No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth

References:

Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA., 2001.
Ken Wilber著，若水譯，事事本無礙，光啟出版社，1991，初版，譯自No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth, Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA., 1991.

Preface to the 2001 Edition

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 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 prepersonal to personal to transpersonal, from instinct to ego to God. And it offered an entire smorgasbord of actual practices and exercises that showed the reader how to reach each of these higher states of consciousness.
In the meantime, the basic message of No Boundary is just what the title says: your own basic awareness―and your very identity itself―is without boundaries. Your basic identity spans the 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.

Preface to the 1991 Edition

This book examines how we create a persistent alienation from ourselves, from others, and from the world by fracturing our present experience into different parts, separated by boundaries.
Life becomes suffering, full of battles. But all of the battles in our experience―our conflicts, anxieties, sufferings, and despairs―are created by boundaries we misguidedly throw around our experience. And this book examines how we create those boundaries and what we can do about them.
This book will show how each boundary we construct in our experience results in a limitation of our consciousness―a fragmentation, a conflict, a battle. There are many such limitations and boundaries in our experience, which together create a spectrum of consciousness.
For the general reader, then, this book will provide a personal introduction to the major methods of growth and transformation―from egoic to humanistic to transpersonal―and will show how these approaches are related to each other. It will also offer the reader specific exercises―to experience these various approaches.

Introduction: Who Am I?

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 and 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?"
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 just 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 to be "not-self." Your self-identity, in other words, depends entirely upon where you draw that boundary line.
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 what's on the inside of that line. The so-called identity crisis occurs when you can't describe how or where to draw the line. In short, "Who are you?" means "Where do you draw the boundary?"
The most interesting thing about this boundary line is that it can and frequently does shift. It can be re-drawn. In a sense, the person can re-map her soul and find in it territories she never thought possible, attainable, or even desirable.
Throughout this book we will return to and examine the no-boundary awareness known as the supreme identity.
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 outside that boundary is "not-me."
The person identifies more basically and intimately with just a facet of his total organism, and this facet, which he feels to be his real self, is known variously as the mind, the psyche, the ego, the personality.
This boundary line between the mind and the body is certainly a strange one, not at all present at birth.
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 less accurate mental self-image, along with the intellectual and emotional processes associated with that self-image. Since he won’t concretely identify with the total organism, the most he will allow is a picture or image of the total organism.
The point is that she narrows her self/not-self boundary to only certain parts of her egoic tendencies. This narrowed self-image we will be calling the persona, and its meaning will become more obvious as we proceed. But as the individual identifies with only facets of her psyche (the persona), the rest of her psyche is then actually felt to be "not-self," foreign territory, alien, scary. She re-maps her soul so as to deny and try to exclude from consciousness the unwanted aspects of herself (these unwanted aspects we call "shadow").
"Transpersonal" means that some sort of process is occurring in the individual that, in a sense, goes beyond the individual. The simplest instance of this is extrasensory perception, or ESP.
Although the transpersonal experiences are somewhat similar to unity consciousness, the two should not be confused. In unity consciousness the person’s identity is with the All, with absolutely everything. In transpersonal experiences, the person’s identity doesn’t quite expand to the Whole, but it does expand or at least extend beyond the skin-boundary of the organism.
The point of this discussion of self/not-self boundaries is that there are not just one but many levels of identity available to an individual. These levels of identity are not theoretical postulates but observable realities—you can verify them in and for yourself. As regards these different levels, it’s almost as if that familiar yet ultimately mysterious phenomenon we call consciousness were a spectrum, a rainbow-like affair composed of numerous bands or levels of self-identity.
The Spectrum of Consciousness
Obviously, since there are different levels of self, there are different levels of self-conflict as well. The reason is that at each level of the spectrum, the boundary line of a person’s self is drawn up in a different fashion. But a boundary line, as any military expert will tell you, is also a potential battle line, for a boundary line marks off the territory of two opposed and potentially warring camps.
This battle line can become acutely prominent on the persona level, for here the individual has drawn the boundary line between facets of her own psyche, and thus the battle line is now between the individual as persona versus her environment and her body and aspects of her own mind.
The fact that different levels of the spectrum possess different characteristics, symptoms, and potentials, brings us to one of the most interesting points of this view.
Therapies and Levels of the Spectrum
I should mention that because, like any spectrum, these levels shade into one another quite a bit, no absolutely distinct and separate classification of the levels or the therapies addressing those levels is possible. Further, when I "classify" a therapy on the basis of the level of the spectrum it addresses, that means the deepest level which that therapy recognizes, either explicitly or implicitly.
Generally speaking, you will find that a therapy of any given level will recognize and accept the potential existence of all of the levels above its own, but deny the existence of all those beneath it.
Growth fundamentally means an enlarging and expanding of one’s horizons, a growth of one’s boundaries, outwardly in perspective and inwardly in depth. But that is precisely the definition of descending the spectrum.

Half of It

Have you ever wondered why life comes in opposites? Why everything you value is one of a pair of opposites? Why all decisions are between opposites? Why all desires are based on opposites?
This fact is so commonplace as to hardly need mentioning, but the more one ponders it the more it is strikingly peculiar. For nature, it seems, knows nothing of this world of opposites in which people live.
Likewise, there is life and death in the world of nature, but again it doesn’t seem to hold the terrifying dimensions ascribed to it in the world of humans.
According to the Book of Genesis, one of the first tasks given to Adam was to name the animals and plants existing in nature.
Adam was the first to delineate nature, to mentally divide it up, mark it off, diagram it. Adam was the first great mapmaker. Adam drew boundaries.
So successful was this mapping of nature that, to this day, our lives are largely spent in drawing boundaries. Every decision we make, our every action, our every word is based on the construction, conscious or unconscious, of boundaries.
The peculiar thing about a boundary is that, however complex and rarefied it might be, it actually marks off nothing but an inside vs. an outside.
But notice that the opposites of inside vs. outside didn’t exist in themselves until we drew the boundary of the circle. It is the boundary line itself, in other words, which creates a pair of opposites. In short, to draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites. Thus we can start to see that the reason we live in a world of opposites is precisely because life as we know it is a process of drawing boundaries.
The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries.
Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries and the opposites they create.
Now our habitual way of trying to solve these problems is to attempt to eradicate one of the opposites.
The point is that we always tend to treat the boundary as real and then manipulate the opposites created by the boundary. We never seem to question the existence of the boundary itself.
Thus we suppose that life would be perfectly enjoyable if we could only eradicate all the negative and unwanted poles of the pairs of opposites.
This goal of separating the opposites and then clinging to or pursuing the positive halves seems to be a distinguishing characteristic of progressive Western civilization―its religion, science, medicine, industry.
It seems that "progress" and unhappiness might well be flip sides of the same restless coin. For the very urge to progress implies a discontent with the present state of affairs, so that the more I seek progress the more acutely I feel discontent.
The root of the whole difficulty is our tendency to view the opposites as irreconcilable, as totally set apart and divorced from one another.
Even the simplest of opposites, such as buying versus selling, are viewed as two different and separate events.
Any time you buy something, someone else has, in the same action, sold something. In other words, buying and selling are simply two ends of one event, namely, the single business transaction itself.
In just the same way, all of the opposites share an implicit identity. That is, however vividly the differences between these opposites may strike us, they nevertheless remain completely inseparable and mutually interdependent, and for the simple reason that the one could not exist without the other.
That is, all the things and events we usually consider are irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration.
According to Gestalt, we are never aware of any object or event or figure save in relation to a contrasting background.
In the same way, I am never aware of pleasure except in relation to pain.
As Whitehead would say, pleasure and pain are just the inseparable crest and trough of a single wave of awareness, and to try to accentuate the positive crest and eliminate the negative trough is to try to eliminate the wave of awareness itself.
To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.
For boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of mapmakers.
To be sure, there are many kinds of lines in the natural world, such as the shoreline situated between continents and the oceans surrounding them.
The point, then, is that lines join the opposites as well as distinguish them. And that precisely is the essence and function of all real lines and surfaces in nature.
The point is that all of the lines we find in nature, or even construct ourselves, do not merely distinguish different opposites, but also bind the two together in an inseparable unity.
A line, in other words, is not a boundary. For a line, whether mental, natural, or logical doesn’t just divide and separate, it also joins and unites. Boundaries, on the other hand, are pure illusions—they pretend to separate what is not in fact separable.
A real line becomes an illusory boundary when we imagine its two sides to be separated and unrelated; that is, when we acknowledge the outer difference of the two opposites but ignore their inner unity.
Already our lines are in danger of becoming boundaries, for we are recognizing explicit differences and forgetting the implicit unity. And this error is facilitated as we proceed to name, to attach a word or symbol to, the inside and outside of the class.
Thus, we can manipulate the symbols independently of their mandatory opposites.
Our problem, it seems, is that we create a conventional map, complete with boundaries, of the actual territory of nature, which has no boundaries, and then thoroughly confuse the two.
And these illusory boundaries, with the opposites they create, have become our impassioned battles.
Most of our "problems of living," then, are based on the illusion that the opposites can and should be separated and isolated from one another. But since all opposites are actually aspects of one underlying reality, this is like trying to totally separate the two ends of a single rubber band. All you can do is pull harder and harder—until something violently snaps.
Liberation is not freedom from the negative, but freedom from the pairs altogether.
The idea is beautifully expressed in one of the most important Buddhist texts, the Lankavatara Sutra: False-imagination teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation, not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two but one.
Ultimate reality is a union of opposites.
That reality is not-two means that reality is no-boundary.
Thus the solution to the war of the opposites requires the surrendering of all boundaries, and not the progressive juggling of the opposites against each other.
When the opposites are realized to be one, discord melts into concord, battles become dances, and old enemies become lovers. We are then in a position to make friends with all of our universe, and not just one half of it.

No-Boundary Territory

There are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality.
It’s not just that there are no boundaries between the opposites. In a much wider sense, there are no dividing boundaries between any things or events anywhere in the cosmos.
With the first type of boundary, we draw a dividing line between different things and then recognize them as constituting a group or class, which we then name frogs, cheeses, mountains, or whatnot. This is the first or basic type of boundary. Once we have drawn our first boundaries, we can then draw a second type of boundary on the first type and then count the things in our classes. If the first boundary gives a class of things, the second boundary gives a class of classes of things. So, for example, the number seven refers equally to all the groups or classes of things which have seven members. Thus with numbers, humans constructed a new type of boundary, a more abstract and generalized boundary, a meta-boundary. And since boundaries carry political and technological power, humans had thereby increased their ability to control the natural world.
However, these new and more powerful boundaries brought with them the potential not only for a more developed technology, but also a more pervasive alienation and fragmentation.
Put simply, the first boundary produces a class. The meta-boundary produces a class of classes, called number. The third or meta-meta-boundary produces a class of classes of classes, called the variable. The variable is best known as that which is represented in formulas as x, y, or z. And the variable works like this: just as a number can represent any thing, a variable can represent any number. Just as five can refer to any five things, x can refer to any number over a given range.
By using algebra, the early scientists could proceed not only to number and measure the elements, but also to search out abstract relations between those measurements, which could be expressed in theories, laws, and principles. And these laws seemed, in some sense, to "govern" or "control" all the things and events marked off with the very first type of boundaries.
This new type of boundary, the meta-meta-boundary, brought new knowledge and, of course, explosive new technological and political power.
This knowledge, power, and control over nature was, however, bought at a price, for, as always, a boundary is a double-edged sword, and the fruits it slices from nature are necessarily bittersweet.
The universe was viewed, at least through the eyes of the classical physicists, as a magnificent but inarticulate collection of separate things and events, each perfectly isolated by definite boundaries in space and time. Further, these separate entities—planets, rocks, meteors, apples, peoples—were thought capable of being precisely measured and numbered, a process which in turn eventually yielded scientific laws and principles.
So successful was this procedure that scientists began dreaming that all of nature was governed by these laws.
As scientists began exploring the world of subatomic physics, they naturally assumed that all the old Newtonian laws, or something like them, would apply to the protons, neutrons, and electrons. But they didn’t. Not at all, not even a little.
Worse yet, it wasn’t just that these "ultimate realities," like the electrons, didn’t fit the old physical laws. These ultimate realities couldn’t even be located!
Now the atom began to look more like a nebulous cloud that infinitely shaded into its environment. As Henry Stapp put it, "An
elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things." These "atomic things," the ultimate building blocks of all reality, couldn’t be located because, in short, they had no boundaries.
Moreover, because these "ultimate realities" of the universe had no definite boundaries, they couldn’t be adequately measured.
Because the subatomic particles possessed no boundaries, there could be no meta-boundaries, no measurements; and hence also, no precise meta-meta-boundaries, no "laws."
The new quantum physicists were forced to recognize the conventional nature of the original boundaries themselves, and for the simple reason that they couldn’t find any real ones.
This is not to say that the real world is a mere product of our imaginations (subjective idealism), only that our boundaries are.
In short, the quantum physicists discovered that reality could no longer be viewed as a complex of distinct things and boundaries. Rather, what were once thought to be bounded "things" turned out to be interwoven aspects of each other. For some strange reason, every thing and event in the universe seemed to be interconnected with every other thing and event in the universe.
In Mahayana Buddhism the universe is therefore likened to a vast net of jewels, wherein the reflection from one jewel is contained in all jewels, and the reflections of all are contained in each. As the Buddhists put it, "All in one and one in all."
Open any good Buddhist sutra, most of which were written centuries ago, and you might read something like this: "By appearance is meant that which reveals itself to the senses and to the discriminating-mind and is perceived as form, sound, odor, taste, and touch. Out of these appearances ideas are formed, such as clay, water, jar, etc., by which one says: this is such and such a thing and is no other,—this is name. When appearances are contrasted and names compared, as when we say: this is an elephant, this is a horse, a cart, a pedestrian, a man, a woman, or, this is mind and what belongs to it,—the things thus named are said to be discriminated. As these discriminations [i.e., boundaries] come to be seen as empty of self-substance, this is right knowledge. By it the wise cease to regard appearances and names as reality. When appearances and names are put away and all discrimination
ceases, that which remains is the true and essential nature of things and, as nothing can be predicated as to the nature of essence, it is called the ‘Suchness’ of Reality. This universal, undifferentiated, inscrutable, ‘Suchness’ is the only Reality" (Lankavatara Sutra).
From another angle, this is the profound Buddhist doctrine of the Void, which maintains that reality is void of thoughts and void of things.
Hence, when Buddhists say reality is void, they mean it is void of boundaries.
The point is that when the world is seen to be void of boundaries, then all things and events—just like all the opposites—are seen to be mutually dependent and interpenetrating. Just as pleasure is related to pain, good to evil, and life to death, so all things are "related to what they are not."
In your immediate and concrete awareness, therefore, there are no separate things, no boundaries. You never actually see a single entity, but always a richly textured field. That is the nature of your immediate reality, and it is completely void of boundaries.
But you can mentally superimpose pretend boundaries upon your immediate field of awareness. You can bound off a section of the field by focusing attention on just a few prominent areas, such as "a" tree, "a" wave, "a" bird, and then pretend to be aware of just that particular object by deliberately excluding the rest of the field of awareness.

No-Boundary Awareness

Unity consciousness is the simple awareness of the real territory of no-boundary.
As simple as that sounds, it is nevertheless extremely difficult to adequately discuss no-boundary awareness or nondual consciousness. This is because our language—the medium in which all verbal discussion must float—is a language of boundaries.
No-boundary awareness is a direct, immediate, and nonverbal awareness, and not a mere philosophical theory.
And especially there is no boundary between subject and object, self and not-self, seer and seen.
The boundary between self and not-self is the first one we draw and the last one we erase. Of all the boundaries we construct, this one is the primary boundary.
So fundamental is the primary boundary between self and not-self that all our other boundaries depend on it. We can hardly distinguish boundaries between things until we have distinguished ourselves from things.
To be sure, any and all boundaries are obstacles to unity consciousness, but, since all of our other boundaries depend upon this primary boundary, to see through it is to see through all.
All in all, it is the gap between the experiencer and the world which is experienced. It thus appears that on the "inside" of the primary boundary there exists my "self," the subject, the thinker and feeler and seer; and on the other side there exists the not-self, the world of objects out there, the environment, foreign and separate from me.
In unity consciousness, in no-boundary awareness, the sense of self expands to totally include everything once thought to be not-self.
Thus, if we can at all begin to see through the primary boundary, the sense of unity consciousness will not be far from us.
Thus, we will not search out the primary boundary and then try to destroy it. That, in fact, would be a grave error, or at least a colossal waste of time, for we cannot destroy what doesn’t exist in the first place.
You cannot eradicate an illusion. You can only understand and see through the illusion itself.
Instead of assuming the primary boundary to be real and then taking steps to try to eliminate it, we will first go in search of the primary boundary itself.
To look for the primary boundary is to look very carefully for the sensation of being a separate self, a separate experiencer and feeler which is set apart from experiences and feelings.
But if we carefully look at the sensation of "self-in-here" and the sensation of "world-out-there," we will find that these two sensations are actually one and the same feeling.
The fact is, the seer, seeing, and the seen are all aspects of one process—never at any time is one of them found without the others.
You cannot hear a hearer because there isn’t one. What you have been taught to call a "hearer" is actually just the experience of hearing itself, and you don’t hear hearing. In reality, there is just a stream of sounds, and that stream is not split into a subject and an object. There is no boundary here.
When you try to hear the subjective hearer, all you find are objective sounds. And that means that you do not hear sounds, you are those sounds.
I cannot see the seer of this visual field.
If I look at a tree, there is not one experience called "tree" and another experience called "seeing the tree." There is just the single experience of seeing-the-tree.
It seems that whenever we look for a self apart from experience, it vanishes into experience. When we look for the experiences, we find only another experience—the subject and object always turn out to be one.
Thus, when the present thought was "I am confused," you were not at the same time aware of a thinker who was thinking, "I am confused." There was just the present thought alone—"I am confused." When you then looked for the thinker of that thought, all you found was another present thought, namely "I am thinking I am confused." Never did you find a thinker apart from the present thought, which is only to say that the two are identical.
Thus the inescapable conclusion starts to dawn on us: there is no separate self set apart from the world.
The inner sensation called "you" and the outer sensation called "the world" are one and the same sensation. The inner subject and the outer object are two names for one feeling, and this is not something you should feel, it is the only thing you can feel.
That means that your state of consciousness right now is, whether you realize it or not, unity consciousness. Right now you already are the cosmos, you already are the totality of your present experience.
In other words, whenever you look for your "self" and don’t find it, you momentarily fall into your prior and real state of unity
consciousness.
When we realize that there is always no self (and this is happening right now) we realize that our true identity is always the Supreme Identity. In the ever-present light of no-boundary awareness, what we once imagined to be the isolated self in here turns out to be all of a piece with the cosmos out there. And this, if anything, is your real self. Wherever you look, you behold your original face on all sides.
This real self has been given dozens of different names by the various mystical and metaphysical traditions throughout human history.
All of these words are simply symbols of the real world of no-boundary.
First we must recognize the difficulties the mystic faces in trying to describe the ineffable experience of unity consciousness. Foremost among these is the fact that the real self is a no-boundary awareness, whereas all our words and thoughts are nothing but boundaries.
So the mystics must be content with pointing and showing a Way whereby we may all experience unity consciousness for ourselves.
They ask you only to try a few experiments in awareness, to look closely at your present state of existence, and to try to see your self and your world as clearly as you possibly can.
But just where to look? This is precisely the point at which the mystics universally answers, "Look inside. Deep inside. For the real self lies within."
They are indeed saying to look within, not because the final answer actually resides within you and not without, but because as you carefully and consistently look inside, you sooner or later find outside. You realize, in other words, that the inside and the outside, the subject and the object, the seer and the seen are one, and thus you spontaneously fall into your natural state.
Absolute Subjectivity would be that which can never, at any time, under any circumstances, be a particular object that can be seen, or heard, or known, or perceived.
But what, then, could this real self be? As Ramana pointed out, it can’t be my body, because I can feel and know it, and what can be known is not the absolute Knower. It can’t be my wishes, hopes, fears, and emotions, for I can to some degree see and feel them, and what can be seen is not the absolute Seer. It can’t be my mind, my personality, my thoughts, for those can all be witnessed, and what can be witnessed is not the absolute Witness.
By persistently looking within for the real self in this fashion, I am, in fact, starting to realize that it cannot be found within at all.
The more I look for the absolute Seer, the more I realize that I can’t find it as an object. And the simple reason I can’t find it as a particular object is because it’s every object! I can’t feel it because it is everything felt. I can’t experience it because it is everything experienced. It is true that anything I can see is not the Seer—because everything I see is the Seer. As I go within to find my real self, I find only the world.
But a strange thing has now happened, for I realize that the real self within is actually the real world without, and vice versa. The subject and object, the inside and outside, are and always have been nondual. There is no primary boundary. The world is my body, and what I am looking out of is what I am looking at.
Because the real self resides neither within nor without, because the subject and object are actually not-two, the mystics can speak of reality in many different but only apparently contradictory ways. ... the inside world and the outside world are just two different names for the single, ever-present state of no-boundary awareness.
In chapter two we saw that reality is a union of opposites, or "nondual." ... to say reality is nondual is to say reality is no-boundary.
In chapter three, we saw that the real world is not a collection of separate and independent things divorced from one another in space and time. Every thing and event in the cosmos is mutually interdependent and interrelated with every other thing and event in the cosmos....to say the real world contains no separate things is to say that the real world is no-boundary.
In this chapter, we saw that the discovery of the real world of no-boundary is unity consciousness. It is not that in unity consciousness you are looking at the real territory of no-boundary; rather, unity consciousness is the real territory of no-boundary. Reality, by all accounts, is no-boundary awareness—that just that is one’s Real Self.