Numinous Nonsense

I just posted a new article on the Buddhist Geeks site this morning, entitled The Path of Wholeness. I wrote the article as a way to explore a shift that has happened in my orientation, over the last couple of years, wherein I’ve moved away from a view of spirituality dominated by transcendence, toward one of integrated wholeness. A little snippet from the article:

What I found, after several years of dedicated searching and practice, was that my orientation had gradually shifted away from transcending life, to a more inclusive relationship with it. I began to feel that the purpose of my life was to be more whole, to include what had been left out or what had seemed undesirable.

It was fun to write on this topic, because it’s such an important aspect of spiritual maturation, and now that I’m leaning in this direction, I’m seeing so many amazing people & teachers who have this orientation. One of my teachers, Jack Kornfield, has really influenced me in this regard. His books A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry are brilliant contributions to a spiritual path that focuses on wholeness.

I’ve also been really drawn to a teacher named Diane Musho Hamilton, who teaches in the Zen tradition. She really exhibits a kind of openness and embrace of life that is something I feel represents a real type of freedom in the world, rather than freedom from it. Emily and I are going on a Zen Sesshin with her next week, and we’re thrilled to be practicing with her. This will be my first longer retreat outside of the Theravada tradition, since I started practicing in 2002. I finally feel that I’ve gone deep enough in that tradition to begin exploring what other traditions have to offer. Here’s to exploration and to being a whole human being!

Awakening needs no verification or validation from the outside. It stands on its own. Anytime we are looking for someone else to verify what we know, what we’re looking for is verification of experience. Experience can be verified and validated, though not always easily, because there are patterns to experience. There is what comes before (the leading up to experience), the actual experience itself, and then the fall-out of the experience. For someone who is familiar with a particular experience, and the signatures of an experience, they can accurately verify someone elses experience as something they recognize and know.

Take for instance the jhana attainments of concentration meditation. These jhana states have been entered by countless people throughout time and their descriptions of what comes before, what the state itself is like, and then the leaving of that state are fairly clear. A yogi who has a good amount of practice in entering these states can easily recognize those experiences in another. Of course there’s always some degree of disagreement–even among the ‘community of the adequate’—about the fine level details of experience, but there’s enough of a common understanding that we can safely talk about experiences being verifiable.

Awakening however is not an experience, is not a thing. Therefore it stands completely on its own, both as something that can’t be fully explained, and as something that needs no explanation. For one who is awake, awakeness is sufficient in and of itself. Still though, there is a process of integrating that understanding more deeply into one’s life. I may forget that awakeness is completely self-sufficient and begin wanting someone to tell me I’m awake, but then remember (again and again) that awakening is. The mind can’t comprehend it, but it’s the most fundamental thing, what one of my teachers calls “the simplest thing.”

Furthermore, it’s not just that awakening stands on its own for me alone. It also stands on its own for everyone. We all share the same fundamental awakeness. And though we may forget this, on the deepest level, it’s what connects us in a connection beyond connection. There being no others to connect with, we are that.