20 Mar Sudden Awakening
In previous blog posts we have seen examples where our sense of self melts away temporarily.
Many Meditators and Mystics aim to extinguish their sense of Self permanently. One way they
attempt to achieve this is through long focused hours contemplating “Who am I?”
There are two ways of ridding us of the Self. The first is to slowly chip away at it using methods which we will look at later. The second is a sudden realization or awakening.
The following two examples of sudden awakening are taken directly from Susan Blackmore in her fantastic book “Consciousness an introduction”
The first example of a person who achieved a sudden realization or awakening is Douglas Edison Harding (12 February 1909 ? 11 January 2007). He was an English philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher and author of a number of books, including On Having No Head – Zen and the Redisovery of the Obvious.
The best day of Douglas Harding’s life-his rebirthday, as he called it-was when he found he had no head. At the age of 33, during the Second World War, he had long been pondering the question “What am I?” One day, while walking in the Himalayas, he suddenly stopped thinking and forgot everything. Past and future dropped away, and he just looked. “To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink
hands, and a khaki shirt front terminating upwards in-absolutely nothing whatever!” (Harding, 1961: 2).
We can all do what he did next. We can look where the head should be and find a whole world. Far from being nothing, the space where the head should be is filled with everything we can see, including the fuzzy pink end of a nose and the whole world around. For Harding this great world of mountains and
trees was completely without “me,” and it felt like suddenly waking up from the sleep of ordinary life. It was a revelation of the perfectly obvious. He felt only peace, a quiet joy and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.
Harding stresses that headlessness is just obvious if only you look clearly. There are not two parallel
worlds, an inner and an outer world, because if you really look, you just see the one world, which is always before you. This way of looking explodes the fiction of inside and out, and of the
mythical centre; it explodes “this terminal spot where ‘I’ or ‘my consciousness’ is supposed to be
located” (Harding, 1961: 13).
Another person who experienced a sudden awaking through very different circumstances is John Wren-Lewis.
John Wren-Lewis was a physics professor with decidedly anti-mystical views when in 1983, at
the age of 60, he was poisoned while travelling on a bus in Thailand. A would-be thief gave him
some sweets laced with what was probably a mixture of morphine and cocaine, and the next thing he knew was waking up in a dilapidated and dirty hospital. At first he noticed nothing special, but gradually it dawned on him that it was as if he had emerged freshly made, complete with the memories that made up his personal self, from a radiant vast blackness beyond space or time. There was no sense at all of personal continuity. Moreover, the “dazzling darkness” was still there. It seemed to be behind his head, continually re-creating his entire consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! and now! and now! He even put his hand up to feel the back of his head only to find it perfectly normal. He felt only gratitude toward everything around him, all of which seemed perfectly right and as it should be.
Both doctors and patient thought that the effects would soon wear off, but they did not, and years later Wren-Lewis described how his whole consciousness had changed for good. I feel as if the back of my head has been sawn off so that it is no longer the 60-year-old John who looks out at the world, but the
shining dark infinite void that in some extraordinary way is also “1.”(Wren-Lewis, 1988: 116)
Wren-Lewis found that many aspects of his life had changed. For example, pain is now more of an interesting warning sensation than a form of suffering. His sleep changed completely from his previously rich dream life to a state of “conscious sleep” in which he is fully asleep yet still aware of lying in bed. The 59 years of his former life now seem like a kind of waking dream, living with an illusion of separate selfhood. By contrast to that ordinary consciousness, he describes his experience now as being just the universe “John Wren-Lewising.” It might seem that this way of experiencing the world would make ordinary life difficult, but he claims that the practicalities of life are easier, not harder, to deal
with because he is not constantly caught up with thoughts about the future.
As for the spiritual path, Wren-Lewis claims that the very idea is necessarily self-defeating, because it does the one thing that has to be undone if there is to be awakening to eternity: it concentrates attention on the future. The process of seeking itself implies a preoccupation with time, and makes a goal out of what is already here and now. In this he is reflecting the paradox of a path to no-path, found so often in Zen. He particularly rejects those philosophies that are based on schemes of spiritual growth or conscious evolution. Awakening is not the culmination of a journey but the realization that you never left home and never could.
These examples show, unequivocally, that awakening does not have to be the culmination of a long process of training or spiritual development. Harding woke up through lone questioning and happen stance, and Wren-Lewis through a poisoned brain. But this does not mean that training and practice
are useless. As one contemporary aphorism has it, enlightenment is an accident, and meditation helps to make you accident-prone.
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