Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Getting esoteric on Open Space with Ken Wilber

Getting through the final...and i gotta say pretty dense pages...of Ken Wilber's One Taste...and this passage caught my brain as it seems to shed some light on the intuition i had in a previous post. Here's the pertinent part from my post:


Chaos draws the attention of the soul (rather than merely mind). Mattering is the quality of attention that drives the self-organising principle. So what is 'mattering'? The recognition/ mirroring of the soul's purpose?/passion? in another being/object/idea... from which connection, the chain of action/arising unfolds...thought, action, and so on...


And here is the passage from Wilber (pg. 275):

...the Self or Witness is the seat of attention, the root of the separate-self sense, and the home of the last and sublest duality, namely, that between the Seer and the seen. It is both the highest Self, and the final barrier, to nondual One Taste.

Nonetheless, the power of Witnessing is the power of liberation from all lower domains, and the Witness itself is present, even if latently, at all previous stages. Each developmental stage transcends and includes" its predecessor, and the "transcend" aspect, in every case, is the power of the higher to be aware of the lower (the soul is aware of the mind, the mind is aware of the body, the body is aware of matter). And in each case, the "is aware of" is simply the power of the Witness shining through at that stage.

Although the Witness is present as the power of transcendental growth at every stage, it comes to its own fruition in the causal realm. As the ego orients consciousness to the gross, and the soul orients consciousness to the subtle, the Self orients consciousness to the causal.

Now, i need to be upfront here and admit that this is the first of Wilber's books that i have read, so my grasp of his jargon is still unripe, and my capacity to translate from his jargon to mine, is even greener, so here, for those of you who enjoy the tartness of early produce...is my first go at it...

I will suggest that chaos is Spirit which dwells in what Wilber would term the nondual. So to translate the first line of my earlier post...Spirit (or the nondual; chaos) invites the presence of the Witness (the seat of attention). So, how does the presence of the Witness drive the self-organizing principle? The Witness roots in the causal, which is transpersonal and transformative by nature. So, perhaps, the presence of the Witness sets up a powerful harmonic that consists of the transpersonal and transformative vibration of the causal and the unique vibration of the separate-self sense. The causal vibration allows for the organization to occur as it synchronizes between the individuals present in the Open Space. The emergence and the transformative product we often see in Open Space are, if i may suggest, the visible evidence of the harmonic--a symphony created by the interweaving of the separate-self vibrations of the participants upon the underlying One Taste--the mystery and radiance of the nondual.

So, whaddya think? Am i totally in outer space here? Or can we build something on this?




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