Discernment
The image is of the Hackerbrücke, not far from the office. It's by
user Ox FF. It is
used here under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Michi and I were at lunch. I said I'm using "self-inquiry" to question every belief, to follow it to it's source. I want to know why I took the belief on. I want to understand what is true, and I realize I know nothing: I merely "papered over" this lack of knowing with one belief after another in a multi-layered tapestry of outrageous complexity.
It's quite surprising to see that there is no basis to one belief or another. This doesn't depress me. On the contrary, it boosts my sense that I'm doing something useful.
"Why are you doing this?" asked Michi.
"Well, I'm running into a problem. A classic problem, to be exact," I said, munching my Algerian cake. We were sitting outside, lured out on the deck by the sun, but suffering in a biting wind. The other tables were empty.
"I've meditated a lot. I've experienced blissful states, and this spurs me on. However, it's painful to lose the bliss. And it's hard to find it again."
"Why?" asked Michi, politely allowing my invocation of the existence of a special "mystical" state to pass. As an ardent rationalist, he'd be in his rights to stop the conversation right there.
"Well, whatever the mind experiences is then wrapped up and conceptualized. This creates expectation of 'how it will be' subsequently, and ripples of dissatisfaction, doubt and fear arise later, when something doesn't happen on schedule. This hides the bliss. Expectation is a real joy killer," I sighed.
"Hmm, okay."
Continuing, I said, "so a feeling of exhaustion slowly gained ground in me. Yes, I may find bliss again, but it will be terminated. Maybe I've embarked on a strange hobby that just terminates in itself."
I shivered slightly in the wind. "So I must return to the beginning and ask basic questions."
"Like?"
"Like, why am I doing this?" I said. "Where does this impetus to sit and try to feel deeper reality come from?"
Michi looked out across the industrial landscape below. "It's that feeling part that worries me. I've seen people talk about bliss, about meditation. I think they're fooling themselves. I wouldn't want to end up somewhere, unable to understand that I'm in a cul-de-sac because along the way I didn't pay sufficient attention to something."
"Heck yeah, I agree," I said. "In spiritual literature, this is called 'spiritual bypassing.' Where you use the trappings of ritual to numb yourself to reality rather than prepare yourself for ever greater contact with it."
Michi was surprised. "I had no idea that this community, which, from the outside, looks like a monument to that kind of 'numbing' we're talking about, would diagnose this as a problem," he laughed.
I laughed too. "Indeed! I think human nature is to blame. Most of us are lazy, and will settle for a simulation of truth for long periods." I thought of the bad guy in the Matrix, who revelled in his rebellion against the truth by enjoying the artificial steak. "This might tip into something we would have once called 'evil:' a deliberate mis-informing. But mostly, it reflects the reality that we are disengaged and easily distracted."
I paused to think.
"I think a person takes a long time, and walks many alternate roads before they're ready to embark on a journey for truth. It's actually a lot of fun to remain comfortable and stay in a groove. I'm worse than most!" This last got a good-natured laugh from Michi.
"So maybe there is a grain of truth at the start of some 'wisdom tradition,' but it gets surrounded by illusions built up by people more interested in entertaining themselves than in getting somewhere," he said.
"Right! A single grain of salt in a mountain of sugar..."
We were finally driven back inside by the wind, which had reached our bones.
"I've found that meditation is helpful to a degree, but I'd really hate to numb myself with it into complacency," Michi said as we bounded down the stairs, in search of a coffee and a place to continue talking.
"You know, this is exactly the problem," I said, now getting a mental picture. "At every level, there is the choice to become ever more awake, or to drift into unconsciousness. A miner who hates his work might drink himself into oblivion rather than say, zoom out and see that his miserable condition is being monetized through a power imbalance. 'Waking up' would involve doing something else. A 'guru' somewhere in India could go further in helping the people who gathered around him, but may numb himself with the sedative of excessive self-regard."
"Then drifting into criminal and predatory relationships with others," Michi said grimly.
"Right. At each level the struggle to grow must continue, or illusion creeps in, distorting your perception."
We found a room and sat down with our coffees. I called it the "Green Room," because the couches were green, and it reminded me of my step-fathers theatre at Sam Houston State. As a drama professor, he was always involved in plays, and the Green Room was where actors went after the show. There were always lively conversations going on among the hyped-up college students, still wearing costumes and makeup. Since then I've thought of the Green Room as a kind of meta-location for discussing the problems "on stage."
"At each level there will be a pattern of helpful beliefs and harmful ones," I continued. "Helpful would mean those that keep you awake."
"This level idea makes me uncomfortable though. Who am I to disparage someone who believes the world is a 'tooth-and-claw' place, where it's kill-or-be-killed? Maybe they are right!" said Michi. "In this judging one belief system as better than another, I detect another kind of slipping into unconsciousness." He shifted in his seat. "And one that is responsible for incredible destruction and cruelty."
"You are exactly right. There are times and places where the most paranoid beliefs are the only ones capable of sustaining life." We both had a palpable horror of "looking down" on others from some place of righteousness. We saw that it's already dangerous ground to talk about belief A versus belief B, because we can't help but attach more to one of them, and disparage the other. Since our consciousnesses tend towards duality, and since we focus on even small differences, before long, our childrens children will be ready to kill each other over the primacy of A over B.
It's dangerous ground, yes. But I think we have to be able to walk it. Maybe it's like the great karst plateau called the Totes Gebirge (the dead mountains) near Salzburg. In spring they are dangerous because there are deep holes covered by snow at that time. You can only travel safely if you can see the holes. This would be awareness, care and concentration.
"But I do think we can speak of levels," I added. "And of some kind of function for choosing the appropriate belief system at a given level."
Michi's eyes widened. Here we had a real disagreement, and those are fun!
"If we liken the levels to altitude on a mountainside, then I can possibly agree to the first point," he said. "From a summit, I look down on others, but I don't judge them as 'lesser than.' It's simply a difference of position. I can 'see more,' and therefore this higher position is more powerful, but I can't let that go to my head."
"Exactly. And you, similarly, are at a lower point in comparison with someone else looking down on you. We wouldn't accept them getting a big head about it," I said.
"Right. But at a given level, I don't think I have any right to say one belief system is better than another," Michi went on. "And I doubt there is a, what did you call it, a function?"
"Yes," I said.
"A function for choosing one over another."
I had to think a moment. I put myself into the mindset of someone holding the world a certain way, and tried to imagine how and why they might move into holding it a different way.
Okay. "Okay, I'm just riffing here, but...here goes," I said. Michi agreed to hear me, by which I knew he would follow along in his imagination with the picture I'm proposing.
"My premise is: The scoring function is your personal judgment. Operating at the level of awareness you currently possess."
I went on. "Let's take a relatively unconscious person. This fella walks around, reasonably pleased with life, but he doesn't think in depth about anything," I said.
"This could be you, you know. Your apparent investigations into depth might be a kind of 'numbing,'" said Michi, eyes twinkling.
"Oh God, it's probably true," I said, looking haunted and giving him a 1000-yard stare.
"But go on."
"Okay. This man thinks of his life as good, but occasionally there are absolutely hammering blows to his sense of safety in the world. Relationships blow up over time, seemingly out of the blue. Goodies to which he felt entitled mysteriously divert to others, and he becomes increasingly miserable comparing himself to them."
"That's definitively you!" cackled Michi.
I nodded gravely. "The problem is that he's unconscious. Most of the severe blows that come to him were catapults he himself fired months or years before. But by failing to reflect on the effect of his actions on the beings around him, he often exceeds the stress bounds of human forgiveness."
I felt Michi's rueful agreement. We've both seen and been this man, and could only hope not to be him again.
"Well. Slowly, he. will. learn. Through painful experience, the best teacher."
"Slowly he'll begin to develop a reflective capability, precisely because it's what's needed," I continued.
"It could even be thought of as an evolutionary response, as this 'part' of his existence is undergoing a greater rate of mutation," said Michi.
"Holy heck, Michi, that is a whole very interesting conversation!" I enthused. "In fact, we could play this man forward not from some 1985 point in time with a Homer Simpson-esque schlub, but what about beginning at a single-celled animal? Whose form changes gradually, climbing through levels of consciousness via discernment, which we can somehow model as a response to stress?"
I had to calm down.
"Okay, so the discernment, or reflective function is evolved through painful experience," said Michi. "But will it really lead Homer somewhere better?"
"Ah. Given infinite time, yes!" I raved, in the grip of a new idea. I was imagining a non-linear function over N dimensions. "There will be cul-de-sacs. There will be 'local maximums.'"
"And how is he prevented from residing 'forever' at a local maximum?" challenged Michi.
"The essential dissatisfaction of human nature!” I said, finger pointing in the air because I felt I'd finally said a thing that was new, to me anyway.
"At any cul-de-sac, given enough time, Homer will ask 'is this all?'" I was pacing now. "And his misery will increase."
"The misery will eventually force greater reflection, and a conscious decision to change," Michi went on, picking up my thoughts.
"And throughout this process, the eventual choice of the appropriate most-satisfaction-creating belief will lead naturally to a 'level-change," putting him at a higher point on the mountain," I continued.
Michi finished the thought: "there to 'look down' on others, not with scorn, but with empathy, because he was there only recently."
I sat down on the edge of the couch.
"There will be failures. There will be regressions. But each regression experienced, in a consciousness now used to deep reflection will be quickly corrected."
"Each regression in fact affirms the rightness of the 'path' that led to this point," agreed Michi.
Discernment.
Reflection.
Judgment. Not in the sense of judging others, but in weighing one way of seeing against another, and choosing the one that gives you the ability (courage?) to live somewhat more awake than before.
This was enough for a lunch break. Back to the mines..!