Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
— LAO TZU
The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
— HENRY MILLER
One interesting, and at times disconcerting, aspect of this year in solitude is the strong academic component. During previous wilderness retreats I’ve been just a man exploring myself and my relationship with the world; this time, part of the context is earning a PhD. It’s been a challenge to establish a personally meaningful relationship with the university and to present my research in a way that’s academically acceptable. Here, I’ll just touch on a few of the central ideas I’ve used to frame my work.
Previously, the only books I took into solitude were the I Ching and the spiritual teachings of Chuang Tsu. This time, many philosophical and psychological readings have influenced my thinking. At the beginning of my graduate studies, I approached academic reading as a requirement for earning a doctorate, but I slowly became fascinated by many of the ideas I encountered and began to realize that they are directly relevant to my life. Not only do they allow me to frame my explorations in academic terms, but they also help me make personal sense of my experience. They add a rich level of complexity and intellectual challenge to my solitary explorations.
At first, I believed I had to either accept or refute the ideas I was studying, as though they were true or false, right or wrong. Eventually I recognized that ideas are simply stories people tell to help them make sense of their world. Understanding this allows me to approach the work of other thinkers in a more relaxed and openhearted way: to take what makes sense and seems useful; to leave the rest or set it aside for later consideration.
My intellectual approach to philosophy is strictly pragmatic; I read and struggle with only those ideas that directly illuminate my experience of living. In my thinking and writing, as in my life, I don’t feel obliged to be entirely consistent, and I sometimes embrace apparently contradictory perspectives. I see many such apparent contradictions as poles of false dichotomies. For example: mind/body; direct experience/conceptual thought; subjectivity/objectivity; religion/science; evolution/creationism. These are false dichotomies because they’re not actually fractures in the world; they result from the conceptual categories we create to think about the world.
Intellectual activity can, though, distance me from the immediacy of the present moment. I have a lot of conceptual baggage to unpack when I step into the unknown. (Actually, whether we realize it or not, we all carry such baggage as a gift and a burden from our cultural heritage.) But the power of solitude sets these influences in perspective and allows me to again be just a man exploring myself and my relationship with the world.
SUCHNESS AND THE CONCEPTUAL MIND
In The Experience of Insight: A Natural Unfolding, meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein writes:
The intellect is the thought-conceptual level of the mind. It can be trained, developed, and used; or it can be a hindrance. It depends how clearly we understand the thought process. If there’s clear insight into its nature, it’s not a hindrance at all. If we mistake the thoughts about things for the things themselves, it becomes an obstacle in that it confuses concept with reality. But, in itself, the intellect is just another part of the entire mind-body process.1
This differentiation between conceptualization and the direct experience of the undefined Suchness of the world is found not only in Buddhist teaching, but in Western philosophy and psychology as well. Michael Polanyi writes:
As observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself. The conceptual framework by which we observe and manipulate things being present as a screen between ourselves and these things, their sights and sounds, and the smell and touch of them transpire but tenuously through the screen, which keeps us aloof from them. Contemplation dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them. Contemplation has no ulterior intention or ulterior meaning; in it we cease to deal with things and become absorbed in the inherent quality of our experience, for its own sake.2
Abraham Maslow differentiates between abstract meaning and Suchness meaning, and sees them as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Abstract, or conceptual, meaning is found in relating one experience to another; in creating a whole from the parts. Together, the whole and its parts have a meaning the individual parts did not have. Suchness meaning is immediate. The ultimate meaning of any experience is simply itself. There is no need to categorize or analyze. Maslow asks, “What is the meaning of a leaf, a fugue, a sunset, a flower, a person?” And he answers, “They ‘mean’ themselves, explain themselves, and prove themselves.”3
A metaphor I sometimes use to describe the relationship between Suchness and concept is to imagine experiencing the world naively as a swirl of shifting form, color, and movement. In order to make sense of and add predictability to my experience, I begin to search for regularity and repeating patterns. Slowly I focus on the similarities and ignore the differences between the “things” I distinguish and wish to clump into groups that I might call cats or steamer ducks. I hold up a clear sheet of acetate in my mind and draw an outline around each of these things. This outline is the concept I (my culture) create to help organize my (our) experience. This is a useful process.
The problem develops when the acetate becomes opaque, and we can no longer see through it to the flowing Suchness beyond; when all we experience are the outlines that we, ourselves, have drawn. At this point, we ’re no longer experiencing the actuality of life, but only our own abstractions and ideas about those abstractions. We create such concepts of self, of other people, of everything. These constructs tend to be static and give a sense of solidity to the objects we ’ve created. When — because everything in the physical world is always changing — the actuality no longer fits into these abstractions, there can be a painful sense of dislocation, and we more or less frequently, usually unconsciously, update our conceptualizations.
One of the intentions of meditation is to focus bare attention on our moment-by-moment experience of color, form, and movement, without trying to categorize, make sense of, or tell stories about it. Slowly, the conceptualizing mind, the intellect, begins to relax, and we can see both the impermanence of “reality” and our more permanent abstractions and thoughts about it.
But philosopher Ken Wilber, in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, argues that making a sharp distinction between conceptual map and “real” territory is simplistic. He points out that what we experience beneath the layer of conceptual thinking is always already contextualized within a cultural matrix of meaning; it is not unconditioned “reality.”
The conversation about concept and Reality is broad, evolving, and possibly endless. From my perspective, there ’s no need to complicate matters. I prefer to keep things simple and pragmatic. I actually experience a difference between thinking about something and experiencing it directly. As far as I can tell, all moments of experience include both of these activities. Conceptual reality is necessary if we are to function in the world, but if we get stuck there and no longer feel the world directly, life loses its joy.
WHAT DO I KNOW, AND HOW DO I USE MY KNOWLEDGE?
What we know has as much to do with how we study as what we study. A metaphor often used to describe education is that it’s like building a tower one brick at a time. As each layer of knowledge is cemented into place, it forms the base for what comes next. But I feel more like an intellectual nomad, living in a ragged tent and wandering through a shifting intellectual landscape. The only facts and ideas I can remember are the ones I’ve most recently encountered — and those buried so deep in my mind they’ve become part of who I am.
Conceptual knowledge is often used to shield the mind from the unsettling experience of profound uncertainty; the uncertainty engendered by direct engagement with the world. But instead of building a self-enclosing fortress of knowledge, the intellect can be used to expand the space of awareness and enrich the experience of living. Conceptual knowledge isn’t useless or bad, but it does tend to be self-referential, and we can easily mistake it for the world it describes.
In the university, clear rational thought is highly valued, and having a wealth of relevant “facts” at our fingertips is often vital to academic success. But modes of knowing other than intellectual are generally not cultivated. Emotion, body sensation, and spiritual insight tend to be overlooked or actively dismissed. Little official recognition is given to the appreciation of mystery and wonder.
THE MYTH OF SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY
During my academic studies, I embraced science and, for a time, believed what I was taught: science ’s mandate is to know the objectively “real” world as it exists apart from the mind of the scientist. Eventually, I was assured, science would develop a single universal all-encompassing theory of the universe.
Over time, I became less convinced of this, and it was a relief to find the writing of physicist-philosopher David Bohm, who argues that scientific theories are not objective descriptions or explanations of the world that should all somehow fit together. Instead, they each open a window and present a particular viewpoint. We don’t imagine that some artist someday will paint the ultimate picture that completely captures the world. Each depiction is an interpretation that adds to the richness of our experience and understanding. Similarly, scientific theories do not directly describe the world; they are stories that describe what scientists experience when they engage with the world in precisely defined ways.
I also began to wrestle with the ideas of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Through their empirical studies in neuroscience, they came to realize that human beings do not have direct access to a supposed objective reality; each of us has a particular perspective dependent on physiology, culture, and personal history. We do not live in a universe, but in a multiverse.
There is no single god’s-eye view that scientists, or anyone else, has access to. What we call objective reality is what we experience, or think we experience, in common. Because of this, Maturana and Varela argue that no one ’s reality is more valid than anyone else ’s, but some are preferable. We must each take personal responsibility for the world we prefer to live in and to behave in ways we believe will help create that world.
They do, though, clearly acknowledge that our realities arise through engagement with the external medium. While we cannot claim to know a strictly objective world, neither do we simply make up reality out of whole cloth. Varela writes:
What we take to be objective is what can be turned from individual accounts into a body of regulated knowledge. This body of knowledge is inescapably in part subjective, since it depends on individual observation and experience, and partly objective, since it is constrained and regulated by the empirical, natural phenomena.4
Instead of arguing about subjectivity and objectivity, a richer way of living is to value as many aspects of the world as possible from multiple perspectives. If we ’re willing to accept the world as deeply ambiguous, perhaps no single, valid description is possible or desirable. This opens up a great deal of space for exploration, without the need to negate any aspect of experience. The intent is not to prove that something is universally true, but to report an experience in a truthful way to see if it resonates with other observers.5
THE SPLIT BETWEEN SPIRIT AND SCIENCE
One difficult challenge for me has been learning how to integrate and justify the integration of spiritual exploration with social science and academic study. This challenge is most often resolved in our culture either by keeping these two disciplines completely separate — as though they are incompatible and might contaminate each other — or by equating spirituality with religion and demanding that intellectual thought conform to religious dogma. Neither approach makes sense to me. If the mandate of science is to study the world, and if the world includes spiritual experience, then we need to find a way for science to study the inner as well as the outer world.
When I discovered Ken Wilber’s integral model, I recognized it as a useful conceptual framework in which I could locate my own research.6 While the model is too rigidly structural to contain my actual life, it does help to organize my thinking — as long as I don’t take it as a literal representation of the world. Here I want to touch on two facets of Wilber’s work that have been particularly useful to me: his differentiation of kosmos and cosmos, and his presentation of the evolution of consciousness.
One aspect of Wilber’s model can be shorthanded as “Kosmos cannot be reduced to cosmos.” Kosmos refers to the full range of our physical, mental, and spiritual experience. Cosmos is a subset of kosmos; it’s the material aspect of the world.
Natural science undertakes to explore, measure, and explain the physical world, the cosmos. This is valid and vital, but science sometimes makes the unwarranted claim that it can measure and grasp all that is real (the kosmos) using the methodology of physical empiricism: that is, everything really real can be measured quantitatively. But while all experience does have a physical component, purely physical explanations cannot account for all facets of experience (even though some scientists claim that eventually everything will be reduced to and explained by physical laws).
This reductionist approach devalues or ignores those aspects of experience that cannot be observed with the physical senses. As a result, nonmaterial aspects of the world that cannot be measured — such as beauty, awe, and consciousness itself — lose substance and are neglected. Indeed, strict materialists deny the fundamental reality of nonmaterial consciousness; but this creates for them a nasty internal inconsistency because their own consciousness is making the claim that it, itself, is not real. This position seems seriously weird to me.
One of the subtle insights of solitude that’s almost impossible to express in language is that spirit both transcends the physical and also dwells within the material world as the ground of all being. Spirit is neither separate from nor the same as physical form. In Nature, Man and Woman, spiritual philosopher Alan Watts uses a clear and simple image to describe this. He writes that spirit is the invisible inside of things and the material world is the outside. With the physical senses, you can never discover the inside. Pull apart an ecosystem and you find a collection of organisms. Dissect an organism and there are organs and cells. Spirit remains invisible inside the physical. Likewise, thought cannot grasp spirit. Spirit reveals itself to a quiet mind and heart.
Often, a hard line is drawn between spiritual intuition and scientific knowledge. Wilber argues that one way to heal this breach is for science to broaden the scope of its observations and recognize that there are different ways of knowing the different domains of experience: sensory observation for the physical realm; rational thought for the mental realm; meditation and contemplation for the spiritual realm.
He argues that all valid knowing (material, mental, and spiritual) can be grounded in some form of scientific inquiry. Such inquiry has three essential components: 1. An explicit practice or methodology: If you want to learn about a particular aspect of the world, follow a specific procedure. 2. Direct observation of data brought forth by the stated practice or method: When I follow this procedure, I experience this. 3. Communal confirmation or disconfirmation by other trained practitioners: Is there commonality in our experiences, and if not, why not?
Can such personal experiences as love, awe, and the felt presence of Spirit become public knowledge? Yes, but care is required. Since no collective observation is possible, my personal experience can become valid public knowledge only if I’m willing to openly discuss what I claim to observe in myself. Acceptance of my claim will be based on the community’s assessment that I am truthfully reporting my inner experience, on the reasonableness of my claim, and on the consistency of my behavior with my report. And yet, even if the community does not accept my claim as generally true, this doesn’t mean it’s not valid and useful personal knowledge for me.
In asking science to expand its domain of inquiry to include the inner world, it’s important to be clear that the exploration must be based on direct empirical evidence — not merely on belief that something is the case because someone else has said so. The actual phenomenon must be directly observed within oneself. Furthermore, the individual must be rigorously honest and precise in his or her observation and reporting so as to not conflate empirical evidence with preestablished dogma. This requires courage and clarity.
This aspect of Wilber’s work was extremely useful to me in persuading my supervisory committee that studying myself in solitude would be a valid academic endeavor.
EVOLUTION OR CREATIONISM
We are frequently bombarded with fierce arguments from two extreme positions that each claims to explain how human beings came to be here: Neo-Darwinian evolutionary scientists are certain that our existence is essentially a fluke brought about by the purely physical process of natural selection working on random genetic mutation over vast stretches of time; strict creationists accept a literal interpretation of the Bible and insist that not so long ago, an eternal transcendent God created the whole universe, including us, from scratch in six days.
Both stances smack of hubris. Neo-Darwinian theory implies that, as far as affecting our existence, there is no intelligence in the universe greater than the (rational) human mind. Christian fundamentalism does not set the human mind as supreme, but it insists that we are created in God’s image, and so we are certainly above all other beings in the universe. Neo-Darwinians refuse to acknowledge spiritual evidence; creationists deny physical evidence.
From my perspective, this argument is futile. There ’s a great deal of fertile ground to explore between these extreme positions. Clearly — unless we ignore the enormous volume of empirical evidence gathered in many related fields of science — the earth is old, and ongoing change is inherent to the universe. God simply did not create everything once and for all some six thousand years ago. But there’s no scientific reason to deny that consciousness might be inherent in the universe and integral to the process of evolution. Keeping an open mind is a useful approach.
The evolution versus creationism argument reflects the philosophical assumptions of materialism and idealism. Materialism claims that matter is the fundamental stuff of the universe, and that mind emerged spontaneously when the nervous systems of organisms reached a necessary stage of complexity. Idealism, on the other hand, insists that Mind/Spirit/God is eternal, and matter somehow emerged from or was created by this nonmaterial force.
This debate is grounded in yet another false dichotomy: that mind and matter are fundamentally different and separate. But what if the fracture is due to how we conceptualize the world? Have we, in our thinking, split apart what is essentially the unified mindmatter “stuff ” of the universe? What if matter is inherently always conscious? This panpsychist perspective is a useful description of my own direct experience in solitude.7
MEDITATION, SOLITUDE, AND EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS
Wilber argues that biology isn’t the only aspect of Kosmos that evolves; consciousness and culture do, too. He points out that individual psychospiritual development takes place within an evolving cultural context. Consciousness and culture always interact and influence each other.
For Wilber, the rational ego is not the end of cognitive development. Humans have the potential to reach transrational stages of consciousness. At these stages, our self-centered identity is consciously recognized and simultaneously surrendered to Something Greater in which we are always already embedded. The vehicle for this journey of transcendence is not rational thought but meditation. For me, solitude also provides a context and a practice that catalyzes these shifts of consciousness.
When exploring and describing nonrational aspects of consciousness, it’s important to not lump all such experiences together. “Higher” levels of consciousness should not be confused with prerational belief and magical thinking. These higher states are beyond rational thought; rather than deny rationality, they transcend and subsume it. Thinkers who value the rational mind above all else tend to see all nonrational experience as regressive — suspect at best and psychotic at worst. Differentiating pre- and transrational stages of development avoids the serious mistake of assuming that all nonrational experiences are roughly equivalent.
I began this retreat intending to use purely secular language — the language of academia, science, and the university — but that’s proved insufficient. I’ve had to acknowledge and include the numinous Presence I sense in solitude. If I were in the wilderness only as a “civilian,” I might be tempted to couch the experience solely in the mythical framework of the I Ching or the mystical writings of Chuang Tsu, but I can’t. My mandate, as both a spiritual seeker and a doctoral student at a respected North American university, is to speak to and perhaps combine (if not resolve) both perspectives.
I could see this as a hindrance, but instead I’ve accepted it as a valuable challenge. Learning to integrate my personal spiritual search into the academic community and learning to use intellectual study as one modality of spiritual practice has provided an appreciated opportunity for development. From an intellectual perspective, my mind has sharpened and broadened, and from a spiritual perspective, it’s all grist for the mill.