Is It the Forest or the Trees

The ever increasing degree of specialization in human collective knowledge has resulted in a level of detail that is beyond the comprehension of any one individual. The great early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrödinger lamented this high degree of specialization in his preface to ‘What Is Life?’ as follows:

 
We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity to and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. 

Erwin Schrödinger 'What Is Life?' 1944

The 70+ years since this publication have seen the volumes of human knowledge increased by many orders of magnitude, but a clear understanding of the All-That-Is remains a mystery.  Perhaps even more of a mystery, now that it is buried in all this newly discovered detail.  What is really need to 'welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole'.

Some are convinced that the whole can only be understood by understanding all the parts. For the All-That-Is, understanding all the parts to understand the whole is beyond the range of human understanding.

There is a commonly understood notion that someone can become so involved in the details of a particular problem that they lose sight of the broader situation as a whole. In so doing, the big picture view of this more general situation is lost in the mass of details. By analogy, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Such is certainly the case in the search for the ultimate truth.

Take for example an actual forest, the level of detail to be considered is very considerable. There is botany for the plants, and zoology for the animals. There are matters of geology and hydrology in addition to climate and . Science has long since recognized this dilemma for real forest, and they have created a higher level of study that extracts bits and pieces from these other masses of detail to create ecology.

The unimaginable levels of detail are much like the Sirens described in Greek mythology who with their enchanting music lured passing sailors to shipwreck on their rocky island. There is something similarly enticing about these extreme levels of detail that many seekers of truth cannot resist. They are lured by them into an inescapable, complex collection of information that smothers and ultimately consumes them.

Resist the alluring temptation of the incredible layers of detail.

Evolution in Western Religious Thought

There has been some historical intellectual consideration of the root source of all things and the possibility of some intelligent creator throughout the course of all humanity, but to connect with any type of unbiased serious intellectual consideration, one has to find a time prior to the corrupting influence of all the politically inspired religions hat have been created along the way. To reach this point of intellectual consideration, one has to look way back to a time when all this hype and hyperbole were not so extreme. In Western thinking, most of this clear consideration goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks, but a few things such as panpsychism actually preceded even that.

Thales of Miletus in the tradition of panpsychism was one of the first to explain the vast diversity in nature as deriving from a single ultimate substance instead of the more traditional use of imagination driven mythological devices. Later, Anaxagoras presented the concept of a universal mind in which he proposed the power of this mind in organisms that enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. Anaxagoras’ concept of mind (nous) and awareness (gnó̱si̱) were believed to be more widely distributed than just humans. He felt that all living things exhibited these characteristics in their interactions with their surroundings, and he further speculated this primal substance of consciousness existed in both animate and inanimate things.

During the first and second century CE, a variety of ancient religious and philosophical ideas began to be fused together under the modern name of gnosticism. Gnosticism is the conflation of ideas from various Greek philosophers steeped in the belief of panpsychism and the emerging teachings of Jesus. The fundamental tenet of all these various flavors of gnosticism is that a person in this material world exists as a divine spark trapped in the human body that can only be liberated by gnosis (aka spiritual knowledge) acquired through direct experience. In gnosticism, one achieves salvation by acquiring correct gnosis (knowledge).

Later, the Christian religion evolution took a radical departure from its original gnostic approach after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity. The influence of Constantine refocused the religion away from spiritual revelation of knowledge to something much more politically expedient for him. In this more political approach, follower were aggressively ‘marketed’ into a religion where the faithful were forced to believe what they were told. This new dogma shifted from the individual focus on peace, love, and knowledge to something more conducive to the accumulation of power, control, and wealth by the church and its administrators.

The point where this power shifting dogma occurred is where everything suddenly gets way more complicated. Up until this point, everyone was free to consider the topic of a conscious creator without worrying about infringement on someone’s intellectual property rights to the Divine. Before this Christian self-proclamation as the only access point to knowledge about the conscious creator, no one owned sole source access to the creator being. Needless to say, consideration of the topic got weird at this point, and these notions about a creator took a turn for the worse.

The intellectual openness of the Enlightenment undermined the oppressive authority of monarchies and the Christian church and paved the way for the political and religious revolutions to come. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, and constitutional government wherein the church and state are separated.

Also during this Enlightenment, a new religious philosophical position of Deism emerged that rejected this Christian revelation as a source of all religious knowledge and asserted that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a conscious creator of the Universe. In something of a return to the original Christian gnosticism, Deists believed answering the question about the existence of a conscious creator can be based on reason and ordinary experience of nature which they in turn called natural theology.

Deist philosophers were not the only ones to reject the Christian revelation as a source of knowledge and to appeal only to the truths that could be established by reason alone. Beyond deism, many others became so disenchanted with this oppressive Christian revelation rhetoric that they became full fledged intellectual deniers. They resist any possibility that such a creator might exist even in the face of certain things that defied their materialistic view of reality such as their very own mysterious consciousness.

In Search of the Ultimate Truth

The concept of an ultimate truth that explains all the happenings in our world and more importantly in our lives is a very intriguing possibility.  Its existence is a mythology to most, but some few get so caught up in this intrigue that they spend their whole lives in search of this wonderful possibility. 

In eastern culture, there is a very specific concept for which there was no direct parallel in western culture. This concept is the belief that there exists a state of human consciousness that transcends suffering and longing and enables the liberation from the cycle of rebirth and death of the individual who attains this level of consciousness.

 Eastern cultures have words like nirvana, moksha, or satori that accurately expressed this concept.  In the English, language this concept was initially translated to the word enlightenment. Today, nirvana has been assimilated into the English lexicon, but the earlier association of this concept to the English word enlightenment has stuck. 

This association by translation has over time actually endowed the word enlightenment with all these higher meanings from these eastern words to the point that it is frequently used to denote these spiritual concepts without further qualification. In the context of this discussion, enlightenment is considered very specifically to be the development of a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of one’s Self (i.e. who/what you are) and the reality surrounding that Self (i.e. what it is and how you relate to it) to the point that one attains this liberation. 

 As human beings, we are self-awareness and have the ability to think, reason, and feel great passion about things. By virtue of these two things, we are able to experience great pleasure and happiness, or conversely, they can also cause us to feel great pain and sorrow. In our lives, we attempt to string together a series of events that optimizes the pleasure and happiness experiences over those that bring pain and sorrow, but this simple life mission proves to be extremely difficult for most of us. 

Most would agree that the gift of life is a great blessing. It is also a compelling mystery whose true meaning appears to be very difficult to understand, but the meaning of life is not really hidden from us. We make it difficult to understand by virtue of the many veils of illusion that we create for ourselves in the form of the many things that we choose to believe about our individual reality. 

We have no choice in this matter of belief. Everyone has to believe some things, but this simple process of believing is a lot harder than it seems. A belief that is assumed correctly with all due diligence and care will eventually evolve into something that is known dispelling the illusion of mystery, but much more commonly an incorrect belief is casually adopted that only creates illusion and the appearance of greater mystery. 

It takes great patience and much thought to decipher the real truth about life from the information that is available to us, but it is worth the effort for it is this Truth that will truly set you free. This collection of thoughts across these blog posts offers some critical observations relevant to some key questions in the life experience. These thoughts are being humbly offered to all fellow seekers of this ultimate Truth for their consideration and independent verification as we are all here just looking for something credible to believe.

Homegrown Enlightenment: Universal Truth

The world in which we live is filled with all sorts of natural distractions. Driven by our inherent thirst for happiness, we plunge headlong into all these distractions hoping somehow to emerge with a sense of contentment that never seems to fully develop. We are trapped in our recurring cycle of desire/action/impression that loops unceasingly on and on as we try to content ourselves with these worldly delights without ever finding a lasting peace.

In stark contrast, Eastern philosophies describe a special sense of contentment as an enlightened state of mind that can only be reached with the regular and prolonged practice of correct meditative techniques. They consider the human conscious experience to be an ongoing journey of self-discovery to very specifically achieve this state of enlightenment, and various visiting Eastern mystics have intrigued some Western aspirants with claims that these same Eastern techniques can be integrated into a Western lifestyle.

After 50 years of focused practice of these Eastern conscious technologies, this Homegrown Enlightenment series is a findings report of how these practices have reshaped my Western perspective of reality and overall understanding of the human conscious experience. Universal Truth introduces the concept of a human conscious experience derived from this Eastern perspective.

Central to this understanding is an elaboration of the concept of truth based on the Eastern Doctrine of Two Truths. The first truth is the relative sense of personal truth that we use to conduct the affairs of our lives. A key component in our personal truth are those placeholder things that we believe to be true. These things believed carry an uncertain burden that can become the source of the illusions and personal bondage that obstruct our personal freedom. The other truth is the Universal Truth that explains the never-changing absolute mysterious foundation that exists as the source of all things.

This book exposes a reality perspective that sets the stage for the further discovery of this Universal Truth that can actually set someone free. 

 

Click to preview book.

 

Homegrown Enlightenment

 

For most of these Western converts, the practice of these techniques was a fashionable at the time trend that quickly faded from their interest. For some others, practice of these techniques would become a passion that would persist for the rest of their lives. This dedicated few who were left in the wake of these visiting Eastern gurus did not withdraw from their active lifestyles to undertake their spiritual journeys. These seekers on their own custom tailored their Western lifestyle to incorporate as much of the Eastern knowledge and the practice of these techniques as possible.  

These individual efforts were largely at the discretion of their own personal intuition and their personal drive and desire to be enlightened. These custom tailored execution strategies would ultimately became something of a personal homegrown enlightenment experiment for each of these many independent seekers that was orchestrated and executed separately by each individual. These homegrown enlightenment experiments were cobbled together to address the personal challenges and dilemmas that are inherent in this process of pursuing enlightenment for that individual without the direct support of a guru.

These Western orphaned seekers found themselves left largely in charge of the logistics and tactics to be used in the execution of these strategic techniques and knowledge in the context of their Western lifestyles. Each individual seeker used their personal intuition as a guide in lieu of learned elders to address current and anticipate future requirements to facilitate their effort, but more importantly, they became responsible for the interpretation of the results of all this effort which would become the biggest challenge for the homegrown efforts.

My Personal Experience

My lifelong path of meditation and self study was set in motion when in deference to several tenets of my Western upbringing, I was formally introduced to the technique of meditation and became one of these Western seeker orphans. Formally introduced means instructed properly in the context of an initiation puja, and not just casually informed by some passing acquaintance to sit quietly and think of nothing.

The effect of this meditative transcendental consciousness on me was immediate from the first moment of repeating the mantra and entering this new meditative conscious state. It was apparent that this experience was something significant that had been missing in all my previous life experiences without my even having known that something was missing. My initial experience with this new transcendental consciousness inspired in me a commitment to this new practice of meditation with the conviction of a person obsessed.

Over the next couple of days, my teacher gave a few more instructions about the techniques and its enlightenment goal before disappearing from my life forever. Before leaving, they conveyed a clear understanding of how to properly perform the meditation technique and a brief theoretical explanation of what to expect over the long term. As the years passed, the general quality of my life experience was on a steady upward trend seemingly the result of this meditation, and this trend of steady progress inspired me to find the time in my daily schedule to accommodate this meditation practice.

Like many of the other Western converts, certain promised times to complete this quest for enlightenment were not consistent with my actual experience. My teachers assured me that regular practice of the technique would result in enlightenment in 8-10 years, but the first decade passed without this major shift in consciousness. The years just kept rolling by without this promised sustained experience of enlightenment, but my commitment to the process never wavered.

Over time, I gradually drifted away from the organization that had developed around this technique. Clearly to me, there were benefits from using these techniques so I continued their practice in what became a persistent journey of self-discovery in my obsessive pursuit of this mysterious enlightenment. Without much contact with others on a similar path, I shared my experiences and practices with no one after having been set adrift by circumstance. All the while, aware of the fact that something inside me was slowly but steadily growing and changing.

Final Revelations

Finally after decades of going down this twisting path, I did finally experience a major shift in my personal conscious experience. Without any direct contact with teachers, guides, or even many fellow seekers, I found myself in what appear to be new state of consciousness that seems pretty significantly different and remarkable, but it is not exactly what I had so naively imagined when starting down this path all those years ago.

With this shift in consciousness, there came an incredible new clarity of thinking accompanied by certain positive changes to my physical body. From this new perspective, there arose a profound line of thinking that began to automatically unfold before me, and everything subsequently began to make perfect sense after a cascading sequence of revelations and insights eliminated all previous confusion. Above all, there came a growing sense of personal liberation that I never could have imagined before experiencing it.

These revelations about the great mystery of life continue to unfold before me. Everyday was an ‘aha’ moment that is perhaps building to some further ultimate ‘aha’ moment that is yet to come. This staggering sense of amazement inspired me to write these things down in an attempt to facilitate my personal assimilation of all this new knowledge into a single coherent piece, but this process of writing also seemed to stimulate the flow of new knowledge.

Was this transition finally the long sought after enlightenment? That possibility seemed so incredibly unbelievable after all that time has passed, and it also seems arrogant and presumptive to make such a call for one’s self. Suffice it to say that I am a long way down a path that I have never taken before so I don’t really know where it has taken me, but the fact of the matter has become that question really didn’t seem to matter anymore. I am where I am in what appears to be a truly remarkable mental space.

Report of Findings

The unvarnished truth presented in this discussion could make some feel uncomfortable because it might conflict with some of their passionately held beliefs. Specifically, those individuals with a closed mind who feel obsessively compelled to hold onto their personal particular set of belief illusions. These illusion fixated individuals are not likely going to appreciated being confronted with some of this very raw truth. Only those who truly dare to pursue this mythical Universal Truth should venture down this particulate spiritual rabbit-hole.

This journey of spiritual self-discovery has become the longest-standing single endeavor that is still ongoing of my life. It has been conducted in near total solitude known only to me for nearly fifty years. This book and others that might follow in this Homegrown Enlightenment series have been inspired by this incredible fifty year journey on this twisting path experiencing various adventures along the way, but it is not a memoir recollection of the journey itself remarkable though that has been.

This Homegrown Enlightenment series is an accurate as my words can convey description of the wonderful mental space that this journey has inspired in me. The opinions expressed here are being offered as food for thought in the personal discovery process of others. They are not things to be blindly accepted as beliefs. Rather, there are offered for consideration by those others who are also trying to sort through all the same challenges to get to their own personal understanding of the truth about the reality of our situation.

This book and any others that may follow in this series are collectively a final report of this my 50 year long homegrown enlightenment experiment. For me, they expose a very special truth about our lives and the surrounding reality that is fixed and permanent. This collection of knowledge has proved itself to be the key to my as my Universal Truth. Maybe it can help others to find their own personal sense of liberation too.

 

 

Western Seekers of Eastern Enlightenment

The concepts of meditation and yoga are commonly understood in a casual way by pretty much everyone in Western culture today, but that was most certainly not the case prior to the arrival of Vivekananda at the Chicago 1893 Parliament of World Religions.  Vivekananda was a charismatic Indian monk who ended up spending about three years in the West before returning to his native India. During that time he wrote four books that introduced Westerners to the classic yogic pathways and established a series of Vedanta Societies to promote the study and practice of one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy called Vedanta.

Vivekananda was the first, but he most certainly was not the last.  In 1920, Yogananda arrived in Boston, and after making the West his home, established the world headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles.  Much later in 1959, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made the first of many trips to the West as part of a global effort to spread his Transcendental Meditation program.  Initially he attracted only small numbers of grown-up middle-class seekers, but when TM caught on among students and the Beatles followed him to India, Maharishi became a counterculture icon. 

These three spiritual leaders in particular and some other less well known ones brought this concept of enlightenment to very receptive Western audiences and left a lasting impression on Western culture.  They each created a layer of trained intermediaries to support the seekers they had established, and these trained intermediaries actively solicited new seekers onto the path in lieu of direct access to the primary guru. In their wake, they left many new seekers looking for this Eastern vision of spiritual enlightenment. 

There are three different Eastern spiritual traditions that describe this state of enlightenment, and in each of these traditions, there are many slightly different specific interpretations of approach to reach this common goal of enlightenment. But across all the three religious traditions and all the variations that exist in each of these traditions, there are only two recognized self-discovery paths to enlightenment. One path is the traditionally understood way of the ascetic, but the other path is structured around a typical householder who is simultaneously engaged in the pursuit of both spiritual and regular worldly activities.

Those who choose the path of the ascetic withdraw from the world to contemplate and meditate as they aspire for their one and only goal of attaining a state of enlightenment. The ascetic renounces all worldly things at the onset of their search. They live their lives withdrawn in seclusion denying all worldly things beyond the bare minimum required to survive. It is a hard and difficult path that is right only for the very select few who are so inclined to pursue it.

The other path of householders engaged in worldly activities is reputed to be the more noble of the two paths because the householder seeker is a productive member of society in additional to being a spiritual aspirant. In fact, the classic tale of enlightenment in the Bhagavad Gita describes the enlightenment of Arjuna who is a man actively engaged in the pursuit of war. The warrior Arjuna received his enlightenment from Krishna as he is surveying his impending enemy and the battlefield that he is about to engage. Instead of the ascetic who withdraws from the world, Arjuna actually received his enlightenment just prior to going to war.

On the path of action, the seeker does not withdraw from the world to pursue enlightenment. Seekers on the path of action create a balanced lifestyle that integrates a system of regular contemplation and meditation into their ongoing activities of living a life and contributing to society. Those on the path of action renounce worldly things by internally eliminating over time their tendencies to become attached to worldly things. As they progress, they can own worldly things without developing binding attachments to them.

All seekers soon come to realize that no matter whether they have chosen the path of the ascetic or to actively be engaged in life, their actual pursuit of this enlightenment is a path that can only be tread alone.  On the path of action, they might find themselves in the company of many other people. Some of the other people may actually be sympathetic to their spiritual journey, but none of them can can actually directly engage one’s solitary spiritual journey because it is a path of self-discovery that can only be traversed alone.

There are two possible outcomes from a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment via these Eastern technologies.  The most common scenario is a life filled with the peace and fullness that comes from the regular practice of meditation and the slow but steady forward progress without actually reaching the goal of enlightenment in that lifetime.  The individual’s unfinished journey will eventually through the process of transmigration of consciousness start a new life and continue the process until full spiritual enlightenment is finally attained.

Alternately, the one who aspires to know given the right conditions will forge ahead and complete the journey of discovery on their own to actually reach the state of enlightenment during the course of their lifetime. In these very rare cases, these pioneering seekers are largely left to their own devices without direct access to a guru. Their seeking experience becomes something of an improvised enlightenment experiment wherein they are left with the responsibility to address all the gaps in methodology and interpretation of results.

The Two Core Questions

Humanity, we presume, is the pinnacle of intelligence on Earth, and from this high place of intellect and understanding, humanity finds itself confronted by the mystery of its very own conscious existence. This mystery by virtue of its great complexity and extreme level of detail is very intimidating to the point it seems to be unapproachable

To consider the overwhelming enormity of this problem all at once is beyond the ability of human intelligence. The problem is, however, manageable when it is reduced down to its most elemental forms that are still sufficiently detailed to develop a clear understanding of everything hat really needs to be considered. The secret to solving this great mystery lies in finding this optimal level of simplification that addresses the problem without all the incredibly overwhelming details. 

This simplification must reduce the matter down to its core elements without the unmanageable burden of all the other details that only clutter the big picture we seek.  At its most basic level, the great human conundrum is driven by the two facts that we are 1) consciously aware and 2) surrounded by an elaborate combination of things in the surrounding physical world.   These two core components inspire in everyone the two fundamental questions of: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is going on around me?’. 

The ‘Who am I?’ question is the basis of our unending search to discover the who, what, and why of our personal existence. This line of questioning exists because we are consciously aware beings trying to figure out the nature of our conscious experience in a physical environment. Initially, this question is focused on the topic of our physical body, but progresses more to the conscious experience of our existence as our understanding matures. 

The ‘What is going on around me?’ question is posed by the physical challenge presented by the hostile physical environment around us that cannot be ignored. This question exists because our conscious awareness is constantly being challenged in a complex physical reality of forms with which we must interact in order to survive and hopefully even thrive. The most prominent of those physical forms is the human body directly connected to our individual conscious experience. 

The human life experience is above all else a journey of spiritual discovery. In this spiritual journey every thought and every action no matter how coarse or misguided is driven by a core primitive impulse to understand the personal true of ‘who am I?/ and the everything else truth of ‘what is going on around me?’. The short term goal of spirituality is to define your conscious identity in terms of functioning in the physical world (i.e. ‘who am I and what do I want to do?’), but its ultimate goal is to develop the conscious spirit to its highest potential and live life to the fullest possible extent. 

 With the passage of time, these natural occurring and seemingly superficial discoveries driven by the core primitives eventually become more clearly recognizable as spirituality, the only path to the ultimate truths. Every individual interpretation of spirituality is different based on their particular level of spiritual evolution and their special interpretation of their surrounding reality. 

From these two fundamental questions, all further human inquiry ensues.