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Out into Wild
Aliveness·
How do I pack for the Journey?
Abstract
I'm an old fool who has returned to school to make sense of my thoughts and, perhaps, get a PhD in the process. A friend told me about this conference and suggested I submit a proposal. At first I thought, "Nah, I don't know enough about systems theory." But then one of my committee members told me to, "Go for it. Talk about what you don't know, that way you'll learn something." That opens up a vast landscape. But there are four things I don't know that I'd particularly like to know - if they are knowable: 1. What is the relationship between direct experience and conceptual knowledge and between 'ordinary' consciousness and 'mystic' consciousness? 2. What does an altered style of consciousness mean for science? 3. How can the boundary between different styles of consciousness become more porous? 4. How can I learn to allow the shift in myself and in others?
During extended wilderness retreats I have experienced shifts of consciousness. No longer a disembodied observer existing outside a lifeless world, seeking meaning in something beyond my immediate experience, I become fully Alive and embedded in the Living universe, the meaning of which is present in living itself. In this state everything is filled with wonder. From this altered perspective I can 'see' the structure of the mind I normally inhabit. That mind seems to apprehend a fragmentary conceptual description of the world rather than directly experiencing the flow of life. While the notion of 'map and territory' may be simplistic, it does reflect my lived experience of this perceptual shift.
The science I have learned belongs, I think, to the world of description and explanation, rather than to the living world. When lost in the wonder of the moment, conceptual knowledge feels irrelevant to me. While I wonder about everything I see (especially why we're here at all), structured questions concerning how the world works find no toehold. When I focus on explanation, I lose the experience of flow. Yet, theorizing is part of being human, and it should be possible to bridge the gap between living and theorizing. How to do this is one of the things I don't know. Must all conceptualization dam the flow?
After exploring how to facilitate the shift of consciousness during 25 years, I'm still back where I began; surrender. The only way I know to become caught in the flow of Life is through personal surrender. Yet daily living often requires goals, plans, intentional activity. How can these apparently contradictory orientations be integrated?
I begin with my own experience. I believe I must, finally, end there as well. My intention in writing this paper is to invite dialogue in the belief that we will find commonality and / or enjoy our interactions in the conversational space we create together. As Wilber, (1995) among others, points out, we cannot know what another person is talking about unless we have had similar experience ourselves. This is not unique to spiritual experiences, but is common to all our comings and goings. If I say to you, "I saw a dog yesterday," and you have no experience of dogs, my statement will be meaningless to you. Only if my words open a window for you into your own experience do we have the opportunity to share meaning. Happily, I believe we have all experienced shifts of consciousness, although we might not have paid much attention at the time nor had the language to describe them.
Here, I ask you to pause for a moment and reflect. Reach in and recall those times - fleeting or otherwise - when suddenly the world changed for you and you felt vibrantly Alive and caught in the flow of the living world. Perhaps it has happened while in the wilderness, or with a lover, or while dancing; perhaps while sitting in your office; perhaps after a serious thump of Tequila framed with salt and lime. However it has happened, remember the immediacy of the experience and how joyfully wild and unpredictable everything seemed. Remember how complete it was in and of itself; how unnecessary and impossible to make rational sense of the moment. Now we have common ground for our conversation together.
There is another reason I begin with my own experience. In spiritual practice (and I believe in all aspects of our lives including science), theory and conceptual analysis count for little without personal transformation. Transformation of consciousness is a radical shift. One way of being and doing becomes another. The movement may be large or small, but the shift, when it comes, seems sudden and complete. The domain of transformation is myself and I experience it behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively. Here I want to explore the emotional and cognitive aspects.
Yesterday after reading a draft of this paper my advisor told me he felt personally attacked by what I am saying. The domain for my investigation of the relationship (conflict?) between direct, lived experience and conceptual thinking about that experience is within me. I sometimes forget this and project the conflict out onto the public domain of science. If you feel under attack in reading this, I apologize. That is not my intention.
To find a toehold I will stretch to the aphorism, "ignorance is bliss"... in a very positive sense. Or rather, to be more specific, "it is joyful to embrace the Unknowable." [I use 'joy' here to encompass love, wonder, peace, and beauty. Know and Unknowable have a specific and narrow connotation. They refer only to conceptual description and explanation and not to intuitive or animal knowing.] This puts us in a very interesting situation. If the mandate of science is to increase conceptual knowledge, does scientific knowing decrease our capacity to experience joy? Further, if one of the fruits of spiritual development is the blossoming of joy, are the practices of science and spirituality irreconcilable? [I use science here in the broad sense of conceptualizing, organizing, and explaining our experience.]
Experience. As part of my spiritual practice I sometimes retreat into wilderness solitude for extended periods. During these retreats I often experience deep shifts of consciousness; not from one state of consciousness to another, but rather from a static style of perceiving the world, informed and conditioned by conceptual knowledge, to a fluid style of experiencing that swirls and flows. In that flow I feel the freedom of a continuously changing perspective; a spectrum of experiential styles that extends from the concrete to the ephemeral. Here, though, I would like to idealize the differences in order to compare two distinct ways of being. So I already run into the problem that my conceptualization of the experience does not actually describe what happens in the moment. Concrete or ephemeral, all experience is, to some degree, ineffable. Feeling fully, vibrantly Alive in a Living world is such an experience. I can't describe it. I can only try to evoke the experience by reminding you to reach inside for times when you have felt it. Like being in love. Not romantic love, but being in the love that fills the universe.
When I first experienced this shift, I had no tools to build a context within which to make sense of it. Slowly these tools are coming to hand and I am working to shape a receptacle with them. This development of knowledge is both useful and a potential trap. I want to use the process of writing this paper as an opportunity to explore the relationship between immediate experience and conceptual knowledge. Things tend to become somewhat circular up ahead. As a friend told me after reading a draft, "It made me dizzy and gave me a headache." Thinking about being alive does that sometimes.
I'll briefly describe some aspects of the shift in consciousness:
1. I feel a sudden release from my ordinary view of the external world and of myself. I can 'see' the conceptual system - a sort of network of cognitive filters that normally structures my perceived reality - within which I usually experience the world and myself. Naively, I have tended to accept this normal experience as 'absolute reality'. After the shift, I accept the new experience as (even) 'absoluter reality'.
2. I am surprised and excited by a profound sense of being vibrantly Alive in the moment and feeling identified with and a manifestation of the whole Living biosphere. I see individual organisms (including myself) as temporarily stable vortices in an undivided flow rather than as distinct objects. The identity of my individual self, this bio-social person, seems of secondary importance.
3. I feel fulfilled by simply living. I realize I have been mistaken to search for fulfillment through intellectual activity. Stillness and receptivity open a space within which I intuit that life is its own meaning. Yet I have a profound sense of not knowing anything at all. I know how to do things, but I don't Know Anything. Logical thought and language are inadequate to describe the experience.
4. The experience is joyful in and of itself, but also troubling because it seems to radically contradict my culture's generally accepted notions of reality.
Western culture in general and academia in particular value knowledge, perhaps, above all else. So the sense of Not Knowing Anything is very disconcerting. (While I imagine the odd grad student other than myself may occasionally feel woozy in the face of his or her ignorance, that is qualitatively different. This is the profound sense that all of existence is spontaneous and free and so is intrinsically Unknowable through rational analysis and cause / effect explanation; that the domain of conceptual knowledge does not intersect with the domain of the living world.)
At first I attributed this sense of not knowing anything to my personal lack of theoretical knowledge about how the world works. So I returned to university and completed undergraduate studies in biology and psychology. There, as expected, I learned a lot about how the world works. But when, after graduating, I again retreated into wilderness solitude I found I had, without noticing it, largely lost the experience of feeling Alive. I could 'look back' and see myself existing within a conceptual structure - biological science - which explained (partially) how life works. But within that explanatory construct there was no life. It wasn't dead, but rather, not alive. As time passed, embedded in nature, I awoke to and could feel my own Aliveness once again. But damned if I didn't also find myself in the domain where knowledge seemed to not pertain.
Confused and troubled by this perceived discontinuity, I turned to spiritual teachings and looked for guidance there. The Judeo-Christian tradition clearly points out the limitations of knowledge:
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Words of the Preacher; Ecclesiastes 1:18)
Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Words of Jesus; Matthew 18:3)
To know all things, learn to know nothing. To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant. (St. John of the Cross; cited in Varieties of Religious Experience.)
These teachings are clear and to the point but they didn't seem relevant to my own questions concerning the relationship between knowledge about the world and the direct, lived experience of being Alive in the present. Krishnamurti, (1968) the Indian mystic, is uncompromising in his assertion that to abide in knowledge cuts us off from reality:
Knowledge is an impediment to experiencing. Knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom. ...There must be freedom from knowledge for the coming of wisdom, but the man who has entered the refuge of knowledge does not venture out for he is gratified with thinking.
The Theravadin tradition of Buddhism also teaches that the world cannot be pinned down and explained. Ajahn Chah (1992) gave this pragmatic instruction to his forest monks in Thailand:
All the teachings in this world can be contained in this one teaching: aniccam, uncertainty. No matter how sure the mind wants to be, just tell it 'Not sure'! Think about it. I've searched for over forty years as a monk and this is all I could find. This is how to approach the Buddha's teaching... aniccam: it's all uncertain.
This uncertainty is what I mean by Unknowable; inaccessible to conceptual thought. [Again, in asserting that the world cannot be grasped and understood through conceptual knowledge and so is Unknowable, I am not claiming it is unavailable to direct, experiential contact. Nor am I claiming conceptual knowledge is not useful. I am strongly asserting that our conceptual descriptions are not alive and that to the extent we are immersed in the conceptual world we cannot experience the Living world; nor can we feel truly Alive ourselves.] This was good news. It has still left me with the Unknowable, but apparently I am not alone in sensing that conceptual knowledge cannot grasp the Suchness of direct experience.
These spiritual teachings, especially the Eastern perspective, provide a context within which I can place my own experience. But still, that experience seems at odds with the belief that the only scientifically valid epistemological approach to the world is through rationality and conceptualization and must result in an increase in structured knowledge.
I recently read the work of biologist-philosopher, Rolf Sattler (1986). He suggested that reality is Unnamable and the conceptual descriptions of our thinking mind are abstractions from the Unnamable. He pointed me to the psychologist, Abraham Maslow, and chemist-philosopher, Michael Polanyi.
Maslow (1966) claimed that even in the domain of science there are two ways of knowing and two distinct kinds of meaning- both of which are valid and necessary in the practice of science. He differentiated between experiencing and rubricizing.
...It was as if I were not content to admire and to enjoy but also had to do something intellectual about it. And often that 'something intellectual' substituted for or displaced altogether the drinking in and contemplative enjoyment of 'the way things are.' This process of classifying in lieu of real perceiving and experiencing I call 'rubricizing', which means the pathologizing of the 'normal' or 'healthy' effort to organize and unify a truly experienced world. The pertinent (and sententious) moral for both the lay knower and the scientist knower is that not fully experiencing is a form of blindness that no would-be scientist can afford. Not only does this maneuver deprive him of many of the joys of science, but it threatens to make him a poor scientist.
He said that:
I did not have to oppose 'experiencing' to 'organizing-integrating', nor the esthetic to the scientific way. 'Scientific knowledge' actually enriched my experiencing rather than impoverishing it, if only I didn't use it as a substitute for experiencing.
Finally he argued that rubricizing is a poor substitute for real experience.
Rubricizing, i.e. shuffling, classifying, and filing the non experienced, is a thin and bloodless activity, rarely happy or enjoyable except at a low level in the hierarchy of pleasures. At best it is a kind of 'relief' rather than a kind of positive enjoyment. To fall into this mode of 'knowing' is, then, not only a way of being blind but also a way of being unhappy.
Michael Polanyi (1958) also discussed the distinction between direct experience and conceptualization.
As observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself. The conceptual framework by which we observe and manipulate things being present as a screen between ourselves and these things, their sights and sounds, and the smell and touch of them transpire but tenuously through the screen, which keeps us aloof from them. Contemplation dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them. Contemplation has no ulterior intention or ulterior meaning; in it we cease to deal with things and become absorbed in the inherent quality of our experience, for its own sake.
Maslow differentiated between Suchness meaning and abstractness meaning and saw them as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Abstract meaning is found in relating one experience to another; in creating a whole from the parts. The whole and its parts then have a meaning the individual parts did not have. This implies that the world has no inherent meaningfulness and meaning must be created and imposed by ourselves. Suchness meaning is immediate. The ultimate meaning of any experience is simply itself. When fully embraced, each moment of life is meaningful in and of itself; simply because it is.
What is the meaning of a leaf, a fugue, a sunset, a flower, a person? They 'mean' themselves, explain themselves, and prove themselves.
In this sense immediate experience is complete in and of itself. There is no need to look beyond to categorize and analyze. It is enough to simply be in the moment.
It seems trivial to say that becoming caught in our own conceptualizations and so losing our direct experience of the world is not a good thing. After all, isn't it self-evident? Just here is the rub. Experientially, it is not self-evident at all. We can become blinded by our compulsive rubricizing and not realize we are doing it. My own experience shows me that I am often unaware I have become caught in this essentially lifeless world of my own invention. It is a surprising and joyful experience to slip free from conceptual bondage and feel part of the Living world again.
The difficulty arises when I confound the conceptual abstractions I have created for the Living world. These constructs form a dynamic model representing how the world works - a model that fills the mind. It may be easier to think of it as a process of filtration or as having colored lenses in front of my eyes; with pink glasses, everything looks pink. A clearer metaphor might be to imagine looking through a sheet of clear acetate. I draw outlines of the shapes I see and call them 'spruce trees' and 'granite boulders' and 'caribou'. If I look through the acetate at other spruce tree, granite boulder and caribou type shapes, I see that there is no exact fit. So I draw a compromise outline that more or less fits everything I decide to call a 'spruce tree', 'granite boulder', or 'caribou'. Now I have a representation of regularity - a container to hold the unruly, unique actuality - that I can compare and contrast with other representations. The more tightly I focus on these outlines the more likely I am to believe they are 'real' and to lose sight of the original scene that lies beyond. The initially transparent acetate, made both opaque and invisible by a coating of invented concepts, can become an impenetrable wall that fills and encloses the mind. In that case I might no longer recognize the ideation as my own invention, but rather accept them as an inherent quality of the world. These abstracted concepts are useful. They are the building blocks of conceptual knowledge. But they are not alive.
Direct experience is different from and cannot be encompassed in conceptual thinking about the world. But, as Maslow (1966) said, this does not mean that these two modes are conceptually incompatible. Neither are they incompatible experientially. Insight meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, (1983) says:
The intellect is the thought-conceptual level of the mind. It can be trained, developed, and used; or it can be a hindrance. It depends how clearly we understand the thought process. If there's clear insight into its nature, it's not a hindrance at all. If we mistake the thoughts about things for the things themselves, it becomes an obstacle in that it confused concept with reality. But, in itself, the intellect is just another part of the entire mind-body process.
Before discussing three practices that create conditions conducive to moving from one domain to the other, I want to look at some things that can block the process. I have been exploring the shift between styles of consciousness for 25 years and it is still mysterious to me. I don't know what triggers it, but I have some sense of what can get in the way. Here is a story about how difficult it can be to escape from our encapsulated thinking. I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian. I learned that the Bible is the literal Truth because it is the direct Word of God. When I began to question this dogma I was answered with certainty based on circular reasoning. "How, " I asked, "do we know the Bible is True? " "It is True because it is the Word of God, " I was sternly admonished. "Yes but how do we know the Bible is the Word of God?" I persisted. "Because it says so right here in the Bible," I was told, and that ended the discussion. I pointed out that the argument is circular, but ignored. This circularity may be inherent in all world views since by definition they are self-referential and self-enclosing.
Not long ago, when I began to study at the university, I was raised there as a biologist. During my senior year, while participating in a DNA fingerprinting seminar, I questioned the validity of scientific knowledge and ran into difficulties. Again I faced certainty based on circular reasoning. The discussion began amicably when I questioned a particular hypothesis relating to sexual selection. We agreed that this was only a working hypothesis and quite possibly erroneous. From there it seemed reasonable to question, as Gould and Lewontin (1979) have done, the adaptationist paradigm. Some of the other students resisted, but after a while most of us agreed that this, too, is just a working model; useful in generating hypotheses, but possibly wrong in the strong claim that all behavior has adaptive significance. When I pushed the issue further and suggested that perhaps the natural world is not evolving according to Darwin's notions I lost all credibility and was accused of being a Creationist; as though these are the only two possibilities. One other student and I continued our conversation beneath the unhappy glares of our companions. We wondered whether nature might obey no laws, but just spontaneously does whatever it is doing. Evolutionary theory is the story we biologists tell about what we think we see around us. Once we considered that, it was not so difficult to see that perhaps all of biology is not what nature is doing, but rather a story we tell ourselves to describe what we think we see. In this discussion, I don't think we gained any new knowledge, but rather changed our perspective on what we thought we knew.
The assertion that the current scientific story accurately reflects, or even underlies, living processes is grounded in the belief that our existence can be explained rationally; that the world makes conceptual sense. Without this belief science collapses. It is acceptable to claim - as a statement of faith - that we can understand the world through rational thought. But this claim often seems to be accepted as a given Truth. This seems circular to me. In the same way the Bible is accepted as True because it claims itself to be so, the rational mind is thought to be capable of discovering and understanding reality because it claims this capacity for itself.
It is difficult if not impossible for a fundamentalist Christian who lives completely embedded in the certainty that the Bible is literal Truth to see the circularity of the claim. It is also difficult if not impossible for a scientist completely embedded in rationalism to see that his or her insistence on the efficacy of rational thought to explain the world is circular. In both cases, the only grounds to accept as reliable the source of what is accepted as true is the claim by that same source that it is so. This is like asking a con artist if he or she is honest. In each case one must move outside the closed system to be able to see its circularity. A fundamentalist Christian can, with effort, open him or herself to other systems of thought. In the case of the rational mind, perhaps the only way out is to stop identifying so closely with thought and be willing to experience and explore the non-conceptual mind.
When I described this insight, the discussion fell apart. Even my fellow iconoclast who had accepted the possibility that biology is not what nature does but only is our story about it, drew the line at abandoning rationality as the ground of our capacity to know and understand the world. This was no small step, but a leap out into the Unknowable. "After all, once we lose faith in the rational mind, what have we left?" he asked. This is a serious question. We have the joyful experience of wild Aliveness... but it may not be good for anything. We also have the real possibility of direct insight which Krishnamurti (1968) claims is the ground of wisdom.
Karl Weick (unpublished paper) studied the deaths of several firemen who died in a forest fire. They had been clearly ordered to drop their equipment and run, but they refused to abandon their gear. The subsequent investigation showed that had they done so they would have escaped. Why did they refuse the order which would have saved their lives? Weick finally concluded that they had identified themselves so completely with their role as firemen, that they had come to perceive their tools as part of themselves. It no more occurred to them to abandon their equipment than it would have to leave behind an arm or a leg. And so they died. I think this tragedy can serve as a metaphor for how we often behave. We can become so identified with our social roles and the intellectual tools that have become part of our self identities that we can not conceive of giving them up even if they cost us our Aliveness.
When I realize that my thinking mind can become self-encapsulated, what can I do? Can I train myself to remain mindful of the thinking process and so not become lost in the content of my thoughts? Yes, I think so. But here I find myself between a rock and a hard place and there are three things in particular that hold me fast. Fear is one of them. Fear can be an important factor in my resisting the shift from conceptual certainty into the Unknowable. Because of my strong desire to control unruly nature through knowledge, the hegemony of the thinking mind can be very comfortable. In part it is my unwillingness to experience the fear of my own vulnerability in the face of life's uncertainty and the need for (at least the illusion of) safety that holds me captive.
Another piece of the puzzle is the idea I have of myself. Perceived through my conceptual filters, the world is a collection of distinct entities. One of these separate entities is me. While this apparently separate self may be an illusion, it damn sure seems real enough. When I begin to slip free from the conceptual domain, I feel myself going down the drain with the bath water. This loss of conceptual self can be terrifying until I realize I am still in the tub and it was only an idea that got washed away. It is like feeling the carpet pulled out from under my feet and thinking I will fall into the abyss until I realize that there is a floor beneath the carpet on which I have been standing all the time.
Once I see that the terror of losing myself is ill founded, what is to prevent the shift from conceptual thought to direct experience? The shift is a fairly simple notion to think about, but to experience it directly is not so easy, even when I am willing to embrace the Unknowable. The problem is that everything I (the conceptual self) do to encourage the shift reinforces that sense of self which strengthens the conceptual level of reality and prevents the experience. What can I do?
In conversation with David Bohm, Krishnamurti (1985) discussed how deeply we are attached to our own thoughts and claimed that perhaps the only efficient way to break free from this conceptual knowledge into direct experience is to become completely absorbed in listening to the words of someone who has already breached the enclosing wall. I think this insistence on a single practice is too narrow. I think any situation that frees us from the social obligation and practical need to think and talk about the world and at the same time brings our attention into the present moment may provide the space within which we can directly experience the flow of life.
The key is to train ourselves to remain mindful of the intellectual process itself and not reify and become lost in the concepts and theories we create. In this case we can be fully alive in the direct experience of our own moment by moment mental activity. This is difficult and circular because we must use the mind to be aware of its own processes. (Maturana & Varela, 1987) But as Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) pointed out, mindfulness meditation is precisely the tool scientists can use to train themselves to bridge the gap between direct, lived experience and conceptual description and analysis of that experience.
The practice of mindfulness trains the mind to remain aware of its own activity. Each time the mind becomes lost in abstract thinking or fantasy or remembering or planning and you become aware of having spaced out, you bring your attention back to the present moment. You use the breath as an anchor to hold you steady. By again and again returning to the direct experience of the present, the grasp of the conceptual mind is slowly weakened. But here too, trying to force the shift only defeats you. Slowly, little by little, you come to realize there is no choice but to experience the world just as it is in the moment. This surrender opens the possibility for the shift.
Long solitary retreats in the wilderness are also powerful opportunities. The desire to survive physically encourages me to remain clearly aware of my immediate circumstances. Fear often energizes my mind. The absence of other people, who would normally mirror and feed back my conceptualizations, weakens my socially constructed world. The actual, living natural world entices me into her embrace. The process of stepping out of the apparent certainty of conceptual knowledge to embrace the mysterious Unknowable is not entirely comfortable. At times it can be painful and even terrifying. As the boundaries of the self begin to shift and dissolve, I sometimes wish to re-think my decision. But here an old aphorism does seem to still hold, "You can run, but you can't hide." And I'm glad, because the joy of experiencing the beauty and wild Aliveness of my existence more directly makes the journey wonder-full... just in and of itself.
Ah, finally I feel myself slip free. I close my eyes and let my consciousness settle and at the same time open out to become still, empty space. Zen Buddhists call this big mind. I watch as thoughts appear, drift awhile like clouds, and then like clouds are gone. Where do they come from and where do they go? Is this big mind self-enclosed and situated in my particular brain or continuous with all consciousness? Are these my private thoughts, or are the thoughts common to us all and come floating by when conditions are right and chance allows? Is my mind a psychic generator, or a receiver, or both?
These questions are interesting and I begin to pay attention more to their content than to the mysterious process of their arising and passing away. Yes, these are exciting questions. I focus more closely and begin to direct my thinking toward building a theory of mind. In this involvement with the thoughts I slip from experiencing the living process of thinking and, through identification, become caught in the thoughts themselves and so reify them. As Goldstein says, "If we mistake the thoughts about things for the things themselves, [the intellect] becomes an obstacle in that it confuses concept with reality." I now see the world through the structure of this thought / concept / theory. It fills my mind. My consciousness is no longer still and empty. It is busy analyzing, organizing, testing, searching for relationships; building conceptual knowledge. This is small mind.
One of the entrancing qualities of breaking free from the conceptual world view which I habitually inhabit is the certainty that now I am seeing things as they 'really' are. When I slip the traces and find myself in what I take to be big mind, I can see many different possible ways to interpret the world. I feel that this view, since it subsumes the others, is finally seeing things as they really are. But isn't this a sign that yet again I have become subtly entranced in small mind? The conceptualization that tastes so sweet to me places my present experience above the others; a sort of God's eye view of things. Sucker! Is this any different than the naive realism of the scientist who asserts his or her objectivism? If this is just a bubble in the mind, how can I move beyond it, and if I do, from where will I be observing? Over and over I try to escape and to see things as they really are untainted by subjectivism. But I can find no solid ground to stand on. Even the belief that there is no solid ground is not solid.
It is as though I am floating down a wild river and wanting a place to stand I build a raft. When I meet others on different rafts, I might tell them about my trip, ask them about theirs, and help them on their way. Or, in my desire/need for certainty, I might pretend my raft is solid ground and try to get everyone on board with me so there will be no-one left out there to remind me I am on a drifting raft. But there is no certainty. My raft of conceptual knowledge continues to float on the flowing water of immediate experience. And even this metaphor, delightful as it is to me, is only a raft... Either that or it's not. How can I know? This deep need for the security, the urge to escape the wild, wet, vulnerable Aliveness of direct experience for the dry illusion of solid, conceptual ground is amazing. And in my own experience of amazement I am plunged back into the flow of Aliveness.
Sometimes I stumble into another delusion which can keep me in the conceptual domain. It is easy to use a spatial metaphor to think about these different domains and then become entangled in it. When I feel I am lost in a lifeless, conceptual wasteland, it can seem like the real world of direct experience is 'out there' somewhere. I imagine I must go on a quest to find that world. This is a mistake of the conceptual mind. There is no other world. There is only experiencing the here and now (however and wherever I am) just as it is. By imagining I have to go somewhere else or change something cognitively or emotionally before I can enter the flow of the Living world, I am strengthening the idea that I am not already part of the flow. To see through this delusion, I need to pay attention to my mind-body processes (to my actual experience) just as they are here and now. The trick is not to make things different, but to experience how they already are.
I began this paper by saying I would talk about what I don't know in my desire to invite conversation and to learn. Perhaps in discussing the Unknowable I haven't yet kept my promise. So now I want to pose some questions.
1. What does the style of consciousness that sees all of existence as one flowing whole mean for biological science that usually studies atomistic reality? I am convinced that this experience is replicated by others and so should be accepted as valid in the public domain of science. If, as Maturana and Varela argue (1987), we bring the world into existence by the distinctions we make, and if, from an altered style of consciousness, we no longer make the same distinctions we have made, has the world changed in a fundamental way? If so, can we study this new world scientifically without imposing our conceptualizations on it once again - which might destroy it?
2. What is the time relationship between direct experience and conceptual thinking? Karl Weick (1995) points out that the process of making conceptual sense of our experience takes a finite amount of time. So in focusing on understanding we are actually making sense of what happened in the past. The time lag may be moments or years, but in either case, we are not actually experiencing what is happening in the present moment. This time lag may be part of the reason we often do not feel ourselves to be fully embedded in our immediate experience.
For me, direct experience and conceptual knowledge are still distinct domains. It used to seem they were sometimes years apart. I would spend extended periods trying to make sense of the world (develop a coherent world view) and then, finally feeling the deep futility of the endeavor, throw it all up and just head out to ride the whirligig of life - free-wheeling for a while. Eventually I would tire of experiencing without context and return to my questions. Recently, the cycle has shortened, but simultaneous direct experience and conceptualization are still beyond me. As Goldstein (1983) teaches, conceptualization is part of the mind body process, but can we only remain aware of the process from the outside? Or can we enter fully into the conceptualizations we create and simultaneously maintain our direct experience of our own Aliveness?
3. What is the functional relationship between direct experience of the Unknowable and conceptual knowledge? I have been exploring some different epistemological notions about our experience of the world and our conceptualizations of that experience (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela et al, 1991; Wilber, 1995). Unhappily, the wonderful old aphorism, "The map is not the territory," (which implies we can experience the actual territory) is too simplistic. Everything we perceive is already mediated by our biology and history. So apparently, the map (our inner creation) is the only territory we can experience. The aphorism has become "the map of the map is not the territory" (von Glaserfeld, 1984; Wilber, 1995). This makes sense to me conceptually, but spiritual teachers and my own experience are unambiguous in distinguishing between the Suchness of direct experience and conceptualized descriptions of that experience.
I have been thinking about drinking beer. (Actually, the longer I work on this paper, the more I find myself thinking about beer.) But beyond that, drinking beer is a good example of the notion that all experience is mediated. Does beer, in and of itself, have a flavor? I still remember drinking my first one. It tasted terrible to me, but, duty-bound, I persisted. I also remember drinking a beer not long ago at a beach-bar in the summer heat of Baja California. Ah sweet, glorious nectar! Where is the real flavor of the beer? In both cases only in my experience. Both experiences were mediated by the context. Yet the Suchness of each experience was radically different than thoughts about or descriptions of it.
Maslow claims that conceptual knowledge enriches our direct experience of the world by giving us a sort of stereoscopic view. Knowing something about beer will enhance my drinking experience. But how does our conceptual knowledge alter the direct experience of Suchness in itself? Or does it affect it at all? Previous experiencing influences current experiencing, but does conceptual knowledge also affect the actual quality of our experience? Our experience of the physical world is constrained by our biology, but is this so of our enculturation, too? Is the world of Suchness we contemplate once free of conceptual constructs still culturally contextualized? If so, then the content of our conceptualizations is important not only in the conceptual domain, but also in the domain of the Unknowable. Not only will previous experience mediate current experiencing, but so will current conceptualizations. In that case our theories, the stories we tell ourselves about the world, matter at a deeper level than the conceptual.
Writing this has jogged another memory and so another story. As an undergraduate eight years ago, I was required to take a course in cellular biology. I found it difficult and was angered when the professor demanded we memorize a huge amount of detail. Late one afternoon in early spring I emerged from the lecture hall where we had just been bombarded with the specifics of photosynthesis for the previous hour. I paused on the steps to breath fresh air and soak in the soft sunlight falling onto pale green foliage. In that moment as I gazed at the tree before me, I was transported. My experience shifted from thinking about the tree capturing photons to use in fixing carbon dioxide into fiber to experiencing the tree as vibrantly Alive. In that shift of consciousness I too became Alive to myself. Lost in the wonder of the carbon cycle I realized that the tree was literally building itself and, secondarily, me to from air and water. Amazing! A whole new conceptualization of the flowing unity of Life.
As I re-visit this experience, I examine my memory trying to see the relationship between the direct experience of Life and the conceptualization within which I felt myself come Alive. And as I sit here watching my own thinking process, I become aware of other memories of other experiences. Sometimes when deep in solitude I sense Something that I cannot describe. It is not physical and yet not not physical either. It is not dependent on the physical nor separate from the physical. I don't know what it is; only that I sense a presence of which I am part. What is it? If I were still a Christian, I would not only label this presence God, but might actually experience it as the Christian God. If I were of another faith, I might experience it another way. It is just at the boundary (or what seems to be the boundary) between non-conceptual experience and conceptually mediated experience that I linger trying to see what aspects of my experience are mediated by world view and which, if any, are not. As soon as I begin to think or write about my looking, I am certainly embedded in language and concepts.
4. What is the difference between science and spiritual practice? Polanyi (1958) distinguished spiritual practice from science not in the quality of the immediate experience, but in the relationship to that experience. He pointed out that the "visionary powers of the scientist which lead him to new discoveries subside, once discovery is achieved, into a peaceful contemplation of the result." So perhaps science's primary concern is with conceptual knowledge and uses direct experience as the raw data from which knowledge is abstracted and to which the abstractions are compared. As Maslow said "First look, then know, then look again." But perhaps the mystic, rather than creating a new conceptual refuge, seeks to repeatedly break free into the direct experience of the mysterious Unknowable.
I have been working on this paper for several days now and want to reflect on my experience of this process of trying to conceptualize my experience of shifts of consciousness and my wondering about that experience. I notice that in trying to integrate experience and conceptualization and the experience of conceptualizing, things get quite circular. If I do not remain grounded in my actual experience of the process, I can easily spin out of control. My actual experience though does not seem to fit into the idealized dichotomy (direct experience and conceptual knowledge) I have adopted for this paper. This is a problem. Where do I go from here?
If I am honest with myself, I have to acknowledge that I have not been able to coherently conceptualize and analyze my own experience. In my frustration I am tempted to give up on this process. But at the same time I feel I cannot do so without neglecting a vital aspect of my own humanness. What is the meaning of writing this paper? What if, for the moment, I neglect abstract meaning - how this work might fit into and increase my knowledge - and experience the process of writing and thinking in and of itself? If I resist my desire for the comfort of "peaceful contemplation of the result," and instead hang tough with the process, then I can see that Suchness meaning, the direct apprehension of my own immediate Aliveness, is always possible even when abstractness meaning eludes me.
I am not physically active in order to achieve the result of a healthy body which I can then peacefully contemplate. Physical activity is an integral part of my living. It is a joyful experience in itself. Perhaps I can be intellectually active in an analogous way. Instead of trying to build a self-enclosing fortress of conceptual knowledge, I might use the conceptual level of mind to enrich my experience of living. Mental activity, rather than being used to create a refuge from the awesomeness of existence, can enhance direct experience, and be part of my own wild Aliveness. I notice that in questioning the relationship between direct experience and conceptualization, I deepen and bring myself into closer contact with the experience I wish to understand. Here too, the process is circular. It is not that thinking and conceptual knowledge are useless or bad, but only that I often find myself lost in my own conceptualizations, mistaking them for the world they describe. And this is my great loss.
In the first section, I suggested that the conceptual context I'm building, within which to make sense of my experience of a shift of consciousness is useful and a potential trap. Even though I have not been completely successful, a context is emerging. This is the abstract meaning of this paper and of my work. It is useful in that it stabilizes and directs the thinking mind. Rather than pointing toward itself, I intend my conceptualization to point toward direct experience. Even so, it will become a trap if I forget this is only talking about experiencing the shift and not the direct experience of that shift. In Zen (Suzuki, 1970) there is a warning that the teaching is only a finger pointing at the moon and not the moon itself. If I get hung up on the finger, I lose the moon. So, I will end where I began; with experience. I like the way Maslow says it:
Many basic experiences in life, perhaps ultimately all experiences, are "unsolvable." That is to say, they are impossible to understand. You can't make any sense out of them beyond their own is-ness. You can't be rational about them; they just are. About all you can do with them is simply to recognize their existence, to accept them, and, whenever possible to enjoy them in their richness and mystery, at the same time realizing that they constitute much of the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?"
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