We have spent a rather long time on the nature of timeless unity consciousness, for once this no-boundary awareness is understood, even in the most general terms, then the nature of the rest of the spectrum of consciousness becomes much clearer. Orthodox psychology, in defining a person’s real self as ego, has to describe unity consciousness as a breakdown of normality, as an aberration of consciousness, or as an altered state of consciousness. But once unity consciousness is seen as a person’s natural self, the only real self, then the ego may be understood as an unnatural restriction and constriction of unity consciousness. Indeed, every level of the spectrum can be understood as a progressive bounding, or limiting, or constricting of one’s real self, of unity consciousness and no-boundary awareness.
In this chapter we will be looking at this remarkable story of the growth of boundaries. Nature, we have seen, knows nothing of this crazy world of boundaries—there are no walls or fences in nature. Yet we seem to live almost completely within a world of boundaries, a world of walls and limits, bounds and battles. Since our only real self is always unity consciousness, how is it that the other levels of consciousness seem to exist? What happens to give rise to all these various levels of identity?
Since every level of the spectrum is a progressive bounding and limiting of unity consciousness, we need only begin our study of the growth of the boundaries at the very beginning, at the first cause, at the first boundary itself. And we have seen this first boundary before. We called it the primary boundary: that split between the seer and the seen, the knower and the known, the subject and the object. And once this primary boundary occurs, a chain of inevitable consequences follows. A host of other boundaries ensue, each being built upon its predecessor; the various levels of the spectrum exfoliate; the world as we collectively know it leaps into existence; and we becomes lost, amazed and enchanted, distracted and complexed, loving and loathing our universe of opposites.
Religion, philosophy, mythology, and even science have offered accounts of this beginning, this first cause, this impulse to creation itself. Astronomers tell us that approximately 15 billion years ago there was nothing, absolutely and completely nothing, and then. . . . Bang! Out of zero, a magnificent explosion which flung existence into the cosmos. Christian mythology tells that thousands of years ago, there was only God, and then, in a series of six-day mini-bangs, the world as we know it came to be. From science with its Big Bang to religion with its Big Daddy, all have sought to pinpoint this initial movement of creation and manifestation. But search as they might in the past, they will never find a satisfactory solution to this first cause, and for the sufficient reason that the past doesn’t exist. This first cause did not occur yesterday. Rather, it is a present occurrence, a present fact, a present activity. Furthermore, this first cause is not to be ascribed to a God apart from our being, for God is the real self of all that is. The primary boundary, this perpetually active first cause, is our doing in this moment.
The most puzzling aspect of all this is why the primary boundary arises at all. Why, to put it in a different form, original sin? Why a world of samsara, maya, the misery of boundaries? This is the natural question to ask, and yet it is a booby-trapped puzzle. For when we ask, “Why the primary boundary?,” we are really asking what came before the primary boundary. But nothing precedes the primary boundary. That is, nothing causes it, nothing produces it, nothing brings it into existence. If there were a cause to the primary boundary, then that cause would itself be the new primary boundary. In theological terms, if the first cause had a cause, it wouldn’t be the first cause. And so, unsatisfactory as it initially seems, the only possible answer to the question, “Why the primary boundary?,” is that there is no why. Rather, the primary boundary arises of itself, as one’s own present activity, but as an activity which is itself uncaused. It is a movement in and by one’s unity consciousness, a movement that has many results, but is not itself a result.
We will return to this initial movement in the last chapter, and see if we can penetrate its secret activity, but all we can say at this point is that suddenly in this moment, and in this moment, and in this moment again the primary boundary arises. We have seen—as in the concave-convex example—that each time a boundary is superimposed upon reality, that boundary generates two apparently contradictory opposites. And the same thing occurs with the primary boundary. For the primary boundary severs unity consciousness itself, splitting it right down the middle and delivering it up as a subject vs. an object, as a knower vs. a known, as a seer vs. a seen, or in more earthy terms, as an organism vs. an environment. The natural line—the skin-line which is not to be denied—between the organism and the environment becomes an illusory boundary, a fence, a separation of that which is really inseparable. Says Krishnamurti, “And in that distance, the division between the seer and the thing seen, in that division the whole conflict of man exists.”
Notice that when this primary boundary occurs (and it is occurring now, moment to moment), then man is no longer identified with his organism and his environment, he is no longer one with the world he perceives, because these two “opposites” now seem irreconcilable. He is identified instead with only his organism as against his environment. The organism is “self,” but the entire environment is “not-self.” He takes up residence on this side of the skin boundary, and stares out and across to the alien world around him. “I, a stranger, alone, afraid, in a world I never made.” With the primary boundary, man forgets his prior identity with the All and concentrates it exclusively on his bodymind.
Thus it comes about that man pretends to leave his real self, pretends to leave the level of unity consciousness, and imagines that he lives only as a separate and isolated organism. But this is precisely the creation of the next major level of the spectrum—namely, the level of the total organism. So the primary boundary severs the unity of the organism-environment, and creates the apparently conflicting opposites of organism versus environment, me in here versus the world out there. All subsequent boundaries will rest upon this initial foundation, for, as Chuang Tzu explained, “If there is no other, there will be no self. If there is no self, there will be none to make distinctions.”
With the primary boundary, our now separate self appears set apart, forever apart, by an unbridgeable gulf from the world “around” it. We no longer are the world, we face it. Unity consciousness becomes individual consciousness, our Supreme Identity becomes a personal identity, the Self becomes a self. And thus the first two major opposites, the subject-seer and object-seen, are torn apart from their eternal embrace and now face each other as mortal enemies. So begins the battle of me vs. my world. The environment out there has become a potential threat, since it has the power to eradicate what I now feel to be my “real” self, namely, my organism, my bodymind. Thus there appears, for the very first time, an entirely new factor, a factor destined to be of overwhelming significance: there now appears the conscious fear of death.
An old Taoist sage said, “The True Individuals of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no joy; exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they went and came. Thus there was in them the want of any mind to resist the Tao, and of all attempts by means of the human to resist the Heavenly.” But what kind of individual is a True Individual? Elsewhere the same sage speaks of a True Individual thus: “I am not attached to the body and I give up any idea of knowing. By freeing myself from the body and mind [i.e., the separate organism or bodymind], I become one with the infinite.” In other words, death of the organism is only a problem to a self which identifies exclusively with that organism.
For at the moment an individual separates her “self” from the environment, then and only then does this conscious fear of death arise. The True Individuals of old didn’t fear death, not because they were too stupid to know any better, but because, “transcending the body and mind,” they were eternally one with the infinite. And the True Individual, as Rinzai would point out, is really one’s own True Self, one’s own unity consciousness. When a person realizes that her fundamental self is the self of the cosmos, then the apparent death of individual forms is not only acceptable but willed.
And I laid me down with a will.
Only parts face death, not the Whole. But as soon as a person imagines the real self to be exclusively confined to a particular organism, then concern with the death of that organism becomes all-consuming. The problem of death, the fear of nothingness, becomes the core of the self which imagines it is only a part.
This primal mood of fear also makes it nearly impossible for the separate self to understand and accept the oneness of life and death. Like all the other opposites we have examined, being and nonbeing form an inseparable unity. Behind their apparent difference, they are each other. Living and dying, birth and death, are simply two different ways of viewing this timeless moment.
Look at it this way: Anything which is just born, which has just come into existence, has no past behind it. Birth, in other words, is the condition of having no past. And likewise, anything which now dies, which has just ceased to be, has no future left in front of it. Death is the condition of having no future. But we have already seen that this present moment has both no past and no future simultaneously. That is, birth and death are one in this present moment. This moment is just now being born—you can never find a past to this present moment, you can never find something before it. Yet also, this moment is just now dying—you can never find a future to this moment, never find something after it. This present, then, is a coincidence of opposites, a unity of birth and death, being and non-being, living and dying. As Ippen put it, “Every moment is the last moment and every moment is a rebirth.”
But man, in identifying exclusively with his organism (the primary boundary), accepts only half of birth-and-death. The death half is refused. Death, in fact, is precisely what he now fears above all else. And since death is the condition of having no future, when man refuses death, that really means that he refuses to live without a future. In fact, man demands a future as a promise that he will not so much as smell death in this present moment. His fear of death, whether operating overtly or subtly, propels him always to think, plan, yearn, or at least intend for tomorrow. His fear of death causes him to search for a future, reach out for a future, and move toward a future. In short, his fear of death generates in him an intense sensation of time. Ironically, because the separate self is an illusion, the actual death of the separate self is also an illusion. As the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan put it, “There is no such thing as mortality, except the illusion, and the impression of that illusion, which man keeps before himself as fear during his lifetime.” At this level, man creates the illusion of time so as to assuage his fear of an illusory death.
In this sense, time is an illusion pushing against an illusion. There is a story about a man who met an old and rather feeble-looking fellow on a bus trip. The old man had a brown paper sack in one hand, and he was placing bits of food into it. Finally the passenger could stand it no longer, and asked what was in the paper sack he was feeding? “It’s a mongoose. You know, the animal that can kill snakes.” “But why do you carry it with you?” “Well,” the old man replied, “I’m an alcoholic, and I need the mongoose to frighten off the snakes when I get the delirium tremens.” “But don’t you know that the snakes are just imaginary?” “Oh sure,” the old man replied, “but so is the mongoose.” Likewise, we use the illusion of time to frighten off the illusion of death.
The eternal and timeless now is an awareness that knows neither past nor future. The eternal now has no future, no boundary, no tomorrow—nothing ahead of it, nothing in front of it, nothing after it. But that is also the very condition of death, for death is the state of having no future, no tomorrow, no time to come. To accept death is thus to be totally comfortable living without a future, that is, living in the present above time, as Emerson put it.
But with the rise of the primary boundary, man refuses death, and therefore refuses to live without a future. Man refuses, in short, to live without time. He demands time, creates time, lives in time. Survival becomes his hope, time becomes his most precious possession, the future becomes his only goal. Time, the ultimate source of all his problems, thus becomes the imagined source of his salvation. He rushes into time . . . until his time comes, and he is faced, as he was in the beginning, with the core of this own separate self—and it is death.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Because we demand a future, we live each moment in expectation and unfulfillment. We live each moment in passing. In just this way the real nunc stans, the timeless present, is reduced to the nunc fluens, the fleeting present, the passing present of a mere one or two seconds. We expect each moment to pass on to a future moment, for in this fashion we pretend to avoid death by always rushing toward an imagined future. We want to meet ourselves in the future. We don’t want just now—we want another now, and another, and another, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thus, paradoxically, our impoverished present is fleeting precisely because we demand that it end! We want it to end so that it can thereby pass on to yet another moment, a future moment, which will in turn live only to pass.
Yet this is only half the story of time. Because man is now identified solely with his organism, the memory traces naturally present in that organism assume a significance out of all proper proportion and become his consuming preoccupation. He clings to his memory as if it were real—which is to say, as if it reported a real past of a real self. He becomes quietly obsessed with his “past”; he identifies with it unconditionally. Because he demands a real future ahead of him, he likes to see a real past behind him, and this he engineers by pretending that memory gives a knowledge of actual past events instead of being part of his present experience. He clings to memory as a promise that he once existed yesterday and therefore will likely exist tomorrow. He thus lives only in memory and expectation, bounding and limiting his present with bittersweet laments of time past and poignant hopes of time to come. He wants something around his present to protect him from death, and so he bounds it with the past and the future.
Notice, with reference to figure 1, that man is now identified with his total organism as it exists in space and time. (I should point out that the large diagonal slash line represents the self/not-self boundary, whose changes we are following. We have just seen it shift from the universe to the individual organism.) So far, however, we have omitted any discussion of the intermediate levels of the transpersonal bands. These bands are too subtle and complicated to discuss at this point. We will return to them in chapter 9, for by that time we will have the necessary background information to make some sense out of them. For now we need only note that these are the bands of only the spectrum where, as suggested diagrammatically in figure 1, the individual’s identity is not quite with the All (which would be the level of unity consciousness), but then neither is it confined to the isolated bodymind (which would be the level of the total organism). At these bands, the self/not-self boundary expands in a very positive sense, so that one finds here a level of awareness that clearly transcends the separate organism.
Let us return to the level of the total organism and continue with the story of the growth of the spectrum. At this level, the individual is identified solely with her organism, existing in time, in flight from death. Nevertheless, she is at least still in touch with her entire psychophysical being. This is why we usually refer to the level of the total organism by a simpler name: the centaur. A centaur is a legendary animal, half human and half horse, and so it well represents a perfect union and harmony of mental and physical. A centaur is not a horse rider in control of her horse, but a rider who is one with her horse. Not a psyche divorced from and in control of a soma, but a self-controlling, self-governing, psychosomatic unity.
But now we come to a major event. With the rise of the next level of the spectrum—the ego level—the centaur is literally broken. For the individual refuses to remain in touch with all of her organism; she refuses to extend her identity to all her organic activities; she refuses globally to feel herself. Instead, she narrows her identity to only a facet of her total organism. She identifies exclusively with her ego, her self-image, her purely mental personality, the abstract portion of the centaur. And this means she denies the body and rejects it on a fundamental level by turning it into property. She is the rider, the controller—and the body is reduced to the role of stupid beast, the ridden, the controlled, the horse.
Why does this occur? Why this new addition of yet another boundary? What pushes the individual away from her centaur, her total organism? As one might expect, there are several reasons for this new boundary between mind and body, but an outstanding one is that the individual is still in flight from death. She avoids everything that might remind her of death, embody death, or even hint at death. And as she constructs her reality in flight from death, the first and most problematic thing she encounters is: her body. The body seems to be the ultimate home of death. She knows her body is mortal; she knows it will decay and rot out from under her. In an uncompromising way, the body is impermanent; and the individual, in flight from death, seeks only that which will promise her a tomorrow—in truth, an immortality of tomorrows. And that plainly leaves the body out.
Thus man comes to nurse the secret desire that his self should be permanent, static, unchanging, imperturbable, everlasting. But this is just what symbols, concepts, and ideas are like. They are static, unmoving, unchanging, and fixed. The word “tree,” for example, remains the same word even though every real tree changes, grows, transforms, and dies. Seeking this static immortality, man therefore begins to center his identity around an idea of himself—and this is the mental abstraction called the “ego.” Man will not live with his body, for that is corruptible, and thus he lives only as his ego, a picture of himself to himself, and a picture that leaves out any true reference to death.
Thus is the ego level born (see figure 1). The natural line between the mind and body becomes an illusory boundary, a fortified fence, an armed wall separating that which is really inseparable. And since each boundary carries a new battle, a new war of opposites is on. The desires of the flesh are pitted against the wants of the soul, and all too often the “spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” The organism becomes divided against itself, forsaking thereby its deeper integrity. Man loses touch with his total organism, and the most he will allow is a mental representation, a self-image, of that total organism. It is not exactly that man loses touch with his body. Rather, he loses touch with the unity of the body and mind, the unity of feeling and attention that is characteristic of the centaur. The whole clarity of feeling-attention becomes disrupted and distorted, and in its place is left compulsive thinking on the one hand, and the dissociated body on the other.
Thus we find ourselves on the ego level: man identified with a mental reflection of his total organism, with a self-image. Now a more or less accurate self-image is a loose self-image. It makes room for the entire conventional history of the organism. It includes the childish aspects of the organism, the emotional aspects, the rational as well as the irrational. It knows the strengths and weaknesses of the entire organism. It possesses a conscience (or “superego”), a bittersweet gift from the parents, and a philosophic outlook, which is a personal matrix of boundaries. A healthy ego integrates and harmonizes all these various aspects.
Occasionally, however, all is not well within the ego. For uncertain circumstances, an individual can refuse to touch aspects of his own ego. Some of the ego’s wishes and desires seem so strange, threatening, or taboo that a person will refuse to acknowledge them. He fears that to have a wish is the same as to act on that wish, and that would bring such terrible consequences that he simply denies that he has the wish in the first place.
He might, for example, have a fleeting wish, a minor aspect of his egoic tendencies, to attack someone. Few people escape these temporary wishes. But afraid that he might act on that wish, he simply denies ownership of it—and then forgets that he denied it. “Me? I’d never even think of such a thing. And since I wouldn’t, there’s just no need for me to deny it in the first place.” But, alas, the wish does remain his, and he can only pretend to disown it. As regards the self/not-self boundary, the taboo wish goes on the other side, or at least appears to. In similar fashion, all of the facets of the ego which are disliked, or not understood and accepted, are secretly placed on the opposite side of the fence. And there they join the enemy’s forces.
To illustrate this split within the ego, take the fellow just mentioned who wishes to attack someone (say his boss), but instead denies awareness of that wish. The wish does not thereby evaporate. It still exists, but it seems to exist outside the ego. In technical jargon, the wish is projected. The guy knows somebody is fighting mad, but since it obviously isn’t him, he has to pick a candidate. The angry impulse, in other words, is still present and still active, but since he denies that it is his, he can find it in the only other place possible: in other people. Suddenly, people in the environment seem to be mad at him, and for no apparent reason! His wish to fight now appears to come from others and to be aimed at him, instead of the other way around. “I’m mad at the world,” when projected, becomes “The world is mad at me.” He understandably develops symptoms of depression.
But something else significant has happened. For the person is now no longer in touch with all of his egoic tendencies. Not only can he not touch his total organism (the fate of all egos by definition), he can’t even think about all of his organism’s potentials, because some thoughts are now outlawed. He cannot find, in other words, an accurate and acceptable self-image. He has distorted his self-image in an attempt to make it more acceptable, and thus ended up by denying facets of himself. He develops a fraudulent picture of himself, an inaccurate self-image. He develops, in short, a persona, and all of the unacceptable aspects of his ego now appear as external, foreign, and not-self. They are projected as the shadow. A boundary is erected within the ego, and the individual’s sense of self narrows as a consequence—while his sense of menacing not-self grows. Thus develops the persona level (see figure 1).
And so we see that through successive boundaries, the spectrum of consciousness evolves. Each time a new boundary is drawn, the person’s sense of self diminishes, shrinks, becomes less roomy, more narrowed and restricted. First the environment, then the body, then the shadow appear as not-self, as “existing out there,” as being foreign objects, and enemy objects at that, for every boundary line is a battle line.
But all of these “objects out there” are just projections of a person’s own being, and they all can be rediscovered as aspects of one’s own self. It is this process of discovery that we will undertake in the rest of this book. And each discovery, though sometimes painful, is finally a joy, for each discovery that an object out there is really an aspect of one’s own self converts enemies into friends, wars into dances, battles into plays. The shadow, the body, and the entire environment have become part of our unconscious, the consequence of our fantasy dreams in a world of maps and boundaries, the gift of Adam to his sleeping sons and daughters. Let us, then, lift the boundaries and look afresh at the real world. Let us lift the boundaries so that we can once again touch our shadows, our bodies, and our world, knowing too that all we touch is at heart the original face of our own true self.