FSMN Articles

"Ken Wilber is highly regarded for his writing on consciousness and transpersonal psychology. He has a deep understanding of eastern and western philosophy and what is known as the perennial philosophy. The main theme of the book is that at some time in our human evolutionary development of consciousness we drew up boundaries, the primary one being the self/not-self boundary. We created a world of separation. Taking these boundaries to be real is the cause of human suffering. Seeing through these boundaries is our way through to our next stage of conscious development and freedom from suffering. The ideas presented have major implications for philosophy, psychology and religion. In particular we will look at the implications for the way we experience everyday life. For a short time before we start on "No Boundary", I will show some simple diagrams that may help in understanding the world view presented. There will be plenty of time allowed for discussion."

Louis Statham's notes

From Ken Wilbur's "No Boundary", chapters -

  1. Who am I?
  2. Half of It
  3. No Boundary Territory
  4. No Boundary Awareness
  5. No Boundary Moment

Yet there is an even more basic process underlying the whole procedure of establishing an identity. Something very simple happens when you answer the question, "Who are you?" When you are describing or explaining or even just inwardly feeling your "self," what you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of your experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling your "self," while everything outside that boundary you feel to be "not-self." Your self-identity, in other words, depends entirely upon where you draw that boundary line.

So widespread is this experience of the supreme identity that it has, along with the doctrines that purport to explain it, earned the name "The Perennial Philosophy." There is much evidence that this type of experience or knowledge is central to every major religion Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism so that we can justifiably speak of the "transcendent unity of religions" and the unanimity of primordial truth. The theme of this book is that this type of awareness, this unity consciousness or supreme identity, is the nature and condition of all sentient beings.

The peculiar thing about a boundary is that, however complex and rarefied it might be, it actually marks off nothing but an inside vs. an outside. For example, we can draw the very simplest form of a boundary line as a circle, and see that it discloses an inside versus an outside:

(inside)outside

But notice that the opposites of inside vs. outside didn't exist in themselves until we drew the boundary of the circle. It is the boundary line itself, in other words, which creates a pair of opposites. In short, to draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites. Thus we can start to see that the reason we live in a world of opposites is precisely because life as we know it is a process of drawing boundaries.

And the world of opposites is a world of conflict, as Adam himself would soon discover.

In the meantime, the results of Adam's endeavors were spectacular, powerful, magical, and he understandably started to get a little cocky. He started extending boundaries into, and thus gaining knowledge over, places that were better left uncharted. This cocky behavior culminated at the Tree of Knowledge, which was really the tree of the opposites of good and evil. And when Adam recognized the difference between the opposites of good and evil, that is, when he drew a fatal boundary, his world fell apart. When Adam sinned, the entire world of opposites, which he himself had helped to create, returned to plague him. Pain vs. pleasure, good vs. evil, life vs. death, toil vs. play the whole array of conflicting opposites swept down on mankind.

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one's boundaries, the more entrenched are one's battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss.

Thus we suppose that life would be perfectly enjoyable if we could only eradicate all the negative and unwanted poles of the pairs of opposites. If we could vanquish pain, evil, death, suffering sickness, so that goodness, life, joy, and health would abound. That, indeed, would be the good life, and in fact, that is precisely many peoples' idea of Heaven. Heaven has come to mean, not a transcendence of all opposites, but the place where all the positive halves of the pairs of opposites are accumulated, while Hell is the place where are massed all the negative halves: pain, suffering torment, anxiety, sickness.

In the meantime, let us note, as does the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, that liberation is not freedom from the negative, but freedom from the pairs altogether:

  Content with getting what arrives of itself
  Passed beyond the pairs, free from envy,
  Not attached to success nor failure,
  Even acting, he is not bound.
  He is to be recognized as eternally free
  Who neither loathes nor craves;
  For he that is freed from the pairs,
  Is easily freed from conflict.

   False-imagination teaches that such things as light and shade,
   long and short, black and white are different and are to be
   discriminated; but they are not independent of each other;
   they are only different aspects of the same thing,
   they are terms of relation, not of reality.
   Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character;
   in essence things are not two but one.

   They said to Him: Shall we then, being children,
   enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them:
   When you make the two one,
   and when you make the inner as the outer
   and the outer as the inner and the above
   as the below, and when
   you make the male and the female into a single one,
   then you shall enter the Kingdom.

Thus, the sole aim of the Eastern (and esoteric Western) ways of liberation is to deliver people from the conflicts and complexities of their battles by delivering them from their boundaries. They do not try to solve the battle in its own terms, for that is as impossible as washing off blood with blood. Instead, they simply demonstrate the illusory nature of the boundaries which create the battles. Thus the battle is not solved, but dissolved.

Unity consciousness is the simple awareness of the real territory of no-boundary. We need no gimmicks to explain it, no mumbo-jumbo, no mystical jargon, no miasma of occultism. If reality is actually a condition of no-boundary and to deny that we will have to turn our backs on Relativity Theory, ecological sciences, the philosophy of organism, and the wisdom of the East if reality is a condition of no-boundary, then unity consciousness is the natural state of awareness which acknowledges this reality. Unity consciousness, in short, is no-boundary awareness. As simple as that sounds, it is nevertheless extremely difficult to adequately discuss no-boundary awareness or unity consciousness. This is because our language the medium in which all verbal discussion must float is a language of boundaries.

In unity consciousness, in no-boundary awareness, the sense of self expands to totally include everything once thought to be not-self. One's sense of identity shifts to the entire universe, to all worlds, high or low, manifest or unmanifest, sacred or profane. And obviously this cannot occur as long as the primary boundary, which separates the self from the universe, is mistaken as real But once the primary boundary is understood to be illusory, one's sense of self envelops the All there is then no longer anything outside of oneself, and so nowhere to draw any sort of boundary. Thus, if we can at all begin to see through the primary boundary, the sense of unity consciousness will not be far from us.

And especially there is no boundary between subject and object, self and not-self, seer and seen. I emphasize that point, and will dwell on it throughout this chapter, because of all the boundaries man constructs, the one between self and nol-self is the most fundamental. It is the boundary we are most reluctant to surrender. It was, after all the first boundary we ever drew. It is our most cherished boundary. We have invested years to fortify it and defend it, make it secure and safe. It is the very boundary that establishes our sense of being a separate self. And as we grow old, full of years and memories, and begin to slip into the final nothingness of death, this is the last boundary we relinquish. The boundary between self and not-self is the first one we draw and the last one we erase. Of all the boundaries we construct, this one is the primary boundary. So fundamental is the primary boundary between self and not-self, that all our other boundaries depend on it. We can hardly distinguish boundaries between things until we have distinguished ourselves from things. Every boundary you create depends upon your separate existence, that is, your primary boundary of self vs. not-self.

The more I try to see the seer, the more its absence begins to puzzle me. For years it seemed perfectly natural to assume that I was the seer which saw sights. But the moment I go in search of the seer, I find no trace of it. In fact, if I persist in trying to see the seer, all I find are things which are seen. This simply means that I, the "seer," do not see sights, rather I, the "seer," am identical to all those sights now present. The so-called seer is nothing other than everything which is seen. If I look at a tree, there is not one experience called "tree" and another experience called "seeing the tree." There is just the single experience of seeing-the-tree. I do not see this seeing any more than I smell smelling or taste tasting.

First we must recognize the difficulties the mystic faces in trying to describe the ineffable experience of unity consciousness. Foremost among these is the fact that the real self is a no-boundary awareness, whereas all our words and thoughts are nothing but boundaries. This, however, is not a flaw confined to any particular language, but is inherent in all languages by virtue of their very structure. A language possess utility only in so far as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

Eternity is not, and cannot, be found tomorrow - it is not found in five minutes - it is not found in two seconds. It is always already Now. The present is the only reality, there is no other.

So the notion of everlasting time is a monstrosity impossible to actually conceive, grasp, or experience in any way whatsoever. But the eternal now, this timeless moment, is as simple and as accessible as your own present experience-for the two are one and the same. Thus, said Wittgenstein, "eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."

Because eternity is the nature of this present and timeless moment, the mystic tells us that the great liberation, the entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven, the very portal leading "beyond the pairs of past and future," exists nowhere and nowhen else but now.

Part of the reason that "contacting the eternal" seems so awesome is that we generally misunderstand the true sense of the word "eternity" itself. We commonly imagine eternity to be a very, very long time, an unending stretch of years, a million times a million forever. But the mystic does not understand eternity in that fashion at all. For eternity is not an awareness of everlasting time, but an awareness which is itself totally without time. The eternal moment is a timeless moment, a moment which knows neither past nor future, before nor after, yesterday nor tomorrow, birth nor death.

Finally, we might ask, what has the eternal now, the nunc stans, to do with unity consciousness? Is there any relation between them? The answer is that there is no relation between them because they are one and the same thing. As Aldous Huxley put it, "The eternal now is a consciousness." As we are referring to it, a unity consciousness.