This is an excerpt from a piece I wrote to Seattle Integral's discussion list in January of 07. I thought it was worth a revisit.

Namaste and Thank you to all of you.  Venita

From my current vantage point, i see the ego, the self, and the
personality as concepts constructed by humans that are useful in
helping us function and learn. I see development as a (constructed)
continuum. And I see all of these concepts as useful tools...the
ego/self, body and personality are vehicles through which to manifest
the Absolute. Without a self/ego and without a personality with it's
quirks and limitations we wouldn't be worth much, nor be able to
function as humans.

When does a person develop enough of a self to "let go of the
self." That is a really complex question because it seems to vary
from person to person and depends on many factors and nuances
(states, stages, types, lines, shadow elements). And really, as
humans, I agree with Genpo Roshi that it seems we never truly let go
of the self or the ego. A question instead would be does it have us
or do we have it. If we can see that the ego is a useful tool, just
like our intellect, our theories, our personality, our understanding,
our skills, etc and live as spirit inhabiting the body and the ego,
then we can use this particular vehicle that we have manifested to
fulfill our greatest capacity in this lifetime. We go from developing
an ego/self to thinking we are the ego/personality/self to seeing
that we have one (them), to surrendering them to spirit or mystery or
life's secret impulse, to identifying as That consiously and then to
bringing That into and through the vehicle, using the vehicle
(ego/body/personality/self) as our way of manifesting the absolute in
this lifetime. On that "continuum" we go from thinking I have no
choice and that I am at the mercy of life, to learning that i can
take responsibility, i have power and i can choose, to realizing that
all of it is true and that with awareness and presence, one can act
and surrender in a way where the two become one and you begin to
allow Life to live itself through you. You are the seeker of the
way, the follower of the way and you are the Way. According to
Shaivism and tantra, there is nothing wrong with desire and
especially the desire for transformation. It is Eros moving you
toward the Absolute and once reached, the Absolute longs to embrace
it's Beloved Other which can only take place by descending back into
the Relative.

    Following is an entry I wrote for on on-line book discussion on Wilber’s The Eye of Spirit before most integral communities came into being. This was with a group from the Haven Institute in Canada. I mention Jock below.  Jock McKeen and Ben Wong are two of my favorite teachers. I was blessed to learn so much from them about the body, energy, emotion and boundaries.

Date: Saturday, January 26, 2002 8:50 AM Subject: [haven-discuss] Wilber- Chapter 9

Dear friends,

On page 206 in The Eye of Spirit, Wilber states:

 "..we are constantly contracting away from infinity into forms of grasping and experiencing and knowing and willing. ....At the beginning of this and every moment, each individual is God as the Clear Light; but by the end of this same moment--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye--he winds up as an isolated ego. And what happens In Beween the beginning and ending of this moment is identical to what happened In Between death and rebirth as described by the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

    I have not read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but I have meant to and I need to attempt it, I think.  Earlier in the paragraph, Wilber refers back to the idea of involution and evolution, stating that the process doesn't just happen during each lifetime, but it also happens in each moment. I find this very exciting.  Within each moment, each twinkling of an eye, I contract into venita and then dissolve into god or Emptiness, over and over and over again?!

    I am not a scientist, but this idea makes me think of Jock talking about atoms...how each atom is mostly empty space and therefore we are comprised of mostly empty space.  I also think about Sephen Hawkings Brief History of Time in which he talks about black holes(?) and howthey are really full of particles of Light! These ideas for me validate my ability to experience myself as now emptiness and now form...the beginning of a vague sense of non-dual experience. And I imagine that as awareness is more refined, the experience of contracting and expanding will speed up. Until an occasional glimpse of the contracting and expanding becomes a pulsation experience.  Until the pulsation experience becomes a Vibrational experience.  Until the Vibration experience is just    Hum.

Photo taken in Tijuana, Mexico December 2007


Let your mind drop into the Heart.
Where Love Reigns Supreme
Like Magic Demons
Streaming rainbow swirls of vibrant venomous laughter
infecting every creature
with the Light of soulful comeuppance

Hideous and quietly tiptoeing
through tulips bobbing into infinite blue
wandering joyously while crying tears
for the amazing sacred holy grace that forever languishes
dying forever into infinite release,

Then reforming into this, another act of love.

***

Photo by Madeleine Lewis

(Entry reposted from May 06 Integral New York City salon discussion list)

There is something so ripe and deep and beautiful in the revelation of our stories.  Open conversation brings human confusion and denial from shadow to light..from the unconscious to the conscious, from the unspoken to the spoken, from the secret to the revealed.  Imagine everyone bringing their previous difficult experiences into the open and discussing them ...with responsibility and deep self-reflection...albeit with questions that remain.   Imagine how much more i/we could learn from the tales and insights of others with this kind of strength, depth, openness to learning and self-honesty.   

This morning i immersed myself in a book called Yoga Spandakarika by Daniel Odier.  He is a scholar with a gift of presenting very simply an integration of the texts of Ch'an, Dzogchen, and the Chinese, Tibetan and Kashmiri Mahamudras. He says:  

"The great subtlety of the Tantric masters was to take the whole of human passions and to ask themselves these questions: "How to make it so that all is used, nothing is denied, nothing is rejected? How to make it so that we will not find ourselves one day face to face with our own demons, who always come back in hordes to destroy the quest? .....The Tantric approach..is to engage ourselves completely with our human characteristics and to accept the whole of what we are. ....Once we start to understand this dynamic, we realize that there really is no place for sublimation. There is simply the act of looking deeply at what is there and of allowing whatever has remained buried to come up out of the ground and open like a budding flower." 

He then goes on to say that as we look at every desire, thought, feeling experience that arises we realize that it isn't a specific desire or passion that brings suffering...but a limitation of that desire or passion (i.e. contracting around it in any way). Instead, if we completely open to it and accept it, we liberate ourselves and everything into the infinite space of the "heart" or supreme consciousness.   "Once passion is freed from suffering [contraction around an object], it becomes even more intense....there is now an impassioned energy that continually quenches our thirst.  ...this spherical kundalini, which unfurls from the heart and permeates the totality of space, is quite simply absolute love. ...Absolute love is neurotic love ...whose limits have quite simply exploded and evaporated:"

Addendum 10/2007

And simultaneously, expansion and contraction are One, like the yin/yang symbol.  One cannot exist without the other.  Contraction is embraced/dissolved in the expansion and expansion is embraced/dissolved into contraction.  The dance happens.

Well, I'm back.  I am a different person than i was.  Aren't we always.....it's just that we don't realize the changes that accrue incrementally and subtly until a huge iceburg breaks away all at once and we find ourselves afloat in some new territory..... and then new reflections show us our new self piece by piece, one side or one angle at a time until we get a big enough picture of who we are now and where we are now landed.  At least for this snapshot in time.  This moment.  Because the change never stops, really.  It's just that we want to cling to form and the known past out of some need for illusory security.  And then we become rigidified and frozen, unhappy, stale, depressed and empty.

So, humm.  Maybe it works better just to keep oneself in motion, present to the ongoing emergent possibilities... the everpresent collaboration with all that exists, that keeps us on our toes, always one with and privy to the unknowable, never sure, but always awake.

I had the priviledge of meeting George Por and Helen Titchen Beeth in Brussels in June.  I met many others as well, in an Art of Hosting workshop in the Belgian countryside.  I travelled to Rotterdam to see my friend Anita Floris whom I met in Salt Lake City last October while at The Big Mind retreat and i spent a couple of hours in The Hague with Peter Merry, learning about his Center for Human Emergence.

These are remarkable people who are making a difference, people who are infiltrating the mainstream with Boddhisattvic innovation.  Our meetings with each other strengthen the Field that can make possible the best of the Human heart, mind, spirit and future.  Through our work in our communities and our meetings with one another, we can make a difference.

Ideas like the Collective Buddha, Evolutionary Nexus, Collective Intelligence, and communties like the Berkana Institute, Integral, Better World Network, Pacific Integral and others are on the verge of coming together.  We are creating a huge web out of thin air, an infrastructure to link the human family in compassionate and hopeful embrace.  It is a big piece of work and we welcome all who are called to join.

photo by George Jisho Robertson 

According to Tibetan Buddhism/book of the dead..... The Indestructible drop resides in the center of the chest. It is like a drop of nectar that is the seed of your soul and it migrates from lifetime to lifetime and is connected to the All.  When one drops into this "drop" of nectar, this place through which the eternal stream asserts itself, words become like honey, sweet, easy and fluid. Paradox finds its Union in this Beloved Temple called Home. Love, Life and Light reside Here and no where.

In this "surrender" is where we "rest" in the knowledge and experience that there is no control and no self. Only the Mercy of the Universe, shining through "our" Wondering, "our" Being and "our" Doing.

On page 180 of The Eye of Spirit, Wilber explains the Tibetan Buddhist model as follows:

"In the heart center of every human, there is an empty essence of consciousness, divided into two layers or drops: 1) the "lifetime indestructible drop," which develops during a particular lifetime, but perishes upon bilogical death, and 2), within or interior to the lifetime indestructible drop, the "eternal indestructible drop," which lasts until Buddhahood and thus transmigrates from life to life until radical Enlightenment."

He continues: "In general....the higher level of stable evolution reached in any given life permeates the eternal indestructible drop and thus is carried, not usually as specific memories but as a mood of adaptation, to the next life.  .....the more evolved the soul is, the less involved it is (i.e., the less it forgets its higher source and suchness), and this continues until radical Enlightenment, whereupon the soul is completely subsumed or superseded in prior Unborn Spirit or radical Emptiness, which is simply the luminous transparency of this and every moment."

Even Formlessness is formless
And Emptiness is empty
And Big mind has no substance
And love is just an illusion

Yet Here I Am

Writing these words
With no self at the helmless helm
And self holding the pen that is no pen
Smiling at the beauty that doesn't exist
And loving without loving

Now
This body moves
as it moves
No one else like this
Formlessness defined through each thought, word and deed
Every movement ordinary.
Every movement divine.


And Tantra - Splashing in the Ecstatic Miracle of the Human Heart

One of 10 million relics in this sea of beauty and death, i sparkle as only i can. Unscathed in spirit and demolished in bone, I walk out of the immersion, onto the shores of this imaginary dream to offer the fruits of my human remains before i am gone again.    

My Beloved. Your Beauty and Grace astound me. I bow to your Greatness.  I bathe in your Glory. I fall to the ground and kiss the earth upon which you walk. I stand tall into the heavens, arms wide open, raised to the sky, rejoicing in your everpresent existence.  

There is a way to be with another that goes deeper than hearing with the ears and seeing with the eyes.  There is the listening with the ears and the seeing through the eyes, yes. But there is also a possibility of feeling into ones own cells.  Breathing awareness into and through one's own entire physical and subtle body/mind/emotion/energy field.  And through that openness, the "other" can be sensed or felt, especially if that "other" is also open.  Then there is a feeling of what it is like to be that person.  How it feels to be and walk in the world as that person.  Where the physical holding is in the musculature of the other, how that holding shifts the skeletal structure, how the holding stops the breath from circulating to expand, contract and take up space.  How all of this holding stops various emotions or freedom of expression and how these various blockages lead to a cluster of psychological processes (including chakra imbalances) and behavioral interactions that interfere with relationships and life effectiveness in general.

In being with someone like this (with their permission), it is then possible to begin reflecting awareness back to help this person see the contractions as well as the amazing qualities of who they are. How relaxing the contractions, actually liberates the self system to allow for greater versatility and fullness.  

With practice, another learns how to empty the mind and breathe awareness down into the body, drop into the body and sense or feel their own cellular body/emotion/mind/energy so their own awareness can be brought to their own holdings and released consciously as they wish. They are able to feel/receive much subtler communication, achieve greater responsivness,  greater aliveness and connection within themselves, to others and to Life. 

In being with another where they are, it is possible to walk together into releasing the blockages that prevent their most potent, authentic and exuberant expression of this precious human body that only they inhabit.  And if they are open, it is an honor to open together and to surrender to immersion in the most Brilliant One that we share.  

The loosening and dismantling continues.  As i keep giving up being right, possessing, being attached to what i think i want i just keep feeling stunned.  I spent last year dissolving and feeling stunned.  This year i am still stunned but i had been struck with Light and stunned by bliss....until now.   Now the bliss is dissipating.  And i am beginning to see that not only am i the Light shining through all things.  But i am the different selves, taking all of the different perspectives of those individual selves. 

As i loosen my self sense, my structure of who i believe myself to be, i have a vague sense of myself as loosely being/becoming/ shifting in and out of all of the many forms.  In this sense, i can change, shift, inhabit the many different aspects of existence.   I loosely become them and as if in a dreamy state i am beginning to see that in a sense i am them.

And i don't feel "out of my body" in this.  From an experiential pov,  i have more of a sense of embodiment than i ever have before.  Now instead of feeling myself incarnated in one distinct form, i have a sense of the notion of shifting into and out of many different forms or selves. 

I can't really say that this feels good. It is disconcerting and yet i am really curious about it.  There's really no place to land, and the ego becomes like a house of cards....empty of anything substantial.   How is this useful?   It allows me greater compassion, understanding, freedom, flexibility, insight, openness to learning for starters.  Likely this will lead to a greater capacity for love, wisdom and skilful communication.

Next week on October 4th, i go to another Pacific Integral GTC seminar.  The last two have opened me in dramatic ways.  It's likely this one will, too.  Two weeks after i return, i go to Salt Lake City for 4 weeks to train in the Big Mind process with Genpo Roshi and Diane Hamilton.  There will be much practice in inhabiting many different selves, seeing that they are all constructs and opening to greater freedom.

And there will be much that is yet unknown.  The more open and loose in structure i can be, the more i will take in and the more expansion that will take place.  That is my practice.....to stay loose and become as much of it as possible while maintaining the integrity that is mine to carry.