Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

One of my dearest teachers died last year at the age of eighty-four. Alix Taylor had studied with some of the great meditation teachers of the Twentieth Century, including a student of Gurdjieff and a little-known philosopher who lived in rural California for many years. Alix introduced me to the work of her 'root guru', Franklin Merrell-Wolff, and I devoured his two books on philosophy and mysticism.

Merrell-Wolff posits three different modes of consciousness. Sensation and cognition are familiar to us: sensing the world and thinking about it. His third mode he calls introception, and fundamentally it is the ability the humans have to experience unitive consciousness. His language here is extremely precise, because, for him, we do not experience unitive consciousness. We realize it. Being unitive it happens outside the normal categories of space and time and cannot be described in those categories. Words and thoughts break down because this realization occurs not within a realm that one can discuss. This unitive realization leaves behind traces that we can experience and describe in our normal space-time categories.

What of my own experiences? I was thunderstruck one evening while dining alone some years ago. The best description was that for an instant the floor, the room, my body, a sense of person, simply fell through, fell away, and the realization of awe inspiring, terrifying unity, presence, being remained. The experience lasted only a moment in my normal waking awareness but I carried away - and still carry - the reverberations of that experience.

If I understand Tibetan Buddhist philosophy correctly, Buddha-mind is simultaneously to realize unitive consciousness and conventional reality simultaneously, constantly. And how far away I am from that!

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Awesome.  Tom, in regards to Franklin Merrell-Wolff I couldn't agree more with what you said.  I don't know if you are already aware of this but there is a really great article about him on The Journal of Conscious Evolution which is a pet project me and Allan Combs started.  

The best description was that for an instant the floor, the room, my body, a sense of person, simply fell through, fell away, and the realization of awe inspiring, terrifying unity, presence, being remained. The experience lasted only a moment in my normal waking awareness but I carried away - and still carry - the reverberations of that experience.

Did you have any body awareness at all?  Any sense of “I” from a local perspective?  It sounds like it was an experience of the pure, unitative Witness.  Incredible.  Thank you for sharing! 

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Thanks so much for the link to that marvelous article! I'll also check out the other material on the site.

It's extremely difficult to talk about the instantaneous realization because normal categories don't apply. There was neither specific locality nor specific temporality - so 'I' (meaning conventional Tom) - didn't exist. The best way I have to understand what happened is that it illustrates Middle Way (Madhyamika) Buddhist teachings: my conventional self was simultaneously realized with this other - perhaps unitive - state for an instant of conventional time. The miracle (if you'll allow me that term) is that the two paths can actually co-exist and be simultaneously realized. What it shows me is how much growing I have to do to be able to realize both continuously!

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Any thoughts on what caused or led to the experience?

I've had some similar things, both from jnana type intellectual exercises, and from meditative practices. Varying in degree and content.

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Two quotes come to mind:

• Pasteur said that 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' I'd rephrase that here to be 'Unitive realizations favor the prepared mind.' I think regular meditative practice is invaluable - if only to stabilize the mind and begin to clear it a bit.
• The other is from the pseudonymous poet Ram Tzu (from his collection No Way): '

Tell me a bit more about the jnana intellectual exercises. I don't know much about jnana yoga and I'd love to understand more.

Tom 

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Well, I called them jnana 'type' exercises, because in this case I'm not talking about traditional jnana like the neti neti, but something more like contemplating the universe and contemplating the self, and letting the ecstatic thrill of realization, of the imagination, trigger off trance like states.

One in particular that was significant for me was a contemplation of the spiral nature of time, using the imagination to explore how the flow of the solar year, the flow of a lifetime, the flow of the universe from big bang to heat death, and dozens of other changes of systems thru time, all contained a structural similarity, a timelike wave that endlessly self replicated at all scales.

A simple visualization, true, but at the time it triggered off a kind of reality shock, combined with a whole body trance state, that I imagine had a lot in common with what you described.

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

That sounds like a marvelous meditation on time itself. If I understand your experience, the mental meditation opened to a much wider experience than the meditation's initial focus. Did you practice the meditation over a period of time or did the experience open quite suddenly?

T 

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

That particular contemplation was kind of a singular event,  - it was fairly formative for me actually, happening when I was a college student some years ago.

 It happened at the end of a multi day series of meditations and exercises, starting on a winter's solstice. I was doing astral projection exercises and working with the symbols of the tarot at the time. The tarot could be said to describe a spiral path of initiations, in which you travel full circle and end up in the same place, but one turn further along in the spiral of time, and it was thinking about that recurring structure that triggered off the particular ecstatic unitive state.

That was on a dec 29th. So, while it was a unique event at the time, I think it was 'caused' by days of focusing my thoughts in a particular way and on a particular topic. 

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Now this gets interesting for me! I'm at work right now on a new Tarot deck, and meditations on the Tarot are a large part of my inner work. Can you tell me a bit more about the approach you used?

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

It's curious to recall that this was thirty years ago. Time flies when you're having fun.

I remember it all quite well. It was an attempt to leap to a new level of understanding of the tarot story, and to invoke new levels of initiation thru that story, so I was doing an intensive study of tarot imagery and history. I had several books and an article printout, and was doing lesser rituals of the pentagram to create a sacred space, then within that sacred space, I was first meditating on tarot symbols, then astral projecting to the realm or 'path' that each card represented.

What I would do was stare fixedly at the card for several minutes, then close my eyes, and a reverse image of the card would be created by my retinal cells. Then I would astral project _thru_ that image of the card, as if it was a doorway, and search the virtual space within the card for more images, and, ideally, for entities.

each astral projection would take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes. I wasn't doing every card, but the cards which i felt were harder to understand, and I would work with the cards in groups, so the effects of one card would be balanced out by the effects of a card I had determined to be it's probable opposite.

I was using the crowley deck for this purpose, and reading his Book of Thoth book for each card as a preiliminary to each meditation.

After a series of days of doing this i figure I was pretty charged up, so the unitive vision that marked the peak of this series of exercises was pretty much inevitable.

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Fabulous! So you were doing pathworking daily. Do you recall on which card you were meditating when things opened up?

I did a series of meditations in 1992-1993 probing the thirty Enochian Aethyrs. When I finished the work several things happened:

1. I broke off all work with inner guides.
2. I stopped searching aimlessly for a relationship.
3. A year later I found my partner John and moved to Iowa. Bizarrely, my partner John looks much like a lover I'd had in an inner relationship - does similar work - treats me the same. So I've always suspected that that inner connection finally manifested physically, but it took my breaking off the inner connection to do it.

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Sigh: my last post got cut off. The Ram Tzu quote is: 'What makes you think you can manufacture grace.' I don't think we can control the process to force a unitive realization. 

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Sure you can.

Piece of cake.

Re: Unitive realization and Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Yeah, it would seem that we would have to be careful about how we define our ability to “control.”  Nonetheless, for time's sake, why else would we have the perennial traditions of mystical spirituality giving us practices towards “Realization”?  They are telling us that we can, indeed, control, to a certain extent (mind you), our ability to have unitive experiences, no?  It's a very good distinction to ponder, I think.