I wasn't until I just sat down now to write this that the experiences of today led me to look up
Supermind. I have been having pretty intense pressure in my head since early this morning. It has been steady all throughout today. I have read a few things of
Sri Aurobindo over the last few years & know that
Ken Wilber,
Mike Murphy, &
Andrew Cohen were all heavily influenced by his philosophy.
I'll let you all in on some of my deepest secret wishes & prayers. I've been talking to God for, well, as long as I can remember. I mean there's been very few periods in my life where I didn't speak to Him/Her/It in various ways & forms. I've had this deep desire to turn everything over, my body, my speech, my mind, my activities, & my qualities. I grew up so alone that this was my only solace. When I say turn everything over, I don't mean to some specific concept of God per say (although it has taken on many of these outward forms over the years), but now that wish is to Merge with that Mysterious Unknowable, in the truest possible essence. My prayers are something like, "May I deeply do thy divine will without falling prey to False Idols (my own limited conceptions of what that would mean), but your deepest, truest will, for the sake of us all." I think I am in some ways moving closer to that wish, or rather it is moving me.
Even in the darkest of my life experience in the midst of when I felt I was totally abandoning God & completely in my Ego, there was the wish may this somehow be of service. I felt I could die, or I would do anything for the real True God. For US.
This pressure almost feels as if its changing the structure of my mind itself. It's as if I have finally stopped running away from God & now It is descending with such intensity my body-mind is having to slowly allow this force to fully inhabit me.
I am afraid of saying these things but at the same time I feel I must say them. I am so human. I am limited, fragile, broken, have made millions of mistakes & have a pile of karma & yet at the same time I am surrendered to my Creator, & I am the instrument of my Mother & my Lover.
This pressure is moving me, cooking my brain, & boiling my blood. I have no idea what will become of John. I have also come to love him dearly. This is all so beyond me & yet it is me. I can only fall flat on my face.
In Jan of 2004, I met Mike Murphy & he talked about Sri Aurobindo's personal Autobiography. Sri Aurobindo kept a personal journal of his yoga. It only got published in 2001. I bought it & tried to read it in 2004. It's so amazing & an incredibly challenging read. The guy spoke 14 languages! When I started reading it, I had the thought, this is me! I felt so drawn to this personal autobio. It's 2 volumes of 1000 pages each written for himself personally. You need a Sanskrit dictionary just to get through the first 4 pages! I left the book when I went back to Hawaii & found it just recently in my California car. For some reason I put Aurobindo's picture on my alter & started to read from it after meditation.
This will be a long & amazing journey to read it. I'll keep you posted.
Tonight I felt the first inklings of what I think is that Supermind & its COLLECTIVE! It's US. It requires all of us.
I also have to pay deep homage to Ken Wilber. The context & map he is bringing in allows for a fuller embrace of this Kosmos. It allows these spiritual discoveries to not get misinterpreted. It allows for these perspectives to find there place in this collective unfolding without marginalizing other perspectives.
"......where it merely asserts identity of abstract (third-person) markers. Those markers are real enough, but they only represent a narrow slice of the Kosmos, a slice generated from real-world sentient beings through a series of abstractions, collapses, and reductions, so that only a few of the dimensions of being-in-the-world are represented, and are represented in a way that deceptively appears that they are not perspectives of sentient beings but simply a view of "the way things are," or what Nagel so aptly called "the view from nowhere." This allows such collapsed cognitions to imagine a Kosmos built of abstract relations and insentient beings (which is itself a perspective of their sentience).
...........
In other words, all of them are pre-quadratic attempts to derive the essentials of the Kosmos from a starting point that prejudicially has already collapsed the essentials out of existence and thus must attempt to recover those essentials with epicycles of further abstractions. Again, I am not saying that aspects of their work are not true; I am saying that they have abstracted their conclusions out of the matrix of indigenous perspectives and then presented them as "the way things are," oblivious to the perspectives in which their "views from nowhere" actually arrive.
This is certainly the case with "metaphysics" in general, whether we find it in Plotinus, Shankara, Asanga, Padmasambhava, Gurdjieff, Hegel, Rudolph Steiner, Carl Jung, William James, or the greatest of recent metaphysicians, Aurobindo. To the modernist and postmodernist critiques of metaphysics, we add the integral critique: their metaphysical systems are interpretations of their own spiritual experiences; the authenticity of the spiritual experiences is not in any way questioned, but the adequacy of their interpretations is: they have unconsciously abstracted, from the matrix of indigenous perspectives, a third-person overview that arrives on the scene secretly privileging the view from nowhere, even (or especially) when it emphasizes the importance of experience, spiritual awareness, feelings, or consciousness: all of those are, in fact, hidden low-order abstractions, and, as such, are the very heart of the metaphysical approach that all post-metaphysical integralism must struggle beyond. If "direct experience" and "consciousness" are already low-order abstractions mistaken for realities (and hence are metaphysical ghosts), the notions of "levels of being," "levels of knowing," "ontological planes," and so on are even worse: they are abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, even though the experiences that those interpretative frameworks are trying to represent are authentic enough. (In this regard, Aurobindo is the most offensive metaphysician in that he is the most accomplished; one can only stand in awe of his metaphysical system.)
Again, I am not questioning their realization or enlightenment or spiritual experiences; I am questioning the framework that they used to interpret and conceptualize their experiences. Those metaphysical interpretive frameworks are simply not adequate to a postmodern integralism that has grown out of metaphysics but can no longer be contained by it (i.e., integralism transcends-and-includes metaphysics)."
