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SURFACES AND DEPTH!!!!!by John DupuyOne of the main insights ofthe great mystics, and one ofthe essential truths of IntegralRecovery is that all su!eringcomes from identification withsurfaces. This is not a dogmathat one has to believe or buy,based on what I or anyoneelse is saying, this is anexperiential given that one will discover as onepractices and plunges again and again into thedepths of one’s own being in daily contemplativeand meditative practice. And yes, again, dailycontemplative interior practice is an essential part ofIntegral Recovery practice. Someone recentlydefined practice as “cultivation through repetition.” 2009 John Dupuy!This is the best short definition I think I’ve heard.What are we cultivating? Through exercise andnutrition: strength, health and vitality; through ourcognitive work: new perspectives, knowledge andwisdom; through our emotional and shadow work:freedom from the dysfunctional aspects of our pastprogramming, and the freedom not to get lost inour current drama; through our spiritual practice:the ability to live our lives from our core, whichmeans our best and truest self. This means goingbeyond the apparent to the essential. We cultivateall of these qualities by the constant repetitiveexercise of these four essential aspects of ourselves: body, mind, heart, and soul.As Marco Morelli once told me, daily practice isequivalent to keeping the fire going under the pot.To keep the fire of transformation and growthgoing, one has to keep the heat up. If oneapproaches the project of transformation andtransmutation piecemeal, or sporadically, thedesired changes simply will not happen. Again, thecall and challenge of Integral Recovery is dailyIntegral Practice.pg. 1
www.IntegralRecovery.comOne of the main problems that I have seen forpeople on this path is the fear that arises oftenwhen one is doing the work. The problem is not that“oh, this doesn’t work,” but “this is too much!” Whenthe darkness and the pain and the chaos and thedark nights emerge, the natural tendency is to runas quickly as possible from the darkness, and eventhe light. It was this same attempt to avoidunpleasant and unwanted states that lead to usingdrugs and subsequent dependency in the first place.As Bill Harris has said for those using Holosync andfacing the chaos that necessarily comes up, “youshould high five your partner,” because chaos is themother of evolution and when chaos kicks in, youare getting ready for what Prigogyne called the“escape into higher order.” If one does not shortcircuit the process and stays with it, one willtransform and grow. How do we do this? Bycontinuing to expand, invite, and allow the processof going from chaos into higher order to continue.We can’t control the chaos, but we can invite it:from caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly. Not justonce, but over and over again: the constant processof recreation (death and rebirth), expansion,evolution and growth. 2009 John Dupuy!A teaching for me in this regard happened when Iwas on retreat at a Benedictine monastery innorthern New Mexico. It was an unstructuredretreat, so I was on my own. I was doing Holosyncmeditation for three hours a day and wasexperiencing a tremendous darkness that was scaryas hell. It was all I could do to stay with themeditation: my nose seemed barely above the waterline. During a break, I was helping out in themonastery bookstore and came across a pamphletby the great American monk, mystic, and writerThomas Merton. My eyes fell on a passage that saidsomething to thee!ectthatthe“To be changed,mysticrecognizestransformed, to move to thethat God is in thenext level or stage we mustdarkness as well asthe light. This was“let the darkness come uponjust the Zen slap Ius,” and let ourselves moveneeded. I returnedthrough the darkness”to my interior workwithanewacceptance for thedarkness, fear and pain, and soon the darknessturned to heat and warmth, and then brilliant clarity.pg. 2
www.IntegralRecovery.comAnd again I emerged from this period into whatseemed like a new plateau, or level of emotionalhealing and spiritual understanding. A line from oneof my favorite poems illustrates this point brilliantly:T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker.”"I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness comeupon you, which shall be the darkness of God. As, ina theatre, the lights are extinguished for the lightsto be changed.To be changed, transformed, to move to the nextlevel or stage we must “let the darkness come uponus,” and let ourselves move through the darkness ofthe birth canal in which our old ideas, beliefs, andidentities die and are reborn again and again. Howdo we do this? By continuing to expand and becomeidentified with the context, the Witness, and not theobjects that arise. We su!er and get stuck when weidentify with objects, mistaking them for subjects,or our self. Meditation is not a process of ceasing tothink. This has lead to great misunderstanding andoften a hurtful anti-intellectual stance. The minddoes not cease to think, but the thoughts arise as 2009 John Dupuy!objects in the vast sea of pure awareness that is ouroriginal face. Our former subjects become objects,until eventually even that dichotomy disappears andthere is only the One and you are IT, always havebeen and always will be. But even this is misleading,because You do not exist in time, time arises in You.I think this is the vital living core of the spiritualwork that we do.Let me tell of a recurring dream that I had when Iwas very young, perhaps seven or eight years old.This is the last part of a longer dream but it isillustrative of what I have been talking about, theconstant repetitive plunging below our surfaces intothe depths of our being through daily meditativecontemplative practice. In the last part of this dreamI am standing in front of this huge pit. I look downinto the pit and see darkness and horror, likelooking into the mouth of hell. At this point I awakecompletely freaked out and terrified. Sometimes ittook a long time for the fear to leave me. Yearslater, when I was attending graduate school, wewere doing a process group and a woman wasspeaking of some deep traumatic experience thatshe had experienced. While she was talking I closedpg. 3
www.IntegralRecovery.commy eyes and had a waking dream or vision. In thevision I am standing before the pit of darknessagain, and this time I do not recoil in terror but diveinto the pit and the darkness. And I feel myselfgoing down and down into this pit of darkness. Ifeel the gore and slime as I plunge deeper anddeeper into this pit suddenly I am through thedarkness and find myself swimming through thisbeautiful blue-green water and all the filth and goreis washing o! me. I then surface and see thebeautiful blue sky and billowy clouds and I am inbetween two islands with palm trees andimmaculate white beaches. It felt like a glimpse ofparadise. I quickly returned to the group andrealized that I had found the meaning andresolution of this terrifying dream from mychildhood. The meaning was clear, the only way outof my darkness was through it, and the darkness isnot deep or infinite but a thin and shallow surfacecompared to the immensity of the beauty that wasunderneath the surface. It is the hero’s journey. Wemust be willing to cross the threshold from theknown into the unknown. We must enter thedragon’s lair, the dark cavern and face our owndemons to find the treasures that lie beyond our 2009 John Dupuy!darkness and fears. By our willingness to take thisjourney we find our medicine, and power: that is ourgift to the world, our payback to life. This is ajourney that we must be willing to take again andagain, through fear, darkness, and chaos, intowisdom, strength and compassion. Over and overagain. Not just once (that would be nice!), stress,chaos, crisis, the mother of evolution. The goodnews is that as we embrace this chaotic rebirthprocess we can do it with equanimity andconfidence in the ultimate goodness of the process.The more we do this with time and practice, themore that we can do this, and the more we can takeon. First, just for ourselves then ultimately for allsentient beings, and, as Wilber succinctly put it, “wesu!er more but it bothers us less.”Again T.S. Eliot:“I said to my soul, be still,and wait without hope.For hope would be hope forthewrongthing;waitwithout love,pg. 4
www.IntegralRecovery.comfor love would be love of the wrong thing;there is yet faith,but the faith and the love and the hope areall in the waiting.Wait without thought, for you are not readyfor thought: so the darkness shall be thelight, and the stillness the dancing.”This passage from Eliot’s “East Coker” is not justpretty poetry but an accurate description of theinterior journey, of the inner work. We must be stilland wait. There can be great activity both emotionaland intellectual as we “be still”, because being stilldoes not mean freezing the universe, it meansholding it in the greater context of emptiness andpure awareness. Imagine a wiggling bug on thesurface of a vast, still ocean. From fifty thousandfeet looking down on the ocean we would say thatthe ocean is still indeed, even though our little bugis shaking all over. In the context of emptiness, thisvast endless spaciousness, no matter what the egoor mind is doing, it happens in stillness: the Witnessis always still (or as Ken Wilber says, “emptiness is 2009 John Dupuy!simple - it has no moving parts.”) To further look atthis, imagine you are a hundred meters under theocean in still calm water. There could be a tsunamipassing over your head and at that depth all will bestill. In our daily meditation, as we plunge everdeeper into this vast spaciousness that is our trueSelf, we are less perturbed by the disturbances onthe surfaces, the peripheries. This does not meanthat we ignore the surfaces either, but we can, forthe first time, perhaps, become really e!ective indealing with these surface manifestations, becausefor the first time we can hold them in their truecontext, and we can do so with lightness, wisdom,and compassion. We can dance the dance of lifewith beauty, skillfulness, and grace because we haveseen and know our original face: the vastconsciousness from which all arises.We don’t “hope” or “love” because we have “faith” inthe waiting. Because as things, emotions, thoughts,and feelings arise in the vastness of our true Self,they will arise, release and self-liberate, and theunderstanding and wisdom that arise from thiswaiting is of a nature and order that seems to befrom a di!erent altitude and magnitude than ourpg. 5
www.IntegralRecovery.comformerly contracted state could have grasped. Thisis just one of the reasons that “cultivation throughrepetition,” or daily practice is so vitally important toour future as individuals, a species, the planet, andso on. Because from these states of expansion andtranscended awareness, a creativity and intelligencethat we are perhaps just beginning to realize, canburn through the fog of our separate, isolated, littleself-dreams and can allow us to truly create theworld anew in all quadrants, lines, stage, states andtypes.“We wait without thought, for we are not ready forthought,” yet. When I plunge into these depths, Icannot stop my mind from doing what it does mostof the time. That is, think. I do, however, bracket mythoughts, not believing the fictions and stories thatit spins about what is arising. They are just storiesthat my little mind creates and will keep me stuck ifI pay them heed. After I do go through the darknessor whatever is arising, through the surface into thevast stillness, then I am ready for thought. In thatdarkness, comes the light and in that stillness thedancing. Again, the problems that we have createdare not solvable from the level, state, or 2009 John Dupuy!consciousness that created them. At the level onwhich they were created, we just create moreproblems, more karma, more knots. To undo theknots and problems we have created on oursurfaces we must go through our surfaces into thedepths of our true being. From that depth we cancultivate the ability to release, unwind and untie ourtraumas and dramas and fictions that keep usprisoners and asleep.Let me introduce a question that I often use inteaching that functions something like a Zen koan,that is a question that, if we struggle with it, andfind the solution in ourselves, leads us to a newlevel of understanding of the deepest essentiallevels of reality and provides us a glimpse of ourtrue self, our “original face” before our parents wereborn, before the Big Bang.This is the question: How could a Jew forgive theNazis? Given these Nazis had murdered yourchildren, wife, husband, parents, family, friends,indeed your whole world and culture. How could youforgive this? Stop reading. See and feel this. See thedoors being kicked in, in the middle of the night.pg. 6
www.IntegralRecovery.comFeel and smell the stench of the cattle cars, theclaustrophobic horror. See the Nazi SS guards, lookat them, feel their arrogance and the cruelty. See theattack dogs, their dogs with them as they open thecattle cars and force your family out and separatethem and strip them and prepare them for the“showers,” the gas chamber See your family dyingin the gas chamber, slowly, horribly, obscenely.Feel it. See it. Smell it. Hear it. And ask yourself, howcould a Jew forgive the Nazis?non-dual state realization. It is beyond good andevil. Am I proposing a new category “goodevil”? Am Isaying that somehow such a realization or stage ofdevelopment puts one beyond such moralizingcategories as good and evil? Am I saying that goodand evil don’t exist? No, good and evil do exist asmuch as clouds and rocks, trees, you and me. WhatI’m saying is that both good and evil arise out ofemptiness, pure awareness, Spirit, You. They areforms, objects, if you will, that arise out ofemptiness, pure luminescent awareness that is yourIt is not humanly possible. It is too much, way too“original
I was doing Holosync meditation for three hours a day and was experiencing a tremendous darkness that was scary as hell. It was all I could do to stay with the meditation: my nose seemed barely above the water line. During a break, I was helping out in the monastery bookstore and came across a pamphlet by the great American monk, mystic, and writer Thomas Merton. My eyes fell on a passage that .
