Aloha from Kauai.
I’m sitting here doing a little reading on the net while my wife and daughter sleep away an eventful day of helicopter riding and playing at the beach. We also walked into a shop that specialized in Buddhist paraphernalia. Everything you might need to get your practice off on a traditional footing. I commented to my wife how far away I felt from all the stuff. Just give me a cushion. And yet it was so beautiful. Then my baby daughter pulled a fan off the shelf that had the Heart Sutra inscribed on it. One side Japanese, one side English. I put it back in its place. My daughter protested. My wife laughed and I had a bit of a flashback to my morning routine as a monk.
All the chanting seemed like such a goofy thing to do, and yet I was always thrilled at the last line of the Heart Sutra: gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha!
Loosely translated this means: gone, gone, gone beyond, gone way beyond, may Enlightenment be so!
Indeed. May it be so for each of us. And may each of us also see that the Witness isn’t the end of it all. In fact, Ken Wilber suggests in a recent post on Integral Naked that Dainin Katagiri Roshi told him:
… the Witness is the last stand of the ego.
This point couldn’t be more important to those who’ve been on the cushion a while. The Witness, or what I’ve called the Eighth Sense, and Wilber cites as the Hindu term turiya, is fundamental in any process of Awakening. But it isn’t the final stop. In fact, the Witness can recognize itself as an ever-so-slight contraction of our personal realm of consciousness since even in the experience of seasoned practitioners, the Witness can still flirt with the edges of egoic grasping.
I write about this in Awake in This Life:
More than a feeling, a sense, or an intuition, the Ninth Sense is the fundamental quality of the entire Mountain of Spirit as well as its climbers. It is the exact Awareness in which all experience, including the Witness, arises and falls. It is the essential, impersonal, quality of feelings, sensations, and intuition, just like light is the essential, impersonal, quality of any image we might see projected on a movie screen.
I go on further:
Whatever name we choose to point to this awakened spaciousness that is infinitely inside and outside of all things, it is never anything other than the awakened totality, the Deep Singularity, of everything all the time. It is always available to us in each breath, at each tragedy, at each of our kids’ successes and failures, at each of our lonely moments, in darkness, and in the inextinguishable, blinding light of the expansive and clear Truth of Being.
The Ninth Sense is Spirit, and it expresses itself in everything and in every way as everything and every way.
This Ninth Sense, or what the Hindu tradition calls turiyatita is shows itself as that which is beyond turiya, beyond the Witness. At the realization of the Ninth Sense the Witness and all that is witnessed begin to merge. Put simply, the Ninth Sense is beyond the experiences of our five gross bodily senses (taste, touch, sight, smell, and sound), as well as our two subtle mental senses (thoughts, and time), as well as our causal experiences of simple witnessing awareness.
Wilber suggests that the recognition of the Ninth Sense shows up like this:
… rather than having an experience, all you’ll sense is a vast sense of freedom. Freedom from objects, freedom from experiences, freedom from time. Whatever it is that you experience, that is precisely what you are not.
And in this freedom, you push, but without pushing; you rest, but without resting; you cleave, but without cleaving. There is the sense of consciousness, but without an object, of emptiness—though empty of that, too. The way is neti, neti: not this, not that. You will never reach a moment of time that is it. For it is something that is always already there.
May it be so.
