The Crag and the Chasm

Another annoying post about radical non-duality. But cool title, no?

Dave’s four worldviews, 1951-????

Since I started listening to, and speaking with, the radical non-duality speakers shown on my blog’s right sidebar, eight years ago, I have started exploring the nature of reality, and human nature, from its very different perspective. This “seeking journey” has taken me from a belief in free will (worldview I in the diagram above) to a belief that we have a self but it doesn’t have free will (worldview II), and then to a belief that we have neither a self nor free will (ie that they are both illusions, created by the brain in a mistaken attempt to make sense of the body’s perceptions — worldview III).

This was the only way I could find to ‘make sense’ of both the ‘glimpses‘ that have seemingly occurred at various times in my life, and the latest science and neuroscience about free will, about the illusory self, and about the nature of time and space. I’ve written about all of this ad nauseam, basically saying the same things (mostly out loud to my self, to be sure I really understand them and their implications) over and over.

But the obsessed seeker for the ultimate truth is never satisfied: I keep looking, with curiosity and some longing, at worldview IV, the full message that the radical non-duality speakers are articulating. The message is that there actually is no ‘real’ time or space, no causality, no ‘thing’ real or separate from everything, and nothing really happening — only “everything appearing”, only “just this”. ‘I’ can appreciate this message intellectually, and feel some resonance with it intuitively, but somehow I ‘know’ that ‘I’ can never actually ‘realize’ or ‘see’ the truth of this as ‘obvious’, as the (apparent) radical non-duality speakers (apparently) do.

I am not sure why this is so important to me. I suppose this is the nature of obsession — like when we can’t remember something but it’s right on the tip of our tongue, so that until we retrieve it we can’t think about anything else. The radical non-duality speakers assert that there is no “path” to this “realization”, and that it really doesn’t make any difference to anything — they insist they are not “enlightened” and are not “teaching” anything, just trying to illuminate what is obvious ‘there’, which is what I describe as worldview IV (though perhaps I should call it worldview zero). And they do not appear to be particularly happy, or relieved, or even passionate about what is now ‘obvious’ ‘there’.

Whatever the reason, and no matter how hopeless, I can’t shake my obsession with this message. I don’t particularly want to. It is at once infuriating and a source of endless curiosity and fascination. The message is so internally consistent (across speakers in five different languages, with very different backgrounds and different ways of describing things and different past belief systems), so effortless, such a (not-grand) “theory of everything”, and delivered with such sincerity, that I cannot shake the sense that it is simply true.

I hear them saying there is no “path” to “see” this, no practice or process for getting “closer” to it, but my gotta-make-sense-of-everything brain will not accept that. It cannot help but try. So much of science, and the glimpses, ‘fit’ with this message, that surely it’s just a matter of finding the rest of the pieces and it will all ‘fit’, surely.

But that thinking, I know, is pure folly. The more I explore it, the wider the chasm between worldview III (where I sit, impatiently, now) and worldview IV (which I impossibly aspire to ‘realize’) yawns. Every discovery just raises more unanswerable questions. So I am teased by discoveries in astrophysics that time does not actually exist — it’s just a mental placeholder and categorization tool for the brain’s desperate and futile sense-making. I am teased by the scientific theory that space is likewise just a conceptualization — that all that exists is an infinite “field of possibilities” where some of those possibilities ‘appear’ (there’s that word again) to ‘happen’. I am teased by Michael Pollan’s argument that the effect of some psychedelics and some deep meditation and some brain injuries is to disrupt the “default neural pathways” in the brain and open ourselves to an entirely different way of perceiving and conceiving of reality — and the possibility that the radical non-duality speakers have somehow permanently ‘slipped free’ of these conditioned, entrenched default neural pathways (and so maybe the rest of us could, too).

I am teased by the possibility that these default neural pathways that seemingly create what Tony Parsons has called the inescapable “prison of the self” arose due to an evolutionary misstep many millennia ago, first described by Julian Jaynes, which I’ve frequently elaborated on as the Entanglement Hypothesis. I am teased by growing evidence that no animals other than humans have this illusory sense of self and separation, and that furthermore they don’t require it to live completely full and functional lives.

I am teased by what my study of evolution has revealed about the immense variety of ways of ‘being in’ and ‘perceiving’ the world, and about how much it explains, and how much it fails to explain, the world as we seemingly separate self-afflicted humans see it. I am teased by how utterly the ‘loss’ of the sense of self and separation in radical non-duality speakers has seemingly changed ‘their’ way of perceiving reality, and how little it has seemingly changed their characters and behaviours. For example, they are absolutely clear that there is no perception of time or causality ‘there’ — everything is “always new” — yet they go on scheduling their meetings as if time and causality were real. And some still entertain (what to me are) conspiracy theories, and are quite entertained by (what to me are) inane programs, in spite of ‘their’ avowal that nothing is really happening, and nothing matters.

And I am teased by the very compelling arguments that all our behaviour is conditioned (which some radical non-duality speakers confirm, with the ubiquitous “apparently” qualifier), even though (apparent) conditioning would seem to absolutely require the existence of (apparent?) time and (apparent?) causality.

The realization that ‘we’ are not “all of a piece”, but rather just collective labels for the trillions of creatures that comprise what we label as “our bodies”, and that it is their conditioning, not ‘ours’ that determines what we do, had me, once again, foolishly and hopelessly, trying to discover or construct a crag, a branch, a perilous path, that would take me from worldview III to worldview IV.

So I felt a recent compulsion to call Tim Cliss, the radical non-duality (he hates the term) speaker with whom I’ve probably had the most extensive conversations, and ask him for his ‘take’ on all of the above discoveries — his take on evolution, on the “field of possibilities” theory, on the “default neural pathways” theory, on the Entanglement Hypothesis, on the possibility of conditioning when there is no time and no causality, and all the other possible footholds, and apparent gaps, in the crag that I am trying to build and use to make my way to worldview IV.

But I know Tim, and the other radical non-duality speakers, have already been asked, in one way or another, about these ideas and connections and apparent inconsistencies in the message. And their answer has always been the same: In essence, it is “I haven’t the faintest idea. (And it doesn’t matter.)”

If I were to ask Tim about all of these things, that’s what he would answer, I am sure, to all of them. He would do so in the most kindly possible way: He’s a softie, and ‘his’ life experiences prior to the (apparent) loss of ‘his’ (illusory) self parallel mine in many ways.

He would be telling me, gently, that there is no way of getting from worldview III to worldview IV, no matter how meticulously the crag that seems to partly bridge them is crafted and cultivated, no matter how maddeningly well all the amazing revelations that came with reaching worldview III resonate with the message of worldview IV. ‘You’ can’t get there from here.

There’s a joke going around about rural wisdom, and it goes like this: A carful of tourists are desperately trying to find some tourist destination, and end up on a lonely country road. They roll down their window and ask a passing farmer for directions. The farmer answers: “If that’s where you’re trying to get to, I wouldn’t recommend starting from here.”

So here I sit, on my largely self-manufactured crag, looking across the chasm at a destination that seems, the closer I try to get to it, ever farther and farther away. And that’s OK. Einstein said he could never understand it all. And if he couldn’t, there is no hope for me. But my conditioning, if that’s what it is, won’t let me turn back from the crag. The view’s pretty good, despite a bit of fog. Just happy to have come this far. Think I’ll hang out here for a while.