My Journey In The Philosophy, Cosmology, And Consciousness Program at CIIS

It seems like it was just yesterday that I received a call from Robert McDermott, asking me to send in an additional letter to the faculty of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS to assure them that I was indeed a correct fit for a field of study that was unique and transdisciplinary in its approach to the cosmos. This approach was far more enchanting and creative than the analytical tradition I had grown accustomed to in my bachelor’s program at CU Boulder. There was so much emphasis placed on the meaning of words and the structure of arguments at CU that I really started to believe God could be proven on a blackboard if the premises and conclusions were both sound and valid. It wasn’t until I had my first mystical experience that I let go of such absurdities. “Thank God,” I thought, while looking at the information for the PCC program, “I will never have to worry about such nonsense as symbolic logic ever again!” (I did revisit it once in the program, but we briefly skimmed over it as a matter of historical interest)

When I applied for the PCC program, I was living in Boulder, Colorado with my girlfriend at the time. While looking at the structure and syllabus from previous semesters with a large Vizsla dog sitting on my lap, I knew that if I were to ever enter a master’s program to further my education, this would be the program to do it. Not only did it tantalize my philosophical tastebuds and emphasize the importance of the creative process in writing, but it also had a spiritual allure to it. Preston, and everything the friends of Preston associated with me, was encapsulated in the program. To even just utter the name of it made me feel like a distinguished individual: Philosophy. Cosmology. Consciousness. When these three words slip out of my mouth, I am reminded of wonder and awe; I see the starry firmament above me and the hands of Jesus nailed on the cross; I see a portrait of Descartes with his gorgeous mustache and a picture of Sri Aurobindo right next to him, with his sleek, black hair; I see the light of a thousand suns, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto; I can feel the Big Bang in my chest and smell the scent of freshly bought books about the evolution of consciousness, the history of philosophy, and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, alongside a copy of Patanjali’s yoga sutras. If it was rigorous and relevant to the love of wisdom in all its manifold shapes and sizes, it was included in the PCC program. That is one of the reasons why I fell deeply in love with it. But I also knew going into the program that I was in for a surprise — I just did not know how I was going to be surprised.

My two years in the program have taught me a lot. Even though it is impossible to summarize everything I have read and written about, I will attempt to distill it all into one statement: the cosmos is an enchanted place. By the word “enchanted,” I do not mean to imply something out of the ordinary, because what I have come to realize is that the enchanted is ordinary. It is what we have always been a part of. The only reason we have failed to see this for so long is because a mass of people bought into the limits of what Rupert Spira calls “the finite mind,” or what Buddhists ordinarily call “the ego” — a term that is thrown around quite often these days in the “I’m spiritual but not religious” circles as well. This part of us, which is more of a verb than a noun, has, for centuries, projected its limitations onto the world and called such limitations “realistic,” “factual”, and “objective.” I am explicitly pointing to such worldviews as logical positivism and scientific materialism. Even though these movements were a part of the necessary unfolding in our evolution, and even though they did a fantastic job of promoting the unity of science and knowledge, they got far too carried away by proclaiming reason as the be-all and end-all, the alpha and omega. As Richard Tarnas points out quite beautifully in Cosmos and Psyche, the rise of reason and rationality, especially in the era of enlightenment, brought about a result that was bitter-sweet. In one sense, it was incredibly useful for practical and technological purposes. There is no denying the fact that society was improved by science and the scientific method. There is also no denying that many silly superstitions were abandoned for the good. But doing away with all the enchanted approaches to the universe stripped us away of all meaning. “We’re on our own.” “God is Dead.” “Meaning is what you make of it” — these statements were thrown around quite regularly during the period that was ironically called “The Enlightenment.” After discovering that we were, in fact, revolving around the sun — a revolutionary discovery, no doubt — we threw the baby out with the bathwater and thought it a rather genius idea to discard religion, God, myth, and all the other “silly” ideas we had about the universe as well. It was postulated, rather arrogantly, that reason could solve all mysteries and answer all ultimate questions about the nature of reality.

Being in this program has taught me that these trends in our history played an important role in the unfolding of consciousness, if for no other reason than to convince us of an interesting observation made by the brilliant Richard Tarnas, yet again: that the process of disenchantment is a form of enchantment. If one sits with this fact long enough and lets it seep into the very core of one’s cells, it should not be difficult to conclude that God, the mystery, or whatever you choose to call it, is far superior to a magician. You see, a magician merely convinces you of something miraculous and mesmerizing. But God has the power to convince you that this life, and everything it entails, is boring, mechanistic, meaningless, and reducible to atoms or neurons firing in the brain. God is so magical that she can convince someone that life is not magical at all. If that is not the work of a poet, I don’t know what is. No wonder there is the idea of Maya in Vedanta — “a term for illusion that causes one to identify with the unreal.” (Bryant 2007)

In some sense, the collective consciousness is on a rollercoaster ride that is complex, non-linear, and so craftily profound that advancement and ruin interweave and interpenetrate with each other. We are not merely advancing as a human race; nor are we merely falling behind and becoming more ignorant and selfish. While the threat of World War 3 is announced on the news, someone might be meeting God through a mystical experience and weeping tears of joy and relief. Someone may be committing suicide while a mother is giving birth to a beautiful baby. We are waking up in some ways as much as we are falling asleep in other ways. The rise and the fall coincide with each other. This is not good or bad — it just is. Only it is a tendency of the disenchanted mind to view evolution in a dualistic manner, to split the world up into two, like subjective and objective, black and white, good and bad, up or down, worse or better. Although useful for practical and experimental purposes, when it comes to the deeper, more subtle aspects of reality, this is a shallow and one-dimensional approach, for, like the mystical experience, the evolution of consciousness can be defined by two opposite truths simultaneously existing at the same time. Paradoxes swim in the deep end of reality, or, as Alan Watts put it, “the world is wiggly.”

So, there is a story being played out here. But the only way to understand that story is to understand the rich, historical context that underlies humanity and the evolution of consciousness. The PCC program made me ask certain questions one loves to ask at the dinner table, such as, “How did we get here?” “What are some of the patterns of history that deserve our attention?” And “Is there such a thing as certainty?” It is one thing to philosophize and engage in the scientific method within a specific cultural milieu and time — quite another to draw back and spot the underlying patterns being played out in both science and philosophy’s unfolding. Here is where the work of philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Richard Tarnas, and Robert Bellah are so compelling. These scholars had a beautiful understanding of context and used their knowledge base to capture the patterns in anthropology, science, and philosophy that are worth noting. Without the recognition of these patterns, our philosophizing will always be unthorough and ineffective. As Nietzsche once remarked, “A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect in all philosophers…everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts; nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.” (Nietzsche 1878)

But here is where I will take an interesting turn. Even though I am on Nietzsche’s side concerning his opinion about the importance of historical sense, I do not side with him about his statement about there being no absolute truths. By building my historical sense, I came to the opposite conclusion. And that is where the beauty of the PCC program comes in. No one in the program, and no course in the program, is telling you what to think. Every teacher and every course is designed to strengthen your sense of what the truth may be. They give you the tools of enchantment and let you get to work. They do not tell you to leave your creative capacities at home as many academic institutions would — no — they invite it in. Your intellectual, creative, and spiritual capacities are all sharpened in a manner that contributes to some invisible whole. For me, there is an absolute truth underlying the process of our unfolding: it is that which has been, and always will be, aware of the unfolding: consciousness. Indeed, the nature of consciousness has occupied most of my waking moments, most of my papers, and most of my thinking and feeling. In specific, I have been obsessed with connecting the nature of consciousness with the phenomena of spiritual enlightenment. One of the discoveries I arrived at while being in the program is that the study of consciousness in academic circles has not placed enough emphasis on soteriology — the study of salvation. Many of the philosophers I read presuppose that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain or an object to be studied in the 3rd person. If they’re not presupposing such things, they are intellectualizing about its mystical properties in panpsychism, or even Buddhism, but failing to do the actual work of self-inquiry and meditation. In short, the obsession with trying to explain consciousness has got in the way of investigating it in the first person. Many philosophers are not embodying the truth of consciousness, in the same way that teachers like Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj did, because they are astonished and hypnotized by their theories of what consciousness might be. This theorizing is getting in the way of existential courage, contemplation, meditation, and a return to nothingness (by “nothingness” here I am not referring to an egoistic and nihilistic mode of being that existentialists like Sartre have alluded to, but rather the space of sunyata, translated as emptiness, which is free of the ego’s nihilistic tendencies).

If we wish to know what consciousness is, we must wake up. But it is impossible to wake up if we are holding on tightly to our intellect, ideas, and books — all of which solidify the center we need to wake up from. That is why the saint Ramakrishna once said the following words: “Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not at all encumbered by learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realize that they know nothing.” (Ramakrishna 2007) It is also why Jesus uttered these most profound words: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.” (Jesus, White 2005) The death of knowledge is the birth of wisdom. Even though many of us may have an intuition of this, and know, deep within our bones, that philosophy is a tool to unravel the truth, I want to argue that many of us have mistaken the practice of philosophy for the truth itself. We have, as it were, hopped on a boat and become far too attached to it so that now we are more infatuated by the boat than we are with the place it is taking us to. How many of us, for example, would be willing to let go of everything we know? How many of us would be willing to throw away all our highlighted books from various philosophers and trust that such a letting go is the only way to hit the bedrock of being? Once again, the words of Jesus come to mind, this time, from the Gospel of Thomas: “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become disturbed. When he becomes disturbed, he will become astonished, and he will rule over the all.” (Jesus, Valantasis 2004) What could it possibly mean to be “disturbed” in the sense Jesus is alluding to here? Better yet, who is it that becomes disturbed? It is not worth guessing what Jesus was trying to say, but it is important to note the sheer radicality and strength of Jesus’ words. One thing is for certain: he is not playing around. The use of the word “disturbed” here carries a force behind it that grabs the ego by the shoulders and shakes it profusely to wake up. He is not trying to give us something to hold onto, nor is he flashing a piece of knowledge we can put in our back pocket for memory’s sake — he is pulling the carpet from underneath us and “bringing the sword” to the ego. The passionate quality of his words are undeniable, palpable, and inspiring. It speaks to the invisible part of us that wants to break through. Jesus wants us to love the truth more than we love our ideas of the truth. His words are urgent pleas for the seeker inside of us to love the truth so much that we would be willing to disturb the ego. How many philosophers are willing to do that?

But it would be unfair of me to say all of this without sharing why this is all so personally important to me. You see, I am the poster boy for the enchanted worldview. In many ways, my time at PCC was defined by the very worldview it promotes. When I moved to Hawaii with my now ex-girlfriend, I had an emotional breakdown that ironically catapulted me into a state of deep and timeless peace. This emotional breakdown was so bad that I had a spiritual breakthrough, and for a week, I was completely stabilized in “a peace which passeth all understanding.” What’s even more fascinating is that this all occurred during my Saturn Return, which is renowned for archetypal qualities such as maturity, the place of no return, breakups, and breakthroughs, along with a feeling of solidity and being put together. (Tarnas 2007) Unlike my first transformative mystical experience, which fed the ideological boy in his early twenties who enjoyed the rush of temporary states of cosmic consciousness, this was not temporary, so it wasn’t an experience at all. It did not take me up to the high heavens and bring me back down with nothing but words to stumble on in an attempt articulate the ineffable. Like the quality of Saturn itself, it was stable, mature, and solid, but effortlessly so. No part of me had to do anything, like meditate, to feel its warm embrace. I was the warm embrace. I was that who is always in a state of meditation. I was the eternal “I am” principle that pervades the entire cosmos.

I could, of course, wax poetic for another 20 pages in this paper about that week, but that is not the point. The point of this paper is to create a sense of urgency and remind us that it is very easy to get caught in the net of academia, with all its emphasis on concepts, theories, explanations, and debate, without actually devoting oneself to the real, which is unspeakable and ineffable. “Hunger for reality,” as my professor Matt Segall once said, “Is what matters the most.” I am not at all claiming that the practice of a scholar is not useful. It has its place — and I have benefitted greatly from it. But more of us in the study of consciousness need to turn our gaze and face the real in silence and aloneness. We need to muster up the courage to be taken by the real. It must occupy our every waking moment with a subtle obsession sensitized to the obvious. We need to treat the truth as if it were not a philosophy, but rather as something that ends all philosophizing. This could be taken to be a pseudo-profound statement — something that sounds poetic and romantic, yet seems unoriginal and unpractical, maybe even false. I would like to argue that the end of objective knowledge is the most important thing to consider in the pursuit of knowledge. In fact, the word Vedanta translates to mean “the end of knowledge.” And many modern teachers of the Advaita-Vedanta tradition, such as Rupert Spira, came to the very conclusion I am alluding to. Here is a passage from Spira’s book, The Nature Of Consciousness illustrating the all-encompassing realization that occurs to the mind-body when we realize that there is no end to objective knowledge:

“Whilst still at school studying science with the intention of becoming a biochemist, I was struck by a realization that was to change the course of my life. One day, shortly after the end of a physics lesson, I was sitting on my bed, my mind simply open and available. Into this availability a thought appeared as if from nowhere, unsolicited by any line of reasoning in which I was engaged or had ever pursued: ‘There can be no end to objective knowledge… I realized that the mind could only ever know its own content and that all such content, being objective, was limited.” (Spira 2019)

By realizing there can be no end to objective knowledge, the search for it ends, and we turn toward the infinite — which is our home.