My working definition of awakening comes from my reading of Daniel Ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: the capacity for direct experience (in real time) of the non-dual nature of reality. However, in an old notebook of mine I came across a different definition from Christina Feldman, which she expressed during a ten-minute consultation at Gaia House.
“Awakening is the implosion of all samskaras,” she said.
I had forgotten this immediately. At the time it made no sense.
Samskaras are unconscious tendencies that influence perception. They determine how and of what we are conscious. The term samskara is often translated into English as “formation”. Fundamental human ignorance gives rise to samskaras and they, in turn, give rise to consciousness – that by means of which we are aware.
A samskara might be a karmic tendency formed in this lifetime, or it might arise from past lives. If that sounds fanciful, consider how these tendencies are neither conscious nor voluntary. Feasibly, they might arise from the influence of other people, which, in turn, arises from the influence of others upon them. In this sense samskaras very evidently reflect the impact of past lives.
Talking with Tommie Kelly about formations (in one of our forthcoming videos on the Nidana Cards) I realised I was out of my depth. When awakened teachers such as Ingram and Feldman talk about formations they are describing territory beyond my personal experience. Although, hopefully, I can give useful pointers to folks completely new to the concept, at best I’ve only caught some sketchy glimpses.
Tommie pointed me to a Daniel Ingram interview online, interesting because Daniel seems to delineate awakening there in a way that chimes more with Christina Feldman’s description. What we experience as personal intentions, he explains, are inseparable and no different from any other perception. It struck me that if reality were experienced directly in this way then formations would be seen clearly for what they are. Was this Feldman’s “implosion of all samskaras”?
So, I decided to explore intention in my daily meditation. I dedicated an hour simply to noting experiences that were preceded by an intention and those that weren’t.
Something very strange occurred.
I had been sitting for a while when my left hand began to move – not slightly, but vigorously, rotating side to side with a waggling motion of the wrist. It was a gesture that in a face-to-face conversation might have signified doubt or: “Hey, hold on there for a minute!” It lasted a couple of seconds. Then, another second later (and I felt immediately this was what the gesture had indicated) the timer sounded the end of the hour.
The weird thing, aside from its predicting precisely the end of the sit, was the lack of volition. My hand moved, but I was not moving it. Neither was it moved by an external force. The impetus to move was from within, but it wasn’t mine.
I had been sitting for almost an hour, carefully discriminating experiences that followed intentions from those that did not. Something seemed to want to show me what it knew would perplex me: a bodily movement with no intention, signifying a future event of which I had no knowledge. Even as I searched for the intention, my hand moved, and I was left looking on in wonder.
Where there is an intention we can say “I did that” and hang a sense of self on it. But, if an experience that’s usually preceded by an intention occurs without one, then an uncanny sense of “otherness” hangs on it instead. This feels anomalous, paranormal, distinctly “tricksterish”. Something seemed to indicate its sentience by signalling that it knew (or could predict) when the alarm was going to sound. It seemed as if something were aware that I was noting intentional and non-intentional experiences and had decided to throw at me one that was neither. Something seemed to demonstrate that it enjoys a relationship to consciousness and time very different from mine.
What came to mind, oddly, was the Pentagon UFO footage, GIMBAL and GOFAST. It had the same feeling: something displaying itself in ways it knows we cannot fit within our frame of reference.
A paranormal experience is a witnessing without understanding. Awakening is an understanding without witnessing. We do not see samskaras until we understand intention is inseparable from any other experience, an understanding that removes all notion of a witness. On awakening, reality appears the same but is understood. On witnessing the paranormal, reality feels perplexingly strange and different from what it seemed before.
Awakening dissolves the witness. Paranormal experience coagulates and isolates it. In response to what we don’t understand we may contract into fear, anger, or avoidance. People often encounter challenges on the path to awakening, anomalous experiences such as kundalini phenomena, unsolicited visions, or communications with discarnate entities. If these cause enough disruption to necessitate disclosure to medical professionals, they may attract a diagnosis of psychosis. The lack of an understanding of the experience is re-framed as a problem, a problem situated within the person seeking understanding rather than in what is not understood.
Fortunately, being human entails an ever-present possibility of understanding. The paranormal can be understood (paradoxically) as radically non-understandable. Then the focus shifts from questions about what a phenomenon “really is” onto our relationship with it. Then we can become a participant rather than a witness.
Our inability to comprehend the paranormal is not “in” us, it is us, because not understanding is the relationship of the human to the paranormal. It’s a samskara. Yet, once seen, it “implodes”.
We might choose to persist in trying to understand what the paranormal “is”, but it ought to give us pause for thought how, despite centuries of effort, we are no closer even to a definition of what we mean by “ghost”, “UFO”, or “faery”. We go on witnessing without understanding because this is our relationship to those phenomena.
It is tempting to wonder if the paranormal is designed to lead us away from comprehension. But that, again, is an attempt to define what it is. Taking this route are those accounts of the paranormal regarding it as “Satanic”. Certainly, paranormal experiences can deceive and mislead, but it depends on how the individual perceives them.
From the perspective of awakening, there is no witness separate from or looking onto reality, but simply reality understanding itself. This implies that the witness is an illusion, but so too is the sense of a separate “other” that creates a paranormal experience.
When my hand moved without conscious intention, it seemed that an intention (to make a signal) arose from something other. But if the experience of an intention is not the same as what expresses the intention then it is equally erroneous to mistake the absence of a personal intention for a paranormal other.
The more inexplicable an experience, the harder it is to discriminate between an event that was intended or (as the skeptic will always insist) an event that occurred naturally. It is mistaking the paranormal for an other that creates a sense of its separation from everyday reality.
Suppose a cup on the kitchen table flies across the room and shatters against the opposite wall. We might trace the cause to a natural phenomenon (a seismic tremor, perhaps) or, in the absence of any known natural cause, consider the paranormal option: the intention of some other. Opting for the latter confronts us with that quintessentially paranormal sense of something somehow operating outside of everyday reality. Yet, patently, if the cup were indeed flung at the intention of an other, the event and its instigator cannot be any less a part of reality than ourselves.
A paranormal experience is like an awakening in the way it confronts us with how intention is synonymous neither with self nor with other. It’s only when we understand the relationship between ourselves and the paranormal as defined by incomprehension that it ceases to appear as what it certainly cannot be: something unreal.
Occult Experiments in the Home 