At some point, the experience of located openness explodes or unfolds into unbounded space. It seems that to reach even the openness, one must keep intention bright while relinquishing volitional control. Maintaining this mindset and attentional brightness (with more volition, it could be called intensity) eventually “explodes” (satori) or unfolds (into asamprajnata samadhi). To experience the openness as consistent, extending somewhat in duration, it is helpful or perhaps necessary to willingly let go of conceptual markers. They will drop off regardless. In this sense, even though this openness may be said to be located, it is not specifiably located.
I am using objective terms, but I am implying that this “openness” is self.
In one sense, then, we can call openness egoLESSness. The individual identification and meaning markers–concepts, volition, reference points (sometimes sensations, sometimes not)–are released from conscious awareness. Nevertheless, one soon slides back into a normal sense of self and awareness, sometimes with emotional and perceptual aftereffects that may encourage one to change one’s general understanding. In this milder experience, one may believe that the self is gone, but there are still some edges or some feeling of individuality even though those edges are unspecifiable, perhaps unrecognized or unnoticed by the person who is experiencing.
If one continually returns to such openness, eventually, the edges disappear. This can occur immediately, like being struck by lightning, and this can occur gradually, like walking through a thick fog and eventually being soaked to the bone. If one reverses that process with the fog, it is more like that the fog eventually dissipates back into it’s space, taking immeasurably minuscule parts of the self with it until everything is gone. The edges dissipate.
What should we call this unbounded space? In contrast, it seems there is an “equal” but very different experience where space and time do not enter in. There is the experience that everything is within, as if the universe moves backwards to the point of the Big Bang, and that point is consciousness. Whereas the unbounded experience is indescribably open, this alternate experience is phenomenally immediate. In each of these experiences, there is no sense of self, there is only the feeling afterwards that eternity was immediately present or that it extends throughout unspoken forever.
(Due to speaking in verbs and nouns, the language is imperfect. Due to the prior experience of individuality, though, the language closely resembles the experiences. Because one is familiar with the edges of individuality, we can say that there is a process of fading. One’s awareness of the edges fade as one is less controlled or defined by those edges; as one is less controlled or limited by those edges, awareness of them fades. This is usually a process. This process can happen “immediately”–in which case the best descriptions are given in the Zen literature. Ontologically, though, those “edges” remain as real as they ever were, but one relates differently to them as circumstances–not limitations–afterwards; they become the various flavors of the “one taste” of being.)
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz