The Teeming Brain

Nearly two years ago at my previous blog, Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, I posted a rant titled “Deaf and Blind, not to mention Dumb.”  It described a visit by Nigerian artist Ibiyinka Alao to the high school where I’m employed as a teacher.  The bulk of the post went to describing my seething anger at the disrespect shown by the students during Mr. Alao’s presentation, which was held in the gym as a mandatory all-school assembly.  I also used my self-given opportunity to say angry and despairing things like this:

“The worst part of it was the contrast between how the students were behaving and the content of what he was saying. The man was laying his heart bare before us, in both his paintings and his words. He explained that he had always been a taciturn young man—and of course he paused to define the word for the younger ones (not to mention the older ones)—and said it was only three years ago that he became able to speak before audiences like us without displaying much fidgeting and nervousness. In explaining the origins of several of his paintings, he filled us in on his private emotional life and told us about his personal and family histories, thus giving us quite an intimate glimpse inside the soul of a sensitive artist who constantly struggles to make sense, and to make beauty, out of the confusions and hardships of life.

“Or at least he would have given us such a glimpse if there had been anyone there to receive it. More and more in recent years, on occasions like the one I’m describing, I am drawn to dwell upon the Aristotelian/medieval concept of adaequatio in the inflection given to it by E.F. Schumacher in his book A Guide for the Perplexed. Although the word in general refers to the model of truth as the conformation of rational thoughts to objective realities which they can grasp, Schumacher speaks of it in more widely in terms of the adequacy—or inadequacy—of an individual to perceive truth at all, and in particular, to perceive the deepest truths of life and reality. ‘Are all men “adequate” to grasp all truth?’ he asks, and then answers no. There must be a necessary minimum capability and appropriate predisposition for a person even to recognize the existence of an exceptionally profound and/or delicate and elusive truth, let alone to understand it. Such is the nature of, for example, the type of truth approached by religion.

“Such is also the nature of artistic truth. Ironically, this is the very thing that Mr. Alao talked about today when he stressed the essentially mysterious aspect of a true work of art. As he stated this, he was facing a group of students who for the most part could not have cared less about him, his artwork, his words, or his presence. And this lack of caring was functionally equivalent to deafness. The man might have stated the secret meaning of life itself, and it would simply have fallen to the gymnasium floor and died quietly.

“Aside from my anger and embarrassment—both for him and for the student body, not to mention us teachers who rightfully shoulder some (but hardly all) of the blame for this state of affairs—the main thought that occurred to me during this fiasco was how sad it all was. Whether he was aware of it or not, Mr. Alao was fighting a losing battle against the influence of television, video games, and the Internet. He couched his delicate and profound insights in chains of sustained, coherent thought, and this simply doesn’t fit the cognitive and emotional capacities and patterns of the contemporary generation of American teens. They are ‘adequate’ to something else entirely, something whose form fits the lines of the flash-cut editing and mind-mushing rhythms of music videos, C.S.I., and video games, and whose content fits the idiotic and sentimental/nihilistic tropes of (un)RealityTV and maudlin pop songs. As a generation they are deaf and blind to anything that doesn’t conform to this shape. And as such, they are dumb not only in the sense of being stupid, but in the sense of not having much, or perhaps nothing at all, to say of value, since their inner world is informed by the basest kind of trash and the outer world appears to them as a solipsistic reflection of their shallowness and barrenness—although very few of them realize this even when it is pointed out to them directly.”

During the interim between then and now, I’ve seen reports from time to time of Mr. Alao’s ongoing visits to area schools here in southwest Missouri.  And I’ve wondered how it is that he keeps visiting us down here.

Just this morning I stumbled across a story in the local-area daily newspaper titled “Spreading the Message of Art,” which reports that Mr. Alao has married a woman from Springfield, Missouri (the hub city of southwest Missouri) and decided to live here temporarily while she finishes college.  He continues to carry his message of the transformative power of art to schools and other institutions around Missouri.

I was really, really impressed by the man when he came here in January of last year.  Today’s newspaper article paints an endearing and impressive picture that accords well with what I saw in him and heard from him in person.  Here are a few choice excerpts:

“Alao, 32, puts on presentations at Ozarks schools because he believes art can be used to address social issues, unite people and build confidence in children.

“‘Nobody can force you to take drugs if you feel good about yourself,’ Alao said. ‘If you help people to be creative, that creativity helps us to be more caring. If you are a creative person you care more about life.’

“Harmony is a key theme in his work, and he symbolizes it through the use of vibrant colors. Often, images of eyes are embedded in his paintings to represent God watching over people.

“Professionally, he’s a trained architect, although painting consumes his life now. He’s in the process of building an art school in Nigeria, said his wife, Jessica Alao. Ibiyinka’s belief that art can change the world, and his peacefulness, immediately captivated Jessica when they met.

“In addition to the presentations at schools, Alao has also worked with Greene County Jail inmates and other prisoners in an attempt to demonstrate the power of art. He was invited to do this through an Assemblies of God prison ministry.

“‘He has volunteered a lot of time and energy just to help other people,’ said Gail Yielding, his mother-in-law.

“His inspiration comes from God, Alao said. ‘I like to think of it as a spiritual thing of my heart. Every physical thing comes to an end, but the spiritual goes on and on and on.’

….“In 2001, when Alao entered an international art competition sponsored by the United Nations, he had no idea how it would change his future. He placed first in Nigeria, went on to compete against entries from 60 other countries and eventually snagged first place out of entries from around the world.

“The Nigerian government named him an ‘art ambassador’; he landed in New York City to promote his work and homeland.

“New York proved too chaotic for Alao. He decided to visit the Midwest, which he says is more reminiscent of where he grew up.

…. “Alao met Jessica Yielding, his future wife, during one of his presentations. Jessica says she was captivated by’”his heart. He’s so peaceful.’

….“[Alao says,] ‘All I talk about is harmony, diversity. I meet a girl who is totally different from me in terms of skin color, where I am from. So I guess maybe it was some kind of invitation from God: This thing I talk about, can I live up to it?”

Well, I’m back from another long hiatus. It’s been four weeks since my last confession—er, blog post. I’m certainly making good on my previous claim, circa early September, that my foreseeable activity here at The Teeming Brain would be sporadic.

At the moment I thought I’d drop in to mention that this downturn in blog activity isn’t due solely to an upsurge in real-life busyness, although that certainly has played and continues to play a role (as with my 13-hour work day yesterday, culminating in my returning home last night around 10 o’clock and leaving again for work this morning around 8). What’s also factoring into the situation is a downturn in my overall motivation to take part in the life of the Internet. And that, in turn, is a result of certain inner changes that have occurred in me over a several-month span.

In a nutshell, I’ve started receiving or experiencing flashes of nondual insight that have put flesh, as it were, on the bones of the spiritual, philosophical, and theological ideas that have occupied my attention for most of my life. Readers of this blog, as well as of my formally published fiction and nonfiction, are well aware of my philosophical and spiritual proclivities. So they (you) may (or may not) be interested to learn that this latest development kicked off in earnest last spring and has continued pretty much unabated ever since. Hints of it appear in some of the posts I’ve published here. The change has taken the form of an intensification of things I initially began to realize some years ago—first intellectually and then existentially—about time, consciousness, and identity. I used to read the words of various sages and spiritual teachers who said things like, “You are not your mind,” “You are not your experiences but the experiencer of them,” “The world happens inside you, not vice versa,” and so on. And I really dug it. Delving into this kind of thing, seeking and savoring books and ideas along these lines, became a way of life for me. My thoughts and bookshelves were, and still are, populated by things relating to meditation, mysticism, theology, Zen Buddhism, nondualism, esoteric Christianity, comparative religion, existentialism, consciousness studies, depth psychology, and more.

But for the most part, my experience of all these things was purely intellectual. I was pursuing not real experience but intellectual ideas—“mere thoughts in your head,” as Eckhart Tolle would say—which I, with my particular personality and set of predilections, found appealing, intriguing, and exciting. Only I didn’t realize this, since I mistook the ideas for the realities.

Now, recently, this situation has undergone a substantial change. It didn’t happen all at once but instead arose, as mentioned above, as an intensifying of something that had already started. I’ve experienced various “awakenings” over the years but this recent change has been more fundamental and extensive than anything that’s come before. My frequent thought/feeling has been, “So that’s what the words always meant!” Another frequent thought/feeling, often accompanied by a fleeting, cackling laughter, has been, “You’ve got to be shitting me” (addressed to no one in particular, or perhaps to myself).

Several side effects have accrued, including an interesting shift in the tenor of my personal relationships and the aforementioned lessening and loosening of my attachment to the Internet. The latter isn’t permanent, I think, since it’s primarily a spin-off of the fact that the fundamental motivations that have fueled a great many of my lifelong pursuits, including my writing (including my activity here at The Teeming Brain), are presently called into question. I’m undergoing a bit of an internal reorganization.

In truth, the whole thing is a lot like what Josh Baran describes as his awakening experience in his excellent and even essential little book of quotations, 365 Nirvana Here and Now. Baran says that after many years of reading books and practicing various spiritual techniques, he flew to Nepal “to receive Dzogchen teachings from a revered master, Tulku Urgyen,” in whose presence he “found my ‘self’ instantly stopped cold. There were no fireworks, no thunder—just the sudden, obvious, stunning realization of the pure awareness that I had overlooked my entire life, not hidden or elsewhere.”

He goes on to write: “In the face of this presence or nowness, all seeking, wandering, and waiting vanished before my eyes. I saw how much of my life’s energies had been focused on looking forward to some imagined future, rather than simply celebrating the all-pervasive present: trying to get ‘there’ instead of being ‘here.’ My previous years of forced meditation and effort seemed, in retrospect, useless.”

Lately, whenever I read Baran’s words and others like them, I find that I actually understand them on a level beyond that of mere interesting thoughts.

In linear-temporal terms, this might be considered a partial fulfillment of some time I spent—virtually, in cyberspace—with the now-deceased spiritual teacher Scott Morrison during the mid-1990s. I came into contact with him via his website 21^st Century Renaissance at www.openmindopenheart.org, now sadly defunct (although most of its contents are still available via the Internet Archive). Scott had just achieved a measure of recognition as a teacher of nondual wisdom via the publication of his little book There Is Only Now, which had aroused considerable excitement among Zen and nondual spirituality circles. He created 21^st Century Renaissance to serve as an online community where people from all over the world could participate in an electronic version of satsang or dokusan, the Eastern spiritual practice in which disciples gather around a teacher and ask questions in order to deepen and sharpen their insight. I became one of his informal students in this manner. Several of the questions, along with Scott’s responses, that appear in the archived website are from me. He and I also struck up a private email relationship, in the course of which I was impressed to discover that he was one of the first batch of original American students of Chogyam Trungpa.

But none of that meant that I really understood what he was talking about. Repeatedly, to me and lots of other inquirers, he said things like, “Give up looking for anything like ‘enlightenment’ or ‘spiritual awakening.’ You’re making it into some sort of external goal to be attained in the future. That’s the very opposite of the truth. Just focus your attention on the present moment and recognize what’s already here, what’s already true, what’s inescapably real when you drop all mental-emotional storylines.” I thought I knew what he was saying, but that was precisely the problem: I thought I understood him, which meant I was just understanding a thought, which meant I was making the whole thing into a “thought in my head,” which was exactly the delusional move that he was pointing out.

Scott died in 2000. For more than a year afterward, I didn’t know why my sporadic emails were going unanswered or why the website had fallen silent. Finally, I wrote to the people at www.sentient.org to ask if they knew what was going on (since I knew they had a page devoted to Scott). They wrote back to inform me of his early death by cancer at around age 40. I hadn’t even known he was ill.

These seven years later, it’s gratifying to return to his books and online writings and have an “Oh, that’s what he meant” experience.

I’ll close this post with two excerpts from two different authors that get at the type of awakening I’m talking about. The first is from Scott:

“What follows has been said in many, many different ways, here and elsewhere. If you are passionately interested in Self Realization, I suggest you go into this very, very slowly and carefully. If we are honest, we can’t assume anything, so don’t take my word for any of this. (What that means is that to know the truth, you have to search your own heart with as much sincerity and integrity as possible. It’s entirely up to you.) That said, it all comes down to this:

“There is only now. This is it. This is everything.

“Everything we think we think we know, in advance, about ourselves, about each other, about the world, about God, about the universe, is nothing but the play of memory, belief, and opinion, with all of its historical, emotional, psychological, social, political, economic, and intellectual baggage. This includes all spiritual, philosophical, and religious beliefs and fantasies.

“The only thing we know, for sure, is awareness.

“If attention is not fixated on self-centered ideas about things, its true nature is revealed as love, affection, insight, clarity, wisdom, equanimity, and compassion.

That true nature is what you are.
You are a verb and the universe is a verb.

“If you don’t deny that, trivialize it, or pretend it’s not so, you will discover that all of the joy, happiness, peace, and freedom you have been seeking everywhere else has been right here all along.

“However, these are all just words. If you are truly open and honest, you can put the words, too, aside.

“Without the word, ‘awareness,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘love,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘freedom,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘peace,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘now,’ what is it?”

The second is from Richard Lang, who worked with Douglas Harding for several years before the latter’s death in January of this year. Richard now carries on Douglas’s work of pointing out the reality of “headlessness,” that is, the immediate, inescapable first-person experience of being not a thing but space, or the capacity for experience, which each of us knows firsthand. Richard’s description below is wonderfully precise and lucid:

“Here’s a suggestion:

“Sit down on your own for ten minutes with the sole purpose of being awake to Who you really are. Keep guiding your attention home to this undivided Capacity for your boundless view, this Silence for the limitless soundscape, this clear Absence that is Room for the edgeless world of body sensation. Whatever you find yourself thinking about, notice these thoughts are happening in your Spaciousness, in your No-Mind. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to try and stop thinking for example, or try and feel peaceful, but simply be aware of being Space for the thinking process, or for whatever you are feeling. Attend to the Space and whatever is happening in it. As you do so, things will naturally reveal themselves, then dissolve. Just keep seeing that things unfold in the Space. It may happen that insights or understanding come to you. If this happens, observe these things too, occurring in the Space. See them arise, see them dissolve. Be aware of all of this happening there, as you look from the Mystery here. The Mystery that you are.

“If the experience is a pleasant one, be aware of that feeling in the Space. Pleasant feeling there to its Absence here—two way attention. If it’s unpleasant—say you don’t like what you are feeling or are impatient for something different to happen—also notice this reaction in the Space. In fact, when difficult feelings appear it’s good news! Now you have the opportunity to see Who you really are in a more challenging situation. See there is no one here to be challenged. Feeling there to no-feeling here. . . Reaction there to no-reaction here—to no one here. World there to Capacity for the world here. Moment by moment, stay with the obvious and visible fact that you are not a thing at Centre but capacity. This experience of staying with the truth of Who you really are in a difficult situation will then help you if you experience something unpleasant at another time. You will know that you have the capacity and power to view it from the Space here, and to respond to it from the Space here.

“It’s not a matter of trying to have any particular kind of experience but of noticing that whatever your experience is, you are viewing it from Awareness, from this boundless clear Space or Single Eye, from Freedom, from Peace.”