I would probably only read this article if you are very committed to awakening. If not, it could be unnecessarily challenging for you. This teaching is about as radical as radical can get – and true spirituality is already pretty radical!
I want to emphasise though that I do not know if this teaching is true, or if it is the full truth; however, I think something Jesus said is appropriate here if it is true:
“Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find, and when they find they will be disturbed, and when they are disturbed they will be astonished, and will reign over the All.”
A bit over two years ago now, I came across a video from the nonduality teacher Tom Das called “The highest truth is Ajata”. Hmm, I thought. I’d been on the spiritual path for 11 years at this point, and had never heard that word. I respect Tom as a teacher so I watched the video. (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RTlr5GdZXc).
It was radical. Like, really, really radical. World-ending radical.
At first I was excited to hear it. My whole life had been focused on awakening for 11 years, and I was so frustrated with not making the “progress” I wanted. Not actually waking up. When I heard it, I thought to myself, “Okay, this is going to change things. This is big.”
Ajata is a Sanskrit word which means “unborn”. “A” being the prefix “not” and “jata” being “born”. “Vada” means “view”. What this perspective states is that “there is no creation.” “Nothing ever happened.” The world is not just illusory, it never even appeared to exist!
After my initial excitement of feeling like this could be a breakthrough for me, a bit of fear crept in. Quite a bit. “Well, this is just one teacher”, I said to myself; “he could be wrong.”
In the following months and years however, I came across more and more teachers who were saying the same thing. Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, Rupert Spira, A Course in Miracles, some awakened friends on Facebook. The evidence started to mount up.
I wrote to Tom, initially, when the fear crept in.
“Is it scary?” I said.
“No, it’s not scary at all, Will. It’s heaven,” he said. “Ajata = total endless peace, love, and bliss.”
Still, there were things I wanted in the world. I wanted a deep relationship with a partner. I wanted to write my book. Will that all disappear?
I don’t know the answer to this question, and really, before I see the ultimate truth myself, what I think about it means absolutely nothing. Whether I believe or disbelieve in ajata is kind of irrelevant. The truth is the truth no matter what I think about it. It’s impossible to know what the coffee in Paris tastes like until travelling to Paris.
This teaching would say that the world does not exist in any way, but only “God”, “the Absolute”, consciousness, beingness, the I Am exists.
As Rupert Spira said once, “When the somethingness of the waking state starts to appear less and less like something, the nothingness of the deep sleep state starts to appear less and less like nothing.”
There’s a tendency for the human mind to picture “nothing” as just an endless black void. But apparently that’s not what is experienced. This state is impossible for the mind to imagine, as I’ve been told. Only that it is everything we’ve always been searching for.
One thing that makes me hesitate with this teaching is my teacher Isira. As best as I could tell, she was the most awake person I’d ever come across, and I remember her once mentioning the book, “The Disappearance of the Universe”, and dismissing the idea as not true. The world does exist, only our thoughts about it do not exist, she said.
That was always my position on this matter until coming across the ajata teachings. But I still just don’t know. I can’t know until I experience the truth, whatever it is, for myself. All the philosophising in the world means nothing. Truth is experiential. Philosophy and spiritual teachings can lead you to water, but they can’t make you drink. At a certain point you have to dive in, even though you don’t know that it’s safe.
This is why I think faith on the spiritual path is so important. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something without evidence, it just means that at a certain point you have to have trust and let go into the unknown.
What are the benefits of this teaching though? Well, what do humans want more than anything? Eternal life and happiness. That is, apparently, what’s on offer with these teachings. What you truly are was never born and cannot die, and it is bliss. Eternal bliss as “God”. That is where the spiritual path ultimately leads. Yet people are running around picking up scraps of temporary happiness, mostly struggling. As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.”
There really is so much denial going on in humans. People, on the whole, are suffering a lot. Yet we often refuse to admit it to ourselves I think because we’re scared that there is no solution. That if we faced up to how unhappy we are we would just get stuck there and it would make it worse. People think the best they can hope for is brief periods of happiness interspersed amongst long periods of struggle.
The spiritual path says there is a solution. And it’s better than we could imagine.
Another benefit is that this teaching really removes your attachment to the world. Regardless of whether the world exists or not, our intense focus and fascination on the vicissitudes of life can distract us from discovering our true unchanging Self (capital S indicating the ultimate Self, not the individual self or ego). This teaching is a very powerful means for shifting our attention in that way.
One thing I have noticed, however, with most people who advocate for the ajata teachings, is that they think the world = suffering, and that it can’t be any other way.
While I think there is both light and dark in existence, and there will always be the full array of human emotion experienced, I don’t see it this way. I believe it is possible to create “Heaven on Earth”. Will it take a while? Yes, but I do believe it’s possible. And I do wonder whether there is an emotional avoidance inherent in the ajata teachings. Maybe if you see the world as inherently just suffering, you are more likely to reject it, and stay in this “absolute” state because it is “safer”.
I don’t know if this is true, but it is a thought that I had. Adyashanti once said, “Don’t get stuck in enlightenment.” If you get stuck in enlightenment, the world will seemingly make you aware pretty quickly of your neglect of it.
As I said, that’s just a possibility for me. I don’t know the truth of this yet. All I know is that I’m going to keep exploring until I find the highest truth myself. Until then, I leave you with this image:
Thanks for reading,
Will.
P.S. Something I’ve learnt a lot on the spiritual journey is to take the “middle way” approach. Buddha is credited with saying this, but in his case he meant it in terms of asceticism versus over-indulgence. The way I see it is that we should always plant ourselves firmly in the middle ground of any propositions and be open to the truth of each, if there is any. I’ve been surprised at how accurate the middle way generally is in this sense, and getting lost in extremes often indicates a blind spot. I don’t know if this is true of ajata, but it’s a possibility. Some teachers have often said the world is real and unreal at the same time. As I said, I will continue to investigate it either way, and even though it might take a while, I’ll get back to you with the results. 😉
Okay, so this post is going to sound a bit crazy. All I can do is recount the events as they happened.
I want to stress here that I do not know that any of this is true. I lean towards it being true, but I simply don’t know.
This is the story of how 7 years ago I began receiving “messages from the universe” about a future partner of mine.
That future partner was my spiritual teacher’s daughter, whom I had never met, and at the time I spoke to my teacher about this, was engaged.
Nevertheless, here is the story…
It all started in the beginning of 2018. At the end of year team dinner with my teacher, she gave us all a little notebook as a present. I thought I’d use it as a positive affirmation book, but never really ended up using it for that. A few weeks later, for the first and only time in my life, I decided I should try this “manifestation” thing. So I took out the notebook and started writing down the qualities I wanted in a future partner. I was 31, and had only had one half-relationship with a girl at that time, so it was a big deal, and was really the thing I longed for most, aside from awakening.
So I started writing. At first it was all the typical stuff: “I want my future partner to be peaceful, loving, kind, fun, intelligent, attractive… etc etc”. Then I started to get more specific. “I want her to be on the same spiritual journey as me, with truth/happiness as the ultimate goal.”
Then I said I wanted her to be “strong-willed, with a strong sense of self.”
This one was interesting to me, because I thought, “Well, I’m interested in enlightenment (typically characterised as transcending the individual self), why do I want someone with a strong sense of self?” But I just wrote what came to me, and this was it.
I then wrote that I wanted her to be “challenging, in a way that motivates me to grow as a person.”
There weren’t too many more points, it was just an A5 page full, so maybe about 12 points all up.
I put it away and largely forgot about it.
I’m not sure how much time passed; it could have been a few weeks or a couple of months. I had just started working full time as a gardener at my teacher’s spiritual centre, and one day at home I was just scrolling through Facebook and came across a post from a spiritual centre in the city called “The Leela Centre”.
When I read this word Leela, I just had this really strong emotional reaction to it. I was like, “Wow, what does that word mean?” I looked it up: it’s a Sanskrit word meaning “The Divine Play”. When I read the definition of it I was like, “I like it even more now, I think that might be my favourite word!”
For the next few days at work I was just saying this word over and over in my head, “Leela, Leela, Leela.” I was listening to talks on the concept of Leela by teachers. I couldn’t get enough of it.
After a few days of this I started to think, “Where have I heard that word before? Has a teacher mentioned it once?”
Then a thought came to me: “Wait, wasn’t Isira’s daughter named something like that?” I had read her autobiography a couple of years earlier and remembered she mentioned she had children. So I went home and looked it up. I scoured through the pages: “Where’s the daughter…?” Then I saw it. Her daughter’s name: Lilha.
When I read that I was like, “Lilha… how do you pronounce that? Is it Lyla or Leela?” I thought to myself, “Well if it’s Lyla I don’t really feel like I have a strong connection with that name. But maybe it’s just a variant spelling of Leela.” So I went and looked it up, and yes Lilha is a variant spelling of Leela.
Okay, so that’s interesting, I thought to myself. I just had this really strong emotional reaction to this word, and it happens to be Isira’s daughter’s name.
I still wasn’t blown away by this at this stage, I was just kind of curious. I said to my friend at this point I was about a 3/10 level of interest. Just curious.
Then one day I was driving home and something occurred to me. Isira had recommended a book for me years earlier called “Astrology for the Soul”, by Jan Spiller. It’s all about what is called your “North Node”, and the qualities you need to develop in this lifetime, and the qualities you need to let go of. I’ve always been a bit iffy about astrology, but Isira said it was an “exceptional” book, and I kind of buy anything Isira recommends strongly.
So I was driving home and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder what Isira’s daughter’s north node is… maybe that could provide some more information on her.” So I looked up her birthday in Isira’s autobiography: 23rd of August, 1995. That makes her north node a Libra.
So I went to the astrology book to look up Libra, and at the time I was kind of having a fun little romantic fantasy: “Oh, I bet it’s going to say she’s an amazing person. Just kind and loving… even her bad qualities, they’re probably not really that bad, they’re just kind of cute.” Like I said, a fun little fantasy.
But then I started to read the Libra north node, and it was, um… not what I was expecting… at all. The complete opposite. It basically said these people have had a lot of incarnations being a real “warrior” type of person, so they have a tendency towards selfishness, and a lack of concern for other people. I was like, “Um… I think my book must be broken or something, this is not right at all.”
After a while of reading this I was like, “Yeah, this doesn’t sound like the person for me at all. Maybe there was a different reason I had a reaction to that name.”
I was about to close the book, and I thought, “… Maybe I should check my north node. Maybe that would be helpful. Instead of just learning about other people I should understand a bit more about myself.”
So I flicked back to where my north node was (Aries). I knew it was at the start of the book, so I was going to flick back to the start, but the page I landed on… it was like my eyes were stuck on a particular sentence. I kept moving to flick back the pages, but they were definitely stuck on this one sentence, and when I focused on it, it was like the sentence zoomed out to my face. It looked, on a physical level, like it got about 3 times bigger.
I read it, and it said, “What these people really need to learn in this lifetime is selfishness.” I was like, “Uh… what the fuck is going on?” I had just been reading the Libra north node, and literally the first sentence of the Libra north node is “What these people need to learn to deal with is their tendency towards selfishness.” And then I flick back to mine and it says, “You need to learn selfishness.”
Because of the way it happened, flicking back to that page, my eyes being stuck on it, and then it zooming out to my face, I was like, “What the hell is going on, this is so surreal.”
So I flicked back to the start of my north node and it said basically that I’ve spent a lot of incarnations being a really helpful type of person, Mr and Mrs Nice. “Debilitatingly selfless,” it said. Yeah, that’s me.
So I started reading through the Libra and Aries north nodes, and everything the Libra north node has is what I need to develop in this lifetime, and everything that I have is what the Libra north node needs to develop. They were complete mirror images of each other.
Okay, this is really strange, I thought. After reading a bit of the Libra north node I was convinced this was not the person for me, and this book is now telling me, “THIS. You need THIS!”
My level of interest then went to, “Okay, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”
I wasn’t satisfied with that, however, so I asked “the universe” for more evidence, and there were lots of little other signs that seemed to point in this direction. By themselves I wouldn’t have paid them any attention, but in combination it seemed unlikely they could all be just chance.
I didn’t speak to anyone about this for a while, I wanted to make sure it was a real possibility before I spoke about it, especially to my spiritual teacher – it was her daughter after all!
A lot of other weird things started happening too. I started seeing double numbers *everywhere*. I’d heard people on the spiritual path talk about this before, and always thought that’s interesting but remained skeptical. It had never happened to me, so I didn’t know what to make of it. But it just started to happen to such a degree that again I found it difficult to put down to chance. It was happening sometimes up to about 90% of the day when I looked at my phone and I thought, “this can’t be happening!” I remember one time I went to a cafe for lunch, and the guy said, “That’ll be $33.” Then he handed me my table number – number 33. “Whoah,” he said. In my head I was like, “Oh dude, you have *no* idea. This is like 0.01% of what’s been going on for me lately.” It started to feel like synchronicities were just happening all around me during this time. I still didn’t talk to anyone about it yet though. I still wanted to make sure this was a real possibility before I did.
Then in May of 2018, Isira held a weekend event called The Presence. I went into what happened here in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, so I won’t go over it again, but basically, Isira told me that I had had a “partial kundalini awakening”. That’s another way of saying an “energetic” awakening.
After a few days of *intense* energy in the body, and meditating on this question of Lilha, I went to my teacher.
“Hey, um, Isira… I need to speak to you about something. It’s about a relationship.” “Oh… you’ve got me kind of interested now,” she said. “It kind of has to do with you,” I said. She smiled. Does she know? I thought to myself. Can she read my mind?
It turns out she didn’t know. I’m pretty sure at this point she thought that I was talking about her. That I’d had this intense emotional experience at her event and that I’d developed feelings for her as a result. Needless to say, that wasn’t it.
Later that afternoon, we went to sit in the little cottage at her centre to talk about what was happening. Again, I’m almost certain that at this point she was thinking I was going to say, “Yeah, I had this emotional experience and I’ve developed feelings for you.” Instead I said, “So… I have a feeling that… there’s a possibility that… my future partner… may be…………… your daughter.” I looked up at her, “If your daughter’s name is Lilha.”
She didn’t say anything. I think she was a bit shocked. “Let me just explain,” I said, holding up my hand so she didn’t stop me before I got it all out.
I went through everything that had happened up until that point. Well, almost everything. I didn’t get to finish before Isira said, “Okay Will, stop.” “I’m not finished,” I said. Then she said more forcefully, “Will, listen to me.”
She then went on to basically play down the events and said, “Will, my daughter’s name is not Lilha,” she paused before continuing… “If she had a spiritual name that’s what it would be… she is engaged.” Afterwards in my head I thought, “I don’t care if she has 5 kids, I’m talking about the messages.”
We ended our brief chat and I said, “This is just annoying.” I can’t remember exactly what Isira said at this point, but it was something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, you know we can use these experiences to understand more about ourselves.”
I went back to work.
After about half an hour of mulling over our conversation, I got angry. “This is bullshit,” I thought to myself. “I wasn’t making this up. These are objective events that happened.”
I wrote to Isira and said I needed to go home. I said, “Look, either I’m completely insane, or something or someone is messing with me, and I don’t like either of those options.”
She wrote back and said, “Will, as your teacher, wouldn’t it be best to trust an enlightened perspective on these things rather than your negative thoughts towards this and yourself?”
This was the first time in the 3 years I’d been with Isira that what she said made absolutely no sense. Negative thoughts about this and myself? What the fuck is she talking about? There are no negative thoughts about this, I just want to know what the truth is.
At this point a massive thunderstorm rolled in. I thought later it was kind of fitting because my internal state was quite thunderous.
I wrote back to her, “I trust you as much as I’m able to trust anything, but I’m not making this up. This sequence of events were very misleading if not true, and that makes me angry. But I’m also thinking, maybe you are not telling me the truth. Maybe you are only telling me what I need to hear so I don’t get caught up in attachment about this or anything else.”
She didn’t reply. I drove home.
I messaged her the next day and said, “Isira, I can’t come back to work at the moment. I’m not sure if I can ever come back to Living Awareness now (her organisation’s name). I don’t want to live being crazy, and if this is not true then that’s the only other option.”
Again, she didn’t reply.
The next few days I kept meditating on this even more. I went really deep and tried to be as honest as I possibly could. Every time I tried to consider what Isira said I was like, “No, these messages are objective facts. It referenced a specific person. There was no reason me coming across that message had to involve Isira’s daughter. I didn’t need that part. I could have been given the message about needing to develop selfishness, and the possibility that my future partner would need to be a Libra north node… I could have received that message in any number of ways. But it included someone. It referenced someone specifically.”
Whenever I tried to consider Isira’s words, I felt uneasy, uncomfortable, like it was a lie. Whenever I considered the opposite perspective I felt at peace, comfortable, like everything made sense.
A few days later Isira’s assistant Leelani called me. “Will, would you like to talk about what’s been going on for you lately?” “Yes,” I said, “that would be good.”
“Would you like to do it over the phone or come over to my place?” She asked. “I think in person would be better,” I said.
So one afternoon I went to Leelani’s place. We sat down and she told me to record the conversation on my phone so I could listen back to it later. We spoke for 2 hours. I went into detail about everything that had been and was happening.
At the end, she said, “Okay, so does it all make sense now?” I said, “No, nothing makes sense but that’s probably -“. “Good,” she said, “I’m glad that nothing makes sense, because that’s the mind, and you are not to answer questions via the mind.”
I got in my car and put the recording on and went for a drive. For the first 20 minutes I was like, “Man, Leelani is on fire today! I had no idea she was so insightful!” Then, about 20 minutes in, I realised… “This is not Leelani talking to me, this is Isira.” At one point in the conversation, when she said the word Leela, I actually heard Isira’s voice, as if it were physically her I was talking to. I was parked by a beach at this point listening, and when she said the word Leela, it just took up my whole consciousness, and then at that exact moment a rainbow appeared. I was like, “What the hell is going on.” From that point on I couldn’t hear or say the word Leela without my body having a physical reaction to it, often convulsing and spasming.
I thought to myself, “Man, I need to go home and have a cigarette,” but instead I drove to my teacher’s centre. I didn’t think anyone would be there, I just wanted to go and sit in the garden and contemplate everything that was happening.
Isira was there though. I knocked on the door and her partner answered, Isira standing behind him.
“You were there today with Leelani, weren’t you?” I said.
“I was in presence,” she said. This was basically her way of saying yes.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” I said.
“What do you mean right? She asked.
“I heard your voice,” I said.
Then she asked me to come inside and talk over a bit more what was happening.
I said to her… “I’d never heard myself say it out loud before (everything that was happening). And when I listened back to the recording, it was like… I only heard truth.”
Truth has a particular frequency to it. This is something that everyone senses to some degree, but especially when you’ve been on the spiritual path for a while, you get a heightened sense of when something is true versus when it’s false. It’s like those kinesiology exercises. When you ask someone to hold out their arm and instruct them to resist you pushing it down, and then tell them to state something that is a lie, even something as simple as what their name is, when they lie you can easily push down their arm. When they tell the truth you can’t. There’s a strength that comes along with truth, and that’s what I experienced listening back to the recording.
Isira was silent and just looked at me.
We finished talking after another 40 minutes or so, and I said to her, “You have the best poker face ever.” Her partner in the next room laughed, but she still gave nothing away.
“I think I’m more awake than you give me credit for,” I said.
“Awakeness only sees awakeness, Will,” she said.
“Bye,” I said, as I walked out and went to sit in the garden.
Her partner came out to speak to me, but again I’m sure it was Isira’s voice coming through him.
“It’s like what the Oracle said in The Matrix,” I said to him. “When Neo asked who Agent Smith was, she said, “He is you, your opposite. A result of the equation trying to balance itself out.” He laughed. “I don’t need to date other women,” I said (something Isira had suggested I do initially). “No,” he said. “But if I have a belief that I do then I do,” I said. “Yeah, but that’s just a belief,” he said.
It was clear to me based on my talk with her, that Isira either knew I was right, or very strongly thought I was right.
I drove home and was just processing all that had happened. At this point, I was convinced. This was true.
I won’t go into the full story of what followed – I’ve got to save something for my book! – but it was both incredible and terrifying.
It’s now been 7 years since this all happened, and as I said in the beginning, I still don’t fully know the truth. I’m still just in the same position I was in right in the middle of all this while meditating on the truth of it: When I think it’s true, I feel calm, at peace, relaxed. When I think it’s not true, I’m utterly confused, uncomfortable, and have no idea how to make sense of everything that happened.
Isira told me she would no longer be available for contact soon after this. I knew why – I think she saw that I didn’t really need her help anymore, and that relying on her for guidance would actually prevent me from finding my own guidance – so it didn’t bother me, but I think once I reach my goal of awakening, she will again speak to me.
One thing she kind of intimated to me at the time was: Your attachment to this is the problem. Regardless of the truth of it. If it’s not true, obviously your attachment to it is a problem. If it is true, your attachment to it is still a problem.
Attachment is always a problem. There is no positive benefit to attachment whatsoever, in any context.
So where I am at now with this is: If this turns out to be true, great! If it turns out to not be true, that’s also fine, and I’ll just find another woman to have a deep connection with.
I’m a big believer that when you sort yourself out, the universe responds to this and provides things that are genuinely in alignment with who you are.
The type of spirituality I have mostly followed over the last 8 years is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, which translates to “not two”.
As you may have guessed by the name, this philosophy suggests that there is no such thing as separation – there are not “two things”. Everything, this philosophy suggests, is fundamentally the same. Made out of the same stuff. That stuff could be called consciousness. Pure awareness.
A lot of people struggle with these ideas. The world around them seems so real and physical. It seems like there really is separation between things. But there’s a very simple way of showing that – even if the materialist paradigm of the universe is correct (which it isn’t 😉 ) – our direct experience can only ever be of pure consciousness and no separation.
That is because, like the title of this post, everything you experience is actually inside your “head”. Now, even this isn’t true. Saying everything appears inside your head is making a concession to the materialist paradigm, where heads are real physical things themselves. And that’s not true. Your head, just like everything else, is just an appearance in and of consciousness.
But for the sake of this post, I’ll make a concession to the materialist paradigm, in order to show that even if it is true, everything we experience is only, and can only ever be consciousness itself, without any separation.
This is because of the way our brains work. A lot of people have an unconscious assumption that their eyes are portals that look out at the world. But this isn’t the way it works. Our eyes are receptors, which take in information, and transmit that information to our brain where images are produced. This is true for all our senses.
Our eyes do not “look out” at the butterfly, they receive information which is then transferred to the vision processing area of the brain, where an image is produced (again, using the materialist paradigm).
But if this is true, this means that everything you have ever experienced has been “inside your head”. There’s no room for the world to fit inside your head, so all you have ever experienced is your conscious representation of the world, never the actual physical world itself (which… there isn’t one 😉 ). There’s no room for space inside your head, therefore there’s no room for separation. Your brain just creates the perception of space and separation, but that isn’t your actual experience.
Go outside at night and look up at the stars. Those stars are appearing inside your head. If the materialist paradigm is correct, your skull should be on the other side of those stars. Your whole world in fact, is surrounded by bone. Again, that is assuming the materialist paradigm is correct, which I maintain it isn’t, but it is still a useful example to show how the world we actually experience can only ever be pure consciousness without any separation.
The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”
What the materialist paradigm suggests isn’t that the world you experience is real and physical, because we know it can’t be – it suggests that there is the world you experience, plus the real world beyond what we experience. An outside, external world in addition to the one we experience.
You’re sitting there reading this on your phone or computer. That phone or computer is “inside your head”. The materialist paradigm suggests there is *another* real phone or computer that exists beyond the one in your direct experience. There has never been any direct evidence for this real external world, because how could there be? It is just an assumption we have made because things really seem physical and separate. But it’s just not the case.
We are still living in an outdated physicalist paradigm though. We have taken the world at face value without really questioning its nature. A little bit of investigation reveals that the world is very different to how we thought it was.
Some people might find these ideas challenging, and they are. Waking up to reality is challenging. It dismantles all our beliefs, and that can be destabilising. As Jesus said: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will be astounded, and will reign over all.”
It takes a little courage to wake up from the dream of mind.
And remember, even your “head” is just in your head. 😉
Much love,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
In some spiritual circles, there is often a distinction made between what is called “The Divine Masculine” and “The Divine Feminine”. In Hinduism these are called Shiva and Shakti respectively.
There is a lot written about these two principles, and I’m not here to write an intellectual rundown on these two ideas, not least of all because I’m not an expert in this field. Instead, I want to give a very simple rundown of how I see these two ideas relate to spiritual awakening.
Shiva, the divine masculine, is often said to represent the absolute reality or consciousness; that which is beyond all form. Shakti, on the other hand, is often said to represent the manifest world, the life-giving energy of the universe, in all her beauty and horror.
The type of spirituality I have mostly followed since my spiritual journey began 8 years ago is called “nonduality”, from the Hindu word advaita, literally meaning “not-two”.
The basic premise of this school of thought is that all is ultimately consciousness, there is no true separation, and thus the separate self is ultimately illusory too.
These teachings are really fantastic for those interested in ultimate truth and enlightenment. However, like all teachings relating to the nature of reality, they have their limitations. As far as I see it, the world is much more nuanced than can be simplistically put down into absolute statements about its nature, and too much emphasis on these teachings can lead to someone rejecting or neglecting the phenomenal world as merely “illusory”.
As I see it, the world is only illusory in one sense – that is, its nature is very different than how most humans usually think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real”. If a magician performs an illusion, we don’t afterwards say “nothing happened”, we say “what we thought was happening was not what was actually happening.”
This is the sense in which I see the world as illusory: It is made out of consciousness, not matter. The world is very much real as consciousness, but very much unreal as matter.
That’s not to say we should disregard the idea of matter altogether – it is still the way consciousness is appearing so should still be taken seriously. I wouldn’t step in front of a bus just because I think matter is ultimately illusory. Illusory me would still die, and all the spiritual excuses in the world wouldn’t change that.
So to just dismiss the world as illusory is to neglect the relative reality of the world, and often leaves people in an intellectual framework without embodying their awakening, or otherwise engaging in “spiritual bypassing”, which is using spiritual teachings as a way to avoid dealing with their issues.
I recently came across a great spiritual teacher called Louise Kay, who I think embodies the balance between “masculine” and “feminine” perfectly. She is in part a nondual teacher, and simultaneously helps people come to terms with and embrace their emotions.
A lot of nondual teachers reject the usefulness of meditation practise. They say, “you already are what you seek, all you need to do is recognise this.” And this is true at an absolute level, and in my opinion can even be a useful teaching at a relative level, but it often leaves people sitting around “waiting for enlightenment”, with no change in their everyday life.
It is a paradox as far as I see it. Yes, you already are what you seek, and yes all you need to do is recognise this, but at the same time practises may be useful in helping you see this. I say “may be” because in my estimation there are no rules for awakening. Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie both woke up in the midst of severe depression, without any previous spiritual path.
The way I approach it now is to keep reminding myself that I already am what I seek, but at the same time, I’m going to do the practises because I feel they help my relative life, and who am I to say that helping my relative life won’t help wake me up? Anybody who says they have a simple answer to that question I think is deceiving themselves.
I had some sessions with Louise and she actually told me that I’m already awake, just that it hadn’t sunk in fully yet, which was great to hear. I still struggle with a lot of depression and anxiety, largely related to my experiences over the past couple of years, so it’s a bit hard to be excited about while I’m still suffering so much, but it’s nice to think that my path is paying off.
In conclusion, I think the Buddha’s teaching of “the middle way” is most appropriate here. Don’t get stuck in absolutes, and don’t get stuck in relativity – embrace both and see where it leads you.
I’m personally excited to see where this path of opening up to my emotions will lead me. I’m only a beginner on this path but I feel it’s perfect for me, as my emotions were what so often made meditation difficult to maintain. A meditation practise that specifically focuses on embracing your emotions in unconditional love feels perfect for me.
I’ll see how it unfolds from here…
Much love,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
About 3 weeks ago, something changed for me. Or didn’t change. Or, the change was that I was no longer looking for a change.
I realised that what I am – consciousness itself – is already awake.
The “shift” I have been trying to achieve for 8 years finally happened. Or, again, didn’t happen.
It’s tough to talk about.
Around 8 years ago I came across some “enlightenment” teachers, and since then I have been ardently striving to achieve this myself. I’ve been obsessively fixated on achieving this realisation, even to the point of it being detrimental to my regular life.
Over the past few months, certain teachings had been hitting me more deeply. Then I started to look into the notion of time, and this is what apparently changed things for me. Or, again, didn’t change them.
I realised that notions of future and past are merely concepts in the mind which occur in the present moment. There is no real “future”. And so my whole house of cards of “I’m going to get enlightened in the future” collapsed. I realised there was only now, and there was only ever going to be now. The “enlightenment in the future” bubble totally popped.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but things were different after that.
I went to listen to a meditation recording and despondently thought to myself, “hmm, maybe this will wake me up.” Then I paused, reflected on consciousness, and thought, “What? Wake me up? How could I be any more awake than I am now? How could awakeness be any more itself than it already is?”
And I suddenly realised, “Oh my God, I’ve stopped seeking.” Consciousness was already conscious. Awakeness was already awake.
The “shift” I had been striving toward for almost a decade had finally “not occurred”. It was instead to see that there was never going to be any “shift”. That… this was it.
It no longer feels like I’m trapped inside my mind. It feels much more like I am consciousness itself, and the mind is merely an appearance in this consciousness, made out of this consciousness.
This is why in Buddhism they often call enlightenment “the gateless gate”. You have an image of this event that will happen to you in the future, some sort of transformation that will occur, but once it “occurs” you realise there was never anything to occur. There was no gate.
Rumi put it more poetically:
“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. The door opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.”
Or, to illustrate the point somewhat humorously: Two Zen monks are standing on either side of a river. The first monk says to the second, “How do I get to the other side?” The second monk yells back, “You are on the other side!”
This is a humorous little joke, but it also illustrates the point perfectly. In terms of awareness, you already are what you’re seeking. What you’re looking for is what is looking.
Now, I don’t think I’m totally enlightened. There’s still a hell of a lot of clearing up to do. There’s still suffering, there’s still a lot of mind activity. The only difference is I no longer feel trapped inside of those things. I feel much more now like I am awareness rather than my mind.
For most of my life, it’s felt like there was an energetic contraction in my head. This fuzziness. This lack of clarity. This blurriness to life.
I was so much asleep to life that for the majority of my life I didn’t even know there was this contraction – until I started to meditate and began to “wake up” a little.
But it finally feels like I’m no longer caught.
I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. “Time” will tell as far as that is concerned. There’s definitely still a lot more to unfold. But this feels like the biggest shift that has occurred since I began this journey 8 years ago.
I spoke to a friend about this realisation, and he said, “Oh, it’s like you’re finally out of the prison of Will.” And I said, “No, it’s more like someone came and opened the door to my cell, but I’m still just sitting in the same cell, only now just looking around going, “well this is different…”
I think the process from here on out will be me gradually coming out of my cell. I have no idea how long it will take until I feel like I’m out, but it feels like the door is definitely open now. 🙂
Thanks for reading,
In love and light,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
I had quite a deep realization a few days ago regarding the nature of “enlightenment”. That is, enlightenment never happens in the future.
I had heard this type of teaching from many teachers in the past, but this time it struck me more deeply.
Enlightenment is a useful word in one way because it suggests to us that there is a very different way of perceiving the world than the way most humans generally do.
This is very useful because it’s true. There is a very different way to perceive the world.
The word becomes a double-edged sword though, because it then suggests to people that enlightenment is an “event” that may happen to “me” in “the future”.
This is where it becomes problematic, because the future doesn’t actually exist, it is just a collection of thoughts that occur in the present moment.
We have learned from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity that the nature of time is very different to how we usually conceive of it. It fluctuates depending on the observer and their particular reference point.
Time literally slows down as gravity increases. As an object increases its speed, time runs slower relative to objects moving slower. This was exemplified in the movie Interstellar, where, upon returning to Earth, the inhabitants there had aged significantly quicker than those who travelled at high speeds through space.
Usually this effect is so small we don’t notice it. You need to be travelling very fast for it to become obvious. But it still exists in our world too. Walk from your room to the living room while someone is sitting on the couch watching TV. You have aged less in that time than the stationary person, only so minutely you haven’t noticed it.
Of course, in our universe, nothing is ever truly “stationary” – the person sitting on the couch is spinning around the axis of the Earth at roughly 1,600 kilometres per hour at the equator, which is rotating around the sun at roughly 107,000 kilometres per hour, and our solar system is moving through our galaxy, which is moving through space itself. This is why Einstein’s theories were called “relativity” and not “absolutivity”. Everything is dependent upon the observer and their particular reference point in space-time.
Do you live in an apartment block on the second floor? Because of the (very slightly) reduced gravitational field of Earth where you are, the people living below you age slower than you. Again, so minutely you can’t perceive it except with the most accurate clocks available. And don’t worry about trying to get the ground floor – to you it won’t seem as though you’ve aged quicker, time will appear to you as having gone on at the same rate. It will only be in comparison to the person living below that time will have appeared to go slower. A total mind-job I know.
So, we have learned from Einstein’s equations that time is not a static construct, moving along at a fixed rate, but instead a perspective that changes relative to the person observing.
At the very least, we have learned that time is not what we usually think it is.
Many philosophers, and any enlightened person worth their salt, go further. They suggest time is not actually real at all, it is merely a construct created in the mind of the conscious observer in order to, in a sense, categorise our experiences.
But there is no real evidence for it in our universe. As the scientist Robert Lanza stated, “you can’t put it in a bottle like milk.”
The only evidence we think we have of it is that we have a memory – in the present moment – of something having been one way, and now being a different way, and we surmise that this supposed change that occurred has occurred in “time”.
But as the Greek philosopher Parmenides once annoyingly said to a friend of his, “just because my hand was over here and now it’s over here doesn’t mean that anything has changed.”
This is something that on initial inspection can sound completely ridiculous, but to illustrate this point, I’ll give an example philosophers often use as a model to explain this called the “block universe”. This is the type of universe many philosophers believe we live in (pictured below), where the past and the future both simultaneously exist as set constructs. From this perspective it’s easy to see how someone could claim that “nothing ever changes”.
The block universe theory, where the past and future are set in stone and each slice of the block constitutes a present moment experience
In my opinion the block universe is an incorrect model of our universe because quantum mechanics still leaves open every possible future state, and even, mind-bogglingly, past states, from the present moment. But it is a useful model to illustrate how it’s possible that time doesn’t actually exist as an independent entity, it is merely created from a perspective in the present moment.
Have you ever experienced this thing you call “the future”? Have you even ever experienced this thing called “the past”? Or have you only ever experienced *thoughts* about these things in the present moment? Have you ever been anywhere else but the present? So why believe in something you have never experienced? In other words, why believe in something there is no evidence for?
This is why enlightenment can never be an event that happens in the future. There is no real future, there is only now. Believing enlightenment may happen in the future will actually prevent you from waking up to the now, which is what enlightenment is.
Enlightenment happens now or never. Because there is only now. Literally.
In love and light,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately. One of the greatest enlightened sages to ever live, Ramana Maharshi, was once asked, “How should we treat others?”
He replied, “There are no others.”
To a lot of people, this won’t make any sense. But when you look closer, what he’s pointing to is that what you really are deep down – consciousness itself – is not different for any person.
The consciousness that is shining out of my eyes is exactly the same consciousness that is shining out of your eyes.
It is all one. Literally.
The reason most people don’t see this, apart from the enlightened few, is because we have been taught from the time we were little babies to regard ourselves as separate and distinct from everything around us.
But this isn’t how we start out.
When a baby is born, they have no sense of me vs other. Their experience is just a whole bunch of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and touch.
They’re hard-wired to have preferences. They like the sound of their mother’s voice and dislike loud noises. But they don’t see themselves as separate from these experiences.
Then people start pointing at them and saying this weird sound that they eventually come to know as “my name”.
A mental construct of them as a distinct and separate self then starts to build.
This is very convincing. The mind is extremely powerful at clouding over the blatantly obvious fact that everything is one.
And this is reinforced and reinforced by society to the point that it really feels like we’re a separate self, distinct from everything around us.
Then some people start to question this through various means.
Maybe they see that it doesn’t make much sense from the point of view of neuroscience that there’s a special place in the brain where our “self” resides.
Maybe they come across the teachings of an enlightened person and start to examine what experiential evidence there is for this self.
Maybe they have a spontaneous awakening where they see this clearly with no clear “path” to this realization.
Whatever the case, these awakenings are taking place in greater and greater number all around the world. There really is a great rise in both the realization and discussion of this topic.
So what about you? How would your life change if you were to see clearly that everything is one and there is no true separation? How would the world look if a great mass of people started to realize this?
As the late comedian Bill Hicks once famously said, “What’s going to happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?”
In love and light,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
Free will may be an illusion, but only because “you” are an illusion too
Update: I don’t fully agree with everything I’ve written here, and I gave a different perspective in my next post: “Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective”
During my undergraduate science degree, I became more and more interested in the big questions of life. What is the universe, how does it function, where does it all come from? I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to answer these questions. As I went along, however, I started to see that philosophy had just as crucial things to say in this matter as science did, so I became more interested in these matters as philosophical questions rather than just brute scientific “facts”.
The first big philosophical question I ran into was the one of free will, which we examined in my class, “Evolution and Human Behaviour”. You see, the more you look into the notion of free will, the harder it becomes to defend it. At least the type of free will most people are referring to when they think about free will: that is, there was a choice or action to be made and they could have acted differently than they did. This idea I will term “true free will” – that we make independent decisions based solely on what we want to do free of any constraints. There is another type of free will – a “relative” level of free will which also needs to be discussed, but as you’ll see it doesn’t give you the type of free will most people believe they have.
The first sledgehammer to my belief in free will came when we studied the famous Benjamin Libet experiments from the 1980s. In these experiments, Libet got people to do simple tasks – e.g. press one of two buttons or flex their wrists – and note the time they made the conscious decision to do so. While they were doing this they were hooked up to an EEG machine to record their brain activity. What Libet found was that he could predict, based on prior brain activity, what the person would do before they consciously made the decision to do it. This experiment has been repeated many times with different types of equipment, and the results all point the same way: in some cases what the person is going to do can be predicted a number of seconds prior to their conscious recognition of what they decided to do.
This is a big one. If our brains essentially operate by the laws governing our universe, albeit with a little quantum uncertainty (though it’s very sketchy to try and sneak free will in here), then none of our thoughts, none of our actions, none of anything about us can actually be claimed to be a truly free choice.
There are many ways to debunk the notion of true free will. There’s the laws of the universe argument stated above, there’s the gene-environment interaction which makes up literally everything we are in this moment, then there’s the more philosophical arguments, for example: you can’t choose what you desire, and your greatest desire will always win out (even if you try and trick the universe by doing something that is not your greatest desire to prove your own free will, that has then just become your greatest desire). Think about it: Have you ever done anything that was not your greatest desire unless you were forced to by someone else or by society’s expectations? When did you ever have two options in any moment, no matter how small it is, and went with the less desirable action. (If you think you can come up with one, let me know in the comments and I’ll explain why it was still, as far as you could tell in the moment, your greatest desire).
Let me throw out a bone though. Even though I think the lack of true free will is true, there’s still a “relative” level of free will as I stated, which, while not giving people the true free will they want, at least doesn’t completely negate the relevance of choice and deliberation. Even though there’s no true free will, choices and actions should still be undertaken as though there is such a thing as choice. It’s sort of a yes and no answer to the question of free will. Yes, from an absolute view the notion of true free will is, I maintain, not just unlikely but an impossibility, but down here at the relative level choices and actions still matter and we shouldn’t just become lazy thinking, “there’s no free will so what’s the point of doing anything.” That’s becoming fatalistic and taking the idea that there’s no free will too absolutely. Even if there’s no true free will, it’s still important to deliberate over choices, weigh up the options, act in the best way you know how. But when it’s all said and done, don’t take any pride or any shame in the outcome. You did the best you could given the conditions you found yourself in. In fact, in every single moment you have always done the best you could for where you were at, even if the outcome was horrible.
Now I will get down to the main reason I think true free will is an illusion. As many mystics and sages throughout the centuries have claimed, the self, or ego – the little homunculus pictured above, the little man or woman we think we have inside our heads thinking and making decisions – that itself is an illusion. In short, the self doesn’t exist. In reality, thoughts occur but there is no *thinker* in addition to the thoughts. Actions take place, but there’s no *actor* making them take place. Can you predict what your next thought will be, or do they just arise of their own accord? In order to predict what it would be, that would mean we would have to think the thoughts before we think them. Actions may appear to occur simultaneously with thought, e.g. a desire for coffee arises, then the thought, “I’ll go make some coffee”, and then the action of making coffee. Did you choose for the desire for coffee to arise, or did it just happen? And if there’s no other thoughts which say, “no I’ve had too much today I won’t make another one”, then coffee-making usually follows. All of these things can take place without there being a true thinker in addition to the thoughts or a true “do-er” in addition to the actions taking place.
This is not just a spiritual claim, however. As the neuroscientist Sam Harris points out, there’s no special place in your brain for the “self” to reside. There’s just a whole bunch of sense data being interpreted by your brain which then post-hoc decides on the idea that there is a self here, separate and distinct from everything around it. Here is a video of Sam discussing this illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fajfkO_X0l0 (7 minutes)
There’s also a great and entertaining video by CollegeBinary on the philosophy of David Hume, who also came to the conclusion that the self is an illusion. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QZ2Ko-FOg&t=89s (3 minutes)
A lot of people find these ideas depressing – both the illusion of free will and the illusion of self – but it really shouldn’t be, there’s a much greater perspective to be gained when these illusions are seen through. As the nonduality or “enlightenment” teacher Gary Weber said at the beginning of his book “Happiness Beyond Thought”: “The bad news is you don’t exist; the good news is you’re everything.”
This is what happens when you begin to “wake up”. When you begin to become “enlightened”. You begin to see through all the illusions your thoughts have created about the world and about yourself, and you see reality as it really is, rather than how human minds say it is.
This is what spiritual awakening really boils down to: it is simply a case of mistaken identity. We have taken ourselves to be these bodies/minds when in actual fact what we are – what everything is – is consciousness. And there is no true separation. This is why Gary Weber said the good news is you’re everything.
The American spiritual teacher Adyashanti put it another way (paraphrased): A lot of people don’t like this idea, they want to be in the driver’s seat. They think just sitting in the passenger seat watching everything would be boring. But that’s still clinging to the illusion of the self, just as a watcher. When you begin to realise, you are the steering wheel, you are the car, you are the scenery you’re passing by, you indeed are everything, it starts to become a lot more interesting.
The illusion of free will isn’t just a fanciful philosophical idea to consider though, it has very real world implications. When you begin to see that people are not absolutely responsible for their actions, compassion arises. You see everyone as a product of their genes and environment, and realise – if *you* were born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would be exactly the same as them and have lived their exact life.
It also has profound implications for the notion of blame and punishment. From my perspective blame and punishment are antiquated notions which only still exist today because people believe in true free will and that people are solely responsible for their actions. The illusion of free will says they’re not. They are a product of their genes and their environment and their particular neurochemistry at the time they made any decisions. Which again, if you happened to be born with their genes and grew up in their environment, you would have made exactly the same choices they did. This isn’t to say people should not be put in jail for crimes – we need that in order to protect the public and act as a deterrent for others. But, I argue, we should stop short of blame and punishment. That is a misperception about the nature of reality.
There’s a story I love about how an African tribe has songs for each member of their tribe, and when one of their members does something wrong, they don’t punish them, they gather around and sing their song to them to remind them of who they truly are. If people who commit heinous acts are treated with compassion and understanding and forgiveness, while obviously still needing to protect the public from them, I believe the rate of heinous acts would decrease dramatically. Often those who commit heinous acts are actually those who most need compassion and understanding.
So what am I going to do now? Well, I’m going to have a cigarette. Why? Because I’ve had a very stressful year and I don’t yet have the willpower to quit. My desire for a cigarette outweighs my desire to quit smoking for the time being, as stupid as it is. I’m going to do my best to quit, but I won’t be able to until I’m able to. Until my desire to quit outweighs my desire to have a cigarette. Even though I know whatever happens could not have happened differently, I’m still going to try and exercise my “relative free will” and do my best to quit.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
I believe there is a great spiritual awakening happening on Earth.
If you had told me this ten years ago I would have stared at you blankly and thought you were a bit nuts.
How times have changed.
The reasons for this are many, but I think it boils down to two main reasons: 1. People are ready. People can sense there’s something wrong with the way life is being lived on our planet and they are looking for alternatives; and 2. The conditions are just right now for the spread of information and therefore wisdom to occur (the most obvious avenue for this being the internet). There is a third factor of technology that I will discuss, but I see it as secondary to these first two reasons.
There are two sides to spiritual awakening itself though. One side is about waking up to absolute reality, what Jesus called “God”, and what many others have called “enlightenment”, “self-realization”, or “awakening”. And the other side is the progression of life on our planet: our cultural evolution, if you will.
To deal with the first aspect: A lot of people don’t know this, but there’s this crazy little thing called consciousness which makes up literally everything we experience.
Don’t believe me?
Try and find something in your experience that is *not* made of consciousness (i.e. your sight, taste, smell, touch, etc). Pretty difficult isn’t it?
Well that’s because everything we know of the world IS made of consciousness, according to our direct perception of it. Everything, in a very real sense, is just in your head. And this is now being backed up more and more by modern physics, which for over a hundred years has been suggesting to us that things are not really things until they are observed – i.e. until they appear in consciousness. In fact it suggests that things are not even things when they do appear in consciousness. It suggests our whole world is made up of nothing but consciousness. This is what the Buddhist teaching of emptiness points to – empty of substance.
This is an amazing fact, and often overlooked because of its simplicity.
But people are beginning to take notice. Not just of the physics, but of consciousness itself. People are starting to question more than they ever have, “what is the truth of all this?”
You see, as Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix – one of the best documentary series ever made by the way 😛 – we’ve been living in a dream world. A kind of trance state created by our minds, which says with absolute certainty that things are things whether or not we are looking at them. Physics says “nu-uh”.
And for some inexplicable reason, there is a massive amount of interest gaining in areas which treat consciousness seriously. Ten years ago you could go to a 10 day silent meditation retreat whenever you wanted; now you have to book months in advance to reserve your spot.
The second part of our cultural evolution and awakening is about ideas and questioning our assumptions to come up with better ways of living. This is the natural selection of ideas which Richard Dawkins coined “memes”. You see this everywhere. How many people do you know who are suddenly interested in the gender pronouns debate? 10 years ago this topic was unheard of. Now, debates are happening all over the place. And, even though it may look crazy and dysfunctional on the surface, what people are really trying to do is make sense of things: refine our ideas so we come up with better, more inclusive ideas.
It may look like not much progress is being made on the surface: Just two people stubbornly arguing for their point of view, but really there is much more going on. People are at least considering the other person’s perspective, even if they won’t willingly acknowledge this during the debate. They are starting to see that there could be some truth to both sides of the argument. There’s a quote which says the progress of spiritual maturity is gauged by an appreciation for paradox and ambiguity. I think this is very true. Take the gender pronouns issue as an example. There is no cut and dried answer to this, just as there isn’t to most questions in society. It’s ridiculous to claim to that gender differences are an entirely social construct, just as it’s ridiculous to claim that social constructs don’t play a major role in gender identification. It’s all about, as Richard Dawkins also once said, “consciousness raising”: appreciating that there may be another side to the story which you haven’t fully understood yet. (note: Richard Dawkins is not a favourite intellectual of mine, but for some reason he popped up twice in one article, go figure).
And the third aspect I mentioned – that of technology. Technology is going to drag us into the 21st century whether we like it or not, and it’s also going to radically change our way of life, as if it hasn’t enough already. The warning that comes along with this is that when a culture develops highly advanced technology, it had better be mature enough to be able to handle it! Which is why I think we are seeing more and more mature debates being held all around the world. People are becoming fascinated with thinkers like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and many others. I noted that, off the top of my head, there are not as many influential female speakers, and this is something that will definitely need to change: we need to listen to the feminine more if we’re going to evolve as a spiritually mature, advanced species. Women may not always speak the same language as men; they may not always give your mind as much of a bone to chew on, but their contribution is just as important, if not more important, given the imbalance that currently exists within our society.
So in general I think people are starting to pause and say, “Hang on, this isn’t working.” “Something’s not right.” “Things aren’t how they’re meant to be.” “I’m unhappy.”
And when people start to realise they’re unhappy – or at least, not as happy as they could be – and usually after a long period of wallowing, they start to look for cures. They begin “the search”. They look everywhere for this thing called happiness, in people, places, ideas, things, but never seem to be able to find it. Or if they do, it’s only temporary. This is when a lot of people start to look at the bigger questions of life, and start to look into spirituality. This is the beginning of the end of their road of unhappiness.
Not that enlightenment is just about curing unhappiness. That’s just a byproduct. Enlightenment is about truth. Truth, it seems, just brings a lot of happiness along with it (eventually).
But this transition won’t be easy. There are a lot of hard truths we’re going to have to face up to as a society to make it through this. A lot of really horrible shit has gone down while we’ve all been sleep-walking our way through life. Enlightenment is sort of like shining a torch in the darkness. When you shine a torch, the first thing you see is all the rats, so you’re horrified. But the next part is the part that’s worth it: the rats hate the light so they begin to flee. So that’s all we’ve got to keep doing; keep shining our torches (mostly on ourselves, because as Adyashanti once said, “enlightenment is an inside job”). I won’t go into the details on what these hard truths will be because a. I don’t know them well enough myself yet; and b. my intention is not to fear-monger here, only to raise awareness, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go into the specifics just yet. Let’s just say, to use a quote from Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In other words, there have been more things going down on Earth than most people have realised.
My prediction is that we’re going to be in for a very rough ride when we finally start to see all the rats that have previously gone unnoticed, but it’s the first step to a life free of these rats. There’s no other way to go about it. You can’t just keep living pretending the rats don’t exist. Well, you can, but it will only continue the suffering we all experience. As the song by The Clash says, “If I go there will be trouble; if I stay there will be double.”
So we all have a choice now. I say go. Even though it’s going to be painful and difficult, the alternative is much much worse.
Which decision will you make?
In love and light,
Will.
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?
I agree, always start with the bad news first.
Okay, so, here’s the bad news:
As a former science student myself, I have a great respect for science itself and the principles behind science. The problem here is not so much with science itself, but with scientists. They’re human after all, and us humans always try to understand things, so we inevitably make assumptions about the world based on what we think is real. A lot of this we then turn into being just a collected body of knowledge we hold onto as “the way things are”. Scientists really do their best to try and avoid this, but they are definitely not immune from it. The psychological need for understanding runs deep, so when something is unclear, we usually latch onto whatever seems most reasonable.
And well, things are not always as they appear. The very foundations of the type of science many scientists fall back to by default — the Newtonian, cause-and-effect type of science — has been on tremendously shaky ground for over a century since the advent of quantum physics. You see, the deeper you look into our universe, the stranger it becomes. Cause does not always precede effect. Things appear to not really be things at all.
And this is why scientists are so confused by quantum mechanics — it’s because they’ve taken legitimate observations about how the world can behave in given circumstances (this is fine, there’s nothing wrong with this part of science), but then the problems start: They begin to construct models out of this for how the world is based on these observations, when there is no evidence for the models themselves, only for the observed phenomenon (our sense perceptions) behaving in a certain way.
Scientists have thus built castles in the sky.
But look, you can’t blame them. We actually need these castles to a degree. Even though it makes absolutely no sense from a quantum physical standpoint, when you turn the handle of a door, it almost always opens. It’s pretty magic the way that happens when you consider what’s happening at the quantum level of indeterminacy. It’s almost enough to make you think we live in an intelligent universe! (the anthropic principle is usually used as a rebuttal against this, but the probability of us standing on top of infinity is… effectively zero, so I wouldn’t exactly call that a strong argument)
But as I was saying — we can’t walk around all day not using any constructed models otherwise we’d be non-functional. But as humans — and scientists are almost always humans — our minds grasp for understanding. We think if we understand the world better then we can make it a more enjoyable place to live. At a very subconscious level, we look for security in understanding. And we can achieve that to varying degrees. I still think the answer to true happiness lies within each and every one of us, not in the external conditions, but the external conditions are still relevant to a degree.
So, scientists, use your models, make your predictions, engage in behaviour in accordance with these predictions, but just don’t make a belief system out of them. Beliefs are the antithesis of science — they are what form when you’ve decided you have an answer and stopped looking at any more evidence — but it’s what humans default back to almost every time. The reason being is that not having belief systems is very unsettling; it feels like we’re on very shaky ground (which we are). We need to get used to that. The future of physics is not going to get any simpler to understand — time and time again quantum weirdness has reared its head and it’s here to stay. We have to accept that our brains most likely didn’t evolve to have the capacity to understand our universe at its deepest level. Our Newtonian brains can’t stretch that far.
So, have some humility. Admit that we might just not be able to understand how the universe really works, but give thanks for the fact that even though it makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of quantum mechanics, at the level of the world humans generally interact in, things still seem to work as though they do, more or less, make sense.
In other words, become a true scientist. A Not-knower. A Maybe-so-er. Someone who observes the universe and attempts to make predictions based upon those, but who never says they understand the way something works, because you know what, around the next corner there could be something that says, “nah, I don’t behave like that. I don’t fit that model.”
And that is what has happened for the last 100 years. In the early 1900s, the universe said, “nah, you guys don’t get me.” And the scientists responded with, “Yes we do, yes we do, just let us think this over some more.” And the universe said, “nah, you really don’t get me.” And scientists have been struggling to pretend ever since.
I’m not saying stop trying. Definitely keep trying. I’m just saying I don’t think our brains evolved to be able to understand the universe at its deepest level. We’ll just be encountering weird shit that makes absolutely no sense to us, and we’ll just have to throw our hands up in the air and say, “Well, fuck, this science tool is really useful, but it’s not going to give us the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.”
Because how could it? How could an investigative method *within* the system it’s investigating ever claim absolute knowledge about the nature of the system itself? It’s a logical impossibility.
So I think it’s time for scientists to acknowledge this and say, yep, we won’t ever get ultimate answers, but at least what we’re doing here is pretty damn useful for us.
There’s a great video on what I’ve discussed here by a youtuber called CollegeBinary where he does 3-minute videos on various philosophers and their theories. The one he does on David Hume is exactly what I’m trying to say here. It’s a great video; very entertaining and very short. Well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QZ2Ko-FOg
There is a solution to all this, and it solves all these dilemmas — it’s called the “biocentric” (or consciousness-centric) universe, championed by Robert Lanza, whom the New York Times called one of the three most important scientists alive today. His approach — coming at the universe from a consciousness standpoint instead of a inanimate physical/energy standpoint — explains away every single problem quantum mechanics has thrown at physicists for the last century. As Lanza says: “It becomes clear why space and time, and indeed the properties of matter themselves depend on the observer.”
His book, “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe”, is a fantastic read and in my opinion one of the most important books ever written. He’s not a great public speaker, so I’d really suggest buying his book (it’s very easy and enjoyable to read), but for those who don’t, here he is at the Science and Nonduality Conference giving a talk on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_F4nOKDSM&t=259s
And I’ll let Robert Lanza take over from here…
Thanks for reading, and happy sciencing!
For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!
