The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Reality

  • Ajata Vada

    A warning:

    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. 😉

  • 7 Year Update

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

    Oh man.

    The last 7 years have been tough. That’s an incredibly big understatement. The level of pain and anxiety I’ve experienced has been crippling. I still can’t leave the house without taking a Valium at the moment because of the risk of my mind taking me down a very scary path which could lead to a panic attack.

    There are 3 causes for this.

    1. My health concerns. I’ve gained 50kgs (110 pounds) in the last 7 years because the antipsychotic I’m on causes massive weight gain, and this has led to a few health issues. Sleep apnoea, high blood pressure, and I recently found out I’m in the early stages of pre-diabetes. Since finding that out I’ve radically changed my diet, and lost 3 kilos in the last 2 weeks. It may end up being a blessing in disguise because I have so little strength left I’m not sure anything else would have been enough to change the way I was living. I’ve also been experiencing heart pains on and off for the past year which has been really scary, but I went to a cardiologist and they said my heart’s fine, so that assuaged my concerns a little bit. It’s been tough though. January and February of this year I experienced anxiety over an extended period like I never have before. I was beside myself. Luckily now my anxiety only gets really bad when I leave the house, so I do that as little as possible. Just enough to go for an hour walk a few times a week. My doctors said I could come off my antipsychotic and just continue to take lithium while keeping the antipsychotic on hand in case I notice myself going into psychosis again, but I just have SO much fear about experiencing psychosis again I’m terrified of this. Which leads me into my next point…

    2. Fear of having another psychosis. I haven’t had a psychosis, or even any psychotic symptoms, for 3 years and 3 months. However, my fear of having another psychosis absolutely terrifies me. It’s the scariest thing in the world to know that your mind can turn on you at some point and make you experience something that can be paralyzingly terrifying. Especially after what happened during my first psychosis in 2018. I read a study that said a lot of people in psychosis show raised levels of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in their blood, an endogenous compound known to be one of if not the most powerful psychedelics known to humans. I thought, great, my biggest fear is losing grip on reality, and now I might be having non-consensual psychedelic trips, which yes, can be great, but can also be horrifying. My first psychosis was equal parts incredible and terrifying, but the terrifying parts were so terrifying I want to do everything I can to make sure it never comes back. That’s why I continue to take medication today, despite it still being my choice whether I want to or not. And the third point…

    3. My spiritual path. My spiritual path is NOT EASY. You have to face up to everything: your pain, your anxiety, your fear of death, your fear of going crazy. The last thing the mind wants is enlightenment. It is the end of the ego. So it will say it wants enlightenment, but is actually doing everything it can to sabotage your efforts. But this transcendence of the mind thing is not easy. If we are identified with our minds, as almost all humans are, then this process of letting the mind go can feel very much like death. Or, as I mentioned, a fear of going insane. And there’s absolutely no way to know that things will work out okay on the other side. This is why I think the spiritual path requires quite a lot of faith. Faith doesn’t mean belief in something, but rather something more like trust that even though you don’t – and can’t – know for certain, you let go in the face of that unknown anyway. It’s not totally blind faith; most people usually have a lot of evidence pointing in this direction, but you can’t know what’s going to happen until you see it for yourself. All the spiritual teachers in the world could tell you, “Don’t worry about it, it’s heaven,” but until you see it for yourself you’ll never know for certain.

    So that’s a sort of brief summary of where I’ve been the last 7 years, and most especially the last 2 years, where it ramped up in intensity. The best I can do is just cope, and try to allow this process to unfold as it will without me getting in the way too much.

    I’ve got a couple of more blog posts to write which I’m more excited about – this one was just a catch up seeing as I haven’t written here in a few years.

    Thanks for reading,

    Will.

  • Enlightenment is an Illusion Too

    Eternity is in love with the productions of time

    William Blake

    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!

  • Enlightenment, The Ultimate Perspective

    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!

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