Post nine of ten, in section Buddhism
Awakening can mean an almost infinite number of things. What I am calling awakening to interdependent origination is the realisation that emerges from a fully embodied and ensouled awakening process. It’s a very mystical experience that involves integration with the underlying energy of the Universe.
This is in comparison to, for example, a Buddhist sutric Awakening, which leads to the realisation that Mind is primary. A sutric awakening of the mind includes opening to the transcendental experience of awareness itself and, through this, perceiving the impermanent, changing nature of how things are subjectively appearing to arise by themselves in every moment. This comes from deep insight into and purification of the mind.
A more embodied and ensouled awakening includes the underlying energetics of all experience and the meaning that permeates everything. Things get a lot more psychedelic when these things are included, and it involves working with the archetypal realm, karmic forces, and the ways in which everything is energetic.
Awakening is a process of becoming more intimately and directly in touch with the truth of experience. Having gone through this process with a truly unfathomable amount of personal and transcendental experience, the outcome is an embodied realisation of a completely different paradigm to scientific materialism and cause and effect. One that can be described most clearly by interdependent origination.
Interdependent Origination
Interdependent origination is more inclusive and holistic than a mind-first way of making sense of experience. It comes from including a huge range of experience, to the point where any perceived ultimate source of truth collapses. Everything is created by everything else in a way that can’t be pinned down.
In the spirit of the embodied and ensouled nature of this realisation, it’s worth recognising that it is different to understand this intellectually than it is to embody it experientially.
The first time I experienced it took a truly unfathomable amount of build-up to get to – the purification of the body and the deepening into the archetypal realm that was required to let go into it was like a many-year-long, intense psychedelic trip. Experiencing interdependent origination was like crossing a threshold into an entirely new way of making sense of myself, time, the Universe, causality, and God. A threshold that, once it has been crossed, can’t be returned from.
This has only deepened. I exist in a lived experience of a quantumly-entangled Universe and ultimately, this is what an embodied understanding of interdependent origination is.
Interdependency
One of the main insights from interdependent origination is that there is no single source of truth. Anything that tries to boil the experience or the Universe down to a simple formula (‘everything is mind’, ‘everything is cause and effect’, ‘everything is empty’) is an oversimplification. Everything is connected to everything else, and the true complexity of the Universe can only be understood as the whole system.
There is, however, a fractal quality to the way that experience emerges. And noticing the patterned details of that emergence can give you deep insight into the nature of experience.
It’s possible to notice some of the key things that experience depends upon to arise. For example, these four things are all required for a human experience to emerge.
- I am creating experience. This version of the Universe only arises because I exist; if I weren’t here, this experience wouldn’t exist
- Experience is creating me. I only arise because this version of the Universe exists; if there was no Universe I wouldn’t be here to experience it
- The Universe is creating experience. It is every aspect of the Universe ever that has created the experience of the Universe
- Experience is creating the Universe. The Universe only arises because it can be experienced
When all of these combine, it connects you to an innately intelligent participatory Universe that you are an expression of.
The images below show each of the different aspects in action – the rainbow part is source or the underlying nature of the Universe, and the white part is the part that is being created.
Importantly, all of these are happening simultaneously. None of them is primary or came first. This means that interdependent origination is not really a concept that you can land on; it’s more like an experience that you can embody and deepen into.
For these illustrations, I have used a donut to represent the Universe.
Interestingly, the Universe is in all these places at the same time, but the different parts of experience – the Universe as a whole and the beings experiencing the Universe – also keep it separate from itself at the same time. The different parts can’t solely be boiled down to just ‘generic Universe expression’. They are here in all their individuality and complexity of expression, too.
When you can experience all of this at once, it collapses the usual sense of cause and effect. Everything is in one way happening at once and in another way playing out along the timeline. Everything is an expression that originates both outside and within space-time at the same time.
I’m far from an expert on quantum physics, but my sense is that it would line up with this perspective in very interesting ways. Here is just one perspective on how that could be possible.
The Soul
One of the simplest ways I have found to describe this interdependent emergence of experience is by naming some underlying building blocks of experience as body, heart, mind, and soul. Each of these plays a vital role in the Universe arising in the way that it does, but for now I want to focus on the soul aspect of the Universe.
The soul can’t be understood as an intellectual concept; it’s more like an intuitive and metaphorical resonance. It’s the meaning that infuses every aspect of experience, and meaningfulness can’t be grasped; it can only be expressed, felt, and lived.
The importance of including the meaning aspect of the Universe in an understanding of true nature, rather than assuming that the mind or something more purely rational is the ultimate source of truth, is that it allows you to step outside of your individual worldview.
A mind-first perspective can lead you into a bit of a strange dead end. Deep insights into emptiness and the collapse of causality can lead people to rationalise experience away, coming to the conclusion that nothing really exists. The mind can also grab hold of insights or views and make concrete statements as if it has an objective perspective on experience.
What the soul and meaning allow you to do is to see these experiences as another expression of meaningfulness. Its flexible nature is much more inclusive in a way where it doesn’t make any conclusion about experience; it just continually flows with what is present.
A part of being able to embody this level of fluidity with all experience is feeling clearly that you are only one aspect of an entire Universe that is being created in this moment. The Universe is inherently alive and full of rich content that you are an expression of. There is meaning, story, and intelligence baked into every aspect of it. This shows you an inherently interconnected Universe rather than a self-created or self-centred one.
From this embodied and ensouled perspective, if you experience a sense of nothingness, for example, then this isn’t an ultimate truth or reality; it is one possible experience to have in the Universe. Something like this can be incredibly profound and impactful, but it is still just one part of the Universal expression that is unfolding in that moment, rather than a final insight.
Conclusion
With interdependent origination, one of the key insights is that there is no one single source of truth or one place that everything has arisen from. It all depends on all the other pieces of the puzzle.
This inability for life to solve itself or to land anywhere ultimate or final is the reason why life even exists. If the Universe was solvable, it would eventually just fizzle out, like a chemistry experiment that had run its course. Or if it could land somewhere solid, it would do that and everything would stop. Or if it could come into unity, then it would become a single experience machine with no experiencer.
The inability for these things to happen keeps it in the process; this is what creates life.