Someone this week, with deep feeling, asked me, “How could I have disconnected from Being?” I’d like to use some Western terms, for now. This is one way to think of this territory. I learned these things basically from the work of A.H. Almaas, and have found them to be concepts which are experientially reliable and verifiable.
However, I need to say that I communicate them through my own filters, and would not want to pretend to represent that school. I couldn’t do that accurately. The best book on this – for the specialist and for the brave explorer – is his The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization.
When we are born, we are born with the presence of Being as our support. We are, though, only able to know it intuitively – it’s a felt presence – and we don’t, of course, have language to make that fully conscious. Furthermore, we are not brought up in an environment which is attuned to Being, and it is therefore not attuned to Being in us. That is, our carers very rarely appreciate our radiance as Being manifest.
As we grow, we become entangled in our self-images; the result of a natural development. We express the natural potentials of our species for a conceptually-mediated life. In the process, we more or less fall in love with our self-representations, thinking that’s who we are. (Remember Narcissus?) This infatuation entails one kind – a central kind – of disconnection from Being. Being doesn’t leave us, of course, but identified with our structures, we are no longer able to intuit the presence of Being.
Furthermore, these structures are also energetically charged with the reactivity around our emotional wounds from our treatment in childhood. This is a complex interweaving of nature and nurture, the result of which is that we end up locking ourselves out of our own heart.
So, instead of our connection to Being, we feel that there is a deficiency, an absence, or even a place where we have died, in our centre. The dynamic of the disconnect, and the defences against feeling the deficiency, contribute to our personality. Identified with what is false and defensive – the structures – and disconnected from our aliveness, we can come to feel that life is purposeless, meaningless and pointless. This will mean additional strategies are put in place to deal with this – for example, the pursuit of pleasure, or of illusory kinds of freedom, and so on – but the central deficiency sticks like tar-paper, making itself felt from time to time in our life, just the same. And, ultimately nothing satisfies for long.
In a sense this is a precise pointlessness, because, being locked out of our own heart, by our misconceptions of presence, we are also locked out of knowing of a precise experience – the point-like presence, the point where our existence is experienced as the outward radiance of Being itself. That is, presence, when reclaimed is felt most essentially as a point in the heart. The core problems experienced in the heart chakra arise from disconnection from Being.
We heal, and move into our next stage of development (as individuals and as a species), by: a) developing positive spiritual capacities (for example, altruism, physical care, mindfulness and meditation); and, b) with the support of such capacities, bringing into the light of compassionate, uncontrived awareness the structures which we have come to depend on, those which are obscuring the presence of Being.
‘Reclaiming’ our connection to Being is possible. Though, in a sense, it’s not a reclaiming, because we can’t go back to our pre-reflective state. Ken Wilber talks of ‘pre-reflective,’ ‘reflective,’ and ‘post-reflective.’ Reclaiming our connection to Being happens, then, in the context of a) healing our reflective capacity, and going beyond it into ‘post-reflective’ presence of Being.