A.H. Almaas in Vancouver

I went to see A.H. Almaas give a talk in Vancouver, accompanied by the other three members of my ITP. His lecture was quite inspiring, although at first I was fighting to stay awake - I've been lacking sleep intensely of late. However, as the talk went on I increasingly came to attention.

For the most part he kept on pointing out the essence that is always present, the basic nature of conscious experience, the ground of being - that which is aware of all but of which we usually are not aware of as such. My impression is that he kept hammering away: look, look, LOOK at this. LOOK! At first my responses were primarily intellectual but as time went on I felt I started to "get it" a little bit, just the merest glimmer. It's sort of like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue, you KNOW you know it but you can't quite bring it to mind. I guess I'm still rather good at pretending not to be enlightened, as Ken Wilber would put it. (And Ken says that as you go up the levels of development it gets harder and harder to deny that you are already enlightened.) But that little taste, that recognition, "yes...I know this...there is something to what you're saying...hmm...." The intellectual response is one thing: yes, yes, I know all this already! But that feeling, that stirring, so faint at this point but present - it's very compelling. Nevertheless, I'm very good at distracting myself (certainly not alone in that) and have a long way ago to fully grok this stuff, to consciously be aware of my be-ing.

My favorite moment was during the Q&A period, when Almaas talked about the idea that you can just "get it" and be enlightened, no further work to do. He said he's heard many people claim that, but he has yet to meet someone for whom that is true. Rather, what happens according to Almaas is that you have an experience of basic awareness, and that is very important - but after that point layers of illusion will continue to arise, and you must look into them and see through them - they must become transparent to you. This process will go on and on. He very clearly stated that the concept of an all-or-nothing, no further work to do enlightenment is unknown in his experience. At this point I instantly thought of mik I el (on the www.integralnaked.org forum), who claims just such a full-on sudden once and for-all rending of the veils of illusion. I am very skeptical of mik's claim. The interpretation given by Almaas feels more right to me, and matches my experience in other areas.

I also liked the response Almaas gave to a woman who referred to an article she read recently in Newsweek that claimed that "the reductionists have won" (both Jason and I were like, "Damn!" "So much for that argument.") Almaas made reference to the idea of interior reality verses exterior reality - not quite using the same lingo as Wilber, but basically referring to the lefthand and righthand sides of the quadrant. He said that when you really get in touch with essence it becomes quite obvious that the physical body and brain - while vitally important for the experience of action and consciousness in the world - are epiphenomena of the underlying essence of being.

The most confusing part was when he went into some detail about emptiness and form, existence and nonexistence, in response to a question. I'm not even going to try to reproduce what he said at that point - it kind of hurt my head! I think he may have been alluding to nonduality; at any rate he was talking way over my head. I am so not there yet. Plenty of work left to do to cover the distance to here!