On the Way: Growth and Transcendence of Personal Consciousness

growth

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About three decades ago, while I was learning Brian P. Hall’s Value Theory, both Barbara Ledig and Beth Clark were extremely helpful teachers. To this day I very much appreciate the depth of comprehension they instilled in me.

I am immensely indebted to two spiritual teachers: Ramesh Balsekar and Wayne Liquorman, who contributed immeasurably to my grasp of the Unthinkable.

I would like to thank Hal Bennett for his encouragement during the time when I still doubted if publishing this book was worthwhile. For the highly useful tips Frank van Zwieten gave me on structuring the book, I remain very grateful. And thank you, Barbara Dunlevie, and Kayleen and Fred Miller, for reading the manuscript of the earlier version of this book, for critiquing the usefulness of the various methods for personal growth and for making suggestions about how to improve the book. In this latter category I am very thankful for Stevi Rarick’s proofreading and editing. Her many suggestions have made the book much easier to read.

But most of all, thank you, Drizz, for working so hard to bring to our marriage the harmony necessary for a contemplative life.

INTRODUCTION

This book is about growth in consciousness. Over a lifetime everybody’s consciousness grows, yet very few are aware of it. Rarer is the understanding of how this growth in consciousness develops. I address myself here to those who consider personal growth important and who would like to understand the process.

The mechanism for personal growth consists of honing skills around needs. At all times during our lives we have values, needs, priorities. In daily living we constantly cater to those needs. By doing so we acquire skills. When skill levels have grown sufficiently, specific needs become routinely fulfilled. Then new needs come to the fore and our consciousness increases.

Consciousness grows through five distinct phases. Different people grow in different ways. The path is different from person to person. Yet the resulting five levels of consciousness are the same for everybody.

For a very few fortunate ones among us this growth of consciousness culminates in a flash of insight that results in the disappearance of all needs. This fifth phase is a state of pure, desireless consciousness and is known as Enlightenment, Awakening, Self-Realization, Moksha, Satori. I will sometimes call it Self-Realization but mostly adopt a term for it that Balsekar uses in his many publications: the Ultimate Understanding. Reaching this state is extremely rare and not something we can achieve ourselves. If it comes about, the event occurs of its own accord. Yet by growing through the first four phases of consciousness we all prepare for it.

***

This book serves three purposes. First, I will try to convince you that higher levels of consciousness than your present one do indeed exist. Second, I will describe how to determine at what level of consciousness you now function. And third, because some may find it worthwhile to actively develop their consciousness further, I will deal with what people typically do to that end.

The book is meant for people who search for meaning. Most of us have a more or less stable worldview and are happy with that. Then the existence of levels of consciousness higher than the present one can be unbelievable, even unacceptable. Personal growth is nonetheless real. It usually slowly increases in importance and may culminate in a fourth, contemplative phase of consciousness: a yearning for experiences that are transcendental in nature.

Some of us have experienced a transcendental event. There are many kinds of such experiences. Yet they all have one thing in common: We realize afterwards that our free will did not cause the event. Then a question may arise. If we did not bring on this event, who or what did? This is known as entering the contemplative phase of consciousness and is called becoming a spiritual seeker.

Becoming a seeker can also happen through natural growth in consciousness. To some the realization of having entered the fourth phase of consciousness happens when meeting a spiritual teacher. Continued growth in consciousness is then usually guided by the newfound teacher. For others becoming a seeker may remain somewhat bewildering. If it is not immediately clear who a possible teacher could be, the question of where to turn may be problematic. This book makes suggestions to those who find themselves without an acceptable teacher and who wonder what the transcendental terrain looks like. It describes various methods people use for searching for transcendental knowledge.

There are three parts to the book. The first part deals with how to fulfill needs. The fourth growth phase in consciousness consists of slowly becoming free of desires. As long as strong desires are still with us, a spiritual search is difficult. Fulfilling needs we consider important has to come first. Part I of the book discusses how to measure what desires we still have and how to fulfill them.

The second part of the book describes how the mind interprets transcendental experiences. Interpretations can be very different from person to person. How the meaning of a transcendental event is experienced depends on where we are in our personal growth at the moment it happens.

The third part of the book talks about the methods contemplative seekers use. It deals with why different people—people of different types—prefer different disciplines.

Most of my knowledge about consciousness I learned from others. There are not many novel theories in this book. Certain combinations of thoughts may be expressed here for the first time, but I am sure most of my experiences are not unique. Although my thoughts were new to me when they first occurred, I am not trying to describe original discoveries. I will often repeat what others have said, sometimes simplifying their language somewhat, and always from my own understanding of what the implications are. And I will share certain tools I have found useful for growing in consciousness. Some of these tools are not well known. All of them have played a role in my own growth.

I have always gained much clarity from making methodical maps. So I will give overviews of the existing literature on personal and transcendental growth in systematic formats, as road maps. Those maps are then combined with things we do, that is, with methods for continued growth. Here and there I will give examples of my own experiences as illustrations.

An example of such a revealing personal experience occurred when I first started considering writing this book. I had a small aha feeling that at first seemed insignificant but that grew in importance afterwards. It happened after one of our weekly evenings of tennis. Eight of us, all in our sixties at the time, play mixed doubles for a couple of hours each Tuesday night. Afterwards we usually went out for a pizza and a beer together. During one of those dinners the conversation drifted toward our physical health. Not unusual, of course, for a group of our age. Larry, how is your shoulder? and Kayleen, is your elbow getting any better yet? are normal subjects. Then Barbara said something like: No fun that when growing older, our bodies start to disintegrate. I countered with: Yes but there is so much that compensates for that. Oh yes? Name one! said Barbara.

We discussed this for a while and concluded that, when aging, most of us slowly become a little wiser. And acquiring a little wisdom seemed somehow connected to the fact that, when growing older, we become more relaxed. There is less anxiety than at an earlier age. We worry less. It is as if the things that once bothered us, are now not as important anymore. For instance, when getting close to retirement money problems have usually gone away. Material needs are now taken care of, and even if they are not, they seem to matter less than before.

We felt that the same holds for what other people think of us. How we look in the eyes of others seems to carry less weight when growing older. And it now even feels unnecessary to improve ourselves an awful lot. We have become acceptable in our own eyes as well. The world, ourselves included, has become more or less all right as is.

I just sat there listening to this conversation, when I suddenly realized that what we were discussing was exactly what I wanted to write about. What a coincidence! Obviously I will go in much more detail than we did that night at the dinner table. But basically what I am going to do here is the same: discuss how to become a little wiser by overcoming worries about security and about who we are as a person. During much of our lives that is precisely what personal growth is about.

When preoccupied with physical needs or when not yet comfortable with who we are as a person, the desire for transcendental experiences tends to take second seat. Apparently we need to learn to alleviate more earthly concerns before developing our transcendental side in earnest. This preparation for transcending the mind by taking care of more primary needs first is every bit as important as actual spiritual practice itself. Growth of transcendental awareness is usually slow at best, but is likely to remain downright sluggish as long as more fundamental worries about security and self-worth are not yet behind us.

If it is true that we postpone major development of our transcendental side until more basic needs are reasonably well taken care of, we will have to start learning how to satisfy these primary needs. We should first establish healthy relationships with things, with other people, and with ourselves. Many people spend all their lives on these issues. So the first part of this book is devoted to erecting permanent structures in our lives that take care of needs for stable and satisfying relationships in three areas: with physical things, with significant others, and with ourselves.

There is another reason to spend so much time on developing these three forms of relationships first. Not only do these relationships need to be in good shape before we can expect to be able to focus on transcendental development, but also, by working on fulfilling basic needs we learn the skill of developing relationships in the first place. This is a very useful skill in the transcendental realm as well. Once we know how to establish stable relationships in the first three areas, we can use these same methods in the transcendental realm. The recipe for personal growth is always the same: skill development around perceived needs. Personal growth always comes about by honing skills. This is as true for the relationships with things, with other people, and with ourselves, as it is for the relationship with what I will call the larger-than-self.

Let me stop here for a moment to define the words spiritual and transcendental. I mean by these words knowledge that lies beyond the grasp of the human mind. It has two clearly different aspects. First, it describes realizations, knowledge, something we know for sure. And second, this knowledge is not accessible with the mind. It cannot be understood, it cannot be described in words.

Strictly speaking, the meaning of the two terms spiritual and transcendental is not exactly the same. Not all transcendental experiences are spiritual in nature. A transcendental experience is spiritual only when it is awe inspiring.

In general I will use the term transcendental. It is more encompassing. And it avoids the impression that I am so spiritual, an ego motivated statement.

Besides physical and mental priorities, many of us have a desire for transcendental experiences as well. Some feel it more, others less, but, in one form or another, almost everybody has this need. The second and third parts of the book are about what to do with that urge for transcendental growth. There I will deal with what specific forms the entity we may see as larger-than-ourselves can take, how to approach it, and what results to expect from our endeavors.

You may wonder what makes me think I am such an expert in the transcendental knowledge. In fact, I am not, at least in terms of new ideas about it. I am not very good at invention. My expertise lies more in playing the role of liaison officer. I am an engineer at heart, so I latch on to the ideas of others and then try to make them into useful tools. Many of my earlier, so-called productive years I spent in industry, designing and building medical instruments. During the nineteen seventies and eighties I ran my own company. At that time the question of what was meaningful for my coworkers—other than a paycheck—presented itself forcefully. Having an engineering mind, I wanted to know if it was possible to measure what people consider meaningful. And to my surprise it turned out that it is indeed possible to objectively decide what different individuals consider important: Part I of the book.

What we are going to do here is to take the output of various experts in the field of personal and transcendental growth, verify their statements as far as possible with my own experiences, and then translate them into useful maps and methods. Having found these methods meaningful myself, I am assuming that knowing about them may be useful for others as well. So in a way this is a how-to book. It tries to answer so what? and now what? questions about personal growth in consciousness.

In this tool making effort we will, of course, have to spend a fair amount of time on theory. Before drawing an individual road map, we need to describe the existing terrain. Yet the main emphasis will always be on what we do in practice and what to expect as a result.

Of the authors who were particularly informative to me let me single out three: Brian P. Hall, Ken Wilber, and Franklin Merrell-Wolff.

In Part I of the book I base myself almost exclusively on the work of Brian P. Hall. He is a priest/psychologist who has made what I consider a major contribution to understanding personal motivation and how it changes over a life time. In particular, he explores the connections between (1) the things people value, (2) their underlying beliefs, and (3) their consequent behavior. Hall has found common patterns in personal growth. His theory culminates in a method for objectively measuring the state of individual development. And he convincingly shows how our past, together with the things we value today, decide how, in broad terms, we will change in the future.

At first I found this quite amazing. From a measurement of the things we call important today it is indeed possible to predict what kind of person we will become tomorrow. Astonishing as it may appear, we can learn to predict our own path of personal growth. Ever since I learned about Hall’s methods I have found such knowledge about myself extremely valuable.

Hall’s system concentrates mainly on the first three of the four relationships I mentioned a moment ago: those with things, others, and self. For the treatment of the fourth, the relationship with the larger-than-self, I will combine Hall’s recipes for personal growth with the complexity of the transcendental domain as depicted by Merrell-Wolff, Wilber, and others. This combination then results in the capability to create individual road maps for personal and transcendental growth in all four areas of relationships.

Wilber has published many works on transpersonal psychology. Few authors have written more comprehensively, and more persuasively, on how consciousness has developed in humanity as a whole and how it evolves in each of us individually. In one of his most important works, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality¹ Wilber gives a beautiful exposé of human evolution. He shows how the stages of personal growth in consciousness in each of us (the study of I that this book engages in) correlate precisely with the historical development of three other areas of human endeavor: the field of science (the study of a singular it), the evolution of culture (the study of we), and the historical growth of social structures (the study of plural its). I highly recommend Wilber’s publications, particularly his A Theory of Everything², for a worldview that ties together humanity’s different fields of growth.

Merrell-Wolff was a western mystic who lived during the first half of the last century. His original training was in philosophy and mathematics. Undoubtedly he himself reached the highest form of consciousness: the Ultimate Understanding. As far as I know, he is the only mystic who meticulously described his own transcendental journey while simultaneously at all stages critiquing his experiences from a philosophical standpoint.

Apart from Merrell-Wolff, Wilber, and Hall, there are scores of other authors to whom I am indebted. Many of those appear in the bibliography. As to the relationship with the larger-than-self I found three groups of authors helpful: those who have chronicled their own path of transcendental growth, those who describe what the culmination of it—the Ultimate Understanding—is like, and those who talk about the connection of the transcendental with their worldview and philosophy.

An author in the first category, telling her own story of transcendental growth, is Bernadette Roberts³. She is a Christian contemplative who has written superbly about her experiences during her transcendental development. Like Merrell-Wolff, she is a contemporary western sage who herself eventually reached Self-Realization.

Countless authors have described the Ultimate Understanding. For the best records of the culmination of the journey, I would mostly recommend eastern teachers. Sages such as Shankara (as written about by Paul Deussen⁴), Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj are good examples. Personally I learned much here from Ramesh Balsekar and Wayne Liquorman.

There are many western philosophers who deal with the connection between the transcendental and philosophy. But many of the classical ones, Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer for instance, I find difficult to read. Although not easy, Merrell-Wolff clicked for me. And later, so did Wei Wu Wei. Among eastern sages who make the connection with western philosophy, Sri Aurobindo and Krishnamurti come to mind.

For me it has often seemed meaningful to understand where I am in my personal growth and what comes next. I hope that for you, the reader, this book will make understanding your life’s journey a little easier as well.

Woodside, CA, 2012

PART I - GROWING THE MIND

CHAPTER I - PRELUDE TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL

The Transcendental and Its Limits

The two subjects of this book are how the mind grows—Part I—and how a search for knowledge beyond the mind happens—Parts II and III. Consciousness-beyond-the-mind, the transcendental realm, what can that possibly be? Maybe we should begin with looking into what is, and what is not, transcendental.

Suppose you have a hunch. You are sitting in a theatre waiting for the movie to start. Somehow you feel that something is happening behind you. You turn around, and sure enough, your good friend Karen is sitting ten rows behind you and is staring at you. You recognize each other and exchange greetings.

The hunch that somebody was looking at you resulted in a thought, in knowledge in the mind. But it could not possibly have originated there. You simply do not have the sense organs to observe Karen’s stare.

This is an example of what I will call transcendental knowledge, knowledge that occurs to us spontaneously. Transcendental knowledge is knowledge that does not originate in the mind. It only results in knowledge in the mind.

I find it clarifying to separate the transcendental from other parts of my consciousness when looking at it in terms of relationships. There are many different kinds of relationships but we can divide them in four broad categories. At times I relate to things. At other times I associate with other people. I also have a relationship with myself. And sometimes I may relate to something that seems to be larger than myself.

These four different relationships are closely associated with four categories of desires. Again, there are a great many different desires. But we can see all our desires as forms of needs to improve one of these four relationships. Let’s look at these four relationships a little closer.

Early in life we are mostly preoccupied with our career and generally, with security issues. First, during our formative years, we play with toys and we go to school to learn how to deal with the things that surround us. Later we get training in how to hold down a job. During those years we develop instrumental skills. We learn how to deal with the material of the outer world. Our relationships with what we consider to be objects take most of our attention. We learn how to walk and talk, and later how to operate tools.

Yet life insists that as well as getting along with lifeless things we also learn how to get along with people. Besides learning how to handle inanimate objects, we develop a competence in maintaining healthy relationships with others. We hone social skills along with instrumental abilities.

At the same time we keep an eye on how we get along with ourselves, asking such questions as: Am I alright? and How do I look in my own eyes? This third kind of relationship, the one with ourselves, involves building ego strength.

Notice that the first two relationships are with entities in the outside world, whereas the third is with something inside. The first is with outside objects and requires instrumental skills. The second teaches how to interact with outside people and requires social skills. But the third relationship is about getting along with ourselves, clearly an