The Message of the Mystics: Ken Wilber

The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation. You yourself try it, and compare your test results with others who have also performed the experiment. Out of this con-sensually validated pool of experiential knowledge, you arrive at certain laws of the spirit – at certain “profound truths,” if you will. And the first is: God is.

The stunning message of the mystics is that in the very core of your being, you are God. Strictly speaking, God is neither within nor without – Spirit transcends all duality. But one discovers this by consistently looking within, until “within” becomes “beyond.” The most famous version of this perennial truth occurs in the Chandogya Upanishad, where it says, “In this very being of yours, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence of your own being, all that exists has its Self. An invisible and subtle essence is the Spirit of the whole universe. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, thou art That.”

Thou are That – tat tvam asi. Needless to say, the “thou” that is “That,” the you that is God, is not your individual and isolated self or ego, this or that self, Mr. or Ms. So-and-so. In fact, the individual self or ego is precisely what blocks the realization of the Supreme Identity in the first place. Rather, the “you” in question is the deepest part of you – or, if you wish, the highest part of you – the subtle essence, as the Upanishad put it, that transcends your mortal ego and directly partakes of the Divine.

In Judaism it is called the ruach, the divine and supraindividual spirit in each and every person, and not the nefesh, or the individual ego.

In Christianity, it is the indwelling pneuma or spirit that is of one essence with God, and not the individual psyche or soul, which at best can worship God. As Coomaraswamy said, the distinction between a person’s immortal-eternal spirit and a person’s individual-mortal soul (meaning ego) is a fundamental tenet of the perennial philosophy. I think this is the only way to understand, for example, Christ’s otherwise strange remarks that a person could not be a true Christian “unless he hateth his own soul.” It is only by “hating” or “throwing out” or “transcending” your mortal soul that you discover your immortal spirit, one with All.

Source: Wilber, Ken. Grace and Grit. Pg 82.

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Category: Integral, Ken Wilber, Mysticism, Spirituality