Nonduality
Prof. John Wren-Lewis
93/108 Elizabeth Bay Road
Elizabeth Bay
Sydney
NSW 2011
Australia
In our last feature of this issue of What is Enlightenment?, we are pleased to present the vivid and thoughtful account of a former spiritual cynic’s experience of being suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted into an altered state of consciousness. Fascinating as a unique expression of transcendent realization, John Wren-Lewis’ description of his powerful spiritual experience is deeply moving and profoundly inspiring. His perspective is unique, he claims, not only because his awakening was thrust upon him without him seeking for it, but also because, for that very reason, he questions many commonly held beliefs about the nature of spiritual awakening.
While his experience is undoubtedly genuine, as his description of it makes very clear, many of his conclusions about the nature and meaning of the whole event of spiritual transformation express the familiar view that beyond the ultimate fact of being itself, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about the meaning of being itself. We look forward to future dialogue with him to question some of his conclusions in the hope of bringing light to this most challenging area of religious thought, i.e., is there meaning and significance to life itself and to consciousness being aware of itself, or is the fact of life and consciousness meaningless beyond the fact that it simply is?
John Wren-Lewis is a man whose fearless and refreshingly irreverent stance makes him willing to question many ideas that for too long many would not dare to question. Andrew Cohen first heard of John Wren-Lewis when he received a letter from him in 1991 describing his experience and asking advice. In response, Andrew called him and they had a lively exchange. In March 1995 when Andrew Cohen was visiting Sydney, Australia, where John Wren-Lewis lives, they had several public and private meetings together. John Wren-Lewis is an awakened man who is unusual because, in spite of having many strong opinions based on a lifetime of intelligent exploration, he remains open-minded and ever-curious.
Before his experience occurred, John Wren-Lewis, mathematical physicist and humanist psychologist, was a primary exponent of the “Death of God” movement of the 1960s. He has published extensively and held several professorial appointments in the United States and the United Kingdom. He is currently hard at work finishing The 9:15 to Nirvana, a book that further elaborates on the subject of this article.
Some, if we believe what they tell us,
are born with God consciousness. Some struggle to achieve it by
strenuous spiritual practice, though by all accounts the success
rate isn’t (and never has been) encouraging. I had God
consciousness thrust upon me in 1983, my sixtieth year, without
working for it, desiring it, or even believing in it, and this
has understandably given me a somewhat unusual perspective on the
whole matter. In particular, I wonder if discipline isn’t
altogether counterproductive in this context and the idea of
spiritual growth totally mistaken.
Before I had my experience, I was a Freud-style skeptic about all
things mystical. I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist or
materialist; in fact I’d published extensively on the need
for a religious world view appropriate to a humanity that has
“come of age” in the scientific and technological
area.(1) But I emphasized that such a faith would have to be
essentially positivistic, focused on the human potential for
creative change, which I believed could become as effective in
the social realm as it has been in the physical realm. I even
believed it possible that the creative human personality might
eventually discover technologies for transcending mortality, but
I saw mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due to failure
of nerve in the creative struggle.(2)
What happened in 1983 could be classified technically as a
near-death experience (NDE), though it lacked any of the dramatic
visionary features that tend to dominate both journalistic and
scholarly NDE accounts.(3) As I lay in a hospital bed in
Thailand, after eating a poisoned candy given me by a would-be
thief on a long-distance bus, there were some hours when the
medical staff thought I’d gone beyond recall. But I had no
out-of-body vision of what was going on, no review of my life, no
passage down a dark tunnel to a heavenly light or landscape, and
no encounter with celestial beings or deceased relatives telling
me to go back because my work on earth was not yet done. And
although I’d lost all fear of death when eventually
resuscitated, this had (and has) nothing to do with believing I
have an immortal soul that will survive death.
On the contrary, it has everything to do with a dimension of
aliveness here and now which makes the notion of separate
survival a very secondary matter, in this world or any other. In
fact it makes each present instant so utterly satisfying that
even the success or failure of creative activity becomes
relatively unimportant. In other words, I’ve been liberated
from what William Blake called obsession with
“futurity,” which, until it happened, I used to
consider a psychological impossibility. And to my continual
astonishment, for ten years now this liberation has made the
conduct of practical life more rather than less efficient,
precisely because time consciousness isn’t overshadowed by
“anxious thought for the morrow.”
I didn’t even notice the change straightaway. My mind was
too busy catching up on why I was in a hospital at night, with a
policeman sitting at the foot of the bed, when the last thing I
could remember was feeling drowsy on the bus in the early morning
and settling down for a comfortable snooze on what was scheduled
to be a seven-hour journey across the jungle-covered mountains.
I’d suspected nothing, because the donor of the candy—a
charming and well-dressed young man who’d been very helpful
with our luggage—had left the bus some miles back. With
hindsight, I guess he decided that retreat was the order of the
day when he saw that my partner, dream psychologist Dr. Ann
Faraday,(4) wasn’t eating the candy he’d given her.
(Ann’s heroic rescue, when I started turning blue and the
bus driver insisted I was just drunk, is quite a story in its own
right, but not the point here.)(5)
The fact that I’d undergone a radical consciousness shift
began to become apparent only after everyone had settled down for
the night and I was left awake, feeling as if I’d had enough
sleep to last a lifetime. By stages I became aware that when
I’d awakened a few hours earlier, it hadn’t been from a
state of ordinary unconsciousness at all. It was as if I’d
emerged freshly made (complete with all the memories that
constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness that was
somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness or
“pure consciousness” that had no separation within it,
and therefore no space or time.
There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity. In fact the
sense of a “stop in time” was so absolute that I’m
now convinced I really did die, if only for a few seconds or
fractions of a second, and was literally “resurrected”
by the medical team, though there were no brain-wave monitors to
provide objective confirmation. And if my conviction is correct,
it actually counts against rather than for the claim so often
made by near-death researchers that personal consciousness can
exist apart from the brain. My impression is that my personal
consciousness was actually “snuffed out” (the root
meaning, according to some scholars, of the word
“nirvana”) and then recreated by a kind of
focusing-down from the infinite eternity of that radiant dark
pure consciousness. An old nursery rhyme conveys it better than
any high philosophy:
Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of Everywhere into here.
Moreover that wonderful “eternal life of everywhere”
was still there, right behind my eyes—or more accurately, at
the back of my head—continually recreating my whole personal
body-mind consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! and now!
and now! That’s no mere metaphor for a vague sensation; it
was so palpably real that I put my hand up to probe the back of
my skull, half wondering if the doctors had sawn part of it away
to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn’t in the least a
feeling of being damaged; it was more like having had a cataract
taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and myself
properly for the first time—for that lovely dark radiance
seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy.
I felt like exclaiming, “Of course! That’s absolutely
right!” and applauding every single thing with tears of
gratitude—not just the now sleeping Ann and the small jar of
flowers the nurse had placed by the bedside, but also the ominous
stains on the bed sheets, the ancient paint peeling off the
walls, the far from hygienic smell of the toilet, the coughs and
groans of other patients, and even the traumatized condition of
my body. From the recesses of my memory emerged that statement at
the beginning of the book of Genesis about God observing
everything “he” had made and finding it very good. In
the past I’d treated these words as mere romantic poetry,
referring only to conventionally grand things like sunsets and
conveniently ignoring what ordinary human consciousness calls
illness or ugliness. Now all the judgments of goodness or badness
which the human mind necessarily has to make in its activities
along the line of time were contextualized in the perspective of
that other dimension I can only call eternity, which loves all
the productions of time regardless.
It was mind-blowing even then, when I was taking for granted that
this had to be a jumbo-sized “mystical experience”
visited on me, of all people, as a kind of cosmic joke, from
which I must quite soon “return to normal.” I envisaged
making public recantation of my antimystical views and joining
the formerly despised ranks of spiritual seekers. Because my
skeptical bias had been recreated along with the rest of my
memories, I toyed with the possibility that I might simply be
suffering some aftereffect of the poison, which the doctors had
diagnosed as probably being a heavy dose of morphine laced with
cocaine. I didn’t really believe this, however, because
there was no trace of the “trippy” feeling that was
always present when I took part in a long series of officially
sponsored experiments with high-dosage psychedelics back in the
late 1960s.
Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the
following days, weeks, months, and years, any ordinary kind of
drug explanation was obviously ruled out. Moreover my
bewilderment was intensified as I discovered how all kinds of
“negative” human experiences became marvels of creation
when experienced by the Dazzling Dark. To convey even a fraction
of what life is like with eternity consciousness would take a
whole book and I’m currently in the last stages of writing
one. It must suffice here to illustrate two features that have
most impressed me and others who know me, notably Ann.
First, if there were a section in the Guinness Book of Records
for cowardice about physical pain, I would be sure of a place
there. But with eternity consciousness, pain becomes simply a
warning signal which, once heeded (irrespective of whether a
physical remedy is available), becomes simply an interesting
sensation, another of nature’s wonders. The Buddha’s
distinction between pain and suffering, which I used to think was
equivocation, is now a common experience for me. And second, my
erstwhile spectacular dream life has been replaced, on most
nights, by a state which I can only call “conscious
sleep,” where I’m fully asleep yet distantly aware of
lying in bed. It is as if the Dark has withdrawn its game of
“John Wren-Lewising” to a nonactive level where the
satisfaction of simply being is totally unrelated to doing.(6)
The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the
most extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it
doesn’t feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially
natural that personal consciousness should be aware of its own
Ground, while my first fifty-nine years of so-called
“normal” consciousness, in ignorance of that Ground,
now seem like a kind of waking dream. It was as if I’d been
entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate
individuals struggling in an alien universe for survival,
satisfaction and significance.
Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to
awakened life, because the rest of the world is still taking the
separation state for granted, and my own “resurrected”
mind still contains programs based on the assumptions of that
state. So in the early days I made every effort to assume the
role of spiritual seeker in the hope of finding help. It came as
a real disappointment to find that no one I consulted, either in
person or through books, had a clue, because ancient traditions
and modern movements alike take for granted that the kind of
eternity consciousness I’m living in is the preserve of
spiritual Olympians, the mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates.
Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of
its own which is gradually enabling me to deal with the
adjustment problems—and a fascinating process it is. In the
meantime, however, I’m very concerned that all the seekers I
come across accept as a law of the spiritual universe that they
have to be content with years—perhaps many reincarnational
lifetimes—of hopeful traveling, rewarded at best with what
T.S. Eliot called “hints and guesses”(7) of the
eternity-conscious state, whereas I see that state as the natural
human birthright.
My intensive investigations in this area over the past decade
have left me in no doubt that proponents of the so-called
Perennial Philosophy are correct in identifying a common
“deep structure” of experience underlying the widely
different cultural expressions of mystics in all traditions.
Nonetheless I find no evidence whatever for the often-made claim
that these traditions contain disciplines for attaining God
consciousness that have been empirically tested and verified.(8)
On the contrary, the assumption that God consciousness is a high
and special state seems like the perfect defense mechanism for
not asking whether spiritual paths are really leading there at
all. Yet this is a very pertinent question, since many mystics
whose utterances most clearly resonate as coming from life in the
eternity-state have asserted that their awakening was “an
act of grace” (or words to that effect) rather than a reward
for effort on their part.
Indeed the more I investigate, the more convinced I become that
iconoclastic mystics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti(9) were
right in asserting that the very idea of a spiritual path 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 firmly on “futurity.” Paths and
disciplines make gnosis a goal, when in fact it is already the
ground of all knowing, including “sinful” time-bound
knowing. To me now, systems of spirituality seem like analogues
of those dreams which prevent waking up (for example, to wet a
thirsty throat or relieve the bladder) by creating a never-
ending nocturnal drama of moving towards the desired goal,
encountering and overcoming obstacle after obstacle along the
way, but never actually arriving.
In other words, I’ve begun to realize that my former
skepticism wasn’t all bad. I think now that I was like the
ignorant peasant boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous
story who simply wouldn’t go along with the courtiers’
wishful thinking about the emperor’s glory in his new
clothes. My mistake was to put down the impulse that causes
spiritual seekers to want a greater glory than ordinary life
affords and makes them hope it’s there in the great
traditions, even when they have no experiential evidence of it.
Or to switch to an even older fable, I decided that heavenly
grapes must be delusory when I could see that none of the ladders
people were climbing in pursuit of them ever reached the goal.
Now I not only understand the urge to find something altogether
beyond the shallow satisfactions and the blood, sweat, toil, and
tears of this petty pace, but I know from firsthand experience
that the “joy beyond joy” is greater than the wildest
imaginations of a consciousness bogged down in time. But I can
also see that the very impulse to seek the joy of eternity is a
Catch-22, because seeking itself implies a preoccupation with
time, which is precisely what drives eternity out of awareness.
Even disciplines designed to prize attention away from doing are
simply another form of doing, which is why they at best yield
only occasional glimpses of the eternal Ground of consciousness
in Being.
So what to do? One thing I learned in my former profession of
science was that the right kind of lateral thinking can often
bring liberation from Catch-22 situations, provided the Catch-22
is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in the form of
metaphysical speculations beyond experience. This is the
exploration to which my life is now dedicated. It’s a
research project in which anyone who’s interested can join,
because the very fact of being interested means that somewhere at
the back of your head you are already as aware of the Ground of
consciousness as I am. So rather than take up my little remaining
space with any of my own tentative conclusions, I’ll end
with a couple of cautionary hints.
First, beware of philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a
framework of growth or evolution, which I believe are the great
modern idols. Both are important phenomena of eternity’s
time theater, but as paradigms they’re old hat, hangovers
from the age of empire-building and the work ethic. We should
know better today, when astronomers have shown that the kind of
planetary destruction that was once imagined as a possible divine
judgment could in fact be brought about at any time by the
perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.
The “I want it now” attitude, so often deplored by
spiritual pundits as a twentieth-century sin, is in my view a
very healthy sign that we are beginning to be disillusioned with
time-entrapment. A truly mystical paradigm has to be
post-evolutionary, a paradigm of lila, divine play for its own
sake, where any purposes along the line of time, great or small,
are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present
in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the
instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all
manifestation, irrespective of whether, from the purely human
standpoint, the manifestation is creative or destructive, growing
or withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading out.
My second warning is to mind your language, for the words we use
are often hooks that catch us into time entrapment. For example,
when we use the term “self” with a small “s”
to describe individual personhood, and “Self” with a
capital “S” for the fullness of God consciousness, the
notion of the one gradually expanding into the other becomes
almost inescapable, again concentrating attention along the time
line. Mystical liberation, by contrast, is the sudden discovery
that even the meanest self is already a focus of the Infinite
Aliveness that is beyond any kind of selfhood.
Again, when the word “home” is used to describe
eternity, there is an almost irresistible temptation to think of
life as a journey of return, whereas mystical awakening for me
has been like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz: the realization
that I never really left home and never could. Here too T.S.
Eliot has the word for it: “Home is where one starts
from.”(10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant
voyaging out from the “eternal Home” into the time
process to discover new “productions of time” for
eternity to love as they arise and pass away.
Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to
spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that
seems interesting—which is what the Buddha urged a long time
ago, though not too many of his followers have ever taken that
part of his teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern
movements alike may be very valuable as databases for new
adventures, but to treat them as authorities to be obeyed is not
only “unscientific”—it seems actually to go
against the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is
apparently the name of the time game
.
I suspect gnosis comes as “grace” because there are as
many different forms of it as there are people. Yet because
we’re all in this together, sharing experience is integral
to its fullness. Whatever experiments you make, share your
“failures,” your hints and guesses, and your awakening
too if it happens, with warts-and-all honesty, because
“everything that lives is holy.”
NOTES
1. See for example my book What Shall We Tell the Children?
(London: Constable, 1971) and the quotations from my earlier
writings in J.A.T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press,
1963), the foundation work of the “Death of God”
movement in the mid-1960s.
2. See especially my article “Love’s
Coming-of-Age” in C. Rycroft, ed., Psychoanalysis Observed
(Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1968).
3. The best overview of this subject is still C. Zaleski,
Otherworld Journeys: The Near-Death Experience in Mediaeval and
Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). There is
now also a Journal of Near-Death Studies published quarterly by
the Human Sciences Press in New York.
4. See Ann Faraday, Dream Power (New York: Berkeley, 1973) and
The Dream Game (New York: Harper & Row, 1976/1990).
5. A fuller version of the story is told in my article “The
Darkness of God: A Personal Report on Consciousness
Transformation through Close Encounter with Death” in the
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1988), pp.
105-121, and in my forthcoming book The 9:15 to Nirvana. At the
time of this incident, we were on holiday from fieldwork in the
Malaysian jungle which led to exposure of the “Senoi Dream
Tribe” legend as a fraud. See Ann Faraday and John
Wren-Lewis, “The Selling of the Senoi,” in Lucidity
Letter, vol. 3, no. 1, (1984), pp. 1-2.
6. For further details, see my article “Dream Lucidity and
Near-Death Experience: A Personal Report” in Lucidity
Letter, vol. 4, no. 2, (1986), pp. 4-12.
7. See T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” 5, in Four
Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944/1959). As an example,
The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon Press, 1974)
relates Merton’s discussion with a very high Tibetan
meditation master in which they both admitted to each other that
breakthrough into “direct realization” still eluded
them after thirty years of assiduous practice. A high Tibetan
lama once told me he expected to spend many more reincarnations
before reaching a state of continuing “eternity
consciousness.”
8. See for example Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New
York: Harper & Row, 1944) and Ken Wilber, The Atman Project
(Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1980).
9. For notes on Krishnamurti in this respect, with particular
reference to recent reports of his alleged affair with a married
woman disciple, see my article “Death Knell of the Guru
System?: Perfectionism vs. Enlightenment” in the Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, vol. 34, no. 2 (1994), pp. 46-61.
10. T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” 5, in Four Quartets.