Posted inHenry's Messages

Message from Henry: Kensho

June 30, 2021

There are three ways we could look at it, especially at how veridical it is.

  1. Kensho is an intense experience a human being can undergo which radically adjusts their way of experiencing themselves and their environment. In particular it undercuts their allegiance to their ordinary separate sense of self. It often has lasting positive effects on psychology and personality.
  2. Kensho is the above, but also offers veridical insights into the nature of consciousness. It reveals consciousness to be boundless, dimensionless and all-pervasive, and allows us to migrate our sense of identity to that consciousness.
  3. Kensho does all the above and also reveals the nature of all experience – of reality itself – to be empty, boundless and single. It’s not merely that consciousness is those things. The actual fabric of the world of things and phenomena also is. 

These are different claims. The first accepts that kensho can be a highly beneficial insight into self. The second adds that we discover the actual nature of consciousness to be vastly greater than something contained within the skull. And the third is both those and a discovery about the nature of all matter and phenomena.

The question is: do these three claims reflect differing doctrinal positions, or do they reflect different depths of kensho? In other words, are they differences in interpretation, or differences in actual experience… something to consider….

Message from Henry is from our June 28, 2021 Newsletter
Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
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