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This Week on Integral Spiritual Center....
Beyond the Fourth - Ken Wilber
Freedom in the Present - Patrick Sweeney
Beyond the Fourth
Beauty is eternity, gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity. And you are the mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Last week we began a beautiful pointing out instruction led by Ken Wilber on the “Myth of the Given” call, as Ken pointed out the Witness of all that arises. But the Witness is not the endpoint of the journey; as Katigiri Roshi instructed Ken—touching off his own initial satori—“the Witness is the last stand of the ego.”
In this week’s featured audio, Ken points out turiyatita (literally, “beyond the fourth”). Noting that thoughts and feelings come and go, Ken asks: what is it that doesn’t come, and doesn’t go? What is the non experiential, the unborn, the uncreate? What never enters the stream of time?
As practice is sustained and deepened, says Ken, you begin to get a tongue taste of your True Self, of IAMness. But rather than having an experience, all you’ll sense is a vast sense of freedom. Freedom from objects, freedom from experiences, freedom from time. Whatever it is that you experience, that is precisely what you are not.
And in this freedom, you push, but without pushing; you rest, but without resting; you cleave, but without cleaving. There is the sense of consciousness, but without an object, of emptiness—though empty of that, too. The way is neti, neti: not this, not that. You will never reach a moment of time that is it. For it is something that is always already there.
Eventually, says Ken, the sheer physics of the subtle realm are such that objects cease to arise, and you find yourself in a place of unmanifest absorption. And then, you come back, and begin again to witness those arisings--but you witness with complete disinterest. Your mind becomes a mirror that reflects all that arises. You are aware even of the self as it arises, and you reflect that, too. A mirror and its objects, all arising in One Taste....
Freedom in the Present (video)
Patrick Sweeney discusses the quality of his teachers that attracted him the most: their radical freedom to be spontaneous in the present moment. He shares how profoundly he has been influenced by the work of Ken Wilber, in particular.
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