By a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For

Home , Jan Chozen Bays, Joan Halifax, Nyanatiloka, Shauna Shapiro

SUBTLE ENERGY AND THE STRUCTURE OF SUBJECT-OBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS

GARY LEE BUCK

A dissertation

submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

PSYCHOLOGY

MERIDIAN UNIVERSITY

2010

GARY LEE BUCK

2010

SUBTLE ENERGY AND THE STRUCTURE OF SUBJECT-OBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS

GARY LEE BUCK

A dissertation

submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PSYCHOLOGY

MERIDIAN UNIVERSITY

2010

This dissertation has been accepted for the Faculty of Meridian University by:

______Roberta Goldfarb, Ph.D. Dissertation Advisor

______Melissa Schwartz, Ph.D. Dissertation Chair

______Aftab Omer, Ph.D. Academic Dean

For the liberation of all sentient beings throughout the vast expanse of conditioned existence.

ABSTRACT

SUBTLE ENERGY AND THE STRUCTURE OF SUBJECT/OBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS

Gary Lee Buck

This study explores ways in which attending with mindfulness to subtle energy patterning that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness enables openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness. The research hypothesis stated that by mindfully engaging the subtle energy patterns that solidify the subject-object structure of consciousness, this structure would be transmuted, breaking the segregation of the knowing subject from its objects, revealing the realm of participatory consciousness.

Literature in Western Psychology about consciousness, human development, and research on Buddhist meditation, plus sources on subtle energy, Buddhism and Imaginal

Psychology were reviewed. There was a gap in the literature regarding analysis of first person reports of expert meditators exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory consciousness, especially from the subtle energy perspective.

The methodology used Imaginal Inquiry to explore the experience of expert meditators focused on hypothesized subtle energy boundaries between subject and object.

vi subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness including the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness. Learning One demonstrated that Buddhist meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry techniques who focus on the apparent boundary between subject and object have easy access to this realm of participatory consciousness. Learning Two empirically demonstrated that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. Learning Three demonstrated that expert meditators can detail the process by which subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention. Learning Four demonstrated that expert meditators can detail the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject/object consciousness.

These Learnings demonstrated the efficacy of Imaginal Inquiry to explore the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness and offered empirical evidence for views held in Buddhist contexts. This research had implications for those studying perception, attention, projection, consciousness, and the psychological role of subtle energy.

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the tireless sacrifice and support of my wife, Patharwadee Kulkeaw. To her my deepest gratitude.

I wish to thank my Dissertation Committee, Roberta Goldfarb, Ph.D., Melissa

Schwartz, Ph.D., and Aftab Omer, Ph.D. for their patient support and for allowing me to tackle an unusual, challenging, and difficult topic that was important to me. I owe a debt of gratitude to my teachers at Meridian University who skillfully opened my mind to the realm of Imaginal Psychology.

Over the years I have been blessed to receive Buddhist teachings from some of the finest teachers on the planet. Of special importance relative to my dissertation topic are Christopher Titmuss, who first inspired my interest in Dependent Origination, the late

Ajahn Buddhadassa, who nurtured that interest, and Joseph Goldstein and Steve

Armstrong, who guided me during the three-month retreat where my own understanding of the relationship between Dependent Origination, the rūpa jhānas and ārippas, and the patterned activity of subtle energy all fell into place. I have especially benefited in more recent years from my association with the Dzogchen and Mahamudra practice lineages of the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. Tibetan teachers in these traditions who have influenced my own development in ways that are reflected in this dissertation are the late

Tulku Urgyen, the late Chagdud Rinpoche, Gyatrul Rinpoche, and Thrangu Rinpoche.

Lama Drimed, who nurtured my interest in Dzogchen, Lama Thapkay, especially for his teachings on Mahamudra, and Lama Palden, for her ongoing support in many ways are

Western Vajrayana teachers who have been influential and/or supportive in important

viii ways. In the Zen tradition, Sasaki Roshi pointed me directly towards my topic with his use of koans. In the Theravadan tradition, Ajahn Amaro of Abhayagiri Monastery offered support and encouragement at a critical time.

I have been fortunate to have found a Buddhist lineage of healing energy work,

Reiki Jin Kei Do, which has helped me to cultivate my own sensitivity to, and understanding of, subtle energy as well as its relationship to visionary imagery. I want to especially thank Gordon Bell, who first attuned me to the Reiki of this lineage, Ann

Pectal, who taught me its healing practices and introduced me to its more spiritual practice of Buddho EnerSense, and Ann’s teacher, Ranga Premratana, who, upon hearing of my experiences with subtle energy and Dependent Origination from Ann, encouraged me to write about that understanding. A letter I wrote to Ranga in response to this request became the basis for my description of my own experiences in Appendix 13.

Numerous friends and colleagues have offered invaluable support along the way.

Among them are Richard Miller, Ph.D., John Prendergast, Ph.D., Leslie Grant, and Tom

Riddle, all four of whom volunteered their time to help me complete a pilot study to test my methodology which gave me the confidence to move forward. Leslie has been an especially supportive friend over the duration of my dissertation efforts, as has my fellow

Cohort Seven member, Glenn Francis, on whom I could always rely for good advice and an understanding ear. My clinical supervisor, Brian Lukas, Ph.D., has helped me to stay afloat financially during my school years. Liza Ravitz, Ph.D., guided me through the emotional challenges of a dissertation, lending encouragement at critical times.

Lastly I would like to thank my eight participants without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. Their generous offering of their time and expertise, as well

ix as their sincere efforts in all aspects of their part in this research project were essential to its completion.

CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Research Topic

Relationship to the Topic

Theory-in-Practice

Research Problem and Hypothesis

Methodology and Research Design

Learnings

Significance and Relevance of the Topic

2. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 22

Introduction

Western Perspectives on Consciousness

Developmental Perspectives on Consciousness

Recent Western Scientific Research on Buddhist Meditation

Perspectives on Subtle Energy, Subtle Body and Subtle Sense Capacities

Buddhist Perspectives on Consciousness and Subtle Energy

Imaginal Approaches to Consciousness and Subtle Energy

xi Conclusion

3. METHODOLOGY ...... 108

Introduction and Overview

Participants

The Four Phases of Imaginal Inquiry

4. LEARNINGS ...... 129

Introduction and Overview

Cummulative Learning: Healing the Cleft in Consciousness

Learning One: Opening from Two into One

Learning Two: A Cartography of Participation: From Interconnectedness to Interpenetration to Insubstantiality and Beyond

Learning Three: Depolarizing Attention: Opening to the Undivided Activity of the Cosmos

Learning Four: Witness to Creation: Rending the World into Two

Conclusion

5. REFLECTIONS ...... 189

Significance of Learnings

Mythic and Archetypal Reflections

Implications of the Study

Appendix

1. ETHICS APPLICATION ...... 226

2. CONCEPTUAL OUTLINE ...... 232

3. CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE ...... 234

4. INFORMED CONSENT FORM ...... 239

xii

5. SCREENING INTERVIEW PROTOCOL ...... 242

6. MINDFUL EXPLORATION EXERCISE AND REPORTING PROTOCOL ...... 244

7. MINDFUL EXPLORATION EXERCISE DAILY JOURNAL FORM ...... 247

8. TEN-DAY SUMMARY REPORT FORM ...... 248

9. POST-DATA COLLECTION INTERVIEW PROTOCOL . . . 250

10. POST-DATA COLLECTION INTERVIEW RESEARCHER SELF-TRACKING FORM ...... 253

11. SUMMARY OF THE DATA...... 254

12. SUMMARY OF THE LEARNINGS ...... 274

13. THE SUBTLE ENERGY DYNAMICS OF DEPENDENT ORIGINATION ...... 278

14. TABLE TWO: THE EARLY LINKS OF DEPENDENT ORIGINATION ...... 320

15. “WHERE HAVE ALL THE BOUNDARIES GONE? LONG TIME PASSING” ...... 324

NOTES ...... 331

REFERENCES ...... 394

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Research Topic

This research project focuses on subject-object consciousness, its transmutation into participatory consciousness and the role of subtle energy activity in that process.

Subject-object consciousness is our human experience of being a knowing subject separate from the known sensory objects that constitute our environment while participatory consciousness is defined by Aftab Omer as “states of consciousness which are unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self.” 1 Parallel concepts for subject-object consciousness include ego-consciousness and duality. Erich Neumann equates ego-consciousness with “the splitting of the world into subject and object, inside and outside,” while Richard Miller writes that “duality arises when the unified field of

Awareness is split by the mind into separate subject and object (and this split is) believed to be real.” 2 Miller’s concept of the unified field of Awareness is thus a parallel concept for participatory consciousness. Michael Levin uses the term participatory in contrast to experience which is “structured into subject and object.” 3 According to John Wellwood, perception involving a split into subject and object, which he calls dualistic perception, leads to “endless inner conflict, alienation and suffering.” 4

For the purpose of this study, subtle energy is described as a usually subliminal domain of faint sensory experience within and around the physical body. This definition draws on Arnold Mindell’s concept of Dreaming, which he also calls “the energy behind

2 everything” and describes as a faint, usually subliminal, radiation within and beyond the physical body.5

In the field of Consciousness Studies, there is a wide divergence of theoretical perspectives concerning the nature of consciousness. Arthur Reber defines consciousness as “a domain of mind that contains the sensations, perceptions and memories of which one is momentarily aware: that is, those aspects of present mental life that one is attending to.” 6 For Antonio Damasio, consciousness is a biological function involving knowing, especially that pattern of mind that links the subject with the object.7 Daniel

Dennett is another proponent of the biological basis for consciousness, seeing consciousness as a derivative of our neurophysiology.8 By contrast, Pierro Scaruffi proposes that consciousness is a basic property of matter while Stanislav Grof and Hal

Bennett see consciousness not as a property or derivative of matter but as a fundamental constituent of the universe.9 Daryl Sharp gives a Jungian definition of consciousness as

“the function or activity that maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego” which he calls “the subject of consciousness.” 10 Edward Edinger describes consciousness etymologically as the “experience of knowing together with an ‘other.’” 11 According to

Eleanor Rosch, consciousness, which she calls a mode of knowing in which knowing seems to reside within a perceiver who seems to be separate from what is perceived, is made out of awareness, or primary knowing, a field-like experience in which the field knows itself.12 Shaun Gallagher describes the perceptual process of creating an object as having two aspects: the intentional directing of awareness towards the object and the conceptualization of the object.13 C.O. Evans similarly proposes that the subject-object split occurs through a process of projection whereby a foreground of consciousness, the object, is created by the activity of attending, leaving an unprojected background, the

3 subject, thus creating a subject-object polarity.14 For Evans, like Rosch, this polarity emerges from an underlying whole, homogenous consciousness, prior to the activity of projection.15

The Buddhist term universally translated as consciousness, viññana (in Pali; vijnana in Sanskrit) is described as the knowing aspect of experience associated with the objects of the senses and the sensory organs.16 This usage gives rise to six forms of consciousness, five associated with the five physical senses and a sixth or mind sense with thoughts, emotions, dreams, visionary imagery, etc., as its objects.17 Consciousness is also described as “bare cognition” which is always joined with vedanā (the positive, neutral, or unpleasant feeling tone of a sensory experience), sañña (the recognition of an objects distinctive marks, including memory if the marks have been previously perceived), and sankhāra (in this context meaning volitional aspects of a moment of knowing.)18 It is important to note here that the Buddhist use of the term consciousness does not include thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. Western concepts of consciousness often do, as in Reber above, or do not specifically clarify this point.

From the Vajrayana Buddhist Mahamudra perspective, consciousness, that which knows, and appearances, phenomena that are known, both emerge from luminosity, a fundamental underlying aspect of experience in which these two are a unity.19

Luminosity, is further joined with emptiness, here the insubstantial nature of phenomena, as facets of primordial awareness, a deeper unity of knowing and known in which emptiness and luminosity are experienced as inseparable.20 A subtle difference Omer’s notion of participatory consciousness and Mahamudra perspective may be the latter’s emphasis on the underlying identity of subject and object as well as their insubstantiality in contrast to Omer’s focus on the non-separateness of the (knowing) self.

However Omer does point to something similar to insubstantiality/emptiness with his concept of disidentification, “a key dimension in the transformation of identity associated with the emergence of a spacious awareness free from frozen images of self.” 21 He thus emphasizes the transformative aspects of this experience of emptiness of self. Emptiness is also an important theme for Linda Sussman who defines it as a no-thingness that emerges when all that makes up our sense-of-self falls away exposing an empty awareness. This empty awareness, she writes, reveals itself experientially when we attend to a subtle activity beneath our usual experience of solid, stable things and encounter instead, their ephemeral coming into apparent existence.22 For Sussman, it is this empty awareness that “take(s) the shape of all forms,” including sense objects, thoughts, and emotions.23 This realm of becoming is the focus of what Arnold Mindell terms lucidity. Lucidity is a subtle sensory capacity that allows us to attend in our direct, present-moment experience of Dreaming, his notion of a layer of faint sensation usually subliminal to, and yet which structures the emergence of, our everyday conscious experience.24 He writes that this realm of subtle sensations within and around the physical body appears as an insubstantial or subtle body. 25 Omer, Sussman, and Mindell here reflect a key element of Imaginal Psychology, the emphasis on direct experience.26

Olga Louchakova and Arielle Warner describe the subtle body as structures belonging to the psyche yet encountered within the body during the practice of looking introspectively within.27 For Ken Wilber, the subtle body refers to blissful states of awareness in which the ordinary and, for him, illusory boundary separating an organism from its surrounding environment no longer pertains.28 Nathan Schwartz-Salant sees the merger between subject and object suggested in the variations on participatory consciousness described above as residing in the subtle body, for him a field-like

5 experience which contains both inner and outer and lies between mind and matter.29 He notes the possibility of our perceiving our own bodies as energy fields, which he says is what alchemists meant by their use of the term subtle body.30 Victor Mansfield and J.

Marvin Spiegelman, similarly describe the subtle body as a field phenomenon, depicting it as an expression of the psyche (the sum total of all our psychological dimensions, including both conscious and unconscious) on the level of subtle energy patterning.31

This experiential domain is widely described in the spiritual literature as being organized in distinct patterns, including centers of greater intensity, called chakras, pathways of flowing sensation, or nadis, and fields of energy, sometimes referred to as auras, all of which constitute kinds of subjectively experienced subtle energy imagery often given the label subtle body.32 Rosalyn Bruyere, Valery Hunt, and Wilber note the spatial proximity and functional relationship of these subtle energy images to certain aspects of human physical anatomy, especially certain endocrine glands and nerve plexes.33 However both Hunt and Wilber are careful to specify that although the chakras interact with the physical body, they are not anatomical in a physical sense.34

In the Eastern spiritual traditions, there are several terms which are understood to be forms of subtle energy, among them qi and kundalini, both of which Mindell also refers to as subtle energy equivalents to his term dreambody, defined as “inner body sensations and connected fantasies.”35 Charles Tart acknowledges the difficulty of defining subtle energy then describes qi as like a mental or archetypal image.36

Louchakova and Warner depict kundalini as the ability of pure consciousness to express itself as the multifaceted phenomenal world.37 They describe the subject and object poles of subject-object consciousness as connected by a spectrum of subtle energies.38 Barbara

Brennan writes that the human energy field, for her a parallel concept to the subtle body,

6 serves as a template for the creation and maintenance of the body.39 Donna Eden uses the term blueprint for this subtle energy function, which Ervin Laszlo depicts as the activity of the archetypes, “primordial structural elements of the human psyche,” as they apply to our physical form.40 In contrast, Wilber attributes the deconstruction of a barrier between self and the outside world that develops early in childhood to the activity of kundalini.41

From the Vajrayana perspective, subtle energy is known through subtle sensations that incessantly permeate the body and is the modality through which we experience what

Rob Preece calls the energy-wind body, a two-way communication link between consciousness and the physical body.42 Preece also describes subtle energy as the creative aspect of luminosity that manifests as imagery.43

My own perspective is similar to Mansfield and Spiegelman, Louchakova and

Warner, and Mindell above yet focuses on this tendency of subtle energy activity to move in a patterned way which can be directly experienced. The subtle energy patterns thus formed constitute a kind of imagery characteristic of the felt experiential domain of subtle energy. The image aspect of subtle energy activity is similar to the way that the activity of water, as it flows out a bathtub drain, forms the visual image of a vortex. The image of a vortex is made of water. We perceptually distinguish this image, this region of the water’s patterned activity, from the body of bath water as a whole. The vortex is thereby conferred an apparent perceptual status of its own when in fact all that is happening is that water in one region of the tub is moving in a particular repetitive manner. In fact, we would be hard pressed to identify that place where the vortex ends and the rest of the water in the tub begins.44

An apt example from the literature on subtle energy/subtle body is that of the chakras. Hunt describes chakras as “wheel-like vortices of energy.” 45 Rosalyn Bruyere

7 writes that to one with ‘second sight,’ an enhanced visual ability allowing for the realm of subtle energy and the subtle body to be experienced visually, the chakras appear as small

“cyclones of energy.” 46 Of course chakras can also be ‘felt.’

Like Sussman’s emptiness, this study proposes that this domain of subtle energy imagery to reside beneath our ordinary everyday conscious awareness and to have a central role in the shaping of our experience. Like Mindell’s Dreaming, the range of subtle energy image-forming activity is not limited to the space within our physical body.

Auras, for example, like chakras, are described as a kind of felt subtle energy imagery which extend beyond the space within our skin.47

As mentioned above, the particular subtle energy imagery which I am studying is felt not as vortices but as boundaries demarcating inner from outer, subject from object, and self from other-than-self. As such these subtle energy images play a critical role in shaping the subject-object orientation of our non-participatory forms of consciousness. I hypothesize that engaging these experience-shaping subtle energy boundary images with mindfulness, in which attention is non-judgmentally focused on present-moment sensory experiencing including those elements which shape the experience, will lead to their dissolution, catalyzing a transmutation of subject-object consciousness into forms of participatory consciousness.48

Although Buddhist sources often point to conceptualization, the process of forming a concept of an object of experience, as the culprit in the creation of the subject-object split, I suggest that there is also this other element at work, the creation of a spatial separation between these two, that may be even more fundamental.49 Similar to

Evans, I focus on a projection-like process whereby the apparent spatial split into subject and object is created. I propose that this process is multi-layered and involves the image-

8 making activity of subtle energy, including the creation of subtle energy boundaries that segregate subject from object.

From a Buddhist perspective, the split into subject and object and the identification with the subject as the self is a central element of human suffering.50

Within the field of Psychology, this split is sometimes described as the deepest expression of alienation.51

Relationship to the Topic

My interest in subtle energy and its relationship to subject-object consciousness has its roots in my three decades of Buddhist mindfulness meditation during which I encountered the direct, subjective experiential examination of consciousness. This exploration led to shifts in my experience wherein the sense of being a knowing subject separate from the known sensory objects constituting my environment had disappeared, revealing an underlying spacious, undivided, self-knowing field of experience.52

Re-emerging into my ordinary subject-object mode of knowing, my understanding of myself and my identity as a human being had shifted. Thus began a transformation of identity, my understanding and experience of who and how I am as a human being, a process that continues to deepen to this day. A compelling aspect of this process has been my quest to understand how this experience of being a knowing subject apparently separate from the known objects of my sensual experience arises out of this singular field of experience.53

In time, my interest focused on Tibetan Buddhism, which utilizes techniques in which the meditator imagines the form of a deity, then works with a subjectively felt subtle energy, allowing this energy to move within the body, as well as directing it out

9 towards, and receiving it from, the deity image in front.54 This practice thus introduced me to mindfulness of the experiential domain subtle energy described above.

In many ways, my personal experience of the realm of subtle energy largely bears out the depictions of the chakras, channels, and energy fields offered by Bruyere, Hunt, and Wilber above. For example, when I experience them directly as expressions of subtle energy, my own chakras have the feeling of a circular motion, which, if considered as if viewed from the front of my body, does move in a clockwise direction. This direct present-moment felt experience of the chakras as a kind of motion having a center and moving out from the center in a spiraling manner is a specific example of what I mean by subtle energy imagery.55

However what I am researching here is part of a new addition to the map of the realm of subtle energy experience. This study examines a hypothesized set of subtle energy patterns or images which arise in a similar way from the activity of subtle energy and create apparent felt boundaries between subject and object. This new description relates subtle energy activity to an aspect of the perception process that structures the perceiver and the perceived into a subject-object duality.56

But it is important to emphasize that I use the word image here not used in a visual sense. Imagery can be formed through any of our sensory capacities. For example, an orchestra playing a symphony generates patterns of sound that create a dynamic image that we can sense and recognize auditorily as a particular piece of music. The subtle energy images I describe experiencing below are sculpted of subtle energy itself and experienced/felt directly through a sensory capacity reminiscent of Mindell’s lucidity.

My awareness of this elusive realm and of the new section of the subtle energy map I am proposing crystallized during a three-month silent retreat devoted to samatha

(tranquility or concentration) meditation, by which the ability of the mind to stay intensely still and focused or concentrated is cultivated and then deepens in discrete stages.57 In the course of this retreat I noticed distinct layers of imagery sculpted of and by the patterned activity of subtle energy, each associated with a particular level of concentration. In my experience, the deepest layers of concentration were the least structured with a new layer of subtle energy structure or imagery being added as experience shifted to each successively less concentrated layer of experience. As this sequence of images unfolded for me, each newly arising image added a new layer of structure, shaping my experience in a new way. This series of patterned subtle energy activity shifted my perception in an orderly sequence that seemed to me to be central to the emergence of my subjectively felt sense-of-self from the underlying undivided field of experience.58

This entire complex of layered, sensed subtle energy images and the tacit meanings and affects associated with them both shaped and constituted my experience. I later concluded that this subtle energy imagery was thus an essential element of what

Omer calls imaginal structures which he defines as

assemblies of sensory, affective, and cognitive aspects of experience constellated into images; they both mediate and constitute experience. The specifics of an imaginal structure are determined by an interaction of personal, cultural, and archetypal influences. These influences may be teased apart by attending to the stories that form personal character and the myths that shape cultural life. During the individuation process, imaginal structures are transmuted into emergent and enhanced capacities as well as a transformed identity. Any enduring and substantive change in individual or group behavior requires a transmuting of imaginal structures. This transmutation depends upon an affirmative turn toward the passionate nature of the soul.59

Though we are usually unaware of them, these subtle energy images can be directly experienced through the cultivation of a highly concentrated mindfulness. Under mindful

11 inquiry these layered structures seemed to undergo transmutation (fundamental structural change) evoking shifts in my affective state (e.g., fear, joy, equanimity), my sense-of-self, and my perception and understanding of the world around me of a deconstructive nature.60 As I mindfully examined them, each layer dissolved revealing the one beneath with its distinctive shaping of my experience, sometimes eliciting dreamlike visionary imagery in the process.61

It is the my premise that our felt sense of being a knowing subject contained within a spatially self-defining boundary is dependent on the formation of patterns or images of subtle energy roughly located in several ways at the boundary of our physical body. My experience suggests that these subtle energy images play a fundamental role in the construction of our subject/object consciousness by their forming an apparent barrier behind which knowing, or consciousness, is segregated from its objects. As such, they are a core aspect of all imaginal structures that arise in the context of this dualistic form of experience. Due to the usually subliminal nature of this aspect of dualistic imaginal structures and the tacit meanings we give it, our subject/object stance is so deeply ingrained that it is experienced axiomatically simply as the way things are and, as such, generally goes unquestioned. However, I suggest that by mindfully engaging this subtle energy boundary aspect of our being, we can transmute this aspect of our dualistic imaginal structures, catalyzing shifts in perception that are free of the delusion of being a self separate from what it knows.62

What follows is a brief description of my experience of the sequence of subtle energy images beginning with that associated with the deepest layer of concentration back through the next four successively less subtle layers. The description below is that which accompanied sight since vision is the sense through which I first noticed the

12 effects of this sequence in the shaping of my experience. It describes the series of subtle energy events which accompanies and structures the arising of the experience of a new visual focus. In my experience the full sequence takes place within a time period of a bit more than a second but can be teased apart by a meditator who can intentionally resolve to remain in a particular level of concentration or move at will from one quantum-like layer of concentration to another, skills I learned during this retreat.63

At the most subtle level of concentration, the newly arising visual experience was nothing more than patches of color and shape with no location in space. The first subtle energy experience is a flow of energy that enters the body near the base of the spine and streams upwards to the center of the chest, often referred to as the heart center. Upon reaching the chest there is an explosion of energy in all directions resulting in the felt sense of an undivided, yet delimited, field with center and periphery. Color and shape are now located at the periphery. This field with center and periphery is the first subtle energy image in the series. The second energy activity phase involves felt movement from the portions of the periphery towards the center resulting in the experience of differences of depth within the visual field creating the overall impression of a spatial differentiation, with some patches of color appearing nearer to and others farther from the center. At this point the field is permeated with knowing. The entire field knows itself.

The third energy movement comes from the heart outwards towards a specific region of the spatially differentiated periphery, the object-to-be, so to speak. At the same time as the focus begins to be narrowed to a specific region of the field, this outward flow remains closer to the heart, roughly corresponding with the outer surface of the torso, forming a boundary segregating the region closest to the center from the rest of the field.

This third, subtle energy image, both directional and boundary-like, begins the process of

13 marking off the region of the field that will become the self from that which is the region of other-than-self. Knowing, now experienced as an aspect of the self, is, at this point, spatially distinct from what is known for the first time in this process and is felt to be located at the heart. Yet, at this third stage, the whole field still retains a unitary quality, that of space rather than knowing. This new boundary demarcates contiguous regions of this spatial whole. The emerging pair of subject and object occupy different regions of the whole but are still connected by the space of the field itself, experienced as a presence that is felt to be ubiquitous throughout this newly partitioned whole. Space as a presence thus serves to join the region of the emerging subject to that of its apparent objects.

With the emergence of the fourth image a major shift takes place. The fourth image begins as a flow of energy from the heart which emanates through the center of the body to the head and then to the region of the face. Here it establishes a secondary boundary between self as that which knows and other-than-self, which is known, between seer and seen. This second felt subtle energy image of the facial boundary is accompanied by a shift in the experience of the space within the field. Instead of being experienced as a presence, space recedes into absence. An apparent gap, space as an absence, opens up between the boundary at the face and the visual imagery now taking shape outside that boundary. What were previously regions of a periphery, some that were closer to or farther from, yet still connected to, the center are now experienced as separate objects discretely located within space, which is experienced as an absence.

Knowing is now completely sequestered ‘inside,’ that is, behind the facial boundary, and looks ‘out’ at discrete objects located ‘outside’ itself in various positions and at different distances. Here for the first time, there is a clear felt division into a knowing subject apparently separate from a region of discrete known visual objects. With this new subtle

14 energy image of a boundary at the face, there is a shift of the felt locus of knowing from the heart to the head.64 In arising together in this way, subject and object are experienced to be ontologically interdependent. That is neither can occur without also the occurrence of the other.65 They depend on each other for their apparent existence as distinct entities.

As I was experiencing this underlying layered and sequential structure, I noticed a strong correlation to the first four links in the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent

Origination.66 This relationship is more fully explored in Chapter Five and especially in

Appendices 13 and 14.67

This entire complex of layered, sensed subtle energy images and the tacit meanings and affects associated with them both shaped and constituted my experience. In my experience this subtle energy imagery is thus an essential, though usually hidden, sensory element of what Omer calls imaginal structures. I suggest that the subtle energy imagery that I am exploring is primarily an aspect of the archetypal dimension of imaginal structures.68

The focus of this research is on this reverse process or the destructuring of the sense-of-self. More specifically I focus on the destructuring of the subject-object split which, my experience suggests, emerges at the fourth layer of the process described above. The following description is again according to my own experience. Through the lens of the fourth layer of subtle energy imagery, a spatial gap is experienced between knowing subject and known object. Knowing is segregated from that which it knows by the image of a facial boundary constructed of subtle energy. As noted above, these two, subject and object, only occur interdependently. When deeply concentrated mindfulness is focused on this apparent boundary it dissolves. Space re-emerges as an active presence forming a field-like experience in which subject and object are now interconnected as

15 aspects of a larger whole. The experience of knowing now shifts to reside at the heart center.

With knowing experienced at the heart, the second more subtle boundary is located at the front of the torso. When this boundary is similarly attended to, it also dissolves. Knowing is seemingly freed from its encapsulation at the heart and experienced as filling the entire field of experience, now coextensive with and interpenetrating that which it knows. The split in luminosity described above has been healed. Even with the first of these two experiences, the delusion of being a separate self has dissolved. Participatory consciousness has emerged. With the second it only deepens.

With the dissolution of the next layer of subtle energy patterning, that which distinguishes objects in the field by their diverse spatial relationship to the center and each other, the whole field loses its sense of being substantial. The experience of emptiness/insubstantiality as described in the Mahamudra literature referred to above and by Sussman has dawned. When the center/periphery structure itself dissolves, luminosity and emptiness are experienced as inseparable aspects of a singular reality. Primordial awareness has dawned. As such, this process of destructuring the sense-of-self involved in the layer-by-layer reversal of the chain of Dependent Origination is an example of

Omer’s notion of disidentification.69

As compelling as this subtle energy expression of these deep, usually subliminal, aspects of the process of perception has been for me personally, I have not seen it described in the Buddhist literature.70 As such I wondered if this kind of experience is idiosyncratic to me or if, in fact, it is simply an as yet unreported aspect of the human perceptual process. I therefore decided to empirically test my own experiential subtle energy understanding of this phase of the perceptual process. .

Theory-in-Practice

According to Imaginal Transformative Praxis, an approach to Imaginal

Psychology developed by Omer which “consists of concepts, principles and practices that constitute an integrative approach to personal and cultural transformation,” through the process of inquiry grounded in reflexivity (“the capacity to engage and be aware of those imaginal structures that shape and constitute our experience.”), those aspects of imaginal structures which contribute to and/or constitute the human experience of being an encapsulated center of subjectivity, that is non-participatory, subject/object consciousness, can be dismantled, at least temporarily.71 This dismantling has the potential to reveal to us the experience of participatory consciousness, a kind of disidentification that evokes a new and spacious way of experiencing “unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self.” 72

Omer’s definition of participatory consciousness mentioned above, suggests a plurality of manifestations without describing the variety of such states or the relationship of one form of participatory consciousness to another. Buddhist theory both marks the transition to participatory consciousness and delineates its various depths. To highlight the Buddhist perspective I have chosen as the Theory-in Practice Mahamudra theory form the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition. From the Mahamudra perspective, we ordinarily experience ourselves in our ordinary or subject-object consciousness as the knowing subject, which is spatially separate and distinct from the objects we know. This way of knowing is what is meant by the term consciousness while appearance refers to that which is known. When this structuring into consciousness and appearance begins to break down, the first shift in experience involves a reconnecting of consciousness with its

17 objects. Instead of being separate and apparently discrete entities, these two are now experienced as interconnected, yet remain distinct, much like the way the poles of a magnet are connected regions of a singular material body.73

A second shift results in the loss of this regional distinctness as the two now interpenetrate.74 From the Mahamudra perspective, this is called luminosity, in which experience dawns as an undivided field exposing the underlying unity of subject and object, knowing and known. A further deconstruction reveals that this undivided field has no substance or materiality, an experience also described as an unimpeded openness, both of which are meanings of the Buddhist term emptiness.75

With this experiential predominance of insubstantiality, there remains within the field the sense of a center as a reference point in relation to the field as a whole. When this subtle energy structure falls away, primordial awareness, the underlying unity of emptiness and luminosity, is revealed.76 I propose that each of these shifts involves the dissolution of a layer of subtle energy imagery, the first two of which function as boundaries segregating knowing from what is known.77

Research Problem and Hypothesis

This research was designed to answer the question posed by the Research

Problem: In what ways does attending with mindfulness to subtle energy patterning that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness? The intention has been to evoke in the participants the experience, understanding, and transmutation of the layers of this subtle energy imagery which create and consolidate the subject-object split by encapsulating knowing within apparent subtle energy images that spatially correspond with regions of the participant’s

18 felt physical bodily boundary. The Research Hypothesis was that by mindfully engaging the subtle energy images that solidify the subject-object structure of consciousness, this structure will be transmuted, breaking the segregation of knowing, as the subject, from its known objects, and thus revealing the realm of participatory consciousness.78

Methodology and Research Design

I recruited long-term meditators who are adept at both mindfulness and concentration practices. The methodology was Imaginal Inquiry, which involves evoking new experiences followed by their expression, interpretation, and integration. I introduced the participants to the practice of attending mindfully to the experience of this hypothesized subtle energy imagery of bodily boundaries to evoke their transmutation.

Participants then expressed and interpreted their experiences through writing, artwork, and a face-to-face interview, all of which also catalyzed personal integration.

Learnings

The Cumulative Learning states that mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundary between subject and object within the context of the Imaginal Inquiry research paradigm is an effective strategy for experientially exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness as well as the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness. Learning One empirically demonstrates that

Learning Three empirically demonstrates that expert meditators can detail the process by which subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention. The participants were able to track their experience as it shifted from subject-object consciousness to participatory forms of experience. Their reports point towards the central role of shifts in attention in this process.

As the converse to Learning Three, Learning Four empirically demonstrates that expert meditators can detail the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject/object consciousness. Learning Four was unexpected. The appearance of the data leading to it is the result of the curiosity and perspicacity of the participants in their exploration of the transitional territory between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness.

Significance and Relevance of the Topic

Learnings One and Two depict experiences that have been reported in various ways and to various extents in the Buddhist and psychological literatures regarding participatory forms of consciousness. However to date, both literatures offer mostly theoretical perspectives and anecdotal evidence. There has been almost no systematic research devoted to this topic, and none that I can find using as data the daily meditation practice experiences of meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry practices. In addition, neither the specific focus of inquiry I gave the participants nor the use of Imaginal Inquiry has been applied to this topic. A major significance of these first two Learnings lies in their uncovering existing forms of knowledge in a new way that gives this knowledge a new kind of validity within the Western cultural context with its emphasis on science as the main manner in which valid knowledge is created. A second significance highlights the feasibility of using this kind of participant group and research modality to explore the experiential territory of participatory consciousness.

Learnings Three and Four demonstrate that highly trained meditators can easily experientially access and explore aspects of the process of perception that are usually below the conscious threshold. Together with Learning Two, they offer the beginnings of a phenomenological map of the journey from dualistic forms of consciousness to participatory consciousness and back. The map that is emerging through these two learnings highlights the role of attention in this journey.

As such, this study contributes to the psychological understanding of the relationship between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness. It highlights the efficacy of Imaginal Inquiry in this exploration and bridges the gap

21 between scientifically-dominated Western cultures and experientially-grounded

Buddhism. In addition, the methodology and choice of participants meets the call of

Shauna Shapiro and Roger Walsh, among others, for more phenomenologically-oriented research using highly experienced meditators in order to further integrate meditative and psychological systems of knowledge and practice.79

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

There is an extensive body of literature dealing with the nature of consciousness from Western scientific and psychological perspectives. Since the topic, subject-object consciousness, deals with the structure of consciousness, it is important to ground this study within this larger context. The Research hypothesis regarding this subject-object structure focuses on the encapsulation of the subject through the boundary-forming activity of subtle energy patterning. As such, placing this research within the context of the literature on subtle energy and its correlate, the subtle body, will also be important.

The Theory-in-Practice as well as my personal connection to the topic comes from the Buddhist tradition so it is also critical to relate the topic to Buddhist theory.

Finally, it is the contention that this subtle energy bodily boundary forms a significant aspect of what Omer calls imaginal structures. I suggest that the dynamics of this subtle energy aspect of our imaginal structures is central to transitions between subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness, also a key element of Imaginal

Psychology. As such, grounding in the literature of this school of thought is essential.

The first literature cluster is Western Perspectives on Consciousness. In this section I will review various ways the nature of consciousness has been defined and explored in the West, including biological and phenomenological perspectives, as well as

23 that of Transpersonal Psychology. This section will emphasize Western views on the subject-object structure of consciousness, its origins, and the possibility of its dissolution.

The second cluster, Developmental Perspectives on Consciousness, will focus on

Developmental Psychology from a Western perspective. I will especially examine what

Western writers have to say about the emergence of the split into subject and object following birth and during the first few years of life.

Recent Western Scientific Research on Buddhist Meditation, the third cluster, explores the current state of research on meditation. Given the Buddhist context of this research as well as the use of expert meditators, this cluster will focus on research involving advanced Buddhist practitioners.

The fourth literature cluster is entitled Perspectives on Subtle Energy, the Subtle

Body and Subtle Sense Capacities. In it I review the literature on these subjects from two main perspectives: the first person, direct experiential perspective and the third person or experimental research perspective. Topics will include the nature of subtle energy, the varieties of subtle body experience and the relationship between subtle energy and consciousness.

The fifth cluster, Buddhist Perspectives on Consciousness and Subtle Energy, will scrutinize both traditional Buddhist literature and the growing body of Buddhist writings by Western practitioners. The focus is on Buddhist perspectives concerning the subject-object split and participatory consciousness, as well as the role of subtle energy in

Buddhist theory and practice.

Imaginal Approaches to Consciousness and Subtle Energy, the last cluster, deals with the literature of Imaginal Psychology, a distinct orientation to the discipline of

Psychology. I examine what theorists from this school have to say about the nature of

24 consciousness, its structuring into subject and object, and its transformation into participatory consciousness. This orientation’s extensive body of writing on the subtle body and subtle energy and their relationship to the realm of archetypes is also reviewed.

Western Perspectives on Consciousness

In this first section, Western perspectives on subject-object consciousness and its transformation into participatory consciousness will be examined, including those representing theoretical standpoints grounded in a third-person research perspective and those which honor first-person ways of knowing. Among them will be biologically-based views and those grounded in a phenomenological approach.

When reviewing the Western literature on consciousness one is struck by the fact that there are a variety of definitions in use for this term. Damasio notes that a standard dictionary definition runs something like “an organism’s awareness of its own self and surroundings.” 1 He augments that definition with further qualifications of his own, describing consciousness both as a biological function and as “the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self.” 2 For him it is “the feeling of knowing – the feeling of what happens when the organism is engaged with the processing of an object.” 3 For William James, consciousness is the context in which “the awareness of content takes place” and is impersonal, the self being an aspect of content.4 Rosch describes the deepest layer of perception as a field experience in which the field knows itself. She calls this primary knowing, a synonym for awareness.5 For her, consciousness, which is made out of awareness, is that mode of knowing which seems to reside within a perceiver who seems to be separate from what is perceived.6

Some authors see consciousness more like a verb than a noun. James writes that consciousness is not an entity but a function, which is knowing.7 Like James, Julian

Jaynes describes consciousness as an activity, as opposed to a thing.8 However in contrast to James, Jaynes uses the term consciousness in a way that suggests not simply knowing itself but a knowing that is shaped by past experience, thought, emotion, etc.9 According to Georg Feuerstein, for Jean Gebser, like Jaynes, consciousness is an activity, emerging out of what he calls the everpresent origin, meaning awaring or unmediated perceiving.10

Gerald Edelman describes consciousness as a process involving “combinations of external perceptions and various feelings that may include vision, hearing, smell, and other senses, such as proprioception, as well as imagery, memory, mood and emotion,” all in combinations that form a whole.11 He notes that consciousness has a directedness or intentionality towards objects, events, ideas, etc.12 He also emphasizes the primarily private nature of consciousness.13

Just as there are different definitions and descriptions of consciousness, so too, are there different views concerning its relationship to the brain and the body. Dennett is a strong proponent of the biological view of consciousness, seeing consciousness as grounded in the mechanistic biochemical neurophysiology of the brain.14 Edelman bases his theory of consciousness in the brain’s massive interconnections, simply stating that their activity entails consciousness and laments the fact that dualistic views of the physical and mental remain so prevalent.15

Both Michael Posner and Amir Raz ground their suggestion that attention may have a central role in the creation of our ordinary subject-object consciousness in the study of the relationship between attention and the brain.16 Raz defines attention as follows: “The process of selecting for active processing ideas stored in memory in our

26 minds, or aspects of our physical environments such as objects.” 17 Raz and Posner summarize the current theory about attention, identifying three distinct aspects: 1) orienting to sensory stimuli, especially visual orientation in space, 2) selecting events, objects, and ideas stored in memory, also called executive attention, and 3) the level of arousal or alertness/readiness for incoming stimuli.18 According to Raz, each of the three major categories of attention has been shown to be associated with different brain anatomy and networks as well as with different neurotransmitters.19

Some writers further divide the function of attention into subsets of these three.

Eran Chajut, Asi Schupak, and Daniel Algom note that orienting to sensory stimuli has two anatomically discrete functions: orienting in space, which “processes the visual field into well-processed and less well-processed chunks,” and orienting to variables pertaining to an object, such as its color or its shape.20 Posner ties the latter more directly to identification/recognition of the object. He also divides spatial orientation but into location of objects, which then leads to orientation towards object variables, on the one hand, and a more globally-focused orienting attention that is useful for locomotion, on the other.21 Raz depicts the orienting aspect of attention as being either overt, with obvious directionality of the body and line of sight, or covert where the body does not disclose information about the directionality of this form of attention.22 Harold Pashler writes about the relationship between the selection of an object for focused attention and its identification, asking which comes first.23 He also distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary forms of the selection of objects and ideas by executive attention.24

Posner finds the most compelling argument for the association of attention and consciousness with the executive function of attention.25 Yet Posner also wonders if the current work on the anatomical and physiological aspects of attention will eventually

27 suffice to explain consciousness or if other mechanisms might be involved, suggesting that perhaps developments from the field of quantum physics, will be required.26

Biology-based views are not limited to those that portray consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain. Mae-Wan Ho’s theory that consciousness is grounded in the predominance of collagen (the main protein content of fibrous tissue found in connective tissue, bone, and cartilage and making up 25 to 35 percent of all protein in mammals) with its unique molecular structure, in the make-up of the human body, which gives the body a liquid crystalline nature, offers an alternative explanation.27 The body as a whole thus behaves as a liquid crystal, including a deep intercommunication between body regions (and the environment) independent of, and faster than, that of the nervous system.28

Making a different argument against the brain-consciousness connection, Grof and Bennett point out that it is the extensive evidence that ties mental functions to the brain, especially in patients who have lost various mental capacities due to brain injury or tumors, that leads many to conclude that “consciousness originates in or is produced by our brains.” 29 They contend, however, that this view, which they call one of the most widespread metaphysical beliefs of Western cultures, is like arguing that when your T.V. has a defective part impairing its normal functioning, it proves that the programs originate in the T.V. set. Grof and Bennett instead see consciousness “not as derivative of matter … but as (an) important primary attribute of all existence.” 30 Scaruffi offers a subtle variation, proposing that consciousness is a basic property of matter.31

Roger Walsh and Shauna Shapiro note that while Western cultures tend to have a mono-phasic view of consciousness, meditation disciplines generally are expressions of multi-phasic perspectives, in which there are different states and developmental stages of

28 consciousness.32 Although this depiction of Western culture may be generally true, there are a number of Westerners who propose theories of consciousness involving multiple layers or developmental stages. Grof’s cartography of consciousness includes ordinary biographical consciousness, a prior perinatal consciousness (“associated with the trauma of birth”) and a potential transpersonal consciousness (“beyond the ordinary limits of body and ego”), which form a developmental sequence.33

Gebser’s interest in the developmental dimension of consciousness focuses on what he considers to be an evolution of consciousness of the human species itself, which involves different ways of structuring of consciousness that have, over the centuries, moved it away from its underlying simplicity, his everpresent origin. He describes the development of human consciousness in five stages of socio-cultural evolution, each a distinct modality involving a discrete structuring of the human experience as a particular kind of projection onto the external environment. These projections serve as lenses which shape our experience of our environment, and can also be retracted and reintegrated.34

Grounded in Gebser’s theory, Wilber offers an elaborate developmental model of consciousness. He details a map comprised of levels (qualitatively distinct layers nested one within the other), structures (persistent patterns), waves (progressions between levels and structures), states (waking, dreaming, etc.), and bodies (the energetic support.)35

Already in some descriptions of consciousness above there is clearly the strong flavor of the relationship between subject and object, especially Damasio and Rosch.

Evans describes consciousness as having a projected foreground and an unprojected background.36 For him, attention is that which structures consciousness in this way, giving it an explicitly known object of attention, the projected aspect of consciousness, and a tacitly known unprojected aspect, “those elements of consciousness that together

29 make up the background when attention is paid to an object,” which Evans equates with the subject or self.37 In this projective process the subject and its objects arise interdependently forming less a duality than a “polarity of self (or subject)-object.” 38

Like Evans, Gallagher depicts the subject of consciousness as being known in a different way than is the object.39 For Shaun Gallagher, perception has two necessary aspects, the making of an object, which involves an intentional directing of the awareness towards the object, and the identification or conceptual designation of the object.

Gallagher notes, however, that proprioception (the sensory experience of sensations produced by bodily tissues such as the muscles or tendons) is not organized in this intentional manner.40 As such Gallagher considers it to be a kind of non-perceptual awareness, an awareness absent the intentional, directional structure of perceptual awareness. For Gallagher proprioecption thus plays a role in the experience of the subject-object differentiation by establishing the subjective somatic background experience of being the subject of perception that attends to the object.41 That is, it gives the perceiving subject the sense of being embodied.

For Peter Nelson, subject and object, are both ontologically relative (can only be defined as things which exist in terms of each other) and ontologically interdependent

(each can come into being only together with the other.)42 This interdependence happens through the creation of an ‘I’ that is detached from an ‘out there.’ According to Nelson this occurs through the projection of a center as the locus of the subject, thus simultaneously creating, by contrast, that which is not located at the center, the objective world. For Nelson, this is a recurring process rather than a stable occurrence.43

We now turn to the transmutation of subject-object consciousness into participatory consciousness. As mentioned above, Omer’s definition of participatory

30 consciousness allows for a multiplicity of expressions all of which are no longer

“obscured by the experience of a separate self.” David Michael Levin writes that the dualistic way of being can be transcended resulting in what he calls the prepersonal, a state he describes as developmentally prior to the emergence of an ego-center or subject.44

Noting the absence of a detailed description of the process involved in this transformation, he calls for a step-by-step experiential map of these crossings.45

Evans depicts his projected foreground and unprojected background of consciousness in contrast to what he calls homogenous consciousness in which there is no polarization into subject and object.46 Dan Berkow equates being aware with “the non-separation of subject and object.” 47 For Berkow this insight emerges when the process of projection that creates the impression of the subject-object split has collapsed leaving a simple experiential openness.48

Some authors suggest that the critical element of their parallel notions to participatory consciousness is the absence of knowing from a perspective. David Peat describes two ways of understanding experience, landscape and inscape. His landscape mode involves seeing the world from a perspective, resulting in our experiencing a world composed of objects external to ourselves, the basic structure of subject-object consciousness.49 In contrast, inscape, his term analogous to participatory consciousness, involves a perspectiveless experiencing in which there is a recognition that “mind and matter are not two processes happening in parallel but . . . two aspects of the one reality.” 50 Kaisa Puhakka makes a distinction between what she calls knowing and having knowledge. For her knowing precedes having knowledge and involves direct contact, an interconnectedness, between the knower and known that obliterates their

31 distinction altogether.51 Such a moment of contact, which, like Berkow, Puhakka equates with the term awareness, “lacks a center of subjectivity,” and is prior to the subject-object-split-creating activity of intention, here meaning the directing of the mind toward an object, as well as being “nonconceptual, nonimaginal, (and) nondiscursive.” 52

For Puhakka, that which in ordinary consciousness is spatially segregated into subject and object, is, in awareness, experienced as coextensive, giving rise to the experience that awareness is “as much subject as it is object.” 53 Yet as Puhakka points out, what she calls knowing remains a cultural taboo.54 Similarly for Gebser, the everpresent origin, his parallel to participatory consciousness, emerges when experience is aperspectival, or lacking a location from which things are known.55

Other writers seem to emphasize an underlying unitive aspect of experience which is central to participatory consciousness. James depicts a universe comprised of but “one primal stuff or material” which he calls pure experience.56 The impression we have that experience is dualistic, he says, is really due more to parts of the whole taking up relationship to each other such that one part is the knower or subject, the other the object that is known. Steven Bodian offers the term emptiness as a deep integration of awareness and its contents, in the experience of which the self is known to be essentially insubstantial.57 For John Prendergast, this emptiness, or as he prefers to call it, the nondual, is directly experienced as a fundamental consciousness, underlying subject- object consciousness.58

Peter Reason and William Tolbert offer a different slant on the absence of separateness that defines participatory experience. While agreeing that “our world does not consist of separate things” they go on to say that, instead, it is characterized by relationships.59 It is this inherent connectedness of relationships that belies the apparent

32 separateness we commonly and mistakenly attribute to the phenomenal world. As humans we participate in a co-creative way in the structuring of these relationships through the “feeling and construing” that we bring to our direct experience of the cosmos.

Martin Buber also takes a relational perspective, describing two basic categories of relationship of which humans are capable, I-Thou and I-It, as well as a transitional process between these two. For Buber, I-Thou involves a mutuality, an experienced acknowledgment of subjectivity at both poles of the relationship, a subject seeing another subject as subject in which the two affect each other through a mutual giving of each over to the other.60 Buber describes the experience of I-Thou as appearing as always new, unreliable, spatially or temporally unmeasurable, and lacking in density, “for everything in it permeates everything else.” 61 According to, Buber this realm of I-Thou can arise in three contexts: our life in relationship to nature, to other humans, and to spiritual beings.62

In the transitional process from the underlying I-Thou to I-It, there is an in-between territory which is “not yet subject-object knowing.” 63 The full I-It relationship emerges

“through the extraction of the subject from the immediate lived togetherness of I and It and the transformation of the It into an object.” 64

Rosch carries this relational perspective a bit further. Focusing on the transition from participatory consciousness into subject-object consciousness she notes that subject and object emerge together. They arise as polarized aspects of a single act of cognition, out of an underlying field of knowing, itself a kind of panoramic awareness.65 When the field no longer knows itself, subject-object consciousness has arisen in which knowing and known appear to be separate.66 Rosch describes how the enclosed consciousness or knowing we call the subject then sees the world as made up of separate things that interact with each other.67

The interdependent emergence of subject and object leads Rosch to suggest that our knowing does not actually happen according to our traditional description of the senses taking in input from an independently existing external reality. Rather Rosch offers a fundamentally different view of perception, which she sees occurring in what she calls mind-world wholes of which the senses are participating parts.68 Christine Skarda carries Rosch’s perspective a bit further when she states that the process of perception, rather than a responding to separate entities “out there” in the surrounding environment, actually involves a “shattering” of an underlying holism to create apparently separate percepts with which the perceiving subject can interact. This results in a division of the underlying unified field of experience into a subject that perceives and a realm of objects that are perceived.69 Consciousness, Skarda proposes, generates both the subject and object poles of our ordinary subject-object oriented experience.70 The views of James,

Evans, Bodian, Rosch, and Skarda above resonate most deeply with my own experience.

John Heron offers a topography of participatory experience which has a dipolar structure. At the center of this polarity, Heron describes the “immediate present experience,” in which a person participates in what he calls “a unitive field of being-in-a-world” characterized by an absence of a gap “between me as subject and what is around as object, between my perceiving and what I perceive, between my consciousness and the content and form with which it engages.” 71 From this fulcrum- without-a-gap, two experiential and participatory poles proceed, one being transcendent, the other immanent in nature. In the transcendent direction Heron describes four levels of experience which are beyond one’s manifest being or personhood.72 Alternatively moving towards immanence, Heron likewise describes four levels of participatory

34 experience that constitute an intentional deepening of our direct perception of our embodiment, spatially here and temporally now.73

Another theme in the Western literature related to the issue of subject-object versus participatory consciousness is that of belonging. In this context, a workable definition of belonging might read: “to be part of; to be related or connected (to).” 74

Maurizio Crippa offers clarification when he notes that in belonging in this sense, one is not possessed by someone or something, but rather “takes part in” or participates.75

Perhaps the best known use of this term in Western Psychology is found in Abraham

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow lists belonging as an aspect of the third layer of his hierarchy, nested in between physiological needs and safety, which are more fundamental, and esteem and self actualization, which come only after the need for love, belonging, and affection are met.76 He stressed that this need included both giving and receiving love and affection and held the lack of this need being met to be the primary cause of adjustment issues and various kinds of psychopathology.77 T. Byrum Karasu observes that belonging is always relational. He sees our human need to belong as persisting from our early bond with our mother as we differentiate, then become independent.78

Maslow and Karasu thus discuss belonging in terms of the various aspects and styles of a human subject’s relationship to other human beings. As such, their perspective depicts a particular slice of subject-object consciousness, that where the object is another person or group of persons. By contrast, John O’Donahue describes belonging in circular terms “as that which embraces everything,” noting that this word is composed of two central aspects of our human nature: being and longing.79 Our deepest longing, he writes, is our longing to know, a profound urge for intimacy and belonging.80 There remains a

35 mystery, he says, around belonging because no one has yet figured out just how it is that we know.81

Karasu describes our yearning to belong as a way we seek protection from “the feeling of inner infinity that each of us secretly carries and that we sometimes experience as a boundless abyss.” 82 In contrast, O’Donahue describes an invisible world within and around us that is our source, a source “more ancient than any family,” to which we always belong, and for which we always long.83 He experiences this invisible world as a living background, within us, within others, and in between ourselves and others, as well, an image of interconnectedness.84 And while he agrees with Karasu that we often fear this invisible unknown and thus try to ignore our longing for it, O’Donahue finds that this unseen dimension is the object of our deepest and most unrelenting longing, an inner call to discover our truest nature.85

In summary, the Western literature on consciousness offers a variety of views on the nature and origin of our split into subject and object as well as the possibility of overcoming that split. However no one seems to give a clear, detailed description of how this split can be overcome or provides any empirical data to support their views. In fact,

Levin calls for research on just this topic. This gap in the literature was addressed by this research project, drawing on Gallagher’s suggestion that mindfulness meditators would be suitable phenomenological investigators for this kind of investigation.

Several authors give a role to the activity of projection in the creation of this split, while others credit attention. But again these authors do not offer detailed descriptions of how the projective or attentional processes they propose lead to subject-object consciousness nor any empirical evidence in support of their theories. This void in the literature was addressed in the course of this study, though it was not the original target.

Developmental Perspectives on Consciousness

Over the past 75 years in Western Psychology, there has been a great deal of interest in the stages of human development from the period before birth on through adulthood. Of special relevance to the topic of this research are the earliest stages of human development, since it is during the first few years of life that an infant comes to experience itself as separate from the world around it. Just when and how that happens differs significantly from one developmental school to another and even from one writer to another within a particular school of thought.

In America, the focus on the development of personality gave rise to one set of views. Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman describe this process, which they call the psychological birth of the human infant in two phases: a period in which the infant discovers its separation from the environment followed by a stage in which the infant recognizes and learns to express its uniqueness.86 Initially, they write, the child is unable to distinguish between self and environment. The first phase involves a shift in libidinal cathexis (the investment of sexual/life energy in an activity, an object or a person) from a focus on internal bodily sensations to a focus on sensory experience coming from sensory interactions (touch, smell, taste, sound, sight) with its environs, resulting in the emergence of a self/other boundary.87 Gradually a polarized relationship with the mother develops and evolves into the recognition that mother is separate.88 The first phase of this shift, which they call symbiosis, begins around two months of age.

Symbiosis involves some nascent awareness on the infant’s part of the mother as an

‘other.’ Mahler, Pine, and Bergman describe this emerging relationship as a “dual unity with one common boundary.” 89 The proprioceptive or inner bodily sensations form what

Mahler, et al., call the core of the self with the sensoriperceptive or externally-based sensations, eventually marking off this bodily self from the world of objects.90 This boundary-formation process entails both the fear of separation and the urge to individuate. With it come two developmental risks: that the boundary will become too rigid or too porous, both of which can lead to psychopathology.91

In Europe two other perspectives on early human development emerged. The

Object Relations school of thought grew out of the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective while attachment theory had it roots in ethology, the study of animal behavior, and the theory of evolution. Melanie Klein was the Object Relations school’s first proponent. For

Klein, an infant’s earliest stages of development were primarily internal and characterized by the processes of introjection and projection of images of the good breast

(an object of the infant’s libidinous desires that fulfilled its needs) and the bad breast

(which left the infant’s needs unmet.)92

W.R.D. Fairbairn shifted the focus of Object Relations thought. He was uncomfortable with Freud’s notion of the libido as some independently existing form of energy. He rather felt that libido is, in fact, inherent in an innate egoic configuration. This egoic configuration, in turn, gives form and shape to energy.93 For Fairbairn, the energic or libidinal dynamism of the ego was directed not at pleasure but motivated instead by the establishment and maintenance of relationships with other people, for which he used the term ‘object.’ These relationships were both energic and affective.94 Relative to the infant’s progression to the experience of being separate from the mother, Fairbairn sees the child as moving from experiencing the mother primarily as a breast to seeing the breast as a part of a larger object, which is nonetheless initially experienced as an aspect

38 of the child’s contents, followed later by a more mature dependence in which the child recognizes that the mother is separate.95

Otto Kernberg describes his Object Relations view of the developmental stages in the first three years of life in terms quite similar to those of Mahler. The main difference is in his description of internal positive and negative images of the primary caregiver which emerge at Mahler’s symbiotic stage. Here these two are still not experienced as separate from the self but rather form two opposing expressions of the singular self- object constellation. Then at the third stage, the self aspects and object aspects of these constellations become integrated into a good and bad self or inner world in relationship to a similarly bi-faceted external object. During this phase, object constancy, the child’s nderstanding that the mother still exists even when she is not physically present, occurs along with the emergence of stable boundaries demarcating ego from object.96

D.W.Winnicott notes that the object is initially a subjective phenomenon, the subjective object. 97 A subsequent development allows the object to be objectively perceived, that is as external to the subject, a stage dependent on the emergence of an objective subject or “the idea of a self, and the feeling of being real that springs from having an identity.” 98 For Winnicott, an important catalyst for the emergence of the objective self is the mother’s beginning to turn more towards her own needs as the child becomes less completely dependent on her.

Like the views of the later object relations theorists, attachment theory is based on the centrality of human relationships in the infant’s early life. John Bowlby emphasizes this view when he writes that attachment behavior is not based on the need for nourishment nor is it sexual in nature.99 He considers attachment behavior to be a separate motivational system. At birth all sensory systems are working and naturally

39 incline towards stimuli from other people, though the infant has a very limited ability to distinguish one person from the other. He traces the infant’s developing visual preferences from birth beginning with a preference for patterns of color rather than single colors at 48 hours to a preference for things that move, then faces, followed by their own mother’s face at 14 weeks, as evidence of in-built biological tendencies that incline the infant towards social interaction.100 According to Bowlby, by the sixth or seventh month this special orientation to the mother is quite prominent and will continue through the child’s second year and perhaps beyond. At this point the infant is clearly attached to the mother. Some time during this phase, the child begins to recognize the mother as “an independent object persistent in time and space” but still remains unaware of the causes of her movements. The awareness of the emotional and motivational dimension of the mother’s being comes sometime after the second birthday.101

Picking up where Bowlby leaves off, E. Engel and E. C. Douglas studied the ability of children aged 2.5 to 5 years to take into account their visual viewpoint in coming to perceptual understanding. In the first stage the child did not yet understand that seeing depends on the use of the eyes and the availability of visual objects. In the second stage, the awareness of the sensory involvement of the eyes is understood but conceptualizes the experience as one of themselves and the object of sight as facing each other. The final stage, occurring around age four to five years old, involved the full awareness of the observer-observed pair, including the independence of objects.102

Other writers credit the sense of touch with a central role in the emergence of subject-object consciousness. Didier Anzieu proposes that it is a baby’s earliest tactile experiences, especially being held against the mother’s body, that catalyze the experiential division into inner and outer, self and other, a process that procedes normally

40 in the context of a secure attachment relationship with the mother.103 In this process the infant begins to experience its own skin, with its two functions of holding in what is ingested in the nutritional and emotional aspects of caregiving and keeping out what should stay outside, as a boundary-forming surface. This surface experience is a crucial aspect of what Anzieu calls the Skin Ego, “a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of the surface of the body.” 104 Esther Bick, offers a view similar in some ways to Anzieu when she posits that the primitive internal parts of the personality experienced by the infant are held together by the boundary- forming nature of the skin. Her theory focuses on the infant’s use of the senses, located at this boundary, to prevent the self from fragmenting into pieces, disintegrating into the vastness of space or losing form amorphously, all expressions of Freud’s death wish.105

In the context of western views on psychology, the notion of narcissism is deeply related both to the sense of being a self and to the developmental process. Reber describes two contexts of human narcissistic experience: primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism, he writes, is “the early stage of development when the libido is overly invested in the self or the ego, or, more simply, in the body,” and is a normal phase in the early infancy.106 Secondary narcissism involves the re- emergence of this pattern of libido turned towards oneself in adult life.107 Alexander

Lowen sees narcissism in adults as stemming from problems in infancy in the infant- caretaker relationship. He does not accept the notion of a developmental stage, primary narcissism, where a child can get developmentally stuck.108 He depicts narcissism as a fixation on self image at the expense of the repressed underlying genuine self.109 Marion

Solomon echoes this view when she calls narcissism “an aspect of relatedness in which

41 the principal focus is on the self and its needs.” 110 She characterizes this style of relatedness as involving a lack of a cohesive self and the absence of trust in the integrity of self-other boundaries.111 Anzieu also sees the experience of boundary as central to narcissism when calls his skin ego the “narcissistic envelope.” 112

All of the views above suggest that as human infants we are born unable to distinguish between ourselves and the world around us. Others offer contrasting views.

Daniel Stern argues that infants are never without the ability to distinguish what he calls core self (“a separate, cohesive, bounded, physical unit with a sense of agency, affectivity and continuity in time”) from core other (everything that is not the core self), though

Stern notes that at this phase the child still does lack the ability to distinguish between its relationship to things and interpersonal relationships.113 Through direct observation of infants, first as they respond to visual objects that appear, disappear, then reappear in various manners, then by observing infants as they imitate facial gestures of caretakers and others, Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore demonstrate that newborns come into this life with the ability to discriminate proto-objects.114 Yet they define proto-object not by its being experienced as separate from the infant but rather by the infant’s ability to experience the object’s constancy over a series of parameters such as visual features and motion.115

The general tone of most writers in the field of developmental psychology is that the emergence of the ability to distinguish self from other than self, no matter when they describe it arising along the developmental continuum, is the emergence of the ability to see things as they really are, that self and other, subject and object are, in fact, really separate entities. For example, Mahler, et al., describe their stage of symbiosis as a kind of “hallucinatory or delusional somatopsychic omnipotent fusion.” 116 Solomon assumes

42 the ultimate reality of the dividedness of the universe when she labels a child’s early experience of oneness, in which divisions are apparently absent, an illusion.117

However there are those who offer an opposing position. For example, in sharp contrast to Anzieu, Jean Liedloff suggests that being held, rather than leading to our human experience of separateness, informs the human infant of its inherent connectedness with its environment. She notes that in indigenous cultures, where infants are in almost constant physical contact with their mothers, there is a strong recognition of the interconnectedness of all of nature. This style of mother-child interactiveness leads to the infant feeling its “rightness, or essential goodness” without which “a human being of any age is crippled by a lack of confidence, a full sense of self, of spontaneity, of grace.” 118 It is in the lack of this ‘rightness’-conferring contact with the mother that

Liedloff finds the etiology of narcissism.119 She bemoans our Western alienation, a fact that she attributes to our childrearing patterns involving frequent periods of physical separation between infant and mother.120

Grof and Bennett offer a different alternative view. Relying on first person reports of adult regression to in utero experience, they say of their earliest perinatal level of consciousness, that there is no differentiation between self and mother or world, “no duality between subject and object.” 121 Instead they depict a boundaryless experience of interconnectedness.122 According to Grof and Bennett, regressions to this period, just prior to the dramatic loss of physical connectedness that birth entails, involve a “death” of our adult experience of and belief in our absolute separateness from the world around us. Regressions to later stages of the birth process do not have this effect.123 Grof and

Bennett thus suggest that the process of birth sets in motion the emergence of our

43 experience of our apparent separateness from our environment and the objects we find in it, and the loss of a deeper underlying truth of our fundamental connectedness.

Wilber notes that the past century has spawned two perspectives relating spiritual experience, including participatory forms of consciousness, to Developmental

Psychology. The first he attributes to Freud, whom he depicts as seeing all mystical experiences as regressions to prerational stages of human infant development. From

Freud’s perspective, given the absence of the rational perspective in these states, they are primitive, suspect, and undesirable. 124 For the second he credits Carl Jung and his followers. In this view, participatory forms of consciousness also represent a return to the experiential modalities of our earliest months of life but here it is the limitations of rationality that are of concern, not its virtues. Such a return to prerational states is desirable, they conclude, precisely because they are prerational.125 Wilber takes issue with each of these views preferring to see participatory forms of consciousness as transrational or as representing a further development beyond rationality which incorporates its value while going beyond its limitations. As such, Wilber warns against equating participatory forms of consciousness with the mindstates of infant humans.126

While suggesting clues as to when in the life cycle the subject-object consciousness first arises, Developmental Psychology provides little insight into the actual dynamics which cause the split into subject and object to occur that might inform how it is possible later in life to open to participatory consciousness. The Freudian view that a shift in the cathexis of life energy from internal to external is involved and the various perspectives about the emerging self-other boundary are perhaps the most relevant to this study. This research project does attempt to empirically establish that subtle energy (a parallel term for libido) is involved in this process and that its

44 involvement specifically takes the form of boundary formation. The approach is one of exploring the destructuring of the subject-object split from the perspective of the hypothesized subtle energy boundaries involved. As such it could be seen as having indirect implications for the field of early human development, especially providing empirical data relevant to early childhood theories of cathexis and boundary formation.

However since this research focuses on adult experience it does not specifically address gaps in the literature of human developmental, except insofar as the transition from subject-object consciousness is a possible stage of adult development. This topic was covered in the previous cluster.

Recent Western Scientific Research on Buddhist Meditation

Roger Walsh and Shauna Shapiro write about the current mutual engagement between Western Psychology and Eastern contemplative traditions, two distinct approaches to the common goal of understanding the human mind that have developed for centuries in isolation from one another.127 According to Walsh and Shapiro, this deepening conversation is a major historical event of our time, one they describe as evolving through a natural progression. An initial period of mutual ignorance was followed by a phase of mutual misunderstanding. Increased communication between these two groups has more recently led to the present period of assimilative integration, characterized by the fact that meditation is currently one of the most researched psychological disciplines.128

While David Fontana suggests that their drastically different approaches to knowledge, Western scientism versus the East’s penchant for introspection, will make it difficult for either to have much meaningful impact on the other, Walsh and Shapiro offer

45 a guardedly more optimistic view.129 They see the dangers in the current assimilative period as parallel to those encountered by Western anthropologists’ in their earliest approach to studying other cultures. In that field, the initial limiting ‘etic’ or exclusively outsider’s perspective, evolved in sophistication to include the ‘emic,’ a native or insider’s view.130 They propose a similar shift in this current cross-cultural interface, one aspect of which is the use of experienced meditators as expert introspectionists.131

Interestingly they note that this shift would actually be a return for Western Psychology to its pre-scientism roots.132 Gallagher supports this suggestion, referring to the Western tradition of phenomenology. He notes that vipassanā (a Buddhist style of meditation emphasizing the cultivation of mindfulness and direct experiential insight) meditators are essentially phenomenologists, trained through their mediation practice to examine and report on their own first-person experience in a formalized manner.133 He highlights the distinction between phenomenology, with its active investigative intent, and simple subjective experience and suggests that skilled phenomenologists can not only provide a specialized first person report on their experience but also help articulate the questions that lead to research.134

Rael Caen and John Policy, in their survey of meditation research, note that neuroimaging techniques applied to meditators have resulted in considerable discrepancies between the results of various researchers. They suggest that the absence of a standardized research design as well as the variety of meditation practices studied account for this disparity.135 They conclude that the primary area of human experience affected by meditation is attention.136 They also note that there is evidence of shifts in self-experience but no coherent physiological theory about why this should happen.137

In another survey article, Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz report that the two main types of meditation being researched are focused attention, which they equate with concentration techniques, and open awareness among which they number both the

Buddhist techniques of vipassanā and Mahamudra.138 Their overview documents a natural learning curve for meditation practices in which initially the brain activity increases as the required mental skills are developed. This stage is followed by a period ease of practice requiring less effort as the learned skill becomes stable associated with reduced brain activity.139 In addition, they credit open awareness meditation with giving meditators the ability not to get stuck in any facet of their experience.140

Since this research project highlights the use of advanced Buddhist meditators, the rest of this review of recent meditation research is limited to individual studies of

Buddhist meditation practices wherein the investigators used subjects that they define in some way as highly experienced practitioners. The research projects reviewed below vary along several parameters. They involve the collection of different kinds of data, target a variety of meditation practices, assess several aspects of mental experience, particularly attention and perception, and utilize a wide assortment of definitions for terms like

‘expert,’ ‘advanced,’ or ‘experienced’ as applied to their Buddhist meditator subjects.

Charlotte Haimerl and Elizabeth Valentine studied the three groups, prospective meditators, beginner meditators (less than two years of practice) and advanced meditators

(more than two years of practice.)141 They administered a shortened version of the

Temperament and Character Inventory, a standard personality test.142 They found a positive correlation between character development and the length of meditation experience in three distinct areas of self-concept: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal.143

Using a standard auditory stimulus protocol, Valentine and Philip Sweet tested meditators and non-meditators for the ability to pay attention in relation to a series of sounds. They divided meditators (a total of 19) into four groups along two variables.

About half the meditators ere mindfulness practitioners while the other half practiced concentration meditation. (Meditators who had practiced both techniques were excluded.)

Each of these groups was further divided into long-term practitioners (more than 25 months) and short-term practitioners (less than 25 months).144 They found that all meditators scored higher than the control group and the long-term meditators scored higher than the short-term meditators for the ability to pay attention. There was initially no difference between the mindfulness and concentration practitioner groups. However when the sequence of auditory stimulus was changed without informing the subjects, the mindfulness groups outperformed the concentration groups.145 They concluded that both concentration and mindfulness meditation practice improve attention but in different ways with mindfulness being better for tasks which required flexibility of attention.146

Working with expert Tibetan Buddhist meditators in two groups, 10,000 to 24,000 hours of practice and 37,000 to 54,000 hours of practice respectively, as well as a two groups of age-matched novice meditators, one of which was offered a financial reward for good performance, J. Brefzcynski-Lewis, A. Lutz, H. Schaeffer, D. Levinson, and R.

Davidson studied the correlations between attentional expertise and brain function associated with one-pointed concentration meditation.147 Subjects alternated between focusing on a dot on a screen and resting state while researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track brain functioning. As a variation, subjects were sometimes subjected to distracting sounds.148 Findings showed that activation of attention regions of the brain and the visual cortex were greatest for the 10,000-24,000 hour group

48 with the 37,000-54,000 hour group showing less activity even than the two control groups. This interpreted as showing that the 10,000-24,000 group having better skill at the effort required to establish and sustain attention than the control groups while the most experienced meditators had so mastered the concentration skills involved that less effort was required.149 When exposed to distracting sounds, the expert meditator groups had less brain activation in areas associated with discursive thoughts but more in areas related to inhibition and attention than the control groups.150

One interesting study focused on a single subject who was accomplished in the

Buddhist practice of entering the rūpa jhānas and āruppas.151 The rūpa jhānas are a set of four discrete increasingly subtle levels of concentration sometimes referred to as absorptions, each with a specific set of defining characteristics including such experiential qualities as joy, happiness, and equanimity. The āruppas are an additional set of four increasingly deep concentration states that ensue after the rūpa jhānas. They are marked by the experience of boundaryless space, boundaryless consciousness, nothingness, and a quality described by the Buddha as “neither perception nor non-perception,” in that order.152 Julian Hagerty, Julian Isaacs, Leigh Brasington, Larry

Shupe, and Eberhard Fetz list 6 qualities of the jhānas and āruppas:

(1) internal verbalizations fade completely or become “wispy”, (2) external awareness dims and startle responses diminish, (3) one’s sense of body boundaries and orientation in space are altered, (4) the experience of evaluations, goals, and “shoulds” diminishes, (5) attention is highly focused on the object of meditation, and (6) the normal sense of time falls away.153

They developed hypothesizes for the first five of these regarding electroencephalography

(EEG) changes they would expect to see in a subject who had entered the jhānas/āruppas meditatively relative to the subject’s resting state.154 Their jhāna master subject then

49 entered and passed through the various jhānas and āruppas while hooked to EEG electrodes. He signaled his progression through the jhānas with mouse clicks so that researchers could correlate his mental states with EEG readings.155 Given that the third quality of the jhānas is the alteration of personal boundaries, the researchers hypothesized that compared to the rest state, the theta and alpha waves for the region of the brain most associated with personal boundary orientation would show increased power. Among their predictions, this is the one most relevant to the current study, which hypothesizes two subtle energy boundary formations. Results supported this hypothesis showing that some kind of boundary-related activity in the brain is occurring during the range of concentration for which the hypothesis predicts shifts in boundary experience.156

Another group of researchers, Antoine Lutz, Lawrence Greischar, Nancy

Rowlings, Matthieu Ricard, and Richard Davidson also worked with experienced Tibetan practitioners, each of which had completed 10,000 to 50,000 hours of meditation including both daily and intensive retreat practice as well as with a control group.157 They studied the effect of objectless meditation devoted to the cultivation of “unconditioned loving-kindness and compassion.” 158 They chose this form of meditation, which “does not attend to a specific object but rather cultivates a state of being,” because they wanted to investigate reports that during this kind of meditation, “the intentional or object-directed aspect of experience appears to dissipate …” 159 They compared baseline

EEG with EEG readings taken while subjects were practicing the target meditation.

Gamma wave activity was higher among the meditators than the control group and increased among the meditator group as a function of increased lifetime hours of meditation. During a period of practice for the meditators the gamma wave activity increased further over their baseline readings.160 They concluded that “attention and

50 affective processes, which gamma-band EEG synchronization may reflect, are flexible skills that can be trained,” further suggesting that their results support the feasibility of using of highly trained meditators as subjects for the study of “high-order cognitive and affective processes.” 161

Other researchers have focused more on perception than on attention. For example, Maria Kozhevnikov, Maria Olga Louchakova, Zoran Josipovic and Michael

Motes studied meditaors in the Tibetan tradition who are experts at deity yoga, a form of meditation which they describe as involving the focus on the internal generation of visual image of themselves as a deity surrounded by retinue. This practice also involves the felt bodily experience as well as the affective experience of the deity.162 They studied deity practice in contrast to another Tibetan practice which they describe as open presence which they say involves an “evenly distributed attention that is not directed toward any particular objects or experiences.” 163 Their subjects self-identified as experts in one of the other of these techniques which they had practiced for at least 10 years including a total of at least 1 full year in intensive retreat. In addition, all subjects were nominated by their teacher for their accomplishment in their chosen meditation practice. Control groups were also used.164 Subjects were given two kinds of computerized assessment tasks both pre and post meditation. The first tested their ability to “transform and compare two spatial objects.” 165 The second evaluated their capacity to hold complex pictures in visuo-spatial working memory.166 Results supported the conclusion that deity yoga increases the practitioners ability to call on visuo-spatial memory resources relative to both the open presence group and the control groups.167

A second study involving perception was conducted by Walsh. Walsh surveyed a control group plus three groups of meditators: A group of 60 meditators at a retreat taught

51 in the Tibetan tradition, eight meditators in vipassanā meditation group for medical students and recently graduated doctors, and a group of seven meditation teachers, including some from each of the Theravadan, Zen, and Tibetan traditions.168 His questionnaire focused on experiences of synaesthesia, a condition in which an individual experiences one kind of sensory experience, for example sound, when a different sensory organ, say the eye for sight, registers a stimulus.169 His three meditator groups ranged from 35 to 85 percent in reporting incidences of synaesthesia that met the study’s criteria while among the control group of non-meditating medical school students, only 9 percent reported synaesthetic experiences.170 Walsh concludes that synaesthetic ability can be cultivated and that meditation is a vehicle for such cultivation.171

The next study explores visual perception. Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, and

Michael Dysart studied four groups: meditators signed up to participate in a three-month retreat, the meditation center staff where the retreat was held, the teachers of the retreat and a non-meditating control group.172 They used a tachistoscope, a laboratory instrument capable of delivering flashes of light of different duration and at different intervals. First they tested their subject to find the shortest interval of light flash that they could detect. Then they exposed their subjects to pairs of flashes with different intervals between flashes.173 They found no difference between all groups concerning their ability to distinguish between two flashes at increasingly shorter intervals but all three meditator groups were able to detect shorter individual flashes of light than the control group.174

Three months later this same group of researchers returned to the meditation center to test the retreatants and staff at the end of the retreat.175 The three-month retreatant group, who had been practicing 16 hours a day during their retreat, were able to detect shorter light flashes than before the retreat and to distinguish between two flashes of light at intervals

52 shorter than before the retreat. Their abilities in these areas surpassed those of both the pre- and post-retreat scores of the retreat staff.176 They concluded that their results support claims in the spiritual literature that meditation can enhance perceptual abilities.177

Several years later the same group of researchers returned to the meditation center to conduct a different kind of study. They worked with three groups of meditators, those who had attended either a two-day, two-week, or three-month meditation retreats respectively.178 The only significant difference between the groups was their average amount of prior meditation experience: 29 months, 34 months and 50 months respectively.179 They administered a questionnaire entitled the Profile of Trance,

Imaging, and Meditation Experience (TIME) to each group.180 Among the variables evaluated, three are particularly relevant to the current research project: ‘image changes,’ defined as changes in the meditator’s perception of his or her own body, ‘identification’ or the perception of a self which knows and is experiencing what is happening, and

‘frame of reference,’ which meant the extent to which the self is a reference point during experience.181 Results showed that for the three-month retreatants, body image changes were reduced compared to the other two groups. However, the three-month group reported decreases in both “identification of the contents of experience as belonging to an enduring self” and “use of the sense of self as a reference for orienting to internal or external experience.” 182

Perhaps the single study that is most pertinent to this research project was also conducted by these same investigators. Forte, Brown, and Dysart found their results using the tachistoscope protocol described above with seven three-month retreat teachers to be so revealing that they devoted a separate article to the reporting and analysis of their

53 findings.183 They write that, according to the teachers of these teachers, all members of this group, who had practiced and average of 12 years at the time of the study, had

“possibly attained the first level of enlightenment where perceptual changes are reported to occur.” 184 In this study three psychologists who were not meditators served as a control group.185 In addition to the tachistoscope exercises themselves, the results for which are included in pre-three-month retreat study described above, these meditators and controls were asked to describe their experience of the process of perception as it occurred for them during the tachistoscope activity.186

As a group, there were a number of noteworthy similarities between the reports of the meditators as distinct from the control group: Meditators report an awareness of the arising, duration, and disappearance of the light flashes, which they see as “events embedded in a constantly changing field of perception.” 187 The authors depict this aspect of their experience as “movement (which) gives rise to form much as the movement of the wind over a water surface gives rise to waves. Similarly the energy of the light flashes creates ‘waves’ in the subtly moving, adapting field.” 188 These meditators described feeling the light contact their eyes, or more generally a sensation in the whole body, followed by a sense of vibration in the mind, both of which occur before their conscious awareness of each flash.189 One meditator commented “I feel the light exactly as it comes on. My whole body and mind respond to knowing that something is going to happen. I feel it first. Then I see it.” 190

The tachistoscope experiments themselves focus on two perceptual thresholds: the limits of the subjects’ abilities to detect flashes of light of decreasing duration and to distinguish between two successive flashes with diminishing time intervals between them. The subjects themselves suggested that focusing attention on experience at the

54 perceptual threshold in order to examine the process of perception could be a useful teaching technique.191 The researchers add that this approach might also offer an opening into the study of awareness itself.192 They note that advanced meditators report noticing aspects of perception normally prior to ordinary conscious experience. As they put it, as a group, these meditators were not only aware of the perceived events but also of the act of perception.193 The authors close by reflecting that advanced meditators:

see how such events come into and go out of conscious awareness and produce insights about how the ordinary perceptual world is constructed. If advanced meditators see events in terms of movement in a field of varying qualities does this supersede ordinary perception of solid durable objects in space? Their description of form-perception as an illusion produced by movements within differential spatial areas is remarkably close to the descriptions of some contemporary physicists.194

Brown was also involved in another research project together with Jack Engler.

This project utilized the Rorschach, a well-know projectve psychological test, with experienced medtators. Brown and Engler’s initial intent in using the Rorschach was that of a personality measure. However when they analyzed their results, they found significant groupings based on the meditators’ reported level of development along a spectrum from relative beginner to mastery. These groupings, rather than following personality differences seemed to the researchers to be more indicative of cognitive and perceptual changes.195 Three sets of subjects were tested: the same group of three-month retreatants used in their tachistoscope study detailed above, meditation students who were identified by their teachers as having especially deep practice, and a group of 10 South

Asian subjects including two master teachers and eight students nominated by these two teachers as having attained at least the first level of enlightenment according to the criteria used in the Burmese Theravadan Buddhist tradition of the highly respected

Burmese master, Mahasi Sayadaw.196

Analysis of Rorschach protocols found four distinct styles of responses among the three-month retreatants and teacher-identified Western practitioners depending on whether they were relative beginners with no particular advanced skill of note in either samatha (tranquility or concentration) practice or vipassanā (insight) practice, particularly adept at samatha, or especially skilled in vipassanā, with one additional group of a few western students who were judged to have attained the first level of enlightenment. For the South Asian group, most were reported to have attained the first or second level of enlightenment while the Rorschach results of the lone meditator reported to have attained the third or fourth level of enlightenment was in a category by itself. 197 The beginning group was composed of three-month practitioners whose protocol at the end of the three-month retreat was essentially unchanged when compared to the pre-retreat results.198

The Rorschach’s of the samatha group showed a tendency to see primarily the shading and colors of the Rorschach with little projective imagery.199 Those of the vipassanā group, including a few retreatants and a few of those identified by the western teachers, were especially rich in projective imagery and concomittant associations.200 Those of the practitioners who had attained the first or second levels of enlightenment, four westerners and nine South Asians, were distinct in the number of responses which referred to spatial and energetic dynamics, referring at times to the subtle energy systems of the body

(chakras and channels). Their remarks often alluded to “the interrelationship of form and energy/space” including that in the emergence and dissipation of their own imagery and associations.201 The single meditator in the most advanced category wove a connected thread through all the 10 inkblot cards with the theme of an overview of the teachings of the Buddha.202 Brown and Engler concluded that the results offered validation of the traditional descriptions of development in meditation practice in this tradition.203

As mentioned above, Walsh and Shapiro suggest new directions for the

East-West, science-meditation interface. The current emphasis on assimilation, in which new ideas are pried into existing conceptual configurations is beginning to give way to a new phase characterized by the “expansion and enriching of conceptual categories.” 204

They call for a further development in this area with the use of talented meditators. As

Rosch puts it “Yes, research on meditation can provide data to crunch with the old mind-set. But they have much more to offer, a new way of looking.” 205 Forte, Brown and

Dysart seem to agree, suggesting one target area for the use of the new way of looking when they write that “In order to understand the nature of meditative experiences, it is also necessary to investigate how the meditators themselves understand their perceptual processes and changes.” 206 This study addresses this particular gap by employing one possible new way of looking not previously utilized, an investigation exercise specifically designed to examine shifts in perceptions in the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness. The participants explored a specific meditative inquiry tailored to catalyze and examine this transition, a research focus not found in the literature to date. Their reports were then systematically analyzed, compared, and contrasted. In so doing, this project relied solely on the direct experience of meditators expert in both samatha and mindful inquiry types of meditation during brief periods of their daily meditation practice. The few articles in the literature which offer indirect empirical insight into the territory of this transition relied on technology (a tachistoscope) or psychometric tools (the Rorschach) and with participant groups not specifically chosen for the same expertise as those for this study.207

In addition, two other studies bear some relationship to this study. Haggerty, et al used EEG technology to study shifts in brain activity related to transitions between deep

57 layers of concentration, especially regarding boundary-related regions of the brain. This study, with its focus on the effects of deep samatha practice on brain activity, also relies on technological data (the EEG) rather than meditator experience and studies only one meditator.208 The current study relies on subjective meditator reports regarding such boundaries and uses a substantially larger group of participants. In a similar vein, Lutz, et al., studied highly skilled meditators engaged in lovingkindness meditation, also using

EEG readings as their data.209 The meditation and data collection techniques used, as well as the intent of the study, were different from those in the current research project, though one of their conclusions, that highly trained meditators can be effectively used to study high-level affect and cognition, supports the use of expert meditators in this study.

Perspectives on Subtle Energy, the Subtle Body and Subtle Sense Capacities

This section explores the topic of subtle energy, its correlate the subtle body and the subtle sensory capacities which give experiential access to this realm of phenomena.

Literature from those who address these topics as first person experiences as well as the work of those who explore them from the third person scientific perspective are explored.

Lastly we will examine the relationship between subtle energy and consciousness.

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, the word ‘energy’ has its roots in the Greek word energeia meaning “active, at work.” 210 ‘Work’ is further defined as “the action or effect produced by natural forces.” 211 The Western science of physics currently acknowledges four kinds of natural forces, listed by Phaedra and Isaac Bonewits as

“gravitation, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear.” 212 Energy is that which is expended in the application of a force during the activity of work and comes in various kinds such as “nuclear, chemical, electrical, magnetic, radiant, thermal, kinetic,

(and) potential.” 213 As Webster’s New World Dictionary further notes, according to

Einstein’s well know equation E=mc2, energy and matter are convertible into each other.214 Miriam Dyak thus observes that science seems to suggest that ultimately everything is energy.215

Yet as Bonewits and Bonewits point out, a “magician, mystic, or energy worker” would each use the term somewhat differently.216 The physicist views energy from the objective third person perspective while a mystic or an energy healer refers to a subjective experience. Those energies the effects of which are reported by some from a first person perspective are often considered to be too faint to be measured by third person scientific techniques. David Feinstein notes that the term ‘subtle energy’ is commonly understood to refer to just this kind of energy.217 Yet, according to Brennan, these two categories of energy nonetheless exist on a single energy continuum.218

William Tiller describes the range of subtle energy as “all those beyond the four well-known and accepted classes of forces” but would not agree that these energies are unmeasurable.219 Presenting an alternative meaning, T.M. Srinivasan suggests that subtle energy phenomena could turn out to be the expression of an underlying kind of energy field more basic than electromagnetic fields.220 Gloria Alvino defines field as “a condition in space that has the potential of producing force” leading to Field Theory, which conceives of the universe, including our bodies, as being full of fields of various kinds, the forces of which are constantly interacting with each other.221

Andreas Wehowsky writes that there is extensive subjective evidence from the spiritual traditions which supports the existence of subtle energies.222 Eligio Gallegos points out that while the West has generally looked at the body from a materialistic perspective involving cells, tissues, organs and biological functionality, and the mind

59 from the perspective of behavior, emotions, cognitive functions, awareness or imagination, in the East the human being is seen first and foremost, both physically and psychologically, as an energy system.223 However a growing body of literature shows the significant degree to which the Eastern view is entering the Western psyche.

Two non-Buddhist traditions are prominently represented in this literature: the

North Asian tradition of qi and the kundalini tradition of South Asia. Garret Yount, Qian

Yifang and Honglin Zhang define qi as universal healing energy.224 Lee, Myeong Soo,

Young Hoon Rim, and Chang-won Kang call qi vital energy, while Sun Ok Chang uses the collection of English words “energy, force, vitality and strength” to describe qi.225

According to Douglas Matzke, qi is a non-physical field surrounding all living things.226

Ted Kaptchuk writes that no one English word adequately serves as a translation of qi.

He proposes conceiving of qi as “matter on the verge of becoming energy or energy at the point of materializing.” 227 Tart acknowledges the difficulty in defining qi suggesting that the whole universe is a flowing of something indefinable that can only be apprehended subjectively, the experience of which is something akin to a mental, or even archetypal, image, a kind of imagining which nonetheless has objective effects.228

For Christopher Hills, kundalini is not something objective (separate from the experiencer) nor is it an energy, nor can it be explained physiologically. Rather kundalini is prephysical, ultimately not different from consciousness itself.229 Haridas Chaudhari equates kundalini with the primordial energy out of which everything in the Universe is fabricated, an energy that is the same energy as that of science but rather seen not through our ordinary physical senses but by what he calls transpersonal superconscient sense modalities.230 Lee Sanella sees kundalini as an energy that lies dormant at the base of the

60 spine, and which, when awakened, rises autonomously through the center of the body, spreading throughout the body as felt bodily sensations.231

The literature on subtle energy describes in detail a corresponding subtle body. which Eden refers to as the body’s subtle infrastructure.232 Bruce Burger calls this “the wireless anatomy of the energy fields of the body.” 233 According to William Collinge, this energetic anatomy is not limited to our physical body but consists of several interrelated fields extending from within the body out into the external environment.234

Caroline Myss depicts the energy field she works with as stretching beyond the physical body as far as the arms can reach. She characterizes this field as “a highly sensitive perceptual system … a kind of conscious electricity that transmits and receives messages from other people’s bodies” and the source of information for what we call intuition.235

Bruyere calls this energy field the ‘aura’ and depicts it as related to “the electromagnetic field which emanates from all matter.” 236 Dyak adds the notion of energy centers, or chakras, to that of energy fields, together which form what she calls our energy body.237

Myss depicts the chakra system as associated with kundalini energy.238 Bruyere credits the activity of the chakras, or small vortices of energy spinning within the body, with generating the human aura.239 Louchakova and Warner define the subtle body as “the temporal structures of the psyche recognized within the space of introspection ‘inside’ the physical body.” 240 Wilber feels that the energetic quality of the subtle body is best described as states of blissful awareness in which our ordinary sense of bodily boundary no longer applies.241

In Western Psychology the term libido, originally used by Sigmund Freud, is a parallel concept to that of subtle energy. Reber defines libido as a form of mental or psychic energy still most often associated today with sexual desire, inspite of the fact that

Freud’s later works give it more the flavor of “life energy.” 242 Calvin Hill credits Freud with discovering that the energy dynamics described in physics and acknowledged in biological sciences, have a correlate in the mind. This energetic understanding of the mind and the study of “the transformations and exchanges of energy within the personality” became the foundation of Freud’s dynamic psychology.243

A different Western view of subtle energy is offered by Wilhelm Reich. Reich defines a form of subtle energy he calls the orgone energy in the following manner:

“Primordial cosmic energy; universally present and demonstrable visually, thermically, electroscopically, and by means of Geiger-Mueller counters. In the living organism, bioenergy, life energy.” 244 Reich concludes that that orgone energy has characteristics that are fundamentally different from electricity and magnetism.245

But how is knowledge about subtle energy and the subtle body gained? Like

Myss, Jean Metzker and Dorothy Leigh, describe the human subtle energy system as a source of information and learning beyond the five senses.246 Louchakova and Warner introduce the term psychosomatic mysticism, a spirituality grounded in “direct apperception (perception with understanding) of the structures of consciousness in the body by bypassing the input of the senses,” experience which they note naturally appears as a consequence of deep meditative concentration.247 Some writers depict their personal experiences of subtle sensory capacities in relation to subtle energy and the subtle body.

For example, Brennan writes that for her, the human aura feels like “currents of wind or energy.” 248 Bruyere portrays her experience of transmitting healing energy to a client as like a liquid flowing through her body.249 Marie Carlsson describes her experience of subtle energies as similar to, though subtler than, the experience of proprioception, but

62 describes the two as interacting with each other.250 Eden reports that the direct perception of such energies can occur at subtle versions of any of the five senses.251

Bruyere suggests that not only subtle sensory experience but all our experiences

(sensory impressions, thoughts, etc.) are actually expressions of subtle energy.252 She writes

When a stimulus comes into the body is it registered in the first chakra. The response in the electromagnetic field of the first chakra, producing an energy flow out of the first center, into the second, out the third, and into the heart chakra. In many of us the heart chakra is typically the place where this flow of energy is absorbed or drained from the field. … However if energy is not drained or absorbed by the heart chakra, it is free to continue out the fifth chakra, the sixth, and finally out the seventh or crown chakra.253

Bruyere believes that such stimuli leading to energetic flow within the body comes from the earth’s own magnetic field, though she acknowledges that others attribute it to a more universal magnetic field which enters the body from above.254

Western style scientific exploration of subtle energies comes in several varieties including research on the nature of traditional energies, like qi, research on the physical and psychological effects of subtle energies, and research on hypothetical forms of energy including and outside the four forces of the standard scientific model. Yan Xin, reviewing the literature on empirical qi research, primarily in China, reports that findings support the following general statements: “qi can be observed, measured, and quantified by precise instruments, qi has the properties of matter, qi has the properties of energy, and qi conveys . . . information content or has the characteristics of information.” 255

Hunt, studying the work of various kinds of healers (e.g., hands-on energy healers, acupuncturists, and Rolfers), discovered a somatic field of energy beyond the electrical activity recorded by standard medical measurements.256 She correlated instrumental measurements of this field with the observations of eight experienced aura

63 readers (people who have the special sensory ability to see the human aura), whose results were further compared with each other. The activity of this field was faster than neurological activity and correlated well with the reports of the aura readers.257

Recording changes in this field simultaneously with changes in blood pressure, heart beat, etc., as well as in response to varied intensity of stimuli, she found that changes in the aura always occurred before changes in any other variable, even when the stimulus was too small to either be consciously noted by the recipient or to activate the nervous system at an unconscious level.258 Hunt also studied the effects of environmental electromagnetic fields on human subjects.259 She used a Mu Room, where the electromagnetic field can be altered without affecting other factors, discovering that varying the electrical or magnetic aspects of the field evoked changes in her subjects’ bodily coordination, ability to locate themselves in space, and awareness of their body boundary.260

James Oschman points to a significant aspect of electromagnetic fields, noting that they are associated with direct current electricity, such as brain waves or the electrical activity generated by the heart. They are thus are propagated throughout the circulatory system as full-body electrical activity.261 Hunt adds that the direct current, continuous nature of human energy fields is what allows them to be vehicles of energy-based communication with external energy sources.262 Tiller observes that all human cells have the capacity to both emit and absorb electromagnetic radiation of at least one energy level. Based on this fact, he proposes that the human body has antenna-like capacities, serving to both broadcast and receive a wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.263 He uses theories of the physics of energy fields around antennas to demonstrate that antennas can produce mandala-like energy signatures very

64 similar to the petaled flower mandala-like imagery found in the spiritual traditions to visually depict the chakras. He even notes that under certain conditions, these mandala-like antenna energy signatures are found to be rotating.264

This antenna theory regarding electromagnetic energy and fields dovetails nicely with another line of Tiller’s work. In the early 1970s, Tiller developed a biological radiation detector specifically to study subtle energy.265 He discovered an energy both emitted and received by human subjects that was not classical electromagnetic energy.266

He found that his subjects could be divided into transmitters or projectors (e.g., healers, qigong practitioners) and receivers (e.g., clairvoyants) of this subtle energy.267

Several authors present interesting developmental perspectives drawing on subtle energy, the subtle energy body, and subtle sensory capacities. Wilber offers a description of how during early development the transcendent bliss with which the infant is born gets constricted into a hierarchical series of apparent knots or chakras, each progressively lower knot being more restrictive and exclusive than its predecessor.268 The entire process finally culminates in what he suggests is an egoic-genital tyranny, resulting in a

“personal identity confined to the boundaries of his skin.” 269 Liedloff suggests that when an infant is in continual physical contact with their mother, their energy fields merge and the infant’s excess energy is discharged through her body. This discharge helps to keep the infant aware of its connectedness to the world around it.270 Jean Metzker and Geoffrey

Leigh used skilled aura readers to observe children in an American daycare center at approximately six-month, 30-month and 54-month intervals. They reported their observations of changes in infants’ auras using a coding form covering six parameters such as density, width, and brightness. Their results support the hypothesis that human energy fields grow smaller and denser as children develop from six to 54 months.271

Yet what is the relationship between subtle energy and consciousness? The literature reveals a wide variety of views on this topic. Ronald Mann equates consciousness and subtle energy, noting that the term energetic consciousness is used in touch healing modalities.272 Alvino finds that the plethora of theories points towards a unification of mind, energy, and consciousness. She observes that meditation is a way to open into the experience of “our oneness with the universal energy, the unified field, or consciousness.” 273 Louchakova and Warner write that kundalini energy “is the power of pure consciousness to unfold the world of multiplicity (i.e., present phenomena). It is the impulse of the unmanifest consciousness to become manifest.” 274

Mark Woodhouse writes that while consciousness and energy are often talked about in the same contexts, no good paradigm linking them has been proposed.275 He presents his own, which he calls energy monism, suggesting that consciousness is the inside of energy while energy is the exterior of consciousness.276 For Larry Dossey,

Woodhouse’s energy monism begs new questions, such as the nature of the boundary between the interior and exterior of energy.277 Observing that consciousness can only be known from a first person perspective, Wilber argues that consciousness and subtle energy are not the same but are intimately related.278 Christian de Quincey presents his own theory of the relationship as follows: “consciousness is the ability of matter/energy to feel, to know and to direct itself.” 279 He thus introduces the element of intentionality.

Louchakova and Warner’s paradigm of psychosomatic mysticism offers yet another alternative. They write “Subtle energies provide the link between (the chakras and channels of the subtle body) and the psyche and its contents (meaning) and the gradient between the subjectivity of pure Self Awareness and the objectified world.” 280

Louchakova and Warner thus conclude that subject and object are related via the

66 spectrum of subtle energies, a relationship which can be studied directly through subtle, detailed perceptions of the body.281 Their views are close to my own but do not specify the patterned subtle, dynamic, energetic details of this relationship that I hypothesize.282

In summary, there is substantial evidence from both the first and third person perspectives documenting subtle energy phenomena and the subtle body anatomy to which such phenomena are intimately related, including some confirmation that is empirical in nature. A few writers go so far as to link subtle energy to consciousness in various ways. However none offer empirical evidence in support of their assertion of this link nor does any author specifically describe either a boundary-forming role for subtle energy in the construction of the subject-object form of consciousness.283 Only Hunt, with her Mu Room experiments, suggests a functional relationship between subtle energy and self boundary. But even here it is the presence or absence of a kind of subtle energy in the field, as opposed to subtle energy activity, that shifts the subjective experience of boundary. Also lacking is any study of a role for subtle energy phenomena in the adult transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness, the focus of this research project, though Hunt’s research hints that this may be the case.

The study of consciousness has been a strong focus within the field of psychology for many years. While perhaps a bit more peripheral, a role for subtle energy in psychological processes has been acknowledged at least since Freud first wrote about libido in the early twentieth century. Some initial research has been done in this direction, for example by Hunt, Metzker and Leigh, and Tiller. With the emergence of the still nascent field of Energy Psychology, it is important now to empirically explore the relationship between subtle energy and various forms of consciousness. The suggestion of the central role of the boundary-forming patterned activity of subtle energy in the

67 structuring of the subject-object forms of consciousness serves, in the context of this research, as a theory to be empirically tested to this end. This study also builds on Mu

Room research by Hunt showing a relationship between subtle energy and boundary experience but uses an approach grounded in the subjective boundary experiences of expert Buddhist meditators without relying on techonologically created changes in the environmental energy fields.

Buddhist Perspectives on Consciousness and Subtle Energy

Buddhism has a long history of exploring and discussing the nature of consciousness. This section will examine Buddhist views on subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness and related issues, such as Developmental

Psychology, as well those on the role of subtle energy in human experience.284

In the Pali Cannon, the oldest recorded teachings of the Buddha, the Buddha himself spoke often about consciousness, especially in three of his core teachings: a) Dependent

Origination: his description of how ignorance (Pali: avijjā, Sanskrit: avidya), not seeing clearly into our true nature, leads to suffering, in which structured or conditioned consciousness (Pali: viññāna, Sanskrit: vijnana) is the third of 12 steps in the process; b) the five aggregates (Pali: khandhas, Sanskrit: skhandas), his description of the five basic constituents of human experience, (the object being cognized, the affective tone of the experience, our perception of the object, our intentionality towards it, and our knowing, or consciousness of it); and c) the six sense modalities (five physical senses plus the mind as a sixth sense, with thoughts, emotions, dreams, etc., as objects) which includes the consciousnesses associated with each of the six sensory modalities.285 He taught that consciousness is that which cognizes or knows, that is, the activity of knowing

68 itself regardless of what is known.286 In the Abhidhamma, the Buddha’s taxonomy of all things physical and mental, he lists seven mental aspects of all moments of consciousness as follows: manasikāra (attention or mental advertence), cetanā (intention or volition), phassa (contact or sense impression), vedanā (feeling tone), sañña (perception), samādhi

(concentration), and jīvita (vitality).287

Representing the Theravadan perspective, Andrew Olendzki describes consciousness as ”the fundamental awareness of cognizing an object,” which he further defines as being essentially the same for each of our six sense modalities.288

Consciousness, however, is contingent on these other two aspects of experience, the object and the sense modality involved, having no existence independent of them.289

Olendzki notes that the Buddha included consciousness in his list of the five aggregates, then goes on to point out that mindfulness of the five aggregates constitutes an important theme in the Buddha’s principle discourse on mindfulness, the Satipaţţhāna Sutta.290

The Dalai Lama, elucidating a Vajrayana perspective, defines consciousness as luminous and knowing, that is the ability to reveal or reflect and the faculty to apprehend or perceive, respectively.291 He points out that the Western view that all mental activity is rooted in physical processes is a belief, not a fact, explaining that neurophysiological approaches to the study of consciousness “will always leave out what it feels like to see blue.” 292 He is careful to make the distinction between consciousness and the sense modalities through which it manifests as well as to note that Buddhism does not distinguish between a knower and the process of knowing.293 While offering his view that there is currently no good explanation of the cause of consciousness, the Dalai Lama suggests that consciousness and matter contribute to the origination of each other such that neither can be the primary cause of the other.294 He reports that in the Vajrayana

69 tradition, while some schools count six kinds of consciousness, a model he prefers, others add two additional forms of consciousness.295 Within the six-fold model, he defines the sixth or mind consciousness in relation to what arises at the five physical sense doors, including our experiences of memory, recognition, discrimination, intention, will, conceptual thinking and dreams.296

Other writers expand on the Dalai Lama’s perspectives. B. Alan Wallace, like the

Dalai Lama, is not impressed by materialist views of consciousness, pointing out that in the current quantum view of physics there are not really any material ‘things’.297 Instead he suggests that what we experience as mind and matter both emerge from a dimension that transcends this apparent duality.298 Jeremy Hayward offers his twist on a Buddhist definition of consciousness which he states as “the brightness and clarity in which a thought or sense perception is directly known.” 299 Thrangu Rinpoche provides a description of the “eight consciousnesses” perspective, which adds a seventh consciousness, the klesha mind and the eighth or alaya consciousness.300 The klesha consciousness constitutes a background to the six sensory consciousnesses, holding the feeling that there is an ongoing knowing self. The alaya is the repository for habitual tendencies that have developed through the individual’s past experiences of the other seven consciousnesses, from a Buddhist perspective including past life experiences, and from which such habits re-emerge when triggered by the situation of the present moment.301

Given the Buddhist emphasis on the six consciousnesses, each associated with a particular sensory modality and its objects, the term consciousness in Buddhism has a distinctly subject-object ring to it. Representing the Theravadan perspective, Ajahn

Buddhadassa attributes this subject-object structuring to our ignorance (avijjā), which he

70 describes as “falling for pairs of opposites.” 302 Ignorance, he writes, is caused by clinging or attachment, the deepest of which is clinging to “me” and “mine.” 303 Martin

Pitt focuses instead on the way language divides up the world into discrete pieces by labeling each part as distinct from the background of the whole, causing our experience to be a series of moments of attention to these parts.304 According to Kabat-Zinn, we are constantly co-creating the apparently external world around us through the activity of our five senses.305

As described above, a predominant Western view is that subject-object consciousness arises during the developmental process of early infancy. While on the whole there is very little in the Buddhist literature regarding what would be called

Developmental Psychology in the West, there are a few interesting allusions to the early life of the human in the Pali Cannon. For example in The Connected Discourses of the

Buddha, Sutta 64, “The Greater Discourse to Mālunkyāputta,” the Buddha notes that “a young, tender infant lying prone does not even have the notion ‘identity.’” 306 The

Buddha goes on to say, however, that within the infant is an underlying tendency to develop a sense of identity or self. Wangyal offers the view that we are born into this world with our energies already out of balance suggesting that, from the Tibetan perspective, the forms of consciousness of early human infancy are different in some fundamental way from liberating forms of participatory consciousness possible later in life.307

However in this context it is interesting to note that Buddhist depictions of that which is beyond subject-object consciousness sometimes utilize biological terminology associated with gestation and birth. For example, one of the Buddha’s own synonyms for

Theravadan Buddhist notion of nibbāna, the cessation of greed, hatred and delusion, and

71 hence the end of suffering, was ‘the unborn’.308 In the Vajrayana tradition we find the term Tathāgathagarbha. Tathāgatha is an epithet the Buddha often used to refer to himself (literally meaning ‘suchness being’) and garbha is variously translated as

‘womb,’ ‘embryo,’ or ‘matrix’ (the original meaning of which is ‘uterus’).309

Tathagatagarbha thus refers to the source, locus, or seed of Buddhahood, which, constituting the embodiment of the end of suffering, is thus ‘unborn.’ In a contemporary context, Heather Sundberg describes the Buddhist experience of emptiness as “the warm invisible womb, cradling the whole mess of our humanness.” 310 Peter Levit, writing from a Buddhist ecological perspective, depicts our human situation “as like that of an infant in the mother’s womb, wherein the womb is the entire world to the foetus. The mother herself resides in the womb of the earth, the earth in the larger womb of the

Universe as a whole.” 311

In the context of Western psychotherapy, Buddhist clinicians have endeavored to compare and contrast developmentally related theories and issues, such as the Object

Relations School mentioned above or the notion of narcissism, with the teachings of

Buddhism. For example, Raul Moncayo suggests that the most salient difference between the Object-Relations School and Buddhism is the former’s emphasis on “the importance of developing a coherent or integrated ego or self identity” in contrast to “the Buddhist doctrine of no-self.” 312 Jeremy Safran further characterizes the difference in the goals of the two traditions. He describes the liberation sought by Object Relations oriented therapists as one of “freeing oneself from one’s ties to old internal objects.” 313 By contrast he characterizes the Buddhist approach to liberation as the insight “that there is no self independent of others,” accomplished by the recognition that the apparent boundary between ourselves and others is constructed rather than innate.314

Mark Epstein addresses the issue of narcissism contrasting psychoanalytic and

Buddhist contributions to this topic. He wrote (in 1995) that Western psychoanalytic theory of the past 30 years has exposed our narcissism, which he defines as “the sense of falseness or emptiness that propels people either to devalue themselves or others,” and yet has failed to deliver an effective cure.315 Epstein notes the Freudian view that narcissism has its roots in the libidinal relationship of the child with its mother.316 From a

Buddhist perspective he relates narcissism to the Buddhist cosmology of six realms of sentient existence, offering the opinion that narcissism is the affliction most particularly characteristic of our human realm.317 He depicts the Buddha’s vision as one of “a psyche freed from narcissism” and sees the Buddhist form of practice as a method for tirelessly tackling narcissism head on resulting in its eventual elimination.318 According to Epstein, the Buddhist key to overcoming narcissism comes through exposing the falsity of our deeply held “conviction in a self that needs protecting.” 319

Engler carries the analysis of the Buddhist process for the elimination of narcissism more deeply when he describes the traditional Theravadan teaching of enlightenment in four discrete stages in terms of Western Psychology. At the first stage of enlightenment, it is our dysfunctional cognitive beliefs that are laid to rest. The next two stages eradicate our affective reactivity. It is not until the fourth and final stage of enlightenment that our “narcissistic investments in our core sense of being a separate self” are lastingly transformed.320 Engler notes that along the way to this ultimate goal there is the continual danger of our narcissistic vulnerabilities co-opting our spiritual practice and experiences for egoic purposes.321 It is interesting that among the defilements that finally fall away permanently at this last stage is that of māna, most often translated as ‘conceit’ or ‘pride,’ but which includes three varieties:

73 inferiority-conceit, in which we judge ourselves to be less than someone else, equality conceit, where we evaluate ourselves as another’s equal, and superiority-conceit, the view that we are better than another.322

While Western Psychology looks to discover when during the course of a human life consciousness first arises, Buddhism sees consciousness arising anew again and again moment to moment as the underlying nature of human experience. As noted above,

Kabat-Zinn writes that we are constantly recreating the apparently external world, the realm of objects in relation to ourselves as the knowing subject. In describing this process, Ñyāņatiloka takes the Theravadan Buddhist Abhidhamma perspective, a view analogous to Newtonian physics in contrast to quantum theory in that it divides the world into discrete parts and the mind into distinct qualities and then describes the interaction between those components. In this view, a moment of sense perception proceeds quickly through a series of complex, subtle, and largely unconscious stages.323 Initially the object, say one of sight, enters the range of vision, acting on the sense organ and eliciting an excitation in the subconscious. If strong enough, the impact breaks through the fog of the subconscious leading to an advertence of consciousness to this newly appearing object.

At this point, eye-consciousness arises in association with the eye. This is followed by the mind-consciousness: consciousness conditioned by the mind sense door, performing the functions of receiving, investigating, and determining the nature of the object, which then conditions a positive, negative, or neutral response based on that determination. Here the mind is sufficiently engaged to have taken the new visual stimulus as an object. With each new object, consciousness arises anew in relation to the object of the moment and in association with the active sensory modality.

Hayward presents a Vajrayana view, parallel to the Theravadan perspective above. It constitutes a description, grounded in the experience of master meditation practitioners, of how out of the unitary background of experience the split into self and world arises.324 First there is the “activation of the five senses … a preconscious recognition of patterning” that involves the separation into inner and outer and, in the external patterning, the distinction between one aspect and another.325 Then a feeling tone emerges in response to the external patterning. Next comes the cognitive aspect, both in relation to a particular object within the external patterning, as well as the first cognitive hint of a sense-of-self, associated with the inner aspect of the patterning. Then there follows a process of projection of meaning from the inner onto the outer including a linguistic label together with connotations. Last to emerge is our ordinary consciousness including a subtle, implied sense-of-self.326 This process represents the sequential emergence of the five skhandhas resulting in our being “stuck in a mode of perception in which space is an empty container filled with apparently separate objects.” 327

Tenzin Wangyal, representing the Tibetan Bön tradition, describes the first stirrings of subject-object consciousness in subtle energy terms as follows:

For each of us, everything begins with the primordial space, the Great Mother from which all things arise, in which all things exist, and into which all things dissolve. In this space there is movement. What causes it, no one knows. The teachings only say ‘the winds of karma moved.’ This is the movement of lung or prana, the energy that pervades infinite space without characteristics or divisions. Inseparably united with the flow of prana is the flow of primordial awareness, pure and without identity. In this pure awareness the five lights arise.328

These five lights are the expression of the luminous nature of primordial awareness and represent the five elements in the form of light that is too subtle to be seen and energy that is too subtle to measure. Yet according to Wangyal, it is these energies which give rise to all other energies including the grosser lights and energies of our everyday world.

When not perceived with clarity these energies evolve in the direction of greater and greater substantiality, the source of all dualistic aspects of experience including the knowing subject and its objects.329 Wangyal is careful to point out that this story is not a creation story, like the physicists’ Big Bang Theory that tells how the universe began.

Rather it is a description of our ongoing lived experience. If the nature of the five lights is not clearly seen, samsāra, the conditioned world of suffering, ensues. When clarity prevails, nirvana, the cessation of suffering, characterizes our experience.330 Barth provides a similar description from the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. 331

Wallace offers an analogous vision when he quotes Dudjom Lingpa: “This ground is … like water in its natural fluid state freezing into a cold wind. It is due to dualistic grasping onto subjects and objects that the ground, which is naturally free, becomes frozen into the appearances of things.” 332 Wallace describes two layers to this primordial background that congeals into subject-object consciousness, the bhavanga out of which an individual expression of subject-object consciousness arises, and the dharmadhatu out of which all phenomena arise.333

According to the Dalai Lama, within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition there are two distinct views about this process. In the first view, the experience of the division into a subject in relation to a multiplicity of objects represents an actual split into an objective aspect and a subjective aspect of experience. The opposing, and from the Dalai Lama’s perspective, preferable understanding, is that regardless of how the experience is felt,

“the actual perceptual experience is a single unitary event.” 334 These two areas of

Tibetan thought, that of the bhavanga and dharmadhatu on the one hand, and the question of whether a split into subject and object actually takes place or not, on the other, offer an interesting bridge to Buddhist views on participatory consciousness.

From the Buddhist perspective, expressions of participatory consciousness take several forms. Some writers describe the breaking down of the division in experience into subject and object. Others point towards the Buddha’s teaching on emptiness. Peter

Fenner offers his view of participatory consciousness when he writes about the

“awakening into the nature of consciousness as pure and unconstructed.” 335 He gives his definition of purity as devoid of structures which objectify.336 For Fenner, this quality of experience, which he also calls ‘unconditioned mind,’ is the highest human goal since in it we are complete, needing nothing.337

Sarah Doering offers a similar terminology with her notion of pure awareness which she describes as “without thought, without associations, non-verbal, (and) completely intuitive.” 338 She depicts this kind of experience as occurring fleetingly in the earliest stages of each and every perception.339 Wallace uses the term ‘primordial consciousness,’ the experience of which, he writes, “transcends all conceptual dualities including matter and energy, space and time, subject and object, mind and matter and even existence and non-existence.” 340 He says the dharmadhatu is known by this primordial consciousness as the unity of itself with primordial absolute space, an experiential insight which arises when all apparent divisions, including and especially that into inner and outer, break down.341 This is possible because it is of the dharmadhatu that all appearances are sculpted, including “external space and internal space, time, matter, (and) consciousness” all of which “consist of nothing more than configurations of this absolute space.” 342 Glenn Eddy offers a parallel perspective grounded in the

Buddhist notion of emptiness or openness when he describes the symbolism of the

Buddhist icon of the dakini as follows: “Dakini represents the encounter with the openness (sunyata or emptiness) of all things, wherein the distinct and concrete patterns

77 we normally perceive are seen to be but fleeting modifications of an open field.” 343

Wangyal uses the terms ‘innate awareness,’ ‘non-dual awareness,’ and ‘nondual presence’ (his translations for the Tibetan term rigpa, Pali: vijjā, Sanskrit: vidya) as alternatives to Wallace’s primordial consciousness.344 He notes that these terms also mean the nature of mind and are synonymous with a unity of emptiness and luminosity and with Buddha Nature.345

Some authors emphasize the interdependence, interconnectedness, or interpenetration of all things, especially including subject and object. Kabat-Zinn describes the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as affectionate attention which he says implicitly includes the invitation to see into the nature of the interconnectedness between subject and object, resulting in a deep and discerning intimacy with the present moment.346 Through mindfulness, he writes, “subject and object merge into the part of speech we so wonderfully refer to as the present participle so we have ‘just seeing’ or

‘just feeling or ‘just knowing’.” 347 Hayward credits mindfulness, especially of the body, with softening the boundary of our limited sense-of-self. 348 This, he says, allows us to tune into a network of energy and awareness that leads to the recognition of “our participation in a larger sense of awareness embedded in nature.” 349 In this way,

Hayward writes, we can experientially reconnect with our interdependence and interconnectedness with all life, including the insight that we are not separate from those around us.350 Pitt attributes the recognition of the interpenetration of all things to meditation with an emphasis on non-conceptual awareness.351 In Appendix 13, I use these terms in a specific manner to refer to the participatory layers of consciousness beneath subject-object consciousness.

Martine Batchelor suggests the term creative awareness as her parallel term for participatory consciousness. She depicts creative awareness as that which remains when our habitual patterns of “feeling that things are fixed, independent, and disconnected from one another” are no longer active revealing an underlying interdependence.352 She emphasizes that creative awareness emerges when concentration and the practice of inquiring directly into the nature of our experience are developed together.353 We will return to this theme below.

A relatively new addition to the body of Buddhist literature is that which offers a bridge between Buddhism and the emerging field of Ecopsychology. Writing in this niche, both Joan Halifax and Joanna Macy describe our possible shift in consciousness to what they call the ‘ecological self’, which Halifax describes as “an awareness realized beyond the boundary of an enclosed self.” 354 Macy adds that this ecological self is

“coextensive with other beings and life on our planet,” in contrast to what she calls our

‘prison self,’ her term for subject-object consciousness.355 She elaborates, depicting our nature as human beings as

open self-organizing systems, our very breathing, acting and thinking aris(ing) in interaction with our shared world through the currents of matter, energy, and information that move through us and sustain us. In the web of relationships that sustain these activities there is no clear boundary demarcating a separate, continuous self. 356

Macy credits the Buddha’s own awakening under the Bodhi Tree to the actuality of paticca samutpāda, Pali for Dependent Origination, for which she prefers the term

‘co-arising,’ as the source of the deeply ecological nature of the Buddha’s message.357

With this view Elizabeth Roberts concurs, noting that by the Buddhist practice of not clinging to anything, “we are free to recognize the world as ourselves. The activity of ego is displaced by the total activity of life in such a way that the rigid boundary between

79 self and everything else begins to dissolve.” 358 She calls this experience ‘communion,’

“a palpable immediacy” in which we discover the underlying relationship between every aspect of the universe giving rise to a vision of the world as “one organism, one energy event, wherein everything is connected.” 359 Like Macy, she emphasizes that this singularity does not dissolve differences but rather allows us to recognize the unity inherent in manifest diversity.360 Macy writes that it is through the recognition of this unity that we are paradoxically freed to more fully express our uniqueness.361

In the context of this research project the primary Buddhist theory depicting participatory forms of consciousness is that of the Vajrayana Mahamudra practice lineages. In the introduction above, the Mahamudra experiential categories of luminosity, emptiness and primordial awareness are described. The emphasis in Mahamudra is on the direct experience of the nature of mind as the unity of luminosity (itself the inseparability of knowing and appearance), also sometimes translated as ‘cognizance,’ and emptiness, in this context especially the insubstantiality of all phenomena.362 An interesting elucidation of that which is often called luminosity is found in the writing of Kalu

Rinpoche. He prefers the English term clarity to luminosity for this union, preferring to use luminosity for the appearing aspect of clarity while calling its knowing aspect lucidity. As clarity, for which he also employs the term self-luminous cognition, these two are a unity.363

The Vajrayana Dzogchen tradition offers similar descriptions.364 In a text attributed to the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the distinction is made between phenomena and pure being. Phenomena is defined by Lama Mipham in his commentary on the root text as “the realm of manifestation, which consists of appearances involving a duality of perceived and perceiver plus the assumption that anything appearing in such a way

80 actually exists in that way.” (A bodhisattva is a being who eschews their own personal enlightenment for the benefits of others, and is believed to eventually become a Buddha after long training over many lifetimes.) 365 Phenomena in this usage is a synonym for samsara, the Buddhist notion of a cycle of repeated rebirths characterized by impermanence and suffering. 366 Regarding pure being, Maitreya’s original text reads:

The other factor, pure being, is defined As suchness, in which there is no differentiation Between a factor perceived and a perceiver, A signifier and a signified.367

Presenting the Dzogchen view on the process of the path from phenomena to pure being,

Lama Mipham, in his classic, Calm and Clear, describes the transition from subject-object consciousness to primordial awareness as passing through stages. Initially the sense of self dissolves while the object retains its apparently independent and substantial nature.368 As practice deepens the experience of an interconnected field emerges in which the distinction between subject and object is lost.369 Yet here the apparent substantial nature of the field persists. Only with continued examination does a further shift take place in which the underlying immaterial nature of the whole field becomes apparent.370 Even at this stage the process is not complete. A subsequent deepening reveals the underlying identity/singular sameness of all aspects of the field, finally extinguishing the last subtle vestiges of the subject-object split.371

Of note regarding the Buddhist view of participatory consciousness is the notion that a particular form of participatory consciousness, primordial awareness or rigpa, characterized in the Vajrayana tradition by the recognition of the unity of the experiential qualities of luminosity and emptiness, can be stabilized, replacing subject-object consciousness as the default form of experience. This is in fact the goal of Mahamudra

81 practice.372 Lama Mipham alludes to this stabilization.373 Various practices are given in the Mahamudra tradition for the purpose of stabilizing the direct experiential insight described above.374 Barth’s rendition of a traditional Tibetan image of the progress of practice has this flavor: “With practice, at first your mind is like a stream cascading down a mountainous ravine. Then, after a while, your mind is like a great river. Finally, your mind is like the mixing of a river and the ocean, or the meeting of a mother and son.” 375

Several mentions of energy above provide a bridge to the Buddhist perspective on subtle energy. Wallace notes that in contrast to Western science, in Buddhism, it is through direct personal experience that energy is investigated.376 Wangyal describes subtle energy as unmeasurable but accessible to direct experience through yogic meditative disciplines. He enumerates three levels to this exploration as follows: an outer level that involves shamanic practices, an inner level that is associated with tantric practices that work with posture, visualization, breath, and mantra (words or syllables, usually in Sanskrit, repeated either verbally or internally), and a secret level, involving recognition of energies as aspects of insubstantial luminosity inextricably associated with emptiness.377 Preece adds that subtle energy is the creative aspect of luminosity, manifesting as our dreams, visions and fantasies.378 Vajradevi writes about Vajrapani, one of the three principle iconic Mahayana Bodhisattvas, the one having perfected the energy of a Buddha.379 Vajrapani is depicted as holding a thunderbolt symbolizing the energetic quality of compassionate action for which Vajradevi uses the Sanskrit term viriya.380

Vajradevi defines viriya as energy directed towards liberation that sees things as they really are instead of through ego’s lens.381 This energy helps us to push through our dysfunctional habits. Vajradevi compares us as humans to icebergs with just a small fraction of our energy above the conscious limen. He says that through tantric practices

82 we work to bring the unconscious energy into consciousness.382 According to Vessantara,

“Tantra sees the whole world in terms of energy.” 383

Several writers note the role of energy in creating human suffering. Ajahn Rat

Rattanayano writes that when our energy is associated with ignorance, cetasika (mental formations) arise, enclosing and tugging on the mind, a process that when not seen clearly leads to discontent. 384 While, as detailed above, Wangyal describes the Buddhist view that we come into this life with our subtle energies already out of balance, Ajahn

Sucitto suggests that the cultivation of samādhi and bodily awareness is critical to the process of balancing these energies.385 Ajahn Taniya writes about one particular form of human energy, that associated with sexual desire. She describes her practice of working with sexual energy by just opening to it with a curiosity about what it wants.386 She reports finding that the usual answer is “oneness or unity.” According to her, when sexual energy is simply allowed to move as energy without the influence of desire it transforms into devotional energy associated with the heart.387

Other Buddhist authors comment on the relationship of energy to mind and body.

Drawing on her experiences with body-focused mindfulness practices, Mirka Knaster contrasts the sense of touch with that of proprioception, the latter referring to the experience of sensations originating within the body while the former involves sensations generated by contact between the body and objects outside it.388 She then goes on to depict her experience of a third sense capacity which she calls the “sense of energy.” 389

This she describes as our ability to sense the invisible and impalpable electromagnetic fields which surround everything, including people.390 According to Preece, subtle energy is known through subtle sensations that incessantly permeate the body and is the means through which we experience what he calls the energy-wind body, a two-way

83 communication modality between consciousness and the physical body.391 Wallace credits samatha meditation techniques with giving the practitioner access to the experiential realm of subtle energies.392 This happens because by thus training the mind the perceptual acuity is greatly strengthened “lowering the threshold between conscious and unconscious mind.” 393 Further development of concentration results in these energies coming into harmony, thus catalyzing the shift to the deep states of meditative absorption known as the jhānas and the āruppas.394

What is the Buddhist perspective on the relationship between energy and consciousness? Ajahn Rat Rattanayano describes citta, often used as a synonym for viññāna, as “a form of energy.” 395 The Dalai Lama sees sentience, or subject-object consciousness experienced through the senses, as connected with both energy and knowing.396 Wangyal lists two main ways that subtle energies or lights can be experienced: dualistically, as the known objects of a knowing subject resulting in the ignorance and suffering of samsāra, or nondualistically, in which their appearance is self-know from within, an expression of wisdom.397 According to Fenner, beings who have mastered this nondualistic mode “create an energy field that has a potency and immediacy.” 398 For Wallace, primordial consciousness is replete with unlimited energy.

He says this energy is the source of every other kind of energy, such as thermal, kinetic, electromagnetic, and gravitational energies described by physicists.399 Vajradevi, writing about Buddhist tantra, the study of “the movement of energy and direct experience,” notes that when we move beyond our tendency to conceptualize to what he calls the non-rational, “we can experience ourselves as pure energy or pure awareness that is unmediated by concepts.” 400 Hayward alludes to such a direct experiential approach when he suggests that through the practice of mindfulness of the body we can become

84 aware of the energy activity around us in which we are immersed leading to a realization of our deeply intimate relationship with nature.401

A full discussion of samādhi and insight, samatha (tranquility/concentration) and vipassanā the primary Buddhist practices used to cultivate direct relationship experience unmediated by concepts is beyond the scope of this paper. However a few words are in order. Samādhi is often described in the Western Buddhist literature as concentration.402

Marcia Rose elaborates on this translation offering the further definition of “gathering together the energy of the mind” emphasizing that this is accomplished by focusing the mind’s attention on one object.403 Pat Coffey offers a different perspective suggesting that the English word ‘concentration,’ a common translation for samādhi, is inadequate to catch its rich meaning. He suggests that a more accurate understanding of samādhi includes the qualities of “tranquility, equanimity, lightness, flexibility, faith, and mindfulness.” 404

Winston King offers the view that both the practices of samatha and vipassanā have as their goal the transcending of subject-object split.405 He shares his perspective that while samatha is used to cultivate deep states of absorption called the jhānas (levls of concentration), insight relative to these profound states of stillness comes upon reflection after returning to less absorbed states. Christina Feldman seems to agree, especially regarding the āruppas (formless levels of concentration). She notes that whether the potential insight that can be catalyzed by such states is actualized or not depends on the quality of investigation a meditator brings to their experience after emerging from the

āruppa in question.406 However Thanissaro Bhikkhu presents a different perspective, arguing that the Buddha himself did not draw such a strict line. He reports that insight is in fact possible while absorbed in the jhānas.407 For Thanissaro, this includes both the

85 rūpa jhānas and the āruppas, with the exception of the fourth āruppa. Both Shankman and

Batchelor describe two forms of concentration using the identical language, ‘exclusive’ and ‘inclusive’ concentration. By these two terms they mean concentration on one object of attention to the exclusion of others versus a concentration that is open and undirected towards any particular object.408

But states of strong concentration, in and of themselves, are not transformative.

Lacking insight into the luminous and empty nature of the mind, they need to be cultivated in balance with vipassanā before they have the ability to transmute ordinary consciousness into liberating forms of participatory consciousness. As Feldman notes, especially the experiential range of the āruppas can easily be mistaken for experiences of emptiness.409

Insight and the shift towards participatory consciousness is the special emphasis in vipassanā meditation. Hayward notes that the practice of mindfulness is the most important practice for softening the limiting egoic boundary of the sense-of-self.

Kabat-Zinn describes how mindfully paying attention to our sensory experience leads to an inclusive, choiceless type of awareness that serves as our threshold into the kinds of knowing that transcend subject and object and thereby change our relationship to both our inner and outer forms of experience.410

The deep integration of samatha and vipassanā is especially emphasized in the

Mahamudra tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism, as is the use of samatha without an object, a form of inclusive concentration. Barth and Thrangu, among others provide detailed descriptions of the uses of both these practices in the context of Mahamudra practice including samatha without an object.411 Wallace also describes the process of developing samatha and vipassanā in sequence. After cultivating samatha to deep levels, vipassanā

86 practiced in the context of deep concentration, or samādhi, can lead to the awakening into primordial consciousness.412 My article on Dependent Origination in relation to subtle energy activity and the samādhi of the jhānas and āruppas offers one practitioner’s description of this process (Appendix 13).413

In summary, the Buddhist tradition provides various perspectives on the nature of both subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness including the possibility of stabilizing the experience of participatory consciousness. Descriptions of how subject-object consciousness emerges out of primordial awareness, even one depicting this process in subtle energy terms, can be found. Yet the specific details of this subtle energy process are not described. Also included in the Buddhist literature are descriptions of the shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness and the practices utilized to that end. My own unpublished article on Dependent

Origination describes in detail the process whereby the activity of subtle energy structures subject-object consciousness out of the underlying primordial awareness and how by attending to the layers of structured subtle energy activity subject-object consciousness can be destructured leading to various forms of participatory consciousness including primordial awareness (Appendix 13).414 I relate this process to the cultivation of samatha and vipassanā working together at deep layers of samādhi, referred to as the jhānas and the āruppas.415

Some writers mention the notion of a boundary between subject and object.

However apart from my own article, no mention is made of the activity of subtle energy as the mechanism of the formation of the apparent boundary segregating knowing from the realm of physical sense objects. It is this specific activity of dynamic subtle energy

87 patterning and the possible undoing of it leading to participatory consciousness that this research explores.

In addition, Buddhism, as an experiential tradition of knowledge, has not taken an empirical approach to the validation of its understanding of human nature. This study addresses this gap by applying an empirical approach to an important area of Buddhist knowledge, the transition from subject-object to participatory forms of consciousness, for the first time.

Imaginal Approaches to Consciousness and Subtle Energy

Imaginal Psychology emphasizes the central role of images and imaginal structures in our psycho-spiritual life and encourages the cultivation of reflexivity. This section will explore the theoretical and practical realm of Imaginal Psychology as a framework for examining the possibility that the nature of our subject-object consciousness is a central aspect of imaginal structures that can be engaged reflexively, leading to its transmutation into participatory forms of consciousness. Imaginal

Psychology draws on various sources for its inspiration, including Jungian and neo-Jungian psychology, alchemy, affect theory, and ecopsychology, all of which will be explored to some extent below. The first portion will examine Imaginal Psychology approaches to consciousness and subject-object consciousness, as well as participatory consciousness. The second segment will examine the role of subtle energy and its close correlate, the subtle body, in Imaginal Psychology, as well as the subtle sensory capacities that give access to these elusive aspects of human experience.

How does Imaginal Psychology view the notion of consciousness? In his dictionary of Jungian terms, Sharp defines consciousness as “the function or activity

88 which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego,” which he calls “the subject of consciousness.” 416 Michael Washburn elaborates on this definition, equating ego with the subject in relation to both other persons and the world around us.417 Jung finds the source of consciousness in the unconscious, the realm of those aspects of psychic activity of which the ego is unaware, offering the radioactive nucleus as a metaphor for the process of projection by which consciousness “is constantly being produced by an energy that comes from the depths of the unconscious.” 418 By contrast, Wolfgang Giegerich insists that it is not possible to derive consciousness from the unconscious, believing that it exists in its own right.419

Edinger adds an etymological analysis that reveals two aspects of consciousness, knowing and withness, resulting in the notion of the “experience of knowing together with an ‘other’.” 420 Edinger likens this process, which involves a splitting into a subject that knows together with a known object, to Erich Neumann’s archetypal description of the division of the universe into Mother Earth and Father Sky, noting that it recurs each time the ego re-emerges after having fallen into an unconscious relationship to its content.421 Neumann himself equates “the splitting of the world into subject and object, inside and outside” with the term ego consciousness.422 For him the ego’s early development that ensues from this split necessarily involves a transitional narcissistic phase as the ego consolidates into two expressions of its central position.423 The first is consciousness as a locus from which action ensues, which developmentally precedes the second function of consciousness, that of the context in which cognition occurs.424

Robert Romanyshyn believes that consciousness, which he equates with the term mind, is an outgrowth of our Cartesian tendency to separate space into interior and exterior and then identify the interior with mind while the exterior becomes a realm of

89 matter.425 Theodore Roszak implicates Freud, characterizing Freudian psychotherapy as a

“patrolling of the boundary lines between ego and external world.” 426 He feels that modern psychology is still stuck in the Freudian view that the skin is the border line between internal and external.427 Laura Sewall sees this dualistic orientation as a defense against our interdependence in the context of a world in constant flux.428 Patricia Berry recognizes parallels in the myth of Narcissus who she depicts as “self-enclosed by (his) own image” in contrast to the loose boundaries of Echo, his pursuer.429 She attributes to

Narcissus the desire to keep things simple, suggesting that it is easier to consider oneself both separate and different from one’s surroundings.430 In contrast to Romanyshyn’s use of terms, Robert Greenway makes a distinction between the mind and consciousness. He defines mind as “the sum of all natural process and the information that emanates from them.” 431 He thus sees mind as an inherent property of the Universe. Consciousness for him arises out of mind as its self-reflexive faculty.432 Already in these views on consciousness we see evidence of a division into two aspects, the subject, or knower and the object, or known.

Consciousness also plays an important role in Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory.

Tomkins takes an evolutionary view of the origin of consciousness, describing it as an emergent quality that became necessary when living organisms developed the ability to move about in space.433 For him consciousness is life’s response to a greatly increased complexity of two kinds. The first is that generated by the fact of an organism’s mobility within its environment. The second is the increased complexity within the organism required to process the expanded experiential diversity of its constantly changing surroundings.434 It arises in part due to the exchange of energy between the outside and the inside of the organism through the experiences of the senses and in part due to the

90 sensory evocation of memory.435 The interaction of these two forms an image of present moment experience. It is this image, which Tomkins calls a ‘conscious report’, as opposed to the actual direct sensory input, that an organism knows or is conscious of.

This process is necessary for the organism to be able to continuously duplicate itself in the face of an unstable external world.436 The organism is the knowing subject in contrast to the external environment which is its range of objects.437 Tomkins holds that biological life is necessary for consciousness and wonders what process causes the unconscious information from the senses and memory to become conscious as the imagery of the report. He assumes that a biophysical or biochemical mechanism will eventually be found.438 Tomkins theory does not seem to take into consideration forms of consciousness other than subject-object consciousness, such as participatory consciousness.

By contrast, many Imaginal Psychology theorists tend to feel that the subject- object split is an outward expression of a deeper hidden unity.439 Discussing archetypal versus object relations psychologies, Hester Solomon writes that what she calls I-ness and other-ness create each other, and then, as a duality, can be resolved by the transcendent function, Jung’s term for a third which arises to unite a pair of opposites.440

Romanyshyn views our split into inner and outer as a rupture in the underlying connection between our sensing bodies and the world they sense, leaving an empty spatial gap between mind and the material world.441 Sussman describes the Grail seeker’s evolved capacity to perceive no-thingness, a deep commonality in all phenomena, which undermines the reality-implying potency of apparent differences, closing the ostensible gap between perceiver and perceived.442

Joseph Campbell explores this theme from the perspective of the world’s mythological traditions. A thesis he finds common to all great mythologies, which he terms the ‘universal doctrine,’ holds that

all the visible structures of the world – all things and beings – are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they arise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve.443

Campbell equates this power with energy of Western science, mana, shakti, the Sioux

Indian notion of wakonda, and, for Christians, “the power of God.” 444 He notes that the psychoanalytical traditions call it libido in its manifestation in the mind.445 He credits the limitations of our senses and the patterns of our thinking with blocking this power and its activity from our view while myth and meditation, in the context of ritual, provide a way for us to open to this ordinarily inaccessible domain of experience.446 Myth and meditation are but doorways to what Campbell calls “that void, or being, beyond categories.” 447 He describes various mythological depictions of the emergence of the phenomenal world out of the void.448

The discussion of subject and object as a dualistic form of consciousness that can be transformed into a unitary expression has strong correlates in other conceptual ways of describing human dualities, especially the dualities of mind and body, self and other, mind and matter, or psyche and matter (where psyche includes not only the conscious aspect of ego but also unconscious mental activity).449 For example, Jung offers his opinion that psyche and matter will eventually be understood to be aspects of one and the same thing.450 Shirley Ma identifies this underlying sameness as Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, which she defines as “the unity of existence which underlies the duality of psyche and matter, the psycho-physical background of existence.” 451 In this vein, Adam

McLean writes that the main thrust of alchemy of the 16th and 17th Centuries, following the lead of the alchemical text, the Rosarium Philosophorum, was the joining of experimentation designed to transmute physical substances with the spiritual aspiration of waking up to the realization that the individual psyche is part of a larger whole.452

A key term in Imaginal Psychology is participatory consciousness, which is marked by the absence of a sense of separation between what appears to be self and what seems to be other, analogous to the dissolution of the division into subject and object.

Jorge Ferrer describes what he calls participatory knowing as a mode of consciousness in which “subject and object, knowing and being, epistemology and ontology are brought together.” 453 In this way of knowing, cognizing self and cognized world are experienced not as distinct separate entities but as interpenetrating each other.454 Heron finds a similarity between Ferrer’s notion of participatory knowing and what he calls “personal participatory relation with being, a relation which is rooted in the human capacity for feeling the presence of what there is.” 455 Sandra Dennis offers the term connective reality to describe our interconnectedness with the world around us.456 Schwartz-Salant’s term interactive field, refers to a oneness of process, residing between the collective unconscious and the realm of subject-object experience, between spirit and matter, and yet overlapping them both.457 James Hillman writes about the importance of breaking through “self-enclosed subjectivity.” 458

Sewall depicts the participatory mode of perception as involving an expansion of consciousness into the spatial gap between subject and object, especially in our experience of vision, the sensory focus of the methodology.459 She describes her own deep experience of vision as a “seamlessness between interior and exterior landscapes, between material and the symbolic realms.” 460 She calls this way of experiencing the

‘ecological self,’ defined as a mode of being in which there is “a permeability and fluidity of boundaries” such that the split into inner and outer is known to be arbitrary rather than actual.461 This shift in experience of sight is characterized by the visual not only being seen but also felt viscerally as the “sensory world … becomes embodied in us (and) subjective experience becomes sensuality” resulting in a change in our hearts - we fall in love with the world.462

Owen Barfield writes that participation

entails that the world itself, the objective world that most of the scientists deal with, is not outside of man in the sense of being independent of him, but is his outside in the sense that every inside has a correlative outside; that it is the obverse of his self-consciousness: his self consciousness displayed before him, so to speak, as his projection.463

Barfield says that participation, which he calls an “extrasensory relation between man and phenomena,” is a given in the way the universe is constructed though our awareness, of this fact, or lack thereof, is a human variable.464 At the heart of his notion of participation is his concept of figuration, our creation of an image in the brief moment between sensory reception of sensation and our thinking about what we have sensed.465

He suggests that how we relate to this process is influenced by culture. Indigenous cultures tend to relate to figuration with an immediacy in which they do not experience a separation from the images they create, a form of experience he calls original participation.466 The cultures of modern Western civilization, however, condition us to think about our images, creating an apparent separation between ourselves and our perceptions, a parallel concept to subject-object consciousness that Barfield terms lost participation.467 Through the impact of this thinking we lose touch with our natural capacity to experience our immediate extrasensory relationship with phenomena.

However by waking up to this process by which we actively participate through

94 figuration in the creation of the whole of our reality, modern man can open to the experience of final participation, which is Barfield’s phrase for participatory consciousness evoked through the transmutation of subject-object consciousness.468

Mindell offers a similar parallel to participatory consciousness with his idea of lucidity, characterized by a decreased involvement in “self and other dualities.” 469

Lucidity entails attending to a layer of experience “that precedes everything you think, see, hear, and do.” 470 Lucidity leads to conscious participation in Dreaming, the realm of subtle primordial events that occur just before experience becomes structured into our ordinary subject-object mode of knowing.471 In a similar vein, Sussman describes the intensification of perception experienced by the Grail seeker involving a reallocation of attention to “the activity beneath our perception of fixed forms,” revealing the

“‘becoming’ of things.” 472 This intensified perception requires what Sussman calls becoming empty, a stripping away of everything that gives us our sense of identity, even the identification with attentiveness itself, and reveals an underlying interconnectedness.473 We come to realize that it is this empty awareness itself that

“take(s) the shape of all forms – sense impressions and objects of the physical world, thoughts and memories, feelings, impulses of will,” in short both subject and object.474

Reason and Barfield both believe the participatory perspective is emerging in

Western culture in the present historical period. Barfield would also warn that since our predominant Western view, that of Western Newtonian science, is fundamentally a denial of participation, the participatory perspective still remains taboo.475

Clearly there is support in Imaginal Psychology for the view that the dissolution of the subject-object divide offers a doorway to participatory consciousness. But what does Imaginal Psychology say about the role of subtle energy and its structural correlate,

95 the subtle body? Albert Kreinheder writes: “What the alchemists called the subtle body is indistinguishable from our idea of the symbol. It is subtle . . . yet it is also a body and therefore has real substance.” 476 Hillman seems to agree when he attributes to the subtle body both metaphorical and literal aspects.477 Noting that sensing is central to our imaging process, Hillman says that imagination is “a great beast, as subtle body, within us.” 478 He calls this subtle body “our brute awareness … the grand conjunction of body, soul, and spirit, … (of) concrete sensation, psychic image and spiritual meaning.” 479

Mansfield and Spiegelman distinguish between subtle body and symbol, positing the subtle body as one of two ways that the archetypal third, Jung’s transcendent function, can be experienced, the other being symbol.480 Schwartz-Salant depicts the subtle body as containing both what we think of as inner and outer, sometimes as two distinct aspects, sometimes as a unity, and as lying between mind and matter.481 Jung used his term somatic unconscious (in contrast to the psychic unconscious) as a synonym for the subtle body. He describes alchemists’ writings about transforming the body from material form into spirit, by which he suggests they mean the subtle body. 482 Jung also depicts the opposite of this process: the development of the human body as analogous to the formation of a crystal guided by a preset abstract geometrical template, suggesting that the subtle body serves as this template for the physical body.483 Mansfield and

Spiegelman describe the subtle body as “the psyche functioning through its material substrate of organized energy patterns” while Schwartz-Salant says that it is possible to become aware that our bodies are energy fields, for him the alchemical equivalent of the subtle body experience.484

These references to energy raise questions concerning the nature of this energy and its relationship to both subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness. Von

Franz describes energy as occurring along a spectrum, with physical energy at one end and psychic energy at the other.485 Jung, himself, further divides the expression of the psychic energy/libido end of this energy spectrum into a second polarity including one pole where the expression is energetic or instinctual while the opposite expression is imagery.486 Washburn sees three expressions of energy: 1) psychic energy, which he defines as egoic activity, 2) libido, and 3) a transformative energy he calls spirit.487 He argues that all three ensue from a more fundamental pool of energy.488 Karen Jaenke eloquently supports her contention that the material world is included in the realm of spiritual energy with a description of her own sense-of-self dissolving, resulting in an awareness of the ubiquity of spiritual energy.489 Walter Odajnyk distinguishes between attention, which he equates with the psychic energy that the knowing self directs towards an object, and consciousness, for him, the psychic field in which known objects appear.490 In his discussion of meditation and alchemy, Odajnyk describes the alchemical nature of meditation techniques which lead to a transformative union of psychic energy with consciousness.491

Some Imaginal Psychology authors also refer to terms for energy noted in the section on subtle energy. For example, for Anodea Judith, energy, which she describes as

“excitement, charge, attention, awareness, … the life force,” is the same as qi or prana.492

Jung concludes that mana, the Polynesian term for energy, which was understood not conceptually but experientially, is likely the forerunner of libido/psychic energy.493

Numerous Imaginal Psychology authors, including Jung, H. G. Coward, Judith,

Mindell, Washburn, and Woodman and Dickson, write about another parallel concept for subtle energy, kundalini. For example, Jung relates kundalini to the subtle body through its correlate, the chakra system, and to the process of individuation.494 Coward describes

97 the role of kundalini in dissolving the “blockages to the free flow of energy through the subtle body.” 495 Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson note the transformative potential of kundalini, specifically pointing to its ability to overcome dualistic modes of experience.496 Washburn sees kundalini as a parallel concept to his idea that the Dynamic

Ground can become activated, releasing spirit, directly experienced by the ego as energy, into one’s being.497

Other writers find links between subtle energy and archetypes. Aizenstadt offers the following general definition of the term ‘archetype’ as “psychological patterns that appear throughout human experience and can be seen in the motifs of age-old myths, legends, fairytales found in every culture throughout the history of the human species.” 498

Esther Harding describes archetypes as “patterns of psychic energy, of life energy.” 499

Solomon says that archetypes are “unconscious universal structures, inherited blueprints, or templates, which organize psychic energy along certain repeatable and recognizable lines.” 500 Jung, himself, described archetypes as embedded in a field of energy.501 Naomi

Goldenberg depicts archetypes, which she says lie behind symbol and image, as having two polarized facets, similar to Jung’s polarity of psychic energy. At one pole resides an archetype’s dynamism, here a parallel for energy, while its image lies at the other.502

Writing from the Eastern alchemical perspective, Michael Winn depicts configurations of flowing qi as a kind of language, the energetic patterning of which serves as its grammar, a description reminiscent of Harding’s use of the term archetype.503 Odajnyk suggests that when archetypes express themselves in material or psychic forms they do so as

“energetic structures” amenable to analysis because their recurring activity follows laws of nature.504 He goes on to describe the possibility of the energy being withdrawn from

“the phenomenal structure of symbolic form” with the subsequent withering of the form.505

Aizenstadt provides an interesting twist to this topic when he offers the view that archetypes exist both psychically and in the physical world around us.506 This line of thought suggests to him a broadening of Jung’s psychology. He notes that neither Jung nor Freud emphasized the interconnectedness between persons and their physical environment.507 He suggests a new term, ‘world unconscious,’ which he depicts as deeper and broader than either of Jung’s notions of personal or collective unconscious.

The world unconscious is his term for the interrelated and interconnected nature of all things of the natural world.508 Dennis offers the view that ultimately the goal of spiritual transformation is the “synthesis of consciousness with the whole world,” her phrase for

Jung’s term unus mundus, thus suggesting that maybe Jung did, in fact, place importance on this deeper union.509

Jeanette Armstrong explores parallels to this line of thought found in indigenous culture. Writing about the world view of the North American Indian tribe, the Okanagan, she describes the Okanagan’s four notions of self: the physical self or body, the emotional self, the thinking self and the spiritual self. The Okanagans, she writes, equate the word ‘body’ with the Earth itself.510 Their notion of the spiritual self is both individual and includes all things.

We translate the word used for our spirit self as ‘without substance while moving continuously outward.’ … this self requires a great quietness before our other parts can become conscious of it and that the other capacities fuse together and subside in order to activate something else – which is this capacity. The Okanagans describe this capacity as the place where all things are.511

According to Armstrong, the Okanagan call the spirit self the true self. In their view it is

“a source for all things…the living source of our life” and has great power, “affect(ing) all things if we engage it within the rest of our life-force activity.” 512

Anita Barrows takes this ecological line of thinking into the realm of developmental psychology. She decries our western cultural emphasis on independence and mastery at the expense of the child’s ability to connect, join and merge. Like

Aizenstadt, she champions the need for a developmental psychology “not exclusively founded in the world of social relationships.” 513 For Barrows, a child’s developing boundaries need to provide structure and containment while also remaining permeable, allowing for “interconnected(ness) not only with other humans but with all living beings and processes …” 514 This permeability allows for the possibility of experiences without clear subject-object division, the realm of participatory consciousness.515 Such a developmental psychology, she says, would take into account not only what the child is moving away from but what they are moving towards, acknowledging that separation from the mother allows for a wider circle of connectedness with both human and non-human objects of experience.516 This broadening sphere of interconnections, she feels, is as critical to our well being as is human attachment. She writes that our experience of bodily separateness, to her an illusion, is the “genuine sorrow” of human existence.517

Hillman goes so far as to declare that “there is only one core issue in all of psychology. Where is the “me”? Where doe the “me” begin? Where does the “me” stop?

Where does the “other” begin.” 518 He later adds the question “where does psyche stop and matter begin?” Offering an answer to his own queries, Hillman asserts that

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the cut between the self and natural world is arbitrary, we can make it at the skin or we can take it as far out as you like – to the deep oceans and distant stars. But the cut is far less important than the uncertainty about making the cut at all. This uncertainty opens the mind to wonder again, allowing fresh considerations to enter the therapeutic equation.519

Focusing on the issue of human perceptual capacities, Sewall takes this discussion into the realm of the philosophy of science. She decries Western scientific preoccupation with norms to the exclusion of potentials, a particularly telling limitation, she says, when it comes to the study of our sensory experience.520 What then is our potential sensory capacity and how does it relate to subtle energy and the subtle body? Dennis describes a subtle experiential realm that partakes of both body and mind, a realm that can be perceived as imagery or sensed kinesthetically (from sensations originating in the muscles, tendons or joints) which she calls the subtle sensory precursors to the image.521

She thus takes a proprioceptive view of subtle energy and offers her perspective that the resolution of opposites such as subject and object is always deeply energetic in nature.522

Hillman notes that we have two layers of sensing involved in our experience of images, a gross sensing which results in the noun, verb, adjective and adverb aspects of our linguistic descriptions of images and a more subtle sensing that informs us of the relational nature of the things and activities of the image, linguistically expressed by prepositions.523 This second sensing, according to Hillman, is also a “sensing of archetypal invisibles, …a permeating ether that dissolves the very possibility of separate faculties, functions, and realms,” and involves the subtle body and the chakra system.524

Mindell describes two distinct modes of experience associated with Dreaming, one verbalizable, such as dreams, the other non-verbal, including subtle sensations.525 John

Conger, whose work integrates that of Jung and Reich, allows for both a free association of the mind, working with images such as dreams, and what he calls a “free association of

101 the body” whereby his clients track the natural movement of energy in the body.526

Mansfield and Spiegelman suggest that the subtle body, which is “the psyche operating through its substrate of organized energy patterns,” is the organ of perception that senses the interactive field.527 Schwartz-Salant describes experiencing patterns of energy in the field between himself and his client that form a perceptible link between the two.528

Such intensified perceptual acuity can be cultivated. Dennis offers prayer, contemplation, ritual and art along with meditation as modalities that can develop our subtle senses.529 Mindell advocates the use of deep concentration and mindfulness in combination resulting in the subtle sensory capacity he calls lucidity.530 Sewall concurs, emphasizing mindfulness of seeing especially focused on the exploration of the contextual dimension of relationships and the apparent interfaces between things.531

Schwartz-Salant describes a subtle shift in the focus of attention from the object itself to the space around it that brings the interactive field into focus, an alteration he depicts as alchemical in nature.532 According to Mansfield and Spiegelman, the emergence of the capacity to consciously experience the energies of the subtle body is the result of spiritual and somatic practices and not an expression of normal bodily activity, a view similar to my own experience.533 Odajnyk draws parallels between the deep states of concentration in Buddhist practice of the āruppas, particularly the third and fourth āruppas, and Jung’s notion of the personal and collective versions of the unconsciouness. He refers to a further deepening of concentration, described in the Buddhist tradition as the ‘cessation of feeling and perception,’ as equivalent to the formless Self.534

In summary, the transmutation of subject-object forms of consciousness into participatory forms of consciousness is an important theme in Imaginal Psychology. In addition, the literature of Imaginal Psychology is rich in references to subtle energy and

102 the subtle body as well as interesting descriptions of the human ability to consciously and usefully engage the subtle but usually subliminal sensory processes that precede our ordinary subject-object way of knowing. This range of experience is tied to subtle energy and subtle body phenomena, including hints, but no clear description, of a subtle energy role in the spatial segregation of subject from object. Some writers (e.g. Barfield,

Tomkins, Omer) offer theories suggesting that these unconscious sensory processes and the images entailed therein, lead to our habitual experience of subject-object consciousness. Jung, Dennis, Harding, Goldenberg, and Winn all propose an intimate relationship between image and subtle energy. Mindell nd Sussman describe the subtle human perceptual abilities that allow for direct exploration of this realm. However they provide no empirical evidence in support of these theories.535

This research project empirically examines the critical issue of the transition from subject-object to participatory forms of consciousness from that subtle energetic angle, including the notion that subtle energy, itself, generates a kind of image through its patterned activity. The research modality of Imaginal Inquiry was employed, the first time that this approach has been used in the study of the various structures of consciousness and the transitions between them, the practice of meditative inquiry, or the elusive phenomena of subtle energy.

Conclusion

The review of the literature supports the view that our ordinary mode of consciousness is characterized by a separation into a subject that knows in relation to objects that are known. However there is substantial evidence from Western psychological perspectives including Imaginal Psychology, as well as in the Buddhist

103 literature, for ways of knowing in which this separation between subject and object no longer applies. There are even some clues as to the relationship between these two major categories of experiencing, such as the notion that the subject-object mode of consciousness arises out of a less structured primordial way of knowing, that in this process, the subject and the object ends of the subject-object split arise together in an ontologically interdependent manner, and that it is possible to reverse this process and open to ways of knowing where subject and object are no longer separate. Yet there are very few detailed descriptions of the path traveled from participatory forms of consciousness to subject-object consciousness and back. Nor are there reports of research dedicated to the study of this transitional territory.

Noting that there is no good explanation for what causes subject-object consciousness, Levin calls for a step-by-step experiential map of these crossings.536 The

Dalai Lama concurs, opining that the third person approach to knowledge is inadequate to this task. He proposes that this map is to be discovered through first person attention to

“the arising and falling of the perceptual process on a moment to moment basis.” 537

Imaginal theorists, such as Mindell, Dennis, and Sussman, suggest that such explorations are not only possible but take us into the realm of the subtle body and subtle energy phenomena. They highlight the heightened perceptual faculties needed for this task.

Among the techniques they suggest to develop these subtle capacities we find listed the cultivation of concentration and mindfulness. While they offer no experimental evidence to support their assertions, some empirical documentation of heightened perceptual abilities can be found in the literature on meditation research. Although in the Buddhist literature we do find some descriptions of the arising of subject-object consciousness and its possible dissolution, (e.g., Ñyāņatiloka, Hayward) and even one depicted from the

104 perspective of subtle energy (Wangyal), no mention of a role for subtle energy in the formation of a boundary separating knowing and its objects is found. In addition, these descriptions are traditional or at best grounded in anecdotal, rather than experimental evidence.

My personal meditative exploration of this territory along the lines suggested by by Levin and the Dalai Lama above has led me to the development of the kind of map they envision.538 In 1994, after years of experientially exploring the Buddha’s teaching on Dependent Origination with this goal in mind, I attended a three-month retreat in 1994 with the intent to further develop my expertise in concentration practice. The success of my efforts in this area catalyzed a series of experiences which led to my own formulation of a new experiential map based on the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination and his description of the deep states of concentration known as the rūpa jhānas and the

āruppas and grounded in the activity of subtle energy. My map for both the arising and dispersing of subject-object consciousness, in part, involves the formation and then dissolution of subtle energy images which act as boundaries between subject and object. I theorize that such boundaries segregate knowing from what it knows during the structuring process thus configuring subject-object consciousness. During the destructuring phase, these subtle energy boundaries dissolve reintegrating knowing with what is known and thus revealing the range of experience referred to as participatory consciousness. My relating of the early phases of this subtle energy map to Mahamudra theory, the principal interpretive lens for this research project, is also unique.

However since I found no others who offered the specific detailed experiential accounting of Dependent Origination that had emerged for me in my personal experience

I wondered if it was in any way generalizable. In addition, an individual meditator’s

105 report is not very convincing as knowledge in Western scientific circles. So for this dissertation I set out to test my map using other meditators. Since my map includes a description of the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness I devised a meditation exercise that was designed to focus the participants on this particular experiential transition. I then collected their subjective reports of their experiences and systematically compared, contrasted, and analyzed them. I suggest that this is a new approach to the development of knowledge within the Buddhist tradition as well as being relatively rare in the context of Western Psychology. In addition, the specific focus on the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness is not currently reported in the research literature on Buddhist meditation.

My own skills with the two main forms of Buddhist meditation, concentration and mindful inquiry practices, were crucial in catalyzing my experiential unfolding. As such,

I chose to define the expert participants not by the length of their meditation practice but by their expertise with these two styles of meditation as judged by their teachers. I have not found any study involving meditators where the participants were chosen using this specific criterion. Although, given the context of my own experience, it might have made sense to work with such meditators during a long meditation retreat, logistical and financial constraints made this impossible. As such, I asked the practitioner participants to report on their experience with the inquiry exercise during their daily meditation sessions. Again, I have not found any meditation studies using meditators subjective reports in this context nor with the specific inquiry exercise I designed.

This study’s Research Problem asks in what ways does attending with mindfulness to subtle energy imagery that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness. The

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Research Hypothesis states that by mindfully engaging the subtle energy imagery that solidifies the subject-object configuration of consciousness, these structures will be transmuted, breaking the segregation of knowing, as subject, from its objects and thus revealing the realm of participatory consciousness. This research project tested this theory using participants who have already honed their concentration and mindfulness skills to a high degree. They were asked to mindfully engage their own subtle energy boundaries.

The past few decades have seen an acceleration of research on various forms of meditation including concentration and mindfulness techniques. The effects of meditation on such topics as stress reduction, various medical measures such as blood pressure, etc., and on the nervous system are being studied with interesting results. Among these studies are those which use experienced meditators as their subjects. In choosing subjects, researchers have generally relied mostly on the length of time that a meditator has been practicing. A few studies have used meditators known to be accomplished by other indicators, such as their reputation as accomplished masters or their mastery of specific meditative goals such as the jhānas. The vast majority of such research relies on measurements using technological instrumentation or psychological testing, or on the bio-imaging of the meditators neurological anatomy. Such studies sometimes emphasize

‘before and after’ or ‘before and during’ comparisons, for example before and after a long period of meditation retreat or before a session of meditation and while meditation is occurring.

Those who track research on meditators, such as Walsh and Shapiro or Wallace, suggest that it is important to add to this mix studies that rely on the ability of highly accomplished meditators to report on their own subjective experience. Imaginal

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Psychology theorists such as Mindell, Sussman, and Dennis describe the subtle abilities which allow for the possibility of attending to aspects of the perceptual process that are usually below the conscious threshold. While a few studies of experienced meditators have focused on this area offering helpful hints, such studies have relied on technological means either to create experiences at the limen between what are usually conscious and unconscious aspects of human experience or to track changes in the brain.539

Research on subtle energy and its role in human experience is in its infancy.

However work is being done on the subtle energy aspects of intention.540 Other studies have utilized the subtle perceptual abilities of psychics as observers to report on the impact on research subjects of particular variables in a creative way parallel to the use of an MRI or CAT, in which psychics are used for their ‘picture-taking’ capacity.541

The research modality of my school, Imaginal Inquiry, developed by Omer, fit my needs quite well. It allowed me to attempt to evoke experience in the participants followed by their reporting on their subjective experience in various ways. It also allowed for the participants themselves to be involved in the interpretation process, an important element given their expertise. Imaginal Inquiry, as a participatory research model, thus used to explore the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness, is unprecedented in the literature. Likewise is the use of this modality to study the subjective experience of expert meditators. In addition, this project is based on the notion that subtle energy moving in a patterned manner constitutes a form of imagery.

As such, this project moved the empirical study of subtle energy phenomena into the realm of Imaginal Psychology for the first time.

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CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

Introduction and Overview

In ordinary human experience, we appear to ourselves to be a center of knowing that is separate and distinct from an external realm of objects of our senses. It is the premise of this research project that this subject-object structure of consciousness is dependent on subliminal patterns of subtle energy activity that define an apparent bodily boundary that segregates knowing from its known objects. When examined mindfully this boundary undergoes a transmutation revealing the realm of participatory consciousness. I explored this theory by studying the impact on the subject-object structure of consciousness when this hypothesized subtle energy boundary was engaged and actively examined using mindfulness. This study utilized Imaginal Inquiry, a research methodology situated within the participatory paradigm that has been developed by Omer. Imaginal Inquiry involves four phases: evoking experience, expressing experience, interpreting experience and integrating experience.

Using expert meditators from several Buddhist traditions as the participants I attempted to evoke new experience for them by having them mindfully engage and examine the apparent boundary between themselves and the world around them during the activity of seeing. Each participant was asked to spend 15 minutes per day applying this inquiry for a period of 10 days. Participants filled out a daily meditation questionnaire entitled the Mindful Exploration Exercise Daily Journal, upon the

109 completion of each day’s inquiry as part of their expression of their experience

(Appendix 7). The Daily Journal ensured that they were expressing their experience while it was still fresh in their minds. The specific mindful focus was designed both to facilitate this transformation from subject-object to participatory consciousness to highlight the role of patterned subtle energy activity in this boundary’s apparent structure and subsequent dissolution. I expected that this engagement would lead to the transmutation of this boundary resulting in experiences of participatory consciousness. Though the participants were all familiar with various expressions of participatory consciousness, I anticipated that this particular doorway to this experiential domain, as well as the discovery of the role of subtle energy activity in the creation of the apparent boundary between subject and object would be new for them.

Interpretation for the participants included a summary written upon completion of their 10 days (Appendix 8) and reached its culmination as they give me feedback on the preliminary analysis of their experiences. This initial interpretation involved analysis of each participant’s Daily Journals and final Summary. First I formulated the initial interpretation based on reading the Daily Journal entries. Next I compared this initial interpretation to that of the participant by reading their Summary statement and adjusting the preliminary anaylsis as appropriate. At this point I then interviewed each participant individually (Appendix 9), digitally recording the process. This interview included sharing with the participant the preliminary analysis of their experiences and getting their verbal feedback. In addition, each participant answered questions I had prepared regarding specific aspects of their reported experiences to help me better understand what had happened for them. Answering these questions also contributed to each participant’s understanding of their own experience. Finally I refined the preliminary analysis based

110 on the participant’s feedback and other data gleaned in the interview. The overall interpretation involved comparing and contrasting the final written analyses as well as transcripts of other aspects of the follow-up interview for all the participants leading to the learnings.

Integration for the participants involved reflecting on the effect of their experience. This process began with the final question on the Summary form and continued during the follow-up interview with their answering a generic follow-up question about the personal impact of their participation. In addition, several other aspects of the follow-up interview protocol were designed to offer possible integrative experiences.

Given their role in the interpreting of their own experiences as well as giving feedback on the analysis of this study, the research participants served also as co-researchers. Taking advantage of their experience and expertise in the practice of concentration and mindfulness in this way was one of the particular strengths of this study.

This study used the relatively small number of eight participants who are an elite group, limiting my ability to generalize my results. However using an elite group of meditators afforded a depth of inquiry that could not be found in the general population.

The study was further delimited by the decision to use Buddhist practitioners who are interpreting their own experiences as part of the data collection. Buddhism represents a particular range of world views, so the participants may have been biased in their interpretation by their Buddhist views. On the other hand, a major tenet of Buddhism is to rely on direct experience rather than beliefs or teachings, even those of the Buddhist tradition, when determining what is true.1 As such, Buddhist meditators who are trained

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to give direct experience priority over beliefs or teachings make good participants in the

Imaginal Inquiry model, which similarly values direct experience.

Given the context of the use short periods of daily meditation practice, as opposed to intensive retreat practice, and restricting each participant’s research period to10 days delimits the range of mindful explorations I could give the participants.2 I chose a 10-day period of daily practice data collection in consultation with friends who are elite meditators concerning the amount of uncompensated time that they might be willing to devote to such a research project for someone doing a doctoral dissertation.3 In addition, I felt that a 10-day period would generate a manageable volume of daily Journal data to analyze. Given the 10-day period, I chose to utilize one particular inquiry exercise while there are several others that would have enhanced this study if more time had been available. These additional exercises would have increased the chances that the participants would have actually noticed the formation and dissolution of the particular subtle energy patterns that I was researching. Although this delimitation made it a bit less likely that I would be able to clearly demonstrate the presence of the subtle energy patterning I hypothesize, I felt that, at the very least, it would be possible to show that experientially inquiring into that hypothesized subtle energy boundary serves as a doorway to participatory consciousness.

I decided not to use co-researchers other than the participants due to the difficulty of finding someone willing to lend time to the project without compensation. Not having a second non-participant voice in the process of data interpretation meant that I needed to be especially sensitive to my own imaginal structures. On the other hand, the design of the study presented logistical challenges that were manageable by one researcher. The

112 initial and follow-up meetings with the participants were individual sessions. The initial individual session, held at the participant’s meditation site, had the advantage of allowing me to see the actual place where the participants would do their mindful investigations and to help them to choose an appropriate visual object as well as to respond personally to their questions. In addition, this arrangement was quite convenient for the participants, making it easier to recruit the experienced meditators the study called for. Given the scarcity of qualified potential participants, this was crucial factor. From my perspective as a researcher, it also allowed me to stagger the 10-day periods of data gathering from one participant to another. This gave me time to effectively interpret each participant’s

Daily Journal and summary submissions within a week of their completion. I was thus able to schedule the follow-up interviews while each participant’s experience was still fresh.

Participants

This research was not was not a study of meditation, but rather of a range of human experience that is most easily accessible to those who are well-trained in both samatha (tranquility) practices and a form of meditative inquiry.4 As such, the participants were Western meditators from the Vajrayana Mahamudra, Vajryayana Dzogchen, or

Theravadan Buddhist traditions carefully chosen for their expertise in both samatha meditation and either vipassanā (insight or mindfulness) meditation or one of the two additional inquiry-based practices in the Tibetan tradition, Mahamudra practice or the trekchod form of Dzogchen practice, as evidenced by the recommendation of their teachers in those lineages.5 It is their strong ability to apply these two skills that distinguishes the participants of this study.6 In addition to meditation skills, I was looking

113 for participants who could articulately communicate about their meditation experience, as well as those who, in the opinion of their teachers, are emotionally mature and stable, who have a well-established daily meditation practice, and who live in the San Francisco

Bay Area.7

I identified the participants by contacting local Western teachers of the meditation traditions mentioned above.8 I described to these teachers the kind of participant I was looking for, asking them to identify potential participants among their students or fellow teachers who they felt possess strong to exceptional ability and expertise in both of the target meditative skill areas. The research model involved meeting individually with participants before and after their 10-day practice of the inquiry, required that individual participants complete their activities during different 10-day time periods. If a participant had dropped out, I could have added another participant from the teachers’ lists of potential participants. In fact, all eight original participants completed the study.9

I asked the referring teacher to make the initial contact with each potential participant to request the student’s permission to allow me to call them regarding possible participation in this research. Once I received the go ahead from the referring teacher, the initial contact with a potential participant was by phone. I briefly described the kind of participant I was seeking, determined if the person I was speaking with fit the qualifications for the study and informed them of the decision in an appropriate manner

(Appendix 5).

Next, for those who met the requirements, I determined their willingness to devote the time and energy required of them as a participant in this study by briefly describing what would be asked of them. For those willing to participate, I inquired as to the best time frame for them in the next two to four weeks for completing their 10-day

114 period of inquiry and set the times for the initial meeting and follow-up interview session.

I explained that the Follow-up Interview was one way in which they, as participants, would be asked to contribute as co-researchers in the study.

The date for the Follow-up Interview for each participant was set for within a week of their completion of their 10 days of inquiry. This time frame had two advantages. The Follow-up Interview was soon enough after the 10-day period of inquiry that the participant’s experiences were still fresh in their minds. At the same time, I had enough time to review their Daily Journal entries and write the preliminary summary of their experience. As such, I was able to use the Follow-up Interview to request feedback from the participant on the preliminary summary as well as ask follow-up questions of each participant specifically designed to clarify any questions raised by their reports. This allowed me to better understand and interpret their experience.

During the initial meeting at the potential participant’s place of meditation, I described the topic and general purpose of the study, issues of confidentiality, discussion of the study’s possible benefits to the participant as well as its possible general benefits, a description of the potential risks to the participant along with the resources available to the participant to address those risks should they arise, the voluntary nature of the study, their freedom to withdraw at any time as well as my freedom to discontinue their participation at any time, and information about where to direct questions or concerns that might arise for them during the study. In addition, I confirmed that they had a spiritual teacher whom they could contact should the need have arisen during the study.

Next we reviewed the statement outlining the details of their consent to participate. I asked if they were still willing to participate. If they were I then asked them to sign the informed consent form at that time and gave them a copy for their reference.

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Next I showed the participant a paper copy of the Daily Journal form they would be asked to fill out after each daily period of inquiry and discussed the process of sending their daily reports to me (Appendix 7). I went over each question verbally to insure their understanding. I also used this section of the initial meeting to emphasize that the questionnaire was designed to reflect their role as a co-researcher in this study.

I then asked the participant to show me their meditation spot and helped them select an object for their visual focus during their daily meditative exploration. This object was chosen for being emotionally neutral and unlikely to stimulate discursive thought. The object itself was thus less likely to affect their ability to concentrate during the exercise. At their place of meditation the object was placed in front of the participant at a comfortable distance and height. I then read to them the basic instructions for the mindful inquiry and answered any questions they may have had about them (Appendix

6). We then engaged together in a brief period of the inquiry after which there was again time for questions. I gave the participant a written copy of both the inquiry instructions and those for filling out the Daily Journal for their reference during the study. Then we loaded the Daily Journal questionnaire onto their computer and I had them send me a blank test Daily Journal submission. Lastly I reviewed the Follow-up Interview as an opportunity for participants to give feedback on the initial interpretation of their reports as well as clarify points in their Daily Journal and Summary.

The Four Phases of Imaginal Inquiry

This research employed Imaginal Inquiry, a methodology that is an expression of the participatory research paradigm. Imaginal Inquiry involves four stages: the evoking,

116 expression, interpretation, and integration of experience. Evoking entailed giving the participants instructions designed to bring them into a direct experiential relationship with the subtle energy patterns and self-boundary I wished them to explore. They applied these instructions in their daily meditation practice for a period of ten days. Expression took the form of filling out the Daily Journal about their inquiry experience.

Interpretation of their experience involved a written summary based on their Daily

Journal entries, which, along with their Daily Journal entries, I examined for key experiential moments and the meaning the participants give to them. Integration for participants was fostered during a Follow-up Interview. I hope to publish the findings in an appropriate journal, as well as share the findings with meditation teachers.

Evocation of Experience

I asked participants to commit to 15 minutes per day of directed mindful investigation during their daily meditation session for a period of 10 days. In an initial individual face-to-face meeting, I gave participants instructions for the specific investigative focus, both orally and in written form (Appendix 6). We briefly practiced the investigative focus together followed by their opportunity to ask clarifying questions.

This gave me the chance to make sure that each participant understood and was doing the investigation correctly.

To simplify and focus the research, from among the five physical sense modalities, I chose sight for this study. This was for two reasons. First, the experience of a clear physical, spatial gap between visual knowing and its corresponding objects is, in my experience, most pronounced with sight. As such, it lends itself most easily to focusing on the felt sense of the subtle energy image of the boundary that segregates

117 knowing from its objects and which is central to the Research Hypothesis. Secondly, the complexity of the field of visual objects makes the ordinary subject-object structure of our seeing consciousness particularly compelling. As Kabat-Zinn points out, “seeing is the most dominant of the senses.” 10 This may in part be due to our biology. As Sewall points out, 50 percent of our brain’s cortex is devoted to supporting visual processing.11

Concerning sight, it is especially difficult for us to imagine that there might be modes of seeing other than our ordinary internal-knowing-subject/external-known-visual object orientation. Put differently we could say that of all our senses, sight gives us the strongest sense of subject-object duality. As such, when the visual veil of subject-object duality is pierced, the resulting shifts in experiential modality and sense-of-self are among the most surprising and revealing that we can experience. I felt that the experiential evidence of the transmutation of subject-object consciousness into participatory modes of consciousness would be especially dramatic using the sense of sight.

Participants were asked to attend to their own direct, present-moment experience of seeing during eyes-open sitting meditation practice. While seeing was occurring, focused on their chosen visual object, participants were directed to examine and explore the spatial relationship between that which is seen and their knowing of it. Where is the outer boundary of that which they experience to be themselves as the knower in a moment of mindful seeing? How is this boundary known? What sense is being used?

What is the boundary made of? What characteristics of this boundary can be discerned? It was the Research Hypothesis that such a boundary tends to dissolve when we engage it mindfully in this manner. I expected that participants would experience periods of the thawing of the frozen or patterned subtle energy image of a self-defining boundary.

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During such moments of boundary dissolution, participants would open into various degrees of boundaryless consciousness in which they would experience seeing with no separation between knowing and what is seen. This kind of seeing involves a disidentification from the image of the self as the separate subject which knows, catalyzing participatory consciousness.

It was the recognition of the boundary between subject and object while seeing, its tendency to dissolve leading to participatory forms of consciousness when mindfully examined, and the role of subtle energy patterning in the construction and dissolution of this boundary that were the target experiences of the study. However this kind of evocation could have also involved other kinds of experience, such as the arising of strong affect or the appearance of visionary imagery. While these experiences were not the specific target of the evocation, they could have been useful in helping the participants and myself interpret and integrate their experiences.

Yet it was also in this area of evoking participatory consciousness that there was some risk to the participants. It was possible that some participants would encounter initial reactions of fear towards participatory kinds of experience or feelings of disorientation and confusion as their usual way of experiencing the world fell away. The fact that all participants were highly practiced meditators chosen, in part, for their emotional stability and who had in all likelihood already had some experience of participatory consciousness mitigated against these dangers. Knowing the territory would have helped them to deal with whatever challenging emotions, thoughts or imagery may have arisen. Their access to their teacher should the need arise, as well as my ability to refer to especially well-qualified psychotherapists, provided additional protection and containment for this study.12

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In addition to the 10 days of meditative inquiry, several aspects of the Follow-up

Interview were also designed to be evocative. I began the Follow-up Interview by asking each participant questions about their early years, specifically about the circumstances of their birth, whether they were breast or bottle fed, and if they experienced any early life traumas. The after giving definitions of both participatory and subject-object forms of consciousness, I asked each participant to discuss their personal experiences with both participatory and subject-object forms of consciousness as well as their experience of the relationship between them. Lastly I requested that each participant create art images, using either paper and oil pastels or modeling clay, of each form of consciousness. After the creation of each image I invited the participant to tell me about their image. Once both images were complete, I encouraged the participant to have a dialogue with each image followed by a dialogue between the two images. In retrospect, it is clear that these exercises did not turn out to be very meaningful or evocative for the participants. Nor was the information generated particularly relevant to the Research Problem or

Hypothesis. As such, the data generated by these aspects of the Follow-up Interview did not contribute to the learnings in Chapter Four.

Regarding my own personal experience as part of the research process, during the period I am collecting data from the participants, I continued my own practice of the exercises described above. Additional evocations occurred for me during the follow-up interviews as well as during the initial and final interpretation of each participant’s data and the overall data interpretation.

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Expressing Experience

Once participants began their practice of the inquiry exercise they wrote daily about their experiences. Their writing took the form of filling a questionnaire entitled the Mindful Exploration Exercise Daily Journal after each daily inquiry session

(Appendix 7). This daily form included sections for reporting their experiences of inquiring into the boundary separating themselves as the knowing subject from the realm of objects of sight. In addition, it asked them to report new avenues of investigation they pursued as well as any insights, imagery, affective states, shifts in bodily sensations, subtle energy experiences and/or shifts in perception that occurred for them during that day’s exploration. This form was provided as a Microsoft Word document that was loaded onto each participant’s computer. Participants e-mailed me their Journal entries daily during their 10-day period of inquiry.

One week after the completion of each participant’s 10-day meditation period and my receipt of their final Daily Journal entry and Summary statement, I met with them in a face-to-face, digitally recorded follow-up interview. I asked questions of clarification about things described in their Journal entries or Summary statement, giving participants further opportunity to express their experience. In addition, the opportunity to tell me about their images of participatory and subject-object consciousness mentioned above was another chance to express experience, one that turned out not to be very useful.

Concerning my own expression of experience, while I did continue with my own meditative inquiry during the data collection period, I did not journal about my own experiences as I had planned. I felt that since my intention was to use the experience of

121 others as a test of my own theoretical perspective, my own meditative insights would not have been so relevant to this task. Instead, I found myself engrossed with the data I was receiving from the participants. I did, however, make an effort to track my own reactions to the Daily Journal reports as well as attend to my inner experiences during the follow-up interviews with each participant. For this latter task I developed a tracking form for use during the actual interviews themselves (Appendix 10). Although I intended to keep my own ongoing journal of my reactions to each participant’s data, in the end I abandoned this idea as too cumbersome. In addition, as I began the data collection, I realized that the amount of data I was collecting was already overwhelming me. With the exception of the form I used during the follow-up interviews, my tracking of my own reactions to the data collection process became much more informal. Even with the tracking form I used during the interviews, I realized that it would take significant practice at this particular kind of multi-tasking before I would be able to effectively track and record my own personal experience while at the same time following the participant’s experience, all the while keeping track of the questions I was asking and responding meaningfully to the participant’s responses. In short, I recognized that with regard to this aspect of Imaginal Inquiry, I am still very much a novice.

Interpreting Experience

Participants initially interpreted their experience while completing their summary of their 10-day process. They identified the most significant events from each category of their Daily Journals as well as their three most important experiences/insights overall.

Their reporting of these three summation points included the meaning they made of these experiences and why this meaning was significant to them.

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I began the process of interpretation in an informal way by reading each participant’s Daily Journal submissions as they came in. During this process I would keep notes on impressions or insights that occurred to me. At the end of each participant’s data collection phase I read through that participant’s complete 10 days of Journal entries and identified the key points. In this process I was looking for the most significant experiences for that participant in the categories I listed in the Daily Journal questions:

• How did the participant engage the boundary inquiry and what did they find?

• What new avenues of investigation did the participant explore and with what

results?

• Did any significant emotions, imagery, bodily sensations, subtle energy

experiences or shifts in perception occur for this participant?

• What meanings did the participant make of their own experiences?

I was especially on the lookout for shifts to participatory kinds of consciousness while remaining open to unexpected experiences. Based on this assessment, I then wrote a preliminary summary of what happened for that participant.

At this point I had not yet have read that participant’s own written summary. Next

I compared my written summary to that of the participant. In retrospect, this step was perhaps less useful than it could have been. In and effort to make participation as easy as possible for the participants, I had, in the instructions for the 10-Day Summary, suggested that they could simply cut and paste from their Daily Journals when writing their

Summaries. Most participants took me up on that suggestion which meant that there wasn’t much difference between their Daily Journal entries and their 10-Day Summaries

123 for the first eight questions. However there was some interesting material in participants’ answers to the summation questions. I edited my own written summary as indicated by what I found in the participant’s Summary. Then I wrote follow-up questions for that participant based on areas in their Daily Journal entries and 10-Day Summaries where I wanted clarification or amplification.

I went to the Follow-up Interview with two copies of my written summary and the list of follow-up questions specific to the participant. During the interview, I gave the participant a copy of my written summary so that they could follow along as I read the summary aloud paragraph by paragraph. I stopped at the end of each paragraph to allow the participant to make comments. Most participants suggested numerous changes to my summary. This review of my written summary was followed by the personal history and art activities described above.

Next I asked each participant two generic questions and numerous other questions tailored to the specific experience of that participant as reported in their Daily Journal entries. These questions were tailored to provide more information about areas in their

Journal entries that were unclear to me or regarding which I hoped that the participant could provide more information to help me in the interpretive process. Lastly, during the interview, I attempted to track my own imaginal structures and affective responses using the form mentioned above (Appendix 10).

After the interview was over I listened to the digital recording. First I listened to the section where the participant had given me feedback on my preliminary written summary of their experiences and edited my draft summaries to incorporate their feedback. (My complete revised summaries for each participant are included as Appendix

11.) Next I reviewed the early life experience reports. In order to help me organize this

124 information I made a chart with each participant’s answers to each of the three questions regarding their mother’s pregnancy and their own birth, whether they were breast or bottle feeding, and their experiences of an early life trauma.13 I found no relevant pattern or relationship to the Research Problem or Hypothesis.

Then I reviewed the section on experience with subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness throughout the lifespan. I transcribed this section and again looked for relevance to the Research Problem and Hypothesis. Although there was a relationship between the participants’ stories about their experience of subject-object consciousness, on the one hand, and participatory consciousness, on the other, the relevance to the specific Research Problem and Hypothesis just was not there.

The section regarding the art and dialogue exercises was next. Similar to the previous two sections, I simply did not find any data that was as compelling in its relationship to the Research Problem and Hypothesis as I found in the Daily Journal entries.

Lastly I transcribed and reviewed the participants’ answers to the questions I asked at the end of the interview. Here, largely because the questions were meant to augment the information found in each participant’s Daily Journal entries, there was great relevance to the specific topic of the study. I concluded that I should focus the analysis on the information in the Daily Journals, my corrected summaries for each participant, and the question and answer section of the Follow-up Interview. Not only was the data in these sources most clearly related to the Research Problem and Hypothesis. It also was that data came most represented the Imaginal Inquiry research model with its emphasis on direct experience.14

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Next I reviewed my final summaries for all participants and began formulating a list of common themes, annotating my copies of the summaries for easy reference. I followed this procedure with a similar analysis of the transcripts of the question and answer sections of the Follow-up Interview. I then edited the list into one with nine possible themes for learnings. After a second review of each of these two types of documents relative to the themes I had identified, I further narrowed the list of learnings down to the four most compelling based on three criteria: relevance to the Research

Problem and Hypothesis, uniqueness relative to the existing research on Buddhist meditation, and the preponderance of evidence in support of that learning. At this point I began writing the Learnings Chapter. The process of writing itself added further refinements to the learnings as well as to the ways in which the data supported or contrasted with the learnings I had chosen. This process was a variation on the meaning condensation method described by Steinar Kvale.15

During the writing process I was required by the format of the Learnings Chapter to reflect on my own affective responses to the data and the participants as well as to describe my own imaginal structures in relation to the analysis process. In order to accomplish this I reviewed my journaling during the data collection process as well as the forms I had filled out during the Follow-up Interview documenting my own responses to the interview process. Together with my own memory of the process, I wrote these sections for each learning. Finally I looked at the affects and imaginal structures I had been able to identify in my own experience and reflected on how they might have affected the interpretation of the data. This analysis contributed to the validity sections for each learning.

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After receiving feedback on the initial Learnings Chapter draft, I decided to add one further step to the analysis of the data. Previously I had focused more simply on the relationship of the evidence to the Research Hypothesis and Research Problem. Having identified learnings and based on my Dissertation Committee’s feedback, it seemed important to increase the emphasis on the preponderance of the evidence. To do this I again reviewed the Daily Journal reports of the participants, tracking statements in support of their shift to participatory consciousness on a day-to-day basis. For each day I noted whether the participant’s report 1) constituted clear evidence for, 2) offered ambivalent support for, or 3) did not support, the conclusion that the participant had experienced participatory consciousness during that session. In some cases I consulted the participants’ answers to the follow-up questions during the Follow-up Interview to help me make a determination. From this information, I created the table in Appendix 11.

In addition, I compiled the document entitled “Statements Interpreted as Indicating

Participatory Consciousness,” also in Appendix 11. The intent of these two documents was to support the findings in Learning One regarding the preponderance of evidence of participatory consciousness and to allow the reader to more clearly assess the judgments I have made in the interpretation process.

Integrating Experience

Integration of experience was an ongoing process for the participants, beginning with their Daily Journal entries, which required them to reflect on and communicate about their experiences. Secondly, writing their own Summaries of their experience at the end of the ten days provided an additional individual opportunity for integration. The

Follow-up Interview afforded further integration opportunities, this time with the chance

127 to respond to the preliminary interpretation of their Daily Journals and Summary reports as well as to my questions of clarification and our dialoguing about those questions. At this point in the process, each participant had the chance to see their experience through another person’s eyes. In addition, the Follow-up Interview ended with the question

“How have you been affected by your participation in this process?” designed to further deepen the conscious process of integration.

The Follow-up Interview also provided several other integration opportunities.

The first set of questions focused on the early life experiences of the participant, that phase of life when, as an infant, subject-object consciousness was first emerging. The second area involved the participant’s experience with subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness throughout their lifetimes. Both these sections of the interview had the potential to catalyze integration of their mindful inquiry experiences relative to their past experience. Lastly, the art activity gave each participant an opportunity to assimilate their experiences on the level of image and symbol.

Once I have defended my dissertation, I will send each participant an electronic version of a summary of the learnings and invite their comments. Reading this summary will afford the participants an interesting opportunity to revisit their experiences as well as to reflect on them in light of the experience of other expert meditators and as my own interpretation of their experiences as a group.

Concerning sharing with the larger community, I hope to publish the findings in the form of a research paper in an appropriate professional journal, such as those in the fields of Consciousness Studies, Imaginal Psychology, or Transpersonal Psychology. I also hope to submit the results to various Buddhist journals, such as Buddhadharma, or

Inquiring Mind. In addition, I will provide summaries of the learnings to those meditation

128 teachers who advised me or recommended their students as potential participants for their use in their ongoing teaching. Lastly I hope to publish a book on my own meditative explorations in relation to the Buddhist teachings on the jhānas, āruppas and Dependent

Origination, including a chapter on this research.

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CHAPTER FOUR

LEARNINGS

Introduction and Overview

The methodology was designed to explore the Research Problem as follows: In what ways does attending with mindfulness to subtle energy imagery that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness? The Research Hypothesis states: By mindfully engaging the subtle energy imagery that solidifies the subject-object structure of consciousness, these structures will be transmuted, breaking the segregation of knowing, as subject, from its objects and thus revealing the realm of participatory consciousness. In particular, the Research Hypothesis refers to subtle energy activity that forms apparent boundaries between knowing subject and known object.

Cumulative Learning: Healing the Cleft in Consciousness

The Cummulative Learning states: Mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundary between subject and object within the context of the Imaginal Inquiry research paradigm is an effective strategy for experientially exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness as well as the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness that ensue.

Learning One empirically demonstrates that Buddhist meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry techniques who focus on the apparent boundary

130 between subject and object have easy access to this realm of participatory consciousness.

The first Learning affirms that in fact all the participants did easily and frequently experience participatory forms of consciousness during their short periods of daily mindful inquiry confirming that such highly trained practitioners can be effectively used to study participatory consciousness. Learning One further demonstrates that mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundaries between subject and object can be an effective way to catalyze the shift from subject-object consciousness to forms of participatory consciousness. Lastly, Learning One also shows that Imaginal Inquiry is a useful research paradigm for the exploration of this shift.

Learning Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. The participants not only easily entered into participatory consciounsnes. They also encountered a significant variety of participatory experiences. The second Learning examines the range of their experiences, concluding that they can be categorized into discrete types and suggesting that they constitute a definite sequence of deepening participation. The several layers in this phenomenological map correspond to the categories of luminosity and insubstantiality or emptiness from the Mahamudra tradition, as well as primordial awareness, the unity of these two.

Learning Three empirically demonstrates that expert meditators can detail the process by which subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention. Learning Three looks more closely at the dynamics of the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness. The reports of the participants highlight two factors in this shift: their

131 inquiry into the boundary between subject-object consciousness and shifts in the directionality and/or breadth of their of attention from a narrow outward focus on their visual object to either a more panoramic focus, an inward focus, or a stance in which there is no focus of attention at all. The inquiry into the boundary between subject and object also entails a shift of attention which may explain how this particular experiential investigation results in the shift to participatory consciousness.

As the converse of Learning Three, Learning Four empirically demonstrates that expert meditators can detail the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject/object consciousness. The fourth Learning thus examines the way in which subject-object consciousness emerges from the underlying realm of participation. The participants demonstrate direct experiential insights into this reverse sequence. They describe a process whereby the mind’s own activity, the directing of its attention narrowly towards the object of its own knowing, causes an underlying wholeness to be rent into two apparently separate parts, creating the domains of subject and object. They further report encountering an underlying bubble-like structure that limits the reach of our visual sense. Their accounts support the views of those who describe the human ability to experience aspects of the perceptual process that are normally below the threshold of conscious knowing as well as the perspective that the role of perception in human experience is to divide up that which is primordially whole.

The descriptions of the participants’ experiences detailed below in the “What

Happened” sections of all the Learnings represent samplings of each participant’s reports.

These samples are taken from their written Daily Journal entries unless otherwise noted.1

Participants were also asked to detail any new avenues of investigation they pursued. In

132 the pages that follow, all participants are referred to by pseudonyms to provide confidentiality.

Learning One: Opening from Two into One

Learning One empirically demonstrates that Buddhist meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry techniques who focus on the apparent boundary between subject and object have easy access to this realm of participatory consciousness.

This ease of entering into participatory consciousness occurred during their daily meditation practice.

What Happened

All of the participants reported encountering direct experiences where there was no boundary or no separation between themselves as the knowing subject and their chosen visual object during their periods of the meditative inquiry. This happened with a high degree of consistency for all participants though in a variety of ways.

For several participants this boundaryless experience was catalyzed by the actual application of the inquiry exercise of looking for the boundary segregating knowing subject from the visual object. For example, beginning with a quality of experience in which there seemed to be a clear distinction between knowing subject and known object with a boundary separating them, “Serena” (pseudonym) applied mindful attention to this apparent boundary. Inquiring in this manner, she found that the boundary tended to become diffuse, sometimes dissolving altogether. Using this approach, Serena noticed that she could intentionally move back and forth between states where there was the

133 experience of a boundary between subject and object and others where there was no boundary.

In his Follow-up Interview, “Finley” (pseudonym) likewise described beginning with “this vague sense, that of the knower … and there’s the object, and they’re separate.” He continued to recount how when he applied the inquiry exercise, his experience shifted. He said “It was quite strongly and clearly perceived as just ‘There’s just a visual experience … a visual consciousness happening.’ And you couldn’t really separate out the knower.” In a Daily Journal passage he affirmed that he was unable to find a boundary between knower and visual object, that is, a place “where one ends and the other begins.” Rather “there are not two things, object and knower. There is just one thing, visual experience. … To say this sounds quite profound yet it was quite close and deep as an experience.” 2

“Thomas” (pseudonym), like Serena, encountered a boundary phenomenon.

When he closely examined this boundary, it appeared to be made of “light itself, more like a cloud than a line.” He wrote that his meditative investigation of this boundary phenomenon helped his mind to let go more quickly leading to the experience “where the open mind blends with the physical. It all becomes mind.” During the Follow-up

Interview, Thomas affirmed that he saw this kind of experience as a form of participatory consciousness devoid of a delusionary sense of a separate self.

“Eileen” (pseudonym) explored various possible boundaries between herself as the knower and the known visual object, including her body, her eyes, the space between herself and the object, and the outline of the object itself. For example, the body and the eyes are places where it made sense to her that there should be a boundary. Yet for the body, whereas there is a feeling of inside and the object seemed to be ‘outside,’ when

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Eileen moved her attention back and forth between an inside and outside focus she was unable to find a clear boundary between these two. Relative to her eyes, she wrote that on one side she felt her body while on the other she saw the object, yet again she was unable to perceive a clear boundary. In her Ten-Day Summary Report at the end of her period of inquiry, Eileen recapped her experience: “No boundary (was) found. After exploring the outline of object, the surface of eyes and the space (between), I conclude that it all arises simultaneously in awareness without separation.”

As “Fortune” (pseudonym) engaged in the inquiry, she discovered a connection between herself and the visual object. At times the link was the felt experience of what she called the “energy/air,” then later the “energy/space,” and finally just the “space” between herself and the object. Initially, in the perception of this link, there was no clear boundary. Later she came to find that the surface of the object was a kind of boundary, but not one that kept her, as the subject from being connected to the object.

“Ondine” (pseudonym) reported that when she looked for the boundary between herself and her visual object she couldn’t find it. This especially occurred when she turned her attention to look inwards. When she did this she did not lose sight of the outer visual image but no boundary separating inner and outer or herself as the knower/perceiver, from the visual object that was known/perceived, could be found.

“Twyla” (pseudonym) described her experience of the object as a “vivid immediacy.” During her Follow-up Interview, she clarified that this vivid immediacy is characterized by the experience of “no separation between the knowing and the image (of the visual object and including its background).”

“Simone” (pseudonym) described her practice as the Buddhist cultivation of what she calls “resting the mind.” As she began her meditation sessions, this resting the mind

135 was there instantaneously. In this resting state she found no boundary between herself, as the subject, and any visual object.

These examples offer a taste of the kinds of participatory consciousness that each participant reported during their ten days of this exercise, a theme that will be explored more fully in Learning Two below.

How I Was Affected

As I received the participants’ Daily Journal reports, I was excited and pleased to see the extent to which all of the participants described experiences of participatory consciousness. I felt relieved that the decision to use participants expert in both samatha

(tranquility or concentration) and investigative kinds of practices had been a good one.

Initially I was a bit frustrated by the rather sparse reports of a few participants. Later, when I learned during their Follow-up Interviews that these participants already had a formal practice that was quite stable where participatory consciousness is concerned, my frustration turned into appreciation of the depth of practice that this stability represents.3

At times I found myself comparing and contrasting my own experiences over my years of meditation practice with those reported by the participants.4 Here and throughout all four

Learnings, as I worked to understand the participants’ experiences, I often felt my own in-the-moment experience shift into the kinds of participatory consciousness they were reporting.

Imaginal Structures in Use

To a significant extent my own identity is shaped both by my many years as a

Buddhist practitioner, particularly as one who has devoted extensive effort to the direct

136 experiential exploration of Dependent Origination, as well as years to the practice of the

Dzogchen and Mahamudra forms of Vajrayana Buddhist practice. More recently, my experience as a graduate student in Imaginal Psychology and the ways that my studies have complemented my Buddhist perspective have given greater breadth to my range of identity. The imaginal structures that move in me related to both Buddhism and Imaginal

Psychology, including my memories and interpretations of my own meditative and visionary experiences and the process leading to my insights into an experiential subtle energy interpretation of Dependent Origination as reported in the Introduction above and in Appendix 13, are the primary imaginal structures through which I make meaning of the participants’ experience.5

Theoretical Concepts

In interpreting the participants’ experiences for Learning One I used two primary lenses. The first is literature on participatory consciousness. Here Omer’s definition of participatory consciousness as “states of consciousness which are unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self” is a central theme.6 For this Learning, the emphasis is on the possibility of opening to experience where the self is not experienced as separate from that which it sees. Heron offers a slight variation on this perspective when he describes our human ability to participate in a field-like experience in which there is no spatial gap “between me as subject and what is around as object, between my perceiving and what I perceive, between my consciousness and the content and form with which it engages.” 7 By thus highlighting perceiving and what is perceived as well as consciousness and the forms it engages, Heron more specifically targets that aspect of our selves that knows as central to the shift to participatory ways of being.

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This emphasis is equally present in Ferrer’s parallel notion of participatory knowing wherein “subject and object, knowing and being, epistemology and ontology are brought together.” 8 In this way of knowing, cognizing self and cognized world are experienced not as distinct separate entities but as interpenetrating each other.9

The second lens is the Buddhist perspective, where such views are found in both

Mahamudra and Dzogchen theories among others. A particularly clear Mahamudra presentation of the relationship between knowing and what is known is offered by Kalu

Rinpoche. He makes the distinction between knowing, which he calls lucidity, and that which appears to the knowing, which he calls luminosity, then goes on to describe them as a nondual unity, for which he uses the term clarity. He contrasts clarity with dualistic experience where the distinction between subject and object prevails.10

From the Dzogchen perspective, Maitreya depicts the difference between phenomena, that is “appearances involving a duality of perceived and perceiver plus the assumption that anything appearing in such a way actually exists in that way,” and pure being, “in which there is no differentiation between a factor perceived and a perceiver, a signifier and a signified.” 11

Interpretation

Relative to Omer’s description of participatory consciousness as “unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self,” I have interpreted particular kinds of participant reports as indicative of this range of experience.12 These reports can be categorized into

138 five types as follows, examples of each of which can be found in the “What Happened” section above:

• finding no boundary between knowing subject and known object (including

the dissolution of an apparent boundary),

• experiencing no separation between subject and object,

• experiencing a connectedness of subject and object,

• finding only one thing, the experience of seeing as opposed to the ‘two’ of

separate subject and object, and

• descriptions of the object as an aspect of mind, in which the object is thereby

considered to be an aspect of the knowing subject.

As reported above, all of the participants experienced participatory consciousness evidenced by reports of at least one of these five categories. However such anecdotal evidence doesn’t fully convey the ease with which this group was able to access participatory consciousness.

In addition to these five types of reports, there were other descriptions of experience which were suggestive of participatory consciousness but which did not quite clearly fit the requirements of Omer’s definition. Such comments included those which hedged on the relationship between the knowing subject and the known object. Eileen’s comment that it was “hard to find a boundary between the visual field and the body” is an example of this degree of ambiguity. She did not quite explicitly say in this comment that there is no boundary yet the comment is suggestive of others where she is quite clear that she can’t find a boundary. Similar ambiguity is found in Finley’s report that ‘knower and object are not so separate,” his many other comments clearly depicting no separation

139 notwithstanding. Another kind of comment included in this ambiguous group involves uncertainty about the nature of the boundary itself. For example, Thomas’ description of the shift in the quality of his experience of the boundary he was investigating to be that of

“light itself, more a cloud than a line” leaves unclear the issue of whether or not this more amorphous boundary still served, in that session, to separate subject from object. While the metaphors of ‘light’ and ‘cloud’ would not, in their literal sense, be considered very effective as separators, nonetheless an ambiguity regarding Thomas’ experience remains.

From the overall perspective, not only did all the participants experience participatory forms of consciousness. Most of the participants reported clear evidence of participatory consciousness such as that described in the “What Happened” section during the majority of their daily inquiry sessions. When I reviewed their daily reports from a numerical perspective, I rated each individual inquiry session as either having clear evidence of participatory consciousness, having suggestive but somewhat ambiguous evidence of participatory consciousness or showing no signs of participatory consciousness. Considered as a whole, the participants engaged in 80 sessions of mindful inquiry. Of these there were clear reports of participatory consciousness for more than seven out of 10 sessions with ambiguous reports representing 16 percent while those with no evidence for participatory consciousness accounted for 12.5 percent. See Table One in

Appendix 11 for details.13

Yet even this numerical analysis doesn’t completely capture the ease of access to the participatory range of experience demonstrated by some participants. For example,

Finley’s Daily Journal entries show that by about the fourth day, his mind naturally inclined towards a mode of participatory consciousness where there was no distinction between knower and known. He would, from time to time, intentionally return to the

140 inquiry exercise out of consideration for the research protocol. When he did so he would rediscover that he couldn’t find the knower. This insight brought him back into the experience where “the separation between knower and object disappeared.” This pattern repeated itself each day for the duration of his 15 minute inquiry and similarly for the rest of his ten-day period of practice.14 As described in Appendix 15, the preponderance of participatory consciousness was even more striking for some other participants.

This prevalence of participatory experience suggests the ease with which such expert practitioners can access the range of participatory consciousness even in brief periods of daily mindful inquiry in the context of their busy everyday lives. As such,

Learning One affirms that working with an elite population of meditators who are identified by their teachers as being expert in both concentration and mindfulness/inquiry practices, offers an especially rich opportunity for the exploration of participatory consciousness and the various issues involved therein. These results also affirm that

Imaginal Inquiry is a valuable paradigm for such research when using this kind of participant. Utilizing this research modality and participant combination, meaningful research on participatory consciousness can be effectively pursued without the necessity of special technology, psychological measurement tools, or the reliance on extended periods of intensive meditation practice, all of which can be expensive research models.

Relative to the Research Hypothesis, the inquiry activity designed to focus participants on the boundary-creating subtle energy patterns did, in fact, evoke participatory consciousness in various ways for all those for whom it was not already a stable aspect of their meditation practice.15 Some of the participants reported encountering the kinds of boundaries I propose while others found no boundaries. For a few, the boundaries they found did dissolve under the gaze of mindful inquiry leading to

141 participatory kinds of experience, while for others the inability to find a boundary resulted in participatory consciousness. Yet only one practitioner, Thomas, reported experiences with boundary phenomena that I judged to be clearly of a subtle energy nature. As such, the data is insufficient to support my subtle energy characterization of the apparent boundaries between subject and object at this time.16

The Research Problem asks in what ways attending with mindfulness to the subtle energy patterning that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness will enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness. This question is addressed in

Learnings Two and Three below.

Validity

This Learning, as well as those which follow, is grounded in the written reports of the participants augmented by their verbal input in a Follow-up Interview as described in the Methodology Chapter above. The involvement of the participants in the review of my initial written description and interpretation of their inquiry experiences and their answers to the follow-up questions of clarification serve as a check against any tendency I might have to misconstrue the participants’ reports.

It is worth mentioning that although some participants did venture out beyond the exploration of the visual sense in their inquiry, the vast majority of their experience was gleaned from their experience of vision. As such, the validity of the interpretation of what happened can be seen as limited to visual experience.17

I suggest a primary limitation affecting validity has to do with all participants being Buddhist. As such, their reporting and interpretation of their own experience was,

142 to some extent, colored by the lens of their Buddhist practices and conceptual views. As a

Buddhist myself, the same can be said of me as the researcher interpreting the data.18

Learning Two: A Cartography of Participation: From Interconnectedness to Interpenetration to Insubstantiality and Beyond

Learning Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. The layers in this phenomenological map correspond to the progression from subject-object consciousness to the forms of participatory consciousness depicted as luminosity followed by insubstantiality, or emptiness, as described in the Mahamudra teachings of

Vajrayana Buddhism. A few participants experienced an additional stage in which there was an integration of luminosity and emptiness, termed primordial awareness in the

Mahamudra perspective.19

What Happened

The experiential absence of a boundary between subject and object gave participants access to a variety of forms of participatory consciousness. Several forms were reported by multiple participants. These include a relationship of connectedness between subject and visual object, the perception that knower and known were interpenetrating in some way, were aspects of the same thing, or were expressions of a single activity, and the impression that the entire field of experience was dream-like or lacking in any material substantiality. One other form was reported by fewer participants

143 yet is still of note: experiential episodes where two or all three of the previously mentioned flavors of participatory consciousness seemed to arise together.

One fairly common experience reported was the absence of a separation between, or a onnectedness of, knowing subject and its known objects. Ondine writes that when she experienced her senses with subject-object consciousness there seemed to be a boundary between herself and the object. However when she actually turned her attention to look for that boundary she could not actually find where it was located. She portrayed her practice of looking inward as resulting at times in the predominant impression of the

“connectedness of everything.”

Finley wrote that the absence of a boundary between subject and object was typified by his inability to find a place “where one ends and the other begins.” Yet for him in this boundaryless experience there remained, at times, a distinction between knower and known even though this distinction was not one characterized by a line of demarcation or by their being physically ‘separate’.20 Somewhat in contrast, Serena similarly reported experiences where no distinct boundary between subject and object could be found while they paradoxically continued to appear separate and distinct in some vague way, an experience colored by a quality of spaciousness.

Early in her inquiry Fortune experienced a kind of direct link between her head and the object. She described this link as “like a bridge” or “an arc of light,” an image that she both felt and saw. However as the days wore on, this bridge-like connection no longer occurred. Instead another kind of connectedness became more prominent. In this experience of connectedness, Fortune found space, itself, to be the factor joining subject and object. She initially described what she calls a “connecting link” as the “energy/air” between these two. As her inquiry sessions progress, she used the terms “energy/space”

144 and finally just “space.” When asked during her Follow-up Interview for more details about her experience of space she noted that it was open and alive and that she somehow felt it.

For Eileen, this quality of inseparability applied especially to the seeing and the object. She wrote that both the body (which sees) and the visual object arose in the same space, though to different senses. Yet in her Daily Journal entries and Follow-up

Interview she commented that at times she also experienced space as that which “creates a distance between things,” wondering if space could be a boundary. In the end, however, she concluded in her Ten-Day Summary statement that everything arose together in awareness without separation. For Serena, the experience of boundarylessness in which both subject and object appeared also sometimes included the awareness of vast space.

Altogether 14 reports from five participants were judged to represent this category of participatory consciousness. Others were suggestive of this form of participation but judged too ambiguous to count.

Another commonly reported experience was the interpenetration of subject and object. The experience of “(visual) image and mind as one and the same” was quite clear for Ondine. She elaborated on this statement during her Follow-up Interview, reporting that at times, for her, “(knowing) exists everywhere.” This insight sometimes occurred with the sense of the mind feeling vaster than the visual field while the visual field appeared to be located within mind. Ondine reported feeling happiness on the days she recounts this relationship between the mind and the visual field.21

For Thomas, the boundary investigation often catalyzed an experience which he described as “being much larger and being aware of the open mind as well as the physical reality at the same time, watching the two blend and move in and out of each other.”

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During his Follow-up Interview he clarified that in this experience there was no sense of self nor of object. In the absence of the sense of a discrete object, there also was not a clear experience of the five senses at work. At these times he said of his experience that

“It all becomes mind.” He described his detailed investigation of this process during the

Follow-up Interview as follows:

One day (I) started to look at how it was all connected, the eyes, the nerves, where the information comes in, where it is interpreted. … Everything (is) connected to the heart. Not just the heart, openness mind. (I) could almost see physical connections to it. At that point I let go of looking at the boundary and I just started looking at or being with the heart and it got huge.

Thomas went on to explain that by ‘heart’ he means “heart center or heart chakra.”

Affectively this shift brought with it the feeling of happiness and contentment and a

“sense of being involved with everything.”

Similarly for Serena there were occasions during the inquiry when known object and the knowing mind were experienced as indistinguishable. She wrote: “The object seemed like it wasn’t different from my perception and from me as the subject.” But these experiences had a paradoxical quality to them since to her the object also often seemed, at the same time, to be separate and discrete in some way. In addition, she describes times when the object felt as if it were an extension of the mind, with the mind creating the visual field.

According to Finley, “about half way through (the second) session I noticed that the sense of distance between me and the bell I was watching disappeared. It was just floating in my visual sense, but almost seemed inside me. Hard to explain.” He later realized that he had the ability to shift between the perception of a separating distance between himself as knower and the visual object and there being no distance. However when he made no conscious effort in this way, he found that he naturally fell into the

146 experience of there being no distance. When commenting about this absence of a separating distance while correcting my written summary of his experiences during his

Follow-up Interview, he acknowledged that this change was also an important aspect of the transition from subject-object consciousness to a form of participatory consciousness in which there is no distinction between knower and known. Logically to Finley, it made sense “that there is an object and a knowing of that object” but as his mind became more still with increased concentration, his direct experience was that “there are not two things, object and knower. There is just one thing, visual experience.” When questioned further on this topic during the Follow-up Interview, however, he reported that there were three aspects to this issue. On the one hand, there was that kind of experience where there appeared to be a knower separate from the object that is known. On the other, there were experiences where it was clear that there was no knower, only knowing, of which Finley reported two versions. In one version, the knowing and the object seemed to be two discrete aspects of the experience. In another version, no distinction was found between the knowing and that which is known.

Eileen related that, at times, she also experienced the visual object as appearing to be inside her. When questioned about this experience during her Follow-up Interview,

Eileen associated this kind of experience with a shift in her orientation from being the knower to that of knowing itself and being it all. While there was no boundary between the visual world of objects and herself as the knower, Eileen nonetheless commented during her Follow-up Interview that when this happened she sometimes continued to experience the objects within the visual field to be three-dimensional and discrete from each other. She noted, as had Ondine and Thomas, that this shift to an interpenetration of knowing and known was blissful.

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In this category, there were also 14 reports from five participants. As with the first category, other reports were suggestive of this quality of participation but judged to be too ambiguous to include.

A third form of experience reported with some frequency was that of insubstantiality. Serena described particularly deep experiences in which the object began to lose its solidity. These experiences were associated with a shift from attending to the boundary of the object to what she calls the awareness of being. “From this perspective,” she wrote, “the object appeared less solid … included in the spaciousness.” At this point for her the whole field, both the subject aspects and the object aspects, appeared to have more of an energetic, insubstantial nature rather than to be anything solid. Thomas seemed to be referring to a similar quality of experience when he described “flashes of a more pure way of seeing, almost a dream world.” For Ondine, during some inquiry sessions the predominant flavor of experience was that of the insubstantiality of all aspects of experience. During one such session, she also described experiencing a flatness to the visual field as follows: “What was seen seemed to become one dimensional (like a painting on a flat canvass with only an illusion of depth).” 22 Twyla offered a similar allusion to the world of art when she commented in her Ten-Day Summary that “there was a shift in the visual field to something more diffuse and less solid than ordinary perception, the overall effect being similar to an impressionist painting.” On the day she described her taste of this immaterial flavor, Eileen wrote both that the knower seemed to have no location at all and that her experience felt expansive and insubstantial.

Altogether there were seven reports of insubstantiality logged by five different participants.

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Both Ondine and Serena offered descriptions which seemed to involve the previously described qualities simultaneously. In her Ten-Day Summary, Ondine wrote that her practice of ‘inward looking’ catalyzed the experience that “nothing is substantial

– all is mind … oneness, connectedness of everything, perceiver and perceived are inseparable.” Serena spoke, during her Follow-up Interview, of times when there was the loss of boundary or distinction between herself and the object during which both were experienced as energy, that is, being insubstantial, while at the same time the object paradoxically seemed to retain the sense of being a solid object.23

Two participants, Serena and Finley, commented that there was a natural progression reflected in the different qualities of participatory consciousness they experienced. While making corrections to my preliminary written summary of her experience during her Follow-up interview, Serena noted that there “seemed to be a progression in my practice to feeling more centered awareness and the investigation became finer.” From my outsider’s reading of her accounts, this progression through her ten days of inquiry began with an initial experience of a separation between subject and object. She then noticed experiences in which there was a vast spacious quality while simultaneously the object continued to remain distinct. This experience was followed by the recognition that the object was an extension of mind or subject, an experience in which the object still seemed to retain some paradoxical quality of distinctness and solidity while no longer being separate from mind. As experience deepened, the object began to lose its solidity. At this point the whole field, including both the subject aspects and the object aspects, seemed to have more of an insubstantial nature than to be anything solid. When this outside observer’s depiction of her progression was presented to Serena

149 during her Follow-up Interview as part of my preliminary written summary of her experience, she concurred.

Writing in her Daily Journal about her own experience of this progression, Serena chose to use the language of subtle energy. She reported noticing a shift in energy as an expression of the difference between the tension of an effortful holding of a boundary and the relaxation of letting go of it. With further examination she discovered that this holding involved a reference point. Her insight into the dynamics of holding a boundary and a reference point suggested to her a relationship between the two. She concluded that holding the boundary and reference point was coloring her experience. She then she began to experience herself more as an energy being while the object retained its sense of solidity. Next, when her experience shifted such that she knew both the object and the sense-of-self to be expressions of mind, the whole of experience, including both subject and object aspects, seemed to her to be more that of energy than of anything solid, while at times the object seemed paradoxically to be both solid and insubstantial. During her follow-up interview, she said that she could almost see this field-like experience, describing this sensing of energy as akin to visual perception “though not on that gross level of the eyes.” She suggested that it may have something to do with the subtle body.

On day nine she reported that awareness itself seems to “(have) a certain energy sensation.”

Finley described two main kinds of experience with some sense of a transitional quality of experience between them. Initially there seemed to be a distinction between knower and visual object. As the mind became more concentrated that distinction fell away leaving only the experience of seeing in which there was no distinction between knower and known object. There was no knower, just the object and the knowing of it,

150 experienced as not distinct from each other. Finley also reported transition phases between these two main forms of experience in which there remained a distinction between knower and known but this distinction is not one characterized by their being physically ‘separate’.24

Thomas offered a slightly different take on the issue of sequencing. In his

Follow-up Interview, he noted that in the approach from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness, there seemed to be a natural sequence to what he characterized as a deconstruction of identity. This sequence shifts from an emphasis on the object to the senses, which then blended together into a singular kind of sensory modality as the boundary where duality was created emerged into awareness. Finally, when this boundary dissolved, experience was typified by spaciousness and the blending of mind and physical reality.

In the stability of their respective practices, neither Simone nor Twyla reported any variety in their experience of participatory consciousness. When I inquired about this in their Follow-up Interviews, both seemed to indicate that in fact there was some variety possible but that whatever forms of consciousness arose, whether subject-object consciousness or other forms of participatory consciousness, they arose within the context of the understanding of the mind as awareness that included its ‘objects.’

How I Was Affected

As the reports from the participants came in, I began to recognize many of the same experiences that had been evoked for me in my own exploration of the relationship between subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness. I felt excited to see evidence from some participants of a deepening sequence of insights similar to the

151 progression that happened for me. I was especially moved by those who showed some recognition themselves of this sequential layering in their own explorations. This was akin to the experience of being accurately seen and understood by another.

Imaginal Structures in Use

In the analysis of the various forms of participatory consciousness that the participants report clearly my identification as a Buddhist practitioner is at work. More specifically, those imaginal structures associated with my own experience of Mahamudra meditation practices are in play. In addition, since my experience of Mahamudra practice is similar to my prior experience of the subtle energy expression of the first four links in the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, imaginal structures associated with this dimension in my practice, detailed in Appendix 13, were also at work in the interpretive process.

As a practitioner I have devoted decades of meditative inquiry to the experiential exploration of Dependent Origination. My recognition that the progression of deepening insight follows a non-linear, labyrinthine path, much like discovering pieces to a puzzle, which only after long exploration finally seemed to fit into a coherent whole played a significant role in the interpretation, as well.

Theoretical Concepts

The primary lens I use for the interpretation above is that of the Vajrayana teachings on Mahamudra. Mahamudra theory depicts a series of shifts in the underlying structure of experience resulting in specific ‘flavors’ or depths of participation that follow a describable sequence. From the Mahamudra perspective, as the split into subject and

152 object falls apart, there is a reintegration of knowing and known referred to as luminosity.

Then, as participation deepens, the practitioner notices the underlying insubstantiality or emptiness of the entire field of experience. Finally there is an integration of the experience of insubstantial emptiness and luminosity referred to as primordial awareness or the nature of mind.25 My use of these teachings is grounded both in conceptual understanding and personal experience. The interpretation of the participants’ experience of the shift from subject-object consciousness to luminosity into two discrete stages, interconnectedness and interpenetration, as detailed below, is my own and has it roots in my personal meditative inquiry relative to the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent

Origination and in reference to my experience of Mahamudra practice.26

Interpretation

Learning Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. Once the apparent separation between subject and object has fallen away a variety of participatory experiences is possible. Reports by the participants in this study show that three distinct flavors of participatory consciousness ensue with evidence also suggesting a fourth. The three flavors include: 1) experiences where participants feel a lack of separation, or an interconnectedness, between subject and object, 2) experiences where the ‘inner’ space of the subject and the ‘outer’ space of the object, that is, the mind and the physical world, blended together or interpenetrated, and 3) times in which the whole of experience was known to be insubstantial. A fourth, less strongly supported, flavor of participatory consciousness involved experiences where these three, or just the latter two, all seemed to

153 happen together. Beyond just the fact of these particular flavors, however, the comments of several participants suggest that a natural progression of experiences may be involved.

In the reports of the participants, their first two flavors, the recognition of the connectedness of subject and object followed by their interpenetration seem to be two discrete phases in the transition from subject-object consciousness to the dawning of the luminosity. The recognition of the interconnectedness of subject and object overcomes their apparent spatial separateness while their interpenetration describes the full integration of these two, which characterizes the direct experience of luminosity. There is a clear relationship between the third reported flavor, insubstantiality and the Mahamudra experience of insubstantial emptiness. Lastly, several participants reported experiences depicting the integration or union of emptiness and luminosity, the Mahamudra description of primordial awareness.27

Subject-object consciousness is characterized by an apparent gap separating knowing subject and known visual object. The space constituting this gap is generally excluded from awareness as an absence rather than felt as a presence. I propose that the initial shift to what I suggest is the first layer of participatory consciousness coincides with a transmutation of the primary boundary between subject and object. This transmutation serves to include the intervening space in awareness. When space is included in awareness it is experienced as a presence rather than an apparent absence. As a presence, it serves as a connecting medium joining subject and object. For me, the image of a magnet, with poles that in some sense have different locations, comes to mind.28 The poles are nonetheless clearly connected to each other through the body of the magnet yet with no distinct boundary demarcating where one pole ends and the other begins.

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Each of the specific descriptions related to connectedness and space above portrays a significant aspect of this particular layer of participatory consciousness, which

I like to refer to as interconnectedness. I suggest that Ondine’s “connectedness of everything,” Finley’s inability to find the place where subject ends and object begins,

Serena’s boundarylessness (together with the stable boundaryless meditations of Simone and Twyla), Fortune’s description of space as a felt, alive, openness and as that which connects knowing subject and seen object, and Eileen’s image of subject and object dancing in space all represent ways of experiencing the loss of both a defining boundary and the gap separating subject from object leading to the expression of interconnectedness.

As the experience of participatory consciousness deepens, where subject and object are first known to be interconnected, they next are experienced as interpenetrating.

There is a paradoxical quality to this experience in that it is possible to discriminate between discrete objects but knowing and the known field of objects aren’t spatially discrete. The field of visual objects and the knowing of them are co-extensive, that is they occupy the same space. Statements reporting the blending together of open mind and physical reality, that the knower, or knowing mind, and the known object are the same, that the distance between the knower and the known object disappeared, that the visual objects seemed to be inside the knower, that everything is just mind, or even that “there is just one thing, visual experience” all have this flavor.29

Five participants reported forms of participatory consciousness where the insubstantiality of their experience was predominant. This matches the third layer of participatory consciousness in the Mahamudra model wherein the entire field of experience, including both knowing aspect and known aspect, is experienced to be

155 lacking in material substance, even as visual imagery remains as a feature of the experience. In this category I include Serena’s experience of the whole field as more energetic than solid, Thomas’ reference to a dreamlike quality in his experience,

Ondine’s depiction of the insubstantiality of all aspects of experience, Twyla’s characterization of her visual experience in her stable participatory meditative state as less substantial than ordinary seeing, and Eileen’s expansive and insubstantial feeling when the knower no longer seemed to have a location.30

As noted above, two meditators, Ondine and Serena, describe experiences in which two or all three qualities of participation, interconnectedness, interpenetration, and insubstantiality, were paradoxically concurrently present and integrated. I suggest that this type of experience corresponds to the Mahamudra notion of primordial awareness as the union of luminosity and emptiness. Subject and object are paradoxically experienced to be simultaneously interpenetrating and insubstantial without the loss of the ability to discriminate between interconnected knowing and known or the various aspects of the known.31

As such, the reports of the participants offer strong experiential support for the validity of the various qualities of participatory consciousness depicted in Vajrayana

Buddhist Mahamudra theory of luminosity, insubstantiality/emptiness, and primordial awareness. In fact, two participants, Finley and Serena, even recognized a progression in their experience that matched parts of this Mahamudra sequence. For Finley, the sequence moved first from subject-object consciousness to interconnectedness, in which there remained a distinction between knower and known object, but one characterized by their not being physically separate. For him a second shift involved a loss of the remaining distinction between knower and known. Serena’s description of her

156 progression mirrored these two transitions and added to them a third, the emergence of insubstantiality.32

Thomas offered a different view of this sequence depicting the approach from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness as involving what he calls a deconstruction of layers of identity. His sequence moves from the object to the senses, then the boundary. Next he describes the shift into what he calls spaciousness, which I interpret to be the transition into participatory consciousness. Thomas thus suggests that there are layers to the process preceding the breakdown of subject-object consciousness into participatory consciousness.33

In suggesting that there is a natural sequence to these forms of participatory consciousness, I am not at all proposing that they will necessarily occur in this order in the course of deepening practice. In fact, in my experience is that the opposite is generally the case. These experiences can occur in any order given the labyrinthine nature of the spiritual path wherein we move towards the center in a circuitous manner that sometimes also moves farther from the center on the way to eventually arriving there.34

The Research Hypothesis regarding the shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness is based on my own experience of an underlying subtle energy patterning creating boundaries which progressively fall away in this destructuring process. A few of the participants did make mention of directly experienced energy in their comments above, notably Fortune and Serena, whose own description of the progression she experienced is taken from the subtle energy section of the Daily Journal.

However the bulk of the evidence, as presented and interpreted, does not yet offer sufficient direct support for this underlying subtle energy structure.35 Relative to the

Research Problem, which asks in what ways shifts to participatory consciousness will

157 occur, Learning Two shows that the participants did experience a variety of openings and shifts to participatory consciousness while using the mindful inquiry exercise I designed for them. The details of how those shifts happened will be explored in Learning Three.

Validity

The validity considerations for Learning Two are largely the same as for Learning

One above. However in Learning Two I have attempted to differentiate between various forms of participatory consciousness, as well. This inevitably involves more shades of gray and relies more heavily on the application of judgment. Some experiences as described by various participants are difficult to clearly categorize. The findings are only as valid as the accuracy of the participants’ descriptions of their experiences and the clarity of the judgment I bring to the analysis of them.

In addition, it is of relevance to note that just a few of the participants presented suggestions of a sequence to the experiences they report. That I use this limited evidence in support of the suggestion that there is in fact an underlying order to these experiences of participatory consciousness can reasonably be called into question.

My response to this critique is that each participant spent only 15 minutes a day for ten days exploring the inquiry designed to evoke experience regarding the relationship between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness. My own coming to this experiential understanding of the natural sequence of Mahamudra insights took place gradually over several decades of regular daily practice sessions usually lasting much longer than I asked of the participants, punctuated by many long periods of intensive retreat practice, both as a lay person and as a monk. It began with a decades-long experiential investigation of the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, Only later

158 when I began to explore Mahamudra practice did I recognize the parallels between

Mahamudra experience and the early links of Dependent Origination as I experience them. The same kinds of experiential jigsaw puzzle pieces the participants have collectively reported initially emerged gradually and in piecemeal fashion over years in my own practice, often not in the sequential order I would eventually recognize once the whole picture became clear. Then in the context of a three-month silent retreat devoted to developing samādhi, a retreat which brought my concentration skills into balance with those of inquiry developed during my years of primarily insight practice, the pieces of the puzzle finally fell quickly into place. The result is the experiential depiction of the 12 links of Dependent Origination that I describe in Appendix 13. I later came to recognize that the earliest of these links matched the progression of Mahamudra practice I detail in the Introduction above.

For me, rather than being a stretch to fit all these pieces, seemingly disparate when coming from different people, into the same puzzle, I find it remarkable, that so many of the pieces of this experiential map have been reported in just ten short days of inquiry by multiple members of a group of only eight, albeit highly talented, Buddhist practitioners during just 15 minutes of targeted inquiry per day. That during this short exercise, a few of these practitioners began to put their pieces of this puzzle together in meaningful sequences is even more striking.36

Learning Three: Depolarizing Attention: Opening to the Undivided Activity of the Cosmos

Learning Three proposes that highly talented meditators can, in the context of

Imaginal Inquiry, provide empirical evidence about the details of the process by which

159 subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention.

What Happened

Eileen, Thomas, and Serena all described the catalytic role of direct experiential investigation of the boundary between themselves and their visual object. They each used the language of subtle energy in their descriptions of this of this process. Eileen explored various possibilities for where she might find the boundary between subject and object.

These included: the surface of the eyes, the surface of the body, the outline of the object and the intervening space between herself and the object. Investigating the experience of seeing at the outer edge of the eyes, she found a transitional region with the feeling of bodily sensations on one side and the seen visual field on the other. She sensed her body as “an energy area of movement, pulsation in a ‘Body’ that has no clear boundary, but a feeling of ‘inside’ whereas the object seems ‘outside’ of that.” When she pushed herself to strongly focus on the object, “it stood out sharply from its background and there (were) clear boundaries, separating it from the air, other objects, visual lines, etc., (sic) color, texture, etc.” But then returning to include her bodily experience once again she struggled to find a boundary between the visual field and her body. At times she noticed that the object is some distance away, with an intervening space. “Yet I can’t see the space,” she writes, “but it could be conceived of as a ‘boundary.’ The object stands out from the space behind it as well, giving a 3-D appearance. (Yet) there is no separation between the object and the seeing.” 37 In her written Summary, Eileen restates her experience as follows: “No boundary found. After exploring the outline of the object, the surface of

160 eyes and the space, I conclude that it all arises simultaneously in awareness without separation.”

Thomas found his experience divided into three aspects, the visual object, the

‘openness,’ which he also calls Mind, and “the (middle) point that separates.” Initially this middle aspect was the “me” and included the senses, that which generated thought, and that which evaluated the experience. Sometimes, as this middle boundary region between the visual field and the openness started to soften, and the experience of it became simpler, he felt as if he was “look(ing) at the point where dualism takes place.”

Later, while I was asking him follow-up questions, he described this lens-like boundary as the transition point between subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness.38

As the days went by Thomas’ sense of this boundary region shifted to be more like a portal of some kind, a window. He wrote that the exploration of this boundary phenomena “is like looking through a window and then looking at the window.” When he made this boundary region, this window, the focus of mindful investigation, it became more like light or cloudlike than a distinct line of demarcation. He further described this transition as follows:

When I sat and really looked at, actually first generated a boundary, to where I could actually see something … at first it was like a dark opening and it was like it had all these wires and tubes going to the heart and then as this thing progressed they became alive, they became the tentacles.

Then during his last few days of inquiry subtle energy phenomena dominated the experience. About this period of his practice he wrote:

All around the lens there was a weaving of tentacles of light. Each one seemed to carry a story. After awhile they wove into a bright ring of light that blended into the openness. … It was as if I was seeing nerve endings all around the act of seeing.

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He also reported numerous subtle energy experiences, particularly in the region of the head, suggesting that “a clearing (of) this area of vision and its relationship to the heart is involved.” In the Follow-up Interview, I asked Thomas about his intermixing of energy vocabulary with visual imagery and the language of seeing. He acknowledged that for him subtle energy was often a visual experience.

Thomas also described several ways in which the boundary dissolved. He reported in his Follow-up Interview that “There was the physical reality. There was the open mind and I’m looking at the boundary and it was as if the boundary dissolved and the two blended together.” In addition to simply attending to the boundary, Thomas said that acknowledging his own role in the construction of the boundary seemed to catalyze a transition into participatory consciousness in which the boundary dissipated and “the open mind blends with the physical. It all becomes mind.” In his Summary statement

Thomas elaborated that when he “let(s) go of the ‘me’ (the middle boundary area) then it is two fields of energy that blend in and out of each other.” As noted in Learning Two above, Thomas described this deconstruction of the sense of separateness as involving a natural progression from attending to objects of the senses, then to the senses themselves, followed by a focus on the boundary which then opens into the experience of spaciousness. He credited the analytical experiential exploration of the boundary phenomena with hastening this shift into participatory experience.

Serena depicted the flow of experience that creates the subject-object split as including elements like shape, color, texture as well as conceptualization and meaning-making in addition to boundary/reference point creation. Yet, during her

Follow-up Interview, she reported noticing that

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when I see that my mind is creating it through all of these different mediums, all the different ways that mind does that, then, yeah, then the more you look at that then the more it starts to fall apart.

For her, insight thus led to participation, catalyzing a natural progression in her experience towards deeper levels of participatory consciousness. First Serena noticed a holding of a boundary and a reference point. She described the letting go of that holding as a shift in energy. With this energetic shift, the boundary between subject and object lost its clarity and she began to experience herself as an energy being while the object retained its sense of solidity. The next shift revealed that the object and her sense-of-self are both expressions of mind. With this insight came the experience that both subject and object aspects seemed to be more just energy than anything solid. Finally, she reported that awareness itself seems energetic. This whole process was catalyzed by a deepening examination of her experience beginning with her holding of a boundary.

Other participants were also curious about why their experience shifted from subject-object consciousness to the various forms of participatory consciousness they encountered. A second major theme that emerged in their reports centered on the activity of attending. While several participants identified a strong role for the use and focus of attention as a key factor in the shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness, there were some differences in their descriptions of this role. Ondine reported in her Follow-up Interview that for many years her practice has emphasized a directing of attention inwards. During her inquiry, when thus attending inwardly, she found no boundary between knower and seen object. For her, this experience of ‘looking’ inward produced an expansiveness of mind and the realization that everything is insubstantial and connected (though at times for her one or the other of these qualities did predominate.) She noticed during the context of this period of inquiry that when she

163 looked outward, these natural, underlying qualities were more easily overlooked. She wrote that the different flavors she experienced within the range of participatory consciousness also had to do with how she placed her attention. For example, when asked in her Follow-up Interview about her relationship to the visual object during expansive, boundaryless qualities of experience she noted that she was looking at the object but that

“it wasn’t grabbing my attention. It was just another part of the boundless, open spaciousness …” She described her attention at such times as more focused in a way that she calls ‘inclusiveness’ than on the object. When experiencing with this inclusive focus, insubstantiality and connectedness were not obscured. Eileen seemed to echo this sentiment when she wrote “I am resting in the awareness and finding no boundary, awareness focused on object and including body sensations, sounds, thoughts, peaceful, open.”

For Simone, letting experience come to her, not directing her attention in any way, was the path to participatory consciousness. As noted above, only by intentionally making a special effort to narrowly focus on the visual object did her stability in participatory consciousness begin waiver at all.

With Simone’s comments on the role of directed versus non-directed attention

Finley would concur. Not being able to find any boundary from the beginning, Finley, in his Follow-up Interview, described three distinct ways he used his attention to further his inquiry. First, he could focus attention on the visual object. Second, he could focus attention on the knower. Third, he could let go of either of these specific foci leading to an undirected, focusless mode of experience. When he would focus on neither, he was no longer able to distinguish between the two. As he put it “There was still the visual experience, which is conscious experience, but not an experience of a knower distinct

164 from the known …” The discreteness of knower relative to the known had disappeared.

There was instead just “the experience of seeing.”

Finley confided his own natural inclination to simply remain in this participatory experience of seeing. But then he would remember that he was supposed to be doing inquiry. Refocusing his attention on the search for the knower, his preferred inquiry, would reestablish the mode of subject-object consciousness, that is, the subjective experiential impression that there is a knower. But in the actual activity of looking for the knower, none was found. The experience of not being able to locate a knower then evoked a return “back into the experience in which the separation between the knower and the object disappeared.” Sometimes this happened spontaneously when it became clear that the knower could not be found. At other times, he more consciously dropped the activity of inquiry, thus letting go of focused attention, resulting in a reversion to the experienced inseparability of knowing and known. He commented that the activity of investigation, the directing of attention, involved a doing and hence an apparent doer. He equated this doing/doer with the knower. The ‘doing’ of the active investigation recreated the felt sense of a separate knower. As such for Finley, the experience of there being no knower distinct from what he knows, that is, participatory consciousness, was thus associated with unfocused or undirected of attention.39

Fortune’s experience suggests a similar difference between the activity of focused investigation and simply being with the experience of seeing. She noted during her

Follow-up Interview that when she stopped actively looking for the boundary between herself and the visual object that an awareness of space emerged. At these times there was “just this space and the object that I was looking at and myself and everything else in the room was just floating in space.”

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How I Was Affected

In general I found the participants’ comments on the process by which their experience shifted from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness exciting in the same way that their reported range of participatory experiences had moved me. It was like the experience of being seen by another described above under Learning

Two. I was especially delighted that a few of the participants encountered boundaries similar to the ones I have found to be at work and that their descriptions did incorporate the language of subtle energy. Yet at the same time there was mild disappointment that, although the participants’ phenomenological descriptions of their experiences seemed very similar to mine, I found more indirect, rather than direct support for my own experience of the specific subtle energy structuring of these layers. The directly supporting evidence was not as strong as I had hoped. Nonetheless the indirect support was extensive and compelling.40

Imaginal Structures in Use

My imaginal structures in play relative to Learning Three are those ensuing from my identification as a Buddhist and my years of Mahamudra practice, as well as my personal experience with the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, as detailed in

Learning Two above.

Theoretical Concepts

Clearly from the description in the Introduction above I have relied on

Mahamudra teachings on the relationship between subject-object consciousness, on the

166 one hand, and appearance/luminosity, and emptiness as well as the Mahamudra notions of the non-directed use of both concentration and vipassanā/mindful inquiry practices on the other.41 Shankman’s depiction of the distinction between exclusive awareness and inclusive awareness is another useful theoretical lens, especially regarding the role of attention.42

Wangyal’s account of the third, or secret, level of direct experiential exploration of subtle energy suggests the elusiveness of this aspect of human experience.43 Lurking in the background is my own subtle energy theory of the Buddha’s teachings on

Dependent Origination and the āruppas, as described in Appendix 13.

Interpretation

Learning Three proposes that highly talented meditators can, in the context of

The Research Question is centered on the hypothesized role of subtle energy patterns in the underlying structure of the subject-object split in consciousness. The methodology focused the participant’s mindful inquiry towards two particular such subtle energy patterns, both of which have the function of creating the impression of there being a boundary between subject and object during the activity of seeing. The Research

Hypothesis suggests what when these subtle energy boundaries are made the focus of mindfulness, they tend to dissolve, catalyzing a shift to participatory modes of consciousness.

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For four of the participants, Eileen, Thomas, Serena, and Finley, the shifts to participatory consciousness that they experienced did in fact emerge out of their exploration of the boundary between themselves and their chosen visual object. For two the falling away of the boundary was associated with subtle energy experience. Serena depicts the dissolution of the boundary she finds as a “shift in energy.” Thomas’ more detailed description of his boundary exploration closely resembles the prediction inherent in the Research Hypothesis. Eileen, on the other hand, discovers an energetic experience of body in her inability to find a boundary. For Finley, his inability to find a boundary left him in participatory modes of experience though he did not describe his experiences in subtle energy language.

Thomas’ experience coincides with the Research Hypothesis, in that he discovered a boundary constructed of subtle energy activity that dissolved when he attended to it resulting in the transition to participatory forms of consciousness. However the experiences described by Eileen and Serena do not clearly depict boundaries constructed of subtle energy activity. Yet their transitions from subject object to participatory consciousness were catalyzed by their inquiring into the hypothesized boundary phenomena between knowing subject and known visual object. In Serena’s case, she did encounter a boundary that dissolved in the face of her mindful attention to it. Although she described the dissolution and subsequent shift to participatory consciousness as an energetic shift, she does not depict the boundary as constructed of subtle energy. For Eileen, in her attempts to attend to the hypothesized boundary she simply could not find one. This not finding a boundary itself catalyzed her shift to participatory consciousness.

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Another element of Serena’s, Eileen’s, and Thomas’ descriptions seems worth mentioning. Each describes their ability to begin to discern their own mind’s role in the creation of the split into subject and object as a contributing factor in their shift to participatory consciousness. This theme of the structuring of experience into subject-object consciousness will be explored more fully in Learning Four below.

Three participants, Ondine, Twyla, and Simone, reported a long-standing stability of a boundaryless participatory consciousness in their meditation practice. As such, the issue of transitioning from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness at the heart of the Research Hypothesis and the Research Problem was not particularly relevant for them during the data gathering period. Nonetheless, both Ondine and Simone did have useful insights to share in the Follow-up Interview regarding the transition from subject-object to participatory consciousness and vice versa. Their comments were consistent with those by Finley and depicted the role of focused of attention.

The reports of these latter three participants suggest that when attention is directed outwardly towards an object, the split into subject and object is the result. They are less unanimous regarding the alternatives to an outward focus. For example, Ondine noted that for her, inwardly directed attention itself results in participatory consciousness while for Finley, directing attention inward in the looking to find the knower indirectly evokes participatory consciousness when it results in the recognition that there is no knower. For

Ondine it was the direction of attention that seemed most critical while for Finley it was what he didn’t find, his experiential insight that there was no knower, that was catalytic.

Several other perspectives are worth noting. Finley describes the use of undirected attention as a second attention-related way of catalyzing participatory modes of experience. Fortune said that for her, it was when she stopped directing her attention, in

169 her case, towards the search for the boundary, that her experience shifted. Simone concurs. Support for both these approaches can be found in the Buddhist literature. For example, Mahamudra practice encourages the cultivation of undirected or objectless concentration as well as turning back to look directly at the nature of the mind itself.44

Shankman’s notion of exclusive versus inclusive awareness offers a similar Buddhist theoretical and practice-related lens.45

It should be mentioned, as well, that the instructions for the inquiry activity given to the participants, to look for the boundary between subject and object while seeing, also shifts the focus of attention away from a singular directedness towards the visual object.

Yet the instructions neither shift attention inward, towards the knower, nor panoramically. The instructions were to broaden the focus of attention to include also the boundary while maintaining awareness of the visual object. As such, the focus was less narrow than simply attending to the visual object but not as broad as a fully panoramic focus of attention. It seems reasonable to wonder whether it was the shift of attention to specifically look at or for the boundary or the breaking of the narrow focus on the object, itself, that was the critical element for Eileen, Thomas, and Serena. What all of these approaches share in common is the shift of attention away from a narrow focus on the specific visual object and the resultant opening to participatory consciousness in which the splitting of experience into subject and object no longer pertains.46

Considered together, the collective reports of the participants suggest that while attention directed towards the hypothesized subtle energy boundary can catalyze the shift from subject-object to participatory consciousness in several ways, it is clearly not the only such catalyst. Shifting attention away from a narrow outward focus on the visual

170 bject whether in an inwards direction, by expanding attention in a more panoramic manner, or simply by not directing attention at all, can also catalyze shifts from subject-object to participatory consciousness.47

For those for whom attending to the boundary resulted in the shift to participatory consciousness, only one, Thomas, clearly experienced the boundary to be of a subtle energy nature. As such, recognizing the subtle energy nature of the boundaries I posit in the Research Hypothesis and Research Problem appears not to be an essential element in the catalysis of the shift to participatory consciousness. My depiction of the nature of the boundaries towards which I directed the participants’ attention as constructed of the activity of subtle energy was not born out by their reports of their experience. I suggest that this may have to do with the particularly elusive nature of subtle energy experience itself, as described by Wangyal.48

The Research Question asks in what ways the shift to participatory consciousness happens. The varied experiences of the participants suggests that this shift can happen in a several ways including simply attending to the apparent boundary between subject and object, insight into the role of the meditator in creating this apparent boundary, and shifting attention away from a narrow focus on the current object of the senses. This later strategy can be applied in several ways including, widening attention to include looking for the apparent boundary between subject and object, shifting attention inwards, shifting attention to a more inclusive or panoramic focus, or simply not directing attention in any way at all.

This Learning focuses on the destructuring shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory forms of consciousness with an emphasis on the critical function of attention.

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Learning Four to follow details participants’ insights into the process whereby the structuring of subject-object experience takes place and the role that attention plays therein.

Validity

Some of the validity concerns noted for Learnings One and Two also apply to

Learning Three. More specifically that the participants reviewed and refined my analysis of their reports enhances validity while their all being Buddhists possibly limits it. As with Learnings One and Two, the validity of Learning Three is restricted to the experience of vision. And once again, the findings are only as valid as the accuracy of the participants’ descriptions of their experiences and the clarity of the judgment I brought to the analysis of them.

Learning Four: Witness to Creation: Rending the World into Two

As the converse to Learning Three, Learning Four proposes that highly talented meditators can, in the context of Imaginal Inquiry, provide empirical evidence about the details of the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject-object consciousness. If our underlying nature, as the Buddhist tradition maintains, is the particular form of participatory consciousness Buddhists call primordial awareness, how is it that subject-object consciousness comes into being? Learning Four suggests that it is possible through mindful inquiry to begin to discover in one’s own experience the underlying processes and structures whereby primordial awareness expresses itself as subject-object consciousness.

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What Happened

Just as some participants were curious about the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness (Learning Three), a few also commented on the dynamics of the opposite shift. For example, during her explorations Serena found that she eventually had the ability to intentionally shift back and forth between states where there was the experience of subject and object as separate and others where there was no boundary between them. In this shifting back and forth she mentioned beginning to see how the boundary and the sense of separation are created as an aspect of the process of visual perception. She further wrote that she “experienced the object as more of an extension of my mind. My mind was creating the visual field.” Serena described what she called ‘flowing’ as the continual recreation of visual experience in relation to an object. Referring, during her Follow-up Interview, to this creation process and the establishment of subject-object consciousness vis-à-vis her particular visual object, she says “It doesn’t feel like it happens just once” but is a continual process. For her, this flowing had the directionality of moving from herself towards some external object. She attributed this flowing experience to the mind, as opposed to the body, and considered it part of the way that mind is creating experience in an ongoing way. This creation process included the boundary between self and other, which was dependent on the establishment of a reference point in relation to the visual object.

Through active explorations involving shifting her visual focus in various ways,

Eileen concluded that the apparent material substantiality of the object was simply the result of how the eye was focused in relation to it. The eye and the object, she said, were involved in a kind of dance that resulted in the object’s apparent solidity. She described

173 the experience of fixing her gaze on the object as like the creation of an anchor around which “the universe arrang(ed) itself, dancing its dance for that moment with (the object) as (its) center.” She noted that “we choose such a center moment to moment.” Yet later in her Ten-Day Summary Eileen wrote “We anchor in the sense of self as the center of the universe. Everything arranges itself neatly from that perspective.” She continued commenting that her inquiries led her to the conclusion that “ … perception and its objects are inseparable, dependent on each other …” In the Follow-up Interview she elaborated on this interdependence, suggesting that, in fact, the two don’t actually exist without each other. “There is no object,” she said “without the seeing and no seeing without the object.”

Ondine suggested that directing the mind outwardly leads to the apparent location of the object in a different place than the subject. For her, with this outward focus the object seemed discrete from “me” as the knower, creating the sense of a spatial gap between these two aspects of experience. In addition, Ondine seemed to attribute the apparent solidity of the world in her subject-object experience of seeing to this outward looking, reporting during her Follow-up Interview that the underlying insubstantiality of all things is overlooked when attention is only directed outwardly. She echoed Serena’s sentiment when she reports that, at times, there was for her the sense that mind is constructing experience. Yet, as noted in Appendix 15 below, Ondine also distinguished between two forms of directed attention: that which is focused narrowly on the object and that which is more panoramic, which she described in her Follow-up Interview as

“inclusiveness.” The latter focus retained the participatory qualities of connectedness and insubstantiality.

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Like Serena, Finley discovered that he could move at will between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness. As detailed above, Finley found that aiming the mind in any direction takes him out of the experience of participatory consciousness.

These observations of his own subjective experience led him to conclude that directed attention is essential to the structure of subject-object consciousness. Fortune offered indirect evidence in support of this view as noted in Learning Three above when she observed during her Follow-up Interview that when she stopped actively looking for the boundary between herself and the visual object that an awareness of space emerged.

Simone experienced a consistent stability in participatory forms of consciousness, though she did make efforts to shake that stability for the sake of the research exercise.

As noted in Learning Three (and in Appendix 15), she reported that the only times her stable participatory consciousness even waivered slightly, were when she would make a particular effort to direct her attention exclusively on the object instead of her natural stance of allowing experience to come to her.

Thomas offers the most detailed description of his exploration of this phenomenon. Through attending to the middle boundary that he found between the visual field and open awareness, Thomas noticed that this boundary began to soften. This softening evoked in him the impression that he was “looking at the place where dualism takes place.” He paradoxically describes the boundary as an aspect of the physical, as opposed to the spiritual, and yet as somehow distinct from the body itself, functioning in some way to keep these two, body and spirit, apart most of the time. Elaborating on this idea while correcting my preliminary written summary of his experience during his

Follow-up Interview, Thomas said the following:

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The boundary is where creativity takes place. It’s as if, though, there’s all this energy on the one side, then there is this boundary or opening or filter and then there is open mind. And open mind, for some reason, has created this physical reality and the explanation of that and the activity of that is in the boundary, is in this portal, is in this opening. That’s when the act takes place as a consciousness. ... creating the physical reality, enlivening it so to speak.

He later continued:

Part of me thinks that it takes energy to keep everything as a physical object. And if you detach from it somehow and pull your energy from it, or your consciousness away from it, and put it somewhere else (then) it all softens. More light comes through.

He remarked that it takes more energy to “buy into” physical reality than to reside in openness.

Thomas depicted the sequence emerging out of participatory consciousness as a process of buying into separation and physicality that involves the construction of layers of our identity. During his Follow-up Interview he described the opposite of this process, the deconstruction of subject-object consciousness, as moving from the objects to the senses, then to the boundary and finally to the open spaciousness of participatory consciousness. When recounting this movement from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness he noted that at the boundary the senses lost their distinctness. When the sequence was reversed subject-object consciousness emerged out of participatory consciousness, including the experience of sensing through distinct modalities.

Thomas went even further noting other particular consequences of this creative sequence. The insight arose for him that:

when I am in the physical me completely, all the decisions that I make are a reactionary closed system. When I am in openness almost all of those thoughts and reactions seem limited and self-perpetuating. … It is as if there is this openness that includes this closed system and then buys into it.

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Thomas saw this area of investigation as the arena of the creative activity by which samsāra is maintained.

Serena offered a description reminiscent of Thomas’ relative to her experience of what she calls the “flowing” quality of visual perception. When asked, during her

Follow-up Interview, about the details of her experience of this flowing she responded as follows:

So there’s these concepts about it and color and shape and a sense of texture, and so it gets … you know that the initial perception of the object … and even of its meaning and knowing what it is. And all of the different mental conceptual formations that happen as a result of that.

Ondine, Eileen, and Thomas also offered interesting images of the underlying structural context in which vision occurs. Ondine described her sense that there is a boundless vastness that extends beyond the limited range of seeing through the eyes. In her Follow-up Interview she called it “more of a universe-sized kind of thing” in which the limited visual field of experience appears. Eileen’s image was that of “the visual field being a small, highly charged bubble inside a vast dark sea that was all inside of me.” She explained during her Follow-up Interview that this feeling of both what she calls “the bubble of experience” and the “vast dark sea” being within her arose when “(My sense of) body has expanded to encompass everything.” She went on to say that this expansion was associated with a shift from the perspective of a person having the experience, that is, the knower, to that simply of knowing itself and a sense of “being it all.”

Thomas’ image was quite similar to Eileen’s. He wrote on the fourth day of his inquiry that he had begun to see “the visual field as a contained ball with its own limits or boundary.” Later, when discussing this image in his Follow-up Interview, referring to a wall of the room where the interview took place, he elaborated as follows:

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I see that wall. That wall is a boundary and my visual ability to see ends right there. There is something on the other side. And it’s me again. So, as a Mahamudra being I know that I completely surround the ball.

Here Thomas offered a visual metaphor for the “closed system” within the openness he described above, again here depicted as kind of participatory consciousness.

While Fortune did not report any spherical imagery of a boundary limiting the visual field, she did describe discovering that the edge of her visual object itself formed a boundary. Eileen also noticed object boundaries that both served to distinguish the visual object from the intervening space between it and the eye and prevented her from seeing its interior. Serena, in her Follow-up Interview, similarly described a boundary at the object but was careful to clarify that her experience led her to conclude that, in fact, the mind was creating that boundary.

How I Was Affected

As I reviewed the data and especially as I began to write about the learnings, I felt a deepening parallel between the reports of the particpants and my own experience of both Mahamudra practice and Dependent Origination, on the one hand, and the concept of imaginal structures at the center of Imaginal Transformation Theory, on the other.

Given the research focus on the deconstruction of subject-object consciousness leading to participatory consciousness, this growing correlation was, both unexpected and quite exciting. It suggested support for my own experiences and intuitions of deep links between these two significant wisdom traditions in my own life. And yet it goes beyond the original focus of this dissertation.

In addition, the bubble or sphere imagery used by Eileen and Thomas has catalyzed a clarification in my own experience in several ways. There is a certain thrill

178 for me, as an explorer of consciousness that accompanies the emergence of new clues or new areas of the puzzle falling into place.49

Imaginal Structures in Use

My imaginal structures in play relative to Learning Four are those ensuing from my identification as a Buddhist and my years of Mahamudra practice, as well as my personal experience with the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, as detailed in

Learning Two.

Theoretical Concepts

Several writers depict the process of the creation of subject-object consciousness as involving the fracturing of a primordial unity while others describe the perceptual abilities that allow for the direct subjective observation of this process. For example,

Skarda sees perception as a process of ‘shattering’ an underlying holism resulting in subject-object consciousness.50 Evans describes the creation of a projected foreground, the object, in relation to an unprojected background, the subject, created through the activity of attention.51 Researchers studying attention divide this activity into several functions. The aspect of attention that is most instructive in the discussion below is that of orienting to visual stimuli, especially orienting in space, and even more specifically, location of objects.52 Especially relevant is the notion of “process(ing) the visual field into well-processed and less well-processed chunks.” 53

Mindell’s concepts of lucidity and Dreaming (‘the realm of subtle primordial events that occur just before experience becomes structured into our ordinary subject-object mode of knowing”) and what Sussman depicts as the Grail seeker’s ability

179 to perceive the ”becoming of things,” represent clear examples of subtle perceptual capacities attuned to this process.54 For them these abilities allow for direct subjective exploration of the usually unconscious activity that precedes, underlies, and structures the emergence of this split into subject and object.

Interpretation

Several themes emerge in their reports of this process. These are the observation that the subject-object form of consciousness is created by mind, that the process of its creation involves a splitting of a primordial whole into apparently separate subject and object, and that the outwardly directed focus of attention is central to the creation of this split. Two participants describe a boundary phenomenon involved in this process while one even gave a specific sequence of subtle events. An additional theme involves comments on an underlying structuring that seems to precede this split and yet remains an integral part of subject-object consciousness.

Four participants reported experiencing the process of creation in various ways.

Ondine’s comment that mind was constructing her experience was the most general of the four, though she also depicted the apparent space between subject and object and the seeming solidity of the phenomenal world as created aspects of subject-object experience.

Eileen agreed, noting that for her the experience of substantiality was not an inherent

180 aspect of reality but due to the way her eye was focused on the object. For Serena, the constructing activity of perception that she calls ‘flowing’ specifically involved both the making of a boundary and the sense of separation between subject and object. She reported that rather than being a stable creation, this boundary/separation phenomenon was continually recreated.

Eileen portrayed further details of the creative process when she described the consequences of fixing her gaze on the object. This directedness of attention resulted in two centers in experience: the object and the sense-of-self. She seemed to be referring to these two when she depicted seeing/perception and the object that is seen/perceived as arising interdependently as centers “around which (the Universe/everything) arranges itself.” For Eileen there was an element of choice or intentionality in this process.

Thomas, the fourth participant to comment on this topic, described his exploration of the boundary between openness mind and physical reality. He saw this boundary as the location where dualism arises, the portal through which openness mind created and then enlivened physical reality, the details of which, he wrote, lie in the boundary activity itself. Thomas offered even more details when he recounted his sequence of the steps involved. He listed the steps as follows: a movement from a participatory spaciousness, to the creation of a boundary followed by the emergence of the discrete physical senses and ending with the prominence of the object.55

In each of the accounts of creative activity above, a common element is the notion of the emergence an apparent rift in the field of experience. Ondine pointed to the spatial gap between subject and object. Serena chose the words ‘separation’ and ‘boundary.’

Eileen depicted two separate centers, the object and the subject, as arising in this process.

Thomas observed that the creative activity that divides experience into mind and material

181 world occurs at a boundary between these two. Though their choice of words or imagery was somewhat different, each depicted a process reminiscent of Skarda’s view of perception as the rending of an underlying whole into two.

Another element of this divisive function of perception noted by participants was the role of attention in the creation process. Finley found that directed attention is essential to the structuring of subject/object consciousness. Ondine concurs, noting that it is the outward directedness of attention that creates the apparent subject/object rift.

According to her, this externalized focus also causes us to overlook the underlying insubstantial nature of things. In addition, Ondine linked a panoramic focus of attention with participatory consciousness. She thus seemed to be saying that it is an outwardly directed attention narrowly focused on the object that causes subject/object consciousness along with its characteristics of a spatial gap between subject and object and the seeming solidity of visual objects. Similarly for Eileen, her inquiry revealed that the substantial nature of the visual world was due to the way that the eye is focused on the object. Serena depicts her experience of ‘flowing’ as having a directionality moving away from the body towards the object. Simone offered her observation that only when she made an intense effort to focus exclusively on the object did her stability in participatory consciousness waiver at all, suggesting indirect support for the role of outwardly directed attention in the rending of participatory consciousness.

These reports offer significant empirical support for Evan’s views on the role of attention, which he sees as a kind of projection, in the creation of the apparent subject-object split. They seem to depict the subjective experience of what Posner and

Raz would call orienting in space, and especially the subset of that activity that Posner names the “location of objects.” In addition, orienting in space includes an element of

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“process(ing) the visual field into well-processed and less well-processed chunks” as described by Chajut, Schupak, and Algom.56 Here I suggest that by attending to one specific chunk, it becomes the “well-processed” object of visual focus to the exclusion of other possible objects, or “less well-processed chunks,” which remain peripheral.

However these latter five authors seem to assume the a priori separateness of the seeing subject from the visual objects being seen. For them the movement out towards the object is an unexamined given, while the reports of the participants highlight the critical nature of this outward thedirectedness as the aspect of orienting attention that catalyzes the creation of the subject-object split from an underlying whole, à la Skarda and Evans.

While Posner and the other attention researchers seem to assume the existence of external space, the reports of the participants imply that the process of attending engenders the experience of an apparently external region of space within which the seemingly separate object is being located.

The experiences of five participants add another element to this subtle viewing of the structuring of perception. Ondine, Eileen, and Thomas all depicted what might be called the field of visual perception as a bounded, smaller region within an unbounded vastness. The boundary they refer to here is not that between subject and object but that which limits the spatial extent of visual experience within which the division into subject and object occurs. For example, Ondine noted that there was a limit to her visual experience. This limited range of experience appears for her within a larger unbounded vastness of mind which she describes as Universe-sized. In Eileen’s words “the visual field (is) a small, highly charged bubble inside a vast dark sea that was all inside of me.”

Thomas used the image of a ball, similar to Eileen’s ‘bubble,’ to describe the contained visual field. Thomas felt that the boundary of his ball was the boundary of the

183 visual objects in the field. During the Follow-up Interview, to illustrate this view, he pointed towards the wall of the room we were in as an example of such an object that was also a boundary in that it constituted the farthest extent or limit of the visual field in that moment. Eileen would agree, noting that the object boundary also serves to define the objects from the rest of the visual field and to block the interior of the object from sight.

Both Fortune and Serena made similar observations of the boundary at the object while

Serena added her conclusion that this object boundary at the object is also mind-created.

For Thomas there was the recognition that what was beyond this boundary of the visual field was also an aspect of himself. This is similar to Eileen’s description of the

“highly charged bubble” and the “dark sea” both being inside her as well as Ondine’s report that her mind seemed to extend beyond the limits of the visual field. As such, for all three, their experiences of this imagery fell clearly within the realm of participatory consciousness.

As noted above, this particular boundary did not divide the field into subject and object. I suggest that instead its appearance is an early step in the process of the emergence of subject/object consciousness from the underlying form of participatory consciousness referred to as primordial awareness. I think of it as the first subtle division in the fundamental holism described by Skarda, which according to her is shattered in the process of perception leading to subject/object consciousness. This interpretation is based not only on Skarda’s theory but on my own explication of Dependent Origination, which includes the emergence of just such a bubble-like subtle energy formation followed by the appearance of individual object boundaries coinciding with the subsequent split within that bubble into apparently discrete knowing subject and known object.57

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In Learning Three, I report on the participants’ insights into the process of moving across that limen from subject-object consciousness to participatory forms of consciousness. Here in Learning Four, I describe the participants’ discoveries concerning the manner in which an underlying wholeness is rent into apparently separate subject and object. Learning Four is perhaps more speculative than the previous Learnings. Learning

Four was not the main focus of this study, but emerged out of the data that was collected.

Also like Learning Three, only a portion of the participants are represented in the data in support of this learning. Nonetheless the reports of several participants do suggest that it is possible, in even a few short days of focused attention for only 15 minutes a day, to begin to discover pieces of a puzzle that can perhaps be described as the converse of the sequence that was pieced together in Learning Two. In that Learning, the reports of several participants suggested that the variety of forms of participatory consciousness actually represent a natural progression from subject-object consciousness towards deepening layers of participation. The evidence reported for Learning Four above suggests that it is possible for a practitioner highly skilled in concentration and mindfulness techniques to begin to discover the processes and underlying structures that facilitate the movement in the opposite direction, from participatory consciousness to subject-object consciousness, as well.58

This ability is described by several authors, including Sussman, but most especially by Mindell, who emphasizes that the combination of concentration and mindfulness, the very abilities in which the participants excel, leads to what he calls

Dreaming.

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Validity

Some of the validity concerns noted for Learnings One and Two also apply to

Learning Four. Once again that the participants reviewed and refined my analysis of their reports enhances validity while their all being Buddhists possibly limits it. As with the other three Learnings above, the validity of Learning Four is restricted to the experience of vision. And once again, the findings are only as valid as the accuracy of the participants’ descriptions of their experiences and the clarity of the judgment I brought to the analysis of them.

Conclusion

I began this research project with the Research Problem: In what ways does attending with mindfulness to subtle energy patterning that underlies and structures subject-object consciousness enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness. In addition, three sub-questions are implied in this Research Problem which are: 1) What kinds of participatory consciousness will be catalyzed? 2) How does the shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness take place?

3) What is the role of subtle energy patterning in shaping of subject-object consciousness?

I developed a research protocol to test the Research Hypothesis which states that by mindfully engaging the subtle energy patterns that solidify the subject-object structure of consciousness, this structure will be transmuted, breaking the segregation of knowing, as the subject, from its objects, thus revealing the realm of participatory consciousness. In particular, I asked the participants to focus their attention on the hypothesized subtle

186 energy boundaries that segregate knowing from what it knows, creating the split in experience into knowing subject and known object.

The reports of the participants have led to the following Cumulative Learning:

Mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundary between subject and object within the context of the Imaginal Inquiry research paradigm is an effective strategy for experientially exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness as well as the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness that ensue. The data points to the conclusion that it is possible to glean valuable information about the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness using the research protocol that I designed. I was able to offer answers to various aspects of the Research Problem, in particular the kinds of participatory consciousness that are encountered when opening into this realm of experience and some insights into how this transition takes place. Relative to the Research Hypothesis, while attending to the boundary between subject and object did result in shifts to participatory consciousness, nonetheless the data about the subtle energetic aspects of this transition was not sufficient enough at this time to support my characterization of these boundary phenomena as being sculpted of subtle energy activity.59

Practicing during the context of a long intensive meditation retreat was not required to catalyze this shift. The use of technology or psychological measurement tools were not required to capture the data confirming this shift. The relatively simple participatory research paradigm of Imaginal Inquiry worked quite well. Relative to the Research

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Hypothesis, this Learning confirms that attending to the apparent boundaries between subject and object is an effective way to catalyze a shift to participatory consciousness in which subject and object are no longer segregated.

The Research Problem was addressed by Learnings Two and Three. Learning

Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. The several layers in this phenomenological map correspond to the categories of luminosity and insubstantiality or emptiness from the Mahamudra tradition as well as primordial awareness, which is the integration of these two. The data suggests that the transition from subject-object consciousness to luminosity is a two stage process, the stages of which I refer to as interconnectedness and interpenetration, with interpenetration representing luminosity. Learning Three describes participants’ reports of how the transition from subject-object forms of experience to the realm of participation occurred.

These Learnings thus answer the Research Question by affirming that the falling away of the apparent split into subject and object results in a variety of participatory modes of experience.

Learning Three proposes that highly talented meditators can, in the context of

Imaginal Inquiry, provide empirical evidence about the details of the process by which subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention. The Research Problem asks in what ways shifts to participatory consciousness are enabled. While Learning Two addresses the ‘shifts to what’ implied in this question, Learning Three addresses the ‘how’ aspect. The reports of the participants

188 suggest that the most salient feature of the ‘how’ is the role of a shift of attention away from a strong narrow focus on the visual object.

Hypothesis. In Learning Four, the collective insights of the participants highlight the creative activity of the mind itself, especially the narrow, outward directing of attention towards its visual focus, as the factors which catalyze the split into subject and object.

Learning Four thus provides research support for those who maintain that the human mind has the potential to mindfully examine the usually unconscious activity of its own perceptual processes.

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CHAPTER 5

REFLECTIONS

Significance of the Learnings

This research project has explored the experiential threshold between subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness. The Cummulative

Learning states that mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundary between subject and object within the context of the Imaginal Inquiry research paradigm is an effective strategy for experientially exploring the dynamics of the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness as well as the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness that ensue. Learning One empirically demonstrates that

Buddhist meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry techniques who focus on the apparent boundary between subject and object have easy access to this realm of participatory consciousness. Learning Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence.

Although anecdotal reports of participatory consciousness abound in the Buddhist literature, I have not found many such reports ensuing from the kind of systematic, analytical, and empirical research context used in this study. Brown and his various co-researchers provide a few examples but their research methods relied on scientific technology (the tachistoscope) or psychometric instruments (the Rorschach) and the

190 comments they report were incidental to the actual focus of their research. This study relied only on the reports of expert meditators specifically engaged in mindfully examining their own direct experience of the simple act of seeing.

Such a systematic exploration of the naked experience of seeing using multiple participants is a different approach to the discovery of knowledge than that employed by the spiritual traditions themselves, even if, in the end, the same learnings about consciousness do happen to be reached. Since this approach to knowledge is closer in its methods to that of Western science, it offers, within that context, a different kind of credibility than does the same knowledge generated by the methods of spiritual traditions.

This approach thus lends enhanced validity, in the predominantly scientific Western context of knowledge creation, to the conclusions traditionally expressed in the Buddhist literature. As such, this approach moves spiritually attained knowledge closer to the kind of knowledge that is acceptable in Western scientific circles. What is not new as spiritual knowledge can be perceived anew to be knowledge in a more scientific context where it previously had not been considered to be known in this sense. Learning One is thus new not because of the conclusion reached about participatory consciousness, but rather due to the process used to reach it, that is, to create the knowledge. This particular way of reaching the conclusion was unknown before. As such, at the very least, Learning One adds a new dimension of validity to traditional forms of knowledge about participatory consciousness, bringing traditional knowledge into the realm of scientific knowledge in the process.

Like Learning One above, Learning Two covers territory described to some extent in the spiritual literature.1 However as I have just pointed outwith regards to Learning

One, the manner in which this knowledge was generated in this study is quite different

191 from that used in the Buddhist tradition itself. I offer these empirically reached descriptions of various qualities of participatory experience and the hints of their sequential nature as modest contributions to the creation of an evidence-supported map of the participatory landscape.

Learning Four empirically demonstrates that expert meditators can detail the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject/object consciousness.

Learning Three thus offers important information about the particulars of the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory forms of consciousness, especially highlighting changes in the application of attention in this shift. Although there is some mention in the literature of the importance of attention in this process, there is no empirical evidence to support that view, a gap this study begins to fill.

Learning Four provides empirical support for Skarda’s theory that the process of perception involves the rending of an underlying whole into the dualism of subject and object as well as for Evan’s view that the object pole of the subject-object split is engendered by a form of projection.2 This Learning similarly offers experimental corroboration for the assertions of Mindell and Sussman that it is possible to subjectively experience and explore the subtle events in the process of perception leading up to the emergence of subject-object consciousness as well as supporting evidence for the subtle human perceptual capacities used in this exploration.3 While Mindell does offer some anecdotal clinical evidence, none of these other authors provide any empirical substantiation in support of their own perspectives.

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Prior to this study there was little empirical evidence in the research literature in support of any of these theories. Again it is the same papers by Brown and his co-researchers mentioned above in relation to Learning One that do offer some support.

A few of their participants in the tachistoscope study made comments about the process of perception prior to the emergence of ordinary consciousness visual experience. Several similar comments were also reported by Brown and Engler in their Rorschach research with advanced meditators.4 However in this current study, the evidentiary support is more extensive as well as more specifically targeted on the theories of these authors. And again, nothing more than the participants’ ability to track their own direct experience during their daily meditation practice and the specific focused inquiry used in this study.

Lastly, the research paradigm that facilitated this evidentiary support is Imaginal

Inquiry, suggesting the efficacy of this research modality for empirical explorations of this experiential territory. The review of the literature has not found any prior use of

Imaginal Inquiry, or, for that matter, any other research model, to specifically explore the transition from subject-object consciousness to participatory forms of consciousness or the reverse of this process.

Although it was outside the scope of the initial intent of this research project, evidence was also collected that supports the view that for some persons the transformation of subject-object consciousness into participatory forms of consciousness can become stable, in effect changing the default mode of consciousness for that person.

In this study, such evidence came from the reports of three participants. This evidence along with an analysis of it is presented in Appendix 15. The fact of the transformation reported by these three is significant in and of itself in that it empiricallydemonstrates, in the context of research focused on daily meditation practice, the possibility of stable, or

193 in Ondine’s case, relatively stable, changes in consciousness. Such evidence is not found elsewhere in the psychological research literature. In addition, the availability of those with this degree of stability in their practice suggests the feasibility of using such practitioners as participants in phenomenological research designed to explore the phenomena of possible stable transformations of consciousness.

The Research Hypothesis predicted that a shift from subject-object consciousness to the realm of participation would result from mindfully engaging the apparent boundaries composed of patterned subtle energy activity that are responsible for the seeming segregation of knowing subject from known object. All of the participants for whom participatory consciousness was not already a stable feature of their experience, did, in fact, experience shifts to participatory forms of experience as a result of their inquiring into this boundary phenomena. A few of the participants did encounter boundary phenomena that then dissipated under the gaze of their mindful inquiry. One described his experience of this boundary phenomena in subtle energy terms. Other participants reported that when they looked for a boundary between subject and object they found none. Their transition to participatory consciousness seemed more related to shifts in attention away from a narrow focus on their visual object, which they generally did not report in subtle energy terms. As such, this subtle energy aspect of the Research

Hypothesis was not adequately supported by the data.

To understand why this was the case I have found it helpful to consider the participants’ experiences in light of my own elucidation of Buddha’s teaching of

Dependent Origination in Appendix 13. One way to conceptualize my experience of

Dependent Origination is that each link has multiple dimensions. From this perspective the emergence of each link is expressed by a subtle energy activity. When unnoticed, this

194 activity results in a structure in a manner similar to the image of the vortex described in

Chapter One above. This structuring shapes the relationship between knowing and what is known. The structuring of this relationship results in a characteristic subjective flavor to one’s experience for each link as it is activated and yet before it is obscured by subsequent links. My own explorations suggest that these different flavors are the experiential expression of specific terms in the Mahamudra tradition, as described in

Learning Two above, as well as having a relationship to one of the āruppas (formless levels of concentration) or rūpa jhānas (levels of concentration with form). With the shift to next link in the chain, a new set of these dimensions unfolds characteristic of the new link and obscuring those of the previous link, which, however, remain in place, though below the threshold of conscious experience.

Lastly, moving in the opposite direction, the dissolution of each link is also marked by characteristic subtle energy activity. With the dissolution of one link, the link before/below it, with its defining characteristics comes to the fore. The flavor of experience then shifts to that typical of this newly exposed link in the chain. The destructuring of the links thus works like a set of nested Russian dolls. Removing the outer link reveals the doll within/beneath, which now is outermost. Experience is shaped by the subtle energy structuring of the present-moment outermost link. When I consider the participants’ reports, I see strong correlations with the subjective flavor of each link from ignorance (avijjā) through mentality-and-materiality and body (nāma-rūpa) as well as clear descriptions of the relationship between knowing and known represented by each of these links.5

It is also significant to note that participants attributed a central role to the directedness of attention (Learnings Three and Four). It is therefore important to point out

195 that the subtle energy structuring activity of the third through fifth links of Dependent

Origination, those of structured consciousness (viññāna), mentality-and-materiality

(nāma-rūpa), and the six sense modalities (the six sense bases or organs and their respective sensory objects, Pali: salāyatana), could all be interpreted as corresponding to expressions of the directionality of attention. My own experience suggests that, in fact, this is the case. The act of attending is characterized by this underlying manifestation and structuring of subtle energy.6

I interpret certain reports of the participants’ as representing occasional glimpses of the categories of structuring subtle energy activity, the structure thus created, and destructuring subtle energy activity. However the preponderance of these experiences was not sufficient for me to draw any conclusions regarding the subtle energy aspects of the Research Problem or Hypothesis. In my own practice the subtle energy activity and the structure it creates are the elusive precursors to the characteristic subjective experiential flavor of each link. It is not until the subtle energetic structuring activity of a particular layer has run its brief course, resulting in the completion of the structure it creates that the subjective flavor of that link emerges clearly in experience. Initially, however, only the subjective experience is noticed. The subtle energy precursors remain hidden. As described in Appendix 13, I began to notice the subtle energetic layer of the process only after the subjective flavors of these layered experiences had already become quite evident and readily available to me in my practice.

Since the subtle energy structuring activity and structure dimensions are antecedents to, and thus more subtle than, the subjective flavor, the ability to attend to or notice these aspects of experience represents a deepening of mindful inquiry. (The same can be said of the subtle energy destructuring activity.) As such, it is perhaps not

196 particularly surprising that the participants reported many more examples of the subjective flavors of the layers of participatory consciousness than of their underlying subtle energy dimensions. That the participants did have some experiential access to this subtle energy activity realm, however, suggests that under different circumstances that I will outline below, this subtle energy range of experience could become more accessible to highly expert meditators such as the participants in this study.

Table Two (Appendix 14) outlines the specific details of these multiple aspects of the first five links of Dependent Origination (first link: ignorance – avijjā; second link: activity formations – sankhāra; third link: structured consciousness – viññāna; fourth link: mentality-and-materiality – nāma-rūpa; and fifth link: the six sense modalities – salāyatana ).7 I have added, in bold type, the experiences of the participants which seem suggestive of the subtle energy structuring activity, the structures, and the subtle energy destructuring activity to which I refer above. I have not included participants’ experiences of the subjective quality or of the structural relationship between knower and known for each link since these are too numerous and are also already adequately documented in Chapter Four above.

While none of the participants offers a clear and concise description of the first five links of Dependent Origination, even of the subjective flavor aspect, collectively their experiences are to me reminiscent of the labyrinthine process by which the various aspects of this model emerged in my own experience over years of practice. That so many parallels to these first five links, as documented in Learnings Two, Three, and Four above, as well as in Table Two (Appendix 14), appeared in the reported experiences of just eight meditators applying the inquiry exercise for a mere 15 minutes a day and for only ten days is to me quite striking. Collectively their experiences can be seen as

197 consistent with and supportive of the subtle energy elucidation of Dependent Origination

I provide in Appendix 13. As such I feel encouraged enough to suggest that further research in this area is warranted.

Both Simone and Serena suggested that primordial or unstructured awareness itself has an energetic dimension. I propose that what I am calling subtle energy represents this dynamism of the underlying primordial awareness. It is this insubstantial dynamism that, through its own activity, creates the appearance of substance in a manner similar to the metaphors of the Three-D cinema and the vortex in Chapter One, conjuring up boundaries that seem to obscure, separate, and encapsulate. This is the self-cognizant vitality of luminosity that through its own activity, its directedness or attention towards the object, divides itself into the apparent polarity, and then duality, of a knowing and a known, consciousness and appearances, a subject and its objects, self and other.

Preece writes that subtle energy is the creative aspect of luminosity reflected in our dreams, visions and fantasies.8 Rosch and Sussman take this notion a bit further.

Rosch describes consciousness, here meaning the knowing subject, as sculpted out of awareness.9 As Sussman puts it, it is awareness itself that takes the form of both subject and object. I am suggesting here that the pattern-forming, image-making, structure-creating activity of subtle energy I describe is the agency by which awareness shapes itself into various forms of participatory and subject-object consciousness.10 That is, the activity of subtle energy is responsible for the creativity that Thomas ascribed to the boundary region he discovered, the creativity that for him engendered the apparently substantial world of our subject-object experience. Wangyal would concur. Giving this energetic process a mythic flavor, he depicts the energic emergence of the phenomenal world out of the stirrings of primordial awareness, the Great Mother.11

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Then, when, in its dualistic form, primordial awareness turns to look at itself, it takes its knowing, energetic aspect (luminosity) as its apparent object. In this turning around of attention, the activity of knowing and the activity of appearing dissolve into each other. This transforming turnabout is dependent on the cultivation of particular mental qualities. When concentration with stillness like the āruppas joins penetrating mindful inquiry they deepen hand in hand. Together they open the door to the rich realm of participatory consciousness with its directly experienceable insights into the nature of the underlying reality: the interconnectedness, interpenetration/luminosity, and emptiness/insubstantiality of all phenomena and their original wholeness as primordial awareness/suchness.12 The evidence generated in this study, while not conclusively supporting this view, does suggest that additional research in this direction is warranted.

The initial motivation for this study as described in Chapter 1 was to test a part of my own subtle energy map of Dependent Origination, the section that describes in subtle energy terms the transition from subject-object forms of consciousness into the realm of participation. I was interested in discovering whether this map was idiosyncratic to my own experience or generalizable to that of others. The data collected on the experiences of the participants making this shift does not sufficiently describe this transition in subtle energy terms to support the conclusion that this section of this map has general applicability to human experience. Nonetheless, there are enough hints in this direction to remain hopeful that further research would justify this conclusion.

This study focuses on the relationship between knowing subject and known visual sensory object. Yet this perspective on the dynamics underlying the shift from subject-object to participatory forms of consciousness also has special significance in the interpersonal context of the field of psychotherapy. In fact, Schwartz-Salant offers

199 a description of this dynamic that parallels the one I suggest in many wasy. For

Schwartz-Salant this shift in experience depends on the cultivation of a heightened alertness and a tenacity in its application to experience, good parallels for mindfulness and samatha practices.13 However these capacities are no longer utilized to attend to things but rather to the atmosphere around things, the space which holds the images we experience.14 According to Schwartz-Salant, this focus is significant for its relaxing of the narrow intensity of our usual perceptual focus so it includes the space around the image, a shift to attend to the visual field as a whole rather than just to the objects within it.15

Both inside and outside are contained in this space, which Schwartz-Salant equates with the subtle body, the somatic unconscious, and the realm of imagination.16 For him this range of experience is especially concerned with the life within and between people and corresponds to the energy of the space of relationships that both parties can simultaneously inhabit.17 This realm without inner and outer is sensed in a manner reminiscent of the way we experience ‘body,’ yet is felt as an energy field, a space with a distinct texture and aliveness and a sameness of subject and object.18 This a realm of “oneness of process,” his notion of the interactive field.19

This mode of experience involves an active awareness of energies and patterns that can be perceived in the field here and now.20 This awareness includes the ways that the field itself is affected and enlivened.21 At the core of this experience is the heart, the dynamic energies and patterns of which serve to connect.22 From this perspective we can come to know “that the heart operates as a central station that orients the process of transmuting sense impressions into consciousness,” an insight which transforms and liberates.23

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Our habitual sense of self, which Schwartz-Salant describes as being.expressed as

“both a center and a containing circumference,” the structure of the ego or subject-object consciousness, gives way.24 We no longer inhabit ordinary space, where observing consciousness sees and thinks about “outer or inner experiences.” 25 Rather within this new experience of space, this subtle body realm where matter and mind are no longer separate, a fresh sense of who we are emerges, a ‘self’ no longer perceived as separate and unchanging.26

In the context of the hopeful signs mentioned above for the potential usefulness of additional research into this topic of the subtle energy structuring of experience, there are numerous implications for the design of future studies. Three areas seem especially relevant to note. To begin with, the mindful inquiry exercise I gave to the participants may have been too vague. I designed this exercise to be intentionally vague for two reasons. First, I did not want to direct the participants too specifically towards the actual boundary phenomena I myself experience. I was curious to see if they would discover it for themselves. In addition, I wanted to give the participants more freedom to shape their own inquiries. In this way, I could take advantage of the special expertise they bring to this kind of exploration. However a future variation in this research protocol could be more directive. Participants could be asked to specifically look for a boundary experience especially at their face and then specifically at the front of their torsos. Perhaps more of the participants would have encountered the same subtle energy boundaries I describe had I directed them to look in this way.

The second way this inquiry could be enhanced concerns the criteria for participant selection. Although I don’t know the details of all the participants’ full practice backgrounds, I learned during his Follow-up Interview that Thomas has an

201 extensive history of doing practices that specifically cultivate the ability to be aware of, and work with, subtle energy activity. As such, it is not surprising to me that Thomas was the one participant whose experience of the boundary most closely resembled my own.

This fact suggests that another criteria for participant selection could be expertise in subtle energy practices, such as Chinese qigong, hands-on healing techniques, like Reiki, or Tibetan Buddhist meditations, such as tumo (the cultivation of inner heat).27 Since the range of experiences one encounters upon having crossed the threshold from subject-object to participatory forms of consciousness bears a strong resemblance to the

āruppas, another possible refinement of the criteria for participants would be to define

‘expertise in concentration’ as meaning having experience with or even being adept at this subtle level of concentration.

The third possible research design modification involves the context of the mindful inquiry practice. To conduct this research with expert meditators while they are on retreat would perhaps be ideal. The mindful inquiry practice could be assigned around week six of a three-month meditation retreat. Participants would be asked to do the inquiry exercise(s) twice daily for a period of three to four weeks. This would approximate the context in which this range of experience became especially evident to me in its intricate detail. The long intensive retreat model would also lend itself to deeper forays into the realm of participatory consciousness. Additional mindful inquiry exercises could be designed to catalyze experience of those layers of participation that lie below the subtle energy boundary formations I posit, changing an individual’s assigned inquiry exercise as their practice progressed. Any or all of these variations could produce different results regarding the subtle energy dimension of participants’ experience.

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In addition, there are some interesting research topics suggested by this study that could build on its Learnings. For example, In Learning Two, I describe the various forms of participatory consciousness that the participants encountered. Furthermore, in

Learning Three, participants reported different ways of paying attention as central to their transition to these participatory forms of consciousness. Although the role of attention in the transitions between subject-object consciousness and participatory forms of consciousness in both directions was not the original focus of this study, nonetheless

Learnings Three and Four document its centrality in this context.

Attention has of late been a focus of research in Psychology and especially in research on meditation and, in fact, comes into play in all six bodies of literature reviewed above. The psychological literature tends to divide attention into various functions including selecting and locating objects in space, with some recognition that as humans we also employ a wider, more global form attention. In the context of meditation research, there is the recognition of different applications of attention in the use of different meditation techniques described variously as focused or object-directed attention versus open, flexible, or evenly distributed attention. Even in the field of

Developmental Psychology, where the term cathexis offers an energy-related near parallel term for attention, we find Mahler, et al.’s depiction of the shift from an internal investment of libido, a Developmental Psychology equivalent for subtle energy, to an external orientation as a critical factor in the formation of the self-other boundary leading to subject-object consciousness.

Some mention of narrow or broader foci for attention is also found in the

Buddhist literature, such as Shankman and Batchelor’s exclusive and inclusive forms of concentration or the use of both object-oriented and objectless or unfocused applications

203 of both samatha and vipassanā forms of practice in the Mahamudra lineage. Attention is also central to Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness.

In the literature of Imaginal Psychology, both Judith and Odajnyk relate attention to subtle energy. Schwartz-Salant implicates a shift in attention from the object to the space around it in the transition to the participatory experiential realm that he calls both the interactive field and the subtle body. Sussman advocates shifting attention “to the activity beneath our perception of fixed forms” which she says will reveal the “becoming of things.”

Learnings Three and Four establish the feasibility of studying attention empirically from the first person phenomenological perspective. Together with the variety of forms of participatory consciousness reported in Learning Two, they suggest new angles for research on attention, including the role of different styles of attention in both shaping different expressions of consciousness and evoking shifts from subject-object consciousness to participatory modes of knowing. My own subtle energy descriptions of Dependent Origination and the jhānas and āruppas as well as the descriptions of the participants experiences detailed in Appendix 14 suggest that further probing into the relationship between the experience of attention and subtle energy could also be fruitful.28

For example, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that there is a relationship between the different styles of participatory consciousness that participants encountered and the particular shifts in attention they employed to catalyze their crossing of the limen from subject-object consciousness to the realm of participation. To test this hypothesis, participants could be asked to shift back and forth between various ways of attending: narrowly directed out towards a visual object, panoramically directed outwards towards

204 the visual field as a whole, focused on the search for the boundary between subject and object, inwardly directed towards the source or location of knowing, and utterly undirected. Participants would be asked to describe the subjective flavor of each experience. Do “looking inward,” “attending panoramically,” and “focusing attention on the boundary between subject and object while seeing” catalyze shifts to different layers of the realm of participation? The subtle energy dimension could be added to this exploration by having participants also report what they notice in those transitional moments as they shift back and forth between these various styles of attention. What does the process of shifting from a narrow attention directed towards the visual object to a more panoramic outward focus feel like?29

Research could also explore Schwartz-Salant’s notions of the subtle body and interactive field. One approach that might be used building on the model of this study is the application of Imaginal Inquiry to Gregory Kramer’s innovative Buddhist practice of Insight Dialogue. Kramer has developed a sophisticated form of vipassanā practice done in the context of interpersonal communication. His intensive retreats offer practitioners the opportunity to explore their use of mindfulness while conversing with others, constituting a natural bridge from the usual Buddhist focus on inner experience and our relationship to the sensory domain of the physical world to the inherently interpersonal nature of psychotherapy.30

Additional compelling follow-up research areas might be those of suffering and compassion. The goal of Buddhist practice is the ending of suffering. Compassion is cultivated in the service of that goal. However from a Buddhist perspective, simply opening to participatory consciousness defined as the absence of "delusionary sense of a separate self" is not in and of itself sufficient to this end. The experiences I describe as

205 interconnectedness, interpenetration, and insubstantiality, are all free of this particular delusion. While they all represent movement in the right direction, from the perspective of Mahamudra theory, none of them are, in and of themselves enough to fully liberate us from suffering. Subtle structures of self still remain in these states, such as the substantiality of self in interconnectedness and interpenetration, and a sense of a center to knowing within the field in all three. Though these are not structures that separate self from other than self, that is, from the objects of our experience, they nonetheless give the sense-of-self some subtle form or structure and thus an apparent reality that deeper experience belies. I refer to this kind of self experience as the self-as-knower.31 While this range of experience is not yet profound enough to cut the roots of suffering, I suggest that opening to these layers of experience that I refer to as interconnectedness, interpenetration, and insubstantiality all do bring a great deal of wisdom and a deepening compassion to the practitioner, a theory which could be tested.

From the Mahamudra perspective, it is opening to a particular form of participatory consciousness, that of primordial awareness, which is devoid of the structures just described, that really catalyzes freedom from suffering. From this Buddhist perspective freedom from suffering comes not in experiences of just the absence of the delusion of a separateness between self and other-than-self but in the freedom from the delusion of the existence of the self in the way that we generally mean that term as being locatable in space, persistent through time, substantial, and separate from the objects of its knowing. The coming together of this full range of insights is what is referred to as primordial awareness. And suffering isn't really fully allayed until there is also the recognition that subject-object forms of consciousness, as well as subtly structured forms of participatory consciousness that I describe as interconnectedness, interpenetration, and

206 insubstantiality all are simply ways that primordial awareness structures or displays itself. It's possible that this is what those who have stability were experiencing when they describe subject-object consciousness arising within participatory consciousness without obscuring the underlying participatory nature of experience.

The Learnings focus primarily on the layers of participatory consciousness which lead up to primordial awareness. However these forms of participatory consciousness,

(unless their structure is recognized as the display of primordial awareness, which was not sufficiently reported by the participants) are not free from suffering in that subtle forms of self still remain.32 Even then it is not just opening to the range of experience and integrated insight of primordial awareness, but its stability that represents an end to suffering.

Given both the effectiveness of Imaginal Inquiry as a research modality for exploring this territory and the availability of highly talented meditators, including those who describe stable experience of participatory forms of consciousness, research into the topic of suffering and its end as well as the relationship between participatory consciousness and the experience of compassion seem both feasible and highly desirable.

On a more personal note, the results of the study have helped me to clarify my understanding and sharpen my conceptualization around several areas of my own experience of Dependent Origination. In particular, the reports of several of the participants of bubble-like fields of visual experience catalyzed my own re-examination of this aspect of my map. This bubble imagery corresponds to the subtle energy patterning of the first and second links of Dependent Origination, those of avijjā

(ignorance), or the absence of seeing clearly into the underlying truth of primordial awareness, and sankhāra, here meaning activity formations.33 I have begun to see this

207 bubble structuring as the outer layer of the bubble of perception while the two boundary structures described above represent an inner bubble. The outer bubble forms first, followed by the depth-of-field creating energy activity at the periphery, the first hint within the bubble of what will be the objects of sensory experience, creating a limited field of perception around a center. Initially knowing or cognizance is experienced as ubiquitous within this outer bubble. But with the arising of the boundaries at the torso and face, the center is segregated from the periphery of this limited field. In this process knowing is felt to be located within the inner bubble and segregated from the emerging objects in the outer bubble.

This image of two concentric bubbles, the outer one defining the extent the visual field of other-than-self and the inner one defining the region of knower/self, works collaboratively with another area of further clarification.34 I have often looked at my map of Dependent Origination as depicting a process of projection whereby the rift between the inner world of the self and the outer realm of the physical environment gets created.

The subtle energy activity of the third and fourth links of viññāna (structured consciousness) and nāma-rūpa (mentality and materiality) establish a directionality towards the object as well as structuring the boundary formations at the torso and face which segregate the two. The directionality together with the segregating function is analogous to the establishment of Evans’ notions of the projected foreground (the object domain) and unprojected background (the subject domain) aspects of consciousness.35

Gallagher suggests something similar with his positing of two necessary aspects of perception, adding the intentional directing of awareness towards the object to the more commonly described application of a conceptual designation to the object.36 Evans and

Gallagher are thus both referring to the act of attending. I further propose that by

208 attention, they, and the participants, are more specifically referring to the ‘orientation in space’ aspect of attention as described by Posner and Raj.37 This aspect of attention looms large in the vocabulary the participants use, as cited in Learnings Three and Four above, to describe the process whereby subject-object consciousness gives way to participatory consciousness as well as in their descriptions of the reverse process, the emergence of the subject-object split out of the realm of participation.

So what then is the relationship between what is called attention and what is called projection? From the perspective of a subtle energy view of Dependent

Origination, first the external world is projected (the formation of the external bubble.)

This seems equivalent to Barfield’s theory of participation, which includes his view that what we call the outside (Barfield’s term is ‘the outside of man.”) is actually personal and projected rather than existing independently of us.38 The notion of the outer bubble being projected goes beyond the reports of the participants who simply noticed it as a deep structural aspect of their experience. However in my own description of the subtle energy activity underlying the twelve links of Dependent Origination, this projection of the outer bubble is the subtle energy starburst expression of the first link. From my experiential perspective, the activity of then attending to a region of our externalized outer self, results in a subsequent projection. This second projection establishes both the boundaries defining the spatial region of our inner self, a second bubble within, and with the same center, as the first, and directionality of attention. I suggest that this latter aspect of attention is the earliest layer of this subtle energy process that corresponds to the psychological notion of cathexis. Attention itself, as a directing or concentration of energy towards what has already been projected as the external world, is a form of cathexis.39

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Of course our thoughts and emotions can also be projected from the inner bubble out onto the objects of our outside, the further elaboration of cathexis. But at this point we are now entering into the realm of those links of Dependent Origination that come after the boundary formations at the links of viññana and nāma-rūpa, such as vedanā, or feeling tone, and tanhā, or craving, our reactive attraction or aversion towards the feeling tone that has been projected out onto the sensory object of the moment. From the perspective of the subtle energy elucidation of Dependent Origination I propose, these links are also felt energetically as movements from the heart center out beyond the subtle energy somatic boundaries established at viññāna and nāma-rūpa to the apparently external object.40 Even here, from the perspective of the direct experience, there is, on the one hand, the attentional aspect, which is the directionality and target of these flows of subtle energy. On the other hand, there are the feeling tone and the craving, the subjective flavor of these layers of experience, that follow, inseparable from these energetic flows out to, and then associated with, the object.41 Both can be understood as kinds of projection and cathexis, the structure of the experience.42

Mythic and Archetypal Reflections

Imaginal Psychology places a central importance on myth and archetype. Perhaps the best way to depict the archetypal nature of the transition from subject-object consciousness to that of participatory domain is to describe the visionary imagery that arose for me personally while traversing the territory also traveled by the participants.

During the long retreat I describe in Appendix 13, first the layers that I call interconnectedness, interpenetration/luminosity, insubstantiality/emptiness and primordial awareness/suchness had all arisen and become easily available for me. Next I

210 began to recognize the first three as displays of suchness. At this point, imagery began to emerge in the context of each of these discrete forms of participatory experience. For example, when the experience of subject and object as poles of an underlying wholeness

(interconnectedness) would arise, I experienced myself as a royally garbed male deity embracing a royal consort. When this layer in the process fell away, the image of the royal consort merged into my own body and male and female aspects were experienced as occupying the same space, the three-dimensional equivalent of the two images of a double-exposed, pre-digital era photo on a single sheet of Kodak paper. This is the participatory mode that I call the interpenetration of subject and object. Upon the dissolution of this layer, the single taste of insubstantiality emerged into prominence and

I experienced myself in the form of one diaphanous kingly body seated on a monarch’s throne.43 My bodily interior contained vast space filled with planets, stars, galaxies, etc.

When the last vestige of a sense of a center in the field in relation to its periphery, the bubble of visual perception, also vanished, all three of these images arose simultaneously and interpenetrating each other, in an imaginal depiction of Suchness, the utter integration of knowing and known as luminosity, which is further inseparable from emptiness/insubstantiality. These images reflect the range of experiences also reported by the participants in Learning Two above.

In his lexicon of Jungian terminology, Sharp describes Eros as “a cosmogonic force of nature.” 44 Here cosmogonic implies something related to the origins of the

Cosmos. Jung himself writes about four layers of Eros. The first is that of our natural procreative instincts. The second is the dynamic relationship between animus and anima, the male and female archetypes we all carry within us yet struggle to reconcile or harmonize in unity. The third is the archetype of the Great Mother, with Sophia,

211 the female embodiment of Wisdom, being the fourth.45 My own imagery above most strongly suggests that for me, the discovery of and sojourn into this territory of participation was related to harmonizing of anima and animus. This imagery is still active in my imaginal range of experience.

Yet another set of images has also emerged as the experience of participation matures. In this new sequence of images, a giant vagina appears invitingly above me.

My entire adult body, like a huge phallus, enters its deliciously warm and wet folds head first and I tingle with full-bodied pleasure. A charge of energy builds within me until it explodes out the top of my head. Moving with this energetic burst, I now find myself inside a cosmic womb. It is a soothing and comfortable place. I feel held and nurtured, profoundly connected, yet still not fully one with that which holds me. Then

I notice another energetic build-up and expand outward, becoming the body of the

Mother herself. As the Mother, I recognize that I am in embrace with

Padmasambhava, the archetypical guru of the Tibetan Nyingma tradition. In a strange paradoxical moment, I see my full-bodied self as Padmasambhava’s lingam inserted into my own vagina. I am both Mother and Father.

This imagery evokes Jung’s third layer of Eros, that of the Great Mother. But it also calls to mind Neumann’s depiction of ego-consciousness, his collate for subject-object consciousness, emerging from the unconscious.46 For him this ego consciousness is the process of splitting the world into inside and outside, subject and object, or in his terms, the division of the Universe into Mother Earth and Father Sky.

My imagistic experience is the reverse of this process. Father Sky and Mother Earth reunite. In this depiction of Jung’s four layers of the cosmogonic force of Eros, I am

212 returned to the realm of the source of creation, moving close to that unity out of which diversity issues forth.

I offer this imagery as an archetypal expression of the phenomenological territory the participants traversed, described, in Learning Two above, as the varieties and sequence of the participatory landscape. Yet in my own experience, there is the subtle energy dimension, the insights into the subtle energy structure of the links of Dependent

Origination, that only emerged for me after the initial appearance of the visionary imagery, and as a further refinement of my mindful inquiry. What interests me most are the energetic aspects of this archetypal domain and the relationship between imagery and its underlying energetic correlates.

As noted above, Campbell describes what he calls the “ubiquitous power” depicted by the world’s spiritual traditions. These traditions, he writes, equate this power with the source of the creation of “all things and beings.” 47 He depicts this movement into manifestation as issuing from the Void in a condensation of this energy into space and the four primary elements. As we have seen, this notion of a process by which various forms of the world of our experience arise from the Void by the activity of a subtle kind of energy is found also in the Buddhist tradition.

Particularly in the literature of Imaginal Psychology, there seem to be many relevant perspectives on this topic, especially concerning the notion of archetype. On the one hand, Solomon sees archetypes as distinct from subtle energy but serving as the templates which shape its activity into “repeatable and recognizable” patterns.48 Odajnyk subscribes to this perspective, making a distinction between archetypes and their expression as “energetic structures.” He offers his view that when the energy is withdrawn from an archetypal structure, the structure itself collapses.49 Harding, on the

213 other hand, sees archetypes themselves as patterns of energy.50 Winn’s depiction of the flowing activity of qi as a language, the patterning of which is itself its own grammar, seems more in tune with Harding’s view.51 Goldenberg also appears to share this perspective when she describes the polarization of archetypes into two facets, one expressed as image, the other encountered more in energetic terms.52 Hillman offers a similar polarization when he describes two layers of our sensory experience of images. In a passage reminiscent of Winn’s language analogy, Hillman depicts one layer as metaphorically equivalent to our linguistic conventions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The second, he says, is a more subtle dimension, comparable to the function of prepositions, which expresses the relational aspect of imagery. For Hillman, this latter aspect, which he specifically labels ‘archetypal,’ involves the subtle body.53 Dennis offers a parallel to Hillman with her description of a subtle realm that can be experienced as imagery or sensed through what she considers to be the kinesthetic precursors to the image.54

My own inclination is to see the subtle energy patterns themselves as archetypes-in-action. I agree with Hillman and Dennis that subtle energy patterns are a more elusive dimension of the kinds of imagery associated with the supersensory versions of our ordinary senses, such as the visual or auditory aspects of dreams or the visionary experiences I describe above, while also constituting a kind of imagery in their own right. I resonate strongly with Hillman’s emphasis on the relationship-structuring activity of the realm of subtle energy. The movement from primordial awareness to subject-object consciousness and back is all about various structural relationships between knowing and known, as are the layers of subtle energy patterns that shape the subsequent developments of subject/object consciousness.55 Here Judith’s depiction of

214 energy as awareness (as well as the suggestion, mentioned above, by participants Simone and Serena that primordial awareness has an energetic dimension), along with Odajnyk’s view that attention is energy offer parallel ideas further connecting this line of thought to the Learnings.56

Of course here what is involved is our relationship to our apparently physical surroundings, including, but not limited by any means to, the people therein. In this vein,

I follow Aizenstadt when he suggests broadening Jung’s psychology to include not only the relationship of one human being to another but also that between human beings and their natural environment.57 I suggest that the experiential territory explored in this research project, the transitions between subject–object forms of consciousness and the range of participatory experience is a common denominator linking these two important relational contexts. What has been learned applies equally to our relationship to nature and to other humans, as objects of our experience. The subtle energy dynamics I describe in Appendix 13 and the correlate experiences of the participants enumerated above and in

Appendix 14 offer a cartography of this relational territory.

This brings me to Omer’s concept of imaginal structures, one of the elements of which is the archetypal. The more I work with this topic of Dependent Origination, reflecting on it from these various perspectives, the more I see strong parallels between this core Buddhist teaching and Omer’s key term. I find powerful suggestions of this parallel in the comments of several of the participants as well. For example, when

Thomas offers his own version of this process, he begins by depicting what he calls the middle boundary as “the place where dualism takes place.” His image of the open mind on one side and the visual field on the other mirrors the Buddha’s term nāma-rūpa, the fourth link and the limen between dualistic and participatory forms of consciousness.

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Thomas depicts this boundary area as a portal of creativity at which physical reality is fashioned, describing the significant investment of energy in the process. He further notes that as he moves from spaciousness through the boundary area, entering into this physical reality he passes through the emergent experience of the senses as discrete modalities, then on to an emphasis on the objects of those senses. He characterizes these steps as layers of identity and describes this experience as marked by limiting and self-perpetuating reactivity, reminiscent of the links of craving (tanhā) and attachment

(upādāna). Serena’s depiction of the creativity inherent in the process of visual perception, including the attribution of concept and meaning, as detailed in Learning Four above, offers a more cognitive view of this process.

These descriptions are pretty good approximations of the links of Dependent

Origination that follow nāma-rūpa. The next link is salāyatana, our six discrete sensory modalities, succeeded by phassa, or sensory contact with the object, which together solidify the experience of self-as-a-sensory organism. The subsequent links are the vedanā, or feeling tone, evoked by the object, then craving for (tanhā) and grasping hold of or attachment to (upādāna) the object. With the emphasis now clearly on the object, these two serve as the impetus around which a conditioned and uniquely personal sense-of-self, or identification, develops (the links of becoming, or bhāva, and birth, or jati).58 This personal image of oneself is a lived subjectivity specific to the individual’s relationship to the object at hand.59

The sequence of patterned subtle energy activity I describe in this study thus constitutes structures that together give rise to the transition from participatory consciousness to subject-object consciousness, the sense-of-self as knower in relation to the known object. This image of the self-as-knower serves as a foundation upon which,

216 the rest of an imaginal structure is created, again involving subtle energy patterning.60 In particular, the boundary formation segregating subject from object is the threshold beyond which non-participatory forms of consciousness arise. To use Thomas and

Eileen’s imagery, in this process, open mind, or primordial awareness, creates an encapsulating ball or bubble, sculpted of patterned subtle energy, and then gets lost within it, obscuring along the way its own underlying unobstructed nature. This leads to what Thomas calls “a reactionary closed system” in which “thoughts and reactions seem limited and self perpetuating.” I suggest that this split of the perceptual field into subject and object and the confining “bubble of experience” as well as the subtle energy boundaries that encapsulate knowing, are essential foundational images, constituting a fundamental aspect of any imaginal structure.61 Following Tart’s depiction of the experience of subtle energy as akin to an archetypal image and Harding’s description of archetypes as “patterns of psychic energy,” I consider the process resulting in this split to be archetypal in nature.62 It serves as a foundation upon which sensory, affective and cognitive dimensions then follow, all the work of an elusive kind of imagery sculpted of subtle energy, the dynamic aspect of primordial awareness.63

The links in the Chain of Dependent Origination thus represent a collective imagery of the rending of the underlying wholeness of the primordial awareness into parts. The first image is the emergence of an apparent center in relation to a periphery. As the process unfolds, nascent consciousness crystallizes at this center in relation to a transient focus of attention emerging at the periphery. This leads in turn to a clear splitting the field of experience into apparently discrete knower and known object, including the image of an encapsulated knowing self. Next is the emergence of sensory experience and a shift of emphasis towards the object of the moment, leading to

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Identification, conceptual proliferation and reactivity in relation to that object. This is a pretty close approximation of the notion of imaginal structures. If I am right in this suggestion, it implies a strong link between this central concept of Imaginal Psychology and a subtle energy elucidation of the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination.

Implications of the Study

This study has numerous implications, both personal and for various groups and fields. From a Buddhist perspective, the transmutation of experience through the reintegration of the apparent split between subject and object is central to liberation from suffering, a view I also hold.64 Secondly, this model of systematically examining the experience of a group of meditators offers to Buddhism a new approach to the bridging of the gap between its Eastern views and Western scientism that does not require buying into the dualistic perspective inherent in the predominant scientific research modalities. Psychologically the topic addresses our deepest felt sense of alienation: that of subject from object, self from other. In the field of psychotherapy it has relevance for the understanding of the intersubjective field between client and therapist and its role in the healing of suffering. From the perspective of Ecopsychology it focuses squarely on the source of our estrangement from the natural world around us, a root cause of our current environmental crisis.

This study is of relevance to the field of Imaginal Psychology by connecting the realm of subtle energy imagery to the rich role that imagery plays in our lives and suggesting an underlying subtle energetic dimension to all imaginal structures. Lastly, this topic is of significance to Buddhist teachers and meditators who are engaged in exploring in their practice the nature and cause of the split in human experience into

218 subject and object in order to better understand and heal human suffering.

For me personally this research project has resulted in the deepening of my own relationship to the topic both in my formal meditation practice and in my daily life activities. In addition, the literature I read as well as the activity of interpreting the participants’ data has catalyzed greater clarity in my own understanding, as well as new angles of inquiry, as noted above. The knowledge I have gained through the literature review on such topics as subtle energy, participatory consciousness,

Imaginal Psychology, and even Buddhist thought will continue to serve me in many ways as I pursue my professional path. I hope to publish my article on the subtle energy dimension of Dependent Origination. I may consider the possibility of getting a research grant to continue this work of the exploration of the interface between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness. The application of Imaginal

Inquiry as a research modality has shown me that there are effective ways to do research in this area that is my passion without selling my soul to the prevailing, inherently dualistic and reductionistic positivist model of research. It is my hope that the study will encourage others to use similar research methods and participants to further deepen our knowledge in this important area.

In proposing a map for sequential layers of participatory consciousness, I am offering a tool that psychotherapists can use in the categorization and assessment of various kinds of altered states of consciousness. This map may be especially useful when treating clients experiencing various forms of spiritual emergence (when a client is opening to types of spiritual experience that are new to them and which may be temporarily disorienting) or suffering from particular kinds of spiritual emergencies

(when spiritual openings become so disorienting as to manifest at least temporarily as a

219 loss of the client’s ability to function normally in certain everyday contexts.)65 In addition, my map may be of use to psychotherapists regarding understanding their own experiences of what Mansfield and Spiegelman as well as Hillman call the subtle body or

Schwartz-Salant’s interactive field during therapy sessions.66

However the results of this study and the further research towards which it points offer more than just a map of this territory. The learnings listed above, especially the significance of various styles of attention, together with the numerous clues pointing towards a central role for the activity of subtle energy in the dynamics of the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness can be used by psychotherapists in yet another way. These insights offer a direction for personal practice by which psychotherapists can cultivate their own ability to shift into the subtle body realm of experience. By developing their own use of attention, especially the ability to eschew the narrow intensity of our ordinary ways of seeing in favor of an expanded visual openness that includes the space around visual imagery, clinicians can improve their access to the subtle body realm, taking it into the interpersonal context of their therapeutic work. Adding to this process Kramer’s relational practice of Insight Dialogue would build an even stronger bridge to psychotherapy and the interactive field. It is this application of the interactive field that Schwartz-Salant depicts.as central to the transformative alchemical process that is the deepest potential inherent in psychotherapeutic exploration.

I suggest that this research will be of interest to those in the field of Psychology studying such topics as perception, attention, projection, the nature of consciousness, and the psychological role of subtle energy. I hope that I have demonstrated the efficacy of qualitative and participatory research paradigms for these fields. I expect that this

220 research will be of special interest to those exploring the interface between Western

Psychology and Buddhist theory and practice, both as an extension of knowledge in this region of overlap and as a demonstration of a research modality and potential participant group that can be effectively used to further this exchange.

There are three subfields within Western Psychology that might find particular relevance in this study. The first is Transpersonal Psychology, which specifically focuses on the human capacity for altered states of consciousness. As the name of this field suggests, it explores experience that is beyond the personal. However included within its range is what I have here described as participatory consciousness. Yet the very range of participatory consciousness that this study covers is not quite beyond the personal in its scope. Within the participatory domain of experience, in which there is no delusionary sense of a separate self, there are those forms which have no personal attributes, as well as the ones studied here, which remain highly personal in nature. By this I mean that there are participatory states which are essentially the same in all aspects, including both structure and content, for all persons who open to them. In addition there are others, which, while similar to all in their structure, are individually unique in their content. The former, such as those described by Fred Hanna, are beyond the scope of this study.67

Examples of the latter are the experiences of interconnectedness, interpenetration, or insubstantiality described by the participants. While each of these participatory forms of experience has its characteristic structural and phenomenological flavors common to all who experience them, nonetheless the content is uniquely personal. For example, in the case of the study, the particular visual image chosen by each participant, remains unique to each participant throughout the range of participatory states here depicted. To use

Thomas and Eileen’s image of a bubble, the particulars of what is experienced within my

221 sphere of perception is different from the particulars met by you in yours, though the bubble-like structure is common to us both.

The second is the emerging field of Energy Psychology, which seeks to address psychological issues through interventions targeting human energy fields, meridians, and chakras.68 I feel that my subtle energy theory of Dependent Origination, which together with Mahamudra theory, provides the underlying theoretical foundation behind the research design as well as the Research Hypothesis, might some day provide a meaningful framework for understanding the role of subtle energy in the structuring the varieties of human consciousness.

Thirdly, the field of Ecopsychology looks at the deep interconnectedness between man and nature. This research supports ecopsychologists’ contention of a profound ontological interdependence in additional to the well-established biological interdependence between humanity, on the one hand, and the natural world, the realm of the objects of human senses, on the other. It is perhaps in this area of Ecopsychology that this research has its strongest potential impact on contemporary culture as well.

Just as my proposed map of the territory of participatory consciousness may be useful to psychotherapists, and the field of psychology, I hope that it might also serve the needs of Buddhist teachers in their understanding of their students’ experiences. I remember at various times in my own career as a Buddhist practitioner where the experiential maps of the territory left behind by those who had gone before helped to both inspire my practice as well as to elucidate and validate my experience. May the map I am offering provide similar support to my fellow Buddhist practitioners, as well.

In addition, the study has many implications for the field of Imaginal Psychology.

Perhaps the most obvious is the efficacy of its research methodology for the study of

222 participatory consciousness and its relationship to subject-object consciousness. In this process there is the opportunity to creatively deepen the challenge to the Western cultural taboo, described by Puhakka above, against participatory forms of knowing.69 I suggest that for this process to reach its potential depths, two elements most strongly associated with spiritual traditions may need to be strengthened as aspects of Imaginal Psychology.

My own experience of Imaginal Psychology demonstrates a robust emphasis on what from the Buddhist perspective would be called luminosity and mindful inquiry. The prominence of the realm of imagery, which imaginal proponents, such as Hillman and

Dennis, describe as a subtle, non-ordinary form of perception, is consonant with the

Buddhist perspective on the underlying luminous nature of experience.70 However I suspect that in the field of Imaginal Psychology the fundamentally insubstantial nature of experience is inadequately emphasized in order for the fullest extent of participatory consciousness to be realized.

Likewise, there is little focus on the cultivation of samādhi in the context of

Imaginal Psychology. Shifting to include a greater emphasis on this aspect of spiritual practice, especially as described by Coffey above, and in balance with the existing strong cultivation of reflexivity would, I suggest, enhance its practitioners’ abilities to access and explore participatory forms of consciousness and enjoy the healing they afford.71

I also believe that additional research will further validate the central role of subtle energy activity in the creation of imaginal structures. The significant support in the imaginal literature for the close correlation between image and subtle energy, as well as their intimate relationship with the archetypal dimension of human, experience point towards an important dimension that can be profitably strengthened within Imaginal

Psychology. Here the interface with another emerging psychological discipline, Energy

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Psychology, would seem to be worth cultivating and exploring.72 My own experience suggests that this interface offers further opportunities for cultural leadership in the face of existing societal taboos.

Conclusion

Von Franz wonders what it is within us that requires us to separate mind from matter.73 Levin highlights the need for “an experiential map, showing the experiential steps: a phenomenology, a logic, of the experiential process” involved in the movement from subject-object to participatory forms of experience.74 Woodhouse writes about the absence of a good theory linking subtle energy and consciousness.75 Within the Buddhist tradition, the Dalai Lama highlights the dearth of a clear explanation for what causes sentience, while Hayward points toward the absence of a theory describing how our apparent separateness arises within the context of our non-separate interdependence.

According to Joseph Campbell, a common feature of the world’s numerous creation myths is the the central role of the activity of a power or energy that he equates with such terms as mana or shakti, noting that its activity in the psyche is referred to as libido. Acknowledging that energy is difficult to apprehend because our sense organs by which we experience the phenomenal world are an expression of it, Campbell depicts ritual and myth as facilitators of a kind of leap into a way of perceiving in which imagery arises that points beyond itself to a directly experienceable realm of openness. It is then in the quietude of meditation, he says, that the mind plunges into this emptiness only to be dissolved.76 Out of this void, the phenomenal world remerges in all its complexity, the

One expressing itself as many, through a layered sequence that Campbell calls a process of precipitation.77 He notes that from the perspective of this unstructured source, “the

224 world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving.” 78

Yet the various parts of this creation, specifically its temporarily existing sentient creatures, experience something quite different, which Campbell characterizes as “a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain.” 79 The spiritual traditions point us in the direction of discovering within ourselves the original harmony out of which we are structured in all our suffering.80

The Buddhist teaching that most fully expresses this view is Dependent

Origination. I suggest that the subtle energetic experience of the process described in this teaching is that of our emergence, our precipitation, to use Campbell’s word, from the unstructured source, leading each of us, as the Buddha clearly describes, to our own version of that “terrible cacophony.” This doctrine points us towards our personal rediscovery of our underlying original nature. I offer this exploration of the limen between subject-object consciousness and the realm of participation along with a subtle energy explication of the early links of the Buddha’s doctrine of Dependent Origination as the beginnings of an answer to these questions asked and needs expressed by von

Franz, Levin, Woodhouse, the Dalai Lama, and Hayward above.

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APPENDIX

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APPENDIX 1

ETHICS REVIEW

Answers to Questions 1-8

1. The participants will be carefully chosen expert Western meditators from the Vajrayana and/or Theravadan Buddhist traditions. In some cases, participants may have participated in both of these traditions. They will be well-trained and proficient in both samatha (tranquility) meditation and either vipassanā (insight) meditation or one of the two inquiry-based practices in the Tibetan tradition, Mahamudra practice or the treckchod form of Dzogchen practice, as evidenced by the recommendation by their teachers in those lineages. (Both the Theravadan and Vajrayana traditions teach samatha and vipassanā techniques of meditation. The Tibetan tradition offers additional techniques for meditative inquiry as listed above.) The intent is to work with meditators who are deeply practiced in the stillness of mind developed through samatha practice as well as expert in inquiry in their use of vipassanā, Mahamudra and/or trekchod. It is their strong ability to work with these two skills that distinguish the group of participants. This will generally mean that the participants will have been meditating in their traditions for at least 10 years and will have attended numerous intensive retreat-style meditation training courses. I am also open to the possibility that there may be a few exceptional meditation prodigies who have shorter periods of practice under their belts yet do possess strong skills in both of the target areas. In addition, I am looking for meditators who have a well established daily meditation practice and who live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Qualified meditators who live outside the Bay Area will be too difficult for me to meet with in person, a requirement of this study. Lastly, among those identified as qualified meditators, I may initially select those who live closest to me since I will be traveling to their homes for the initial meetings and follow-up interviews.

I intend to identify these participants by contacting local Western teachers of these traditions. I personally know many Western vipassanā teachers in the area through my long association with Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I also know several Western Vajrayana teachers who live and teach locally. I will describe to these teachers the kind of participant I am looking for, asking them to identify potential participants among their students or fellow teachers. I will ask teachers to identify students or colleagues who they feel possess strong to exceptional ability in both these meditative skill areas. As there are no clear, generally agreed upon objective standards to measure ability in these areas, I will rely on the teachers I contact to use their judgment in making that assessment. To some extent there will be individual differences in the standards applied from one teacher to another resulting in some variety in the skill level of the participants. Lastly I will determine the teacher’s willingness to serve as a spiritual resource should the participant(s) they are referring encounter difficulties as a result of their participation. I will initially recruit ten participants. The study does not involve group activities. Since this model involves meeting individually with participants before and after their

227 application of the inquiry I will give to them, it also allows for the participants to complete their activities during different time periods. Although each participant will complete a ten-day period of daily inquiry and reporting, the dates of their ten-day periods will be different. This affords me some breathing room regarding the possibility of participant drop-out during the study. If some participants do drop out, I can simply add another participant from the remaining list of qualified meditators or ask my teacher contacts to provide more names.

It is possible that some of the participants will know one another since they may be students of the same teacher or may have met through their association with Buddhist practice. However since the participants will not be engaged with each other during the data gathering process, this should not be a factor which will in any way influence the study. In order to doubly insure that this is the case, I will ask participants not to discuss their participation with anyone other than myself, their spouse/partner, their teacher, their therapist (if they have or need one as a result of their participation) or the Dissertation Director at the Institute for Imaginal Studies (if they have questions or concerns they do not wish to take up with me.) I will ask that they keep their participation confidential in this way until I have completed the data collection and analysis at which time I will contact all participants and release them from their agreement to keep their participation confidential.

2. I will ask the referring teacher to make the initial contact with each potential participant requesting permission to allow me to contact them regarding participation in this research. Once I have received the go ahead from the referring teacher, the initial contact with a potential participant will be by phone. During the first phone conversation, the screening interview, I will introduce myself as a doctoral student in psychology at the Institute for Imaginal Studies and refer to their prior conversation with their teacher or colleague which has prompted my call. I will briefly describe the kind of participant I seek, focusing on prior training and expertise in samatha and vipassanā, Mahamudra and/or Dzogchen practices, confirming what their teacher has told me. I will also check to make sure that they currently have a daily meditation practice routine and that they are located within a manageable distance to facilitate individual face-to-face meetings. If they respond positively, I will check to see that they have the necessary computer skills (use of Microsoft Word), an e-mail account and the ability to attach files to an e-mail.) At this point I will determine if the person I am speaking with fits the qualifications for the study and inform them in an appropriate manner. (See scripts in Appendix 5 for acceptance and rejection of potential participants at this stage in the process.)

Next, for those who meet the requirements to be participants, I will determine their willingness to devote the time and energy required of the study. To do this, I will then briefly describe the outline of the study indicating that it will involve 15 minutes of daily meditation which I hope will not add to their daily practice but will fit naturally within the time they already spend meditating daily. I will describe the additional 10-15 minutes required to fill out their Daily Journal and e-mail it to me, as well as the hour-long initial meeting and the hour-and-a-half-long follow-up interview, both to take place at their place of daily meditation, most likely their home. I will then ask if it would be possible for them to fit participation in the study into their lives. If they are willing, I will inquire

228 as to the best time frame for them in the next four weeks for doing their ten day period of inquiry. I will set the time for the initial meeting at which time I will explain their participation in detail being sure to inform them that at any point in the process they will have the freedom to drop out of the study for any reason. I will set the date for the initial face to face meeting to be the day before they start their daily inquiry. I will explain that during this meeting I will give them instructions for the inquiry, answer any questions they have, and ask them to sign a form indicating their informed consent to participate. I will make it clear that upon hearing further details in that session they are free to change their minds about going ahead with their participation. Lastly I will also set the time for the post-inquiry follow-up interview, ideally within four to five days of their completion of their ten days of inquiry. This will allow me time to review their Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report in order to come to my own preliminary interpretation of their experience as well as to formulate follow-up questions specific to their experiences. This meeting will also still be soon enough that the participant’s experiences will be fresh in their minds.

During the initial meeting at the potential participant’s place of meditation, I will encourage them to feel free to ask me questions at any time during the initial presentation. I will then explain how they have been chosen (for their training and ability in the meditation techniques mentioned above). Next I will give the participant a copy of the consent form and then go through the consent form together section by section, reading aloud each section and elaborating on it as necessary until the potential participant is clear about that section. This process will involve describing the topic and general purpose of the study, issues of confidentiality, discussion of possible benefits to the participant as well as general benefits, a description of potential risks and the resources available to address them, the voluntary nature of the study and their freedom to withdraw at any time as well as my freedom to discontinue their participation at any time, information about where to direct questions or concerns during the study, and the final statement outlining the details of their consent to participate. I will confirm that they have a spiritual teacher who they could contact should the need arise during the study. I will let them know that after I have gone over further details of the activities they will be involved in, I will ask if they are still willing to participate. If they are I will then be asking them to sign this form.

Next I will show them a paper copy of the Daily Journal they will be asked to fill out after each daily period of inquiry and discuss the process of sending their daily reports to me. I will then ask them to show me their meditation spot. At their place of meditation I will read to them the basic instructions for the inquiry, answer any questions they may have about it, then sit with them while they do a brief period of the practice. Again there will be time for questions. I will give them a written copy of both the inquiry instructions and the instructions for filling out the Daily Journal for their reference during the study. Once they have had all their questions answered, we will load the Daily Journal questionnaire onto their computer and have them send me a test daily submission. I will then check my e-mail account from their computer to make sure I have received their test e-mail. Lastly I will confirm that they are still willing to participate and if so, ask them to sign the Informed Consent Form, leaving with them a copy for their reference.

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The participants will then begin their ten-day period of daily inquiry on the agreed upon day, preferably the next day. They will spend 15 minutes in sitting meditation daily applying the assigned inquiry exercise. At the end of their daily inquiry, they will fill out the Daily Journal on their computer and e-mail it to me. The inquiry is designed to be done on ten consecutive days but if something prevents the participant from completing the daily inquiry on a particular day, continuing the next day is permitted. I will ask, however, that each participant complete ten days of inquiry, though it is not essential that they be on consecutive days.

Once the ten days of inquiry have been completed, I will meet with the participant at their place of meditation for the follow-up interview at the preset time. This interview will be digitally recorded. During this interview I will first ask participants some questions regarding their personal history, especially concerning experiences of the first few years of life and experiences with subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness throughout their lives. I will then ask questions of clarification regarding their written Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report. Next I will share with the participant my preliminary interpretation of their experiences and ask for their feedback. Participants will also be asked to create images of both participatory and subject-object consciousness as well as to engage a parts dialogue between these to modes of experience. Upon completion of the interview I will thank the participant for their participation. I will let them know that once this dissertation has been approved I will be mailing to them a summary of the Learnings.

3. During the initial face-to-face meeting with each participant, after verbally reading the consent form and describing the details of their participation as in 2. above and answering any questions they may have, I will ask the participant if they are still willing to participate. If so, I will ask them to sign one copy of the consent form and give them a second to keep for their reference.

4. There are no physical risks associated with this research. There are some psychological risks due to the nature of the inquiry participants will be engaged in. Inquiring directly into the boundary of the sense-of-self can result in that boundary dissolving, catalyzing a shift into one form or another of participatory consciousness in which the relationship between the knowing subject and his or her known objects is altered. Such a shift could include experiences where the sense of separation between self and object has completely disappeared or experiences where the sense of self itself is completely absent. The psychological states one encounters upon experiencing such shifts, as well as the shifts themselves, can be psychologically disorienting or distressing for some persons. Such distress could include calling into question deeply held beliefs about oneself or the world one lives in or result in intermittent or persistent shifts in perception that are unfamiliar and initially uncomfortable.

5. By choosing highly expert meditators, I have both increased the chances of such shifts happening and reduced the risks that such shifts will have a psychologically destabilizing impact. In the first place, as well trained and well practiced Buddhist meditators, all of the participants will be aware that such shifts are to be expected in the course of a life devoted to the practice of Buddhist meditation. In general, those for whom such shifts

230 present the most difficulties are those for whom they happen unexpectedly without such prior proper cognitive preparation. Secondly, I consider it likely that many if not all the participants will have already encountered some such shifts in the course of their Buddhist practice as well as any psychological challenges such shifts may present to them personally. This research is not so much designed to evoke this kind of shift in the participants for the first time as to explore a particular doorway to the experiential realm of participatory consciousness that I expect will be new and meaningful for all the participants. Nonetheless, it is possible that there will be some among the participants for whom the shift to participatory consciousness will be a newly evoked experience and that it may present for them some psychological risks and challenges. For others the doorway I am providing may result in deeper forays into the many-layered experiential territory of participatory consciousness than they have previously encountered. In the event that such psychological challenges do occur, I am prepared to provide a referral source of Bay Area clinicians especially screened for their ability to work with clients facing this kind of situation, which might called spiritual emergence or spiritual emergency. An organization I helped to found, the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology (ISP), screens psychotherapists for the skills necessary for handling such cases and provides a directory of such clinicians in the Bay Area on their website. (See www.instituteforspiritualityand psychology.com for the ISP Therapist Directory and their criteria and competencies for such clinicians.) In addition to the availability of qualified psychotherapists, each participant will also have a connection to a spiritual teacher to whom they will be encouraged to turn for spiritual guidance if the need arises.

6. For Participants: The exercise participants will engage in during this study will provide an opportunity for participants to develop their inquiry skills in a context that is not often emphasized in Buddhist training, that of the sense of sight during sitting meditation. I expect this to be of significant experiential value to the participants, especially since sight is a dominant sense in creating our experience and beliefs about the physical world around us. The Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report participants will be asked to fill out as well as the follow-up interview will give them the chance to reflect on and articulate their experiences in a way that is not generally part of Buddhist practice contexts. The exercise given offers the possibility to open to new experiences directly relevant to their ongoing Buddhist practice. All of these benefits have been mentioned by friends who have informally tested the methodology for me. The format of the follow-up group meeting offers participants the opportunity to learn about Imaginal Psychology and its research methodology, Imaginal Inquiry, particularly as they relate to their own Buddhist practice. In addition, they will be exposed to my larger theory regarding the role of subtle energy patterning in the formation of the sense-of-self and the relationship of this theory to Buddhist teachings on Dependent Origination and the jhānas.

General Benefits: It is my hope that the results of the study will support my broader theory regarding the formation of the sense-of-self. I believe that this theory will be useful to the community of Buddhist practitioners at-large. In particular it will be of use to Buddhist meditation teachers in their work with their students. This larger theory, as well as the particular focus of the study, also has significant implications for the study of consciousness and the relationship between subject and object, mind and body as well

231 mind and matter, all of which are of interest to the field of Western Psychology. In addition, if the Research Hypothesis bears out then it will also have relevance to Imaginal Psychology in several ways. First, it will provide research validation of the phenomena of participatory consciousness. Secondly it will begin to demonstrate a role for subtle energy patterning as an aspect of imaginal structures. This role will be identified with a subtle energy dimension of imagery (subtle energy patterns as images as well as the relationship between subtle energy and other forms of imagery.) Such a connection will contribute to the construction of a theoretical bridge between several distinct aspects of Jungian theory: archetypes, the energic dimension of human experience and the role of symbols. New bridges will be formed between Imaginal Psychology, Buddhism and the emerging disciplines of Ecopsychology and Energy Psychology. Lastly, relative to the field of psychotherapy, especially its depth and imaginal expressions, this study has implications for the understanding of the interactive field between therapist and client. In particular, it will suggest specific training exercises that may be of use in helping psychotherapists become more adept at entering into and exploring the interactive field with their clients.

7. Once the dissertation is approved, I plan to mail the participants a written summary of the Learnings.

8. See Appendices which follow.

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APPENDIX 2

CONCEPTUAL OUTLINE

Evoking Experience

Initial face-to-face interview

• Introduced to specific mindful inquiry exercise and try it for the first time.

Individual application of mindful inquiry exercise

• Daily application of mindful inquiry exercise, 15 minutes a day for 10 days, scheduled at the end of the participant’s regular daily meditation session.

• Individual exploration of any new avenues of inquiry catalyzed by the given exercise.

Expressing Experience

Following daily mindful inquiry sessions

• Fill out and submit multi-faceted Daily Journal entry.

During follow-up interview

• Verbally respond to researcher’s follow-up questions about Daily Journal entries and written Ten-Day Summary Report. • Art activity creating images of subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness.

Interpreting Experience

Following completion of 10-day period of daily mindful inquiry sessions

• Complete Ten-Day Summary Report of mindful inquiry.

During follow-up interview

• Give feedback on researcher’s initial interpretation of Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report.

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Integrating Experience

During follow-up interview

• Respond verbally to researcher’s questions about personal history re subject-object consciousness vs. participatory consciousness. • Dialogues between subject-object and participatory modes of being represented by the artistic images that have been created and the participant. • Reflect on and respond verbally to researcher’s question regarding how they have been affected by their participation.

Receive and read the researcher’s summary of Learnings.

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APPENDIX 3

CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE

Initial Face-to-Face Meeting (1 hour)

I. Informed Consent

A. Orientation to Informed Consent form (10 minutes) 1. Researcher greets participant and finds appropriate seating for initial meeting. 2. Read together Informed Consent form emphasizing the following: a. Researcher will keep all identities confidential and participants are asked to keep their participation confidential until released from such agreement by researcher.

b. Potential risks and benefits. c. Participation at all times is voluntary. 3. Researcher responds to any questions participant may have. 4. Researcher has participant sign form and gives them a copy.

II. Orientation to Mindful Inquiry Protocol (40 minutes)

A. Give the participant a copy of the Mindful Inquiry Protocol.

B. Review focus 1. Researcher reads the description of the focus of this research and answers any participant questions.

C. Review general timeline 1. Daily practice of mindful inquiry for 10 days, 15 minutes per day. 2. Each day fill out Daily Journal and e-mail to researcher 3. At the end of the 10-day period complete Ten-Day Summary Report form and e-mail to researcher.

4. Participate in follow-up interview. D. Orientation to Daily Journal.

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1. Researcher shows copy of Daily Journal to participant, reading over each question.

2. Researcher reads through section on writing style for the Daily Journal. 3. Researcher answers participant questions. 4. Upload Daily Journal to participant computer. 5. Send test e-mail with Daily Journal as attachment to researcher as test. 6. Researcher checks e-mail account on-line to confirm receipt of test e-mail.

E. Orientation to mindful inquiry exercise.

1. Researcher asks to see participant meditation site. 2. Researcher helps participant select object for visual focus and its location for exercise.

3. Researcher reads through basic instructions. 4. Researcher answers any participant questions. 5. Researcher and participant sit together briefly doing the exercise for five minutes.

6. Researcher again answers any participant questions.

F. Review Ten-Day Summary Report form.

1. Explain written summary and review Ten-Day Summary Report form. 2. Advise that Ten-Day Summary Report form will be e-mailed to participant upon receipt of last Daily Journal.

III. Review follow-up interview format and receipt of summary of Learnings (2 minutes)

A. Researcher reviews all aspects of follow-up interview. 1. The follow-up interview will involve discussion and exploration of the participant’s experience of the 10-day period of meditative inquiry as well as art work and other personal exploration.

B. Review process for receiving researcher’s summary of Learnings. 1. Summary of Learnings will be mailed to all participants upon completion of the dissertation.

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Individual Practice Phase

I. Daily Mindful Inquiry Practice and Reporting (over a period of 10 days.)

A. Participant 1. (Evoking) Applies mindful inquiry exercise for 15 minutes daily for 10 days during daily meditation session.

2. (Expressing) Fills out Daily Journal form each day and e-mails it to researcher.

3. (Expression) Upon receipt of Ten-Day Summary Report form at the end of the 10-day period, fills it out and e-mails to researcher.

B. Researcher. 1. Receives and securely stores Daily Journal and Ten-Day Summary Report submissions.

2. Upon receipt of tenth Daily Journal entry, e-mails Ten-Day Summary Report form to participant.

Follow-up Interview Phase

I. Interpretation of Each Participant’s Expressions of Experience (during week following participant’s 10-day practice period.)

A. Researcher 1. Reviews Daily Journal submissions and formulates own interpretation of participant’s experience and follow-up questions for interview.

2. Researcher reviews Ten-Day Summary Report submission and compares to own interpretations adjusting as appropriate.

3. Researcher writes preliminary report of interpretations and follow-up questions for this participant.

B. Follow-up Interview (Scheduled within one week of completion of participant’s Ten-Day Summary Report, digitally recorded, approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes total.)

1. Researcher greets participant and thanks for submissions. (5 minutes) 2. (Integrating) Researcher asks specific questions regarding mother’s pregnancy, birth, breast feeding, early life trauma, separations, losses. (5 minutes)

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3. (Integrating) Researcher asks questions regarding personal history with experiences of participatory consciousness and non-participatory consciousness. (10 minutes)

4. (Expressing) Researcher introduces art exercise of creating images of both participatory and subject-object modes of consciousness. (15 minutes).

a. Participant creates image of participatory consciousness. b. Participant is invited to speak about this image. c. Participant creates image of subject-object consciousness. d. Participant is invited to speak about this image. 5. (Expressing) Researcher introduces dialogue exercise (15 minutes): a. Dialogue between participant and participatory consciousness image. b. Dialogue between participant and subject-object consciousness image. c. Dialogue between the two images. 6. (Expressing) Researcher asks follow-up questions of clarification re Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report. (15 minutes)

7. (Interpreting) Researcher reads own preliminary interpretation asking for and receiving feedback from participant. (15 minutes)

8. (Integrating) Researcher then asks participant how they have been affected by their participation. (15 minutes)

9. (Data collection note) Researcher keeps the images created by the participant as part of the collected data. (If the participant has chosen to use modeling clay, the researcher will digitally photograph the sculpture as part of the data collection rather than keeping the actual sculpture, which will be too fragile to safely and easily store.)

C. After the Follow-up Interview 1. Researcher (or professional transcriber) transcribes interview. 2. Researcher reviews transcription and art work making adjustments to preliminary written interpretation as appropriate and integrating in new expressive and interpretive data and as well as personal history information before finalizing the interpretation for this participant.

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Overall Interpretation Phase (upon completion of individual interpretation for all participants)

I. Participant Confidentiality Commitment.

A. Researcher releases participants from their confidentiality commitment about the details of their participation.

II. Overall Data Review and Interpretation

A. Researcher reviews finalized summaries for all participants creating overall written summary interpretation of what happened.

B. Researcher analyzes final overall interpretation relative to hypotheses and other relevant theories.

C. Learnings are reported in Learnings Chapter draft and submitted for review and feedback by Dissertation Committee.

Final Participant Integration Opportunity

I. (Integrating) Upon completion and acceptance of the dissertation, the researcher mails a copy of the Summary of Learnings to each participant.

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APPENDIX 4

INFORMED CONSENT FORM

To the Participant in this Research:

Summary of the Research

You are invited to participate in a study on the nature of the boundary between knowing subject and known object during the experience of seeing. The study’s purpose is to better understand the nature of this boundary and its possible transmutation.

Participation will involve using a specified mindful inquiry practice during daily meditation periods of 15 minutes at your regular place of meditation over the course of 10 days. You will be given instructions regarding the particular meditative investigation you are being asked to undertake and will then journal daily regarding your experience of your investigation. The journaling will take the form of short written responses to eight questions provided to you as your Daily Journal of your meditation experiences. The questionnaire will be provided in the form of a Microsoft Word document which you will fill out on your computer and e-mail to the researcher daily during the course of your investigation period. At the end of the 10-day period, a follow-up interview with the researcher will be scheduled at your place of meditation or another place convenient to you which will be digitally recorded and later transcribed. This interview will last approximately one and a half hours. Your period of ten days of meditation will begin on _____ and end on _____. Your follow-up interview will take place on _____. (to be filled out by the interviewer prior to the initial face-to-face interview based on the screening interview discussion of convenient times for the participant.)

Confidentiality

For the protection of your privacy, your Daily Journal entries, art work and all digital recordings and transcripts will be kept confidential and your identity will be protected. All documents including your Daily Journal entries and follow-up interview will be identified only by a participant pseudonym assigned by the researcher. Once received, all Daily Journal entries will be transferred to and stored in a file on the researcher’s computer in a computer file folder protected by a password known only to the researcher. The recorded transcript of the follow-up interview will be downloaded onto the researcher’s computer and stored in the same protected file folder as your Daily Journal entries. The follow-up interview will be transcribed for ease of analysis. A professional transcriber may be used for this process. Computer transcripts of the interviews will likewise be stored together with the Daily Journal entries and interview digital voice files in a secured file folder. During the analysis of data, paper copies of these documents will

240 be printed out to facilitate the analysis. These paper documents will be stored in a locked file cabinet in the researcher’s home when they are not in use. This signed consent form will also be stored in this locked cabinet. This Informed Consent Form will have your name and signature on it, but not your identifying pseudonym. The master list of participant real names and their assigned pseudonyms will be kept in a separate computer file and file folder with a separate password, again known only to the researcher. Back-up copies of the Daily Journal and the follow-up interview will be recorded onto CDs and stored in the researcher’s safe deposit box at a local bank. In the reporting of information in published material, any information that might identify you will be altered to ensure your anonymity.

Since it is possible that any one participant may know other participants, each participant is asked to keep the details of the study as well as their own experiences and interpretations of them confidential until all participants have completed their ten-day period of practice and the follow-up interview. Once this has occurred, the researcher will release all participants from their agreement not to talk about their participation.

Benefits and Risks

This study is of a research nature and may offer no direct benefit to you. The published findings however may be of benefit to the field of psychology as well as to Buddhist teachers and practitioners and may benefit the understanding of the nature of consciousness, especially its subject-object form, as well as document the contribution that highly experienced meditators can make to the understanding of the human mind and human experience. This study is designed to minimize potential risks to you. However, some of the procedures such as examining the boundary between subject and object, may touch sensitive areas for some people. In particular, this exercise could result in temporary altered states of consciousness and perception, which, for some persons, could be unsettling or disorienting or result in such emotions as anxiety or fear. If at any time you develop any concerns or questions, I will make every effort to discuss these with you. I, the researcher, cannot provide psychotherapy, but at your request or using my professional judgment, will facilitate referrals to an appropriate mental health professional, if such need should arise.

Voluntary Participation

If you decide to participate in this study, you may withdraw your consent and discontinue your participation at any time and for any reason. Please note as well that I, as the researcher, may need to terminate your participation from the study at any point and for any reason.

Questions or Concerns About This Research

If you have any questions or concerns, you may call me at (707) 789-9357 any day between 9 AM and 9 PM, e-mail me at [email protected], or you may contact the Dissertation Director at the Institute for Imaginal Studies, 47 Sixth Street, Petaluma, CA,

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94952, telephone: (707)765-1836. The Institute for Imaginal Studies assumes no responsibility for any psychological or physical injury resulting from this research.

Consent

I, ______, consent to participate in this research on a voluntary basis. The researcher, Gary Buck, MA, has explained this research project to me in detail and has satisfactorily answered all my questions.

______Date ______Signature of Participant

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APPENDIX 5

SCREENING INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

(Screening interviews will be by phone with those meditators identified by their teachers or colleagues as fitting the participant profile.)

Greet the potential participant and introduce myself as doctoral student in Psychology at the Institute for Imaginal Studies working on my dissertation. Remind the participant of their prior conversation with their teacher or colleague about this research project.

Explain the purpose of the phone call is to confirm basic information about them as potential participants and to briefly explore the possibility of their participating in this research.

Questions:

1. Could you briefly describe for me your practice background focusing on the traditions you have practiced in and the kinds of meditation you have practiced? (Look to verify the depth of experience of the potential participant in a Buddhist tradition and with both samatha and vipassanā (mindfulness) and/or Mahamudra or trekchod styles of practice.)

2. Could you briefly describe your current daily practice? (Establish that the potential participant does have a current daily practice.)

At this point make a judgment as to whether or not this potential participant meets the meditation requirements. Then describe the meditation background of the participants I seek as long-term Buddhist meditators who have extensive training and expertise in both samatha and vipassanā (mindfulness) practice and/or Mahamudra or Dzogchen Trekchod styles of practice.

If the potential participant meets the requirements:

“You clearly meet these requirements so I would like to continue by briefly describing what participation in this research project would mean for you. Then if based on that description you feel you have the time and interest to participate, I would like to schedule a meeting to explore that possibility in more depth.”

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If the potential participant does not meet the requirements:

“You have an interesting background in spiritual practice. However for this particular study I am looking for participants who …

(have more extensive practice expertise with (samatha, vipassanā) meditation.) or (currently have an active daily practice.)

Thank you for your time and interest. All the best in your spiritual endeavors.”

For those who meet the requirements:

If you choose to participate in the study, I will be asking you to spend 15 minutes a day for a period of ten days doing a mindful exploration. My hope is that this daily exercise would fit into your current daily meditation routine so as not to add any more time to your busy schedule. After each 15 minute exploration, I ask that you fill out a short Daily Journal form which I will provide to you, then e-mail your Daily Journal entry to me.

In addition, I will be scheduling an initial meeting lasting approximately one hour during which I will explain various aspects of the project, such as ‘voluntary participation’ and ‘confidentiality.’ At this meeting I will give you the instructions for the mindful exploration exercise, and go over the Daily Journal reporting form. Upon completion of your ten days of practice, I ask that you submit a brief written summary of your experience on a form that I will provide. You will then participate in a follow-up meeting for the purpose of discussing and further understanding your experience over the 10-day period. This meeting will also involve some informal art work and other kinds of personal exploration.

The total time involvement is roughly half an hour per day for ten days (5 hours), time writing your summary (30 minutes to an hour) plus a one hour-long initial face-to-face meeting and a second face-to-face meeting of approximately one and a half hours following your 10 days of mindful inquiry. (Total time, approx. eight hours)

Finally, once all eight of the participants have completed the process and the dissertation has been approved, I will mail you a written summary of the learnings.

Does this sound like something you would be willing to do and would have the time to do sometime over the next few months?

For those who say “Yes” I will then schedule the initial meeting and ten-day period of practice to follow.

For those who say “No.”:

“I understand. Thank you for your time and interest. All the best in your spiritual endeavors.”

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APPENDIX 6

MINDFUL EXPLORATION EXERCISE AND REPORTING PROTOCOL

Protocol

Thank you for your willingness to participate in this dissertation research.

My Research Focus: I am particularly interested in the relationship between various ways that consciousness is structured. OR I am exploring the subtle structure of consciousness. In order to do this I have recruited a small group of experienced meditators, including yourself, who will use a mindfulness exercise designed to facilitate this exploration and report on their experience.

Scheduling Your Formal Practice: As a participant, you will practice this exercise each day for a period of ten days. During this time, as part of your daily meditation practice, I ask that you spend 15 minutes per day using a mindful investigation which I will describe below.

Daily Journal: After your daily formal 15 minute exploration of the exercise, take a few minutes to sit down at your computer to record anything noteworthy that occurred for you during the day’s exercise using the Daily Journal form that I have provided. Each Daily Journal entry provides space for the following:

• your experience of the particular meditative investigation I describe, • new avenues of investigation that you pursued, • insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen, • any emotions evoked by the practice, • any images evoked by the practice, • any significant bodily sensations evoked by the practice, • any experiences you would describe as subtle energy experiences, and • any shifts in perception that occurred.

Use your judgment to decide what is most significant to you to include. If you have nothing to report for a particular category just enter “None.”

New Avenues of Investigation: While the main focus of this research is the mindful exploration exercise described below, as an experienced meditator this exercise may catalyze new directions of investigation you are moved to explore. Feel free to follow those leads as they arise while also continuing to practice the main exercise as the primary focus of your 15 minute session.

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Summary: At the end of the ten-day period, I will e-mail you a form to fill out summarizing your experience for the week. This Ten-Day Summary Report will have the same categories as your Daily Journal forms, one additional writing exercise and instructions for filling out the form.

Writing Style:

I am less interested in receiving a well-crafted narrative than a report that documents what was significant to you. Using bulleted points, rather than a paragraph format, is fine. Sometimes meditation experiences are difficult to describe. In writing your reports and summary, feel free to use the style of writing that feels most appropriate and comfortable to you, anywhere along the spectrum from literal, logical, and linear, to metaphorical, symbolic, and poetic.

I expect that your summary will run about one to three single-spaced typed pages in length. Please limit yourself to no more than three pages. Be sure to include your name and the dates covered by the report. E-mail your weekly summary to me at [email protected].

Concluding Interview: I will schedule a follow-up interview for about a week after your completion of ten days of practice. This interview will be take place at a location of your convenience and will be digitally recorded. This interview is for the purpose of discussing and further understanding your experience over the 10-day period, and will also involve some art work and other kinds of personal exploration.

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Mindful Exploration Exercise

Visual Object

This exercise explores the experience of seeing. As an aid in your meditation you will choose an object to be the focus of your seeing during those parts of the exercise which require a visual focus. For this object, choose a something small about roughly 1”- 2” tall and 1”- 2” wide. Your object should be emotionally neutral and simple in form. Place your object about 4 feet in front of you, preferably at about eye level as you sit in your meditation posture.

Mindful Exploration Exercise

(I suggest re-reading the following brief paragraph before each day’s session.)

In your usual sitting posture, meditate with your eyes open. In this exercise you will be examining the experience of seeing. Focus your sight specifically on your chosen visual object. While holding your focus on your visual object, try to find in your direct, present moment experience the boundary between yourself as the knower and that which is seen. Where do ‘you’ as the knower end? Where does the visual field begin? If you experience a boundary, what is it that communicates to you its presence? What happens when you include a mindfulness of that boundary in your experience of seeing? Does the boundary remain stable or does it change? If it changes how does it change? Or perhaps you find that there is no boundary. What is your direct experience? What impact does your exploration have on you? Continue with this exploration for 15 minutes, taking brief breaks to relax your posture and refocus your visual attention as is useful for you.

Meditation Journal

At the end of the session, take a few minutes to fill out the Daily Journal form about your experience of the exercise for this day and e-mail the completed form to me.

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APPENDIX 7

MINDFUL EXPLORATION EXERCISE DAILY JOURNAL

Day 1

Name: Date:

1. When I look for the boundary between myself and what is seen (describe what happens):

2. Describe any new avenues of investigation (if any) that you pursued:

3. Report any insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen (if not included in 2 or 3 above):

4. Describe any emotions that were evoked:

5. Describe any imagery that was evoked:

6. Describe any significant bodily sensations that you experienced:

7. Describe any experiences that you would call ‘subtle energy’ experiences that occurred:

8. Describe any shifts in perception that occurred:

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APPENDIX 8

TEN-DAY SUMMARY REPORT

Name: Date:

Instructions: Take some time to review your Daily Journal notes. Then fill out this summary form and return it to me. In doing so focus on those experiences and insights that have been most important to you. Direct ‘cut and paste’ quotes from your Daily Journal entries is a good strategy to simplify the process, though there may also be new insights or even experiences catalyzed by this review process itself. If there is nothing to report for a particular category, simply note “None.”

1. When I look for the boundary between myself and what is seen (describe what happens):

2. Describe any new avenues of investigation (if any) that you pursued:

3. Report any insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen (if not included in 2 or 3 above):

4. Describe any emotions that were evoked:

5. Describe any imagery that was evoked:

6. Describe any significant bodily sensations that you experienced:

7. Describe any experiences that you would call ‘subtle energy’ experiences that occurred:

8. Describe any shifts in perception that occurred:

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List below the three most significant experiences for you in this process. For each experience describe the meaning do you make of the experiences and explain why is this meaning significant to you?

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APPENDIX 9

POST-DATA COLLECTION INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

Preparation

Before the interview, complete the written preliminary interpretation of this participant’s experience based on their Daily Journal and Ten-Day Summary Report submissions. Formulate a written list of follow-up questions specific to this participant’s reports. Questions should focus on getting clarification of or elaboration on statements made in the participant’s submitted reports.

Interview

Greet the participant and thank them for their submissions.

“I’d like to begin by reminding you that my commitment to confidentiality regarding your participation in this research project includes our time together today.”

Personal History Questions:

“I’d like to begin to day by asking you a few questions about the early years of your life. Are you aware of any unusual circumstances or events having to do with your mother’s pregnancy or your birth?”

“Were you breast or bottle fed?”

“Describe any early life traumas (accidents, illnesses, abuse), separations from caregivers, or losses (family members, home, important possessions) that you may have experienced in the first three years of your life.”

Questions Regarding Prior Experience with Subject-Object and Participatory Forms of Consciousness:

Explain the notions of subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness using the definitions from the Proposal Introduction as follows:

Subject-object consciousness: “Subject-object consciousness is our human experience of being a knowing subject separate from the known sensory objects that constitute our environment.”

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Participatory consciousness: “Participatory consciousness is defined as ‘states of consciousness which are unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self.’” (Give credit to Aftab Omer)

Ask participant if they have any questions about these definitions. Once any questions have been addressed, instruct the participant as follows:

“Please comment on your experiences of these two modes of consciousness over the course of your life as well as any experiences you have concerning the relationahip between these two.”

Introduction of the Art Activity:

“I have brought some art supplies today for you to work with (paper, oil pastels, pencils, and modeling clay.) Using any of these supplies I’d like you to begin by creating an image of participatory consciousness. Your image could be metaphorical, symbolic, representational, just whatever emerges for you.”

Once the participant has completed their image invite them to talk about it.

“Tell me about your image of participatory consciousness.”

“Next I‘d like you to create a second image, this time of subject-object consciousness. Again you can use any of the materials provided and the image can be metaphorical, symbolic, representational, just whatever emerges for you.”

Again, once the participant has completed their image invite them to talk about it.

“Tell me about your image of subject-object consciousness.”

Researcher Introduces the Dialogue Exercise Using Images Created During the Art Activity:

With the participant seated, place the art image of participatory consciousness front of the participant. “Imagine that your image of participatory consciousness can speak to you. What does it want to say? What does it want you to know about it or about yourself? Dialogue with the image, speaking out loud your side of the dialogue and reporting verbally the image’s side in whatever way you can.”

Next replace the image of participatory consciousness with the one of subject-object consciousness. “Imagine that your image of subject-object consciousness can speak to you. What does it want to say? What does it want you to know about it or about yourself? Dialogue with the image, speaking out loud your side of the dialogue and reporting verbally the image’s side in whatever way you can.”

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Finally place the two images in front of the participant facing each other. “What would your two images like to say to each other? Allow the images themselves to dialogue with each other, verbally reporting their conversation.”

Explain that as the researcher I will keep the art that has been created as a part of the research data. (If the participant has chosen to use modeling clay, the researcher will photograph the sculpture as part of the data collection rather than keeping the actual sculpture which will be too fragile to safely and easily store as part of the data.)

Follow-up Questions: Ask the prepared questions of clarification about items in the participant’s Daily Journal and Ten-Day Summary Report submissions that were unclear or need elaboration.

“I have read through your Daily Journal entries and your Ten-Day Summary Report and have a few follow-up questions of clarification.” (Ask questions prepared in advance specific to each participant’s written reports.)

Feedback on Preliminary Interpetation:

“Based on your Daily Journal entries and Ten-Day Summary Report, I have written my own preliminary summary of what happened for you which I would like to now read to you for your feedback.” Read the summary out loud. Then follow with questions such as:

“Could you please comment on my interpretation?”

“Have I written anything that doesn’t ring true to you? What would have been more accurate? Is there anything important that I’ve left out?”

Integration Question:

After completing the dialogue exercise, ask the participant “How have you been affected by your participation in this entire process including the meditative inquiry and journaling as well as the discussion and activities of today’s session?”

There may be follow-up questions to the participant’s answer to this question.

Closing

Thank the participant for their answers. Let them know that you will be in touch regarding releasing them from their confidentiality agreement not to discuss their participation and that you will be mailing them a copy of your findings once the dissertation has been accepted.

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APPENDIX 10

POST DATA COLLECTION INTERVIEW RESEARCHER SELF-TRACKING FORM

Participant: ______Date: ______

Activity Researcher Observations: Researcher Reflexivity: My Posture, Gesture, Voice Affective Response, Tone, etc. Imaginal Structures

Early Life Questions

Personal History Questions

Art Activity

Active Imagination with Art Pieces

Follow-up Questions and Feedback

Integration Question

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APPENDIX 11

SUMMARY OF THE DATA

The summary of data that follows is composed of three forms of data. This first section is the Revised Summary for each individual participant. After receiving each participant’s full ten days of data and before reading their own 10-Day Summary, the researcher reviewed the data for that participant. Based on this review the researcher then wrote a summary of that participant’s experiences. This summary was then revised twice. The first revision was based on the participant’s own summary of their experiences. This first revision of the summary was then taken to the Follow-up Interview. During the Follow-up interview, the researcher and the participant read the summary out loud together. The participant commented and made corrections to the researcher’s summary in order to make it an accurate depiction of their experiences. The researcher then made final revisions based on this input. The summaries below are these final versions.

The second section which follows is entitled: “Statements Interpreted as Indicating Participatory Consciousness.” A description is included at the beginning of that section. The third section is a chart showing the frequency of reports of participatory consciousness for each participant.

Revised Summary for Ondine

Ondine easily experienced participatory consciousness in her sitting practice. This especially occurred when she turned her attention to look inwards. When she did this she did not lose touch with the outer visual image but the boundary between inner and outer, between herself as the knower/perceiver and the visual object known/perceived, between herself and the object could not be found. In addition, this inward looking catalyzed the experience that “nothing is substantial – all is mind – even outward looking which gives the illusion of separation is only an aspect of mind – oneness, connectedness of everything. … perceiver and perceived are inseparable.” This experience of participatory consciousness seemed to vary from session to session. In some sessions it had the flavor of the visual image and the mind being one and the same. In others the predominant flavor seemed to be the insubstantiality of all aspects of the experience. Sometimes the visual field seemed flat, lacking in depth of field. At still other times the experience was primarily that of boundarylessness. Lastly there were times when the predominant sense was of the mind being vast, even larger than the visual field itself. Yet there was a sameness about all of these flavors as well. The different flavors seemed to be related to how Ondine used or placed her attention within the experience of participatory consciousness. When looking outward, the object seemed to be discrete from ‘me’ as the knower. There seemed to be space between these two aspects of experience (the air between them)

255 but still no boundary was found, no limit of the self or of the object. “If you ask me where the limit of ‘me’ is, I can’t tell you.” Even regarding brain activity there didn’t seem to be a boundary. “When I look for the boundary of my mind, it seems much bigger than this skull.” This lack of boundary was even true for Ondine when she explored a different sense door, touch. So for this participant whether looking inward or outward there was the possibility of participatory consciousness. Even these two experiences of looking outward and looking inward were experienced as having no boundary between them. Both could be experienced simultaneously. When this was happening there was the experience of participatory consciousness, which was characteristic of looking inward, and the apparent boundary, which sometimes, but not always, characterized looking outward, both at the same time. When this happened this participant experienced this apparently paradoxical situation as simply the way things are. Particularly when not meditating formally, Ondine still experienced times when subject-object consciousness was still as it was before she began meditating, that is, there appeared to be a boundary that goes unquestioned. These kinds of experience intimated to her the unreliability of our ordinary perceptions. At times there was the sense that mind was creating experience. Ondine’s experience suggested to her the importance of how attention is focused. In particular looking inward produced the experience of an expansiveness of mind and the realization that everything was insubstantial and connected. “It’s all the same stuff,” she writes. Sometimes the insubstantiality was the stronger quality while at others the interconnectedness predominated. When only looking outward this natural expansive and insubstantial quality could be overlooked. The primary affective or emotional tone experienced in these 10 day of exercises was one of calmness and peacefulness. At times there were also feelings of pleasure, happiness and contentment. During the one day when it was hard to concentrate on the inquiry activity, these feelings were replaced by frustration. As such, the feelings of calmness (“the mind isn’t chatting”), happiness and contentment seemed associated with the experience of the various flavors of participatory consciousness. The pleasurable states and the calm peaceful states seemed be especially associated with boundarylessness and expansiveness of mind. With the experience of insubstantiality calm, peaceful quality of mind but not the happy or contented quality was mentioned. During the Follow-up interview, Ondine commented that she hadn’t made that connection herself but conceded that it might be true. Ondine reported that her practice now often involves turning to look to see if she can find this calm, peaceful feeling, “that experience of acceptance,” characteristic of participatory consciousness in the midst of what might be called “bad” or “negative” experiences. “And,” she says, “you can.” No visionary kinds of imagery were experienced by Ondine during the inquiries. However at one point, recitation of phrases characteristic of the Buddhist practice of Mettā, or Loving Kindness, did spontaneously arise. In addition, Ondine reported that when she was able to hold both the looking inwards and the looking outwards attentions simultaneously, there was the sense of spontaneously knowing what to do or not to do in any situation. She seemed to associate this latter experience with subtle energy.

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Revised Summary for Twyla

Twyla was quite stable in the experience of participatory consciousness that was without boundaries in her formal meditation practice. She described her experience of the object as a vivid immediacy. She experimented in several ways with the position of the object. When she removed her glasses the object blended in more with the cloth on her altar. When she placed the object on a mirror, there was less distraction with the background and her focus on the object grew stronger. However, even with the distracting, patterned background, the boundaryless immediacy of seeing was stable. Multi-tasking by adding a mantra recitation also resulted in no change in the immediacy of the experience. Relative to affects/emotional states, Twyla reported generally being calm, peaceful, and contented. During the tenth session compassion arose. Physically, relaxation and ease tended to increase as a session progressed. Sometimes there was the experience of bliss, which she described a subtle energy experience. Twyla experienced various kinds of imagery, including memories of her travels to places around the world, including Tibet, as well as scenes from nature. One unusual image was that of pine needles growing on her arms. During one session she experienced a yellow square and a green half circle. Sometimes as she focused on her visual object the colors would shift or the object would glow, occasionally emitting ribbons of light. During sitting meditation, her visual field consistently appeared to be “less solid than ordinary (visual) perception.” Twyla described this quality of experience as “a fluid fuzziness not unlike an impressionist painting.” Twyla mentioned one specific nyam, (Tibetan for ‘meditation occurrence’) , that of the Vajra Chain, which is a constant feature of her experience whether in formal meditation or not.

Revised Summary for Thomas

Thomas founds his experience divided into three aspects, the visual object, ‘the openness,’ which he also seemed to call ‘Mind,’ and ‘the (middle) point that separates.’ Initially this middle aspect was the ‘me’ and included the senses, that which generated thought and that which evaluated the experience. In the summary statement Thomas said that when he “let(s) go of the ‘me’ then it is two fields of energy that blend in and out of each other.” The body itself seemed to be a kind of filter-like boundary. He noted that “this physical ‘me’ acts as an interpreter and even a creator.” Yet when Thomas allowed the body to “soften and become part of the openness ... When I let go and let it all flow, the body started to move as if it were a plant waving under water.” Sometimes as this middle boundary between the visual field and the knower started to soften and the experience of it became simpler, it was as if he is “look(ing) at the point where dualism takes place.” When it was made the focus of mindful investigation, this boundary region became more like light or cloudlike than a distinct line of demarcation. At other times Thomas reported taking a vantage point in which all three, Mind, object and the point that separates, were held in awareness together. As the days went by, the sense of the boundary shifted to be more like a portal of some kind, a

257 window. He wrote that the exploration of this boundary phenomenon “is like looking through a window and then looking at the window.” He further commented that there was developing for him a shift in his way of relating to the physical body in meditation from being simply an object of mindfulness to that of being “a portal or filter between the objects and the mind.” Yet this boundary function also was there when it was the body that is being attended to (instead of a visual image.) He saw the boundary as essentially part of his physical self, not his spiritual self. Yet he also described this portal aspect of the body as separate from the body. It functions to “keep the two (physical and spiritual selves) apart most of the time.” “The boundary is where creativity took place.” he writes, “It’s as if, though, there’s all this energy on the one side, then there is this boundary or opening or filter and then there is open mind, and open mind, for some reason, has created this physical reality and the explanation of that and the activity of that is in the boundary, is in this portal, is in this opening. That’s when the act takes place as a consciousness. ... (creating) the physical reality, enlivening it so to speak.” Yet for Thomas, without the physical body, the boundary and this filtering, creative function were non-existent. Eventually the experience became more open and free flowing in which the boundary was just part of the openness and flow. Letting go of the focus on the boundary, Thomas experienced “a rich heart experience. It was as if the boundary investigation has become a warm up.” The investigation helped him to open into the Mahamudra experience. By this he seemeed to mean that the analytical, experiential investigation of the boundary phenomena in some way helped the mind to let go more quickly. Regarding the experience of Mahamudra which this catalyzed, he says it was the experience “of. being was much larger and being aware of the open mind as well as the physical reality watching the two blend and move in and out of each other.” He saw this as a form of participatory consciousness where there was no longer a delusionary sense of a self. Thomas also saw this range of experience as related to what he called ‘psychic reality’ in which “images come and go, like in dreams. … When I sat and really looked at, actually first generated a boundary, to where I could actually see something … at first it was like a dark opening and it was like it had all these wires and tubes going to the heart and then as this thing progressed they became alive, they became the tentacles.” During the last few days subtle energy phenomena dominated the experience, he wrote: “All around the lens there was a weaving of tentacles of light. Each one seemed to carry a story. After awhile they wove into a bright ring of light that blended into the openness. … It was as if I was seeing nerve endings all around the act of seeing.” This aspect, he said, was not Mahamudra. It was not a letting go, but it seemed to be associated with this layer of phenomena where the experience of Mahamudra was accessible. Also of note, on the last day Thomas described energy flowing “from the front to the back.” The insight arose that when “when I am in the physical me completely, all the decisions that I make are a reactionary closed system. When I am in openness almost all of those thoughts and reactions seem limited and self-perpetuating. … It is as if there is this openness that includes this closed system and then buys into it.” Seeing all this helped him to clarify mindfulness. He also noted that it took more energy to remain in the closed system than in openness. Thomas saw this area of investigation as somehow including a creative dimension in which samsāra was maintained. Acknowledging his own role in the construction of the boundary seemed to make it easier to remain simply “in the knower,” which was a kind of “detachment from the physical self.” A second

258 statement about the effect of noticing this creative aspect suggested a different image in which “the open mind blends with the physical. It all becomes mind.” Thomas reported suspecting that this same kind of investigation could be done with all of the senses, in fact with all of the eight consciousnesses (the six sensory consciousness plus the underlying persistent sense of self, or klesha consciousness and the alaya, or storehouse, consciousness.) Later he further wondered how this exploration might be used in other forms of visual experience such as visualization practice and in dreams. In his dreams he reported he hadn’t yet been successful in applying this practice. “I can look at the dream objects and I can look at me looking at the dream objects but so far I can’t let go.” (This practitioner had practiced dream yoga or lucid dreaming, that is the cultivation of the ability to know that he is dreaming while he is dreaming, as part of his spiritual path from an early age.) He noted his suspicion that this inquiry exercise was purifying some specific part of our psyche and wonders what change it will catalyze. Thomas described various affective states including calmness, enjoyment, fun, and frustration. He expressed some concern that emotions had been closed down by the “matter of fact side” of this exploration. Yet in his summary he described a subtle sense that “there is deeper emotion coming to the surface.” He interpreted this to mean that a new round of growth is emerging that will involve a “letting go of another layer of false identity.” The tiredness he felt during the inquiry period suggested to him that there was an energy blocked here having to do with this emerging emotion and suggested that there will be a commensurate freedom once it has been worked through. While this challenging emotion seemed to be emerging there was nonetheless a lightness of the heart. He felt more access to “the awareness that is outside of it all.” He was less caught in his usual mental patterns and therefore more available to others in his life. Thomas noted that during his first session the image of his Tibetan teacher “was in and out of the process smiling and supportive.” At times during his explorations Thomas experienced “flashes of a more pure way of seeing, almost a dream world.” The exercise seemed to help him see the physical more as a dream. At one point he experienced the visual field as “a contained ball with its own limits or boundary.” Later he seemed to call this the “bubble of reality” which was created by a being and included a feedback and interpretation system while all the while “the knower watches.” Thomas noticed various kinds of physical experiences including tightness and loosening in the eyes and parts head, neck and upper torso, as well as a shaking and nodding of the head. He also described a lot of subtle energy experiences, particularly mentioning the region of the head, suggesting that “a clearing (of) this area of vision and its relationship to the heart is involved.” He experienced a fair amount of bodily movement which he interprets “as if energy is trying to get out.” He further commented relative to his energy experiences that “Most of it was subtle energy as if looking for a path.” On one occasion when the shaking ended he described his heart as opening into a fullness.

Revised Summary for Fortune

There are several themes that stood out in Fortune’s reports of what happened when she looked for a boundary. Initially she experienced a “connecting link” between

259 herself and the visual object. At times the link was what she called the “energy/air” then later the “energy/space” and finally just the “space” between herself and the object. During one of the last few sessions which were characterized by this awareness of space she also reported experiencing less bodily awareness. At other times she seemed to be describing something “extending from the eyes to the object” which on one particular occasion served to link “eyes-object-mind.” During two sessions she experienced a particularly acute mindfulness of the space between herself and the visual object such that it was as if the object was “floating in space.” This experience also seemed to be accompanied by a sense of fluidity of both the object and herself. Initially in the experience of this link there was no clear boundary. Then Fortune discovered that the edge of the object constituted a boundary. As time went, on this boundary was also often described as the “softening edge of the object.” Fortune experimented with several variations on the inquiry practice. Two variations involved looking at other visual objects, including during that day when the object seemed to be floating in space. During this session, when she looked around at other objects, they too seemed to be floating. Fortune also experimented on the last few days with two different ways of engaging the object: “reaching out with awareness to the object” and “allowing the object to come into my awareness.” She noticed a subtle tension in the former that wasn’t in the latter, a tension she identified with the concept of grasping, a Buddhist term for our tendency to try to “take hold” of aspects of our experience. She expressed her preference for “allowing the object to come into my awareness” because it lacked the subtle tension of the “reaching out” towards the object. Two curiosities arose for this Fortune. A practice she had recently engaged in on a long intensive retreat, that of seeing the “elemental level” of both object and herself, spontaneously arose for her during the inquiry. She found herself curious if it was a memory returning from that retreat or if she was experiencing it anew. At another point she asked herself the question: “The knower and the known, what is the difference?” This participant also found herself returning to the inquiry at times during her daily activities. She reported that such moments helped her stay in touch with such familiar insights as: “the fluidity of life, everything is changing, everything is in motion” and “the eye sees only color and shape, the mind knows what we have labeled it.” It was this impact on her daily life that Fortune felt was the most significant to her as a result of her 10 days of inquiry. Fortune reported one imaginal structure, that of wanting to be a good meditator, which seemed to arise paradoxically with the understanding that there was no right answer or right way to do the practice. Although Fortune reported no imagery arising during the inquiry sessions, the night before her final day of inquiry she had a dream just before she woke up in the AM. In this dream she was doing the inquiry. During this dream practice the boundary at the object was particularly soft.

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Revised Summary for Finley

Finley reported that he generally has a strong and stable samādhi, or concentration, component to his formal sitting practice. He described beginning the inquiry by wondering about the term “boundary.” In his own experience he was unable to find a boundary between knower and visual object, that is, a place “where one ends and the other begins,” but nonetheless did, at times, continue to distinguish between these two elements of experience. At other times the distinction between them disappeared. Given his consistent inability to find a boundary, Finley reported that his exploration during his 10 days of inquiry often took other, related directions. He described three distinct ways of using attention as he applied the inquiry. First he could focus attention on the visual object. Second he could focus attention on the knower. Third he could let go of either of these specific foci. When he focused on the knower the sharpness of the experience of the object diminished. Likewise when he focused on the object, the awareness of the knower was weakened. When he would focus on neither, he was no longer able to distinguish between the two. There was the experience of knowing but in this knowing he could not find a knower. As he put it “There was still the visual experience, which is conscious experience, but not an experience of a knower distinct from the known … .” The separation between the knower and the known had disappeared. There was instead just “the experience of seeing.” He conjectured that perhaps this is what is meant in the Buddhist literature by “eye consciousness.” At one point Finley noted that he was unable to account for how or why the distinction between the knower and the object fell away. However this occurred over and over again for him whenever he withdrew focus of attention from both the knower and the object. He also observed that the transition to the experience of the loss of distinction between knower and known seemed to involve “some sort of letting go or ‘dropping back’.” Finley noted that his meditation sessions tended to involve two flavors of experience. One flavor, was that of participatory consciousness in which the distinction between knower and know was not active. He would tend to hang out in this experience but then remembered that he was supposed to be practicing inquiry. He would then return to active investigation. This return to active investigation had the effect of pulling him out of participatory consciousness. Having thus returned to actively looking for a knower, he again found none. This experience brought him “back into the experience in which the separation between the knower and the object disappeared.” Sometimes this happened spontaneously when it became clear that the knower could not be found. At other times, he more consciously let go of the activity of inquiry resulting in reverting back to the inseparability of knower and known. He commented that the activity of investigation involved a doing and hence a doer. He equated this doing/doer with the knower. The ‘doing’ of the active investigation recreated the felt sense of a separate knower. Relative to experience where the division into knower and known object disappeared, he further commented that “the sense of self gets quite thin, even while experience is clear and sharp.” He explained that by this he meant that he remained open the possibility that there were subtle forms of self that he was still not seeing in these states where there was no distinction between knower and known.

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In subsequent sessions, Finley noticed that “as concentration strengthens the distinction between knowing/knower and object lessens.” He became curious about how he was able to distinguish between these two, concluding that a problem with language was at work. According to Finley, the word ‘knower’ has no referent that can be found in his direct experience. The object, on the other hand, can be found but simply as an aspect of the make-up of the whole of visual experience. Logically, to Finley, it made sense “that there is an object and a knowing of that object” but as the mind became more still with increased concentration, his direct experience was that “there are not two things, object and knower. There is just one thing, visual experience.” He further noted that the particular object seemed not to matter. If one removed the object nonetheless visual experience or visual consciousness would persist, “except the makeup of the experience would be different.” He said that to say this sounds profound yet it was quite close and deep as an experience. Finley noted that the activity of inquiry tended to pull him out of deeper levels of concentration resulting in the reappearance of the experience of distinct knower and object, a distinction that tended to disappear again the more still the mind became. There were two main kinds of experience with some sense of a transitional quality of experience between them. Initially there seemed to be a distinction between knower and visual object. As the mind became more concentrated that distinction fell away leaving only the experience of seeing in which there was no distinction between knower and known object. There was no knower, just the object and the knowing of it, experienced as not distinct from each other. Finley also reported transition phases between these two main forms of experience in which there remained a distinction between knower and known but this distinction was not one characterized by their being physically ‘separate’. Although Finley reported no experience of imagery, nonetheless it is interesting that his experience of the visual object sometimes changed significantly during a session of inquiry. In his description of his first daily inquiry session he wrote about this shift in his experience of his chosen visual object, a meditation bell, as follows:

Initially there was a sense of “bell.” Not verbally, not words in the mind, but the idea of “bell” was there. After 8 – 10 minutes I noticed that the notion of “bell” was absent and there was just light, color, and shadow. It wasn’t that the image changed – it looked the same - but that the perception of it as a bell dropped away. There was just the visual experience consisting of light and color. Also, my mind began more narrowly focused on the visual object, and, while remaining with the object, a sense of expansiveness grew over the 15 minutes.

When asked about the relationship between this shift in perception relative to the shift to participatory consciousness he described, Finley said that the two were intimately related. The falling away of the conceptual sense of “bell” coincided with the shift to experience in which there was no distinction between knower and object. He noted that his reports emphasized the shift to participatory consciousness because his awareness was more focused on the aspect of consciousness than on the aspect of perception. It is of note that Finley reported that the issue of conceptual designation is significant relative to how he experienced both the subject, or knower, and the object, yet in different ways. For the knower he found that there was actually no directly experienceable referent to which the conceptual designation “knower” applied. The

262 conceptual designation was there, it seemed, to create the impression that it actually had a referent. Relative to the object, he found that when the conceptual designation of “bell” fell away as an aspect of his visual experience, there was a shift in the experience of the object. It was experienced as “light, color, and shadow.” With the loss of conceptual designation the object did not disappear but how it appeared, how it was understood, changed. On the second day he noticed another shift in the experience of the visual object, this time one affecting his spatial relationship to the object: “about half way through the session I noticed that the sense of distance between me and the bell I was watching disappeared. It was just floating in my visual sense, but almost seemed inside me. Hard to explain.” He later realized that he had the ability to shift between the perception of a separating distance and there being no distance. However when he made no conscious effort in this way, he found that he naturally fell into the experience of there being no distance. When questioned about this shift, he acknowledges that this shift was also an important part of the shift from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness in which there is no distinction between knower and known. He notes that the loss of spatial separation is a very strong element of the shift to participatory consciousness. In fact these two, the shift in spatial relationship between knower and object and the falling away of the idea of “bell,” were both reported as occurring during the same period of practice in Finley’s Day Two report. During the first five days Finley noticed a pleasant energetic sensation throughout the body that at times became quite blissful. But this blissful experience seemed to be absent during his last five days of inquiry. This report of bliss was Finley’s only report of emotional states. However he did seem to indicate a signifcant degree of interest in the inquiry. At times a strong quality of equanimity seemed to be present when his concentration was strong. Finley reported that subtle energy experiences were occurring during his inquiry but that they were not different from those that usually occur for him during formal sitting practice sessions. When describing the overall significance of the experience, Finley noted that the relative ease with which the experience of subject-object consciousness shifted into participatory consciousness was the most significant aspect of his ten day inquiry. He wrote: “It became clear that this (participatory consciousness) is not a far away experience, and, in fact, I can drop into that awareness fairly easily during times when my mind is able to become quiet and still.”

Revised Summary for Simone

Simone has a stable practice in which the Buddhist practice of resting the mind occurs very naturally and without effort in her formal sitting practice. In this resting state she founds no boundary between herself as the subject and the visual object. When she made the effort to specifically focus on the object itself, the quality of being open to all experience narrowed but the underlying resting of mind was never lost. Shifting back and forth between different objects also produced no change in the experience of boundarylessness. This also was true when Simone tried doing

263 the practice in a noisy environment, which had no impact on her experience that there was no boundary between the knowing and the visual object. On day nine Simone wondered “if there is a gross or subtle sense of ‘I’ or does it fall away and re-emerge?” In the asking of the question a subtle sense of ‘I’ did emerge, however when Simone turned to look directly at this subtle sense of self, the self couldn’t be found. In this insight her experience returned to the quality of resting in the nature of mind. She interpreted this as meaning that there is a freedom from grasping. Simone reported no insights or curiosities, no affects or emotions, no imagery, and no bodily sensations of note. She did report that while meditating with this open quality of mind, when the mind rests, there was the recognition of the presence of subtle energy and that it too was just experience arising. Subtle energy happens when the mind is thus at rest. She ended by saying that this open awareness itself was a ‘subtle energy.’ She wrote that the term ‘subtle energy’ is for her “the best way to describe the shift that happens when the mind rests, nothing to control, not wanting anything special, no preferences, etc., just resting whether on an object or not doesn’t matter. It is just the result of being open to whatever arises and seeing its empty nature, thus a boundarylessness.”

Revised Summary for Serena

Serena experienced a fluidity if consciousness, moving fairly easily back and forth between various forms of knowing. In one version of consciousness there seemed to be a clear distinction between knowing subject and known object with a boundary separating them. When continuing in this mode with attention to the boundary, the boundary tended to become diffuse or dissolve altogether. Serena found she could intentionally move back and forth between states where there was the experience of boundary between subject and object and others where there was no boundary. In this shifting back and forth she described beginning to see how the boundary and the sense of separation were created as an aspect of the process of visual perception. In these moments she described the boundary as an “appearance.” She noted that maintaining this created boundary seems to take some effort as well as involving the establishment of a reference point. Serena further noted that she was less aware of her body when the sense of separation was more pronounced. In another version of knowing for Serena, there was no distinct boundary. Nonetheless the knowing subject and known object did appear separate in a vague way. At other times there was the sense of the known object and the knowing mind not being different. In one session this feeling of not being separate from the object gave rise to some anxiety at which point the sense of there being a boundary was restored. Over time in a given session, the tendency was for experience to shift from that of there being a boundary towards the experience of no boundary. Sometimes this boundaryless experience included a sense of vast space. Serena writes: “(I) felt a real softness and spaciousness that included the meditation object yet the object also appeared distinct. (I) shifted my focus (between an) awareness of spaciousness that appeared vast and the object experienced as having distinct boundaries.”

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In still other versions the object was sometimes felt to be an extension of the mind, with mind creating the visual field. She wrote “The object seemed like it wasn’t different from my perception and from me as the subject.” Yet this insight seemed to go against the sense that the object still appeared separate and discrete in some way. Shifting to an awareness of being seemed to ease this apparent paradox. Serena then practiced shifting back and forth between these two perspectives, the awareness of the apparent solidity of the object and the awareness of being. In doing so the object began to appear less solid. Serena also mentioned shifting attention back and forth between the “boundaries of the object” and awareness. Serena seemed to begin to see solidity as a mode of appearance, over the creation of which she had some control. It was no longer simply just “the way things are” for her. Serena experimented with shifting her focus from the object to a more panoramic viewing of the entire visual field which she found more restful than focusing on the object. In this more panoramic mode of knowing the experience was given the freedom to reveal itself more fully. The availability of the boundaryless qualities of consciousness varied from day to day for Serena. By her own account in her summary, there “seemed to be a progression in my practice to feeling more centered awareness and investigation became finer.” As an outsider reading her accounts, the shift seemed to begin with an initial experience of a separateness between subject and object. She then began to encounter experiences in which the boundary between subject and object lost its clarity while simultaneously these two aspects of experience nonetheless appeared somehow to remain separate and distinct, an experience colored by a sense of spaciousness. This experience was followed by that of the recognition that the object was an extension of mind or subject, an experience in which the object still seemed to retain some paradoxical quality of distinctness and solidity. As experience deepened the object began to lose its solidity. At this point the whole field including the subject aspects and the object aspects seemed to have more of an energetic, insubstantial nature than to be anything solid. The last stage of this progression seemed to come during the last day’s inquiry. Initially her experience during Session 10 seemed to revert to the more subject-object form of consciousness in which “the boundary felt more solid, myself and the object more distinct…perception more conceptual.” In this experience she found herself “trying to recreate a prior experience.” As she continued she found herself “looking for any sense of freshness in the moment of perception and considering that my experience of solidity and (my) trying to recreate a prior experience was the experience…my projection creating perception…mind creating the story….awareness arising shining light on the experience of mind that wants to perceive and relate to it as real when it is just mind.” About this experience she wrote that she found it “curious that I turned an experience of solidity, and seemingly not very meditative, into an experience of mind…awareness met with some clarity to reveal some direct understanding of mind.” In her summary se seems to be referring to this experience when she describes “seeing my mind create boundary and resting in awareness of seeing the creation.” This change occurred when she “shifted from seeing the object without awareness to perceiving the object with awareness.” This seemed to be a meta perspective in which even subject-object consciousness is seen to arise within and as an aspect of a larger participatory field of awareness. This felt to be a further deepening of the process.

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Concerning emotion and affect, this inquiry exercise elicited some initial boredom, frustration, and an inner critic’s voice which wondered if she was doing the exercise right. Then as the experience that the boundary was created by the self became clearer, there were occasional moments of anxiety and resistance to that insight. Later as the insight deepened, it brought a pleasurable sense of being centered. Yet at times there was also some attachment to the experience of being centered and to the emerging experience of the subject and object not being different from mind, and the ability to let go of that attachment. In her summary she reported that the “sense of ease and centeredness in my ability to hold awareness and investigate my experience was satisfying. (I) felt less confined within boundaries of my own creation.” Serena experienced some experiences of imagery. In one session she reported some experience of light and vibration. In another there was a memory of Christmases past catalyzed by the fragrance of a candle. Most intriguing was her ninth day report that she could “almost see the energy field.” She found this experience difficult to put into words. Initially Serena wasn’t quite sure what the term ‘subtle energy’ referred to. Then as her sessions progressed she began reporting various subtle energy experiences. First she noticed a shift in energy as an expression of the difference between holding a boundary and the relaxation of letting go of it. In this holding, which involved a kind of effort, she discovered a tension. Further examining the experience of holding and the tension therein she discovered that what she was holding was a reference point. This thus described this process as one of coming to an insight into the dynamics of holding a reference point. There was “certain tension in maintaining a reference point” and holding that reference point was coloring her experience. Then she began to experience herself more as an energy being while the object retained its sense of solidity. Next, when her experience shifted such that she experienced the object and the sense of self as expressions of mind, the whole of experience including both subject and object aspects seemed to be more that of energy than of anything solid. Finally on day nine she reported that awareness itself seemed to “(have) a certain energy sensation.” Also on this day she reports “tingling spaciousness, energy sensations on the top of my head.” In her summary, Serena reports feeling “energy around myself, the object and surrounding area.”

Revised Summary for Eileen

Eileen explored various possibilities for the boundary between the knower and the seen visual object. She described experiencing herself as “an energy area of movement, pulsation, in a ’Body’ that has no clear boundary, but a feeling of ‘inside’ whereas the object seems ‘outside’ of that.” She moved back and forth between the felt sense of the body and the visual, from inside to outside but still could not grasp the boundary. She discovered that she could be aware of this felt sense and visual experience, inner and outer, at the same time. The knower knew the body, the person and the visual object all simultaneously yet could not really separate them. She especially noted the inseparability of seeing and object. At times it seemed to her that the knower had no location at all. This experience felt expansive and insubstantial. At others times, it was as if the object was

266 experienced as inside her. She explored the possibility that the boundary was at the eyes where some kind of transition occurred in that on one side she found the visual field while on the other side she could not ‘see’ but rather ‘felt’ her body. It made sense to her that there should be a boundary there, but she was unable to find a clear boundary in her own direct experience. Eileen noticed that the object, however, did seem to have boundaries that separated it from other objects in the visual field, including the air or space. While there was no separation between the object and the seeing of it, nonetheless the object did stand out from the space around it with a 3-D quality. She saw this kind of boundary as made up of colors, lines, and textures. She further commented that the outer surface of the object functioned as a boundary which prevented her from seeing its inside. But when she turned to the body, she could not find a clear boundary except when she held up her hand and looked at it as a visual object. Then the hand, as a part of the body, seemed to have the same boundary qualities as other visual objects and appeared separate from other visual objects. Eileen noticed that the body and the visual object seemed to arise in the same space though at different sense gates, while the space itself in which they arose could not be grasped. In this experience she found no knower or self. At times she experienced this space as a kind of boundary, as that which separates her body or eyes from the visual object. During several sessions she reached the conclusion that there was no boundary or knower even while still experienced the sensations of body and the visual image. She found relief in this insight and the quiet, peaceful, open quality of her experience of seeing that was evoked, which then included the other senses as well: “body sensations, sounds, (and) thoughts.” The different sense gates arose in the same space. She called this mode of experience “resting in the awareness” and wondered if this knowerless awareness has a limit. On one occasion she described this mode of experience as being associated with “a sense of gently falling, me and the object and the whole bubble of experience, floating/falling.” Eileen also explored different ways of focusing her vision. She shifted her focus to include the background, then shifted again to attend to the space between the eyes and the visual object. This latter shift resulted in multiple images of the object that seemed insubstantial. Through her explorations of shifting her visual focus she concluded that the apparent solidity of the object was actually a consequence of how the eye was focused in relation to the object. The eye and object were involved in a kind of dance which resulted in the object’s apparent solidity. One day she explored turning out the light. Noting that the visual object disappeared, she also concluded that the object doesn’t exist without her awareness, then wondered about calling the awareness “hers.” In another form of experimentation, with her eyes closed she visualized the object, which she then experienced to be inside her body but not felt like the body, rather insubstantial, more like a mirage. She noticed that when the object was visualized inwardly she could alter its position, shape, and size at will. These explorations of different ways to focus on the visual object led her to the conclusion that “… perception and its objects are inseparable, dependant on each other, how seamless it is, and how impossible to figure out.” Reporting a range of emotional overtones in her practice from “slightly unsettled,” “uneasiness,” “frustration,” and “constriction,” to “relief,” “peaceful appreciation,” and “joy/freedom,” Eileen offered a clear image of association connecting her emotions to the particulars of her practice. She wrote that this emotional spectrum from one pole of “frustration/pain/uneasiness” to the other of lightness/joy/spaciousness”

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“seemed in direct relationship to how narrowly I focused on object/task.” A narrow focus resulted in the more unpleasant end of the spectrum while a more open, relaxed focus brought lightness and joy. She described the “subtle strain in maintaining the narrow focus, contrasted with the relief of open awareness.” She reported a parallel range of bodily sensations and, in her Ten-Day Summary, suggested that the same associations with the quality of focus also applied to this spectrum of physical experience. She wondered if the strain of the narrow focus is particular to her, or perhaps is “more universally the pain of left brain perception, or even the effort of upholding illusion.” Eileen described the visual field as “a small, highly charged bubble inside a vast, dark sea that was all inside me.” She described the experience of fixing her gaze on the object as like the creation of an anchor around which the universe arranged itself, dancing its dance for that moment with (the object) as (its) center.” She notes that “we choose such a center moment to moment.” At one point she experienced a kind of expansion to a way of knowing in which body, self, and object are all known simultaneously, finding this experience to be freeing and joyful. When all was said and done, in her summary report, Eileen wrote: “No boundary (is) found. After exploring the outline of object, the surface of eyes and the space (between), I conclude that it all arises simultaneously in awareness without separation.”

Statements Interpreted as Indicating Participatory Consciousness

Except where indicated below, the following participant written statements were in response to the Daily Journal question: “When I look for the boundary between myself and what is seen (describe what happens):”

Some participants used the same or very similar answers on multiple days. For others, there were several statements for the same day that indicated the presence of participatory consciousness. As such, the number of statements listed below for each participant does not necessarily match the number of days for which that participant experienced participatory consciousness as enumerated in the table in at the end of this Appendix below. This list is also not meant to be exhaustive of all the statements interpreted as indicating participatory consciousness but a representative selection of thereof.

Statements are listed according to whether they were judged to be clear evidence for participatory consciousness or ambiguous evidence. For some participants, examples of statements that were deemed not to support a conclusion of participatory consciousness are also listed. In some instances, there were both clear and ambiguous statements on the same day. In that case, the day was judged to be one with clear evidence of participatory consciousness.

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Ondine

Clear

• There is no boundary between the perception and the knowing of it. • I can't find the place or a boundary with the awareness itself—no sense of a perceiver or me as a perceiver)--sense of image and mind as one and the same. • I can't find the boundary of my mind—sense of expansiveness—my mind seems to extend farther than I can see • Lose sense of “I'm seeing” – more like vast mind is experiencing and a sense of mind constructing the experience. • Looking outward, the object appears to be several feet away but where the boundaries are between us, I don't know. Looking inward – loss of sense of anyone looking and nothing of substance found. • If I touch the object would there be a change in the sense of no boundary? No – still don't know where the boundary is. • I realize that I have not said that there is no boundary between looking inward and outward – they occur simultaneously – although we do lose track of the inward when attention is only focused on the outward. In fact, seeing these occur simultaneously is the core of my practice – I call it “paying attention to the outward seeing (otherwise a car might run over you) while at the same time connecting with the inward seeing.” –multi-tasking! (Note: Here Ondine seems to be describing an integration of participatory and subject-object consciousnesses.) • I didn't do much looking for boundaries today – I just enjoyed the space without boundaries. • Looking outward there appears to be a boundary and looking inward where there is no boundary between myself and the object seems totally compatible – both are true – that’s just the way it is. (Again Ondine seems to be suggesting the possibility of an integration of participatory and subject-object consciousness)

Ambiguous

• Looking inward produces the opposite effect – awareness of expansiveness of mind.

Twyla

Clear

• No boundary. Object effortlessly perceived. • (No boundary) perceived. The object is immediately and vividly apparent to me.

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(Researcher Note: Twyla indicated during the Follow-up Interview that she encountered the same kind of experience in each of her periods of inquiry which is stable for her in her formal sitting meditation practice. (See Appendix 15.) She further clarified that this vivid immediacy is characterized by the experience of “no separation between the knowing and the image (of the visual object and including its background).”

Thomas

Clear

• Then I let it all go and it was all open flowing and the idea of a boundary was part of that openness and free flowing. • After a while (the tentacles around the lens/boundary) wove into a bright ring of light that blended into the openness. (Researcher’s note: During the Follow-up Interview, Thomas indicated that this experience involved the flowing together of the open mind and the physical as in the statement below.) • I just let go of all the boundaries and let it all flow together and went back to a rich heart experience. (In response to the question: “Describe any new avenues of investigation (if any) that you pursued:”) • There is a lessening of the visual hold when the open mind blends with the physical, it all becomes mind. (In response to the question: “Report any insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen:”)

Ambiguous

• (The boundary) seemed more like a portal. It was light itself, more a cloud than a line. • It is as if there is this openness that includes this closed system and then buys into it. (In response to the question: “Describe any imagery that was evoked:”)

Not counted as participatory consciousness

• (too ambiguous) So this meant that the mass of senses including the evaluator and the thought generator were all the boundary. Open spaciousness then Physical me then the object. The physical me acts as an interpreter and even a creator. • (too ambiguous) The distinction between Mind and object sharpened and then grew softer. I was able to stay at the middle point longer and then relax with it sooner. To watch both and the point that separates mind and object. • (too ambiguous) I started to look at the boundary between the field and the knower and there is a distinction between the two, but it started to soften.

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Fortune

Clear

• Awareness of a connecting link extending from my eyes to the object. • Sense the energy/air connecting myself and the object. There is no hard boundary. • Sense the energy/air connecting myself and the object can’t find a boundary just a knowing there is an object and there is the seeing of the object. Sense of the link from eyes-object-mind • Awareness of a connecting link extending from my eyes to the object. I realize the boundary is the edge of the object. • Awareness of a connecting link extending from my eyes to the object and the boundary is the softening edge of the object.

Ambiguous (Researcher’s note: The following statements were judged ambiguous as opposed to being counted as an absence of evidence, in light of their similarity to the Clear statements above, which were written for days preceding those for which the following statements were recorded.)

• Awareness of space between my eyes and object as though object was floating in space. • I sense the energy/space between self and object. The boundary is the edge of the object. • Aware of the space between myself and the object, the boundary being the edge of the object. The edge of the object seemed softer

Finley

Clear

• I could never find the boundary, the point or place where one ends and the other begins. I could, at times, discern the distinction between the two, while at other times that distinction disappeared • I could no longer distinguish between the knower and the object. There was a sense of one thing, which is the experience of seeing. • I can now easily and immediately move between highlighting awareness of the knower or of the object, and losing the sense of a distinction between the knower and the object. • I quickly lost the experience of separation between the knower and the object. • As the mind gets more still, from a purely experiential perspective (not rational understanding) there are not two things, object and knower. There is just one thing, visual experience.

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Ambiguous

• I was back into the experience in which knower and object are not so separate. • I can change the perception of physical space between myself and the visual object, between having a sense of the distance and having no sense of the distance.

Simone

(Researcher Note: Simone indicated during the Follow-up Interview that all the responses listed below referred to the same kind of experience which is stable for her in her formal sitting meditation practice. See Appendix 15.)

Clear

• A boundary cannot be found. Even though the object is “seen” it is a part of the whole experience. • No boundary found. • Mind rests. • None (boundary) can be found • Just open awareness

Serena

Clear

• Can shift between seeing the boundary and not seeing it. • There is resting in awareness of being with the object not separate from the subject and there is creation of separation. • I see the visual perception creating the appearance of a boundary. … The appearance of the boundary flows in and out of awareness … continue to investigate. (The second sentence was in response to the question “Describe any new avenues of investigation (if any) that you pursued:”) • Experienced the object as more of an extension of my mind. • The object seemed like it wasn’t different from my perception and from me as the subject • A sense of boundary sometimes distinct other times seems to dissolve

Ambiguous

• At times I see a distinct difference between me and the object then over time the boundary becomes more diffuse.

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• Experienced object as more solid and myself as subject as more of an energy being with less distinct boundaries. • When I shifted my attention to awareness the object appeared included in spaciousness

Not counted as participatory consciousness

• (too ambiguous) I found it easier to rest in mindful awareness of the entire field. (In response to the question: “Describe any new avenues of investigation (if any) that you pursued:”) • (too ambiguous) curious that I turned an experience of solidity and seemingly not very meditative into an experience of mind…awareness met with some clarity to reveal some direct understanding of mind. (In response to the question: “Report any insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen):”) • (too ambiguous) shift in perception happened when I shifted from seeing the object without awareness to perceiving the object with awareness (In response to the question: “Describe any shifts in perception that occurred:”

Eileen

Clear

• No boundary, no knower. • Finding no boundary. • There is no separation between the object and the seeing.

Ambiguous

• Knowing that has no location. • When I look at the object I don’t see any boundary. I see the outline against the background and perceive the space between “me” and it. “Me” is experienced as an energy area of movement, pulsation in a “Body” that has no clear boundary, but a feeling of “inside” whereas the object seems “outside “of that. (Researcher’s note: While this statement shows that the participant found no boundary, there is also indication that there is a perceived space between herself and the object. She doesn’t indicate whether or not this space has a connecting or separating quality. I therefore chose to count this report among the ambiguous days.) • Hard to find a boundary between the visual field and the body. • Awareness including all of it, but differentiated, shifting from felt sense to visual when moving focus from “inside” to “outside”, but I can’t grasp exactly where the boundary is. Can have simultaneous awareness of both. (In response to the question: “Report any insights or areas of curiosity that have arisen (if not included in 2 or 3 above):”)

Table 1 - Day-to-Day of Evidence of Participatory Consciousness Experience

Participant Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total Ondine yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes 9/0/1 Twyla yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes 10/0/0 Thomas amb yes no amb no no no yes yes no 3/2/5 Fortune yes yes yes yes yes amb amb yes amb amb 6/4/0 Finley yes yes yes yes yes yes yes amb amb amb 7/3/0 Simone yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes 10/0/0 Serena no yes yes yes amb yes yes yes yes no 7/2/1 Eileen yes no amb amb yes yes no yes no yes 5/2/3 Total 6/1/1 7/0/1 5/1/2 6/2/0 6/1/1 61/1 5/1/2 7/1/0 5/2/1 4/2/2 57/13/10 Average 7.1/1.5/ 1.4

Yes – Clear evidence of participatory consciousness Amb – Ambiguous evidence suggestive of participatory consciousness No – No evidence suggestive of participatory consciousness

Total – Yes/Amb/No

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APPENDIX 12

SUMMARY OF LEARNINGS

The topic of this dissertation was the role of subtle energy patterns or images in the structuring of the subject-object orientation of consciousness and their dissolution leading to participatory consciousness. Participants, experienced meditators expert in both mindfulness and concentration meditation, inquired mindfully into the hypothesized subtle energy somatic boundary between subject and object to discover in what ways attending with mindfulness to this boundary would enable openings and shifts towards participatory consciousness. The research hypothesis stated that by mindfully engaging these subtle energy patterns that solidify the subject-object structure of consciousness, this structure would be transmuted, breaking the segregation of knowing, as the subject, from its objects. The realm of participatory consciousness would thus be revealed.

Buddhist Mahamudra theory was the primary theoretical lens.

Mahamudra theory is grounded in the experience of consciousness, appearance, luminosity, emptiness, and primordial awareness. Ignorance about the fundamental nature of experience arises when luminosity predominates over emptiness. Luminosity itself has two aspects, knowing and appearance. When appearance dominates, it obscures the underlying self-cognizant nature of experience resulting in the split into subject and object. Through mindful inquiry, this apparent structured separation into knowing and appearance and then a deeper split into luminosity and emptiness are healed. Primordial awareness is recognized. Literature in Western Psychology about consciousness, human

275 development, and research on Buddhist meditation was reviewed as well as sources on subtle energy. Both the literatures of Buddhism and Imaginal Psychology were then reviewed relative to these topics. There was a gap in the literature regarding analysis of first person reports of meditators expert in both mindful inquiry and concentration exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory consciousness, as well as an absence of experimental literature on this topic from the subtle energy perspective.

The methodology used was Imaginal Inquiry, which involves the evocation, expression, interpretation, and integration of experience. A mindful inquiry exercise, focused on the hypothesized subtle energy boundaries between subject and object was used to evoke the experience of the transition between subject-object and participatory consciousness. Participants applied this inquiry for 15 minutes a day for 10 days, journaling about their experiences. The researcher analyzed their reports, involving the participants in the process by conducting a follow-up interview with each participant that included their input to the researcher’s preliminary findings.

The Cumulative Learning stated that mindfully inquiring into the apparent boundary between subject and object within the context of the Imaginal Inquiry research paradigm was an effective strategy for experientially exploring the transition between subject-object and participatory forms of consciousness as well as the variety of expressions of participatory consciousness. Learning One empirically demonstrates that

Buddhist meditators expert in both concentration and mindful inquiry techniques who focus on the apparent boundary between subject and object have easy access to this realm of participatory consciousness. Most participants encountered some form of participatory experience on the majority of days of their inquiry.

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Learning Two empirically demonstrates that the transition from subject-object consciousness to states where there is no longer a sense of separation between subject and object represents a range of discrete experiences that has a natural sequence. The types of participatory consciousness encountered by participants suggested a categorization into four main types: 1) interconnectedness, in which there was a felt connection/lack of separation between the subject and object, 2) interpenetration in which knowing and the known visual field were experienced to be occupying the same space, 3) insubstantiality in which both appearances and that which knew them were experienced to be insubstantial and 4) primordial awareness, in which there was a seamlessness between all these three kinds of experience. A few practitioners suggested that there was a natural sequence to some of these experiences.

Learning Three proposed that highly talented meditators can, in the context of

Imaginal Inquiry, provide empirical evidence about the details of the process by which subject-object consciousness shifts into participatory modes of experiencing, highlighting the role of attention. Participants reported variously that as their attention shifted away from a narrow focus on the visual object in various ways that their experience in relation to the object transmuted into a participatory mode. These modifications included attending to the apparent boundary between subject and object while seeing, opening to a panoramic focus, turning attention inward or towards the knower, and resting in a focusless manner.

As the converse to Learning Three, Learning Four proposed that highly talented meditators can, in the context of Imaginal Inquiry, provide empirical evidence about the details of the process by which primordial awareness expresses itself as subject-object consciousness. Several participants’ reports included documentation of the underlying

277 structures and subtle changes that led from the participatory range of consciousness to subject-object consciousness. These included a narrowing of attention to the specific visual object and the recognition of a limited, bubble-like visual field within the unbounded vastness of mind itself.

The significance of the learnings was their demonstration of the efficacy of using expert meditators within the context of Imaginal Inquiry to explore the transition between subject-object and participatory form of consciousness. The data analysis revealed the central role of attention in this transition. Although the hypothesis was not adequately supported by the evidence, there were many interesting parallels between participant reports and the researcher’s underlying subtle energy elucidation of the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination. The researcher identified limitations of research design that could account for the fact that the data in support of the role of subtle energy patterning was not more compelling. In addition, proposals for future research modifications which would better test the theory and hypothesis were offered. The lenses of the creation myth along with archetype theory were used to explore the broader meaning of the learnings. This research had implications for those studying perception, attention, projection, consciousness, and the psychological role of subtle energy.

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APPENDIX 13

THE SUBTLE ENERGY DYNAMICS OF DEPENDENT ORIGINATION

By Gary Buck

In the mid to late 70s during the early years of my practice of Buddhist vipassanā or insight meditation, I encountered both numerous kinds of experiential insights as well as various moments of profound opening which brought home to me in an undeniable way a central tenet of the Buddha’s teaching. This tenet, called anattā, or no self, refers to the actuality that there is no inherently existing, substantial entity, which both persists through time and is spatially distinct to which the concept self refers. As undeniable as these openings and insights were, nonetheless the sense-of self, the moment to moment felt impression that there is a self or that I am a self, always returned. I began to wonder how it was that out of the underlying ground of being, which is devoid of any sense-of-self, this illusory yet compelling impression that I am a self does repeatedly arise.

This focus of inquiry became a central feature of my practice for the next twenty years. During that time there were numerous experiential glimpses into the subtle workings of what we might call the mind/body complex, which afforded hints of an answer to my question. Then in the context of a three-month intensive silent meditation retreat devoted to the other primary form of Buddhist meditation, samatha meditation, which develops tranquility and concentration, these various hints, along with a new array of experiential evidence, all came together to form a coherent phenomenological picture

279 of the process involved in the arising of the sense-of-self. What follows is a description of that experiential journey into an understanding of the Buddha’s teaching of paticca samutpada or, as it is most commonly translated into English, Dependent Origination.1

The Practice of the Brahma Vihāras and the Jhānas

I had chosen for this particular retreat to explore practices for the cultivation of samādhi, or the inward collectedness of mind, often translated into English as concentration. Buddhist texts describe samādhi as deepening in quantum-like stages called the jhānas.2 The particular practices I chose to employ for the cultivation of the jhānas are those which develop what the Buddha called the Four Brahma Vihāras, or

Divine Abodes, of lovingkindness (mettā), compassion (karunā), empathic joy (muditā) and equanimity (upekkhā).3 Following traditional Theravadan Buddhist instructions for the cultivation of the Brahma Vihāras, I started my retreat with the intensive practice of mettā or lovingkindness meditation.4 As taught in the Burmese style of Mahasi Sayadaw, the practitioner begins by focusing mettā towards oneself. Phrases which convey the feeling of lovingkindness are repeated in a mantra-like fashion. The feeling of the lovingkindness itself gradually emerges and grows stronger. This feeling then eventually becomes the primary object, or mental focus, for the development of samādhi.

During the course of the practice the teacher is looking for signs that the practitioner’s samādhi is maturing as well as indications of the deepening and broadening of the quality of lovingkindness. As such, instruction is given in a two-dimensional manner. On the one hand, as the quality of lovingkindness develops, the object of the lovingkindness is changed, shifting from oneself first to someone such as a mentor or close friend who is especially deserving of love, then to a person towards whom the meditator feels neutral,

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next to a person towards whom the meditator has negative feelings and finally to various classes of beings on a universal or infinite scale.5

On the other hand, attention is paid to the developing inward collectedness of the mind. As the student shows signs of a depth of samādhi approaching the first jhāna, the teacher instructs the student to begin to make resolves to strengthen, in turn, each of the five mental factors characteristic of the first jhāna.6 These resolves are made at the beginning of each period of sitting. As the factors grow stronger through the cultivation of these resolves, a further resolution is added, that to enter the first jhāna. Once the student begins to have clear experiences of the first jhāna, instruction is given to make resolves to remain in that state, then to remain for predetermined periods and finally to resolve for the higher jhānas. These are the kinds of instructions I received during the first month of my retreat.

Within the first two weeks of my retreat, the resolves took effect. I began to have clear experiences of four successive, quantum-like, levels of samādhi. These shifts in experience were associated with distinct recognition of the particular groupings of mental factors associated with each of the first four jhānas, called the rūpa or fine material jhānas, as described in the Pali Canon. In addition to the experience of the relevant factors enumerated in the texts, these levels of samādhi were, for me, also associated with changes in a particular subjectively felt field of energy within and surrounding my body.

With the arising of the first jhāna, this field of energy, which I generally experience to extend somewhat beyond my physical form, contracted to an egg-like shape roughly the size of my physical body. It extended from the energy center or chakra at the top of my head to the chakra near the base of my spine. With the second jhāna, this field of energy

281 shrank once again until it extended from my third eye chakra to the energy center in my second chakra, just below my navel. The shift to the third jhāna catalyzed a further contraction to a narrow band of energy in my central core that stretched between my throat chakra and my solar plexus. With the fourth jhāna this energy field collapsed completely into my heart chakra.7

The Subjective Experience of Energy

Since the subjective experience of what I am calling ‘energy’ is an important aspect of the phenomenological description of my experience throughout this article, it seems important to explain what I mean by this terminology. I am using the word

‘energy’ to designate that which is felt when a particular range of subtle somatic-like sensations are experienced. In the spiritual literature of Eastern traditions, words such as qi, shakti’ or kundalini are used to portray similar kinds of phenomena. In these traditions, the felt experience of this kind of energy is intensified in certain locations in the body referred to as chakras and flows in certain routes called channels.8 In spiritual traditions of healing, such as the Reiki tradition popular these days in the West, the experience of healing energy is felt as a stream of subtle sensations that enter the healer at the crown of the head, flow downwards to the heart center then out the arms to the hands and into the body of the client. Those with experiences such as these will easily recognize the kind of subtle sensation which I am describing.

Perhaps another way to approach this kind of experience is to note the difference between the tactile and proprioceptive bodily senses. The kind of sensation to which I refer is much like the experience of the proprioceptive sense which informs us of our body’s present posture, movement in space or the ‘goings on’ inside the body rather than

282 our tactile sense, which informs us of our interactions with external objects. As such, the experience of the energy fields mentioned above is somewhat similar to postural awareness though the experience of the former isn’t limited to the area within the physical boundary of our body as is the latter. Another familiar example of this kind of experience of what I am calling energy is the chill we feel running up our spine in response to a striking revelation. Experiences of this kind of subtle sensation are often experienced by meditators as they deepen their ability to attend to their direct present moment experience. It is with this description of the direct experience of energy in mind that I now return to the details of my practice.

The Jhānas Continued

Having begun to have clear experiences of the jhānas, I was instructed to resolve to remain in the various jhānas for specific periods of time. In addition, my teachers coached me to practice moving intentionally between the four rūpa jhānas in order to familiarize myself with them and to develop my mastery of them. This I was able to do without too much difficulty, though I found it much more interesting to examine the experiential aspects of these shifts from one jhāna to another, the process, so to speak, rather than to simply master remaining in these particular states of mind.

In my previous years of practice in the Theravadan tradition, the strength of my practice had always been my ability to investigate my experience with great precision.

With my teachers’ encouragement I now began to apply this ability to the experience of the jhānas themselves. In my early Theravadan training, I had been taught that beyond the first jhāna, the samādhi was too strong to allow for much investigation or insight. But now I was experiencing just the opposite. By paying close attention to the experience of

283 moving through the jhānas, I learned a great deal about the details of the process. I began to notice that for me within each jhāna there were again distinct quantum-like levels through which samādhi progressed as each jhāna matured, and then transformed into the next jhāna. In addition to the shift in the field of energy mentioned above, each jhāna began with an intense energy collected at the top of the central energy channel.9 A cascade of energy then flowed first down the left hand channel followed by a second cascade down the right side. Then as the factors for that jhāna consolidated, the energy at the top chakra moved downwards through the central channel in subtle, quantum-like shifts, first to the third eye, then to the throat, next to the heart, then to the second chakra and finally to the chakra at the bottom of the spine.10 Reaching this lower chakra there was a burst of energy up the central channel to the top.

By this point the jhāna had reached a sufficient maturity that discursive thought was essentially cut off. Again the energy dropped in the same five stages to the bottom of the spine at which point two options seemed to be possible. The samādhi of that jhāna could continue to deepen yet further in which case a kind of cessation or gap in conscious experience would occur. Alternatively, the energy could once again rise to the top chakra and the subsequent jhāna would emerge, with its characteristic energy field shape as well as its defining mental factors. My interest focused primarily on the experience of the energy shifts within and between the various jhānas. The momentary gaps in experience that seemed to characterize the deepest level of each jhāna did not particularly interest me and I did not cultivate them.11

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Two Significant Shifts in Experience

During my explorations, two new experiences unfolded, each of which was to be critical to the topic of Dependent Origination as it relates to the jhānas and the arising of the sense-of-self. First, during a sitting in which I quickly progressed through the rūpa jhānas, I came to rest in the fourth jhāna characterized by equanimity. After some time, my body underwent a powerful energy shift similar to those that previously had signaled the move to the next deeper jhāna. My energy state and the quality of my present moment experience then shifted abruptly resulting in a new experiential perspective, the focus of which was the vast, boundarylessness of space. If the shift from one rūpa jhāna to another could be compared to going up one floor in an elevator, the shift from the fourth jhāna to this focus on space was like going up 5 to 10 floors all at once, so sharp was the difference. Energetically it was as if a shell surrounding my being had split open. First the top of my head lifted off. Then the shell around my torso cracked open down the front, opening out towards the back, followed by the whole shell falling downwards and taking the portion supporting my lower torso with it as it then disappeared into the vastness of space.

As my practice unfolded, I soon became familiar with four additional distinct levels of samādhi. The first three of these four were associated in turn with the experience of consciousness pervading the vastness of space, with the utter indivisibility and insubstantiality of that vastness, and of the mind's inability to make a clear object of, i.e. to fully perceive any one of the previous three foci, in which there was recognition of the three simultaneously but the inability to objectify or reify them.12 In addition, beyond these four layers of samādhi, referred to as the āruppas, I encountered a further deepening

285 of samādhi so profoundly still that even the recognition of these three qualities as distinct aspects of the field of experience, had fallen away.13 In time, I was able to resolve to move between these various levels of samādhi as I had been with the rūpa jhānas.

The second experience, which was later to play an important role in my exploration of Dependent Origination, concerned the field of energy I described earlier in relation to the rūpa jhānas. During my exploration of the rūpa jhānas, I learned that I could move between these levels of samādhi simply by focusing on the sensations of this energy field itself and resolving to shift my experience of it either inwardly or outwardly.

Relative to my ordinary state of consciousness, the rūpa jhānas from first to fourth represented a progressive inward collapse or collectedness of this energy field. Moving backwards from the fourth to the first rūpa jhāna, this energy field expanded outwards with each shift to a less subtle of concentration. I wondered if this field could further expand outwards beyond the level of the first jhāna. Establishing my intention in that direction and using the first jhāna as a starting point, I soon discovered that this subjective bodily energy field did indeed have additional layers of expansion. I experienced three distinct levels associated with sets of energy centers above the crown chakra and below the first chakra, located successively further beyond the boundary of my ordinary physical body. When I resolved to expand yet a fourth time, the field of energy itself seemed to simply burst. This exploration left me with a system of thirteen chakras, the commonly known seven associated with the seven energy centers of the physical body, as well as three above and three below the body.14

Continuing my explorations of the jhānas, I found that as my facility with them grew stronger, the quality of samādhi associated with them as well as their characteristic mental factors would remain in place even after the end of my formal periods of sitting

286 meditation. That is, if I ended a period in the second rūpa jhāna, when I continued my practice in a period of walking meditation I continued to experience that jhāna as I walked, as well. This seemed quite odd as I had been under the assumption that the jhānas were states of mind accessible only during silent and motionless sitting practice, particularly with one's eyes closed. I now found that these same states of mind were continuing during my walking meditation and as I went about meeting the basic requirements of my day, such as eating, bathing, etc. I began sitting with my eyes open during my formal sittings. One of my teachers mentioned having had similar experiences so I took them in stride. As my practice matured in this way, my interest naturally shifted from the jhānas themselves towards the implications of these states and the way they arose in relation to the Nature of Mind and the sense-of-self.15

Nature of Mind

Initially I began to notice a great similarity between the qualities of the first three

āruppas and the description of the Nature of Mind or view as I had been taught by my

Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen teachers, specifically that the Nature of Mind is an all-pervasive awareness/emptiness.16 The first āruppa, with its quality of boundaryless space, the focus on space expressed Mind’s all-pervasiveness nature. The second āruppa emphasized the self-aware nature of this open, unobstructed field of experience. The third

āruppa focused on this field’s insubstantial or empty nature. It seemed to me that these parallels between these three aspects of the Nature of Mind and the experience of the first three āruppas were no coincidence. In the fourth āruppa, these three qualities are experienced as inseparable and simultaneous, the mind having lost its ability to focus on or objectify even these subtle aspects of itself. My recollection that the Vajrayana

287 tradition often talked about the union of vipassanā and samatha at particularly deep levels of practice seemed to support the significance of this parallel.17 I should also make it clear that I am not suggesting that the experience of the āruppas is equivalent to the liberating experience of these aspects of mind. Here at this point, though the similarities were striking, the difference was even more significant. But more on this below.

The Hua-yen Perspective

As the richness of the integration of the qualities of the āruppas with ordinary activity deepened, I was further struck by another parallel. During my early practice years

I had been interested in a particular Chinese school of Buddhism, the Hua-yen tradition, which is based on a Mahayana Buddhist text, the Avatamsaka Sutra. In the Hua-yen tradition, a great deal of emphasis was placed on what are considered to be underlying universal qualities such as the interdependence, interpenetration, and identity of all things.18 I found that with the transition from the fourth rūpa jhāna to the first āruppa, that of boundless space, one shift in my experience was to become aware of the presence of space between myself and the objects in the world around me. In less concentrated modes of experience, I had essentially ignored that space, which I simply experienced as an absence or spatial gap. Now in the jhāna of Boundless Space, I experienced this space between things as a positive presence that served to connect, rather than separate, all the objects within it. This connectedness could be described as being similar to the way in which the water of the ocean connects the fish that swim in it, even though the fish possibly aren’t much more aware of the water than we usually are of the space or atmosphere around us. The quality of a wholeness in which all ‘things’ were simply regions within a singularity, the vast, limitless ocean of space, was quite profound.

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Whereas up to this point, I had experienced my own subjectivity as ‘that which knows’ to be spatially separate and distinct from the external physical objects of its knowing, within this newly emerging quality of wholeness, subject and object were experienced as simply regions within the whole. Just as the two poles of a magnet are spatially localized yet connected regions within a larger unity, subject and object now seemed spatially separate yet still connected in a ‘polarized’ kind of relationship. I understood this quality of experience to be one expression of the interconnectedness of subject and object, a quality that is strongly implied in the Hua-yen literature.

Continuing on to the jhāna of Boundaryless Consciousness, another shift happened which was reminiscent of a specific Hua-yen quality, that of interpenetration.

In the experience of boundaryless space, there remained a region which knew, the subject, and a region which was known, the object, the two simply being regions that were deeply and intimately connected as part of the whole of space. Now in the experience of boundaryless consciousness, this sense of two contiguous regions within the whole broke down. Knowing was now coextensive with what was known. As the boundary between knowing and that which was known disintegrated, so did the sense of spatial segregation of the five physical senses. As this quality of experience was integrated into walking meditation, for example, the experiences of the various senses interpenetrated each other, seemingly occupying, at times, the same space. It was as if objects of sight and sound arose within that which knew them rather than externally, as did bodily sensations. At times it was as if the whole field of experience was ‘body.’ I mean this in the sense that in some way the same sensing through which I usually experienced my own physical body from within was now expanded to include all experiences and to the entire, boundaryless field of awareness. However in this range of

289 experience, the division between these subtle physical sensations and the knowing of them characteristic of my ordinary bodily experience no longer applied. The field of experience was a field of energy and the ‘knowing’ of that energy, which was inseparable from that energy itself, was qualitatively more like the knowing of ordinary physical sensations than like that of any other sense, including the mind.19

At this point, that ‘knowing’ happened without its usual and familiar subject/object split. The distinctions of depth of field, of density, of visual or auditory locale, were as much felt as seen or heard. The boundary between subject and object had dissolved in some new and deeper way. Subject and object now fully interpenetrated each other. Nonetheless the different ‘objects’ of experience remained discernible in some sense, albeit through this particular sensing modality. Distinctions were still perceived.

And while in the previous experience of boundaryless space, the mind could still make a clear object of space, here the mind sustained its primary focus on the boundaryless, all-pervasive, unitary quality, of knowing. The sense of the vastness of space had receded as the predominant aspect of experience and was replaced by the self-cognizant quality with which space was now imbued. The image of a double-exposed photograph conveys some idea of this experience. While the two superimposed images can still be made out, they nonetheless occupy the same piece of photographic paper.

With the shift to the third of the āruppas, another quality came to the fore, that of the utter insubstantiality of this entire field of knowing. At this point, while the content or diversity of experience remained apparent, it faded from significance in the face of the all-pervading insubstantiality common to all apparent content. Prior to this, non-spatial

‘distinctions’ between ‘things’ remained, albeit somewhat paradoxically. In the previous jhāna, ‘objects’ were experienced as interpenetrating the knowing of them. Yet they

290 remained somehow discernible even while ‘knowing’ pervaded the whole of the field of experience. Now even these subtle distinctions dissolved. Not only were all things utterly equal in the light of this all embracing common denominator of experience, there was just this one insubstantial reality and all things were essentially identical as this actuality. Yet here there also remained the mind's ability to focus on this underlying identity of all things in their insubstantiality. This then covers several of the qualities emphasized in the

Hua-yen literature. The first one mentioned above, that of interdependence, seems to be related more specifically to the level of the fourth rūpa jhāna in a way I will describe later in the context of the coming discussion of Dependent Origination.

The Fourth Āruppa

So there remained this subtle subject/object split within the field of experience.

Either the quality of unbounded space connecting the field of experience into a whole, the boundaryless consciousness or the self-cognizant nature of this singular field or the identity of all aspects of this field of experience in their insubstantial nature served as the subtle focus or object of knowing. However to use the term ‘subject/object split’ here would perhaps somewhat misleading. It might be more accurate to describe this experience as subjectivity knowing itself, i.e., turning back towards itself, taking aspects of itself as a subtle kind of self-referential object of its own experiential focus.

Regardless how it is described, even this unusual, almost imperceptible, focusing of knowing fell away with the shift to the fourth āruppa. At this point the mind lost its ability to hold any of the previous three qualities in focus. At times this range of samādhi was experienced as a continuing but unsuccessful attempt by Mind to refocus on one of its own three aspects. Each momentary attempt to attend quickly dissolved to be followed

291 by another momentary attempt. Mind was no longer capable of sustaining attention on these three aspects of itself. In this absence of sustained attention the underlying complete integration of these three became the predominant experience. These three qualities of

Mind were known to fully interpenetrate each other in an insubstantial way. And yet due to some subtle latent habitual tendency these gentle yet futile attempts to objectify continued.

In the absence of the ability to sustain even these most subtle foci of attention, there was also the absence of full reification. These three aspects of Mind now failed to manifest as fully ‘real’ in the way that we ordinarily mean that word, though they were still present and recognized. In the same way that things we ordinarily experience as substantial were seen, at the third āruppa, to be insubstantial, here the qualities of the nature of Mind, previously experienced as in some way real, lost that quality of reality.

This, the fourth āruppa, is usually referred to in English as

Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception. I have come to understand that to mean that one of the two necessary aspects or functions of full perception is missing. It seems to me that for full perception, in our ordinary sense of the word, to occur, there first needs to be a recognition or conceptual designation of the object being known (not to be confused with discursive thought.) That which is recognized further needs to be ‘objectified’ as a distinct focus of that which is knowing or recognizing it in order for the full experience of the object’s (or quality’s) apparently discrete and inherent reality to emerge. In the early

āruppas, this is accomplished by Mind singling out an aspect of itself to attend to and then sustaining that attention. Now at this fourth āruppa level of samādhi, this latter step can no longer be fully established. In the absence of such sustained attention, the perceptual process is incomplete, though not altogether absent. Yet reification of even

292 these subtle aspects of mind is no longer occurring. There is the experience that nothing is ‘real’ in the way we ordinarily use that word.20 However, even at this level of samādhi, the mind, in some subtle way, still turns to attend to the overall state itself. At this point it seems to me that the jhānas still remain unliberated, though deeply insightful concerning the Nature of Mind and of experience.

By this time my range of experience had grown to include another level of samādhi deeper still than this fourth āruppa. With one further descent into the depths of stillness, the remaining aspect of the perceptual process, recognition (sañña), and the subtle feeling tones of experience (vedanā) upon which recognition is based, also fell away.21 Raw, utterly uninterpreted, yet self-cognizant experience remained.

Non-Referential Experience

During this period of my retreat, in addition to spending some time exploring the

āruppa range of experience each day, my primary focus remained the cultivation of the

Brahma Vihāras. As these spiritual capacities developed, they brought with them their own interesting experiences, sometimes of a visionary nature, but that is beyond the scope of this article. However what does seem to be particularly relevant about the

Brahma Vihāra practices relative to the development and exploration of the āruppa levels of samādhi and my later insights into Dependent Origination, are the techniques taught for pervading these qualities infinitely. For example, as my expression of lovingkindness deepened, I was eventually instructed to sequentially direct lovingkindness infinitely and successively to all beings of a certain class in each of ten directions. The discipline of these meditative progressions served to strengthen samādhi as well as to connect the mind more deeply with its own underlying boundaryless nature, enhancing the particular

293 experiential foundation upon which the samādhis of the āruppas first arise and then mature.

It was while thus practicing the pervasion of the third Brahma Vihāra, muditā, or empathic joy, in this infinite way that another quality of experience emerged in my practice. Resting in the third rūpa jhāna, sending muditā to all beings, I began to notice both the gap and boundary that was part of the experience. The boundary was that outer limit of what I took to be myself while the gap was the apparent space between that boundary and the infinite field of beings throughout which I was pervading muditā. I focused on these aspects of the experience of that sense of separation, looking to see of what they were constructed.22 In so doing, the apparent separation suddenly dissolved. I found myself in a quality of mind with the characteristics of the jhāna of boundaryless space. Noticing the sense of the connectedness with the infinite field but also the remaining polarity between the subject region and the object pole, my practice of muditā fell away and I turned to examine the structure of this polarity. This sense of spatial regionality of subject and object poles within the whole of space then dissolved and the entire field of experience was filled with awareness, knowing and known now coextensive and all-pervasive in location. Nonetheless some subtle sense of boundary between the objects, or rather their ‘distinctness,’ some ability to discriminate, remained so I focused on that. This sense of distinctions between things then dissolved and the whole of my experience simply rested as an insubstantial field.

At first it seemed that all the boundaries were gone. Then out of the corner of my mind's eye, so to speak, I noticed that there remained a shell of sensation around my heart center. My attention turned to that shell. Soon it began to crack open and as it did a brilliant light burst out. Quickly the shell closed itself. My attention turned again to the

294 shell and this time the shell completely disintegrated with a powerful explosion of light.

The quality of experience of the fourth āruppa again arose however with one significant difference. There no longer was any attempt whatsoever to make an object of any of the three qualities of mind. Neither was there any taking up of the union of these three aspects as a focus of attention. Some subtle energetic patterning, some vestigial urge to take up objects and thereby create some subtle subject/object split, which had previously characterized my experiences of the āruppas, had now disappeared. It was as if some last bastion of subtle resistance to the underlying utter integration of the all-pervading, self-cognizant and utterly insubstantial aspects of the field of experience had finally collapsed. There was a deep experience of profound joy and a quality of having come home to the original nature of all things, beyond the realm of suffering.

As this kind of experience, which I came to refer to as suchness, recurred and matured over the next few days of practice, this quality of not taking even the particular foci of the āruppas as subtle objects of mind, extended into the other āruppas, as well. A new set of experiences thus arose which I came to refer to as the Suchness of Infinite

Space/Interconnectedness, the Suchness of Boundaryless Awareness/Interpenetration, etc. Each experience was simply a kind of presence or suchness in which the predominant aspect of the experience, for example the quality of knowing pervading the field of experience in the second āruppa, was no longer being particularly singled out or attended to in any way whatsoever. As such, these experiences were similar to the āruppas but without the usual subtle proto-subject/object structure which defines the āruppas.23

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Self-cognizance, Radiance, Luminosity, Bliss

One additional interesting shift also occurred. Up until this point in my practice whenever my experience seemed to match that of the ordinary jhānas, any experience of joy, or bliss had basically ended with the advent of the fourth rūpa jhāna. The āruppas themselves had been marked by deep serenity and equanimity rather than any quality which could be described as bliss. Now, however, in these experiences of what I am calling the various suchnesses, a new dimension had emerged. With the falling away of the taking of the qualities of mind as objects, characteristic of the āruppas, bliss now reappeared in this range of samādhi. I found that bliss was clearly associated with the boundaryless awareness aspect of the nature of mind. Relative to these variations on suchness, bliss was clearly associated with both the suchness of boundaryless awareness and the suchness of neither perception nor non-perception. This latter expression of suchness contained the predominant qualities of the three earlier suchnesses inseparable from each other, and as such, included the aspect of mind of boundaryless awareness. It is this aspect of the nature of mind in which, in its unconditioned mode (i.e. predominant but not being taken as an object,) bliss seems inherent.24 Here again I found a convergence between my experience and the Vajrayana teachings on the Nature of Mind.

In those teachings, the quality of Mind described as its self-cognizant, radiant or luminous nature is also often described as bliss.25

The experience of these suchnesses then progressed in various ways that included archetypal, visionary representations of each of these experiences on several levels, but for now, given the focus of this discussion on Dependent Origination, I will return to the topic of insights in this context.

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The First Hints of Dependent Origination

As my practice continued, my attention turned to the process whereby out of the underlying suchness, or ground of experience, the sense-of-self would re-arise. I first returned to this focus of investigation during this particular retreat when one evening, while experiencing through the jhāna of emptiness (as opposed to what I call the suchness of emptiness described above) I got up from my meditation posture in my pitch black room, my mind still resting in this third āruppa, and turned on the light. As an entire new visual experience, the visual image of my room, arose out of the darkness, I noticed a flow of energy up my spine from the first chakra into my heart, followed by a starburst flow of energy outwards in all directions. Exploring this experience further (by repeating it over and over again) I was struck by the fact that until the flow of energy reached my heart, the visual experience held the quality of suchness while as soon as the flow exploded outward, the quality of suchness was lost and a subtle kind of proto-polarity arose. The same strong sense of the insubstantiality of the entire field that characterized the third āruppa also characterized the visual field but this time I noticed that there was no ‘depth of field,’ so to speak, nor any clear spatial split between a subject pole of experience and its objects. However there had now emerged a sense of a center or reference point in the field of experience, and a subtle identification with it, in relation to peripheral regions of the field. The entire field remained boundaryless, self-cognizant and insubstantial with the sense of insubstantiality predominating at this point. Yet within this unified field there was now a faint felt sense of center and periphery. The thought occurred to me that this split of the most subtle kind represented the arising of avijjā, the underlying blindness to the truth of our original nature or suchness, which the Buddha

297 described as the ground upon which samsara, or the realm of suffering, was built. It seemed to me that this was the foundation upon which all reification, including the sense-of-self, rested, as well.

I wondered what would happen if I explored the same experience from the perspective of the other āruppas. Over the next few days I began to systematically explore this area of experience and insight, resolving to rest in one or another of the

āruppas, then allowing a new sensory object into experience and noticing what happened.

I found that by moving successively to each lower jhāna, a further step was added to the process of experience. For example, when I resolved to rest in the jhāna of boundaryless consciousness and again explored the arising of the visual field, with each new visual experience there was first a flow of energy up the central channel to the heart. This was again followed by the same starburst flow characteristic of the third āruppa which then further developed as, with some kind of secondary activity of the initial energy flow, a diversity of intensity within the field of sensation was established. What I would call

‘proto objects’ emerged. A kind of visual depth of field emerged in which these emerging objects in the field felt closer to or further away from the center without either being fully disconnected from it or from each other. This quality of experience was characterized by the same self-aware quality of the whole field that defines the second āruppa and with the same taking of this kind of experience as a subtle object by the mind as well.26

Reflecting on these distinct, quantum-like levels of experience, I found myself struck by the seeming parallels between these experiences and the early links in the chain of Dependent Origination. As mentioned above, experience in the jhāna of emptiness suggested ignorance or avijjā, literally ‘not knowing’ clearly the true state of affairs, i.e. the underlying truth of suchness.27 Experience within the quality of the jhāna of

298 boundaryless consciousness suggested the second link, or nidāna, in the chain of

Dependent Origination, that of sankhāras. Sankhāra is most often translated into English as karmic or activity formations.28 My experience at this level of samādhi suggested a kind of primordial forming, or taking shape, of the ‘things’ or formations which would later develop into the discrete objects of the object pole of the field of experience. This taking shape emerged out of the additional layer of patterned energy activity which arose within the field of experience at this level of samādhi. With the previous jhāna of nothingness, in the absence of this new level of activity, the predominant experience was not of any emerging objects within the field but of the emptiness or insubstantiality of the field itself (out of which the ‘proto-objects’ would then emerge.) The emergence of the

‘proto-objects’ at the jhāna of boundaryless consciousness involved no addition to the field but rather a differentiation within its basic dynamic energetic fabric structured by a patterned activity of that very energy. As such, this process of differentiation through patterned energy activity seems intimately related to the obscuration of the underlying insubstantiality and the emergence of the experience of substantiality.

To bring this concept of the role of activity formations into more tangible form, I like to use the mundane example of the water exiting down the drain of the bathtub at the end of your evening bath. Before the plug is pulled, the water simply rests quietly in the tub. With the pulling of the plug, a new movement or activity begins within the water. As the downward flow of water accelerates a vortex forms. In fact, the vortex is nothing more than water moving in a patterned manner. Nothing has been added to the water itself. But this patterned activity of the water creates a new shape for the eye to see and for the mind to label. The impression is created that there is now something called a vortex, when in fact, all that is happening is water moving in patterned manner. My

299 experience suggests that a similar process is afoot in this quantum-like energy patterning

I am describing. Energy activity in a patterned manner leads to the experience of differentiation, which, as we shall see, gives rise in turn to the experience of materiality.

Note the relationship of this metaphorical description to the translation of sankhāras as karmic or activity formations. But let me continue.

Conditioned Consciousness

When I resolved to remain in the first āruppa, that of boundaryless space, and again attended to newly-arising visual experience, the same sequence described above recurred. But this time an additional step was added to the end of the sequence. Once the field of visual experience had been established and the subtle depth-of-field distinctions between the ‘proto-objects’ within the field had emerged, a third energy pattern arose, again as a flow from the heart. This flow was directed outward towards the visual field. It was finite in nature, surging out to what that region that roughly corresponded to the location of what would be the surface of my ordinary physical form or body in the region of my torso. Here the first impression of what would be experienced as the bodily boundary arose, though at this stage in the process it was more cloudlike than a distinct boundary. Nonetheless it served as a kind of fuzzy demarcation between knowing and known.

This was the first clear experience in this sequence of knowing being distinct from that which was known. At this point, the entire field of experience was still held together and unified by the overriding experience of the presence of space but that space was divided into distinct regions of ‘knower’ and ‘known,’ defined by this new pattern of energy. These two regions were not yet clearly spatially separated but rather were

300 contiguous regions of a spatial whole. However at this point, consciousness, or the knowing aspect of experience, was no longer spread throughout the field. Instead knowing had precipitated out from the field as a whole to the space within the region of this subfield corresponding roughly to the space within the newly emerging outline of my physical body and centered in the heart.

Another way of describing this step in the process is that for the first time in this sequence, knowing seemed to be distinguished spatially from that which was known.

Consciousness, in the sense that the Buddha meant when he described the third link in the chain of Dependent Origination, had arisen. Here consciousness means knowing in relation to or conditioned by an object.29 A limited, structured consciousness had arisen based on the condition that there also was an object or, at this point, at least an objective pole, of experience.

Perhaps another even more precise way to describe this level is that the poles of subject and object have begun to emerge simultaneously as distinct aspects of experience.

Yet here at this point in the process they remain connected. To me it seems accurate to say that at this layer of samādhi, knowing is no longer the unstructured self-cognizance of the underlying field of experience itself but a regionalized ‘knowing’ in relation to, or conditioned by, a ‘known’ object region. Knowing has lost sight of its own underlying unstructured, ubiquitous nature. Here at this stage in the process knowing emerges as viññāna, constituting the third nidāna or link in the chain of Dependent Origination.

It is worth noting at this point that the Pali word vññana, which is invariably translated as consciousness, has as its root ñana (Sanskrit: jnana) which means something like ‘wise knowing’ or ‘knowing grounded in wisdom’.30 The prefix vi- denotes something that is fragmented, fractured, or divided, suggesting that vññana is

301 wisdom that has been fractured or fragmented, characterized by the quality of dividedness.31 In the context of my explorations, that vññana or perhaps we could say

“knowing-no-longer-grounded-in-wisdom” arises at this point suggests that this very structuring of this link, this emergent division of the field of experience into subject and object regions, is critical in the obscuring of the underlying ñana. Viññāna, as the third nidāna, then carries the meaning of unwise knowing due to the fracturing of the underlying knowing leading to a structuring of that knowing in relation to an object. We could also say that here knowing is conditioned by its newly emergent positioning vis-á-vis its known object.32 It should be noted that this structuring of knowing began with the emergence of a central reference point in the field of experience.

It is also worth pointing out at this juncture that conditioned consciousness as a nidāna was associated in my experience with the āruppa of boundaryless space and not the āruppa of boundaryless consciousness. Knowing in the jhāna of boundaryless space is structured or conditioned in a way in which it is not in the āruppa of boundaryless consciousness. That is, in the samādhi characteristic of infinite space, the inherent boundaryless nature of consciousness or awareness has now been obscured by a further complexification of the energy patterning process which has sequestered knowing in a region juxtaposed with that which it knows. It is important not to confuse these two contexts, for both of which the English term ‘consciousness’ is so often associated.

The Full Split into Subject and Object

Continuing my explorations, I shifted to the rūpa or form jhānas beginning with the fourth jhāna, again primarily using seeing as my context for experience. Once again the experience proceeded as before but with the addition of another new layer or pattern

302 of energy activity. Once the regional poles of knowing subject and known object had been established as in the first āruppa, the next outpouring of energy flowed from the heart to the region of my ordinary bodily boundary that I experience as my face. This flow seemed to be more directed to a specific aspect of the visual field, a visual object, rather than generally toward the field as a whole. With this flow the apparent gap between subject and object was more deeply and profoundly established. Awareness of space fell away. The two poles were no longer two regions within a field of boundaryless space. The presence of ‘empty’ space as the ocean-like all-connecting medium in which experience occurred was now being ignored. Space was now experienced as an absence or gap between subject and visual object. The knowing subject and the known object in the visual field were now experienced as separate, spatially distinct, entities. Knowing itself seemed to reside in the head, rather than in the heart center.

For me this kind of experience has come to represent the formal division of the field of experience into knowing or mind and the forms or rūpas that mind perceives.

This level represents the most subtle level of experience at which subject and object are clearly spatially separated. As such, this decisive splitting of the field of experience happens at the fourth or most subtle of the rūpa jhānas, which serves as the doorway into the āruppas as previously described.

The Interdependence of Subject and Object

At this point, subject and object are now experienced as seemingly distinct from each other. However in this process there is no separate arising of only a subject or only an object. Rather this apparent pair can only arise together, with the forming of this experiential chasm between them in the field of experience. It can be said that subject and

303 object co-emerge or arise interdependently, i.e. dependent one on the other both for their very ‘existence,’ and in our human experience of them as apparently distinct entities. It is worth taking particular note at this point that this interdependence of subject and object is of an ontological nature. This is the stage in the process for me where the Hua-yen concept of interdependence emerges. The progression from this stage of interdependence back towards the earlier links completes the full Hua-yen sequence from the interdependence of subject and object to interpenetration of subject and object and finally including the underlying identity of these two aspects of our human experience.33

Mind and Matter

This stage is also the earliest stage in the process where a clear experiential distinction between mind and matter emerges, hence the Pali name for this nidāna of nāma-rūpa or mind and materiality/corporeality, both in its sense of physical bodily existence and its sense of materiality in general.34 For its use in the context of Dependent

Origination, Nyanatiloka translates this Pali term as ‘mental and physical processes’.35

While in the āruppa (immaterial) jhāna range of experience, all aspects of the field of experience are inseparable from each other and marked by insubstantiality, here an apparent distinct separation, or dualism, of mind and body, mind and matter, or mentality and substance emerges. As such, we have here a Buddhist answer to the age old “hard problem” in psychology: Is mind an epiphenomenon of body/matter or is body/matter the expression of mind? Insofar as ‘mind’ here means our separate individual subjectivity, this Buddhist perspective grounded in Dependent Origination, or as it is alternatively called, interdependent co-origination, suggests that this apparent pair arises interdependently out of a singleness which is primordial to them both. And of course, this

304 stage in the process also represents the arising of ‘mind and matter’ dependent or constructed upon the prior foundation of conditioned consciousness, just as conditioned consciousness has previously arisen dependent upon the foundation of activity formations which have arisen dependent upon the prior condition of ignorance.

An Increasingly Complex Structure

Once again this latest step in the sequence is the result of patterns of energy emerging within the field of experience. The step-by-step increase in the complexity of the overall structure of patterns of energy with each successive stage in this process suggests that the activity of these flows of energy and the formations that result are also further progressions of the sankhāras or activity formations of the second step. In fact it seems to me that with the arising of sankhāras as the second nidāna, all that follows could be described as a more and more elaborate proliferation of this energy patterning process.

In some sense all the links are themselves sankhāras, i.e. karmic or activity formations.

Actually it might be more accurate to say that each link is a further elaboration of the link of sankhāras, just as we could say that each link after avijjā or ignorance is a deepening of ignorance or that each link after viññāna or conditioned consciousness is a further conditioning of conditioned consciousness. Each link is not so much distinct in itself but rather adds a new layer to the increasingly complex summation of the previous links. And at this point, our structure has many layers yet to be added.

The Experience of the Senses

Repeating my experiment from the vantage point of the third rūpa, or fine material, jhāna, I noticed that another layer of patterned energy activity was added to the

305 previously described sequence. An additional flow from the heart followed the flow of the fourth jhāna. This new flow, however, moved directly, more narrowly and specifically to the location of the physical organs of the eyes. Now for the first time I found myself experiencing the visual object as if looking outward through the eyes themselves. The sequential layers of patterned energy had evolved to highlight the structure of the particular sense door associated with the kind of experiential field (visual)

I had been exploring. After nāma-rūpa, arising dependent on it, had come the sense modality or fifth of the twelve links of Dependent Origination. The Pali term for this link is salāyatana (sal – six, āyatana – sense bases) which recognizes that from the Buddhist perspective we have six sensory modalities, including the mind as the sixth.36

Continuing, now in the second rūpa jhāna, once again a new layer of patterned energy flow emerged. However this time the flow came not from the heart but from the visual object. Energy flowed from the object of visual attention to the eye itself, actually impinging on the organ in a subtle tactile-like manner. Upon the foundation of the sense door, the link of contact (Pali: phassa) had arisen.

By this time I was beginning to explore this same sequence of experience in relation to the other senses, as well. For example, I would sit in silence and wait for new sounds to arise noticing what happened depending on in which jhāna I was resting.

Nearly identical experiential sequences arose up until the third jhāna where the experience would differ depending on which sense modality was the focus. When a sound arose, the flow from the heart that was characteristic of the third jhāna and the link of salāyatana flowed to the ears rather than to the eyes, while at the second jhāna the nidāna of phassa, the flow from the object field also found its way to the ears. A similar pattern occurred in relation to tactile bodily sensations with the flows of energy focusing

306 on the part of the body where the tactile sensation was felt. So although the majority of my explorations relative to Dependent Origination during this retreat focused on the experience of seeing, I felt confident that they apply equally well to all five physical senses with some variation at these two links of sense modality and contact.

With the shift to the first rūpa jhāna, once again a new energy pattern originating at the heart chakra flowed to the sense organ through which experience was now occurring. However this time the flow didn't stop at the sense organ but continued outward to the object at the objective pole of experience. In addition, the experience of this flow included a subtle feeling tone, ranging from pleasant to unpleasant depending on the particular object of my attention. This feeling tone was thus ‘projected’ in this manner out onto the object creating a strong experiential association to it. Dependent on contact, feeling tone (Pali: vedanā) arises.

Craving and Grasping

At this point, having run out of jhānas to explore, I began to wonder how the remaining five links of Dependent Origination might be tied to these initial seven.

Remembering the above-mentioned exploration of layers of a subtle energy field experience associated with an outward expansion beyond the field experience of the first jhāna, I began to resolve to enter these ‘outer’ quantum-like levels of experience. Resting in the first of these and repeating my visual experiments, I found that another layer was added to the sequence of energy patterns. A second rush of energy flowed out towards the object, this time more from the entire body itself, or at least from the entire torso, rather than through the sense door. However this time I noted a subtle difference. For each of the previous stages, once the particular pattern of energy associated with a particular level

307 of samādhi had arisen, it remained, seemingly frozen in place. Now at this level, the flow from the body towards the object first arose and then died away, arose and died away, arose and died away, continuously as long as attention was focused on the same sensory object in the context of this same depth of samādhi.37

Moving to the second level of outer expansion, the same flow from the body to the object noticed at the previous level arose again. However this time once established, the flow remained in place, no longer collapsing and reappearing moment to moment as in the previous level. As I explored these two kinds of experiences more fully, I found that while initially the flow I had experienced had been out towards the object, there were also times when the flow was more a pulling back from the object. Not surprisingly at this point, the direction of the flow was related to the quality of the feeling tone felt that was associated with the particular object of attention. The flow outwards toward the object was the manifestation of desire in relation to an object with a pleasant feeling tone projection while the flow which pulled back from the object expressed aversion in relation to an object with an unpleasant feeling tone projection. Whether a desirous or aversive energy pattern had arisen it became stable at the next layer in the process. I concluded that these latter two stages corresponded to craving (Pali: tanhā), the seventh link in the chain of Dependent Origination, and grasping or attachment (Pali: upādāna), the eighth link, which represented the habituation of whichever form of craving, either desirous or aversive, had arisen. Dependent on feeling, craving arises. Dependent on craving, grasping arises.

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Becoming and Birth

Making the resolve to expand to yet another outer level, an additional layer of patterned energy was added to that of the craving frozen into grasping of the previous two levels. The best way to describe the newly emergent pattern at this level is that the sense of myself as a distinct, unique being in relation to this particular object of the moment suddenly came into focus. Energetically this felt like a settling back into my particular body/mind which took on the distinct flavor/structure/feeling of my personal relationship or reaction to this particular object. However as in the first outer level with the link of craving, at this third level of outer expansion this new energy pattern was not stable but rather arose and then collapsed repeatedly. It was not until the fourth level of outward expansion, associated with a bursting of the field of energy, that this new sense of my particular ‘self’ or individuality in relation to the object of the moment became stable. These two levels came to represent to me the link called becoming (Pali: bhāva) followed by that of birth (Pali: jati). These two links, then, describe the coming into apparent existence of my fully developed sense-of-self as a separate and distinct being with a particular personal style of relating to the specific sensory focus of the moment.

Dependent on grasping, becoming arises. Dependent on becoming, birth (of the fully developed ‘sense-of self’) arises.

The Inherently Unsatisfactory Nature of This Process

The last or 12th link in the chain comes about when the particular sensory object of focus is in some way replaced by a new focus of attention. At this point, the entire complex pattern of energy, this multilayered structure of the sense-of-self, that has arisen

309 in relation to the previous focus of experience, collapses. This is the link of jarā-marana, or as it is often translated, “old age, decay and death.” 38 The complex energy pattern experienced as my particular sense-of-self decays or dies at this point.

That all experiences eventually come to this, gives rise to the fact that from the perspective of an apparently independently existing self, life is inherently incapable of providing reliable security or lasting contentment. This in turn results in “sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair.” 39 As the Buddha so often says in the Pali suttas as he ends a description of the twelve links of Dependent Origination in this constructive order from avijjā onward, “Such is the origin of this whole mass of suffering.” 40

With the turning of attention to a new object, the entire sequence then once again arises in relation to that new focus, culminating with a new version of my particular sense-of-self being ‘born’ in relation to or conditioned by the new object. The decay, unsatisfactoriness, and death of one dependently arisen sense-of-self is thus followed by the dependent arising of a new one. And on and on the process goes.

In the Blink of an Eye

At this point it might help to give some kind of temporal reference to this process.

My sense from my own experience is that from the instant a new experiential focus is first felt as a flow of energy rising up the spine from the first chakra to the heart through the arising of the full blown sense-of-self of the 11th link of birth, takes just a bit more than one second to occur.41 The fact that we are generally so profoundly unaware that this process is happening is due to several factors. First, there is the swiftness and complexity of this sequence of subtle events. Second, the deepest layers of the process are associated with levels of samādhi that are a challenge to accomplish and master. Third, the

310 sensitivity to subtle energy phenomena and the precision of self inquiry involved in noticing subtle energy in its various stages of patterned activity also requires, for most of us, years of persistent cultivation. Yet with the experiential tools of mindful investigation and samādhi the details of the process can be uncovered in a manner quite similar to the way a biologist uses the progressively more powerful magnification capacities of a microscope to systematically explore the increasingly minute details of cellular life.

A Multiplicity of Subjectivities

The tenth and eleventh links of bhāva and jati are the most complex of all the links. The sense-of-self which arises at this point comes complete with our fully developed personal cognitive and emotional complex regarding the object of our attention of the moment. Included in this structure are our interpretations of and projections out onto that object, as well. With the arising of each link in this process, all the preceding links are relegated to unconscious obscurity. As such, it is with this last link of jati that we are most experientially familiar. One way that we notice this link is by the way we ourselves change in our own way of relating to the world dependent on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. That is, we manifest as a multiplicity of subjectivities, the particular subjective self of the present having arisen dependent on the present-moment object of our attention. Different experiences draw out of us different aspects of our multi-faceted personality, our various complexes or subjectivities, so to speak. Yet in the midst of these changes we experience a subtle sense of something that holds these disparate aspects of our self expression together, an underlying common denominator, so to speak. This sense comes from the deeper structures which have

311 preceded this link of jati and which don’t change so much in their basic structure from one perceptual object to another.

The Three Layers of the Sense-of-Self

To understand this more fully we might consider that this multi-layered process of the sense-of-self arising has three distinct general layers. The first general layer is that of the initial arising of a subtle identification with knowing, grounded in the sense of here being a center in the field of experience and developing to include the experience of a polarization between knowing and known with the knowing seemingly located at the center. Yet this sense-of-self, is not fully distinct as a knowing subject from the range of known objects, nor is it quite the completely non-referential unification that is our deeper nature. I think of this layer as self-as-that-which-knows or self-as-knower.

The second layer of self first arises when the subject and object poles within the field of experience clearly split apart. With this spatial division into knowing and the particular forms that are known there arises the identification with the physical body and its sensory modalities. This level represents the self in relation to the physical senses or self-as-sensory-organism. Here there are several variations on the sense-of-self dependent on the sensory modality that has been activated, all of which are grounded in the sense of being a separate, embodied knower in relation to other-than-self objects, which are known. There is, of course, some variation from one person to another concerning the particular acuity of the various senses and even some individuals who lack one or another of these senses, such as a person who is blind or deaf.

The third layer is that of the individual, the level of each particular human being’s patterns of response in all their complexity, variety and uniqueness to the object field of

312 experience. This general layer of the sense-of-self is grounded in our attraction, aversion, or indifference to the objects that are known and develops into our unique personal response to the present moment situation. This is the level, if you will, of self-as-personality.

The level of sensory organism is constructed on the prior foundation of the layer of identification with knowing. The level of personality is constructed on the prior foundation of the layer of identification as a sensory organism. As these particular dimensions of identification arise one after the other, they culminate in the apparent and subjectively felt ‘existence’ of what we call the human self. It is the apparent constancy of the self-as-knower in relation to the varied array of sensory input that conditions our impression that the self has continuity through time. The split into subject and object at the fourth nidāna of nāma-rūpa evokes the impression of spatial distinctness, giving our sense-of-self its feeling of discrete, physical, bodily and sensory existence. These two layers provide the impression of commonality and continuity in contrast to the multiplicity of the third layer. On the other hand, it is the uniqueness of the mix of personal complexes of this third general layer of our sense-of-self which adds the flavor of individuality to our overall experience of ourselves. This then is how our experiential sense-of-self, with its apparent temporal continuity, physical discreteness in space and unique individualized expression, is constructed.

The Eight Collections of Concsiousness

I recently came across an article by Thrangu Rinpoche entitled “The Eight

Collections of Concsiousness.” 42 As I read the article I was struck by how closely this

Tibetan Mahayana map of consciousness matches the three-layered description of the

313 sense-of-self outlined above. This Tibetan inventory of the types of human consciousness describes five consciousnesses associated with the five physical senses as simply perceiving through their respective sense doors, analogous to the self-as-sensory-organism. Based on this sensory perception, the judging and discursive thought patterns of the sixth, or mind, consciousness, our personality, kicks in.

Underlying them both is the klesha (Pali: kilesa) mind, which constitutes much more subtle forms of activity that create the relatively stable underlying sense-of-self comparable to the self-as-knower described above. This Tibetan model goes on to describe the eighth, or all-base, consciousness out of which the activity generating the other seven arises.43

The Process of Deconstruction

In a life of spiritual practice in which mindfulness augmented by investigation and deepening samādhi are cultivated, the construction process of these three layers of the sense-of-self is reversed. The frozen patterns of subtle energy melt under the warm light of our examination of them. The apparent solidity of these structures gives way to their underlying dynamic nature and their ability to obscure dissolves in the process. Through a deepening inner collectedness balanced with a mindful attentiveness and together with the active factor of subjective, first hand investigation of direct experience, the links are first revealed and then fall away one by one. Attending to our psychological patterns, we penetrate to the desires and aversions driving them. Examining the nature of grasping and craving, they both dissolve revealing the feeling tones of experience to which they respond. With the penetration of this layer, the multi-faceted level of the personality gives way to the underlying sense-of-self-as-sensory-organism. Attending directly to the

314 experience of the layers of patterned energy of which this aspect of our sense-of-self is constructed, first the link of, contact, then that of the sense modalities and finally the apparent split of our experience into mind and materiality also fall away.

With this dissolution of the apparent gap or boundary between sensory objects and that which knows them, the unifying quality of boundaryless space dawns.

Consciousness remains subtly conditioned at this point, still experiencing itself as a region within this space. With the further dissolution of the subtle energetic patterning creating even this apparent regionality, consciousness or the knowing faculty, no longer structured spatially into knowing subject and known object, permeates the field of experience. Yet with this cessation of conditioned or structured consciousness, subtle distinctions remain as the power of the underlying energy’s patterned activity is still strong enough to manifest apparent distinctions, differences in depth of field and density within the boundless field of consciousness.

With the subsidence of this level of obscuring activity, i.e. the cessation of the link of sankhāras, an awareness of the essential and insubstantial self-sameness of the entire field arises. However there remains the impression that there is a center to the field of experience, a subtly structured experiential reference point in relation to an apparent periphery. Yet even this sense of their being a center to the field of experience dissolves in the face of a strong inquiring attitude grounded in deep samādhi. Then the true suchness of experience dawns when, no longer conditioned by any taking of a stance or experiencing from a perspective, our true nature finally emerges from behind the obscuring veil of ignorance and all that arises dependent upon it.44

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This Series of Lenses and the Labyrinthine Path of Practice

This multi-layered patterning of energy is thus like a series of lenses through which we can experience. Each lens-like layer gives our experience a particular flavor.

As our sense-of-self is fashioned a layer at a time, each subsequent layer refocuses our experiencing in a new way while obscuring our awareness of the quality of experience structured by those layers which have come before. In this way, our multi-layered sense-of-self is born. In a life of practice, as each of these layers of patterned activity constituting our sense-of-self subsides, the layer beneath with the particular experiential view of reality that it affords, is revealed.

Yet over the course of years of spiritual practice, this peeling away process hardly happens in the neat linear fashion described above. In my own case, rather there were periodic glimpses into this or that layer. In the early years of my practice, the truth of the

Buddha's teaching of anattā or the selflessness of phenomena had become compellingly clear. From that understanding there arose a strong desire to discover how it is that out of the fundamental underlying absence of a separate and persistent self, the appearance of a strong and convincing sense-of-self arises. Over the years, experiential hints, pieces of a phenomenological puzzle, occurred at various times. Sometimes it was the sense-of-self appearing and passing away moment to moment. At others, it was the momentary arising of a sound inseparable from the knowing of it immediately followed by the identification with the felt sense of being the separate knower of that sound. At still others, it was noticing the flow of sensation from the object pole to the sense door and back again to the object with the arising of each new sensory experience. During a retreat in England in the

316 late 70’s, during which I experienced spontaneously for the first time the range of samādhi I now recognize to be the four rūpa jhānas, I was continually fascinated by the ontologically interdependent, co-emergent nature of subject and object. While living as a monk in Thailand in the 80’s, two strong themes in my practice were the noticing of how a particular sense-of-self arose in response to a particular sensory experience and the awareness of space as a connecting presence rather than an absence which separates. At times the apparent boundary or separation between subject and object would dissolve. At others, this or that experiential flavor of oneness would arise or there would be deep insight into the insubstantial nature of all aspects of experience. Such is the round-about, labyrinthine quality of a life of practice. These earlier clues now make sense as glimpses of various parts of the whole chain of Dependent Origination as described above. As experiential puzzle pieces, they now fit into their proper places forming a coherent picture of how the sense-of-self arises. As such, for me they now provide a useful map of the phenomenological layers of human experience consistent with the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination.

Samsara and Nirvana

This period of my practice in the mid 90’s with this particular set of insights brought to a kind of completion a phase of my own inner exploration. But of course the

Buddha’s path does not end with this understanding. Rather for me this phase in my life of practice felt more like a new and truer beginning. There are deeper and more profound levels to this suchness and the danger that any one of them can be grasped as some final stand or perspective. And there is, of course, the job of integrating this understanding and

317 quality of suchness back into the realm of Dependent Origination, the realm of samsara.

Without this integration it seems to me there is no true taste of the non-dual.

This process of reintegration is one of becoming increasingly aware (more often, more fully and more continuously) that the structure of human experience is crafted out of patterns of energy activity. This energy is experienced, as mentioned above, in much the same way as a subtle proprioceptive sensation, though not limited in locale to what we ordinarily experience as our physical body. From this perspective, and given the particular structures described above, which include both what we normally experience as ourselves and that we perceive as other than ourselves, it would not be inaccurate to say that the entire field of experience is, in some important sense, ‘body.’ In addition, this energy, as it is experienced, is not distinct in any way from the knowing of it. To borrow and reframe a metaphorical image from the Hua-yen tradition, this energy on the one hand, with its myriad of patterned ways of appearing, and awareness, on the other, are as inseparable as Michaelangelo’s David and the marble of which it is sculpted.45 Given this deep intimacy which ever pervades the field of experience, where is there ever the slightest gap between samsara and nirvana?

Other Interpretations of Dependent Origination

This is what I have experienced. As I have described above, to me there seems to be a natural and striking fit between this phenomenological process of the arising of the sense-of-self and the Buddha’s enumeration of the twelve links of Dependent

Origination. Of course, as with other aspects of the Buddha’s teaching, I would expect some variety, both of experience and interpretation from one meditator to the next. I simply offer a kind of map based on my own interpretation of the experiential territory I

318 have traversed with the hope that it may be of use to fellow explorers. Likewise I don’t consider the experiential context in which I’ve described Dependent Origination to be the only relevant context to which this teaching of the Buddha applies. Rather it is for me only one of, no doubt, numerous applications. Certainly the traditional description of

Dependent Origination taking place over the course of three lives would in no way be diminished or invalidated by this description.46 Likewise, I strongly suspect that some version of Dependent Origination is also at work for each of the variety of forms of sentient life in their various planes of existence as described by the Buddha.47 Relative to our human experience, this description of Dependent Origination above seems particularly apt in relation to the five physical senses. My experience strongly suggests to me that it applies equally well to grosser mental experiences, such as discursive thought or emotions. Perhaps the deeper workings of karma as expressed in the Tibetan eighth or all-base (alaya) consciousness are yet another example of this central doctrine. I feel that this teaching, like many of the Buddha's teachings, is like the fractal theory that has recently risen to prominence in western science whereby patterns are structurally replicated on various levels of magnitude of space/time dimension.

Conclusion

This concludes this brief description of my explorations on the topic of the relationship between the jhānas and Dependent Origination. It has left me with a view of

Dependent Origination as the Buddha's phenomenological description of how, out of our underlying original nature, our habitual and constructed ‘sense- of-self’ arises. We could say, employing an oft-used metaphor, that our sentient predicament is that we are like waves on the surface of the ocean. We tend to experience our separateness, our

319 distinctness, our uniqueness as waves, but habitually ignore the fundamental, underlying, oceanic connection, our common identity as water. This particular depiction of

Dependent Origination is then a description of how such a wave forms and then comes to experience itself as unique, persistent and separate both from the other waves and from the ocean below. Likewise, viewed in reverse order, whereby layer after layer the links of

Dependent Origination are gradually penetrated and removed through the application of samatha and vipassanā meditation practices, this teaching is a directly experienceable understanding through which this misperception can be deconstructed, understood and thus remedied

Dedication

Whatever there is of my own confusion and delusion contained in the words above, may it not confuse others. May whatever is true and conducive to wisdom and compassion serve to aide and inspire others in their practice. I dedicate any merit generated through this attempt to shed some light on the Buddha's teachings of

Dependent Origination to the full and complete liberation of all sentient beings throughout the vast expanse of conditioned existence.

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APPENDIX 14

TABLE 2 - THE EARLY LINKS OF DEPENDENT ORIGINATION

The links of Dependent Origination can be looked at from various perspectives. Table A lists some of these aspects. In Bold are participants’ experiences that I associate with the subtle energy (SE) activity of structuring, the structure created, or the subtle energy activity of destructuring. Participant’s experiences regarding the subjective experience and the relationship between knowing and known have been documented in Chapter Four above for the first through the fourth links of Dependent Origination, especially in Learning Two, and, as such, are not included here.

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Before First Link: Āsavas (Outflows from the bhavanga)

SE Structuring Activity: Energy flow enters first chakra and moves up the central channel.

Structure: No center, no periphery. Eileen: Experienced “knowing which has no location.”

Subjective experience: The union of Emptiness/insubstantiality, Luminosity/interpenetration, and Openness/interconnectedness. Visual field patches of color like an impressionist painting. Knowing has no location. Twyla: The visual experience of insubstantiality had “a fluid fuzziness not unlike an impressionist painting.”

Relationship between knowing and known: Knowing and known not separate, have no location. No knower. No discrete objects.

Mahamudra aspect: Primordial awareness/Suchness. Unity of Emptiness, Luminosity, and Openness.

SE Destructuing Activity: Flow recedes out of the seven chakra system.

Associated Āruppa: Neither Perception nor Non-Perception and the Cessation of Feeling and Perception.

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First Link: Avijjā (Ignorance or not seeing clearly the nature of mind)

SE Structuring Activity: Starburst outward from the heart

Structure: Delimited visual field with center lacking depth of field: Eileen: “the visual field being a small, highly charged bubble inside a vast dark sea that was all inside of me.” Thomas: “the visual field as a contained ball with its own limits or boundary.” Ondine described a boundless vastness, “a universe-sized kind of thing,” in which the limited visual field of experience appears. Finley reported that at times the visual field had a flatness to it.

Subjective Experience: Visual imagery with lack of depth of field, whole field known to be insubstantial. No directing of attention. No knower. No discrete objects.

Relationship Between Knowing and Known: Whole field is self-known, no discrete objects.

Mahamudra Aspect: Emptiness/Insubstantiality predominates.

SE Destructuring Activity: Center breaks apart resulting in loss of center/periphery structure and flows back down to the first chakra.

Associated Āruppa: No-thingness

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Second Link: Sankhāra (Activity formations)

SE Structuring Activity: Movement form periphery back towards the center

Structure: Emergence of depth of field, and discrete objects which now seem substantial, the appearance of the boundary/surface of objects. Both Eileen and Fortune mentioned the boundary/edge/surface of the object. Eileen described the object as standing out from the space behind it “giving a 3-D appearance.” Thomas noted that the wall of the room where I interviewed him prevented him from seeing what is beyond it also has this flavor.

Subjective experience: The visual field is self-cognizant but discrimination of objects becomes possible. Interpenetration of knowing and field of objects. Knowing and known are co-extensive. No directing of attention. No knower.

Relationship Between Knowing and Known: Knowing and what is know are coextensive. Interpenetration of knowing and known

Mahamudra Aspect: Luminosity (Emptiness/insubstantiality is obscured.)

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SE Destructuring Activity: Three-D creating movement from periphery recedes to periphery.

Associated Āruppa: Boundaryless Consciousness

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Third Link: Viññāna (Structured Consciousness)

SE activity: Flow from heart out towards proto-object (specific area of the visual field) stopping at the outer surface of the torso. Ondine attributed the difference in location of knowing and know which arises at this link to the activity of outwardly directed attention. Serena depicts the mental activity she calls “flowing” that was involved in the creation of the object as moving from herself towards an external object.

Structure: Boundary at the torso. Knowing at hear center, with the presence of space connecting all aspects of the field. Serena attributed the spatial distinction which arises at this link to the activity of mind including the creation of a reference point. Fortune described energy/air or energy/space as the connecting link between the knowing and the object. Thomas described the boundary between open mind and visual field as involving significant investment of energy.

Subjective Experience: Knowing centered at the heart, inside boundary. Object located outside boundary. Yet object field remains contiguous to region of the subject.

Relationship Between Knowing and Known: Knowing and known field are discrete but spatially contiguous. Attention directed generally towards the visual field. Emergent sense of a knower not yet separate from what is known.

Mahamudra Aspect: I suggest the use of the term Openness for this link. This term is used in Mahamudra and Dzogchen teachings though it often is equated with Emptiness. I suggest that it could best be reserved to refer to the spaciousness associated with this link and its characteristic of the felt presence of space as opposed to space as an absence characteristic of the next link.

SE Destructuring Activity: Boundary at torso dissolves with a flow of energy collapsing back into the heart. Finley described the sensation of “dropping back” which he associated with the loss of the distinction between knower and known.

Associated Āruppa: Boundaryless Space

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Fourth Link: Nāma-rūpa (Mind and Body, Mentality and Materiality)

SE Activity: Flow from the heart up to the head and out towards the object at the face. Ondine attributed the difference in location of knowing and know which arises at

323 this link to the activity of outwardly directed attention. Serena depicts the mental activity she calls “flowing” that was involved in the creation of the object as moving from herself towards an external object. Structure: Boundary formation at the face.

Subjective Experience: Knowing felt to be located in the head. Subject and object now experienced to be external and separate. There is a spatial gap between the two. Space experienced as an absence rather than a presence. Attention directed narrowly towards the external visual object.

Relationship Between Knowing and Known: Separate and discrete knower and known object.

Mahamudra Aspect: Consciousness and appearances. Ontologically interdependent subject, or knower, and object, or known. Coemergence of subject and object.

SE Destructuring Activity: The boundary at the face dissolves with a flow of energy collapsing back down to the heart. Finley described the sensation of “dropping back” which he associated with the loss of the distinction between knower and known. Serena wrote that she experienced “awareness separate from the object with a sense of boundary sometimes distinct other times seems to dissolve.”

Associated Rūpa Jhāna: Fourth Rūpa Jhāna

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Fifth Link: Salāyatana (Six Sense Modalities)

SE Activity: Flow from the heart up to the eyes. Thomas described a connectedness between the eyes and the heart.

Structure: Boundary formation at the eyes. Thomas wrote that as he moved from the spaciousness through the boundary area into the region of the physical objects, he passed through the emergent experience of the senses as discrete modalities.

Subjective Experience: Visual object is experienced as being seen through the eyes.

Relationship Between Knowing and Known: Subject experiences self as sensory organism seeing through the eyes.

Mahamudra aspect:

SE Destructuring Activity: Energy flow collapses from the eye back down into the heart. Thomas noted that the dissolution of the boundary he experiences had the effect of clearing the relationship between the eyes and the heart.

Associated Rūpa Jhāna: Third Rūpa Jhāna

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APPENDIX 15

“WHERE HAVE ALL THE BOUNDARIES GONE? LONGTIME PASSING” 1

In an unanticipated development, three of the participants proved to already be quite stable in their experience of participatory consciousness. This circumstance gave me the opportunity to empirically document their persistent transformation as well as their experience of the integration of subject-object and participatory modes of experience. Whereas subject-object consciousness is the primary or default mode of consciousness for most human beings, this evidence supports the view that it is possible for this to change, for participatory consciousness to become the primary mode of experience, both within formal meditation experience and in daily life activities. The reports of these participants also demonstrate that when this shift in consciousness is stable, it does not preclude subject-object consciousness. However when subject-object consciousness does return, it does not obscure or replace participatory consciousness.

Rather the two are experienced paradoxically at the same time.

What Happened

Three participants, Twyla, Simone, and Ondine, reported in their Follow-up

Interviews that they have a stability in their meditation practice in which there simply was no experience of a separating boundary between themselves and their chosen visual object. Twyla wrote that no boundary was perceived as her initial daily answer to the first

Daily Journal question, which asks the participant to describe what happened when they

325 looked for the boundary between themselves and their seen object. Her answers for the following nine days were essentially the same. In her Ten-Day Summary for this question

Twyla added: “Visual appearances are immediately and vividly present within awareness when the eye encounters an object.” As noted in Learning One above, by this she meant that she experienced no separation between knower and known.

On day one Simone answered this first question by writing: “A boundary cannot be found. Even though the object is ‘seen,’ it is a part of the whole experience not to the exclusion of any experience.” Her answers for the rest of the ten days echo this initial description. During the Follow-up Interview she acknowledged that the boundaryless experience is so familiar and so instantaneous for her that there was no need to look for the boundary. It wasn’t going to be found. Nonetheless she did make efforts to find the boundary. She described her boundaryless experience with the term “mind rests.” When asked in the interview to define this term, she depicted it as follows: “It’s a knowing that you can’t identify … because in that resting is the mystery so you can’t say it’s this and this. … But yet it’s recognizable.” She goes on to say that the mind being at rest is not an

‘experience’ in the way we normally use that term. However Simone was reluctant to give any definitive description because she said any linguistic description would miss the point and therefore be misleading.

Ondine attributes her stability to her discovery of the stance of “looking inward.”

“From this inward looking,” she wrote in her Ten-Day Summary answer to the first question:

the insight is that nothing exists substantially—all is mind—even outward looking which gives the illusion of separation is only an aspect of mind—oneness, connectedness of everything. There is the loss of sense of me and the object—perceived and perceiver are inseparable.

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Though, for Ondine, this inward looking participatory mode of experience has become her natural, spontaneous default stance in her formal practice, she does describe the ability to intentionally shift back into subject-object modes of consciousness if she makes a special effort to focus outwardly exclusively on the object. In addition, on the third day,

Ondine’s report did not show evidence of participatory consciousness. Instead, she describes her mind as “wild … distracted … looking at the object but attention was elsewhere” and acknowledges how frustrating that was for her.

Both Twyla and Simone indicated in their Follow-up Interviews that their access to participatory modes of experience persisted throughout each of their 15 minute inquiry sessions. In fact, both of them, out of a loyalty to the specific focus on investigating the boundary between subject and object of this research, made efforts to find ways to practice which the would challenge their stable boundaryless experience of seeing their chosen visual object. Twyla experimented in several ways. For example, she changed the position of the object, removed her eyeglasses, placed the object on a mirror, and even tried multi-tasking by adding a mantra recitation while continuing the inquiry exercise. In her Ten-Day Summary, she concluded that none of these experiments had any impact on her participatory mode of seeing the object. Simone tried moving her attention back and forth from one visual object to another with no apparent effect on her mode of experience. Then she moved to a noisy environment to do the practice, again with no effect. However she reported in her Ten-Day Summary that when she made a concerted effort to tighten her concentration on the object “everything narrows and the ability to just ‘rest’ with the object diminishes.” In a similar vein, during her follow-up interview,

Ondine acknowledged efforts like those of Simone and Twyla. For example, she explored

327 touching the object but still experienced no line of demarcation defining where she left off and her object began.

Relative to non-meditation periods, in the follow-up Interview Twyla described her stability in participatory consciousness as round-the-clock. She noted that when the activities of her day required subject-object consciousness, participatory consciousness simply allowed it to function simultaneously as needed. Yet at these times it did not obscure the underlying participatory consciousness.

As it did for Twyla, participatory consciousness occurred very naturally and without effort for Simone, persisting for the duration of each of her periods of formal daily meditation practice and extended to the rest of her day as well. In her Follow-up

Interview when asked about her daily life activities, Simone also described the possibility of subject-object consciousness arising within the context of her stable participatory consciousness. She noted that in her approach to practice, there is no intent to get rid of subject-object consciousness, but rather to understand its nature.

When asked about her daily life experience during the Follow-up Interview,

Ondine replied that in contrast to her formal meditation periods, she often experiences subject-object consciousness, in which there is the sense of a boundary between herself and her visual objects, in the context of her routine activities. However Ondine did describe the ability to, at times, look both inwards and outwards simultaneously. When this happens, both participatory and subject object forms of consciousness can be experienced at the same time. She found it important to note in a Daily Journal entry that she also finds no boundary between subject-object consciousness and participatory consciousness. She reported that for her this apparently paradoxical situation is simply

328 the way things are. Ondine added that at times when both are present, she intuitively knows the best course of action in that moment.

In contrast to Twyla and Simone, Ondine described significant variety to her experience of participatory consciousness. However when I explored this variety with her in the Follow-up Interview discussion regarding my Summary of her experience, she made the point that there was a sameness common to the various participatory flavors, as

Interpretation of the Data

The reports of these three participants provide empirical evidence for the possibility that participatory consciousness can become a stable feature, the default mode of a person’s experience. That three of the participants reported stable experiences of participatory consciousness in their formal meditation practice is evidence that such shifts in consciousness can become deeply engrained. I don’t have enough information to comment on the manner in which this happened for these three participants, that is the similarities or differences in their individual processes of transformation. However, while

Ondine seems to have a high degree of stability in participatory consciousness in her formal practice, nonetheless this stability seems less profound than for Twyla and

Simone, as evidenced by her comments regarding the one session when, to her frustration, she did not seem to experience participatory consciousness. This difference also seems evident in the reports of these three participants concerning their daily life experience. While Simone and Twyla enjoy continued stability in their everyday activities, Ondine’s constancy in daily activities apparently wavers to some degree, further supporting the conclusion that her degree of stability in participatory consciousness is less developed

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It seems important to note that all three of these meditators, each in their own way, acknowledged that within their stable participatory consciousness, at times forms of subject-object consciousness also arose. At these times, both forms of consciousness seemed to be active simultaneously. That is, these three meditators did not lose touch with participatory consciousness at these times. This form of experience was quite different from ordinary subject-object consciousness, which has the effect of obscuring the underlying participatory nature of consciousness.

As mentioned above in Learning Two, neither Twyla nor Simone offered descriptions of variety relative to participatory consciousness. I propose that this is because that which is stable for them is the form of participatory consciousness of primordial awareness. I suspect that they experienced the other forms of participatory consciousness between subject/object consciousness towards primordial awareness in much the same way that they experienced subject-object consciousness. That is, once primordial awareness is stable as the default form of consciousness, other forms of participatory consciousness, such as interconnectedness, interpenetration, and insubstantiality, simply can arise simultaneously within primordial awareness, as can subject-object consciousness, without obscuring the underlying primordial awareness.2

Ondine’s Daily Journal entries do depict a significant variety of participatory experience.

However Ondine did augment those reports during her Follow-up interview by noting that a common flavor ran through them all. The notion of a common thread is consistent with this idea, that it is primordial awareness that is stable, though I did not have the foresight to clarify with Ondine the specific flavor of this thread.

Buddhist Mahamudra teachings emphasize that once a practitioner has opened into the particular form of participatory consciousness called primordial awareness that

330 the next task of the practitioner is to stabilize this experience and provides practices to that end.3 In addition, the literature describes two kinds of primordial awareness:

“primordial awareness that knows reality exactly as it is” and “primordial awareness that knows the nature of reality to its fullest extent.” 4 The former is characterized by the clear seeing of the emptiness of all phenomena and is the most basic form of primordial awareness the attainment and stabilization of which is the goal of Mahamudra practice.5

Once this form of primordial awareness begins to emerge in one’s practice with some regularity, it naturally begins to express itself with four variations that comprise the primordial awarenesses that know the nature of reality to its fullest extent, characterized by the knowledge of the manner in which all delusionary forms of consciousness arise.6

The former version, termed the Primordial Awareness of the Dharmadhatu, serves as a common denominator of this latter group of four.7

Relative to Imaginal Psychology, Omer’s idea of the transmutation of imaginal structures leading to transformation of identity is an important lens through which I view this data.8 Although the data is not extensive enough to clearly document that this shift in the default mode of consciousness constitutes a transformation of identity for each of these three participants, I would nonetheless suggest that in fact that is the case.

The phenomenon of the stability of participatory consciousness was unanticipated in the research design. Since the Research Hypothesis and Research Question focus on the movement from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness, the experiences of Twyla and Simone during their daily periods of inquiry period weren’t relevant to either, though this seemed less true for Ondine. Her comments regarding the varieties of participatory consciousness appear as evidence for Learning Two above.

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NOTES

Chapter 1

1. Aftab Omer, “Key Definitions,” e-mail attachment from Karen Jaenke to Gary Buck, Septermber 7, 2006, entry for “participatory consciousness.”

2. Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 122; Richard Miller, “Welcoming All That Is: Nonduality, Yoga Nidra, and the Play of Opposites in Psychotherapy,” in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, ed. John Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2003), 215.

3. David Michael Levin, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” The Humanistic Psychologist 28, nos. 1-3 (2000), 294.

4. John Wellwood, “Double Vision: Duality and Nonduality in Human Experience,” in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, ed. John Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2003), 139.

5. Arnold Mindell, Dreaming While Awake: Techniques for 24-Hour Lucid Dreaming (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 2000): 5 and 14; Arnold Mindell, Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self (Boston: Sigo Press, 1982), 23. Mindel also calls this experiential realm “the basic substance of the material world” as well as “the power that creates the figures of dreams.”

6. Arthur Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 154.

7. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 4 and 11.

8. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 433 and 34.

9. Pierro Scaruffi, “Towards Unification of Cognitive and Physical Sciences: Cognition as a Property of Matter,” [article on-line]: http://www.thymos.com/statement.html; Internet; accessed 11 August 2006; and Stanislav Grof and Hal Zina Bennett, The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), 5.

10. Daryl Sharp. Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts (Toronto, Canada; Inner City Books, 1991), 42-43.

11. Edward Edinger, “The Meaning of Consciousness,” Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (1977): 34.

12. Eleanor Rosch, “Primary Knowing: When Perception Happens from the Whole Field: A Conversation with Eleanor Rosch,” interviewed by Otto Scharmer, October 15, 1999, [interview on-line]; available from http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Rosch-1999.html; Internet; accessed 6 March 2006, 6, 8. Primary consciousness is a parallel to participatory consciousness defined above, though here the emphasis is on knowing inseparable from that which is known, rather than on the absence of a separate self.

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13. Shaun Gallagher, “Bodily Self-Awareness and Object Perception,” Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies 7, no. 1 (2003), [article on-line] http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/theoria03.html; Internet; accessed 18 March 2007.

14. C.O. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness (New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1970), 144. This view is quite close to my own though much less detailed. My own more complex theory of the structuring of consciousness involving the patterned activity of subtle energy includes a stage in the process where the activity described serves very much the structural role of projecting a realm of objects and another stage whereby a specific object is selected for attention. However it is my experience and contention that this projecting alone is not enough to create the experience of a subject separate from the object of its attention. The creation of a boundary is also involved.

15. Ibid., 104. Homogeneous consciousness is thus also a parallel to participatory consciousness, though with the emphasis on the absence of projection that creates the sense of an object separate from that which knows it. Jung offers parallel imagery to that of Rosch and Evans, describing consciousness as created by energy radiating from the unconscious, though his unconscious is unknown, rather than a kind of knowing. This comment by Carl Jung is reminiscent of Mindell’s description of Dreaming as a subtle radiation, usually subliminal, within and around the physical body (sse note 5 above). C.A. Meier, ed., Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932-1958, trans. David Roscoe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 13-14. This image from Jung, together with the Jungian definition of consciousness from Sharp above, suggests an energetic movement from the unconscious which relates the ego as subject with its known object. This is similar to my own view though my perspective suggests that the subject and its object are not just related in this process but actually created as apparently separate entities as well. While Rosch and Evans suggest that subject-object consciousness arises out of more wholistic forms of knowing, Jung seems to point towards a source that is not a form of knowing.

16. See, for example, Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, ed. Nyanaponika (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1980), 240-243. The Theravadan Buddhist tradition is found today primarily in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. It is historically the oldest of the three major traditions of Buddhism; the others of which are the Mahayana/Zen and Vajrayana traditions.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid. For vedanā, see 235; for sañña, see 201-202; for sankhāra, see 199-201.

19. Vajrayana Buddhism is that tradition characteristic of Tibet, certain areas of northern India, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the Japanese Shingon tradition. Mahamudra is a form of practice shared in common by three of the four major Vajrayana lineages of Tibet, India, Bhutan and Sikkim. Those three lineages are the Kargyu, the Gelugpa, and the Sakya. This definition for luminosity comes from Peter Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra (Petaluma, CA: Mahamudra Meditation Center, 1998), under Chapter 2 “Exploring Mind Series,” Section 4 “Luminosity and Voidness of Mind,” [book online] http://www.mahamudracenter.org/MMCMemberMeditationGuide.htm#_Toc420995709; Internet; accessed June 3, 2008. For an additional source on this topic see Kalu Rinpoche, Luminous Mind: The Way of the Buddha,. trans. Maria Montenegro (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997), 22-23. Kalu Rinpoche uses the term clarity rather than luminosity which he divides into lucidity, for the knowing or subject aspect, and luminosity for the appearing, or object, aspect. These two, he writes, are nondual.

20. For sources on emptiness as insubstantiality see Stephen Batchelor, “Buddhist Economics Reconsidered,” in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allan Hunt Badiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990), 180. Wangyal notes that the activity of subtle energy (Tibetan: lung, Sanskrit: prana) is also inseparable from primordial awareness (Tibetan. He continues, noting that this subtle energy activity becomes luminosity. Experienced dualistically, he says, the phenomena of the activity of subtle energy takes on greater and greater substantiality, eventually “manifest(ing) all phenomena, including subject and objects that make up all dualistic experience.” Tenzin Wangyal, Healing

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with Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2002), 8-10. However Wangyal’s description is in general terms and does not include any particulars about how subtle energy activity results in our seeing dualistically, the topic of this study. A further source for the unity of luminosity or clarity and emptiness can be found in Khenpo Tsultrim Gyatso Rinpoche, Progressivbe Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, trans. Shenpen Hookham (Auckland, NZ: Zhyisil Chokyi Ghatsal Publications, 2001) 92-93.

21. Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “disidentification.” The term ‘frozen’ suggests solidity and thus substantiality. Omer thus seems to suggest that disidentification is related to the absence of a substantial sense of self. However he could also mean frozen more in the sense of fixed or persistent as opposed to fluid, dynamic, or impermanent.

22. Linda Sussman, “The Empty Grail: No-thingness as Liberator of Imagination,” unpublished lecture presented at Meridian University (formerly know as the Institute of Imaginal Studies), Santa Rosa, CA, December, 2002, 3-4. Here Sussman’s concept of empty awareness strongly resembles Rosch’s primary knowing. However Rosch seems to emphasize that primary knowing gives rise to consciousness while Sussman emphasizes that the things of our ordinary experience have their nascence from empty awareness. Rosch thus emphasizes the subject, Sussman, the object, both arising out of an underlying undivided awareness.

23. Ibid., 4 and 9.

24. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 11, 16, and 27.

25. Ibid. , 5 and 14; and Arnold Mindell, Dreambody: The Body’s Role in Revealing the Self (Boston: Sigo Press, 1982), 23.

26. Yet while Sussman and Mindell apply emptiness to all phenomena, including both self and other-than-self, in a way similar to the Buddhist notion of emptiness, Omer’s absence of frozen images refers specifically to the self. Note here also that the language of subject-object draws a somewhat different line than that of self-not self.

27. Olga Louchakova and Arielle S. Warner, “Via Kundalini: Psychosomatic Excursions in Transpersonal Psychology,” The Humanistic Psychologist 31, (Spring and Summer 2003): 137.

28. Ken Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” in Kundalini: Evolution and Enlightenment, ed. John White (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1990), 128. Wilber suggests that the subtle body itself is participatory consciousness though Wilber adds bliss to its description.

29. Nathan Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship: Alchemy and the Transformation of the Self (London: Routledge, 1998), 13.

30. Ibid., 96.

31. Victor Mansfield and J. Marvin Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference as an Interactive Field,” Journal of Analytic Psychology 41, no. 2 (1996): 196 and 187. This definition of ‘psyche’ is based on that found in Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 107.

32. For descriptions of these centers or chakras, channels, or nadis, and various layers of subtle energy bodies, see, for example, Judith Anodea, Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1996). There seems to be some variation between different descriptions of this realm of experience, perhaps because, as Steve Gooch says, there is some degree of uniqueness to the individual experience of this realm of subtle energy imagery due to its inherently dynamic and impermanent nature. Steve Gooch, Reiki Jin Kei Do: The Way of Compassion and

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Wisdom, (Hants, U.K.: O Books, 2006), 26.

33. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 42, 49; Valery Hunt, Infinite Mind: Science of the Human Vibrations of Consciousness (Malibu, CA: Malibu Publishing Co., 1996), 15; Ken Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” 128.

34. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 15; Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” 128.

35. Mindell, Dreambody, 5. Alternate transliterations for qi are chi (from Chinese) and ki (from Japanese). For simplicity, I have used qi even in reference to works where the authors use one of these other English spellings, except where quoting directly or in the titles of their works. Note that Mindell makes a connection between the direct experience of subtle energy and imagery with his use of the term ‘fantasies.’ This possible relationship will be developed further below.

36. Charles Tart, “Aikido and the Concept of Ki,” Psychological Perspectives: A Semi-Annual Review of Jungian Thought, (Fall 1987): 340-343. Mindel and Tart thus both link subtle energy to imagery.

37. Louchakova and Warner, “Via Kundalini,” 140.

38. Ibid., 141.

39. Barbara Brennan, “Possible Physics of the Human Energy Field as Indicated from High Sense Perception Observations,” presentation at “Subtle Energies and Uncharted Realms of the Mind: An Esalen Invitational Conference,” July 2-7, 2000.” [online summary] http://www.esalenctr.org/display/ confpage.cfm?confid=8&pageid=73&pgtype=1; Internet; accessed 2 March 2007.

40. Donna Eden, with David Feinstein. Energy Medicine (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), 30; Ervin Laszlo, “Subtle Connections: Psi, Grof, Jung, and the Quantum Vacuum,” Dynamical Psychology: An International, Interdisciplinary Journal of Complex Mental Processes, (1996): 5; [article on-line]; http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1996/subtle.html; Internet; accessed 10 August 2007; and Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 27-29.

41. Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” 123.

42. Ibid., 91-92.

43. Rob Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2006), 94-98. Tibetan for subtle energy is lung, sometimes translated as “wind.” Re the relationship between subtle energy and imagery, as Preece puts it, “The symbol is one of the main languages of the energy-wind…” In Vajrayana practice, lung is the primary element to be transmuted. See page 93. Preece’s view that the energy wind body is not the physical body but related to it is similar to Hunt and Wilber’s views above.

44. I suggest that this metaphor of the vortex is a good depiction of the Buddhist term sankhāra. Sankhāra is usually translated as karmic formations. The word karma literally means action or activity. Thus we could say activity formation. As Ñyāņatiloka writes, the meaning of sankhāra varies according to its usage. In some contexts it has the meaning of intention or volition. Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 199-201.

45. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 15.

46. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 42. Bruyere also relates this vorticular phenomena to a larger field surrounding the vortices, that of the human aura. From Bruyere’s perspective, it is the vorticular activity of the chakras that generates the field phenomena of the aura. (See page 18) Bruyere attributes this knowledge

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as coming from the perception of persons who have “second sight.” (See page 42.) From Bruyere’s perspective, as an example of a subtle energy image the chakra exemplifies this analogy to a ‘t’. William Tiller offers another relationship between subtle energy and imagery. His work suggests that the human subtle energy system is part of a system of bodily ‘antennas’ through which we are in communication with the realm of subtle energy around us. He notes that the energy field configurations around physical monopole antennas are mandala-like and bear striking resemblance to the round, flower-like images of the chakras depicted in the spiritual literature. William Tiller, Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness Walnut Creek, CA: Pavior Publishing, 1997, 77-78, 123, and 125-126. I offer both of these examples in support of the idea of subtle energy imagery. Wilber offers yet another image of the chakras as knots representing a constriction in the flow of subtle energy. Wilber, Ken. “Are the Chakras Real?” 120-121.

47. Auras, like chakras also have s subtle sight image dimension as well as this felt image. This is analogous to our physical body which can be felt from the inside subjectively and has a certain felt shape while it can also be seen from the outside by others, as well as by ourselves such as when we look at our own limbs or see our image in a mirror. The fact that auras extend beyond the skin however serves as evidence for the view that subtle energy imagery is therefore a realm of experience different from that of proprioception, “a general term for those sensory systems that are involved in providing information about position, location, orientation and movement of the body and its parts” or the sensory experience of sensations produced by bodily tissues such as the muscles or tendons. Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 607; Webster’s New World Dictionary on Power CD, Version 2.1. (Auckland, NZ: Zane Publishing, Inc., 1994-95), entry for “proprioception.” My perspective is thus in contrast to that of Gallagher who writes that proprioception contributes to the subject-object structuring of experience by establishing the somatic experience of being the subject. Gallagher, “Bodily Self-Awareness.”

48. This definition of mindfulness is a paraphrasing of that used by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, (New York: Hyperion, 1994) 4. Kabat- Zinn’s exact words are: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.” A fuller definition of mindfulness comes from the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. These Four Foundations include: 1) mindfulness of the body, 2) the feeling tones of sensory experience, 3) the mind, and 4) what is sometimes called mind- objects, which includes such structural aspects of experience as the five skhandhas, (corporeality, feeling tones, perception, karmic formations, and conditioned or structured consciousness), the five categories of the constituents that shape human experience, as well as those aspects of experience that cause one moment of experience to be a moment of suffering or those that cause another to be a moment of liberation. Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Text Society, 1980), 204-206. In short, as Christina Feldman notes, the Buddha’s formulation of this teaching was based on his own turning “towards his body, his mind, his feelings, and towards everything that arose in his consciousness, seeing them as the ground for his awakening.” Christina Feldman, “Practicing with Vedana: The 2nd Foundation of Mindfulness,” Insight Newsletter, (Fall/Winter, 2006/2007): 1. Mindfulness is also an important tool in Imaginal Psychology. See note 61 below for a detailed discussion of its role in this context.

49. Webster’s New World Dictionary, entry for “conceptualization.” For an example of a Buddhist writer who emphasizes the central role of conceptualization, see Martin Pitt, “The Pebble and the Tide,” in Dharma Gaia, 102. Conceptualization involves a kind of mental labeling or thought. From a Buddhist perspective, thoughts are one kind of object for the mind sense door. My own explorations show that thoughts are made into objects in a manner similar to the objects of the five physical senses. A process much like the one I am describing here is at work. This leads me to conclude that the formation of subtle energy boundaries between subject and object is a more fundamental factor in the structuring of subject-object consciousness than is conceptualization. Attending to this subtle energy activity also works better as an experiential doorway to participatory consciousness than does attending to conceptualization. Further relevant to the issue of the relationship between subtle energy and thought, Bruyere describes ideas as flows of energy. See Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 76. My own experience suggests that ideas arise in a

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prelinguistic manner and are turned into thoughts as words in the mind and then objectified in much the same process I describe for sensory experience.

50. See Anita Barrows, “The Ecopsychology of Child Development,” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 108.

51. Wellwood, “Double Vision,” 139. For similar views expressed from the perspective of Ecopsychology see Macy, Joanna, “The Greening of the Self,” in Dharma Gaia, 3.; Barrows, “The Ecopsychology of Child Development,” Dharma Gaia, 106-108.

52. This kind of experience represents one type of what Omer calls disidentification. Here it is the ‘frozen image’ of the sense-of-self as a knowing subject separate from its sensory objects that ‘thaws.’ Sandra Dennis refers to this range of experience as connective reality and notes the importance of the “suspension of the sense of ‘I’” involved. See Sandra Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon (York Beach, ME: Nicholas Hays, 2001), 109 and 129. As we have seen, Rosch’s primary knowing, Evan’s homogenous consciousness, and the Buddhist terms luminosity (in the sense that knowing or the subject is inseparable from that which is known and therefore there is no separate sense of a knowing self), emptiness (in the sense that any separating quality would be insubstantial and therefore not capable of creating actual spatial segregation), and primordial awareness (as the union of luminosity and emptiness), each with its own particular experiential flavor, are all forms of participatory consciousness. I suggest that other parallel concepts include Michael Washburn’s dynamic ground and Jean Gebser’s ever-present origin. See Michael Washburn, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995) and Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985).

53. For example, how does it happen that I experience the computer screen that I see in front of me as I type these words as apparently separate from me even though I have access to a range of experience in which it is clear that it is not, but rather that I and the computer screen are simply aspects of a single undivided activity.

54. Deity practice is taught in various formats. Another format involves imagining oneself as the deity.

55. Note that the same subtle energy pattern can be experienced either by ‘second sight’ or felt.

56. The early stages of this map are described in brief below. See Appendis 13, 295-303, for full details.

57. B. Alan Wallace, “The Buddhist Tradition of Samatha: Methods for Refining and Examining Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 2-3 (1999): 176-177. This retreat took place at the Insight Meditation Society, Barre, MA, in the fall of 1994. These quantum-like states of progressively more profound inward absorption are known as the jhānas and āruppas in Pali, the language of the Theravadan Buddhist Canon. For descriptions of these states see Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 83-85, and the Buddhist section of the Literature Review in Chapter Two.

58. This sequence varied slightly at certain stages depending on which of the five physical senses was active at the time I observed it. See Appendix 13, 305.

59. See Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “imaginal structures.”

60. Although equanimity is not generally listed as an affect, it is nonetheless relevant as a description of one’s affective state when used, as I do here, in its Buddhist sense as the absence of such affects as fear, disgust, shame, or pride.

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61. For example when the layer of patterned subtle energy defining the break into discrete subject and object dissolved, I sometimes experienced myself embodied as a royally-garbed male in intimate erotic embrace with a similarly attired female consort. For more details of the imagery that arose for me, see Chapter Five below.

62. Mindfully engaging this particular aspect of imaginal structures is a form of reflexivity for which Omer provides the following definition: “Reflexivity is the capacity to engage and be aware of those imaginal structures that shape and constitute our experience.” (Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “reflexivity.”) Both reflexivity and mindfulness are important concepts in the field of Imaginal Psychology, where the relationship of reflexivity to mindfulness is described as follows: “mindfulness is focused attention to present experience, in all its richly dimensioned hues, while reflexivity would also include an awareness of the structures that are shaping present experience, which have to do with personal, cultural and archetypal dimensions.” Karen Jaenke, Personal communication to Gary Buck (Petaluma, CA: The Institute for Imaginal Sutdies, November 30, 2006. Jaenke goes on to further describe reflexivity as follows: “reflexivity has two aspects, one, an awareness of present moment experience, and two, an awareness of what structures, molds it to be this way.” She details her views on the differences between these two by stating that mindfulness is thus “part of reflexivity, in its focus on present experience” while “reflexivity extends one step further, to include awareness of the structures that go into shaping present experience.” However I take issue with this depiction of mindfulness. Thich Nhat Hanh writes “Mindfulness of positions of the body is not enough. We must be conscious of each breath, every movement, every thought and feeling, everything which has any relation to ourselves.” Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 8. Hanh bases his statement on the Buddha's quintessential sermon on Mindfulness entitled “The Four Foundations of Mindfulness,” a translation of which is included in his book. In this definitive statement on mindfulness practice, the Third Foundation, mindfulness of mind, includes the mindfulness of the mind affected by delusion or unaffected by delusion, while the Fourth Foundation, mindfulness of mind objects, includes the mindfulness of the five aggregates and the six sense modalities together with the fetters that arise dependent on them (see Note 1 above.) See Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 145-155. The five aggregates, or skhandhas in Pali, represent a central Buddhist explanation of the components which make up our human experience. Together these five give human experience its ordinary everyday structure. It would be reasonably accurate from a Buddhist perspective to say that these five constituents working together form an image of a separate self. They include sensory, affective and cognitive elements and their very foundational role in the structure of experience is quite archetypal in that they are common to all humans. In particular, the fourth skhandha, sankhāra, often translated as karmic formations, includes all those influences from our past experience impinging on the present moment. The fetters associated with the six sense modalities include things like our problematic views about the nature of the self (an aspect with a strong cultural dimension), our attachment to rules and rituals (another culturally influenced dimension), and conceit, in this usage the Buddhist term for our tendency to compare ourselves favorably or unfavorably with others (a highly personal as well as cultural dimension). See Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 198-199. The twelve links of Dependent Origination, another of the Buddha’s teachings about the structure and process of human experience are covered by the virtue of many of its links, such as feeling tone, the six sense faculties, consciousness, craving, etc., being mentioned in one or another of the Four Foundations. For a detailed explication of this teaching which is beyond the scope of this paper see Payutto, P. A. Dependent Origination: The Buddhist Law of Conditionality (Bangkok: Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1994.) In addition, the Fourth Foundation includes the Four Noble Truths as objects of mindfulness. This teaching, in which the Buddha delineates his understanding of the fact of human suffering, its causes, the possibility of the end of suffering in a human life and the path leading to the end of suffering, the Buddha often equated the Second Noble Truth, that of the cause of suffering, with Dependent Origination. Ñāņamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 30. Dependent Origination thus describes how the structuring of our ordinary human experience leads to suffering. This is of particular significance to me because Dependent Origination is the Buddhist theory on which this dissertation and its hypotheses are ultimately based. In my experience of these many facets of mindfulness in my own

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Buddhist practice, they include awareness of the personal, cultural and archetypal dimensions which shape our experience.

Given all these ways in which mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition includes those factors which shape our present moment experience, I find it difficult to distinguish between these two: mindfulness, as I understand and experience it as a practice in the Buddhist tradition, and reflexivity, as it is used in Imaginal Psychology. Perhaps at most, there is a difference in emphasis in that mindfulness places no special emphasis on personal, cultural, or archetypal influences but simply includes them along with mindfulness of the body, of feeling tone, etc.

63. During this retreat, in subsequent retreats and at times in my daily practice as well, I have explored this sequence forward and backwards, over and over again.

64. This sequence of subtle energy patterns continues beyond this fourth layer to include an additional seven layers. See Appendix 13, 304-308, for a full description.

65. I highlight this term as I will return to it below together with three other terms, interconnectedness, interpenetration and insubstantiality.

66. This relationship is more fully discussed in Chapter Five and Appendix 13, 295-303, and Appendix 14. This process of layered subtle energy patterns then continued for another seven levels. Looking at this process from a less detailed perspective, at the most subtle levels of concentration, the emerging subtle energy image of the sense-of-self seemed to be simply the subjective experience of a center in a primordially centerless field of experience. In the middle range of concentration just described, subsequent layers of patterned subtle energy imagery seemed to produce the perception of felt subtle energy boundaries segregating this center from the rest of the field as described above. From behind these boundaries, I, as a knowing subject, experienced the external world through the senses as an apparently separate realm of discrete objects. At the subsequent grossest levels, additional structured layers of felt energy corresponded to my individual patterns of response, such as attraction or aversion, shaped by the influences of personal history and cultural conditioning, as the subject, or knowing self, to the sensory objects I encountered. I experienced the completed complex of layered subtle energy images as being materially substantial, of limited extension in space, persisting through time, and responding to sensory input from the region beyond its boundaries, in other words, my sense-of-self. By this statement I mean that our most basic sense-of-self is characterized by three defining factors. First, we experience ourselves to be separate and distinct spatially from the world around us (having limited extension in space). Second, this fact of our being spatially separate and distinct persists through time. I was separate and distinct yesterday. I am separate and distinct today and therefore fully and reasonably expect to be separate and distinct tomorrow (persisting through time). Third, from this experience of being separate and distinct, I nonetheless interact with that from which I am separate and distinct through my sensory sensitivity to that which is separate from me and by my actions in response to my sensory experience (respond to sensory input). This last aspect, our responding to input, is the aspect of the sense-of-self where adaptive identities are created and expressed. (Omer defines adaptive identities as follows: "In the course of coping with environmental impingement, as well as overwhelming events, the developing soul constellates self images associated with adaptive patterns of reactivity. These self images persist as an adaptive identity into subsequent contexts where they are maladaptive and barriers to the unfolding of Being.” (See Omer, “Key Definitions,” adaptive identities.) I suggest that it is these other two aspects, the self as limited in space and persisting through time, which are threatened by “environmental impingement” and “overwhelming events” giving rise to reactive identities. As such they are not themselves adaptive identities but more fundamental aspects of the sense-of-self and include our experience of being a center of knowing separate and distinct from a realm of known objects, our subject-object consciousness. Each layer worked like a lens with its own specific tint and magnification, thus molding my experience in distinct ways.

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The details of these subsequent eight layers are not so relevant to the focus of this dissertation so have not been described here. However for those who are interested in the entire picture, a full description of the eleven layers culminating in the twelfth layer, that of suffering, can be found in , Appendis 13, 295-309. In fact I encourage the reader to take time to read Appendix 13 at this point. The rest of the dissertation will make more sense and its relevance both to Psychology and to Buddhism will be much clearer once Appendix 13 is read and understood as the deep background of this research and my relationship to it. In general, this process is one of dividing up, responding to, and then elaborating on, that which is primordially a single, yet dynamic whole. Christine Skarda proposes a parallel theory for neurophysiology. Her view is that the function of the neurophysiological processes of perception is to break up this underlying holistic unity into apparent parts which can then be manipulated. Included is the division into a knowing subject in relation to known objects. See Christine Skarda, “The Perceptual Form of Life” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 11-12 (1999): 79-93.

67. These correlations are also alluded to in the Theoretical Concepts section of Chapter Four, Learning Two below and in Chapter Five. For details of my own experiences of interconnectedness, interpenetration/luminosity, insubstantiality/emptiness, and primordial awareness/suchness see Appendix 13, 287-292. Appendix 14 details experiences of participants that I interpret to represent this range of experience. The experiential unfolding of these early links of Dependent Origination is quite complex. It is difficult to do it justice within the page limits of this dissertation. As such, I am grateful that my Dissertation Committee has allowed me to append a more detailed description of this process (Appendix 13) that should clarify the main point of this paragraph for those interested.

68. Naomi Goldenberg depicts archetypes as having two dimensions, image and energy. Naomi Goldenberg, “Archetypal Theory After Jung,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, (1975): 208. My work falls more into the energy aspect of archetypes but brings forward the notion that this energetic dimension also has its own type of imagery.

69. To get an idea of what this shift in perspective is like, consider an example from medical science. If you prick your finger with a needle and squeeze it, a drop of blood appears, red in color. From the perspective of the naked eye, the conclusion that blood is a red liquid is easily reached. If you now smear that drop of blood onto a glass slide and look at it under a microscope, the shift in experiential perspective leads to a different conclusion. All of a sudden, it becomes apparent that blood is not a red liquid. It is a clear liquid. It just has a lot of little red things in it. Shifting to more powerful levels of magnification, new understandings emerge: the boundaries of those red things turn out to be porous and they themselves contain smaller entities. In a similar manner, as the lens-like layers of subtle energy patterning are peeled back with the increased perceptual acuity afforded by concentration and mindfulness, our experience shifts. Each new experiential modality gives rise to its own particular understanding of who and how we are. As my own early Buddhist practice progressed, I began to have glimpses of the particular kinds of experience mentioned above. At first these glimpses came in a way that I later understood to be out of context of the entire sequence. I would experience moments where I felt deeply connected to the world around me, others where subject and object would clearly arise together as discrete yet interdependent aspects of the same sensory experience, still others where knowing and known were coterminate, without the slightest gap between them, while at other times I was struck by the insubstantiality of the entire field of experience. Then on the retreat described above, these apparently disparate experiences fell into place as pieces of a larger puzzle, that of Dependent Origination. I explored with joy and fascination this central teaching of the Buddha as it unfolded in my own lived experience. At one point during this retreat, there began to be periods of time when these discrete layers of experience would arise with full awareness of the underlying subtle energy structuring or imagery. When this happened, the lens of the subtle energy imagery involved would still shape my experience. However with the underlying structuring in full view and understood for its experience-shaping role, the particular shape of the experience no longer felt convincing. For example when the bodily boundary at the torso returned yet was experienced as an aspect of the display of awareness itself, the boundary no longer had either its previous substantial quality or the capacity to convincingly demarcate a limen between subject

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and object. I came to refer to these experiences to myself as the Suchness of Boundaryless Space/Interconnectedness, the Suchness of Boundaryless Awareness/Interpenetration, etc. See Appendix 13, 294. As the experience of these Suchnesses became for a time somewhat stable, I began to also experience visionary imagery associated with each of them. With the dissolution of discrete subject and object into the Suchness of Interconnectedness, I found myself dressed in royal garb and in tantric embrace with a similarly attired female partner (myself seated in meditation posture, my consort sitting on my lap, my penis inserted into her vagina and with energy circulating up through the center of my body to my head passing into her through our kissing lips then down through her body through her cervix and back into me through my penis). With the dawning of the experience of Suchness of Interpenetration/Luminosity, our two bodies merged, no longer adjacent but now occupying the same space. As the Suchness of Insubstantiality/Emptiness arose, the tantric embrace fell away. I then found myself robed as a king seated on a royal throne with a in the crook of my left elbow (the Vajrayana symbol of the secret or fully integrated consort. Serenity Young, Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography and Ritual, (New York: Routledge, 2001) 159) my insubstantial body filled with solar systems, galaxies, super novae, etc. When the center itself dissolved, all three of these images arose together. Finally when energy dropped down to the area of the base of the spine, I emerged as the image of a dakini, literally translated as ‘skygoer’ and representing our direct perception of the insubstantiality and impermanence of all aspects of our experience. See Glenn Eddy, (text on the back of a print of a painting of Kurukulle Dakini) Oakland, CA: Sky Walker Publications, 1974. One of my Tibetan teachers called these visionary aspects of my experience “adornments of rigpa (primordial awareness).” These are just a few of the rich range of visionary experience that accompanied this period of my practice, those most relevant to the focus of this research project. This imagery thus constitutes another chapter in the unfolding of my personal imaginal structures relative to this topic. It is interesting to note that while this process is a good match for Omer’s definition of disidentification, it nonetheless goes beyond his depiction of participatory consciousness. The former highlights the absence of “frozen images of self,” here the absence of even ths most subtle of such images. The latter however focuses not on the absence of such imagery but on the absence of a “delusionary sense of a separate self.” (Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “disidentification.”) At these subtle levels, it is my experience that subtle images of self can persist that, however, do not yet create the impression that the self is separate. Combining these two terms, Omer emphasizes the delusional effects of a sense of self that is separate and what he calls “frozen” for which we might substitute the term “static.” To this the Mahamudra Buddhist view would add “substantial” and something like “perspectival.” By perspectival I mean having a locational reference point, such as the subtle sense of their being a center in the field of knowing that then serves as a seed crystal around which the rest of the sense of self accretes.

70. As mentioned in Note 66 above, I see the perceptual process as deeply related to the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, a relationship I explore in detail in Appendix 13, 295-309

71. Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “reflexivity”; personal correspondence from Omer and Jaenke, November 13, 2008.

72. Excerpted from Aftab Omer’s definition of ‘participatory consciousness’, in “Key Definitions,” entry for “participatory consciousness.”

73. This particular stage that I call interconnectedness is one that I have added to the more traditional rendition based on my own experience of luminosity emerging from subject/object consciousness in two discrete phases.

74. A metaphor which is suggestive of the experience of interpenetration is the way that two photographic images interpenetrate each other in a double exposure, although in fact this would be more accurately a parallel to the interpenetration of two objects rather than subject and object. To make this metaphor more compelling, imagine that one of the images is the sense-of-self, or subject, and the other is the object which is other-than-self.

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75. Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra. See Chapter 4 “Spontaneous Coemergence Series – Introduction” for this definition of emptiness as openness.

76. In these various layers of participatory consciousness, what we call our physical body does not disappear from our experience. Rather it is first felt to be interconnected with and then interpenetrated by what was previously perceived as the external physical world around it. The body is known to be of the same insubstantial nature as consciousness itself. We could say that rather than disappearing, our experience and understanding of body is transformed. As such, these forms of participatory consciousness are embodied, albeit in experientially different ways than is subject-object consciousness. As we traverse these layers of participatory consciousness, from a Jungian perspective we are discovering and bringing into consciousness deeper and deeper layers of the personal unconscious, particularly that portion that Jung called the somatic unconscious. See C. G. Jung, Nietsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung (in two volumes), ed. James L. Jarrett, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988): 441. Buddhism also describes a further experiential deepening into what Jung called the collective unconscious. Some writers equate this with the Buddhist term alaya vijnana, or storehouse consciousness. See Chapter Two, note 283, below for a discussion of this topic. Just as participatory consciousness can be explored as a multilayered deconstruction of subject-object consciousness, we can also attend to the restructuring of subject-object consciousness out of participatory consciousness. The key aspect of this process is the focusing of knowing onto one particular aspect of the overall field of primordial awareness. As this happens the field first develops the sense of a center in contrast to is periphery, then appears to become substantial, then polarizes into connected regions of knowing and known and finally fully splits into subject and object as apparently separate, discrete and substantial entities. My own experience suggests that the role of patterned activity of subtle energy is central to this process. In this study I focus on the emergence of the experience of boundaries as this process of patterned subtle energy activity develops. The first boundary that emerges is experienced at the torso and defines surface of interconnection or contiguity between the polarized regions of knowing and of that which is known. The second boundary is felt in the region of the head and has the result of splitting subject and object into spatially discrete, discontinuous entities, the experiential shift into the realm of the duality of mind and matter. I suggest that this underlying subtle energy structuring is an archetypal system, a generally unconscious set of primordial templates that structure human consciousness and experience, the discrete layers of which can be teased apart in our direct experience through the application of integrated mindfulness and concentration. (This definition is paraphrased from the entry on the word archetype in Daryl Sharp’s Jungian glossary. Sharp’s one sentence definition reads: “Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.” Daryl Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 27-29.) Once these layers have been thus deconstructively teased apart and become familiar, it is also possible, at times, to begin to be aware of them once they have arisen and even as they arise, noticing how they are shaping experience as described in Note 66 above. However my experience suggests that this development does not begin to emerge until the full range of deconstructive layers of experiences has been uncovered and become quite familiar to the practitioner.

77. This description of the role of layers of subtle energy imagery and their dissolution suggest a particular way that the teasing apart of imaginal structures can occur, one which leads to the emergence of a multi-layered understanding of participatory consciousness. From an imaginal perspective, reflexivity is the tool used to facilitate this process. From a Buddhist perspective, the integration of deep concentration and highly developed mindfulness is required. From an imaginal perspective, such a teasing apart of imaginal structures results in shifts of identity. From a Buddhist perspective, the emphasis is on liberation from suffering.

78. It should be noted that while participatory consciousness does not involve a split into knowing subject and known object, the object aspect of the experience is essentially unchanged. It is rather seen through a different lens, that of participatory consciousness, in which the subject is not experienced as separate from the known object. For example, when seeing a tomato in participatory consciousness, it still appears red and to be spherical in shape. However our understanding of its ontological status, the nature and manner of its existence and its relationship to that which knows it, will have changed.

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79. Shauna L. Shapiro and Roger Walsh, “An Analysis of Recent Meditation Research and Suggestions for Future Directions,” in The Humanistic Psychologist 31, (Spring and Summer, 2003): 103; and Roger Walsh and Shauna L. Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology: A Mutually Enriching Dialogue,” in American Psychologist, (April 2006): 234 and 236. Imaginal Inquiry, with its emphasis on gathering first person data, is closely related to phenomenological research. Shapiro and Walsh’s focus on experienced meditators as research participants is echoed by B. Alan Wallace in “Materialism of the Gaps,” Mandala, (December, 2006/January, 2007), 8-10.

Chapter 2

1. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 4.

2. Ibid., 11.

3. Ibid., 26.

4. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in William James, Essays in Radical Materialism: A Pluralistic Universe (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 5-6.

5. Rosch, “Primary Knowing,” 6 and 8. In this and other references for Rosch, she is writing from her professional role as a psychologist at University of California, Berkeley. Rosch also happens to be a seasoned Buddhist practitioner which obviously informs her professional views to a certain extent. She is an example of the growing influence that Buddhism is having in many areas of the professional world of Western Psychology. However since the context of her written contributions are more within the realm of psychology than Buddhism, I have chosen to present her views here rather than in the Buddhist cluster below. For example, see the reference below for a talk she gave to the American Psychological Association.

6. Ibid., 7 and Eleanor Rosch, “What Buddhist Meditation Has to Tell Psychology About the Mind,” lecture delivered to The American Psychological Association, August 23, 2002, [lecture on-line]; available from http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Rosch2002Talk.pdf; Internet; accessed 30 March 2007.

7. James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” 3-4.

8. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 65-66.

9. Ibid., 68.

10. Georg Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser, An Introduction and Critique (Lower Lake, CA: Integral Publishing, 1987), 42.

11. Gerald Edelman, “The Embodiment of Mind,” in Dædalus, (Summer 2006): 24.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 433 and 34.

15. Edelman, “The Embodiment of Mind,” 23 and 29. However Edelman offers no mechanism for how this entailment occurs.

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16. Michael Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91, (August 1994): 7398; Amir Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” The Anatomical Record (Part B: The New Anatomist), (2004): 281B, 22.

17. Ibid., 21-22. Raz mentions that vision is often used for research on attention.

18. Ibid., 26-27; Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7398.

19. Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” 25-31 He writes that the executive attention is associated with the anterior cingulate gyrus while the location of objects in space is a function of the right temporoparietal lobe of the brain with the corresponding part of the left hemisphere governing attention to the characteristics. Regarding neurotransmitters, Raj adds that “the orienting network is modulated by the cholinergic system, the alerting network by the neopinephrine system and the executive network by mainly dopamine systems.” Raz also describes the three major aspects of attention as having different developmental histories. He depicts orientation to external space as essentially fully developed by the age of 4 while executive function and alertness take longer to mature. Alertness continues to develop through adolescence and into adulthood.

20. Eran Chajut, Asi Schupak, and Danile Algom. “Are Spatial and Dimensional Attention Separate?: Evidence from Posner, Stroop, and Eriksen Tasks,” Memory and Cognition 37, no. 6, (2009), 924.

21. Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7399-7400.

22. Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” 28.

23. Harold Pashler, The Psychology of Attention (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 17.

24. Ibid., 3.

25. Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7401.

26. Ibid., 7403. Taking the assertion of a central role for attention in the creation of consciousness in a particularly unusual direction is Bruno Van Swinderen Van Swinderen studied the selective attention process in fruit flies, noting its similarity to that in humans. He wrote that fruit flies are also the smallest animals to have arousal (e.g., asleep vs. awake) variables like ours, making laboratory study of the physiology and genetics of attention with this species relevant to the discussion of attention in humans. He suggests that the extent to which consciousness is related to attention implies the extent to which animals also have consciousness. Van Swinderen proposes that human consciousness may have evolved from similar forms of consciousness in lower animals. Bruno Van Swinderen, “The Remote Roots of Consciousness in Fruit-Fly Selective Attention,” BioEssays, 27.3, 322, 327-328.

27. Webster’s New World Dictionary on Power CD, entry for “collagen”; Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Entry for “collagen.” [encyclopedia on-line]; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collagen; Internet; accessed December 7, 2008.

28. Mae-Wan Ho, “Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience,” Kybernetes 26, 265-276; [journal on-line] http://ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/brainde.html; Internet; accessed 4 March 2007. Ho notes that communication from one part of liquid crystal to another is instantaneous.

29. Grof, and Bennett, The Holotropic Mind, 5.

30. Ibid., 11.

31. Scaruffi, “Towards Unification of Cognitive and Physical Sciences,” 5.

344

32. Roger Walsh and Shauna L. Shapiro. “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology,” 232.

33. Grof and Bennett, The Holotropic Mind, 20.

34. Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness, 42. For a good overview of Gebser’s evolutionary views see Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness, 47f.

35. Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 5-7, 13. Wilber describes 12 distinct levels of consciousness which he lists as “matter, sensation, perception, except, impulse, image, symbol, endocept, concept, rule, formal, vision-logic, vision, archetype, formless, nondual.” He has gleaned his theory through an exhaustive review of the literature of the world’s spiritual traditions, the reports of which he finds to have such a consistent degree of similarity that it lends a high degree of credence the validity of the descriptions therein.

36. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 77-79.

37. Ibid., 104 and 144.

38. Ibid., 105-106 and 144, and C. O. Evans and John Fudjack, “Consciousness: An Interdisdciplinary Study,” [article on-line]; http://www.menatlstates.net/consciousness.html; Internet; accessed 1 February 2006, 88. As Evans puts it, “The object of attention is to the unprojected consciousness as one side of a coin is to the other.” Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 104.

39. Shaun Gallagher, “Bodily Self-Awareness and Object Perception,” Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies 7, no. 1 (2003), [article on-line]; http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/theoria03.html; Internet; accessed 18 March 2007.

40. Ibid., 11. However proprioception can be brought into conscious awareness by making the experience of proprioception the focus of attention. I suggest that it thus becomes an attentive, reflective kind of awareness and is perceptual.

41. Ibid., 4-6. For example, while the movement of the eyes during the scanning of the visual environment is not experienced as part of the visual image, according to Gallagher, that movement nonetheless in a subconscious way contributes to the experience of being the subject.

42. Peter Nelson, “Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction: Through the Ontological Looking Glass,” in Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, ed. Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, and Kaisa Puhakka, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 68, 76. Donald Nathanson also acknowledges the interdependence of ‘self’ and ‘other’ though he discusses the self only in the context of relationships with other human selves. Donald Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), 199.

43. Nelson, “Mystical Experience and Radical Deconstruction,” 76-77. This notion of the projection of a center is thus a kind of opposite image of the projection of the object such as in Evan’s theory of consciousness. Nelson credits this idea of the projection of a center resulting in a concomitant periphery to Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959), 22.

44. David Michael, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” The Humanistic Psychologist 28, nos. 1-3, (2000): 289, 292-293. For Levin the move to the prepersonal is a kind of regression to a developmentally earlier way of being.

45. Levin, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” 293.

345

46. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 105 and 169. . 47. Dan Berkow, “A Psychology of No-thingness: Seeing Through the Projected Self,” in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, eds. John Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal (St. Paul, MN: Paragon Press, 2003), 191.

48. Ibid., 201.

49. David Peat, “Unfolding the Subtle: Matter and Consciousness,” [undated lecture on-line]; Center for Frontier Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. [talk on-line]; http://www.fdavidpeat. com/bilbiography/essays/text/temple2.txt; Internet; accessed 9 June 2007.

50. Ibid., 5.

51. Kaisa Puhakka, “An Invitation to Authentic Knowing,” in Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, ed. Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, and Kaisa Puhakka (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 13-16.

52. Ibid., 15 and 23. Note that this kind of moment is prior to the formation of what in Imaginal Psychology are called imaginal structures.

53. Ibid., 24-25. This lack of distinction, Puhakka says, is blissful.

54. Ibid., 18-20.

55. Feuerstein, Structures of Consciousness, 42 and Jean Gebser, The Everpresent Origin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), 135. In this aperspectival mode of being Gebser’s other structures of consciousness are not so much absent as consciously integrated, becoming in some sense transparent to themselves. This transparency allows the everpresent origin to shine through these structures that normally block it, suggesting that it is a state of consciousness which is not obscured by structures which usually give the impression of the self being separate.

56. James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” 4.

57. Steven Bodian, “Deconstructing the Self: The Uses of Inquiry in Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice,” in The Sacred Mirror,” 233, 237. Both Bodian’s and Prendergast’s uses of emptiness are parallel concepts for the same word in the Theory in Practice.

58. Prendergast, “The Sacred Mirror: Being Together,” in The Sacred Mirror, 3. From a psychotherapeutic perspective, Prendergast notes that prior to the direct experience, emptiness is often imagined as annihilation, engulfment, abandonment or fragmentation leading to anticipatory fear. Yet once welcomed, the actual opening into emptiness is more likely to be peaceful and filled with joy, compassion and gratitude. See Prendergast, “The Sacred Mirror,” in The Sacred Mirror, 94-95.

59. Peter Reason and William Tolbert, “Introduction: Taking the Metaphor of Participation into Our Lives and Practices.” ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transformation 23, no.4 (2003): 2.

60. Martin Buber, The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings, ed. Asher Biemann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 186.

61. Ibid., 185-186.

62. Martin Buber, I and Thou: A New Translation With a Prologue "I and You" and Notes by Walter Kaufmann, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 57.

346

63. Buber, The Martin Buber Reader, 222.

64. Ibid,. 231.

65. Rosch , “What Buddhist Meditation Has to Tell Psychology,” 3-4 and 15.

66. Rosch, “Primary Knowing,” 7-8.

67. Ibid., 4-5.

68. Ibid., 15.

69. Christine Skarda, “The Perceptual Form of Life,” 2-3 and 5.

70. Ibid., 12-14. In fact these two poles are, for her, ontologically interdependent, neither being found except in, and due to, the presence of the other.

71. John Heron, Sacred Science: Person-centered InquiryInto the Spiritual and the Subtle (Ross-on-Wye, England: PCCS Books, 1998) 91.

72. Ibid., 87-90.

73. Ibid., 94-100. The focus of this research is the immanent pole of Heron’s map.

74. Webster’s New World Dictionar, entry for “belong.”

75. Maurizio Crippa, “To Whom do You Belong?” Traces: Communion and Liberation International Magazine 3, March, 2003 [article on-line]; http://www.traces-cl.com/march03/ towhomdo.htm; Internet; accessed July 24, 2009.

76. Abraham Maslow, ”A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50, (1943): 381.

77. Ibid.

78. T. Byrum Karasu, “Growing Down: Becoming by Belonging,” Psychology Today, May/June, 2009; [article on-line]; http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/4843; Internet; accessed July 25, 2009.

79. John O’Donahue, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong (London: Bantam Books, 1998), 3.

80. Ibid., 25.

81. Ibid., 27.

82. Karasu, “Growing Down,” 2.

83. O’Donahue, Eternal Echoes, 35.

84. Ibid., 39-40.

85. Ibid., 37-38.

86. Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant

347

(New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1975), 3. This two stage process parallels my own second and third stages of the moment to moment emergence of the sense-of-self.

87. Ibid., 44-45. I will revisit the issue of the involvement of energy, particularly that referred to as the libido, in this process in the section on Imaginal Psychology. The definition of cathexis comes from Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 114-115.

88. Ibid., 89, 92, 101, 118, 121, 169, 183-184, 191, and 223-224. Kaplan’s description of this whole process closely parallels my own experience of the ongoing, repeated arising of the sense of self from the underlying primordial awareness as our attention shifts from one sensory experience to another. As such, I suggest the possibility that the activity of our day to day experience of perception vis à vis the sense-of-self represents a recapitulation of the process of development early in life.

89. Ibid., 44. At this point, Mahler, Alpine, and Bergman feel that the infant’s sense of self is not yet clearly differentiated from the mother.

90. Ibid., 47, 54-55, and 65.

91. Ibid., 9-11

92. Richard Chessick, The Psychology of the Self and the Treatment of Narcissism (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1985), 93.

93. W. R. D. Fairbairn, An Objects-Relations Theory of the Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 85.

94. Richard Rubens, “Fairbarin’s Structural Theory,” in Fairbairn and the Origins of Object Relations, ed. James Grotstein and Donald Rimsley (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994), 157.

95. W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (New York: Routledge, 1952), 41-46.

96. Otto Kernberg, Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (New York: James Aronson, Inc. 1976), 68-69.

97. Chessick, The Psychology of the Self, 97.

98. Ibid.

99. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Volume III: Loss, Sadness, and Depression (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980), 39.

100. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss: Volume I: Attachment (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), 266-273.

101. Ibid., 267-268.

102. E. Engel, and E. C. Douglas, “Visual Viewpoint Development,” a paper presented at the Southeast Psychological Association Meeting, Washington, D. C., 1980.

103. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1989), 36-38.

104. Ibid., 40.

348

105. Esther Bick, “The Experience of the Skin in Early Object-Relations,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968): 484.

106. Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 481.

107. Ibid.

108. Alexander Lowen, Narcissism: Denial of the True Self (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1983), 12.

109. Ibid., 25.

110. Marion Solomon, Narcissism and Intimacy: Love and Marriage in an Age of Confusion (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), 43.

111. Ibid., 69.

112. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, 39 and 41.

113. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 10, 26, 51, and 63.

114. Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore, “Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology,” in The Body and the Self, ed. José Luis Bermudez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 44.

115. Ibid.

116. Mahler, et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, 45.

117. Solomon, Narcissism and Intimacy, 67.

118. Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Lost Happiness (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 1977), 34.

119. Ibid., 119.

120. Ibid., 71.

121. Grof and Bennett, The Holotropic Mind, 38.

122. Ibid., 59.

123. Ibid., 73.

124. Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2000), 211.

125. Ibid., 212.

126. Ibid., 210-213.

127. Walsh and Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology,” 227.

128. Ibid.

349

129. David Fontana, “Essay Review: Tibetan and Western Models of Mind, Parts One and Two” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network 73, (August 2000): 2-5 and 74; and Walsh and Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology,” 236-237.

130. Walsh and Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology,” 228.

131. Ibid., 236.

132. Ibid., 235.

133. Shaun Gallagher, “Phenomenology and Neurophenomenology: An Interview.” Interviewed by Michael Sasma in 2003; [interview on-line]; http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/GallINTERVIEW.htm; Internet; accessed 3 March 2007, 5.

134. Ibid., 2.

135. B. Rael Caen and John Polich. “Meditation States and Traits: EEG, ERP and Neuroimaging Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 6, no. 2 (2006): 200.

136. Ibid.

137. Ibid.

138. Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz. “Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, September, 2007, 176. I would note, however, that their definition of open meditation, “nonreactively monitoring the content of experience from a moment to moment, primarily as a means to recognize the nature of emotional and cognitive patterns” (see page 176) is rather passive and does not allow for the kind of active investigative exploration that is also found among practitioners of vipassanā and especially Mahamudra.

139. Ibid., 173.

140. Ibid.

141. Charlotte Haimerl and Elizabeth Valentine, “The Effect of Contemplative Practice on Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Dimensions of Self-Concept,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 33, no. 1 (2001): 37.

142. Ibid., 42.

143. Ibid., 44.

144. Elizabeth Valentine and Philip Sweet. “Meditation and Attention: A Comparison of the Effects of Concentrative and Mindfulness Meditation on Sustained Attention,” Mental Health, Religion &Culture 2, no. 1 (1999): 63-66.

145. Ibid., 66-67.

146. Ibid., 67.

147. J. Brefczynski-Lewis, et al., “Neural Correlates of the Attentional Expertise of Long-term Meditators,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 104, no. 27 (2007): 11483.

148. Ibid.

350

149. Ibid., 11484.

150. Ibid., 11487.

151. The āruppas are sometimes referred to as the āruppa jhānas while the full set of eight levels of concentration are also sometimes collectively referred to simply as the jhānas. See Ñyāņatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary, 83-85.

152. For a more detailed description of the rūpa jhānas and the āruppas, see Richard Shankman, The Experience of Samādhi: An In-depth Exploration of Buddhiist Meditation (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc. 2008), 32-52.

153. Michael Hagerty, et al.,“Working Paper: EEG Power and Coherence Analysis of an Expert Meditator in the Eight Jhanas,” paper presented at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute, June 6-12, 2008, Garrison , NY; [paper on-line]; http://www.wisebrain.org/EEGofJhanas.pdf; Internet; accessed 11 November 2009.

154. Ibid., 3. The researchers write that the sixth quality of the jhānas and āruppas, the shift in the sense of the passage of time, cannot be tested using EEG techonolgy because the region of the brain implicated in this function is located too deeply within the brain to create electric signals detectable at the scalp.

155. Ibid., 4.

156. Ibid. The writers of this working paper did not report on shifts in EEG activity between the different layers of the rūpa jhānas and āruppas. I was particularly interested in the shift between the fourth rūpa jhāna and the first āruppa, and then from the first āruppa to the second āruppa, since in my own practice these transitions correlate with the falling away of the subtle energy boundaries I was studying. When I contacted Hagerty to inquire about his findings regarding this transition, he reported that it was the visual cortex that showed major shifts between the fourth rūpa jhāna and the first āruppa while those from the brain regions associated with personal boundaries were less pronounced. Personal communications, September 2 and 3, 2009. This result is particularly intriguing. This study focuses on the boundary experienced during vision in part because vision it is my sense that the experience of there being a boundary between subject and object is stronger during seeing than during other sensory experiences. As such, the falling away of that boundary is more pronounced in vision than in other senses. Since I correlate the falling away of this boundary to the transition from the fourth rūpa jhāna and the first āruppa this finding reported by Haggerty parallels to my own direct experience. In addition, in my own experience, the shift between the fourth rūpa jhāna and the first āruppa is much more pronounced than either shifts between different āruppas or between different rūpa jhānas. See Appendix 13, 283-286. How this finding relates to the hypothesis that these boundaries are structured of sublte energy would involve a discussion of the relationship between the brain and subtle energy experience. See Ho’s entire article “Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience”; Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 77-78 and 123-126; and James Oschman, “What is Healing Energy? Part Three: Silent Pulses,” Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, (April 1997): 187, for interesting possibilities of what this relationship might be.

157. Antoine Lutz, et al., “Long-term Meditators Self-Induce High Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 10, no. 46 (2004): 16369.

158. Ibid. I would personally disagree with the characterization these researchers give to meditation practices involving the cultivation of compassion as being objectless. Having practiced such meditations myself under intensive retreat conditions, I find that rather than being objectless, the state of mind being cultivated is actually an object of experience at the mind sense door, as opposed to being an object of the five physical senses. As such this practice is not truly objectless.

351

159. Ibid., 16371. As someone who has practiced loving-kindness and compassion meditation, albeit a Theravadan as opposed to Tibetan form of this practice, I question this description. My own experience is that the intention to cultivate the specific qualities of mind of loving-kindness and compassion constitute a directedness of intention. In addition, such practices are usually taught in such a way that the qualities of loving-kindness are directed towards either oneself or another person or perhaps more generally towards all beings, but nonetheless there is a directionality involved. As such these forms of meditation do not seem to me to be truly undirected. From the Buddhist perspective, qualities of mind are objects of the mind as a sense door and so constitute a kind of object in relation to knowing subject just as do sensory objects of the five physical sensory modalities. See my description of samatha practice devoted to the cultivation of the Brahma Vihāras or Divine Abodes, in Appendix 13, 279-281. These are the four qualities of mind of loving kindness, compassion, empathic joy, and equanimity. Ňyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 44.

160. Ibid., 16371.

161. Ibid., 16372. That the authors of this paper support the usefulness of highly trained meditators for research of attention and the cultivation of validates the choice of meditators expert in samatha and vipassanā for this study.

162. Maria Kozhevnikov, et al., “The Enhancement of Visuospatial Processing Efficiency Through Buddhist Deity Meditation,” Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (2009): 646.

163. Ibid.

164. Ibid., 647.

165. Ibid.

166. Ibid.

167. Ibid., 651.

168. Roger Walsh, “Can Synaesthesia Be Cultivated?: Indications from Surveys of Meditators,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12, no. 4-5 (2005): 7. The Theravadan tradition is the oldest Buddhist tradition, currently still found as the predominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanks, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. The Zen tradition is a later form of Buddhism today practiced in China (where it is called Ch’an), Korea, and Japan. Both forms of Buddhism, along with Vajrayana Buddhism, have now become popular in the West.

169. Ibid., 5.

170. Ibid., 9-10.

171. Ibid., 14-15.

172. Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, and Michael Dysart, “Differences in Visual Sensitivity Among Mindfulness Meditators and Non-Meditators,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 58 (1984): 729.

173. Ibid., 730-731.

174. Ibid., 731.

175. Daniel Brown, Michael Forte, and Michael Dysart, “Visual Sensitivity and Mindfulness Meditation,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 58 (1984), 778.

352

176. Ibid., 780.

177. Ibid., 781.

178. Michael Forte, Daniel Brown, and Michael Dysart, “Differences in Experience Among Mindfulness Meditators,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 7, no. 1 (1987-1988): 48.

179. Ibid., 50.

180. Ibid., 49.

181. Ibid., 54.

182. Ibid., 56.

183. Michael Forte, Daniel Brown, and Michael Dysart, “Through the Looking Glass: Phenomenological Reports of Advanced Meditators at the Visual Threshold,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 4, no. 4 (1984-1985): 323.

184. Ibid., 326. The Theravadan tradition describes four levels of enlightenment. At each level particular aspects of human experience that lead to suffering are either attenuated or uprooted altogether. It is not until the fourth level that suffering in all its forms has been fully eradicated. Bhikkhu Ňanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi describe the fetters leading to suffering that are eradicated at the first stage of enlightenment as “identity view, i.e., the view of a self among the five aggregates, doubt in the Buddha and his teachings, and adherence to external rules and observances, either ritualistic or ascetic, in the belief that they can bring purification.” The five aggregates are the object being cognized, the affective tone of the experience, our perception of the object, our intentionality towards it, and our knowing, or consciousness of it. At the second stage of enlightenment, the fetters of lust, hatred, and delusion are attenuated. At the third stage of enlightenment, lust and hatred are completely eradicated while at the fourth stage, desire for rebirth in either the fine material realms or the immaterial realms, conceit (of which there are three forms: superiority conceit, inferiority conceit, and equality conceit), restlessness, and delusion (or ignorance) are completely eradicated. Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 42-43.

185. Forte, Brown, and Dysart, “Through the Looking Glass,” 326.

186. Ibid., 327.

187. Ibid., 329.

188. Ibid., 330.

189. Ibid., 332

190. Ibid.

191. Ibid., 333.

192. Ibid., 336.

193. Ibid., 335.

194. Ibid., 335.

353

195. Daniel Brown and Jack Engler, “The Stages of Mindfulness Meditation: A Validation Study, Part I: Study and Results,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 12, (1980): 146-147.

196. Ibid., 151-156.

197. Ibid., 156-174.

198. Brown and Engler, “The Stages of Mindfulness Meditation: A Validation Study,” 163.

199. Ibid., 160-163.

200. Ibid., 163-166.

201. Ibid., 163-172.

202. Ibid., 172-175.

203. Ibid., 169-191.

204. Walsh and Shapiro, “The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology,” 228.

205. Eleanor Rosch, “Is Wisdom in the Brain?” Psychological Science 10, no. 3 (1999), 224.

206. Forte, Brown, and Dysart. “Through the Looking Glass,” 325.

207. See Forte, Brown, and Dysart, “Through the Looking Glass,” and Brown and Engler. “The Stages of Mindfulness Meditation.”

208. Hagerty, et al.’s study has as its focus the jhānas and āruppas, which interestingly do form a part of the deep background of this present research project. (See Appendices 13 and 14.)

209. See Lutz, et al., “Long-term Meditators Self-Induce High Amplitude Gamma Synchrony.”

210. Webster’s New World Dictionary, entry for “energy.”

211. Ibid., entry for “work.”

212. Phaedra Bonewits, and Issac Bonewits. Real Energy: Systems, Spirits and Substances to Heal, Change and Grow (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007): 22-23.

213. Ibid.

214. Webster’s New World Dictionary, entry on ‘matter.’

215. Miriam Dyak, The Voice Dialogue Facilitators Handbook: Part 1 (Seattle, WA: L.I.F.E. Energy Press, 1999): 73.

216. Bonewits and Bonewits. Real Energy, 21.

217. David Feinstein, “Subtle Energy: Psychology’s Missing Link,” Shift in Action: IONS Noetic Sciences Review 64, (June 2003): 3.

218. Brennan, “Possible Physics of the Human Energy Field,” 4.

219. Tiller. Science and Human Transformation, 14.

354

220. T. M. Srinivasan, “What Are Subtle Energy Fields?” Excerpt from “A Subtle Energy Technology for Noise Reduction in Physical and Psychophysical Systems” [article online] available at http://twm.co.nz/subtle.html, Internet, accessed 3 February 2007.

221. Gloria Alvino, “The Human Energy Field in Relation to Science, Consciousness and Health, Parts 1 and 2” [article on-line] http://www.twn.co.nz/energ.html and http://www.twm.co.nz/energy2.html; Internet; accessed 8 August 2007. As the Institute for HeartMath notes, the current status of subtle energies is similar to that of electromagnetism 250 years ago in that “the effects could be seen but not directly measured.” Institute of HeartMath, “Subtle Energy Research,” [article on-line] http://homepages.ihug.co. nz/~sai/SubtleEnergy.html; Internet; accessed 22 July 2006: 1.

222. Andreas Wehowsky, “Energy in Somatic Psychotherapy,” lecture given at The First Dutch Symposium for Body-oriented Psychotherapy, Driebergen, 1998. [lecture on-line]; available from http://www.asaseraives.pt/docs/energy.pdf; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007.

223. Eligio Stephen Gallegos, “Animal Imagery, the Cakra System and Psychotherapy,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 15, no. 2 (1983): 125.

224. Garret Yount, Yifang Qian, and Honglin Zhang, “Changing Perspectives on Healing Energy in Traditional Chinese Medicine,” in Consciousness & Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, ed. Marilyn Schlitz, Tina Amorok, and Marc Micozzi (St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, 2005): 421.

225. Myeong Soo Lee, Young Hoon Rim, and Chang-won Kang, “Effects of External Qi-Therapy on Emotions, Electroencephalograms, and Plasma Cortisol,” International Journal of Neuroscience, 114 (2004): 1494; and Chang, Sun Ok. “The Nature of Touch Therapy Related to Ki: Practitioners’ Perspective,” Nursing and Health Sciences 5 (2003): 104.

226. Douglas Matzke, “Direct Awareness of Chi: Case Study,” lecture presented at “Towards a Science of Consciousness,” 1996 (Tuscon II), University of Arizona, [lecture on-line]; http://www.matzkefamily.net/doug/papers/tuscon2b.html; Internet; accessed 10 August 2007, 1-2. (page numbers)

227. Ted Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine (Chicago: Congdon and Weed, 1983), 35-36.

228. Tart, “Aikido and the Concept of Ki,” 340-343.

229. Christopher Hills, “Is Kundalini Real?” in Kundalini: Evolution and Enlightenment, ed. John White (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1990), 106-119.

230. Haridas Chaudhari, “The Psychophysiology of Kundalini,” in Kundalini: Evolution and Enlightenment¸ 62-63. Chaudhari gives no definition for his term ‘transpersonal superconscient sense modalities.’

231. Lee Sanella, “Kundalini: Classical and Clinical” in Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, ed. Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof (New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, 1989), 99-108.

232. Eden, with Feinstein, Energy Medicine, 2-3.

233. Bruce Burger, Esoteric Anatomy: The Body as Consciousness (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998), 7.

355

234. William Collinge, “Subtle Energy: Basic Principles” excerpted from Subtle Energy: Awakening to the Unseen forces in Our Lives (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1998); [excerpt on-line]; http://www.healthy.net/collinge/basic.htm; Internet; accessed 7 September 2004.

235. Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 33-34.

236. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 18.

237. Dyak, The Voice Dialogue Facilitators Handbook, 74.

238. Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit, 69.

239. Dyak, The Voice Dialogue Facilitators Handbook, 74.

240. Louchakova and Warner, “Via Kundalini,” 126 and 137.

241. Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” 126-128. Exquisite visual images of subtle body anatomy can be found in work of Alex Grey. See Alex Grey, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (Rochester Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1990), especially the plates entitled “Psychic Energy System,” “Spiritual Energy System,” “Universal Mind Lattice,” and “The Void/Clear Light.”

242. Reber, Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 418.

243. Calvin Hall, Primer in Freudian Psychology (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1954), 6.

244. Wilhelm.Reich, “Glossary,” in Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), xx.

245. Ibid., 188.

246. Jean A. Metzker and Geoffrey Leigh, “A Short-term Longitudinal Study of Energy Fields in Infants and Young Children,” Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine 15, no. 2 (2004): 140.

247. Louchakova and Warner, “Via Kundalini,” 126 and 130. Tiller also attributes the awakening of an awareness of subtle energy and subtle body experiences to the meditative cultivation of concentration. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 63 and 177.

248. Brennan, “Possible Physics of the Human Energy Field.”

249. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 96.

250. Marie Carlsson, personal communication to Gary Buck, 23 March 2007. Carlsson is the author of “Kundalini and the Bonnie Method of GIM (Guided Imagery and Music),” Journal of the Association for Music and Imagery 8 (2001-2002): 35-55. Tiller expresses a similar view when he writes that muscle proprioception is the physical body’s link to subtle energy. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 132.

251. Eden, with Feinstein, Energy Medicine, 43-44.

252. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 76.

253. Ibid., 69. This view is quite similar to my own experience of the subtle energy dimension of sensory experience. However Bruyere does not elaborate what happens when energy is drained from the

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field at the heart. I suggest that my subtle energy description of Dependent Origination depicts what happens next. See Appendix 13, 295f.

254. Bruyere, Wheels of Light, 76. My own experience and view is that both are true. The creative energy that structures our perception enters from below and has it source in the planet we live on while another energy, which tends to destructure experience enters from above and has a much vaster source.

255. Yan Xin, “Dr. Yan Xin on Scientific Qigong Research,” [article on-line]; http://www.twm.co.nz/DrYan_qi.htm; Internet; accessed 8 August 2007.

256. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 21. These included electroencephalography (EEG - measurements of the brain’s electrical activity), electromyography (EMG - measurements of the electrical activity of muscles) and electrocardiography (EKG - measurements of the heart’s electrical activity).

257. Ibid., 22.

258. Ibid., 29.

259. An electromagnetic field is the combined effect of two fields generated by a charged particle: and electric field generated by the particle when stationary and a magnetic field generated by the particle in motion. From the view of classical physics, fields are continuous and move like waves while quantum theory requires fields to be particular, specifically photons, which transfer energy in discrete packets. Electromagnetic fields are one of the four natural forces currently recognized by physics. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, entry entitled “Electromagnetic Field” [encyclopedia on-line] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_field; Internet: accessed 10 October 2007.

260. Ibid., 30-33. Aura readers observing subjects in the Mu Room were able to confirm reports in the literature that electromagnetic energy enters the body through acupuncture points while also adding that it flows through the connective tissue (tissue whose main known function is to hold together and support organs and other tissues). Note the connection between this observation and the perspective presented by Ho in the section on Western approaches to consciousness above.

261. Oschman, “What is Healing Energy? Part Three,” 183. Oschman also offers clear support for Ho’s theory. See 187, caption for Fig. 5 and 190.

262. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 20. Hunt also notes that energy fields around living organisms are active while those around inanimate objects are not.

263. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 106-107. Tiller lists the autonomic nervous system, acupuncture points and meridians, and the chakra system as examples of specific antennas associated with the human body. He suggests that different human body antennas serve different layers of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation which in turn Tiller relates to the different layers of the subtle body depicted in the Indian cosmology. Tiller writes that antennas have different electromagnetic fields associated with them, both near fields and larger, broader fields. He suggests that the near fields constitute the human aura. Tiller notes that the presence throughout the body of neurohormones and neurotransmitters that are electromagnetically sensitive is another way in which the whole body is involved with subtle energies. (Although electromagnetic fields are among those measurable by science and so not technically subtle energies, the body’s capacity to sense them would be a capacity more subtle than our ordinary sense capacities.) See pages 107-108,127-128 and 166. Oschman concurs in this view that the human body functions as an antenna. See Oschman, “What is Healing Energy?: Part Three,” 187, caption for Fig. 5 and 190.

264. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 121-127. Also see pages 76-78 for examples of the mandala-like imagery to which Tiller refers.

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265. Ibid., 4.

266. Ibid., 10.

267. Ibid., 14. Ernest Pecci describes Tiller’s overall theory as depicting the universe as a lattice-like network along which are conveyed wave-like patterns generated by superluminary (traveling faster than the speed of light), subliminal subtle energies. Ernest Pecci, Foreword to Science and Human Transformation, Tiller, xiii-xix. This view of a universal lattice is reminiscent of the Buddhist and Hindu concept of Indra’s Net. See Francis Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1977), 1-20. Qigong is a Chinese system for “physical, and mental training for health, martial arts, and self-enlightenment.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. entry for “qigong.” [encyclopedia on- line]; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong; accessed June 30, 2010.

268. Wilber, “Are the Chakras Real?” 122.

269. Ibid., 123-125. The awakening of the kundalini energy, Wilber says, is a process which undoes this tyranny. See 126. Wilber’s depiction includes the infant’s Oedipal fantasy of sexual union with the mother as a way of overcoming the fear of death, an explanation which makes some sense if you are a male but does not work from the feminine perspective.

270. Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, 151.

271. Metzker, and Leigh. “A Short-term Longitudinal Study of Energy Fields in Infants,” 138. Metzker and Leigh speculate that this developmental process may be due to a 1) the development of other means of communication with other beings and information gathering from the environment meaning less need for energetic communication and information gathering, 2) a shift in the infants understanding of themselves away from an energetic understanding towards a self understanding based increasingly in thought and language, and/or 3) a response to the lack of support from the environment for energy experience as a part of reality. To me it also suggests a decrease in the degree of interconnectedness with the environment perhaps leading to a heightened feeling of separateness from it. Citing research on brain development documenting the effects of disuse on our mental capabilities, Tiller believes that subtle energy senses are lost through disuse during our early years but can be regained. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 147-149. His view could also be related to Metzker and Leigh’s findings.

272. Ronald Mann, “Subtle Energy in the Therapeutic Relationship,” Complimentary Health Practice Review 3, no.2 (1997): 67, 70. Mann lists acupuncture, Therapeutic Touch, and Reiki as examples.

273. Alvino, “The Human Energy Field, Part II.”

274. Louchakova and Warner, “Via Kundalini,” 140.

275. Mark B. Woodhouse, “Energy Monism: A Solution to the Mind-Problem that Connects Science and Spirituality,” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network.[journal on-line]; http://scimednet.org/library/articles/9711301510.htm; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007, 1.(page number)

276. Ibid., 4.

277. Larry Dossey, “Energy Talk,” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network, [journal on-line]; http://scimednet.org/library/articles/9711301421.htm; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007.

278. Ken Wilber, “Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Subtle Energies,” Explore 1, No. 4 (2005): 259-260.

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279. Christian de Quincey, “Language, Energy & Consciousness: Can Energy Talk Enlighten Us About the Mind,” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network, [journal on-line] http://scimednet.org/library/Articles/PCSdequincey.htm; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007.

280. Louchakova and Warner, “Via Kundalini,” 140.

281. Ibid., 125, 139, and 141.

282 See Appendix 13, 295f.

283. However as noted in the section on Developmental Psychology above, Mahler, et al., do tie boundary and subtle energy together when they implicate a reallocation of libido from an internal cathexis to and external cathexis in the emergence of the experience of a self-other boundary in the early months of a human infant’s development.

284. There are three major historical developments of Buddhism still active today, generally referred to as the Theravada (or Hinayana), Mahayana, and Vajrayana traditions. A simple way to describe the major difference might be to contrast the Theravadan emphasis on direct experience of the emptiness of self leading personal enlightenment with the Mahayana emphasis on the emptiness of both self and other, evolving into a motivation to serve the enlightenment of all beings. Both the Theravadan and Mahayana approaches rely on samatha practices to quiet the mind and vipassanā to observe and investigate the full range of one’s own direct, present moment experience. Vajrayana Buddhism is a variation on Mahayana Buddhism that uses these techniques to focus on the direct experience of the nature of mind itself. In Vajrayana practice these specialized forms of inquiry are referred to as Mahamudra practice and the Trekchod form of Dzogchen practice. The Vajrayana tradition also extensively uses practices involving visualization (a misnomer since the imagery generated also involves other senses, including subtle senses such as that which I refer to as subtle energy sense.)

285. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000). Part II deals with Dependent Origination, Part III with the five aggregates, and Part IV with the six sense modalities. The list in English of the five aggregates comes from Andrew Olendzki in Gloria Taraniya Amborsia and Andrew Olendzki. “The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness,” Insight Journal, (Fall 2002): 13. The notion of the five aggregates is one parallel concept from Buddhist thought for Omer’s term imaginal structures. The usual formulation of Dependent Origination ends in the link of suffering and is seen as a description of the causes of suffering. The twelve links in order leading to suffering are ignorance, activity formations, structured consciousness, mind and body, the six sense modalities, contact between sense organ and object, feeling tone, craving, attachment, becoming, birth and finally old age, suffering and death. However in one sutta from the Digha Nikaya, or Long Discourses of the Buddha, there is an alternative rendition of the links after the seventh link of craving. This rendition is more psychological in its tone. The sequence in this version continues with seeking, acquisition, ascertainment, desire and passion, attachment, stinginess, defensiveness, and culminating in various evil and unskillful phenomena including the taking up of sticks and knives; conflicts, quarrels, and disputes; accusations, divisive speech, and lies. This version of the later links, together with the more common sequence offers a reasonable parallel depiction of the cognitive and affective aspects of an imaginal structure. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. “The Mahanidāna Sutta,” in Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Great Discourse on Causation: The Mahanidāna Sutta and Its Commentaries. Kandy, Sri Lanka: The Buddhist Publication Society, 1984; [translation on-line]; http://www.vipassana.com/canon/ digha/dn15.php; Section entitled “Dependent on Craving”; Internet; accessed 28 July 2009.

286. Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 388.

287. Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 46 and 114-115. The role of manasikāra in this context is especially noteworthy in that it represents the first contact between mind and a particular object and serves to bind the other aspects to the object, a kind of projective function. Ñyāņatiloka also describes manasikāra

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as the critical factor in “breaking through the subconscious life continuum (bhavanga) (to) form the first stage in the perceptual process.”

288. Ambrosia and Olendzki, “The Fourth Foundation of Mindfulness,” 13.

289. Ibid., 15.

290. Ibid., 13-16. The English for this title is “Discourse on the Establishments of Mindfulness.” The translation of satipaţţhāna as “establishments of mindfulness” comes from the sidebar to this article written by Bhikkhu Bodhi. A more common English translation is “foundations of mindfulness.” The sutta itself can be found in Ñāņamoli, Bhikkhu and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 145-158. The five skhandhas as an object of mindfulness are discussed in the fourth of four major sections of the sutta. As noted above, the Buddha’s conception of the five skhandhas is a very close parallel to imaginal structures as defined by Omer and that the focus of the skhandhas as a place to establish mindfulness is then a strong parallel with Omer’s definition of reflexivity as “the capacity to engage and be aware of those imaginal structures that shape and constitute our experience.” See Omer, “Key Definitions,” entries for imaginal structures and reflexivity. As is described below, one view of the skhandhas is that their sequential emergence results in consciousness arising in relation to an object of one of the senses, essentially subject-object consciousness. Jeremy Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” in Dharma Gaia, 69-70.

291. Dalai Lama. A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night: A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1994), 124.

292. Ibid., 128, 130. The Dalai Lama attributes to Western science the view that “all mental process are necessarily physical processes which he calls a metaphysical assumption not a scientific fact.” 128 The Dalai Lama also makes another interesting comment on the difference between Western scientific views and Buddhist perspectives. He notes that Darwinian theory does not distinguish between sentient life and non-sentient life, and therefore does not account for the emergence of what we call consciousness leading to the capacity to experience pain and pleasure. See 115.

293. Ibid., 125. It is of interest to note that this comment by the Dalai Lama is tantamount to saying that from the Buddhist perspective, when it comes to knowing, the usual linguistic conventions of subject and predicate do not apply.

294. Ibid., 131.

295. Ibid., 124, 168. These two additional forms of consciousness are the afflicted consciousness and the ground consciousness. See below.

296. Ibid., 168.

297. B. Alan Wallace, “External, Internal and Nondual Space,” paper presented at the 26th Mystics and Scientists Conference: “Space in Mind: At the Interface of Inner and Outer Space,” King Alfred’s College, Winchester, England, April 13, 2003. [paper on-line]; http://www.alanwallace. org/External,%20Internal,%20&%20Nondual%20Space.pdf, Internet, accessed 24 February 2007.

298. Ibid., 10.

299. Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” 71.

300. Khenchen Thrangu, The Five Buddha Families and the Eight Consciousnesses (Boulder, CO: Namo Buddha Publications, 1992), 13.

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301. Ibid. Thrangu notes that the alaya has sometimes been described as a universal form of consciousness or equated with Jung’s collective unconscious. He takes issue with these depictions, affirming that the alaya resides within the stream of an individual’s unconscious. Thrangu, Khenchen, Essentials of Mahamudra: Looking Directly at the Mind (Boston : Wisdom Publications, 2004), 62. However the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious also resides within each individual. See Moacanin, Radmilla, The Essence of Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism: Western and Eastern Paths to the Heart (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 29-30. Moacanin also depicts Jung’s collective unconscious as identical for all persons. It seems to me that it is in this characteristic that these two, Jung’s collective unconscious and the Tibetan concept of the alaya, do differ. While Jung’s idea is the same in all persons, Thrangu’s use of the alaya is unique for each person, grounded as it is in individual experience. The collective unconscious might be more accurately equated with the Buddhist notion of the common form of human life as contrasted with other forms of sentient existence, such as animal forms, e.g. horses, lions, or tigers, each of which has a generic species form, or those that inhabit the divine abodes such as devas (similar to the Western notion of angels) or deities (of which the Buddhist tradition describes multiple expressions), each of which has its specific template of manifestation that is perhaps closer to Jung’s view that the collective unconscious represented as an inherited aspect of our make-up as human individuals. See Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 35-37.

302. Ajahn Buddhadassa. “The Life That Doesn’t Bite: Freedom in Buddhism,” trans. Santikaro Bhikkhu, in Inquiring Mind: A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community 23, no. 1 (2006): 6.

303. Ibid.

304. Martin Pitt, “The Pebble and the Tide,” 102.

305. Kabat-Zinn, “Coming to Our Senses,” 6.

306. Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, 537.

307. Tenzin Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light: The Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2002), 22.

308. Ñyāņatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary, 129.

309. Ibid., 219; "Lion's Roar of Queen Srimala Sutra," trans. Lama Shenpen Hookham, [translation on-line]; http://www.webspawner.com/users/tathagatagarbha11a/ index.html; Internet; accessed November 26, 2009.

310. Heather Sundberg, “Emptiness Includes Everything,” in Dharma Streams, bi-annual newsletter published by Mountain Stream Meditation Center, Auburn, CA, (September through February 2008-2009): 1.

311. Peter Levitt, “An Intimate View,” 93-94.

312. Raul Moncayo, “The Finger Pointing at the Moon: Zen Practice and the Practice of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” in Psychoanalysis and Buddhis: An Unfolding Dialogue, ed. Jeremy Safran (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 338.

313. Jeremy Safran, “Introduction,” in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, 23.

314. Ibid.

315. Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without A Thinker (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 39 and 6.

316. Ibid., 81.

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317. Ibid., 18. The other realms are the hell realm, the realm of hungry ghosts, the animal realm, the realm of jealous gods (who have bodily forms), and the realm of the formless gods. See Lati Rinbochay and Denma Lochö Rinbochay, Meditative States in Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997), 29-47.

318. Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker, 4 and 41.

319. Ibid., 45.

320. Jack Engler, “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Reexamination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism,” in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism; An Unfolding Dialogue, ed. Jeremy Safran (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), 40-41. Engler’s depiction of the four stages of enlightenment from the Theravadan tradition here is given from his psychological perspective. A traditional Buddhist explication is given in notes 184 and 197 for this chapter above.

321. Ibid., 38.

322. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 114.

323. Ibid., 241-2. The rest of this paragraph summarizes this same passage.

324. Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” 69-70.

325. Ibid., 69.

326. Ibid., 69-70. This passage summarizes the process described on these pages. Hayward then goes on to list some ways in which Western empirical science supports this view. (page 71) This description comes close to my own, though my experience suggests some differences in order and involves more details especially of the initial patterning resulting in the split into inner and outer. My own emphasis is on the nature of the patterning referred to, particularly its nature as subtle energy. See Appendix 13, 295-309.

327. Ibid., 66. I have used the Sanskrit spelling, skhandha in place of the Pali khandha since in Buddhist vipassanā circles that is the more commonly used spelling. All other Buidhist words are in Pali or Tibetan.

328. Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 8. Although the Bön tradition predates the arrival of Indian Buddhism in Tibet from India and, as such, is not technically of the same Buddhist lineage, Bön does trace its own roots to Tonpa Sherab, a Buddha who predates Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha of our era. (See pages xix-xxii for a short history of Bön.) Its teachings and practices are very close to those of the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition in Tibet, especially Dzogchen or the Great Perfection, the highest teachings of the Nyingma school. As such, I have chosen to include Tenzin Wangyal’s work in this Buddhist literature review.

329. Ibid., 8-9.

330. Ibid., 9. Here again is another description that is close to my own experience and theory yet the particular details, especially about how the activity of energy gives rise to the split into subject and object, are again missing. But what is somewhat unusual about this particular description is that it offers a picture or image of repeated emergence of the sense-of-self or subject grounded in the activity of subtle energy, the focus of my own practice and research.

331. Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra, See his “Appendix B: The Meaning of Mahamudra,” the sub-section entitled “The Adventitious Stains of Ignorance and the Path of Liberation.”

362

332. B. Alan Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” in Life Positive, (January 2006): 66. As a parallel concept Wallace offers the Western physics idea of the background vacuum, also described as embued with infinite energy, the excitations of which produce the configurations of mass-energy we experience as the physical world. See Wallace, “External, Internal and Nondual Space.” The Dudjom Lingpa quote is from Dudjom Lingpa, The Vajra Essence: From the Matrix of Primordial Consciousness and Pure Appearances, a Tantra of the Self-Arisen Nature of Existence, trans. by B Alan Wallace, (Ashland, OR: Mirror of Wisdom, 2004.) (This is a restricted text requiring that the recipient have received teachings, empowerment and a reading transmission from a qualified lama before being allowed to purchase. Though I have received such teachings from qualified lamas for other similar texts by Dudjom Lingpa, I have not received teachings on this particular text. As such I have not been able to get a copy to read for myself to confirm the quote and its context or to determine the exact page number in the text. However Wallace himself is the translator of this text and a highly respected Vajrayana Buddhist scholar and academic. As such it is quite unlikely that he would misquote or quote out of context from this text. And since this passage so eloquently makes Wallace’s point, I have decided to include it without detailed reference to the source text.)

333. Wallace, “External, Internal, and Nondual Space.”

334. Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night, 172-173.

335. Peter Fenner, “Nonduality and Therapy” in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, ed. John Prendergast, Peter Fenner, and Sheila Krystal (St. Paul, MN: Paragon Press, 2003), 25.

336. Ibid., 29.

337. Ibid.

338. Sarah Doering, “Simply Resting in Knowing,” in Insight Journal, (Winter 2008): 24.

339. Ibid.

340. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 66.

341. Wallace, “External, Internal, and Nondual Space.”

342. Ibid. Elsewhere Wallace describes a fundamental difference between physics and Buddhism. He writes: “Theoretical physics provides us with conceptual quantitative insight into the nature of space devoid of consciousness, whereas Buddhism presents experiential insights into the nature of subtle dimensions of space suffused with consciousness.” Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 66.

343. Glenn Eddy, text on the back of a print of a painting of Kurukulle Dakini (Oakland, CA: Sky Walker Publications, 1974).

344. Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, xix. It is interesting in this context to note the parallel use of the terms ‘innate’ and ‘nondual’ as well as the similarly parallel pairing of awareness and presence. This latter is particularly interesting as it suggests an especially intimate relationship between epistemology and ontology, a theme which will resurface in the Imaginal Psychology section of the literature review to follow. In Wangyal’s description above of the emergence of subject in relation to its objects, it is out of the dharmadhatu that both arise. See page 9.

345. See Chapter One, above for definitions of luminosity and emptiness, the union of which is synonymous with Buddha Nature.

346. Jan Chozen Bays, et al., “Mindfulness: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation?” in Inquiring Mind:A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community 22, no. 1 (2006): 6.

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347. Ibid., 6-7. Note the similarity to the Dalai Lama’s comment above that Buddhism does not distinguish between a knowing subject and the process of knowing.

348. Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” 74.

349. Ibid.

350. Ibid., 64-66.

351. Pitt, “The Pebble and the Tide,” 104. Pitt goes on to note that it is this vision of interpenetration that forms the basis for Buddhist morality which he sees as inherently ecological.

352. Martine Batchelor, “Breaking Free with Creative Consciousness,” in Insight Journal, (Winter 2008): 11-12.

353. Ibid.., 13.

354. Joan Halifax, “The Third Body: Buddhism, Shamanism, and Deep Ecology,” 22; Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” 53.

355. Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” 53 and 61.

356. Ibid., 58.

357. Ibid., 60.

358. Elizabeth Roberts, “Gaian Buddhism,” 148.

359. Ibid., 153.

360. Ibid., 151.

361. Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” 60.

362. Khenchen Thrangu, Crystal Clear: Practical Advice for Mahamudra Meditators, trans. Erik Pema Kunsang, ed. Michael Tweed (Boudhanath, Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 2003), 55-56, 58. See also Thrangu, Mahamudra: Looking Directly at the Mind, 62 for the reasoned argument that supports the actual direct experience.

363. Kalu Rinpoche, Luminous Mind, 22-23.

364. The Dzogchen tradition is a practice lineage of the Nyingma School of Tibetan Buddhism. The Nyingma School is the oldest Tibetan lineage of Buddhism and traces its roots to the arrival of Padmasambhava in Tibet in the Eighth Century. Its practices, particularly Dzogchen are currently popular in the West.

365. Maitreya, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Pure Being, with commentary by Mipham, trans. Jim Scott (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2004), 75. Mipham compares phenomena to a painting which has perspective, where there appears to be depth of field although in reality only a flat piece of canvas is involved. 75. For the definition of a bodhisattva see Webster’s New World Dictionary, entry for “bodhisattva.”

366. Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 197. The actual spelling of samsara in Pali is samsāra. However since samsara has entered the English language I have used its English language spelling.

364

367. Ibid., 77.

368. Lama Mipham. Calm and Clear. trans. Tarthang Tulku (Emeryville, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1973), 97-110. While my descriptions include both a detailing of the subtle energy aspects of this process and the shifts in perception involved, Mipham’s description focuses on the perceptual aspects.

369. Ibid., 102

370. Ibid., 103.

371. Ibid., 105.

372. It should be noted, as is be demonstrated by the reports of participants described in Appendix 15, 326 and 328, that this does not mean that subject-object consciousness no longer arises.

373. Ibid., 103 and 104.

374. For practices used for stabilizing Mahamudra insight see Thrangu, Essentials of Mahamudra, Chapter 13: “Maintaining Mahamudra in Meditation and Post Meditation,” 181-207 or Dagpo Tashi Namgyal, “Dagpo Tashi Namgyal’s Essential Advice on Maintaining Mahamudra Practice,” trans. (with commentary) Lama Thapkay (Peter Barth). [translation on-line]; http://www. mahamudracenter.org/ MaintainingMahamudraHTML.htm; Internet: accessed November 6, 2009. Dagpo Tashi Namgyal offers a description of the stages involved in this stabilization in Clarifying the Natural State: A Principal Guidance Manual for Mahamudra, trans. Erik Pema Kunsang, ed. Michael Tweed (Boudhanath, Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 2001), 76-100.

375. Ibid., Chapter 1: “Resting Mind Series.” Though this description is most often found in the context of teachings on samatha practice, Barth assures me that it is also used and applies equally well regarding the stabilization of the view, and represents the development of the unity of samatha and vipassanā. Personal e-mail correspondence with the author, December 12, 2009.

376. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 64.

377. Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 3-4. Emptiness being the underlying insubstantial nature of all experience, luminosity being the union of knowing and the appearances that are known, insubstantial luminosity is simply an expression which denotes the underlying unity of luminosity and emptiness, that is the underlying insubstantiality of luminosity.

378. Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra, 94-98.

379. Vajradevi, “Vajrapani: Breaking Free,” Wildmind Blog, July 29, 2008. http://wildmind. org/blogs/ n-practice/breaking-free/; Internet; accessed May 18, 2009; Wikipedia, [encyclopedia on-line], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Vajrapani; Internet; accessed 27 November 2009, entry for “Vajrapani.” The other principle Mahayana Bodhisattvas are Avalokiteshvara, representing the perfection of compassion, and Manjushri, representing the perfection of wisdom. Mahayana Buddhism is the northern version of Buddhism primarily found in China, Korea, and Japan. Vajrayana Buddhism is generally considered to be a form of Mahayana Buddhism that is characteristic of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkhim, and parts of India.

380. Wikipedia, entry for “Vajrapani.”

381. Vajradevi, “Vajrapani: Breaking Free,” 2.

382. Ibid., 5.

365

383. Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas: A Guide to Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Tantric Deities (Birmingham, England: Windhorse Publications, 1993), 211.

384. Rat Rattanayano, Ajahn. “Vipassana Meditation,” Baan Mae Sapok, Mae Win, Mae Wang, Chiang Mai, Thailand: Wat Tham Doi Tone, undated.[article on-line]; http://vimuttidhamma.org/ article. php?subaction=showfull&id=1171598253&archive=&start_from= &ucat=3&; Internet; accessed 9 November 2008.

385. Ajahn Sucitto, “Samadhi Is Pure Enjoyment,” Inquiring Mind: A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community 20, no. 2 (2004): 39.

386. Ajahn Taniya. “Freeing Our Life Energy: An Interview with Ajahn Thaniya,” in Inquiring Mind 23, no. 2 (2007): 20.

387. Ibid., 19 and 48.

388. Mirka Knaster, “Senses Galore,” Inquiring Mind: A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community 20, no. 2 (2004): 18-19.

389. Ibid., 19.

390. Ibid.

391. Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra, 91-92.

392. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 65.

393. Alan Wallace, “Scientific Mind, Buddhist Mind: An Interview with Alan Wallace,” interviewed by Margaret Cullen, Inquiring Mind: A Semiannual Journal of the Vipassana Community 20, no. 2 (2004): 22.

394. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 64-65. Wallace goes on to say that it is the range of concentrated experience of the jhānas and the āruppas that give us access to realm of what he calls ‘pure forms,’ which he equates with the archetypes. 65-66.

395. Rat Rattanayano, “Vipassana Meditation.”

396. Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark Sky, 111.

397. Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 9. Above he describes how subject-object consciousness emerges out of the nondual due to the activity of subtle energy.

398. Fenner, “Nonduality and Therapy,” 28. He goes on to note that psychotherapists who have cultivated this nondual quality can sense the presence of energy blocks in their clients by attending to the subtle energy activity in their own bodies. See page 41.

399. Wallace, “Energy Dynamica,” 66.

400. Vajradevi, “Vajrapani: Breaking Free,” 4-5.

401. Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” 74.

402. Ñyāņatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary, 190.

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403. Marcia Rose and Pat Coffey, “Developing Samādhi: Practicing Concentration, an Interview with Marcia Rose and Pat Coffey,” Insight Newsletter, (Fall/Winter 2009/2010): 1.

404. Ibid.

405. Winston King, “The Structure and Dynamics of Attainment of Cessation in Theravadan Meditation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLV, no. 2 (1977): 2.

406. Christina Feldman, “Interview with Christina Feldman,” in Shankman, The Experience of Samādhi, 147, and personal e-mail communication with the author, December 15, 2009.

407. Thanissaro Bhikkhu. “The Path of Concentration and Mindfulness,” Insight: A Joint Newsletter of the Insight Mediation Society and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, (Fall 1997): 30.

408. Batchelor, “Breaking Free with Creative Consciousness,” 10; and Richard Shankman, personal e-mail communication July 7, 2009. Shankman elaborates as follows: “The basic concept is that, at the culmination of inclusive samādhi, the mind (I do not know how to define 'mind') becomes undistracted, utterly unmoving and still, yet aware of the full range of experiences that might arise.” However Shankman limits his comments on inclusive samādhi to concentration up through the four jhānas, offering his opinion that in the four āruppas there is more of an exclusive focus on the theme of each āruppa, that is infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither-perception-nor-non-perception. My own view, developed in Appendix 13, 295-303, offers a different perspective.

409. Feldman, “Interview with Christina Feldman,” 148.

410. Hayward, “Ecology and the Experience of Sacredness,” 74; Kabat-Zinn, “Coming to Our Senses,” 6 and 31.

411. Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra, Chapters 1 “Resting the Mind Series,” and Chapter 2 “Exploring the Mind Series”; Thrangu, Essentials of Mahamudra, 135-137; Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 64-66.

412. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 64-66.

413. See Appendix 13, the whole of which is devoted to a description and discussion of the possibility of a deep integration of samatha and vipassanā in the range of both the rūpa jhānas and the āruppas.

414. See Appendix 13, 295-314.

415. Wallace, “Energy Dynamics,” 64-66.

416. Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 42-43 and 49-50.

417. Michael Washburn, Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 92.

418. C. A. Meier, ed., Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932-1958, trans. David Roscoe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press., 2001), 13-14. This view is consistent with my own perspective though Jung gives far fewer details concerning the actual process than do I. See App 13, 294-302.

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419. Wolfgang Giegerich, “ONTOGENY = PHYLOGENY?: A Fundamental Critique of Erich Neumann’s Analytical Psychology,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, (1975): 111-129.

420. Edward Edinger, “The Meaning of Consciousness,” 34.

421. Ibid. For Edinger, knowing is only possible in this subject-object configuration. For Neumann’s description of the separation of the world into Mother Earth and Father Sky see Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness, 102-127.

422. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 126.

423. Ibid., 122.

424. Ibid., 126.

425. Robert Romanyshyn, Ways of the Heart: Essays Towards an Imaginal Psychology (Pittsburgh, PA: Trivium Publications, 2002), 93.

426. Theodore Roszak, “Where Psyche Meets Gaia,” Ecopsychology, 11.

427. Ibid.

428. Laura Sewall, Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999), 74.

429. Patricia Berry, Echo‘s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, Inc. 1982), 113-114.

430. Ibid., 122.

431. Robert Greenway, “The Wilderness Effect and Ecopsychology,” Ecopsychology, 130.

432. Ibid.

433. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Volume I: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1962), 11; Tomkins, Silvan. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Volume 4: Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1992), 288-289.

434. Tomkins, Silvan. Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Vol. 4, 288-289.

435. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Vo1.I, 7.

436. Ibid.

437. Ibid., 17.

438. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Vol. 4, 290.

439. For example, see references for Hester Solomon, Romanyshyn, and Sussman which follow.

440. Hester Solomon, “Archetypal Psychology and Object Relations Theory,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 36, (1991): 308.

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441. Romanyshyn, Ways of the Heart, 95 and 100. This description of the appearance of a spatial gap between subject and object closely parallels my own view though without offering a clear depiction of how this happens. Romanyshyn further describes this splitting as actually having three aspects: “A spectator self, imprisoned in a body made into a specimen observing in distance and neutrality a world turned into a spectacle for its exploitation and use.” While Jung depicts consciousness as a projection from the unconscious, Romanyshyn describes how, in our dependence on the inner-outer split, we tend to project the unconscious portions of the inside-mind-space out onto aspects of the outside-world-space. Romanyshyn feels that this happens particularly when mind is experienced as distinct from body, another mark of Descarte’s influence. As Romanyshyn puts it “disembodied minds project, embodied minds establish an interactive gestural field” leading to “a way of knowing … beyond the dichotomy of subject and object.” See 92-95.

442. Sussman, “The Empty Grail,” 3-6 and 10-11. This experiential insight leads to compassionate activity. Here Sussman’s use of emptiness is a clear parallel to the use of that concept in Buddhism.

443. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), 258.

444. Ibid.

445. Ibid.

446. Ibid.

447. Ibid.

448. Ibid., 271-313.

449. Object is generally meant to refer to the physical world objects of our senses. Subject generally refers to the knowing aspect of mind which can also have one’s own body as a material object of the tactile sense. Self can include both body and mind in contrast to the other-than-self world around us.

450. C. G. Jung, Collected Works: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Volume 8 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 215.

451. Shirley Ma, “The I Ching and the Psyche-Body Connection,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 50, (2005): 241-242. Ma further offers the experience of the Self in Jungian Psychology, of the Tao in Taoist practice, or of the Chinese alchemical symbol of the Golden Flower, among others, as equivalents. This view is similar to my own hypothesis that subject and object, which fully emerge interdependently at the link of nāma-rūpa (mind and matter/body) resolve back into a deepening unity as the subtle energy patterning which creates this apparent duality dissolves in the light of inquiry.

452. Adam McLean, “A Commentary on the Rosarium Philosophorum.” [article on-line]; http://www. alchemywebsite.com/roscom.html; Internet; accessed February 22, 2009.

453. Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 122.

454. Jorge Ferrer, “Participatory Spirituality: An Introduction,” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network, [journal on-line] http://www.scimednet.org/Articles/RPferrer.htm; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007.

455. John Heron, “Participatory Fruits of Spiritual Inquiry,” ReVision: A Journal of Knowledge and Consciousness 29, no. 3 (2007): 7.

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456. Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 110.

457. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 21 and 23.

458. James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, Inc., 1981), 31.

459. Laura Sewall, “The Skill of Ecological Perception,” Ecopsychology, 209.

460. Sewall, Sight and Sensibility, 16 and 29. Sewall writes that this quality is essential to the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

461. Sewall, “The Skill of Ecological Perception,” 202-203.

462. Ibid., 209-210.

463. Owen Barfield, “Participation and Isolation: A Fresh Light on Present Discontents,” in The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 204.

464. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 22-27.

465. Ibid., 24.

466. Ibid., 40-41.

467. Ibid., 35.

468. Ibid., 137-139.

469. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 19.

470. Ibid., 11, 36. Lucidity is thus a parallel in some respects to Barfield’s ‘figuration.’ However, while Mindell includes sense experience as an aspect of lucidity, for Barfield sense experience precedes figuration.

471. Ibid., 17 and 59. As such, Dreaming involves participation with all sentient beings.

472. Sussman, “The Empty Grail,” 4 and 9.

473. Ibid., 3 and 10-11.

474. Ibid., 4. Again, Sussman’s description of emptiness is very close to the use of this term in Vajrayana Buddhism.

475. Peter Reason, “A Participatory Window,” Resurgence, 168 (1998): 42-44; and Barfield, “Participation and Isolation,” The Rediscovery of Meaning, 205.

476. Albert Kreinheder, “Alchemy and the Subtle Body,” Psychological Perspectives 6, no. 2 (1975): 135.

477. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: HarperCollins, 1975), 174.

478. Ibid., 141-142.

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479. Ibid., 142.

480. Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference,” 196.

481. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 11-13. Schwartz-Salant notes that as an alchemical metaphor of transformation, the subtle body belies our ordinary experience and belief that we are separate from each other and have at our core some unchanging individual essence. This view of the self as interconnected with the rest of the universe and having no individual persisting aspect is consistent with the view of Vajrayana Buddhism.

482. C. G. Jung, Nietsche’s Zarathustra, 441. Jung uses the analogy of sublimation from the physical sciences, the process by which a solid can be transformed directly into a gas, without first passing through a liquid phase, to suggest that it is possible to de-materialize or subtilize matter. Jung, Nietsche’s Zarathustra, 1067. This perspective resonates well with Michael Winn’s Chinese alchemical perspective that “matter is spirit that is not yet reintegrated with the formless dimension of spirit.” See Michael Winn, “Internal Alchemy with Michael Winn,” interviewed by The Empty Vessel magazine, [interview on-line]; http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/Alchemy.htm; Internet; accessed 13 April 2007.

483. Ibid., 450. Note the similarity to Eden’s and Bruyere’s views in the lit review section on Subtle Energy above.

484. Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference,” 196; Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 96. Schwartz-Salant as well as Mansfield and Spiegelman find evidence for this notion of the subtle body in the experience of relationship, particularly in the dynamics of the psychotherapeutic transference/countertransference.. Schwartz-Salant nonetheless also acknowledges that for the alchemists, the subtle body was not a matter of interpersonal relationship but of simultaneously catalyzing changes in outer physical substances and the alchemist’s own inner psychological being in the context of the relationship between a person and the material world. See Schwartz-Salant, TheMystery of Human Relationships, 29, and Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics of the Transference,” 484.

485. Marie-Louise von Franz, On Dreams and Death: A Jungian Interpretation (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), 144.

486. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, 211.

487. Washburn, Embodied Spirituality, 121, 216, and 219, respectively.

488. Ibid., 69 and 209. Washburn calls this the power of the Dynamic Ground, defined as “the deep core of the psyche and seat of non-egoic psychic potentials.”

489. Karen Jaenke and Kimmy Johnson. “Water and Stone: All of Nature Participates in Our Remembering,” ReVision 21, no. 1 (1998): 31.

490. V. Walter Odajnyk, Gathering the Light: A Psychology of Meditation (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1993), 48. Odajnyk thus seems to use the term ‘consciousness’ more in the sense of participatory consciousness.

491. V. Walter Odajnyk, “Meditation and Alchemy: Images of the Goal in East and West,” Psychological Perspectives: A Journal of Jungian Thought Integrating Psyche, Soul & Nature 22, (1990): 55-71. Odajnyk describes the stages in this process and relates them to parallel stages in both Western alchemy and Jungian psychology, including equating this union with the Jungian notion of the Self.

492. Judith, Eastern Body, Western Mind, 9.

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493. C. G. Jung, “On Psychic Energy,” The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 61-66.

494. C. G. Jung, “Psychological Commentary on Kundalini Yoga,” (Part 1), Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, (1975): 9-32. See Part 2, for Jung’s misgivings about the higher chakras and Coward for a discussion of these misgivings in light of current understanding. H. G. Coward, “Jung and Kundalini,” Journal of Analytical Psychology, 30 (1985): 381 and 383.

495. Coward, “Jung and Kundalini,” 383.

496. Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 71.

497. Washburn, Embodied Spirituality, 53, 70, 78, 83, and Michael Washburn, “Psychic Energy, Libido & Spirit: Three Energies or One?” Personal Transformation, [online journal] http//:www.personaltransformation.lcom/Washburn.html (2002): accessed Dec. 13, 2006. This view supports my own perspective that subtle energy and its activity can be directly perceived. However, I would add that that one of the transformative impacts of spirit is to sharpen one’s introspective perspicacity such that it becomes possible to directly perceive the canalization of Washburn’s other two energies, psychic energy and libido, as well, rather than only their effects. I suspect that this is what Mindell is pointing towards when he describes his Dreaming.

498. Stephen Aizenstat, “Jungian Psychology and the World Unconscious,” Ecopsychology, 94.

499. M. Esther Harding, The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I’: A Study in the Development of Consciousness, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 136.

500. Solomon, “Archetypal Psychology and Object Relations Theory,” 313.

501. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 8, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” par. 417.

502. Naomi Goldenberg, , “Archetypal Theory After Jung,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1975): 202. Here Goldenberg’s notion is reminiscent of Jung’s division of the psychic energy pole of his energy spectrum into a secondary polarized range from more purely energetic expressions, on the one hand, to imagery, on the other.

503. Michael Winn, “Daoist Internal Alchemy: A Language for Communicating with Nature’s Intelligence,” paper presented at the National Conference of Daoist Scholars and Adepts, Vashon Island, WA, May, 2001, [paper on-line]; http://www.healingtaousa.com/pdf/taoalchemy.pdf; Internet; accessed 23 November 2007.

504. Odajnyk, Gathering the Light, 186-187.

505. Ibid.

506. Ibid., 95.

507. Aizenstat, “Jungian Psychology and the World Unconscious,” 95.

508. Ibid., 96. Aizenstadt depicts the world unconscious as the inner natures of the world’s organic and inorganic phenomena. Of course, from a Western scientific perspective, the inner nature of matter is energy. Aizenstadt argues our ecological relationship to the rest of nature has an importance similar to that of our relationships with other humans and that it should be included in the field of psychology. This shift necessarily involves our direct sensory experience of the physical world we live in.

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509. Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 69.

510. Jeannette Armstrong, “Keepers of the Earth,” Ecopsychology, 320.

511. Ibid., 322.

512. Ibid. On the same page, she further notes that this spirit self “teaches that this old part of us can ‘hear/interpret’ all knowledge being spoken by all things that surround us, including our own bodies, in order to bring new knowledge into existence.”

513. Anita Barrows, “The Ecopsychology of Child Development,” Ecopsychology, 106.

514. Ibid., 103.

515. Ibid., I06-107.

516. Ibid., 108.

517. Ibid.

518. James Hillman, “A Psyche the Size of the World: A Psychological Foreword,” Ecopsychology, xvii.

519. Ibid., xix.

520. Sewall, Sight and Sensibility, 11.

521. Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 22. However historically, Dennis says, more emphasis has been placed on the image, resulting in neglect of the subtle sensation “backdrop,” of the imagery. See 140.

522. Ibid., 77.

523. James Hillman, “Image-Sense,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, (1979): 134.

524. Ibid., 135-136. Hillman uses the term third eye, a common synonym for the sixth of the seven chakras. In other respects, his perspective is reminiscent of Mindell’s ‘luminosity’ or the subtle perceptual capacities that Sussman attributes to the seasoned seeker of the Grail.

525. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 23-24.

526. John P. Conger, Jung & Reich: The Body as Shadow (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1988), 197.

527. Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference,” 196. This capacity Mansfield and Spiegelman contrast with the psyche, which “functioning through symbolic intuition is the organ of perception of archetypes.” See Chapter Five below for a discussion of the relationship between subtle energy and the archetypes which eschews this dichotomy between the interactive field, on the one hand, and the archetypes, on the other.

528. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 68, 74, and 96. See Chapter Five below for more on this topic by Schwart-Salant.

529. Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 110.

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530. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 11, 16, and 27.

531. Sewall, “The Skill of Ecological Perception,” Ecopsychology, 204.

532. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 223.

533. Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference.” 186.

534. Odajnyk, Gathering the Light, 61-63. For a comment relative to my own understanding of this particular layer of samādhi, see Appendix 13, 292 and 294, note 23.

535. It should be noted however that Brown, Forte, and Dysart do suggest that their tachistoscope study does support the claims in various literatures of the existence of enhanced perceptual abilities, especially among highly trained meditators. Brown, Forte, and Dysart. “Visual Sensitivity and Mindfulness Meditation,” 781; Forte, Brown, and Dysart, “Through the Looking Glass,” 335.

536. Levin, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” 293.

537. Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night, 131-135.

538. See Appendix 13, 295-309.

539. E.g., Forte, Brown, and Dysart, “Through the Looking Glass.”

540. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 14.

541. Hunt, Infinite Mind, 22.

Chapter 3

1. For the Buddha’s most famous words to this effect, see Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans. “Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas,” Anguttara Nikāya (Gradual Discourses of the Buddha), 3.65, [translation on-line]; http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html; Internet; accessed 19 July 2008.

2. Time and financial constraints prevented me from doing this research in what I would consider to be the ideal context, that of a two- to three-month silent meditation retreat with the initial month devoted to the cultivation of samatha practice while the remaining time would be focused on inquiry exercises including the one in this study. It was in the context of such a retreat that I first encountered the experiences which have led to this study. However as a practitioner myself who meets the qualifications for participants in the study, I find that the experiential territory I am researching is readily available in the context of my own daily practice. As such, I felt that the use of an elite group of meditators would compensate for these delimitations to some extent.

3. These are expert meditators who do not qualify as participants in the study because they know my own experience and perspective too well. Based on their advice, I asked participants to spend roughly 25-30 minutes per day, over a period of 10 days of which 15 minutes was spent doing mindful exploration I gave to them. The remaining time was devoted to filling out a Daily Journal of their meditation experience. For those with busy lives this could best be accomplished if they simply used 15 minutes of the time they devoted to daily meditation for my inquiry exercise, increasing the likelihood of their willingness to participate.

4. This dual meditative expertise is not one I have found in the literature on research done using highly skilled meditators, contributing to the uniqueness of this study. Other studies using such meditators

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have tended to define meditation expertise in terms of months of meditation practice with a wide variety of length of practice criteria or have worked with meditation teachers or monastic practitioners. Some researchers studied meditators just after periods of intensive practice.

5. Both the Theravadan and Vajrayana traditions teach samatha and vipassanā techniques of meditation. The Tibetan tradition offers additional techniques for meditative inquiry which are to some extent specific to the various schools within the Tibetan tradition. As there are no clear, generally agreed upon objective standards to measure ability in these areas, I relied on these teachers’ professional judgment and personal knowledge of their students in making their assessment. This resulted in some variety in the skill level of the participants. In some cases, participants may have participated in more than one of these traditions. The selection of participants was guided by the level of expertise and the meditator’s willingness to join the study, not by which of these traditions they represent. I made no attempt to balance the number of participants from the various groups nor to analyze the participants’ experiences according to their particular meditative backgrounds. While such analysis would perhaps have enriched the study to some extent, it would have made the analysis unmanageably complex. Two of the participants are themselves teachers in one of these traditions. One was referred by her own teacher while the other offered herself as participant when I contacted her about her students.

6. Their skill level generally meant that they have been meditating in their traditions for at least 10 years and have attended numerous intensive retreat-style meditation training courses. However I was also open to the possibility that there may be a few exceptional meditation prodigies who have shorter periods of practice under their belts yet do possess strong skills in both of the target areas. As such, I relied more on teacher recommendation than on any objective, measurable factor.

7. The primary risk in this study concerned participants’ personal reactions to the shift from subject-object consciousness to various expressions of participatory consciousness. Such shifts can be disorienting to some, occasionally catalyzing a particular kind of psycho-spiritual crisis that has been characterized as a “spiritual emergency.” See Stanislav Grof, ed. Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1989). The teachers I approached to recommend participants are all skilled in helping students navigate this kind of challenge should it arise for one of their students during the study. I confirmed each teacher’s willingness to serve as a spiritual resource should the participant(s) they referred encounter any psycho-spiritual difficulties as a result of their participation. The fact that the participants were all seasoned practitioners, most likely already quite familiar with the experiential territory of participatory consciousness, as well as chosen, in part, for their emotional maturity strongly mitigated against this being a problem. In addition, the fact that participants already maintained a daily practice meant that their targeted skills would likely be sharp and fresh. Qualified meditators who live outside the Bay Area would have been too difficult for me to meet with in person, a requirement of this study. Other factors such as the age, gender, ethnicity, etc., of participants were not considerations for this study.

8. I personally knew many Western vipassanā teachers in the Bay Area through my long association with Spirit Rock Meditation Center. I also knew several Western Vajrayana teachers who live and teach locally. As such, participant recruitment turned out to be quite feasible.

9. It was possible that some of the participants would know one another since they may have been students of the same teacher or may have met through their association with Buddhist practice. However since the participants were not engaged with each other during the data gathering process, this was not be a factor which in any way influenced the study. However in order to doubly insure that this would be the case, I asked participants not discuss their participation with anyone other than myself, their teacher, their therapist, or the Dissertation Director at the Institute for Imaginal Studies (should they have questions or concerns they do not wish to take up with me). I asked that they keep their participation confidential until I had completed the data collection. At that time I contacted all participants and released them from their confidentiality pledge.

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10. Kabat-Zinn, “Coming to Our Senses,” 6.

11. Sewall, “The Skill of Ecological Perception,” 203.

12. I am a founder and Board member of The Institute for Spirituality and Psychology which has developed an on-line directory of therapists who have been specifically screened for their capacity to assist clients experiencing challenges as a result of their spiritual practice. This directory was up and running by early 2009. In addition, during my many years on staff at the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, both vipassanā centers holding frequent intensive residential retreats at which these kinds of issues arise with some frequency, I have been involved in identifying and assisting meditators experiencing such challenges. In fact while on staff at Spirit Rock, I headed a task force of teachers and mental health professionals which developed a protocol for handling such situations on retreat. I am therefore in a good position to identify such challenges should they arise in the participants and to refer them for appropriate assistance.

13. It was hard to judge to what extent these questions may have helped the participants to integrate their experiences. For the most part they found the early life questions to be somewhat odd and seemingly out of context relative to their meditative inquiry experience. Several participants suggested that the question about their lifetime experience with participatory and subject-object consciousness was so broad as to be difficult to answer in a meaningful way. What did come from this line of questioning was the realization that three of the participants were actually quite stable in their experience of participatory consciousness. Their stories of their transition to this stability were inspiring. In addition, initially there were three participants who seemed to describe early life experiences more idyllic than the others. It turned out that these three were also the ones who were quite stable in their experience of participatory consciousness. Only one of them could remember any early years trauma. I found myself thinking that this might be significant in some way. Then, several weeks after her follow-up interview, one of two who had not remembered any traumatic event, contacted me to report that, in fact, she had experienced trauma as an infant but just hadn’t remembered it during the interview. At this point, the differences between the early lives of these three participants in comparison to the others no longer seemed significant.

14. Although the art and dialogue exercise was also designed to evoke new experience, in contrast to the ‘birth and early years’ and ‘participatory and subject-object consciousnesses through the life’ sections, nonetheless it didn’t actually catalyze fresh participatory experience for any participant. It did induce some reflection on participatory experience which is quite different and for me as a researcher less compelling, unless it refers to newly evoked experience such as that which occurred during the meditative inquiry.

15. Steinar Kvale, Inteviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 193-196. Kvale describes this process as it applies to an interview, listing five steps as follows (my paraphrasing):

• Read through the whole interview to get an overall sense of it. • Identify “natural meaning units” expressed by the subject. • Restate the theme of each natural meaning unit as simply as possible. • Interrogate each meaning unit from the perspective of the hypothesis of the study. • Tie together the themes of interview into a final descriptive statement.

I adapted this process to the material of Daily Journal entries and written Summaries.

Chapter 4

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1. The Daily Journal is described in detail in the Expressing Experience section of Chapter Three above. A copy of this form is included below as Appendix 7.

2. This kind of experience was not new to Finley. Yet there were aspects of newness for him. He described his discovery of how close at hand participatory experience was for him and how easily he could drop into this mode of being by using this search for a boundary when his mind is relatively still as his most significant learnings from his research participation.

3. This appreciation only grew when, during the Follow-up Interview, I heard the rather remarkable stories of their quick shift to stability after beginning meditation practice.

4. This tendency, is referred to in Buddhist terminology as māna (Pali), inadequately translated as ‘conceit’ or ‘pride’, and listed as the eighth of the ten samyojana (Pali) or ‘fetters’ binding beings to samsara. Māna is described as having three expressions: māna, or equality-conceit, omāna, or inferiority-conceit, and atimāna, or superiority-conceit. It is said that when these three forms of māna are overcome, there is an end to suffering for that being. See Ñyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 114 and 198-199.

5. When it comes to the imaginal structures that shape my interpretation, I find it instructive to consider the field of ‘categorical perception,’ “the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influence the observer’s perception.” See Robert Goldstone and Andrew Hendrickson, “Categorical Perception,” Advanced Review, Vol. 1, (January/February 2010): 69. Categorical perception suggests that the categories we hold may bias our perception in the direction of those categories. This is the danger of researcher bias. I may be more likely to interpret the data in light of the Buddhist and Imaginal Psychology categories that are alive in me due to my associations with these two fields of knowledge. But categorical perception cuts both ways. Researchers may miss important meanings embodied by the data because they lack the cognitive categories which the data reflects. Of course this is just as true for the reader of the research report as it is of the researcher. Interpretations which seem quite clear to the researcher due to categories which they actively hold may seem confusing or illogical to a reader for whom those categories are not alive. I suggest that this is especially true where experiential categories are involved, such as in the present study. There may be a difference between having a conceptual grasp versus an experiential grasp of a concept. For example, someone might have knowledge of coffee, its source in certain geographical regions, the kind of bush it grows on, the way the bean is processed, etc., yet still not have tasted coffee. Their knowledge may have some use, albeit quite limited, when reading an article on the subtle differences in the flavor between coffee made from Sumatran versus Colombian beans. Possible examples of important experiential categories in this study are participatory consciousness, luminosity, insubstantiality, primordial awareness, and subtle energy. I ask the readers to keep these perspectives in mind if categories used and experiences described in this report, such as these five, are not yet part of their conceptual and experiential repertoire.

6. Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “participatory consciusness.”

7. John Heron, Sacred Science: Person-centered Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle (Ross-on-Wye, England: PCCS Books, 1998), 91.

8. Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 122.

9. Jorge Ferrer, “Participatory Spirituality: An Introduction,” Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network, [journal on-line] http://www.scimednet.org/Articles/RPferrer.htm; Internet; accessed 27 February 2007. 10. Kalu Rinpoche, Luminous Mind, 22-23.

11. Maitreya, Distinguishing Phenomena from Pure Being, 75 and 77.

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12. Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “participatory consciousness. “

13. Table One in Appendix 11, 273, shows the breakdown of these three kinds of sessions by participant. Appendix 11, 267-272, also gives additional examples of participant statements that were judged to be either clear or ambiguous evidence for participatory consciousness or as demonstrating an absence of participatory experience. Even removing Twyla, Simone, and Ondine, who all described a stability of participatory consciousness in their practice, the remaining participants still reported participatory consciousness during 56 percent of their sessions with another 26 percent of sessions judged to be ambiguous, while only 18 percent of sessions showed no evidence of participatory experience.

14. During the Follow-up Interview Finley reported a stability of concentration in his practice, though not a stability of participatory consciousness. Nonetheless, he was one of four participants whose daily reports showed clear or ambiguous evidence of participatory consciousness for all ten days.

15. This issue of stability is topic of Appendix 15 below.

16. Possible explanations for the participants’ not finding the subtle energy boundaries I posit are explored in Chapter Five below.

17. My own explorations also included other senses, most notably hearing, touch, and the experiences of mind as a sense with thoughts and emotions as its objects. I suggest that although some of the details are different, the same basic pattern prevails regardless of which sense door is in play.

18. See Note 6 above on categorical perception. The use of Buddhist meditators by a Buddhist researcher is both a weakness and a strength. Without prior experience of the Buddhist concepts used in the analysis. their effective application to the data would not be possible.

19. While three Mahamudra categories are listed here, the analysis that follows involves four categories. The reports of the participants as well as my own experience suggest that the transition between subject/object consciousness and luminosity happens in two discrete stages, which I label interconnectedness and interpenetration/luminosity. Mahamudra theory does not offer a term for, nor as far as I know does it describe, a discrete stage equivalent to what I call interconnectedness.

20. During the Follow-up interview, Finley confirmed this kind of experience as a transitional phase between subject-object consciousness and the next quality of participatory consciousness described below.

21. I mentioned to Ondine during her Follow-up interview that I had noticed that she reported happiness on days when interpenetration was her predominant participatory experience while this affective quality was missing from reports on days emphasizing insubstantiality. She said that she hadn’t noticed the association herself but acknowledged that it could true.

22. Finley also reported times where there was a flatness to the visual experience but doesn’t relate it so clearly to the experience of insubstantiality.

23. Other expressions of participatory consciousness were reported as well but are beyond the scope of this analysis. For example, several participants reported shifts in the experience of the appearance of the visual object itself in ways other than appearing insubstantial. Their descriptions are suggestive of the layer of participatory consciousness below that were interconnectedness, interpenetration and insubstantiality are experienced as an integrated whole. See Appendices 13 and 14 for my own descriptions of this range of experience range. 24. This paragraph comes from my Revised Summary for Finley.

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25. Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra, “Exploring Mind Series” and “Spontaneous Coemergence Series,” and personal e-mail correspondence with the author, June 13, 2008. A further Buddhist lens is provided by teachings in the Vajrayana Dzogchen tradition, especially the work of Lama Mipham, who offers descriptions of the stages in the transition from subject-object consciousness to the participatory form of consciousness referred to as suchness, pure being, or primordial awareness. See Mipham, Calm and Clear, 97-110

26. For details of my experiences and interpretation of Dependent Origination see the Reflections Chapter below and Appendix 13, 295-309

27. Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra, “Exploring Mind Series” and “Spontaneous Coemergence Series,” and personal e-mail correspondence with the author, June 13, 2008.

28. Mahler, Pine, and Bergman’s image of their developmental stage of symbiosis as a “dual unity with one common boundary” also comes to mind. See Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, 44.

29. In addition, one particular facet of interpenetration, or luminosity, is its blissful quality, which clearly distinguishes it both from interconnectedness preceding it and insubstantiality, which follows. Three of the participants Ondine, Thomas and Eileen all described feeling happy or joyful specifically in association with their experiences which I interpret as interpenetration or luminosity. All, including bliss, are aspects of this same quantum-like layer experientially located between interconnectedness, described above, and insubstantiality, to be described next, in the sequence of the varieties of participatory consciousness that I have encountered over and over again in my own exploration. See Appendix 13, 294-295. Luminosity is also sometimes described in Buddhist literature as blissful. See Khenchen Thrangu, Looking Directly at Mind: The Moonlight of Mahamudra, Crestone, CO: Namo Buddha Publications, 2001, 165.

30. In my own experience, a lack of depth of field is also one characteristic of this layer of participation, a quality reported by Ondine as associated with emptiness. See Appendix 13, 289.

31. Even this description does not quite do justice to the experience of primordial awareness. It is possible to take these three qualities emerging together as a subtle object of experience, which I would characterize as the description of the fourth āruppa. It is for me when the subtle subject/object split of this āruppa falls away that primordial awareness, as the full integration of luminosity and emptiness, emerges. See Appendix 13, 292-295, for details of my own exploration of this range of experience.

32. This sequence is also presented in the Vajrayana Dzogchen lineage. See Mipham, Calm and Clear, 97-110.

33. This description runs parallel to my own depiction of several links of Dependent Origination as described in Appendix 13. In particular, Thomas’ depiction of the boundary fits my experience of the link of nāma-rūpa, mind-and-matter, while his mention of the senses corresponds to the subsequent link in the constructive order, that of salāyatana, or the six sense doors. The links that follow the six sense modalities, phassa, or contact, vedanā, or feeling tone, tānha, or craving, and upādāna, or grasping, all have to do with our relationship to the object of the moment. The link that precedes nāma-rūpa, that of viññāna, or structured consciousness, corresponds with the first foray into participatory consciousness that I describe above as interconnectedness and is characterized by the experience of space as a felt and connecting presence. This is in contrast to the experience of space as an absence that I find to be characteristic of the link nāma-rūpa and for subsequent links. For more details see Appendix 13, 299-309.

34. See Appendix 13, 314-316, for more on my own experiences of the circuitous nature of the path and yet the possibility of discovering an underlying natural sequential order to the variety of participatory experiences.

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35. Nonetheless the reports of the participants do match quite well the experiential flavors of the sequential modes of participatory experience that I describe in the Introduction above. I suggest that this represents a form of indirect support for my subtle energy understanding of Mahamudra theory (as well as for my similar understanding of the early links of the Buddha’s Chain of Dependent Origination as described in Appendix 13, 295-303.).

36. It is perhaps worth mentioning that although some participants did venture out beyond the exploration of the visual sense in their inquiry, the vast majority of their experience was gleaned from their exploration of seeing. As such, the interpretation of what happened can be seen as limited to visual experience, even though in my own experience the same basic patterns prevail for all six of our sense doors.

37. For those interested in Dependent Origination, compare this statement by Eileen with my phenomenological description of the first few links of Dependent Origination in Appendix 13, 295-301.

38. See Learning Four below for Thomas’ further elaborations on this idea.

39. Interestingly, Finley describes the actual moment of the falling away of the distinction between subject and object as involving “some sort of letting go or ‘dropping back’.” When asked how this dropping back was known, he said that it was ‘felt’, clarifying that he didn’t mean in the body but more in the mind. This image of falling back is reminiscent to me of the subtle energy experience I associate with the dissolution of the two subtle energy boundaries I experience in this process: the first at the face, the second at the outer surface of the torso. When each dissolves there is a flow of subtle energy back into the heart from whence the energy first came when these boundaries were established in relation to the object of the moment.

40. See Chapter Five below.

41. Barth, An Online Guide to Mahamudra Meditation. This online resource is devoted to the description and explanation of the practices of samatha and vipassanā meditation in the Mahamudra tradition. See especially Chapters 1-4.

42. Shankman, personal e-mail communication, July 7, 2009.

43. Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 3-4.

44. See Barth, An Online Guide to Mahamudra Meditation, Chapter 1: “Resting the Mind Series,” Exercise 8: “Just Sit,” for undirected concentration and Chapter 2: “Exploring the Mind Series,” for which all the exercises involve turning attention to look directly at the mind itself.

45. Shankman, personal e-mail communication July 7, 2009.

46. I am not suggesting that this discussion of the process of moving from subject-object consciousness to participatory consciousness is exhaustive. There are no doubt other ways to accomplish this transition beyond the two I’ve identified. For example, an additional focus of attention in the process of mindful inquiry, one mentioned in the Dzogchen literature, is to search for the substance of which an aspect of experience is made. Regarding approaches other than mindful inquiry, the use of psychotropic, substances, Stan Grof’s holotropic breathwork, as well as Vajrayana visualization practices come to mind. See Grof, and Bennett, The Holotropic Mind and Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra.

47. A possible augmentation to my interpretation is suggested by the work of Forte, Brown, and Dysart. They used a tachistocope to explore the visual threshold of experienced meditators by shortening the duration of flashes of light and the interval between such flashes asking meditators to describe their experience. See Forte, Brown, and Dysart, Through the Looking Glass, 326-328. Several of their

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participants suggested the efficacy of this technique for deepening practice. Forte, Brown, and Dysart., write:

Some subjects felt that requiring subjects to hold their awareness at threshold so as to describe their perceptual experience could be a way to directly teach about the enlightenment experience. Meditators could gain insight into the process by which the perceptual world is constructed. They could further learn to turn awareness back on itself to achieve what is called enlightenment. (Ibid., 333 to 334.)

My own map of the process whereby subject-object consciousness emerges out of the underlying unified field of experience describes the full transition from participatory forms of consciousness to subject-object consciousness takes place when the second of the two subtle energy boundaries I describe is fully established. See Appendix 13, 295-303. This particular boundary thus forms a threshold, or limen, between the two ranges of experience, dualistic subject-object consciousness, on the one hand, and participatory forms of consciousness on the other. By focusing the participants’ attention on the experience of a boundary between subject and object, and asking them to describe their experiences, I was essentially directing the participants to exploration of this threshold in much the same way that Forte, Brown and Dysart’s participants worked with a somewhat different, but related, perceptual limen. In fact, as the data shows, when the participants did hold their attention in this way, they reported shifts to participatory consciousness as well as insights into the process by which the world of their perceptions was both structured and destructured. . 48. See Chapter Five for more thoughts on this topic.

49. I find myself experiencing something a bit different that can perhaps best be described as a bubble within a bubble. The subtle energy boundaries at the face and at the torso that I experience between myself and the field of visual objects is something like an inner bubble. This inner bubble defines ‘me’ as the subject in relation to the outer bubble of the realm of objects, encapsulating knowing, locating it within ‘me.’ What I’m coming to suspect in my direct experience is that this inner bubble has another function. This inner bubble serves as a screen. Onto it are projected our thoughts and emotions, allowing them, too, to be experienced as inner objects, as opposed to the apparent outer location of visual objects, of a knowing that appears to reside at the common center of both bubbles. This projection of thoughts and emotions onto this inner screen also allows them to become inner objects separate from that same knowing center. Both bubbles arise in a vastness as Eileen describes. My own experience suggests that first the outer bubble forms and then this inner bubble arises within it. As such, in the destructuring process, the inner bubble goes first followed later by the outer. This phased loss of division into inner and outer allows first for the experience of connectedness, then that of interpenetration, with the sensory objects of the outer bubble. The image of the subtle energy boundary I experience functioning as an inner bubble of perception against which thoughts and emotions are projected mentioned in the section on how I was affected above is a new development. I have not yet had the benefit of years of personal experiential testing and validation of this new piece of the puzzle. I offer it tentatively. It is not included in my paper on Dependent Origination (Appendix 13) which was written years before I undertook this research project. As such I have not included it as a lens through which I interpret the participants’ experience.

50. Rosch , “What Buddhist Meditation Has to Tell Psychology,” 3-4 and 15; Christine Skarda, “The Perceptual Form of Life,” 2-3 and 5.

51. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 77-79, 104, and 144.

52. Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” 26 to 27; Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7398; Chajut, Schupak, and Algom. “Are Spatial and Dimensional Attention Separate?” 924.

53. Chajut, Schupak, and Algom. “Are Spatial and Dimensional Attention Separate?” 924.

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54. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 17and 59; Sussman, “The Empty Grail,” 9.

55. For a theory that matches Thomas’s description, see my subtle energy elucidation of Dependent Origination, Appendix 13, 295-309.

56. Chajut, Schupak, and Algom, “Are Spatial and Dimensional Attention Separate?” 924.

57. See Appendix 13, 295-299. The subtle energy patterns I describe for the subsequent layers of participatory consciousness as experience moves toward the full emergence of the apparent split into subject and object also offer a description paralleling the role of narrow outward attention on the object suggested above. I find it interesting that at least one of the participants, Thomas, also attributed a central the role to the activity of energy in the structuring of subject-object consciousness as well as in giving the phenomenal world its apparent substantial appearance.

58. For those interested, there are many similarities between my own exploration of Dependent Origination, as a description of how the process of perception creates the field of experience characterized by a split into knowing subject and known object, and the descriptions of the participants above. I find parallels to my own experience in all four areas they describe. My experience suggests that what Eileen calls the “bubble of perception” emerges first, followed by the split within the bubble into subject and object, characterized by a directionality of subtle energy flow that corresponds with the directing of attention towards the object. The result is the apparent substantiality of the visual field together with both a boundary phenomena and a gap between seer and seen. See Appendix 13, 295-303, for the details of my own experiences and the meaning I make of them in relation to Buddhist theory.

59. See Chapter Five below for a discussion of why this happened and the implications for future research.

Chapter 5

1. For example, see Mipham, Calm and Clear, 97-110.

2. Skarda, “The Perceptual Form of Life,” 2-3 and 5; Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 77-79. I should point out relative to Evans’ theory that my own view is a bit different. Evans suggests that attention itself is the projecting activity that creates the separation between a projected foreground or object and an unprojected background or subject. The details of the participants’ reports are less clear on this point. Rather they tend to support my own experientially based view that the projection of the object end of the subject-object split emerges in stages. In my view, initially the field of awareness is split into a center relative to a periphery. I understand the participants’ reports of the limited, bubble-like, visual field of experience within the larger limitless expanse of awareness to be their description of the result of this initial step in the process. However none of them reported the actual emergence of this bubble, nor the subtle energy activity I describe leading to this emergence of this sphere of visual experience. The object pole is further structured at the next step in the process whereby a depth of field occurs within the visual sphere, beginning the process of creating the appearance of discrete visual objects. The next two steps then describe the orientation of attention directed from the center towards a specific region of, or object within, the visual field. As such the projection of the realm of visual objects precedes our attending to an aspect of that realm. I suggest that it makes most sense to limit the term attention to these last two steps since attention is usually used in relation to a knowing subject which knows an object. It is this structure that begins to emerge at these last two steps in the process. However even the initial stages of the emergence of the bubble of visual perception and the diversifying depth of field within that bubble could be seen as part of the orienting in space aspect of the formal use of the term attention. See Appendix 13, 295-298, for more details of my own experience of this process.

3. Mindell, Dreaming While Awake, 17and 59; Sussman, “The Empty Grail,” 9.

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4. Brown and Engler, “The Stages of Mindfulness Meditation: A Validation Study,” in Wilber, Engler, and Brown, Transformations of Consciousness, 181-187 and 203-207.

5. Ñyāņatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 125. Ñyāņatiloka also lists ‘mentality and corporeality’ as a translation and notes that nāma-rūpa literally translates as ‘name-and-form.’ For my own experiences in relation to these first four links which I further describe as interconnectedness, interpenetration/luminosity, insubstantiality/emptiness, and primordial awareness/suchness, as well as to the remaining eight links of this chain-like process, see Appendix 13, 295-309. Appendix 14 also offers some of my insights into this subtle area of experience.

6. Although the subjective qualities reported by the participants do bear resemblance to the āruppa or rūpa jhānas, I have not highlighted this aspect in this research report. Those interested can find descriptions of my own experiences in Appendices 13 and 14 below and draw their own conclusions regarding the experiences of the participants reported in Learning Two. This topic runs through the entirety of both these appendices is devoted to this topic.

7. For more about the term sahkhāra, see Chapter 1, note 44. In fact this listing in Appendix 14 begins with that which occurs just before the first link of avijjā. The term for this activity is āsava, or influxes. On one occasion, Sariputra, the Buddha’s disciple foremost in wisdom actually lists the links of Dependent Origination in deconstructive order going on to include āsava after the ceasing of avijjā, so it is not without precedent to use this listing. See Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Ñanamoli, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 143-144. I utilize it here because my own subtle energy experiences include a stage prior to avijjā that I equate with āsava, (an upwards flow of energy entering the subtle energy system at the first chakra and moving to the heart chakra). Since there are a few examples of reports from the participants which are reminiscent of my own subtle energy and phenomenological experience of āsava as the precursor to avijjā, I have included it as well. Āsava are the outflows from the bhavanga, a parallel concept to, though in some ways different from, Jung’s notion of the individual unconscious. A major difference is that from the Buddhist perspective, the bhavanga includes stored impressions from previous lifetimes of the individual’s life-continuum.

8. Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra, 94-98.

9. Rosch, “What Buddhist Meditation Has to Tell Psychology About the Mind,” 1-2.

10. Sussman, “The Empty Grail,” 4.

11. Wangyal, Healing with Form Energy and Light, 3-4 and 8.

12. It is for this reason that I specifically selected as the participants practitioners who are adept at both concentration and insight practices. Their creative use of the inquiry exercise and the experiences they have reported validate that strategy. The reports of individual meditators as they describe their traverse of this territory and the catalysts that deepened their experience may differ depending on which faculty, concentration or mindful inquiry, was in the lead. No doubt some of the variation between the participants’ reports has to do with this aspect of individual difference, but both faculties are essential to the process. It is worth mentioning again at this point that I am describing what I consider to be insight at the āruppa levels of samādhi, a somewhat controversial topic in Buddhist circles. See Shankman, The Experience of Samādhi, 83-90, 122, 148. With regard to my depiction of the sequence of interconnectedness, interpenetration, etc., it is important to mention that this progresssion also has one additional step. At the beginning of this sequence prior to interconnectedness, I also add the experience of the interdependent arising of the apparently separate subject and object. This mutual ontological dependence is what I term interdependence. However since the emergence of this mode of experience is the first layer of subject-object consciousness and not in and of itself a form of participatory consciousness, it is not included in this study except as noted by some

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participants as described in Appendix 14, 321, and in my own description of Dependent Origination in Appendix 13, 302-303.

13. Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 223.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 5-6, 11, 17, and 74.

17. Ibid., 17.

18. Ibid., 30 and 96.

19. Ibid., 21-23.

20. Ibid., 68.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 74.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 37.

25. Ibid., 6.

26. Ibid., 11 and 26.

27. Thubten Yeshe, The Bliss of Inner Fire: Heart Practices of the Six Yogas of Naropa, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998, 22. My own experiences during the retreat mentioned above moved me to learn a Buddhist version of Reiki, which has significantly enhanced my own sensitivity to the subtle energy realm of experience both in my daily meditation and everyday activities. For a description of this practice lineage, see Gooch, Reiki Jin Kei Do: The Way of Compassion and Wisdom.

28. See Appendix 13, 295-309

29. In my own case, during the retreat described in Appendix 13, one of my teachers suggested that I pay specific attention to the experience of shifting from one jhāna to another. This style of investigation later proved useful in my own exploration of the dynamis underlying the shift from one link to another of the Dependent Origination. Appendix 15 documents the potential stability of participatory consciousness, the least anticipated result in this study. This peripheral finding also has stimulated interesting ideas for further research with this particular subset of expert meditators. For example, given that participatory consciousness is a range of experiences, which particular forms of participation can become stable? Based on Buddhist teachings on stability, particularly in the Vajrayana tradition, I would hypothesize that it is the form of participatory consciousness described as primordial awareness that becomes stable. The reports of these participants also highlight the possibility that within the context of a mind stable in participatory consciousness, subject-object consciousness can arise without obscuring the underlying participatory nature of experience. This is another dimension of participatory consciousness that could be researched with this particular type of participant, using Imaginal Inquiry as the research modality, and with various mindful inquiries as the central feature of the protocol for these meditators.

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30. Gregory Kramer, Insight Dialogue: The Interpersonal Path to Freedom (Boston: Shambala, 2007).

31. See Appendix 13, 310-313.

32. Appendix 13, 292-309, describes my personal experiential relationship to this view, which is pretty orthodox (though not my subtle energy perspectives regarding the jhanas, the āruppas, and Dependent Origination, with which I offer a fresh perspective to the discussion) in Buddhist circles.

33. In fact although the image used by the participants was that of a bubble or sphere, the actual experience is more like that of a portion of a sphere (perhaps we could say semi-sphere) since the visual field extends only to the area in front. In fact here the term ‘sphere’ is not meant in a literal but metaphorical sense, an apt approximation of the shape that actually occurs. See Appendix 13, 295-298, for the details of my own description of this layer of participatory consciousness.

34. In my own experience, these two forms are more accurately portions of metaphorical semi-spheres, which nonetheless have the same focal point.

35. Evans, The Subject of Consciousness, 77-79.

36. Gallagher, “Bodily Self-Awareness and Object Perception,” 3.

37. Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” 26-27; Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7398.

38. Barfield, “Participation and Isolation: A Fresh Light on Present Discontents.” 204.

39. To carry this imagery and line of thinking a little further, my current mindful inquiry explorations, catalyzed by this research project, suggest that this inner bubble then becomes a screen onto which our thoughts and emotions are displayed. This structure accounts for the fact that we can also take thoughts and emotions as objects of our attention apparently distinct from our knowing of them. I suggest that from a Buddhist perspective, this is the activity by which subject-object consciousness associated with the sixth sense door, or mind, arises. Of course thoughts and emotions can also be projected out onto the objects of our visual sense, as well. In either case I suggest that the linguistic or emotional content of the projection rides the subtle energy flow as it moves outward from the heart, either to the subtle energy somatic boundary or to the object. As such, in this process, the aspect of ‘directing attention towards’ and that of ‘projecting onto’ are difficult to distinguish. One refers to the directional activity or movement of subtle energy as an expression of awareness while the other involves the content carried by that movement. Along these lines I am reminded of Yan Xin’s comment that “qi has the properties of energy, and qi conveys . . . information content or has the characteristics of information.” See Yan, “Dr. Yan Xin on Scientific Qigong Research.” Myss, as well as Metzker and Leigh, also describe a relationship between subtle energy and information. See Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit, 33-34, and Metzker and Leigh, “A Short-term Longitudinal Study of Energy Fields in Infants and Young Children,” 140. In fact, this notion of the activity of energy carrying information is one that is quite common in modern life. Radios, televisions, cell phones, computers, and the Internet all rely on this basic principle. If we add to this line of thought Tiller’s and Oschman’s notion of the human body functioning as an antenna that can both transmit and receive, together with Ho’s theory of the physical body as a liquid crystal, it’s not hard to imagine a working model of how this might all happen. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, 106-107; Oschman, “What is Healing Energy?: Part Three,” 187, caption for Fig. 5, and 190; and Ho, “Quantum Coherence and Conscious Experience,” 3-4.

40. See Appendix 13, 304-308.

41. This kind of attention/projection onto the already established ‘outer man’ or outer bubble of perception can then have cultural dimensions wherein large groups of people have the same content to their

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projections that nonetheless can vary over historical time periods. However at this point it I suggest that other aspects of attention are in play. Here it is no longer the ‘orienting in space’ aspect of attention at work, but perhaps rather ‘the selecting of ideas and predilections stored in memory,’ a function Posner and Raz call ‘executive attention’. See Raz, “Anatomy of Attentional Networks,” 26-27; Posner, “Attention: The Mechanisms of Consciousness,” 7398. Once again we find a relationship between the activity of energy and the transmission of information.

42. I suggest that it may be more clarifying to develop vocabulary that highlights the specific functions of these different expressions of projection and cathexis. The Buddha’s 12 stages of Dependent Origination could serve as a model for such language in English.

43. In this kingly form, I held in the crook of my left elbow the staff of a trident, the tantric symbol for the fully-integrated or secret consort. See Judith Simmer Brown, Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 2001), 328, n. 62.

44. Sharp, Jung Lexicon, 51-52.

45. Carl Jung, The Psychology of the Transference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press., 1969), 10.

46. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 102-127.

47. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 258.

48. Solomon, “Archetypal Psychology and Object Relations Theory,” 313.

49. Odajnyk, Gathering the Light, 186-187.

50. Harding, The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I,’ 136.

51. Wynn, “Daoist Internal Alchemy,” 2-3.

52. Goldenberg , “Archetypal Theory After Jung,” 202.

53. Hillman, “Image-Sense,” 135.

54. Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 22. However as should be obvious by now, I take exception to Dennis’ depiction of the subtle energetic experience as kinesthetic (or proprioceptive) in nature. As is clear both in the subtle energy descriptions in the literature and in my own experience, as well as in that of the participants, our ability to sense this phenomenal realm is not limited, as is kinesthesia, to the region of space within our skin. The notion of kinesthesia assumes a split into an interior of the body and that which is external to the body. As such, it is inherently related to what we are calling subject-object consciousness, which is characterized by this split, or, at best, the first layer of participatory consciousness, which I call interconnectedness. However in the realm of participatory consciousness, as the distinction between inner and outer progressively falls away, the division between kinesthetic, as having an inner object, and other forms of sensory experience as being related to outer objects, also falls away.

55. This structuring process is the activity of the first four links of Dependent Origination as described above and in Appendix 13, 295-303, and Appendix 14, 320-323. It is the apparent separation of subject and object that gets structured, though, as we have seen, there are several intermediate stages on the way to the seemingly complete separation that arises at the link of nāma-rūpa. The links that follow nāma-rūpa are all further elaborations on this basic underlying structuring into two apparently distinct entities.

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56. Judith, Eastern Body, Western Mind, 9; Odajnyk, Gathering the Light, 48. In fairness to Odajnyk, I should point out that he does make a distinction between attention as energy and the consciousness that directs it.

57. Aizenstat, “Jungian Psychology and the World Unconscious,” 95. I would suggest that we need to take this expansion of Jung’s work even further to include the man-made aspects of our environment such as cityscapes, the interior of an office building, or the screen of a TV or computer, as well. These days, they also constitute important aspects of our overall sensory experience.

58. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 36 and 82. In Pali, jati is spelled with a bar over the ‘j’, a symbol my wordprocessing program does not have.

59. For the subtle energy dynamics of these later links, see Appendix 13, 304-309. Just as the appearance of the object is a temporary event in the life of the individual, so is the subjectivity it conditions. When the object is replaced by a fresh focus of attention, a new subjectivity arises in response to changing conditions. In Buddhist terms, this process is equated with samsara, considered to be inherently unsatisfactory due to the impermanence of all its aspects. Such is the Buddhist understanding of human discontentment or suffering, the twelfth and final link in Dependent Origination.

60. I suggest that this self-as-knower constitutes what is called the klesha consciousness in the eight-fold model of consciousnesses used in some schools of Tibetan Buddhism. See Khenchen Thrangu, The Five Buddha Families and the Eight Consciousnesses, 13.

61. Special credit to Thomas, Eileen, and Ondine for this imagery of the bubble of perception as noted in their reports above.

62. Tart, “Aikido and the Concept of Ki,” 340-343; Harding, The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I,’ 203.

63. As described in the learnings above, this archetypal aspect of imaginal structures can be engaged mindfully leading ultimately to various layers of participatory consciousness. These deeper layers recounted above are both characterized by a quality of spaciousness and free from what Omer calls “frozen images of self.” As such, engaging this aspect of imaginal structures leads to Omer’s notion of disidentification. See Omer, “Key Definitiona,” entries for participatory consciousness and disidentification.

64. For example, see Lama Mipham, Calm and Clear, 91-110. The Buddha’s theory of Dependent Origination provides a much more detailed map concerning the emergence of our human conscious experience from its the underlying, undifferentiated background and its further differentiation leading to suffering. My own exploration has led to my description of this process in terms of layered, quantum-like subtle energy patterns/images. This theory, which is a description of the role of layers of subtle energy patterning/imagery in the emergence of the human sense-of-self out of the underlying singular field of experience is a new and directly experienceable explication of this core Buddhist teaching, his most detailed explanation of the causes of suffering. I have included my own unpublished article on this topic as Appendix 13, below. The present study provides a first experimental test of one critical section of my more extensive theory of the psychological role of subtle energy patterning, i.e., the emergence of the split in experience into subject and object. For a more traditional interpretation of the teaching of Dependent Origination, see Payutto, Dependent Origination.

65. Paul Levy, “Spiritual Emergence/Emergency,” Alternatives: Review for Cultural Creativity 8, (1998); [article on-line]; http://www.alternativesmagazine.com/08/levy1.html; Internet; accessed 3 February 2010.

66. Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 141-142; Mansfield and Spiegelman, “On the Physics and Psychology of the Transference as an Interactive Field,” 196; Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 11-13, 96.

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67. Fred J. Hanna, “Dissolving the Center: Streamlining the Mind and Dismantling the Self,” Transpersonal Knowing, 134-141.

68. This description is a paraphrase of one that can be found on the website homepage of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, http://www.energypsych.org/displaycommon. cfm?an=2; Internet; accessed 15 February 2010.

69. Puhakka, “An Invitation to Authentic Knowing,” 18-20.

70. Hillman, “Image-Sense,” 134-136; Dennis, Embrace of the Daimon, 22. For the Buddhist perspective, see Preece, The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra, 94-98.

71. Rose and Coffey, Developing Samādhi, 1.

72. I have been happy to see the appearance of offerings focused on this area in the past few years in the programs of my own school, Meridian University, which is a pioneer in the field of Imaginal Psychology.

73. Von Franz, Psyche and Matter, 17.

74. Levin, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” 293.

75. Woodhouse, “Energy Monism.”

76. Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 258.

77. Ibid., 271 and 281.

78. Ibid., 288.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

Appendix 13

1. This teaching of Dependent Origination holds a central place in the Buddha’s system of instruction, which he called the Dhamma or Natural Law. For example, at Majjhima 28:28 the Buddha is quoted by his disciple foremost in wisdom, the Venerable Sariputra, the Buddha’s disciple foremost in wisdom, as having remarked “One who sees Dependent Origination sees the Dhamma, one who sees the Dhamma sees Dependent Origination.” (Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 283. Dependent Origination is also intimately associated with the Buddha’s well known formulation of the Four Noble Truths, traditionally considered to be a more elaborate way of describing both the Second Noble Truth (the cause of suffering) and the Third Noble Truth (the cessation of suffering.) See Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 30.

2. These quantum–like states are generally divided into two groups of four, the rūpa, or form, jhānas and the āruppa, or formless, jhānas. A ninth level of samādhi beyond the last āruppa is also described. For a listing of these nine levels of concentration, see Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourseso of the Buddha, 302f.

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3. Ibid., 40:9f.

4. A good reference on the practice of lovingkindness is Salzberg, Sharon, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Shambhala Publicaitons), 1995.

5. Ibid., 100-101. These pages offer a more detailed description of this last instruction.

6. Such resolves take the form of mentally stating an intention at the beginning of a period of formal sitting meditation. For example, at this point in my retreat, I began each sitting with a resolve such as “During this sitting may the jhāna factor of sukha (commonly translated into English as ‘happiness’) arise and be strengthened.” For the details of the mental factors which define this and the other three rūpa jhānas, see Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 83. Ñyānatiloka’s definitions/translations are not always to my liking but to go into that issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

7. This relationship of the movement through the jhānas to changes in the experience of a personal field of energy is not one I have encountered except in my own experience. Others I know who have had similar instructions and success in experiencing the jhānas seem to have different kinds of experiences, though the quantum-like nature of the mental states, the particular mental factors involved and the ability to shift from one jhāna to another through mental resolve or intention are clear common denominators of my own experience and that of other meditators with whom I've compared notes.

8. For a description of the channels and chakras from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism see Lama Thubten Yeshe, The Bliss of Inner Fire, 103-111.

9. Ibid., 105.

10. I realize that this description bypasses the third charka or solar plexus. That is what actually happened in my experience.

11. Once again in my discussions with other practitioners, I have not found others who have had this particular kind of experience, though some other practitioners also have experienced levels of depth within the range of each particular jhāna. I consider the jhānas to be discrete ranges of samādhi rather than singular experiential states.

12. These jhānas are generally referred to as the immaterial or formless jhānas (Pali: āruppas). They are named the jhāna of Boundless Space, the jhāna of Boundless Consciousness, the jhāna of Nothingness, the jhāna of Neither-Perception-nor-Non-Perception. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 84-85, 132-133.

13. This layer of samādhi is called sañña-vedayita-nirodha (the cessation of perception and feeling) or nirodha samapati (the attainment of extinction). Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 132. Ñyānatiloka notes that traditionally this state of samādhi is limited to the third and fourth stages of enlightenment of anāgāmī and arhatship as depicted in the Theravadan tradition. My experience suggests otherwise.

14. I have on occasion heard mention in Vajrayana circles of a practice associated with thirteen chakras but have not been able to receive any teachings or find any references on it. I'm curious to know if that practice works with this same set of thirteen energy centers or with a different set.

15. It was not until several years later, while translating for a Thai monk named Ajahn Jumnien, that I heard clear descriptions of the distinction between what he called the lokiya (mundane) rūpa jhānas and lokuttara (supramundane) rūpa jhānas, the former being primarily deep states of samādhi associated with formal sitting practice and the latter being a maturation of those states in which they became

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integrated into one's ordinary range of activities and sensory perceptions, as well as a context for deep insight. (This is a rough approximation of Ajhan Jumnien’s usage of these terms, in part due to the limits of my Thai language abilities, so it is possible that my use of these terms may not exactly match his. However I suspect there is more similarity than difference between his usage and my own. A more traditional Theravadan use of lokiya defines it as pertaining to the experience of those who have not yet attained any of the four levels of enlightenment described in the Theravadan tradition. Lokuttara then applies to the experiences of those who have attained to this range of insight and liberation. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 109. From this perspective, one might imaging that the lokuttara jhanas could also be experienced while doing formal sitting meditation while it is the depth of insight of those who have attained to a level of enlightenment that allows the qualities of the jhanas to be accessible during ordinary daily activity.) Ajahn Jumnien, however, teaches that this division of the jhāna experience into lokiya and lokuttara applies only to the rūpa jhānas. His perspective is that because in the āruppas the distinction between subject and object falls away, insight is not possible. As my practice progressed, my experience suggested that the āruppas, inspite of the profound change in the nature of the relationship between knowing and what is known inherent in them, also have a lokuttara expression. A similar reintegration of samādhi into ordinary activity began to occur for me within the range of samādhi characteristic of infinite space, boundless consciousness, etc. It is also worth mentioning at this point that the investigation of the links of Dependent Origination described below took place within what I am calling, following Ajhan Jumnien's terminology, the lokuttara jhānas, that is a range of quantum-like experience of deep samādhi that is insightfully integrated into the full range of sensory experience, rather than progressively withdrawn from it as in the case of the lokiya jhānas. It was at this point that insights which later formed the foundation for a new depth of my understanding of Dependent Origination began to emerge.

16. The Tibetan Dzogchen literature is rich with descriptions of the three aspects of the nature of mind. For example see Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Carefree Dignity (Hong Kong: Ranjung Yeshe Publications, 1998), 67, 71.

17. For example see Lati Rinbochay and Denma Locho Rinpochay, Meditative States in Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1997), 115, for a the Buddhist perspective on the role of the formless absorptions as the basis for path consciousness, i.e. the moment of the arising of liberating insight For descriptions of the movement within deep samādhi into insight from the Tibetan perspective see Khenchen Thrangu, The Practice of Tranquility and Insight: A Guide to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc. 1993), 111-141 or Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Carefree Dignity, 64-87. In the Theravadan tradition there are hints of the deep potential for insight in the subtle samādhis of the jhānas.

18. A good introduction to Hua-yen Buddhism including these three qualities is Francis Cook’s book, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1977).

19. In the Theravadan tradition, mind is generally included as a sixth sense modality with thoughts, emotions, imagination, dreams, etc. as its range of objects. For a Tibetan perspective which posits eight rather than six consciousnesses, see Note 41 below on the Eight Consciousnesses.

20. The quality of this conceptual designation is quite unlike our usual thinking, which we experience as words in the mind, almost as if we are hearing ourselves talk. At this subtle layer of samādhi, such conceptualization could be described as pre- or maybe proto-linguistic. The concept is there in some subtle sense in that there is an awareness of recognition, but that recognition is not yet expressed phenomenologically in the mind in any linguistic way.

21. These two, vedanā and sañña, together with sankhāra and viññāna, constitute the four mental aggregates (Sanskrit: skhandhas, Pali: khandhas), which from the Buddhist perspective sum up all mental phenomena. Add rūpa, form or materiality, and we have the Five Skhandhas, a core element in the Buddha’s description of conditioned or constructed reality. We will encounter the term vedanā again in a somewhat different context below as part of another of the Buddha’s lists, the 12 links of Dependent

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Origination. As with many of the Buddha’s key concepts, the same word is used in slightly different ways or to refer to different levels of the same phenomena in different areas of his teachings.

22. This particular focus for phenomenological investigation is taught in the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. See for example Lama Mipham, Calm and Clear (Emeryville, CA: Dharma Publishing , 1973), 102.

23. I have since come to recognize that these qualities of experience (which eventually numbered five, including in addition to the four āruppas, the samādhi of the cessation of feeling and perception) match very well the description of the Five Wisdoms or Five Primordial Awarenesses as taught in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition. See Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness , trans. Susanne Schefczyk (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2002), 55-74. Also see Tenzin Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 9. It is also of interest, given the association I make between these states and the aruppas as well as the early links of Dependent Origination that the Buddha, himself; offers some similar descriptions in the section of the Mahanidāna Sutta referred to as the eight emancipations, the last five of which involve the aruppas. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Great Discourse on Causation, 144.

24. By the term ‘unconditioned’ here I mean that the qualities of the āruppas are no longer being taken as subtle objects by a subtle form of subjectivity. Knowing is no longer structured or conditioned by its attending to even this subtle kind of object.

25. See, for example, Thrangu Rinpoche, Looking Directly at Mind: The Moonlight of Mahamudra (Crestone, CO: Namo Budda Publications, 2001), 165

26. From a psychological perspective these early stages in the process of the construction of the ‘sense-of-self’ as that which knows and the description of the structuring of sensory experience to follow could be described as including the emerging of the distinction between figure and ground. See Wikipedia, entry for “figure-ground (perception)” [encyclopedia on-line]; http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/ Figure-ground_(perception); Internet; accessed 18 April 2010.

27. The etymology of this Pali term is illustrative. Vijjā (Sanskrit: vidya: Tibetan: rigpa) translates into English as ‘higher knowledge’ or gnosis, i.e., self-illuminating knowledge of a spiritual, synchretistic, and esoteric nature. (Ñyānatiloka, Buddhsit Dictionary, 237 and Webster’s New World Dictionary, entry for “gnosis”). The prefix ‘a’ is one which negates. Avijjā thus refers knowing which is not of this self-illuminating, synchretistic kind. From the Buddhist perspective, this ‘lower,’ non-gnostic mode of knowing is ignorance, the most common English translation for avijjā.

28. This Sanskrit word karma, has colloquially come to mean the effects of our past actions influencing our present circumstances. However the actual meaning in Sanskrit is simply ‘action.’ See Ñyānatiloka, 92.

29. Bhikkhu Bodhi defines viññāna as “the basic awareness of an object” (Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 27) while Ñyānatiloka writes that viññāna “furnishes the bare cognition of the object.” (Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 240.) Thus both emphasize that consciousness in its Buddhist sense involves the simple, unelaborated knowing of an object.

30. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 126.

31. Personal conversation with Ajahn Amaro of Abhyaygiri Monastery, Redwood Valley, CA, April 4, 2010. It is of some note that both the terms for the first and third nidānas involve negations of deeper kinds of knowing. (See Note 27 regarding avijjā above.) In the case of viññāna, that which is negated is clearly the knowing that is pañña (Sanskrit: prajna) wisdom. Vijjā, on the other hand is an especially deep form of wisdom in that, like pañña, all the corruptions (Pali: āsava, also translated as ‘inflows’ or ‘taints’) have been removed, but also includes other specialized knowledge, such as the

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knowledge of former lives or knowledge of the minds of others. (Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 3) Perhaps we could say that vijjā is the perfected form of pañña. Likewise we could say that the division or fracturing of the underlying wholeness of experience at the link of viññāna represents a deepening of the ignorance which first emerges at the link of avijjā.

32. Given this meaning, I prefer to translate viññāna as ‘conditioned or structured consciousness.’

33. Note that where the Hua-yen tradition offers three terms, I have actually experienced four discrete kinds of experience. The addition of what I call interconnectedness between interdependence and interpenetration is my own wrinkle on this theme, grounded in my own experience of a transitional stage between interdependence and interpenetration. This application of these three core Hua-yen concepts to the phenomenology of the relationship between subject and object is only one possible set of experiential correlates for them. There are other valid applications at other, more subtle, levels of experience and at grosser dimensions of experience as well. It seems to me that many of the Buddha's teachings have a way of being true and valid on different levels of experience, giving his teachings a fractal-like quality.

34. Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 125. Other possible English translations mentioned by Ñyānatiloka are ‘name and form’ and ‘mind and body.’

35. Ibid., 158.

36. Ibid., 191. It is interesting to note that ayatana is also used to describe the āruppas for which use Ñyānatiloka prefers the English word ‘sphere.’ This use is suggestive to me of the English term ‘field.’ We could then look at the whole field of experience as consisting of six sub-fields of experience corresponding to the five physical senses and the mental experience. These can then be seen as divisions within a more primordial field of experience which has the characteristics of the āruppas, i.e. boundaryless, self-cognizant and insubstantial. This view would be consistent with my experience of both the jhānas and of Dependent Origination. Especially the explosion of energy outward from the heart at the first nidāna seems to be the establishment of the underlying field in which perception occurs, and as which the ‘spheres’ of the six senses arise.

37. This arising and falling away, though here appearing for the first time in the sequence of the nidānas of Dependent Origination, was similar to my experience of the fourth āruppa. See see Appendix 13, 292-293.

38 Ñyānatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary, 82 and 117.

39. For example, see Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 253-257. Here is the clear connection between Dependent Origination and the Buddha’s Second and Third Noble Truths or the Cause of Suffering and the Cessation of Suffering.

40. Ibid.

41. In 1998, I wrote the first version of this description of my experience of the phenomenology of Dependent Origination in the form of a long letter to Ranga Premratana, the teacher of Ann Pectal, one of my Reiki Jin Kei Do teachers, at his request. In that letter I included this accounting of the time span involved in the unfolding of the full 12 links of Dependent Origination. Several years later I had the good fortune to attend a retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I worked at the time, which was jointly led by Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Ajahn Amaro. Tsoknyi Rinpoche presented the Dzogchen teachings of the Tibetan Nyingma lineage while Ajahn Amaro related them to aspects of the Buddha’s teachings from the Theravadan tradition. In his next to last talk, Ajahn Amaro discoursed on the topic of Dependent Origination. As he concluded his presentation, he referred to his own teacher from the Thai forest tradition, Ajahn Cha, as follows: “Ajahn Cha used to say that following Dependent Origination is like dropping out

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of a tree and trying to count the branches on the way down. It is that quick. The whole process can play itself out from beginning to end in a second and a half. Pow. We can hardly track what is happening but – thump! – we know it hurts when we hit the ground.” (Amaro Bhikkhhu, Small Boat, Great Mountain: Theravadan Reflections on The Natural Great Perfection (Redwood Valley, CA: The Abhayagiri Monastic Foundation, 2003), 145.)

42. Thrangu Rinpoche, “The Eight Collections of Consciousness,” Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, (Fall 2002), 58-62, 65.

43. Thrangu Rinpoche, “The Eight Collections of Consciousness,” 59. It seems important to note that this all-base consciousness is not the same as the non-referential experience described above as suchness. Rather it is a deeper level of subtly conditioned experience and in the final analysis, from the Tibetan perspective, also needs to be purified or de-conditioned. In the Tibetan Vajrayana view, objects arise out of the all-base consciousness and then through the activity of the other seven consciousnesses are experienced as existing externally to the mind. This understanding fits my own experience of the initial arising of the phenomena of seeing as occurring at the base of the spine then flowing upwards to the heart where the energy patterning process of Dependent Origination kicks in ultimately resulting in the apparent experience of an external object of sight being perceived by an internal mind through the physical agency of the senses. This concept of the all-base-consciousness is reminiscent of the Theravadan term bhavanga-sota which Ñyānatiloka translates as the “Undercurrent forming the Condition of Being, or Existence.” (Ñyānatilokaā, Buddhist Dictionary, 38) From the Theravadan view we can here introduce the Pali term āsava, generally translated as something like ‘cankers,’ ‘taints,’ or ‘corruptions’ but which literally means ‘influxes.’ The role of the āsavas relative to Dependent Origination as a seldom mentioned thirteenth link prior to the first link of avijjā is described by Sariputta in a sutta on right view (Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 143.) Thus we have a Theravadan version of this Tibetan description of the eighth consciousness. Influxes from the ‘Undercurrent forming the Condition of Being’ arise. Dependent on these influxes, avijjā (klesha mind) arises and thus starts the whole process of Dependent Origination.

44. I suggest that the falling away of these latter links has its equivalent in the Tibetan Mahamudra tradition. There the sequence might be described as follows: the domination of the display over the knowing of it falls way dissolving the gap between knowing and known. This is the dawning of luminosity. However, here this self-cognizant display of phenomena still overpowers the underlying insubstantiality. With the next layer, insubstantiality comes to the fore, replacing luminosity as the dominant aspect of experience. When the last obscuring pattern of energy subsides, the underlying inseparability of luminosity and emptiness, primordial awareness, is what remains.

45. See Garma C. C. Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1971), 224-230. The Hua-yen description of the interpenetration symbolized by this image is much more extensive than the one I’ve given it here but the general principle is largely the same.

46. Payutto, Dependent Origination, 33-40.

47. For a detailed description of the various forms of sentient existence from the perspective of Tibetan Buddhism, see Lati Rinbochay and Denma Lochö Rinbochay, Meditative States in Tibetan Buddhism, 29-47.

Appendix 15

1. The title of this appendix is an adaptation of the refrain of the song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger, 1986, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” written and

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performed by Pete Seeger, The Essential Pete Seeger, Vanguard CD, (compiled from recordings made by Folkways Records, 1950-74).

2. This interpretation fits my own experience during a period of relative participatory stability during a long intensive meditation retreat as detailed in Appendix 13, 294. I found myself referring to these experiences as the Suchnesses of Boundaryless Space/Interconnectedness, Boundaryless Awareness/Interpenetration, Emptiness, and Identity and find a strong parallel between them and four of the Five Wisdoms listed in the Vajrayana Buddhist literature. See Wangyal, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, 9. During her Follow-up Interview, when I asked Simone about the lack of variety in her reporting especially in reference to the Five Wisdoms, she indicated that though these wisdoms were familiar to her in her experience, it was the underlying primordial awareness that was much more significant as the common denominator among them.

3. For example, see Barth, A Meditation Guide for Mahamudra, Chapter 4: “Spontaneous Coemergence Series” and Chapter 5: “Dawning of Certainty Series.”

4. Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness, trans. Susanne Schefczyk. (Boulder, CO: Snow Lion Publications, 2002), 58-59.

5. Ibid., 59-60, 66.

6. Ibid.,

7. Ibid., 70. The other four are called the Mirrorlike Primordial Awareness, the Primordial Awareness of equality, the Discriminating Primordial Awareness, and the Primordial Awareness that Accomplishes All Actions. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche cautions that these five “should not be understood as separate entities but rather should be understood as different functions of one’s enlightened essence.” Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness, trans. Shenpen Hookham (Oxford, England: Longchen Foundation, 1986), 89. For more details of these qualities of experience, sometimes also called the Five Wisdoms, see Thrangu, Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness. For an experiential description of this range of experience see Appendix 13, 292 295.

8 Omer, “Key Definitions,” entry for “imaginal structures.”

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