We Must Lower Our Egos . . . For the Sake of the One

Each of the world's great religions and wisdom traditions has an esoteric and and exoteric component, notes Moslem cleric, Imam Faisul Abdul Rauf, "an inner and an outer path leading to the same Wholeness, the same Absolute, the same One."

"God, Baha, whatever name you want to call Him with," says Rauf, "Allah, Ram, Om (whatever the name might be to which you name or access the Presence of Divinity) is the locus of Absolute Being, Absolute Love and Mercy and Compassion, and Absolute Knowledge and Wisdom - what Hindus call Satchitananda. The language differs but the objective is the same."

Thus, Rumi, the great Sufi poet, writes (in part):

"What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself.  

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature's mint, nor of the circling' heaven.
I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saqsin
I am not of the kingdom of Iraq, nor of the country of Khorasan
I am not of the this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise, nor of Hell
I am not of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan.

My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless ;
'Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward;
I know none other except 'Ya Hu' and 'Ya man Hu.'
I am intoxicated with Love's cup, the two worlds have passed out of my ken . . ."

 

"There is only one Absolute Reality by definition," Rauf points out, "one Absolute Being by definition, because 'absolute' is by definition single, and absolute, and singular. There is this absolute concentration of being, this absolute concentration of consciousness and awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of Divinity. And that should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human."

"The human soul embodies a piece of the Divine Breath, a piece of the Divine Soul," Rauf notes. "This is also expressed in Biblical vocabulary wehn we are taught we are created in the Divine image," he points out.

"What is the imagery of God," he asks. "The imagery of God is Absolute Being, Absolute Awareness, and Knowledge, and Wisdom, and Absolute Compassion and Love. Therefore, for us to be human . . . in the greatest sense of what it means to be human . . . means that we, too, have to be proper stewards of the breath of Divinity within us, and to seek to perfect within ourselves the attributes of being - of being alive, of beingness -  the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, (and) of awareness, and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings."

"This," says Rauf, "is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform upon which we must all stand. And when we stand upon this platform, as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. And I believe . . . that we are on the verge, and that with the presence and help of people like you . . .  we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah, when he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war, (or) make war, anymore."

"We have reached a stage in human history," he concludes, "where we have no option: We must lower our egos . . . control our egos . . . whether it is the individual ego, personal ego, family ego, or national ego. And let it all be for the glorification of the One."

Spiritual . . . And Religious

"If religion becomes a cause of dislike, hatred and division, it were better to be without it, and to withdraw from such a religion would be a truly religious act. For it is clear that the purpose of a remedy is to cure; but if the remedy should only aggravate the complaint it had better be left alone."

-- 'Abdu'l-Baha --

In a recent editorial blog on The Huffington Post (here), writer and educator, Laura Weingberg, makes an insightful argument for being 'spiritual and religious' rather than merely 'spiritual but not religious.' The crux of Ms. Weinberg's argument is that worship of an all inclusive God demands that we act in this world in a principled manner. Her critique of the SBNR folks (like myself), however, is that there is not necessarily an imperative for us to behave in a manner that fulfills our obligations to God.

"Spirituality can lead to a relationship with God," Ms. Weingberg notes, "but religiosity demands the fulfillment of obligations to God. Why is that desirable? Because committing to God changes who we are; we can no longer be what we are automatically, or even what we aspire to; we are obliged to push ourselves beyond that and to find our true selves, the "soul who is pleasing unto God.""

Ms. Weinberg's view can be critiqued on the grounds that what can be described as 'religious' may yet fall far short of seeking "our true selves." This transcendental search, one assumes, is the hallmark of being 'spiritual and religious' rather than merely and nominally 'religious." But is the search to find that which is transcendental and transformational in life not also the hallmark of being 'spiritual' but not necessarily 'religious'? Personally, I think it is. The quest for spiritual meaning, I believe, is the essential quest - even if it remains unrecognized and unacknowledged - of all persons.

Ms. Weinberg, a Baha'i (and thus a member of one of the world's most inclusive faiths), provides a compelling and all-encompassing vision of 'what' (not 'who') God is:

"I believe in a God who is the creator of the universe and all that it contains," she observes, "who established and operates through natural laws, and loves all that He has created. This great, unknowable Creator has not, in the Baha'i view, left humanity to struggle along without assistance or guidance. God is not watching us "from a distance" as we bumble around, laying waste to His perfect work. He is close to us, with us, actively intervening in human history, guiding us to our destined future."

"Religion offers not only a close personal relationship with God," she notes, "but a sense of common purpose with Him, the hope that somehow our efforts to promote human well-being are in line with His plan."

"There is," she points out, "a path out of the mess we are in; we need to refer to His guidance to walk it."

I can agree wholeheartedly with all of the above, except that last line. One looks out at the multitude of religious faiths, philosophies and wisdom traditions and it seems plain to me that there are a plethora of paths out of the mess we are unarguably in. Does being "spiritual and religious" imply that we can utilize the insights and directions from only one path? If it does - and I suspect that most solely 'religious' people believe that it does - then you can still count me amongst the "spiritual but not religious crowd."

Personally, I will take what guidance I can from any and all of the world's great religious and spiritual traditions. Whether that wisdom comes from the Buddha, the Baha'u'llah or Bambi's mother is irrelevant to me, so long as it leads me out of my narrow self and into a unitive relationship with the God of my understanding, a God that it is wholly consistent with that described by Ms. Weinberg.

As Ms. Weingberg quotes 'Abdu'l-Baha : "(T)he purpose of a remedy is to cure." Thank God there seem to be a variety of cures out there. For one prescription may be more effective than another for a particular sufferer. And some may, indeed, require a combination of dosages.

From the Information Age to a Transformational Age

Ultimately, the greatest effect of the newly-born Information Age may well be the birthing of an Age of Transformation in which cultures, spirituality and human consciousness itself all evolve to face and overcome the existential challenges we face.

As transformational philosopher, Ken Wilber points out in the attached video, never before have all of the fruits of the world's great wisdom traditions - East and West, ancient and modern - been available (or potentially available) to all of the world's people. It is, perhaps, this largely unheralded potentiality for a radically new understanding of each other, the wisdom traditions which are our common heritage, and ourselves, which has triggered the rise of religious fundamentalism that we now seen in all traditions. History shows that inevitable change often provokes a reactionary response before it is widely accepted.

"This is the first time in history," Wilber observes, "that we actually have access to all of the world's cultures, to all of their forms of transformation. We have stuff from all the way back to shamanic techniques, all the way through the great axial wisdom traditions. We have various yogas East and West. We have some of the most profound contemplative traditions of all of humanity. They are all available to us, certainly at least in terms of study. But also increasingly. . . we have transmitted, realized teachers in virtually all of the great contemplative and meditative traditions. This has never, ever, ever happened in history."

"So, on the one hand," he notes, "we can put all of these things on the table and look at them, and say what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses. There are important truths in all of them. What we want to be able to do is sort of look at this, without diluting any of them or getting any of them to change, but simply putting all of them together in a way that they are mutually reinforcing (and) mutually beneficial. And then we can start to discern the key ingredients of transformation by studying what all of them have in common, using some of them to fill in the gaps that are perhaps not present in others. And that is just from the great wisdom traditions."

"A profound understanding of human growth and development has been contributed by the modern West," he points out. "And there are aspects of consciousness that modernity and post-modernity have spotted that you can find in no sutras, no tantras, no Kaballah texts, no Sufist texts, and so on. So, for the first time in history we really have a chance of putting all these things together, and not in a way to put them all down, but in a way to mutually enrich them. And that is what is extraordinary."

Axial Age Syncretism: Ancient Greece Encounters Buddhism

Growing up in the West, my worldview was that Buddhism was an Eastern and foreign religion. I did not know much about Buddhism, which is as much a philosophy and psychology as it is a religion per se, nor did I know too much about early history, European or Asian. I suspect many readers are in the same boat.

The Greek influence is clearly evident
in this statue of the Buddha circa the
1st-2nd century CE.

(Tokyo National Museum)

 

Since then, however, I have learned much more about the so-called "axial age," which saw the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece, the rise of Judaic monotheism, the emergence of the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, and Lao-Tze in China (among others). Several historical facts about this pivotal era in the story of civilization had eluded me. First, that the Greek Empire stretched much further into Asia than I had realized. (I had always pictured the frontiers as lying on the border of the Persian Empire, some distance to the west of modern Iran). Second, that Buddhism was not a Far Eastern phenomenon at that time, but rather it had spread across the Indian subcontinent (where it competed with, and was an offshoot of, the Sanata Dharma of ancient Vedic India). Third, that Buddhism(or Buddhist philosophy and influence) had rapidly spread west along the ancient Silk Road. And, fourth, that Indo-Grecian nations were set up along the Silk Road and survived for many centuries following the death of Alexander, facilitating the East-West flow of ideas, technologies and philosophy.

Indeed, I did not know that Alexander had conquered and established colonial cities in what is now modern Afghanistan. Nor did I know that he had pressed further into Kashmir and the Punjab, before being repulsed by strong kingdoms along the Ganges and retreating back into Asia Minor where he fell ill and died in Babylon in 323 B.C.E. Nor, at the time, had I heard of King Ashoka (304-232 B.C.E.), the great unifier of the Indian sub-continent, who subsequently adopted Buddhism and sent Buddhist emissaries far and wide, or that those emissaries had traveled as far as Egypt and Athens, itself. It was, it seems, a much smaller "world" in ancient times than it appeared to be, a factor that was not fully conveyed in the Eurocentric account of history I had been taught.

In the attached videos, the folks at OpenSourceBuddism.org, give an insightful account of the spread of Buddhism, and do a masterful job in describing the extent and effect that Buddhist teachings had on ancient Greek philosophy, as well as describing the Greco-Buddhist syncretism that purportedly played a large role in establishing the Northern School of Mahayana Buddhism (which would later spread to Tibet, China and Japan, even as Buddhism more or less died out in its native India, with the exception of Sri Lanka).

Know Thyself!: The Hidden Dimension of Consciousness

"Know Thyself!" is the great admonishment behind all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, for it seems that virtually all such traditions acknowledge that there is the small "self" or "ego" which we take to be "who" we are, and a hidden, transcendental "higher Self" which, though obscured by the ego's narrative, is the very essence of our being.

"Most people," observes the great psychologist, Carl Jung, "confuse "self-knowledge" with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents."

"People," he points out, "measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical structure, of which the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all this is not known, which also exists."

"What is commonly called "self-knowledge"," he notes, "is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen "with us" or "in our family" or among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand, one meets with illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities whcih merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case."

"In this broad band of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control," he warns, "we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what it is that is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self," pp. 14-16.]

In "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali" (written with Christopher Isherwood), Swami Prabhavanada notes that "(t)he external world even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman" (or true nature of our being). In short, we need to be "in the world" but not "of the world," as great sages and philosophers have told us since time immemorial.

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda observes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 24.]

But how to know this non-conflictive and acceptive consciousness of our inner being? Through introspection, self-examination and meditation is the answer found in virtually all traditions.

"(M)editation," Prabhavananda observes, "is evolution in reverse. Meditation is a process of devolution. Beginning at the surface of life," he explains, "the meditative mind goes inward, seeking always the cause being the appearance, and then the cause behind the cause, until the innermost Reality is reached."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," p. 41.]

Thus, to "Know Thyself!" one must move beyond the small "self" of the ego to the transcendental "Self" of one's own inner being.

Theodore Nottingham: The Knowledge of the Essenes

Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.  Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain: Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind: Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire: Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever. . . .

-- Psalm 104 --

For those seeking to understand the unity of the world's great wisdom traditions - the unity of religions and teachings that seem to be more and more related, the more we come to know of the ancient world - the attached video on the Essenes (creators of the Dead Sea Scrolls), by the Rev. Theodore Nottingham, a polymath scholar of the world's ancient and modern spiritual teachings, is a must-see.

"The Essenses were an advanced and highly evolved race of people," Nottingham observes. "Much of their time was devoted to the study of ancient texts, various branches of the healing arts, (and) there were also those who travelled far and wide through the various centers they maintained."

In very modern terms, Nottingham explains how, "(l)ike many of the ancient gnostic groups, the Essenes believed that humankind was made up of three aspects: the body, mind and emotions."

"The ultimate goal of the individual," he explains, "was the evolution, not only within him or herself, but also in regards to the planet and universe as a whole. The body was the  outer means through which this was expressed, while the mind was seen as the inner manifestation, and creator of thoughts and emotions, which the body then responded to and acted upon. Thought was therefore considered to be the highest, most powerful force in the universe, as it was seen as the instigator of both feeling and action.

"The Essenes," Nottingham points out, "therefore trained themselves to harness this power in a positive way, knowing that each thought effected  the lives of everyone on the planet through the vibrations they sent into the collective unconscious."

(The Rev. Theodore Nottingham is a theologian, television producer and author of many books exploring the esoteric teachings of Christianity and other wisdom traditions. He is currently the pastor of Northwood Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.)

Tolerance, Love and the Essence of All Religions

In his study of the Sanatan Dharma - the wide and multi-branched body of teachings known as Hinduism in the West - Radhanath Swami (born Richard Slavin) "discovered the basic truths of all religions in a way that the oneness of God and religion is comprehensively understood." "The essence of Hinduism," Radhanath writes on The Huffington Post, "is the same essence of all true religions: Bhakti or pure love for God and genuine compassion for all beings."

"Why," he asks, "should we fight over which religion is better? It is pointless. True love for God devoid of selfishness or egoism is the best religion. Wherever true love, broad mindedness, integrity and compassion are present, there one will find real religion through whichever path it is realized."

"God reveals different visions of Himself according to the needs of time and place," Radhanath observes. "Throughout history, declaring one vision all in all has been a convenient pretext for aggression, as it is relatively simple to manipulate uneducated or insecure people with propaganda. It is unfortunate to see that God, whom all faiths exalt as great, is so often depicted as small, petty and partial to one group."

"My childhood conviction that the inherent beauty of God must lie at the essence of all true spiritual paths has only grown over the years," Radhanath notes. " Of course," he observes, "the accounts of tragedy in the name of God have endured as well."

"Whenever I hear such unfortunate news," he writes, "I can't help but think that perhaps a prudent addition to the premise of God's greatness would be that God is greater than our comprehension of Him -- greater even than the religions we dedicate in His honor. God is independent and not restricted by our expectations or demands. This is the premise of the Bhakti tradition and the starting point of the journey to reawakening our love of God: God is so much bigger than we imagine."

In the attached video lecture on "the essence of all religions," Radhanath notes that intolerance and indoctrination may be found amongst the adherents of all religions, but that at the heart of all such wisdom traditions there is a message of selflessness and unity.

"The supreme dharma or religion, is to love God," he observes. "That love must be to the degree it is unmotivated by any selfish egoism, and uninterrupted by any circumstances that may come upon us." Such a religion, he says, "actually satisfies the heart."

"We are all looking for happiness," Radhanath points out, "and that happiness is within us. To connect to that, and to be an instrument to share that with others, is true religion."

Describing the Ineffable: What is God?

"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --
("The Over-Soul")       

How we ceaselessly struggle, and inevitably fail, to describe in words the ineffable! Rumi tells the story of how the small fish came to the big fish inquiring about something called "the ocean." "How," the big fish thinks to itself, "can you describe the ocean to someone who is already in the ocean?"

In the attached videos, masters from the world's great wisdom traditions try and describe the Whole. In essence each of these great practitioners try to describe the same unitive reality they experience, and which others have blindly fought over since time immemorial.

"The fight in the world is not between good and evil," observes Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. "Even today the wars in the world (are) not between good and evil, it is always between one man's belief and another man's belief. The moment you believe something that is not a living experience for you, you are already in conflict with somebody else who believes something else."

"God is beyond even our idea of the beyond," observes Sufi author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. "We all come from God," he has written elsewhere, "but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of this world, leaving behind the "clouds of glory" of our true Home."

[Vaughan-Lee, "Love is a Fire," p. 21.]

A Second 'Axial Age'

Are we entering a second "axial age" similar in breadth, yet different in content than the first "axial age" (a term coined by German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, to depict the fruition of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Zoroastrian, Judean and Greek religious and wisdom traditions between approximately 900 BCE and 200 B.C.E.)?

Certainly, with the existential problems we collectively face, and our technologically advanced potential for communicating ideas in a truly global culture, the ground is ripe for an emerging consensus of spiritual insight based upon the latent similarities in all the world's great wisdom traditions. And, perhaps, what we are seeing in the radicalization of fundamentalists across existing religious traditions is indicative of a reaction against a newly emerging "axial age" that embraces the core non-dual teachings of all the world's great wisdom traditions and the emerging consensus about global bio-genesis, global interdependency, and the key role that consciousness plays in shaping our world.

In an insightful Huffington Post article, author Duanne Elgin makes the case that we may, in fact, be on the cusp of just such a second axial age. Noting that the first axial age was very much a reaction to the emergence of city states and the use of new iron age weaponry in savage, widespread warfare, Elgin suggests that the time is now ripe (culturally and technologically) for a new spiritual paradigm to emerge.

"In a world of growing individualism and differentiation," Elgin notes, "the religious emphasis on compassion served as a vital bridge between people. Now, a second major axis with a very different orientation is opening in the world. Religions of separation are becoming religions of communion as we realize there is no place to go where we are separate from the ever-generative womb of the living universe. The second axial age begins with a recognition emerging from the combined wisdom of both science and spirituality; namely, that we are already home -- that the living universe already exists within us as much as we live within it."

"The universe is a communion and a community," says Elgin, quoting theologian Thomas Berry, and, "(w)e ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself."

"Compassion remains a vital element of spirituality," Elgin notes, "but it is now being held increasingly within a context of communion rather than separation."

"As people around the world move into spiritual communion and empathic connection with the living universe," Elgin suggests, "we see the role of religion differently: Less often do people look for a bridge to the divine. Increasingly, people seek guidance and community in the journey of awakening within the living universe. People want to know there are others on the journey of soul-making and seek guideposts along the way to support the awakening of their experience of unity and intimacy within the universe. Less and less are people seeking only religions of belief. Carried along in this great cultural project of awakening, we are increasingly seeking religions of direct experience -- religions of communion with a living universe."

"The 'Great Work" of our time," says Thomas Berry (in the attached video), "is
moving the human community from its present situation as a destructive presence on the planet, to a benign or mutually enhancing presence. It's that simple."

"When our aliveness consciously connects with the aliveness of the universe," Elgin observes, "a current of aliveness flows through us. At that moment -- when life meets life -- a direct connection between the living universe and ourselves is realized and we have an awakening experience. We no longer see ourselves in the universe, we experience that we are the universe."

"We do not need to manufacture or imagine awakening experiences," Elgin suggests. "Instead, we only need to experience directly what is already true about the fundamental nature of ourselves as beings who live within a living universe. When the conscious knowing of ourselves becomes transparent to the reality of our participation in an ever-emerging universe, we recognize there was no separation to begin with -- we all emerge in communion at every moment within the unity of a continuously regenerating universe."

That recognition is already becoming apparent - irrespective of the religious tradition from which it emerges - as a quick search of the Internet will reveal to those who make the inquiry.

Alan Wallace: Physics, Consciousness, Buddhism and Science

Alan Wallace, Ph.D

Alan Wallace is a strong voice in scientifically and spiritually progressive circles, urging Western science to broaden its perspective to include the study of consciousness itself, as well as the psychological insights of Eastern wisdom traditions.

A trained physicist and Buddhist practitioner, Wallace holds a doctorate in religious studies, and urges 'mind scientists' - cognitive psychologists, neurologists and neuroanatomists, etc. - to look beyond their current scientific paradigm which has almost completely avoided the subject of consciousness itself, labeling it as 'subjective' and, therefore, beyond the pale of objective, empirical scientific inquiry.

"What people often fail to recognize, however," says Wallace, "is that the very category of the physical, of the mental, is a category that we humans have constructed . . .  and reconstructed over the last four hundred . . . years of science."

"We have created (and) devised, based upon our modes of observations, of measurement (and) of experimentation, exactly what the parameters of the 'physical' are. What is matter? What is not matter? These are human definitions," he points out, "and these definitions have evolved as science has evolved."

"The 'physical' (or) matter, is precisely what the physical sciences are good at measuring," Wallace observes. "But the category, once again, is a physical construct. So the notion that everything in the universe must fit into a construct that we human beings have devised, and then insisting, moreover, that everything in the entire universe must fit into a construct as we have devised it now . . . strikes me as idolatry."



"Thus far," says Wallace, "mainstream science overwhelmingly has assumed that consciousness simply emerges in some as yet inexplicable way from complex configurations of chemical compounds engaging or intereacting with electricity. But no one has proposed exactly how this occurs. "

"No one has proposed with any degree of confidence, or any empirical confirmation," he notes, "when in the evolution of life on this planet consciousness first arose and what the conditions were for its arising. Nor do we know in the developoment of the human fetus inside the mother's womb . . . when consciousness first emerges, or what the necessary and sufficent conditions for it doing so (are)."

"The whole of science over the last four hundred years," he observes, "has never devised any sophisticated means for directly observing states of consciousness, the mind, mental processes. Especially over the last century, the overwhelming majority of scientific inquiry into the nature of the mind has been indirect, focusing on what scientists are good at looking at, the physical, the objective the quantifiable."

"Certainly scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists will interrogate others about their subjective experiences," he concedes." But, as one cognitive psychologist recently commented, we do not take other people's reports of their subjective experiences as facts, we simply take them as reports, as data. The same cognitive psychologist claimed that all of our subjective experiences consists of 'hallucinations.'"

So," he notes, "we are to rely then more on the metaphysical principles of materialism, than we are upon our own immediate experience. As if our own immediate experiences doesn't count and we should rely rather on the scientists' observations, as if they have some special access; and upon their metaphysical assumptions that everything must boil down to matter and the emergent properties of matter.

"Th(is) appeal to the authority of a certain community is exactly the mindset of medieval scholasticism," Wallace points out. "It is exactly the mindset that the pioneers of the scientific revolution revolted against."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

 As a polymath scientific advocate who endeavors to bridge the gap between Western scientific paradigms and the trove of psychological insights arising from Eastern wisdom traditions, Wallace tries to build a bridge between two of the most prolific knowledge systems that humanity has developed. He points out that Eastern traditions have always been focused first and foremost on the mind and consciousness, while Western Science has concentrated almost exclusively on the physical - matter, energy, time and space.

On the other hand, "Buddhist contemplatives and others," he notes, "have found multiple dimensions, have found a dimension of consciousness that lies beneath our ordinary psyche - the conscious and subconscious minds - called the substrate consciousness. (A consciousness) which is blissful, luminous, non-conceptual and does not arise from matter, does not arise from neuronal activity in the brain, does not arise from matter of any kind. It is not material, it does not arise from the material. It is conditioned by matter, but does not arise form matter. A deeper dimension of consciousness.

"All that we know of the universe," Wallace notes, "is what the universe reveals to us in response to our questions and our systems of measurement."

Part Two of Wallace's interview, in which Wallace expands upon the fascinating intersection of cutting edge physics, metaphysics and Buddhist thought, continues below.

Non-Duality in Western Civilization

The West has always been influenced by the East. Even the West's principal religious tradition, Christianity, arose in Palestine, and has as its at root a fundamental non-dualistic perspective. See, for example, the following biblical passages: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD thy God is One." (Deut. 6:4); "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." (John 14:11); "I and the Father are one." (John 4:24).

This non-duality is no mere coincidence of wording, says philosopher and best-selling author, Peter Kingsley. The sense of 'One-ness' was already there at the birth of pre-Christian Western civilization and was then merged into the arising Eastern Christian tradition.

"Its fine what's going on in terms of coming together, and bringing different traditions, together, and this idea of a new global 'One-ness' (or) global harmony. But to me it's very important actually to be able to say, "Well that's been there since the beginning, and we here are looking towards bringing a greater reality or sense of 'One-ness' into these tatters of Western civilization."

"To me,"" Kingsley notes, it is very very important to say, "Yes, but that sense of 'One-ness,' not only did it happen to be there when Western civilization was born, but that it was out of that sense of 'One-ness' that Western civilization was very deliberately created."

While strains of the non-duality from the East permeates both the Old and New Testament, and indeed all of Greek thought, perhaps the great neo-Platonist Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it best in the second book of his famous "Meditations," when he observed:

"This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part."

Eckhart Tolle Part III: The Present Moment, Spirituality and Religion

Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle,
author of "The Power of Now" and
"The New Earth: Awakening to Your
Life's Purpose."

"(A) fundamental thing that first of all you need to realize," says enlightened spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "is that life is 'now' and never not 'now.'" It's only this moment ever. Past and future only have a secondary reality. The past only exists if you remember it now. The future only exists if you mentally project yourself into some future moment; but, even that, you can only do 'now.'"

"Your entire life unfolds in this space of 'now,'" says the best-selling author, in the third of a three-part interview. "You cannot think, feel (or) experience anything that is not 'now.'"

However, "(p)eople don't live like that," he observes. "They live as if past and future - especially future for many people - were more important than the present moment. And they have a strange relationship with the present moment, which means with life. For many people," he notes, "the present moment is regarded unconsciously as an obstacle, because they are 'here' but they want to get 'there.'"

"That's a dysfunction," Tolle observes, "making the present moment into an 'obstacle.' Or, even worse, making the present moment into an 'enemy.'"




"It is the one basic spiritual truth," Tolle says. "That one basic spiritual truth expresses itself in different forms in the different religions. So, I'm going to the basic spiritual truth, instead of taking things from different religions and mixing them up."

"The different religions," he notes, "are just expressions of the one basic spiritual truth. So I'm going to the source of that, and express(ing) it in a way that people can understand and realize in their own lives without having to subscribe mentally to this or that religion."

"Whether they are Christians or Buddhists, or whether they subscribe to Islam, or any other belief, it doesn't matter," says Tolle, "the basic truth is there if you look deep enough in all the religions. So it is (a matter of) finding the core of spirituality that is there at the core of all religions."

"We go to the core of religion," he concludes, "rather than treating religion as an ideology, which it often becomes."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

(See the first and second parts of Tolle's three-part interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Sandra Abrams, here and here, respectively.)

Sages: Paul Brunton on the East and West

"When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will  be scattered like ants across the World, and the Dharma will come to the land of red-faced people."

-- Padma Sambhava --
[Eighth-century Indian guru; founder
of Tibet's first Buddhist monastery]

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Paul Brunton (1892-1981)

From age to age, and on all continents that were occupied by humankind, there have been great sages bearing messages of radical non-duality. Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisagardatta were two such sages from our modern era, and the relatively little-known philosopher Paul Brunton, a student of both, was another.

In speaking of the world's great sages (see the attached video, below), Brunton wrote:

"The world should be more grateful for the presence of such men. The good they do is mostly indirect, however, through intermediaries, or mostly hidden because psychological, so it escapes the world's notice.

Further, in speaking of the interplay between Eastern spiritual traditions and the "materialistic" West, Brunton wrote:

"We Westerners ought to be humbler than we usually are in confessing that we need to borrow some spiritual bread from the Orient today, as we did long ago. We ought also to be humble enough to confess those defects in our civilization and culture which arise from our emphasis on the quest for material wealth or livelihood. But, this said, let us firmly reject the absurd exaggerations of those Orientals who accuse us of a materialism so gross that we are unable to respond to spiritual urges at all. This is nonsense. It is true that the Oriental's basic instinct moves toward religion. But, in this modern era, this instinct is being overlaid with those same urges which have made the West what it is today. The same process overtook medieval Europe. Let us all, then, face the truth about what is really happening to us, both here and there, to all races alike. For make no mistake: it is a universal phenomenon."

"When the era of science overtook the West, the era or reason applied to mechanical development and external institutions, the push towards it was so great, the rewards so attractive, that we lost much of our balance. The East is being drawn in the same direction, the chief difference being that it has started later in time, and same push is beginning to appear all over the East. Will it not lead ultimately to the same defects? Not quite, for the Easterner has the spectacle of our own lopsidedness to warn him whereas we had no living example to provide us with such a lesson. What is the meaning behind this universal process? For we cannot believe it to be accidental in a divinely ordered world?"

"Philosophy answers that it is a fated evolution that man everywhere is intended to develop his intelligence and refine his feelings in all directions. If it is not materialism to attend to physical matters, to work for one's livelihood, to seek the comforts and conveniences of applied science or even the beautiful homes of applied art. Man is a growing creature: his reasoned thinking demands that he seek the one, and his aesthetic feeling demands that he seek the other. The materialism enters when to get these things, we forget the daily need of prayer and meditation, of listening for the voice of moral conscience and heeding the laws of spiritual balance."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," pp. 16-17]

 Noting the then already-evident Western interest in Eastern wisdom traditions, Brunton writes:

"There is wider general interest in these subtle Oriental ideas than ever before but there is not much evidence of wider general willingness to practice with fervour the goodwill, the forbearance, and the compassion without which those ideas are half-dead, bereft of their best values."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 35]

And, on the convergence of the Western scientific vision, with Eastern metaphysical traditions, Brunton observes:

"When the scientific wisdom of the West unites with the mystic wisdom of the East, we shall arrive at truth."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 57]

An "Acceptive Love" Without Conditions or Objects

Love, what it is and what it means, has been a subect for philosophers and poets, theologians and ethicists, lovers and beloved, since the mists of time. The ancient Greeks, those philosophers that have been so influential on Western culture, recognized three categories of love: agape love, or the love we feel for other beings, generally; filial love, the love we feel for those family members and friends who are closest to us; and, erotic love, the love we have for our partner or our spouse.

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997)

Viktor Frankl, a renowned psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, wrote in his classic work, "Man's Search for Meaning," that it is in love that a person can find one of his or her several paths to meaning in this life.

"Love," he notes, "is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Further more, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."

 Frankl's thoughts on love speak, I believe, to all the differing levels of love that the Greeks spoke of; yet, there is perhaps still another level of love which can perhaps encompass all of these varyuing degrees of love, and in so doing actualize the potential in all of us,

"God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him," we read in the New Testament (1 John 4:16). This level of love, according to Pope Benedict XVI "express(es) with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny." But what kind of love is it that is synonymous with God, and which we are told we are capable of manifesting and abiding in?

One often hears or reads of "unconditional love," but is it really possible to have a love without conditions? Perhaps not, so long as that love is focused upon another person, whether it be agape, filial or erotic love. But perhaps it is possible to manifest a love without conditions, if and only if, it is a love that stems from a higher, expanded level of consciousness in which there is no specific object of that love, but rather everything, including the seer, becomes the object of such undifferentiated love.

It is this level of love - manifested in what I have come to think of as a state of "acceptive consciousness" that transcends the ordinary conceptive and rational nature of the self-consciousness of the observer - which seems to be the essence of many of the reported instances of higher religious or mystic experience, experiences reported not only by Christian mystics, but by mystics and sages from all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions.

"Individual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures, remarked Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great theologians of the 20th-century." "Love has taken away my practices and filled me with poetry," writes Rumi, the great 12th-century Sufi teacher and poet.

Unadulterated love, compassion and charity have all been the focus of the world's greatest and most enduring traditions, Christian and Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist, Taoist and Zoroastrian, and so many other traditions alike. But perhaps the greatest statement of this state of "acceptive consciousness," where all pre-conditions and objects of love fall away, is the following famous passage from St. Paul's first letter to the fledgling Corinthian church:

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

[I Corinthians 13:1-13]

When Paul speaks of "the completeness coming,"and when Rumi speaks of "poetry,"this I believe is the love that transcends the individual self, the "acceptive love" that is the height of the religious or spiritual experience of the world's great mystics, irrespective of caste or creed. This is what is meant, I believe, when a wisdom traditions tells us that "God is love;" an objectless love that transcends the limitations of self-conscious thinking. It is the radical, non-dual love of enlightenment.

The Condensed "Perrenial Philosophy"

Spiritual Teacher Ram Das (aka Richard Alpert)

In The Harvard Psychedelic Club, author Don Lattin traced the story of how Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (soon to become Ram Das) and Huston Smith (soon to be the "dean" of Comparative Religions studies) clashed with Andrew Weil (soon to be America's health food and integrative medicine guru) and the"powers-that-be" over the now infamous psilocybin and LSD trials conducted at Harvard University, clinical and non-clinical trials which "ushered in" the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. (A video of Lattin, at a book reading for the The Harvard Psychedelic Club is available here.)

Lattin is a chronicler of the ongoing spiritual revolution that was sparked in the 1960s. He is now working on  a group biography of English polymath philosophers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, together with American social pioneer, Bill Wilson. Huxley's 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, sparked the interest of Leary, Alpert and Weil in the possibilities of using psychedelic drugs to create a mystic experience. With his friends Gerald Heard and Bill Wilson (one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, although definitively not acting in that capacity), Huxley conducted further experiments with LSD as a method of gaining the enlightenment experience described by saints and mystics of all the world's wisdom traditions. (Wilson reportedly thought an LSD trip might potentially spark the vital spiritual experience that the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, had identified as a possible curative for the disease of alcoholism.)

Bill Wilson was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential men of the 20th century, while Heard was a particularly well-known BBC commentator whose book, Pain, Sex and Time, Huston Smith credited with sparking his interest in religious studies. Nonetheless, it was Huxley, author of the immensely popular science fiction novel,  A Brave New World, who was the most recognizable and notable of the three.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Huxley's most influential work may have been The Perennial Philosophy rather than A Brave New World, however. A study of how mystics, saints and sages from all the world's wisdom traditions describe their journey and attainment of mystic enlightenment, The Perennial Philosophy is in a very real sense an updated and cross-cultural version of William James' groundbreaking work, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The Perennial Philosophy has remained in-print and is still widely available, while Heard's Pain, Sex and Time has only recently been reprinted. However, the most succinct statement of what all three would have called "the Perennial Philosophy," is found in Huxley's introduction to a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, by their friend and compatriot Christopher Isherwood together with Swami Prabhavananda, a Vedantist monk. (The Song of God is still available through the Vedanta Society of Southern California, of which Isherwood, Prabhavananda and Huxley were all members.)

In the following briefest of words, Huxley describes the underlying message and findings of all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions:

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

It is these four ideas - known by most cultures, but forgotten by many - that were at the heart of the Western spiritual renewal that was kickstarted in the 1960s, and which continues (minus the reliance on LSD and other psychedelics, which turned out to be a bit of a dead end) with us today. While Huxley died in 1963, before he was able to see the revolutions (religious and otherwise) spawned in the crucible of the 1960s, the ideas of the "Perennial Philosophy" continue on in the various non-dual teachings of Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Andrew Cohen and so many others.

Physics, Spirituality and 'the Structure of Consciousness'

Quantum Fluctuations by Kevin Moore

Arthur I. Miller's book, 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession, traces the evolution of the relationship between Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Carl Jung, arguably, the West's most influential psychoanalyst. What started as a patient-therapist relationship quickly morphed into a partnership of metaphysical exploration.

The volume immediately caught my eye in my local bookshop not-so-much because of its subject matter - interesting though it may be - but, rather, because of a memorable passage from Gary Zhukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a now-classic treatise on the convergence of modern physics, metaphysics and the world's oldest wisdom traditions.

The memorable passage which had stuck with me from my first reading of the Wu Li Masters was the following passage on the fundamental nature of quantum physics that features the parallel views  Pauli and Jung held on the true nature of 'reality':

"According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way round.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, wrote:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

 Jung's friend, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, put it this way:

From an inner center the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world . . . 

"If these men are correct," Zhukav so memorably wrote, "then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness." [Emphasis added.]

Now why didn't high school physics start with that remarkable proposition rather than with the rote repetition of Galileo's experiments with falling bodies? That would have caught my attention!

The great theoretical physicist, Richard Freeman, reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand quantum physics. (The bongo-playing polymath also reportedly said, "If you think you understand quantum physics, you've got rocks in your head!")

The quantum world is apparently beyond (and antithetical to) our human comprehension because our language and mere existence in the 'ordinary world' of our conscious existence prohibits us from envisioning the indeterminate and radically interconnect nature of basic reality - a 'proven' reality where everything is composed of discrete 'quanta' of energy, yet where there is no such entity as a separate "thing."

Whether there is, in fact (and I believe there is), a limit beyond which our ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate the "suchness" of what "is" - to use a famous Buddhist description of fundamental reality - it is truly remarkable how the phenemona and explanations of quantum theory echo the conclusions of the world's most ancient wisdom traditions; conclusions which are themselves impossible to fully penetrate with "ordinary" consciousness. Hence, the search for "enlightenment" which has remained a fundamental concern and pursuit of humankind since we first walked out of the mists of time.

Zhukav's assertion that "physics has become the study of the structure of consciousness" is tantalizing because at once it seems to unite the three great streams of humankind's pursuit of knowledge: the sciences (which are all rooted in physics), the social sciences (that are all, in their fundamental aspects, sub-systems of psychology), and the humanities (which highest discipline is metaphysics).

Zhukav concludes his exposition of the 'New Physics' - which admittedly does not cover the most-cutting edge of quantum theory, such as "superstring theory" - by examining the profound implications of Bell's theorem and the work of quantum theorist David Bohm (who was a unique participant in the "dialogues" of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, one of the 20th-century's rare, enlightened masters).

In the closing pages of the Wu Li Masters, Zhukav, initially quoting Bohm, observes:

"Matter is a form of the implicate order as vortex is a form of the water - it is not reducible to smaller parts." Like "matter" and everything else, particles are forms of the implicate order. If this is difficult to grasp, it is because our minds demand to know, "What is the 'implicate order' the implicate order of?"

"A new instrument of thought such as is needed to understand Bohm's physics," Zhukav writes, "would radically alter the consciousness of the observer, reordering it towards the perception of the "unbroken wholeness" of which everything is a form."

The relationship of form with the formless, the reordering and submergence of ordinary human consciousness within universal consciousness, and the description of ultimate reality and our relationship to it, are the elements of all the world's great religious, spiritual and metaphysical traditions. As Zhukav notes, "all eastern religions (psychologies) are compatible in a very fundamental way with Bohm's physics and philosophy. All of them are based upon the experience of a pure, undifferentiated reality which is that which is."

In the end, as the juxtaposition of Jung and Pauli's views illustrate, just as in the beginning of human inquiry, not just physics but all explorations of  'what is' become "a study in the structure of consciousness."

Or, in the words of Rumi, the 11th-century Sufi poet and mystic (as translated by Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi):

"If you have a body, where is the spirit?
 If you're spirit, where is the body?
 This is not our problem to worry about.

  Both are both. . . .

 Invisible, visible, the world
 does not work without both."