What Remains When the Additions Fall Away?
“The only thing that really matters is to be. Man is, the rest that he has is by addition.”
So says the mysterious teacher whom Armando Cosani identifies as Judas Iscariot in The Flight of the Feathered Serpent.
It is an intriguing statement because, when we observe our lives, we discover just how much time we spend adding: a name, an education, a profession, possessions, opinions, relationships, achievements and failures, political and religious beliefs, status, reputation, memories and ambitions. Even our ideas about the kind of person we are.
Ask someone who they are and they will usually answer with one or more of these additions. They will tell you what they do, what they have, where they come from, what happened to them or what they believe. Yet before I was successful or unsuccessful, married or unmarried, wealthy or poor, admired or criticised, educated or ignorant, there was something more fundamental. I was, and now I am.
Perhaps the spiritual journey is therefore not always about becoming something more, but about discovering what remains when what has been added is allowed, for a moment, to fall away.
Before the Additions
We live in an increasingly quantitative world. We count almost everything: our age, income, qualifications, possessions, followers, achievements, productivity, weight and hours of sleep. Measurement is extraordinarily useful, but it can also encourage us to imagine that accumulation and transformation are the same thing. They aren’t. There is a difference between quantity and quality.
A tree does not become an oak because sufficient quantities of miscellaneous material have been assembled in one place. Something inherent in the acorn determines what can unfold from it. Soil, rain and sunlight nourish the process, but they do not manufacture the essential nature of the oak.
Maurice Nicoll explored something similar in his psychological commentaries. He asked his students to consider the difference between a quantitative and a qualitative universe. However many copper coins one accumulates, he observed, their mere multiplication does not turn them into gold. Accumulation by itself cannot produce a change in quality. As he put it, “change is not addition, but actual change of the kind of person one is.”
This casts Cosani’s mysterious statement in an interesting light: “Man is, the rest that he has is by addition.” Perhaps much of what we ordinarily call our identity belongs to the world of addition, while Being belongs to another order altogether. This does not mean that quantity is bad or that the additions are unnecessary. The question is simply whether we have mistaken what has been added by us for what we fundamentally are.
When the Colour Disappeared
The Australian psychiatrist and meditation pioneer Dr Ainslie Meares describes a remarkable experience in Strange Places, Simple Truths. Meares had been visiting Japan and exploring Zen meditation. A few days after leaving a Zen temple, he was sitting alone after dinner in one of Tokyo’s leading hotels. A band was playing and couples were dancing. Tired, he allowed his mind to drift naturally into the meditative state he had been studying, and then something unusual happened.
The ordinary vividness of the room began to disappear. The lights became points of brightness, waiters became shadowy figures, the dancing couples lost their normal definition and appeared almost as misty silhouettes, and then the colour disappeared. Later, looking from his hotel window towards the brightly coloured lights of Ginza, Meares entered the state again and once more found himself looking at points of uncoloured light.
He wondered whether his mind had temporarily returned to what he called “a more primitive way of functioning.” Perhaps, he speculated, some of the complexity of human perception had developed progressively through evolution and his meditative state had temporarily allowed part of that complexity to recede. Whether his evolutionary explanation was correct is less important here than the experience itself: something had been subtracted. Colour and definition had disappeared and ordinary interpretation had receded, but Meares did not disappear. It was as if his man-made self had stepped back, revealing something more fundamental beneath the complexity that had subsequently developed “over the period of evolution”.
You Are Not in the Bag
A meditation developed by Jerome Finley approaches the same question deliberately. In The Clear Plastic Bag, the meditator imagines a transparent bag containing a swirling purple light. Into it, one by one, go the things normally identified as me or mine: your name, clothes, possessions, furniture, house, job, personality, hopes, difficulties, dreams and nightmares, fears and beliefs. Eventually even the clothes you are wearing and the physical body itself are placed imaginatively into the bag.
Everything ordinarily used to answer the question Who am I? is now swirling around inside it. Yet the one thing that cannot be put into the bag is the Self that is looking at it. “You are not in the bag. You are who is looking at the bag,” concludes Finley.
This is not an argument about whether possessions, personality or the body are real or unreal, but rather an exercise in identification. If I can observe my thoughts, am I simply my thoughts? If I can observe my fear, am I fear? If I can observe the personality I have accumulated through decades of experience, is that personality the whole of what I am? The exercise takes Cosani’s proposition and makes it experiential.
Jean Klein asks “Who am I?” When the question is allowed to become still rather than answered intellectually, it takes us towards the quiet centre within, where there can be a letting go of the world and, in the old phrase, a willingness to let go and let God.
Before Speech
Meares took this process of simplification considerably further. Dr Ian Pearce, writing about Meares’ therapeutic work in The Gate of Healing, describes groups making completely unintelligible grunts, which Meares regarded as atavistic sounds reaching back towards a stage in human development before sophisticated speech. Pearce suggested that such exercises might help quieten over-intellectual activity and permit the body’s natural homeostatic processes greater freedom. Again, the particular scientific explanation can be separated from the underlying observation.
Meares also successfully underwent a difficult dental extraction without anesthetic by entering the meditative stillness he had been exploring in Japan. He commented that the sensation of pain, like the sensation of sight, must have grown in complexity over the period of evolution, which is what one might expect. When the mind goes back and functions at the primitive level, he wrote, “the colour, as it were, goes out of the sensation of pain” and, as a result, pain loses its hurt.
Meares’ work went beyond personal experiment. He used his form of stillness meditation therapeutically and published clinical observations, including work involving cancer patients. In an article in Australian Family Physician in March 1981, he described the case of a 54 year old woman who had recovered from breast cancer following intensive meditation (“Regression of recurrence of carcinoma of the breast at mastectomy site associated with intensive meditation”, Australian Family Physician, Vol 10, March 1981). Interestingly, Meares described how she undertook stillness meditations each weekday for one month experiencing her “essential being”. His central interest was in the possibility that profound mental stillness might allow natural regulatory and healing processes to operate differently. This bears an interesting resemblance to the understanding of healing found in A Course in Miracles, where healing is fundamentally an undoing of perceptions of separation in order to reveal an underlying wholeness. As the Course states: “Pain is my own idea. It is not a Thought of God, but one I thought apart from Him and from His Will. His Will is joy, and only joy for His beloved Son. And that I choose, instead of what I made.”
The Many “I”s
But if we begin removing the additions – the “what I made”, we encounter another problem. When I say “I”, who exactly is speaking?
Maurice Nicoll, drawing upon the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, repeatedly describes the ordinary personality as consisting of many different “I”s. One wants simplicity, another wants recognition; one wants peace, another wants excitement; one forgives, another resurrects the grievance; one decides what must be done tomorrow, another wakes tomorrow and wants something entirely different. Each appears temporarily and announces itself as “I”. We imagine ourselves to possess a single continuous will, yet even fairly casual self-observation reveals how changeable we can be.
Cosani’s mysterious teacher offers an intriguing parallel. He tells Cosani of an internal Judge, a higher “I” that has become obscured by education, conditioning and habit. This Judge is not merely another voice competing with all the others but is described as belonging to another order: an intelligence within us whose presence can gradually be remembered.
Perhaps, then, spiritual development is not the creation of yet another “I”, but the gradual undoing of our habit of allowing every passing “I” to become sovereign. To achieve this, Nicoll advocated the practice of Self-Remembering and disidentification. Instead of immediately declaring “I am anxious”, for example, one can begin to observe: “It is anxious”. The anxiety has not been denied; it has been put in the bag, and the Self is observing it.
I Need Nothing
Emma Curtis Hopkins wrote about a metaphysician who said he could meet any apparent lack of supply with a strong negative statement. If he required money, he would say, “I do not need money.” By negating the idea of need, Hopkins believed that he cleared the way for supply. “When the right negations are stated, our affirmations are exceedingly effective,” she wrote, adding that after “wise and earnest negations…. mighty affirmations spring forth from nothingness.”
Gary Renard approaches the same idea through A Course in Miracles. Wanting, he suggests, can itself reinforce the belief that we lack something. The alternative is to release our insistence upon what we think we need and become receptive to guidance rather than attempting to dictate the form in which our good must arrive.
The same idea appears in a line from the 1970s television series Kung Fu, when the young Kwai Chang Caine, “Grasshopper”, is told by one of his Shaolin teachers: “Rank and reward are as of nothing to a man at one with himself.” Or, as A Course in Miracles puts it more bluntly: “The perfect need nothing.”
Understanding What Cannot Be Understood
Immediately following his extraordinary Tokyo experience, Meares writes about Shinto, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan. He was struck by its simplicity. The kami, associated with nature, growth, streams, mountains and ancestors, seemed to Meares to provide a “delightfully simple way of understanding that which cannot be understood.”
The modern intellect tends to assume that greater understanding must involve greater complexity, but sometimes that is not the case. There may be aspects of existence which cannot finally be reached by adding another explanation. Instead, understanding may call for becoming quiet enough to encounter something before deciding what it means, for, as A Course in Miracles puts it, “in quietness are all things answered, and is every problem quietly resolved.”
Still Being
This is where the work of Jean Klein becomes particularly interesting. Klein repeatedly turns attention away from the accumulation of spiritual knowledge and towards direct awareness. His work does not primarily invite us to construct an improved spiritual personality, but points instead towards the awareness within which personality, thought, sensation and experience arise.
One does not discover Being by thinking harder about Being, but through becoming still. In the “perfect brilliant stillness” that David Carse expressed, one notices and feels the presence of stillness itself. Klein declared that “silence is love”.
Continuity
To experience true Being there has to be a consistent practice, an approach Cosani’s teacher called a continuity of purpose, where the practitioner enters into solitude and silence which are “your most precious companions immersing with them into the depths of yourself.” Through continuity of purpose we begin to recognise the still Being within, leading ultimately towards what A Course in Miracles describes as the continuity of eternity: our ultimate destination as we awaken from the dream of illusions and exchange guilt for peace, viciousness for love and pain for joy.
Joel Goldsmith repeatedly describes spiritual awakening not as the acquisition of something external, but as the gradual “sloughing off” of the human self, with its fears, desires, wants and mistaken sense of separation, so that the Christ within — the wisdom within — becomes increasingly evident. Again, undoing is emphasised as the way back to Being, not addition.
For Goldsmith, God is not merely a distant Being to whom the individual must somehow travel. Instead, God is the substance of Being.
The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich referred to God as “the ground of being.” His theology was very different from Goldsmith’s, but the phrase offers another intriguing approach to the same question: not God as simply one more being among other beings, but as the ground upon which Being itself depends.
For Goldsmith, our own substance is divine. Emerson similarly wrote of being “part or particle of God”, and the New Thought tradition develops the idea that we are expressions of divine Mind and therefore receptive to divine ideas. If our substance is divine, then wisdom, love, vitality, joy and supply do not ultimately originate in the external forms through which we experience them.
If love, supply, wisdom and wholeness ultimately have their source in God as individual Being, then constantly looking outside ourselves for another person, possession or achievement to complete us begins to look like another form of mistaken addition. This does not mean refusing the love of another person or rejecting the abundance of life; it means ceasing to demand that these things manufacture a completeness which, spiritually understood, was never absent. They can then come through whom they will and from whatever direction they will, and we can receive without making the source of the gift our God.
Being
And perhaps we have now come back to where we started: “The only thing that really matters is to be. Man is, the rest that he has is by addition.”
The additions do not have to disappear. The error was never necessarily in having these things, but in asking them to tell us what we are. Perhaps this is why genuine inner transformation cannot finally be quantitative: we cannot accumulate our way into Being. As Nicoll recognised, change is not addition. As Meares discovered and practised, when complexity recedes what remains is an awareness of a presence, and his therapeutic work explored the healing possibilities of experiencing “our essential being”. We join with the Self that Finley identifies as the observer of the bag when all its contents have been placed inside it, and encounter the silence that Klein declared was love itself.
As Joel Goldsmith concludes, God is not another addition but the substance of Being itself. The spiritual journey is not ultimately a journey towards becoming something we are not; it is a continuity of purpose through which we cease, little by little, to mistake the additions for ourselves, until the question becomes: what remains when everything I have mistaken for my Self is put down?
It is not my rank or reward, my opinions or possessions, nor even the passing voice which currently calls itself “I”. It is something which was present before the additions and remains beneath them.
I am.
