What is Awakening? What is Enlightenment?

From the excellent interview, “Who Hears This Sound?” in The Sun Magazine with Adyashanti:

“Saunders: Do you use the terms “awakening” and “enlightenment” interchangeably, or are you talking about two different experiences?

Adyashanti: Awakening is when you realize that what you thought you were was nothing more than a dream, and you perceive the reality outside the dream, what’s dreaming the dream of you. It’s not just a mystical experience. It is actually realizing the underlying unity of all things.

Simply because you’ve had an awakening, however, does not mean you stay awake. Enlightenment, in simple terms, is when you stay awake. If the awakening is abiding, that’s enlightenment. And most awakenings are not abiding — at least, not initially.”

Then he adds awakening is really the beginning:

“After that initial awakening, there is almost always the work of cleaning up, of the “me” surrendering itself. I usually say that’s the beginning of the second phase of spirituality: what I think of as “life after awakening.” There’s this myth of “That’s it. I have that experience; I hoist my enlightenment flag, and it’s over.” Sooner or later most everybody realizes it’s not that simple. There’s a whole other phase of the spiritual life that happens after awakening, and in some ways it’s more subtle and complex and difficult to navigate. There’s not much written about it, and most of what is written is so old and trapped in tradition that modern people can’t make sense of it.”

When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everyone else.

21 And he said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick? 22 For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23 If any man have ears to hear, let him hear. – Gospels of Mark

I’d been thinking back to when in time was the last time I made any significant income stream (not counting living off savings account or 401K), or random spurts of underpaid freelance projects here or there. And the answer goes back ten years ago. I felt that re-examining that time period would yield some deep-seated conditioning (i.e. belief) that I’d overlooked, yet still was living out loud.

So what happened ten years ago briefly, names changed, and the gory drama edited out (sure make a good film, ala The Social Network): I got my dream handed to me–I was on the ground-floor founding team of an Internet start-up in 1999, something I’d been dreaming of for years (harder to pull off when I didn’t live in the Valley, at the time.) I had a wonderful experience at Open Market (once a start-up, but after its IPO the culture resembled a mature corporation). I wanted a new adventure in building something unprecedented.

The founding CEO, let’s call him Will (later he became chairperson, and hired a CEO) had us meet to discuss the book “The Wisdom of Teams,” weekly so that we could apply it within the company especially the management team.

Fast forward to the crux: you must remember that by end of 2000, the IPO market was shut and watching the NASDAQ dips was nauseating and thus, raising venture capital funding was getting tighter. We were working off a seed round, but would have to raise more money soon.

At some point, all the teamwork stuff became lip service, and self-preservation kicked in: “Every man to his own devices.” But even that wasn’t forthrightly said; the temperature dropped and you could tell viscerally we weren’t really a “team.” Unilateral decisions started to be made without discussing it with the rest of the management team.

I was rather emotionally immature at the time, yet gathered up the strength to ask Will, “Why did you fire Jason?”

That was our CFO.  “Well, we had to let someone go. Our burn rate…. and we need to conserve cash… and…”

I felt he was hedging around the question. I countered: “Jointly we might have come up with another solution. I know I would have taken a cut in pay. Maybe we all could have taken cuts so that no one is let go. Or, maybe there was another place we could cut.”

I didn’t know it at the time but the CFO was let go because of his integrity.

The entire fiasco only got worse over the next  three months.

The experience to this day has tarnished the entire notion of “teamwork.” I hadn’t really realized this was so distasteful to me until someone sent me an email recently asking me what my definition of “teamwork” was, and I bristled.

As Scott Peck accurately observed in The Different Drum, a marriage is a community of two. Not too long ago, I entered into a collaborative partnership with someone I love–and voila! the same thing magically seemed to happen. There came a sense of self-preservation where “me” asserted itself over the mutual needs of “we”, then communication lines closed, and finally the whole thing collapsed.

So, I realized, hmmmm….. I am the common element here.

On a walk today I realized self-preservation (in 2000, Will was trying to secure his capital investment–although he wasn’t the only investor, as well as his reputation as a hot-shot serial entrepreneur), and in the creative+romantic partnership it was an emotional “I don’t want to be hurt” (probably on both our sides?) type of self-preservation.

Self preservation is self-protection–a  fancy way of carting around an identity as at least there must be a self  existent if such a self needs protecting. For all the frustration I had at Will for lying time after time and not being forthright… Hello, I realized that lying is a single form of self-protection. So is staying silent and silencing our voice.

Staying mum, “fitting in,” “getting along to get along” is my kind of self-preservation.

“Thus, as a human being, we can’t have these childish ideas that enlightenment means “everybody loves me.” Maybe everyone will love you, but more likely some will and some won’t. But when you have given the whole world its freedom, then you have gone a long way toward finding your own freedom. They are tied inextricably, one to the other.” — Adyashanti, The End of Your World

After I got home from the walk tonight,  I saw that the very thing that irked me so much–”self-preservation at the expense of the welfare of the whole”–is when seen from another vantage point something I also do quite often myself.

I then got on the Internet and came across an article on a new treatment for lupus (wasn’t doing a thing related to diseases beforehand), and re-reminded that I had only heard of this disease this summer (I know it’s nothing “new”, but I am not a doctor so it never entered my vocabulary before). So this summer, in quick succession, I’d heard a friend of a friend’s daughter as diagnosed, and that my new housemate had lupus. So I looked up the symbolism yet again: “A giving up. Better to die than to stand up for oneself. Anger and punishment,” and the affirmation (I don’t really do affirmations, but one is revealing): “I speak up for myself freely and easily. I claim my own power. I love and approve of myself. I am free and safe.”

“We cannot be true as long as we are expecting or wanting others to agree with us. That will cause us to contract–maybe they won’t like what I say; maybe they won’t agree; maybe they won’t like me. When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everyone else. When we realize that we are the one and only Spirit that manifests as everything and everyone, in the very nature of that realization is total freedom for all. There is a certain fearlessness in this realization. People sometimes come to me and say, “Well, Adya, there’s still some inner place”–and, I find, it’s often a very early childhood place–”that’s afraid to just be what I know to be true.” And, of course, I say, “You have to look at it, to see how you, yourself, formed certain belief structures based on what happened in the past. You have to look into it and see if those belief structures are really true.” But also, we need to recognize that we have no way of knowing or predicting how the world will receive us.” — Adyashanti, The End of Your World

I find what Keith Ferrazzi says about a safe place to speak up and take risks to be very compelling. So often I am thinking I cannot speak up or even “be” myself because it’s not safe here. This is a completely new way of looking at it from view of first and foremost creating that safe place for others:

“Each is us is responsible for creating the safe place around us. I’m going to repeat that one more time because it is so important. Each of us is responsible for creating the safe place. It is a conscious choice that we make to create the environment that invites others in. It means putting the other person’s safety first and making your intentions clear.”

p.s. Not sure anything’s resolved. Too much reliance on resolution techniques only asserts separate self, I’ve found. Just realizing “aha! you spot it you got it” often is awareness enough. Awareness itself is Self-rectifying.

p.p.s. Oh, and a very cosmic joke thing, is I Googled Will–I hadn’t given him a second thought in perhaps eight years. He’s off starting a startup incubator of all things. Funny is because I’d been thinking of something  similar in terms of a laboratory/hunch incubator/think tank (no, not necessarily Internet startups–any kind of radical, edgy, innovative tinkerings and ideas), and writing about it on my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches.

“I” arises and whenever it arises it gets hurt

Seeking  for the exact phrasing of the quote, “To pave the whole world with leather, you need only put on a pair of shoes,” I find this highly relevant post to my post yesterday,  the linchpin sentence: “I’ arises and whenever it arises it gets hurt.

“Is it possible to learn our lessons directly from the only teacher that we really have – life? Instead of looking to someone else for a theoretical diagnosis, to look directly at the problem itself? Theories are born of man’s quest for a solution to the immediate problem of sorrow. But who created this problem? I myself. Trouble does not come from outside. We do not need theory. Look at it directly – here is my sorrow; it arises in me. This may not be easy for everyone. It needs a certain maturity of intelligence, a certain ability to focus one’s attention on the source of sorrow while undergoing that sorrow. This may be difficult while the pain is still there. Therefore, the theories and belief systems will take us to a certain point, but the solution must be found inside.

Sorrow is experienced very clearly – I know I am miserable. So, if instead of trying to destroy all my external enemies I readjust the thing within myself that responds to external circumstances, the problem is solved. No one is my enemy. In the Yoga Vasistha it says, “To pave the whole world with leather, you need only put on a pair of shoes.” Instead of trying to manipulate the environment to suit myself, why not readjust the self so that it does not get hurt?

Is there a state of mind, a state of awareness where one is not hurt or sorrowful at all? Let us observe what it is that gets hurt. Look directly, without any theory whatsoever, merely look within to see where the hurt is experienced – totally unrelated to the external provocation. I am hurt, or whatever it is that says ‘I’ in this body, that is hurt. But what is it that says ‘I’ in this body… eyes, heart, stomach? There is no ‘I’ and therefore there is no hurt! I discover that the truth is extremely simple.

Yet since body consciousness is there, it is possible that I will be hurt again. ‘I’ arises and whenever it arises it gets hurt. But if I have found the key, what does it matter if someone locks the door? It is as simple as that. And all the theories that man has invented are meant only to lead us there, to the discovery that ‘I’ is not. When we realise that simple truth, confusion disappears.“

– swami venkatesananda (via The Last Stoic blog)

vulnerability, intimacy, candor, community and communion

“There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability.” – M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace

Lately, I’ve been running a story that repeats and loops through my head, my emotions, and finally, my actions. I’m aware of it; however, being conscious of my unconscious so far hasn’t shifted a thing.

The rerun story basically revolves around this theme: It is alienating to be real, to be vulnerable, in a society that values the veneer of propriety–even masked under niceties as politeness and kindness.

They’ll just back slowly away from you lest this authenticity is contagious. I know because I witness it happening over and over .

Or the flip-side coin of the same-same story, which feels even worse to the me: they’ll drool in worship and chase you for a ‘hit’ of supposed “rarified” Presence–put you way up and out on a pedestal–still alienated, still distant.

So I tend to end this story: “I tried that and it backfired–no thanks, not again.”

I can find plenty of evidence to stay guarded and protect “myself.”  There’s the lack of reciprocity when I am real online–to the point where I feel shunned as some kind of emotional wreck and woo-woo airy-fairy chick. That shock of discovery that emotions are forbidden terrain. For instance, I hadn’t realized it was taboo to cry on the phone to your close friend (“Get a grip. I’m not speaking to you until you get it together.”) Then, there’s that “love of my life”  relationship that imploded this autumn and left a harrowing  imprint in my heart that I’m still reeling from.

Sure, there’s the counter-evidence. For instance, all the books I randomly am drawn to this past month advocate “vulnerability” and “candor” and “intimacy”–yes, even corporate “never ever ever wear your heart on your sleeve” business (see “Who’s Got Your Back?” by Keith Ferrazzi). I can toss them against the bedroom wall in fury, but they touched me instead. I cried. And not the kind of crying that comes from sorrow–more like the tears of  hope kindling again that maybe, just maybe, actual communion among human beings is possible.

Well, I’ll go out on limb here once more. The other little nudge? I started biting my nails again about a year ago, or so. Not stress. I have so much extravagant time to relax and unwind for myself than every billionaire on Earth has money.  This nail-biting had been a lifelong habit until about eight years ago. Then one day I noticed my nails were long and strong. The so-called “lifelong” habit simply disappeared as I blossomed into my authentic self.  So it was a little disconcerting that I was back to the old habit.

I tend to see the physical world as a vast forest of symbols. Now, these archetypes and symbols aren’t any kind of ultimate truth of reality, but they do permeate my sensory awareness. It’s just something I’m attuned to more than anything I learned in some book somewhere. So, with that context, I wondered what the symbolism was behind biting nails. When I observed closely, it was mostly my ring finger on my left hand the suffered the worst of all. Hmmm, so I got curious instead of worried.

It was revealed to me that nail-biting represents a need to be vulnerable and unprotected.  Especially on the ring finger, I tend to tear at the skin around the  cuticle. The tearing of skin around a fingernail signifies a desire to expose the inner self to the world. And finally, the ring finger itself represents “unions and grief” (according to Louise Hay, and it rings true–remember it’s also the wedding band finger!) and the left hand represents the feminine, “material” physical/relative world.  So, in a nutshell, I have a strong inclination towards intimacy, while also harboring grief over unions that “backfired.”

You were expecting resolution on this blog post? Nope, I just wanted to share where I am right now. How I feel. The absurdity of looping stories–and how we know they are not true and even how boring the repetition is becoming, and yet there they are. Sure, there’s some resolution coming. Whenever I stop resisting, I suppose.

“What do I know for sure is true?”

Okay, nothing I wrote is true. I cannot possibly be alienated. I don’t even exist. Existence exists. Or paradoxically just as true, I am Whole. Wholeness itself. Only discrete parts cut off might think they are “alienated.” That’s illusion. Kind of like a leaf fluttering on a tree crying and wailing out about how alienated it feels from the other leaves and the tree itself: “Hello, um, excuse me leaflet… you are the tree.”

So this post is my small attempt of trying vulnerability again. I don’t have any solutions. I’m not bursting with illuminated wisdom. I’m saying I don’t have a clue–and yet, that’s okay too. It is what it is.

p.s. The books I reference that fell into my lap include a “random” powerful section on agape (start on page 295, “No Strings Attached”) in Keeping the Love You Find, Ubuntu, The Different Drum (this book in particular has been a blessing and a balm), Never Eat Alone, Who’s Got Your Back?, and even Where Do Good Ideas Come From? (which is really focuses on collisions and community with other people sparking innovation, and not solitary confinement).

UPDATE: A few hours after this post I realized that even “vulnerability” doesn’t contain the term I’m really aiming for. Candor comes closer, more complete (as vulnerability seems to imply only sharing the struggle.)

More than anything the word that popped out during a long walk among the sage, mesquite and palo verde trees was “integrity.” I always felt as if I certainly know the definition of that word, yet went ahead and looked up online, and the first result: “an undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing wanting.” Yes, precisely. The whole shebang.

socially acceptable judgments are judgments

I once recall Adyashanti saying (paraphrased just in case– yet, it’s really strange how the stuff I hear him say in person sticks to me as if he said it just five minutes ago–maybe that’s what ‘happens’ when speech is clear and inspired and infused with the presence of the moment), “Everyone wants to be enlightened, and still get to judge their neighbor.”

One of the hardest things in the last three years particularly (honestly, the first year post-awakening it was quite hard to even consider judging folks, too busy fascinated in exploring the nuances of the multiplicity and delight of diverse personalities from an entirely new perspective to fall into trap–yet), is to see through the judgments that are socially acceptable.

by http://ailukewitsch.wordpress.com

One example that is almost done playing out in my life:

Capitalistic/materialistic people we love to hate. Now, I don’t hate these people–but even the slightest aversion is a judgment. And although I did once have a popular business, social media, and marketing blog–it was always slightly unconventional, and I never was much of a money chaser.

However, for some reason I can’t fathom entirely–probably because the entire Universe conspires for our awakening–all the way, I was almost thrown into every extremes of tiniest of aversions in last three years. No matter how slight, they became magnified and looming.

So slowly I started hanging out with a bunch of folks from intentional community/off-the-grid and other eco-green folks, to New Agers particularly in 2012 Ascension crowd (I’ll debunk that another day), to underground artists of all kinds (street musicians, street/recycled fashion, graffiti artists,  zine writers, slam poets–yada yada), to gutterpunks and such that the only common thread (truly, as some of these groups don’t even like each other) was they all in their own ways had “issues” with The Man. And, by association, money and the economic system was His primary tool.

I have just finished reading the book, Zero Limits, by Joe Vitale, as I practice Ho’oponopono on and off since 2003 and was slightly surprised by the unabashed vitriol in the Amazon reviews. I know Vitale is definitely one of those folks that provocatively aims at pushing people’s buttons around money issues so they can drop them, and at that pushing he has succeeded.  The trick is to realize that those reactions of disgust and “how could you tarnish Divinity with your advertisements and money-grubbing” are plain and simple judgments and our own reactive projections.

Anyhow, the point being is that I was TOTALLY unaware of my pushing away greedy capitalists and money being any kind of conditioned reaction whatsoever as I was socially supported in my judgments until about two months ago when I started to re-apply Ho’oponopono clearing. (That I needed any technique to simply be in the grace of non-resistance surely was a clue…. yet I was so contracted and in my head that the idea of dropping into Awareness of No-Mind didn’t even occur to me. That’s okay–as Ho’oponopono if one looks squarely at our own projections will lead one to remembering it is much simpler, and then the technique is abandoned like a boat after we’ve crossed the waters onto the shore.)

p.s. I’m not saying judgment is ‘bad,” but it’s certainly not true and they become an overlay on Reality as it is. Especially if one has realized All, we’re all That yucky stuff we push away too–and pushing hurts. Partly explains why it has felt like an enormous struggle for me last few years–it is when I fight self in the “guise” of Others. Struggle is not our true nature–that’s what resistance to what’s true feels like.

p.p.s. Other techniques to cross to shore (the ‘shore’ being metaphorically equivalent to nirvan, enlightenment, self-realization, etc.) that are helpful include any type of seeing and accepting our  projections ala Carl Jung’s shadow work, The Work by Byron Katie, and ho’oponopono. Also Adyashanti’s method of writing down and journaling only what we know to be absolutely true is helpful.

charting the non-abiding awakening as seen through these eyes

“This is the time for you to compute the impossibility That there is anything But Grace.” — Hafiz

I hadn’t felt the need to post on this blog for many years. However, there is a little nudge that says, Write Here, Write Now (or could it be: right here, right now?), as my main blog might be clogged up with too many posts on enlightenment otherwise. And here, I can focus to my heart’s content as there are far fewer readers. Even if it is just myself writing to the ether, to the No-thing, that would be fine.

I just feel that this is a very particular time for me, and I don’t tend to go back and write about the past. Reading memoir is one thing, writing them is not for me.  I will write about the Present and Presence, however. So if I write now, it’s also recorded in case this is of assistance to anyone else questioning what is happening to them in their search for absolute and ultimate truth.

Since April 2006, I have (and use the term “I” quite loosely and vastly) been going through the process of non-abiding awakening.  Last month, I returned to my Mom’s house and had left behind a book, “The End of Your World” by my teacher Adyashanti. I had not read it in two years. What a godsend to re-read it now.

Basically the book is intended for folks in non-abiding awakening, although there is value there for anyone experiencing resistance (haha–almost everyone).

There is knowing the truth of Existence (and hence our own non-existence) directly for yourself (awakening), and then there is being that completely without conditioning asserting itself in rote reaction (abiding awakening). Anything in-between we’re going to term “non-abiding awakening.”

I once recall Adya saying, and here I paraphrase:  “To know and not to be is still not to know.”

So this blog for here on out is dedicated to what my “process” (can’t speak too much in terms of universalities–except I do have about eight friends also in non-abiding awakening–not a ‘state’, perhaps process is more accurate) feels like, tastes like, acts like as it unfolds from the initial awakening towards allowing Beingness.

p.s. If it is any consolation (and this is sort of silly as time is totally irrelevant to the timeless) it was approximately seven years from Adya’s initial awakening to abiding awakening.

Do Buddhists Talk about Grace?

I met a new friend yesterday. I presumed he was Buddhist, but he dropped the word grace into our conversation one too many times.

"Do Buddhists talk about Grace?"

"I'm not Buddhist."

Of course I'm not unusual and I recalled: "The bodhisattva goes completely beyond convention." (from the book, Mother of the Buddhas: Meditation on the Prajnaparamita Sutra by Lex Hixon).

This is the third consecutive uninitiated conversation about grace I'd had in the last three days. So I'd thought I'd share my inklings:

Grace is the free and unmerited beneficience of a God which is all and nothing and beyond comprehension. It is the natural law of the cosmos – well outside the gravitational pull of man-made law of sin and/or karma – which is ever-available in each and every and every moment. The metaphor of gravity can be extended: The lightness of Being that comes by accepting grace each moment is akin to the weightlessness and bouyancy and peace of outer space. 

It is so unconditional and infinitely patient that it will allow you to hit the snooze button as many times as you wish, yet your remembrance of its embrace eventually wakes you up gently and in your own time.

The Ego Says The Ego Needs to Go

Keith Ray pointed me to Adrian Savage's piece on "Expansive Egos." While I enjoy Adrian's blog, the biggest 'barrier' to Awakening is thinking anything, including ego, well, especially the ego, needs to 'go' or needs to be abolished and then everything would be perfect.

I'll be in the Tao then. Someday if only.

There is no then.

You are immersed in Tao right now 24/7. But you don't see it because of this mental interpretative layer that's like a thin film over your vision chirping: "This needs to go" or "That needs to go." Other similar looping refrains: "I should be…", "They should be…", "The universe should be…"

Trying to control your so-called ego into submission (or death) is merely the most subversive ego-manager trick. Trying to make harmony only masks the innate harmony in Reality.

The vastness of Tao (since Adrian quotes the Tao Te Ching) is totally completely all-encompassing. What it means that the ego doesn't exist is it has no substance to it – try pointing to it. Where is it? Can you really find your ego?

This is all sounding "easier said than done." To get to point where you can see through your interpretations, it is useful to witnesss and investigate thoughts that have the quality of "This needs to go" and "This should be different than it is right now." I recommend Bryon Katie's book Loving What Is. I also like to carry Bryon Katie's worksheets in my notebook everywhere I go.

You'll finally get to the place where the finite mind becomes like one of your other five senses, rather than it trying to be the author of the whole infinite she-bang. The infinite doesn't fit quite as well into the finite, but the other way around works quite nicely. And then you see for yourself it's all seamlessly infinite anyway. That open clear space isn't infinite period – it has the felt sense of sublime qualities of infinite complete whole peace, ease, intelligence, and love.

Mind wants its freedom, not a straightjacket. – Bryon Katie

An Exchange with Tao

"But, I still get angry and impatient and tired. People still compete and strive and try to seek advantage over others. Needless suffering compounds needless suffering, and I reckon I need about another 10,000 lifetimes before I'll be wise enough to say "Yes!" to that each time I confront it." – email from a friend

There are no 10,000 lifetimes before or after this instant. Only thought seems to reincarnate every instant, until we realize they actually don't. As my teacher finally got through to me Wed.,  there is no absolutely no "event" that "happens" that switches one from unawakened delusional clod to enlightened sage. You just realize you
couldn't have possibly have said No and there is simply Yes, not even you saying yes.

Alan Watts: Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen

Everyone is born a mystic and a lover who experiences the unity of things and all are called to keep this mystic or lover of life alive. – #7 of Matthew Fox’s 95 Theses

In my research I’ve been noticing the Beat poets and writers were definitely mystics “digging” life in their own foray into the forest for the Holy Grail. Kerouac reasserted over and over that “the Beat Generation was basically a religious generation.”

Reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Synder myself I sense an authentic urge but couldn’t help feeling that sometimes the Zen and the Buddhism was warped a bit, especially from the most notorious Beats. (There weren’t much in way of teachers in the US then, just moldy books in libraries.)

Then I came upon an essay by Alan Watts, born in England he died in the Bay Area – the North Bay of Mill Valley to be precise. His “Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen” essay just gets to the heart of it all. Very enlightening read.

Square Zen is “a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.

Whereas…

For beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. [He describe its self-defensive underside.] But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master.

Watts goes on to masterfully explain why satori “can lie along both roads.”

Ultimately, the ancient Chinese Zen masters practiced everyday Zen, an ordinary “no-fuss” Zen. Fuss comes in when we’re “mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and “fuss” when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture for five hours a day.”

Alan starts and ends with the Tao which is close in essence to the Chinese Zen, or Ch’an. To begin, “Tao is that which one cannot depart. That which one can depart is not the Tao.” And he ends with this Taoist poem.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;
The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, some short.

A “Spiritual Radicals” course is being offered by UC Berkeley this spring and fall in San Francisco. From the course Description:

This course introduces students to seven highly original thinkers–J. Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Ram Dass, Chogyam Trungpa, and Matthew Fox–whose lives and work brought about a renaissance in American spirituality. Authors, scholars, and religious figures, they each journeyed beyond accepted norms and reinvigorated religious practice through the retrieval of ancient wisdom.

They all brought a Beat sensitivity of personal experience as the final authority. And it’s no coincidence that Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception in 1954 ushering in “Howl” and the sixties’ psychedelic movement. When Allen Ginsberg tired of drugs in his attempt to recapture a natural 1948 peak experience (named it Harlem Vision even) he turned to Chogyam Trungpa as his guru. In separate journeys, Ram Dass (last home Tiberon) and Steve Jobs went in search of the same guru in India. Dass found him, but Steve wandered in India and promptly on his return started tinkering with Apple. Oh, I could go on and on. (These guys ‘cept Matthew Fox are all dead, but there are living breathing radicals right here in our midst today! And no, they’re mostly not celebrities.)

p.s. Looks like Matthew Fox even had a blog for a brief while. Fox is also the founder of the University of Creation Spirituality (now Wisdom University), which was in Oakland and looks to be headquartered in San Francisco now.