On Retreat with Alan Chapman

I recently returned from the best spiritual retreat of my life. It was the most absorbing, supportive and productive period of practice. The retreat was taught by Alan Chapman, my friend and erstwhile magickal cohort, but before anyone concludes that my assessment is therefore biased, consider the admission it requires on my part: that whereas I have ineffectually fannied around for the past five years, Alan has created a teaching and a vocation that presents a joyful, revolutionary challenge to the spiritual orthodoxy.

Alan Chapman.

The guru, pictured snickering into his coffee after telling a knob joke.

Putting it frankly, Alan’s approach pisses all over Buddhism from a great height. My previous retreats were all Buddhist-based, with the attendant assumption that spiritual development demands confrontation with suffering, and that progress only occurs through intense effort. Alan’s teaching draws instead on Greek philosophy for its cosmology and methods. This is a genuine enlightenment tradition that originated in the West but, unfortunately, has not been properly understood or practised here in quite some time.

Here is how we practised it last week: we socialised; listened to Alan explain the teaching and its practice; took turns to engage in one-to-one Socratic dialogue with Alan; sat in formal practice approximately three times per day, for periods of up to 30 minutes; used a specific method for examining each other’s dreams, day-dreams and ‘random’ thoughts; ate nice food; went for relaxing walks and visited the pub.

By omitting the usual Buddhist lunacy of ‘noble silence’, last week acquired the flavour of a shared endeavour. I became absorbed not only in my own process, but also in the expression of that same process in my fellow retreatants. During the week people were indeed waking up.

Alan has formulated three classical stages of enlightenment. The first of these is awakening. This is the attainment of abiding non-dual awareness, a stage of insight sometimes described as ‘enlightenment’ by Buddhist teachers such as Daniel Ingram, or by Advaita teachers such as Tony Parsons. The second of Alan’s stages is liberation, which I will discuss in more detail later. The third is enlightenment, which Alan also refers to as ‘Returning to the Source’. There is a further refinement of understanding beyond this stage, but I do not currently have the personal experience to describe anything beyond liberation.

I will not be describing either Alan’s teachings or methods in any great detail. He is the one best-placed to do that. Instead, I will describe what happened to me during the week, the attitudes I adopted and the insights I received through exposure to the teaching.

I entered the retreat recognising that I was badly stuck. The last few years have been pretty tough. Yet on the basis of the weird and wonderful things that had happened during my magickal alliance with Alan, I was pretty confident that a breakthrough was likely.

As readers of this blog are aware, I love psychic and psychological stuff, and the breakthroughs expressed themselves primarily in these terms. This did not surprise me, but others were having very different experiences. Some were engaging with the process on an intellectual level, some on an emotional level. Others were having insights during the teaching, whilst they were fully conscious and awake. In my case, the insights arrived mostly when I was alone and asleep.

Alluring goddesses

On the first night I dreamt:

I was at a magickal moot where a group of women were taking on possession by goddesses. The women were attractive, and in some cases not wearing many clothes. After the ritual, there were all these expressions of divine femininity with which we could converse. Some were so alluring, they were intimidating. A voice introduced each goddess and explained her nature. As the introductions proceeded, the images became more abstract and the explanations included unpronounceable languages, or featured terms that could not be translated. The images were no longer like women at all, but were abstract designs featuring lines, or rips made in sheets of paper.

The retreat was so informal that the closest thing to it I have experienced is a magickal moot. And Alan was making for the retreat the kind of outrageous claims he used to make back in our magick-wrangling days. (Not that they failed to bear fruit.)

Diagram on a flipchart showing a Platonic cosmology.

The Platonic cosmology. You’ll have to come on a retreat to find out what it means…

Alan asserts that no effort is necessary for the process to advance. Paradoxically, the only thing to be done is to avoid the temptation to force or try to guide the process oneself, a sure-fire recipe for becoming stuck.

In the Platonic cosmology, the soul is in the process of perfecting itself and returning to its source in the One. During the retreat we were invited to explore what we really want. This exploration through questioning revealed how there are ultimate ideals for which everyone is longing, a longing that no one can remember ever being without. Our longing for goodness, wholeness and perfection entails that in some way we have known these already, and the soul is on a mission to return to them. In Western spiritual traditions, this longing, its source and its goal, is represented in the figure of ‘the Beloved’.

My dream on the first night seemed concerned with identifying the Beloved. At first, real women are assuming divine forms. But already there is progression into something new and unfamiliar: abstract forms and unfamiliar languages, which bypass the ‘allure’ and ‘intimidation’.

At home with Grimes

The next dream I recorded:

The singer Grimes is coming to the retreat centre. She will be staying in my room. We are a couple.

The Beloved is now a specific figure [1]. We have an established relationship and her arrival is imminent. There is a confidence in this dream, which might be arrogance or psychotic pride, if it were not that the longing is reciprocated by the Beloved. The retreat was enabling me to understand how the longing always already is reciprocated.

If Alan’s first big claim was that no effort is necessary, and all we had to do was allow the transmission of the teacher’s enlightenment to work on us, then the second was this: that suffering is not a necessary part of the process.

This is so contrary to what I have read and experienced in the past that it seemed too good to be true. But it turned out that it is true. Last week was the only retreat on which I experienced virtually no discomfort or suffering, yet it was the only retreat during which I attained a classical stage of the process. So-called ‘Dark Nights of the Soul’ or periods of ‘contraction’ are not inevitable phases of spiritual progress. Alan convinced me that it really is possible to have only fun whilst on retreat.

There was a whole session exploring what the ‘shitty bits’ in spiritual practice actually are. I will not rehearse it here, except to say the realisation that nailed it for me is how the expression of longing for the Beloved, which is the focus of the practice Alan teaches, is not dissimilar from the longing to be free from the desolation of a Dark Night. To experience one is actually to experience both. In a flash of insight, I could not envisage ever being stranded in a Dark Night again.

To be in love is to long for someone, even in their presence. And to be loved is to be longed for in return. The longing of the soul is at once its love for the Beloved, and the longing of the Beloved for ourselves. The assurance in the dream that Grimes’s love was mine was an expression of this. Only a misguided assumption that the longing signifies a deficit, or that persuasion is required to win someone who already loves us, could spoil the imminent wedding.

Me and Dave

The relationship with the Beloved came into more detailed focus in the next dream:

David Bowie visited. He played the guitar part from his song Fashion. ‘That sounds amazing,’ I thought. ‘It just pours naturally from him.’ The problem was that Bowie could interact only with other celebrities. It felt a bit shitty, but I pretended to be the comedian Vic Reeves, interviewing Bowie, in order to spend time talking with him. I might also have to pretend to be Bob Mortimer for a while, after being Vic, but this was not a disaster: Bowie was happily talking. This was the only situation that Bowie could deal with, and I was creating that situation, making him comfortable.

Waking, there was a blissful sensation in my heart that I had never before experienced, as if my heart were open to the world and something were radiating outwards. It was neither overwhelming nor uncomfortable, but somehow like a quietly flickering flame.

Chaotic-looking words and sketches on a flipchart.

Alan’s analysis of the ‘Bowie’ dream. Part of the technique includes drawing and writing out the dream.

The Beloved, effortlessly excellent, overflowing in the expression of Its goodness, appears in the guise of Bowie. The image of the Beloved seemed to be diversifying also in my co-retreatants’ dreams, encompassing hermaphrodites, transgendered individuals, and a septuagenarian in the costume of a sexy young woman.

Alan’s approach to dream divination is that the dream shows what is already the case. There is no guidance or instruction to be extracted from a dream. If we understand by means of the dream what is happening now, then that understanding takes effect. When Alan analysed my dream in the group, it became apparent how pretending to be a celebrity afforded the contact with Bowie. This might seem inauthentic, but rising up to Bowie’s level in the guise of Reeves was already proving successful. What the dream showed was that my assumption I would have to go on pretending was unfounded. It feels to me in the dream that I shall also have to pretend to be Bob Mortimer (Reeves’s comedy partner), yet this never actually happens. Instead I wake up to bliss.

Not my job

Understanding the dream did indeed appear to be enough to drop a false belief and allow the process to continue. The ‘Bowie’ dream came on Wednesday night, was analysed on Thursday, and the breakthrough into liberation had arrived when I woke on Friday. On the Thursday night I had two dreams, the first one before the breakthrough, the second after. The latter I shall perhaps save for a future article, but this was the former:

I was in a junior role at a fashion agency. The staff were giving cookery demonstrations and serving food to important customers. A young, gay guy, senior to me, was cooking. His boss, an immaculately coiffured black woman, looked on in controlled horror. ‘Who is coming to the next demonstration on Friday?’ someone asked. ‘Dior,’ said the woman. It was clear the young ‘chef’ would not be competent. I was so junior within the organisation that none of this had anything to do with me.

A fashion agency is certainly a place where I would be the least qualified to work. But within the agency, all the staff are incompetent at what they have chosen to pursue. This was not an anxiety dream, because of the pleasurable realisation at the end that none of it was my responsibility. Dior would come on Friday, regardless of anything I could do. Dior / Dios / Dieu / God is the One beside whom everyone is incompetent.

When I woke on Friday, for the first time in five years there was a change in the structure of consciousness. Before then, at the level of awakening, on looking into awareness there had been something that did not fit any category of the personal mind: it was not a thought, emotion, sensation or idea. Beside it, all categories and distinctions failed.

The problem I had struggled with for the past five years was how this ‘thing’, which was evidently what people have been describing for millennia as the experience of God, could have any relationship to me. The answer had seemed that our natures were distinct: God is ‘absolute’ (the same for all time, everywhere and to every being), whilst my awareness is ‘relative’ to this.

At awakening, God manifested as a radical nothingness transcending consciousness, on the threshold of which comprehension failed. But, last week, this changed in a totally unexpected way. What specifically had changed was the nature of my longing for God, the longing for the Beloved. Where, formerly, the sense of radical nothingness had appeared, as something impersonal and foreign from the nature of my being, in its place was now the longing. The longing itself had transformed into something impersonal and absolute. As such, there was no longer any distinction between my longing for God and God’s longing for me. This absolute love, a love in which loving is indistinguishable from being loved, meant that there were no longer two distinct natures. God and I were unified in a single awareness.

Alan Chapman and me.

Selfie with the guru.

I could not have dreamt in a million years that this was remotely possible. In subjective terms, it feels like my heart has expanded infinitely. But this infinite heart is God’s as much as mine. My heart is encompassed within the heart of God, even as God raises mine to the dimensions of Its heart.

Why had it taken five crappy years to come home to this? Alan had guided me to a place where I could understand. Sick of the apparent disconnect between my nature and God’s, I had decided that the disconnect was not real and had come to regard the experience of God as an appearance only, as merely a sensation. This was in effect a denial of the Beloved, an attempt prematurely to terminate the disconnect, rather than entering more deeply into relationship and resolving the seeming problem through genuine understanding.

Alan’s retreat returned my practice to the longing for the Beloved. In other words, it put me in touch again with my soul.

At the moment, I am still on honeymoon with this new phase. Alan has briefed me on the next set of seeming problems, which I will perhaps discuss here if or when they arise. For now, I am still trying to express this new understanding as fully as I can, and to the Buddhist framework I have used in the past to describe these experiences, I think I must finally say goodbye.

Footnote

[1] It is interesting how Grimes featured in a recent article on this blog, in connection with the figure of the Girl Genius. It looks to me now as if the appearance of the Girl Genius archetype foreshadowed the Beloved. The vision of the Girl Genius seems to describe the quest of the soul for the Beloved, and her relationship with duality now appears to be a naive description of liberation. Something seems to have been trying to help me out even further back than this. In August last year, an instruction arrived whilst meditating that I should dedicate myself to the goddess Psyche, who is – of course – a personification of the soul. My article ‘The Myth of Psyche and Eros’ was the result, but Apuleius’s allegory seems pretty trite alongside Plato.

26 thoughts on “On Retreat with Alan Chapman

    • Wow. You just made me realise that The One is not perfect. (Because if it had the attribute of perfection it would no longer be One.) Instant mind warp! Hope you’re well, Raph, and still on honeymoon with the new reality.

      • All is well, Dunc! I’m actually feeling like this honeymoon is never going to end…. ;-) Email me if you are so moved — I think you have it now from the reply, no? — Jase, Hami, and I are trying to put together a Virtual Pub with fellow retreatants.

    • It certainly was. I was tempted to mention other people’s experiences, and to share some group photos of fellow travellers on the Perfect Way, but I decided in the end to err on the side of confidentiality, of course. ;-) Please feel free to link from here to your own account of the retreat, if you’ve written one.

  1. Great writeup Duncan! I echo your sentiment, was an amazing retreat all round with a superb bunch of people. Looking forward already to October.

  2. Great blog, Duncan. Very vulnerable and informative. How do we get in on this enlightenment action? Alan’s online presence is a little… sparse.

  3. Thanks for a thorough article Duncan. Actually when Alan announced his retreat some time ago it piqued my interest. My own experience of current Buddhist retreats is commensurate with what you say in this essay. Last year, I spent a lot of time in one well known centre based in Hereford and in the end there was a sense of just going through the motions, the endless treadmill of Dhamma…. That said it has to be admitted their advantage is that they are Dana based. I am not sure if Alan’s retreat is predicated on this notion, if not can you have a word in his shell like and get me on the guest list?

    • Hi John! I’ve been to that place, too. Harsh. :-D Alan’s retreats are not dana-based, but he does have a sliding scale of charges. And don’t go thinking I was on a freebie, just cos I’m mates with him!

  4. Thanks Duncan,
    I understand, I was joking about the guest list. One question, I can not access Alan’s retreat website it does not seem to be available. Any suggestions?

    Thanks Again,

    John.

    • No worries, John! Apparently, the inaccessibility of Alan’s website is intentional. (?!) :-/ But you can contact The Lad Himself directly via the email address I mentioned above, in reply to Tim.

  5. There is something confusing about this article. Chapman is said to define 3 stages:
    1. non-duality (Said to be Daniel Ingram’s flavor of enlightenment)
    2. liberation
    3. Enlightenment

    You hints that you are past liberation, or around that stage. Then you says that according to Chapman, Enlightenment doesn’t requires effort or going through shitty stages. It’s not clear if he is talking about the third stages or the first.

    • Thanks, Simon. I have amended the text. Hopefully this clears up the ambiguity you highlighted. My understanding of Alan is that no stage requires effort, including awakening (i.e. abiding awareness of non-duality).

      This was certainly my experience during the retreat. But what is required, of course, is attention and commitment to allowing the process to unfold. The idea that reality requires us to ‘penetrate’ it (through practices such as ‘noting’, or whatever); or the idea that reality has to be hacked or seen through in some way, in order to yield some kind of personal reward, is that from which an unhelpful conception of effort may begin to take hold, and from which a Dark Night experience will arise.

      However, I’m conscious that I cannot go back to the pre-awakening stage and test this claim by experiencing that part of the process again. (I would if I could!) Personally, I cannot state with absolute confidence that awakening requires no effort. But I would point to the way that some individuals certainly seem to have attained awakening spontaneously, or with very little effort on their part. Indeed, people I know personally seemed to get there with far less effort than I was putting in, and seemed far less hampered by the sort of Dark Night experiences I was having to endure. Also, there is the direct realisation upon awakening that whatever practice we were engaged in was utterly irrelevant to getting there.

      To someone at the stage of awakening, who is used to practising in an Ingramesque / hardcore dharma fashion, I would suggest that they examine the bliss they experience from the awareness of emptiness, the longing they experience for this bliss, and (if they happen to be in a Dark Night) the longing they experience to be free from their suffering. A method like the one Alan teaches, however, which involves personifying the practice as a relationship with the Beloved, seems to me a better safeguard against the trap of approaching this as a problem to be worked out for personal gain, rather than as an intimate dance with our true nature, which is always already happening.

      I haven’t managed to formulate yet any useful advice I could give to someone at pre-awakening, who is used to a Buddhist / DhO framework. This is really frustrating — but maybe that’s the reason I don’t formally teach this stuff… :-/

      • How can any stage require effort? Who is doing the effort? You are so right in everything you’ve said. There is grace involved. I think that those of us who experience, or observe, pure awareness without the help of buddhist teachings do not have the clinging to the suttas that I see many Arhats have. The suttas are useful in the cultivation of right view, but they are not truths, and they do not apply once one is liberated from suffering and desire.

        It is very frustrating. But at the same time, all things are as they should be. I would like to discuss many things with you, Duncan. There will be benefits. I’m sure you feel me.

  6. That’s all incredible. Thrilling post!! Love to know Alan is still up and blowing minds as ever. :)

    I just got home from a Goenka retreat (I remember you’ve been on one years ago, Duncan). It was my third, but the first one after signifcant constant practice – daily vipassana, but also effortful magickal practice also very focused on personal gain – being ‘better’ at this aspect or the other.
    During the 10 days I practiced body-scanning vipassana with ardour and persistence. But the practice itself is very simple and ultimately should be non-effortful – with the exception of the effort to sustain constant, stable, mindful, and clear attention (which I found easy, with not even much samatha). (well, there are the “strong determination” sittings also, a more complicated animal peraphs).
    But when it comes to vipassana, body scanning style, you just surrender to sensations. This is my take of course, Goenka says “observe and be equanimous”, and your pattern of reactions will lose strenght by themselves, getting out of the way. It’s God or the Dhamma that does all the work.
    There’s some instruction as to how to scan the body, but ultimately it doesn’t matter what sensations you experience; you keep conscious and equanimous, pattern reactions lose force by inertia, nature does her thing, bingo. Well, he doesn’t mentions any dark night at all…
    I might be not getting some subtetly though. Though feeling really better, a lot lighter, having get rid of harmful patterns, I’m still pre-enlightenment. Is Alan’s approach fundamentally different from this kind of Vipassana?… Or maybe it’s just Hardcore Dhamma or maybe Mahasi-style noting?
    Also, I see that Alan’s it’s dependent on the presence or activity of an enlightened person (which is ok – the usual). But in theory you could sit vipassana by your own and nature inside your body can be the teacher…

    ps. some time ago I saved a discussion I found on a random google groups discussion thread where they talked about Mahamudra – I guess – and in essence it was: people dark night because theravadins focus heavily on anicca insight first – because it is easier to “penetrate” – and then the meditator finds himself with the illusion of a self, in the midst of a decaying world. On mahamudra they would first work up anatta, then you swallow anicca a lot easier.

    • I am fairly certain Alan’s approach is distinct from vipassana, I am familiar with the dead-end of what is called awakening, by Ingram and related people.

      It is not necessary to practice vipassana, to reach awakening, I did not. I merely exerted myself in wholesome states, my guide to practice was the Pali Canon. But that shit dead-ends after a while.

      Eventually you find yourself in a constant, perhaps non-abiding, non-dual awareness that I choose to call emptiness.

      It is nice and all, but not awakening.

      • Of course, there are many techniques capable of Awakening. By what I observed, all of them have consciousness (or attention) and equanimity (or surrender) as their essential functional components. It may be that these techniques don’t *cause* enlightenment, but at very least they allow you to get attention out of your labirinths far enough so that you notice the Grace that has always been there.
        But I talk from theory. What I experienced with 3 years of solid body-scanning (non-Ingrameque) vipassana is reduction of undue suffering, less blind reaction, more love and aceptance. This may not be enlightenment, or not even lead to it; I don’t care; ‘cos every second of meditation has paid very well allowing me to know and to be intimate with my deeper, inner nature. To integrate myself to an extent that would sound impossible for me 3 years ago. Should even I know there were concrete ways to ascend out of darkness earlier, I would maybe avoid wasting my health and sanity in the twisted pathways of my dark years. But maybe I would just not listen… I needed to go very far in suffering, to treasure Freedom (however little I’ve managed so far) so much.
        If all you got was “nice and all”, maybe check your practice. In Goenka’s view, it’s one thing to engender and dwell in Samadhi states, and other to Know Thyself through Wisdom, and other thing to develop Ethics, and the plane isn’t supposed to fly if lacking any of these pieces (though all of them boil down to different admnistrations of Consciousness and Equanimity; this essential formula is also the one on Tarot Trump XIV on Harris-Crowley deck)
        Anyway, all the blessings I’ve received came from just feeling my body – feeling Nature inside me, and it’s Law – with great attention – and acepting it, allowing every part and parcel to teach me Truth, to blossom in Truth, with open heart. The only effort was sustaining attention.
        I ask again (if unheard): is this fundamentally different from what is Alan doing? How so?
        Maybe the goal oriented, effortful practice is just a common misaprehension amidst what has been called Pragmatic Dhamma?
        Axé
        ~Iago

      • Hi Iago. Here’s how Alan describes what he does:

        Retreats are made up of a number of sessions per day, each composed of divine works, dream/daydream divinations, and traditional philosophy. The aims of the retreat are ideal: a direct, effortless knowing of the nature of reality through transmission, an understanding of what is known rather than the indulging of beliefs about it, and a sharing of the journey with a rare community. Enjoying life – including socialising over great food – is a key component of the retreat.

        I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this sounds the same kind of activity as ‘sustaining attention’, or whether it sounds anything like what you experienced on the Goenka retreat. (For more details, use the email address above in the reply to Tim.) Another thing to consider is that many using a Buddhist approach (including Goenka) seem to regard ‘equanimity’ as a mental state. In that case, is it correct to equate it with ‘surrender’ (as you seem to do in your comment), which is perhaps an action or a process? I experienced the retreat with Alan as refreshingly free from the notion of experiencing any particular feelings, or having to exercise anything other than reason (which necessitates a modicum of attention, of course).

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