Q: How to communicate about such things if what one experiences in MER is altogether beyond communicating?
A: MER’s source, purpose, penetration and utility is ineffable – deliberately defying all human access and meddling. It is spontaneous, comes for no apparent logic or reason known to man and cannot be induced, evangelised or proselytised, in my understanding.That’s been my conclusion for a long time. Very frustrating for the merely curious.
Q: In my experience of what you call MER, all thinking ceased in terms of thinking about anything of my own volition. There was, suddenly, and with little warning, complete and utter emptiness within which perception continued, but it was perception without cognitive hooks; that is, perception did not trigger thought or internal dialogue at any level. If I were to attempt a description, I would describe it as an internal/external silence that had nothing to do with absence of sound. A ‘thought’ could arise, I remember, but it was alone and by itself in relation to what was required in any given moment, otherwise there was nothing. It was not my thought; there was no personal aspect, no sense of self, no sense of identity. Thought was not even an option; it was no more than an occurrence. There was just a continuum of silence carrying its own curious signature. I think this is where Merrell-Wolff made the mistake about High Indifference; it’s got nothing to do with ‘indifference’, which is a value-laden term with strong ego connotations. It has to do with experience, any experience, in terms of pure cognition rather than reflective, reflexive cognition: one simply becomes the stream of experience beyond the needs of conscious identification. What I perceived had nothing to do with trees or street; it was everything at once, and that included insights into things utterly beyond my conscious mind’s capacity to grasp. There was no sense of ‘grasping’ anything mentally; just a seeing into the very nature of existence. There was, I realised later, the possibility of a wholly new type of consciousness developing on the planet within which the limited perspective of the human mind had altogether vanished. That, I suspect, is somewhat near to what you mean by MER being experientially ‘nonhuman’, although I may be quite wrong in thinking so.
A: I had no sense of consciousness, or of being humanly conscious, in my experiences of MER. This makes me wonder if I was even human when I had them. What I was getting from the MERs was certainly not anything that could in any way be associated with or understood by the humankind I knew then or since.
I like your, “There was, I realised later, the possibility of a wholly new type of consciousness developing on the planet within which the limited perspective of the human mind had altogether vanished”. This conforms with some Sufi traditions about humanity’s evolutionary future. A philosopher friend of mine told someone else I’m hundreds of years ahead. I presume he mean’t because of my MER experiences. I just hope humans know more in a few hundred years than I do now …
Q: I refuse to teach; it attracts the needy to their detriment. I’m quite willing to talk when such talk is permissible and appropriate, but not at any other time except in the most general of terms. And so my life continues as it has always done, in the moment as best I can.
A: I’ve come to the conclusion real spiritual teachers can only relate to genuine Seekers, those who are readied almost despite themselves, who have begun to shuck the veils of humaness, presumably under the influence of the source of MER? This is another conundrum – what makes a Seeker, why them? Are they the ones who “hunger and seek after righteousness and truth” (whether they like it or not if my own experience of being a Seeker is anything to go by).
Mystical Experiences of Reality 