"Consciousness, hence being. The very undeniability of my
present awareness, the undeniability of my consciousness,
immediately delivers to me a certainty of existence in this moment,
a certainty of Being in the now-ness of this moment. I cannot doubt
consciousness and Being in this moment, for it is the ground of all
knowing, all seeing, all existing. This, of course, is exactly the
path that had been taken by Vedanta, by Vajrayana, by the
Neoplatonists, and by many other great wisdom traditions. It is the
path of I AM, and this great I AMness is said to open directly on
to, or even to directly be, nothing other than pure Spirit, radiant
God/dess, the Atman that is Brahman, timelessly and eternallya
supreme equation secreted in the fact that you cannot doubt the
Immediacy of your own Now-ness. Consciousness, therefore Being. And
Being is God in the state of I AM.
"Who am I? Ask that question over and over again, deeply. Who am I?
What is it in me that is conscious of everything? This self-inquiry
was used by Sri Ramana Maharshi to realize the Self, the Self that
is one with the entire Kosmos in all its radiant splendor. In other
words, Sri Ramana Maharshi was using the Cartesian doubt to drive
to heart of the Atman that is Brahmanalthough, of course, the
technique is centuries old. Descartes did not invent it, he merely
rediscovered it. In Descartes's burning desire to know 'What is
ultimately true? What is so true that it can never be doubted ?,'
he turned his attention inward with such a fierce and awesome
dedication to Truth that he eventually was broughtas all such
sincere and prolonged self-inquiry isdirectly to the Self that is
the Witness of all worlds, a Self that can never be believably
doubted because it is always already ever-present. Consciousness IS
Being, even here and now.
"How similar was this Cartesian doubt to the Path of Awakening in
the great wisdom traditions? Here is only one example, taken from
Dzogchen Buddhism, generally regarded as the highest of the
Buddha's teachings. This is from the great Paltrul's
'Self-Liberated Mind':
"'At times it happens that some meditators say that it is difficult
to recognize the nature of the mind (note: in Dzogchen, 'the nature
of the mind' means the ultimate reality of pure Emptiness or
primordial Spirit). Some practitioners believe it to be impossible
to recognize Spirit. They become depressed with tears streaming
down their cheeks. There is no reason at all to become sad. It is
not at all impossible to recognize. Rest directly in that which
thinks that it is impossible to recognize Spirit , and that is
exactly it .'"
Lesa Powell looked up. "In other words, if you think that you know
Spirit, or if you think you don't, Spirit is actually that which is
thinking both of those thoughts. So you can doubt the objects of
consciousness, but you can never believably doubt the doubter,
never really doubt the Witness of the entire display. Therefore,
rest in the Witness, whether it is thinking that it knows God or
not, and that witnessing, that undeniable immediacy of
now-consciousness, is itself God, Spirit, Buddha-mind. The
certainty lies in the pure self-felt Consciousness to which objects
appear, not in the objects themselves. You will never, never, never
see God, because God is the Seer, not any finite, mortal, bounded
object that can be seen. (Consciousness, therefore Being not:
objects of Consciousness, therefore Being.)
"Thus, this pure I AM state is not hard to achieve but impossible
to escape, because it is ever-present and can never really be
doubted. You can never run from Spirit, because Spirit is the
Runner. To put it very bluntly: Spirit is not hard to find but
impossible to avoid: it is that which is looking at this page right
now. Can't you feel That One? Why on earth do you keep looking for
God when God is actually the Looker?
"Therefore, simply rest in the ever-present Witness. As Patrul also
says: 'There are some meditators who don't let their mind rest in
itself or in basic immediateness, as they should. Instead they let
it watch outwardly or search inwardly. You will neither see nor
find Spirit by watching outwardly or searching inwardly (for it is
the Seer, not the seen!). There is no reason whatsoever to watch
outwardly or search inwardly. Let go directly into this mind that
is watching outwardly or searching inwardly, and that is exactly it
.'
"Well, all of that is good Cartesianismalthough, again, Descartes
didn't invent it, he just rediscovered it in his own I AMness. This
path of self-inquiryand the Great Liberation that is secreted in
the ever-present I AM stategoes back at least 2,000 years
(although the traditions always claim, not completely convincingly,
that it goes back tens of thousands of years or more). We find it
in Plato and therefore Neoplatonism (and therefore virtually every
mystical school in the West), where it appears as a basic
Wakefulness present even in sleep; it is clearly announced in India
in the Upanishads, where this Atman that is Brahman is the doorway
to Enlightenment; we find it in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism (when faced
with those who thought that the attainment of nirvana depended on
prayers and chanting, Zen asked instead: 'WHO chants the name of
the Buddha?'); we find it in the great Christian mystics, such as
Boethius, who in his great distress cried out to Philosophia, who
ever-so-gently whispered in his ear: 'You have forgotten who you
are.' Because who you are is... Spirit itself, even when you think
you can never find it.
"At the beginning of the modern worldthat is, somewhere between
the Renaissance and the EnlightenmentDescartes looked into this
own mind and found the Looker. From Descartes this I AM realization
poured into modern Western philosophy. When Husserl explains that
the world could end and it wouldn't affect the pure Self, or when
he describes the splitting of the witnessing self from empirical
self (e.g., in section 15 of Cartesian Meditations ), or when
Fichte describes the pure Observing Self as being infinite and
supraindividual Spiritthis is Western Vedanta at its finest. To
varying degrees we find it in Kant, Spinoza, Schelling,
Schopenhauer, Sartre, Heidegger... oh, it is a long list!
"And I am getting quite ahead of the story." Powell laughed,
shifted her position sitting on the stage, and continued. "Several
scholars have suggested that Descartes's major satori occurred in
an altered state of consciousness when he climbed into an old stove
and curled up on himself. He is quoted as saying something like,
When I came out, my entire philosophy was formed.
"Well, what we do know is that Descartes very probably had a peak
experience of the causal realm. A peak experience of the pure Self,
the formless Witness, the pure Consciousness that cannot believably
be doubted because it is the ground of all Being and all doubt. A
peak experience of Atman, a peak experience of the ever-present I
AM: no wonder Descartes was the first great modern philosopher,
powered by that fuel!
"Butand this is crucialwe also have good reason to believe that
Descartes's frontal developmentthat is, his average center of
gravitywas at the orange meme (this was, after all, the beginning
of modernity). And therefore Descartes did pretty much what
integral psychology predicts that he would do: he interpreted his
altered state or peak experience of the causal realm in terms of
the orange meme . Aye, and there's the rub.
"We can find no evidence that Descartes was permanently developed
to the causal realmthe causal was therefore only a passing state,
not a permanent trait. Recall that integral psychology maintains
that a person at virtually any stage of development (infant, child,
adultpurple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, etc.) can have an
altered state or peak experience of any of the great states of
consciousnessgross, subtle, causal, nondual (corresponding to
waking, dreaming, sleeping, and nondual). But the person will tend
to interpret that altered state in the terms of their present stage
of development.... (continued in URL)
Though it has to be noted that even the causal is not a complete
and final realisation, especially in Buddhism, since the experience
of causal consciousness does not necessarily entail realisation of
no self and non duality where even cartesian dualism is
transcended.
