事事本無礙.(美)肯·威爾伯.英文原版

1、ContentsHYPERLINK l PREFACEPreface to the 2001 EditionHYPERLINK l CH1Introduction: Who Am I?HYPERLINK l CH2Half of ItHYPERLINK l CH3No-Boundary TerritoryHYPERLINK l CH4No-Boundary AwarenessHYPERLINK l CH5The No-Boundary MomentHYPERLINK l CH6The Growth of BoundariesHYPERLINK l CH7The Persona Level: T

2、he Start of DiscoveryHYPERLINK l CH8The Centaur LevelHYPERLINK l CH9The Self in TranscendenceHYPERLINK l CH10The Ultimate State of ConsciousnessIndexPreface to the 2001 EditionALTHOUGH No Boundary is the second book I wrote, almost thirty years ago, it is still one of the most popular of my books. I

3、 believe the reason is simple: No Boundary was one of the first books to present a full-spectrum view of human potentials, potentials that reach from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, and in so doing, it integrated the very best of psychology with the best of spirituality. In drawing on the

4、finest of both Eastern and Western approaches to human growth and development, it charted a complete spectrum of consciousness that moved from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, from pre-personal to personal to transpersonal, from instinct to ego to God. And it offered an entire smorg

5、asbord of actual practices and exercises that showed the reader how to reach each of these higher states of consciousness. The completeness of this approach made it rather unique, and I believe that is why readers have continued to respond enthusiastically.The years since I wrote No Boundary have co

6、nvinced me even more that its basic message is still sound and true. Human beings do indeed possess a remarkable spectrum of consciousness, a vast rainbow of extraordinary potentials and possibilities, and those potentials do indeed run from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. Individuals can

7、grow and develop through that entire spectrum, directly experiencing each of those levels or colors in the rainbow, resulting in a direct experience of spirit itself. Various psychological and spiritual practicesmany of which you will be offered in the following pageshelp us directly experience thes

8、e various levels or waves in our own being. Thus, using a combination of these practices can help us fully awaken to every color in the rainbow of our own being, to every level of consciousness in the entire spectrum, and thus awaken to our real nature and true conditionan awakening known as enlight

9、enment, release, or the great liberation.No Boundary was a popular version of the first book I had written, a large, somewhat academic book called The Spectrum of Consciousness. Those books would form the foundation of the almost twenty books that would follow. I would of course refine and polish th

10、e various points, but the essentialssuch as the spectrum of consciousness itselfare still much as presented here, which is probably another reason this book has remained so popular. If you enjoy No Boundary and would like to see some of these further refinements, you might start with an overview of

11、my current work, called A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality.In the meantime, the basic message of No Boundary is just what the title says: your own basic awarenessand your very identity itselfis without boundaries. Your basic identity spans th

12、e entire spectrum of consciousness, from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, and thus in the deepest or highest part of you, you embrace the All. What follows is a simple guidebook to this extraordinary territory of your own true selfless Self.K. W.Summer 2000Boulder, ColoradoNO BOUNDARY1Intro

13、duction: Who Am I?SUDDENLY, WITHOUT ANY WARNING, at any time or place, with no apparent cause, it can happen.All at once I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, and immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire

14、was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead

15、matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventu

16、re all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. (R. M. Bucke)What a magnificent awareness! We would surely be making a grave error i

17、f we hastily concluded such experiences to be hallucinations or products of a mental aberration, for, in their final disclosure, they share none of the tortured anguish of psychotic visions.The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold, the gates were at first the ends of the world.

18、 The green trees when I saw them first, through one of the gates, transported and ravished me Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manife

19、st in the light of day. . (Traherne)William James, Americas foremost psychologist, repeatedly stressed that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely diffe

20、rent. It is as if our everyday awareness were but an insignificant island, surrounded by a vast ocean of unsuspected and uncharted consciousness, whose waves beat continuously upon the barrier reefs of our normal awareness, until, quite spontaneously, they may break through, flooding our island awar

21、eness with knowledge of a vast, largely unexplored, but intensely real domain of new-world consciousness.Now came a period of rapture so intense that the universe stood still, as if amazed at the unutterable majesty of the spectacle. Only one in all the infinite universe! The All-loving, the Perfect

22、 One In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss, came illumination. I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composedI know not whether material or spiritualrearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlast

23、ing life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chainnot a link left outeverything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended into one harmonious whole. (R. M. Bucke)The most fascinating aspect of such awesome and illuminating experiencesand the aspect to

24、 which we will be devoting much attentionis that the individual comes to feel, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he or she is fundamentally one with the entire universe, with all worlds, high or low, sacred or profane. The sense of identity expands far beyond the narrow confines of the mind and bod

25、y and embraces the entire cosmos. For just this reason R. M. Bucke referred to this state of awareness as cosmic consciousness. The Muslim calls it the Supreme Identity, supreme because it is an identity with the All. We will generally refer to it as unity consciousnessa loving embrace with the univ

26、erse as a whole.The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all proprieties and di

27、visions were mine; all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the kingdom of God. (Traherne)So widespread is this experienc

28、e of the supreme identity that it has, along with the doctrines that purport to explain it, earned the name The Perennial Philosophy. There is much evidence that this type of experience or knowledge is central to every major religionHinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaismso that

29、 we can justifiably speak of the transcendent unity of religions and the unanimity of primordial truth.The theme of this book is that this type of awareness, this unity consciousness or supreme identity, is the nature and condition of all sentient beings; but that we progressively limit our world an

30、d turn from our true nature in order to embrace boundaries. Our originally pure and nondual consciousness then functions on varied levels, with different identities and different boundaries. These different levels are basically the many ways we can and do answer the question, Who am I?Who am I? The

31、query has probably tormented humankind since the dawn of civilization, and remains today one of the most vexing of all human questions. Answers have been offered which range from the sacred to the profane, the complex to the simple, the scientific to the romantic, the political to the individual. Bu

32、t instead of examining the multitude of answers to this question, lets look instead at a very specific and basic process which occurs when a person asks, and then answers, the question Who am 1? What is my real self? What is my fundamental identity?When someone asks, Who are you? and you proceed to

33、give a reasonable, honest, and more or less detailed answer, what, in fact, areyou doing? What goes on in your head as you do this? In one sense you are describing your self as you have come to know it, including in your description most of the pertinent facts, both good and had, worthy and worthles

34、s, scientific and poetic, philosophic and religious, that you understand as fundamental to your identity. You might, for example, think that I am a unique person, a being endowed with certain potentials; I am kind but sometimes cruel, loving but sometimes hostile; I am a father and lawyer, I enjoy f

35、ishing and basketball And so your list of feelings and thoughts might proceed.Yet there is an even more basic process underlying the whole procedure of establishing an identity. Something very simple happens when you answer the question, Who are you? When you are describing or explaining or even jus

36、t inwardly feeling your self, what you are actually doing, whether you know it or not, is drawing a mental line or boundary across the whole field of your experience, and everything on the inside of that boundary you are feeling or calling your self, while everything outside that boundary you feel t

37、o be not-self. Your self-identity, in other words, depends entirely upon where you draw that boundary line.You are a human and not a chair, and you know that because you consciously or unconsciously draw a boundary line between humans and chairs, and are able to recognize your identity with the form

38、er. You may he a very tall human instead of a short one, and so you draw a mental line between tallness and shortness, and thus identify yourself as tall. You come to feel that I am this and not that by drawing a boundary line between this and that and then recognizing your identity with this and yo

39、ur nonidentity with that.So when you say my self, you draw a boundary line between what is you and what is not you. When you answer the question, Who are you?, you simply describe whats on the inside of that line. The so-called identity crisis occurs when you cant decide how or where to draw the lin

40、e. In short, Who are you? means Where do you draw the boundary?All answers to that question, Who am I?, stem precisely from this basic procedure of drawing a boundary line between self and not-self. Once the general boundary lines have been drawn up, the answers to that question may become very comp

41、lexscientific, theological, economicor they may remain most simple and unarticulated. But any possible answer depends on first drawing the boundary line.The most interesting thing about this boundary line is that it can and frequently does shift. It can be redrawn. In a sense, the person can re-map

42、her soul and find in it territories she never thought possible, attainable, or even desirable. As we have seen, the most radical re-mapping or shifting of the boundary line occurs in experiences of the supreme identity, for here the person expands her self-identity boundary to include the entire uni

43、verse. We might even say that she loses the boundary line altogether, for when she is identified with the one harmonious whole there is no longer any outside or inside, and so nowhere to draw the line.Throughout this book we will return to and examine the no-boundary awareness known as the supreme i

44、dentity; but at this point it would be worthwhile to investigate some of the other, more familiar ways in which one can define the boundaries of the soul. There are as many different types of boundary lines as there are individuals who draw them, but all of them fall into a handful of easily recogni

45、zed classes.The most common boundary line that individuals draw up or accept as valid is that of the skin-boundary surrounding the total organism. This seems to be a universally accepted self/not-self boundary line. Everything on the inside of that skin-boundary is in some sense me, while everything

46、 outside that boundary is not-me. Something outside the skin-boundary may be mine, but its not me. For example, I recognize my car, my job, my house, my family, but they are definitely not directly me in the same way all the things inside my skin are me. The skin-boundary, then, is one of the most f

47、undamentally accepted self/not-self boundaries.We might think that this skin-boundary is so obvious, so real, and so common that there wouldnt be any other types of boundaries really possible for an individual, save perhaps for those rare occurrences of unity of consciousness on the one hand or the

48、hopelessly psychotic on the other. But in fact there is another extremely common, well-established type of boundary-line drawn by a vast number of individuals. For most people, while they recognize and accept as a matter of course the skin as a self/not-self boundary, draw another and, for them, mor

49、e significant boundary within the total organism itself.If a boundary line within the organism seems strange to you then let me ask, Do you feel you are a body, or do you feel you have a body? Most individuals feel that they have a body, as if they owned or possessed it much as they would a car, a h

50、ouse, or any other object. Under these circumstances, the body seems not so much me as mine, and what is mine, by definition, lies outside the self/not-self boundary. The person identifies more basically and intimately with just a facet of his total organism, and this facet, which he feels to be his

51、 real self, is known variously as the mind, the psyche, the ego, the personality.Biologically there is not the least foundation for this dissociation or radical split between the mind and the body, the psyche and the soma, the ego and the flesh, but psychologically it is epidemic. Indeed, the mind-b

52、ody split and attendant dualism is a fundamental perspective of Western civilization. Notice even here that I must use the word psych-ology for the study of overall human behavior. The word itself reflects the prejudice that the human being is basically a mind and not a body. Even St. Francis referr

53、ed to his body as poor brother ass, and most of us do indeed feel that we just sort of ride around on our bodies like we would on a donkey or an ass.This boundary line between the mind and the body is certainly a strange one, not at all present at birth. But as an individual begins to grow in years,

54、 and begins to draw up and fortify his self/not-self boundary, he looks upon the body with mixed emotions. Should he directly include it within the boundary of his self, or is it to be viewed as foreign territory? Where is he to draw the line? On the one hand, the body is the source of much pleasure

55、 throughout life, from the ecstasies of erotic love to the subtleties of fine foods and mellowness of sunsets taken in by the bodys senses. But on the other hand, the body houses the specter of crippling pain, debilitating diseases, and the tortures of cancer. For a child, the body is the only sourc

56、e of pleasure, and yet it is the first source of pain and conflict with the parents. And on top of that, the body seems to be manufacturing waste products that, for reasons totally mystifying to the child, are a constant source of alarm and anxiety for the parents. Bed-wetting, bowel movements, nose

57、-blowing-what an incredible fuss! And its all tied up with thisthe body. Where to draw the line is going to he tough.But by the time the individual has matured, he has generally kissed poor brother ass good-bye. As the self/not-self boundary is finalized, brother ass is definitely on the other side

58、of the fence. The body becomes foreign territory, almost (but never quite) as foreign as the external world itself. The boundary is drawn between the mind and the body, and the person identifies squarely with the former. He even comes to feel that he lives in his head, as if he were a miniature pers

59、on in his skull, giving directions and commands to his body, which may or may not obey.In short, what the individual feels to be his self-identity does not directly encompass the organism-as-a-whole, but only a facet of that organism, namely, his ego. That is to say, he identifies with a more or les

60、s accurate mental self-image, along with the intellectual and emotional processes associated with that self-image. Since he wont concretely identify with the total organism, the most he will allow is a picture or image of the total organism. Thus he feels he is an ego, and that his body just dangles