Transcending the self for the Self

The following quotes are so exciting! I came across the technique of "witnessing" many months ago through the work of Bill Harris, of Holosync and Centerpointe. The following exercise and quotes, however, are from Ken Wilber, in his book, No Boundary. Basically, there is the idea that our true "Self" (as opposed to "self" with a small letter 's'), is who we really are, our eternal soul, which ultimately is part of, or one with, God (look up the concept of panentheism, as opposed to pantheism). The small-letter "self" is our ego-identified self, the self we've created and grown attached to. We get attached to that "self" and think that it's the only reality. Our ego-self masks who we really are. If you can get in touch with your authentic, eternal Self, you will ultimately see that there is nothing to fear and that there is no loss, no death, and no separation. Our ego-self is an illusion, masking our oneness with God and with every one and every thing.

Through the witnessing technique, you take the perspective of your Transcendent "Self", observing your small-letter "self".

The "Witnessing" Technique for Experiencing your Transcendent Self:

I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body.

I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires but I am not desires.

I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions but I am not emotions.

I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts.

[End of Exercise; additional Wilber quotes follow]

Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to disidentify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you -- since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them.

Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them.

To witness these states is to transcend them.

Thus, we can understand why Patanjali, the codifier of yoga in India, said that ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing.

If you are at all successful in developing this type of detached witnessing (it does take time), you will be able to look upon the events occurring in your mind-and-body with the very same impartiality that you would look upon clouds floating through the sky, water rushing in a stream, rain cascading on a roof, or any other objects in your field of awareness. In other words, your relationship to your mind-and-body becomes the same as your relationship to all other objects.

Transcendence in and through Pain

A couple of weeks ago I had a pain relapse from my herniated disc. It returned to the debilitating state as it was when it all started in October 2007, and for a few days I could barely move or go to work. So on Thursday, January 10th, I had a minor medical procedure called "facet blocks" to cauterize some nerves along five sets of vertebrae that were channeling pain signals to my brain from the "slipped" disc. Mercifully, that procedure was largely successful, as the worst of the sharpest, stabbing pain was greatly reduced or eliminated. I don't feel 100% perfect now, but at least the situation can be endured and I can go to work and do some regular activities.

Not a day has gone by since October when I have not thought about pain, how to respond to it, how to fix it, and how to make sense of it. I have certainly had my days of frustration and anger and sadness. More and more I am getting the impression that Western medicine really doesn't have all the answers, or a quick fix (other than pills), and many of my experiences with doctors have been quite negative. Not only do treatment recommendations differ from one doctor to the next, but most doctors I have met (so far) were complete jerks (to put it mildly!), lacking even an ounce of compassion or humanity. Over and over again, I have also run into people who have dealt with back pain through surgeries, medication, and all the other usual Western methods, and it seems like one horror story after another. Many times the treatment only serves to make the condition and pain worse, or leaving the patient a veritable drug addict. I am currently really at a fork in the road when it comes to knowing where to go from here. My faith in Western medicine has never been lower (not that I'm not thankful for the facet block procedure, which was really minor and the least invasive action I could take, but it seems like my options from now on could lead to a lifelong quagmire of surgeries or experimental guesswork). Ultimately I think it rests on me to keep a positive attitude and cultivate a larger, spiritual meaning to make sense of this experience and to live with it. There must be a way to endure this positively and constructively. I do believe in the power of the mind to heal the body. I do believe things happen for a reason and that there is much for me to learn from this pain.

From a spiritual standpoint, I have found some new and beautiful ways for understanding pain. The following is a quote by Hazrat Inayay Khan, a Sufi mystic and author, from his book The Unity of Religious Ideals:

In reality God is within you, and as He is within you, you are the instrument of God and through you God experiences the external world and you are the best instrument of conveying yourself to God.

I also found a similar perspective from reading Willigis Jager: the idea that not only is God within us, but He is living through us and experiencing our lives in and through us. God is living through this pain with me; I am not alone in enduring it. It is like the idea of Christ's cross: that we each have a cross to bear in this world, but that it is imbued with even more significance if we can see it through Christ's sufferings. The experience of Christ is a mirror image of our own. If we can follow in His footsteps, pain can really become something that helps us evolve to a higher state of being and consciousness.

The Buddhist concept of karma also adds another dimension of meaning, and I really think it is not much different than the Christian idea of surrendering to divine providence. The following is an amazing quote from Ken Wilber:

I’ve dealt extensively elsewhere with the concept of karma and illness—in Grace and Grit, for example, and more recently in Excerpt A of volume 2 of the Kosmos Trilogy. But it remains one of the most confused areas of understanding imaginable. I’m not going to get into it at any length here, but just let me make a few very brief points. Many people hear of situations like this, or perhaps suffer similar ones themselves, and imagine it must somehow be retribution for some horrendous crime in one’s past. But keep in mind that karma doesn’t mean that what happened earlier in this life is finally catching up with you; the orthodox doctrine of karma actually means something that happened to you in a previous life. According to the doctrine of karma, in this life you are reading a book that you wrote in a previous life. Many people draw the erroneous conclusion that because, e.g., they used to yell at their spouses, they now have throat cancer—but that’s just not the way it works.

As a matter of fact, from at least one angle, the “bad things” that are happening to you now actually indicate a good fruition—it means your system is finally strong enough to digest the past karmic causes that led to your present rebirth. So if you were reborn—that is, if you are alive in a body right now—then you have already horrifically sinned, and unless you work it off in this lifetime, guess what? You’re coming back. Illness itself does not cause more karma; your attitude towards illness, however, does. Therefore, if you are undergoing some extremely difficult circumstances right now, and you can meet those difficulties with equanimity, wisdom, and virtue, then you are doubly lucky—the causes that led to your being reborn now are starting to surface and burn off, and you’re not generating any new karma while you burn them (as long as you meet them with equanimity and awareness).

I only mention this because all too often, people undergoing difficult circumstances of one variety or another add a type of New Age guilt or blame to an already difficult enough circumstance, and truly, that’s not only inappropriate, it’s inaccurate. If you would like to pursue some of these concepts in this more integral fashion, please check out Excerpt A. In the meantime, if you’re undergoing some sort of truly difficult or even horrific circumstances, please don’t kick yourself when you’re down. That, indeed, would create bad karma. The good news is that you are finally ready and able to burn off the karma that led to this rebirth, and this is good news indeed—if you meet it with love and openness and a smile.

From this perspective, the endurance of pain and suffering, and one's positive response to it, can become a very noble action, setting things right in the world, making corrections for past wrongs, turning a negative into a positive. This also seems to be the same message one gets from reading the lives of saints, Catholic or otherwise. Pain and suffering are facts of life and ultimately unavoidable. It's how we respond to it and make constructive use of it that make all the difference. We could either see ourselves as helpless victims of random chance, bad luck, or fate, or we could see it as a great opportunity given to us by God for a reason.

I will have much more to say on all of this in later posts. I am currently reading an analysis of Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence.

Jager on Religion, Spirituality & Esotericism

The following quotes are from Benedictine monk and Zen master, Willigis Jager, from his book, Search for the Meaning of Life.

On spirituality versus religion:

I make a distinction between spirituality and religion. Spirituality teaches a path into experience and deals with what is experienced. Religion, by contrast, is instruction that has evolved into dogmatic theology. These dogmas do, in fact, derive from experience, but they have been absolutized, and only a few believers understand them in an experiential fashion. In esotericism there is instruction but no dogma. "Dogma" here relates to traveling a path to come to one's own experience.

These thoughts might give rise to the misunderstanding that esotericism could subsist all by itself. Not so. Religion needs the two pillars of esotericism and exotericism, otherwise it can easily fail to reach its goal.

A definition of "esotericism":

Ultimately esotericism is concerned with a new experiencing and grasping of reality. The true esoteric paths don't lead out of this world, but into the heart of the moment, into life. The point is to feel not contempt for the world, but an entirely new form of love for it. And with that we come to the essence of mysticism in both the East and the West: religion is life, and life is religion. When I experience the fact that my rising in the morning and putting on my slippers is a profoundly religious act, then I have recognized what religion is. But this is simply not possible without deep experience. In the Eucharist we solemnly proclaim that this is not just bread (in other words, not just form) but the essence of divinity appearing in this form. In the Eucharist we solemnly proclaim that nothing exists that is not God, which means that we actually ought to experience even our breakfast as one more way the Divine expresses itself. It is a sacred action to live one's life here and now. In the final analysis, the sacrament of the moment is nothing else but "living in the will of God." That is the way to happiness.

Profound Holosync Experience

Over the last couple of weeks I have been pretty successful at returning to a regular daily meditation with my Holosync meditation CDs. I originally started Holosync around May 2006 and managed to listen almost daily for six months. Then with a change of job, and an addition of a commute, my listening became sporadic; maybe only a handful of sessions per month. I always longed for a way to get back into my Holosync and see the same sorts of growth and peak experiences that I had had in those first six months. I could really feel and see positive changes from Holosync, which I believe have lasted up to the present time. Those first six months were really amazing, and brought so much positive change, mental clarity, and emotional equilibrium.

So this morning's session was very nice. I've been listening to Awakening Level 1, Disc 4, for the past two weeks, half an hour per day, as recommended by the instructions. Today's session was so beautiful that I continued on for the full hour. During the end of the first half hour I experienced the sensation that my body just disappeared. It was like my mind was falling down into itself and my body just melted away and became a subtle, pulsing wave sensation. It was really incredibly beautiful and blissful; a feeling of just pure being-ness or wave-like energy. Perhaps it was a taste of the void or nothingness. It lasted for several minutes, into the second half hour. A few times I would catch myself observing myself, thinking, "Hey, this is cool! Let's keep this sensation going!"

I also observed, as usual, my thoughts wandering all over the place (from remembering certain chores I need to take care of today, to random thoughts, worries, and memories). Every time I would catch myself wandering, I would bring my focus back to a mantra, usually just the beginning phrase of the Rosary, "Hail Mary, Full of Grace". I've found that when I get focused on repeating a mantra while listening to Holosync that it can increase or maintain the blissed out feeling that Holosync creates. I think there is real potential for combining Holosync with other mental exercises for intensified growth.

Then as the hour of Holosync was gently fading away, I could hear the Sunday morning church bells softly pealing outside my window (I live near some churches). It was so beautiful and amazing! Today's Holosync meditation was truly exquisite.