On the way
Entries: 22 Oct 01 – 18 April 04Welcome to this first public outing of an inner journal which includes occasional brief reports on the way of transformation. John Heron,13 April 2005.
A note on the chiaroscuro of the inner journal: On the shadow side lurk the seductive anomalies of narcissism and inflated delusion. On the bright side there are the benefits of personal clarification, focused illumination and an affirmation of the inner life. More widely, there is a tacit invitation to dialogue and exchange perspectives with other inquirers on their own idiosyncratic paths. This dialogue, to be fruitful, calls for the risks of intimate disclosure.
For the very important interpersonal complement to these predominantly personal entries see Cookbook of dyadic inquiry and Shekinah.
Key entries: 14 May 02, 8 Oct 02
22 Oct 2001
I stood on top of the pyramid this morning and talked up spiritual fire. I guess it’s around all the time. When I speak out loud and open up to what there is in every respect without let or hindrance, the fire surges through and I become experiential flame. I stand and speak within physical space, embraced within subtle space, open to the origin of all this in what there is; and my-being-in-these-interpenetrating-spaces becomes an all-consuming, all-sustaining, all-creating everywhere active fire.
29 Oct 2001
Being in face-to-face relation to another person, with felt intimacy and mutual presence, opens up a field full of the potential for dynamic and world-transforming action – here in this place where we are.
30 Oct 2001
What’s my basic world view, in a few short sentences? The divine is bipolar: spirit and manifestation. Spirit is bipolar: beyond the manifest and within the manifest, transcendent and immanent. The manifest is bipolar: the subtle and the phenomenal. Both the spirit and the manifest are one and many. Our intentionality in relationship in this situation here and now mediates and amalgamates this divine quaternity of polarities.
3 Nov 2001
The one taste, nondual state is a simple fusion of a developed state of witnessing, with the everyday state of feeling the presence of perceiving-a-world.
10 Nov 2001
I stand within our domestic pyramid, in its interior space, open my body-mind gesture to what there is in every respect without let or hindrance, and declare the word “Fire”. Then I am aflame, a flame within the all flame, fiery all through.
1 Feb 2002
I made a mistake when sorting through my files, and lost a whole lot of journal entries between mid-November 2001 and the end of January 2002. What a pity, there were so many viable, illuminating entries. Such a shame! Oh well, I let them tumble away into nothingness, dissolve into the void. Frankly it was a bit of a struggle to let go of my attachment to journal-vanity and narcissism.
2 Feb 2002
Immanent spirituality manifests as the affective mode of the psyche, which involves a felt sense of fit in relation to the present situation, where this felt sense harbours a creative impulse to appropriate action, balancing the respective claims of the one and the many. See Feeling and Personhood, Figure 2.1, page 19, where affect is shown as embracing experiential and practical knowing.
4 Feb 2002
My current view is that the primary locus of human spirituality is situational, relational, co-created, dynamic and action-oriented. It is about the spiritual presence generated when humans interact with each other and their cultural and natural situation to transform their world – that is, to flourish in their world holistically. The dimensions of such interaction are communion, image-making, meaning-making, decision-making, and the varieties of conjoint transformative action.
This account of spirituality breaks down the distinction between spirituality, morality, psychology, politics, economics and ecology.
Co-creation involves a person in transformative transactions with elements of their own being relevant to the situation, with other persons involved, with other presences in the natural environment affected, with relevant norms, values and beliefs of their own culture, with human artefacts involved, with unseen presences and powers, with the divine as situational presence of this event.
The world peels off in layers from the exfoliating heart, of which You are the abundance and the fullness.
Action is an intrinsic ineffable knack of knowing how to co-enact, with the dynamic plethora of possibility, a new manifest determinate of the great indeterminacy of the divine.
7 Feb 2002
Parity is the primary value for humans. Parity between self-influence, peer-influence, up-hierarchy influence and down-hierarchy influence.
9 Feb 2002
More on parity. Parity meaning equal significance, giving equal weight to: not in any particular instance, but over time, in sequential balance. Today I may need to give greater attention to the value of up-hierarchy energies, tomorrow to down-hierarchy energies, on Monday to peer influence, and so on, but over time they all integrate into mutuality, harmony and balance – absolute parity.
Parity of ascent and descent, of vertical and horizontal, of the Many and the One.
I sat in my attunement chair for an hour and a half from 5.30 am this morning. A fairly regular practice at that time or earlier. It’s a La-z-boy chair. You can raise up a support for the legs, and the back has about 18 different notches for reclining from the vertical to the near horizontal. Then seat and back recline together to maintain lumbar support. It’s an excellent device for converting sleep into meditative attunement. This morning I attuned to the subtle worlds that are the ground and support, the very foundation, of the astral and physical cosmos. This supersubtle realm upholds our experiential world and its astral counterpart, and of course pervades them through and through. Physical existence gives a kind of privileged access to the everywhere intensive and extensive supersubtle. Just go down into your physicality and peer through it, look straight through what is in fact the rather slender veil of it, and there you are immersed in the all-pervasive supersubtle. Every good kitchen has a back door into an abundant garden whence it draws its nourishment. The body is the back door into the supersubtle, but it must be very relaxed and comfortable, and I alert and attentive, to pass through it. There is a certain notch on the chair which provides just the right angle of entry.
1 March 2002
The primary locus of human spirituality is situational – in this place with these people, in the collegiality, the diversity-in-unity, between the “when” and the “where” and the “with whom”.
28 April 2002
We did a Feeling and Personhood exercise in the late afternoon. We took it in turns with the following. One of us read out sonorously a three sentence passage from the book about expansive feeling as the ground of the psyche, while Pachelbel’s canon in D was playing in the background. The other relaxed deeply and openly, absorbing the sound of words and music, and letting the words echo for some more minutes until the music finished. Very nourishing. I indwelt an ocean of feeling out of which a pyramid arose, above whose apex a shimmering cloud of light extended.
29 April 2002
Sit in the La-z-boy chair from 5.50 am to 6.50 am. Then back to bed for some dreams. In the chair I dissociate into the uncreated, the unborn, the ultimate, the absolute, beyond all name and form, the simple, liberated space of awareness. This liberated space eventually always gently and warmly disavows the dissociation and settles down around the cosmic and psychological content which it both includes and transcends. To say it includes this content is not to say it is identical with it, it is just to say it includes it. Just like the ocean transcends and includes plankton, whales and such like.
30 April 2002
Sit in the chair from 3.50 am to 5.20 am. Open to the uncreate which settles in the heart, where layers of the create – the super-subtle, the subtle, the subtle-gross and the gross – peel off continuously in the ever-present, like contiguous petals emerging and unfurling. The subtle emerges from the super-subtle, the subtle-gross from the subtle, the gross from the subtle-gross, the gross disintegrates into the uncreate void, whence the super-subtle emerges, as the ever-present process continues. With these petals of the uncreate heart we feel our co-creative presence within our diverse realms of being.
Moving alone around the house during the day, I talk up experiential fire, the inextinguishable flame of being manifest. Interfused petals flaming round the uncreate.
In the evening about 7.15 pm, we do our cosmos ritual on the top of the pyramid, affirming our interconnection with the physical cosmos, the subtle comos and their spiritual ground. Then we take a candle each, one the light of Logos, the other the life of Shekinah, down staircases on opposite sides of the pyramid and process along a long passage from each end to meet in the middle of the pyramid. We place the candles on the low altar there and sit before it while a Tibetan bowl sounds its note. I open to the uncreate in the heart of each of us, and in the heart of every human on the planet. One race, one heart, one drama of multifarious unpeeling.
10 May 2002
I am in the chair for a couple of hours starting somewhere around 3 am, much earlier than usual. With my being I affirm emergently in many different ways the immediacy of You, Thisness, Thatness, What-there-isness. You as the Between, the I that integrates subject and object, my awareness and its immediate contents, in a seamless experiential whole of being. All sorts of stuff cascades within this seamlessness. Somewhere within this cascade a youth rushes eagerly toward me in some subtle realm.
In the early afternoon I stand in the middle of the pyramid and declaim aloud, “I open to what there is in every respect without let or hindrance”. I make the declaration with the openness of my whole embodied being. This generates a blaze of experiential fire – a participation in the fiery breath of current creation. In terms of my model (Figure 6.1, page 95, Sacred Science) this experiential fire is an integration of my immediate present experience, its ground in its inner spatio-temporal matrix with its evoked constitutive fiery subtle energies, rooted in a deep impulse of immanent spiritual life, flaming in the air of sustaining universal mind, within the invoked creative outpouring of powers, presences and the transcendent Thou. So it is present experience integrated with immanent 1, 2 and 3, transcendent 1, 2 and 3.
11 May 2002
I go to the chair about 5.20 am for an hour or two. I simply attend to my attention, am aware of my awareness, although it’s a bit more than that. I am aware of, and participate in, my living presence. Awareness of my awareness is nourished by my own living being. Divinity enjoys the feast it is serving up through my flesh.
13 May 2002
I sit in the chair from 5.30 am for an hour and a half. I spend some time opening to the ground, the foundation of my being, and of being – rootedness in the void. Then I open to the awareness, the free attention, that embraces our galaxy, the whole extended sphere of it, not just the central disc. The disc is some 10,000 light years thick, but the whole galactic sphere is 100,000 light years in diameter. Finally and for the greater part of the period in the chair, I settle into the following. I have in my being the silent speech “This is You” referring to my awareness with its immediate multi-layered experiential living content, and divinity. So this awareness of living content is You the divine. Awareness, life, multi-layering, content, You, me, there is no separation anywhere, no loss of distinctness nor of differential meaning anywhere.
Afterwards in bed I have a lucid dream. A shakti woman is driving the a small sedan car we are in backward, the wheels on our left graze the curb, then she pulls the car out into the road still going backwards. I am alarmed. I protest loudly, and fearfully, that we will crash. She does a U-turn careening round backwards down a road or lane that goes back to where we started. She manouevres the car round and parks it facing the same direction as before we started our backward trip. I notice a male passenger in the back; and also that there has been a miraculous transformation. I tell them that we are all in the same car, but that what for them it is still a closed sedan, is now for me an open sports car with no roof and windows and no windscreen – a vintage model called an Avis Minor (avis, Latin for bird). We are in the same car but from the vantage point of two different and interpenetrating realities, mine roofless, theirs roofed. When shakti finally parks the car, the front edge of the left front wing scrapes a little on a wall.
I sit in the chair from 4.33 am to 6.33 am. The living thoughts – being thoughts – of silent speech, are windows, conduits to their referents. They are epiphanies: they commune with being. For a while I roam about divinity, exploring various thought-epiphanies, varied participatory approaches to, perspectives on, divine life-mind-manifestation. Then I settle on the thought-epiphany “This is You”, referring, as before, to the divinity of Your-my awareness with its immediate multi-layered experiential living content. I open to the spontaneous guidance of this epiphany. Today it takes me, over and over, in a series of cycles, into a third eye cone, a tunnel penetrating both upwardly and deeply into subtle space, which opens out at its end onto a world of spiritual intimates. Somewhere between these cycles, there is a phase where it is as if the top of my skull comes off, like a boiled egg with the top removed, and my brain is being flushed out with subtle energy.
Later in the day I reflect that this kind of spiritual and subtle experience, afforded within deep states of solitary meditation, especially in the pre-dawn hours, is secondary to what is afforded by relational forms of spiritual practice with other human beings. The solitary practice certainly deconstructs the contracted ego, opening it to the subtle and the spiritual. But this only deals with that part of the ego which is contracted against transpersonal realities. The sustained solitariness of such practice does nothing, per se, to deal with that part of the ego that is contracted against interpersonal collaboration. If anything, solitary meditation reinforces that sort of contraction by ballooning round it a subtle kind of inflation. Which is why traditional meditation gurus are notoriously unaware of the claims of ecumenical collaboration with each other, and are, in effect, in subtle comptetition for souls in the marketplace.
The interpersonal contraction of the ego needs dealing with at its own level, by acquiring competence in peer decision-making, followed by collaborative action, with regard to how we transform ourselves and our world. This kind of deconstruction of the ego is both fully interactive, incarnate, multi-level and holistic, engaging the subjective, the intersubjective, the social and the physical. Its rigours, including the rigours of chaos, burn up the privatized ego; its collegial creativity pours out rewards on all levels. And there are no traditions that teach it, because it necessarily transcends doctrinal transmission by authorized teachers. It’s a new dispensation, only self-generated now by humans in this place.
Relational forms of spiritual practice, co-decided and co-exercised with other humans, seem to me to be primary, more fundamental than solitary forms. This is because they deal more radically and more comprehensively and more co-creatively with more of divine reality. Also interpersonal contraction is the toughest, thickest part of total ego contraction. If you deal with that really effectively, on all levels, you necessarily deal with the thinner transpersonal part. However, solitary forms of practice are a very important secondary back-up for dealing with this part.
15 May 2002
Instead of going by transcendence into the formless and then going on with it until it starts to subsume the phenomenal and turns into the so-called nondual (and leaves you devoid of all sorts of spiritual interactive skills), start with participatory perceiving grounded in the human capacity for feeling as I define it, practise this and expand this as a ground for developing emotional, interpersonal and psychosexual and other spiritual interactive skills, including above all peer decision-making and collaborative endeavour in world transformation.
26 May 2002
Consciousness is not experience. Experience is experience of being in a world; it’s a composite of consciousness and life. Experience is sentience, feeling being in a world. It is developing, changing, becoming. Life is the motive power of this becoming. Consciousness as such is changeless, the great attractor.
Spirituality is not measured by high states, but by co-creative achievement. High states confuse the supersubtle with the spiritual.
You use revisionary concepts to release perceiving from the restrictive grip of traditional concepts.
Motion is the grounding form of life, animation.
18 Aug 2002
I’ve been away for five weeks to the USA and UK working and seeing family. Both activities have been rewarding, and yet what a pain to be away from my home here in NZ for so long.
How to live a life consciously, have a living consciousness, manifest a dipolar and tripartite theology. How to make relational forms of spiritual practice primary. What a joyful set of creative endeavours.
I’ve been vegetating for a week, spending every day getting my silent computer system up and running and tidying my desk. This has largely been done, so now the wider and deeper issues beckon: enlivenment, engagement, enlightenment.
Enlivenment: opening to present animation, the dynamics of eternal life, the everpresent fire of being.
Engagement: relational forms of spiritual practice – participative perceiving, mutual attunement with persons, participative decision-making, personal/social/planetary transformation.
Enlightenment: turning about in the everyday mind to open to universal mind.
17 Sept 2002
I’m wondering about the conceptual format of my experiential worldview. Divine animation on every level. Each body or sheath is alive in its own way. The physical body is alive in relation to its intake of air, food and water. The subtle body is alive in its relation to its engagement with the everywhere, everpresent subtle fire, the flame of subtle being, the eternal sheath of the divine. The supersubtle body is alive in relation to its taste of divine nectar.
18 Sept 2002
Theology and psychology again. Preconventional, conventional, postconventional and postpostconventional, these four as a model of personal development as we understand it today – this is OK.
19 Sept 2002
There’s a flame in my heart. It’s the flame of eternal life, divine animation. It lives forever and without end, within time and beyond time. It is the signature of immortality.
6 Oct 2002
I sat in the middle of the pyramid intoning aloud “YOU are the ground of my being” and opening the roots of my motivation to their divine ground, their spirit-animation. The result: a flow of fire upward from these roots.
One aspect of my personal path: to use the vibrational power of my voice to open my living being to the divine; and to use the metaphorical power of speech to open my awareness to the divine. Of course, spirit-animation is the vibrational power of my voice.
I am a living being and an aware being. My animation and my awareness are interdependent, co-relative. They are the dynamic poles of my entity. My animation is the sheath, vehicle, epiphany, manifest of my awareness. My awareness is the celebrant of my animation.
My primary sheath is immortal, that is, non-mortal. It combines transience and permanence. It is forever and it undergoes transfigurations and transformations. Transfigurations alter its frequency, transformations change its form.
My secondary sheath is mortal, my so-called physical body. I say “so-called” because it is a temporary exudate of the primary sheath. It exists for purposes of training and learning, and for mastery of multi-domain living, that is for living awarely, creatively in several interrelated domains.
My primary sheath is a fire-body, a flame-body, a burning signature of entityhood. It is a glory of creation.
7 Oct 2002
Battling with fatigue, lack of sleep, overeating. I want to make some kind of statement about the sort of universe I live in and the range of practices I adopt.
Nothing on the agenda for the day. Time to check in with the motivational ground of my being. I sit in the middle of the pyramid and say, with charismatic voice, “I open to the divine animation that is the root of my motivation”. Immediately there is an upward flow of fire from the root into the belly, the solar plexus and the heart; and a downward surge over each shoulder and down the back, like a descending cloak of flame. “O fire of agni, flame forever where I am.”
Charismatic voice is the evocative power of human sound manifesting intent through transformative speaking. This mode of voice is like a wind that fans the flame of animate being.
For there is a kind of divine being that is animate, alive, moving, changing, doing things, constituting persons and worlds of all sorts and their transformations from and into each other.
Our inquiry group met last night. First off, a long discussion, with several rounds of voting, about an application from someone wanting to join the group. We decided to invite this person to attend for three meetings to test the waters, then to make a decision either to attend regularly as a committed member, or to leave; and group members would each make a response to whatever choice is made. Then we had a check-in round, each person reporting on whatever salient dynamic of their living they chose to share. After that, I brought in the basket of instruments and coloured cloths. For a long time there was vigorous rhythmic percussion – drums, rattles, cymbals, bells, wooden blocks, aboriginal pipe – with movement, gesture and posture, and no vocals. Then the sounding began, continuous and gentle until a pause. Next, with sacred dance and postures, a powerful multitone crescendo arose from group members. With devotional presence we sustained the fluctuating intensity of the interpenetrating sounds, with a series of cresendos and diminuendos. Other realities cascaded into the potentized prana of our physical and social space. Then at the final dying fall we sat in a silent circle hands linked, dwelling within the presence of Shekinah, feasting on the sweet nectar of the Divine Between: all in one, each in all, everywhere relationship, full of openness.
Now it is time to report on what Barbara and I have been doing since I got back here on 10 August from my five week trip to the USA and the UK. After two weeks of my taking it easy, we launched a three day review of our past and current process, and forward planning into the future. The review covered: (1) the many dimensions of our relationship; (2) our dyadic programme of shared practices; (3) prior lists of unfinished projects; (4) the purpose of the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry. The forward planning included: (1) personal, including holidays; (2) our dyadic programme of shared practices; (3) Centre activities and programme; (4) developing the grounds.
Under review (1), the many dimensions of our relationship, we reviewed all the following: our emotional dynamic; practical tasks; financial/legal/property; intimacy/nurturance/sex/togetherness; recreation; time together/time apart; decision-making; spirituality; families; TV; social life; age issues; food/exercise/sleep; intentional dying; careers/occupation; marriage; global viability. This review was very fruitful and rewarding as a living growth process: good strong, clear, open, rigorous and refreshing loving. It led over into a review of our past and current dyadic programme of shared practices. And this in turn developed into forward planning of the programme for the next three and a half months. We have at the time of writing been busy with the revised and extended version for five and a half weeks.
This dyadic programme is a programme of relational forms of spiritual practice. I think these really are primary in some fundamental way. The core practice is how we make decisions. On very many conjoint choices before us, however major or minor, we each first of all decide privately what our personal preference is, and only when both of us have got clear about this, do we disclose these preferences and in the light of these proceed to a negotiated shared decision. This has been a rigorous interpersonal discipline for many years, and may be exercised several times a day.
As well as being rigorous (we don’t allow each other to avoid the first crucial step of determining personal preference), we keep it light, easy and playful. It is also intrinsically interesting and liberating. On matters large and small, we are continuously discovering who we are and where we stand. The process keeps the relationship sweet and clean, creative and respectful, and avoids collusion, control and muddling along. It ensures that co-operation is authentic and not cobbled together unawarely. It means that each person can check in with the deep inner ground of their motivation, to get a sense of where they truly stand as a basis for creative agreement. Thus immanent spirit is a spacious co-creative partner to the contract.
In our review of that process, we realized that there may have been a number of invisible decisions, not made in that way. “Invisible” because they were made relatively unawarely in some other arbitrary manner. So we are intrigued to see if, in the future, we can spot these invisibles and identify how they are done and what it is about them that has made them invisible. I have to report that so far, five weeks on, either we haven’t done any invisibles or we haven’t spotted them. And to be honest, I’m not sure which of these is the case.
These are the names of all the other regular practices which we put into our forward plan for our dyadic programme, and which we have enjoyed over the past five weeks: mutual appreciation session, silent mutal gazing, the cosmos ritual in the house pyramid, the fire ritual in the glade, the ritual walk round the seats and sites, primary theatre, co-counselling, erotic energy declaration, identity check, Feeling and Personhood exercise, co-visualization. Interwoven with the plan are: grace at mealtimes, our conjoint decision-making process, and the sacred carnalities of erotic intimacy, and naked nurturance.
The mutual appreciation session is a joy: we take it in turns to celebrate a quality, a way of being or doing, that we appreciate about the other, up to a limit of three each – so we don’t overdo it. What these six declarations and celebrations create is a very engaging and charming archetypal field, a spacious qualitative zone that opens up around us. We expand into the one mirror we each hold up for the other.
After the appreciations, we often do silent mutual gazing. As our souls settle into this enlivening process we become immersed in the dual-unity of Shekinah, the living open reality of the sacred Between. It’s like being headless with two heads: only the Between savouring the unity of the duality. This mode of access to incarnate divinity really is so sweet, so rich in ambrosia. Why does not everyone use it? It is the true and universal form of satsang: peer to peer transmission of divine presence.
9 Oct 2002
I wander round the house, and I wonder round the house, saying “This is You”, opening to what I see as what I AM, the unity of the whole subjective-objective process, all in one.
11 Oct 2002
Sludge, torpor, age, sloth, lack of sleep.
13 Oct 2002
Ditto.
14 Oct 2002
Last night we lay in bed in a naked embrace, close, flesh to flesh. In the shared silence, so pregnant with mutual regard, our souls spoke the unspoken words “We are You”, our nurturance held in the spacious arms of divinity.
The performative, transformative use of language wells up out of the hara, the life centre in the belly. Co-creative, divine-human animation generates words, phrases and sentences that are transformative epiphanies: they manifest experientially their referents. They are Tantric doorways, windows, gateways, born of the marriage of life and mind, animation and awareness, shakti and shiva.
23 Oct 2002
We lie naked and close on the bed for an afternoon tropical siesta, the sweet passion of the Pacific ocean breaking gently on the shore a few metres away. As we merge into a luminous tactile highly alert swoon I feel our resonance with the archetypal ambrosia of a goddess and a god embraced within the unity of being. Shekinah of the South Pacific.
28 Oct 2002
We’ve been in a fale for nine days beside a long stretch of sandy beach at the north west end of Foa Island, Tonga, South Pacific. Every day we swim across a channel from the northern tip of Foa to a small uninhabited island immediately to the north. There’s enough of a challenge for me to feel a tinge of the heroic: diverse reefs just below the surface, a westerly current whose strength varies with the cycle of the tides, and the distance across. The main business is snorkelling all the way over. I make my arm and leg strokes on the outbreath, and breathe in the prana of the ocean through the hara as I glide forward among the tropical fish. Sitting in a shaded grove on the edge of the beach after arrival, I feel the primordial unity of woman, man, earth, vegetation, sea and sky – a feast of orchestrated integration.
9 Jan 2003
I am all this here and now and the ground of it and the sky of it.
10 Jan 2003
All this behind the eyes where the inner and outer universes are one. Big one eye. Seeing in and out at the same time. Always big one eye.
19 Jan 2003
I sit in the chair for an hour and a half from about 3.45 am. I start opening to the divine creative word, the transcendent logos, then as the process of attunement and resonance continues, it slowly descends through my heart into the ground of all my primary energies, the divine ground of the life desires to circulate the blood, to breathe, stand, move, eat, drink, to be nurtured, be sexual, to hear, see, smell, taste and touch. I become infused with the deep indwelling godrich source of all human pleasure and excitement in being embodied.
20 Jan 2003
I go to the chair some time after 3 am for a while. I am taken with a threefold, tripartite attunement: of emergence, of presence and of emanation. I am open to the ground of my being, the rootedness of my embodied being and its desires and energies in the divine void, the womb of being; I am open to the everpresent jewel of OM in my heart; I am open to the emanation of my “I” from the Logos, the divine creative word. Three in one, the realistic trinity: the ground, roots and stem of the lotus flower; the jewel within the lotus flower; the overshadowing effulgent light within which the lotus flower blooms.
Barbara returned yesterday evening from the Co-counselling International workshop. She had an envelope full of appreciations of her being, written on various sizes and shapes of special paper and card. What a feast for me to read. So many had realized who she is. I was lit up by the glow from these validations of her presence.
24 Jan 2003
I sit in the chair for 90 minutes from 3.30 am. I spend the whole time indwelling the life presence in the hara.
My teaching about spiritual practice is that there are three basic kinds of practice, and two modes of each kind. The three kinds are enlivenment, engagement and enlightenment; and the two modes are attuned reception and expressive action. Enlivenment is about opening to and expressing the divine potential within the primary energies of our embodiment, that is, within the basic life impulses to breathe, stand, reach out, move, sleep, eat, drink, perceive, speak, relate, be sexual. Engagement is about opening to and co-creatively expressing the divine presence that is the connectedness between us and other entities in this here and now situation. Enlightenment is about opening to and expressing transcendent divine awareness and its refraction through powers and presences.
28 Jan 2003
I sit in the chair for about two hours from 3am. I attend to the uncreate, the unborn, the spacious non-manifest, by penetrating the manifest veils of the physical, the subtle and the super-subtle. Of course they are veils when I seek to penetrate through them, or draw them open like curtains, to open to the uncreate. When I creatively and actively engage with them, then they are revelatory and dynamic epiphanies. The uncreate is a great openness in which all forms and processes reside, and which is unbound by any of them, and is the absolutely indeterminate correlate of their distinctiveness.
30 Jan 2003
I sit in the chair for 90 minutes in the early hours between midnight and pre-dawn. I enter the eternal vitality of the spiritual heart, dwelling in the ecstatic inner kindling of immortal flame. Everpresent life is fire.
3 Feb 2003
See Sacred Science, pages 249-250, for a full account of presence-as-such.
5 Feb 2003
Sit in the chair from 3.30 am for an hour or so. Simple tranquil intrasensory awareness attunement. The physiological pleasure of total relaxation. Divinity of the tissues. Endorphin playground.
10 Feb 2003
Breathing in vital force from the archetypal body into the mediating body, breathing out vital force from the mediating body into the etheric envelope of the physical body.
12 Feb 2003
There is mortal vitality. And there is immortal, that is, nonmortal, vitality: vital force is the irreducible complement of awareness in the post death states. As an embodied being, I have access to physical vital force, to subtle vital force (of three different qualitative kinds), and to supersubtle vital force.
13 Feb 2003
Sit in the chair for an hour and a half pre-dawn, and lift off, subjectively, through the resurrections. Resurrection one: from the physical body to subtle body 1 within the individualistic postdeath realms. Thence to resurrection two: to subtle body 2 within the co-operative postdeath realms. Thence to resurrection three: to subtle body 3 within the transcendent postdeath realms. Thence to the great liberation of resurrection four: beyond the sublunary, bound realms of the postdeath journey, to the supersubtle body (subtle body 4) within the vast open empyrean spaces of the archetypal, supersubtle universe. Thence to resurrection five: to subtle body 5 within the embrace of the uncreate, the original one unborn being.
At the same time as going out from realm to realm, to the peripheral embrace of the uncreate, I am going in, peeling off corresponding petal sheaths around the heart, until the final fifth sheath opens inward to the infinitude of the uncreate within the heart.
15 Feb 2003
I sit in the chair for ninety minutes predawn, and attend fully, without respite, to the explosive divine potential of kundalini-shakti within the bodily fundament. It moves my bodily energies into a state of grace.
18 Feb 2003
I sit in the chair for ninety minutes or more predawn (ending at 5.24 am). After using several mantra doorways from the esoteric tradition of EFML – all of which open on potent avenues to the experiential divine – I am consumed by the everpresent divine fire. I am a lambent flame within the here and now immortal fire of god.
25 Feb 2003
The spiritual potential within primary life energy: the inquiry approach through combined presentational and practical knowing, that is, through creative artistic vital and imaginal action. Here are the steps I take:
The basic vital-imaginal action is to draw a highly animated line on the canvas (layer one in Adobe Photoshop). This is a line charged with elan vital, the “rhythmic vitality” that is the classic aesthetic criterion of Chinese art. This is a line fraught with the Dionysian emergent presence in the creative act of drawing it. It is full of imaginal potential coded into the vital force of its emergence.
Integrate this line with its polar complement, an exact mirror image. I do this by making a copy of the line, pasting the copy into layer two, and flipping it horizontally, and positioning it as the symmetrical complement to the original line.
This integration of the original line and its polar complement may already reveal its imaginal, archetypal potential. A compelling image of a life-form and its process, or of interacting life-forms and processes, appears.
It may or may not be appropriate to enhance the resultant image by repeated the whole process on two more layers, layer three and layer four. These two bipolar forms are integrated together.
I merge all the layers into one composite image, and open my creative energies to the call of colour. The subjective-objective components parts of the image push their claims for their distinctive colouring.
I then apply one or more artistic effects to the whole image, to do with sources of illumination, brightness, contrast, colour control, gradients, texture, and so on. The purspoe of these to enhance its aesthetic impact and presence.
The basic evaluative criterion for the image is threefold: its rhythmic vitality, its presence, and its enhancement of awareness as a gateway, a Tantric opening, into the Shekinah between.
1 March 2003
I sat in the chair for 90 minutes before and including early dawn. Into the nirvana of the uncreate, whence outpours in sound and light the glory of the supersubtle, then the subtle, then the corporeal. This uncreate then traces its progeny in the very cells of the corporeal body. The uncreate is the ground of the cell, the heart of the cell and the open perimeter of the cell.
I can practice attunement to the divine in six ways, three in which the active will opens inwardly to the receptive, and three in which the receptive is ground to the active will opening outwardly to engage with the subtle, social and physical worlds.
The active will opening inwardly to the receptive:
Especially predawn, opening to the transcendent uncreate and tracing its descending lineage as the ground of the manifest.
During the day, opening to the divine presence that is the reality between all of us, the differentiated entities interacting and interconnected within this here and now situation where we are.
During the day, opening to the impulses of divine animation that are the ground of our human motivation to act in this, that or the other way in our present situtation.
The active will opening outwardly to engage with the subtle, social and physical worlds:
Formulating and communicating visions of integral development for human beings.
Engaging in a variety of co-operative practices with other persons and the biosphere.
Manifesting idiosyncratic and authentic individual autonomous creativity.
2 March 2003
Time is the nature of becoming. It has three dimensions of simultaneity, duration and change, and the all-inclusive one of these is simultaneity. Becoming means being in a world of simultaneous events: events that occur at the same time. An event has duration, it lasts from before to after. And an event undergoes change: it is different after from what it was before. Simultaneity includes an explicit degree of duration and change, and an indeterminate tacit or subliminal degree of duration and change. To be aware of two events as simultaneous is to be aware of their concurrent duration and change manifest within a certain temporal limit.
3 April 2003
I live in the archnatural body through the immortality of the soul.
15 April 2003
Yesterday a full day of sluggish torpor.
21 April 2003
I open to what there is in the full incarnational praxis of entityhood.
22 April 2003
Incarnational praxis. The same as enlivenment. It means activating the incarnational being – through intentional upright and open posture, expansive gesture, charismatic power of voice and choice of words – to resonate with the totality of being, in every respect without let or hindrance. This activity converts the practitioner of it into participative experiential fire, the living flame of here and now divinity.
9 May 2003
Last night I slept for just over four hours, then did the following for just over three hours. I lay on my back in bed without moving, legs uncrossed, arms and hands out to the side. First I tuned in to, visualized and affirmed, all the body systems: bones, muscles, skin, cardiovascular, brain and nerves, alimentary canal and vital organs, endocrine. Second, I tuned in to, visualized and affirmed, the subtle matrrix of the physical body, its energy centres, energy conduits. Third, I tuned in to, visualized and affirmed, the immortal flame sheath, the undying divine body. At the conclusion of all this, I rejoined the esoteric fellowship of mystic light. “Esoteric” means “intelligible only to those with special knowledge” and “intended only for the initiated”. Any worthwhile science, of any kind, is esoteric in both these senses for serious practitioners of it. At the same time it entails an obligation among these practitioners to explain and apply its beneficial implications exoterically, and to make entry into its inner sanctum available for all who wish to acquire the appropriate skills.
4 June 2003
In the early morning, after a few hours sleep, I opened up to the fullness of the dark energy of my embodiment in the full process of divine becoming, the whole spatiotemporal matrix of our planet in its cosmic setting, especially the temporal form of our biosphere with its evolutionary diversity of its creatures and the unfolding coagulum of the human race and its multitudes of risen souls in the postdeath states. Mentally intoning “divine” on the inbreath, opening to the variety of beings within their extended temporal womb, and “becoming” on the outbreath affirming the developmental thrust of the whole.
29 Oct 2003
What are two basic shortcomings of the Wilber world view? (1) It is a category error to include the development of human souls within the concept of evolution. (2) Accounts of past human behaviour cannot properly be used to define what people ought to do in the future, nor to predict what they will do.
12 Nov 2003
Short on sleep last night.
26 Jan 2004
What guiding principles do I hold about human spirituality?
One principle is that of enlivenment (another two are those of engagement and enlightenment). It’s to do with the development of immanent spirit, that is, spirit as indwelling spiritual life, spirit as the root motive force of all our living body-mind energies. This root motive force is bipolar: it is the will to live as a distinct individual, a unique idiosyncratic human entity; and it is the correlative will to live as a universal human participant in a multidimensional cosmopolis.
This evening eight members of our inquiry group met for the first time this year, after the summer break, although the others are still away on summer holidays.
29 Feb 04ArisingThis morning before the altar in our attunement room I open to my arising from the great space within the ground of what there is. Actually it is the great interconnected web of all of Us arising.
2 March 04
Inquiry
The path of inquiry calls attention to the divine as the wellspring of my will to live, as my present relation with whom and with what there is here and now in this situation, and as the transcendent source of my consciousness. In each of these three contexts, however, the “my” becomes transformed into a translucent and participative distinctness within a wider unity.
3 March 04
Divine root
I sat in the chair later than usual – about 6.35 am – and opened downward to the divine root of my will to live, of the motive power in my bones and muscles, blood and guts, and brain – the three Bs.
7 March 04
The Voice
The divine speaks in the belly, in the hara. It is co-generated speech, the idiosyncratic language of mediated immediacy. I lay in bed in the early hours this morning giving linguistic shape in the belly to the Voice.
Mortal gateway
Divinity is the easiest of all things to know, and inescapably so. In the many-one universe with such a diversity of idiosyncratic entities, there are very many ways of diving knowing. The body is a great gateway: its stance, its movements and gestures – all they need is a little attitudinal tweak, a letting go of contraction and tension into all-around openness, to feel the living presence of the great space.
The mortal body is premised on the immortal body. To be in the mortal body in a certain kind of way – alert and relaxed, simultaneously present in all its parts, aligned and open in all directions in gesture and posture, free behind the eyes and spine – is to know its immortal premise, the firebody that is a universal participant in cosmopolis. Cosmopolis – the supersubtle first world of our indwelling.
13 March 04
Dyadic review follow-up
We got out all the detailed notes of the three-day review of our dyad which took place two and a half months ago at the end of December. We transferred on to a wall chart all the individual and conjoint action-plans we had made at that time and pinned it on the outside of the bathroom door upstairs. We then got fascinated by the uncompromising down-to-the bone devil’s advocacy points, and by the greater or lesser rebuttals, which each of us had made to confront any degeneration and collusion in the quality of our relationship (of course there were also accessions). I wondered whether it would be fruitful to put all this into our Cookbook of Dyadic Inquiry as an addendum.
14 March 04
Lambent flame
I sat in our attunement room this morning and opened downward to the divine root of my motivation to live as a distinct entity and my motivation to live as a universal participant in cosmopolis. There’s an upsurge of inner space and energy, a discreet fire, a flame. I look into the large mirror on the altar befor me. First an aureole around the head and shoulders, then a lambent flame at the the base of the spine, flickering upwards.
Walk and glade
We did our walk and glad ritual starting half past noon. Very leisurely: it took an hour and three quarters.
On the second seat, mutual gazing. On the fourth seat, mutual appreciations. In the glade, our fire and self-generating culture ritual. In the lower clearing in the bush, a smidgeon of co-counselling. In the dell, primary theatre. After the sixth and seventh seats on top of the hill, back to the altar in the centre of the house (also the centre of the pyramid) to close.
17 March 04
Splendour
Walked round the house opening the fire-body, the immortal sheath, to its immersion in the interior universe, the first and most intimate body of the divine. What splendour shafts through these remarkable spaces.
28 March 04
Sat in the chair for an hour from 5.16 am, opening to Thou, the interior space, the pregnant void whence I emerge. The fullness, the nurturance of coming into being.
1-5 April 04
A five day co-operative inquiry with four colleagues from Oasis Centre in the UK and six of us from our Centre here. A remarkable breakthrough event, culminating in the morning of the final day in a transfiguring charismatic celebration of being. For a full ninety minutes we co-generate an extraordinary space, with diverse crescendos of tonal resonance, with varied patterns of percussive music, with a vast divine-human range of impromptu declarations and assertions, with exhilarating lightness and laughter, with many joyful verbal vulva hallelujah-variations, with the participation of angel choirs, with our united archetypal roar of the divine wolf, and more and more, and forever and forever, the light-filled humour of an everlasting, everopen gracious space between.
18 April 04
Lying in bed pre-dawn I spent an hour or so mentally intoning “we” on the inbreath, while visualizing the whole interconnected web of life on the planet, human and non-human, incarnate and discarnate, in one great extended sphere merging into the super-subtle realms at the orbit of the moon; and intoning “are” in the outbreath, while visualizing a flame in an empty space at the centre of the sphere which was also in the centre of my being.
Home at human-inquiry