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'Amish Pasture Lying Fallow... Winter, Northern Maine'
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Ken Wilber - No Boundary -
Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification "therapy," you may find that your entire individual self ..., which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self - your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts - is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance.
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Henry Suckman, in One Blade of Grass -
I once heard the Englishwoman Tenzin Palmo give a talk about the twelve years she spent in a remote Himalayan cave. The isolation had been part of her Buddhist training. An audience member asked how it had felt to get ready to come out again.
"Fine," she said. "Either you're cooked or you're not."
"How do you know if you're cooked?" the questioner wanted to know.
"You just know. You're done."
She paused, then added that she'd heard of people who had done the same twelve-year cave training and not been cooked by the end. But if you were, you were - that was all there was to it.
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Suckman comments on this cooking -
You can get this impression in the world of meditation: people go in ordinary; then something happens in the middle, inscrutable, ineffable, not castable in language...; then they reemerge new, different, "done."
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To get cooked does not mean one has to go somewhere other than one's daily living. Likely, the time of cave cooking is mostly over, as well as men and women locking themselves together behind walls into a separate sacred clan shielded from the outside world. Life as-it-is with others in the outside world is the oven for most of us to get a cooking.
This being-cooked is popularly called "spiritual transformation." We are not returning to a former state of heart-mind. We see the unfolding of before unseen, unrealized, unlived potentials in ourselves, hidden under the show of normalcy.
Being-cooked unveils depths and powers of humanness hidden by our habitual, egoic identity - which is a dilution. Yet, humanness is more than this nowhere-to-be-found identity. In fact, the ego dons varied, oft conflicting, identities. The ego can even play spiritual by boasting that it does not exist.
In becoming more human, one may appear to be becoming weird-like to others. Persons may find themselves strangely uncomfortable around such a woman, the very presence of her challenging the storyline by which one has come to live to fit in the general idea of being good, right, and loyal to the larger society or a group providing a provisional identity.
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Zen Buddhists have an analogy for this being-cooked. Before enlightenment, one sees mountains as mountains. Then, mountains are no longer mountains. Here, one may think she has reached some special end-state, more real than before. If the cooking continues, she comes once more to see mountains as mountains. What has changed, if one sees as before? Or does one see as before?
One sees things as different than prior seen. One sees the same things. The seeing has changed - here, seeing does not exclude any aspect of the renewed relationship with the world; it includes an all-self intimacy.
This seeing includes feeling. The cooked one is not numbed to the sensate of the world. One sees the native nakedness, the eternal freshness, of things. Initially, mountains were experienced through the concept "mountain." Now, one sees mountains as mountains, with no intervening, diluting content. One is not touching a "mountain," one is touching and being touched by a mountain.
This seeing is not merely you seeing the mountain; instead, it includes the mountain telling you who or what it is. Before, you could not listen to the mountain: you told the mountain what it is. Now, the world is experienced as its own self-revelation.
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Since one now sees the mountains as mountains, but unlike before, one finds it problematic to express this to others. The same words have different meanings, for language now arises from the seeing and serves the seeing.
Yet, words are needed to lure others to crawl or jump into the oven. Words can resonate with the experience of a cooked-one. Also, words are means to encourage persons not to lose heart on the Way.
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Emerging from the cooking does not mean getting-cooked is over. Yet, there has emerged a subtle state of intimacy-with-things that is not undone.
Also, in the Way, we may have cooked experiences without our being-cooked. These breakthroughs should not be mistaken for being-cooked; otherwise, they detract from the Way, experiences being mistaken for a non-experience. Many experiences point to the non-state, but being-cooked is a non-experience. The non-experience is the portal from which we continue to experience.
Now, we know through knowing directly, non-experientially. So, knowing is the non-experience. Being-cooked refers to this intimacy. Experience is enriched, for it arises from the suchness of each thing, each person. This contemplative awareness integrates, therefore, experience and non-experience.
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The non-experience, in theistic terms, can be called "union with God." This was the goal when I began living a contemplative life in the mid-1990s. This is a fitting indicator of the non-experience when one does not posit a deity only outside experience - non-experience does not mean outside experience. However, the sense of experience being the fruition of non-experience works well with this aspiration for union with God.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery in the poetry.
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