Posts Tagged ‘accepting the paradox’

Enlightenment Being or Becoming?

Enlightenment part 14

Tony Crisp

Having walked in the High Pasture of awareness and known something beyond the opposites, beyond division, beyond thinking, I look around and still use the word I. I and not I are both real and I live with them.

From this perspective a response arises in me about the way enlightenment is sometimes presented. It is sometimes said there is nothing to be achieved, nothing to struggle for, nothing that we havent already got. On the High Pasture of consciousness this is certainly true. But in that awareness there are no opposites and all opposite are true. So we can equally say there is everything to be achieved. There is everything to struggle for.

This is a strange paradox, but it is what we live in the middle of. It is what we are. Complacency is not a part of that paradox. Complacency is a form of duality, a one-sidedness that has no real part of enlightenment. Enlightenment is constantly everything. Peace and strife, action and non-action, being and becoming. The philosopher Erwin Goodenough said that “A book on love, loyalty or justice would gain little but pedantry by starting out with a concise definition of the term. Only as we describe the various conflicting elements associated with such words can we finally arrive at a meaning that includes these complexities; for important matters we understand, not as we simplify, but as we tolerate the paradoxical.” ¹

If you look at the illustration at the top of this page you will see it can be two things at once.

When I meet this I am reminded of Sri Aurobindo who spent the last forty years of his life exploring consciousness and its possibilities. An Indian by birth but a genius educated in the West, he was active in the world before his inner explorations. Aurobindo pointed out that we are a creature in transition. There is work to be done, the work of transformation. The journey that began with inanimate matter and has come so far cannot stop at the imperfection and the mediocrity that is man. It must go on.

This takes work, the work of uniting personal will and effort t with the downflow of spiritual force and awareness possible to us all at this time. There is an accelerated evolution going on. That cannot happen without a choice a choice to be part of it, or to remain as the human creature we are today. It cannot happen without the pains of change and the experience of death as the old falls away.

Tempting as it is, I cannot say from all my being that there is nothing to achieve, and nothing to reach for. Yes, I have everything inwardly, at my core. But I want to give birth to that core in the world, and that means birth pangs. See Jesse Watkins Experience of Enlightenment.

See the Aurobindo Site

Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 15

Collective Consciousness – The Dawn of Awareness

Dreams are an expression of biological life forming a dim awareness of itself, an ill-defined awareness as it came alive in the creatures swarming on our planet. Life became conscious in that way millions of years ago. From the human point of view we do not see it as a powerful form of consciousness. But the focused self-aware consciousness of human beings feeds back into that unfocused ocean of awareness because we are a connected part of it. That fundamental awareness, or what the Australian aborigines call the Dreamtime, and what a lot of people probably mean when they use the word God, is transforming constantly through the impact of new experience. This transformation comes about through an interaction between the focused self-awareness of human beings and that fundamental awareness behind existence. That core awareness is archaic and ancient, a collective experience of everything that has lived. That core awareness is unfocused, but in that is its wonder. It doesn’t particularise. It doesn’t end up being any one thing. It remains all encompassing, a collective. Because of the interaction between physical life forms and that core awareness it is evolving all the time.

At times I have explored that deep ocean of unfocussed sentience, and at one time as I dropped deeply into it I had the sense, or the awareness, that life has a unified consciousness. In that consciousness life has the awareness of millions of years of experience through all its creatures. This awareness developed into a living framework, a living matrix. Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals.

All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. It does this because of the factor of randomness, because an aspect of the universe and life is chaotic, and it has through that a freedom to do the unexpected. And Life integrates what it learns.

Life learned how to build, how to develop an integrated system. The lesson was  learned slowly, but it was unfolded from the already existing building blocks or framework that formed the universe. Integration means connectivity. It means symbiosis, working together for mutual gain. It means love in its most profound sense – the giving of self to another as happens in pregnancy and child rearing; as happens in life where to survive we live on the death of other things such as when we eat plants or animals. All that life has learned is now a great matrix of influence that continues to flow into the way things work, and who we are. This is like an enormous structure that directs things and holds them to that pattern. I suppose this could be seen as a sort of establishment – what is established. But this would not be a real insight into that collective awareness. Because all the time, in a sort of flashing newness of creativity the collective awareness constantly upgrades, it constantly experiments, it constantly tries out new things. And it integrates what it learns.

Human society with its immense variety, it is enormous range of experience, its conflicts, its pain and challenges, is the most amazing source of experience and experiment. It constantly presents variety and opportunity to try out new things. And I saw that life is learning about energy exchange, about shifts, about not holding on. Or perhaps it has learned that and it is offering that as possible behavioural responses to us human beings. In any case, for me personally, I saw that I do not need to hold on to any particular form of relationship. One of the most powerful stances we can take is that of balance. Not holding on to the shifting experiences we meet is the balance that allows us to move and shift according to this moment, this need, this person we are dealing with now.

I saw that dreams express an archaic wisdom. They express that wisdom mentioned above that the collective awareness has gathered through unimaginable variety of life experience. It expresses the possibility of all the behavioural responses that it has learned. For instance, in human society there are all manner of relationship between the man and the woman. There are men with one wife, no wife, or many wives. There are men who never enter a relationship all their life. There are women with no husband, with one husband, with several husbands, or several partners. Of course the unusual forms of sexuality such as prostitution and homosexuality explore yet more varieties of personal experience. It isn’t that any of these are right or wrong, they are simply variations on a theme. As in music that satisfies, the theme may explore conflicts, pain, or discord as the music moves toward integration, toward synthesis and satisfaction.

It is not only genetic coding that influences us to respond to present events. There is also an experience that lies behind that coding. There are the millions of years of life experience that led to the code. The archaic in us exists because of connections. The whole matrix of life exists because of connections. Many of these are obvious as we see in the food chain, as we see in the relationship between plant life and the sun and the earth. We see these connections in the way that bacterial life and plant life and human life work together. One thing relates to and depends upon another thing. At a deep level we all acknowledge that dependence. We feel it as a sort of holiness or awe. We see it as a fundamental truth but unfortunately often ignore it.

Our tribal religions frequently, and unfortunately, get disconnected from that archaic source of life. The religion, although it states it is about the creative impulse in us all, often doesn’t help us to connect with that creative source, with that internal archaic awareness. So dreams, and the love that people have for each other, are always a more direct route to re-connection. They take us back to that wisdom, that tried and true experience. They arouse again the awareness of our connection with each other.

Some things life has learned are fundamental. Of course the collective consciousness has experience of all types of human relationship. That core experience knows that it is only out of the death of one life form that another exists. It is only by acknowledging and living our place in the scheme of things that we keep our own connection with that core of awareness open. In that way we maintain our integrity and growth. Each of us, from our forebears, from the circumstances of our birth and culture, through pain or wonder experienced, have achieved a particular shape or personality structure. Being that shape, we do not need to conform to somebody else’s shape or requirements. It is the variety that the core awareness treasures and absorbs. Our particular shape has its own qualities and weaknesses. What does need to happen though, is that we need to stand openly, as the shape we are, before that fundamental awareness. We need to bring ourselves just as we are to that connection with life so that it may experience us more fully. In that connection we share with it, and it shares with us. It savours us, and we savour it. If we feel guilty or attempt to hide parts of ourselves, then we remain unwhole. Unwhole in the sense that part of our nature is the core awareness. If we lack that we are only a fraction of what we might be. We are the odd shape we have become. With our core connection we are whole no matter what shape we are. Without that connection we remain separated and alone. See You Are a Dual Being

Certain things are holy, like motherhood, or fatherhood. They are holy because they are so fundamental to life as it expresses on our planet. Marriage is such a holy thing because it represents and is an expression of the wonder of reproduction and parenthood. This should not be confused with partnership, such as occurs in a homosexual relationship.(1) Because things such as marriage, that manifest the most primordial aspects of life, are holy we need to honour them, and perhaps kneel before them in some way. They transcend any one person’s life and experience. Because of this, things like motherhood develop into an immense archetype. In other words they become a focused collection of uncountable human experiences. All such huge areas of experience are patterns in the core awareness. They are immense patterns in the internal structure of human life. And although life itself honours them, although life itself largely flows through the patterns they are, life does not stop us making leaps right beyond the boundaries of those archetypes. In that way we make new connections new possibilities for life itself and for the environment.

() That is not to say that a homosexual relationship does not express another of the most profound aspects of life, that of love. But love should be seen as a transcending influence rather than simply a genital desire or an expression of need or dependence.

See Sorg.

Archetype of the Void

Fundamental to all experience are the opposites of emptiness and fullness, space and substance, sound and silence, something and nothing, female and male, light and darkness. We not only meet these polarities at every moment in such things as hearing a sound that is only apparent because it is surrounded by silence – the silence between the sounds – but also all people and objects are only individually identifiable because they exist in empty space. But more important than that in understanding the archetype of the void is that each day we cycle through the alternating experience of existing and not existing – of having focussed personal awareness and then meeting the loss of it in sleep. The midway point between these polarities is dreams.

In dropping into this experience of sleep where there is a void or loss of personal awareness, we lose any sense of self and body and so the transition from waking self awareness to the void is easy. But the archetype of the void is about meeting it with awareness. For many people this can be a difficult or frightening thing. We tend to think of the void as a huge nothingness, a vacuum in which the human personality will disappear. This can seem very frightening, that behind everything is a sort of nothingness. The amusing thing is that this is an everyday human experience. In sleep we have dropped into that void. Our personality has indeed, as far as we are concerned, melted away and disappeared. Yet the next morning we awake and all is well. We have survived.

When people think of the void they usually see it as a destruction of everything – a death of self. But the nothingness of the void is part of the paradox of existence – for the nothingness is at the same time everything. But everything is all inclusive. As such it cannot have any defined characteristics or shape, otherwise it wouldn’t be everything. This is because if you were to say what a beach is, you could not say the sea was the beach, or the sky, or the land. None of them separately is the beach. The beach is the indefinable amalgam of them all. In just that way the Nothing is the indefinable everything that underlies the particulars of life.  The Next Step.

The conscious meeting with the void is part of the gradual expanding of personal awareness. It is akin to, or the same as, going to sleep with full awareness. When we sleep our body and brain enter into a very different state; we lose awareness of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch; our voluntary muscles are paralysed, and our experience is internalised. So, consciously entering sleep is a journey into a very strange world completely unlike our waking life. Part of that world is the full surround virtual reality of dreams, but there are dimensions beyond imagery, beyond form, beyond the opposites, beyond personal separated existence. This is the void, and to confront it consciously is a transformative experience.

Seeking the void is at the heart of the Buddhist way of life, as it is also at the heart of Christian mysticism. See Dimensions of Human Experience; Cloud of Unknowing; buddhism and dreams; void; yoga and dreams.

The void may be depicted in a dream by a shimmering haze, a transparent wall into which you can walk and become absorbed. At times it might be shown as the ocean, falling into space with just points of light, or a huge abyss’ or a massive hole. At other times it might be met as an ordinary scene or object that yet is seen as infinite space or complete liberation or a wonderful or threatening emptiness. Meeting such imagery or experiences in any degree produces powerful personal change. It produces a new sense of oneself; one no longer focussed on the ego or body personality – the self we consider ourselves to be through our body shape, gender, beauty or ugliness, or through our social position, our wealth, work or acclaim. It is, as the Buddhists name it, liberation. Meeting it is part of what Jung calls individuation. See: example under void.

Example: To my amazement a huge living and wondrous circle appeared on the wall. It was full of movement, everything dancing in time to music. At the very centre of the circle was emptiness, nothing, a void. Yet out of this nothingness all things emerged. There were plants, animals, people, hills, rivers and mountains all coming to birth. They danced out in their own individual movement, yet each unknowingly was part of the whole wonderful and intricate dance which made a great pattern and movement in the body of the circle. All danced to the periphery and there turned and moved, still in their ballet, back to the centre. At that centre they plunged into its oblivion again. But at that very moment new life sprang from it to dance once more.

When we do meet it however, the strange thing is that what appeared as an absence or denial of oneself is actually an addition. Suddenly we see that everything has been added, and nothing taken away.

The negative aspect of this archetypal experience is the loss of any personal meaning or motivation, the feeling of melting and perhaps even death. The positive side is of tremendous opportunity to live beyond previous limitations and boundaries; the realisation of ones own core existence in timelessness and infinite potential, along with the meaninglessness of prevalent views of death.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

What do I feel about the nothingness that constantly surrounds me?

Am I scared of the idea of that at base I might not exist in the same way I usually see myself?

Can I let go of all that is involved in the little me and surrender to the vast me?

It might be helpful to read Individuation and Methods of Awakening.