I had my Zen phase for six or eight months in my late teens, and I remember thinking it sounded like great fun to run around in a robe, gazing into students’ eyes and saying dynamically soul-jarring remarks to awaken them. Wilber isn’t fun, at least in his books. I’m a magician of sorts now, which means I get to wear a robe quite often, though I don’t often find I have soul-jarring remarks to offer. But robes, and doing ceremonies in robes, is cool, so I don’t mind.
Wilber claims he has had experiences of kensho or Zen-style awakening more than a dozen times in his life. Browsing online about his career recently, I came across a reference to the fact he had lost the condition of non-dual consciousness thus attained for some months, after being laid up with a staphylococcus infection a few years ago.
My reading this happened to coincide with one of those 1.35-second openings that come once in a while, when I get some sort of awareness of the immense, light-filled Openness all around me, in which I am simply one phenomenon among myriads. It’s really cool, and I wish I could get it to last … well, 5.31 seconds would be good to start with. But to do that, I would have to take charge again, and the moment that ego-formulation moves back in, my 1.35 seconds seem to be up.
What did strike me (as it has before) was that the experience was of something that is perpetually existent. “I” as in “me, myself” is something with an expiry date at some point in the next 30 years or so, while this light-field is immeasurable. I admit that, as a result, I don’t any longer have a deep fear of death that seems to haunt many people. I fear decrepitude: immobility, blindness, memory loss, chronic pain, dementia or any of the other indignities old age brings that could prevent me being mobile, curious and creative for years to come, but the actual check-out looks no worse than waking up on a wet Monday morning, but in reverse.
Now Wilber, interestingly, was spiritually impoverished by his illness. That got me considering just how subjective these mystical or near-mystical states are. To quote one Chad Bagley commenting to Salon magazine about a recent Wilber article it ran:
"But what he's really getting at is that he is having feelings and sensations that he really can't put a finger on and therefore must be "mystical" in some way. Does it ever occur to these purveyors of woo-woo that the feeling they may be having are the result of chemicals running around in their brains?..... Wilber, like so many other new age gurus, likes to dress his touchy feely claptrap up in rational and scientific cloths. But hey, hogwash is hogwash by any other name."
Now, I imagine the idea of delinquent brain chemicals has indeed occurred to Wilber many times, while Mr. Bagley has likely not experienced kensho or even the sort of experience I’m claiming. Wilber spent years in strict training to produce his awakenings, and nobody does that without going through tortures of doubt and self-accusation.
But is it just “chemicals running around” in our brains? Since the contrary cannot be proved, and brainwaves on an EEG chart only indicate brain activity, not the sources of the experiences themselves, we can chase this tail with our teeth for a lifetime.
The fact remains that these experiences have effects on our thought processes that are hardly detrimental. To be made more aware, more appreciative of life and less afraid hardly seems to me to be a step backwards. Sure, it can be if the ego reasserts its control so much that we go off and start a cult based on our own occasional insights, but since I don’t have the ambition to do that (even if, according to some critics, Wilber does), I’m not considering it here.
What does seem to be the crucial psychological condition is an ability to hold this deeper or higher awareness in everyday consciousness. While becoming that light-plenum might be the end goal, even the most enlightened humans probably can only sustain a relationship to it most of the time, not a perfect union. When the physical organism is knocked out by serious illness, plaque-ridden blood vessels in the brain or other physical detriments, it cannot sustain the link, and it’s lost, or seems lost. Wilber, it seems, regained his: I still hope to establish a deep and lasting one for myself.
But, given the arguable nature of any scientific evidence, I’m going to stick with what I have felt during personal experience, and assert that this Openness, this transpersonal All-Whatnot, exists beyond anything I could call my own brain or body or even my own dividual consciousness (assuming that’s truly a separate thing to my physical neural net). My brain/mind fluctuates incessantly, but this is supremely stable. At the very least, I find the All-Whatnot can be much better appreciated without my trying to reduce it to the known or the comprehended. It seems to insist on being treated as “other” before it can experienced as a Oneness that is Nothing.
In that, it resembles a human lover who wants to be respected before yielding. Which brings this notion close to what has, shyly, been a core belief of mine since my first opening at age 20: that the universe is literally love, and so-called enlightenment is the full appreciation of this fact.
I cannot prove it. Yet it appears the All-Whatnot wants to prove this to me itself.