Annotating Almaas
‘Presence’ is the first of the facsimiles of enlightenment I’m endeavoring to write about. One of the first hits at the beginning of my research was this excerpt from Chapter 3 of The Inner Journey Home by A.H. Almaas.
Right away, we are confronted with the metaphor of the title, the “inner journey,” which immediately injects psychological distance in the form of starting and ending places. If we are always looking at simple awareness, shouldn’t it be more like “Where’s Waldo?” Our simple awareness is always here all the time as what we perceive, it’s just that we’re seeing it as compound awareness. You don’t ever have to go anywhere to encounter simple awareness, making any metaphor that invokes notions of a journey or even “the path” an immediate misdirection.
This is not to say that Almaas is wrong, at least in terms of the veracity of his expressions about simple awareness, I just think his use of metaphors is counterproductive to his own cause here.
When we discern the inner field that is the soul or individual consciousness, we experience it as presence, independent from and more fundamental than all the content of consciousness and all characteristics of subjective experience. When we recognize pure consciousness, then, what we become aware of is the process of consciousness, its existence, its truth.
The idea of an “inner field” relies on the idea of space and also on the containment schema, for the inner field is inside something, nominally our bodies I suppose. But we are also told it is a “presence” that is apart from the contents of our experience. That’s how he’s talking about simple and compound awareness. But then he uses the term “pure consciousness.” It’s another synonym of simple awareness, but the use of the term ‘pure’ brings forth a moral dimension. There is a lot to go over in the discussion of the connection between ideas of moral purity and that of spiritual enlightenment, a connection I find to be as detrimental to the cause of finding spiritual enlightenment as anything else one encounters in spiritual enlightenment culture [SEC]. However, he also uses the term “recognize,” which is a feature of attention and a clear way to express what spiritual enlightenment is.
The presence — the “hereness,” the “beingness” of consciousness — is not something extra to consciousness; neither is consciousness an extra property of this presence. This is one of the primary discoveries in the inner journey: Presence is always consciousness, and pure consciousness is always presence.
I’d state this as “simple awareness is not an addition to compound awareness, and compound awareness is not an addition to simple awareness.”
This is similar to how photons are always light, and light is always photons. It is not that photons have the extra property we call light, or light possesses an extra property we call photons. Light and photons are two names of the same thing, emphasizing two different ways of viewing the same reality.
Simple and compound awareness expressed again. This isn’t a bad simile, although the use of the term “light” is adjacent to the fact that “light” represents one of the facsimiles of enlightenment.
When we apprehend consciousness in itself, independently of the function of consciousness of objects, we experience presence. The term field of consciousness is an attempt to describe the presence of the soul. Furthermore, as we recognize that consciousness is fundamentally presence, the knowledge of our depth begins to open up.
This statement is kind of a mess. Points for using “apprehend,” which points to attention, but deductions for using the word “experience” adjacent to his word for simple awareness. It suggests that simple awareness is an object in awareness rather than the carrier of our awareness of objects. I think what Almaas means as “presence” is what Vedanta calls jnana, which is the term which describes the attentional skill of binding to simple awareness. So rather than an object, his “presence” appears to refer to the ability to recognize simple awareness, which is nominally what spiritual enlightenment is. The idea of “knowledge of our depth” is perhaps yet another way to say this, unnecessarily if you asked me.
Recognizing presence teaches us a great deal about consciousness, soul, and essence of soul. In this recognition, we can know ourselves in our fundamental mode of existence. We begin to see, perhaps for the first time, that what we are is more fundamental than all the content of our experience. We are more fundamental than our sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, symbols, ideas, concepts, and so on.
I’m afraid this passage contains a lot of seeds for conceptual objects to grow from, foremost the idea of a soul. Whether it’s Almaas’ intention or not, when you say ‘soul,’ you say “spirit in the body.” There’s no proof of a soul, and I’m contending the idea has its origin in our extensive cognitive employment of the containment schema. But by invoking the ideas of “soul” and “essence,” we’ve once again objectified simple awareness as being a “thing” inside us. Finally, the use of the word “fundamental” suggests a deeper level, a more essential condition. That’s not a horrible way to refer to simple awareness in terms of its relationship to compound awareness.
We awaken to our essential nature, which is more fundamental and more basic than our body, heart, and mind. We experience the fabric that is necessary for the existence of all that we have taken to be ourselves. We begin to recognize our real self, our soul.
By referring to simple awareness as a fabric, compound awareness would either be the fabric after it’s printed or fabric constructed into an object such as a garment. I’d change this to suggest simple awareness are the fibers that compound awareness is woven out of, and that recognizing our identity in the fibers is spiritual enlightenment. But the metaphor isn’t really necessary at all. This is just different ways to say the same thing and I’m not personally convinced that’s the right way to do it when you are attempting to communicate about simple awareness.
More precisely, by recognizing presence, we become aware of the fundamental ground of our soul; we discover the inner fabric that holds all of our experience; we are enlightened to what we are beyond time and space.
“Beyond time and space” exposes us to pan-psychism, the idea that human consciousness is something that is universal and transcendent. I’m contending that is a confusion caused by the fact that simple awareness is aconceptual, and that encounters with the aconceptual can be rendered into compound awareness in the form of various phenomenological conditions that may have you feeling beyond space and time. But since our embodiment requires that we all use the bathroom, the notion is at best, quaint, and unfortunately, represents a dense forest of entailments from which ideas about spiritual enlightenment may arise, creating a log jam of distraction the moment the concept is accepted and installed as a presupposition about one’s individual existence.
A.H. Almaas seems clearly familiar with his own simple awareness, in my opinion, and that puts him miles ahead of most of the other purveyors of SEC. But because the task of conceptualizing simple awareness is a complete loss before one even starts, the potential for confusion and distraction via metaphor seeps in despite his (and most anyone else’s) best efforts.
