An alchemist: student of strangeness
Part One: Update on Weirdness
'Does a God who has conceived and borne intimate witness to all life and manifestation throughout the vast multi-dimensional realms of ineffable splendor - over countless aeons and through infinite iterations of mind-boggling dynamic evolution - really care what individual human beings choose to eat, drink, wear, say, or believe? Let alone choose to do with their genitals? I would suggest that the answer is no. God doesn't mind at all. Not even a tiny little bit......... Perhaps the only thing that would be of tremendous interest to a supreme creator entity is just how well we are progressing on our own individual spiritual journey......' (Neil Kramer, 'One Dream, Many Awakenings')
Neil could well have added that this 'supreme creator entity' does not care overmuch about personal trauma, either. Unpleasant, disorienting, and, er, certainly traumatic: but in the cosmic scheme of things, personal trauma barely registers. This is a perspective that I can at least begin to entertain as the traumatic element in recent life events slowly fades into the distance.
It is almost a year now since my life was thrown into unexpected turmoil by the trashing of our house by flood, all within the wider context of an astonishing and nightmarish synchronicity (see 'Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine', July 10th 2012, and 'Life Inside a Random Universe', August 21st 2012). Suggested interpretations of the flooding have poured in from a variety of sources: of a neglected house protesting; of a dwelling place that we originally moved to in immaculate condition now demanding to be our own creation; of the collapse of an ego personality and a corresponding rebirth and renewal; to mention just a few. People have read their Jung, taken note of the reality of correspondences, and these have been the results. To all who have offered suggestions, I say 'thank you'.
On the subject of the massive synchronicity involved, however, words of wisdom have been less forthcoming. This is more seriously weird, cutting across our normal perceptions of time and space, and I have been largely left to my own devices to deal with this one. There are times when I have tried to dismiss the whole idea of this being synchronous as erroneous, just a chance coincidence; but the odds of this being the case are infinitesimal. The 'meaning', if indeed that is an appropriate notion, remains elusive. Maybe dark archontic forces started to take notice of me, and havoc was the result. Certainly, soon after the event, it was chaos and destruction - in the form of Shiva -that readily came to mind. Or maybe the Universal Consciousness decided the time had come to test my resolve; or that I was off-course and, failing to do anything about it, needed a helping hand in straightening myself out. Or maybe the Universe was simply putting on a fantastic magic show as a means of opening up my experience of the non-ordinary elements to existence.
As the months have passed, I have become less concerned about 'understanding' the synchronistic aspect to the event, than simply absorbing on deeper levels that it took place at all. In retrospect, I can begin to envision these various synchronistic events as all parts of a kind of initiation. An invitation into non-linear modes of experiencing....
Without doubt, the period prior to the house flood found me accessing unfamiliar states of consciousness - both during and outside formal meditation/mystical practice - with an ease and regularity that was new to me. An unmistakable change - maybe I was being primed for something bigger. But still nibbling around the edges. Then a higher intelligence entered centre stage: 'OK, dude. So you're interested in weird stuff? Well, here's something to really get you going. You won't like it. But I think you can take it.'
So it was an exit route from purely causal, linear, time-and-space perception into direct experience of something quite different. The old mechanistic way of thinking just wouldn't be able to get a handle on this at all. The water pouring from the attic onto the sodden floors below was not just an agent of destruction: the leaking water tank was also a vase of initiation, bestowing grace upon one terrified student of consciousness.
Today, the weird continues to manifest more regularly in my everyday life. While the domino-style world continues, another functions in parallel, the two entwining from time to time to create a richer tapestry. Rather like a number of computer programmes running simultaneously, one visible and obvious, the others chugging along in the background, but ready to manifest the moment it is appropriate. As it has started to become more commonplace and familiar, the weird is gradually becoming, well, less weird. More like a facet of life that I am constantly challenged to accept with equanimity.
Part Two: Buddhism's Missing Link
As should be clear from some of my recent posts, the questions of 'Why did I become a Buddhist?', 'Why did I stop being a Buddhist?', and 'How did Buddhism work and not work for me?' continue as threads in my life. They are not so much obstructions to personal energy as part of the wider task of understanding myself - plus, understanding what many of my former colleagues (some still good friends) are still up to.
Just recently a theory has presented itself to me. It remains speculative and not fully digested, yet worth outlining here nevertheless. It concerns missing bits in Buddhism as commonly practiced by westerners today.
As one such westerner attempting to follow a Buddhist path at the end of the twentieth/ early twenty-first century, I sensed that something major was missing. The practices just didn't work for me anymore. That was not, I concluded, because I was just lazy or obstinate or avoiding issues. The thing that was missing, I now see more clearly, was the weird stuff. The mystic shit. And the connection goes like this......
The sacred path is enumerated in various ways in Buddhism; but as an umbrella term, you can't do better than the Threefold Way. This consists of Sila (translated most frequently as 'morality' or 'ethics' - it's how you conduct your everyday life), Samadhi (meditation, one-pointed concentration), and Prajna (Wisdom). As I have seen Buddhism commonly practiced by westerners, the importance of Sila is readily understood and its practice taken seriously. The effects of our habits of body, speech, and mind in moulding consciousness are properly recognised. Folk are also generally prepared to take on Prajna, be it reflecting on impermanence, meditating on the dissolution of the elements, attending a course in Vipassana, Mahamudra, or any other of the wealth of approaches the Buddhist tradition offers to 'the way things really are'. But what about Samadhi? Sure, most folk spend a bit of time on a meditation cushion, but it's more than that. On presenting the Threefold Way, the Buddha put forth Samadhi as a whole one-third of the path. It was Sila, Samadhi, Prajna; not Sila, Samadhi, Prajna. My (past) experience leads me to suspect this is often not grasped. One reason? Samadhi is tough, disturbing, and seriously weird. It's where you find the mystical stuff; and where you can go nuts.
As conventionally presented, Samadhi has two main threads. One is that of developing one-pointed concentration. The other is the element of entering dhyanas, 'supernormal states of consciousness' as they are sometimes described, and each associated with a corresponding objective world (different density/dimensional realms as they are described in some western mystical traditions). I have met few Buddhists who appear to have taken this dhyana stuff all that seriously. More typical is an incident I recall from being on Buddhist retreat thirty years ago. One Buddhist colleague of mine, who clearly suffered from an overly discursive mind, emerged from the shrine room after another unsuccessful attempt at one-pointedness with a broad grin on his face. 'It's OK' he beamed reassuringly. 'You only need a bit of the first dhyana (the 'lowest' of these 'supernormal states') to become Enlightened.' A comfort, no doubt, to those reluctant to leave behind the unfamiliar; but a complete misreading, nonetheless.
Despite apparently being an integral part of the Buddha's path, these dhyanas are known to get a bad press, or at the least to be presented in a spirit of ambivalence. Typical, maybe, is the relevant section in 'A Survey of Buddhism', the magnum opus from his earlier years of my former Buddhist teacher. Having described the various states of superconsciousness, as he calls them, he goes on to discuss the supernormal powers associated with them: things like walking on water, passing through walls, telepathy. These powers, he emphasises, are not to be developed for their own sake: should they appear, they are devoid of spiritual significance, and are to be looked on 'with indifference, even with disgust.' The Buddha, apparently, regarded these powers 'with contempt and loathing.'
While there may be some truth in all this, it is hardly psychologically astute. For a modern western practitioner, bred on a diet of the Three D's (Descartes, Darwin, and Dawkins), any suggestion that we don't need to emerge from the safety of normal, consensus reality will come as a great relief. This distortion - that the supernormal powers are loathsome, therefore this dhyana stuff isn't worth the paper it is described on - amounts to a huge cop-out. You can only view these supernormal powers with loathing and contempt because you have actually been there and seen their limitations first-hand. The type of caution declared in 'A Survey...' may have been relevant at the time of the Buddha, when life seems to have overflowed with meetings with devas, yaksas, and all sort of other-dimensional entities. Or in tenth-century Tibet, when unleashing conjurations of thunderstorms on your neighbour's crops was a favourite pastime. Our 'weird stuff', intimately connected with the dhyanas and non-ordinary states in general, was more familiar to these people. To modern western folk, things are very different: entering the world that is embraced by the term 'samadhi' becomes in itself an enormous challenge and achievement. It means taking on the supernormal states and the weird stuff that is their hallmark. Leaving behind the narrowly rational, everything you ever learnt at school, scientific materialism and the rest. Synchronicity, telepathy, crop circles, past life regression, encounters with fourth-density entities, etc etc : anything that challenges the linear time-space programme, introducing in its stead felt paradox, strangeness, creating elasticity with regard to causal relations. This is all part of 'becoming whole'.
In the popular versions of the Buddha's life, as his final act before Enlightenment, he 'travels up' through all the superconscious states, then comes back down again. This is not, we can presume, done purely as a piece of good entertainment for the masses, but as an integral part of the process of the Buddha's awakening, a profound teaching. In the light of what I have written above, its meaning becomes transparent. Full, red-blooded spiritual awakening has to contain everything, including the weird stuff. A being coursing purely in ordinary, linear consciousness is a mere ghost of a being. For modern western folk, it might be more appropriate to think of the samadhi stage as the stage of high strangeness. It's where the universe, and the individual who comprises part of that universe, ceases to work in the manner we are used to. This is what we are concerned with, rather than a literal journey up an escalator of 'superconscious states'.To chart a course through this unfamiliar territory will require all the strength, the energy, the subtlety, and the courage that we can muster. Do this and the student of consciousness will truly earn the title of spiritual warrior.
