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Ken Wilber – Folge 39 Part 2
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Ken: I would like to make a little jump in time to the moment when you met Treya. Is that okay?
Veit: Sure. When was this?
Ken: Because you know, for me, this is… I hope it’s fine that I’m asking you, but I have to tell you
this.
This was my first meeting with you, it was about this book, you know. So I found out much later
about your philosophical work.
Veit: Right. I’ve only really commented on Treya publicly one or two times. And I’d be glad to do
so now. But one of the reasons is that it’s by far one of the most profound periods in my life. And
my relationship with Treya changed me in so many unbelievably deep and profound ways.
In some ways, it was even kind of bigger realizations of several things that I already knew and
that I was already living. But they became enormously accelerated in these circumstances. And
it was, I think, because from the very beginning, it was a situation framed by a constant
awareness of death. I mean, it really was life and death. You can’t just have academic ideas
here, this is life and death, and you can’t get around that. This happened just 10 days after we
were married. We discovered she had cancer, and the kind of cancer she had was so virulent
that the number of people that lived five years was exactly zero percent. In other words, you
couldn’t expect five years even if you did absolutely everything right that was known at the time.
That was serious, and that was, in a sense, the test of both of our beliefs, our awareness,
whatever spiritual realizations we had had. By that time, I had been intensely meditating for at
least 10, 12 years. She also had a major meditative practice. And one of the things that, just
speaking for myself, it was an extraordinary deepening of awareness. Because of my practice,
which I had… I was sort of practicing all the world’s religions, but I had particularly been focusing
on Zen Buddhism, because, again, there was this thing called Satori, and I just really wanted to
know what that was.
Over the course of over a decade or so, I had ended up having several Satori. It was everything
I thought it was. It certainly helped with the writing that I was doing. But that even got deepened
and accelerated during the course with Treya. And one of the things that happened was, as
soon as we found out that she had cancer, I just threw my whole life over to being of service to
her. Up to that point, because we had met when I was in my early 30s, I had been writing, you
know, literally every day for about 10 years.
In terms of spiritual practice, it was more and more about what happens with awareness as you
meditate and do spiritual practices. It becomes in Sanskrit what’s called “neti neti.” I’m not this,
I’m not that, I’m not this, I’m not that. It’s a whole process of disidentification with any small, finite
entity that you identify with. The traditions maintain that that’s a case of mistaken identity
because that’s not who you really are.
You can write out a whole list of things describing yourself. Like if somebody right now says,
“Okay, describe who you are,” you might say, “Well, my name is this, I’m this old, I weigh this
much, I was born here, I got educated here, I’m in a relationship now, I work at this job.” You can
just list all of these things. But the traditions would say, just notice that those are all objects that
you can see. Now you have another self, and it is the self that’s actually seeing that. All the
things that you saw are fine, but they’re not your real self. They’re your relative self, but now who
is that seer?
Who is that witness of all of that? One hint is it’s neti neti. It’s not that thing, it’s not that thing, it’s
not that thing. It’s the thing that sees all those things. It’s the seer. It can’t be seen. This is just
pure awareness. It’s pure consciousness and it’s sometimes called your true self. You still have
to talk in realistic terms a little bit, but Zen master Shibayama called this true self “absolute
subjectivity.” That just means it’s just that pure subject, not anything that can be seen as an
object. So, just pure awareness. And so it’s the self that was watching you describe yourself.
That point you were describing wasn’t the real self, it was an object self, a small self. But the big
self is ever-present, timeless, radically open, and radically free, but it’s not bound to identify with
anything. It’s a radical freedom from all of that.
One of the things that happen in any of the paths of great liberation, any of the great mystical
paths, is that when you do have one of your first profound satori’s or awakening experiences or
enlightenment experiences, it’s this realization of just that pure self, that pure “I am-ness” that
isn’t any little thing here or there. You realize that that’s a radical freedom. It also happens to be
sort of deeply intimate with everything that’s arising. So it’s not any one thing. So it’s neti neti,
but it’s everything. It’s absolutely embracing everything. And so that’s always held to be a relief
from suffering, a relief from angst, a relief from fear.
The Upanishads say, “Wherever there is other, there is fear.” And that’s right. The little separate
self is always separating itself from other things. And since there’s other, there’s fear, because
those other things can hurt it. They can kill it, they can squash it, they can frustrate it, and so on.
But when you are one with that other, as well as one with this self, when you’re one with literally
everything that’s arising, there is no other. So there’s nothing that can hurt you literally. There’s
nothing outside of you that could run into you or crash into you and cause problems.
For the same reason, there’s a fundamental lack of addictive desire or grasping, because again,
there’s nothing outside of you. It’s all arising within your awareness. That had become quite
obvious to me over the past 10, 12, 15 years. But it got a particularly deepened realization with
Treya. I would say there were sort of two parts. One was this sense of freedom. And then one
was the sense of all-embracing love. I’ll come back to the love.
But the freedom was up until I met Treya. I literally spent pretty much every day of my life
writing. I get up, well, I still do, but I wake up around three or four in the morning, get up
immediately, go to the desk, and start writing. I just start pouring down and just keep going as
long as I can sit up and write. When my fingernails start getting purple and my lips start getting
purple, I just have to stop. Then I’ll go back to the same thing the next day.
So when Treya had cancer, I just stopped doing all of that really for the first time in my adult life.
Even though I’d had these relatively deep experiences of Satori and neti neti and all of that, I
found that at a very deep level it was very hard for me to let go of… it wasn’t the activity, it was
the subtle identity that I had created around doing that. That’s what I was, this writer. And when I
stopped doing that, that really was sort of the last major thing that I had a strong identity with,
and that was just taken away. For about a year it was extremely hard, it was a very difficult
situation. I really was just undergoing the sort of death of that particular small, older self. I wasn’t
losing the capacity to do the activity, but I just was no longer radically identified with it and sort of
grasping onto it. That was what was kind of left of my separate self-sense.
As I had to just let go of that, then I was forced to just see it as an object. I was forced to just
become aware of it and rest more in just pure awareness. Treya was doing a similar thing
because she was also dying. She immediately, as she found that news out, went into an
increased meditative practice because she knew what was happening. Here’s both of us dying,
literally, from moment to moment.
I always say, right up to the literal moment she physically died, I always said that the two of us
grew up together and we died together. That’s what happened. In the midst of this sort of dying
to these smaller selves, if you look at it, okay now there’s this pure awareness or pure
consciousness or ultimate ground of being that you’re becoming more in touch with. Usually,
most of the mystics, I don’t like that term but most of the mystics east and west, Buddhist,
Vedantic, Christian mystics, maintain you can’t really describe that ground of being. Because
any concepts that we use make sense only in terms of their opposites. Even infinite versus
finite, happy versus sad, good versus evil, pleasure versus pain, almost all of our concepts are
part of a dualistic scheme.
But reality doesn’t have any opposites because it’s radically inclusive. You can’t even say that
without a contradiction. That’s why people like Nagarjuna and the whole emptiness notion in
Buddhism, it’s basically saying that any quality you want to define ultimate reality with,
consciousness, being, bliss, awareness, whatever you want, in fact, the real reality, which
Nagarjuna called emptiness, shunyata, is neither take any one of those terms series, we’ll just
call that x, whatever it is. Nagarjuna had treatise after treatise demonstrating using any number
of words for x, consciousness, bliss, being, what it was
. He demonstrated that ultimate reality is neither x, nor not x, nor both, nor neither. Another is
just a radical cleaning out of all your concepts, all your dualistic concepts. The more you do that,
the more you find what’s left in existence is just pure awareness, not labeled, not
conceptualized, just pure awareness. It also happens to embrace everything that’s arising.
We were both going through that process, even though most of the great and sophisticated
mystics like Nagarjuna said, okay, you can’t really describe this thing, all you can do is directly
awaken to it. But until that time, any description you use is just wrong. It won’t work. But you find
common metaphors that are often used to describe it. Even Eastern traditions will often refer to
that ultimate state as sat-chit-ananda, being consciousness bliss. Another famous trinity is the
good, the true, and the beautiful. That kind of works. Probably the single most famous is “God is
love” and it’s a special kind of love. We have sort of what you call small love and big love. Small
love is “I love this, I don’t love that, I love this, ooh I hate that.” So it’s another set of dualistic
opposites and most people know small love. They love this, they don’t love that. But big love is
radically all-inclusive. It includes small love, it also includes hate. It embraces both of those fully.
As a matter of fact, everything that arises moment to moment is embraced fully by love because
love is just another name for the ground of everything that’s existing.
Under circumstances like that, you have to realize how really sharp, major, intense big love is.
So it’ll say things like “I love that mountain, I love those trees, I love those clouds, I love that car,
I love those buildings, I love my friends.” It’ll also say “I love the ozone hole and I love terrorist
attacks and I love seeing people suffer and die. I love global warming and I love…” I mean
literally, it’s the ground of all being and so everything that’s arising is arising out of this infinite
love. In the relative realm, okay, I really don’t like global warming and I’m gonna work to stop
that, but that’s on the ground of love because the ground of being is the ground of all being. The
ground of being isn’t just the ground for the stuff you like and then the stuff you don’t like doesn’t
have a ground of being. No, it does. Even in the Bible, “I the Lord make the light to fall on the
good and the bad alike. I the Lord do all these things.”
That’s what big love is. As Treya and I were dying and realizing neti neti, I’m not that, I’m not
that, we were also opening to this really deep unconditional love. When we first… it might sound
paradoxical, but we first learned how to do it by loving each other. That love was so… just for
both of us, we had all loved before and deeply. But for both of us, it was just nothing like this
ever. It just blew us away. It seemed to be that love that was just so deep, it was connecting with
the entire ground, and it just spilled out of us and embraced the entire universe. This is
happening to me, who has now not been writing.
Well, after that first while, I stopped writing the day she got cancer, and then I went through a
year of extremely difficult adjustment where I really had to die to that self. Then for the next four
years that she lived, I was simply there 24 hours a day serving her. That’s all I did. I’m getting a
lesson in how to apply this love in a selfless service. These things are all kind of moving forward.
It’s moving forward in terms of this understanding of both universal freedom and universal love.
Then it’s also being applied just directly to this person and to just this event, and just what we
were doing here. But it became deeper and deeper. My loving care for her just kept deepening
the whole time. It was mutually reinforced and the love that we would feel from the other person
would make us feel worthy to receive that kind of love. Because most people just, when you’re
met with something like that, the common response is, “Well, I don’t deserve that, whatever that
is. If you really knew me better, you’d know what a rotten person I was and you couldn’t possibly
love me the way you are now.” But that was just the work that we did and it was extraordinary.
Treya was… one of the reasons that she was a teacher for me was she had this almost absolute
transparency of her own individual self. One of the ways that showed up is that she literally had
no secrets. I found this out in an unbelievable way after she had died. She had asked me to
write a book about this ordeal to try and convey some of the things that had happened. It wasn’t
something that I would have myself chosen to do, but I was fine. I promised I’d do it and I did in
the book “Grace and Grit.” Treya, for the whole time I knew her and apparently searching back
several years, kept journals and she made entries in those journals almost every day.
I always just noticed that it wasn’t like she would, you know, get in the corner and, you know,
close the shades and do it all hidden. But it just seemed to be a really important time of hers and
time that she could just be alone and focus on what was happening for her. I had actually
decided that when she died, I was going to simply destroy the journals. I wasn’t going to read
them. I wasn’t going to let anybody else read them, because I felt that that was just her private
time. The last night that I carried her upstairs before she died, there was a stack of her journals
in the corner. As we walked by them, all she did was point to the journals and she said, “You’ll
need those.” I knew exactly what she meant. If I was going to write this book, I would need to be
able to include her thoughts about things. I would have to read the journals and she was
saying… she knew I wasn’t going to. And so she was saying, “No, you need, it’s OK.”
So, I got those. Reading them was one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever done. But what
increasingly surprised me deeply is that there wasn’t really a single major thing in her journals
that she hadn’t told me. Now I think of myself as open, I think of most people as open, but if I’m
writing journals, I’m going to say one or two things about people that I’m not going to tell them,
you know. “I love this person, but by the way, he’s an idiot” or something like that. Absolutely
transparent. She had no secrets. I think it was in part because she had this extraordinary
awareness that just permeated her being and just made it radically transparent. I never saw her
lie.
Of all the horrifying medical treatments she went through, I never once saw her afraid. I never
saw fear in her. It was because of this radical openness. People who actually met her, that’s why
they fell in love. It was just an immediate, “Ah,” and one of the most common things that I would
see, and I loved it, and I would see this even with spiritual teachers. We’d be in line to talk to a
famous spiritual teacher or something. I would talk and it was great, we connected, and Treya
would start talking to them. I would always watch them, and the teachers were just like… And it’s
like, what is this? Then she’d get out of line and they’d always turn to their aides and go, “Okay,
who was that?” And they’d go, “Oh, well, yeah, right.” That was what you would like to become.
That was a stunning, constant lesson for me. It’s just that kind of presence, that kind of integrity,
and that kind of honesty is radically rare.
She was also one of the literally two or three most physically beautiful women I’ve ever met in
my life. So I felt that even with the cancer and the difficulty and all of that, it was the best thing
that ever happened to me, and I am so thankful for those five years that we had together. The
thankfulness of that outweighs the incredible sadness of losing her. The good stuff was so
overwhelmingly good. I’m just a much better version of what I was. And I was a relatively good
version. But this was a super education in being an authentic human being.
