From Wholeness and Integration 

Here’s a summary that I wrote 1/20/18, about 10 months after the morning in question.

It’s about breaking the cultural frame that keeps us from solving our species-wide problems. Being able to allow all the competing systems and seeing the wholeness. Gebser’s “transparency”. Kegan’s Level 5. The center of Preece’s wheel. The Indigenous vision. Chapman’s sense that Kegan’s L5 and Dzogchen are related. Simplicity and complexity meet at their edges.

Note: I just discovered that five years previously I elaborated an earlier iteration of the aspect of trying to break the cultural enthrallment to contact source. That note of 12/9/2012 was an immediate precursor of starting this whole project.

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The morning of 3/28/17 I was having trouble sleeping. I mentally  went through my sleep and pain strategies, but none of them seemed sufficient for this particular moment. I started to panic as the practices appeared faster and faster and seemed more and more inadequate.

Each strategy was from a system I had studied and practiced with some depth. But so many systems appearing in quick succession  drained all of them of all their value. Negative thoughts were battling for my attention with previously effective practices.

Desperate, I tried an idea that I’d never been able to sustain for more than a few moments previously. Just allow whatever appears to fully unfold, no matter how strong the resistance. I’d been reading Ken McLeod’s most recent book, A Trackless Path, his translation and commentary on a Dzogchen text of Jigme Lingpa. Ken’s description of his struggles with this practice made it seem more accessible. What ensued seemed like a revelation  of a thread running through my life, but previously just below consciousness.  I sketched a quick outline so I could go back later and recover the revelation.  Here is the sketch. Putting meat back on the bones is my next project. Actually the next step is to try to describe the “thread running through my life, but previously just below consciousness” that  was revealed. (1/23/18).

Sketch of narrative arc by my Plotkin stages, made 3/28/17, to help remember the revealed thread:

STAGES 1-2
Home
Nourishing

STAGE 3
Culture shallow
Reading
Vision of breaking out

STAGE 4
Lsd to break conditioning, access genetic layer
Impossible culture project

STAGE 5
Find zen
immerse
Need Econ
Roshi says do both
Independent Scholar’s Journal
Zen path dead end

STAGE 6
Library self authoring
Using mantra crystals

STAGE 7
Physically can’t sit
Integration fades becomes mental
Hard challenge of progression

STAGE 7 OPENING EVENT
Last night ping pong pinball panic
Let go into dzogchen
All the strands emerge
Forging level 5 identity
Spacious allow panic let all elements unfold
All inclusive by necessity
Letting go of search for system of control
More complex and richer
Tolerate having no fixed mental structure

Note 2/5/2019: A condensed version of the “opening event” directly above is found at Dogen quote.