the Institute of Unlearning, editorial 43

Every now and again I receive a great email from a sincere truth seeker who, after being inspired by or resonating with something I have written, desires to know more. In particular, the information often sought after is the HOW of the unlearning process. How is it that one can arrive at a knowing of the ways of the world and express it with so much clarity?

I want to say right off the bat that such questions are always humbling. After all, who am I but some motivated (or insane) human that spends his time and money on airing his own observations about life on third density earth through a website? What makes me an “authority” that others would seek out?

Yes…I have had breakthrough experiences that changed my vision of the world. The jury is still out, though, on whether those experiences were orchestrated by my own waking-conscious will, the randomness of quantum exchanges in a physical universe of multiplex possibilities, or the precisely decided plan of some-as-yet-not-fully-understood form of consciousness somehow interested in my life process.

One could go on endlessly thinking up the causative reasons for our life experiences. Eventually, you have to stop speculating and choose something, whether it works or not. It makes the most sense to me to live AS IF you are in control until the evidence is ultimately shown to indicate otherwise. Be that as it may, I now submit for your enjoyment and/or edification, a recent exchange with an emerging unlearner.

Hi Patrick, I feel that I'd like to get your opinion on the situation I'm in of which perhaps you're familiar.

I'm an ex-religious 22-year-old who hasn't had --or can't recall-one spiritual incident in his whole lifetime. I see the world as 90% of the population does… through my 5 senses, which is shocking to me considering how much reading I've done on meditation, enlightenment, spiritual healing et cetera. I've studied many philosophies and many things and I've reached a level of understanding in regards to the Universe and our place in it that few people achieve, but all through the 5 sense perspective. I know nothing beyond my 5 senses, yet at the same time I'm positive that we are infinite beings living out an illusion of separateness; that the Universe is a creation of God; that we are here to experience all levels of existence from pain to pleasure and that there is no punishment for anything we do, only learning and evolving.

Yet from all the conclusions I've reached, I'm torn by the fact that I haven't directly experienced anything beyond the 5 senses. For example, while I'm positive we are infinite beings and that we are not our bodies, I've never actually discovered the true experience (yet I still feel 100% sure). Alan Watts believes we are infinite because at one point he actually experienced enlightenment; he saw the world as it truly was while I only believe this because of mystics, Buddhists and the like and their accounts of a divine state.

How can I know these things and yet still be locked in my own prison? Maybe I'm asking an all-too-common question.

Thanks,

Robert P.

Dear Robert,

Thanks for your sincere inquiry. There are a few ways that your question can be approached. Firstly, I will ask you to consider the possibility that you have ALREADY broken through the 5 sense barrier to achieve your knowledge. You know many of your understandings in your mind via the knowledge you have acquired through books and your own innate ability to reason.

REASON, in and of itself, is not a five-sense physical phenomenon. Science can only explain it as the firing of synapses and neurons linked to bio-chemical processes, but you and I know that it comes from more than that. Science.... at its best...can only deliver one third of the truth (art and morals being the other two thirds). So a majority of what humanity understands as truth is not based on physical phenomena. All of life points us in the direction of non-physical causation or interaction, yet we refuse to “see” it because it fails to pass decisively through these tiny five filters in our bodies. Science itself could not exist unless there was more than the 5-sense world. (Mathematics is not a physical sense phenomenon...which so much of science depends upon).

Please don't take that answer as being dismissive of your conundrum. I KNOW what you are after.... the WHOLE BODY knowing that life exceeds the limitations of your skin and senses. Such knowledge is possible and there are several ways to get glimpses or peeks at them, depending upon what risks you are willing to take.

You have invested heavily in meditation, with little breakthrough results. Meditation can deliver, but its frustrations lie in there being no definite timetable...and masters will tell you that that LUST for the breakthrough may be the one thing blocking it from occurring. VERY TRYING!

There are body work and breath work techniques that can help to get you outside of yourself, and even some sound tools can induce altered states of consciousness. I am a bit reticent to endorse anything, because I trust that your spirit will grab onto whatever lead that is most appropriate for you.

Even physical exercise can deliver the knowledge you seek, one of my moments of expansion came from the so-called “runner's high”. I wasn't looking for it and didn't do anything to induce it consciously, yet there it happened.

Finally, I would also like to highlight that certain toxic substances (drugs) have a history of delivering phenomenal knowledge regarding the limits of human perception. Once again, I cannot endorse this path, but I wouldn't dare turn anyone away from it either. So much beauty and truth has been delivered to the world through the impetus of drugs that it seems very odd to me that we approach them with so much fear and loathing in the world. I am no pharmacological expert or shaman, but do know each drug is not the same and will deliver a slightly or radically different perspective from each other and your own “waking” consciousness. Many spiritual gurus disdain this road, but that may simply be a method of turning away the insincere truth seekers or some self-limiting rule that using drugs to attain knowledge is somehow a form of “cosmic cheating”.

As with any truth sought after, the price it will exact from you will be high. How much do you really want to know? How badly are you willing to have your entire world destroyed before your eyes? The great truths will not affirm you, but will devour you whole and spit or shit you out. If you're ready for that kind of knowledge I have no doubt you will get it.

Placing a timetable on it...no one can do. That's between your higher self and you.

I hope my response to your letter is of some use to you. I look forward to hearing of your breakthrough when it happens. When one person breaks through, he or she does so not merely for his or her own benefit, whether she or he is aware of that or not.

May you know truth in abundance!

On a final note, to Robert and anyone else holding such a question in their life, it must be stated that physical, as well as spiritual and mental knowledge gained from our experiences, can often be misleading, especially at first, when the experience is very new and extremely vivid.

In those moments of breakthrough, our deflowered Self will try to find language to describe just what the fuck happened or is happening. It will try to do so in terms it already understands rather than in the language it has yet to learn. This explains many instances of humans having breakthrough experiences, only to translate them as affirmations of their own little, petty, and ultimately inconsequential belief systems. What they quickly forget is that a breakthrough is just that…a VIOLENT tearing at the fabric of perception. Growth is ultimately forced upon us.

Even the unlearner is susceptible to the fear that such experiences can bring, but by far, the most dangerous aspect of the process is the rush to bring others along your path before you, or they, truly understand the conceptual landscape emerging in your psyche. The damage done here can be lasting and real, so proceed boldly, but with awareness.

Then again, who can truly know if one is ready for something before the experience actually occurs? The admonishment here is that breaking through for its own sake is not the goal. Integration of ever-greater parts of ourselves is the process in which we are all inescapably engaged.