(Alex Grey's vision of Kosmic consciousness.)
“We can’t attain Buddha-nature any more than we can attain our feet. We can simply look down and notice that we have feet, we can remember that we have them. It sometimes helps, if we think that we do not have feet, to have somebody come along and point to them. A Zen Master will be glad to help. When you earnestly say, “I don’t have any feet,” the Master will stomp on your toes and see who yells out loud. Then he looks at you: ‘No feet, eh?’” (Wilber, One Taste 335).
I do believe that transcendent experience is in fact possible, that with practice and sometimes at the hand of some unforeseen force or circumstance higher levels of consciousness can be attained. And I also believe that Westerners can reach this level of awareness. This is largely due to convincing accounts I have read and heard, but it has become my firm belief because some inexplicable faith inside me pulls me to believe. This seems like a relative desire – and it is, I am compelled by one of the Qualities, but the Gita announces (does not solely denounce) the Qualities as the kicking off point for transcending them. “Purity, being luminous, strong, and invulnerable, binds one by its yearning for happiness and illumination” (Gita 113). Now, I have not had any extended experience of this condition, but I have seen brief glimpses of it. As Ryan said, What if the Gita is totally wrong? What if the Gita was written by a psychotic, or what if evidence was unearthed that it had been crafted by some Hindu Hitler of the sixth century before Christ? What if I am deluded and my experiences were psychotic regressions to infantile desires? Fortunately, the Gita offers a way to verify its experiential claims. (They are indeed claims founded on experience and not merely intellectual contrivances.) The only way to know if the Gita, and all of the great Wisdom traditions of any culture, is valid is to test its claims for oneself. THIS MEANS PRACTICE.
“Having thought over it, you are free to act as you will” (Gita 149).
It is true: everything I have written here, everything I will ever write, every single word printed in the Bhagavad Gita is merely a concept. All concepts and ideas and words are dualistic; they have meaning only in terms of their opposites – the one and the many, inside and outside, the near and the far. But the Gita suggests a way to remember the non-dualistic ground of being that gives rise to our dualistic relative plain. Pure Subjectivity, pure Witness, pure Love, pure Action through practice, yoga, meditation. “Beyond comparison of the eternal with the non-eternal am I” (Gita 121). Even though our words are dualistic, this should not confine us to silence. (Saul Williams, passionate Kosmic poet, demonstrates the power of visionary words, asking us, “What is the density of an egoless planet?”) Words cannot substitute for direct experience, but they can still describe and approximate experience as long as we – that’s intersubjective – are clear about what we mean.
These are all words, as Bump announced, that we are bandying between us, and that is problematic because each of us interprets the meaning of any word differently. What is ‘detachment’? Well we have this nebulous cloud of meaning around which our individual associations and connotations swirl, but in order to have a meaningful conversation we need to do our best to clarify what we mean by ‘detachment’. To me it means recognize that you recognize objects – the table, food, trees, your body, your desires and emotions, and even your thoughts – as objects, not as part of you as a subject. Interior growth is the process of going deeper into your subjectivity, recognizing objects so that you no longer have to be identified with and controlled by them. As renowned developmental psychologist Robert Keegan defines growth, “The subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage.” A transcendental experience means pushing this growth to its zenith where you are no longer identified with any of the passing objects that float by in your infinite awareness. You become pure subject, or Subject. Atman blends into Brahman.
(Ken Wilber explicates the seeming contradictions of spiritual claims. "Hurts more, bothers you less.")
Neither does this entail apathy or lack of participation in the world. Andrew Harvey makes this clear in his Foreword to the Gita: “It is clear, I think, to anyone who sees the depth of the global predicament we are in that there can only be one way out now – the way out of ‘mystical activism.’ An activism that is not fed by mystical wisdom and stamina will wither in the fire of persistent and persistently exhausting disappointment and defeat and tend to create as many new problems as those it tries to solve” (Harvey, Foreword xii). When you remember your Original Face, you don’t fall out of the world. By recognizing the transience of the relative world it does not therefore become unimportant or uninteresting. “When you realize that ordinary life is just a dream, just a movie, just a play[,] [y]ou don’t become more cautious, more timid, more reserved. You start jumping up and down and doing flips, precisely because it’s all a dream, it’s all pure Emptiness” (Wilber One Taste 67). I cannot confirm (nor can I contest) this realization, but many great mystics the world over – Buddha, Jesus, Plotinus, Sri Ramana Maharshi – have. “Enlightenment is thus not catching a really big wave, but noticing the already present wetness of whatever wave I’m on. Moreover, I am then radically liberated from the narrow identification with this little wave called me, because I am fundamentally one with all other waves – no wetness is outside of me. I am literally One Taste with the entire ocean and all its waves. And that taste is wetness, suchness, Emptiness, the utter transparency of the Great Perfection” (ibid 338). Just begin.
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