Just when you thought it was safe to go back into an ego centered life, along comes David Carse's extraordinary book, 'Perfect Brilliant Stillness'...
Carse talks about a traditional Yoga Theory claim that human consciousness is comprised of four states. Three of these we are all intimately familiar with: the waking state, the dream state and the state of dreamless deep sleep. There is, however, so testify countless yogis and meditators, a fourth state, called Turiya in Sanskrit. This state is the witness of the three familiar states.
Generally speaking, writes Carse, we humans tend to conduct the search for self-knowledge ass backwards. We assume, quite incorrectly, that the waking state egocentric mind can know or realize the transcendent Turiya state.
Au contraire, says Mr. Carse. According to Advaita Vedanta, the waking state is the least conscious of the four states. Dream awareness is a higher state, closer to the ineffable Turiya. Ironically, psychology and mind-body therapies in the west generally operate on the premise that the waking state is primary and dream interpretation is conducted accordingly. We ransack dreams to see what meaning and significance they have for the daytime 'me.' In fact, says Carse (and brilliant neo-Jungian, James Hillman, by the way), it behoves us to treat the dream realm with a good deal more respect than that.
Deep Sleep, contrary to western notions that it's a dumb blankness without meaning, is an even more sublime state, closer to core Beingness. Swami Muktananda once said, "In deep sleep we move close to the Self. That is why it so rejuvenates us." For those who might argue that deep sleep is nothing more than darkness, I offer this profound observation from the NeoPlatonic philosopher, Dionsyos the Areopagite, "There are two kinds of darkness and one is caused by an excess of light."
It is typical of the ego's misguided aspirations in the area of psychic hegemony to presume that our grand quest for self-knowledge is to be conducted solely by it.
The supreme subjectivity of the Turiya state is not and cannot be known as an object by the lesser states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. On the other hand, notes Carse, the transcendent fourth state knows the other three very well, though not in the dualistic, outwardly fixated way that the conscious mind knows things. There is an immediate knowing that thinking never really catches up with. A glimpse of it can be had, turning a corner and bumping into a beloved friend whom you haven't seen in twenty years.
Our misconducted searches for self-knowledge might well begin with admitting the inadequacy of our prevailing Googlego search engine. What many of experience as grace is what happens when we shut up long enough to listen rather than project.
A funny thing happened on the way to the web forum
It took over forty years of yoga, meditation, tai chi, qi gong, active imagination work ala Carl Jung, James Hiillman and Mary Watkins, Tibetan Buddhist Dharma and hosts of other worthy endeavours before I started to get a real gut sense of how selfish I was being almost all the time. I mean that sincerely, not as any fake attempt at humility. Sure, a part of me has always wanted to know what human life was about beyond insurance policies and getting even. The mystery of being here at all has not faded with the apparent passing of apparent time. But the selfishness part has always been there, too... preoccupations with my growth, my health, my spiritual understanding, my liberation, my success, my worthiness, my peace of mind, ad infimytum.
Big help for 'me' have been the Youtube videos by Paul Hedderman on the subject of 'selfing'.
Selfing is something that almost all of us are doing all the time. It is so innate, so ingrained and (seemingly) spontaneous that we entirely take for granted that we ARE a self; a separate self, a self arrayed against an entire out-there universe of pleasure and pain that is going to kill us one day. We hardly ever notice that this existential dichotomy of self and other is something we're doing. We're sustaining it through projecting and believing in a me with a personal history. We don't notice how trapped we are by our self-narrative until we try to let it go. Who's going to let it go? the 'me' whose whole life is invested in being the story?
When I first got a feel for how impossible it was for me to let go of me, it scared the shit out of, well, me. All this spiritual stuff that I knew and that fills these Free Range Ego pages, wasn't helping with the one thing that really mattered, releasing the vice grip of Narcissus. Insights occurred in the midst of fear and self-doubt. It became evident that stopping the activity of 'selfing' did not depend on anything I could do or anything I knew. The Heddermanian logic was impeccable. If the self isn't real in the first place, are you not pretending it is real by trying to do something about it?
Here was the impasse. And it was not easy for me to remain impassive in relation to it.
If you, dear reader, find content in these pages that you deem valuable, believe me, the worst mistake you can make would be in thinking that the author is someone who knows what he's talking about. I wrote most of this website still clinging, in ways subtle and tediously ignorant, to the notion that I was someone who knew enough about spiritual and metaphysical matters to at least make an attempt to put some of it out there in the public domain. That's my self-defensive justification and I'm sticking to it.
I'm trying to be as honest as I can be here while still selfing my ass off. Why am i so hooked on selfing? Seem to be two main reasons in my case. The first has to do with survival, primitive fight or flight mechanisms, bodily preservation and etc. We are taught from such an early age that we are these meat bodies and terrible things can happen to them, and thus to 'us' if we're not really careful. The second reason hit me like a lightning bolt years ago when I viewed the original of William Blake's 'Satan' at the Tate Gallery in London. The Luciferian angel was beautiful with gossamer wings that enfolded whole tracts of creation and eventually led to his eyes which were full frontal, no holds barred, everything stops here PRIDE.
PRIDE!
in being, above all, a separate self.
Big help for 'me' have been the Youtube videos by Paul Hedderman on the subject of 'selfing'.
Selfing is something that almost all of us are doing all the time. It is so innate, so ingrained and (seemingly) spontaneous that we entirely take for granted that we ARE a self; a separate self, a self arrayed against an entire out-there universe of pleasure and pain that is going to kill us one day. We hardly ever notice that this existential dichotomy of self and other is something we're doing. We're sustaining it through projecting and believing in a me with a personal history. We don't notice how trapped we are by our self-narrative until we try to let it go. Who's going to let it go? the 'me' whose whole life is invested in being the story?
When I first got a feel for how impossible it was for me to let go of me, it scared the shit out of, well, me. All this spiritual stuff that I knew and that fills these Free Range Ego pages, wasn't helping with the one thing that really mattered, releasing the vice grip of Narcissus. Insights occurred in the midst of fear and self-doubt. It became evident that stopping the activity of 'selfing' did not depend on anything I could do or anything I knew. The Heddermanian logic was impeccable. If the self isn't real in the first place, are you not pretending it is real by trying to do something about it?
Here was the impasse. And it was not easy for me to remain impassive in relation to it.
If you, dear reader, find content in these pages that you deem valuable, believe me, the worst mistake you can make would be in thinking that the author is someone who knows what he's talking about. I wrote most of this website still clinging, in ways subtle and tediously ignorant, to the notion that I was someone who knew enough about spiritual and metaphysical matters to at least make an attempt to put some of it out there in the public domain. That's my self-defensive justification and I'm sticking to it.
I'm trying to be as honest as I can be here while still selfing my ass off. Why am i so hooked on selfing? Seem to be two main reasons in my case. The first has to do with survival, primitive fight or flight mechanisms, bodily preservation and etc. We are taught from such an early age that we are these meat bodies and terrible things can happen to them, and thus to 'us' if we're not really careful. The second reason hit me like a lightning bolt years ago when I viewed the original of William Blake's 'Satan' at the Tate Gallery in London. The Luciferian angel was beautiful with gossamer wings that enfolded whole tracts of creation and eventually led to his eyes which were full frontal, no holds barred, everything stops here PRIDE.
PRIDE!
in being, above all, a separate self.
