As we have seen, our view of reason has altered dramatically since the time of Heraclitus. As he saw it, whatever man discovers in himself merely reflects what belongs first to nature—just as man himself does. Our fundamental belief in perseity tells us otherwise—that reason is a quality unique to man; but common sense suggests that Heraclitus was right—and the Universal Law insists that he is. There is no element of which we are constituted that is peculiar to us or is even possessed by us. That is true not only of reason, but of the mind’s sensitivity as well.
The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles held that everything is made from four elements: earth, air, fire and water. And because his culture did not consider anything to be divorced from spirit, Empedocles also identified the four elements as the four spiritual essences, “the four roots of all things.”322 Carl Jung spoke of the four elements symbolically as the four types of consciousness: sensation, thinking, intuition and emotions. We are intimately linked to those elements on every level: earth, air, fire and water are not just basic to our lives as humans, they also symbolize the diverse energies from which we and all else are made—including our mind’s sensitivity. As we have seen, what impairs that sensitivity are all the unintegrated parts of ourselves, both perspectives and emotions, that we cannot reconcile with the whole. The result, whether we intend it or not, is that those parts stand like battlements between us and the whispering world to which we belong. Once we recognize the elements of earth, air, fire and water within us, we recognize the world’s sensitivity within us; and then we can experience the battlements coming down and discover within us a clarity of being that imparts felicity to our every response and action.
Air, for instance, is the very stuff we breathe. Our relationship with it is often uneasy. Whenever people struggle to keep their feelings under control, they stifle their breathing to prevent it from moving too far into the depths of the body. When they become willful, they hold it or force it. Breath is dangerous because it liberates feeling, and thereby also liberates the sensational thinking of the logosmind. But it also represents life itself: we find that the roots of our words animal, psyche and spirit all trace back to different words meaning “breath.”
Breath is an all-in-one agent of transformation and renewal and integration. This is as true of the physical process of respiration as it is for the spiritual process of inspiration. Physically, the in-breath carries dissolved world stuff into the body to become part of its intelligence; the out-breath carries dissolved parts of the body away to unite with the world’s intelligence. Spiritually, a whole-body breath unites thinking and being; as such, a whole-body breath reveals and activates the embodied axis. We were all born as whole-body breathers, but as the isometrics of neglect take up residence in our bodies, we incrementally lose that ability, and may eventually even forget what a whole-body breath is. The sense of what we mean by ‘a whole-body breath’ is potently conveyed in a single phrase by Chuang Tzu:
True men breathe from their heels.
Others breathe with their gullets,
Half-strangled.323
I consider myself fortunate to be an actor for many reasons—but foremost among them is having had to pay scrupulous attention to the united energy of body and mind, and to where I was dividing it or willful with it, and then learning over time how to release the ‘frozen’ parts of myself. You can’t release the breath as a whole without releasing the whole of the body; and you can’t release the whole of the body without releasing any ideas or feelings that are frozen within—feelings that are suppressed or edited or judged or manipulated. When you do release all that on the breath, it enables you to “feel the thing as a whole.” Allowing yourself a ‘whole body breath’, it turns out, is essential not just for the actor’s truth, but for anyone’s. And frankly, it took me months of study with a remarkable voice teacher, David Smukler, before I learned what it meant to release the whole body on the out-breath and to allow the whole body to answer to the in-breath. David helped me understand that the pulse of the whole-body breath originates in the responsiveness of the pelvic bowl, and that the sacrum—that triangular bone at the base of the spine—is crucial to that responsiveness. The sacrum actually releases down and back to welcome the breath into the body, and settles down to the center to release the breath into the world; in doing so, it also sends a wave of release up the entire length of the spine—and when the spine is released into fluidity, it eases the rest of the body into fluidity. When David first introduced me to that notion, I was so out of touch with the pole of my conscious being—the Neolithic hub of relationship—that I could barely feel what he was talking about. Now it is second nature.
In the eyes of the Laius Complex, the breath presents the most powerful interference with which it has to contend, a natural force of unpredictable consequences. A deep, relaxed, abandoned breath will unleash sensations of life that buoy you into the unknown. The internalized Authority senses that journey as an insurrection, and will want to restore order by imposing patterns on the breathing—often in ways so familiar we fail to notice. Those patterns are the instruments of self-tyranny, constraining the spirit of breath with the cybernetics of will; and a body deprived of its own sensitivity cannot notice the world’s.
Constricting the breath flow turns mindful flesh into obdurate matter. But if you start to pay attention to your breath flow, you will be rewarded with insights into habits of consolidation that are otherwise invisible. If you release the breath on a sigh, can you passively attend to your body’s intelligence and simply experience the sensations precipitating through it? Do you put your breath on hold as you get into a car or get up from a chair? As you concentrate on a fine-motor task, or push a heavy weight? When you stand to deliver a speech? When you reach for something? When you meet someone? Or when you catch something that is thrown to you? If so, you are reverting to the cybernetics of the hetabrain mode. And then the most interesting question to ask is: what would you risk by releasing the breath flow? And the most interesting answer is to go ahead and try it.
As a liberator of the energies of your Being, breath is aptly symbolized by the dragon. It’s telling that the traditional views of the dragon in East and West are so radically at odds. The differences between them are summarized by Kakuzo Okakura:
The Eastern Dragon is not the gruesome monster of mediaeval imagination, but the genius of strength and goodness. He is the spirit of change, therefore of life itself.324
Substitute “breath” for “dragon” in the last half of that quote (“breath is the genius of strength …”), and you have a pretty good description of its latent power. Symbolically the dragon serves to remind us that the whole-body breath unites the various elements of the world. He swims in the sea, lives deep in the earth, flies through the air, and breathes fire. The mnemonic is useful. It has often been said that we carry the sea around with us, as evidenced by the percentage of saltwater in our blood; but more tangibly, the swell of the sea lives on in the huge internal wave that each breath initiates and to which the whole body responds. As we breathe from our heels, the whole body is sensitized to the earth we stand on. Air, of course, is the element we breathe in, taking into our core the intangible energy of the space around us. And fire lives not just in the life-giving oxidization that rips apart molecules in our bodies, but also in the spiritual fires sparked by breathing, which turn to ash the structures of the hetabrain. It’s no wonder the hetabrain wants to keep this dragon on a short leash—by doing so it keeps change on a leash; but it also tethers “the genius of strength and goodness.”
In the West our relationship to the dragon is epitomized by the legend of St. George, which was recounted in the popular medieval book The Golden Legend. We don’t need to look far into it to see what this story was communicating. St. George was a knight, and like most knights he was buffered from the world’s sensations by his armor and is found riding his high horse—an evocative image within the context of this book. The famous fight took place at the dragon’s lair, where the king’s daughter was being held captive. Dragon and knight clashed with each other, and the dragon was badly wounded. St. George did not finish him off though; he
said to the maid: Deliver to me your girdle, and bind it about the neck of the dragon and be not afeard. When she had done so the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast and debonair. Then she led him into the city.325
Whatever you do, don’t head downtown without your breath on a leash.
In the particulars of this tale the male element of doing protects the female element of Being from the dragon, whose single most dangerous aspect was his breath: with it he “venomed the people.” The male element tamed the breather by bleeding the vitality from it, so that the female element could keep it on a leash. In more symbolic terms, what St. George saved this virgin maid from was her own energy and sensuousness as awakened by a whole-body breath, which was venomous to the kingdom of the hetabrain. Her girdle—used, as girdles are, to constrict breath and feeling—is placed around the neck of the Dragon, the narrow divide between head and body that, like a drawbridge, protects the thinker in the head from interference by unbidden feelings. The symbolic value of that girdle lives on in the necessary badge of the modern businessman: the necktie—the wearing of which signifies a tacit pledge not to breathe or feel too deeply. Fewer sights are more indecorous to our sensibilities than a display of unchecked emotion by the wearer of a necktie. By symbolizing control, the tie represents a tacit promise that the male element will remain in charge.
The encoded lesson of St. George and the Dragon has been well learned over the centuries. To this day the male element of doing protects our female element of Being from the sensational energies of the breath: we breathe and speak according to will and muscle, rather than from the sensuous, mindful present. “Everything breathes together,”326 as Plotinus once observed; but only as we move beyond willful breathing do we, too, begin to breathe with all else. In fact, you might quite simply note that if you are not breathing with the world, you are breathing alone; if you are breathing alone, you have achieved discontinuity from the present. There is a further lesson that the astute reader could draw from this tale: be careful what you demonize.
Water is the element that enables the exchanges of life itself; and the exchanges made possible by fluidity, which water represents, constitute the sensitivities of the logosmind, of entelechy and of reality. On a small enough physical scale (sub-atomic, for example) or within a sufficiently large time frame (think of a time-lapse film of a galaxy forming) the essential fluidity of all matter becomes manifestly apparent. We don’t notice that a hunk of marble or steel is in a state of flow, but it is. In the dimension of consciousness, too, nothing is fixed: self, world, thought—everything is in process.
As we have identified the ‘known self’ with ice, we have identified the felt self with water. The fluidity of water is a quality that brings everything into relationship: a dolphin off Nova Scotia sends ripples across the Atlantic. The very fact that everything in the universe exists only in relationship tells us that it exists in a state of yielding flow. That is exactly what makes fluidity so essential to our elemental sensitivity: when we relax the body into its natural fluidity, the heart comes into relationship with our core—the cello string a wave medium—as do our emotions and perceptions, and around us, the present itself.
To feel the subtle fluidity of your body, your world and your life is to enter their essential reality; it is also to reclaim an ancient identification. We do not normally speak of a “body of earth” or “air” or “fire”—but when we stand by a lake and call it a “body of water” it is because, on a deeply intuitive level, we identify it with our bodily self. We intuitively understand our soul in a similar way: the word comes from a Teutonic base for a body of water, saiwa-z, which means “lake” or “sea.” Our thought, too, is associated with images of water: we speak of the ‘stream of consciousness’, and might politely excuse ourselves for interrupting ‘the flow’ of someone’s thinking. And as for our emotions, our language is full of metaphors in which they gush, or come in waves, or flow through us. Such associations remind us that the fluid subtlety of the logosmind is one in which body, soul, thought, feelings and world all participate without division. The love-based intelligence of the logosmind liquefies the world; and when we release ourselves into its fluidity, we release ourselves into the subtle currents of Being.
In my experience, the most reliable barometer of consolidation in the body is the spine. It is sensitive to any tyranny we might exercise: at the slightest impulse towards willfulness, the spine tends to pull back from Being and contract into itself. By contrast, allowing the spine to lengthen into fluidity is a small adventure of ordinary heroism. In fact, all healthy movements of the body tend to open fluidly to the unknowable present, rather than retracting into the consolidations of the ‘known self’: the body is a field of intelligence, and the spine a river running through it. As we release the energy of that field into the felt present, the body as a whole is released into its essential fluidity—and as should be clear by now, that essential fluidity of the whole is the felt self.
Water’s elemental fluidity defies the fixity of any pattern, and so it eludes all tyranny. Instead, water gives itself to innumerable, never repeated forms: rivers, waves, waterfalls, rainfalls, clouds, trees, animals and whirlpools. Alan Watts’s image of the whirlpool is a particularly apt metaphor for the loving logosmind in that it has no clearly defined border, but is fed by and is continuous with the watery world in which it stands—whirlpool and river belonging to the same strength. In fact, if we consider any of the living forms of water—whirlpools, waterfalls, clouds or human bodies—we can see that each is a process through which the energy of the world constantly courses. That energy is not incidental to those forms, but actually creates and sustains them; and any of them is devoid of so much as a molecule to serve as a permanent fixture within it.
As we have seen, the heroic surrender to ordinary being reveals the body to be a fluid expression of mind—a form always in transition, and never the same twice. Everything within us that is patterned aims at resisting transition; what is fluid within us is form in flux, revealing in its ease our intention and the guidance of the present. When the energies of the present and our own intention course through us like that—transforming matter and carrying it into the newness of each moment—we are experiencing the nature of reality as described in a Buddhist scripture known as the Heart Sutra. Its most famous passage reads: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form; form is not other than emptiness.”327 Alan Watts explains this apparent paradox with great simplicity, by reminding us of the two meanings of our word clarity.
We think of clarity at once as translucent and unobstructed space, and (also) as form articulate in every detail—as what photographers, using finely polished lenses, call ‘high resolution’—and this takes us back to what Lao-tzu said of the usefulness of doors and windows. Through perfect nothing we see perfect something.328
When we are empty of the hetabrain’s desire to supervise and pattern what self and world become, then we surrender to a clarity of being that is informed by the world around it. We can then feel the self and the present to which it belongs “as a whole,” with a lucidity that is at the same time a dialogue. We feel form in emptiness. Just as we feel emptiness in form. In fact, we might understand that the Heart Sutra is also telling us “informed presence is no other than emptiness; emptiness is no other than informed presence.” All of the illusions that Buddhism seeks to help us move beyond are rooted in a refusal to be informed by the world—a refusal that clings to the vanities of perseity. The Dalai Lama, writing of the Heart Sutra, says:
In sum, the production and disintegration, increase and decrease, and so forth of forms are possible because forms are empty of self-powered existence. Phenomena such as forms are said to dawn from within the sphere of the nature of emptiness.329
The Dalai Lama’s idea of “self-powered existence” echoes the tyrant’s age-old urge to “self-achieved independence”; both ideas underpin the assumption on which every action of the hetabrain is founded: that the self is enclosed in the body. That much is clear, I think. But what can it mean to say that all the forms of the world dawn from within the nature of emptiness? In fact, we can understand it as a natural corollary of the Universal Law of Interrelationship. The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna helps us to see the connection. Sometime shortly before A.D. 200 he bucked the prevailing idea that something could be called real only by virtue of its inherent, independent nature—which is essentially the view of perseity. Nagarjuna claimed that nothing is in possession of its own independent nature. As he wrote, “things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.”330 This idea of the essential emptiness of things was not nihilistic. As Alan Watts explains it,
first of all, emptiness means, essentially, “transience,” that’s the first thing it means. Nothing to grasp, nothing permanent, nothing to hold on to. But it means this with special reference to ideas of reality, ideas of god, ideas of the self, the brahman, anything you like. What it means is that reality escapes all concepts. If you say that there is a god, that is a concept; if you say there is no god, that’s a concept. And Nagarjuna is saying that always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve, or wrap it up in a parcel.331
That explanation helps us to understand that the terms emptiness, fluidity and spaciousness provide different ways of talking about the fundamental nature of reality—a nature we fundamentally resist with our need to conceptualize. Our word concept traces back to qap-, “to seize, hold, contain,” the same Indo-European root that gave us haven. We employ our concepts as havens to contain the world’s parts and keep them static; but when you try to hold the world captive (from the same root as concept), you actually hold yourself captive, like an animal in a net. To fight against the net is endlessly tiring. But if you surrender to emptiness, no net can hold you—you simply slip out of its knotted patterns, shedding concepts as a snake sheds its skin. Reality is essentially fluid, and fluidity is no other than emptiness: there is nothing permanent in reality to grasp, nothing to hold on to—but in its ceaseless, all-aware currents, there is everything to feel.
To say the reality of the world abides in emptiness is one thing; to say the reality of the self abides in emptiness is something else. But the emptiness in which the self abides is what remains once we shed the patterns and structures and fixities of the ‘known self’; once its baffles have dissolved within the embodied corridor, and the grounded heart has opened to mutual awareness; once we sensitize ourselves to the fluid present and surrender to its living guidance. Only in the afterglow of such emptiness can we truly receive ‘what is’ and exchange with it. It is an emptiness that surrenders to the world, like heroic intention; it is the emptiness of a flower vase ready for a bouquet, or of a flute ready to be played. It is an emptiness made possible by an awakened confession of ignorance before the mystery that is our most intimate counselor. When you confess your ignorance and let go of what is ‘known’, you tangibly empty yourself to the world: by emptying of concepts, you empty of will; by emptying of will, you empty of muscular tension; by emptying of muscular tension, you empty of discontinuities; by emptying of discontinuities, you join the fluidity of the world; by joining the fluidity of the world, you join the present. Every time the body’s sensitivity returns to emptiness, it returns to experience, like an animal cut loose from a net. In that regard, to return to emptiness constitutes a form of patricide: our surrender to fluid spaciousness annihilates not the self, but the fearful, patterned, isolated, willful Pater in the head. It makes us like the tree—open to the world, in possession of nothing. Not even, we might note, in possession of the self.
Now, to lack willfulness is considered a catastrophe within our culture. As we commonly see it, to lose your will is to lose your identity, your purpose, your power, your ability to engage with the world. As with ‘irrationality’, that is strictly a hetabrain view of things. The fact is that the more willful you are, the less you are able to engage with the world—in the same way that the more absorbed you are by the monologue in your head, the less able you are to attend to the present. All willful effort displaces Being; by teaching us to solve our daily challenges with effort, our culture teaches us daily to separate thinking from being and bury the female. We cannot learn how to be whole until we understand what it is to eat with no effort, to listen with no effort, to speak our truth with no effort; until we understand what it is to give ourselves to the present as we might calmly enter the currents of an ice-cold river.
There is a psychological term, ‘abulia’, which literally means a loss of will, and refers to a pathological inability to make or act on decisions. But although abulia seems to result from a lack of will, I think it more specifically results from a breakdown of the cybernetics on which the will relies; in other words, abulia is symptomatic of an enclosed system that can no longer self-regulate and yet willfully refuses to relinquish its insularity. The resulting stalemate is a form of stasis. That syndrome seems to be implicated in most disease as well, once we understand the cellular tensions observed by Candace Pert and the repressed emotions observed by John Sarno to be forms of insularity. In fact, that syndrome represents the blind canyon of self-absorbed independence into which our tyranny leads, and is the source of much of our frustration and despair and alienation.
It would be a mistake, then, to look at the accomplishments of physical genius as accomplishments of the will. Physical genius is rather a heightened sensitivity that is open to the world’s guidance, and so is characterized by “a distinctive fluidity and grace,” as Malcolm Gladwell observed. Its fluidity is its empty analog intelligence, attending to the whole; and its grace arises from its dance with the whole. Grace cannot be self-achieved: it is quintessentially corational; nor can it be scooped from the river and possessed: it is a quality of reciprocity, of relationship; and it is made possible not by knowledge, but by the responsive sensitivities of empty intention.
As the sage Lieh Tzu wrote, “he who for knowledge substitutes blankness of mind really does know.”332 A blank mind, of course, is one that has allowed its perspectives to join the fluidity of the whole that they might be informed by the whole. Meister Eckhart wrote passionately and perceptively about the fluid state of blessedness in which you are empty of will, empty of knowledge and empty even of God. In fact, Eckhart tells us that “God is neither a being nor intelligent, nor does he understand this or that. Thus God is empty of all things, and thus he is all things.”333 In general, though, the West has tied itself in knots over the concept of emptiness or nothingness, because emptiness cannot be quantified or measured or patterned or systemized or known. How can it even be real? We long ago transferred our allegiance from the black of Being to the white of manifest knowing and doing. Parmenides found the very idea that nothingness could exist so preposterous he preferred to conclude that any movement was impossible because “all is full of what is.” Descartes filled the heavens with a liquid that pushed planets and stars around rather than give his assent to heavenly emptiness. That liquid was conceptualized by Newton and others as ether, a concept that stood until Michelson and Morley failed to detect motion relative to it, and Einstein demonstrated that space and time were not relative to any medium, but rather to the speed of light.
Just as the West has remained uncomfortable with emptiness, and sought to fill the heavens, we seem to feel most assured when the body is so filled with the isometrics of neglect that no room is left for newness. The corridor within is stopped up; the corridor that is the corational world around us is filled with dead matter, mute as a corpse. The task we have taken on, though—in effect, to fill and partition the empty river of Being—is one that gives us no rest. We even work to fill extensions of the self: we fill our bank accounts and our houses, we fill our lawns with uniformly clipped grass, we fill our daybooks, we fill our closets, and we fill the quiet of our environment with nonstop distractions. Nothing new, not even a breath, can be poured into what is already full.
As we have seen, the consolidations of the self create a refuge from life—a shelter, a house—the very architecture of which is determined by the cellular tensions that make up the ‘known self’. Tellingly, house comes from the Indo-European base “to cover, to hide”: you cannot live in the world until you come out of hiding; you can only arrive home once you leave the ‘house’. Home, as we have seen, comes from an Indo-European base meaning “to lie, settle down”—and indeed, to be at home in the world is to be settled within it: at rest in its fluidity, ultimately, which is also to be at rest in its emptiness. And here we are treading into paradox again: only by returning to emptiness can we be truly full; only by dissolving the self in spaciousness can we come home to the self; only through absence can we come into full presence; the dialogue of Being can only be manifest within the nonbeing of will-lessness. Emptiness, it turns out, despite being a negative, has a positive value. As Lao-tzu observed:
we shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.334
It is helpful to note that the yardstick of time tends to banish both emptiness and fluidity. Calibrated time is a tyranny: immune to the Energy of the present, it cannot be hastened or slowed, but can only be identified by the strict numbering of clocks and calendars. In reality, though, the regimented numbers on clocks and calendars are Ideas that can tell us nothing about the present. They can identify ‘now’ according to the nonexistent realms of ‘then’—but they do nothing to illuminate ‘now’. Time is never here—only timelessness is here. Time is a fugitive, fleeing the present; if you join time, you become a fugitive as well. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote,
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.335
To join the present is to enter its eternity. To understand that the present is timeless—literally ‘without time’—is to see that life itself is timeless, for life exists nowhere else but in the present. We cannot experience life until we let go of all anxiety about experiencing it and drop our awareness into the body’s center of fluid wakefulness: the pelvic bowl, which is empty of time. If sensation is our bridge to the present, anxiety is our rampart against it. Mythology frames the pull of anxiety quite specifically: any time you feel anxiety, you are actually feeling the tyrant within straining towards self-achieved independence. Straining to make two of one; straining to revoke your natural porosity, to shelter your thinking from the body’s sensations. But when we exile sensation from our field of awareness, we stop being where we are: our subtle sense of place falters and is superseded by the urgent proddings of the tyrant time.
If the pelvic bowl and the present are empty of time, it is noteworthy that light, which is widely associated with consciousness and divinity, is also empty of time. Einstein showed us as much: at the speed of light, time literally ceases. From the perspective of the starlight that enters your eye from a galaxy a hundred thousand light-years away, it has spent not so much as a millisecond in transition. All corners of the universe, as far as light is concerned, are right here, right now, and exist timelessly.
The anxieties of calibrated time absorb your attention with issues of what might happen and what you might do about it—issues that treat the present as a place for solving the problems of the future. That view of the present is the overriding perspective of our culture. And the farther your anxiety carries you from the timelessness of the pelvic bowl towards the head, the closer doomsday comes and the less time is available—just as the higher you climb a mountain, the less air is available until, in the upper atmosphere, the air becomes so thin you can’t catch your breath. The upper reaches of anxiety confine us in the Authority of the head, where we suffocate between the rarefied pressures of past and future. Caught in that citadel of abstractions we grow breathless in the atmosphere of insufficient time. Leaning on the calculations of the hetabrain, we anxiously strive for more control, when what we really need is more breath.
The timelessness of the pelvic bowl is very much like the eye of a wheel or a whirlpool or a hurricane. Its stillness—from an Indo-European root meaning “to place”—is what locates us in the specificity of place and the easy, fluid presence of the body: be still, and know that you are here. For the ancients the stillness of the pelvic bowl revealed the place from which we relate to the world; and in that the self exists only through relationships, we can see why that motionless hub is also the center of Being: it is the nexus through which we massively connect with the world around us. The still eye of the whirlpool is also the ‘I’ of the soul, a dimension of the dialogue that, like Logos, births within us the truth of the present. In that regard, the still emptiness at our center is the stillness of the present as it lives within us. It is the quantum vacuum, birthing all forms. If the elemental sensitivity of the breath releases the body’s intelligence into fluidity; and the elemental sensitivity of fluidity brings everything into relationship with the still core of our being; then those relationships can be processed and clarified and brought into harmony only once we center ourselves in the pelvic bowl. And that brings us to grounding.
In our Western industrialized culture the thinking of the body is nowhere more restricted than in the legs, the part of us that is farthest from the head. The natural flow of sensations through the thighs, the calves and the feet has been stifled to a dull stasis. Our language betrays our neglect: when we talk about our bottoms, we are not talking about “the soles of our feet”—as a cousin of the word meant in Old Irish; we are talking about the lower extremity of our trunk. What we experience as ‘me’ generally stops at the pelvis, and what lies below it is merely attached to ‘me’. Naturally enough, we find that state reflected in our art: Western theater, for example, is an almost legless art form. The legs are used pretty much as stilts on which the actors perambulate across the stage when required to—typically, to move from one chair to another. The legs cannot anchor the actor’s expressiveness, because their intelligence is stagnant. So the power of an actor’s performance is concentrated from the waist up: in the flapping of the arms, the lean of the torso, the emphatic bobbing of the head, and of course, in the concentrated expressiveness of the face.
In oriental forms of theater, by contrast, the upper body is often kept open, relaxed and available—and it is below the waist that one finds the strength that really drives the performance, an exchange of power that flows through the legs from and into the earth itself. In the walk used in Noh theater, the feet never lose contact with the ground, and they slide along it with a sensitivity that attunes the whole actor to the world through which he moves. Kabuki, Kathakali, Chinese opera and Butoh are all similarly reliant on the power and sensitivity of the grounded intelligence below the waist.
As is the art, so is the culture. The Japanese return to the earth to sit and eat and sleep. A Westerner could spend months without ‘returning to the earth’, held apart from it by chairs and benches and sofas and beds and cars. More critical than all of that, our legs themselves separate us from the earth: by and large, we experience them as highly functional prosthetics. We perch on high in the hetabrain, and they sit at the bottom of the “vehicle,” as Plato put it, moving us about. We experience neither what it is to live within them nor what it is to know ourselves through them. When we stand on them we habitually lock our knees, which desensitizes us to the earth and also locks our hips. When the hips are locked, the energy in the pelvis is restricted, the lower back is strained, and the responsiveness of the spine is compromised. In other words, our natural energy is stopped up. In traditional Chinese medicine the joints of the body are understood as gates for the body’s energy. When the joint gates are open in the hips, knees and ankles, the hips are able to float, as a rowboat floats on water. That is something most adults in our culture simply never experience.
Experiencing the legs as prosthetics is so much the norm for us that it’s become almost impossible to tell someone about knowing herself through her legs; there is barely the glimmer of a cultural memory left by which she could understand. Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetics, relates an incident in which he was trying to help a woman inhabit the livingness of her legs—to help her experience them as embodied mind rather than mere matter. She came from a strenuously physical background: she had been a dancer, and when Lowen met her she was a T’ai Chi instructor. He took her through two intensive exercises, which deepened her breathing, and then he went straight into a third, during which her legs began to shake. When she finished, she stood up and said, “I’ve been on my legs all my life. This is the first time I’ve been in them.”336 Consciousness can only dwell within what is energetically sensitized, and this was the first time in her adult life she had been awakened to that sensitivity in her legs; and she had concentrated on her legs throughout her career in ways that most of us only dream about doing.
When Heracles was on number eleven of his twelve labors, a giant named Antaeus attacked him on the road. Heracles threw the giant down three times, but each time Antaeus hit the ground, he bounded back with renewed strength. The fourth time they tangled, Heracles hoisted Antaeus off the ground and strangled him. Antaeus, it turned out, was the son of Gaia, Mother Earth, who filled him with strength whenever he made contact with her. In a sense, we are all Antaeus: children of the earth, we have been hoisted away from her by the male element of doing, and are suffocating for want of some meaningful connection with her. As we have noted, the names we give to earth—“dirt” and “soil”—suggest something you would want to distance yourself from. But when we distance ourselves from the earth, we also distance ourselves from its ordinariness—just as Laius did in his carriage, the Kurgan on his horse, and the male gods in their sky. To distance yourself from the ordinary is to distance yourself from kinship; no longer a child of the world, you seek the altitude that resplendently asserts your independence from it. Living in such a rarefied orbit, we have become like astronauts who have departed from the Earth to gaze back at it from afar, but then have forgotten how to come back home.
Fifty years ago Dürckheim wrote, “Today the paramount problem is how, literally, ‘to earth’ people who are caught in the hypertrophy of the rational intellect.”337 If anything, that problem is more pronounced now than ever before. As the digital age infuses our lives with ever-increasing levels of abstraction, we increasingly rely on “the hypertrophy of the rational intellect” to navigate our way through them. Enthralled and fascinated with the abundance offered by the information glut, we stray farther and farther from the simple abundance of Being—and so too from our own sensational groundedness and presence. And despite the daily barrage of information bits to which we are subjected, we still hunger for more—certain that if given enough of them, we will eventually have all the bits necessary to make a whole. Our devotion to digital knowing is so focused that we neglect and even forget our analog intelligence. The head is in charge, and is doing its best to sort it all out. So much is that the case that our viscera are habitually clenched against the present, and we might live our entire adult lives without once exploring what it means to completely give up being ‘in charge’ of how we greet the moment—to give up all designs, expectations or ideas about it—and just release ourselves into its waiting arms, wherever that might lead us.
To come to rest in the present like that is also to come fully to rest on the ordinary earth. And the earth is, after all, what we literally rest on; consequently, as we lose our connection to it, we lose our ability to rest—to achieve the “quieted mind.” When we do come to rest on the maternal earth—breathing from our heels, as Chuang Tzu put it—time rests too; as our sense of where we actually are is restored, the tyranny of time dissipates and we find that we are simply here, belonging to the place our senses have newly discovered. The word place is related to the Sanskrit word prthuh, which means “spacious”; and indeed, it is in the ordinary place to which you belong now that you encounter the spacious spirit of the present. The challenge, then, is to learn how to arrive where you are and pay attention to it; and to do that, it helps to have a clear understanding of what prevents us from being present: what makes it so difficult to ‘be’? What in us obscures our sensitivity to place—to the vibratory intelligence of the here and now? What keeps us from being grounded?
Our very being is supported in its existence by all the universe: as we have seen, our lives are affected by the gravitational pull of a single electron at the remotest fringe of the remotest galaxy. The relationships that sustain us are not static, but are continuously expressed through exchanges of energy: where there is no exchange, there is no relationship; where there is a diminished exchange, there is diminished relationship—and so, too, a diminished sense of being. We diminish our being—our ability to be present—by locking up our energies, and we have at our disposal two primary means of achieving that: we can withdraw from sensation, retract into the head, and lock up our energy in ideas and analysis—what Dürckheim called “the hypertrophy of the rational intellect”; or we can lock up the energy of our emotions, and keep it bound in the body, unable to join the newness of the moment. Both methods belong to the diminished sensitivities of the ‘known self’.
We have already looked at how ideas and analysis can promote unintegrated perspectives that lock up our energies. Unintegrated emotions create a similar effect: like unintegrated perspectives, any unintegrated emotion will reduce the specificity of your response to the present, dulling you to it. John Sarno, whom I mentioned earlier, has written about an epidemic of conditions that are commonly attributed to structural or systemic abnormalities in the body, but which he has often found to arise in order “to prevent the conscious brain from becoming aware of unconscious feelings like rage or emotional pain.”338 He has found that symptoms such as chronic pain in the back, neck, shoulder and limbs, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, eczema and arthritic pain are frequently our way of distracting the conscious mind from unintegrated emotions. Sarno writes about the ability of the mindbody to create “a reduction of blood flow to a specific part of the body, resulting in mild oxygen deprivation, which causes pain and other symptoms, depending on what tissues have been oxygen deprived.”339 He calls that effect TMS, short for tension myositis syndrome—and he and his colleagues have successfully treated a staggering range of conditions, often where medical interventions have failed, by helping patients acknowledge and integrate the emotions underlying their symptoms. To his credit, Sarno does not find any such psychosomatically based symptoms to be indicative of a defect in someone’s personality: they are inextricably part of our very makeup—part of what makes us human. As he puts it, “Psychosomatic phenomena are not a form of illness. They must be seen as part of the human condition—to which everyone is susceptible.”340
It is noteworthy that Sarno often finds rage at the root of TMS—for rage is a concomitant of self-tyranny: the inner tyrant feels rage at his own fear of Being, and at every instance in which his agenda is thwarted. Nor is he able to fully acknowledge his rage: such acknowledgment is either deemed superfluous to his objectives, or the rage represents an unacceptable contradiction of what he ‘knows’ of the self. I think it is no mere coincidence, then, that the epidemic of TMS disorders in our culture matches in its scope the epidemic of our self-tyranny—which itself expresses an epidemic mistrust of the female element of being. That brings to mind a harrowing observation by a veteran of the U.S. porn industry: “Nobody ever goes broke overestimating the rage and misogyny of the average American male.”341 And how, as a woman, could you not answer with rage?
Emotion literally means “to set in motion”; but an unintegrated emotion cannot move. Instead of helping to activate the self and bring the particulars of the world into focus, it binds up our energy and divides us from the world. By so doing it limits our responses to the fourth sphere of the mind’s sensitivity—the Emotional Body. Some people hold on to emotions for weeks, years, or even decades. They can talk with fresh resentment about something that happened to them forty years earlier. And so we carry around unintegrated angers, fears, hatreds, jealousies, embarrassments, griefs—each of them fragmenting our relationships and stifling our being. Such unintegrated emotions wait beneath the surface, dissociated and invisible until triggered by some often fairly innocuous inconvenience or slight, unleashing a grossly disproportionate response that jerks us out of the present with a vengeance. (“Did you see that driver cut me off?”) If you pay close attention to the events that trigger you, you will be peering into the vaults of your own frozen energies—your private cryonics bunker for emotions that periodically resurrect, and then go to sleep again, coiled within themselves, sapping your energy.
If our unintegrated emotions and perspectives are what keep our energies locked up—and keep us from a clarity of being, unable to join the all-liberating present—then how do we unlock them? First we should acknowledge that they are locked up in the mindful tissues of the body—so that liberating them actually means unlocking the body’s consciousness in such a way that its energies might integrate with our being, and discharge into the world, much as the swarming energies of the sky course through a lightning rod to reconcile with the earth. The main issue facing us, then, as Dürckheim understood, is: how do we ground ourselves? Dürckheim was a master of grounding. His book Hara: The Vital Center of Man is a classic on the subject, and he left us eloquent testimony about the need for a paradigm shift to transform our entire relationship to the world around us—one that could be achieved only once we learned to return to the pelvic bowl and “earth” ourselves. Dürckheim died in 1988, but in our own day there is another master of grounding: Denis Chagnon. The strength of Chagnon’s work lies not just in its proven ability to help countless individuals recover from illness and sustain well-being—occasionally in contradiction of what medical science deemed possible; its strength also resides in a technique Chagnon developed for grounding that is so simple that anyone can master and practice it. Tellingly, Chagnon’s technique is not rooted in idea or imagination, but in the body’s own intelligence.
Chagnon’s story is known to many people: he developed cancer, and declined the treatments offered by conventional medicine. His condition deteriorated to the point that the cancer had spread through his body, he was barely able to walk, and was given three weeks to live. But he paid attention to the pain that was wracking him, paid attention to the energy of it, and slowly discovered he could alter that energy and alleviate the pain. With that, he began his slow recovery—during which he developed the specifics of his technique, as well as the ability to read and work with energy in others.
Chagnon’s grounding technique is easy enough to learn. First, bring your awareness to the perineum—the very center of the pelvic floor. To find that spot it helps to slightly engage the perineum—something you do naturally when you keep yourself from urinating. Dropping your consciousness into that spot precipitates a number of changes. If you are patient with it, you will find that as your consciousness in that spot becomes increasingly clear, it will naturally extend out to connect with the exact spots where your ovaries are—or would be if you were a woman: a few inches below the navel, and to either side. Those three spots—the perineum and the two ovaries—form what is called the pelvic triangle. The effect of its geometry within the body is to locate and harmonize the pelvic intelligence, that the corridor of our embodied consciousness might ground itself there and surrender to it, as Orpheus to Eurydice. Once that happens, the analog axis can open the self to its potential for exchange with the world. And just as we find in the present a stillness that underlies all things, there is a stillness within the pelvic triangle that underlies the felt self: a deep center of present calm that supports and unifies all of its activities, a home in which the self continuously rests, even as it engages with the world and changes. It is in that borderless, still center of the felt self that present and self can meet in repose—newly sensitized.
An increase in the mind’s sensitivity is also an increase in our vulnerability—and we can be at ease with such vulnerability only when there is a commensurate deepening of our stability. The heart cannot blossom with the world’s sensitivities until the felt self is rooted in the triangle’s dark stillness. In other words, our stability, our rootedness, comes about as we bring increasing consciousness to the geometry that locates and harmonizes our pelvic intelligence. The triangle is small enough in four dimensions, but in five it is bottomless. The easy dialectic of stability and sensitivity made possible by that triangle holds within it the creative tension of the felt self: as the fluid whole of the body’s intelligence empties itself into the grounded stability of the pelvic bowl, it integrates into our being, imparting to the body a clarity of the utmost sensitivity. That clarity is “feeling the thing as a whole.”
Our ability to consciously ground ourselves is made more challenging and more necessary by the historic journey from hub to head made by our ancient ancestors, and retraced by each of us as individuals in our early childhood. We were systematically taught to heed rules rather than our true being; and to separate our thinking from the inconveniences of sensation; and to so dull our youthful spontaneity and wakefulness to the world’s calling that we could sit still for hours at a time, day after day, year after year within the four walls of a classroom; in short, we have all been taught since childhood to assert the male element and diminish the female. Evolving beyond the patterns of our upbringing requires intention rather than will; sensation rather than ideation; surrender rather than accomplishment; discovery rather than calculation. It involves the primordial, mythic ceremony of marriage by which the male genius for perspective devotes itself to being in an unreserved partnership. That ceremony never ends, but is played out ceaselessly within the crux of our consciousness as we fall more and more deeply into the spacious universe of the felt self.
The essence of that ceremony is played out in the exercise that closes Chapter Six—the Elevator Shaft—but with this difference: you begin by bringing your awareness to the pelvic triangle: first to the perineum, then to the ovaries. Once the base of the corridor within can be clearly felt, allow the center of your awareness to travel the length of its axis—from the head down through the body to the base. This is not an exercise of imagination: it is a journey of sensitivity and intention, and it will bring to the forefront of your attention any baffles, chambers or shadows that interrupt the seamless intelligence of the felt self and break it into the segmented multiplicities of the ‘known self’. Those baffles and shadows emerge as you pay close attention to your descending center of awareness: if you find that it stalls, or becomes indistinct, you have encountered an interstice—a gap in the integration of your consciousness. The remedy is to just feel it: heighten your sensitivity to that consolidated energy so that you can thereby heighten its sensitivity—releasing its endarkened energy into consciousness. As you pay close and loving attention to that consolidation, it will soften and yield so that your center of awareness can chaperone it down through the corridor and into the welcoming receptivity of the pelvic intelligence—which can accept into its infinite womb all our unintegrated perspectives and emotions and bring them into relationship with being. Just as lightning clears the air, the mindful process of grounding clears the body; and such clarity in the body is no other than the clarity of our being.
As our self-divisions discharge, self-supervision gives way to self-awareness, and then to mutual awareness, as the unified self opens to the unified present. When we are grounded in the stillness of the living present, able to “feel the thing as a whole,” the stability of our all-inclusive ease enables us to welcome the instability that is necessary to life itself. We can remain within the ever-shifting dialogue of exchange because we continue to process ‘what is’: nothing resisted, nothing frozen in a concept, everything assimilated and integrated and felt—the axes of our consciousness attuned to the exchanges that constitute our essential life. To process the present is to be grounded; to be grounded is to process the present. That is what the subtle dialogue is all about.
My mother, whose life of spiritual questing and service and honesty carries her into a profoundly grounded state, calls that state “Being at rest in the Spirit”—and I cannot think of a more apt description of it. Grounding centers us in the ease of ‘being where we are’, in the embrace of which union we welcome the unknown energies of the all-aware world, and submit to them, and exchange with them as intimately as a child with its mother. Understanding that provides us with some useful tools for reflection: when you seek to move forward, do you tend to do so by consulting your own intelligence, or by joining it to the world’s? Does your attention reflexively dive back into the familiar paths of your own cognitive ‘knowns’, or do you discharge it into this place without design? Indeed, you might venture even further to ask: what does your body’s sensitivity understand, by belonging to this place, that you too might understand by belonging to its sensitivity?
The primary function of grounding in the present is to clear your energy so that you can stand within its energy. That is implicit in Klein’s suggestion of a relationship between perineum and a Sanskrit verb meaning “sets in motion, pours out, discharges.” Once you recognize that the energy you experience in your body is your intelligence, it is easy to see that when you clear the body’s energy, you are clearing the mind. In the early stages of learning how to ground, you just subtly lift the perineum, feel the ovaries answer, and let your awareness travel down through the corridor to merge with the pelvic triangle—a union that will carry you into the vibratory life of this newborn moment. Later, when you practice grounding consciously, it helps to begin elementally: first, allow your breath to drop into the pelvic floor, for until the pelvic floor is brought into consciousness, there can be no pelvic triangle; then consciously relax your body into fluidity—unlocking every cell into mindfulness; and then activate the pelvic triangle, and begin to process baffles and constrictions as you lovingly drop all of the body’s consolidations into the infinite stillness that waits within it. I find it often takes five to ten minutes of grounding before I can clear the body’s energy and come fully to rest in the present. A natural setting can make it easier: sitting by a lake, or on a large boulder, or standing by a tall tree with your hand resting on its bark, feeling its deep-rooted life—all of that will help you come to rest in the companionship of the here and now, and by doing so will help open the heart’s gate to the light of the world.
With practice, the perineum becomes sensitized in your awareness without your needing to engage the muscles that help locate it. As the base of the pelvic triangle grows stronger, so does its sense of abiding stability. Eventually you may find that, in the way that a riverbed holds the coursing of the river, the corridor within holds the coursing of the present. As the sensational present flows down the corridor and out through the perineum—which “sets in motion, pours out, discharges”—the clear stillness within the triangle may feel to you like a glowing ember in a breeze, or the tranquility of the moon behind racing clouds, or a stone rooted in a rushing river. And so it is that the all-aware present courses through you as water through a whirlpool; or as the sun rises into the mouth of the Celestial, Two-Headed Serpent of Mayan mythology, travels through its body, and emerges from its other mouth to set; or as the setting sun enters the mouth of the goddess Nut of Egyptian mythology, travels through her body, and is birthed with morning to rise once more. When the life of the present travels through you, imparting the touch of its currents to the stillness in your core, you are not only grounding yourself—you begin to help the world to ground. That is, if you are grounded, those around you will tend to be calmer, more settled. If several people ground together, they can help each other ground more quickly and more deeply.
Chagnon’s grounding technique is a powerful reality check, helping us shrug off the freight of our culture’s self-absorption and the pull of its fantasies. It is the surest means I have found for escaping the bottled-up wasp trap of the head and liberating the self into the clarity of Being. I don’t ground because I should, then, but because it is the easiest way I have found to simply ‘be’. I ground in the course of my daily activities; but I also sit and ground as a practice—ideally in the morning, clearing my capacity for relationship in readiness for the adventure of the day. I sometimes imagine the circumstances of that coming adventure as I’m grounding, preparing an openness to each situation I foresee: I might imagine being grounded while helping my kids, or teaching a class, or at the outset of a meeting. This is not my way of planning what to do in the course of my day; it is my way of preparing to be present in it.
It is unusual for me to stay with any practice for very long: I typically go into a learning curve with a new technique for a while and then move on once I have integrated the learning, or if I run into a limitation I cannot navigate: either mine or that of the technique or both. My experience with Chagnon’s method of grounding has been different—the wakefulness of the pelvic triangle has been unfailing in its support for my adventure of surrendering to ‘what is’, and I don’t yet even sense a horizon: what it offers is as limitless as the energy of the present with which it unites you. The more deeply the marriage carries you into that energy—the more you can rest in its spirit—the more clearly you can process it; the more you can process it, the more deeply grounded you are. Many people come to Chagnon’s technique to help them through an illness or injury—and as a tool for self-healing its potency is truly remarkable. I use it to heal myself into wholeness—for which its potency is just as remarkable.
The pelvic triangle locates an ancient place of relationship, one that has been referred to as the navel, the Mind Palace, the hub of Being, qosqo, hara and the root chakra. It is strikingly reminiscent of the pubic triangle so prominent in Ice Age Venuses, and turns up in other ways as well. Katsuko Azuma, a well-known performer of classical Japanese Buyo dance, speaks of a secret art that was passed down to her:
My master used to say that every performer has to find his own power center. It could be imagined as a ball of steel in the center of a triangle whose apex is the anus and whose other two angles are the corners of the pelvis at the level of the navel.342
Azuma’s triangle closely approximates Chagnon’s—which holds a space of such power and grounded calm that I have come to think of it as the self’s womb of stillness: within it the present gently rests, through it the present gently flows, rebirthing the self. That womb of stillness is not in itself a solution to anything, or a destination; it is just the primordial, physical, wordless, sacred base of the self which, centering you in the subtlety of your own wholeness, enables you to let go of your addictive analysis of ‘what is’ and the bound emotions that perpetuate that addiction, and come to rest in the life of ‘what is’. It is the place in you that most fully answers to ‘I’ and most readily recognizes ‘We’. It enables that perfect marriage in which you are utterly calm, and fully engaged. Once the present infiltrates your core and touches it, then you have succeeded in the heroic submission. In the simplest of terms, that’s what being present is all about: as the present touches your core, it lives within you, even as you live in it—and then there really are no definitive divisions left in the world. In that porosity, in that self-achieved submission, you unite with the world’s energy, strengthened by it—just as Antaeus was by his mother’s.
Our elemental, five-dimensional sensitivity is what roots us in the world’s. We have discussed air, water and earth; the final element is fire.
Fire is the most vivid and familiar display of the exchange of energies to which we all are born. For that reason it often and variously serves as a symbol of life: in our rituals (e.g., the menorah) and monuments (“the eternal flame”); in our literature (“Out, out brief candle”); our popular culture (“Like a candle in the wind”); and in common metaphors (“burning the candle at both ends”). To look closely at the brightness of a burning candlewick is to see a dancing shape which, like that of the whirlpool, is empty of anything permanent. But it also differs from the whirlpool: the particles that make up a candle flame are visibly transforming as they pass through it. Gases from wax, wick and air are being processed into light, heat and soot. In fact, those transformations are the candle flame, just as the energies that unite and transform through the crux of our consciousness are the life that burns in us.
The transformations that make up fire symbolized for Heraclitus not just life, but the way of the world: “Everything becomes fire, and from fire everything is born, as in the eternal exchange of money and merchandise.”343 Heraclitus saw all things participating in a worldwide conflagration of becoming and unbecoming. He observed,
This world, which is always the same for all men, neither god nor man made: it has always been, it is, and always shall be: an everlasting fire rhythmically dying and flaming up again.344
The everlasting fire, dying and being reborn, is symbolized by the sacred, mythological Phoenix, which—as singular as the world—continually resurrects itself in a consuming fire: its old form burns away, releasing a burst of energy, and from the ashes a newborn Phoenix arises.
The Hindu god Shiva similarly shows us the world as transformation. Shiva—who like Orpheus was known as the “Player of the Lyre”—is the god of creation and destruction. In one hand he holds a drum, which calls the forms of the world into being; in another hand fire, which destroys all forms and names. The two actions are intimately connected: you can hear the world call you into being only to the extent that you give the names and forms of your life over to the everlasting fire that sustains it.
Heraclitus tells us, “Fire catches up with everything, in time”;345 but we nonetheless strive to preserve the names and forms we carry within us. Our commitment to their preservation can prove resilient even when challenged by the rigors of spiritual training and discipline; it sometimes yields only to a shock. Many shamans bear the scars of a traumatic injury that brought inner vision in its wake: Odin was blind in one eye; in some people, like Denis Chagnon, a reborn sensitivity was brought about by ravaging disease. I heard of a Zen monk who had trained diligently for years without achieving enlightenment and finally went to the abbot of the temple to express his discouragement. The abbot said that the monk was right to feel discouraged—in fact the abbot felt the same way, and if within three days the monk still hadn’t found enlightenment, the abbot would have to kill him. The monk returned to his practices with a fevered determination. One day passed, without a breakthrough. Two days passed. Partway through the third day the abbot began preparing for the execution. Still nothing. The day ended. The monk was ceremoniously led to the courtyard to be put to death—and as he approached the gallows, he awoke.
Reality is always a thinly disguised fire: to awaken to the present is to see the world around you in flames, a Phoenix being burned and birthed even as you are. That vision throws open a doorway to the ordinary mind, a state in which you see neither abstraction nor permanence, but ephemera: the simple magic of newness and nowness in which we all share. You cannot awaken to that state of mind guided by the idea that you should see things that way; like the Phoenix, that state can only be born of a fiery transformation—whether it smolders slowly in the embers of the soul, or suddenly blazes forth as you are being escorted to the gallows. What the transformation entails, specifically, is an incineration of the self-achieved discontinuities of the ‘known self’. Aoki experienced that on October 2, 1967, and speaks of reaching the “zero point of consciousness.” As he tells it, he became literally nothing, and what he knew of the world became nothing; it was at first terrifying and confusing:
Inside of me, the things I liked and disliked, virtue and vice, being and nothingness, truth and falsehood, light and dark, the world in which the system of order and symmetry is maintained completely disappeared.… Everything that does not pertain to the innermost self suddenly disappears and fuses with the original universe, as one gaseous element with another.346
Aoki also comments, tellingly, that the ‘zero point of consciousness’ enables you to see things “much more clearly than those who live in the ‘systematic’ world.”347 The systematic hetabrain, which insists on evicting mystery from the world, is in fact what keeps us from recognizing it. Western thought has historically devoted itself to refining its perspectives on reality—a proper undertaking for those who, as Genesis assures us, have been given dominion over it. The efforts we have put into that project have created an elaborate, sparkling framework of concepts and systems of knowledge—but they have done little to help us be alive to the world as it is, or to sensitize our broken hearts to its unbroken wholeness.
In medieval Europe, the first scholastic to argue for the unbroken wholeness of Being was the brilliant theologian Duns Scotus. His term for it was “the univocity of being.” Univocity literally means “one voice,” and Scotus argued that Being, as such, included things and creatures and God and their attributes, and was the primary object of the human intellect—much as David Bohm argued that the implicate order, as such, includes all the attributes of the explicate order and is the proper focus of study for physicists. And what became of Duns Scotus? In his day he was known as the Subtle Doctor; the cultural tide then turned against him with a vengeance. He is with us still, though, immortalized in our language: it is from his name that we get our word dunce.
We might think of the universe itself as the ‘one voice’ through which the limitless awareness of Being expresses itself. The history of thought in other cultures often shows a matter-of-fact acceptance of the univocity of Being and the contingency of all things on its mystery. The sixth Patriarch of Chinese Zen, Hui Neng, attained enlightenment when he overheard a stranger recite a verse from the Diamond Sutra: “Let your mind function freely, without abiding anywhere or in anything.”348 The verse, which describes the “zero point of consciousness,” stands as a final abnegation of the authority of perspective. At the time, Hui Neng was an illiterate young peasant selling firewood—which, like perspectives, is continually gathered and burned away; but on hearing those words he suddenly experienced the true nature of his mind and was ‘awakened’. We can glimpse the nature of that awakening by considering a description of mind that he later wrote:
The capacity of mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad men and good men, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the midst of emptiness. The emptiness of human nature is also like this.349
Your capacity for emptiness, as we have said, is also your capacity for relationship—and there is nothing neutral about it; it is fully sensitized, and wide open to the currents of Being.
Others have also found the dimension of mind to be “broad and huge.” Gregory Bateson saw mind not just in the body, but in systems and matter at all levels of life. Physician Larry Dossey coined the term ‘nonlocal mind’ to describe the observed abilities of the human mind to function in ways that are confined by neither space nor time. Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington concluded that “the stuff of the world is mind stuff” and “the substratum of everything is of mental character.”350 Heraclitus stated that “No matter how many ways you try, you cannot find a boundary to consciousness, so deep in every direction does it extend.”351 Stanislav Grof, one of the twentieth century’s foremost pioneers in the study of nonordinary states of consciousness, has noted that “under certain circumstances, human beings can also function as vast fields of consciousness, transcending the limitations of the physical body, of Newtonian time and space, and of linear causality.”352 Furthermore,
each individual is an extension of all existence.… This means in the last analysis that the psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy.353
The mind of limitless sensitivity described by Hui Neng and others lies beyond the realm of the felt self: it belongs to the borderless final sphere of the mind’s sensitivity—the felt One. We are born into it by a self-intentioned holocaust of the vanities of separation, and an abandonment to the sensitivities that attune to consciousness. When the fire of the world reaches your core and turns knowledge to ash, the fluidity of the logosmind undergoes a phase shift analogous to the change that water molecules undergo when heat breaks them from the confines of liquidity and releases them as vapor. When the energy of the world’s fire ignites that phase shift in your Being, your consciousness opens beyond the fluidity of your discrete body into the limitless ether of the world. Aoki described it by saying that “everything that does not pertain to the innermost self suddenly disappears and fuses with the original universe, as one gaseous element with another, becoming one.” Thomas Merton described it by saying that “one arrives at mind by ‘having no mind’: in fact, by ‘being’ mind instead of ‘having’ it.”354 Similarly, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus wrote in the third century A.D. that when man “ceases to be an individual, he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world.”
What does it mean, though, to ‘be’ mind rather than ‘having’ it? Or to cease being an individual? It is a sort of death, certainly, but it is a Phoenix death of resurrection. The discrete self dissolves, the margins all leaky, and the last vestiges of your self-consciousness vaporize. In the empty spaciousness of the present, foreground and background trade places: you become the background that contains your experience—you become the felt One that contains the felt self. You fuse with the kinship of the thinking world as “one gaseous element with another.” Ancient Greeks believed that the cosmos was permeated by the gaseous element ether. It was from ether that the stars and planets were believed to have been made. In the late nineteenth century ether was postulated as the medium of space necessary for conveying waves of light. The word ether comes from the Greek word aithein, “to burn brightly,” which itself comes from the Indo-European root aidh-, “to burn.” It has cousins in the Sanskrit word idhryas, “of or like the brilliance of a clear sky”; estuary, “the mouth of a river”; and edify—and how often it is necessary to burn away a misconception in order to edify ourselves.
When the burning Phoenix of the world penetrates the loving logosmind and initiates a phase shift, your mind’s sensitivity is born into the ninth sphere. No longer does that sensitivity just sustain a dialogue with the Logos—it joins it: it joins the bright-burning, spacious mind-ether of the world; and then the radiance of that burning becomes your radiance. If we wished to name the intelligence that sustains the felt One, we could look to the associations that cluster around the ancient Greek idea of the ether and speak of the aithemind. In that the word begins with the first letter of the alphabet, it helps us to remember that the aithemind is the alpha mind, the source of all thinking, the foundation of consciousness. In keeping to the Greek word, aithein, “to burn brightly,” we are reminded that it is the bright-burning incineration of perseity and its tinderbox divisions that opens us to our true nature, which is part of and continuous with the mind-ether of the present.
And so it is that the Phoenix of the world, an elemental necessity to corational thinking, finally burns away corationality itself. Technically we cannot really call the thinking of the aithemind corational: because the specter of perseity is abandoned altogether, the sort of partnership on which corationality is based evolves into a merger. In respect of that, we might call its direct experience of the mind holorational—to mean “the thinking of the whole”; or even, in remembrance of the Indo-European root of rational, “joining the whole.” When Morehei Uyeshiba recalled the occasion of his own enlightenment, he bequeathed to us a vivid description of the holorational experience. It came upon him in the aftermath of a training session in budo, which is the practice of a martial art for the purpose of self-knowledge:
Then in the spring of 1925, if I remember correctly, when I was taking a walk in the garden by myself, I felt that a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body and changed my body into a golden one.
At the same time my mind and body turned into light. I was able to understand the whispering of the birds, and was clearly aware of the mind of God, the Creator of this universe.
At that moment I was enlightened: the source of budo is God’s love—the spirit of loving protection for all beings. Endless tears of joy streamed down my cheeks. Since that time I have grown to feel that the whole earth is my house, and the sun, the moon and the stars are all my own things.
The training of budo is to take God’s love, which correctly produces, protects and cultivates all things in Nature, and assimilate and use it in our own mind and body.355
If the logosmind is the realm discovered when you allow the present to touch your core—an act that we have identified as the true heroic submission—then the aithemind is the realm discovered when you recognize the light of the present, and allow it to touch your core, and live there. As Uyeshiba noted, we have come to call this state enlightenment. When he assimilated the light of God’s love, his mind and body phased into the golden radiance of the bright-burning ether, and he was able to understand “the whispering of the birds.” Indeed, with such a Phoenix-like revelation, the logosmind’s sensations and vibrations turn into the harmonies of song; as the body becomes like air, the world becomes like an aria. It is song that enables Orpheus to call the world into harmony; Bateson found music in the morphology of the crab, “repetitive with modulation”356; Sammy, the hero of William Golding’s novel, found that “the power of gravity, dimension and space, the movement of the earth and sun and unseen stars, these made what might be called music and I heard it.” The music of Shiva’s dance unifies all things by immersing them in its rhythm. Natalie Curtis in The Indian’s Book observed, “In nearly every Indian myth the creator SINGS things into life.”357 And of course Rumi wrote of the bright reedsong that sustains us all.
The rhythms of song are the rhythms of life. We attend to rhythms all the time, often without being conscious of it. It is rhythm—from an Indo-European base meaning “to flow”—that constitutes the shape of any form: the replication of patterns, by contrast, bespeaks a mechanical beat. Rhythms arise from the present and tell us about it. The rhythm of a gesture reveals the present, as do the rhythms of branches in the breeze, clouds scudding across the horizon, birds wheeling in a flock, or ants scurrying. It is in the rhythm of an artwork that its deepest artistry resides, whether in the contours of sculpted marble or the undulations of an ink-brush painting. Rhythm is embodiment. When someone speaks it is the rhythm of her voice—its vibrational song—that reveals her life and mind, far more than the specific words she utters: within that rhythm are felt the implicit perplexities of the moment in a way that words, tied as they are to meaning, could not describe. Similarly, it is in the vibrational rhythm of the world’s calling—its univocity, its song—that the life of the world is revealed. In the perplexing weave of reality, rhythm tells us about the living and dying of all its various currents: the ever-changing Phoenix—birthed, growing and perishing—over and over.
Fluidity is the medium of exchange: it is what the ‘known self’ guards against, what the felt self surrenders to, and what the felt One becomes. Technically, gases and liquids are both fluids—but the fluidity of a gas is finer and of a higher energy than that of a liquid. Similarly the exchange with the world in which the aithemind participates is finer and of a higher energy than that of the logosmind. And although hetabrain, logosmind and aithemind are discretely delineated only in our ideas about them, our perspectives on them may be sharpened by considering other differences:
• The thinking of the hetabrain is unipolar; the thinking of the logosmind is axial; and the thinking of the aithemind is the thinking of a field.
• The hetabrain is identified with ice, the solid state of water; the logosmind with its liquid state; and the aithemind with air, the gaseous state. The aithemind is the least substantial state—the least consolidated.
• In the hetabrain, the energies of consciousness—physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual—are differentiated, divergent, and at odds; in the logosmind, they reconcile as one and come into relationship with the One Mind of the world; and in the aithemind, they are recognized as the One Mind of the world.
• The hetabrain looks at the world as though through a window; the logosmind opens a door onto the world; and the aithemind is without windows, doors or walls.
• Whereas the hetabrain maintains a tyranny of the self, and the logosmind is sustained by a self-achieved submission that allows the present to touch our core, the aithemind is sustained by a submission that allows the light of the present to touch our core. In its essence this is a self-union: the self with the Self.
• Whereas the hetabrain adheres to a consciousness of tyranny, and the logosmind dwells within a consciousness of being, the aithemind dwells within a consciousness of consciousness.
• Whereas the hetabrain is centered in the cranium; and the logosmind is centered in the crux of our consciousness—the interfusion of the two axes; the aithemind is centered in the consciousness of the world.
• Whereas the thinking of the hetabrain is segregated from Being, and the thinking of the logosmind is unified with Being, the thinking of the aithemind is unified with spirit.
• Whereas the hetabrain holds to the past and plans for the future, and the logosmind heeds the present, the aithemind merges with the present, replete as it is with past events and future potentialities.
• Whereas the hetabrain is characterized by doing then here—reliving the past and anticipating the future; and the logosmind is characterized by being here now; the aithemind is characterized by being here and there, now and then. As Hui Neng understood, it functions freely, “without abiding anywhere or in anything.”
• Whereas the unipolar hetabrain does not tolerate paradox, preferring to systemize phenomena into tidy schemes of duality; and the logosmind lives paradox in the union of complementary opposites that takes place along the axes of our consciousness; the aithemind is centered in a love that transcends paradox.
• Whereas the hetabrain lives in respect of its duplicates of the world, and the logosmind lives hand in hand with the companionship of the world, the aithemind merges with the spirit of the world.
• Whereas the hetabrain attends to only four dimensions, and the logosmind attends to five, the aithemind attends primarily to one—the fifth—finding it seamlessly expressed through the other five.
• Whereas the hetabrain experiences the body as mere matter—something to be known and controlled from above (i.e., from the head); and the logosmind identifies with the body as its fluid medium of thought; the aithemind identifies with the light of love.
• Whereas the hetabrain rules over a body of multiple parts in a world of multiple parts; and the logosmind discovers the wholeness of the self by surrendering to the wholeness of the world; the aithemind lives the world’s wholeness through the wholeness of the self.
• In terms of the search for wholeness—the basic human activity—the hetabrain seeks wholeness by analysis; the logosmind seeks wholeness by assimilation; the aithemind finds wholeness in a communion of spirit.
• Finally, we can characterize what could be called the basic experience of each of the three realms of the self: whereas the basic experience of the barriered ‘known self’ is This Is Me, and that of the corational felt self is the mutual awareness expressed by We Are, the basic experience of the felt One is I Am, wherein one identifies seamlessly with all Being.
I have borrowed those last descriptive phrases from Jean Houston, who uses them to identify three realms of the psyche. This Is Me she describes as the mask we wear, the self we present in our everyday existence, which accords with the ‘known self’. We Are she speaks of as the realm in which “psyche and cosmos gain access to each other”358: it is the state of corationality. Once the dark hood of perseity drops away, the living truth of We Are, of I and Thou, of self and present, is embraced as something the heart knows beyond all idea. The revelation of We Are is a full recognition of ‘the human inseparability principle’: it topples the barriers created by neglect; it dissolves the rules on which entitlement relies; it announces the continuum of Being to which we all belong. By honoring that continuum, We Are opens our hearts to the world’s natural spaciousness—just as This Is Me is a slippery funnel that leads away from spaciousness. In fact, if we pay the slightest attention when we turn into that funnel and leave the reality of We Are, we can feel space contract and our sense of place ebb. And that makes me think of how different our experience would be if, like the Penan tribe of Borneo, we had, as Wade Davis observed, no words to distinguish between he, she or it, but many words for we. Finally, Jean Houston describes I Am as a realm of such union with the sacred ground of Being that “no longer do we persist in the pathos of the great divide between self and spirit.”359 The great I Am is the aithemind, the felt One.
We might also consider another, much older trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. If, as is written, we were created in God’s image, we should be able to look to God’s threefold image to discover the basic modes of the self. And indeed, the trinity of God stands as a prototype for the trinity of the self. God the Father corresponds to the hetabrain. God was not immanent in the created universe: He did not come into Being with the world, the stars, the seas and land, but stood in Himself, independent of them, and made them—thereby at once modeling and sanctifying the hetabrain’s basic division between thinking and Being. As the Pater watches the self from the perspective of the head, so the biblical Father watches over His children from above like a worried parent. He is rational and knows all of the answers, for which his children turn to Him for help. His Authority is absolute: He makes the rules by which they must live, and His entitlement in doing so is beyond dispute. His concern is with the laws that govern human lives rather than with the principles that animate them. He is also more concerned with the sins of the past and the building of the future than with the present, concerns that belong to the judicative hetabrain mode of ‘doing then here’—the result-driven mode. By nature He is complete and fully mature—fixed and eternal—beyond any need for or possibility of growth. And just as the hetabrain self lives in a world of duplicates created by its willful concepts and answers and agendas, so too man lives in a world created by the will and agendas of God the Father.
God the Son corresponds to the loving logosmind. Unlike the Father, the Son is a child of this world. He doesn’t watch it as from a window on high, but experiences it from within the sensations of flesh. Metaphorically, he is the doorway unto the world, “which no one is able to shut.”360 His life is driven by questions, with all of their attendant passions and doubts, and is in a continuous process of growth and discovery. What He offers to others is not answers, but parables and their attendant principles; not solutions, but the perplexing prick of reality: when the Pharisees brought the adulteress before Him and asked Him to uphold the law—which required that she be stoned—He replied, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”361 The living of the Son is rooted in the here and now; He doesn’t take a shortcut around process for the sake of results; and His thinking is resolutely corational. Unlike the Father, who preaches law, the Son preaches love—the supreme intelligence.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t preach. Like the aithemind, the Spirit is associated with light and is without a localized, individual identity. It is unseen and everywhere, without limit and without a center, like the field with which the aithemind is identified. True to its name, the Spirit is holy in both senses of the word: sacred beyond measure, and whole—inclusive beyond what we might imagine. It is the harmony that moves, and moves through, the five-dimensional world.
In thinking about the Holy Spirit, we might further consider that on a personal level, if our soul infuses flesh that is conscious rather than dispirited, then the more we can dissipate the consolidations of the ‘known self’ from within us, the more the light of the spirit, the burning, transforming love of the mindful world, might shine in and through us. The great Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata described how a Zen disciple leaves the isolated self and enters the world of spirit: the disciple
departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless.362
This universe of spirit described by Kawabata is an experience of the felt One, and represents the direct experience of the mystic. It is a direct experience of reality. It is the experience that shows us, as Andrew Harvey put it, that
at all moments, all manifested and separate things are secretly one with their source of Light—and so with each other.363
The three states of our Being—characterized as frozen, liquid and gas—are also represented mythologically: the frozen state is that of the consolidated tyrant, the liquid that of the hero, and the gaseous that of the hero reborn, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the self. Krishnamurti once observed, “Enlightenment is an accident; but some activities make you accident prone.”364 The phase shift into the aithemind may indeed occur by accident; but our culture, infatuated with its own abstractions, probably makes us less accident prone than most. Opening through the spheres from hetabrain to logosmind, though, is not a matter of accident. Quite simply, once you recognize your own self-absorption, and recognize it as the product of self-tyranny; and once you realize that the world’s sensitivity can only stir a heart that is not weighed down with self-directives, and that to willfully direct yourself is to bury yourself in fantasy—then you find yourself free to make a choice. Bluntly speaking, you can choose to side with fantasy—in all its flattering divisiveness—or you can side with Being. To choose Being requires the honesty and courage and submissiveness of the ordinary hero within you, who would rather risk the unknown terrain of aliveness than be stifled in the inadequacies of the normal. If you side with Being, you will change and be changed; but you will never again be alone. Be still, and know that you are known.
As we have seen, your elemental sensitivities consist of the breath that moves through you, the fluidity of your mindful body, your groundedness in the present, and the fires of rebirth that incinerate fantasies of division and sensitize you to a heartbeat that is not your own: the resting pulse of the present, which suffuses and supports all that is. As those elemental sensitivities awaken you to the sensitivities of the world, what you ‘know yourself to be’ is eventually felt as an anchor that holds you back from the sensational fluidity of the moment. In mythic terms, we might say that when the hero is reborn into Being, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the ‘known self’, he allows the fullness of his own nature to be present. No part of him is censored; no isometrics are at work. He is fully at ease with all the perplexities that make up the present. Of course, the present knows no duality: it is neither male nor female, neither god nor goddess, but both. Similarly, the wholeness of the reborn hero is an androgyny that requires the sensitivities of female and male equally: it is transcendent and immanent, changing and resting, bold and gentle, light and dark, particle and wave, discerning and integrative, adventurous and receptive, wild and wholly at peace.
The androgyny of the felt self simply mirrors ‘what is’. Until our culture deplores rather than celebrates the willfulness and arrogance of a male strength that disdains its roots in Being—until we recognize and fall in love with and attend to Being in all its corationality—we will continue to live out our impoverished ideas of ‘what is’, even as we remain stubbornly incapable of recognizing ‘what is’. That the consciousness of patriarchy ruling most of humanity has left us addicted to perspective and incapable of integration is amply demonstrated in each of the major problems we face: the unsustainable and malignant values of the global economy, our crushing overpopulation, the insanity of our arms proliferation, the destructiveness perpetrated on our animals and environment by the practices of agribusiness, and the deep cultural crisis of meaning. What cannot integrate will disintegrate. Our culture, like Laius, stubbornly believes that whatever problems it faces are best solved through the exercise of power. But no tyrannical measures, even the most sophisticated and best intentioned, can deliver us from the Four Horsemen we have summoned forth. All our fundamental relationships are tyrannical ones, posited on division, mirroring the divisions within. Until we shake off that enclosed, acquisitive, self-serving tyranny, rescue the female element from the shadows, and heed her, we will never come into relationship with ‘what is’ or accord with our responsibility to it.
‘First, Being: then doing’ represents at the same time the path of the ordinary hero and the path of the mythic mother. As we have seen, the similarities between the mother and the hero reborn are striking. Both are resolutely on the side of life: both give birth to the new, and do so in love. Both undertake their labors with a self-achieved submission: they can fulfill their soul’s journey in no other way. Both serve selflessly, and in that service move beyond self-consciousness into the consciousness of consciousness, which locates their spiritual center of gravity outside of the self: the mother’s in the child, the hero’s in unknown Being, calling. Furthermore, the mother and the hero do not insist on their own perspectives—they fulfill their work by loving and bending to ‘what is’. We could comment, then, that the mother is a true hero; and similarly, that the hero’s quest elevates him into motherhood. In fact, the whole journey of the soul is an evolution into cosmic motherhood—a state of grounded sensitivity that looks to the world with love, listens to its need and its calling with compassion, and acts, often heroically, always selflessly, on its behalf. Whether our own evolution shapes of us a heroic mother or a mothering hero is a matter of indifference. We can see that Christ on the cross was a mother, heroically giving birth to a new consciousness; and Mary stood by with the steadfastness of a hero, upholding his labor with peace and love. As a mother gives of herself to her child, wanting it to grow into its own strength and clarity, so too the reborn hero upholds with compassion the world around him and those with whom he shares it. Through his actions and inactions he births a deeper harmony.
As we learn to act from a mother’s inclusive love, we also learn to extend it to our own bodies and souls. We learn to mother our own body as it seeks to birth itself into health and wholeness and grace and strength. We learn to mother our elemental sensitivities and help them grow into the world. And we learn to mother our own conscious innocence, to reclaim the spontaneous delight and curiosity and abandon and playfulness and fresh seeing that naturally belong to every child of this world. We can be summoned by the world only when that innocence is reclaimed; and only when we are summoned can we truly find ourselves—for what is true in us is, quite simply, whatever comes into relationship with the present and recognizes itself there. To do other than surrender to the present is always to retreat into fantasy. And that way tyranny lies.
As we have seen, the qualities of emptiness and fluidity and spaciousness are different perspectives on the same phenomenon: a receptivity to the present that allows it to move through us that we might move with it. “Form is no other than emptiness.” Of course, it is one thing to theorize about emptiness; it is another to directly experience it.
In this exercise the body is imagined to be an hourglass filled with sand. If you stand in an alert, neutral position and close your eyes, you should be able to relax into the hourglass image and feel it clearly. Imagine, too, that there is a little plug in the bottom of each foot that loosens and falls out, so that two streams of sand begin to pour down out of each sole. As that happens, the level of the sand in your body begins to slowly drop, leaving emptiness behind.
Feel the level of the sand drop as specifically as you can, from the top of the head, down past the eyes, nose and mouth, down past the chin into the neck, through the neck to the sternum, and so on down through the torso. If your fingertips are touching your thighs, you can imagine the sand in your arms running through your fingertips into the legs. As the sand drops through the chest, belly and pelvis, it leaves emptiness behind. And on it continues, through the thighs, past the knees, down through the calves, the ankles, to finally empty out through the feet.
Take a moment to scan the body for any grains left behind, and allow them to detach and drop through the emptiness and on out the bottoms of the feet. If you let yourself linger in this emptied state of spaciousness, you will have a chance to discover what it is to hear the world around you from essential emptiness. When you wish to, you can open your eyes and discover how the world looks from that emptiness. In emptiness, anything is possible. You may also wish to walk and discover what it is to step, empty, through the world. To get the most from the exercise, it helps to understand that this emptiness in the body matches the emptiness of pure Being, in which the isolated male element of doing has no place to stand. Whenever you feel the emptiness being compromised, dissociated ‘doing’ is simply trying to find a foothold.