With The Da Vinci Code movie now on general release, interest in the story is widespread. Specifically, is it true, or how much of it is true?

I’ve tried to analyse the book’s basic themes over on Syntagma, and discover how much is really factual in the whole package, bearing in mind that it is a novel. However, it’s a novel that takes its broad themes from an earlier book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so I’ve especially looked at that book too.

Here’s the link: The Surprising Truth in The Da Vinci Code.

Andrew Cohen’s EnlightenNext organization is offering an MA in Conscious Evolution. Here’s the crux of it:

We are excited to announce that we will begin our third offering of an MA in Conscious Evolution in collaboration with the Graduate Institute of Milford, CT this fall.

We aim to provide not only an intellectual understanding of this emerging interdisciplinary field but also an experiential one: our focus is on the evolution of consciousness in real time. To accomplish this, you will study and interact, in person, with a veritable who’s who of today’s leading thinkers. We also teach skills to elicit direct, awakened engagement to bring about individual and collective evolution.

Classes begin on September 22, 2006. Have questions? Call the Graduate Institute at [USA] 877-63-LEARN or email at info@learn.edu. Ask to speak with a current student if you would like hear someone’s firsthand experience.

Nirvanoception is my own word for space consciousness, the underlying awareness that allows us to glimpse the Nirvanic realm beyond ordinary consciousness.

Here’s a short extract from my book, The Nirvaneans:

You are all Buddhas,
but you don’t know it.
Bankei

Nirvanoception is the third, usually latent, mode of knowledge. I say “usually latent” because we’re mostly unaware of it. We freely use body-mind modes of “perception” (senses) and “conception” (mind) to navigate around our world, while remaining completely in the dark about “space consciousness”, which is working in the background.

Normal consciousness is narrowly focused in our heads. Nirvanoception is wide, space consciousness, which takes no heed of trivial daily concerns. It clarifies during nirvanic experiences because perception and conception are “left behind” with the body-mind.

The aim of any spiritual path is to clean up the doors of perception and conception so that Nirvanoception shines brightly in our consciousness. To be precise, it’s how Nirvana experiences itself.

That is the Enlightened state. It’s what Tibetans call the Clear Light. It allows a higher mode of being to possess us, effecting a complete transformation of personality.

As Evelyn Underhill put it: “Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that ‘spiritual spark’, that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life…Under [its spur] the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation … to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception.”

So what is the Path of Nirvanoception? How does it differ from other paths?

It is essentially the path of the Jnani (as Vedantists would say); the path of analytical meditation, or the wisdom stream (as the Dalai Lama puts it); the path of Discrimination (Merrell-Wolff); the path of Knowledge (Gnosis), and the path of Direct Seeing. All these “names” could apply equally as well.
Put bluntly, if you want twenty years of psychotherapy, see a Freudian analyst. If you want arthritic knees, try the usual paths of meditation. If you want nice feelings, try charismatic Christianity.

The Path of Nirvanoception is a direct assault on the summit of Nirvana by attempting to break through to a higher mode of being. The aim is to allow the “Suprapersonal” to clean up the conditioned, karmic entity we normally are, thus releasing the clear light of Nirvanoception.

The Nirvaneans by John M Evans will be published in early 2007 by Humdrumming.

Here is an extract from the Preface to my book, The Nirvaneans, which is being published by Humdrumming some months hence:

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even just a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it built in an infinite number of dimensions to its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by misreading texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

In trying to make these pages accessible to readers of all religions and none, I have risked a sprinkling of revised terms, mainly to avoid some of the coinage of religious discourse. Words like Cosmosity, nirvanean, and nirvanoception appear from time to time. The context should explain their meaning: for example, a Nirvanean is someone who has achieved the nirvanic viewpoint, while Cosmosity is “supreme spiritual enlightenment”—“divinization” to Christians and others. Similarly, just as we exercise perception (of the bodily senses) and conception (of the mind) in our everyday affairs, so we utilize nirvanoception when we experience Nirvana. The difference between it and our physical knowing, is that body-mind uses a “point consciousness” while nirvanoception is “space consciousness”.

I believe these states are equally valid from all religious points of view. Differences appear, as always, because of competing terminologies.

This subject has received sustained psychological analysis and research over three millennia in the East. If we are to understand our Western traditions better—and Christianity is in dire need of that, I believe—we should not hesitate to study the proto-scientific techniques of Gautama Buddha and others, and freely import their ideas, especially if they cast useful light on our own tangled mystical insights.

The method I have used throughout is to investigate the lives of nirvaneans, in addition to their words. Actions speak more compellingly than language ever does, and Nirvana shapes its children in special ways for specific endeavours.

Part One looks at Nirvana in all its aspects. The first chapter seeks a comprehensive definition of the word. Readers shy of long definitions may skip all but the first page or two. Chapter 2 probes the state of Nirvana and nirvanic experiences, citing actual descriptions of them.

Part Two gets to grips with the lives, works and words of the nirvaneans themselves. The selection covers Japan and China, 20th-century India and modern Europe.

The objective of this volume is to demystify Nirvana, not in any reductive sense, but simply to cast a fresh light and, dare one hope, ease our progress towards it.