Hi John B:
I wish you the best of luck in your quest to experience higher levels.
Each of us must choose his own way to discover his personal
essence and become enlightened to the spiritual realm if indeed such
a realm exists.
My own experience of indefinable reality (Quality) came as a result of
following the instructions of an experiment called the *inner gesture*
first proposed by Dr. Hubert Benoit and described by Ken Wilber in the
same book and chapter I mentioned before. By performing this inner
gesture repeatedly and faithfully Benoit claims we can realize that
*each of us lives in the state of satori and could not live otherwise . . .
because it is our eternal state, independent of our birth and of our
death.*
Briefly, the purpose of the inner gesture is to stop temporarily all our
concepts, mental images and mental objects, i.e., to hold onto for a
longer period than otherwise possible the sensation of pure
experience prior to thought--Pirsig’s *pure value.* To accomplish this
we must cut off the process which gives rise to thoughts at its source.
Benoit's thesis works within the framework of energy mobilization--that
each instant our energy is constantly rising up from the level of Mind
where it is pure, informal, non-objective, timeless and spaceless
energy. This energy as it mobilizes seems to well-up from within, and
then, as it passes the biosocial level, takes on form as thoughts and
direction as emotions. These imaginative-emotive processes
disintegrate and disperse our energy which then becomes our normal
everyday awareness.
Examples of this *welling up of energy prior to thought* are when you
instinctively grab for a falling crystal goblet or jump off a hot stove
without any thought or intention crossing your mind--two extreme
examples of what is happening all the time, for our energy is constantly
being snapped up by ideas, concepts, thoughts and emotions, thus
erecting a screen between self (ego) and reality (Mind or Quality).
Or so the theory goes. The key to blocking thoughts from arising
automatically according to Benoit is to change from a passive mode of
attention to an active mode, that is, to adopt an attitude of active auditor
who authorizes your inner monologue to say whatever it wishes
however it wishes. This is done simply by saying to oneself, *Speak, I
am listening* and then adopting an attitude of vigilant expectation as to
what will occur. This constitutes the inner gesture that suspends
thought without suppressing it because when you authorize any
thought to arise that wants to and then actively listen and watch for it,
none arises.
Now every time I've practiced this, always just before drifting off to sleep
at night, I have experienced a moment of seeing into nothingness, a
moment of timeless awareness. For me, it's a frightening experience,
almost like sinking towards death because my normal means of being
and staying alive by thinking and feeling suddenly stops although I'm
wide awake. On the other hand, I experience a profound realization of
who I really am--a realization I cannot put into words at all.
Well, to each his own. But I thought you might be interested in the
Benoit method of *seeing what is without an image.* The connection to
the MOQ is obvious. Please keep us informed of your progress.
Platt
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