Nightfall

One of my life-long interests has been the literary field of science fiction. (Films too, although it is unusual for a quality SF movie to be made -- a rare exception was the year 2009, when not one, but two thoughtful and well made SF movies appeared, those being District 9, and Moon). Growing up as I did in the 1960s-70s, part of the 'Golden Age' of SF, I was exposed to the usual suspects: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, van Vogt, Ellison, Sturgeon, Knight, Pohl, etc. Back then SF seemed to represent to me some of the best of the marriage between science and sheer possibility. It was all brimming with hope, and endless enthusiasm for the limitlessness of human creativity (both imaginary, and scientific). I enjoyed the genre of fantasy too (mostly Tolkien), but SF in particular represented that brazen courage that envisioned a future of dynamic change and endless strange experiences brought about by the interface between reason and imagination. 

Some of what I read back then still stands out in memory, but in particular, Isaac Asimov's short story Nightfall. As I recall he wrote this when very young, around 20 years old. John Campbell published it in his iconic magazine Astounding back in the early 1940s. The premise of the story was relatively straightforward, but very clever. It centered on an alien solar system that had several suns (as opposed to our own system, which has only one star). In that solar system was a planet, populated with intelligent humanoid life (foreshadowing the Star Trek ethos, which is based on the cheerfully anthropocentric idea that intelligent life in the galaxy, if there is such, would be very much like us). Asimov took this to absurd lengths, calling the stars by such names as 'Alpha', 'Beta', 'Gamma', and giving rather ridiculous names to the main characters (but, how many 20-year-olds can actually write, let alone realistically). 

The idea of the short story is that this alien planet, with its several suns, is bathed in perpetual sunlight, and never knows the night -- except for once every several thousand years, when a very rare eclipse and solar configuration occurs that results in an actual night. There are myths and legends about this nightfall, which include the (preposterous to the denizens) idea that with nightfall appear all these stars in the sky. They have of course never seen stars, which only show at night (something they have not known in their lifetime), and so the existence of these 'stars' is considered by them to be pure myth. 

The basic premise of the story is that the people of this planet will not be able to handle the psychological effects of nightfall, and civilization will collapse in an orgy of panic and chaos. (The idea is accentuated by the results found by an archaeologist who shows that there have been periodic intervals in the history of the planet, corresponding to the rare nightfall occurrences, when civilization has collapsed into disorder and barbarity). When the eclipse occurs, and the nightfall descends, many of the inhabitants of the planet do in fact go insane. 

The psycho-spiritual symbolism of a story like this is rich indeed. According to Buddhist legend, when the Buddha became enlightened under his famous tree, it occurred with the rising of the 'morning star' (Venus, the brightest 'star' -- though of course it is a planet -- in the sky). I always took this to mean that the Light of our true nature outshines the lesser light of our conventional self (perspective). Venus appears brightest shortly after sunrise or sunset (which is why it is also called the 'evening star'). It is the 'light in the sky' most closely associated with the primary light (the Sun). As such, it is a very good symbol for our intention to wake up.

The stars at night drove many of the inhabitants of Asimov's world mad because they represented the full force of the unknown. There is little in life that terrifies us more than the unknown. People will commonly choose the known hell over the unknown (which is why negative patterns are so utterly repetitive, as in the Buddhist Wheel of Samsara). And yet, the essence of waking up to higher possibility and the vast potential of our deeper nature lies in embracing the unknown.

Sooner or later we all need to face the searing light of the 'stars at night', all the more so if we have never allowed for the possibility that they, just like our higher potential, even exist. In doing so, we may indeed go insane, but given that we live in an insane civilization, that could be a good thing.

The unknown is not to be feared, but embraced, and is unavoidable anyway if we wish to cultivate the courage and tenacity that are so essential for maximizing our potential.  

Lost and Found

Over the years, I've watched very little TV. Occasionally I'll rent the DVD collection of some series, and watch that -- such as the original Kung Fu show (the one that played from 1972-75, with David Carradine, along with Keye Luke as the blind guy with the walking stick who famously called him 'Grasshopper'). When I do watch a DVD TV series, it's usually something historical (such as The Tudors, or Rome). Recently however someone recommended the series Lost to me (which ran from 2004-10). I'd of course heard the buzz about this series over the years, but never saw one episode. I was in an electronics store the other day and decided to pick up the first year episodes. Over the past few days I've watched several of them.

It's a well produced show, and I can understand its popularity. For any not knowing the central premise, it's about a group of people who have survived a plane crash, and are marooned on a south Pacific island. It's all somewhat reminiscent of William Golding's classic novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of boys stranded on an island (also via plane crash), who subsequently break into factions.

The thing that strikes me most about Lost, however, is how the clever storylines involving almost endless relationship-combinations (after all, they do have some 48 characters -- at least in the first season -- to work with), serve to highlight some matters about the very nature of relationship, and in particular, ego-identity. The main feature of conventional ego-identity is the tendency to believe that our personality is somehow absolutely real, and more, somehow immortal. This is why death is always such a strange matter to gaze directly into. Death seem to imply the end of the personality, the end of the story, and at some basic level, nobody really believes that can happen. (Fiction writing, or film, is very effective in that regard because it has the ability to spin 'new worlds' out of thin air -- after-lives, multiple dimensions, alternate timelines, etc. -- all designed to make sure that the personality endures forever).

A show like Lost is great for examining the whole nature of personality, because here are all these people stranded on this deserted island (at least, it seems to be deserted -- the hint is constantly given, of course, that it is not deserted, and that of course plays perfectly into our hopes that we are not truly alone in life), with no distractions (except for their memories -- although unlike Kwai Chang Caine in Kung Fu, who lived half his life via flashbacks, Lost does it via parallel storylines). In having no distractions, they basically have nothing but their relationships with each other. And it is here where it's possible to see into the illusory nature of personality, and why most wisdom-traditions agree that personality does not survive the death of the body. (Even when they proclaim that something survives the death of the body, most traditions agree that this 'something' is not the conventional personalty).

So what the hell is the personality? For one thing, it is clearly an interactive phenomenon, interdependent, and entirely dependent on the actions of other personalities. Personality is more rightly understood as a process, not a 'thing'. For example: put a bossy person in a room with another person who is even more bossy. Soon the first bossy person will no longer be bossy. So, what happened to their bossiness? Etc.

If personality is largely interactive and dependent on other personalities to define itself, then clearly it can have no substantial, intrinsic nature. It is something of a mirage, a play of light and shadows. All wisdom traditions agree that the illusory facade of the personality must be seen through if there is to be any hope to penetrate deeper, to more essential and timeless truths.

The expression 'find yourself' is of course a cliche, and like all cliches, it carries no real power, because it lacks the ability to hold our attention. But that's not because it lacks truth. In fact, it is a great truth that to 'find ourselves' is a crucial step. But it is not possible without first 'losing ourselves'. There is a well known expression from Zen, that Dogen once wrote:

To study the Buddha way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things [i.e., everything].
To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to free one’s body and mind, and those of others.

To 'study the self' is to gaze unflinchingly into the personality, and see clearly its nature -- and how, like these guys on the island in Lost -- it is so utterly dependent on the personality-manifestations of others.

To 'forget the self' is to see through the ever-changing nature of personality, and to become less attached to its manifestations (i.e., its behavior -- and especially, the behavior of others).

In 'forgetting the self' (personality), we can become 'enlightened by the ten thousand things' because now we are open to the deeper truths of Reality that surround us at all times. To get there, however, it is essential that we let go of attachment to our personality.

In short, we need to 'get lost' in order to 'be found'. We need to see deeply and honestly into the dependent nature of personality, in order to become free of the illusion that we are our personality.

We are not our personality. That is merely the 'psychological clothing' we dress up in. We are something much deeper. 

Spiritual bullshit, and why Neo took the wrong pill

The issue of 'spiritual bullshit' is one that any sincere truth-seeker sooner or later encounters. As a good lead-in to this topic, it's helpful to look at the Zen concept of makyo.

Makyo in Japanese literally means 'the devil in phenomena'. Technically, it has to do with various states of mind that arise in meditation, especially fancy visions that, in some respects, herald deeper meditation practice. These visions, or other states of mind, are ultimately to be ignored however, because they are illusions, even if impressive ones.  

On a more subtle level, what makyo refers to is the seductive power that the mind has to pull us away from our pursuit of the ultimate truth (assuming, for a moment, that we have made ultimate truth a priority). When we sit in meditation, or when we attempt to employ deep inquiry into our essential nature, we inevitably face the 'monsters' of distraction. We get pulled away from our original quest. We get diverted, and in so doing, we fall into elaborate dream-worlds. In our very attempt to become more clear, we simply develop a new type of confusion -- 'spiritual' confusion.

The so-called spiritual path is full of 'traps' that will seduce the average seeker and send them down rabbit holes chasing illusory worlds. In the iconic movie The Matrix, when Morpheus offered Neo the 'red or the blue pill' -- with the red pill representing so-called 'awakening' and the blue pill a return to his conventional life -- he, of course, chose the red pill, and subsequently entered into all sorts of wild experiences.

From one perspective, he should have stuck with the blue pill, and just added the ingredient of awareness. The main idea of living an awake life is to engage 'ordinary reality' -- the 'blue pill' -- with awareness. The red pill led Neo further into fantasy, into makyo, and into the most problematic of all 'reality-tunnels' for the seeker of truth: to dream that we are awake. (Which then, of course, requires a further dream to justify the last one -- or in the case of The Matrix, a sequel).

Gurdjieff, that radical and crude Greek/Armenian mystic/shit-disturber, once famously disparaged all kundalini experiences as mere 'imagination', or altered-states of consciousness. He said that we have the remarkable ability to dream that we are awake. Much as we can have a 'lucid dream' at night, a dream where we somehow know that we are dreaming, so too can we generate a mental state, within our spiritual practice, where we are convinced that we are now awake -- when in fact, we've simply entered into a more psycho-spiritually sophisticated dreamworld.

Much of modern-day spirituality is in fact a type of extended makyo. We live during a time of chronic attention-deficit and mass delusion on many levels. The population spike of the past century, and the glut of available information via endless advances in communication technology (my once cool cell phone, recently replaced by a cooler Blackberry, is totally passe), means that the average person is now bombarded by all sorts of 'wavelengths' that contribute toward destroying their capacity for attention. In the spiritual, esoteric, 'inner work' domain, there are no more 'secrets'. Everything is available. But does it make any difference?

For the truth-seeker, yes, because the temptations are magnified. As St. Augustine once whined, 'I can resist anything but temptation'. We live in the Golden Age of temptation. Accordingly, it becomes all the more important to become more and more discerning, in particular, about the distinction between makyo and Reality.

And yet, how do we know behind which door Reality is hiding, if we don't know what Reality is? That is the eternal mind-fuck, but it is also the ultimate Zen koan. And our guide is, in this case, nothing else but a burning desire for the highest truth. Now, in my last blog, I stated that passion is better than desire, and ultimately that is true. But questing for truth does in fact begin as a desire. Nurtured, however, this desire becomes passion. And our passion for Truth, if we stick with it, soon becomes a vehicle by which we examine ourselves from two essential angles: the spiritual, and the psychological.

The former, the spiritual, is all about the ultimate truths of existence. It is straightforward enough once looked deeply into: the individual ego-identity is an illusion, there is no real 'free will' (how could there be, if the separate ego-self is an illusion?), separation/isolation is a mirage generated by the ego, there is only One Reality, and so forth. The more tricky aspect is the psychological domain, because it is here where the ego makes its 'last stand', so to speak -- and where it puts up a bloody good fight.

There's a stage in the ancient Chinese Zen master Kakuan's 'Ten Bulls of Zen' where he mentions the sudden realization that all thoughts are originating from the 'Source', because only the Source is real. Until we understand this point, we are deeply susceptible to the trickery of the ego, foremost of which is the viewpoint that I am here, knowing the truth, and that (or you) is over there, separate from the truth. From that place, it is possible to have all sorts of spectacular spiritual experiences, something like going to a fireworks show: I am here, and these cool fireworks are over there. I am here, and God ( or Truth, or Christ, or Buddha, or the Infinite, take your pick) is over there. 

To grow on the path of awakening, is to become more and more honest about our spiritual bullshit -- the ways in which we glorify our spiritual experiences, or our 'understanding', all the while, remaining a distinct 'someone' from these experiences and understandings. The ego-self is in a perpetual state of recoil, and is endlessly creative in its ways of isolating itself. It is also highly skilled at co-opting anything, in particular spiritual principles. I am a person with spiritual insight and understanding. The ego frames 'understanding' as an object to be owned, as yet another toy to buttress or exalt itself with.

In short, if we're truly interested in awakening, we need to go beyond distractions and their power over us, and we need to remember, on a daily basis, what really matters. We need to confront ourselves on our almost endless capacity for creating spiritual distractions by exalting experiences -- everything from the subtle visionary makyo of meditation to the wild visions of an ayahuasca journey -- and enjoying the isolation of the ego-self that these experiences allow for, and ultimately reinforce.  

Passion

I spent five consecutive months in 2009 writing about 4 to 6 hours per day, with the end result being a manuscript titled The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley. I had conceived of the idea for this book several years ago -- I've been involved with the teachings and communities of all three intermittently for three decades -- but bogged down as I was with work, travel (I run personal growth trainings in several cities), and other writing projects (I had no less than four manuscripts in development), my Magi book was continually getting put on the back burner. I then stepped aside for a moment, and pondered why my writing of these manuscripts was developing so slowly. The answer was immediately clear. I was trying to write them in accordance with a pre-conceived plan about which one should go first, second, and so forth. I was not listening to my 'deep self', and in particular, how it communicates via passion. 

To cut to the chase: more often than not, it is passion that is our most trustworthy guiding light in life. When we don't follow our passion, our work stagnates, our creative offerings (as they may be) dry up, and we always have a sense of being out of step with our greater possibilities. Passion is an energy that is distinct from its more problematic cousin, 'desire'. Desire both needs (and usually uses) others, but passion works fine on its own, un-welded to the object it may be focused on.

Noting which of the manuscripts I was working on I had the most passion for, I proceeded on that basis, and soon found myself free of any annoying 'writer's blocks'. The chapters churned out almost effortlessly, and at the end, I had not only a manuscript of 230,000 words (over 700 pages), I also had a contract with a reputable publisher (O-Books, based in England). 

I took a break from writing for a few months after finishing the Magi MS, and plunged back in in the summer of 2010 with my next project, Rude Awakening: Perils, Pitfalls, and Hard Truths of the Spiritual Path. The book is also contracted to O-Books and will be out likely around mid-2011. It's a no-holds barred look at a lot of what passes for transformational work in current times, a critique of such, and a lengthy section on what I see as seven graduated stages of awakening. The book also contains a section profiling seven radically awakened people, those being Socrates, Jesus, Milarepa, Hakuin, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Yaeko Iwasaki. (Aficionados of 'enlightenment lore' may not immediately recognize the latter name: she was a Japanese girl of 25 who passed through several deep awakenings in her zazen practice, as guided by the fierce Zen master Sogaku Harada, shortly before dying of chronic illness; her story is told in Roshi Philip Kapleau's classic work The Three Pillars of Zen (Anchor Books, first published in 1965). 

Rude Awakening is concerned with cutting through the layers of fog that accrue around the average truth-seeker in life, and the importance of remaining true to the highest calling of the seeker. In some ways it is a 'next chapter' to The Three Dangerous Magi, as these three 'rascal sages', whatever else might be said about them and their double-edged lives, were deeply passionate souls with vast appetites for both the 'spiritual path', and life in its most obvious and natural sense. What truths they came to were via both their relentless investigations into such, and their fearless embrace of the world around them. That all three stumbled, at times badly, is a given. And yet stumbling should, indeed cannot, stop us from proceeding deeper into our calling. I don't think we get anywhere in life if we don't tune in to, open to, and follow, our passion -- our 'bliss' as Joseph Campbell called it. And that certainly applies to the spiritual path as well.

Spirituality is not meant to be monochromatic, lacking in juice, in creative vitality. It is meant to be a marriage of wisdom and life, and a direct expression of what it is we realize via the sincerest efforts of our probing mind and spirit. Ultimately, our passion is to be oriented toward the highest, and deepest, truths of existence and being.