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#3189 - Friday, June 6, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
The Life is Like That blog features the following letter. If you want to help this person out, comment on this blog entry at http://lifeislikethat999.blogspot.com/2008/06/misty-perception-question.html
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Hello, I've been studying the philosophy of Advaita, Buddhism and Taoism as well as trying to find a cognitive shift in my perception so that I can experience the world as non-dual. One night I read something regarding the question of truth. What is true and what isn't? Should we proceed from the standpoint of everything being false? An illusion? Something clicked in my mind and the next day I was experiencing extreme panic attacks and have been ever since (that was a week ago). Now when I look at my fiancee I doubt her existence and feel a flooding of panic that is overwhelming. I also feel this with everyone else as well as objects, time and existence itself. I know that this is an odd question, however, I was wondering if you have any insight into how I should proceed. Thank you for your time and expertise.
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Respond at http://lifeislikethat999.blogspot.com/2008/06/misty-perception-question.html. Send us a copy as well, and we'll probably feature it in the Highlights.
Also consider, was this person screwing around with his psychological state by "trying to find a cognitive shift in my perception"? Is "trying to experience the world as nondual" the new LSD or the new TM or the latest Carlos Castaneda spar with reality?
http://www.amazon.com/Sciousness-Jonathan-Bricklin/dp/0979998905/ref=cm_cr-mr-img
Sciousness by Jonathan Bricklin, editor
A review by Jerry Katz
Eirini Press -- http://eirinipress.com/index.html -- is a new publisher of nonduality books,
filling the niche of the Western contribution. Sciousness is
their only title at this time. If Sciousness exemplifies, in both
content and design, the quality of their forthcoming books,
Eirini Press is positioned for serious success.
Beyond "The Varieties of Religious Experience":
Those who have enjoyed James's The Varieties of Religious
Experience, will discover what James could not talk about in that
series of lectures: the truth of "pure experience" or
nondual awareness. The following quotation is an example of about
how far James could go in "Varieties" toward
approaching nonduality:
"It is evident that from the point of view of their
psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower
mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great
subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is beginning
to admit the existence, but of which so little is really
known."
"Varieties" was a series of lectures delivered in
1901-1902. In 1890, James first suggested the nonduality thesis
but did not develop it until 1904. This book collects James's
nondual writings published during 1904 -1905, with short writings
from 1890 and 1912. The intended audience is students, scholars,
readers of Western philosophy as well as followers of the
literature of nonduality.
Sciousness:
If sciousness sounds to you like "suchness," that's the
point. James recognized that nondual experience knows no
"with-suchness," only suchness, or pure experience, or
the essence of Zen. Con-sciousness is suchness accompanied by the
sense of "I," or a "me," a
"myself." A great effort is made in this book to
describe the "I."
Radical Empiricism:
James called his nondualism radical empiricism. His empiricism is
radical because it absorbs what is directly experienced and ALL
that is directly experienced, including unifying experiences and
nondual experience.
He brought ordinary empiricism up to speed by showing that
nonseparateness is to be included, along with separateness, along
with collectionism and abstraction as part of a description of
reality.
In that effort, James brought Rationalism down to earth by
showing that nonseparateness, unity, or Truth is not a separate
order of reality eventually requiring corrective agencies of
unification.
A Definitive Anthology:
In Sciousness, Jonathan Bricklin has constructed a definitive
anthology that conveys completeness and unity in the presentation
of William James's nondual expression. This work is driven by
intellectual argument and is based in James's confession of
nondual knowing. It is elevated by elements of charm and poetry
which arise out of the anthology's design and the writings by all
the three authors. Most importantly, this work is founded in
Bricklin's understanding of what nonduality is.
This is mainly a collection of James's writings. The book opens
with its crowning achievement, without which James's nondual
writings on their own would not likely be published for a broad
audience of philosophy and spirituality readers. The book's crown
is Bricklin's article, Sciousness and Con-sciousness, which
introduces and analyzes James's nondual work, making it readily
understandable.
The article is followed by six writings by James. The book ends
with an article on radical empiricism by Theodore Flournoy, one
of the few contemporaries of James who understood and appreciated
his thesis, and which served in its day as a crowning (if little
known) achievement on behalf of James.
Thus the anthology is balanced: James's writings are located
centrally, flanked the writings of Bricklin and Flournoy. The
entryways of the book consist of the preface, in which Bricklin
elegantly delivers the nugget that James prepared the way for
quantum theory expositions on nonduality and for Western seekers,
students, and teachers of nonduality; and six pages of an Eastern
nondual confession by Seng-t'san (Sosan), Third Zen Patriarch.
The exit is a quotation by Rilke.
Zen meets William James:
The Seng-t'san selection, On Believing in Mind (Hsin-Hsin-Ming),
is a bowing to the East prior to the reader's turning to the
West. Most readers and knowers of nonduality will be led into the
Western mode of nondual writing through the Eastern description:
"All things are the same at their core / but clinging to one
and discarding another / Is living in illusion."
Or is it as simple as a bow and a turn to the West? In this book,
East and West are not so separate. The turn is not from East to
West, but from an emphasis on Eastern to an emphasis on Western
thought and influence. Bricklin points out that D.T. Suzuki
alerted his teacher Kitaro Nishida to James's writing and Nishida
used James's phrase "pure experience" in his scholarly
writings intended to bring East and West closer. Suzuki himself
is well known as a bringer of Zen to the West. Martha Ramsey has
pointed out to me that Zen and Buddhism rode into Western minds
and hearts upon literary steeds of Romantic and American
Transcendentalist traditions. Bricklin himself extracts the Zen
nature of James's nondual writings and in the process he uses a
Zen which itself was probably influenced by William James. That
is, a Zen that is perhaps thinly infused by James is brought to
today to explain James.
Show me the nonduality:
How nondual was William James? That's what today's audience wants
to know. People today can read a few words and detect whether
someone is speaking with authenticity or parroting someone else.
Listen and decide for yourself:
"If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent
which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought
is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond."
"...things and thought are not at all fundamentally
heterogeneous, but are made of one and the same stuff, a stuff
which one cannot define as such, but only experience, and which
one can call, if one wishes, the stuff of experience in
general."
"I believe that consciousness, as it is commonly
represented, either as an entity, or as pure activity, but in any
case as fluid, unextended, diaphanous, devoid of all content of
its own, but directly self-knowing - spiritual, in short -, I
believe, I say, that this consciousness is a pure chimera, and
that the sum of concrete realities which the word consciousness
should cover deserves a quite different description."
"The instant field of the present is at all times what I
call the `pure' experience. ... If the world were then and there
to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and
objective, for it would be `the last word,' would have no critic,
and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality
intended."
"The instant field of the present is always experience in
its `pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as
yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually
classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion about
fact."
Here James is on verge of refining "pure experience"
into "pure silence:"
"Whatever differing contents our minds may eventually fill a
place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content
of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through
which, and over which they join. The receptacle of certain of our
experiences being thus common, the experiences themselves might
some day become common also. If that day ever did come, our
thoughts would terminate in a complete empirical identity, there
would be an end, so far as those experiences went, to our
discussions about truth. No points of difference appearing, they
would have to count as the same." Thirteenth century mystic
Jnaneshvar (translated by Swami Abhayananda) echoes:
After such a discourse,
That speech is wise
Which drinks deeply of silence.
James's approach was soft:
James did not confess his knowings and leave them at that. Not
without lengthy philosophical explanation and demonstration.
Rather than simply state the way things are - and he knew - he
would soften his confessions with phrases such as, "I
believe," "I conclude," "I should like to
convey," "I feel," "I say," "I am
convinced." If someone uses those phrases today, they are
deemed halfway up the mountain, even if they are not. "James
theorized about pure experience sciousness more than he described
instances of it," Bricklin writes.
Were James preaching to a congregation, the language would have
been different. There is a sense that James wanted to simply be
the preacher and tell it the way it is: In this passage he comes
close: "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in
myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as
a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized,
reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my
breathing." Here too: "While still pure, or present,
any experience - mine, for example, of what I write about in
these very lines - passes for `truth.' The morrow may reduce it
to `opinion.'" However, James asserts that this knowing of
`truth' is valid: "When the whole universe seems only to be
making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its
ceaseless changing?), why, of all things, should knowing be
exempt?"
There's a sense that James wants to leap from declaring his
confidence to declaring the truth that he knows. In fact,
Bricklin leaps for James - or let's just say he infers --
wonderfully and memorably in his article.
The limits of philosophy:
James called philosophy an "ugly study" since if
offered no "sublime and simple" Ultimate Reality.
Bricklin says, "James never developed his philosophy of pure
experience sciousness beyond brief passages and essays. To do so
would have made it ugly."
William Samuel, who wrote and taught during the 60s-80s, was
himself blunt about philosophy: "God would be a sadist if
one's saving grace depended on a detailed knowledge of
philosophy. What kind of god would require continual delving into
the abstruce and arcane lore of mysticism or metaphysics as a
passport to a Reality that is already ONLY and
unchallenged?"
The limitlessness of philosophy - direct path:
William James offers a direct path nondual teaching. Dennis Waite
says in his book Enlightenment, The Path Through the Jungle, that
the direct path begins "with one's own experience, and tests
one's assumptions against the simplicity of this experience in
the moment. It examines the world, body and mind, showing through
one's experience how they are nothing other than the awareness,
which is the Self." Self is James's "pure
experience."
Waite says "The direct-path approach is characterized by an
uncompromising, logical approach to the truth (and is) most
suitable for those of a philosophical bent."
Waite quotes Sri Atmananda, a teacher of direct path in its
purest form: "(the direct path) is removal of untruth by
arguments, leaving over the Truth absolute as the real
Self."
Though I would not call James's writings the purest direct path
teaching, they are historically significant and wondrous to read,
considering the the audience for whom they were intended.
Conclusion:
In the 60s and 70s, many seekers of spiritual truth learned about
mysticism and found affirmation of their nondual intuitions
within William James's book, The Varieties of Religious
Expression. Now we can discover that James was a nondualist
afterall. Sciousness is a superb anthology, the best possible
book imaginable for the discovery of the nondual William James.
Sciousness by Jonathan Bricklin, editor http://www.amazon.com/Sciousness-Jonathan-Bricklin/dp/0979998905/ref=cm_cr-mr-img