A friend sent me this link.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220216-the-man-rethinking-the-definition-of-reality
It's a very good summary of David Chalmers' life and thought. Throughout, the parallels with ancient mystical insight are nontrivial. For example, there is the contention that the world - external reality - is an illusion. The flat out recognition of this fact, this truth, is the first important step toward enlightenment, toward liberation from the shackles of this illusion we call 'the world'.
This precisely corresponds to Neo's awakening in The Matrix. Most people are more than happy to be immersed in the illusion, to experience and behave as if it's all real and meaningful, money, success, failure, the entire material world and external reality. But when you awaken, when you see that it's all really hollow, a series of nested veils like Russian dolls, then you're freed from the suffering and anxiety, freed from the 'golden chains' of attachment to what seems like such a concrete and compelling reality: 'the world'.
It is directly from this kind of awakening that a person grasps the deeper truth beyond and behind the illusion (or simulation - same thing, different words) that the meaning and significance of life is all internal, it's inside you, and you do control that. Your experience can be hollow, shallow, an intoxicating roller coaster ride chained to external events, or your experience can be solid and powerful, anchored to your stable and calm consciousness, undisturbed by the ups, downs, and sideways movements of the world around you, like an endlessly entertaining performance.
Then comes the second liberation, the second awakening. You see that - the illusion is the reality after all! Because for most people, most of the time, it is. And their experiences, their attachments, their joys and sorrows, their fears and desires, are completely real to them. That's no illusion!
Instead, that is their internal, subjective real experience, not some distant or abstract fantasy, but rock solid reality, invoking pain and pleasure as the case may be.
And I should note that the yogis, the sages of all flavors, recognized all this long ago, these buddhas and bodhisattvas. They developed a highly nuanced science of consciousness with an understanding of the different stages and degrees of realization and liberation, an index of samadhi and moksha, and a knowledge of how to navigate these various stages and modes of being.
Along with the millennia of accumulated wisdom is a profound awareness of the dangers and pitfalls along the path. Perhaps one reason that most people never take 'the red pill' is some intuitive awareness that there is danger that way. Having your whole understanding of life and the world shattered can be disorienting and disturbing. Some people are not ready for unguided psychedelic experience, whether induced by drugs or some other means.
To employ another contemporary and popular mythology, the Force has a dark side, and it's very seductive. If you see beyond the illusion, you also gain the power to manipulate and exploit people, like Jim Jones or Amrit Desai (Kripalu) - or Facebook!
You have many others - perhaps most - like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation, with a mixed legacy. That influence had a positive effect on many people, including George Harrison, David Lynch, and Ray Daliio. (This discussion makes me think of George's composition on Sgt. Pepper's, which I love, 'Within You and Without You'.)
There is one other important element. You alluded to it in your writing about the sangha, the community, or in Muslim terms, the uma. This is the political ramification of spiritual awakening. Referring now to the Matrix myth, there is nothing more threatening to the status quo, to those in power, than a spiritually awakening person. Even more than someone who is merely 'woke' in social justice terms. (I so very dislike the term, 'woke'. It is grammatically incorrect and inelegant. It is also inaccurate and sonorously discordant to my ears.)
Most threatening of all is a group, a community, of awakened and morally committed people. Spiritual awakening does necessarily include a powerful moral component.
There are three images, actual real photographs, that led directly to the end of the American involvement in the Viet Nam war.
The first is the South Vietnamese general who summarily executed a man with a shot to the side of his head with his revolver on the street in Saigon.
The second is the young suffering girl stumbling along the road in agony, with her clothes burned off her body, her entire naked body scorched by Napalm.
The third is the Buddhist monk, one of many who did the same thing, who had doused his body in kerosene, and sat calmly as he set himself on fire. A self-induced Napalm experience.
How do you understand a person who does that? What is the emotion, the commitment, the discipline that can induce a person to do that? IMO, it was that powerful and perplexing question that had even more impact than the other two images. You just couldn't wrap your mind around that degree of passion for peace and an end to suffering. It was Christ in real time, in real life, right in front of your eyes, on the TV in your living room, an unforgettable example of a single human's power and possibility rising to the level of the divine, above and beyond all limits. This was the embodiment of nonviolent protest at its most extreme, and perhaps its most effectiveness. There was more than a single monk who did this. I don't know how many. But imagine a small army, or an entire sangha or uma, so willing to employ self-sacrifice for the cause of peace and social justice. This was the strategy of Mahatma Gandhi, later mimicked by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, too.
There was a powerful historical resonance in this act as well. In Europe some humans burned other humans 'at the stake' for 'practising witchcraft' or for expressing heresy in defiance of the Holy Roman Church's orthodoxy. The Inquisition really happened. This kind of brutal and tortuous response to people who deviate from the norm, who challenge the status quo, who expand the possibilities of human potential, have often been the subjects of shunning, isolation, oppression, imprisonment, torture and death. This fearful and violent response to deviation is one reality that is integral to the imagined worlds of the Matrix films and the Sense8 series. These imagined worlds are not so far removed from the real world as they might first appear.
Unfortunately, and exactly opposite to such principled self-sacrifice, today we have suicide bombers expressing their politics through violence against others. We overestimate their threat. Suicide bombing or suicidal attacks by other means (like 9/11) are self-limiting with little possibility of widespread popularity or practise. Instead of inspiring self-sacrifice for the greater good, they inspire revulsion and condemnation.
Today in the United States the tendency toward violence to serve political and/or cultural purposes is most pronounced and most visible on the far Right. People can say one thing in a poll yet never seriously consider taking action. Still, a disturbing cross section of the population demonstrated an all too eager willingness to cross the lines of peaceful expression on January 6th, 2021. How far will the most extreme go and what responses might they trigger? Don't forget Oklahoma City. Could we see a group of committed Christian MAGA suicide bombers? Could we see more politically motivated killings of civilians?
There is no equivalence between the January 6th insurrectionists and Black Life Matters protesters. The first group sought to overturn the most legitimate election in US history and do physical, even fatal, harm to our elected representatives. They attacked the police without restraint or mercy.
BLM protestors did a lamentable amount of property damage but almost no damage to people. They were defensibly protesting uncalled for violence by the police against black and brown people, violence that included torture and murder. They had no intention to harm. Their intention was to reduce unnecessary harm.
Those who attempt to describe equivalence between BLM protests and January 6th rebellion are insincere. Any such equivalence is false. They are not the same in any way. except perhaps that both involved upset people. One set was upset by long standing patterns of injustice. The other set was upset by not getting their way in a free and fair election.
Making such distinctions is the obligation of spiritually awakened people committed to the truth.
If one takes the expanded view that the true sangha, the entire uma, is all people, all sentient, feeling beings, all plants, animals, rocks, oceans and galaxies, all of creation, past, present and forevermore, then political and moral activism become an integral requirement of the spiritual path. There is no middle, no halfway, no permanent escape to a mountaintop, a cave in the Himalayas, or an island in the tropics. Like the Buddhist monks who went up in flames, the marchers with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. a spiritual life, a moral life, an inner realization, is expressed in action.
It is all maya, illusion, simulation.
Yet it is all Truth, as well.
One can realize both
We are either all in this together or we're not.
One way leads to a world of enlightened interdependence reducing suffering and increasing fulfillment for all.
Another way leads to a world of ignorance, selfishness, pain, and deprivation for most with riches and power for a few.
Which world do you choose?