When you were just an infant, your experience was, in the words of William James, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” You had no language and hence no discrete categories of thought to label, classify, and organize your perceptions. Everything just swirled around you, bombarding your senses from every side. It was fascinating – and frequently overwhelming.
With time and the acquisition of language, you developed an ability to make sense of your experience. The taller powers of your parents and teachers taught you a system of simple signs and a binary logic that gave you the power to box up the qualia of experience into clear and distinct oppositions – black-and-white, up-and-down, inside-and-outside, right-and-wrong, good-and-bad.
With these bold lines of division, your experience of Reality – which is not simply black or white, by the way – was forced into a logical and emotional regime that you could manage.
But as you continued to mature, more and more of Reality seemed to elude your neat little boxes of meaning. The black-and-white scheme in your mind proved increasingly inadequate to the task of making sense of real life – or as we might also call it, life in Reality.
For a while you could make minor adjustments to your mental scheme, to your logical and emotional regime of meaning – similar to how early astronomers had to add minor epicycles to the larger orbits of planets in order to preserve the ancient theory that required heavenly bodies to move only in perfect circles.
To whatever extent Reality refused to fit cleanly into your mental scheme, you labeled it strange or odd or extraordinary, perhaps miraculous or ominous. It’s possible that you didn’t even notice this dimension of Reality, given that your mind had been conditioned – instructed, programmed, brainwashed – to ignore it, as if it didn’t even exist.
This more willful disregard for what violates or transcends the logical categories of our mental schemes is what Alan Watts named ignórance.
With the continued development of your emotional and rational intelligence, you gradually learned how to navigate the persistent ambiguity of life in Reality.
What had earlier threatened to overwhelm your comprehension and undermine your sense of security slowly came together – or so it seemed – in a transcendental unity of its own. Interestingly, this transcendental unity was not merely a bigger category in your regime of meaning, large enough to contain more (or all) of Reality. Instead it surpassed your categories of meaning altogether, while also including you and everything else in its higher wholeness.
Behold, the Present Mystery of Reality.
Now, if you are still with me, we have just reviewed the arc of your maturity in three stages: (1) from an infant surrounded by the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sense experience; (2) through a long middle period of applying your mental scheme to reduce that confusion to the binary logic of black-and-white; and finally (3) breaking through the wall or veil of meaning to realize that Everything is Connected and All is One.
That breakthrough realization is an experience opening to an entirely new way of being, to the truly liberated life. We should wish that for everyone.
It is in the second stage of development, however, when the work of meaning-making and world-building is in full swing, that many of us get stuck – or lost, to use another fitting metaphor of what happens.
The logical certainty and emotional security provided in this construction project can make us feel as if everything has been figured out and the threat of chaos has been neutralized, or at least held at bay. If religion is involved, then our mental scheme will typically include numerous “epicycles” of magical thinking, metaphysical speculation, and dogmatic belief that post a patron deity at the borders of meaning and at the dark gate of death.
The paradox of a mental scheme, of a logical and emotional regime of meaning, lies in the fact that we need it to make sense of our experience, preserve our sanity, and manage an identity in time. But it can also become a prison (‘stuck’) or a wasteland (‘lost’), keeping us from the more mature, reasonable, responsible, reality-oriented and liberated life that our human spirit seeks.
The diagram above illustrates the situation at stage two in the arc of maturity outlined earlier. In the development of identity called ego formation, a center of self-conscious experience has been anchored inside the whirlwind of sensations (James’ blooming and buzzing confusion). This stationary point can now function as the pivot for our work of logical division, box-building, and securing a fixed horizon of meaning.
Inside that middle realm of egoic experience things are black-or-white, good-or-bad, right-or-wrong, us (insiders) versus them (outsiders).
In the diagram, slanted arrows signify possible pathways of breakthrough and transformation. One pathway leads downward and within (or inward and down) to the Essential Ground of Being. A common symptom and “tipping event” in this downward/inward breakthrough is a growing transparency of the clear and distinct objects that had earlier and for so long set the field of opposites, keeping things under wraps and properly in order.
This growing transparency is really the dawning insight that all things are manifestations of an essential Mystery, like countless transient waves on an unfathomable sea of deeper oneness.
If you happen to be a religious believer, this is where something inside you begins to suspect that your god is more about you than about Reality. And to whatever degree your god has its origins in the human experience of God – capitalized to serve as a nickname for the grounding Mystery of Being – it too takes on a transparency that steadfastly thwarts your nervous attempts at possessive devotion and doctrinal certainty.
On this esoteric-contemplative path, all you can do is release your hold on the constructions of belief, attachment, identity, and meaning, allowing consciousness to descend to the inner presence of Soul and its ineffable Mystery.
As the divisions of identity and meaning begin to dissolve away before the manifesting Mystery of Being, something else starts to dawn on your awareness. Although all waves are of One Ocean (i.e., the deeper oneness of Being), they are nevertheless still distinct waves, doing their thing at the surface, dancing and interacting together, reaching out and rolling back into the Deep.
This, then, is a second pathway of transformation – not down-and-within this time but out-and-beyond, through the participative field of relationships and farther out to the Universal Whole, or the higher wholeness of Reality (aka the Universe).
Of course, it isn’t necessary to reach an outer limit before this sense of the Whole is awakened, since wholeness is an integral and pervasive principle, not just an inclusive one.
On this ecstatic-transpersonal path, your awareness breaks past the bounds of self (= ecstatic) and reaches into a Reality that transcends yet encompasses your personal identity (= transpersonal). Up here in higher wholeness, ego’s self-conscious experience is transfigured – like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly – into a joyous sense of belonging.
The individual center of your personal identity is not canceled out or dissolved away, but rather lifted into a communal experience of belonging, harmony, and wholeness. In connecting with others – or what amounts to seeing for yourself the evident Truth that nothing and no one is separate from the rest – you are free to ascend into community where We are All in this Together.
Tracts of Revolution 