'I Am'- In a Post Modern World

"I Am’ in a Post Modern World

By

Tenzin Gyurme

Copyright © 2008 by Tenzin Gyurme and Niall Nicholson

Published in Ireland by House of Goddess, all rights reserved

First Printing 2008

ISBN No: 978-1-311-11499-0

Smashwords

House of Goddesss, Limerick, Ireland

www.houseofgoddess.eu

Introduction

‘What is it about life in the present tense that has humanity on the fast track to self-destruction?’

‘Why is it, that with all of our technological advances, life has actually become more, rather than less complicated?’

‘When is man/woman-kind going to wake up, take the wheel and drive this planet back into a workable paradigm?’

These three questions are just some of the many questions of deeper meaning that are floating around the universe. And as there is no such thing as an original thought, these questions too, are not new.

With that in mind then of course the answers, or at least an answer, is also floating around the universe, just waiting to be accessed by the man or woman that is patient enough to listen for it. The patience and the ability to listen on such a profound level that it opens up the universal hall-of records (also known as the akashic records), is in itself the subject of several of my books in the ‘Mastery Series’, and bears considerable review.

For now, let us just agree that a sense of profound patience only arises when I release myself from a ‘need’ for an answer. In fact, I become ok with the possibility of never actually finding ‘an answer’, as I gain a deeper understanding of the question. This paradigm is known as ‘deep waiting’, or ‘waiting without goal"

So what is ‘waiting without goal?’

The second that we define a goal that we are waiting on, it already creates a condition to our patience. The patience to continue waiting, is limited by our ego-centric ability to withstand not having that which we declared as a desire… The goal.

This condition is a restriction, and the restriction will not allow for all of the possibilities to arise, and therefore the understanding of the question will be incomplete, or the ‘answer’ will be insufficient for the challenge that arose in the first place.

This, in part, is what has handicapped our post-modern existence. A lack of real patience, the kind of patience that comes from an unconditioned ability to wait on the appropriate solution or ‘answer’ to any of life’s profound mysteries or questions. For the ego is completely hamstrung by the concept of un-conditional anything. Being a creation of causes and conditions, anything by nature that is unconditional, is in itself, an anathema to the ego.

So, by ‘waiting without goal’, we remove the condition of the wait, thereby allowing unconditional patience to arise. This, then, is the challenge in the time of post-modernity. In the ‘Age of Distraction’, we have only so much time on our busy calendars, in our purpose-driven lives, and ego-conditioned existences to be truly patient and wait for the answers that already exist in the universe. For remember, there are no original thoughts, therefore, as these questions have existed since beginningless time, then so have the ‘answers’.

Could it be, that the mystics and seers of antiquity simply had the time to be patient? Did the medieval pre-modern man and woman become enlightened simply because there were no re-runs of ‘I love Lucy’ on twenty four hours a day on cable? Or is there something more profound to the conversation that is keeping us from accessing that which we all have as our divine birthright… . access to the Universal Mind!

In this book, I will borrow heavily from G. I. Gurdjieff’s book, ‘Life is Real, Only Then, When ‘I Am’’, and Ken Wilbur’s, ‘The Marriage of Sense and Soul’, in order to string together a workable pattern of social and group consciousness that has evolved since recorded history (at least in the present tense), has documented.

Though I will rely on these texts for foundational points, I will be branching off into new territory that maps out another possibility, which then creates the opening for another solution which could very well be easily digestible on a world-wide scale, creating real results that will save humanity from its ultimate demise.

Which, as I have stated before, there are no original thoughts, just recycled and repacked ones, most likely this reality has occurred before as well.

Chapter One

How Consciousness Evolved

First, I will introduce you to Ken Wilbur’s work, in order to establish a foundation of terminologies and working paradigms. As we will see in Wilbur’s work, he masterfully diagrams the working of the human psyche and the evolution of consciousness, religion and science; as well as its current collapse. Whether it is possible to re-integrate spirituality and science in today’s world is the premise of his work, and as such, I found it to be a wonderful foundation from which to start.

THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO WILBUR

The pre-Modern, Great Chain of Being

Each level in the Great Chain of Being incorporates the previous level, like nested circles.

Matter = Physics

Life = Biology

Mind = Psychology

Soul = Theology

Spirit = Mysticism

Every higher level possesses the essential features of the lower level, but then adds elements not found on those levels.

The Modern West, after the rise of the Great Enlightenment, became the first civilization in history to deny the Great Chain of Being. This was created by the differentiation of our value spheres of art, morals and science.

So what exactly is modernity? Various different scholars from Max Weber to Jurgen Habermas, have suggest that what specifically defines modernity is something called ‘the differentiation of the cultural value spheres, which especially means the differentiation of art, morals, and science. This differentiation allowed each sphere to make profound discoveries that, if used wisely, could lead to such ‘good’ results as democracy, the end of slavery, etc.

The brilliance of this definition of modernity—namely, that it differentiated the value spheres of art morals and science—is that it allow us to see the underpinning of both the good news and the bad news of modernity. Also known as the dignity and the disaster.

The bad news of modernity was that these value spheres did not just peacefully separate, they often flew apart completely, The wonderful differentiations of modernity went too far into actual dissociation, fragmentation, alienation. As the value spheres began to dissociate, this allowed a powerful and aggressive science to begin to invade and dominate the other spheres, crowding art and morals out of any serious consideration in approaching reality. Science became scientism— scientific materialism and scientific imperialism—which soon became the dominant ‘ official’ world-view of modernity.

In order to re-integrate Science and Spirituality we must realize that science is but one of several valid modes of knowing, and thus can peacefully coexist with spiritual modes. Although this view --which is now generally called epistemological pluralism—was the backbone of the great wisdom traditions, it collapsed with the Great Chain, upon which it depended. When modernity rejected the Great Chain, it simultaneously rejected epistemological pluralism.

The traditional view of epistemological pluralism was given perhaps its clearest statement by such Christian mystics as St. Bonaventure: every human being has the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of contemplation. This gives us a balance of empirical knowledge (science), rational knowledge (logic and mathematics), and spiritual knowledge (gnosis)

Some of the greatest philosophers-mistics the world has ever known— usually gave the Great Chain twelve levels:

see table

But mainstream modernity has soundly and thoroughly denied reality to the eye of spirit. Modernity recognizes only the eye of reason yoked to the eye of flesh—in Whitehead’s phrase, the dominant world-view of modernity is scientific materialism, and whether that science be the holistic science of systems theory or the sub-atomic physics of quantum events, science is the eye of reason linked to evidence offered by the empirical senses. In no case is the eye of contemplation or the eye of Spirit required… or even allowed!

The real difficulty, then, is not showing how empiricism, rationalism, and mysticism can fit together in the Great Chain of Being, it is not showing how they can all be harmoniously integrated in a great spectrum of conspicuousness, it is not demonstrating that such a synthesis is coherent and complete.