Toward Intimacy

    "To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things." Zen Master Dogen  

    Enlightenment and Awakening are usually used to mean the same thing: experiencing reality directly, without the illusion of separation from everything, seen and unseen. 

     Intimacy implies direct, real-time connection and engagement, without any interference. Example: witnessing a beautiful scene in nature so that in the moment, we're 'lost for words' and can vividly remember it 60 years later. I witnessed such a clear starry night sky around midnight when I went outside after studying in first year university. Perhaps more important than the perceived, because I've seen & forgotten hundreds of clear starry night skies, was the letting go (from fatigue) of continuous thinking & self-talk, and then suddenly facing nature's splendor without words getting in the way.

    To be immersed, with all our senses innocently open, in an experience and rest in it, simply savouring without separating ourselves from the physical, full-body sensory 'isness' with our words, ideas, opinions, commentary, is a rare, brief phenomenon lasting seconds. Most of us are deeply conditioned by our materialistic, hyper-rational culture, and thus completely identified with the continuous running commentary 'story of me,' so letting that go can feel like voluntary ego death.
    A key component of meditation is practicing to rest in awareness with mental, emotional & physical stillness & silence continuously, for longer & longer periods of time. So we're not forming opinions or judgments, but remaining equanimous - emotionally neutral, stable, all our senses open, peacefully, intimately connected to everything right here, right now. 

    During meditation “you are not escaping the world; you are getting ready to fully embrace it.” Christine Skarda

     “Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.” J.D. McClatchy

    “There are only two ways to live your life.
     One is as though nothing is a miracle.
     The other is as though
     everything is a miracle.”         Albert Einstein

    Most of us are usually continuously lost in self-talk, which rarely has anything to do with present experience. So at best, we're partially engaged with whomever or whatever we're doing ie nowhere near intimacy. Our mood depends on the degree to which the world of our self-talk clashes with our present moment reality. In this all-too typical scenario, we're too busy to stop to smell the roses, and would assume nothing in life is a miracle.

    Our self-talk is essentially our opinions about past or future events. Our opinions are strikingly less detailed & variably distorted compared to actual events. So imagine being free of self-talk, how much more vivid, detailed, accurate & 'engaging' our appreciation of everyone & everything would be. I suspect the difference would be akin to a falling-down drunk becoming completely sober. Life would appear miraculously rich.

    Spiritual practices to facilitate Awakening include Self-Inquiry eg asking ourselves 'Who is suffering?' and then progressively going deeper & deeper than our name, age, sex, address, occupation, etc, etc, until finally we might wordlessly feel into our 'original face before our parents were born.' Persistent open mind / hearted curiosity and sequentially letting go of 'easy rational answers' is key, as we go deeper & deeper to remember our own and everyone & everything else's Origin.

    Below, is an imho very worthwhile 14-minute 'direct pointing' to help us remember who we truly are. Watch this short video at least twice:

  Angelo Dilullo: "Awakening - What is It and How to Do It"

More than One Way of Knowing

    One might wonder why a hyper-rational perspective so dominates industrialized societies these days. By hyper-rational I mean unbalanced, very narrow & machine-like, as if human beings were isolated machines, manipulating completely separate, unrelated external mechanical objects, in a totally random, dead, meaningless universe. Seriously??
     This is physicalism - the current orthodoxy under which we unknowingly live. But like other dogmatic belief systems, it cries out for open examination & wise correction!

     “Materialist or Reductionist Science … has concluded that we are the only sentient beings in an inanimate universe that is without life, meaning, purpose, direction or intelligence. This bleak ‘philosophy’ has taken on the power & absolutism of an ideology.”
     Anne Baring – Awakening to a New Story – The Evolutionary Imperative of Our Time” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hITMBPOwyDY

     “Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.”
     Bob Samples. “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness.” Jalmar, 1976.

     "Our understanding of knowing is multifaceted and education emphasizes memory, reasoning, learning style, language, intelligence, & on & on. Acknowledging the vast array of distinctions, I want to cut beneath these to claim that with respect to education, consciousness, & culture today, there are two ways of knowing. That is, there are two fundamental ways that the mind works to know the world. There are myriad variations to be sure and certainly plenty of other ways to slice this rhetorically, but the most salient concern today comes down to this.
     One way we will call categorical. This knows the world through abstraction, through separating it from us, through taking apart to understand. In a sense everything is reduced to parts, to lowest units that are differentiated, named, catalogued. It reaches its apex in metaphor of computer zeroes & ones. Categorical awareness narrows in to focus on detail and seeks precision, objectivity, & presupposes certainty. It simplifies & represents, proceeds linearly & sequentially, and generalizes. Our schooling emphasizes this way of knowing, and for the most part, only this.
     The other knowing is through contact (experiential) instead of category. Its style is direct, relational, embodied, and recognizes wholes & connections. Awareness through contact enables a broader view, one connected with the world & the body, scanning for changes in the environment. This knowing seeks novelty, picks up implicit meaning & metaphor, is able to read faces & other cues of individuals instead of simplified, predetermined, and generalized categories. Knowledge through contact is evolving, implicit, & indeterminate since it always exists in relationship to something else and is not ever fully graspable.
     Iain McGilchrist, drawing from a vast body of neuroscientific and phenomenological data, makes a compelling case that these ways of knowing have neurological substrates corresponding to the anatomically distinct hemispheres of the brain.”
     Tobin Hart. “The Integrative Mind: Transformative education for a world on fire.” Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

      "Iain McGilchrist, author of, 'The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,' says that we are dominated by this left-hemisphere analytical view, which of course you see going straight into artificial intelligence. And we’ve neglected the right-hemisphere creative, intuitive, holistic side of ourselves. For him, the master hemisphere, in terms of his book’s title, is the right hemisphere, not the left hemisphere, because  

     • FIRST the right hemisphere gives us an idea of the whole, then  

     • SECOND information is sent to the left hemisphere for analytical elaboration, finally

     • THIRD it should be sent back to the right hemisphere for a higher level of integration. 

     So he never says we only need one hemisphere. He says we must create a culture in which these hemispheres are working together and we therefore re-establish our balance."
      David Lorimer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn00MFFVyIo

 

     "To cut a long story short, it struck me that it was a problem with our thinking ... about things out there that were objects, that didn’t have any kind of embodied reality for us. And that interested me in what's going on in our brains. And when I studied medicine, I was very much inspired by Oliver Sacks and his writings, principally “Awakenings,” an extraordinary book. That book shows that when something goes wrong brain, it affects their whole world. Or something goes wrong with their mind, it affects their body. These things are deeply, closely connected. So I studied medicine, and went off to neurology & psychiatry, which is the area of overlap.
      It was there that I started to ask myself questions. Why is the brain divided? In medical school, nobody ever said why the brain is divided in two halves. Nobody knew, and nobody even asked the question why. And later, I learned that the two hemispheres have completely different ways of looking at the world. There was a lot of nonsense talked about hemisphere difference that put serious scientists off the topic altogether. I was told, ‘Don’t even touch this topic because it’s career death. It’s pop psychology. It doesn’t have any basis.’
      And yet, when one came to look at scholarly research on people who had damage to one or other hemisphere, you could see that they had completely different effects, depending on where it was - the left or the right hemisphere. And that was being overlooked & ignored. People say, ‘Ah there aren’t any really serious differences.’ But I think what they were doing wrong was they were thinking of the brain as a machine. And so they were asking the question you would ask of a machine, ‘What does it do?’ And they said first of all, well the left does reason & language, and the right does emotion & pictures.
      And then they found that this was completely untrue, because each hemisphere got involved in all those things. But what they didn’t seem to be asking, was the question you would ask a part of a person which is, ‘How, in what way does each hemisphere get involved in these things?’ And if you do that, you find that each hemisphere is involved in every single thing that makes up parts of our lives, just with a completely different take on it. That was the difference! To begin with, I couldn’t quite see how staggeringly important this was. Then I realized, the two halves of the brain were attending to the world in two different ways. And we know that when you attend differently, you see different things. There are lots of clever demonstrations, some by Darren Brown the illusionist, and so on, which show that if you’re not expecting to see something, you don’t see it; if you look with a certain kind of attention you see one thing, if you look with another kind of attention, you see something completely different. Quite apart from those clever demonstrations, in our daily life, when we look at things with a certain kind of attention, we find a different kind of world from what is apparently the same world on a different day when we’re attending to it differently.
      I heard a lecture by John Cutting, whom I considered the most interesting living psychiatrist. He had done what no other physician had been doing, which was looking at what happened after right hemisphere strokes. Everyone was focused on left hemisphere strokes. And they thought well nothing serious happens to somebody with a right hemisphere stroke because they can still use their right hand, and language is usually unimpaired. But actually it turns out that they’re much more seriously impaired, & harder to rehabilitate after a right hemisphere stroke than after a left hemisphere stroke, even though, after a left hemisphere stroke, it’s very probable that you won’t be able to speak or be able to use your right hand. Now that surprises people. But what John was saying is when the left hemisphere is damaged, you see these very obvious results, but when the right hemisphere is damaged, what you don’t immediately see is that their whole experience of the world has changed. And he alerted me to some things in this lecture which rang a bell. He said, the left hemisphere fails to understand implicit meaning – it doesn’t understand metaphor, jokes, irony, sense of humor. It takes things very literally, in a sort of mechanical way. It is less in touch with the body than the right hemisphere, and literally the body image, which is not just a visual image but an image in all senses in the brain of ourselves as embodied beings, is in the right hemisphere. And he was saying also that the general ideas, as it were, get collected abstractly in the left hemisphere, but unique instances, embodied concrete instances of things are better appreciated in the right hemisphere.
      ... it’s the left hemisphere that does the talking. It’s my left hemisphere now that is speaking to you. And it has set up a kind of language that works well for it. But it’s much harder to convey the meanings & knowledge that the right hemisphere has.
      And often, when you make something explicit, you utterly change its nature. You see this with sex, you see this with religion, you can see it with jokes, you can see it with poems. And when you disembody something, you utterly change its reality for us and how we relate to it. And when you abstract and generalize something, you’ve completely lost what was unique & special about it. You’re doing a rather paradoxical thing – you’re destroying the thing you’re trying to examine, in the process of examining.
      And very often, I think, what we as a society have been tending to do in the last 150 years, is increasingly to denature the world by our way of talking about it abstractly, mechanically, reductively. And we have not attended to, because it’s harder to see, what is lost and, what, as it were, the part of us that understands the implicit, knows.
Now the implicit is enormous compared with the explicit. The bit that we actually see explicitly, in the center of the focus of our consciousness is minute. It’s conservatively estimated to be much less than 5% of all the stuff that we’re knowing & experiencing, and probably it’s very, very much less than that. So the unconscious mind, which includes the whole of our bodies as well as the other parts of the brain and so forth, is taking in, dealing with, assessing & responding to the world – knowing things as it were, that in our explicit, conscious mind we’ve ruled out, we don’t talk about, and we say we don’t believe in them. So that actually skews the picture of what the world is, who we are, and how we relate."
      Matter is a Relative Matter with Iain McGilchrist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAlwrnpHIs
 

     "There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe." Teilhard de Chardin

      “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

     “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince”

     Insights from a present-day, 84-year old mystic & long-time meditator, John Butler:
     “The more I appreciate the wonder of the world around me, the more I realize my own ignorance & incapacity to understand. And I love the verse from scriptures that says, ‘My ways are higher than your ways, my thoughts than your thoughts,' says the Lord. And also another one that says, ‘The wisdom of man is foolishness to God.’ I suppose that’s why, as we grow in spiritual awareness, what we call knowledge – the answer to questions, also goes through as it were a process of evolution.
      Now faith is really higher knowledge. Lower knowledge is concerned with facts & answers. So we study, we read books, we ask questions, search the internet. Why do these things happen? We try to analyze the different parts. As you stand more at the top of the mountain, somehow these questions rather fall away, and you acquire a deeper understanding – an understanding of wholeness. It’s not so concerned with the bits & pieces of separation. You see the wholeness of things.
      If you lie on your back and look at the sky, you don’t normally say, ‘Why is this bit of cloud like that? Why isn’t the other bit shaped in the same way? Why are some dark & shadowy? Why are other bits light?’ We’re used to looking at the sky as a whole, aren’t we? And we can see the comings & goings of things, within a greater unity, within a greater harmony.
      And so, a part of spiritual development is that partial knowledge ie knowledge of different parts, bits of this & bits of that, what you could refer to as ‘name & form,’ gets replaced by a higher knowledge, which is called, faith. Now faith is the evidence of things not seen. You don’t see with the eye of flesh. You see with the eye of heart.
      We’re to understand what can never be explained in terms of ordinary encyclopedic knowledge. Begin to understand the meaning of love, and of peace, and of freedom. No one can explain what these things are.
      Yet we all know instinctively what they are. We talk about them every day, like we talk about God. Who really knows what we’re talking about? We may have a sort of inkling, but... Yet there is faith, isn’t there? Faith is a sort of knowing, but a fractured, partial knowing. It’s a knowing that enables one to have faith or trust. And these statements, ‘All things happen for the best, to those that love God.’ It’s really a statement of faith, of higher knowledge, that knows it perhaps instinctively, better than in analytic knowledge. I mean who can ever say, what’s best and what’s worse?”
     John Butler : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3R_2jOcqSU

 

     "William James more than 100 years ago, speaking of mystical experience said that one of it's characteristics, besides ego dissolution & transcendence of space and time, is its 'noetic quality.' And this was the quality that what you learned, the insights you had, were not merely opinions but were revealed truths. And they have a stickiness & a power that is central to the experience, and it is what allows people to change."
     Michael Pollan interviewed by Katherine May, "The Future of Hope 4": https://onbeing.org/programs/michael-pollan-and-katherine-may-the-future-of-hope-4/

 

     “When you consider all the saints and prophets as legitimate and no longer differentiate between religions, you have arrived at the stage of truth.”
     Ostad Elahi (1895-1974) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oo_QhUQToA

     “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
      R. Buckminster Fuller

 

John Butler's - 33min talk

 

Levels of Peception & Understanding - A Deep Dive

     “It’s fascinating to see how Empedocles and Parmenides explain things just as clearly as (9th century Taoist / Chan poet Hanshan), but scholars have mistranslated and even altered the Greek texts because they have no frame of reference, either intellectual or experiential, for understanding what they are saying. This process of mistranslation is incredibly significant because it’s on the basis of such misunderstandings that our Western civilization has been founded.”
     “Common Sense, An Interview with Peter Kingsley.” Parabola, 11/1/2016 https://parabola.org/2016/11/01/common-sense-an-interview-with-peter-kingsley/

     Below is imho, a priceless interview by C.S. Soong of Peter Kingsley, author of "Reality." For optimal clarity, you may choose to both read AND listen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZFdOt78lXM) to this interview: 

     “We – you and I and pretty much everyone – live under a kind of spell. We are spinning around in a daze, deaf & blind to what’s really going on, to what can liberate us and truly fulfill us and make us effective participants in life. Sure, we’ve got our plans for accumulating this, and attaining that, and changing him or her, but that’s all part of our self-deception, our misunderstanding of what’s essential. So often we try to convince ourselves we are living a full, contented life, but there is always pulling at our heart. Ambition and restlessness are just its shadows, and it will go on tearing at our hearts, until we start to acknowledge what is missing.
     I discovered that Parmenides & Empedocles, these two Greeks whom I knew nothing about, were on the main line. They were right at this nerve that lies at the very beginnings of Western culture as we know it. And it was the people after them, in the century or two after Parmenides & Empedocles, who realized how important they were. But then gradually, the renown, fame & reputation of Parmenides & Empedocles was eclipsed by the reputation of the people who came after, and really in a way, to my mind, weren’t doing something quite as important or fundamental at all.

Interviewer: ‘So let’s take Parmenides, the founder of logic, as you say in this book, considered the father of rationality, rational discursive thinking. What did you find about that legend of him and whether it was accurate?

     Well, there are many, many problems. I guess I’d always been, since I was very young, looking for something authentic, feeling there has to be something authentic, even offered to us, even in our own Western civilization, which has dismissed so much with its materialistic, rationalistic attitude, especially in today’s post-modern deconstructionist era, as passe & finished. I knew there must be something hidden at the beginning of this culture, because it didn’t make sense to me the way things have been going. And with Parmenides it was really a matter of stage-by-stage looking, looking. Now here we have a guy, supposedly according to all the histories of philosophy & history textbooks, who is a rationalist – not only a rationalist, but the founder, the father of Western rationalism, the originator of logic – but to begin with, he wrote a poem. And that’s a bit weird, because how many logicians nowadays would write a poem? It doesn’t really add up. And then, when I started looking at this poem itself, and getting enough knowledge of ancient Greek to be able to really work my way around it, I realized first of all that he isn’t the bad poet that he’s sometimes, in fact really all the time made out to be nowadays, and the incredibly skillful uses that Parmenides made out of poetry, which had effects that eventually I was able to track down and say, ‘Yes, these effects tie him in with religious traditions, spiritual traditions, mystical traditions, incantatory magical traditions. That they’d been put aside and totally ignored because people just want to look at him as a philosopher.’ If you look at a philosopher for philosophy, you’re not going to see anything else. That was the beginning. Then the other very, very important thing which wouldn’t leave me alone was the very beginning of this poem describing the origins of so-called logic. Parmenides describes how he was given all the knowledge that he presents in the rest of his poem, as the result of a journey into another world. Specifically, he describes (this ‘world’) in all the language & terminology of his times, as the journey into the world of the dead, which is where we go when we die, and also, for the Greeks, this world of the dead – Hades, and even beyond Hades – this is where traditionally, the physical world came out of. So he’s been taken to a point which nobody basically, except for a couple of heroes: Hercules, Orpheus, Odysseus, is allowed to get to while alive. So that already puts Parmenides in a very, very special place. He’s an initiate.*** But this world gives him the secret of what is beyond life as we know it. And of course immediately, that opens up the whole area of what is the purpose of life, and how does it exist, what does it mean in relation to death, which we tend to ignore and push aside as much as we can. 

[*** “A spiritual journey is a calling. It is something initiated from somewhere beyond the ego, from a depth within the psyche that the ego has no access to on its own.” Adyashanti, “The Essence of Spirituality”
     In today's language, an 'experiencer' eg NDE: Bruce Greyson. “After. A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond.” St. Martin’s, 2021.]

Interviewer: ‘And when you talk about things like the purpose of life & meaning of death - this seems so far away from the conventional understanding of what ‘logic’ is, what it constitutes.’

     Not at all. This is one of the strange, strange paradoxes for us in the West. We can go back century after century and look at the history of philosophy to see why. It’s a really strange story, but for us, logic has come to mean a justification basically of the rationalistic worldview that we live in. This already goes back to Aristotle. Logic is used to confirm certain perceptions essentially. It’s based on certain rational rules which have been invented to justify and substantiate the way that we see things. Now if you look at say Buddhist logic in the East, which I came to know after discovering the same principles in Parmenides’ logic, you see that their logic plays a very different role. It’s actually a tool which is designed to undermine our ordinary perceptions & our ordinary values. First of all, it’s designed to not only make us question, but to make us see that this physical world doesn’t quite add up. And this is something Parmenides, and also his successor Zeno, talked about very, very beautifully. They basically say, ‘Let’s take this world on its own terms, but when you take it really seriously, and look at it truthfully, honestly & carefully, it doesn’t make sense.’ 

     “Reality is rife with paradox. Only the mind can’t figure it out.” Stephan Bodian PhD

Interviewer: ‘In what way would he characterize the human condition - the way we tend to live our lives?’

     This is something Parmenides & Empedocles go to quite a bit of trouble, right at the beginning of their respective poems, both of them, to describe the human condition specifically. And here I have a few lines from Parmenides, where he describes humans, all humans, as ‘knowing nothing. The helplessness in their chests is what steers their wandering minds, as they’re carried along in a daze, deaf & blind at the same time. Indistinguishable, undistinguishing crowds.’ It’s not a very flattering way to describe people. And it’s funny also to see how century after century of scholarship has tried to deflect this criticism away from being a criticism of humans in general, because that would include even academics & scholars, God forbid, and put it somewhere else. But this is Parmenides’ way, and also Empedocles’ way of saying, ‘Look, life as it is lived is aimless. And however much you think you’re achieving, it’s insubstantial, it’s just like leaves in the wind. It’s going to blow away and before you know it, it’s gone, and so are you.’

Interviewer: ‘And this knowing nothing reminds me quite a bit of Socrates and the dialogues he had with people, and of course you write about it in your book “Reality” – this idea that he would keep asking questions and eventually the person, who was holding & trying to justify a certain opinion, would realize that that opinion might not have any justification, and Socrates would maybe leave them, and they might be confused and a little bit dismayed. Is Socrates part of this lineage of “you think you know, but you really don’t know”? ’

     Very, very much, and … somehow through many hundreds & thousands of years, we really have forgotten, we’ve lost the sense of what Parmenides, Socrates & these people were actually doing. We get into very, very difficult water here, because we in the West, especially with democracy, we all assume that we have the right to our own opinions. And of course, on one level that is absolutely, 100, 150% justified & necessary. That’s how a democratic society works. But what’s actually been forgotten is that Socrates for example, and Parmenides wasn’t just coming in with more opinions, he was coming from a depth of awareness inside himself which he had earned, which he had discovered. And I have to emphasize there were very, very specific ways & practices in Greece in that time for coming to that state of consciousness and become stabilized in it. And the point about that state of consciousness is it’s not actually a state of believing. It’s a state of knowing. And that’s very, very difficult, because if you come into a democratic setup, whether it’s ancient Athens or modern San Francisco, the question is going to be, ‘Well, why do you say you know something that I don’t? Why do you have something to contribute that’s any better than my opinions?’ And this is a very, very delicate area, very, very delicate and very wonderful to look at, because Socrates really wasn’t putting out new opinions, new beliefs. He was aiming at, and he succeeded, in undermining peoples’ beliefs about themselves – the superficial beliefs. And of course he got into great deal of trouble – so much that he was put to death. 

     “We are human beings, endowed with an incredible dignity; but there’s nothing more undignified than forgetting our greatness and clutching at straws.” Peter Kingsley, “In the Dark Places of Wisdom”
 
Interviewer: ‘Let’s talk about thinking and rational thought. There’s something that both Parmenides & Empedocles were trying to convey about its deficiencies, what it doesn’t accomplish for us, how it’s perhaps counterproductive to getting to real meaning. You point out how thoughts lead to division & separation. You write that “our minds are like a dog’s bladder.” Could you elaborate?’

     This is again a huge, huge area because we live here in a world of thinking, not just of opinions, but all the time with our selves where we think & think about everything, and everything is done on the basis of thinking. And what Parmenides said was, you can’t understand thinking unless you get beyond thinking. I mean this is actually impossible. You can’t understand thinking by thinking about it. And I think that a lot of modern philosophers get caught in this trap of thinking about thinking about thinking. And it just doesn’t work. And this is why when Parmenides describes, at the beginning of his poem, being carried to another world, which is the origins of this world as we know it, which lies behind this whole visible universe, he’s also talking about getting behind the structures of perception that actually maintain this world and keep it intact. And so this is the path of initiation, that you have to get behind thinking, you have to get past this world that we exist in, in order to understand it. It doesn’t mean leaving anything behind. It doesn’t mean that you have to leave thoughts behind after that. You have to come back and do the best you can in this world of thinking and in this physical world. But actually, to be able to experience another state of consciousness which, I have to say from my experience, is quite objective. It’s not a matter of, ‘Well different mystics, or different people in different traditions say that.’ There is something that exists. And I know many people would like to disagree with that. But it’s just something very, very simple. And once you experience that simplicity, then you can come back and do the best you can in this world of complexity, and continual thought & division. And I can just say one thing which for me is very, very beautiful about the teaching of Parmenides & Empedocles in particular, and I really have to emphasize that Parmenides as well as making this journey into another world & coming back with a very, very strange formulation – the earliest formulation of what logic actually is – he also was presenting extraordinary scientific discoveries in his palm, which hadn’t been talked about or mentioned or even known about by the people when he was writing. So the point I’m making is that for Parmenides & Empedocles nothing is excluded. Thinking always tends to exclude things. When we think, we have an opinion, and that automatically excludes someone else’s opinion. And this is why it’s very difficult trying to convey what someone like Parmenides was talking about. Because there is always room for the opposite. The opposite is always included, and this why it’s so beautiful how in the first half of his poem, Parmenides will say, “This logically is the way things are. This is the reality.” But then in the second half of his poem, he will actually go on and say, “Well that’s the truth, now I’m going to deceive you, and I’m going to talk about this world of illusion.” He doesn’t leave it out.

     “The ability to appreciate paradox and doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity.” Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Interviewer: ‘There is quite a bit of discussion, particularly in the section on Empedocles in this book about the consciousness, the awareness that you were talking about. What’s there asking us or inviting us to do in the way of sensing things, of being aware of perceptions? What are they inviting us to do on a concrete level in terms of where we focus, & how we focus our consciousness?’

     Well to begin with, there’s the quality of silence, of inner silence. And they (Parmenides & Empedocles) both made, as it were, a condition for coming to these practices the need in an individual to be aware that something’s missing in their lives. And if we just come to this in the same spirit that we think we can accumulate some other experience, it’s not going to work. There has to be some sense of a lack in one’s life. There has to be somehow a sense of just a little place somewhere inside us for something that’s missing, something that doesn’t quite add up, something’s that not right, maybe a sadness. And Empedocles states it very beautifully where he describes how there’s actually a place we need to come aside to inside ourselves – it can be inside or outside – which is different, which is a place apart, which is somehow outside of this perpetual round of acquisitive existence. Because if we just come to this with the same acquisitive mentality, we can get all the different black belts in martial arts and in meditation techniques, but it’s not going to be going into the right place inside us as human beings. So this element of silence was very, very important. Somehow it’s important for there to be a pause, so we can actually hear that something’s missing. It’s like if you are silent, you can actually hear the silent voice of something inside us, asking for something else. And we usually smother that call. What is so beautiful about the practices themselves, and I really feel I need to emphasize that this is something quite unknown.
     We in the West are now in a situation, thanks to the opening-up of the world in so many ways, I have to say not in new ways, because the world has always been open, there’s always been a tremendous amount of travel, 2,000, 3,000 years ago, people were already traveling from Tibet & central Asia down to Greece and the other way around. I have to emphasize that there have always been these connections. Certainly the Western world, the Mediterranean, was not closed off from the rest of world, as people try to say before Alexander the Great and so on. This is all untrue. There were always the paths, and people did travel, remarkably fast as well.
     But what has happened now in the West is that somehow there’s a very, very deep mindset which has become very, very concrete. It’s there underneath everyday thoughts, everyday ideas, our politics so much, and that is this notion of Western civilization as something materialistic, something rational, and so what has happened for the last 200 years in particular, is when people get a spiritual craving, when they feel something is missing in their ordinary, everyday life, they look to Hinduism, Buddhism, and then to more esoteric traditions, theosophy, and recently to the wonderful Native American traditions, South American traditions, and really, if you like, the nerve of my own work, the core of it, is that there is a sacred tradition at the roots of our own Western world. And that it’s really fundamental for us now, at a collective level, to get back to that sacred core of the Western world – behind all the misunderstandings, behind all the rationalizing, the materializing, to get back to the sacred core. Because otherwise, there really isn’t much of a future for this Western civilization. We have to somehow get back to the beginning. And so, the reason why I’m prefacing what I’m going to say in this way is here we have at the roots of Western civilization a so-called philosophy, the very birth of Western science, not just a series, but a whole system of meditation techniques. If you like you can call them yogic techniques, because they include breathing practices, and so on. And this is really quite extraordinary, that the founder of Western logic, the father of many, many aspects of science even, and with Empedocles cosmology and so on, was giving meditation techniques, yogic practices as a prerequisite for understanding teachings that would come later. And there is now remarkable archeological evidence which cannot be denied, that has been very, very strangely silenced for the last fifty years, demonstrating Parmenides, the father of logic, was in fact a priest of Apollo, and he was involved in very, very specific ecstatic practices to do with dreams, dream-interpretation, so-called incubation rituals. And these are the real foundations, these are the background of Western logic, not what we like to believe.
     But these practices, to get on to the techniques themselves, what do they offer if you want to come to them? Again, they offer everything, because nothing is excluded. On the one hand they offer techniques for going into this other state of consciousness, this other world that Parmenides described, this world of tremendous stillness, of physical stillness if you like, of meditation, certainly of mental stillness. But they didn’t just ignore the world of the senses. As I said earlier on, they also gave the most remarkable techniques, especially Empedocles, for really becoming aware through our senses, and for realizing for the first time – and it’s quite a shock when you start to do this – but normally, we are not aware. We go through the day, we drive our cars, we make breakfast, we talk with people, go out to dinner, watch television. But when you start to do these practices, you actually start to realize that that is not being aware. We don’t know how to see or listen. And this is something we believe we do, but it’s like we are sensed, we don’t sense. We don’t really sense to see, it happens to us. There’s a whole level of waking up, which brings the world together and gives it a much, much deeper meaning through these practices.

Interviewer: ‘What is reality and how does it relate to my internal state, my sense of being independent and separate from other things? How would you begin to answer this? How to Parmenides & Empedocles begin to answer that question?’

     Well we’re not separate. This is the problem. We start from the apparent sense of separateness, which really we Westerners have; Native American people don’t have that. We are not separate. And this eventually brings with it a rather beautiful realization. One can start off doing practices, by if you like, meditating. And I have to say these meditation techniques are very specific – remember, they’re being given by the founder of logic. These are not airy-fairy other-worldly techniques. These are very, very specific. You can begin by saying, ‘I am meditating,’ but then after a while you start to realize that you are being meditated, because everything is one, and everything is connected. So it’s very difficult for me in a way to start off as it were from this assumption that we are separate, because it doesn’t really work. It’s part of the illusion we were talking about earlier.

Interviewer: ‘Are there similarities between the Tao and what Parmenides & Empedocles are trying to tell us about?’

     Very, very much. And one of the principles I find so beautifully similar in Parmenides and in Taoism, is the more we try to get something for ourselves, the less we end up with. It’s this very, very strange paradox that by trying to accumulate things for ourselves, we diminish ourselves. And by somehow becoming nothing, and of course there are many misconceptions that can come up around that idea or reality of becoming nothing, then everything is given because you do become a part of everything, which is what we are in our essential natures anyway. So yes, and there is the flow. This is something that I again find so beautiful, there is this constant sense in Taoism and in Parmenides’ & Empedocles’ teaching of something natural, something organic. We tend to think of spiritual practice as often somehow unnatural, needing sacrifices, asceticism, abstention, giving up this & that, but again they say there’s nothing to give up. It’s a matter of including. But it’s a matter also of including our deeper needs, our deeper longings, our deeper urges, and not leaving those out, which can so easily happen.

Interviewer: ‘I’m going to read something from the book, Reality: ‘There is nothing left to grasp or learn. All we need has already been given and lies quietly within us. And there will be no separation, no loss, unless you are careless enough to let it go.’ So the nub of the idea is that everything we think we want or think we need or are attaching to is already internal? 

     Is already internal, and we really don’t have to struggle for it or fight for it because there’s something so clear and definite inside ourselves, that we don’t need to struggle for it outwardly. Just to give one very, very brief final example maybe, that I find so interesting, these people – Parmenides in particular, and many others from around his time and before & after in the Mediterranean two & a half thousand years ago, they were law-givers. And it’s very, very strange that for them, laws were actually given from this other world. And this is something really inconceivable to us now, because we think that if someone was to come along now and say that they were given some laws in a dream, you’d say, ‘Yeh, and what leg are you trying to pull? What are you trying to get away with?’ But these laws that were brought from this other state of consciousness, they were selfless. They weren’t concerned with what my party can get, with what I can acquire. And it’s wonderful because again, at the democratic level, with the thinking process which is absolutely beautiful & fine, you can work out laws. But there’s this other level, where laws can come through, which I have to emphasize were laws for a whole society, laws for cities, and also laws for the individual – laws that we have to live by."

      “Rationality is simply mysticism misunderstood.” Peter Kingsley, 'Reality'

     See also: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/02/maturing-beyond-ordinary-happiness.html