Fifthness as States and Stages: Ultimate Nonduality or just another Mode of Duality?
This is the final chapter of an experimental book on stage development as Transcendental Pluralism that I wrote as part of a German course called Presencing the Spiral and which I translated throughout the English version of that course.
This chapter speaks about the final stages that I discovered in my research on adult development, stages that correlate with a Fifth realm of consciousness — Fifthness — which seemlessly interweaves with the Fifth state, i.e., Turyatita.
The following image cartographs this spectrum of the Fifth:
Fifthness
“I continued in oblivion lost,
My head was resting on my love;
Lost to all things and myself,
And, amid the lilies forgotten,
Threw all my cares away.” St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel
The Fifth State
In the poem by St. John of the Cross, the eighth stanza, and thus the last stage of the prayer, reveals a final transformation in the contemplator: one’s own face is tilted over that of the beloved reality and both merge in oblivion and the cessation of everything. A metaphor of the head or face is often used with this state, from the Upanishads to Wilber; later speaks of one’s own head becoming a large, blue pancake.
Wilber writes for example in The Religion of Tomorrow about looking at a table, telling yourself you are not the table, disidentifying yourself and finding the witness and then:
“Notice that the table is right where you thought your head was — the table is resting on your shoulders, right where your head used to be. Notice the same for the rest of the world around you — simply see it all arising on your shoulders, right where your head used to be. There is no head; there is no subject looking at all those objects out there; there are just all those things arising, and they are arising on your shoulders, in the space where your head used to be. There is not the world ‘out there,’ on the other side of your face, and the world ‘in here,’ on this side of your face: the whole world ‘out there’ is actually arising on this side of your face, is arising within you, within your headless awareness, right here, right now. Allow the immediate, direct awareness of the world to exist all on its own, pushing out any sense of a Watcher or Looker; there is simply this thing and this thing and this thing, all arising right here within me, arising in the open clearing, or space, where a Watcher or Looker once was. The very feelings of a thing ‘out there’ and a watcher ‘in here’ are directly and immediately the very same feeling — to feel the space where my head once was is to directly feel the world itself arising in that space. I can taste the sky; it’s that close. Looking at the Pacific Ocean, I can pick it up in my fingers and hold it there; it’s that close. Looking at a mountain, I can feel it arising exactly in the space my head used to be; it’s that close! There are not two worlds — subject versus object — there is just one taste, and you ARE that; it is all arising within your very being.”
We are now moving out of the inner representation of the visual field and vision and into our last sensory channels as an inner state. While the sense of one`s face is of crucial importance in Firstness, paired with taste and smell, which all find their union in the insular cortex, this new face is probably an expression of the trigeminal nerve — Wikipedia says: “The trigeminal nerve (from the Latin trigeminus ‘three’), or trigeminal nerve for short, also known as the fifth cranial nerve, N. V, carries sensitive (→ trigeminal perception) and motor fibers with which it supplies the face, nasal cavity, oral cavity and masticatory muscles.” In addition, the Vagus nerve in particular and thus the parasympathetic nervous system, which down-regulates the human body, appears to play a special role here. When both the trigeminal and Vagus nerves are stimulated, the precuneus lights up, an area of the brain where Bindu is located in Hinduism, which is described to be the divine drop, the gateway to spirit, and the connection to the cosmos as well as the entrance point of our soul.
The Duality within the Nondual Realm
The precuneus has multiple functions — as representation of a 1st person perspective, the construction and representation of maps, perspective taking and more — but seems especially important in (a) either harmonizing and coactivating anti-correlated neural networks, like those described in fourthness (the dorsal stream and the ventral stream as much as default mode and the task positive mode), and to boost neuronal growth factors through its connection to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, or (b) downregulating neuronal functions and disrupting network coherence as we see it in states of no-self reached through meditative concentration or the intake of entheogens that lead to incoherence and the shutdown of e.g., the default mode and thus self-referential processes. In its most extreme form, the second mode is described in Buddhism as the attainment of cessation that leads to a complete interruption of the stream of consciousness:
“But when Noble Ones who have already produced the eight attainments develop concentration, thinking, ‘We shall enter upon the attainment of cessation, and by being without consciousness for seven days we shall abide in bliss here and now by reaching the cessation that is Nibbána,’ then the development of absorption concentration provides for them the benefit of cessation.” Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga
But likewise, we find a completely annihilating perspective in Christianity. For example, in the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, we find a beautiful description of the transition from seeing to a new mode of perception:
“In the deepest darkness, this darkness over-illuminates that which is most over-bright,
and in that which is utterly untouchable and invisible, it over-fills the eyeless intelligences with super-beautiful splendor.
“You, O dear seeker,
occupy yourself intensively with mystical contemplations,
and leave aside the physical experiences
as well as the spiritual activities and everything that can be physically experienced and spiritually attained,
and everything that does not exist and everything that exists.
And let yourself be raised in the way of ignorance, as far as it is possible, to the
union with the one who transcends all reality and knowledge.
For through this ecstasy, which is absolutely and utterly free and detached from yourself
and from everything, you will be brought to the super-real ray of the divine shadow, after you have removed everything from yourself and are detached from everything.
“And then you are freed from all these things that are seen, as well as from the seeing,
and you enter into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance,
where all knowing comprehension closes its eyes,
and you find yourself in the completely untouchable and invisible;
you belong completely to the one who is beyond everything,
and no one else, neither yourself nor anyone else;
and by the stilling of all knowledge you are united in a better way with the absolutely unknowable
and by knowing nothing, you know beyond reason.”
In the mystical theology, we find Dionysius’ metaphor of the sculptor. He writes that in order to enter the over-bright darkness, one must trust in blindness and ignorance, that we must not-see and not-recognize:
“Just as, for instance, a sculptor, in order to arrive at a design of essence, must cleanse the marble with hammer and hands of all matter that would stand in the way of the pure beholding of the form still wholly hidden within it: our only feasible act is the removal of such material obstacles. Only this abstraction can allow us to reveal the veiled beauty of the unknown image.”
Much more extreme than Dionysius, who always links a movement of affirmation of relative qualities of the divine with negation, however, is the tradition in which Willigis Jäger saw himself, for example, who, in the prayer classic The Cloud of Unknowing, advocates the radical removal of rock, an image that ends in the process of purification through pure nothingness and “the state of a person changes in an infinite way when he feels this ‘nothingness’ spiritually and this feeling takes place in the ‘nowhere’.” Given the parallels to dementia, that Bettina Wichers in her Transpersonal Gerontology between dementia and nondual awareness points out, that exist when after ego-dissolution the relative realm is not “reinstated by active (re)construction, […] [and] a process sets in that subsequently dissolves all associated ego aspects and also no longer stimulates them involutionarily for re-construction”, it might not be overly surprising that Jäger spent his last years in complete loss of his memory function and self with a dementia diagnosis.
Advaita as well knows this state, that Robert Wolfe summarizes in the Ajata Project as follows:
“Nonduality is, of course, advaita (‘non-two’). The end point of the advaita teaching is self-realization — enlightenment or ‘liberation’. This is said to occur when the individual’s identity permanently dissolves into the omnipresent and unlimited Oneness (also known as the Self) and the true nature of the Self is realized.
“When this happens, it is as if it is a miracle for the individual. It is thoroughly life-changing and indeed world-changing. So, this is primarily the reason why Self-realization (or Advaita) is taught.
“However, for the Self-realized, the so-called reality has taken a completely different shape. As a result, even Advaita (or Self-realization) is no longer seen as it used to be. What this view represents is ‘not two, not even one’. Where there is not even one, there is no thing: nothingness, emptiness or void. This (expanded) perception is known as ajata (‘no creation’). As the expression goes: ‘no creation from the beginning’. This means that nothing ever had an origin or ‘came into existence’. Ajata is a realization that arises from advaita or self-realization.
“I would summarize your question like this: ‘Why teach Advaita when you could teach Ajata?’”
This extreme refusal of reality`s fullness is the cognitive mode within the Fifth — pure voidness or emptiness that is free from anything but sheer dark nothingness. Wilber in The Religion of Tomorrow points to the pathology of the fifth state when he writes that it can overextend into the void and a fracture between suchness, as all that is, and the deep, empty mystery arises:
“This fracture can […] arise due to an intense ‘anatta’ belief that has been cutting off subjectivity from the beginning, a cutting and severing that culminates here with an absolute severing of Absolute Subjectivity, thus keeping the true nature of the self-contraction forever hidden from its awareness. […]The result, especially in meditative states, is that one works toward a state, stretching from nirvana to nirodh, where true Nonduality is not understood or realized, but rather ends in a purely dualistic nirvana versus samsara, Emptiness versus Form, infinite formless versus finite form — and consciousness disappears into a formless, desireless, thoughtless, egoless, samsara-less, state of utter vacuity, a total nirvana utterly divorced from all samsara, or a pure cessation of all manifestation of any sort in a pure nirodh, which is the goal of Theravada Buddhism. All of this follows from the denial of the relative reality of atta, or atman (as in ‘anatta’; that is, ‘no atta’ or ‘no self’ whatsoever), which is part of a View that, with an equally tilted meditative-state development, drives toward a final meditative state that is not all-inclusive, not all-pervading, not all-embracing, and not all-liberating but is dualistic, partial, fragmented, siloed: nirvana (unmanifest) versus samsara (manifest), nirodh (total cessation) versus self-liberating (manifestation), ‘off the wheel (of reincarnating samsara)’ versus ‘embracing the wheel (for the benefit of all).’”
On the other hand, Wilber sees the possibility for a second fracture — one that within the model of Transcendental Pluralism goes along with the feeling awareness present in Fifthness — and leads to a fullness without the recognition of ultimate voidness. Wilber writes:
“It tears Not-twoness into two and pushes one member of a particular pair of polar opposites into the repressed submergent unconscious, even to the extent of creating a hidden subpersonality. When Suchness (prematurely) denies the Witness or ‘I-I’ or Absolute Subjectivity, it cuts out the deepest dimension of Consciousness itself as it begins to manifest in, and as, the apparent world. Deepest Absolute Subjectivity is not let go of and gracefully released into nondual Suchness, but is split off, buried, and hidden, then covered with scar tissue. It’s not now something that can be integrated into the overall Whole of Being and Becoming, but is something looking out at the world through its own dissociated and alienated corner of the Kosmos (where it has been sent and told to hide its face and look only at the walls in the corner it is facing, a punishment meted out by the subjugating force of dissociating repression, the result of one of the highest and final forms of Primordial Avoidance). Due to this Avoidance, one’s full ‘I-I-ness’ is not available in Awareness.”
Wilber does not give any examples for this side of the coin, presumably because it is much more difficult to recognize a person here as one who is in a late state, because, as the saying goes, “Before enlightenment: chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood and carry water” and therefore a person here might look like embodying an earlier state: Wilber for example assess St. Teresa of Avila as having mastered the causal realm, but from the point of view my work offers she would have reached the fifth state and provides the same reflections as Wilber, namely pointing at an empty oblivion and the fullness on the other side, but with a different nuance and tone — as we will see later.
A.H. Almaas with his diamond approach tends more towards the side of suchness when he writes in Facets of Unity that the view of this practice reflects two Sacred Ideas: “the Sacred Work and the Sacred Will. The understanding of Sacred Work implies that the ego-self does not know what is to happen, and one can only participate in the Sacred Work of the whole by attending to what is true in the present moment. The understanding of Sacred Will implies that the working of all reality is expressed in our own unfolding process and that the easiest way is to surrender one’s personal effort or will to that working. Furthermore, the perspective of Sacred Ideas is also reflected in the Diamond Approach method through the systematic examination of the particular patterns that govern one’s egoic character. This method contrasts with many others that encourage the student to meditate directly on the primal ground of being or awareness, leaving aside the disturbing contents of thoughts and feelings that are considered relatively unreal.” In many ways there is a huge difficult to discern whether one deals with a state of Fourthness and one-taste or whether on actually has undergone the Dark Night of the Will and completely handed over immanence to the transcendent darkness and the will therein, or as Aurobindo writes as a final step in our transformation…
“is to know the Divine Being who is at once our supreme transcendent Self, the Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality, and the Divinity within of which our psychic being, the true evolving individual in our nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of which it is the witness ever living within us and the conscious instrument of its light and power and joy and beauty. Aware of the Divine as the Master of our being and action, we can learn to become channels of his Shakti, the Divine Puissance, and act according to her dictates or her rule of light and power within us. Our action will not then be mastered by our vital impulse or governed by a mental standard, for she acts according to the permanent yet plastic truth of things, — not that which the mind constructs, but the higher, deeper, and subtler truth of each movement and circumstance as it is known to the supreme knowledge and demanded by the supreme will in the universe.”
St. Teresa of Avila stated that she never completely managed the transformation beyond her fourth watering, from union to spiritual marriage, nevertheless she points at the Fifth state when she elaborates her seventh mansion of the interior castle:
“What distinguishes the sojourn in this abode from the life in the others, then, is, as I have said: that here there is almost never any drought or interior turmoil, such as occurred at times in all the others, but the soul lives as good as always in tranquility; […] and all the graces He bestows on the soul here, she receives — as I said — without any action of her own, apart from the fact that she has already surrendered herself completely to God beforehand. […]
“Truly, if there were nothing else to be gained in this way of prayer than to realize with what special care God endeavors to communicate himself to us, and how he asks us again and again — for it seems to be nothing else — to remain with him, then all the efforts that one has taken upon oneself to enjoy this, that one is touched so gently and so penetratingly by his love, would seem to me well spent.”
She then, agreeing with Wilber points at the two sides of the nondual state. First, she points at an oblivion wherein none exists…
“And so the soul cares for nothing, whatever may happen, but lives in a wondrous oblivion, so that — as I said — it seems as if it no longer exists at all. Nor does it want to be there at all, in any way, unless it realizes that something can proceed from it which will increase the glory and honor of God a little; for this it would gladly lay down its life from the bottom of its heart.”
…and then some passages after she refers to the feeling awareness here that is the descending will of the divine, which in her case is “a desire for greater suffering:
“but not in such a way that this desire troubles her as before; for the longing that the will of God may be done in her, which now fills this soul, is so overwhelming that she regards everything His Majesty does as good: if He wants her to suffer, so be it; if He does not want it, she does not toil over it as she once did.”
Resolution of the Pathology
The Church Father Gregory of Nyssa expresses how, when Moses descended from the Mount Sinai, from the Cloud of Unknowing, he realized the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies with his people in the world, while he still dwells with God — even if, on closer inspection of the story of Moses, can also be seen as a loss of God, because it punishes Moses after his return and says that he will never enter the holy land: a sort of immanent nonduality, where all and nothing co-arise, is possible in way that aligns with the via-positiva. Likewise in his numerous catechetical writings about the unity of God the Father and God the Son, we likely see a recognition of harmonizing the voidness aspect of the absolute with the bliss of pure suchness as living a mysterious will. In the Great Catechesis he uses the metaphor of fire as including the voidness within actuality:
“Just as one sees the fire surrounding the fuel on a torch and the mind is able to distinguish the fire on the substance quite well from the substance nourishing the fire, but in reality the two cannot be separated from each other, so that one would be able to show the fire detached from the fuel, for example, but rather both constitute an inseparable unity, — no one, however, transfer to me the transience of the fire in the object of comparison, but let everyone only accept what corresponds in the example, leaving aside all that does not correspond or is inappropriate. In the same way, therefore, as we see the flame closely connected with the fuel, but by no means enclosed by it. What then prevents us from assuming a certain unity and connection of the divine nature with the human and, despite this connection, from holding fast to the correct concept of God, in the conviction that the Godhead remains free from the barriers of finitude, even if it dwells in a human being?
“For just as it is proper to the flame to strive upwards, and therefore no one finds this its natural efficacy conspicuous, but all who see the flame, like a heavy body, sinking downwards, would consider such a thing astonishing, just as the fire, though remaining fire. Yet in its movement downwards it takes a direction contrary to its nature, so the greatness of the heavens proves, the splendor of the stars, the arrangement of the universe, or the constant and orderly direction of all things, does not prove the divine and exuberant power to the same degree as the descent to the weakness of our nature, just as the high inclines to the low and appears in lowliness, but without descending from its majesty, just as the Godhead unites with human nature and becomes the latter, but remains godliness.”
The feeling awareness driven, and immanence-oriented people here find to express non-duality in positive terms once they grow through the early forms of that state — the 5.1 State being radically torn between the void and suchness, the 5.2 State as above in St Teresa`s writings is moving in an either-or-relativity between the two states — and develop forms of tantric meditations that handle the different realms of energy in accordance with the principle of nonduality in the Fifth: living in divine oblivion while sustaining the human nature, and likewise sustaining the divine on the other side. As Je Tsongkhapa Lobsang Dragpa points out, only when we reach the third of the non-dual tantra states, we eliminate the risk of regression into earlier realms or pure suchness without voidness, “wherefore, by this reason, by this stage of clear enlightenment [, the 5.3 State], one truly attains clear light, the taintless nature of one’s body, speech, and mind becomes universal voidness — the reality of transcendent wisdom that purifies the three consciousnesses [that Tsongkhapa knows as living within Thirdness], and that thought-free and inexpressible condition is the realm of nirvana, formless, hard to know, delivered from evolution and birth, extremely clear like the light of sun, moon, fire, and jewels.”
Je Tsongkhapa in his piece Brillinatly Illuminating Lamp of the Five Stages, from which the above quote was taken, offers such a tantric outline to manifest non-duality and finally reach the so-called communion stage, i.e., the 5.4 State. At first one must establish ultimate clear light transparency which is suchness or thatness, as called in the translation of Tsongkhapa`s work by Robert A.F. Thurmann, has to be the unity of the four voids and four forms of joy or bliss: these joys are the descent of energy from the crown center or precuneus and Fifthness through the four Vayus meaning, (1) when neural energy melts from the crown wheel to the throat wheel into udana and Fourthness, there is joy; (2) from the throat wheel to the heart wheel into prana and Thirdness, supreme joy; (3) from the heart wheel to the navel wheel into samana and Secondness, ecstatic joy; and (4) from the navel wheel to the genital wheel into Apana and Firstness, orgasmic joy; while the voids are the parallel proceedings as (1) crown to throat, void, (2) throat to heart, great void, (3) heart to navel, extreme void, (4) navel to genital, universal void.
After we thus understood the actual meaning of “thatness” we can slip over into a place where the two realities show up as a pair “and the indivisible uniting of their actualities the communion — this is the main communion, which gives meaning to the other communions:”
“As for the way in which all vessel and essence worlds are condensed into the single communion body, the root of all animate and inanimate things is no more than mere energy and mind, and that is what arises as the single communion body. ‘This process’ refers to resurrecting from clear light like a fish leaping from the water. The ‘mere’ of ‘a mere split second’ excludes any obstruction by any other thing [in arising] from clear light.”
Likewise, more cognitive mode oriented paths, following the via-negativa, are capable to come to a conclusion of the interplay between the duality of void and suchness, and often do so in the famous fashion of the Bodhisattva Nagarjuna, by declaring the void itself as ultimately unreal and non-existing in absolute terms as well — just like any other object in awareness, emptiness or voidness, nirvana, exists only in conventional terms for the human mind. Therefore, it is stated in The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
“15. Nirvana is said to be
Neither existent nor nonexistent.
If the existent and the nonexistent were established,
This would be established.
“16. If nirvana is
Neither existent nor nonexistent,
Then by whom is it expounded
‘Neither existent nor nonexistent’?
“17. Having passed into nirvana, the Victorious Conqueror
Is neither said to be existent
Nor said to be nonexistent.
Neither both nor neither are said.
“18. So, when the victorious one abides,
he Is neither said to be existent
Nor said to be nonexistent.
Neither both nor neither are said.
“19. There is not the slightest difference
Between cyclic existence and nirvana.
There is not the slightest difference
Between nirvana and cyclic existence.
“20. Whatever is the limit of nirvana,
That is the limit of cyclic existence.
There is not even the slightest difference between them,
Or even the subtlest thing.”
Similarly, Chandrakirti in an Introduction to the Middle Way comes up with a related solution when he describes the resultant ground through mastering the Bodhisattva Bhumis:
“11.09 Just as moonlight can shine bright in a cloudless night sky, he strives again on the ground that gives rise to the ten powers, and in the Unsurpassed he will find the object of his striving, supreme peace, which is unrivaled as the ultimate culmination of all qualities.
“11.10 Just as space remains indistinguishable even within different vessels, no differentiations of phenomena exist in suchness. Since he perfectly realizes everything in terms of a single taste, the buddha, the excellent mind, perceives the knowables in a single instant.
“11.11 If ultimate reality is pacification, then the mind will never perceive it, yet there can be no knowledge of an object without the mind as a knowing subject. And in the absence of a knowing mind, what knowledge can there be? This is a contradiction in terms. Also, with no knower how can you teach about it to others, saying, ‘It is thus’?
“11.12 When no-arising is suchness and that mind too has no arising, it is by assuming its aspect then, as it were, the mind perceives suchness. Just as for you, when the mind takes the aspect of an object, it perceives it, so in dependence on convention, we say the mind can know suchness.”
Once the final state is reached those cognition-driven paths likewise end up in a unity, where not so much the divine is that which mixes with all of reality but all of reality becomes the pure self-abiding cognitive mode that extinguishes all the differences and relationships to finally leave nothing to meditate — the Bodhisattva Saraha states therefore:
“Realized ones have neither an object of meditation nor a meditator.
Just as space cannot observe space,
emptiness does not meditate on emptiness.
The nondual mind is like water [mixed] with milk:
continuous great bliss in which diversities are of one taste.”
From the State-Trajectory to a Stage: The Incomplete View of Ultimate Enlightenment prior to Fifthness
When we look at Wilber`s conception of the Fifth state, i.e., Turyatita (Nondual), we can recognize that it is strictly defined in terms of Fourthness — at first one might be unwilling to move into the Dark Night of the Witness/Self but “allowing the Self (in any and all forms) to uncoil in the vast expanse of All Space is the fundamental cure to the Witness’s unwillingness, or inability, to let go of itself, die to itself, and resurrect as the One-in-Allness of the Kosmos itself,” and “when this death occurs, then right where it thought its head was, the entire universe itself is sitting, self-arising, self-shimmering, self-radiant, self-liberating.” The Fifth state is not actually a fifth in the series, but it is a modification of the fourth, and the whole emptiness of voidness aspect of the nondual or spirit-realm is projected to be non-different from the Fourth but simply its dying towards the earlier three realms.
The same holds true for spiritual states in all earlier realms of consciousness. Each sphere makes the humans in it consider ultimate enlightenment in the terms of their dimension: firstness, secondness, thirdness, or fourthness.
We find Moses within Secondness hears God speak “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” and then hides his face, afraid to look upon God, the later states, the “I-am-ness” manifests as an expression of the Second, a subtle, imaginary, and representational symbolic play. Likewise, St. Teresa already names, in The Book of My Life, her third state a union with God, as much as the fourth watering is again a union with the Highest, paradoxically leading up to Spiritual Marriage in her later work, on the Mansions of the Interior Castle, which again is nothing but a further union: once she reached the causal state, all later states are simply experienced as the earlier — in their causal, and thirdness coloring.
Thus, it does not surprise that Mahayana Buddhism, as a tradition of Thirdness, finds Enlightenment basically within the first Bodhisattva Bhumi — a correlate of the 3.1 State and Stage — one resides in the Bodhisattva`s mind, so Chandrakirti, “and endowed with light beautifying the sublime ones, this ground of Perfect Joy is the water-crystal gem, which dispels all darkness and reigns victorious.” Likewise, for Mahayana Buddhists emptiness only exists in conventional terms — it is ultimately unreal or as we quoted Nagarjuna above it is, “when the victorious one abides, he Is neither said to be existent nor said to be nonexistent. Neither both nor neither are said. There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and nirvana. There is not the slightest difference Between nirvana and cyclic existence,” however, once we enter Fifthness, the ultimate reality is no longer ultimately unreal in the same way — voidness that delivered the emptiness of the earlier realms, once discovered, becomes an awareness-less darkness that is nothing more than the deathless dying liberation which the cognitive mode as via-negative brought into the world at any earlier stage, the feeling mode of which is suchness or thatness, as the fullness of the earlier four realms in their attempts of unification.
Therefore, Buddhism as a tradition of Thirdness knows only three conceptual forms of emptiness pointed to in the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, where however, the third is basically only the freedom from the earlier and not a recognition of the devoid-ness of real existence that Thirdness carries:
(a) Firstness as the imaginary nature the defining characteristic of which is “what is nominally and conventionally posited as the essence or the distinctive characteristic of phenomena, even just in order to designate them,” is unreal and devoid of existence.
(b) Secondness as dependent nature or other dependence which is “the dependent arising of phenomena. It is like this: ‘When this is, that arises” pointing to the emptiness of life.
© Thirdness as the perfect nature, as the freedom from the two earlier, that is ultimate unreality comes from the actual defining characteristic or the ultimate reality which we consider “as the permanent and immutable lack of any actuality or essence in the imaginary defining characteristic superimposed on the other-dependent defining characteristic.”
In one of the Bodhisattva Maitreya’s revelations to Asanga, namely The Ornament of the Great Vehicle Sutras, we thus find the Buddhist dharma elaborated in five metaphors, i.e., …
“Resembling shaped gold, a lotus in bloom,
and an excellent meal enjoyed, when stricken with hunger;
Like receiving a letter with good news and an open treasure drove,”
… but inherently only elaborating on three layers, with the first two metaphors pointing at (1) the emptiness of Firstness and thus the imaginary nature and (2) dependent origination within Secondness; whereas (3) the “excellent meal enjoyed” hints at the conceptual understanding of the three realms in Buddhism, and (4) refers to suchness that is like a “letter with good news” telling us of (1), (2), and (3), while (5) is points at the negation of (1), (2), and (3) as non-conceptual wakefulness that is accomplished by the noble ones — we see again that (4) and (5) indicate a union of both: suchness and a negation as non-conceptuality.
If each layer brings with itself a new understanding of our nature and voidness, we, once we enter Fifthness, must have two more natures and their emptiness at our hand. First, we recognized in the transition into Fourthness that ultimately the meaning which bridges or mediates between Firstness and Secondness does not exist — as Wilber recognizes in No-Boundary there is no actual mediation across boundaries as unity is ever-present. Others like Niklas Luhmann write about meaning operations that are ultimately empty insofar they are based on deliberately delineating between self and other, systems and environment, or any other duality however, what stays true in a sense is the idea of a cognitive witness or observer and a certain sense of unity in feeling awareness including the realness of Vijnana, the Intuitive realms, all of which is surpassed once we enter Fifthness. There we — when we interpret Aurobindo in the later written chapters of The Life Divine in that way — find…
“Impersonality […] [as] the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.”
Once we reach up into Nirvana and don`t stop there as a static relation, so Aurobindo, it is possible to ”ascend into higher regions of the Spirit where its immobile status is the foundation of those great and luminous energies,” that we experience as the visionary thought process — in this we move into the one without another, of which the earlier realm of Fourthness is just a separative power, as the idea of the Overmind-Maya presented by Aurobindo might insist:
“Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence.”
In other words, once we enter the Fifth, we, too, completely leave the realm of awareness — which resides as the feeling and fullness mode of the new existence — and step into that new dualism where there is the absolute void, seemingly free from any possibility, that Aurobindo calls the Brahman, with the Maya as the creative imagination of the Overmind below it, which is the feeling mode as suchness. However, “the vast baseless negation of reality purporting to be real cannot be the sole outcome of the eternal Truth, the Infinite Existence,” speaks Aurobindo, and then defines the oblivion, as St. Teresa called it, as “indeterminable in the sense that it cannot be limited by any determination or any sum of possible determinations, but not in the sense that it is incapable of self-determination.” It is “to awaken to this true seeking and true knowledge veiled within itself, to the Reality from which all things hold their truth, to the Consciousness of which all consciousnesses are entities, to the Power from which all get what force of being they have within them, to the Delight of which all delights are partial figures” and therefore, unless we have ourselves absorbed into its negating character and vanish from our human existence as body, life, mind, and soul, evaporating in the dissolution-clarity of nothingness as spirit, we recognize that we are within a larger being and its operations.
This self, that Aurobindo calls the Gnostic Being is the all-reality that is still compartmentalized in the way of arising in quasi separate individuals, entering through Bindu, the gates of the respective brain areas related to the precuneus, and make us part of its larger unraveling of universal truth by making us all the recipients of its therapeutic, normative, and practical abilities from beyond any individual consciousness; for in its voidness it is a supra-sensual knowing and receiving. And while in Fourthness non-locality is basically realized as a holographic mechanism of introjection and projection, where other persons consciousness can arise as a separate sup-personality or split-consciousness within the awareness within which and as which everything appears as the sense of a unitive flow — of the Overmind Maya — without any real inside or outside, unless we delineate it by cherishing the realness of earlier realms, Fifthness, as it transcends awareness and consciousness into the mode of being, which simply abides as a mysterious luminous and blissful darkness, allows oneself to be non-locally present as a first person perceiver, as the simple identity of what is, at any place one has entanglements to, leading to intense modes of dislocation as only the earlier layers within oneself can work as the epistemological modes for the exploration differing human identities as expressions to arise as the simple thatness of oneself, while Fifthness has no clear way to differentiate within itself based on criteria such as identity, difference, relationship, or self but can do so only through inviting a retro causality from the earlier layers working into it, by comparatively figuring out the delineations and reciprocations between the various intimately received identities that permeate, color, and enrich the unitive sense that is neither here nor there but everywhere all at once — as that All-Knowledge an All-Being of all sentience that we share. Or as Sri Aurobindo writes on The Gnostic Being:
“He will not meet the world only in its external form by an external contact; he will be inwardly in contact with the inner self of things and beings: he will meet consciously their inner as well as their outer reactions; he will be aware of that within them of which they themselves will not be aware, act upon all with an inner comprehension, encounter all with a perfect sympathy and sense of oneness but also an independence which is not overmastered by any contact. His action on the world will be largely an inner action by the power of the spirit, by the spiritual-supramental idea-force formulating itself in the world, by the secret unspoken word, by the power of the heart, by the dynamic life-force, by the enveloping and penetrating power of the self, one with all things; the outer expressed and visible action will be only a fringe, a last projection of this vaster single total of activity.”
The Discovery of Fifthness
Some years ago, I discovered two drawings in a collection of writings by Sri Aurobindo called The Hour of God. In the first he depicts the Supreme Self-Contained Divine as consisting of four parts — Tat, Sat, Aditi, and the Parameswara — below which the manifestation takes place. The second image depicts the realms of manifestation of body, life, mind, and supermind as truth-form, truth-life, truth-mind, and Vijnana Loka with a fifth realm above. In that time, I moved away from seeing reality in terms of quadruplicities but unintentionally started to include a fifth: that made me wonder whether I transitioned into a new layer of consciousness aligned with the fifth state, i.e., Turyatita. However, it took me more than a year to actually figure out anything about that place and to find some certainty, which then made me fuse the two charts by Aurobindo into the new core structure of my model seen below.
In Aurobindo`s life this transition seemingly took place in the early 1920th. In his book on The Mother we find a new ideal state, a new identical transformation, and therefore a new radicality in his thought expressed here while the structure of his writing alike the 4.1 Stage drops into a simpler overlay, that however, conveys more complexity as it now embraces five layers:
“There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavor, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers.
“But the supreme Grace will act only in the conditions of the Light and the Truth; it will not act in conditions laid upon it by the Falsehood and the Ignorance. For if it were to yield to the demands of the Falsehood, it would defeat its own purpose.
“These are the conditions of the Light and Truth, the sole conditions under which the highest Force will descend; and it is only the very highest supramental Force descending from above and opening from below that can victoriously handle the physical Nature and annihilate its difficulties . . . There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature.
“The surrender must be total and seize all the parts of the being. It is not enough that the psychic should respond, and the higher mental accept or even the inner vital submit and the inner physical consciousness feel the influence. There must be in no part of the being, even the most external, anything that makes a reserve, anything that hides behind doubts, confusions and subterfuges, anything that revolts or refuses. […]
“Do not imagine that truth and falsehood, light, and darkness, surrender and selfishness can be allowed to dwell together in the house consecrated to the Divine. The transformation must be integral, and integral therefore the rejection of all that withstands it.”
Likewise, in a short essay on The Supramental Yoga from 1930, the structure of the 5.1 Stage, in which a Fifth makes a kind of statement about “that something is as it is”, can be clearly seen as well. While in the writing on The Evolving Deity and the Path, there is a new emphasis on passivity, an identical transformation that also appears in Aurobindo’s 1927 writing The Mother. Man must surrender to the divine, ascend into this new self, this new un-reflected ideology, which stems from the experience of simple unity and the realization of our evolving nature:
“If the prudent consent and watchful devotion of man will enable the supramental power to act according to its own deep and clear insight and versatile power, it will sooner or later bring about a divine transformation of our present imperfect nature. This descent and this action are not without their dangers and are not free from the possibility of a disastrous fall. When the human mind or vital desire seizes the descending power and attempts to use it according to its own limited and erroneous ideas, or according to its own inadequate and selfish impulses — and until the lower mortal nature has learned something of the procedure of that higher immortal nature, this is practically inevitable — then missteps, aberrations, difficult and seemingly insurmountable obstacles, wounds and sufferings cannot be avoided, and even death or utter ruin cannot be ruled out. Only when the mind, life and body have learned the conscious integral surrender to the Divine can the path of yoga be easy, straight, fast, and safe.
“And it must be a surrender to the Divine and only to the Divine, an opening to the Divine and to nothing else. For it is possible for a darkened mind and an impure life force within us to surrender to ungodly and hostile forces, even to mistake such forces for the divine. There can be no more disastrous error. Therefore, our surrender must not be a blind and unresisting passivity to all influences or to any influence; rather, it must be sincere, conscious, and vigilant towards the One and Supreme alone.
“Self-surrender to the Divine and Infinite Mother, however difficult it may be, remains our only effective means and our only permanent refuge. Self-surrender to Her means that our nature is an instrument in Her hands and our soul a child in the arms of the Mother.”
In Aurobindo`s revision of The Life Divine, and within the newly added chapters, we then again can find an inverse transformation with all that goes along with it. As much as the 5.2 State is in an either/or between void and suchness, Aurobindo in Indeterminates and Cosmic Determinations reflects on the relationship between the said nothingness of the absolute and the fullness of reality, as Maya while he, as people at any second stage starts to construct normative ideas again in The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong, and Evil. In this normative point of view, we can see how fivefold enumerations are now generally present in contrast to the fourfold ones Aurobindo offered in his earlier writings during the second decade of the 20th century; so, once we connect to the “Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality, and the Divinity within of which our psychic being, the true evolving individual in our nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of which it is the witness ever living within us and the conscious instrument of its light and power and joy and beauty,” we are possessed by an eternal Truth-Consciousness and our being, knowledge, and action is transformed and that “[5th] a spontaneous truth-awareness, [4th] truth-will, [3rd] truth-feeling, [2nd] truth-movement, [1st] truth-action can then become the integral law of our nature.”
Aurobindo in his Inside-View perspective generates, as we know it already from the earlier stages like the 3.2 and 4.2 Stage combining an Identity with its Inversion:
We can likewise speculate on the Outside-View, following the same pattern as it did within Fourthness and the earlier realms. In Ken Wilber`s forthcoming book Finding Radical Wholeness: The Integral Path to Unity, Growth, and Delight we can see that Wilber shifted away from his fourfold pattern to a fivefold one. The introduction to the book states that a new path is offered including five categories, “each of which is a unique path to wholeness.” Radical and complete Wholeness accordingly includes five dimensions: Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up.
In recent writings of Wilber as in the foreword to An Integral View of Tibetan Buddhism: Preserving Lineage Wisdom in the 21st Century we can see that Wilber no longer uses the fourfold sentence structure of fourthness but offers fivefold clauses as this one as an expression of the 5.1 Outside-View:
Likewise, we can find the 1st Quarter at a seeming 5.2 Stage following the pattern as we know it for example from the 3.2 and 4.2 Stage generating some sort of awareness — including the number of tiers — holding together, in the sort of an awareness of awareness, an identity that fuses the new realm with earlier ones:
While the Inside-View in Aurobindo`s work at the 5.2 Stage attempts to balance “what is” and “what is not”, it is likely that a mature Outside-View at this stage would not like Aurobindo in the chapter on Indeterminates and Cosmic Determinations attempt to equilibrate the antinomies of pure nothingness and the all-reality as here, where he writes in an entering the 5.2 Stage compound and smash-fashion…
… and thus, elaborate on how the void and oblivion could grow into fullness — but the Outside-View would choose — in a non-pathological, two-sided attempt for a unity between Nirvana and Samsara — either void or suchness as its awareness and from there manifest its opposite as the unity it is aware of. But we will see…