Perennial Mysteries of Life & Death

    The excerpts below, are from an imho EXCELLENT 88-minute discussion: "WHAT IS LIFE?" between Tim Freke & Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY 
    To get value out of this, savour slowly, with all your senses open. Enjoy!

    Tim Freke (TF):     “You & I are both human beings on this bittersweet journey of being alive, and we both got older. What is it? How have you come to terms with that mystery? How do you see it as you make that journey?”

    Iain McGilchrist (IM): “I think intrinsically it’s that mystery one never comes to the bottom of. As William James said, ‘We can never close our accounts with reality.’ And I think just being aware of that is both very valuable, and as you say, somewhat rare. We take the most mysterious things for granted, such as the nature of time and consciousness, and that we’re alive at all, or that there is anything at all rather than nothing. So these things are eternally intriguing, but that’s part of their value.
    I mean if we could say, ‘Oh I know exactly what it is,’ well first of all, you’d be a fool, but secondly, you would have lost something of what it is that makes life have meaning. The odd thing is that if we could narrow down the meaning of these things in a simple way, to what we normally mean by, ‘Oh that means that,’ then it would have no meaning. Its meaning depends on its meaninglessness at one level, much as the idea of purpose would be vitiated* if it was clear that there was a purpose in the sense of a utility - you know we do this, because of that. (* vitiate – spoil or impair the quality or efficiency of)

TF     “One of the things that I’ve explored a lot is the coexistence of opposites … and one of the opposites that plays itself out for me all the time, is the way in which I feel that I can live with an appreciation of the mystery – the numinous nature of existence, AND a story I’m telling, which I’m constantly trying to define. One of the reasons I want to have these conversations is that it refines my story, my understanding. … generally we don’t realize we’re embedded in a story, that there is a cultural story which we take for granted. And that part of the function of doubt & mystery is to come out of that story, and actually see, to actually be conscious in this moment - this breathtaking mystery, we don’t know what it is, and then we have the best story we can find to navigate it, and deeper stories open up deeper experiences.”

IM     “I’d like to pick up the word ‘story’ because of course nowadays, it can be used to mean a lie - ‘telling stories’ as children say. And the word story, and the word fable, and the word myth, which are now all used to mean things that are fundamentally unlikely to be true, started off as words that designated a perfectly truthful approach to reality. When philosophers and scientists normally talk about a narrative or a story, the background to that is often that we make it up in order to comfort ourselves, because we need some sort of meaning, so we invent it. And there again, that word has changed. Invention used to mean discovering something, finding it, whereas now it means making it up.
    So I believe there is, very importantly, a way of dealing with these imponderables that you mentioned, which is not head-on. The more you try to analyze it directly, the more you come away with a handful of dust. You need to approach it in a more oblique way, implicitly. And this is where art, music, poetry & religion take their value – from being able to embody things that normally we can’t talk about directly. If the tendency then is to dismiss them, because they can’t be talked about directly, or because this involves a narrative or a mythos or something, is to misunderstand another way of grasping reality.” 

TF      “One of the things that strikes me about that is that there seems to be the intellectual mainstream, which within its own domain is vocal & dominant, which then percolates through. When it says, ‘Oh you tell a story about it, or you make up meaning,’ seems to imply that the imagination is somehow unreal, that it’s a bolt-on extra. There’s reality, which is physics and biology – kind of, and then there’s this bolt-on extra, which is the whole realm of the imagination. Whereas it seems to me that the imagination is the most emergent level of reality. It’s the whole journey of evolution over these 13.8 billion years has led to imagination. It’s gone from hydrogen to ideas. It’s gone from matter to something not made of matter, and that realm of ideas where we’re creating stories is not a bolt-on extra. It’s actually another level. It’s not the most real exactly, but the most emergent, the latest level of reality. It’s all been leading to this.” 

IM     “I haven’t thought of imagination as something that’s a product of evolution, partly because I imagined that imagination is foundational, that it is an important part of creative consciousness, and that actually everything that exists partakes of it.”

TF      “You had mentioned purpose, and one of the key things for me which makes me want to understand this is not just what is it, but what shall I do with it?
    I’m alive. I know that I’m going to die. Life is full of joy and suffering. Does it have a purpose? Who would know anyway? And yet, it feels like we live from those purposes.
    A lot of my method, I guess, is to look at the moment, because that’s what I’ve got. And to see what’s in it. And one of the things which came from that, ‘Oh, each moment’s the realization of a new potentiality. Every moment’s new and every moment contains everything that’s ever happened before. It’s implicit within it.
    Me arriving here is implicit of our communication, the whole of the Big Bang, everything. The past is present & hasn’t gone anywhere is a very powerful idea I associate with Rupert Sheldrake. This process has been one of evolution realizing potentiality. So that the purpose of existence ... is intrinsic to the very nature of what it is, which is the continual realization of potentiality. And because of the accumulation of everything that’s happened in the past, there’s a tendency towards more & more emergent realization, so that now we can have conversation because soul has emerged, psyche has emerged, which wasn’t happening when there was just hydrogen. But that was a precursor for this. So that there seems then a very deep purpose with which we are intrinsic parts which is to continue that realization of ever deeper, more emergent potentials. And actually, I think we’re doing it right now in having this conversation, because the new potentials now are being realized in the imagination. They’re not particularly biological or physical anymore. They’re happening on this imaginary or cultural soul level.” 

IM     “Well, I want to pick up two ideas that you just raised. One is to do with meaning and the other to do with purpose, and they have something of the same structure to them.
    There’s a certain way of thinking about what meaning is. For example, I can tell you what the meaning of the instructions for how to operate a new piece of machinery I’ve got. What that means is very easy to do.
    But quite what King Lear means is another matter.
    Even more problematic is, I can say, ‘My wife means the world to me.’ And people say, ‘What does she mean then?’ And there isn’t a way you could possibly work with that. Nor does it work with great music. It seems to me that some of the most wonderful experiences, pregnant with meaning can be derived from listening to Bach – there’s no conceivable way they can be reduced to a meaning in what I would consider the left hemisphere sense, which is, ‘Come on, what’s the meaning in sentences we can analyze & understand?’ But there is another kind of meaning which we experience with the whole of our being and is more implicit and can’t be articulated because by articulating it, we reduce it, we cut bits off artificially from it, and reduce its meaning by giving it an explicit meaning.
    Now the same thing happens with purpose. When we say something has a purpose, we normally mean, ‘I can see that doing this causes that,’ and that’s an outcome that I wanted. That’s a kind of purpose, a kind of utilitarian purpose. It would seem to me that when we discover that we have no purpose, it’s that kind of purpose we discover. There is no utilitarian purpose in that sense. It’s not all designed by some engineer God to produce a certain result.
    What happens instead is that guaranteed by the fact that it is not produced to an instrumental purpose, in order to serve something outside of ourselves because the engineer is serving his own purposes. Our lives are not engineered. This universe is not engineered in that sense, but it seems to me full of purpose. And that purpose is I think, and this is where we agree, the fulfillment of potential. It’s simply in what is there potentially, becoming being. And once it’s become being, the process moves on. And that’s where you say everything that’s happened is already still there, is that something is left behind by this process but it’s also changed by the continual becoming. So even though in retrospect, it looked like this, now with further retrospect, it looks different. So the whole of everything is changing, and I would see the present moment as a something that is traveling through a medium of potential and actualizing as it goes, leaving this actual path behind it. And it’s not determined from behind by a series of steps but actually drawn towards fulfillment of purpose."

TF     “Yes, beautiful, there’s so much in there. ... so the moment right now seems to be the meeting of the past and the possible, always. And the possible is what you mean by the creative or the cosmic imagination, that kind of sense that there’s something which is giving birth to something new – doing it now, and now, and now. … It’s that journey of realization potential which seems to be fundamentally what a life is, as part of this greater journey, that ‘I am doing that.’
    John Keats said ‘the world is a vale of soul-making.’ I love that. That’s a very essential message for me. It feels like I’m making my soul, because I’m made of my past. I’m made of everything I’ve ever experienced, everything I’ve ever been. This is now who I am and I’m making myself. Or I’m being made as well. It’s not just me doing it.”

IM     “I think that remark of Keats is both beautiful and quite deep. It’s suggesting that the soul is not a being, an entity, a thing, but is instead an aspect of a process which we help to nourish or can stifle. So in our lives we can grow ourselves or we can stunt ourselves. It’s those choices that make our life what it is. So I think it’s a very good remark.
    This is where we get into the realm where language is extremely difficult, but the present is where the past and potential meet. I think it’s very difficult not to almost spatialize when talking about time, so we see two things that meet but of course they’re not two things that meet. The present is an infinitesimal moment that travels through this business, actualizing as it goes. … The Buddhist concept of emptiness is often misunderstood. We think of things in binary sort of ways, that is, there is nothing, but there is no thing there. This emptiness – the word 'sunyata' - is derived from a root that means a seed that is potential to grow, and it’s an emptiness as that of a womb that is a potential for something to grow in. And so quite often what we need to be doing is the idea of negation, which in the Western tradition just looks like the absence of something important. But negation is the stopping doing things that get between us & something that is there for us to discover. Often what we need to do in order to be creative is not to make something happen, but to create a space, in which what is already potentially there is invited to grow, to flourish & fulfill itself.”

TF      “My strange life has led me to be interested in what traditionally gets called spiritual awakening or waking up in consciousness to this presence which is completely spacious, emptiness. And I want to invite you to do two things: to mention just the essence of left vs right hemisphere dominance, and the thing I’m particularly interested in is how that or does that have anything to do with awakening or spiritual experience, because one of the things I notice is that a lot of people come to me and say 'Look I understand this all intellectually, but I don’t experience it.' 

    And one of my jobs is to help them experience it, and that’s probably what I do most. And I wonder, is that to do with being trapped in a left brain conceptual understanding and needing to free up into a more right brain understanding? For me the gnosis that arises, the deep knowing, the most central thing, which is before words. And I try then to put it into words and what I end up saying sounds very naïve & a bit child-like, ‘It’s all good really, despite everything. I know it’s awful, but it’s also good. It really is.’ It’s very childish intuitions, but they’re the deepest things I know. And I wonder is that also to do with the left brain and right brain thing, or is that something separate?”

IM      “Everyday language arose to enable us to utilize the world effectively, and we have to use special kind of language to deal with things that are not everyday realities for us because, unless we’re careful by expressing them in language we reduce them to familiar things, whereas the whole point about them is we’re trying to convey something that is unfamiliar. As Nietzsche said, ‘Words make the uncommon common,’ and what you’re talking about are things that are generally-speaking, unusual but nonetheless very deep in meaning. We wouldn’t expect them to translate easily into everyday words, so I think that everyday language is a problem for certain kinds of understanding, because it tells us that we’ve got it. It says, ‘I understand that.’ ‘I grasped it.’ Whereas, in fact what it needs to do is to abdicate that power because it’s actually a destructive process. It’s getting between us and understanding something that only by removing language we can contact, and for me as a psychiatrist, one of the things has been an understanding that people who are particularly articulate often need special help with realizing things of a deep emotional kind. This can be done by using implicit therapies rather than explicit therapies. A lot of therapy takes place in language, but there are therapies that don’t involve that, that involve either metaphors of bodily movement – of enacting things, or of painting or sculpting.
    And often city lawyers would be very reluctant to go and do these therapies, and I’d need to persuade that it didn’t matter that they had no artistic skill. But the trouble is they were so good at articulating things in everyday terms that that got between them & something which, only when they were able to adopt a more implicit approach a more oblique approach, came to life."

    I personally found it worthwhile to transcribe the entire conversation. In my next blog, I plan to continue where we just left off. Enjoy!

 Well worth deeply listening to the full 88-minute discussion:

 

Larger, More Meaningful

Lay down your money and you play your part
Everybody's got a h-h-hungry heart

Bruce Springsteen "Hungry Heart"

 

      We all hunger for something that no amount of food, drink, accomplishments, homes, cars, trips, etc can ever satisfy for long. How many who, upon reaching their career goals, with lots of money, possessions etc are completely devastated to discover that they feel even more desperately empty & hungry than ever.

 

      “… we live in a very odd historical moment: there has never been a time in the history of our species when so few of us have paid attention to the world that surrounds us. … Without attentive immersion in the larger-than-human world – the exact immersion for which we are biologically adapted – we dissolve into individual and collective malaise.” Thomas Lowe Fleischner 

“As we travel through life, we are all seekers
after something larger than ourselves…”
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer PhD

 

      “The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But… that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself — what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually perceive this frontier between what you call your self and what you call other than your self, whether that’s a person or a landscape.” David Whyte

     There are different experiences as a result of meditation practice. “There’s the progressive deepening & growing level of experience which is really a development of consciousness, which changes the way we perceive the world, which changes the way we feel reality, deal with good news or bad news, and so on. 

     And there are other moments when there’s a sudden, unexpected, beautiful flowering, eruption or manifestation. 

     But the combination of these two kinds of experience is found in meaning. What we need today, desperately, is meaning. If you go on the internet, I suppose you could get caught down a rabbit hole searching for meaning in terms of an explanation or exposure to conspiracy theories – this is the meaning of this and that.
     I have a friend who has worked with the dying for all of his medical career. And he observed of course that some people died well, and some people died painfully and in agony. And he came to realize, as others have done, that the big difference was found in the question of meaning. He’s come to the conclusion that ‘meaning’ means the experience of connection, deep connection. Ultimately, it’s not just a connection to your life’s work, or money you’ve created, or the degrees you’ve accumulated, or successes you’ve had, but the connection is with people, and with your self - your deeper self. And that’s why, when people are dying, they want to reconnect with people they’ve hurt, or people they’ve become alienated from. And this reconciliation in the last days of their lives is a liberation – a transformation of consciousness.”
     Laurence Freeman interview: https://batgap.com/laurence-freeman/

     “James Hillman has wisely observed that people come in to psychotherapy not only to relieve their painful symptoms or trace the historical roots of their traumatic woundings, but also to find an adequate biography, by which he means a story that honors the ineffable sources and soulful foundations of their own unique, irreplaceable lives. In addition to understanding the source of their injuries, and working these through with a therapist, they are looking for a new and larger narrative – the true story of their soul’s dual destiny on this earth as citizens of two realms. 

     Ironically, trauma survivors are in a unique position to claim this larger vision because they are often forced prematurely into non-ordinary reality – a spiritual and often mentalized world that helps them survive the unbearable pain of their early affect relationships. They become what James Grotstein calls ‘orphans of the wheel.’ But simultaneously … they become avatars of the ultra-real.”
     Donald Kalsched. “Trauma and the Soul. A Psycho-spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption.” Routledge, 2013.

Sherose Island Rocks!

Our Story is Incredibly Powerful

     Clinging to the story of our life & our self-concept can lock us into a single, narrow way of seeing, & behaving. This is common, easy, and sad.
     Amoda Maa invites us to a far richer, more vibrant life:

     “In awakening, we awaken out of the dream of separation, out of the dream of duality, that there is an abiding sense of peace there, and oneness, that the world disappears in that, because we come to rest in an inner space, and inner dimension of beingness that is beyond the world of form. But if that realization, that knowing, that seeing is to really be lived in our everyday lives, then it’s not about transcending the world, it’s not about avoiding the world of opposites, denying the world of duality. 
     And that’s where the questions really come in. How can I really live this truth in my everyday life when the world seems to create division, when the world still pushes & pulls and I experience the polarity of my feelings, my thoughts, my emotions? What has happened to the nondual state, that inner dimension of beingness, the formless? And do I have to keep returning to that through meditation or some kind of practice or through stillness in order to remember, in order to realign, in order for it to become the deeper, lived truth?
     If it’s to be really lived, if you are to be fully awake and fully human, then there must be a re-visiting or re-emergence into the world. There must be an inclusion of the world, which means that nonduality, nondual awareness, or nondual realization must be realized in the midst of duality. That means meeting the world as you perceive it, as you experience it, without the story of the world in it. What does that mean? 
     That means that the world that we see, this thing that we call the world, my world, the world, is not real, because everything you perceive & experience can only be seen & experienced through your own belief system, through your own conditioning. So we do not see the world as it is, but as we believe it to be. So however profound or transcendent awakening is, that does not magically erase all that conditioning, all that conditioned seeing.
     There needs to be a meeting of that, and seeing that what you see is colored by your story. The story comes in whenever we say, ‘It shouldn’t be like this;’ ‘The world shouldn’t be like this;’ ‘My experience shouldn’t be like this.’ Whenever expectation, hope, agenda, fear, come to the forefront of your experience, of your seeing of the world, of your meeting of the world – it’s those expectations, hopes, fears, shoulds & shouldn’ts that create the world of opposites, that create the divisions. The division is not in the world, the opposites are not in the world, although there is a polarity in the world of form. The opposition is in you. The division is in you. And this continues to operate even after awakening. 
     And so the invitation is to meet the world without a story, not by denying or avoiding, not by suppressing or turning away from your experience, but by being willing to meet the world in your vulnerability, as your vulnerability, to meet the world as openness, to meet the world as broken-heartedness, to watch how every vestige of self-defense or upholding the self either as special or as victim – as poor me, in response to the world you experience, is the very thing that is creating the division in you. To meet the world in your nakedness, is to allow it to break your heart open, to allow it to touch the core of vulnerability. Because when you do, the ego’s attempt even in spiritual awakening, to create a safe space at which you have arrived, where nothing can touch you, will be brought to its knees. And it needs to be brought to its knees, over and over again. It’s not about poor me. It’s not about meeting the world with the story of victim, which is a very tenacious story, in many different ways. Some people have it in the world of relationship & intimacy; some people have it in the world of work or creative expression; some people have it in the world of relationship to money, support & resources. Somewhere, each of us carries some degree of poor me. That’s the one to watch out for. To meet the world without the poor me, even in the midst of where the poor me wants to rise up, which is where we are hurt, where something touches us deeply, where we feel vulnerable, where we feel raw, where a feeling, a sensation, an energy, an experience reveals itself that we really don’t like, because it doesn’t match our idea either of how we should be – because it makes us feel not good enough, not perfect enough, not spiritual enough, not enlightened enough, not worthy enough – or our idea of how the world should be. And our idea of how the world should be is very linked to that because we want the world to show us that we are good enough, that we are lovable enough, that we are worthy enough, that we are spiritual enough, and so on. 
     That’s where division, that’s where the world of opposites continues to play itself out. So to meet the world, which is to meet your experience of the world, because there is no thing as the world out there. Everything is appearing in you, through you, as you. The world is in you, it is inseparable from you. The world is your experience, your direct experience. If your direct experience is one of division, of should or shouldn’t, of denial, suppression or upholding, then you are creating the world of division, you are creating the world of opposites. To meet the world without the story, of its should or its shouldn’t, of I need it to be this way, of I need myself to be this way or that way, is radical - it’s revolutionary. 
     Whether we’re talking about on the way to awakening, or after awakening when you have to come back down to earth and live your everyday life. It doesn’t matter which one we’re speaking of, it’s the same. It’s revolutionary. It brings an end to division in you. But it’s not a one-time affair. It’s not just a realization of that and suddenly you’re in a magical world where nothing touches you, you’re not experiencing those inner dynamics. It’s over & over again. It’s like a love affair. That intimacy is called for over & over again, in every experience, in every moment, in every interaction, in every relationship. By meeting the world in this way, by meeting your inner world, which is all there is, in this way, there is a purification of all that is divided in you. There is a purification of the world in you. And, it’s as if you start to ripen. You start to ripen like the fruit on the tree that needs the constancy of the sun cooking it up to come to its fullness, so they can naturally drop off the tree. It doesn’t have to plucked, or cut off. It naturally, at the right time, falls off the tree. It’s like a wine that takes time to mature in the barrel in order to taste good. It’s like the chickpea in the pot that needs to be boiled – to death, so they can then be absorbed & assimilated. 
     So your capacity to meet the world over & over again is the maturation process, is the ripening process. The world is not separate from you. The world is in you. Your awakening is not about removing yourself from the world, rising above the world, but by having the world totally absorbed & metabolized, metamorphosed through you into the nectar of love. It’s a love that includes all the details of your experience, but is not constrained by those details. That’s what I mean by finding or realizing or living the nondual within the dual – the nonduality within the duality. It is totally inclusive because there is nothing outside of you. But the story of you and your experience with the world is no longer wrapped around it. Because as each story wraps itself around your experience, there is separation, there is a boundary, a cloak around this experience and this experience. Suddenly you’re in the world of separation and opposition and that’s where the suffering is. Without the story it is all allowed, it all comes pouring in, you are totally given to it, you’re wide open, permeable, and the world and you become one, and that is love - love that is not conditional on your experience, not conditional on you being loving, lovable, perfect, enlightened, spiritual, successful, or anything else that you can name. This is an ongoing process - an ongoing process that is often avoided, or simply missed out because it’s not often spoken about. 
     What we speak about mostly is the awakened state, how to get there, how to experience it, how to point to it, and so on. Enough! Enough! How many times are we going to hear that? Maybe you need to hear it some more. But I want to talk about the other part, which is what I am talking about, which is the embodiment of it. Embodiment of enlightenment or awakening is not about enjoying the body; it’s not about tantra; it’s not about opening the senses; it’s not about yoga; it’s not about dancing. It can include that. Nothing is excluded from the human experience. The more we open, the more refined our experience, which then goes beyond the body. But the embodiment of enlightenment is not about that, it’s not about fixating on any of that. Of course it includes coming into our bodies, in the sense that many people live in their heads – or seem to, I mean I don’t know how you can just live in your head – that’s ridiculous, you’re still living in your body, but their experience is often cut off from the feeling in the body and so on. Of course it includes that – that’s primary. But I’m talking about something else, something a little further along the line. I’m talking about seeing every story you impose upon your experience. And it gets more & more subtle, more & more subtle. There is no arrival point that I know of where you can say, ‘It’s done.’ There may be periods of time where it feels in some way done, when there is such openness & grace. But do not rest there. Well, rest there for a while, but do not claim that as the final destination. Neither claim that as an accolade for the self. It’s very tricky. It’s very easy to fall into that. Because as soon as you claim it, as soon as you self-congratulate in that, you will be humbled, you will be brought to your knees again. It’s not a punishment, it’s grace. Because some subtle vestige of ego, which does continue to operate in human form, it doesn’t die, it transmutes, but it still has a tendency to claim its experience. We are self-reflective beings. We’re not earthworms with no capacity for self-reflection. We do have a neocortex & so on, so we can self-reflect. It is both our blessing and our curse. That’s how consciousness becomes conscious of consciousness – of itself. So it is our blessing in that sense. But it’s also that we’re constantly taking a snapshot of our experience, and it can be very subtle. So when we find ourselves at this openness, as if a river of grace is moving through us, do not believe it to be the end. Just be open. Just be humble. Just be curious. Because the human experience goes on, and on, and on, and on. And yes it gets more refined. The purification becomes more refined. And in that refinement, and in that subtlety, it can get trickier. And it requires your vigilance. Not a vigilance that comes from mind or willfulness, but from some deep, soft part of you that is given to truth, that is given to love, come what may, come what may.
     So do not avoid the world, do not avoid relationship, do not avoid work, do not avoid money, do not avoid the body, do not avoid your relationship to anything that is a part of the human experience, even if it appears unspiritual. Do not create that division. Once the wall between spiritual and unspiritual comes tumbling down, and perhaps is demolished once & for all, then life itself becomes your practice. Life itself becomes your guru. That’s not just a nice little phrase to say. I mean it! There is nothing but life that teaches you ultimately. Life is constantly, constantly offering you the opportunity to end division. Life is love, however horrific it appears to be. It does not mean that we just loose ourselves in the world of form, and re-identify with the world of form. It’s not about abandoning the inner sanctuary, the kingdom of heaven that is your true nature, that which is beyond form within you always. It’s not about abandoning that and going running back into the world and saying, ‘To hell with all that spiritual stuff. I’m just going to enjoy all this,’ or ‘I hate this,’ or whatever. It’s called being lazy. And getting lost again, and so the cycle begins. It’s about staying wide open, as the kingdom of heaven, whilst letting, allowing the world to appear in you. There’s a big difference between the world being out there & you getting lost in it, re-identified in it; or you running into the inner sanctuary & holding onto it; or sometimes running out & then running in – it’s called spiritual practice – it’s still a divided place. It’s about being open as this, which is always here, and letting it all appear in you, because it’s unavoidable, it’s going to go on appearing until you die, and then we don’t know. We’ll find out then. So that’s my invitation.”

       Amoda Maa "Meet the World Without a Story"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE2N2LrY7Po

Amoda Maa "Meet the World Without a Story"