| I've followed the writing of Erik Davis at www.techgnosis.com for years. A while back he had one of the coolest descriptions of ishvara-shaksi, the creator witness. Pretty wild. Reminds me of Garuda-consciousness. [Excerpt] Diamond Solitaire Washing Beets with God  November 28, 2007   A little over a decade ago, I had a bona-fide, Grade A, no-shit “mystical” experience—or at least something that felt a hell of a lot like a mystical experience. I have never written about it before, don't talk about it much, but I’ve been thinking about it lately and thought I’d give it a shot here, ineffability and scare quotes and all. The deal went down, absurdly enough, during a month-long retreat at a Zen center in northern California; even more absurdly, it happened while I was washing a bunch of beets in the garden. I had come to the center to recover and reorient after the agony of finishing the final draft of Techgnosis. I was pretty wrung out. During work period one afternoon, I found myself alone in a shady corner field, rinsing a pile of freshly unearthed beets in a free-standing outside basin. I stood there, in the cool but sunny air, washing big clumps of moist, fragrant mud from the red roots. I hadn’t had any alcohol or drugs in weeks. What happened next is tough to describe, and I think I need to lay down a bit of background first. One idea you’ll find in esoteric psychology (and elsewhere) is the notion that there is a vital difference between the content of consciousness—sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc—and the subject that perceives or, better, witnesses these feelings and perceptions. (I discuss this idea in the weird light of Descartes and the Matrix here.) On the surface, the Witness might seem to be needlessly “dualistic”—a redeployment of the Cartesian split between mind and body that everybody is always bitching about. But its still kind of true, and meditation, to say nothing of rigorous self-observation, helps clarify the Witness by loosening identification with the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that enmesh our being without entirely defining it. So I’m rinsing the beets, minding my own business, vaguely enjoying the cool water washing away the moist and pungent mud, when my “I” suddenly rockets like a SciFi space elevator into the highest, most barren and serene realms of Witness consciousness. I became the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher of the watcher..., a bootstrapping eensy-weensy spider of observer and observation that shed layers of identification as it flip-flopped up the water spout into ever more rarified levels of subjectivity, until there was not much left. What did this feel like? The analogy that arose most forcefully a few moments later, when I was able to reflect again, was of some sea-farer’s spyglass rapidly being drawn open, an action which extends the reach of the eye even as it, in some sense, increases the distance between the eye and the surface medium where the world inscribes its traces. My eye, my I, was now peering into my experience from Olympian climes. (...) Whole entry here. |
