Going beyond

Questions of inner and outer space

Having spent the last two months continuously receiving teachings and empowerments I have not had much time to write. So here I am sharing one of the most popular articles I posted last year.

Last week I visited the London Science Museum. It was a mild March day, cloudy with sunny spells, and lots of people walking around South Kensington’s pedestrian walkways at a relaxed pace. Not knowing the floor plan and the sights on offer, and without even trying to find out for myself where it was I should choose to go, I wandered into a gallery that spoke of space exploration. Prototypes of machines that go to the moon, original spacesuits complete with underwear embedded with tubes that carry water to regulate body temperature, and a large contraption designed to measure things on Mercury. Seeing bits of spaceships in tangible metal really brought home how real space travel is. Data on this is usually confined to images in the news but here it took on quite a different dimension. I could imagine boarding the Apollo spacecraft as if I were boarding a plane.

I was not the only one who decided to visit the museum that day. In fact, I found it difficult to walk in a straight line on account of hundreds of school children who happened to be there, too. In pairs and small groups they were busy discussing and trying to work things out when they were not corralled into long lines by their teachers. The children struck me in two ways: first, by their ability to keep up a constant quantity of decibels quite effortlessly, it would seem and, second, by the interest and engagement they expressed in the presence of all these exciting objects. Space is a frontier for adventure and heroism, and it really captures the imagination.

Every planet of our solar system is present in that gallery in one way or another, and I surprised myself by noticing in my mind a sense of going beyond. Going beyond our planet earth, going quite outside the parameters of life on earth, going beyond the usual limits of my imagination and experience. I could feel the draw of space and the attraction of using one’s fortune to navigate and populate new worlds. After all, that is what humanity has done for millennia in different regions of this planet, so we are simply witnessing a familiar human longing transposed to outer space.

Once I had established this line of thinking in the space gallery I could see how it could be applied to lots of other machines on the museum ground floor. The enormous steam engine that used to power 1,500 looms in the north of England would, at the time, have been ground-breaking. The old open-top cars took people beyond their known limits of speed and brought new sensations. I could see myself travelling along a tree-lined road in the summer, with the sun coming through the leaves and dappling the way ahead, bouncing up and down on those hard wheels as the trunks of the trees would flash by us at regular intervals – whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Driving like that is going beyond boredom and the mundane, it is pure exhilaration.

The Science Museum convinced me, if I were in any doubt, that in our modern times any ideas we may entertain of going beyond the usual boundaries of our lives will be connected to the feats of science, technology and artificial intelligence. I can see how utterly convincing that viewpoint can be, how very real our advances have proved. Every few decades, at least, the limitations of human beings are effectively redefined as a result of scientific progress. That, in itself, is quite extraordinary.

Upon leaving the galleries later that afternoon I began to reflect on what all this means for the way I usually understand the prospect of going beyond. All mystical traditions have developed their unique ways of defining what ‘beyond’ is like and they all entail some way of going beyond the limitations of the physical domain. In Buddhist thought, transcendence is labelled nirvana or enlightenment and is what the Buddhist path is all about. It is about freeing our minds from conditioning and habits, and about finding a new way of being and seeing based on the infinitely boundless space of reality at the heart of existence. It’s about overcoming the causes of suffering so the experience of suffering no longer arises, while endless rebirth in painful existences no longer takes place. One can go beyond samsara, the Buddha tells us, by establishing a mind free of emotional filters and cognitive error.

I know that very few people these days are interested in enlightenment. Enlightenment is not on our cultural radar and, according to several surveys, it’s not even on the minds of those who venture into Buddhist centres. We may search for healing and wholesomeness, for a better life balance, for more peace of mind, but generally we’re content with improving our lot just enough for it to feel improved. We are not interested in going that extra mile to shed limitations altogether. In fact, it’s so difficult to imagine what nirvana would be like, and so disheartening to think of the effort that would be needed to get there, that most sane people don’t even ‘go there’ in their minds. In fact, we could say that enlightenment is not something we believe in at all, and certainly not something that motivates us to strive for as the most sublime goal of human life – as thousands of people apparently did for centuries. Enlightenment is just too nebulous and unattainable, far more unattainable than the moon.

But there lies the rub. Enlightenment is not far away, on the other side of the galaxy. It is not beyond our reach. Actually, the wisdom and love of the enlightened mind are here with us, right now. We need no money or machines to access it, we simply need to turn our focus within. Then we discover the inner world and all the treasures it holds. And this is not esoteric nonsense, or a useless exercise that will bring no tangible benefit, on the contrary it is supremely practical. Wisdom and love cut through the desire to wage war, they overturn the greed that drives us to profit to the detriment of others, they override those selfish impulses that destroy the environment… and they bring joy and contentment into our lives, too. Surely that is a worthwhile vision and deserves our consideration as a different way of going beyond the sad state of affairs we are in at present.

Buddhist meditation leads to an experience of space. We ‘go beyond’ space as an idea or a theory to space as a dynamic living experience. There is space that is bigger than the sky, infinite and endless with no edges or corners anywhere. It’s the space within which everything and everyone exist, even entire universes find their place within it. It is a space that is both inner and outer: within my own mind and in the outer world at the same time. This space is the reality we are all looking for because when we abide in it we feel deeply content and at ease. But as I gazed into the faces of the children all around me in the gallery I was aware there is no museum in the world where they can learn about this.

See my books Discovering Buddhism and A New Way of Seeing.

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