Ken Wilber on 'god-connectedness' 
[very rich in covering many aspects; I don’t speak his ‘down to earth language’ but his insights are clear and powerful. GCS]

An interview by: (Shambhala) SUN (a major Buddhist magazine):

SUN: Fair enough. What I would like to do now is to ask a few very technical questions. Okay?

KW: Okay.

SUN: One of the most confusing things about being a practitioner of Asian mystical traditions is the fact that before the Enlightenment the West had a thousand-year tradition of a civilization based on a highly mystical religion: Christianity. And yet in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality you characterize this thousand-year period as one that promised but did not deliver genuine transcendence. Why do you say that? How could a whole civilization miss the point for so long when it had expressions of the idea in Plato, the Corpus Hermeticum, Neoplatonism, mystical Christianity, and so on?

KW : Imagine if, the very day Buddha attained his enlightenment, he was taken out and hanged precisely because of that realization. And if any of his followers claimed to have the same realization, they were also hanged. Speaking for myself, I would find this something of a disincentive.

But that's exactly what happened with Jesus of Nazareth. "Why do you stone me?" he asks at one point. "Is it for good deeds?" And the crowd responds, "No, it is because you, being a man, make yourself out to be God." The individual Atman is not allowed to realize that it is one with Brahman. "I and my Father are One" -among other complicated factors, - that realization got this gentleman crucified.

The reasons for this are involved, but the fact remains: as soon as any spiritual practitioner began to get too close to the realization that Atman and Brahman are one - that one's own mind is intrinsically one with primordial Spirit - then frighteningly severe repercussions usually followed. Of course there were wonderful currents of Neoplatonic and other very high teachings operating in the background (and underground) in the West, but wherever the Church had political influence - and it dominated the Western scene for a thousand years - if you stepped over that line between Atman and Brahman, you were in very dangerous waters.

Saint John of the Cross and his friend Saint Teresa of Avila stepped over the line, but couched their journeys in such careful and pious language they pulled it off, barely. Meister Eckhart stepped over

the line, a little too boldly, and had his teachings officially condemned, which meant he wouldn't fry in hell but his words apparently would. Giordano Bruno stepped way over the line, and was burned at the stake. This is a typical pattern.

SUN: You say the reasons are complicated, and I'm sure they are, but could you briefly mention a few?

KW : Well, I'll give you one, which is perhaps the most interesting. The early history of the Church was dominated by traveling "pneumatics" (charismatics), those in whom "spirit was alive." Their spirituality was based largely on direct experience, a type of Christ consciousness, we might suppose ("Let this consciousness be in you which was in Christ Jesus"). We might charitably say that the Nirmanakaya of each pneumatic realized the Dharmakaya of Christ via the Sambhogakaya of the transformative fire of the Holy Ghost - not to put too fine a point on it. But they were clearly alive to some very real, very direct spiritual experiences.

But over a several-hundred-year span, with the codification of the Canon and the Apostle's Creed, a series of necessary beliefs replaced actual experience. The Church slowly switched from the pneumatics to the ekklesia, the ecclesiastic assembly of Christ, and the governor of the ekklesia was the local bishop, who possessed "right dogma," and not the pneumatic or prophet, who might possess spirit but couldn't be "controlled." The Church was no longer defined as the assembly of realizers, but as the assembly of bishops.

With Tertullian the relationship becomes almost legal, and with Cvprian spirituality actually is bound to the legal office of the Church. You could become a priest merely by ordination, not by awakening. A priest was no longer holy (sanctus) if he was personally awakened or enlightened or sanctified, but if he held the office. Likewise, you could become "saved" not by waking up yourself, but merely by taking the legal sacraments. As Cyprian put it, "He who does not have the Church as Mother cannot have God as Father."

Well, that puts a damper on it, what? Salvation now belonged to the lawyers. And the lawyers said, basically, we will allow that one megadude became fully one with God, but that's it! No more of that pure Oneness crap.

SUN: But why?

KW : This part of it was simple, raw, political power. Because, you know, the unsettling thing about direct mystical experience is that it has a nasty habit of going straight from Spirit to you, thus bypassing the middleman, namely, the bishop, not to mention the middleman's collection plate. This is the same reason the oil companies do not like solar power.

And so, anybody who had a direct pipeline to God was thus pronounced guilty not only of religious heresy, or the violation of the legal codes of the Church, for which you could have your heavenly soul eternally damned; but also of political treason, for which you could have your earthly body separated into several sections.

For all these reasons, the summum bonum of spiritual awareness - the supreme identity of Atman and Brahman, or ordinary mind and intrinsic spirit - was officially taboo in the West for a thousand years, more or less. All the wonderful currents that you mention, from Neoplatonism to Hermeticism, were definitely present but severely marginalized, to put it mildly. And thus the West produced an extraordinary number of subtle-level (or Sambhogakaya) mystics, who only claimed that the soul and God can share a union; but very few causal (Dharmakaya) and very few nondual (Svabhavikakaya) mystics, who went further and claimed not just a union but a supreme identity of soul and God in pure Godhead: just that claim got you toasted.

SUN: As for some of these more profound currents that became marginalized. What is the relationship between Plato's concept of "remembering" and enlightenment? Ever since I read the Meno I've thought there was one. But I couldn't quite figure out what it was.

KW: Yes, I think there is a very direct relationship. If we make the assumption, pretty safe with this crowd, that every sentient being has Buddha-mind, and if we agree that with enlightenment we are not ‘attaining’ this mind but simply ‘acknowledging or recognizing it’, then it amounts to the same thing if we say that enlightenment is the remembering of Buddha-mind, or the direct recognition or re-cognition of pure Emptiness.

In other words, we can't attain Buddha-nature any more than we can attain our feet. We can simply look down and notice that we have feet, we can remember that we have them. It sometimes helps, if we think that we do not have feet, to have somebody come along and point to them. A Zen Master will be glad to help. When you earnestly say, "I don't have any feet," the Master will stomp on your toes and see who yells out loud. Then he looks at you: "No feet, eh?"

These "pointing-out instructions" do not point to something that we ‘do not have’ and ‘need to acquire’; they point to something that is ‘fully, totally, completely present right now’, but we have perhaps forgotten. Enlightenment in the most basic sense is this simple remembering, recognizing, or simply noticing our feet that is, noticing that this simple, clear, ever-present awareness is primordial Purity just as it is. In that sense, it is definitely a simple remembering.

SUN: And you think Plato was actually involved in that type of recognition?

KW: Oh, I think so. It becomes extremely obvious in the succeeding Neoplatonic teachers, and in these areas, the apples rarely fall far from the tree. Plato himself says that we were once whole, but a "failure to remember" - amnesis - allows us to fall from that wholeness. And we will "recover" from our fragmentation when we remember who and what we really are. Plato is very specific. I'll read this: "It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a [contemplative community] devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark." Sudden illumination. He then adds, and this is very important: "No treatise by me concerning it exists or ever will exist."

SUN: Purely wordless.

KW: Yes, I think so. Very like, "A special transmission outside the scriptures; Not dependent upon words or letters; Direct pointing to the mind; Seeing into one's Nature and recognizing Buddhahood." We have to be a little careful with quick and easy comparisons, but again, if all sentient beings possess Buddha-mind, and if you are not yet going to be crucified for remembering it, then it is likely enough that souls of such caliber as Parmenides and Plato and Plotinus would remember who and what they are in ‘suchness’. And yes, it very much is a simple remembering, like looking in the mirror and going "Oh!" As Philosophia said to Boethius in his distress, "You have forgotten who you are."

SUN: I'd like to ask you a specific question about the connection between ultimate and relative truth. You said that the Buddha's teachings are completely adequate for the realization of Ultimate Truth, but that relative manifestation keeps on changing because "Emptiness takes on different forms." But really in Buddhist teachings there is just one intelligence. The Ati tantras call it rigpa. It's basically supposed to be the same as vipashyana or prajna. I'm wondering if you agree about this one intelligence? Is this the same intelligence that understands calculus? Is it the same intelligence that discovers quantum physics? Is it the same intelligence that microbiologists use to map the human genome?

KW: And you ask because ... ?

SUN: They are supposed to be the same "one intelligence" but they don't look the same. These scientific and philosophical teachings of the West seem to be examples of relative truth that were not discovered in Asia. You obviously believe that the Asians were the world's experts on finding or identifying the mind that cognizes Emptiness. But how can we reconcile this if there is only one intelligence? Put succinctly, why didn't rigpa discover calculus or quantum physics or human DNA?

Kw: Because there is not simply one intelligence, not the way you mean it. Remember, even in the Madhyamaka, where we have the Two Truths doctrine, there is a corresponding Two Modes of Knowing - samvritti, which is responsible for the relative truths of science and philosophy, and paramartha, or the recognition of pure Emptiness. Whatever relative manifestation there is, it is illumined or lit by rigpa, as the one intelligence in the entire universe, which is true enough. Rut within that absolute space of Emptiness/rigpa, there arise all sorts of relative truths and relative objects and relative knowledge, and Emptiness/rigpa lights them all equally. It does not choose sides, it doesn't "push" anything. It doesn't push against anything because nothing is outside it.

SUN: Could this be summarized by saying whether there is one intelligence or not?

KW: One intelligence that flashes in many different forms. As the Christian mystics put it, we have the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation - all of which are ultimately lit by rigpa, or one intelligence, or Big Mind, but each of which nonetheless has its own domain, its own truths, its own knowing. And, most important, mastering one eye does not necessarily mean you master the others. As we were saying, these are relatively independent streams.

SUN: So the eye of contemplation is capable of disclosing absolute truth or Emptiness, whereas the eye of mind and the eye of flesh can disclose only relative truth and conventional realities.

KW: Yes, I think that is a fair summary of what are after all some very complex issues.

The traditional analogy is the ocean and its waves, which is a really boring analogy, but bear with me. The wetness of the water is Suchness (or Spirit). All waves are equally wet. One wave isn't wetter than another. And thus, if I discover the wetness of any wave, I have discovered the wetness of all. When I directly recognize Suchness or Emptiness, or the wetness of my own being, right here, right now, then I have discovered the ultimate truth of all other waves as well. Emptiness is not a Really Big Wave set apart from little waves, but is the wetness equally present in all waves, high or low, big or small, Sacred or profane -which is why Emptiness cannot be used to prefer one wave over another.

Enlightenment is thus not catching a really big wave, but noticing the already present wetness of whatever wave I'm on. Moreover, I am then radically liberated from the narrow identification with this little wave called me, because I am fundamentally one with all other waves - no wetness is outside of me. I am literally One Taste with the entire ocean and all its waves. And that taste is wetness, suchness, Emptiness, the utter transparency of the Great Perfection.

At the same time, I do not know all the details of all the other waves: their height, their weight, the number of them, and so on. These relative truths I will have to discover wave by wave, endlessly. No Sutra of Wetness will tell about that, nor could it. And no Tantra of the Soggy will clue me in on this.

That's why I earlier said that contemplation is sufficient for ultimate truth: it will directly show you the wetness of all waves, the radical suchness of all phenomena, the Emptiness in the Heart of the Kosmos itself, the primordial purity that is your own intrinsic awareness in this moment, and this moment, and this. But meditation will not, and really cannot, tell you about all the details of all the various waves that nevertheless arise as the ceaseless play of Emptiness and spontaneous luminosity. As you say, it will not automatically give you calculus, or the human genome, or quantum physics. And historically, it definitely did not, which should tell us something right there.

SUN: I have a question about the Great Chain of Being, and it dawned on me that the Great Chain might be related to what you are saying about manifestation and relative truth.

KW: Yes, they are very similar notions. In other words, the Great Chain theorists - from Yogachara and Vedanta in the East to Neoplatonism and Kabbalah in the West - maintain that Emptiness (or the "One," meaning the Nondual) manifests as a series of dimensions, or levels, or koshas, or vijnanas - or "waves" - a spectrum of being and consciousness. The spectrum of levels is the relative or manifest truth, and the vast expanse in which the spectrum appears is Emptiness or absolute truth. Ultimately the absolute and the relative are "not two" or nondual, because Emptiness is not a thing apart from other things but the ‘suchness’ of all things, the wetness of all waves. And rigpa is the flash, the recognition, of that nondual ‘isness’, the simplicity of your present, clear, ordinary awareness - the opening or clearing in which the entire universe arises, just so.

But, of course, that as not merely an abstract concept. One Taste is a simple, direct, clear, recognition, in which it becomes perfectly obvious that you do not see the sky, you are the sky. You do not touch the earth, you are the earth. The wind does not blow on you, it blows within you. In this simple One Taste, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, and swallow the universe whole. Supernovas are born and die all within your heart, and galaxies swirl endlessly where you thought your head was, and it is all as simple as the sound of a robin singing on a crystal clear dawn.

SUN: The different forms of Emptiness, the different waves of the Great Perfection.

KW: Yes, in the relative world, new truths are constantly emerging; they emerge within Emptiness, within this brilliantly clear opening that is your own awareness in this moment. And whether what arises in the vast expanse of your own primordial awareness is calculus, physics, pottery, or how to make yak butter, will depend on a thousand relative truths and relative forces, none of which individually can be equated with Emptiness, and yet all of which arise as gestures of the Great Perfection or Emptiness itself - that is, all of which arise in this simple, clear, ever-present awareness, the wetness or the transparency of your very own being.

So within "one intelligence" or "Big Mind," all sorts of small minds and stepped-down intelligences arise - that's the Great Chain - and those relative truths, like the clouds in the sky and the waves in the ocean, have an appointment with their own relative karmas and a date with their own destinies.

The West has its relative truths, the East has its relative truths. And mostly in the East we further get a clear understanding of absolute truth, because the toaster was not your fate for dabbling therein. And definitely, my theme is that a judicious blend of relative truths, East and West, set in the primordial context of radical Emptiness, is a very sane approach to the human situation.