Part I Part II Part III

[Please read "Introduction to the Deconstruction of the World Trade Center," posted on this site, or much of the following will make little sense. Thanks, KW.]

     After her lecture on Tuesday, Lesa Powell stayed for an hour or two and talked with interested students about René Descartes, who she said was the first great modern (orange) philosopher and therefore the first great whipping boy of the green postmodernists. Kim insisted that I stay for this, but why, I don't know.

      "It will help you understand that idiotic AI you're involved with."

      "Oh really?"

      "Oh really. The Cartesian dualism is the major sin of modernity, didn't you know that?" She began laughing, as if this were some sort of inside joke. "And you don't want to be living in sin, do you? What are you, Wilber, all of 20 years old? And already living in sin."

      At that point, Powell overheard Kim and interjected, "This young lady—is that you, Kim? Yes—Kim here is pulling your leg, folks. The Cartesian dualism is actually the beginning of a brilliant and profound Vedanta for the West, an enormous accomplishment spotted by a few geniuses like Moshe Kroy, but unfortunately a fact completely—and I mean completely—lost on the lemming-like loonies of postmodernism. Care to hear why?" And Lesa laughed her easy laugh, white teeth on black skin in the shimmering soft lights of the stage.

      I thought, what the hell, I might as well hear this. My mind had so many stretch marks on it already, I figured, what's a few more contusions on my cortex, bruises on my brain? It's not like I actually needed it.

      Woody Allen: "The brain—that's my second favorite organ."

      "Don't look so pained, Wilber," Kim grinned.

      Lesa: "You've heard the constant refrain around Integral Center: this or that theorist is 'half right, half wrong.' And you know why we say that so often: it's because no mind—and therefore no theorist—is capable of producing nothing but falsehood. As Joan quips, 'No one is smart enough to be wrong all the time.' That means that every philosophical view and perspective has some sort of truth to it , and our job is put all the partial truths together in a wonderful tapestry of human possibilities, and not pick one partial truth and defend it to the death against all others.

      "Well, that goes double for poor Descartes. Of course he made some mistakes, most of them glaringly obvious to us of today; but the things he got right were profound—absolutely, astonishingly, outrageously profound. And any sort of truly integral embrace would not be integral without the important, if partial, truths of Cartesianism.

      "Almost three decades ago, a person who would eventually become a co-founder of IC wrote an essay called, 'In Defense of Descartes,' which began, 'It has become a fashionable stupidity to rake Descartes over the coals, usually for all the wrong reasons.' Three decades ago: that was right at the beginning of the postmodern invasion, the rise of the green meme, and the tsunami of the mean green meme. Needless to say, the fashionable stupidity increased, becoming the first—and arguably the most influential—cornerstone of academic boomeritis. I guarantee you, when you hear an attack on the Cartesian dualism, you are smack in the face of a nasty case of boomeritis."

      "See, Wilber, this could be fun."

      "I'd rather eat airline food."

      Lesa Powell smiled gently. "So let's start with perhaps the most amazing aspect of Descartes's work, and then suggest a few ways that he might have gotten sidetracked. To begin with, the cogito. That is, ' Cogito, ergo sum ,' usually translated as, 'I think, therefore I am.' But that translation loses the immediacy of the intuition that impelled Descartes. As interpreters such as Kroy and Bonnett have pointed out, this pithy phrase really has the meaning of: 'consciousness, hence being.'

     "In other words—and this was the basis of the famous Cartesian doubt—there are many things that I can doubt, but I cannot believably doubt my own consciousness in this moment . My consciousness IS, and even if I tried to doubt it, it would be my consciousness doing the doubting. I can imagine that my senses are being presented with a fake reality—say, a completely virtual reality or digital reality, which looks real but is merely a series of extremely realistic images. But even then, I cannot doubt the consciousness that is doing the watching.

     "Likewise, I can imagine that my consciousness is delivered to me by a complex brain mechanism of neurotransmitters, synapses, and the like, so that my consciousness is merely a byproduct, an epiphenomenonon—but that is merely a rational deduction, and even that deduction is known only in my immediate consciousness. This does not deny that the brain is involved in consciousness; it simply points out that unless the immediate reality of my own present consciousness is included in the equation, I am missing a reality that I cannot believably doubt in any event.

     "Consciousness, hence being. The very undeniability of my present awareness, the undeniability of my consciousness, immediately delivers to me a certainty of existence in this moment, a certainty of Being in the now-ness of this moment. I cannot doubt consciousness and Being in this moment, for it is the ground of all knowing, all seeing, all existing. This, of course, is exactly the path that had been taken by Vedanta, by Vajrayana, by the Neoplatonists, and by many other great wisdom traditions. It is the path of I AM, and this great I AMness is said to open directly on to, or even to directly be, nothing other than pure Spirit, radiant God/dess, the Atman that is Brahman, timelessly and eternally—a supreme equation secreted in the fact that you cannot doubt the Immediacy of your own Now-ness. Consciousness, therefore Being. And Being is God in the state of I AM.

     "Who am I? Ask that question over and over again, deeply. Who am I? What is it in me that is conscious of everything? This self-inquiry was used by Sri Ramana Maharshi to realize the Self, the Self that is one with the entire Kosmos in all its radiant splendor. In other words, Sri Ramana Maharshi was using the Cartesian doubt to drive to heart of the Atman that is Brahman—although, of course, the technique is centuries old. Descartes did not invent it, he merely rediscovered it. In Descartes's burning desire to know 'What is ultimately true? What is so true that it can never be doubted ?,' he turned his attention inward with such a fierce and awesome dedication to Truth that he eventually was brought—as all such sincere and prolonged self-inquiry is—directly to the Self that is the Witness of all worlds, a Self that can never be believably doubted because it is always already ever-present. Consciousness IS Being, even here and now.

     "How similar was this Cartesian doubt to the Path of Awakening in the great wisdom traditions? Here is only one example, taken from Dzogchen Buddhism, generally regarded as the highest of the Buddha's teachings. This is from the great Paltrul's 'Self-Liberated Mind':

      "'At times it happens that some meditators say that it is difficult to recognize the nature of the mind (note: in Dzogchen, 'the nature of the mind' means the ultimate reality of pure Emptiness or primordial Spirit). Some practitioners believe it to be impossible to recognize Spirit. They become depressed with tears streaming down their cheeks. There is no reason at all to become sad. It is not at all impossible to recognize. Rest directly in that which thinks that it is impossible to recognize Spirit , and that is exactly it .'"

     Lesa Powell looked up. "In other words, if you think that you know Spirit, or if you think you don't, Spirit is actually that which is thinking both of those thoughts. So you can doubt the objects of consciousness, but you can never believably doubt the doubter, never really doubt the Witness of the entire display. Therefore, rest in the Witness, whether it is thinking that it knows God or not, and that witnessing, that undeniable immediacy of now-consciousness, is itself God, Spirit, Buddha-mind. The certainty lies in the pure self-felt Consciousness to which objects appear, not in the objects themselves. You will never, never, never see God, because God is the Seer, not any finite, mortal, bounded object that can be seen. (Consciousness, therefore Being— not: objects of Consciousness, therefore Being.)

     "Thus, this pure I AM state is not hard to achieve but impossible to escape, because it is ever-present and can never really be doubted. You can never run from Spirit, because Spirit is the Runner. To put it very bluntly: Spirit is not hard to find but impossible to avoid: it is that which is looking at this page right now. Can't you feel That One? Why on earth do you keep looking for God when God is actually the Looker?

     "Therefore, simply rest in the ever-present Witness. As Patrul also says: 'There are some meditators who don't let their mind rest in itself or in basic immediateness, as they should. Instead they let it watch outwardly or search inwardly. You will neither see nor find Spirit by watching outwardly or searching inwardly (for it is the Seer, not the seen!). There is no reason whatsoever to watch outwardly or search inwardly. Let go directly into this mind that is watching outwardly or searching inwardly, and that is exactly it .'

     "Well, all of that is good Cartesianism—although, again, Descartes didn't invent it, he just rediscovered it in his own I AMness. This path of self-inquiry—and the Great Liberation that is secreted in the ever-present I AM state—goes back at least 2,000 years (although the traditions always claim, not completely convincingly, that it goes back tens of thousands of years or more). We find it in Plato and therefore Neoplatonism (and therefore virtually every mystical school in the West), where it appears as a basic Wakefulness present even in sleep; it is clearly announced in India in the Upanishads, where this Atman that is Brahman is the doorway to Enlightenment; we find it in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism (when faced with those who thought that the attainment of nirvana depended on prayers and chanting, Zen asked instead: 'WHO chants the name of the Buddha?'); we find it in the great Christian mystics, such as Boethius, who in his great distress cried out to Philosophia, who ever-so-gently whispered in his ear: 'You have forgotten who you are.' Because who you are is... Spirit itself, even when you think you can never find it.

     "At the beginning of the modern world—that is, somewhere between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—Descartes looked into this own mind and found the Looker. From Descartes this I AM realization poured into modern Western philosophy. When Husserl explains that the world could end and it wouldn't affect the pure Self, or when he describes the splitting of the witnessing self from empirical self (e.g., in section 15 of Cartesian Meditations ), or when Fichte describes the pure Observing Self as being infinite and supraindividual Spirit—this is Western Vedanta at its finest. To varying degrees we find it in Kant, Spinoza, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Heidegger... oh, it is a long list!

     "And I am getting quite ahead of the story." Powell laughed, shifted her position sitting on the stage, and continued. "Several scholars have suggested that Descartes's major satori occurred in an altered state of consciousness when he climbed into an old stove and curled up on himself. He is quoted as saying something like, When I came out, my entire philosophy was formed.

     "Well, what we do know is that Descartes very probably had a peak experience of the causal realm. A peak experience of the pure Self, the formless Witness, the pure Consciousness that cannot believably be doubted because it is the ground of all Being and all doubt. A peak experience of Atman, a peak experience of the ever-present I AM: no wonder Descartes was the first great modern philosopher, powered by that fuel!

     "But—and this is crucial—we also have good reason to believe that Descartes's frontal development—that is, his average center of gravity—was at the orange meme (this was, after all, the beginning of modernity). And therefore Descartes did pretty much what integral psychology predicts that he would do: he interpreted his altered state or peak experience of the causal realm in terms of the orange meme . Aye, and there's the rub.

     "We can find no evidence that Descartes was permanently developed to the causal realm—the causal was therefore only a passing state, not a permanent trait. Recall that integral psychology maintains that a person at virtually any stage of development (infant, child, adult—purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow, etc.) can have an altered state or peak experience of any of the great states of consciousness—gross, subtle, causal, nondual (corresponding to waking, dreaming, sleeping, and nondual). But the person will tend to interpret that altered state in the terms of their present stage of development. And that appears to be just what happened to Descartes: he had a profound altered state of the causal realm and then interpreted that in the general terms of the orange meme—and there, in a nutshell, is the dignity and the disaster of the Cartesian worldview.

     "Descartes was not permanently developed to the causal as a stage or wave; he was permanently developed more-to-less to the egoic-rational wave, the orange meme. But even that part—his embrace of the orange wave—was an aspect of his evolutionary brilliance and his developmental genius. Descartes was indeed the first great modern philosopher, because he was the first philosopher to identify with the orange-wave worldview and therefore start asking questions from within that worldview. Most (not all) of the previous, premodern philosophers of Europe were still asking questions from within the mythic-membership worldview, from within the blue meme. But in a burst of developmental brilliance rarely seen anywhere in history, René Descartes punched through the herd mentality of blue and started asking, and answering, orange questions. I mean, this was, this was... absolutely amazing....

     "Okay. So, at this point we have to take a four-quadrant view to get a sense of what happened to these two basic truths—and their strange admixture—that Descartes possessed: namely, (1) a peak experience of pure I AMness, a peak experience of causal Consciousness that is undeniable, unqualifiable Being, a peak experience that (2) was interpreted through the orange meme, or the egoic-rational worldview as it broke through the mythic-membership worldview. Both some very good news and some very bad news awaited the final results. And the critics, at this point, are not altogether wrong in some of their postmodern pontifical pronouncements." Powell smiled, looked at us with a sparkle that hinted of things to come.

     "In other words, we want to do an integral historiography of Descartes: all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states. [See Sidebar A : Integral Historiography.] I won't do an exhaustive 'historiograph' right now, but I'll mention a few major items. We just gave a brief rundown on the 'states and stages' features of Descartes's breakthrough philosophy: namely, a temporary causal state interpreted by the orange stage (and, I would add, specifically in the cognitive line). So that is a brief summary of the levels (orange), lines (cognitive), and states (causal) aspects of the integral historiograph of our friend René.

     "In the quadrants—well, we just gave the Upper-Left quadrant, we just gave a brief summary of his integral psychograph as best as we can piece it together today. But what about the profoundly important collective quadrants? In the Lower-Right quadrant—which in some ways is the most important historically, because it is the material-social engine that drives so much of human activity, an insight not lost on Marx—we notice first and foremost that the social system is fast approaching the industrial revolution. Now, Descartes is not fully of the industrial era. He wrote his Essays in 1637; the Englishman Thomas Newcomen invents the steam engine in 1705 and James Watt perfects it in 1769. But all of the four-quadrant forces that would eventually give rise to the Industrial Era are starting to simmer beneath the surface . And the genius Descartes can smell a coming revolution. Or, if you're into postmodern poststructuralism and you fairly despise all things modern, then you would say that Descartes was the first canary to drop dead in that coming mine shaft disaster.

     "The point is that Descartes is indeed riding the emerging orange wave, both good and bad. Putting this all together into an integral historiograph (however abbreviated):

     "In the Lower-Right quadrant we find that—in empirical hindsight via a reconstructive science, and NOT in an a priori (Hegelian or Platonic) determinism—this emergence would involve a variety of social systems all resting on the techno-economic mode of industrialization; in the Lower-Left quadrant, a variety of cultural worldviews would emerge that involved, one way or another, a postconventional, worldcentric, egoic-rational unfolding of the universe (postconventional worldviews that, among other things, eventually extended individual rights of agency to all human beings, resulting in everything from feminism to the abolition of slavery in every industrialized nation on earth); in the Upper-Left quadrant, a center of psychological gravity that switched from blue to orange (at least in the cultural elite), liberating reason from its confinement in ethnocentric myth; and in the Upper-Right quadrant, a series of behaviors focused on the individual and his or her freedom of action under institutionalized laws.

     "One other major item needs to be mentioned. The rise of modernity—or the egoic-rational worldview, or Gebser's era of perspectival reason, or Habermas's emergence of an ego identity form a role identity—in short, the rise of orange as a significant and often governing societal structure that supplanted blue and its medieval mythic-membership structures—this emergence also involved the vitally important differentiation of the Big Three—that is, the differentiation of art, morals, and science; or the I, the We, and the It; or the beautiful, the good, and the true. This differentiation—which is common in the general cognitive shift from conop to formop—was a central feature of the European historiograph throughout much of the 1700s. And this differentiation, as many scholars from Weber to Habermas have suggested, was indeed the basis of the great dignities that modernity brought: democracy could supplant monarchy, science could challenge myth, egalitarianism would erode aristocracy, freedom would fight slavery—the incredibly positive gains of the Enlightenment were about to descend the world with revolutionary results.

     "However, for various reasons that some of my colleagues have discussed (see, e.g., Sex, Ecology, Spirituality ), the rise of modernity also marked not just the differentiation of the value spheres of art, morals, and science—which was the great dignity of modernity—but the dissociation of those spheres—which was the great disaster. In combination with: a tilt to agentic rationalism pervading culture in the Lower Left (an 'overly' orange worldview, a valuation of science over morals and art); a pervasive personal dissociation of reason and feeling in the Upper Left (most likely due not to any pathology but simple adolescent enthusiasm); and a rampant industrialization in the Lower Right (which put a massive emphasis on purposive-rational structures and a pandemic materialism of Its), a strange thing happened: the It domain began to aggressively dominant the I and the We domains —what Habermas calls 'the colonization of art and morals by science.' The famous 'disenchantment of the world' was about to begin. Put bluntly, the Right-Hand quadrants just squished the daylights out of the Left-Hand.

     "So there was the good news and the bad news of modernity. On the good-news side: modernity marked the emergence of worldcentric, postconventional orange from ethnocentric, conventional blue, a revolution that would, among so many other beneficial things, bring the rise of the representative democracies around the world, the end of slavery, the rise of feminism, the gains of modern medicine, physics, and the ecological sciences. And, as with every other emergence of a major wave of development, there was the downside, the shadow elements, the bad news, foremost among which was the dominance of scientific materialism and an industrial ontology that said: only 'its' are real . The interior dimensions of consciousness, value, meaning, and intentionality are not really real—the I and the We, art and morals, introspection and intuition, consciousness and spirit—all of them are really nothing but material Its, variations on frisky dirt, illusions thrown up by dust as it wends it way through the lonely Kosmos—for matter alone is real.

     "Welcome to the worldview known as flatland. As many of you know, there are two major versions of flatland— atomism, which believes that only the Upper-Right quadrant is real; and systems theory , which believes that only the Lower-Right quadrant is real. The former is gross reductionism —reducing the world to atomistic Its—and the latter is subtle reductionism —reducing the world to dynamically interwoven processes and holistic patterns of Its. Both of them completely gut the interior dimensions of I and We."

     "But is that really true?" The small group of students had been almost completely silent up to this point; one finally broke the circle and almost blurted out his objection. We all suspected he was a systems theorist of one flavor or another. "Because systems theory, particularly its recent forms, explicitly attempts to take all phenomena into account and then give a holistic picture of their interaction."

     "Give us an example, would you please?" Powell smiled.

     "Sure. Take the traffic patterns in downtown Chicago. If you look at them as billiard balls in a fragmented Newtonian world, then you can't really make sense of their patterns. But if you back up and look at the overall flow of cars in Chicago, you can see these beautiful patterns of mutual relationships. You can even describe these patterns using the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. This is the opposite of reductionism! It fights atomism by demanding a big-picture science, a wholistic science!" The student was obviously agitated.

     "Okay, okay, I hear what you are saying. But please, just notice: you say that you can describe these beautiful traffic patterns using the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. I'm sure you can, honest. But what you cannot do—and none of your systems theories can do—is tell me what level of consciousness the drivers of those cars are at. Is a particular driver red, or blue, or orange, or green, or turquoise? Because a driver motivated by turquoise is going to have a profoundly different agency than a driver at red, yet none of these differences can be seen by systems theory. Yes? Systems theory treats each of the cars as if it had the same level of consciousness in it—because the tools of systems theory have no way to see or understand the interior levels of consciousness in those cars. Each car is therefore treated as the same type of entity moving in the dynamically patterned flow. Each is treated as an equivalent strand in the great Web of Life. In other words, interior intentionality is reduced to exteriorly observed behaviorism, although this time it is the behavior of a collective system and not a single individual. Systems theory doesn't focus on a single flatland strand, as atomism does, it focuses on a flatland web of strands—and in both of them the strands are still completely eviscerated, gutted of their actual interiors, which never display themselves in the exterior web. This is a disaster of the first magnitude." The student stared blankly ahead.

     "Look, my friend, systems theory does indeed fight the atomism of the Upper Right by pointing out that all objects actually exist in systems of dynamical relationships. But systems theory leaves out the actual interiors of both those objects and those systems. There is no successful agent-modeling system that accounts for the I and We domains in their own terms . And this leads to a series of real catastrophes when systems theory then thinks that it is actually being wholistic, or offering a comprehensive model of the Kosmos. In fact, it is a dreadful reduction of the interiors to flatland systems devoid of consciousness, care, compassion, value, meaning, depth, and divinity. You think you have a cure for flatland, but you are simply magnifying it—thus adding to your subtle reductionism a deep self-deception."

     The student looked absolutely crushed. Powell leaned over quickly. "Oh, dear, I didn't mean it like that. No, no. Oh, it's okay, it's okay. I didn't mean you personally."

     "This is too cool," Kim whispered.

     "You are brutal, Kim," I replied. "That poor kid. I'm thinking maybe fifty thousand dollars in therapy."

     "Oh, he'll be fine. He's a jerk anyway."

     "Kim, trust me, you need a green-meme transplant immediately."

     Powell looked around. "As some of you know, Fred Kofman is a valued member of Integral Center. Fred was Peter Senge's main collaborator in forming the Organizational Learning Center at MIT, which specialized in applying dynamical systems theory to business practices, an approach which had—and still has—an enormous following. But Fred started to become increasingly suspicious that something was profoundly wrong with systems theory, and when he began to explore an AQAL model (all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines, etc.), he realized why: systems theory grasps holistic exteriors but not holistic interiors, and yet both of them are needed for any true wholism. You can find some of Fred's important contributions to integral approaches at Frank Visser's website ( www.worldofkenwilber.com); see especially 'Holons, Heaps, and Artifacts.'

     "Let's push ahead, shall we? We were at the point that, historically, flatland began to descend on the world, and flatland involved the denial of interiors, the denial of depth, the denial of the spectrum of consciousness and the spiral of development—all of those realities in the I and the We would be collapsed, crushed, distorted, or completely denied altogether. So powerful was the grip of flatland that all of modernity AND postmodernity would lie in its clutch. When postmodernity finally, proudly, claimed that there are nothing but surfaces in all directions—no depth, no within—just sliding chains of signifiers—it had finally and fully succumbed to flatland. And irony of ironies: in doing so it claimed that it was finally free of modernity, whereas it had finally died from it.

     "So, Descartes, yes?" We all laughed.

     "Descartes has unfairly gotten much—sometimes all—of the blame for the bad news of modernity, and none of the credit for the good news. Well, we have gone over much of this in the main seminar, yes? The basic reason Descartes has gotten none of the credit for the good news of modernity is that postmodern poststructuralism—PMS for short—does not recognize any dignities, differentiations, or good news of modernity: modernity is all bad news and dissociations and disasters, period. Not to mention the fact that his breakthrough to I AMness has been lost on most critics, except those few—Kroy, Bonnett, Catherine Kahill, Margaret Sullivan—who have experienced it themselves and are therefore capable of recognizing it in somebody else. But I tell you, my friends"—Powell seemed to grimace—"the knee-jerk reaction that claims the Cartesian dualism is the root of all evil is a slander perpetrated by the mean green meme at its meanest and most ignorant." Powell paused, took a breath, looked again at the poor student slowly recovering.

     "Speaking of which, what is the Cartesian dualism, anyway? In other words, what part of the bad news of modernity did Descartes have some hand in? As you might surmise, we at IC reject most of the common claims about Descartes and therefore about the Cartesian dualism (more about that later). So let's set aside the typical PMS assertions for the moment and state the real shadow side of Descartes as simply as possible: the downside of Descartes was that not that he split mind from body, or that he split thinking from feeling, or that he split reason from nature, or that he introduced the disembodied hovering monological eyeball, or that he mechanized nature. The central problem was that he took his peak experience of the pure Self and applied it to the rational-egoic level. He interpreted his experience of the Divine Self in terms of the orange ego.

     "From that colossal goof (it's a common form of what we call 'the Atman project' at that stage of development), all the other 'Cartesian problems' flowed. But as for most of the 'problems' ascribed to Descartes: first of all, most of them aren't problems but major advances; second, the actual problems are indeed problems, but they are usually quite misunderstood because they are interpreted through the green meme and often the mean green meme (and boomeritis). So a great deal of careful, reconstructive work is required in order to arrive at a more adequate, resonant, second-tier, integral historiograph of Descartes and the period that gave rise to him.

     "Let's start with the so-called Cartesian dualism, which, after 'patriarchy,' is probably the single dirtiest word in the PMS canon." Powell looked up and laughed good-naturedly. "The Cartesian dualism is supposedly the split between mind and body, or subject and object in the broadest sense, and many critics have actually ascribed the origin of this dualism to Descartes—a notion shot down by Karl Popper in his careful review of the problem. No, the Cartesian dualism is the split that you feel right now between the perceiving subject—which seems to reside somewhere between and behind your eyes—and the world you see 'out there.' You definitely feel, in your own awareness right now, that you are somehow 'in here' looking at the world 'out there,' yes?

     "Well that, very simply, is the real Cartesian dualism. You feel that you are 'in here' and the world is 'out there.' Let's call it the primary Cartesian dualism (because, as we will see, there are all sorts of 'lesser' and derivative dualisms associated with it). And as for that primary Cartesian dualism, no amount of postmodern poststructuralism will cure you of that feeling of being split from the world. Let me tell you, my friends, I know hundreds of postmodernists, and not one of them has overcome that fundamental feeling of being a subject confronting a world of objects, that fundamental feeling of the self-contraction. And not just postmodern poststructuralism: no amount of systems theory, no amount of chaos theory, no amount of the new physics, no amount of studying transit astrology, no amount of repeating over and over that the world is a unified Web of Life—none of those merely thinking activities will cure you of the Cartesian dualism.

     "You see, what Descartes actually discovered, with this dualism, is the great (but not ultimate) dualism between Shiva and Shakti, between Purusha and Prakriti—the great dualism between the pure formless Witness and everything that is witnessed. This dualism is the dualism that you feel right now. But far from being some sort of ghastly error, the perception of this dualism is actually the beginning of the Great Liberation, the beginning of the process of Awakening.

     "Awakening to what? To your primordial Divinity, to the Divine Self, to the empty Witness that is free of all pain, suffering, death, and mortality. You can start toward that Great Liberation right now by practicing the Cartesian doubt: simply ask, Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

     "I am aware of my feelings, so I am not my feelings—Who am I? I am aware of my thoughts, so I am not my thoughts—Who am I? Clouds float by in the sky, thoughts float by in the mind, feelings float by in the body—and I am none of those because I can Witness them all.

     "Moreover, I can doubt that clouds exist, I can doubt that feelings exist, I can doubt that objects of thought exist—but I cannot doubt that the Witness exists in this moment, because the Witness would still be there to witness the doubt.

     "I am not objects in nature, not feelings in the body, not thoughts in the mind, for I can Witness them all. I am that Witness—a vast, spacious, empty, clear, pure, transparent Openness that impartially notices all that arises, as a mirror spontaneously reflects all its objects.

Part I Part II Part III