On Experience vs. Action

Question: You were saying earlier that the ultimate state is
not an experience. But I often feel that state as a powerful
experience or sense of overflowing into the world.

Wilber: Let me try to explain. Right now, you notice things arising. You have an experience of this; you have an experience of that. Objects are arising in your awareness moment to moment—they come, they stay awhile, they go. Now, the space in which these experiences come and go is not an experience—that vast openness, or spaciousness, is not an experience. It doesn’t come and go; it’s unborn. It’s also called emptiness because it’s transparent; nothing sticks in it. And it has no moving parts, so it can’t break down. That’s the part that’s not an experience. Out of that (although it’s not really out of that) there can be movement, obviously, in the gross manifest realm. And that can be looked at as an overflowing, which tends to have more of an experiential component, because you’re moving in the world of manifestation. So there’s time and motion, and there’s superabundance and it’s overflowing. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t confuse the ultimate state with an experience.

Cohen: At the beginning of the path, we tend to measure our progress in relationship to moments or periods of time when we’re experiencing what you described as that overflow. In other words, when that which exists beyond time is felt in the context of time, when it rubs up against time, so to speak—in those moments it becomes more obvious to us. And so we think when we’re having that particular feeling experience, we are there or it’s happening. And when that feeling is absent, we are not there and it isn’t happening. But when you begin to wake up to who you really are and what the absolute nature of this whole process is, you give less importance to those moments of overflow as an indicator of who you are and what’s ultimately true. As you mature, you become more centered in what’s always true no matter how things feel or how they appear.

Wilber: When I was studying with Chagdud Tulku, who was one of the great Dzogchen masters, people would come to him and say, “Oh God, I finally got it. There’s this clarity and it’s just so unbelievable! I get it. I get it.” And he was very funny, because he would ask, “Did it have a beginning in time?” They’d say, “Yes, about half an hour ago.” And he’d always say, “It’s not it. Come back later.” So anything that has a beginning in time is not real.

Question: In what you’re both saying, I hear a call for action rather than experience, an emphasis on doing rather than being.

Cohen: Yes, because the fact is, we’re all self-centered experience junkies who have a very materialistic relationship to our feeling experience, and we have to cut that out! The future needs to be created now, and we don’t have any more time to sit around and enjoy the ride. We have to make something happen. Of course, there is a dimension to all this that never moves, that infinite ground of being that is the foundation of everything. But since the sixties, everybody’s been talking about “be here now,” and now we have “the power of now”—it’s the same old thing. Personally, I think the last thing we need is more being here now. It’s not enough.

A real integrated understanding of enlightenment has to embrace both dimensions. The absolute nature of everything is inherently free and inherently full and inherently perfect. And any liberated perspective, including an evolutionary one, has to be based upon a deep realization of that truth. But that’s just the foundation. Upon that foundation there’s an urgency to embrace this creative or evolutionary principle. Most of the time, we’re all so lost in neurotic self-concern that if someone tells us, “Transcend the mind. Be in the moment,” we go, “Ahhhh,” and we feel some relief, and we say, “That’s it.” But I say, “That’s not it.” All we’re feeling then is some relief from our narcissistic self-obsession and from “the burden of existence”—which is, ridiculously enough, how a lot of us actually feel about being alive. When you realize that the universe can only know itself through the unique capacity for consciousness that you and I possess, suddenly it’s not a burden to be alive. It’s the greatest gift and the greatest privilege to be a human being, right here, right now.

Wilber (to Questioner): Does that help you understand your experience?

Question: Well, it is nice to hear more emphasis on doing. I resonate with that—not less being, just more doing.

Wilber: But don’t get stuck in doing, or Andrew will go after that too.

Cohen: Yes, if it is doing that is not informed by the mind of enlightenment.

Wilber: Make sure you get that part—seriously!

Cohen: Of course, there are a lot of people doing great work who are not being compelled by the mind of enlightenment, and I’m not criticizing that in any way. But I’m talking about something different here. I’m talking about being compelled from the deepest and highest part of the self. And remember, the degree to which you’re willing to respond to that compulsion is the degree to which you will experience self-liberation in that moment.

Question: But the spot right before that is a little scary.

Cohen: Right, yes. Because the spot right before that is the ego’s hesitation, inertia, and self-concern. It’s the part of ourselves that we all have to get over, sooner rather than later. We don’t have time to carry on like that—even though most of us aren’t willing to give up the luxury of time. We don’t have time to endlessly—

Wilber: —be here now. It takes too long! (Laughter)

Cohen: Right! And also, we don’t have time to endlessly struggle with the ambivalence of the ego. The ego will always be ambivalent. The Authentic Self, which is not separate from the energy and intelligence behind the universe, experiences only the ecstatic compulsion to create the future, with no sense of hesitation whatsoever. But the ego is identified with the past and attached to the way things have been, full of doubt and terrified of change. And on it will go, ad infinitum. So finally a decision has to be made, if you can permit me to say this, for eternity. It’s not just a choice you make for your life, right now. When an individual awakens and makes this choice absolutely and irrevocably, I’m convinced it reaches beyond this lifetime.

On Ego

Question: What practices do you teach to guard against ego—to catch oneself when one is acting out of ego?

Wilber: There are two things I think are really important in terms of catching ego in your own path. One refers to the Absolute Self, if I can put it that way, and the other refers to the finite self. Meditative or contemplative traditions are very good at helping you reawaken to the Absolute Self, to the ever-present witness or Maha-atman, which is the Godhead in you. What you’re likely to face there are ways you can mess that up, remnants of ego that get stuck there, and the traditions are pretty good at rooting those out. What they’re not good at dealing with, because they can’t see it, is the shadow of the finite self. So people can be relatively enlightened in certain traditions but have shadow elements that are quite shocking, because there’s no way meditation can get at them.

I use several ways to get at that shadow, but one is a process that we developed at Integral Institute called 3-2-1 (as in third person, second person, first person). There are two versions of this practice. In the morning when you wake up, you think of a dream and think of the element in the dream that’s the most disturbing—it could be the most attractive, most positive, or most negative. So that’s a third-person object or “other.” Now, most psychodynamic theories agree that these elements that disturb us most are parts of our own finite selves that we haven’t come to terms with; we’ve repressed them or projected them and they appear as other. Your finite self has split something off from itself and that shadow element will screw you up all the way to enlightenment and back, because there’s no way to get at it. So in the morning you simply take one of these elements and hold it in front of you and talk to it. Now it becomes second person. And once you’ve converted it to second person, then the next step is to make it first person, to identify with it, to actually speak from that place: “I am the monster,” and so on. That’s a very good way to help you get out of the victim mode, because one of the primary ways you get into the victim mode is by projecting some aspect of yourself that you hate outside of yourself, and then it attacks you all the time and you can’t figure out why. So that’s the 3-2-1 process. You can also do it at the end of the day—take an event, thing, or person that upset you and follow the same process.

Here’s where meditation can make it worse: If you’ve split off some aspect of your finite self and turned it into a third person, and you say, “I’m not angry, but boy that person seems to be angry at me. I don’t know why; I never get angry,” and then you sit in meditation and say, “There is anger, there is anger, there is anger,” all it does is increase the disassociation. So meditation increases the disassociative capacity vis-à-vis your own shadow. That’s one reason why, if people get deeply involved in meditative practices, after five, ten, twenty years all they have left are enormous shadows, and everything else is gone. And if they’re teachers, they get together over lunch and talk about their shadows! They can bring a great deal of mindfulness to the shadow; they just can’t cure it.

So meditation is very important, but you have to remember that there are things to keep the Absolute Self straight and things to keep the finite self straight, and you want to try to have at least a practice or two to cover both. If you don’t do both, you’re in a great deal of trouble. The 3-2-1 process basically keeps your finite self healthy, even while you try to transcend it.

Cohen: In the way that I teach, I try to get people, number one, to recognize that they have an ego, and number two, to actually become deadly serious about transcending it in a way that is significant.

I don’t personally believe it’s possible for anybody, through the power of their will, to transcend ego completely. There apparently have been rare individuals who accomplished such a thing, but it seems to me that this was really a force of grace or karma, something that just seemed to happen. But I am convinced that it is possible to transcend ego to a profound degree, simply through the power of one’s own awakened intention to do so. However, getting an individual to take seriously for more than a nanosecond the possibility of actually transcending their own ego is very difficult. The very notion is just not part of our culture. But if it’s not going to happen as an act of grace, the individual has to want to achieve that more than anything else.

One thing I put a tremendous amount of emphasis on is getting people to begin to pay attention to their own experience, and not just when they are practicing meditation. Once you really get what meditation is, it becomes something that you’re always doing. And if you are paying attention in this way, then you are going to become aware of what ego is and what it feels like. You will become aware of the fact that we all have all kinds of unwholesome motives arising within us.