A forum for seekers of spiritual awakening through self-transcendence, irrespective of spiritual tradition, religious or non-religious background or affiliation.
.... Our goal is to walk with true spiritual seekers, and to provide encouragement along the path as these modern spiritual pilgrims quest for the holy modern grail --- a new state of consciousness and being ....
Showing posts with label cosmic consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cosmic consciousness. Show all posts
There are few resistance pockets left,
patches of shade the sun has not struck,
but mostly this universe is transformed.
Every star has become the evening star.
Every soul, a king with no flag or parapet
to shield him from direct light.
Go within and discover this land
where everyone is a living soul
under a wide, sky-field with a king entering
from the other side, a jubilee, a singing
where wine and dessert and the other thing
are given away.
Last night I was out of myself.
If I were that way again, I could finish
this poem, but I'm not.
My poet-self is a protective pawn
put before the king, who is Shams,
whose light changes every being to an ocean,
and every body to a coral reef.
-- Jalalludin Rumi --
[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," pp. 310-311.]
"If it is indeed reasonable . . ,. to be both spiritually inclined and scientific," asks psychologist Charles T. Tart, PhD., "how could we go on to develop an evidence-based spirituality for the twenty-first century?" How can we get beyond simply "I believe it," or "I don't believe it," and start to find out what is true and false about the area we call spiritual and psychic, and how do you go on to develop that in a useful kind of way?"
"If you look at the results of real science, and not scientism," Tart observes, "there is a lot of evidence to show that humans beings sometimes show the kind of qualities that we would expect spiritual beings to have. And, therefore," he points out, "it is quite reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in your approach toward life."
In the attached videos, Tart, a fellow of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, lays the basis for a scientifically-reasonable twenty-first spirituality, examining research results in 'subtle energy' (known as chi or prajna in the East), 'psychic' healing, mindfulness, meditation and higher states of consciousness. The last video, Part 6 in the series, is particularly interesting as it compares Eastern spiritual 'psychologies' with traditional Western psychology (and what he calls "dismissive materialism").
"We can," Tart observes,"start separating out in a relatively objective way what is genuine and what is superstition or brain malfunctioning and use that to refine and clarify, and hopefully make more effective, various spiritual systems that are designed to make people have direct spiritual experiences. For instance, if meditation is associated with certain kinds of brain wave activity, and we can train that kind of brain wave activity more directly, maybe we can combine those two things and come up with a way to teaching meditation more effectively than it is done traditionally."
In the video below, Apollo 14 astronaut, Dr. Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to walk on the moon), recounts the profound spiritual awakening - an experience of what the ancients called 'samadhi' - which he had while viewing the Earth, Moon and Sun in synchronicity from the immensity of space.
Mitchell's transformational experience prompted him to look deeply into the confluence of the world's great wisdom traditions and science. As a result of this search, Mitchell went on to found the Institute of Noetic Science ("IONS"), a think-tank dedicated to "supporting individual and collective transformation through consciousness research, educational outreach, and engaging a global learning community in the realization of our human potential."
Writing in the most recent IONS newsletter, Mitchell comments on the breach between religious and scientific outlooks over the last four centuries, and makes the case that a rapprochement between the two disciplines - one focused outwardly, the other inwardly - could allow humanity to tap into a vast and under-utilized potential for higher consciousness, thereby yielding a new moral ethic which could help us to resolve the existential problems we face.
"Perhaps after 350 years of divisiveness between science and religion," Dr. Mitchell writes, "we are on the threshold of a new era of knowledge and cooperation. It should be obvious that objective observation and reason do not by themselves produce a satisfactory ethic for living – neither for the individual nor for social systems. Facts become divorced from values, and action from need."
"On the other hand," he notes, "intuition and inspiration do not by themselves produce the agreement society needs to bring about order, structure, and survival in the material world. In this case, observation frequently becomes subject to individual interpretation according to the covert biases of the individual."
There is, however, Mitchell points out, reason to believe that these two great strands of humanity's quest for knowledge can, and should, converge.
"Research over the last fifty years by little-known but forward-looking thinkers," Mitchell observes, "has shown there is a vast creative potential in the human mind that is as yet almost totally unrecognized by science. Nonrational cognitive processes have so far eluded scientific description. However, this potential has been previously known and described by a few ancient sages and enlightened religious teachers, using veiled prescientific language to express what they discovered through subjective, intuitive, experiential means."
"We are," he opines, "on the threshold of rediscovering and redefining those concepts and insights through the objective, rational, experimental efforts of science – if dogmatism and outmoded belief structures do not prevent it. The proper direction of sophisticated instrumentation and laboratory techniques can be the means whereby the physical and metaphysical realms are shown to be different aspects of the same reality."
"If this is demonstrated," Mitchell wryly observes, "it would be ironic, but appropriate, that so-called godless technology and materialistic science should lead to the rediscovery of the essential unity of science and religion."
It is ironic, and just too, that this vision of a convergence of science and religion comes from an individual who glimpsed the potential for a confluence of humanity's understandings of 'inner space' and 'outer space' in space itself.
Western science is just now coming face-to-face with the question of just 'what' consciousness is, although much of its work is still concentrated on the quest to find the neural correlates of consciousness - a sign that the scientific search is still for consciousness arising as a phenomenon of the brain, rather than as an independent phenomena. This, of course, indicates the Western bias for materialism.
It is now over 100 years, however, since William James "threw down the gauntlet" (as Alan Wallace notes in a convincing Google TechTalk), challenging Western science to investigate just what "consciousness" is, and why there appear to be so many different forms - particularly higher forms - of it. "
In his masterwork, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James writes that: "(P)ersonal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness." And, describing the qualities of such higher states of consciousness, beyond our ordinary egoic, self-consciousness, he observes that "(t)hey are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time."
Moreover, he notes, "(m)ystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. . . . They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and feeling of an enlargement of perceptions which seems imminent but which never completes itself."
[Wm. James, "Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 379-384.]
Two of the examples he cites are from the Canadian psychiatrist, Richard M. Bucke (author of the renowned book, "Cosmic Consciousness"), and the great Indian teacher and spiritual ambassador to the West, Swami Vivikenanda.
Writing of his own experience of a higher, transcendental consciousness, Bucke observed:
"Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run guaranteed. The vision lasted but a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."
The Indian yogi, Swami Vivikenanda, burst onto the Western stage with his appearance at the Parliament of the World's Religions, held at Chicago's World Fair in 1893 and exposed Westerners, most for the first time, to the millennia-old yoga (or religious) teachings of the East. Vivikenanda's views on transcendental consciousness were extracted by James, from Vivkenanda's famous work, "Raja Yoga," in which he observed:
"(T)he mind itself has a higher state of consciousness, beyond reason, and . . . when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes. . . . All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samadhi. . . . Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the sense of egoism. . . . There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves - for Samadhi lies potential in us all - for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite and its contrasts of good and evil altogether and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."
[Ibid., p. 400.]
When a man emerges from the experience of Samadhi," James notes, "the Vedantists assure us that he remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illiumined." The same conclusion is drawn of course by Bucke, and is a central tenet of his book, "Cosmic Consciousness."
All this goes to show, that the experience of individuals in the West and East (as amply demonstrated by both William James and Bucke) attests to higher states of transcendental consciousness beyond the mere egoic consciousness that the vast majority of us function and suffer (to greater or lesser degrees) in. Yet, it appears that Western-based science continues unabated in its attempt to find and map the neural correlates of these states of heightened consciousness, even while they have so far been unable to find the neural basis, or even come to a generally accepted working definition, of consciousness itself.
A video critique of William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" by the distinguished American philosopher, Richard Rorty, is included, below.
Enlightenment is a "new state of consciousness and being" which is deeper and more profound than our ordinary self-consciousness or "ego". Experience of this deeper, impersonal state of consciousness is available to anyone - particularly, anyone who has the clarity of intention and impeccable and unwavering commitment to individual and collective liberation from the egoic enslavement of our conditioned, learned processes of rational and analytic reasoning.
Enlightenment is the state of the adept - beyond our reacting to sensory stimuli through (i) mere reception of the stimuli, like when a frog reacts if he were poked with a needle, (ii) the deeper perception of what a stimulus represents, like the dog that gets nervous at the vet when it sees the needle, or (iii) through conception, or forming ideas about possible stimuli - physical, purely mental or a combination of such - as when a child reacts when first told he or she is "going to get a needle", irrespective if they have been inoculated before.
These three "ordinary" states of consciousness, as well as the state of the adept, or cosmically conscious person who has benefited from an experience of enlightenment experience are clearly discussed in Richard M. Bucke's classic work, Cosmic Consciousness, which was written by Bucke (a friend and student of the poet, Walt Whitman) in 1901 and went on to become - or so I hear - a "Hippie Bible" in the '60s. It is still in print.
More recently the three ordinary levels of consciousness preceding enlightened consciousness were set out by Neale Donald Walsh (he of "The Complete Conversations with God" fame) in his book, What God Wants: A Compelling Answer to Humanity's Biggest Question. Walsh describes these three levels of ordinary consciousness - reception, perception and conception - as reptilian, mamallian and human. He describes the differences in terms of (a) getting to close to a cobra's personal space, in which case it will react and strike, (b) a he-lion perceiving a rival as being too close to his personal space, and his pride of lionesses and reacting to the smell of another lion's urine on a tree used for marking his territory with his scent, and (c) the physiological reaction of jealousy we humans experience when we think (or conceive the idea) that someone is hitting on our spouse at a cocktail party.
According to the great Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, one may achieve this state of liberation and self-transcendence spontaneously (a) through an act of Grace - documented, if rarely - or, (b) through a profoundly deep, honest and personal contact with friends (particularly if those friends have become aware that freedom and liberation from the false but 'seemingly real', sense of "ego" or separate individual identity is possible in this lifetime), or (c) more likely, through consciously walking on a path "which leads to a higher education of the mind, beyond mere rationalism".
Enlightenment, self-transcendence, mystic union - the state of consciousness and being described by every great world religion or wisdom tradition - is, thus, a heightened state of depth consciousness beyond what a person who has not progressed on the path to a higher understanding of his or her mind and state of being is normally capable of. It is the experience of a profound spiritual awakening, and the continued, quiet abiding in that state.
There are few resistance pockets left,
, which was written by Bucke (a friend and student of the poet, Walt Whitman) in 1901 and went on to become - or so I hear - a "Hippie Bible" in the '60s. It is still in print.
" fame) in his book, 
. Walsh describes these three levels of ordinary consciousness - reception, perception and conception - as reptilian, mamallian and human. He describes the differences in terms of (a) getting to close to a cobra's personal space, in which case it will react and strike, (b) a he-lion perceiving a rival as being too close to his personal space, and his pride of lionesses and reacting to the smell of another lion's urine on a tree used for marking his territory with his scent, and (c) the physiological reaction of jealousy we humans experience when we think (or conceive the idea) that someone is hitting on our spouse at a cocktail party.