The Heart of Christ Consciousness

by Ken Wilber

Hello, everybody, and thank all of you so much for being here with

us. I hope that this will be a really special event for all of us. I think it will

be!

Now, hopefully you all got a chance to see the paper, “INTEGRAL

CHRISTIANITY—Preliminary Overview,” which I trust wasn’t as boring as

the title. But it’s a quick summary of the Integral Framework that is the

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backbone of an Integral Christianity, and so with luck it gave you a general

understanding of just what it is that we’re trying to do here, and what you

can expect to get out of this gathering. Now before I go any further, let me

apologize for reading this. I usually don’t do that, but there are several

specific items I want to make sure that I cover, and so I’ve jotted them

down. So please bear with me on this, and again, I do apologize.

The Preliminary Overview hopefully gave you a sense of the Integral

Framework and its major elements—quadrants, levels, lines, states, and

types. And as really boring as all that can sound, I trust that you could start

to get a sense of how important those elements really are, especially when

we are creating the actual maps and guidelines that we will use to make

sense of our entire lives, maps that we will actually be using to navigate the

various territories we will run into during our stay on this planet—this is

important stuff. That paper particularly focused on quadrants, and their

simplified form as “the Big Three”—the perspectives of I, we, and it. The

paper also stressed “levels,” or the 6-to-8 major levels or structures of

Growing Up, and how this applies directly to spirituality. And it ended by

promising to walk all of us, at this gathering, through some of the more

important—some of the highest—states in the path of Waking Up, or the

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Great Liberation. And that’s what we’re going to do right now—directly

experience some of these highest states of Waking Up.

* * *

So we said that the path of Growing Up in the spiritual line was

growth in the path of a spiritual intelligence, or how we think and talk about

Spirit; whereas the path of Waking Up was a series of direct spiritual

experiences, of how we immediately experience Spirit.

If we look at these direct spiritual experiences, from the numerous

traditions throughout history, we find that there are often a very similar set

of states that are described by the world’s great meditative and

contemplative traditions. So in that Overview paper we briefly described the

6-to-8 major structures of consciousness in Growing Up, so now we’ll be

looking at the 4 or 5 major states of consciousness in Waking Up.

Structures are hidden maps and interpretive grids, like grammar, that govern

how we experience reality; and states are immediate and direct experiences

themselves.

So, for example, Tibetan Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, some forms

of Neoplatonism, and several other prominent mystical schools give 5 major

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states of consciousness, and these 5 major states become the 5 major stages

of meditation—that is, the 5 major stages of development in the practice of

meditation. So with these 5 major states, only the first and lowest one starts

out fully awake and fully in consciousness—the other 4, even though

present, are not fully realized or fully entered in Wakefulness, and that is

what happens with meditation, that’s what meditation is for.

You’ll see what I mean as I now list them—these 5 major states of

consciousness are said to be: the waking state (also called the gross state,

with its gross physical energies); the dream state (also called the subtle state,

with its many subtle energies); the deep dreamless formless state (also called

the causal state); and then turiya (which is simply Sanskrit for “the

fourth”—as in, the 4th major state of consciousness, which is what this one

is, after, of course, the first three states, the gross, subtle, and causal—and

this 4th state is said to be a state of pure Witnessing, pure Awareness, or the

pure Observing Self, the True Self or Real Self); and then the last and

highest state, turiyatita (which simply means “beyond turiya,” or “beyond

the 4th,” so…beyond the Witness, and it’s beyond the Witness because it’s

the union of the Witness with absolutely everything that is witnessed—the

total union of subject and object—resulting in a “unity consciousness” or a

“nondual awareness,” a pure Oneness. Now again, these might sound a little

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theoretical—but we’ll be doing some direct experiential exercises so that

you can experience these directly for yourself in just a moment).

So at birth, everybody is awake and aware in the first state, and so it is

specifically called “the waking state.” And the actual aim of meditation

(although in many Western approaches to meditation such as mindfulness,

this part is never really mentioned, but still) the actual aim of meditation is

to take Awareness or Wakefulness, and have it move through all 5 states—to

that state of ultimate oneness or unity consciousness or nondual Awakening

or Enlightenment. Now you can be in virtually any state and have a peak

experience of a higher state; but the real point in meditation is to

permanently move Awareness or Wakefulness through all of these states so

that all of them have entered consciousness or entered Awareness, and

deliver up their incredible secrets to your own awareness. At the very

highest state, that of nondual unity consciousness, you will realize that your

real identity is one with Spirit and one with absolutely every single thing

now arising in your awareness (in fact, one with everything in the universe).

And this state of oneness, you will also realize, you have always

actually been aware of, you just didn’t notice it. Now that sounds a little

strange, but it’s behind all the seemingly paradoxical statements of the

mystical traditions the world over about how the goal is always already

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present; that you are moving through a “gateless gate”’; that Enlightenment

is {quote} “unattainable” because you already have it; that people wishing

for spiritual realization are like people standing neck deep in water and

crying out in thirst; that your realization is a pure product of Grace (and

Grace means “no effort needed” to be saved)—in other words, there’s

nothing you yourself can do about it, it’s already given to you; your

realization is really just a recognition, a remembering of something you’ve

always known. Zen masters say they are {quote} “selling water by the

river.” It’s the true meaning of Christ’s atonement (or “at-one-ment”) which

is said to have fully removed the barrier of original sin for all humans (and

“original sin” is simply the self-contraction—that’s the first sin, and the

beginning of all other sin and separation and duality and suffering). The old

Adam introduced the self-contraction—sin and separation and fragmentation

and duality (which all humans inherited—all humans are born with the

self-contraction); and the new Adam—Christ—introduces one’s True

Nature, one’s original Face, one’s Supreme Identity with ultimate Spirit

itself, which erases original sin for everybody and is given for Free, as a

product of pure Grace.

But if we’re still under the illusion of being the self-contraction—and

it is an illusion, which means it isn’t real, it doesn’t actually exist—but if we

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imagine so, we have to undergo its death and resurrection—and that is

what’s Jesus of Nazareth himself had to do—dying on the cross to being a

mortal Jesus the Nazarene and being reborn and resurrected as his own

Christ-consciousness, timeless and eternal, spaceless and all-pervading. So

note that the Catholic church maintains—for reasons it doesn’t seem itself to

fully understand—but it maintains that all one has to do to be re-instated in

this resurrected state of oneness is undergo baptism—it doesn’t matter if the

priest performing the baptism really understands what it means, and it

doesn’t matter if the person being baptized really understands it—it works in

any event, and it works because what it is removing isn’t really there to

begin with. It can’t fail because the job is always already accomplished.

This is what Zen means by “the gateless gate”—you work really hard, you

meditate, you have your first big satori or Enlightenment experience—you

walk through that gate of Awakening—and then you turn around and look

back for the gate, and you see it isn’t there, and never was.

It’s paradoxical, but that’s only because of what has to happen in

order for Spirit to really manifest a world—in order to do so, Spirit has to

forget that it is Spirit, or else the world would still just be a self-realizing

Spirit, no real difference. For this world to really be different from Spirit in

some sense, then in the world itself Spirit has to forget that it is Spirit. It’s

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like as a child if you tried to play a game with yourself—I’m sure most of

you tried to do this at some point, maybe you tried to play checkers with

yourself. But it doesn’t really work, does it?, because you always know

what moves both players will make, because you’re playing both sides; in

order for it to really work, you would have to forget what at least one player

is doing—you would have to forget that you are you, when you play the

other side, so you wouldn’t know what moves you were making as your own

opponent, and so there would be an actual game. Same with Spirit creating

this world—in order for it to work, Spirit has to forget who and what it is,

has to forget that it is Spirit itself doing this. This is what the Eastern

traditions mean when they say the manifest universe is the lila of Spirit—

“lila” literally means play, game, sport—and in order for it to really work,

Spirit has to forget. This forgetting—this amnesia—is what “dis-members”

Spirit into a multitude of apparently separate, fragmented, isolated bits and

pieces and things; and this dis-memberment—the illusory separation or

dismembering of the One into the Many—is overcome when we

“re-member” or “re-collect”—bring back together again—our true Nature,

which is ultimate Spirit itself. This is why Christ said, in the central ritual of

all of Christianity—the communion, the eating of the body and drinking of

the blood of Jesus Christ—{quote} “Do this in re-membrance of me.”

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Re…membering..., overcoming dis-membering; or re-collection,

recollection, remembering what we once knew, and what we still are, but

forgot. Because, even though Spirit pretends to forget itself, it is still Spirit,

and it is still fully, completely, wholly present right now—how could the

Absolute actually disappear or go away? It’s play, it’s a game, it’s not real.

There is, and always will be, only Spirit. And in practical terms, that means

that you, just as you are right now, are actually one with God. Right now.

And if we don’t remember that, then it’s death and resurrection for us.

But again, the result is already guaranteed because it’s already fully

accomplished and fully present; in the Christian version, it’s fully given by

Grace, nothing you have to do. But this is the paradox of liberation, the

Catch-22 of Enlightenment—you’re already Enlightened, so seeking it just

presumes you’re not, thus pushing Enlightenment away—hence to seek to be

Enlightened is to prevent real Enlightenment—so you can have it, unless

you want it, then you can’t. As the Taoists put it, “If in the Tao [the T-A-O],

If in the Tao there is any training, the completion of that training marks the

destruction of the Tao”—in other words, there’s nothing you can do to get it,

and your very trying pushes it away (to seek Spirit absolutely assumes that

you are not now Spirit, so it just re-enforces the initial illusion—the

presumption of separation from Spirit—all spiritual seeking rests on that

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presumption—that false, illusory presumption); but, the Taoists continue, “If

there is no training in the Tao, one remains an ignoramus”—you still have to

try in order to realize the futility of all effort. As Blake said, “The fool who

persists in his folly becomes wise”—and spiritual seeking is the grandest

folly of all—it’s us seeking and chasing after what we already are right

now—it’s chasing after the chaser—it’s like running after our feet.

So if “the fool who persists in his or her folly becomes wise,” spiritual

seeking just speeds up the folly. If you think the Earth really is flat (if you

think you really aren’t Enlightened), then get in your ship and start sailing as

fast as you can, and when you realize that you are never going to fall off,

you’ll realize the Earth isn’t flat—when you realize you will NEVER attain

Spirit, you’ll realize, you’ll re-member, that you can’t attain Spirit because

you already ARE Spirit. You can’t attain Spirit just like you can’t attain

your feet.

And this all goes back to what Spirit has to do in order to create the

world of relationships and multiplicity in the first place. In order for each

sentient being to be able to play the Kosmic game of checkers, each sentient

being has to forget that it is Spirit—and so bang!... here we all are. What,

me? I’m Spirit? (You’ll directly see what this means in just a moment when

we move to those experiential exercises.)

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In the Overview paper, we saw that people like James Fowler found

that virtually everybody in their own growing up, grows up through the same

basic 6-to-8 major stages in spiritual intelligence (and again, “spiritual

intelligence” is one of the multiple intelligences or developmental lines that

move through these same 6-to-8 developmental levels. These multiple

intelligences, as most of you have heard, include things like cognitive

intelligence, emotional intelligence, moral intelligence, aesthetic

intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and so on; and as different as they all are,

they all move through these same basic 6-to-8 structures or levels of

development—in one version, archaic to magic to mythic to rational to

pluralistic to integral; and those stages can be condensed to egocentric

[archaic and magic], ethnocentric [mythic], worldcentric [rational and

pluralistic], and Kosmocentric [integral and higher]). That’s Growing Up in

any of our developmental lines, or multiple intelligences, or structure-stages

of consciousness (including the spiritual line or spiritual intelligence).

Now, in a very similar fashion regarding states and Waking Up,

researchers such as the brilliant Daniel P. Brown have found that all the

major meditation systems that they have looked at move through the same

basic 4-or-5 major states (not structures, states—structures are intelligences

or patterns of interpretation or ways of thinking about something—but states

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are direct experiences, immediate awareness—not thinking about

experience, but direct experience itself—spiritual experience, not spiritual

intelligence—Waking Up, not Growing Up. States are like the actual words

we use and experience, and structures are like the hidden grammar tying

them all together. Again, both are equally and crucially important, yet both

of these paths have never been combined and used together—ever; so what

we’re doing here is a bit of a historical first, and an important part of any

truly integral spirituality or Integral Christianity).

So back to Dan Brown and these 4-or-5 major states in Waking Up.

Dan calls moving from gross to subtle the stage of “Awareness”; moving

from subtle to causal is the stage of “Awareness itself”; moving from causal

into turiya or pure Witnessing is the stage of “boundless changeless

Awareness” (and we’ll do some experiences for that); and the last stage,

nondual unity, he calls Awakened Nondual Awareness (and we’ll do some

experiences for that). These are just examples of the standard stages (the

state-stages) in the path of Waking Up. Thus Evelyn Underhill, in her

classic book Mysticism, maintains that all mystics go through the same 4 or

5 major stages—from gross purification to subtle illumination to

causal/{slash}witnessing dark night and infinite Abyss, to final unity

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consciousness (or nondual awareness). And she found stages similar to

these in every major mystic she examined.

But remember—and this is the central point—pretty much any one of

those stages of Waking Up (gross, subtle, causal, witnessing, and unity

consciousness) can be experienced at virtually any stage of Growing Up

(magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or integral)—those two developmental

paths are relatively independent—so those two factors have to be kept firmly

in mind. Thus, we all have two different components to our spirituality—

one is the ways that we can Grow Up in spiritual intelligence, and the other

is the ways that we can Wake Up in direct spiritual experience—and they’re

both important because we will interpret our Waking Up experience

according to the stage of Growing Up we are at. That’s the crucial recent

discovery—and we’ll continue to see exactly what that means.

So it’s not enough to just become Enlightened if you’re stuck at a

mythic-literal stage of Growing Up—you’ll just be stuck in a state of

ethnocentric oneness. So both of those paths are important. We might

summarize this by saying that we want to experience our highest state of

consciousness in Waking Up (namely, nondual unity consciousness) but

from at least the worldcentric stage or higher of our Growing Up. Both of

those are crucial. In fact, the world really doesn’t need more Enlightened

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people at an ethnocentric stage—that’s not going to help. In many ways it

will hurt. We all know fairly Enlightened teachers who are nonetheless

sexist to some degree, or racist, homophobic, authoritarian, domineering

hierarchical, xenophobic, fundamentalist, sometimes power driven,

sometimes money obsessed; we’ve even recently discovered several highly

respected Zen Masters who turned out to be rampant sexual predators—all

of these represent ethnocentric or even egocentric levels of Growing Up in

various lines, even though these teachers were fully awakened to

Enlightened unity awareness and were highly acknowledged for that fact and

highly respected for it. And now, finally, we have a theory that can explain

that fairly common occurrence—and so we know we can do something

about it as well—namely, include both Growing Up and Waking Up.

This is a monumental change in our understanding of spirituality—

these two different paths. We can, for the first time, understand how

religion and spirituality can be both the greatest boon humankind has ever

known—a source of genuine love and insight and wisdom—and the greatest

cause of suffering and murder and homicide the world has ever seen. And

we can start, also for the first time, to make sure those scales tip in our favor.

This has never happened.

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So finally, let’s now walk through some of these higher states—as

direct experiences. Now the first three stages—waking, dreaming, deep

sleep—or gross, subtle, causal—are actual states of consciousness—that is,

you can enter them, stay a while, and leave, or not enter some of them at all,

at least not in consciousness. But various meditation paths work with

moving your Awareness through them so that you enter all of them in

consciousness—so that dreams become lucid dreams and deep formless

sleep becomes tacitly conscious. Now those are important, but it can take

months or even several years to do that in some cases. And in any event,

they are not the highest states to which you have access. The highest

states—and these are also the ones responsible for your Awakening or

Enlightenment or Great Liberation—are the last two states—Witnessing and

unity consciousness (turiya and turiyatita)—and those are said to be

ever-present (that “gateless gate”), which means all of us have access to

those right now. In fact, both of those states are fully present and fully

functioning—and you already know them, right now—this is indeed the

gateless gate—and you’ll see this in just a moment. So let’s have a look at

those.

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What I’m doing here are called “pointing out instructions”—I’m

merely going to point to something that is already there in your awareness,

that is already present, and I’ll keep pointing until you see it.

So let’s start with turiya, the 4th state, Witnessing awareness,

boundless changeless Awareness. (Sounds good, doesn’t it?) But start by

simply becoming aware of yourself—just, pay attention to what you call

“yourself,” notice “yourself”—and then silently begin describing yourself.

You might say to yourself, for instance, “My name is so and so, I’m this old,

I’m this tall, I weigh this much, my hair is this color, my skin is this color, I

work at this job, I have this education, I’m in relationship with so-and-so,

we’ve been together this many years, I am (or am not) married, I like these

kinds of books, these kinds of music, these kinds of movies, I enjoy sports

like basketball and football, I like shopping, especially for shoes and

handbags, my favorite vacation spot is…,” and so on and so on. But just

really become aware of this self of yours, really see it as objectively as you

can, get a good idea about what it is, feel it as intensely as you can.

But then notice that when you do that, there really are 2 different

selves involved here. The first is the self you were describing, your

everyday, conventional, object self, sometimes called the ego; in general,

your separate-self sense, the self-contraction, the self you can see and feel,

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the self you were describing. But then there is the Self—capital “S”—that is

doing the describing, doing the looking and the observing—this is the

Witness Self, the Observing Self, the pure Seer. And the pure Seer cannot

be seen—the Seer can no more see itself than a tongue could taste itself or

an eye could see itself—it’s something doing the Seeing, not something that

can be seen. So begin to feel into this Seer, this Witness. And as you do so,

notice that you won’t see anything in particular—if you see anything, that’s

just another object, another thing seen, it’s not the real Seer, the true

Witness. So what is this Seer that cannot itself be seen? What is that?

As you look for this Seer, you won’t find any specific object; all you

will start to notice is a feeling of vast Freedom, of Release, of Spaciousness,

of Openness. The attitude of the Seer or the Witness is: “I see the

mountain, but I am not the mountain. I have sensations, but I am not those

sensations. I have desires, but I am not those desires. I have feelings, but I

am not those feelings. I have thoughts, but I am not those thoughts. I am

the pure Witness, pure Awareness, the pure Seer of all of those things seen.”

You are pure Awareness, you are not any of the contents of Awareness.

You are the Seer, not anything seen. Patanjali, the founder of Yoga, said

that {quote} “Ignorance (non-Enlightenment) is the identification of the Seer

with the instruments of seeing.” And that’s right—we confuse our pure

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Seeing Awareness with some contents of Awareness, with some thing that

can be seen or heard or touched or felt. And so our pure Awareness, which

is pure infinite Freedom, slips into bondage with those things that it

identifies with. Awareness—the Witness, the Seer—is itself a vast, pure,

open, clear, empty Freedom or Spaciousness, not bound to any thing or

event, and not identified with any thing or event. It is what the mystics call

“neti, neti”—it is not this, not that.

Listen to St. Dionysius, in a sense the founder of all Christian

metaphysics—and I assure you, he means this literally—and just listen to

this—this is the very core of Christ-consciousness—he is talking about the

highest Self that is one with Spirit—that Spirit is {quote} “neither a soul, nor

a mind, nor an object of knowledge… neither is it reason, nor thought, nor is

it utterable or knowable; neither is it number, order, greatness, littleness,

equality, inequality, likeness, nor unlikeness; neither does it stand or move,

nor is it quiescent; neither has it power, nor is power, nor light; neither does

it live, nor is life; neither is it being, nor everlastingness, nor time…, nor

wisdom, nor one, nor oneness, nor divinity, nor goodness..;. nor any other

thing known to us.” Now that’s neti, neti!—not this, not that, but pure

Freedom from ALL of that.

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Now think of all the ways you described yourself at the start of this

exercise—those items are not really what you are; they are all exactly what

you are not. Those are what your ego is, not what your True Self is, or your

Highest Self or Real Self or Christ Self or Buddhanature. We are indeed

victims of a vast case of mistaken identity—we have identified our True

Self, our pure Awareness, with a bunch of little objects, things that can be

seen or known or felt or touched, and not their Seer, their real Self. And this

little self is born, and its stays a while, it suffers a lot, and then it dies. And

that’s our typical life as ego, as the self-contraction, as the separate-self

sense. And the joke is, it’s not even a real self or real subject—it’s just a

bunch of objects, of things that can be seen, it’s not a real self or subject—

you can see it as an object! Rather, Zen Master Shibayama calls the Real

Self {quote} “Absolute Subjectivity”—the pure Subject, the pure Seer, the

pure and highest Self, which is not an object, not a phenomenon, not

anything seen. Of course, technically, the mystics—and Master

Shibayama—would deny even that term (“Absolute Subjectivity”)—as soon

as we see it and think it, it’s just another object, another thing that we are

not. Rather, resting in this pure Witnessing Awareness, all that we know or

feel, to put it metaphorically, is this sense of vast Freedom, of transparent

Openness, of pure Spaciousness. “I have sensations, but am not those

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sensations; I am Free of them. I have desires but am not those desires; I am

Free of them. I have thoughts but am not those thoughts; I am Free of

them.” Pure, infinite, Freedom; the Great Liberation.

And you can probably start to see that, whether you were aware of it

or not, this Witness has always been present as whatever awareness you

had—there was this Witness already there doing the real looking—and

further, this Witness already lives in eternity. Now, to see this, we have to

get the real meaning of “eternity” first. It does not mean “living forever” or

“living in everlasting time”—it means living in a moment without time, or

living in the timeless Now. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, {quote} “If we take

eternity to mean not everlasting temporal duration but a moment without

time, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the Present.”

And the Present, the timeless Now, is the only thing the Witness

actually ever knows. We think of the past and the present and the future as

if they are all real things strung out on a line. And in order to {quote} “be

here now” or “live in the Now,” we are supposed to focus on the present

moment and not pay any attention to the past or the future. That’s actually

done quite often as a real practice. But in fact, we are always and only

aware of the Present moment, the timeless Now—we don’t have to do

anything to get in touch with it. Again, this is ALREADY accomplished.

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Just think of anything in the past. What you are actually aware of is a

thought, and that thought is occurring in the Now moment. When that past

actually occurred, it was also just a Now moment. Likewise, think of any

possible future—what you are actually aware of is a thought, and that

thought is also occurring in the present Now moment. If that future ever

occurs, it will be a real Now moment, too. The only thing that you—that

your Witness—is ever aware of is a timeless, ongoing, endless Now

moment. The Witness is always living in the Now, always living in eternity.

The timeless Now is not hard to attain, it is impossible to avoid. Eternity is

not something you’re going to discover tomorrow; it’s something you’re

already drenched in right Now, with no effort whatsoever required. What

else are you aware of but right Now?

There’s a famous Zen koan that says, “Show me your Original Face

[which means, your Real Self—your Original Self, your True Self], Show

me your Original Face, the Face you had before your parents were born.” A

Self you had before your parents were born? Now Zen means that

literally—it most definitely is not symbolic or some sort of metaphor. And

that’s all they really mean—your Real Self, this ever-present Seer or

Witness, is only aware of a timeless eternity, which exists before any

temporal stream unfolds and starts parading by in front of it. So of course

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this timeless Now exists before anything that unfolds in the linear stream of

time, including before your parents showed up in time.

This is exactly Christ’s {quote} “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Think

about that statement—that’s exactly his Original Face, isn’t it? It’s amazing,

and it’s true for each and every one of us. This present I AMness—the very

feeling of being you before you identify with something, just your pure

beingness, your pure I AMness, the simple feeling of being, right here, right

now—you’re aware of that, yes?—your simple present Awareness, whatever

it is—that simple, ever-present feeling of I AMness is the pure Seer, the true

Witness, Absolute Subjectivity, your Real Self, your Original Face, your

Buddhanature, your true Christ-consciousness. But it’s so close (as Meister

Eckhart put it, “God is closer to me than I am to myself”), but it’s so close to

us, that we quickly overlook it and start identifying with all these little finite

objects and things—this body, this thought, this possession, this desire, this

relationship—and pretty soon, all we are, are these convoluted networks of

finite objects, things, and events, and we have completely forgotten who we

are before we are anything—which is this pure I AMness, living in the

timeless, eternal Now, radically Free and totally Liberated. That is who and

what we always are—we are, that is, always a perfect Christ-consciousness,

and that consciousness is one with the reality or Spirit of this entire universe

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(“I and the Father/Mother are one”). And we have to die to an identification

with the self-contraction, or the illusion of the little seen-self, in order to be

reborn as that which we always already truly are—this pure Awareness that,

before Abraham was, I AM. (“Before Abraham was, I AM”—Can you say

that?)

There is an area of your awareness, right now, that directly realizes

this pure I AMness that is just pure I AMness, not I AM this, or I AM Ken

or John or Mary or Angie; just I AMness, not I AM a teacher, I AM a

doctor, I AM a waitress, I AM a dishwasher—just the pure simple feeling of

Being, exactly what you are aware of right now—EXACTLY what you are

aware of right now, this pure I AMness, this simple feeling of Being, before

it is anything else—before the Seer has identified with something seen—

PURE Freedom.

This I AMness is always there (just like what it is aware of, is always

the timeless Now); it’s a constant, unchanging Presence—{quote}

“boundless changeless Awareness,” right? You probably can’t remember

what you were doing at this time a week ago; but you can be sure I AMness

was there. You probably can’t remember what you were doing a month ago,

but you know I AMness was there. You likely can’t remember what you

were doing a year ago, or a decade ago…, or a century ago, or a millennium

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ago, or even before the Big Bang—but I AMness was there, because it never

enters that stream of time—it is the timeless moment, not some event in

time—there’s no before or after for it, just an endless Present. And that is

why this is the Self you had before your parents were born, before the

universe was born; this is why this Self is Unborn (meaning never entered

the stream of time), and why it is Undying (and therefore never leaving the

stream of time, either). It is your one, true, unchanging, unperturbed, True

and Real Self, your Original Face, your genuine Christ-consciousness, your

true and infinite Condition, before you went and identified it with all sorts of

dopey, small, finite, born and dying, pain-inducing, suffering-filled, itty bitty

identities—exactly what you are not. And all of those mistaken identifies

have to be literally died to on your own cross—you have to fully and

seriously let go of them, dis-identify with them, and resurrect your one,

True, ever-present, pure Spirit of the Supreme Identity, your real Being and

Supreme Self, which you have never been without, although you have tried

hard to forget it on many occasions. And you cannot attain this, any more

than you can attain your feet or acquire your lungs—you already fully

possess this and you know you are aware of this—you can only recognize it,

acknowledge it, see it when it is pointed out, and meet it with that long lost

“Aha! I know you! How could I ever have forgotten!” It’s fully present,

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100% present, right now—Spirit is looking through your eyes, hearing with

your ears, feeling with your fingers, touching with your skin, speaking with

your voice, thinking with your mind. How could you not see this right

now?!? Whatever is arising—good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, pleasure

or pain, light or dark, happy or sad—every single thing and event is arising

in your all-encompassing Field of Awareness, your perfectly accepting

Mirror-Mind, the pure I AMness that loves and welcomes it all. This is who

and what you really are. This is a real Christ-consciousness, embracing the

entire universe arising as perfectly reflected within you, with open and

loving arms.

Now I could give hundreds of quotes from the mystics around the

world about how this I AMness is one with Spirit living in eternity. But we

are truly fortunate to have with us this weekend the superb spiritual teacher

Adyashanti, who is specifically transmitted in the Zen tradition, but who also

has found a profound connection with Christianity and the Jesus story, so let

me quote from him:

When we look back over the arc of our lives, from the time we

were born to the present moment, each of us can touch upon that

intuition that there’s something about us that is unchanged.

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Throughout all of the ups and downs and changes of life, something is

now as it ever was. To touch upon this is… to experience eternity

within.

Throughout the hole trajectory from birth to childhood to

adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only

physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something

remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal

within…. When we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of

what’s the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of

divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter

and brighter in our lives.

I believe that the character and presence of Jesus has something

very important to show us in this regard—that each one of us is the

son or daughter of God…. This is the perennial mystic revelation of

awakening to our true nature, at one with the divine. The Jesus story

is a means of activating the living presence of our being, so that we

realize that each one of us is the son or daughter of the living God.

And in the Gospel of Thomas, one of the Gnostic Gospels, Christ says:

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“I am the light above everything. I am everything. Everything

came forth from me, and everything reached me.”

Now, to see this part of Christ-consciousness—the “I am everything”

and “Everything came forth from me”—we need to move on to what is said

to be an even higher state than the Witness—in fact, the highest state, that of

pure unity consciousness, or more technically, nondual awakened awareness.

This is also something ever-present but almost always overlooked. And so

let’s see if we can’t remember this.

Start by picking out an object 10 or 20 or 30 feet in front of you—a

table, a person in a chair, a computer, a picture on the wall—or if you’re

listening to this on a recording, then maybe a tree, a building, a parked car,

anything like that. Then get in the position of the pure Witness (“I have

feelings but am not those feelings; I have thoughts but am not those

thoughts”). Then focus on this object, “feel” this object; then feel the Seer,

feel the Looker, feel the Witness or Observing Self. Then slowly let the

sense… of… being… a… Looker… disappear—and let only the awareness

of the object remain (that is, just the main object and the other objects

surrounding it—let just those objects remain). Just focus on the object—

there is just the object—it is self-existing, arising on its own, existing on its

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own. Let that object fill your awareness—there is not a Looker looking at

this object, there is only this object, filling your Field of Awareness. Where

you thought the Looker or Seer was, is only this object arising. If you try to

feel your Looker or your Seer, right where that feeling used to be, you

actually find just this object, self-existing, self-arising. So the Looker

slowly disappears, and its place is fully taken by just the object (and its

surrounding objects)—those alone remain in Awareness, filling Awareness,

with no Looker of them—just the objects, self-arising, on their own. You are

completely gone, and there is just “all this” arising, moment to moment.

Douglas Harding has a wonderful exercise for realizing this, called

“on having no head.” Start by noticing that you really don’t have a head—or

anyway, you certainly can’t see your head. All you can see is two fleshy

blobs—your nose—and then a huge empty space. While you’re noticing

that empty space, if you also notice the object, you’ll see that the object is

arising right in that empty space, right where you thought your head was.

That object is actually directly in the space where you used to believe your

head was. That object is just sitting right between your shoulders, right in

the space of your head. There is not a world of objects out there and then

the world in here on this side of my face; actually, all of the world’s objects

are arising on this side of my face, right where my head used to be. All of

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those objects “out there,” in other words, are actually arising within me.

The entire universe is arising within my own being. There is no separation

between me and the world—the entire world is arising right where my head

used to be. There’s no space between what is arising and what I am—I

directly AM everything that’s arising—I AM one with everything…. It’s all

arising within me…. I am not in this room; this room is in me (is in my

awareness, on this side of my face—is directly touching me, is within me).

In other words, there are not two worlds; there is not a world out there

and a world in here; there is only one world, and it’s all arising directly

within me… touching me. This intense oneness of me and everything is

unity consciousness, and you can probably see that it is always occurring, it

is ever-present, whether we realize it or not….

Trungpa Rinpoche was asked what Enlightenment felt like. And he

replied, “The sky turns into a big blue pancake and falls on your head.”

That’s kind of funny, but it’s exactly right. The sky, which seemed to be

“out there,” is actually sitting right on your shoulders, right where your head

used to be—it’s {quote} “fallen” on your head. The sky is so close you can

taste it, you are truly one with it. Zen says {quote} “Drink the Pacific Ocean

in a single gulp”—and that’s the easiest thing in the world to do when you

and the ocean are one. The entire universe is arising within your being—and

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you are that, all of that—all of this. You’re not really a subject looking at

objects, there are just objects arising within you, moment to moment. It’s

not Subjectivity, it’s Suchness, or Thusness, or Is-ness, the pure present

Now-moment-reality as it’s arising in its pure Is-ness, its immediate

Suchness, its not-two-ness. You can stand back and Witness this moment,

but then you have to separate this single oneness-feeling of Suchness into

two feelings—the subject in here and the objects out there. But when all the

objects are arising in here, on this side of my face, within me, then there’s no

in here and no out there, there is just the moment-to-moment arising of

things as they are, things in their nondual radiant Suchness, and they are all

arising within me, and I can feel EVERYTHNG within me, just as it is—and

then there’s no within and no without, just moment-to-moment THIS-ness, a

self-feeling oneness. Not subject and object, not Self and Other, just a self-

feeling oneness, a self-existing isness.

Becoming this timeless oneness is a thing that mystical Christianity

can help us with, particularly because of its emphasis on Love. And this is

one of the things I’d particularly like to emphasize about Christianity,

including an Integral Christianity—and that is its stress on the importance of

Love. Christ said, “A new commandment I bring you—to love each other as

I have loved you.” Or the famous, “Love your enemies as yourself.”

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Because Love is simply the emotional side of the state of being one. When

we love somebody—really love them—we feel a special closeness, a unity, a

oneness, with them. Even when we say something like, “I love ice cream,”

what does that mean? It means I want to eat the ice cream—I directly want

to be one with it!

So, many people can get into the Witness or 4th state fairly easily; and

that’s good. But they often have a harder time really getting into the 5th

state, the headless, nondual, unified state of oneness. But the whole point of

describing God as Love is to emphasize that God is the power that drives

unions, that drives oneness—a drive often called Eros. The power that

drives quarks together into atoms, atoms together into molecules, molecules

together into cells, cells together into organisms… and all the way to the

human organism, where it then drives egocentric into a wider ethnocentric,

and ethnocentric into worldcentric, and worldcentric into Kosmocentric—all

driven by this universal power of Loving Oneness, or Spirit-in-action.

So you can apply this Love directly by getting in the stance of the

Witness, and then begin by starting to call the Witness (and telling yourself

that it is) {quote} “the feeling Witness”—thus, when I Witness that table,

I’m actually feeling it in awareness; it’s a feeling-awareness. So see

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everything you Witness as actually being a feeling-Witnessing. Feel

yourself actually touching everything you are Witnessing.

Then the next step: when the Witness feels an object, in reality it is

becoming one with that object—it’s a direct touching, embracing, enfolding,

enwrapping—it’s a loving/touching. So start calling it “the Loving

Witness.” Realize that everything you are seeing right now is actually

something that, in your deepest core, you Love. That’s how it gets in your

awareness in the first place—in order to be aware of it, you have to include

it, you have to embrace it, you have to enfold it—you have to Love it, in a

really primary way.

So it’s relatively easy to get into the Witness, so fine; then start

realizing that everything you are Witnessing is actually a

Loving-Witnessing. When you Witness anything—even your enemies—you

are touching it, you are embracing it in awareness, you are enwrapping it,

you are Loving it—and that’s a capital “L” love, which loves absolutely and

all-inclusively everything (including hate and fear and evil and nastiness)—

{quote} “I the Lord make the light to fall on the good and the bad alike, I the

Lord do all these things.” And likewise I, the Supreme Self and Suchness,

extend my Love to the good and the bad alike, I the True Self do all these

things.” This is often called “the Mirror-Mind”—it accepts absolutely

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everything it reflects, with no judgments, no rejections, no grasping, no

holding on.

And so this pure all-inclusive Witnessing awareness is replaced with a

pure all-inclusive Loving awareness (still Witnessing, but as it actually

dissolves into a Loving and merging with everything witnessed), a

touching/loving/oneness with everything it is aware of. And, indeed, when

you really Love something, you become one with it. You give your whole

heart and mind and body and soul to that thing—and so the Witness, which

tends to be unemotional, distancing, detached, unconcerned, slowly shifts

into a field of warm, Loving, feeling-awareness, with the entire universe

enfolded in your loving awareness, the entire universe arising WITHIN

YOU (right where your head used to be, in a pure Loving oneness).

You Are All of This, with not a single thing or process or event or

image or sensation whatsoever left out. If pain arises, pain is allowed to

arise in this Loving/oneness awareness. If thoughts arise, thoughts are

allowed to arise in this Loving/oneness awareness. If the egoic

self-contraction arises, the self-contraction is allowed to arise in this

Loving/oneness awareness. If fear arises, fear is allowed; if depression,

depression is allowed. There is nothing—not a single thing whatsoever,

anywhere, anytime—that I, the Lord, turn my back on, because in reality I

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have created every single thing and event that exists—the good and the bad

alike, the true and the false alike, pleasure and pain, happy and sad, up and

down, in and out, awakened and ignorant. My entire being is one Radiant

Field of Loving Awareness or pure Oneness—and the more things I include

in that Field, the more Loving I become—with, finally, the entire universe

arising within me—literally, the entire universe arising within my being—in

that Field of all-embracing Loving Awareness.

So we want to get into the stance of the Witness, and then realize that

everything we are Witnessing is something our Awareness is directly

touching; and to directly touch and embrace means to Love, to directly and

wholeheartedly Love. The very feeling of the Witness ever more and more

slides into a feeling of warm, overflowing, unconditional Love/oneness—the

Witness is touching everything, the Loving-Witness unconditionally Loving

everything, and in so doing, becoming directly one with everything—

literally, EVERYTHING, with not a single object, no exceptions, left out.

This suddenly recenters our whole Awareness in direct relationship with,

and oneness with, the entire Kosmos, and as I Witness all of that, then slide

into a radical Love/Unity with absolutely all of that, then my Awareness and

the entire Kosmos suddenly click into a resonant oneness, and the entire

realm of all Reality aligns itself perfectly within my own pure Being. And at

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that point, as Christ said, “It is finished.” I have become One and fully

Whole; the Kosmos has become One and Fully Whole—and they are the

same Oneness. This is a radical, unsurpassable, hallowed state of ultimate

Holiness—that is, ultimate Loving Wholeness—and the perfect deliverance

of all things and events and beings. And take off your shoes and bow in

reverence, for this is Holy Ground.

In the various spiritual Traditions, there are many supremely high

qualities that are identified with saguna Brahman—that is, Brahman with

qualities, Brahman or Spirit as it begins to manifest as this world and starts

to take on characteristics (from its pure formless unqualifiable state of

Emptiness, or nirguna Brahman). But around the world, these supremely

divine qualities have included things like Being, Consciousness,

Compassion, Bliss or Joy, Forgiveness, and Love. Love is indeed connected

primarily with the Christian tradition, and represents one of its relatively

unique contributions to the World’s Great Traditions (just as all different

schools have some sort of unique items they bring to the integral table). And

notice that Love, for example, is quite different from Compassion.

Buddhism emphasizes compassion, which is great. But compassion applies

only to things you can feel sorry for; whereas Love also embraces those

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things you can be happy about and celebrate. So if somebody loses a job,

then you can have compassion for that. But if somebody inherits a million

dollars, you don’t say, Oh, I’m so sorry, I have so much compassion for that

person. But you can love their getting the million dollars; you can also bring

a loving understanding toward their catastrophes and disasters. Love is the

all-applicable solvent for moving separation and isolation to oneness and

unity, and thus it can heal any wounds of fragmentation, isolation, and

brokenness.

Thus, Love is one of the most potent paths for moving from the

separate self to a pure Oneness and unity consciousness. And that includes

moving from the highest, subtlest form of separate self—which is the

Witness itself—moving from that to the nondual state of Suchness or pure

Thusness. So, as a practice, throughout the day, spontaneously recall the

difference between the small seen self and the Supreme Self, the pure Seer,

the true Witness, and rest as that Witness. So a move from the ego to the

Witness of the ego (and all other objects, as well). This move will allow you

to let go of, to dis-identify with, any negatives—any fear, anxiety,

depression, agitation—that you are feeling; your pure I AMness is “not this,

not that,” a pure Freedom from all phenomena.

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Then slowly start recognizing the feeling of Witnessing as being a

feeling of all-embracing, warm Love. Allow yourself to Love the world, and

absolutely everything in it, and melt into a Loving Oneness, with the entire

world, which is arising exactly where your head used to be, so that this

moment becomes not a twoness-experience—out there and in here—but just

a singleness-experience—this present moment-to-moment Thusness of

everything arising as a self-feeling oneness.

Now there are things in the world that are indeed good, and things that

are bad—and we don’t forget those distinctions, and we don’t stop operating

on them. We work to increase the good (in any form), and decrease the bad

(in any form). But now we’re talking, not about relative truth, but about

ultimate truth, absolute truth—which is the Ground of Being of everything

that exists, good and bad alike. And one of the reasons more people don’t

realize their true Being and ultimate Condition is that they can’t imagine

accepting the bad in their life. They can’t imagine a state of 100%

Acceptance, of total Loving Oneness or Singleness. They can’t imagine a

level of ultimate reality where Mother Teresa and Adolph Hitler are both

equally embraced, and both equally Loved—capital “L.” So they can’t see

an absolute Ground of All Being that is the Source, Condition, and Suchness

of every single thing and event in the entire Kosmos—and thus they can

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discover neither their own highest True Self nor the Suchness and Condition

of the entire universe. They remain locked in the realm of separation,

isolation, judgment, ranking, picking and choosing.

The oldest Zen poem in existence begins, “The perfect Way is without

difficulty, except it avoids picking and choosing.” Any choice—such as

between good and bad—means picking this thing and not that thing—and so

you’re locked out of an EVERYTHING MIND (as Chris Grosso calls it)

right in that first step. And being locked out of Everything Mind, all that

you do after that will get it wrong.

Picking and choosing is the second step we make, and it’s a very

important step—but only if we have taken the first step first correctly, and

realized—and become directly one with—the Suchness, the Is-ness, of

absolutely everything that is arising. Because everything has emerged from

some place—and it emerged from pure Source, pure Emptiness, pure

unqualifiable Spirit, pure creative Nothingness, just as the Big Bang did, just

as each moment right now does; as Schelling put it, straight out of pure

Nothing arises Something—and not just part of Something comes from

Spirit—ALL of it comes from Spirit. Where else would it come from? You

think God went, “Okay, finished Mother Teresa, good going if I say so

myself, and… Adolph?—where on earth did that guy come from? Glad I

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had nothing to do with that.” Uh-uh. It ALL comes from the ultimate

Source, Goal, and Ground of All Being—and that also means, from your

own highest Self, and your own purest Suchness, now and now and now.

And so before you start deciding what is good and what is bad, what should

be done and what should be avoided, whom you should admire and whom

you should despise—before any of that, Love it All, accept it All. It’s in

your Awareness, and anything IN your Awareness is being enfolded,

enwrapped, Loved by your primary Awareness—so step into that Love. As

Mother Teresa herself put it, “Love until it hurts.” Love your neighbors as

yourself, love your enemies as yourself, love each other as yourself, love

those chairs as yourself, love those rocks as yourself—and that’s “the love

that moves the sun and other stars.”

Think of it as the Total Painting of All That Is. Every painting has

dark and light spots, peaks and valleys, ups and downs, ins and outs. But if

we just want to be aware of the light parts, and get rid of all the dark parts—

and we actually do that—all that will be left are a bunch of light parts, and

the painting will look like a polar bear in a snow storm in the Arctic—it’s

pretty much all gone, featureless. Rather, everything—without exception—

that is arising right now is a crucial part of the Total Painting of All That

Is—the dark spots just as much as the light spots.

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Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t work to improve the world—

you should. But that’s the second step we take, the step of picking and

choosing. But the first step, the crucial step, is to be fully aware of the Total

Painting—absolutely every brush stroke, every light and dark and good and

bad and pleasant and unpleasant and up and down of the Total Painting.

Don’t turn away from anything—rule #1, Don’t turn away from anything; let

awareness cover absolutely everything that is arising.

Most of us have some thing—no matter how small—that is just too

uncomfortable, or too painful, or too embarrassing, or too frightening, or

something—and so we turn our awareness away from it; we look away,

however briefly; and thus we move away. But our job is to start by

accepting it all… and thus becoming aware of it all, aware of the Total

Painting of All That Is—no looking away, no turning away, no moving

away. Let it All in. Witness it all equally—the pure Mirror-Mind. And we

do that by realizing the Witness is already doing that—it’s already aware of

all of this—just notice that and drop into it, rest as what it is already doing.

And your second job is to then drop out of it—that is, drop the

Witness, drop the Looker, drop the sense of being a subjective Self, and

become One with the Total Painting of All That Is. It’s all arising right

where your head used to be, within you—the entire universe arising within

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your own being, your pure Loving Awareness… of pure Oneness… with the

Total Painting of All That Is. That is your ultimate Condition, your pure

Suchness or Thusness or Ground of All Being. And this is your resurrected

Awareness. Move from ego (or seen-self) to the Witnessing Self (or pure

Seer) to nondual Suchness (or the oneness of the Seer with everything

seen)—ego to Self to Suchness. And as Nagarjuna would say, Suchness is

neither self, nor not-self, nor both, nor neither… but the simple Thusness,

the naked Isness, of this timeless Present to this timeless Present to this

timeless Present, no inside or outside, just the pure Suchness of this Now

moment arising as a singleness, arising as One Taste, right where your head

used to be.

Put your mind in your heart, and let the whole world in. It’s a warm

world. But this isn’t sentimental New-Age love—that loves feelings and

hates logic and rationality, or loves sensitive people and loathes hard asses,

or loves its own view of the world and scowls at all others. If one thing is

left out of my mirror-mind Awareness, I don’t have true Love, fundamental

Love. One thing, literally, and I don’t have the Total Painting—and then I

can neither Witness the Total Painting, nor become One with it. Through

what might be called our Primordial Avoidance, we look away, we turn

away, we move away—we avoid; the self-contraction is doing this

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avoidance right now (and if you’re aware of the self-contraction, you’re

aware of this sensation of avoiding). And with this avoiding, we’ve missed

the mark, which is the original meaning of the word “sin” (“to miss the

mark”). The mark is 100% Acceptance, total Loving Oneness.

It really is like the reflections of objects in a mirror—and all of us

have been identifying with just one or two of the reflections, whereas what

we want … is to identify with the mirror itself, with the source itself. And

as long as we are not including some reflections, even just one of them, we

can’t actually fall into the real condition of the mirror. It’s truly all or

nothing. Most of the time, it’s been nothing—we have missed our true

Identity and real Condition as Source and Suchness—we have turned away,

looked away, moved away, from some item in the Total Painting. There’s

some sort of Primordial Avoidance. But now, with absolutely totally

inclusive Loving-Awareness, with 100% Acceptance of All That Is, we can

indeed include it ALL, truly ALL, right now, just as it is.

And so, right now, even if the self-contraction is involved in

Primordial Avoidance—and it is looking away, turning away, moving

away—our prior Loving Awareness can directly be aware of that

self-contraction—you can be directly aware of the self-contraction, and thus

fundamentally Free of it—and this is already happening; the self-contraction

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is simply another thing arising in the ever-present Field of Loving

Awareness of the Total Painting of All That Is. And that Loving Awareness

is indeed ever-present; it’s your own headless Awareness, your oneness

Awareness, right now, even if the self-contraction is part of the Total

Painting—let it; just be one with everything else as well. Ego to Self to

Suchness.

Pure Love means unity consciousness means EVERYTHING Mind.

Once you have slotted into that pure Oneness, then you can start making

your judgments and creating your rankings and firing up your particular

values. But do so from the Ground of ALL Being, and not just some picking

and choosing you prefer. Rather, it’s Godhead’s preferences, which means

“I the Lord make the Light to fall on the good and the bad alike,” and not

just “I, Mr. or Ms. So-and-so, make the love to fall on just this and this, and

not that or that.” That primordial avoidance keeps the world separated and

fragmented and broken, and it keeps us separated and fragmented… and

broken. Or more accurately, keeps us in the illusion that we are separated

and fragmented and broken. That gateless gate—which means fully given

by Grace (which means, no effort required at all) is the state we’re here to

remember.

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And let me repeat: the crucial step here is to recognize that, right now,

it’s already happening, all of it—exactly the way you are right now is

exactly, already it. Every single thing that is happening right now is exactly

the way it should be happening—already. You are already living precisely

in the timeless Now moment; you are living in eternity. You already have a

no-head Awareness, directly one with everything that is arising

moment-to-moment, in a state of pure Loving Oneness. There is not a single

thing—not the smallest thing—that you need to do to make any of this

happen, because it’s already actually happening. That’s the ultimate

message of the mystics worldwide. That’s exactly the sin, the illusion, that

Christ died to remove for all of us

—and by the way, it worked.

Now, let me make a brief comment about True Self, Unique Self, and

nondual Suchness. Many of you have heard of the notion (emphasized by

Marc Gafni, myself, and others) that our True Self, one with Spirit, is not a

mere no-self blank, but a Unique Self one with Spirit and one with the All.

And that’s true. Even if every one of us in this room were totally

enlightened—so that we were all deeply aware of the one True Self and pure

Spirit of the entire Kosmos, nonetheless each of us would differ in at least

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one way—all of us sitting here in this room would see this room and

everybody in it from a different angle, a different perspective, a different

view—and a view radically unique for each of us. So the only time that the

Witness, that the True Self, that I AMness is the radically same Self in all of

us is when we are in a state of formless, pure, unmanifest absorption (with

no objects or phenomena at all arising). There are no objects arising, and

thus no awareness-of anything, just pure Awareness, what the Nirvana Sutra

calls mahatman, the Great Self, the True Self. And that’s correct. But as

soon as any object arises whatsoever, as soon as any sort of world or

universe or Kosmos arises, that True Self sees that object through the

particular bodymind of each individual (via a gross, subtle, or causal body),

and thus, while perfectly remaining the True Self, it also becomes a Unique

True Self for every individual alive (or dead in the bardo, too, for that

matter). So pure I AMness, the pure Witness, the True Self, even though it

is itself, at its highest, empty of any qualities or characteristics at all, it still

has a unique perspective of and on this world. So your I AMness is both the

one and only single Spirit and Source of this entire world, AND it is an I

AMness that is uniquely yours. It’s what makes you you, this radically and

fundamentally different perspective that you and you alone have, even if it is

the one and only Spirit of the Kosmos looking through that perspective. So

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as you sit back and rest in the Witness, as you rest as I AMness, and allow

the Total Painting of All That Is to fully arise in your field of Awareness,

this pure You-ness is a radically unique You-ness that is also the one and

only Spirit of the entire world. And every sentient being can say that. So

what you have always felt inwardly as that unchanging and ultimate you-

ness is exactly this True Self, this pure I AMness, shining as your Unique

Self.

Now, when you move from turiya to turiyatita, or from the Witness to

unity consciousness, the last vestiges of feeling any sort of self-sense

completely vanish. There is not the self in here versus the world out there—

there is not even the True Self or Unique Self or Supreme Self left, standing

back and Witnessing the entire World—there is only the entire World, but

this World is felt as your own ultimate and radical identity—the Seer and the

seen become one, Self and Other become totally one, you become headless,

and the entire universe is arising within your own being. There is no sense

or feeling of a Self of any sort standing back and witnessing. There is just

the present moment in whatever realm—gross, subtle, causal, emptiness,

nondual—just that moment arising…, and it feels itself, unity experiences

unity, or more technically, nonduality experiences nonduality—subject does

not experience object, rather one taste experiences one taste. There is just all

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of this, and nobody looking at it; just it, just suchness, just isness. The Self

of any sort has collapsed into Suchness. This is not a Unique Self but a

Unique Suchness. You simply cannot find the feeling of anything like a

separate self anywhere, not even a Supreme Self or Ultimate Self. There is

not a Self looking at phenomena, there is only the sum total of all

phenomena is looking at itself, experiencing itself, and you simply feel, not

like a separate Looker or Watcher, but simply all of this as it is arising, just

like this, just as it is, just in its suchness—again, in whatever realm, one taste

experiencing one taste.

This is why, in Daniel P. Brown’s research, this stage of the

Witness—which he calls, remember, “boundless changeless awareness”—is

marked by the last remnant of illusion, which he calls “individuality,” and

that individuality vanishes when you move to next and highest stage, that of

nondual awakened awareness. You see, the Witness or Pure Self or Unique

Self is itself very subtly dualistic; it is the very beginning of the subject

versus object duality—it is Absolute Subjectivity, to be sure, but still a

Subjectivity separate from objects, a Self separate from Other, and thus

fundamentally dualistic (so it does have at least this characteristic, which is

what prevents it from being pure nirguna or unqualifiable Spirit). It is the

highest state that we can get into in this manifest realm, but it is also the last

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and highest barrier to pure nonduality, pure Thusness or Suchness or real

Spirit. Thus, any sense of selfness, even Supreme Selfness, simply vanishes

into the ongoing Present moment, which contains the entire universe within

your ultimate Being—and you do not witness any of that, you simply are

that. Self has collapsed into Suchness; turiya into turiyatita; Absolute

Subjectivity into subject-object oneness (or nonduality); pure

Self-versus-Other into pure Self-Other Oneness, which allows both Self and

Other to arise, but identifies with neither, but rather with their prior,

nondual, unifying Ground.

So this doesn’t mean the Witness—the pure Seer and True Self or

Unique Self—this doesn’t mean that is a bad thing—not at all. Remember,

it is the highest state in the entire dualistic or manifest world—and being the

Witness, or discovering your Unique Self, is certainly better than being the

ego (of the gross realm) or the soul (of the subtle realm) or the Higher Self

(of the causal realm). This is your Highest Self, an inherent radiance of God

or pure Spirit itself. It’s just that you don’t want to stop there, high as that

is. There is a further step you want to take. Zen says you’re at the top of a

100-foot flagpole, and yet you must take one more step. What do you do?

Hmmm?

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Basically, you solve this koan or riddle when you realize the next step

is already taken, it’s already done, you’ve already accomplished it. You are

always already without a head; always already one with everything that is

arising; always already living in the pure Now moment and thus always

already living in eternity; the entire universe is always already arising within

your own true Being. And you know this whenever you feel this

ever-present sense of I AMness pop into embracing and being one with the

entire world arising in front of you right now. Just bam! And you ARE this,

all of this, right here, right now, and forever, endlessly, in this timeless Now.

You’ve already stepped off the 100-foot pole.

So, how can we summarize this gateless gate situation? Several steps:

ego to Self (capital “S”) to Suchness. First, recognize the difference

between your relative conventional self, the separate-self sense, the

self-contraction, the seen self, on the one hand; and, on the other, the real

Self, the Seer, your Unique Self, the pure Witness. The pure Witness lives

in the timeless Now moment, and it is aware of the Total Painting of All

That Is. And the Total Painting means THE TOTAL PAINTING—

absolutely every single thing and event is allowed to arise, just as it is, right

now, moment to moment. And the Witness is simply aware of all of it, with

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no exceptions whatsoever—the Mirror-Mind, the Everything Mind, it turns

away from nothing, it avoids nothing, it chases after nothing. The small self,

the separate-self sense, always has something that it won’t look at—some

thing, image, sensation, event, some something that is just too painful, or too

uncomfortable, or too embarrassing, or too something, and so in this

moment it looks away, it turns away, it moves away—and it’s doing that,

right now, in some fashion—it’s contracting against something in the total

moment, right now—it’s not in a state of 100% Acceptance—and you can

feel it as the self-contraction, the seen-self—and thus contracting, it gets

caught in the world of separation, fragmentation, suffering, pain, sin, and

duality. But the Witness lets it ALL in; the Witness meets each moment

with 100% Acceptance—all-embracing Acceptance of the Total Painting of

All That Is. And you don’t have to work for this; the Witness is already

doing this, right now, all of it, perfectly—you make no effort to see all these

sights arising, you make no effort to hear all these sounds, you make no

effort to have constant sensations, it is all spontaneously and without any

effort occurring right now. All you have to do is rest as that evenly

Witnessing Awareness, which is already existing and already doing that

perfectly—it’s already happening, just notice that Witnessing and then rest

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as that—rest as that boundless, changeless, pure I AMness, the still point in

the center of the cyclone.

And the Witness can do this because the Witness is not any single

thing that it is being aware of—it is totally dis-identified with all that is—

pure nonattachment, nonseeking, nongrasping—pure boundless changeless

Awareness in radical infinite Freedom. The Seer cannot be seen, and

anything seen is not the Seer. The Seer, the Witness, is neti, neti—not this,

not that. Remember the quote from St. Dionysius: it is not Spirit, it is not

demonic, it is not good, it’s not bad; it’s not divine, not sacred, it’s not

profane, either; it’s not knowable or unknowable, not high or low, in or out,

light or dark, not utterable nor nonutterable, not anything that can be known

or seen or felt or touched, it’s not awakened nor ignorant, it’s not big nor

small, heavy nor light, not all-pervading, not timeless, not infinite, not

eternal—it’s none of those, and it’s not their absence, either—it’s radically,

radically unqualifiable—and that means, nothing can be said about it—

including that statement.

This is why resting in the Witness is called by Christian mystics

{quote} “the cloud of unknowing”—it’s a pure Witnessing free of all

identification with anything arising (but technically, that statement, too,

would be denied); St. Dionysius called it {quote} “divine ignorance”; Zen

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calls it “don’t know mind.” The entire Buddhist notion of Emptiness is built

on this. As the founder of that school of Buddhism, the philosopher-sage

genius Nagarjuna, put it, “You cannot say that Reality is Being, nor Not-

Being, nor both, nor neither”—and for “Being” you could say “spirit” or

“Gaia” or “Self” or “implicate order” or “oneness” or “unity consciousness”

or “infinite” or “eternal”—it is not any of those, nor not those, nor both, nor

neither. You get the radically nothingness of it? It is radically Empty of all

qualities (including that one). Your own pure Witnessing right now is empty

of all of those—the Witnessing itself. All of those are concepts, and

concepts only make sense in terms of their opposites—infinite vs. finite,

sacred vs. profane, enlightened vs. ignorant, formless vs. form, spirit vs.

matter—but Reality has no opposite. As Wittgenstein put it, it cannot be

said, but it can be shown. That is, you cannot define or conceptualize or

think or categorize ultimate Reality, but you can directly realize it or

immediately experience it. And that is what practices, like these pointing

out instructions, are meant to do—directly point to that which cannot be

characterized without falling into dualism, which is exactly what it is not—

although that, too, would be denied as a mere statement, and becomes true

only when you directly experience it with pure mirror-mind Awareness.

(And even “experience” is not a great word for this, because all experience

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has a beginning and an end, and usually a subject and an object, and this

Realization has none of that.)

The closest you can get to this pure Seer or true Witness or Real Self

is metaphorically saying that it is simply a feeling of radical Freedom from

everything, a pure Spaciousness or pure Presence in which everything arises

moment to moment, with not a single thing left out, or turned away from, or

moved away from, or looked away from—a 100% Acceptance of the Total

Painting of All That Is, exactly as it is arising right now, and right now, and

right now. But that is not true as a mere statement—even though it is trying

to point beyond dualism, it is itself just a bunch of dualistic concepts. So it

becomes real only when directly experienced or directly realized—beyond

any mere words—by directly resting in this Witnessing Awareness itself (do

that, and you know what it is; describe that, and it’s just mere words). But

then, this spiritual experience is like any experience—all experience, not just

spiritual experience, but ALL experience is ineffable: no experience is

describable in words—listening to Bach music, eating a piece of cake,

watching a sunset, making love, jogging through the park—none of those

can perfectly be described in words, so why should spiritual experience be

any different? So all of the words we use to describe these states are just

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pointers, feeble attempts to point to the moon—just don’t mistake the finger

for the moon.

So falling into the Witness or pure I AMness is metaphorically also

called the Great Liberation; or Moksha—Freedom. It is to directly discover

and fully realize your Unique Self, which is Unborn and Undying Real

Self—unborn, because it never enters the stream of time but exists only in

the timeless Now; and Undying, because having never entered the stream of

time, it never exits, either—it is neither born nor dies in time. It is rather

ever-present—it is the simple feeling of Being that you have right now, the

simple feeling of I AMness that is perfectly present right now, moment to

moment to moment—and you don’t have to do a thing to gain that I

AMness, that simple feeling of Presence that you are perfectly aware of right

now—perfectly. You’re aware of this right now, yes? And this I AMness—

Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I AM”; or the Psalms, “Be still and know

that I AM God”; or when God itself said “Tell them I-AM-that-I-AM has

sent you.” That simple feeling of ever-present I AMness—that immediate—

that absolutely present right now—feeling is indeed said to be one’s

Supreme Identity, an Identity with pure Spirit itself, so that it is, ultimately,

God itself who is looking through your eyes right now, and hearing with

your ears, and touching with your skin. Pure, spaceless or infinite, timeless

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or eternal, true and unblemished Spirit—as a direct realization, not

conceptualization and not even as a typical experience, which has a

beginning in time—this realization is something that is already in your

awareness right now and always has been—a realization that occurs when

you rest as the radically pure Witness, the pure Seer, which cannot be seen

but is doing the Seeing, and is… itself… --that pure Witnessing itself—is not

a thing or event or known or unknown entity, but (metaphorically) the pure

empty Space, the pure Freedom, the pure Awareness in which all of those

items arise—in which the entire world is arising right now—you are that

pure mirror-mind Awareness, and not a single content of that Awareness.

The pure, clear, empty, open, spacious, infinite Expanse, Freedom, or

Spaciousness in which this entire world is arising—the pure, boundless,

changeless, unforced, effortless, transparent I AMness or pure Witness,

radically Free of absolutely Everything—just a pure open empty

Spaciousness or Awareness in which all of this is arising moment to

moment. The first step—from ego to Self—is recognizing and realizing

that. And welcome to your True Self, your Unique Self.

Then the next step of this “gateless gate”—moving from Self to

Suchness—is, while resting in the pure Witness or pure Looker, allow the

feeling of being a set-apart Looker-at-things to simply dissolve into ALL of

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those things. There is not a world out there and a world in here—there is

just one world, and it is arising on this side of your face, within you, exactly

where your head used to be. The reason you are not any single thing or

event in the universe—neti, neti—is because you are every single thing and

event in the universe, equally. You are the ENTIRE world. You are not

only aware of, you are one with, the Total Painting of All That Is. You don’t

see the mountain, you are the mountain. You don’t hear the rain, you are the

rain. You don’t watch the clouds, you are the clouds. You don’t feel the

earth, you are the earth. You certainly are not in this room, this room is in

you. (See that?)

You are the simple Suchness or Thusness or Isness of everything

arising in this moment, everything without any exceptions at all. And this

means that primary level of reality where every single thing and event in the

universe is equally accepted and allowed—from Mother Teresa to Adolph

Hitler to the KKK to the neo-Nazis to Jesus Christ to Gautama Buddha to

Joseph Stalin—the Ground of All Being is the Ground of ALL Being. So

you dissolve into the entire universe as the entire universe arises within you,

on this side of your face, exactly where your head used to be, and there is no

separation between you and the entire world—you can taste the sky, it is that

close; you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, it’s sitting on your

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shoulders. There is no separation, no space, between the Seer and the

seen—the sky has turned into a big blue pancake and fallen on your head.

You ARE ALL of this—the Total Painting of All That Is—and when you

feel yourself, on this deepest level, that is all that you really feel—namely,

ALL of This. This is your real Self and true Suchness. It includes your ego;

it just also includes everything else that’s arising, no distinction. “The

Perfect Way is without difficulty, except it avoids picking and choosing.”

And a wonderful connecting link between the Witness and this state

of unity consciousness is Love, pure Loving Oneness. So as you are resting

as the Witness, letting in the Total Painting of All That Is, radically

Accepting 100% of everything that is arising right now—then feel that

Witnessing Awareness as a Loving Awareness, a Loving Oneness. The

distancing of the Witness is replaced with the intimacy of a One Taste, an

all-pervading taste of Loving Oneness. Allow yourself to Love it all, “the

love that moves the sun and other stars.”

Zen calls this shift {quote} “the bottom of the bucket breaks”—

because the sense of there being a “bottom” or a “back” to your

Awareness—that is, the sense of there being a Looker, a Watcher, a

Witness—just collapses into everything witnessed, the bottom breaks into a

pure Oneness, a pure nondual unity consciousness. If you feel into this

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carefully, wherever you think there is a Looker, there is simply something

being looked at—and then the entire sense of there being a subject and an

object collapses into One Taste. Wherever you think there is a subject,

including an Absolute Subject, there is just a series of objects, and you ARE

those objects, they are arising within you; you and them are one, a pure

loving oneness.

And this Loving Oneness is unfolding in this timeless Now, to this

timeless Now, to this timeless Now. As Erwin Schroedinger, the cofounder

of modern quantum mechanics, put it, “The Present is the only thing that has

no end.” The entire universe is arising within you in a timeless eternity—

and this is your Ultimate Condition and true Suchness.

So, is the “gateless gate” really there? Yes and no. Yes, there is a

gate, in the relative sense that, even though you are always already this

Loving Eternal Oneness, you can indeed, in an illusory fashion, forget this,

or deny it, or ignore it. And therefore, as the Taoists put it, “If there is no

training at all, then one remains an ignoramus.” In almost all cases, each of

us needs at least some pointing out instructions, some spiritual practice, in

order to re-member and re-cognize and re-collect our True Condition. But

one of the first things that we see when we finally walk through this gateless

gate is that the gate isn’t really there—in reality, we were always living in

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this state of eternal Oneness, and our Awareness was always only aware of

the timeless Now and that True Condition. The illusory world, as illusion,

never really happened—even though we dreamt, imagined, that it did—

which is actually, and simply, what Spirit itself did in order to create this

manifest universe in the first place. It had to forget that it was Spirit, even

though, of course, it actually remained Spirit and the forgetting was just a

dream, just an illusion, just a game.

Imagine you were pure Consciousness—you were 100% conscious 24

hours a day, and one of your days was a thousand ordinary years. After

billions and billions of years of that, maybe you get a little tired of that, yes?

So you might decide, “I know, I’ll drop this constant Consciousness, and I’ll

pass out—I’ll fall asleep, I’ll dream entirely different worlds, and I won’t

know it’s me doing it until I wake up.” And so you fall asleep, and sleep for

8 hours, and in that dream state you have some wonderful experiences and

sometimes some really frightening experiences. You wake up, and you’re

like, “Wow, that was wild. It was certainly different! I’m going to do that

again.” And so you each night for many years you sleep, and you dream.

Sometimes you dream of wonderful events—having fame or fortune or

being in orgies or traveling various worlds; and sometimes the events are

horrible—people starving, being tortured and killed, their bodies ravaged by

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unspeakable illnesses and endless suffering. But the waking-up part is so

good, you keep doing it. And then finally one day you make a huge

decision. Instead of going to sleep for just 8 hours, you’ll go to sleep and…

you won’t put an end-limit on how long you sleep. And…. here we all are.

Dreaming away….

But this is why the stories of the realized God-men or God-women

throughout history are always so paradoxical. I mean, doesn’t it strike you

as just a little funny that, if Christ is the one and only Son of God, there is

actually ever any doubt that things will turn out okay for him? And this is

particularly a weird situation if you are a fundamentalist Christian, and only

Jesus is allowed to be the Son of God. Your job, as a believing Christian, is

to follow Jesus’s example as perfectly as possible, but you don’t get to be

the Son or Daughter of God—you’re just you, yet you’re supposed to act

exactly like somebody whose Dad was the Father of the entire universe. It’s

crazy, it’s insane—as many fundamentalists are. But the mystics are

virtually unanimous that the real message of Jesus is that we are ALL the

sons and daughters of God—as Meister Echkart put it, “The Father gives

birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth—me, his

Son and the same Son.” The same Christ-consciousness, exactly. But it’s

all a joke, it’s a game, it’s an illusion. Ultimately, the gateless gate isn’t

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there—but we can only see that by passing through the illusion of the gate to

begin with. Christ, the Son of God, still had to die on the cross. Could that

be any grosser, or any more telling?

So that’s the paradox of liberation. In reality, we are always already

liberated, but we have managed to get in a position where that is not totally

obvious to us, and thus, even though {quote} “if there is any training in the

Tao, the completion of that training marks the destruction of the Tao,”

nonetheless, {quote} “if there is no training, one remains an ignoramus.”

So the final word is: work hard as hard as you can in order to

accomplish something that does not need to be done. And I hope these

pointing out instructions have helped you, at least a little bit, along that

unnecessary journey. A journey whose goal is too simple to believe, too

close to be grasped, too present to be accomplished, too Now to be attained.

Okay, it’s time for me to begin winding this down. And you all have

been great to hang in there for all of this. I really hope it hasn’t been too

dreary. There’s only one last point I’d like to make. We’ve briefly

discussed it earlier, but I’d like to end with it. It’s not enough merely to be

traditionally Enlightened or to have reached a stable nondual unity

consciousness—although that Waking Up is clearly absolutely important.

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But think back—when you were in your headless nondual unity state (the

highest state-stage development in Waking Up)—or if you’re still in it—

simply notice that you can be at almost any level of structure-stage

development (that is, any level of Growing Up)—you could be in that

headless unity state and be at magic, or mythic, or rational, or pluralistic, or

integral—and yet you would still have this sense of being one with your

world. But again, if your world only included up to, say, mythic-literal,

there are still “over your head” the entire realms of the rational world, the

pluralistic world, the integral world and higher. You will remain

ethnocentric, and thus actually of limited help with the wicked problems of

human solidarity, ending war, joining into group harmony, acting on global

issues including global warming, global poverty, global epidemics, and other

worldcentric problems, as well as advancing genuine world peace across the

board—you might, in fact, attempt to prevent some of them, because they

help everybody and not just your group or sex or race or belief system or

nationality or particular spiritual path. Enlightenment on its own does not

help—it must be accompanied by increased levels of development in

Growing Up. Love of course is central—but there is egocentric love,

ethnocentric love (Nazis loved their families), worldcentric love, and

Kosmocentric love. Just saying, “All you need is love” is categorically

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useless and often just wrong. Just how inclusive you can be depends on

your level of Growing Up, not just Waking Up. The unity consciousness

itself depends on Waking Up; just how many are in the unity depends on

Growing Up. Waking Up is given to us, free and ever-present, and we

should never forget that or proceed without that realization; but Growing Up

we have to work for—and we shouldn’t forget that, either. States are free;

structures are earned.

Both of those are crucial—and this is certainly a major item we would

want to leave you with from this exquisite gathering of integral souls,

looking at Christianity. Christianity is now the world’s largest religion—as

we noted, 1 out of 3 people on the planet buy some version of this religion

(and usually, of course, it’s a mythic-literal version). But this is one of the

single most important points that individuals, concerned with how to help

the world move forward, should put right at the top of their list of important

items. Because we can certainly say that without getting the major Great

Religious Traditions into a place where they can help implement the

conveyor belt (from egocentric to ethnocentric, and then beyond that to

worldcentric and Kosmocentric), then whether they are actually helping or

actually hurting humanity can be answered in a not very positive fashion,

I’m afraid to say.

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This gives individuals—who want to see spirituality play a genuine

role in the coming transformation—this gives them a real course of action

that might actually make a real difference. But without acting from this

more integral and inclusive view—including both Waking Up and Growing

Up—then the deeply ambivalent, even harmful, impact of religion on the

world remains most likely. In its ethnocentric and lower forms, religion has

indeed been—and remains—the greatest source of war, torture, and murder

in humankind’s history; it’s time to help move it to those levels where it can

become what it has always been to its greatest saints and sages—the single

strongest source of an infinite, radiant, all-embracing Awareness,

Consciousness, and Love, the love that really does move the sun and other

stars. “Let this consciousness be in you that was in Christ Jesus, that we all

may be one….” Now, finally, with Integral Spirituality, we have a much

better idea of how to do that….

Thank you!