Part II

Part I Part II Part III

     "Now that state of pure Witnessing is 'half-way' home to the Great Liberation. This pure Cartesian dualism is actually Shankara's great Crest Jewel of Discrimination : I am not this, I am not that— neti, neti . The pure Seer is not any objects that can be seen—and that PURE dualism is the causal realm in its all formless, pure, empty glory. It is an unbelievably high state—second only to the ultimate nondual—and that is why, if you THOROUGHLY experience this pure dualism, you are indeed half-way home. You can already feel some of this Great Liberation in that, as you rest in the ease of witnessing this moment, you already feel that you are free from the suffocating constriction of mere objects, mere feelings, mere thoughts—they all come and go, but you are the vast, free, empty, open Witness of them all, untouched by their torments and tortures.

     "This is actually the profound discovery of Purusha, of Shiva, of the pure divine Self, the formless Witness, causal nothingness, the vast Emptiness in which the entire world arises, stays a bit, and passes. And you are That . You are not the body, not the ego, not nature, not thoughts, not this, not that—you are a vast Emptiness, Freedom, Release, and Liberation.

     "With this discovery, to repeat, you are half-way home. You have dis-identified from any and all finite objects; you rest as infinite Consciousness. You are free, open, empty, clear, radiant, released, liberated, exalted, drenched in a blissful emptiness that exists prior to space, prior to time, prior to tears and terror; prior to pain and mortality and suffering and death. You have found the great Unborn, the vast Abyss, the unqualifiable Ground of all that is, and all that was, and all that ever shall be.

     "But why..." Powell looked gently at all of us. "Why is that only half-way home? Because as you rest in the infinite ease of consciousness, spontaneously aware of all that is arising, there will soon enough come the great catastrophe of final Freedom and Fullness: the Witness itself will disappear entirely, and instead of witnessing the sky, you are the sky; instead of touching the earth, you are the earth; instead of hearing the thunder, you are the thunder. You and the entire Kosmos become One Taste—you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, hold Mt. Everest in the palm of your hand; supernovas swirl in your heart and the solar system replaces your head."

     Powell's radiant skin seemed to glow from within, a translucent ebony plugged into some sort of scintillating Kosmic energy source. "To put it in dry technical terms, beyond the causal—which retains the primary dualism of Subject versus all objects—there lies the pure Nondual state, where the Subject and All Objects become One Taste, where Emptiness and Form become 'not-two, not-one.' But don't mistake One Taste for nature mysticism—in the Nondual state, Gaia can disappear entirely, as she does in dreams and deep sleep, and you are still One Taste, you are still Freedom and Fullness in all domains that arise. Gaia is just another finite object, and you are not this, not that. But if Gaia arises, fine, then you are one with Gaia. If nothing arises, you are one with nothing. You are One Taste, the empty mirror that is one with any and all objects that arise in its embrace, a mindlessly vast translucent expanse, infinite, eternal, radiant beyond release. And you... are... That.

     "So the primary Cartesian dualism—which is simply the dualism between Shiva and Shakti, Purusha and Prakriti, in here and out there, subject and object, the empty Witness and all things witnessed—is finally undone and overcome in nondual One Taste. Once you actually and fully contact the Witness, then—and only then—can it be transcended into radical Nonduality, and half-way home becomes fully home, here in the ever-present wonder of what is.

     "This, of course, is the profound meaning of Tantra. Shiva or Purusha (the Seer or the Witness, the pure formless Consciousness) is usually depicted as a male; and Shakti or Prakriti (the Seen, or the entire world of manifestation) is often depicted as a female. The point, of course, is that you are supposed to identify with both . Tantric art always shows Shiva and Shakti making love, or becoming One and Nondual. This is the eternal, erotic, ecstatic embrace of subject and object, mind and body, male and female, in here and out there—an embrace that lights up the sky with the shouts of the stars as they make love with infinity.

      "And so how do you know that you have finally and really overcome the Cartesian dualism? Very simple: if you have really overcome the Cartesian dualism, then you no longer feel that you are on this side of your face looking at the world out there. There is only the world, and you are all of that; you actually feel that you are one with everything that is arising moment to moment. You are not merely on this side of your face looking out there. 'In here' and 'out there' have become One Taste with a shuddering obviousness and certainty so profound it feels like a five-ton rock just dropped on your head. It is, shall we say, a feeling hard to miss." Powell smiled gently, her awareness floating in the room.

      "At that point, which is actually your ever-present condition, there is no exclusive identity with this particular organism, no constriction of consciousness to the head, a constriction that makes it seem that 'you' are in the head looking at the rest of the world out there; there is no binding of attention to the personal bodymind: instead, consciousness is one with all that is arising—a vast, open, transparent, radiant, infinitely Free and infinitely Full expanse that embraces the entire Kosmos, so that every single subject and every single object are erotically united in the Great Embrace of One Taste. You disappear from merely being behind your eyes, and you become the All, you directly and actually feel that your basic identity is everything that is arising moment to moment (just as previously you felt that your identify was with this finite, partial, separate, mortal coil of flesh you call a body). Inside and outside have become One Taste. I tell you, it can happen just like that!" and Lesa snapped her fingers—"The sound of one hand clapping," she whispered.

      "Now in this nondual state of One Taste, of course you know where your body is, and of course you can feel an identity with it and with your conventional ego; but you also feel, as a constant wave of awareness, that you are one with everything that is arising—in the waking, dream, and deep sleep state. You are both radically Free—because you are dis-identified with any and all objects—and radically Full—because you are paradoxically one with all objects in all domains. You transcend absolutely everything, and therefore you embrace absolutely everything, here in the pristine world of the Great Perfection of ever-present One Taste."

      There was a long silence. "And friends, you don't get this from reading postmodern poststructuralism," she said with a gentle laugh. "All that happens when you believe theories or ideas like systems science, pluralism, postmodernism, web-of-life notions, dynamical chaos theories, and so on—no matter how relatively true they might be—all that happens is that you are still on this side of your face looking at the world out there, but instead of thinking atomistic thoughts you are thinking holistic thoughts: both of them experienced on this side of your face. I think somebody once said that this is like switching from iron chains to gold chains.

      "Well, perhaps later we can discuss ways to overcome—to really overcome—the half-way home of Cartesian dualism by recognizing, confessing, and realizing ever-present One Taste. But now, let's drag ourselves back to the topic at hand. What can we say about the Upper-Left quadrant in René Descartes?"

      "Geez, Kim, how can she change gears like that? I still can't find my head."

      "Buckle up, nancy boy. The folks at IC say that Lesa can span the entire spectrum in a microsecond."

      "Is that true? Is that really true?"

      "Who knows? Charles says she can. But the funny thing is, she never, never, never talks about it. She's gone the whole seminar without even mentioning this third-tier stuff. In fact, this talk right now might be a first for her. It's pretty far out, don't you think?"

      "Okay, we might suppose, with a fair amount of evidence, that in the Upper-Left quadrant, Descartes's average level of development, his center of gravity, seems to have been orange—certainly in the cognitive line. But it definitely appears that he had a temporary altered state or peak experience of causal consciousness, of the pure Self, of the absolute Self that is not any object (and therefore can never be doubted; only objects can be doubted), the pure Self that transcends nature, body, mind, and manifestation altogether. But he applied this intuition of the certain Self to the rational ego. And there is the real problem: he therefore imagined that the rational ego itself was dualistically set apart from the world of objects .

     "And that indeed was a colossal catastrophe. And because he backed this catastrophic confusion with the full force of his undeniable genius, then, um, we have a bit of a problem.

     "To begin with, you see, the rational ego is just another set of objects. The rational ego is not ultimately a real Self, it is just a set of objects with which we have identified our Self , and thus this set of objects called 'ego' appears as a little finite subject or self (which we imagine is ultimate and foundational, as long as we are identified with it). This is what generally happens at the orange wave (in fact, at each wave of development, we identify the Self with that wave until we can let go of that wave, dis-identify with it, and transcend it in the next wave. This continues until all lesser selves have been shed, all subjects have become objects of the Self, and thus the Self alone remains as a locus of the Supreme Identity— tat tvam asi —You are That. In development, the subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage, until all subjects have become objects of the pure Self, which results in the causal wave).

     "Thus, the rational ego merely appears to be a real self because we have identified the Self with the ego. But the Self or Witness can in fact witness the ego, can make it an object, can disidentify with it, can transcend it. But, alas, that is exactly what dear Descartes did not do. Precisely because he experienced the pure Witness as a passing state and not a permanent trait, he did not actually develop to that stage of the causal Witness. His center of gravity remained orange, and to the orange self or ego he applied his intuition of the radical Self.

     "This led him to believe that the rational ego was his real Self, and worse, lead him to believe that this rational ego was separate from, divorced from, the world of objects around it. But the rational ego actually exists only in a world of relationships with all the other finite subjects and objects around it. That is, the rational ego itself exists fully situated in the four quadrants—as all manifest occasions do, whether finite subjects (Left Hand) or finite objects (Right Hand). Only the pure, formless, causal realm is free of the quadrants (because it is completely unmanifest and formless). But Descartes applied his intuition of the purely transcendent Witness to the finite egoic-rational self, and therefore split that self from both the body and from nature, ignored the cultural intersubjectivity inherent in all finite selves, and thus landed us with what has been called, in understandably nasty terms, the Cartesian dualism.

     "So, if I may summarize this part, the 'primary' Cartesian dualism—which was very likely a part of Descartes's altered state experience of the causal realm—reflected his fairly accurate experience of the causal Witness, which is indeed set apart from, or transcendent to, absolutely all finite objects. The causal Witness or pure Self radically transcends mind, body, nature, thoughts, and objects altogether. This was the great discovery of neti, neti —not this, not that. But because Descartes experienced this as an altered state and not a stage, he was forced to eventually interpret this experience through his present stage of development. In other words, he applied his intuition of the pure Self to the rational ego, and then quite understandably (but incorrectly) imagined that (1) the rational ego is set apart from the body; (2) the rational ego is set apart from nature; (3) rational thoughts alone give absolute and certain truth (which is the misapplication of the certainty of the ever-present Witness—which is indeed Self-evidently Certain—to finite rationality—which is nowhere near certain); (4) the senses give no real knowledge at all; (5) the rational-ego transcends cultural embeddedness; (6) nature and the body are mechanistic objects.

     "Well, those six items are indeed all problems, aren't they? But can you now see how they got started in his profound 'half-Vedanta' insights? So we call the first or major dualism—between subject and object (Shiva and Shakti)—we call that the primary Cartesian dualism. And the other six aspects I just listed, which basically stem from the primary Cartesian dualism, we call the 'lesser' or 'secondary' aspects of the Cartesian dualism. And my point is that most of Descartes's critics have swarmed all over the secondary Cartesian dualisms and completely missed the primary Cartesian dualism. Which is why they completely miss the cure for the real Cartesian dualism. I'll come back to this crucial point in a moment.

     "There is no reliable evidence that I am aware of to indicate that René Descartes went further and had an altered state or peak experience of the Nondual, and thus he got rather stuck, not just with the Shiva/Shakti dualism—which in its pure form is a very high accomplishment!—but with the Shiva/Shakti dualism applied to his rational ego. Yikes! And here you can pretty much drag in all the PMS condemnations of this stance that you want.

     "But notice immediately that if poor ole René did not overcome the Shiva/Shakti dualism, or the primary Cartesian dualism—namely, the fundamental felt split between the subject in here and the world out there— neither did the postmodernists . As I said, I don't know a single postmodernist who has done so (except a handful who also practice meditation). Rather, the postmodernists came up with a series of moves that did several things at once: (1) spectacularly failed to address the original or primary Shiva/Shakti dualism that was the essence of the great Cartesian discovery; (2) confined their attention to several of the lesser, secondary features of the Cartesian dualism, where they (3) very successfully addressed some of the obvious aspects of secondary Cartesianism, such as the hyper-agentic Enlightenment ego and its dissociation from body and nature, but (4) with a few important exceptions, fell short of adequately addressing the subtler, hidden, more obscure—and more important—problems of secondary Cartesianism, such as the real nature of intersubjectivity and its genealogy.

     "It's getting late. Care to go into those briefly?"

     My numbed and novocained brain failed to register the question. Kim, the idiot, said, "We'd love to, Dr. Powell." I looked at the systems-theory student Powell had recently pummeled; he shrugged.

     "We'll do it real fast," she smiled. "First, the 'Cartesian dualism' came very quickly to mean the relation of the finite ego-mind to the finite world of objects (or the finite subject to the finite object). Any consideration of the original Shiva/Shakti dualism and the infinite Self dropped out of the equation (except in a few important cases such as Husserl, Fichte, and so on—which we will not discuss now, except to say that their important philosophies were attempts to come to terms with the pure Self and the Shiva/Shakti dualism; but without a four-quadrant formulation, and without an enduring breakthrough to the Nondual, they fell short of the integral mark. See Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for further reflections on this).

     "Now the simplest way to understand the Cartesian dualism at this historical point is that the individual ego-mind was pictured as a separate, autonomous, isolated agency divorced from nature, body, and culture. We call this the 'secondary' Cartesian dualism because it does not address the original dualism of an infinite-formless Self witnessing a world of finite objects—part of Descartes's altered state—but rather has now been reduced (by Descartes himself, as well as most of his critics) to the relation of a finite ego-self to a world of finite objects. That is a very important relation to understand, but it does not capture the original dualism in its purity or importance. Still, it became one of the burning questions of modernity, and rightly so. Secondary Cartesianism, embraced by Descartes himself—precisely because he confused Self and ego—pictured the finite rational ego as radically divorced from body, nature, and world. And that was indeed a nightmare.

     "In fact, if you look at the four-quadrant diagram, the Cartesian (and eventually Kantian) ego can be pictured as a little person standing in the Upper-Left quadrant completely disconnected from the other three quadrants . That is the major epistemological mess that the downsides of the Enlightenment left us with (i.e., the Big Three were dissociated, not merely differentiated). And because the ego-mind (or the Upper Left) is in fact inseparably connected with the other three quadrants, several different schools quickly arose to challenge this truncated picture, to challenge the Cartesian dualism or the Enlightenment epistemology, with each of the schools arguing for the importance of one of the neglected quadrants. All of them had important truths, important pieces of the puzzle, marred only by the fact that all of them thought they had the total picture. Well, we all make that mistake, eh? Even us integralists today only have a piece of the overall pie, as tomorrow's integralists will point out. But, you know, we'll all be dead then, so who cares?" We all laughed with her.

     "The first post-Cartesian, post-Enlightenment movement was the Romantic. It pointed out several important relationships that the supposedly autonomous rational ego was missing (or denying or repressing). The first ignored relationship was the fact that the ego-mind is inseparably connected to the feeling body (and through that, to nature at large). This was an attempt, in the Upper Left, to reconnect the rational ego with the vital, organic body. Nietzsche, Herder, Novalis, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Freud would all have something important to say about this inward dissociation that began to plague the Enlightenment-self (both in theory and in life).

     "But please notice, René Descartes was not responsible for this inner dissociation between thoughts and feelings that sometimes occurred in people of the modern era. It is the standard possible pathology of the orange meme (a dissociation that begins at blue), and it shows up wherever the orange meme shows up (in whatever culture, East or West, North or South). The previous memes do not show this inner dissociation between formal-operational mind and felt body because the previous memes do not have a formal-operational mind to begin with. The preoperational and concrete-operational minds are not strong enough to dissociate in this way; they are free of this particular pathology not because they are above it, but below it.

     "Put it this way: this inner dissociation from the felt body (and its correlative, outward dissociation from sensory nature) would have begun to plague humanity around the time of the Enlightenment whether or not René Descartes had ever lived; whether or not it occurred in the East or the West; and whether or not men or women were in charge of culture at the time (females may have a lesser propensity to disembodied abstractions, but they do not have a lesser propensity for their forms of orange pathology: both men and women are equally responsible here; indeed, studies show that both males and females at the conscientious stage of development show tendencies to abstract formalism and its dissociation). This is a possible pathology inherent in the orange wave of development of both genders. Laying the blame for this at the feet of Descartes (or men in general) is simply preposterous. Of course," Lesa added, "realizing that the Western Enlightenment would have had essentially the same form even if women had been in charge is at odds with virtually every school of feminism, but that is not my fault," she laughed. "And besides, my position—that women would have screwed up the Enlightenment in the same basic ways as men—is actually a tribute to women.

     "Anyway, I don't mind naming diseases after their most famous victims. After all, we call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis 'Lou Gehrig's disease,' after its most famous sufferer; and we name 'boomeritis' after the generation that was its first great victim. So, in a roundabout way, it's not altogether wrong to call this dissociation the Cartesian dualism, as long as we realize that René Descartes was its first great victim, not its first great cause. The actual cause or causes of this dissociation were events occurring in all four quadrants, which molded the specific form that the creative emergence of orange out of blue happened to take. But those contours, as I said, would have been essentially similar in other cultures; this particular dissociation is the inherent possible pathology inherent in the orange wave of consciousness and cultural evolution. It can be lessened and mitigated—or exaggerated and exalted—by events in the other quadrants, but it is does not exist because babies at age 2 start reading Newton and Descartes and get all screwed up in a billiard ball world!

     "Okay, the first positive insight of the Romantics involved the necessity to heal this split between mind and feelings. The second important insight of the Romantics was that the individual subjectivity (the Upper Left) is not a disengaged, fully autonomous subject, but rather is set in extensive fields of cultural intersubjectivity (the Lower Left). This is most certainly true, and the Romantics, to their everlasting credit, were the first to really articulate this—Herder, Schiller, Rousseau, the Schlegels, Novalis, Coleridge, and crew. It was this emphasis on the cultural context—and hence on the importance of hermeneutics, of recognizing other cultures, of interpretation, and of background context—that made the Romantics the first real postmodernists. In fact, the Romantics were the first truly great green-meme theorists in history. Their lineage stretches to Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Derrida...."

     "I thought you said the Boomers were the first green-meme generation in history."

     "Yes, the Boomers were the first generation where a significant percentage had their center of gravity at green—in our case, about 25% of the population is green. Remember that the Romantics were a relatively small group of avant-garde thinkers and artists, probably no more than 1% of the population. The same is true with most of these counter-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment movements that we are discussing right now: they were an extremely small part of the overall population at the time that they first arose. In fact, most of the population during the time of 'orange' Enlightenment itself was at pre-Enlightenment, premodern blue—I'd guess about 60% of the population during the Enlightenment was not orange but blue. And probably 30% was red. And perhaps 5%, if that, was actually at orange; and less than 1% at green or higher. But you get the picture. Remember, Paul Tillich estimated that what we call the Renaissance was participated in by about 1000 people."

     That caught me completely off guard; what a galvanizing thought.

     "This is what is so funny about PMS scholars blaming most of the world's woes on the 'Newtonian-Cartesian' paradigm. The vast, vast majority of people—then and now—couldn't tell you a single accurate thing that either Newton or Descartes said. The dualisms and mechanisms that are associated with their names are features of the world that arise at various waves of development and would be there with or without those gentleman. Normal infants in every known culture have a conception of object permanence by age 18-24 months, and trust me, the kids ain't reading Newton." She smiled, shifted her position, took a long breath.

     "Okay, however few in number, the Romantics were the first great green-meme theorists. Which means they were the first to also get caught in boomeritis and the cult of the self. This is now so well known that we needn't dwell on it. But wherever green goes, boomeritis follows, and the Romantics initiated virtually every major form of boomeritis imaginable, from the retro-Romantic slide to the glorification of the noble savage to the celebration of tribal purple consciousness to the cult of the divine ego and the wonder of being me. Ah yes.... And, needless to say, they did not overcome the original Cartesian dualism or the Shiva/Shakti split, although they always claimed to have done so. Instead they centered on various aspects of the secondary Cartesian dualisms, and with regard to those secondary issues, they made both some important contributions and some unfortunate blunders, or so it seems to me.

     "To briefly repeat their important discoveries and contributions: in the Upper Left, the rational ego is intrinsically connected to its vital, organic, bodily roots; (2) from there it is organically connected to all of nature (in the Right Hand); and (3) in the Lower Left, the rational ego and its subjectivity are intrinsically connected to intersubjective structures of language, cultural background, and mutual relationships. All of those insights are profoundly true, I believe, a testament to the greatness that healthy green is capable of. In a moment will address the problems the Romantics left us with, but let's finish the present story first.

Part I Part II Part III