One Taste
Congratulations on another superb issue of WIE. My only minor complaint is that whereas the editors at WIE have always presented my work fairly and accurately, the implication in your last issue is that I see enlightenment as the product of development, or as being the highest stage of development ["In the Meantime: An Interview with Frances Vaughan"]. This is simply not my view, and never has been; or rather, it is at best only "half" the picture as I see it.

Enlightenment is not the highest stage of temporal development, but a stepping off of the cycle of temporal development altogether. As Shankara pointed out long ago, if enlightenment were the result of certain actions, stages or causes, that would make enlightenment an effect, and that would make it strictly relative, temporal and nonabsolute—would make it, in other words, not enlightenment. Rather, enlightenment is the radical realization of the ever present Condition of all conditions, a radical Freedom that is radical Fullness, an infinite Release in the midst of misery, a tacit realization that you are utterly one with all that is arising moment to moment in any and all domains, high or low, sacred or profane. This radical realization, existing in the timeless and ever present moment, can occur at virtually any stage of ordinary development and is not the result of any cause, because it is itself timeless and ever present, uncaused and unborn.

Nonetheless, there is abundant cross-cultural evidence that the higher one's degree of consciousness development, the more likely this realization can occur. This is why, even in radical paths such as Vedanta and dzogchen, meditation practice is highly valued as a help, but not a cause, of enlightenment. As Richard Baker Roshi puts it, "Enlightenment is an accident; meditation makes you accident prone."

Likewise, anything that can help you increase your capacity for consciousness development—moral development, cognitive development, spiritual development—makes it more likely that you will recognize your own primordial mind and actualize your own true estate, which is simply One Taste—the realization that you and the entire Kosmos are One Taste in all realms, waking to dreaming to sleeping, and that taste is Divine.

So psychological as well as spiritual (or meditative) development is helpful in unfolding one's own deeper potentials—you can develop virtually everything from moral response to meditative absorption (samadhi). But all of those are of the relative, manifest realm—the realm of samsara—and the whole point of enlightenment is to step off that cycle altogether. This is why Vedanta and dzogchen also maintain that, in the last analysis, meditation will not itself bring final spiritual awareness (because such awareness, being ever present, has no beginning in time and thus cannot be entered: you cannot enter that which you have never left). Nonetheless, psychological as well as meditative development makes it more likely that one will finally tire of development altogether and thus step off the wheel of the endless torture of experience known as samsara and, resting in ever present awareness, manifest One Taste in all domains.

This paradoxical fact (enlightenment is ever present and uncaused, yet consciousness development can make it more likely to be realized) is why, in The Eye of Spirit, I spend the first eleven chapters talking about various forms of development, and then in the last chapter—the concluding chapter—talk about getting out of development entirely and recognizing the ever present One Taste. Both sides of this paradox of enlightenment need to be kept in mind. Too often, people will advocate only one or the other side. If they advocate only development, they miss the precious and ever present nature of One Taste. To develop forever is to miss the point forever. Or they emphasize only the radical nature of ever present enlightenment, and fail to give their students the expedient means that can help make one "accident prone"—means that include psychological and relative spiritual (or meditative) development. Thus their students talk endlessly of radical transformation, but few actually realize it.

The great Zen master Ma Tsu probably put it best: "If there is any development in the Tao, the completion of that development is really the ruin and destruction of the Tao. But if there is no development at all, one remains completely unenlightened."
Ken Wilber
Boulder, Colorado


Letter from Bombay
I was delighted with Chris Parish's article ["Close Encounters of the Advaita Kind: The Euphoric Nihilism of Ramesh Balsekar"]. Apart from being accurate, it was not only very well written but also sincere and honest.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Bombay, India

Wake-up Call
The "philosophy" of Ramesh Balsekar is ultimately an exercise in silly semantics. He essentially describes the world and the actions that occur within it merely as events that "just happen." While this is, from a particular vantage point, a truism, it ultimately takes us nowhere. Sure, it can be said that our thoughts are mere events, that we have no control over our ability to control, as it were, or ultimately no choice in the choices we make. But while Balsekar does not acknowledge it, this analysis brings us full circle, rendering everything meaningless, whereupon everything is meaningful again. The bottom line is: we still perceive that we have a free will because, in Balsekar's paradigm, it is God's will that we perceive ourselves as having free will, and that we perceive ourselves as having a choice—regardless of whether the choice, once made, was made in a way that God predetermined we make it. God's role, therefore, ultimately becomes irrelevant to us. Perhaps God's will is predetermined as well, but does pondering this or knowing it really matter, then? It simply brings us back to where we started, which is that we were made to perceive that we have choices to make that affect ourselves and other people, and therefore we do. The danger of Balsekar's approach, however, is that which the interviewer repeatedly pointed out: it invites people to use it as an excuse to make self-serving choices, or to do anything or nothing, because the world ceases to have moral content. Everything being God's will, my murdering the little boy next door has as much value (or lack thereof) as your altruistic giving of alms to the poor.

Finally, I find it intriguing that Balsekar considers himself a brilliant "sage" who "understands what is happening," unlike the "ordinary man" who, of course, does not have such insight. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, was nothing but a "programmed body/mind organism." In my book, this smug and self-important man, yammering away in his cushy little beach apartment about the self-evident but incomplete observation that the world is the play of the Lord, is not qualified to comment on the actions of someone clearly beyond him in both understanding and action. And by the way, God preprogrammed me to say that, because God knows Balsekar needs a wake-up call.
Lisa Novak
via email

When God Intervenes
As usual, I thoroughly loved your latest issue of WIE. Andrew Cohen's introduction was a wonderful summation of the Gordian knot presented to those who seek liberation.

A close look at theoretical physics, to my mind, answers the free will vs. determinism question: nothing is determined. At least consider the madness proposed by Ramesh Balsekar, that an action happens if it is God's will for it to happen. Balsekar would include the horror of the death camps as part of this "will." Agreed, events happen, thoughts occur, but it is only God's background energy that is used for these deeds—not His will. It is our will, our deeds that create and destroy on this small stage. Our lives are mere surface features of a huge, conscious multiverse. We are given over to ourselves, and God does not exercise any force or will at all in our affairs. "Force is not of the Tao," says Lao Tzu. In the fine work Samadhi and Beyond by Sri Surath, we read that it is only at the stage of samadhi [spiritual ecstasy] that God intervenes: "In this quiescent state the Father takes charge. He gives a new shape to the soul and pushes it on to a new creation."

The multiverse, as a conscious being, is bringing forth enlightened beings. And what is an enlightened being? An enlightened being is a fully conscious being. When you are conscious, as the multiverse is conscious, you are enlightened.
Richard H. Pratt, Ph.D.
Henderson, Nevada

Who Are We?
I would like to make a comment on the interview of Ramesh Balsekar by Chris Parish published in the last issue of WIE. While reading the interview, it occurred to me that it may be helpful to ask the question as to who we are. The interviewer kept defending the view that we ought to take responsibility for our actions, while Balsekar maintained that we have no control over them. I think both may be right, depending on what we identify with, so the problem is with what we mean by "we." As long as we identify with our body/minds there is no doubt that "we" are responsible for our actions. But as soon as our awareness enters the first level of the spiritual realm, we no longer identify with our body/minds. Then we become conscious of the fact that we have a body and we have a mind, but that we are fundamentally more. We now identify with the "silent witness," and we just observe our body/minds. Our body/minds then appear to us as more or less autonomous entities which, in Balsekar's words, are just "doing God's will." "We" no longer control our actions; we just observe them.

It is clear that during the interview Parish identified with the mind, while Balsekar represented the level of the silent witness. Parish, however, describes the silent witness very well in the epilogue when talking about the insight gained afterward in the tea shop. Then it became clear to him that "I was not drinking the tea! I was not sitting at the table!" Evidently a realization of a new, more encompassing "I" had emerged.
John K. Landré
Woodside, California

Lazy Man's Enlightenment
Chris Parish seems to imply in the epilogue following his interview of Ramesh Balsekar that his "ecstatic" experience indicates the profundity, wisdom and correctness of Balsekar's description of Advaita. If this was really Parish's point, then I strongly disagree. Anyone can have a very pleasurable experience and still be extremely deluded. A real psychopath might in fact have a similar experience while killing someone. Positive feelings and a freedom from tension do not in any way necessarily indicate the presence of wisdom. Perhaps I misunderstood and Parish was just trying to be funny. I hope so. Ramesh Balsekar seems to have warped the wisdom of "not-knowing" into a very lazy man's enlightenment. I think real wisdom has more to do with acting appropriately, free from conceptual bias and filter, and absolutely nothing to do with an abrogation of responsibility. Maybe Balsekar's conversation with Parish was a "skillful means" of working with Parish's mind, but I doubt that. I'm not inclined to give Balsekar that much credit.
Brian Adler
Boulder, Colorado

Chris Parish responds:
It has become clear over the past few months that many readers of WIE apparently didn't recognize the point I was trying to make when I described my "enlightenment" in a Bombay tea shop following my "close encounter" with Ramesh Balsekar. Rest assured that as far as I'm concerned, Planet Advaita is a nice place to visit, but I definitely wouldn't want to live there.

Onto Something
I was not aware of your excellent magazine until I picked it up two days ago. It contains information that is pointed, timely and useful. Your articles on Advaita are quite comprehensive and, taken together, could answer many questions a student may have.

The article on Ramesh Balsekar is excellent. It is the classic discussion of "free will" that is one of the demarcation lines between enlightenment and seeking. While it is a fascinating topic for philosophers, it is not even an interesting discussion for the sage—for whom it is obvious that there is no such thing. But Chris Parish's interview was also brilliant in illustrating how a sage can have preferences and motivations while at the same time claiming to be without self-will! Like my ten-year-old says, "Figure that out!"

Of all your articles, however, I found Simeon Alev's interview with Peter Masefield ["The Roar of the Timeless Beyond"] the most astonishing. I have never been attracted to Buddhism; my opinion was that it must be as far from Buddha as right-wing Christianity is from Jesus. I see that I was correct. Masefield's interpretation of Buddha jibes with my own personal experience and that of every sage I know of. The idea of "right view" as being preliminary to the path is, of course, in harmony with the "glimpse" or "initiation" that Advaitins talk about. There are two types of people in the world—those who have had a clear, nondual glimpse of Reality in which there are no "others," and those who have not. And without this "glimpse" it is not possible to have the required motivation to proceed or to correctly extricate oneself from the maze of desire.

Masefield is really onto something. Now the Eightfold Path sounds like Advaita: first you need a guru, then initiation, then you work out the sadhana [spiritual practice] with the correct view. I have always thought that a vast absorption into nonbeing was the thing that made everything else possible. How can one succeed without some special and magical motivation? And Masefield mentioned in his interview the unusual fact that it also comes with the assurance that Realization is a guarantee for you. Either he knows that from firsthand experience, or he is really onto the Big Guy. The "guarantee" part of that is highly esoteric and unknown. That is like a real fingerprint to me. Not many people know about that and I don't think I have ever read it before.
Anonymous

Lights Unto Themselves
Referring to WIE's interview with Peter Masefield, if it is true, according to Buddhist texts, that humans can only be enlightened through the intervention of a Buddha, then why did not Shakyamuni Buddha state this explicitly? And why did not the enlightened monks surviving the Buddha make it explicit? Why would this central truth need to be deciphered 2,500 years later through an intensive study of texts? These seem like obvious questions which I wish you had asked. Also perplexing is Mr. Masefield's language when on one hand he states that "you couldn't attain enlightenment without the intervention of the Buddha"—describing those enlightened through such intervention as "sort of passive recipients"—and on the other that "if you want [enlightenment], you have to pay [the] price, and that means following the orders of the Buddha," and that "people do require discipline if they're going to attain some kind of liberation." What would be the point of rules and discipline if enlightenment is "always the result of a special teaching that they received from the Buddha"? Why would the Buddha have needed to be "an extremely authoritarian individual"? It seems that either Mr. Masefield's conclusions are a bit off-target or the Buddha wasn't quite as enlightened as "Buddhists" think. If Masefield's conclusions are accurate, then essentially the Buddha was saying that his living teachings were the only way to attain enlightenment, and that "complete submission" to his authority was required. It is interesting that Mr. Masefield refers to Islam and the Unification Church as examples, as the Buddhism he describes begins to sound quite similar.

Mr. Masefield's assertions become particularly questionable when he states that "from within their own theology, it's important that [religious movements] control and manipulate their followers." This editorializing leads to my suspecting a bias skewing his research and conclusions. He appears to be unable to conceive of an authentic and profound spiritual movement in which practitioners are "lights unto themselves," which, of course, is what the Buddha in his last words urged his followers to be.
Jim Scheid
Bristol, Vermont

Variety Is the Spice
of Enlightenment
After reading your never-a-dull-moment last issue, I found myself repeating the famous words of Omar Khayyam:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about, but evermore
Came out by that same door wherein I went.

Thus the Advaitists tell us that:

Enlightenment means realizing that "you are not the doer."
Enlightenment means realizing that the Absolute is the only doer.
Enlightenment means realizing that you are THAT.
So—enlightenment leaves you back as the doer after all!

Then Peter Masefield tells us that in the original Buddhist teaching:

The Noble Eightfold Path leads to enlightenment.
The first step of that path is a right view of Reality.
A right view of Reality is possible only after enlightenment.
So—the path to enlightenment can't start until it's completed!

And much more in the same circular vein.

But don't get me wrong; to me this isn't depressing at all. On the contrary, it strikes me as possibly pointing toward a new line of inquiry in WIE's very welcome search for "evidence-based enlightenment." I've always found that when circularity occurs, I am using words which have no meaning in my lived experience. In this particular case, terms like "absolute," "nondual," "attainment," "emptiness," "unity," etc.—and of course "enlightenment" itself—will continue to fall back on themselves so long as they are used in the abstract to describe generalities, because then no one really "knows what they're talking about."

To break this cycle, we need to get more specific. This is why my partner Ann Faraday and I make backbreaking efforts to follow the advice of Alan Watts to "eff the ineffable" whenever we attempt to describe our "enlightenment" experiences. For example, when I describe mine in terms of knowing myself as "eternity John-ing" (see your Spring/ Summer 1995 issue), is it the same as Ann's experience of what she calls "no self"? Both of us are trying to express the feeling of the experience instead of talking in abstractions. Mine feels very much like a sense of the Absolute as loving fullness, while Ann's terminology seems to be expressing a felt sense of Its emptiness of selfhood. Could it be that enlightenment reflects different aspects of the Absolute, rather than a monolithic Reality which has to be either one thing or the other?

And if we sometimes behave in less-than-perfect ways, not always completely selfless, compassionate or dignified, does this mean that we are not Really Enlightened? Or does it mean that we've just "slipped out" for a moment or two? Or longer? Does it bother us? Or do we feel that Absolutely everything is Absolutely okay to the Absolute?

These are the kinds of specific and personal questions that need to be asked of anyone claiming "enlightenment." And if, as it seems to me, variety is not only the spice of life but also its very purpose and delight, then surely the Absolute, Eternity or Whatever revels in differences and rough edges rather than any kind of standardized perfection.

Which may be why the "Eternity-experience," as I prefer to call it, has different effects on different people's lives—leading some to the dharma, some to minister to the dying, some to sail around the world, some to write a novel, and others perhaps simply to become better parents or children (though I've yet to hear of an Enlightened One taking up stockbrokering or real estate). And if Omar Khayyam is moved to retreat peacefully with his book of verse beneath a bough, with a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and Thou beside him singing in the wilderness—well I'm sure that's just fine with Eternity!
John Wren-Lewis
School of Studies in Religion
University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia

A Close Reading
Thank you for the best edition ever of WIE, "Does Anybody Know What They're Talking About?"—a compendium of Advaita and Buddhist approaches to liberation. Well done! And what a brilliant coup to open this investigation with Ajja, an authentic, alive-and-well-in-India enlightened human being ["Who Is Ajja? A Meeting with the Absolute"]. East meets West, as together Ajja and Andrew Cohen define enlightenment through who they are and how they live their lives. Ajja speaks of rapture: "This is supreme bliss. . . . When this jivatma [individual self] is dropped, that bliss is there, already existing." The experience of the Absolute described here is the type of experience—described by Swami Yogananda, D.T. Suzuki, Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda—that turned our heads around in the sixties. This type of ecstatic language explained the psychedelic experience—the spark that launched the spiritual gold rush. But with Ajja and Andrew, we see that the main event is not the brief experience but the courage to surrender unconditionally to the Absolute so that total transformation can occur: "So let us go beyond this world of dualistic action, let us evolve, let us reach the Paramatma [the Supreme Self]."

This "Meeting with the Absolute" is a hard act to follow. What are people calling enlightenment if not this? But because it has the appearance of an exclusive situation, it raises the question: Can enlightenment be transmitted? Can one prepare for enlightenment, or will it only occur if it is "God's will"? Your section on Advaita offers intriguing answers. Chris Parish brings us into Ramesh Balsekar's "close encounter," where anything and everything is explained as "God's will," conditioning and destiny. So enlightenment is in God's hands—very simple. Very confusing! Swami Dayananda ["Advaita 101"] follows the way of the monastic scholar, teaching that "enlightenment doesn't depend upon experiences [but] upon shedding my error and ignorance" through the study of holy scriptures. Hmm. Enter Dr. Vijai Shankar ["Making God Laugh"], who proclaims that the world is an illusion—that "you are a spiritual being having a human experience"—and asserts emphatically that Advaita is an experience that cannot be taught! I appreciated seeing, through this section on Advaita with its fine introductions and brilliant dialogues, that while enlightenment is defined in many different ways, and different paths may change one's perception of the world, they may not all end in the experience of the Absolute.

I think I can understand why, for your Buddhism section, you chose H. H. the Dalai Lama, the foremost Buddhist alive in the world today; Helen Tworkov, editor of the most influential Buddhist magazine; Stephen Batchelor, renowned author and popularizer; and Peter Masefield, a scholar who has discovered some rather devastating information regarding Buddha's transmission. But considering that enlightenment is a question of the heart, these people are a group of talking heads—a head of state, the head of a magazine, the head of a college, and a college professor. Even in this day and age the Buddhist tradition has within it those who are serious about enlightenment; it would be great to hear from a Tibetan tokden—a yogi who has attained liberation—or a Zen monk who has experienced satori [awakening]. After reflecting on this section on Buddhism, I wonder if Buddhism will survive this issue of What Is Enlightenment?

The section begins with H. H. the Dalai Lama ["No Independent Existence"] giving a profound yet elementary teaching on "no-self"—fluff. Amy Edelstein fills in the blanks, describing his big-heartedness and compassion so that we will remember there's more to him than just the dharma lawyer. And Edelstein's dialogue with Helen Tworkov ["Is Buddhism Surviving America?"] is the centerpiece of this Buddhist section. I was nodding my head and saying "Right on!" all the way through the interview; Buddhism has slid down a sidetrack in the West, off of the main line of liberation. In "Absolutely Not!", with Andrew Cohen and Stephen Batchelor going at it, Batchelor proves just what a dilemma Buddhism has reached with his watered-down definition of enlightenment as a relative matter. His intellectual verbiage is about as inspiring and easy to follow as a lecture on advanced calculus. Sharp questions by Andrew Cohen. Dull answers by Professor Batchelor.

Simeon Alev's interview with Peter Masefield, "The Roar of the Timeless Beyond," will hopefully having a roaring response among the Buddhists. Masefield's distinction between the ariyasavaka, one who has "right view," and the puthujjana, one who does not—together with the implications this distinction has for our understanding of and ability to follow the Eightfold path, and his conclusion that after Buddha's death this understanding was lost—sound like devastating news to Buddhism, because without understanding "the view," nothing else can follow. This appears to support Tworkov's thesis regarding the state of confusion in Buddhism today.

"In the Meantime," enter parapsychology with Frances Vaughan to pick up the pieces. Susan Bridle's introduction and interview show just what can happen when enlightenment gives way to relative matters of the ego. The experience of the Absolute, which begins the issue like an explosion that destroys the tight grip of ego, has become a fizzle on the therapy couch, where weak egos must be healed "in the meantime." What is she talking about?

Thank you again for this classic compendium on enlightenment. I've lived with it for a month and read it—on the subway and at home—many, many times.
Loring Palmer
Cambridge, Massachusetts