Silence, Part 2: in many guises

Japanese Feather
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The Unmanifested is not separate from the manifested. It pervades this world, but it is so well disguised that almost everybody misses it completely…
Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence of the Unmanifested in that?
... Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be…
The Unmanifested is present in this world as silence… All you have to do is pay attention to it…
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within. Silence without, stillness within. You have entered the Unmanifested.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter 7, “Portals into the Unmanifested”

It is curious to me that Tolle doesn’t capitalize Silence, yet he does capitalize Unmanifested. I have always equated the two. Perhaps, I am wrong in this.

When my consciousness first shifted, back in 1975, the shift (my awakening?) began with a sudden thundering of Silence. I was leaning over to whisper a joke to a friend, as we sat watching a video tape of Maharishi, played to a roomful of TM teachers in the midst of a six week retreat. I was midway through my lean, when Silence cracked so abruptly I jerked straight up in my chair.

I never finished my lean, nor did I ever deliver my snide comment.
Instead, I looked around the room absorbed by this all pervading Silence.
At that moment my life was changed forever.
Then, I got up and walked out.

I no longer recall why I felt so compelled to leave. It was night. We were in the country and being out under a brilliant canopy of stars, rather than in the confines of a crowded room, was probably my motivation.

By the time I was done walking, it was long past lights-out, and my new found friend (the course leader who’d accompanied me when I fled the meeting) was pretty much holding me up. My legs had grown wobbly. I’d become quite drunk on my new reality. Eventually, she dumped me upon my bed to spend the night totally Awake.
I slept one hour every other night for the next two weeks. It made little difference whether my eyes were shut or open, whether my body moved, sat still, or slept.
I was always Awake. … How I managed to go back to sleep is a story for another time.

Since then, Silence has broken in upon my ordinary awareness time and time again during the most mundane behavior.
It strikes suddenly, without preamble.
It always seems precipitated by some other simple sound: a fly pinging against a lamp shade, a dog barking in the distance.
It can be electrifyingly intense or have the strangest subtlety.

I’ve had Silence spin me almost off my chair while sitting in a coffee shop.
I’ve watched Silence roll across the room just as a wave rolls to shore, buckling my knees and felling those around me also, in something of a silent tsunami.
It feels as if I’m going to faint, but I never have. I simply lose thought and muscular control for some few moments.
This has even happened while working at the computer in the lab. I was startled to watch computer monitor go black in perfect synchrony with Silence descent upon me.
We had to reboot the system. After the third time, the monitor was dead.
I never mentioned my involvement to the others and the Department covered costs.

Silence is not simply about sound.
It is also about space and form, which is just a way of saying it is also about Nothingness.

Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist without no-thing, without the empty space that enables it to be. Every physical object or body has come out of nothing, is surrounded by nothing, and will eventually return to nothing…. The Unmanifested is not only present in this world as silence; it also pervades the entire physical universe as space - from within and from without. …Nothing – space – is the appearance of the Unmanifested as an externalized phenomenon in a sense-perceived world. That’s about all one can say about it, and even that is kind of a paradox. …Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter Seven.

Silence is also about Love.
When Maharishi “made me a teacher,” I sat alone with him for sometime and we talked. As a final gesture, he gave me a picture of his teacher, Guru Dev, then said, “Now, you keep him happy.”
With those words, a wave of Silence, some “carpet flap” in an Ocean of Nothingness started at the far wall of the room. I knew it to be Maharishi’s love for Guru Dev and I watched it roll towards us. Even though I’d seen it coming, its splashiness of Love was beyond any expectation. Speechless and wide-eyed, I reached out with both my hands, clamped them hard upon the lithograph, bowed and backed out of there.

My Penguin paperback edition of the Bhagavad Gita is old and very fragile now.
But, I had it with me back when my consciousness first submerged into Silence.
These are the words that I underlined then.
I’m sorry that Adyashanti doesn’t speak about God more. Perhaps it is the Zen in him.
And I’m sorry that I couldn’t stay Awake. Perhaps it is the ego in me.

In cosmic consciousness silence and activity co-exist at the same level; whereas the level of God-consciousness is completely free of all duality; it is the living silence of eternal life, and Unity pervades all activity as water every wave…. When the awareness of the Self in cosmic consciousness develops into the awareness of God in God-consciousness, it develops on the level of silence; the whole process is one of the transformation of silence. At every step the quality of silence changes.… In transcendental consciousness, silence is devoid of any activity. In cosmic consciousness, the silence of Self-awareness co-exists with activity. In God-consciousness, the co-existence of activity and silence is transformed into oneness of awareness with God. This silence of God-consciousness is the most highly developed state of silence. It is all life on the almighty level of existence. It is the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient silence of Godhead. It is a completely different state of silence, which has nothing in common with the silence of cosmic consciousness or transcendental consciousness.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, On the Bhagavad Gita, A New Translation and Commentary, Chapter 6, verse 3.

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.”

Mario’s Email

svengali
Originally uploaded by Carolyn Garcia

I received an email the other day. It posed two questions that I’d like to share:

1) Why is it really impossible to go on living moment to moment with full awareness?
2) How come "unwanted thoughts emerge" and we can't wipe them off!!?
Sometimes I am inclined to think that we have an innate ("evil") tendency which we have to learn to know and co-exist with...but how!?

Sincerely, Mario

Good questions, I think. Right to the point.
So, why is it impossible to live moment to moment “fully aware” once we understand how nice that kind of life would be?

It’s because full awareness cannot be maintained through our good intentions, our meditation practices, or intellectual understanding.
Full awareness is maintained automatically by the body, our physiology.
Or in other words, enlightenment is a state of consciousness and each state of consciousness is supported and maintained by a specific physiology.
This is the nature of all states of consciousness.

Spontaneously we shift from waking, to sleeping, to dreaming.
We cannot will ourselves to remain asleep forever, or stay in a beautiful dream.
We wake up. And then, we cannot remain awake forever.
It is the same with remaining “fully conscious.” We cannot will it.
The Body has a will of its own.

If you have insomnia – intellectual understanding is no cure. The more you think about the insomnia the less likely you are to fall asleep. Telling yourself to go to sleep is a futile endeavor, only increasing your agitation.
Similarly, intellectually understanding that there is something called “full awareness” won’t produce the state. And trying to remain “fully aware” is futile. The moment our attention lapses full awareness is gone.

But, we can effect the shifting back and forth between states of consciousness to some extent.
We can go to bed, lie down and wait quietly. Soon the body slips into sleep.
Set an alarm clock. You are likely to awake on time.
And too we can affect the quality of our sleep or wakefulness by the things we do that affect our physiology. If we want to have a good, alert day and not to be dull or sleepy, we know that we need a good night’s rest, eat correctly, and avoid excessive drugs and alcohol.
This everyday knowledge of how to behave and support our everyday states of consciousness is similar to knowledge of spiritual practices: meditation, inquiry, yoga, Qigong.
All these practices help orient us towards fully awakening.
But, in the end, awakening to full awareness happens through Grace, when all the ego’s efforts get out of the way.

Or as the Sufi paradox states:
If you seek Him,
you will never find Him.
But if you do not seek Him,
He will not reveal Himself to you.

It’s a fine line to walk.
And this is the short answer.
There are other equally valid ways in which to answer the question. But, this is from a physiological perspective. It can be flushed out a bit by other comments I’ve made in the past.

But that’s it for today. As I wrote Mario – they are making me work at work these days.
(Some people have all the nerve… is that a negative thought surfacing? Oh, NO!)
So, off I go.
Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll get to Question #2.

Thanks to Carolyn Garcia for illustration: Svengali.

Smaller than the Smallest, Larger than the Largest

Spinal Tap
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk brought to mind a phrase Maharish was quite fond of:
Knowledge is structured in Consciousness.
(i.e. what you know depends upon whether you are asleep or awake or dreaming, your state of consciousness.)

And there is a corollary:
Every state of consciousness is supported by a unique physiology.
(i.e. observe the body’s behavior during waking, sleeping, and dreaming states. Or view the physiological parameters elegantly diagramed by dream researcher, J. Allan Hobson.)

By contrast, Adyashanti chooses to emphasize a very different point.
Adya says enlightenment is not a state of consciousness.
Which I think is his way of emphasizing that the Consciousness experienced in Enlightenment is the Pure Consciousness of Non-Changing and Ever-Present Wholeness.

Pure Consciousness is not generated by the brain.
Pure Consciousness is the ground, the clay – from which the universe, all brains and all brain-states arise.
(And, personally, given as I am to physiology, I still think one of these brain-states supports the behavior we think of as “enlightened.” That is to say, a specific brain state supports Consciousness becoming conscious.)

It is all very circular -
like some kind of möbius strip, or better yet
M.C. Escher’s, “Drawing Hands.”

Maharishi used to tell us,
The range of Creative Intelligence (Consciousness) is from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest.

As I tried to understand this - just what could be smaller than the smallest
and also larger than the largest -
I used to contemplate a hierarchy of academic disciplines that ran something along these lines:

When describing the smallest things
quantum physics begins with the vacuum and QED (quantum electro-dynamics)
which is the basis of all chemistry
which is the basis of all biology
which leads to needing sociology
and geology for studies of the World
which leads to planets and astronomy
which leads to galaxies and spiral nebulae, space-time and gravity,
and of course the big-bang (where everything comes out of nothing)
which must be understood in terms of astrophysics
which loops us back to QED and the vacuum.

Can you picture what this means?
I could never quite swallow that the vacuum was actually Pure Consciousness.
But years later when I re-read my notes I found that Maharishi believed they were identical.

So yesterday, I went looking one more time.
I found these words online, those of a physicist, regarding QED:

To be sure, we are electromagnetic creatures in an electromagnetic world, existing at the intersection between light and electricity.

If you haven’t done so already, do listen to Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk at the TED conference.
You’ll find this is pretty much what she discovered for her self.