Memes and the Tortoise and the Hare

Petri Plate 4, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures…It was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976).
Wikipedia

Here are some points I have been thinking about:
1)   Spiritual Paths seem to change with time. Advaita now has neo-advaita. This causes arguments.
Some say you can become enlightened in about 30 minutes and “I’m done.” Some say it can take a life time and always opens up to greater depths. This argument is getting very nasty in some places. (Curiously, what doesn’t change is the presence of fundamentalism: rigidity and the willingness to destroy in the name of Truth.)
2)   We used to think that enlightenment changed the personality into that of a saint. Now, there’s clearly a distinction. It’s been put this way for clarity: Saints are those who display the ideals human behavior. Sages are those who have realized the true nature of the Self. This dichotomy began with Eastern teachers’ sex and money scandals. The behavioral license seems to have been cut loose path direct path emphasis of no-self. There’s no one to be a jerk. Jerkiness just happens, while no-me is free.
3)   Spiritual paths aka “how we spiritually evolve” are memes. Thus, we can expect “the teachings” to follow the laws of genetics: to change and mutate into new and fitter forms with time.
4)   The ability to evolve itself evolves. Thus, if you wanted to graph the speed of evolution, at some point you’d expect it to go parabolic.

Point Four comes strictly from concerns of molecular geneticists (of which or whom I’m one).
The ability to evolve, or “evolvability”, seemed really obvious to me the first time I heard the phrase. It’s not just that everything else in Creation evolves, so why not the ability to evolve… but there seemed to be the whole specific history of genetics revealing that Life (genes) invent new mechanisms to evolve at every major evolutionary transition.

So, when I hear that many people are awakening by directly inquiring into no-self, I cannot dismiss the possibility that awakening can be quicker now than in the past.
If spiritual paths are meant to evolve our consciousness,
If a shift in consciousness is the only means a person has to escape suffering,
If a shift in consciousness is the only hope our species has for survival,
If the ability to evolve evolves –
HEY! I should be hoping and expecting enlightenment to take less time.

That said, scientists NEVER think things are that simple. Turns out, they have only recently completed an experiment that demonstrates evolvability. I find the details illuminating:

A long-term evolution experiment on E. coli has been running for more than 50,000 generations. Two beneficial mutations arose in some strains prior to the passage of the first 500 generations. The researchers dubbed the strains that carried these mutations at 500 generations the eventual winners (EW) and those lacking the mutations the eventual losers (EL).

Surprise #1:  The fitness of EW and EL was compared. Both strains EW and EL had significantly higher fitness than the ancestral strain. But early on, the EL appeared fitter than the EW. The EW strains were at such a disadvantage that if these strains had not accumulated additional mutations, they would have gone extinct in just 350 more generations.

Surprise #2:  But, over time the EW acquired more beneficial mutations than the EL. These “later date” mutations enabled the EW to overcome their fitness disadvantage. In other words, the EW during their period of lesser fitness actually possessed a greater evolvability than the EL. You could see this difference in evolvability intially.  That's not so surpising.  The influence of genes isn't always obvious on the surface.

This saga of the bacteria reminds me of the tortoise and the hare.
The hare could get there quickly, but he had an arrogance that laid the ground for his ultimate defeat.
The tortoise in his own slow careful manner got there in the end.

These bacteria also make me wonder if perhaps the same thing isn’t happening with the memes of our spiritual teachings?
Direct path is great! Bam, you’re there: No-self. “I’m done.”
But, maybe, that leads to something of a dead-end evolutionarily (aka, eventual losers).
Meanwhile, some poor schlep of an Advaitan tortoise actually sits and meditates for 10 years, 20 years.
When he awakens, sometimes there may be no-self and sometimes there is an ego that could stand a little therapy and responsibility for that is taken.
And so change continues. Insights go deeper. Curiosity is maintained.
Maybe this is the EW, the deeply embodied enlightenment because the ability to evolve, evolvability is alive and well.  (for a different way of saying this, BATGAP has a really nice interview with Adyashanti regarding keeping a teaching fresh)

Does the world need more sages or more saints?
Does spiritual bypassing ever really work?
Does throwing a bomb for peace bring an end to war?

The other day I offered this quote, perhaps it’s again a good way to end:
Practice begins with enlightenment.
Suzuki Roshi

Witness-Consciousness

Documenting self image
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness which is both mind and matter and beyond both.
Nisargadatta

I have been thinking about witnessing.
I have been wrestling with the experience for so long, I think it worth the effort to untangle.

Nisargadatta says:
First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only…

And only then is there a next step or
[Ultimately] there is no subject and object, whereas in the witness there is still subject and object, but the subject no longer identifies himself with the object as the ordinary man does.
Paul Brunton

Right there, so much gets explained. So much gets established.
The trinity of experience is introduced:
experiencer, process of experiencing, object of experience…

In the witnessing consciousness there is both subject and object, but the subject is no longer identified with object. This is a good definition for what Maharishi Maheshi Yogi termed Cosmic Consciousness:

The identity of self has been disentangled from objective relative. And it this sense it can be called self-realization.
The self is recognized and experienced as separate from activity, thus establishing a true duality from which one can awake.
Prior to this there has been what Maharishi would call “the unity of ignorance” as self is all bound up with identification.
Curiously, the ego (be that defined as “individuality” or the sum total of our conditionings) remains fairly well intact.

Maharishi taught that in Cosmic Consciousness a person had become enlightened, but that was not the end to evolution. Unity was possible. But the process of evolution took time and there were no specific techniques to speed the transformation along.

What Maharishi encouraged was meditation that allowed the mind to become more and more familiar with subtle levels of experience. In essence, the senses become refined – purified. This helped Cosmic Consciousness to transform into God Consciousness – still a dual awareness because both you and God exist. Purification occurs in the body, through refined digestion and the production of soma. As the senses become refined, the heart opens. Through Love the heart unites that which the intellect had separated.

In some respects, this differs from the position taken by many of today’s teachers of the Direct Path. Adyashanti teaches anyone can awaken at anytime: no need to become a good person, no need for purification. One awakens from the mind through techniques of inquiry: “Who am I?” and “I am….”
But, Adya also teaches that for “emptiness to dance” this realization must settle deeper as if into the heart and belly. He calls this embodying awakening – and it too is a process that takes time and can be miss managed.

I so appreciate Adya for teaching about the subtleties of this process and the stumbling blocks:

… the position of the witness can become a fixation… this means of course, that there hasn’t been a true and thorough realization. It is more like a half realization; it’s like being half awake…

and then he sites this famous saying:

The world is illusion. Brahman alone is real. The world is Brahman
Ramana Maharishi

This saying speaks to certain insights that come with awakening. The first insight, that “the world is illusion,” is not a philosophical statement. Seeing that the world is illusion is part of the awakening experience. It is something that is known; we discover that there is no such thing as an objective world out there…This first statement, then, is pointing to this insight, which comes with realization.

The next statement, “Brahman alone is real,” points us toward the recognition of the eternal witness. The witness to the world is where all the reality is. From this perspective of awakening, the witness is experienced to be much more real that what is witnessed. What is witnessed is seen to be like a dream, like a movie or a novel, unfolding in front of us. There is a great amount of freedom in this, but also a great tendency to become stuck in the idea that, “I am the witness to what is.”…

[“Brahman alone is real”]…could also be understood as “The witness alone is real.” But without the third statement, “The world is Brahman,” we would not have true non-duality. In the statement, “The world is Brahman, “we have the realization of true oneness. “The world is Brahman” collapses the position of the external witness. The witness position collapses into the totality, and suddenly we’re not witnessing from

the outside anymore. Instead, witnessing is taking place from everywhere simultaneously – inside, outside, around, up, down. Everything everywhere is being witnessed from inside and outside simultaneously, because what is being witnessed is what is witnessing. The seer and what is seen are the same. Unless that is realized, we can get stuck in the place of the witness. We can become stuck in a transcendent void, in emptiness…

the next phase of the journey of awakening [is] the collapsing of the witnessing position. It starts to collapse when we see that if witnessing is different from the witness, then there is inherent division. Letting yourself see this division is the beginning of the collapse… you can start to see the elements of ego that are using the witnessing position as a way to hide, to not be touched by life, to not feel certain feelings… Make no mistake – to see a fixation within ourselves because someone explains it to us is not enough… It must be discovered in oneself, for oneself.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World.

Grief: "Yes!"

Canvas C
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I’ve not written in a while – it has seemed impossible.
I’ve decided to try posting snippets, and in this case, a transcript that I’ve been contemplating.

It’s a rather long excerpt from an Adyashanti CD, Enlightenment: The Direct Approach.
It deals with grief: grief with a capital G - grief that at times shakes the student, Adya is talking with, into convulsions.
Such deep grief has become very familiar to me in the past few months.

I want to understand such grief.
But, also notice that when Adya speaks of resisting the Immensity he speak of the entire Cosmos and he doesn’t frame his comments as metaphor or analogy. (He uses metaphor later, referring to plugging a hose with your thumb.)

The Grief at issue here touches an Immensity, and that Immensity apparantly involves, both experientially and in parsing Adya’s words, the entire Universe.
I was always embarrassed by Maharishi using the term Cosmic Consciousness.
Now, I believe he was simply trying to be accurate in his terminology.

How is this possible – that human consciousness becomes Cosmic?
What would that process feel like?
The proverbial camel and the eye of a needle come to mind.
But the extremes of the actual task are far greater actually: one individual and the entire Universe.

Notice too, that when Adya asks the student to explain her grief, she says she feels like she’s been “living life backwards.”
Awhile ago I mentioned Thomas Merton’s description of Adam’s sin as “a double movement of introversion and extraversion.”
In this phrase “living life backwards” we again meet something of that trick of twist.
Somehow, the Cosmos in which I exist seems to keep getting turned around and swallowed so that it resides within me.
I find this flip and twist excruitating. I react as one would to an electrocution.
Later, upon reflection, I find that returning to my true nature feels like executing some sort of fancy dive: forward somersault with full twist.
And you must pull it off without the slightest splash.

...But, the main point here regards grief and the transcript goes like this:

Student: About three months ago I gave up what I was doing, not really knowing why, but I just had to do it… I have this sense that there is something deeper in me wanting to move through and by doing what I was doing, I was just kind of bailing-out. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. But it really meant just falling back and giving up income and having no idea what was going to happen.

So what’s been happening in that process is just a lot of grief, just intense grief touching upon a depth of aloneness that is terrifying. I can intellectualize what is going on and yet … the feelings that come up are just so big, they feel like they are just going to rip me apart. And there is part of me that wants that, just let it take me over and I can’t…

Adya: It’s going to happen you know that. The moment is going to come and you’re not going to be able to resist it… It’s just about saying yes to it. Yes…. Whatever. Yes. It’s going to kill me. Yes. I’m ready.

Student: Yeah. I can say that when I’m not in it.

Adya: What I am saying is it will visit you until you get to that place where you really say/feel throughout your being, Yes.
Yes, you’re just done resisting…
There is a great Immensity that is coming up within you. The thing that makes it feel intense though, as opposed to immense (immense and intense are different things)… The Cosmos is immense. It’s not necessarily intense. The resistance of that much space, the resistance makes it be perceived as an intensity… Something holds on as the Immensity of Being is coming into your consciousness. Then It is experienced as very intense, overwhelming, terrifying maybe.
That’s why I say when you can get to the moment when you can just say, “Yes!” it’s like you’ve taken your finger off the front of the hose… It’s experienced totally differently. All is well. Then all is unimaginably well.

Student: Yeah. I’ve had glimpses of that… And you know the grief that is in there, that endless, endless grief, it just takes me over sometimes. It’s just unstoppable.

Adya: What’s the grief about? What’s the bottom of the grief?

Student: There’s really not a story or a memory…the best I can put it, I feel like I’ve been living life backwards in a way and that I’ve come to this core of I can call it separation, just the deepest, deepest core separation, just being ripped apart out of wholeness…I find it difficult because I don’t see it around me much. It feels like such a lonely process.

Adya: It feels lonely for the moment inside yourself [as other people hide it]… inside of us, [there] is the central wound…the core wound of turning away from what we really are. As soon as we turned away we experienced separation that causes a grief and suffering and everything else that follows. But as you get very close to that essential turning away… that’s the grief, the grief for having turned away from what you really were and the separation immediately issued. … it’s the grief of turning away from the immensity of what you really are.

Student: And that’s what it feels like, that I am on that edge. I just have to remember. I have to know what I hold in me, what I’m here to express, cause it’s just so painful not to.

Adya: You’ll find it by turning into that intensity. And when I say, “Yes,” I’m trying to impart a certain sense - it’s the letting go of resistance.

“The drop experiences the Ocean by becoming one with it.”
That’s what Maharishi use to say.
No complicated somersaults and twists need be involved.
In fact, Maharishi used to describe the inward dive of meditation as simply leaning over and letting go.

“Yes.”

Zen Stories, now and then

temple disconnection
Originally uploaded by cjb22

Knowing that we are looking for something we already have and are does not, of course, mean that the journey is
unnecessary, only that there is a vast and sublime joke
waiting to be discovered at its end.
Andrew Harvey, 'The Direct Path'

So, off I tramp. Much a do about nothing, all around the mulberry bush.
Becoming a scientist was never much in doubt. They love to hypothesize and think -
always with the question.

Zen Story One: How Grass and Trees Become Enlightened

One day a fifty-year-old student of enlightenment said to Shinkan: "I have studied the Tendai school of thought since I was a little boy, but one thing in it I cannot understand. Tendai claims that even the grass and trees will become enlightened. To me this seems very strange."
"Of what use is it to discuss how grass and trees become enlightened?" asked Shinkan. "The question is how you yourself can become so. Did you even consider that?"
"I never thought of it that way," marveled the old man.
"Then go home and think it over," finished Shinkan.

I find I do not want to explain myself. No talking it through with the girls.
I am almost sick of words. Almost.
I want to experience and then just let it be.
No labels. No putting it to words.
In labeling I feel a torque.
Is it a twist of fear? Yes.
Is it a twist of “Not True?” Yes.
It is a twist of ego? Yes.

I am almost sick of words. But not quite - damn, I’m blogging still
Still
I am not quite anything.
Best case label, “I am Nothing.”
That is so obvious. Obvious oblivion.
Then there is that torque -
How can I deny: the tree, the table, the sky, the thoughts?
All That must be at least Something. I know that truck can hit me hard.

So that must be something And thus I can’t be Nothing.

But I am.
Nothing.
Staring me in the face
The contradiction is so funny. I laugh hugely, silently
And that is contradiction too
as no grin breaks upon my face.

Rumor had it Angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Maybe I’m an angel… no, that was just a rumor.
More likely, I’m a pin head
Dancing on the Void
Dancing, Dancing
Insisting on the pin head.