Yin Yang: An image that perfectly encapsulates the paradoxical “half-truth” nature of reality
I’ve been mulling over the most recent article I wrote – “The Illusion of Free Will” for a couple of weeks now, and the thing is – I don’t really agree with it. At least, not fully.
This is going to be
an article where you don’t get any set, defined answers, so if you
don’t like articles of that kind, skip over this one now.
The question of
whether humans – or any sentient being – has free will was one of
the first big philosophical questions I ran into in my undergraduate
science degree.
At the time, I had
an assumed belief that humans had free will, that we were ultimately
responsible for the decisions we made, and should be held accountable
for our actions. The more I looked into this belief, however, the
less it seemed to make sense.
In order to really
explain my “position” on this, I’m going to have to get quite
deep. Think ultimate nature of reality deep.
I think the best way
to do that is with a diagram. This will obviously be limited too, but
it’s the best way I know how to convey my perspective.
The Three Levels of Reality
At the ultimate
level, there’s the Source of all existence. The ultimate One. The
Infinite reality.
This is beyond the
dualistic mind of humans. Beyond good and evil. Beyond right and
wrong. Beyond this versus that.
As the Heart Sutra
of Mahayana Buddhism states: “Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi
svaha” which translates to “Gone, gone, gone beyond, totally gone
beyond.”
Welcome to reality.
This is the annihilation of the separate self. The ultimate
perspective on reality. The eradication of distinction.
Not everyone wants
this. Even those on the spiritual path, not many of those truly want
ultimate truth – they want to just make their lives a little
better.
That’s fine.
Everyone has their path to walk, walk it freely as long as you
choose!
I think this is the
path I have chosen, however. Do I know that for a fact? No. It’s
quite possible to me that I could stop short of this so long as my
life was enjoyable.
There’s a part of
me that feels I won’t be satisfied until I know the ultimate
perspective however. Time will tell as far as that’s concerned.
Which brings me to
the point of this post, which is kind of a rebuttal against my last
post.
Even though
ultimately everything is one, and ultimately everything comes from
the same source, there is still simultaneously distinction. The
Infinite reality can split itself up as much as it likes and still
remain infinite.
And that’s what
humans are. A splitting off of infinity.
Life is
simultaneously all one and yet has distinctions within it.
Which is where the
question of free will, along with the existence of the self, becomes
a bit blurry.
Ultimately if there
is only one and no separation, then obviously there can’t be any
true free will or true separate self.
But within that reality, there exist the *appearance* of distinction. And those appearances are still relevant. They still have their own unique makeup. Their distinct preferences.
This is where, from
my perspective, life becomes not a simple yes or no answer, but more
like a three-layered answer.
There’s the ultimate perspective. Then there’s the unique individuation. Then there’s the mental construct or ego level of identification.
The third layer, the
ego layer, is the one that I think is entirely illusory and that
humankind would be much better off getting rid of entirely.
But that still
leaves the unique individuation level. The level where life is seen
from the ultimate perspective but acknowledges the distinct
manifestations of that ultimate one.
And that’s where
it could be said that “free will” is not an entirely erroneous
concept.
If a unique
individuation has a desire, and the freedom to act upon that desire,
then for all intents and purposes that could be said to be a free
choice.
The issue is not so
much about answering a question definitively as it is about removing
set belief systems.
The belief in true
free will is problematic, just as the belief in no free will is
problematic. The question instead becomes “from what perspective
are you asking that question?”
Because the answer
differs depending on what perspective you’re asking the question
from.
So, do we have free
will? Yes and no. Does the self exist? Yes and no. Is this answer
going to satisfy you? Yes and no.
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!
One of the reasons I find it difficult to write sometimes is not that I have writers block — there are lots of things I could write about — but instead, as I’ve moved along my spiritual path, I’ve begun to see degrees of logic and validity in what almost everyone says. I can see their point of view, even if I think it’s only a fragmented view, or missing the bigger picture, I can still see the truth in it.
I mentioned in one of my previous blogs that there’s a quote which says: “An appreciation for paradox and ambiguity are a good measure of spiritual progress.” I think this is very true. The more I delved into any topic, the more I could see the logic of both sides of most arguments. Some were better arguments than others (some are obviously totally gibberish), but in almost all of them I could still see the valid point they were making.
Which leaves me in an interesting position, both with writing but also in social situations. I’ve always been a pretty quiet person, but now in conversation there’s so much more silence coming from my end because I find myself disagreeing with people a lot less. I may not agree 100% with what they’re saying, but I can agree with it partly.
So when someone asks me my opinion on something, it’s always a tricky thing to answer.
Some questions are easy, “Do you prefer apples or oranges?” Answer: oranges. Easy.
But when the conversations become more complex, there are so many different perspectives to consider, and so many contradictory truths coming from both sides that I find myself in a very odd position of not really being able to answer concisely. I usually end up with a long response which goes something like the article I’m writing here.
Take politics for example. I used to consider myself a left wing type of person, and I think many people would still consider me that today, but over the years I’ve gained a lot of appreciation for the opposing side of politics and the valid points they make. (they also make a lot of invalid ones in my opinion, which is why I don’t consider myself a right-winger).
But let’s take a look at one simple example: unemployment benefits. I’m lucky enough to live in a country where these are available for those unable to work for various reasons. It provides something to fall back on when times are tough, and I think this is a great service offered by our government. However, there’s a counter-argument which also has some validity: If you hand out free money to people, they’re not going to be as motivated or proactive about getting a job and getting back into the workforce. For some people, this could actually be doing them a disservice, because a lot of our self-worth is derived from what we do for a living and what we contribute to society. It may make people lazier, thinking “Well, I’ve got enough to live on, I can just lay back and take it easy for a while.” I don’t think many people would consider this the recipe for fulfillment or happiness. So you see, one simple issue, two opposing points of view, tough love or soft love, both with their own degree of validity.
Or how about the gender pronoun debate? Yes it’s crazy to put people into boxes and say, “You’re this gender therefore that means you must be a, b, and c.” But likewise, it is also crazy to say that there are no biological differences between the genders. So how can you really provide a concise opinion on something as multi-faceted as the gender pronoun debate when there are so many intricacies and subtleties that go into the debate?
Or another: the question of whether humans have free will. On the one hand you could say, everything is pre-determined by physical laws governing us, therefore there’s no such thing as true free will. On the other hand, we make (relative) choices all the time. Some decisions we have a lot of choice in, some decisions we have less choice in, but it’s still what could reasonably called a “choice”.
And this simultaneity of truth or “relative truth” perspective goes down to physics itself. Look at the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics: when not observed, the electromagnetic spectrum behaves as if it were a spread out wave of possibilities. When observed, this wave function collapses to a single point giving us a determined set of characteristics for a given particle. So in answering the question, is light a wave or a particle the answer is: both. Or one, depending on which measurement you’ve taken or chosen not to take.
The physicist Leonard Susskind thought up a conversation which took place between Alice from Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter. It went like this:
Ever since her last science class, Alice had been deeply puzzled by something, and she hoped one of her new acquaintances might straighten out the confusion. Putting down her cup of tea, she asked in a timid voice, “Is light made of waves, or is it made of particles?” “Yes, exactly so,” replied the Mad Hatter. Somewhat irritated, Alice asked in a more forceful voice, “What kind of answer is that? I will repeat my question: Is light particles or is it waves?” “That’s right,” said the Mad Hatter.
I see this pattern in all of human thinking and human endeavours, which is why philosophers, despite going hard at all these problems for millennia, have never come up with any good unifying theories for how to explain life or any other issue they were discussing. They’ve merely been circling around the whirlpool trying to sneak a look in at truth.
But truth is multivariant. There are so many different layers to truth that to put in down in words — in the language of humans — is an almost impossible task.
Right now there are many ways to discuss what’s happening here while you’re reading this. First, there are subatomic particles which were set in motion at the beginning of time and were all pre-destined to make it to this point and to having this conversation. Second, we’re having this conversation because of the cultural situation we find ourselves in. Third, there are electronics within our computers which are processing the input and transferring it to your phone, allowing for communication. Fourth, at the level of quantum mechanics, we have very little idea how this functions but it seems like an infinite wave of potential is collapsing in every moment giving us this exact experience.
All of these are simultaneous truths, and one doesn’t discount the other, which makes it difficult to really discuss exactly what is happening. You have to first set up a premise which is never ultimately true, in order to have a conversation within defined parameters.
I personally believe this will always remain the case. When you look at how our minds evolved, they are basically like those little labeling machines from the 80s. We think if we stick enough labels together we can come up with a coherent story to explain things. But those labels are still just labels. In Zen there is an expression: “Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.” That’s the mistake our minds always make. In order to simplify things and find a “yes” or “no” answer to every question, we dumb down reality (and ourselves) by clinging onto these simplistic solutions.
And us humans hate this. This “yes and no” response. We want set and defined answers we can guarantee on and thus know how to navigate this world we find ourselves in a bit better (or, just as often, to feed into our egoic self that we’re right and we’re smart).
So what should we do in a world that’s so contradictory and holds so many valid but opposing points of view? Well, this for me is where the logic of love comes into play. I believe we are all really on a search for love; a search for unity and connection. So why not just start there, where we’re all aiming to reach anyway? Why not just love the person or situation as they are without the need to label them as good or bad, useful or useless, right or wrong.
I have found in my own journey, as my mind’s fixed positions began to crumble more and more, I experienced more empathy and compassion for those around me, and I also funnily enough became smarter. I became smarter because I was looking at each situation with an open mind, and considering whatever the proposition was entirely on its own merits, not relying on my mind’s previous conclusions about the subject in question.
And this is still happening to me today. My mind is still crumbling and crumbling, but I’m getting smarter all the time. I’m definitely not the smartest person in most rooms, but I can seem like it because I have such an open mind and can see things from a bigger picture than I used to be able to.
That’s why I think love is not just an ideal to hope we run into, but one we cultivate through expanding our awareness and understanding those with different points of view.
As one of my idols Helen Keller said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.”
Imagine the world we would live in if people everywhere started to consider all possibilities when having discussions, rather than doggedly arguing for their set point of view, with all its inherent limitations and contradictions.
At the end of the day, when the mind begins to break down, and you can see people who are still totally enslaved by their own mind, compassion arises. Love arises. This is why I consider love not just an emotion but the most logical position given the circumstances we find ourselves in.
So, as always, and to the best of my ability, 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!
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!
Content warning: This post contains references to pedophilia, which may be upsetting for some people. Apologies if so. ❤️
This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend about the spiritual teacher Fred Davis, who – about 40 years ago when he was a teenager – indecently assaulted some of his younger nieces. This created a bit of a storm within the spiritual community: some coming to Fred’s defence; others lambasting him and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to teach spirituality.
Well, Fred, after spending much of his life as an alcoholic, and at times being homeless or in mental institutions because of this, finally joined Alcoholics Anonymous to try and fix his drinking problem. He did fix it, and ended up becoming a much-in-demand AA guide for others who were trying to do the same.
As part of the 12-step program in AA, one of the steps is that you need to connect with and apologise to all the people you have wronged in your life. Fred did this, and obviously one of these things was writing to his nieces to apologise for his actions. He offered to talk to them too, if they wanted to. Four years later, a couple of them did, and they recorded the conversation and gave it to the police. Despite this being some 30 years in the past at the time, the state where Fred lived, South Carolina, had no statute of limitations for sexual offences, so he was brought before a judge and convicted of the crimes. The judge took into account his recovery from alcoholism and the good work he was doing being a guide for others to do the same, and sentenced him to weekend incarceration for a period of 90 days in jail, registration as a sex offender, and some other strict provisions for five years. Some may say this was too lenient, but I’ll let others be the judge of that. Fred wrote a blog post about this back in 2014 when it all came out, which can be found here, and it is an interesting insight into the nature of what happened. I recommend reading it: https://awakeningclaritynow.com/glass-houses/
Which brings me to the topic of this post, and WHOAH, what a heavy topic it is. Probably the heaviest topic you could possibly discuss: An adult taking advantage of a young, innocent child for their own gratification, thereby causing untold grief and trauma to the victim. Like I said… heavy.
So where to start with such a topic? How to start with such a topic?
I have always found myself in a peculiar situation whenever the topic of pedophilia comes up. I obviously feel great remorse for the victims and the amount of suffering they must have endured as a result of their experiences, but I always also felt something else simultaneously: compassion for the perpetrators. I always felt, wow, this is considered the most reprehensible crime you can commit in society, and this person just committed it. That must be a horrible thing to experience, regardless of their guilt.
This is not to say it’s not a horrible thing that they did – it is. It’s just to say: these people were so mentally unwell that they committed what is considered to be one of the worst crimes in society. And pedophilia, it must be said, IS a mental illness: There is no biological reason why an adult should be attracted to a pre-pubescent child, it makes no evolutionary sense. Therefore, the cause must be a psychological illness which has made them act in this way.
Which leaves us in an interesting position. Most people who are mentally unwell are usually treated with compassion, even those who commit crimes. I myself committed a crime during a psychotic episode (assault), and I was treated (mostly) with compassion and understanding. But not pedophiles. Oh no, their crimes are just too egregious to have any compassion for whatsoever.
I think this is wrong. I think every person deserves compassion and understanding regardless of the crimes they have committed. And yes, this too includes Hitler, the one person who is often singled out as the example for the most evil man in history.
The reason being: I consider all life as one, you see. Not just as an idea, but as a fact. So I consider anything anyone does to another person that is harmful to the other person as a sign of a kind of mental illness on their part, a misperception about the nature of reality. If they saw clearly, I argue – if they saw truly that life was all one, then they would not have done it. But they weren’t seeing clearly, therefore they had some degree of mental illness.
In fact, I consider 99.99% of the population to be to some degree mentally unwell. If you look into your own life, I’m sure you can find examples where you’ve acted a bit crazy or a bit irrationally. Sure, you may not be as mentally unwell as some people, but it’s still a sign of mental illness. In this sense, I consider everyone who doesn’t clearly see the oneness and interconnectedness of all life as, to varying degrees, mentally ill. This includes myself. I haven’t yet reached a point where I see life as all one all the time. I have had glimpses of it, which is how I am able to write this, but I don’t walk around all day seeing oneness. There’s still too much mental activity clouding my seeing of this simple fact.
And it is a fact, even just from a logical point of view. When you think about it logically, life has to be all one, ultimately speaking, because it all comes from the same source. It is a logical impossibility that there could be more than one source for existence. Why? Because if there was more than one source, then it wouldn’t be the ultimate source, it would only be a relative source. If there was more than one, then there would have to be another source from which those two sources sprung. You can’t have a split at the base of existence. This is where the philosophy of nondualism is so accurate and so valuable. It is not the only truth, there are still other relative truths – but it is the truth. This is why it is called in Hinduism: advaita vedanta – which translates to “not-two”, and “the end of the vedas”, indicating this is the highest teaching.
But please don’t take offence to what I’m saying either. I’m not labelling you personally as mentally ill, I’m just saying it is the nature of the mind, because of the way it evolved, to often misunderstand things. You see, as I’ve mentioned numerous times in my blogs, our minds really did only evolve for basic biological functions and to survive in the apparently physical world we inhabit. It didn’t evolve to understand reality, only to surviveand reproduce in it. There’s some great work done by the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, where he computer-modeled evolutionary scenarios to see which conditions would win out. To his surprise, the one determining factor in evolutionary success was survival – i.e. passing on your genes – not perceiving reality as it really is. Here is his Ted talk on the subject (20 minutes), called “Do we see reality as it is?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY He ends the talk with the quote: “Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth; it’s about having kids.”
So how does all this relate back to pedophilia, you might ask? Well, as I mentioned, I think we are all, to some degree, mentally ill, because we do not see reality accurately. Some of us function well in this survival-oriented paradigm, others function less well, but in neither case are they seeing reality accurately. And this I believe is where all harm stems from: not seeing things clearly. If Fred Davis, or Hitler, or anyone else you want to mention, saw clearly at the times they were committing their crimes, they would not have done them. Why? Because they would see that it was really just another aspect of themselves they were harming. As the nonduality teacher Gary Weber once said, “It would be like cutting off your own hand – it just wouldn’t make sense so you wouldn’t do it.”
So I believe everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness. Not because their crimes don’t matter or the victims suffering doesn’t matter – it does, and people should still be sent to prison if they commit these acts in order to protect others and to act as a deterrent for others. But everyone deserves compassion and forgiveness, because when we harm another it is only ever because we are not seeing clearly. We are acting from a deluded perspective, and thus are deserving of sympathy, not hatred and judgment.
What a world we would live in if people saw those who committed heinous acts as deserving of understanding and compassion rather than hatred and derision? A much nicer one, I think.
Something else came up when I was talking to my friend about this, and that is the idea of “what you resist persists”. Eckhart Tolle – another great spiritual teacher – once said that he thinks a big part of the reason there is so much pedophilia in the Catholic church is because of their demonization of sexuality. If you demonize something, you often, in a strange way, make it somehow more appealing. Just like the illegalization of drugs. If someone says you can’t do something, you kind of want to say, “Oh yeah? Why not?” Tolle noted that the suppression of sexuality in the Catholic church often led to it becoming distorted and manifesting in perverse ways. I agree with his judgment on this (although I accept there are most likely other factors too, but I don’t want to make this post any longer than it already is). [Important note: I just want to be clear here: I am *not* saying that we should accept pedophilia and then it might go away; we should *always* as a society say that pedophilia is wrong and immoral, I am only talking here about the demonization of sexuality in the Catholic church (and, to a lesser extent, society as a whole) which has led to sexuality manifesting in perverse ways.]
The spiritual teacher Adyashanti once said this too: “Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”
I think the same goes for things like pedophilia. In the case of the Catholic church, they have resisted human sexuality to such a point that it has become a taboo perversion for them, rather than a natural expression of love and unity (or whatever else you want it to be, so long as it’s done with mutual respect and consent).
But it’s not just the Catholic church who do this: we do this all over society. Imagine a society where instead of demonizing and hating pedophiles, we treated them with understanding and compassion. Imagine the effect that would have on the pedophiles themselves? If you’re told by society that you are the lowest of the low, beyond forgiveness, you are more likely to act in that way. If society instead treated them with understanding and compassion, the would-be pedophile might instead think, “oh, I am just mentally unwell, it’s not that I’m an evil person”, and they would be much less likely to commit the act in the first place – they would seek help and feel supported.
This is not to say it is wrong to feel anger, or wrong to feel sadness when things like this happen. That is a misunderstanding of what I’m saying. Anger and sadness are legitimate responses to bad or unwanted situations. So I’m not saying don’t feel anger when things like this happen. I’m just saying, look to see if you can’t also find the part of you that contains forgiveness. The part that has understanding and compassion. The part that knows this person acted out of their own illness, not out of a conscious decision to harm another person for no reason.
Thanks for reading, and as always,
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!
Cults are an interesting phenomenon, and they definitely do exist. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, there’s no shortage of examples of these charismatic yet deluded figures leading their followers, desperate to believe in something, off the proverbial cliff.
But the word cult gets bandied around a lot, and often in a very casual manner.
So what really defines a cult? Well, for me, the defining aspect is when the teacher becomes more important than the teaching, and the teachings are defended blindly against the weight of evidence against them.
Now, just to get my side of the story out of the way first – I’m definitely not in a cult (said every cult member ever). As a former science student, the idea of any type of belief, scientific or otherwise, is anathema to me. Beliefs, I believe (hehe), are the opposite of the scientific and true spiritual method of making observations based on direct experience. And direct experience is ALL we ever have access to in determining truth, so using something other than direct experience to guide our lives seems pretty silly to me.
Which is why it is so strange to me that I, of all people I think the least cultish person I know, have been accused of being in a cult.
The cult I’ve been accused of being a part of is the one surrounding my spiritual teacher, Isira, and the organization supporting her teaching, Living Awareness.
It seems that any time two or more people gather around a common spiritual cause, it’s automatically labelled a cult. But what did Jesus say? (another person who was accused of running a spiritual cult) – “Wherever there are two or three gathered in my name, I am there.” This is also probably why Buddhists hold sangha (spiritual community) to be the most important aspect of spirituality – because we learn more from our interactions with others than we ever could just going it alone.
The irony is, I’m only ever accused of being in a cult by people who have never heard my spiritual teacher give a talk. Their knee-jerk reaction is: “Someone’s teaching you something that is not (yet) the norm in society?” – CULT! Anything that is the norm in society – science, politics, medicine, etc – they’re all fine to have teachers for, but nothing esoteric, nothing that isn’t easy to understand. This really is ironic because there is so much more cultish behaviour in these fields than in any spiritual field I have personally encountered. Although I do consider myself lucky in that sense – I had a good, skeptical, scientific training before ever becoming interested in spirituality, so I was always quite cognizant to never believe stuff just for the sake of believing in something.
Which is what I think all cults, spiritual or otherwise, really boil down to: belief. In my opinion beliefs should not exist. From a scientific perspective, a belief is something you form when you say, “Okay, we’ve had this result, we’ve seen the evidence, we can make a conclusion now and stop any further investigation into the matter.” Why would anyone ever want to do that? In that sense I think beliefs have no place not only in science but in society as a whole. They are just psychological crutches people use because the world is so complex and the psychological need for humans to have some guiding principles is so great that we’re quick to latch onto anything that we feel gives us security.
People think we NEED beliefs of some kind in order to function, but we really don’t. Casual beliefs, like the belief in time and space (they don’t really exist the way we think they do, so yes, these too, are beliefs), are fine to have and to use in everyday situations. So long as we acknowledge that they are indeed beliefs, and don’t actually represent the true nature of reality.
I realise I’m asking a lot. Letting go of beliefs is a TOUGH road. The reason being is that our thoughts are so tied in with our emotions. They are inextricably linked to them. So to let go of a belief is not just to let go of a belief, it’s to let go of the feeling attached to that belief. And to do that, we need to experience that feeling in its raw state. Hence the resistance. We often think, “If we could just make sense of the world… if we could just finally get that last puzzle piece that fits everything into place then we’d have a full picture of how the world worked and we’d be *secure*.” We could finally relax.
Well, I don’t think it’s ever going to work like that. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t think our minds really evolved to understand the true nature of reality. They evolved for relatively mundane tasks like picking berries, having sex, spotting predators, etc etc. We’ve done pretty tremendous things with this very limited brain of ours, don’t get me wrong, but in terms of understanding absolute reality – not a chance. As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, it’s a logical impossibility for a system that operates within a system to fully understand the system it operates within. This is what Einstein’s theories of relativity were all about – it is all relative to the particular observer, at their particular reference point in space-time.
But this principle applies just as much to our regular lives as it does to what we could call “Einsteinian post-modernism”. I’m not arguing that we completely throw out tradition and culture – a lot of things are here because they do, more or less, work, and serve a function.
Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve discovered the ultimate answer to something, because, you know, around the corner there’s always something waiting to say, “nah, that doesn’t describe me.” It’s a little bit like women – if you try to figure them out you’ll come up against a LOT of problems, and they will certainly let you know about them.
So what to do in a world we can never understand fully? Well, the same thing we do with women I think. To borrow a quote from the legendary Oscar Wilde: “Women are meant to be loved, not understood.”
Love in the face of not understanding is the key that unlocks all the doors in my estimation. Because when you think about it, love is really the end goal of everything we are aiming for anyway. Everything we do, ultimately, is to find and experience more love. So why not just skip the whole process and start with love itself, the place we’re all really aiming for anyway?
In conclusion, keep using your ideas so long as they are useful, just be careful about turning them into beliefs of “that’s just the way things are”, because sooner or later in this incredibly complex world of ours, you’re going to run into a situation where it doesn’t fit.
And as for my “teacher”? Well, if she suddenly started to not make sense or act a bit cuckoo, I’d be out of there in a jiffy. So far, that hasn’t even been close to happening, so I’m quite happy with hearing her wisdom for the time being.
As always, 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!
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I’ve listened to countless spiritual teachers on my seven year journey into spirituality. The number of hours spent listening to teachers on youtube would be easily in the thousands. But one still stands out head and shoulders above the rest: my teacher of the last three years, Isira.
Now, that is saying something! Some other spiritual teachers I’ve listened to I have absolutely loved; the main other one being the American teacher Adyashanti. I used to tell my friends he was the first man I ever loved. Kiran Trace (from Mystic Girl in the City) once called him “the shit”, and it’s hard to really top that description of him. He is an incredibly good teacher.
But, as he says himself, he’s very much a “wake up” guy – he’s not a “how to live your life better guy”. And he describes his teaching method as being very “broad strokes”. Which is fine. Wake up guys are great – they wake you up! It’s also fine being a broad strokes teacher: there’s no use getting into all the nitty-gritty of spirituality when you’re just coming onto the scene; you need someone who can lay it out in general terms so you get an overall picture of what spirituality is all about.
My gratitude to Adyashanti is out of this world. If I saw him in person I have no doubt I would have tears in my eyes. He helped me along the way SO much.
But, and even though it pains me to say this because of how much I love Adyashanti, I still found someone better. Someone deeper. Someone with more breadth of understanding. Someone who could talk to anyone and offer them advice for exactly where they were at, and exactly what they needed to hear.
That teacher is a woman called Isira.
Now, I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog before, but for those who haven’t read that: When I first came across a video of Isira, I didn’t really “get it”. I came away thinking “she seems like a nice lady”, but that was about it. There was no deeper recognition. Then, about a year later, a friend recommended her to me again so I went along to one of her satsangs (a Sanskrit term meaning “association in truth”). This time I got it. This time I felt her presence, and it was powerful.
I remember walking into this room with all these people seated facing an empty chair at the front of the room. Then Isira came in, dressed all in white (“what’s with the white?” I thought to myself), and sat down in the chair. She scanned the room in silence, welcoming everyone. Then she got to awkward, little me, at the farthest side of the room, as far away from the centre of the action as I could get (this was always my preferred place in all situations). She looked me in the eyes and I instinctively looked away, embarrassed. After a few moments I looked back up to see if she had moved on, but she was still looking at me, with the same warm, welcoming face I originally saw. She wasn’t going to let me get away with my shyness.
The satsang was a success, I guess you could say. This time I got a glimpse into what she was about. I felt her presence and was uplifted all the way home.
There was an announcement that the organization was looking for volunteers, and almost immediately I began volunteering. I was the technical equipment storage and transport guy, and eventually became the tea-maker for Isira’s one-on-one consultations on Saturday mornings. I sort of fancied myself a bit like the kung-fu master who guards the Oracle in the Matrix, albeit much less skilled in martial arts. All I really did was mix tea.
I was fascinated by this woman, as many who meet Isira are. I had never met a truly enlightened person in person before, so I watched all her actions, analysed all her movements, looked at her through squinted eyes trying to figure her out. Trying to see if she really was as enlightened as she seemed.
The difficulty was, you see, she wasn’t your typical mountain-top, rag-wearing guru. She lived life. She enjoyed food. She had preferences. “Do enlightened people have preferences?” I thought to myself. Well, I guess it makes sense. She is human after all, and she’d much rather I hand her a cup of dandelion tea than a cup of dirt.
You see, the idea of spirituality has become so disconnected from everyday life we think there are only two options: you either choose the world, or you choose enlightenment. You can’t have both. Isira seemed to have both, which raised a lot of questions for me. Does she still like nice things? Does she still have relationships? Does she still have sex?? I found out the answer to all these questions was yes, which gave my mind more things to ponder.
Hmm, so it’s possible to be enlightened, and still live a completely full life in the world. That sounded pretty good to me. Most of the previous teachers I had listened to had been mostly male, and mostly just spoke about the importance of “waking up to absolute reality”. Isira talks about that too, but in equal measure she talked about issues in the world. I found that really exciting. Enlightenment didn’t mean you became just a nobody, it meant you became even more fully your natural self. Sure, the natural self was seen from a perspective of absolute oneness, but it didn’t discount the relevance of the manifest world – it celebrated it. To me it appeared she had achieved the goal I came to think true spirituality stood for: to become both fully human and fully divine.
Now, I didn’t always like Isira – in fact, sometimes I hated her!! I was so enraptured by this woman’s presence and energy that my ego wanted her attention and love to be focused on me as much as possible. Obviously this is not only an unreasonable demand on anyone, but Isira would never let us get away with these silly ego trips. She always kept herself at a slight distance because of this. Sometimes I interpreted this as her not liking or not loving me enough, but really it was just her way of making sure she wasn’t pandering to our egos, thus making the problem worse. When you spend any amount of time around Isira, your ego gets some harsh lessons. In fact, it is sometimes even hard to be around her because of this. Some people really can’t take it and react negatively to it, projecting all their blame onto her: e.g. “she’s a fake teacher!”; “she doesn’t really care!”; “she’s only interested in herself!”; etc, etc, etc. (all these examples are examples which came from myself 🙂 ). Because you see, the thing is, when an ego comes up against someone whose ego has been thoroughly removed, it can turn pretty nasty. I remember at a retreat once a woman said: “I thought I was a nice person, but I wanted to kill you! And you just responded with the same love you always did.”
I’ve got to be honest – as I’m obviously not completely free of the ego myself, there’s still a part of me that desires this attention. This can still make my ego very annoyed, and I think that will remain until I am completely free of my egoic attachment to her.
To this day it still surprises me that Isira is not more well-known than she is, but I think there are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, she has not had much of an online or youtube presence until just recently; and secondly, and maybe more significantly, I think that as in my case the old saying holds true: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” When I first came across Isira, I wasn’t “ready” for her. I wasn’t resonating on a wavelength that was close enough to be able to really get her. That changed for me in the year between seeing her video for the first time and then attending one of her satsangs. And I think this will happen on a collective level as well. I think humanity may be getting nearer and nearer to be ready to be able to hear Isira, and to be ready for the message and energy she is here to contribute.
All I can say finally is, I can’t wait! I’m greatly looking forward to a time when people en masse start to see who Isira really is, and what she is here to do.
As always, in love and light,
Will.
For more information on Isira, check her out on youtube, or visit her website at www.isira.com
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!
This story was originally going to be titled “The importance of listening to high vibrational music”, but I felt that this is such a good album it deserved a post all of its own. The album is the self-titled album “Radnor & Lee” from Australian musician Ben Lee and American actor Ted Mosb… I mean Josh Radnor… the lead character from How I Met Your Mother.
How these two people (one of whom has never played an instrument) ended up coming up with the most inspiring, soul-touching album I’ve ever heard I will never know, but somehow they did it.
As some of you may know from one of my previous blogs “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, I ended up in a mental hospital for 3 months.
These places are not fun. Not only are you in a mental hospital, you also have literally nothing to do all day but ruminate on how you ended up there and pace up and down the corridors.
The one thing we were allowed (no mobile phones, no internet, no coffee) was a small mp3 player, which was the one saving grace in this oppressive environment.
During my three months there I almost did nothing but pace up and down the corridor listening to this album, which gave me some reprieve from the soul-crushing monotony of life in a mental hospital.
Also, as some of you may be aware, I had just had a partial spiritual awakening (my spiritual teacher called it a kundalini awakening), so I had enormous amounts of energy flowing through my body and no way to let it out in that environment. This led to me, for 3 months almost non-stop pacing up and down the hallway either in silence or listening to my mp3 player. I joked with the staff that I think I had done about as much walking as the girls from Rabbit Proof Fence.
For those who don’t know that reference, it is a beautiful but sad story about a young aboriginal girl, her sister, and her cousin, who were taken (part of the “half-caste”, “stolen generation” as it’s known in Australia) from their families to be integrated with “civilized” Western life and have the aboriginal blood bred out of them. These three girls didn’t like that situation, so they decided to make a 2,400 km (1,500 mile) journey along a rabbit proof fence to be reunited with their families. It took them nine weeks of walking to return home, despite being tracked by a professional aboriginal tracker, the girls managed to cover their tracks effectively and stayed in hiding with their families once they made the journey back.
I’m quite sure, in my 3 month stay in hospital, that I did about as much walking as those three girls, while listening to mainly just one album on my mp3 player — Radnor and Lee’s self-titled album. And also a little bit of Kali Uchis’ Por Vida, which is also a *great* album. I feel I learnt a lot about women listening to that album.
But back to the Radnor and Lee album, aside from some Bright Eyes music, I haven’t found any music that has touched me so deeply or inspired me so much.
A couple of songs you might like to listen to are:
So I just wanted to say a public thank you to Ben Lee and Josh Radnor (and Kali Uchis) for helping me get through one of the most difficult times in my life. You three people made is *slightly* more bearable in that horrible place.
So, thank you, and I hope your albums spread far and wide so other people can experience the same thing I did with it.
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!
I write about a lot of things on my blog: mental health, spiritual awakening, the reality of the extraterrestrial phenomenon; but at the end of the day it all really boils down to one thing: Love.
I believe love is the highest emotion a human can experience, and I believe it is what we are all deeply searching for. All our actions to attain pleasure, success, fame, money – it all comes down to a deep desire to experience love, to experience connection. To love, and to be loved.
If the content I am posting does not share more love, more freedom, more joy, more truth, then I think what I’m writing is a waste of time. Or, worse than that, it is actually harmful to those reading it.
I think as humans we are really so much more powerful than we think we are, and we have a much greater influence on the world around us than we think we do.
One of my favourite quotes by one of my favourite spiritual teachers is by a guy called Adyashanti (his name is a Sanskrit word meaning “primordial peace”). He once said: “If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they’d be crushed by the realization of it.”
I experienced this during my spiritual awakening. At a certain point I began to realize just how much fear and sadness and pain I had been causing and was causing to those around me by my actions and by my state of consciousness. This led to me one night alone in a park, lying on the grass with my hands on my heart just repeating “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…” I’m sorry for all the pain and hurt I have caused by my actions, and I’m sorry for not realizing what I was doing at the time.
You see, as humans we often think in a very simple, linear way. In mathematical terms, we think we either add more happiness or subtract more happiness, but it is so much more than that. So so much more. Not only is our effect on the whole not just a simple additions or subtractions, it’s not even a multiplication or division: Our effect on the whole is exponential.
Someone once told me a little fact: If you give a compliment to three people, and each of those three people give a compliment to three more people, etc etc, then by level 15 every single person in Australia has received a compliment. That’s almost 10 million people (although the population of Australia has grown significantly since then). So, in just 15 simple steps, every single person in Australia is happier.
But it’s not just compliments, it’s our simple, everyday interactions with people. Are we approaching other people from a place of love and openness, or are we approaching other people from a place of fear and contraction?
You see, thanks to good old mathematics, we really are actually so much more powerful than we think, and simple acts of kindness, or simply being in a positive state of being has a profound impact on those around us, who then pass on that profound impact onto the other people they meet that day.
Now, I believe there is a great awakening taking place on planet earth. It doesn’t really matter whether you also believe this to be true or not for what I’m saying to be true. But I believe through a range of avenues – technological, social, economic, environmental – we are becoming much more aware of our effect on the world around us, and are beginning to make big changes in these areas. But here’s the greatest thing: the changes we make don’t need to be huge, they just need to be little, as often as we are able. Like the Australian musician Paul Kelly sung, “from little things big things grow.”
There’s a quote that says: “In an avalanche, no snowflake ever feels responsible.” But the flip side is also true. A whole bunch of snowflakes rolling down a mountain, grows exponentially and can produce a significant impact on anything that gets in its way.
So, like the late comedian Bill Hicks once said, we have a very small, simple choice to make in each moment whether we are living from love or whether we are living from fear. That may sound cliched and oversimplified, but I think most profound things are simple.
There are two sides to this awakening thing though. On the one hand, waking up means you finally start to see where all the problems are coming from. You start to see the fear and the anger and the sadness that has always been suppressed and swept under the rug. So it might not always seem like things are going *great* during this waking up period. Just look at American politics right now for a perfect example. But on the other side of the coin, the great thing about this awakening is that it’s happening all over the place, so as more and more people begin to wake up to these things and to their own contributions, it becomes easier and easier for others to do the same. This is why it is so important to “find your tribe”. Find people who have a similar outlook on life as you do, and this connection will amplify the awakening process happening in both of you. As Jesus once famously said, “wherever there are two or more gathered in my name, I am there.”
The sad thing is, this means you may need to cut ties or keep your distance from people you no longer resonate with, or who have a very pessimistic view of life, because they will only bring you down and slow down your own evolution into who you really want to be.
This is why I think things on earth are going to transform much quicker than most people realise. It is because of this exponential effect of those with similar visions joining with their little contributions into making in the end massive contributions.
So while things may seem to be getting even darker and more chaotic at the moment, the opposite effect is also happening, and all we need to do, as Bill Hicks said, is choose love over fear. It really is as simple (and sometimes difficult) as that.
But for those who find it difficult, remember what Jesus said when he was being crucified on the cross: “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” That I think is the case with every negative action in the world. Every negative action comes from a place of misunderstanding – a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of all life. If you truly begin to see life as all one, as one web of life, then how could you do something that would harm your neighbour? It would be like cutting off your own hand. It would no longer make sense. It really does start to become as clear as that. Or, as one of my idols, Helen Keller once said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.”
Scientists have often stated that we live in a kind of “middle world” of the universe. We’re small enough, and move slowly enough, so that the effects of time dilation and space contraction don’t appear obvious to us, and we’re big enough so we don’t experience the quantum weirdness of things, where things appear to not really be things at all. But that doesn’t mean we’re not affected by these things, it’s just not as obviously apparent to us in most cases. The consequence of this is that our brains really only evolved for relatively simple things: find food, shelter, sexual partners – we didn’t evolve to understand concepts like infinity or to truly appreciate the effects of exponential growth. But these things are real whether we are able to conceptualize them effectively or not. I’ve included a picture of infinity below for your perusal.
A picture of Infinity* (*not to scale)
So, next time you’re out interacting with people, or even just by yourself in your room, just remember how powerful you are. You are exponentiallypowerful. You are so fucking powerful that your brain didn’t even evolve to be able to understand how powerful you are.
How cool is that?
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!
After beginning my life in a very “rational” and “scientific” (or so I thought) way, when I was 25 my life changed in a big way: I suddenly realized I knew very little. I also realized there was a whole field of inquiry I had previously disregarded – that of “spirituality”.
Spiritual is an interesting term. To me, it doesn’t really mean much, but you have to use some word to describe what we’re talking about, and if we changed it to a new word it would just ruin that word as well.
Having been a science student at university, I was always interested in the biggest questions of life – What is it? How does it work? Where did it come from? – and I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to work these questions out. And don’t get me wrong: science is an incredibly powerful and indispensable method of inquiry for investigating how our universe *behaves*. But… it doesn’t exactly tell us what it *is*.
There’s a very famous thought experiment (philosophers love to have these) by an Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson, called “Mary’s Room”. The short version of this thought experiment is: Imagine you have a girl, Mary, who is born into a black and white room, but she is an amazing scientist. The best scientist in the universe. She knows everything. Mary is like a little human God. But… she was born in a black and white room.
The thought experiment is one of knowledge. In philosophical terms this is called epistemology, the study of knowledge – what is knowledge, and how do we know what we know?
The thought experiment goes like this – if Mary knows everything in the universe, she knows all about colour. She knows all about the electromagnetic spectrum and photons and how the retinas in our eyes receive this information and transform it into electrical signals which are interpreted by our brains, thus producing the experience we know as “colour”. But again, Mary only lives in a black and white room. The thought experiment then poses the question: If Mary leaves the black and white room into the outside world and actually sees colour for the first time, does she learn anything new that she couldn’t have learnt from just studying the physical mechanics of light and nerve processing alone?
In other words, is there anything about life that cannot simply be reduced to its physicality.
The answer to me quite obviously is yes, she learns something new that she couldn’t have learnt if she hadn’t left the room. The thing she learnt was not based in physicality but in experience – what philosophers call “qualia” – the subjective, conscious experience of a phenomenon.
This to me really gets to the heart of what the term “spirituality” is all about: What is our direct perception of life, what is our experience of life, when you take away all the mental labels and models our minds have placed over the top of everything.
Say, for example, you’re eating an apple. You could say you’re eating an apple, but really there’s just this roundish, red, crunchy, delicious (if you like apples) blob of sensation in front of you. Now, obviously to communicate we need to use these labels. We can’t say “could you please hand me that roundish, red, crunchy, delicious blob of sensation on the table there?” It would be a great waste of time. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that all we ever really experience is the blob of sensations, never the actual “object” we call an apple. As Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix: Neo: This… this isn’t real? Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
The thing is, we live in the same universe that apple lives in, so this also applies to us, and the labels we use to describe ourselves are only labels for a collection of sense perceptions we have called our “self”. To me, this is the essence of what spirituality is really all about. It’s realizing that the labels we use to describe things are only labels, and they don’t get fundamentally to the actual nature of the thing we’re describing. In other words, things are not what we think they are, and we are also not what we think we are.
Try this experiment:
Without referring to your mind for information, and just look into your direct experience, ask yourself the question who or what are you? Your mind may say, “Oh my name’s Greg.” Yeah, but that’s just a name, a label given to you at birth, what were you before you were given that name? Or you might say, “I’m a landscaper!” Yeah, but that’s just your profession… if you changed jobs I’m pretty sure you’d still say you were you. So what exactly could you be if you really go deeply? Well, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you are your mind, but what is the mind? Just a collection of thoughts that come and go. What if you stop thinking? Are you still you then? So it needs to go even deeper than that. You might then start to touch upon that which is in you that never changes, that which is always there, the conscious witness of all your experience.
This is why enlightened master after enlightened master has always repeated the phrase: you are consciousness itself! And when you look deeply into all of your experience, you realise that everything you experience is actually made up of this consciousness: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste… the whole world, as far as our actual experience of it goes, is nothing but consciousness. And you are not a separate part of it, you are a collection of sensations, just like the apple.
This might sound depressing to some, but really it is liberating – it means you are no longer tied to any of the mental identifications you had with yourself. All your previous thoughts about yourself, your faults, your struggles, is all just consciousness blobbing its way through existence. And when you start to let go of all those previous thoughts about yourself and the world that you had, and start going with the flow of your direct experience, without the mind getting in the way with its constant chatter, the blobs start to blob a whole lot better. The reason for this is because when you’re perceiving things more directly as they are, rather than through the filter of the mind with all of its preconceptions and belief systems about how you think they are, you are more directly in touch with what is really happening.
In one way, spirituality is a very simple topic. It’s just a case of mistaken identity: we have mistaken ourselves to be the body or mind we perceive in front of us instead of seeing ourselves as consciousness, the witness of these bodies/minds. In another way though, we live in a very large and very complex world, so spirituality can also be a very large topic, and I’m not going to be able to cover everything in one blog post (especially because I don’t know anywhere near everything about it!), but essentially that’s what spirituality means to me – realizing that you really are one with the universe, and that, again, as far as our direct experience goes, the whole universe is made out of what we could call “consciousness”.
It might sound like a big leap to say that just because our direct perception of life can only ever be consciousness that the universe must only be consciousness, but this position is also being backed up by modern physics as well, which, while confusing the hell out of almost every physicist in the world, points to the fact that the “physical” world we think we perceive is actually a construction that depends on the conscious observer of the event. That things are not things until they are witnessed by an observer! There’s a great video on this by someone on youtube called Inspiring Philosophy – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5pq7W5yRM&t=225s. Now, I don’t agree with his religious conclusions at the end – I think he is making a leap in reasoning there that you can’t make, but it is still a great video up until that point.
Probably the best physicist I have found today discussing this topic is a person called Robert Lanza. He was called by The New York Times one of the three most important scientists alive today, just to give you a bit of an idea of how good a scientist he is! He is a much better writer than speaker, and his book “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” is a fantastic read and very accessible even for those unfamiliar with physics. But for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read a book, here he is at the Science and Nonduality conference giving a talk on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_F4nOKDSM&t=47s
As I said, spirituality is also a very broad topic and covers a whole range of issues, but this is what it means to me in its most basic form, as a former science student and advocate of the scientific method (the method based on direct evidence!). I may make some more blog posts on the broader topic of spirituality in future but I think that’s all I have to say for now.
Thanks for reading,
Will.
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I’ve listened to many many spiritual teachers over the last 7 years since my spiritual journey began. As I mentioned in my first blog post, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, I consumed endless hours of youtube videos, read books, and watched interviews with teachers from all around the world, the best I could find. Below is the chronological list of teachers who I have found most helpful to me on my path.
Gary Weber
I was initially attracted to Gary because he seemed very down to Earth and came from a scientific background just like myself. He was also very involved in brain research on the differences in brain wiring that so-called “enlightened” people had compared to “regular” people. He is also a subject in the new book by Dr Jefferey A. Martin which is a research book on this topic called “The Finders”, which I highly recommend for the scientifically minded among you!
Eckhart Tolle is a great teacher for a general audience, and one of the best introductions for learning to live from a place that is not so dominated by the mind’s chatter. I highly recommend the interview series he did with Oprah where they went through his book “A New Earth”. (His first book is called “The Power of Now”)
I don’t usually like telling people that I have loved listening to Osho because there is so much controversy surrounding him and what happened at his ashram (ashram is a Hindu word which basically means a spiritual hermitage or monastery/community). I don’t know the details of exactly what happened, although I think a lot of the negative stuff that happened was actually perpetrated by the person he left to run his commune, Ma Anand Sheela, while Osho went into silence and seclusion for 3 years while his ashram was being built. But despite all that, and despite his often (intentionally) provocative and playful nature which some can find confusing, I found him to have an incredible amount of insight in spiritual matters, and I do consider him someone who was enlightened.
Note: I will just add that if Osho were indeed responsible for any of the crimes or allegations leveled against him, then I would just say that his enlightenment was not as complete as I previously thought. Enlightenment is a process just as much as it is a “shift of perception”, so you can still get some “enlightened” people behaving badly – all it means is that they haven’t fully integrated their awakening yet. However, I am very skeptical of the claims against Osho, because a lot of people had reason to dislike him. I should also add that he was never charged with a crime (unlike Sheela), despite the FBI doing their best to do so. That’s all I’ll say on that matter. His teaching remains great in either case.
Well, what can I say about Adyashanti… Aside from Isira, who I mention in the end of this post, Adyashanti is the teacher who had the most profound effect on me, and who I considered my main teacher for most of my journey. Another teacher I listened to a bit, “Kiran” (aka Mystic Girl in the City), once described Adyashanti as “the shit”, and I think that’s about the best description anyone has ever made of him. He is an incredible teacher, and would be one of the first I would recommend people listen to, along with Eckhart Tolle and Isira.
I never really read much of Ramana’s work – not that he had a whole lot to read – what I know of him mostly comes from quotes I have seen, but I still consider him one of the greatest enlightened masters to have ever lived. His presence even just in photographs is palpable.
Fred Davis
Fred has a bit of a checkered past: He was charged (40 years after the fact) of indecently assaulting 2 of his nieces when he was a teenager. Not a very nice story, but he was charged for the crime and sentenced, and today he is now a very good spiritual teacher. He has a very direct, straightforward way of explaining concepts that can be difficult to grasp, so I highly recommend him for that. Some people refuse to listen to him because of his past, which I understand, but I believe people can make amends for their pasts if they are truly remorseful, which I believe Fred is.
Bentinho came onto the scene as a young, fresh-faced nonduality speaker a few years ago, and he was great at what he did. He was certainly very clear in his teachings. He then moved into more empowerment/manifestation style teachings, at which point a lot of people (including me at the time) started to not resonate with him as much. I now see the value those teachings can have, and I now consider him a fantastic teacher of both nonduality and empowerment/manifestation teachings. He has been accused of being cocky and egoic, and I can definitely see why he rubs some people up the wrong way – to me it’s still possible that he has a bit of an enlightened ego – but regardless, as far as his teachings themselves go, he’s one of the best in my opinion.
This is where my interest in spirituality took me a little bit more… out there. As I mentioned in my previous blog, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”, I came across this person who claimed to channel an extraterrestrial being called Bashar on an interview program called “Buddha at the Gas Pump”. I was very skeptical at first, but was soon blown away by the clarity of his teachings and guidance. He ties in nondual philosophy with empowerment teachings, and really opens up your mind to the possibilities of the world we live in. Fantastic teacher!
Well, as with Adyashanti, what can I say about Isira… I think she is hands down the greatest spiritual teacher I have come across in my seven year journey into spirituality. I have not yet seen anyone who has both the depth and breadth of understanding of spiritual matters (aka life matters!) as Isira does. Like Adyashanti, she is essentially a “middle way” teacher – able at one point to direct someone to the absolute truth of who they are (consciousness) and then in the next moment provide pin-point guidance on any topic I have ever heard someone asked her a question about. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I was volunteering with Isira for 2 years before a big shift happened for me, and in that two years I was constantly amazed by the clarity and truth expressed through this teacher. I find it hard to imagine finding another teacher as good as her. A+!
To end with, I’ll just add special mentions to some other teachers who I’ve loved listening to: Byron Katie, Mooji (unfortunately now in his own controversy, although I am very skeptical about this because the article written on him was written by someone who intentionally sets out to defame spiritual teachers), Gangaji, Rupert Spira, Jac O’Keeffe, Nisargadatta, oh and of course Jesus of Nazareth 😉 (another pretty controversial guy there too! 😛 )
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!
