living in is the preserve of

spiritual Olympians, the mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates.

 

Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of its

own which is gradually enabling me to deal with the adjustment

problems—and a fascinating process it is. In the meantime, however,

I'm very concerned that all the seekers I come across accept as a law

of the spiritual universe that they have to be content with

years—perhaps many reincarnational lifetimes—of hopeful traveling,

rewarded at best with what T.S. Eliot called " hints and guesses " (7) of

the eternity-conscious state, whereas I see that state as the natural

human birthright.

 

My intensive investigations in this area over the past decade have

left me in no doubt that proponents of the so-called Perennial

Philosophy are correct in identifying a common " deep structure " of

experience underlying the widely different cultural expressions of

mystics in all traditions. Nonetheless I find no evidence whatever for

the often-made claim that these traditions contain disciplines for

attaining God consciousness that have been empirically tested and

verified.(8) On the contrary, the assumption that God consciousness is

a high and special state seems like the perfect defense mechanism for

not asking whether spiritual paths are really leading there at all.

Yet this is a very pertinent question, since many mystics whose

utterances most clearly resonate as coming from life in the

eternity-state have asserted that their awakening was " an act of

grace " (or words to that effect) rather than a reward for effort on

their part.

 

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

iconoclastic mystics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti(9) 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. To me now, systems of spirituality seem like analogues of

those dreams which prevent waking up (for example, to wet a thirsty

throat or relieve the bladder) by creating a never- ending nocturnal

drama of moving towards the desired goal, encountering and overcoming

obstacle after obstacle along the way, but never actually arriving.

 

In other words, I've begun to realize that my former skepticism wasn't

all bad. I think now that I was like the ignorant peasant boy in Hans

Christian Andersen's famous story who simply wouldn't go along with

the courtiers' wishful thinking about the emperor's glory in his new

clothes. My mistake was to put down the impulse that causes spiritual

seekers to want a greater glory than ordinary life affords and makes

them hope it's there in the great traditions, even when they have no

experiential evidence of it. Or to switch to an even older fable, I

decided that heavenly grapes must be delusory when I could see that

none of the ladders people were climbing in pursuit of them ever

reached the goal.

 

Now I not only understand the urge to find something altogether beyond

the shallow satisfactions and the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of

this petty pace, but I know from firsthand 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. Even disciplines designed to prize

attention away from doing are simply another form of doing, which is

why they at best yield only occasional glimpses of the eternal Ground

of consciousness in Being.

 

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

was that 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, because the very fact of being interested means that

somewhere at the back of your head you are already as aware of the

Ground of consciousness as I am. So rather than take up my little

remaining space with any of my own tentative conclusions, 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 theater, but as

paradigms they're old hat, hangovers from the age of empire-building

and the work ethic. We should know better today, when astronomers have

shown that the kind of planetary destruction that was once imagined as

a possible divine judgment could in fact be brought about at any time

by the perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.

 

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, a 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.

 

Again, when the word " home " is used to describe eternity, there is an

almost irresistible temptation to think of life as a journey of

return, whereas mystical awakening for me has been like Dorothy's in

The Wizard of Oz: the realization that I never really left home and

never could. Here too T.S. Eliot has the word for it: " Home is where

one starts from. " (10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant

voyaging out from the " eternal Home " into the time process to discover

new " productions of time " for eternity to love as they arise and pass

away.

 

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 actually

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. "

 

posted:

 

..b b.b.

[Guest guest]

" First Day:

 

I wonder why he actually posted this. It's a good post. No laughter

and loathing here. Still seems attached to the old '.b b.b.,' image. "

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nisargadatta , " .b bobji baba "

<Roberibus111 wrote:

>

> from an extraordinary Friend:

>

> The Dazzling Dark

> A Near-Death Experience Opens the Door to a

> PERMANENT TRANSFORMATION

>

> by: Prof. John Wren-Lewis

>

> Sydney Australia

>

>

>

>

>

> Some, if we believe what they tell us, are born with God

> consciousness. Some struggle to achieve it by strenuous spiritual

> practice, though by all accounts the success rate isn't (and never has

> been) encouraging. I had God consciousness thrust upon me in 1983, my

> sixtieth year, without working for it, desiring it, or even believing

> in it, and this has understandably given me a somewhat unusual

> perspective on the whole matter. In particular, I wonder if discipline

> isn't altogether counterproductive in this context and the idea of

> spiritual growth totally mistaken.

>

> Before I had my experience, I was a Freud-style skeptic about all

> things mystical. I wouldn't have called myself an atheist or

> materialist; in fact I'd published extensively on the need for a

> religious world view appropriate to a humanity that has " come of age "

> in the scientific and technological area.(1) But I emphasized that

> such a faith would have to be essentially positivistic, focused on the

> human potential for creative change, which I believed could become as

> effective in the social realm as it has been in the physical realm. I

> even believed it possible that the creative human personality might

> eventually discover technologies for transcending mortality, but I saw

> mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due to failure of nerve

> in the creative struggle.(2)

>

> What happened in 1983 could be classified technically as a near-death

> experience (NDE), though it lacked any of the dramatic visionary

> features that tend to dominate both journalistic and scholarly NDE

> accounts.(3) As I lay in a hospital bed in Thailand, after eating a

> poisoned candy given me by a would-be thief on a long-distance bus,

> there were some hours when the medical staff thought I'd gone beyond

> recall. But I had no out-of-body vision of what was going on, no

> review of my life, no passage down a dark tunnel to a heavenly light

> or landscape, and no encounter with celestial beings or deceased

> relatives telling me to go back because my work on earth was not yet

> done. And although I'd lost all fear of death when eventually

> resuscitated, this had (and has) nothing to do with believing I have

> an immortal soul that will survive death.

>

> On the contrary, it has everything to do with a dimension of aliveness

> here and now which makes the notion of separate survival a very

> secondary matter, in this world or any other. In fact it makes each

> present instant so utterly satisfying that even the success or failure

> of creative activity becomes relatively unimportant. In other words,

> I've been liberated from what William Blake called obsession with

> " futurity, " which, until it happened, I used to consider a

> psychological impossibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten

> years now this liberation has made the conduct of practical life more

> rather than less efficient, precisely because time consciousness isn't

> overshadowed by " anxious thought for the morrow. "

>

> I didn't even notice the change straightaway. My mind was too busy

> catching up on why I was in a hospital at night, with a policeman

> sitting at the foot of the bed, when the last thing I could remember

> was feeling drowsy on the bus in the early morning and settling down

> for a comfortable snooze on what was scheduled to be a seven-hour

> journey across the jungle-covered mountains. I'd suspected nothing,

> because the donor of the candy—a charming and well-dressed young man

> who'd been very helpful with our luggage—had left the bus some miles

> back. With hindsight, I guess he decided that retreat was the order of

> the day when he saw that my partner, dream psychologist Dr. Ann

> Faraday,(4) wasn't eating the candy he'd given her. (Ann's heroic

> rescue, when I started turning blue and the bus driver insisted I was

> just drunk, is quite a story in its own right, but not the point

here.)(5)

>

> The fact that I'd undergone a radical consciousness shift began to

> become apparent only after everyone had settled down for the night and

> I was left awake, feeling as if I'd had enough sleep to last a

> lifetime. By stages I became aware that when I'd awakened a few hours

> earlier, it hadn't been from a state of ordinary unconsciousness at

> all. It was as if I'd emerged freshly made (complete with all the

> memories that constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness

> that was somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness

> or " pure consciousness " that had no separation within it, and

> therefore no space or time.

>

> There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity. In fact the

> sense of a " stop in time " was so absolute that I'm now convinced I

> really did die, if only for a few seconds or fractions of a second,

> and was literally " resurrected " by the medical team, though there were

> no brain-wave monitors to provide objective confirmation. And if my

> conviction is correct, it actually counts against rather than for the

> claim so often made by near-death researchers that personal

> consciousness can exist apart from the brain. My impression is that my

> personal consciousness was actually " snuffed out " (the root meaning,

> according to some scholars, of the word " nirvana " ) and then recreated

> by a kind of focusing-down from the infinite eternity of that radiant

> dark pure consciousness. An old nursery rhyme conveys it better than

> any high philosophy:

>

> Where did you come from, baby dear?

> Out of Everywhere into here.

>

>

>

> Moreover that wonderful " eternal life of everywhere " was still there,

> right behind my eyes—or more accurately, at the back of my

> head—continually recreating my whole personal body-mind consciousness

> afresh, instant by instant, now! and now! and now! That's no mere

> metaphor for a vague sensation; it was so palpably real that I put my

> hand up to probe the back of my skull, half wondering if the doctors

> had sawn part of it away to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn't in

> the least a feeling of being damaged; it was more like having had a

> cataract taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and

> myself properly for the first time—for that lovely dark radiance

> seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy.

>

> I felt like exclaiming, " Of course! That's absolutely right! " and

> applauding every single thing with tears of gratitude—not just the now

> sleeping Ann and the small jar of flowers the nurse had placed by the

> bedside, but also the ominous stains on the bed sheets, the ancient

> paint peeling off the walls, the far from hygienic smell of the

> toilet, the coughs and groans of other patients, and even the

> traumatized condition of my body. From the recesses of my memory

> emerged that statement at the beginning of the book of Genesis about

> God observing everything " he " had made and finding it very good. In

> the past I'd treated these words as mere romantic poetry, referring

> only to conventionally grand things like sunsets and conveniently

> ignoring what ordinary human consciousness calls illness or ugliness.

> Now all the judgments of goodness or badness which the human mind

> necessarily has to make in its activities along the line of time were

> contextualized in the perspective of that other dimension I can only

> call eternity, which loves all the productions of time regardless.

>

> It was mind-blowing even then, when I was taking for granted that this

> had to be a jumbo-sized " mystical experience " visited on me, of all

> people, as a kind of cosmic joke, from which I must quite soon " return

> to normal. " I envisaged making public recantation of my antimystical

> views and joining the formerly despised ranks of spiritual seekers.

> Because my skeptical bias had been recreated along with the rest of my

> memories, I toyed with the possibility that I might simply be

> suffering some aftereffect of the poison, which the doctors had

> diagnosed as probably being a heavy dose of morphine laced with

> cocaine. I didn't really believe this, however, because there was no

> trace of the " trippy " feeling that was always present when I took part

> in a long series of officially sponsored experiments with high-dosage

> psychedelics back in the late 1960s.

>

> Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the following

> days, weeks, months, and years, any ordinary kind of drug explanation

> was obviously ruled out. Moreover my bewilderment was intensified as I

> discovered how all kinds of " negative " human experiences became

> marvels of creation when experienced by the Dazzling Dark. To convey

> even a fraction of what life is like with eternity consciousness would

> take a whole book and I'm currently in the last stages of writing one.

> It must suffice here to illustrate two features that have most

> impressed me and others who know me, notably Ann.

>

> First, if there were a section in the Guinness Book of Records for

> cowardice about physical pain, I would be sure of a place there. But

> with eternity consciousness, pain becomes simply a warning signal

> which, once heeded (irrespective of whether a physical remedy is

> available), becomes simply an interesting sensation, another of

> nature's wonders. The Buddha's distinction between pain and suffering,

> which I used to think was equivocation, is now a common experience for

> me. And second, my erstwhile spectacular dream life has been replaced,

> on most nights, by a state which I can only call " conscious sleep, "

> where I'm fully asleep yet distantly aware of lying in bed. It is as

> if the Dark has withdrawn its game of " John Wren-Lewising " to a

> nonactive level where the satisfaction of simply being is totally

> unrelated to doing.(6)

>

> The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the most

> extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn't

> feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural that

> personal consciousness should be aware of its own Ground, while my

> first fifty-nine 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.

>

> Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened

> life, because the rest of the world is still taking the separation

> state for granted, and my own " resurrected " mind still contains

> programs based on the assumptions of that state. So in the early days

> I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual seeker in the hope

> of finding help. It came as a real disappointment to find that no one

> I consulted, either in person or through books, had a clue, because

> ancient traditions and modern movements alike take for granted that

> the kind of eternity consciousness I'm living in is the preserve of

> spiritual Olympians, the mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates.

>

> Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of its

> own which is gradually enabling me to deal with the adjustment

> problems—and a fascinating process it is. In the meantime, however,

> I'm very concerned that all the seekers I come across accept as a law

> of the spiritual universe that they have to be content with

> years—perhaps many reincarnational lifetimes—of hopeful traveling,

> rewarded at best with what T.S. Eliot called " hints and guesses " (7) of

> the eternity-conscious state, whereas I see that state as the natural

> human birthright.

>

> My intensive investigations in this area over the past decade have

> left me in no doubt that proponents of the so-called Perennial

> Philosophy are correct in identifying a common " deep structure " of

> experience underlying the widely different cultural expressions of

> mystics in all traditions. Nonetheless I find no evidence whatever for

> the often-made claim that these traditions contain disciplines for

> attaining God consciousness that have been empirically tested and

> verified.(8) On the contrary, the assumption that God consciousness is

> a high and special state seems like the perfect defense mechanism for

> not asking whether spiritual paths are really leading there at all.

> Yet this is a very pertinent question, since many mystics whose

> utterances most clearly resonate as coming from life in the

> eternity-state have asserted that their awakening was " an act of

> grace " (or words to that effect) rather than a reward for effort on

> their part.

>

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

> iconoclastic mystics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti(9) 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. To me now, systems of spirituality seem like analogues of

> those dreams which prevent waking up (for example, to wet a thirsty

> throat or relieve the bladder) by creating a never- ending nocturnal

> drama of moving towards the desired goal, encountering and overcoming

> obstacle after obstacle along the way, but never actually arriving.

>

> In other words, I've begun to realize that my former skepticism wasn't

> all bad. I think now that I was like the ignorant peasant boy in Hans

> Christian Andersen's famous story who simply wouldn't go along with

> the courtiers' wishful thinking about the emperor's glory in his new

> clothes. My mistake was to put down the impulse that causes spiritual

> seekers to want a greater glory than ordinary life affords and makes

> them hope it's there in the great traditions, even when they have no

> experiential evidence of it. Or to switch to an even older fable, I

> decided that heavenly grapes must be delusory when I could see that

> none of the ladders people were climbing in pursuit of them ever

> reached the goal.

>

> Now I not only understand the urge to find something altogether beyond

> the shallow satisfactions and the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of

> this petty pace, but I know from firsthand 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. Even disciplines designed to prize

> attention away from doing are simply another form of doing, which is

> why they at best yield only occasional glimpses of the eternal Ground

> of consciousness in Being.

>

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

> was that 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, because the very fact of being interested means that

> somewhere at the back of your head you are already as aware of the

> Ground of consciousness as I am. So rather than take up my little

> remaining space with any of my own tentative conclusions, 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 theater, but as

> paradigms they're old hat, hangovers from the age of empire-building

> and the work ethic. We should know better today, when astronomers have

> shown that the kind of planetary destruction that was once imagined as

> a possible divine judgment could in fact be brought about at any time

> by the perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.

>

> 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, a 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.

>

> Again, when the word " home " is used to describe eternity, there is an

> almost irresistible temptation to think of life as a journey of

> return, whereas mystical awakening for me has been like Dorothy's in

> The Wizard of Oz: the realization that I never really left home and

> never could. Here too T.S. Eliot has the word for it: " Home is where

> one starts from. " (10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant

> voyaging out from the " eternal Home " into the time process to discover

> new " productions of time " for eternity to love as they arise and pass

> away.

>

> 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 actually

> 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. "

>

> posted:

>

> .b b.b.

>