To anybody following this thread, I just wanted to say that I wasn’t quite as familiar as I should have been with Ken Wilber’s work in the previous weeks. I now see that I was having one almighty Dark Night of the Self (worst experience of my life), which marked the State transition from Causal to Empty Witness (Turiya). I simply didn’t know this was going to happen in advance and so I wasn’t able to make sense of what was happening to me while it was happening, and of course the mainstream medical community had no idea either.
In my previous post my frame of reference was wrong. This was not, for the most part, an Indigo Structure issue, but a State transition issue that occurred at the Indigo Stage. I am still at Indigo but my State has changed to Empty Witness. It’s an unmistakable shift in the nature of consciousness. You can’t fail to notice it. It’s as if a giant gaping hole of infinity has opened up in the location where some sort of causal egoic component of consciousness used to reside. Or perhaps a better analogy is to say that the infinite awareness component was always there, but the causal egoic component was obscuring the infinite component and had to ‘die’ and fall away in order to reveal what was underneath. The dying process is what Ken refers to as the Dark Night of the Self, and Ken does make mention of the fact that this is a profound type of death. The following quote is taken his The Religion of Tomorrow (which is the most relatable book I have ever read in my life, and that’s on the back of studying Western analytic philosophy for 20 years):
“That first phase, or causal-to-Witness phase, of the dark night of the Self is a profound death in many ways, a complete dis-identification with all finite qualities, traits, tendencies, and characteristics of a self-sense. (The turiya Empty Witness is indeed
“empty” of all contents, objects, and phenomena…”
“Profound” is an understatement Ken! It should come with a massive warning label.
The outcome of all of this is quite incredible. Initially my causal egoic self represented the appearance of this infinite awareness (Empty Witness) as something foreign, scary and void of content. But this seems to have been some sort of egoic self-delusion and infinite awareness is, in fact, totally devoid of content but does have a subtle warmth and peacefulness to it. This seems to interact with the content of the ‘outside’ world in the most brilliant way. Everything that I previously enjoyed about reality has gained a new depth of enjoyment, and even the things I didn’t enjoy have a newfound beauty. A stunning rawness of feeling that I have never felt before. And the default baseline experience is a simple, present peacefulness. Increasingly, I can switch into infinite awareness at leisure without the need to meditate.
I can’t give enough credit to Ken Wilber. The man is a genius. To me, he must be some type of ‘consciousness savant’. The beauty of our situation, by being alive in a Post-Ken-Wilber Era, is that Ken has laid down the paths for us. The mist has cleared and I can see the way forward from Empty Witness to Nondual, and the Structural path from Indigo to Violet to Ultraviolet to White. I had always felt a deep sense of imposter syndrome throughout my life, as though I were playing the game of being human. That imposter syndrome has lifted, and I have gained a path forward in life. I can see, for instance, that another ego death will likely occur at my State transition from Empty Witness to Nonduality (Ken calls this a Dark Night of the Higher Self), but he seems to suggest that this type of ego/identity death will be less profound than the previous one, which is good news as I don’t want to end up in the hospital emergency department again! I can also see that I have many Structures ahead to transcend and include.
I understand that the path may take years, but I am young (40 years old), and there is no purely logical reason why I can’t proceed to a permanent State of nonduality and White Supermind. And there is nothing at all special about me. That’s the important thing to realise if you’re reading this post. If you met me, you would regard me as a simple, regular person. There is nothing about my identity or situation that makes me noteworthy, which means that there is nothing stopping you (whomever you might be) from taking the same path as me. If you can make it to Third Tier, then you’ll understand that there is no vocation more important than Waking Up and Growing Up.
Please understand that Ken has mapped the Waking Up path in such a simple-to-understand way that would otherwise have been impossible for us to navigate without deferring to some type of Ancient Tradition, which would have taken half a lifetime to properly comprehend. My journey to date has taken six months. Those six months have been highly confusing but now that I am familiar with Ken’s work, I can see that he has basically distilled the contents of the Dharmic traditions and Western mystical traditions into a single thesis, and combined those great Waking Up traditions with Growing Up in such a way that the Buddha himself would be surprised. The Buddha never had access to the Growing Up component of consciousness that Ken has merged with Waking Up.
Ken contextualises his place in history as a ‘Fourth Turning of the Dharma’. This may sound grandiose at first glance, but I am convinced that Ken Wilber is a modern-day Buddha. He is going to be hugely important historical figure to posterity. Sometimes we just can’t see the importance of someone like Ken Wilber due to the fact that he is miles ahead of us.
I can see that I am starting to manifest the type of dysfunctions that crop up at Violet (thanks for warning me Ken!), so I will finish here. If anyone ever wants some individualised assistance with mid-level Waking Up and Growing UP, then please feel free to message me. It’s a service I will offer entirely for free and I will never see any form of recompense (various synchronicities have recently resulted in my being financially free).
