Subjective Experiences of Awakening, Part 2, Alan Watts

Greetings, Friendlies. :)

(Part 1 here.)

I’m going to offer three descriptions of awakening that fit on a sort of spectrum running from more common, everyday, temporary experiences, to (perhaps) the full monty. The descriptions come from Alan Watt’s This is It, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone, and a quote from Kitaro Nishida. We’ll start with Watts.

Actually, instead of reading this blog post, may I recommend you pop over to Internet Archive and read Chapter 1 of This is It? It’s only a few pages. And totally 🤯.

In the interim I will try to excerpt a sense of it:

Watts speaks of “the universal prevalence of … astonishing moments of insight … a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is. Existence … ceases to be a problem; the mind is … wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are…” [1]

“The central core of the experience seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living. … Surrounding and flowing from this insight is an emotional ecstasy, a sense of intense relief, freedom, and lightness, and often of almost unbearable love for the world…”

“Its clarity sometimes gives the sensation that the world has become transparent or luminous, and its simplicity the sensation that it is pervaded and ordered by a supreme intelligence. At the same time it is usual for the individual to feel that the whole world has become his own body, and that whatever he is has not only become, but always has been, what everything else is.”

Because we do not have common (secular) languaging for this experience, it is usually expressed in terms of a person’s religious and philosophical understanding. As such, descriptions vary as much as religions and philosophies do.

“As one and the same pain may be described either as a hot pang or as a cold sting, so the descriptions of this experience may take forms that seem to be completely opposed. One person may say that [they have] found the answer to the whole mystery of life, but somehow cannot put it into words. Another will say that there never was a mystery and thus no answer to it, for what the experience made clear to [them] was the irrelevance and artificiality of all our questions. One declares [themself] convinced that there is no death, [their] true self being as eternal as the universe. Another states that death has simply ceased to matter, because the present moment is so complete that it requires no future. … One feels [themself] taken up and united with a life infinitely other than [their] own. … another will feel that [they have] experienced, not a transcendent God, but [their] own inmost nature. One will get the sense that [their] ego or self has expanded to become the entire universe, whereas another will feel that [they have] lost [themself] altogether and that what [they] called [their] ego was never anything but an abstraction. One will describe [themself] as infinitely enriched, while another will speak of being brought to such absolute poverty that [they own] not even [their] mind and body, and [have] not a care in the world.”

“To a theist this will naturally seem to be a glimpse of the presence of God” (Pascal):

The year of grace 1654,
Monday the 23rd of November, St. Clement’s day
From about half past ten in the evening
until about half past twelve, midnight,
FIRE
God of Abraham. God of Isaac. God of Jacob
not of the philosophers and the wise.
Certainty, joy, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.

Or to a Buddhist, emptiness (Yüan-chou):

I came back into the hall and was about to go to my seat when the whole outlook changed. A broad expanse opened, and the ground appeared as if all caved in.… As I looked around and up and down, the whole universe with its multitudinous sense-objects now appeared quite different; what was loathsome before, together with ignorance and passions, was now seen to be nothing else but the outflow of my own inmost nature which in itself remained bright, true, and transparent.

I was reminded of Stephen Batchelor’s “Everyday Sublime” when Watts said, “[This experience] carries with it the overwhelming conviction that the world is in every respect a miracle of glory”

“[The experience] is a release from self-consciousness, that is to say from the fixed belief and feeling that one’s organism is an absolute and separate thing, as distinct from a convenient unit of perception. … For if it becomes clear that our use of the lines and surfaces of nature to divide the world into units is only a matter of convenience, then all that I have called myself is actually inseparable from everything. … It is not that the outlines and shapes which we call things and use to delineate things disappear into some sort of luminous void. It simply becomes obvious that though they may be used as divisions they do not really divide.”

I told you it was 🤯. It’s only a few pages. Here’s the link again.

Next time, Buddhadasa’s Nibbana For Everyone.

With friendliness!

***

[1] “This is IT”. Somewhere between 1954-1958?