Ground of all being – exploring deep meditation states

 

 

Recent meditation experiences had me researching descriptions of the experience of ultimate reality. They were the kind of rare (for me) experiences that left me struggling to say anything about, except by using such vague phrases as “beyond the beyond”. I found myself clutching at such expressions because I wasn’t aware at that point of others who had had experiences like them. To try and give a better idea of what I mean, here are my meditation notes from a recent sitting which began with going through the jhanas and reaching the immaterial jhanas:

Beyond words
Beyond profound
Beyond everything
No words will do.

I am not usually so stuck for words!

When I later looked back on the experience I wondered if the Hindu description of ultimate reality, ‘Sat Chit Ananda’ (beingness, conscious awareness, bliss or joy), might apply, and my researches suggested that some aspects of that phrase could apply to my ‘beyondness’ meditation, but some, such as joy, could not.

Just as a small aside, if you are interested and have a look around such sources as Yogapedia or ‘Yes Vedanta’ for ‘sat, chit, ananda’, you’ll find such things as:

It represents the supreme state of consciousness, where one experiences the unity and wholeness of all existence.
Some consider sat-chit-ananda to be equivalent to God or Brahman (Absolute Reality)

Anyway, back to my main theme of ‘What’s going on in these meditations and could it help other people?’ During another recent meditation, the experience of this ‘beyondness’ was something like a dark, silent void (not dark as in sinister, by the way). There was no sense of an identity of any kind. Looking back, maybe the word ‘potential’ could be added, but even that is just clutching at straws…

So I widened my search to see if I could find descriptions of experiences that might be relevant. The phrase that most closely resonated was ‘the ground of all being’ and the things that a couple of people said about that. As far as I know, this was a form of words first used by Meister Eckhart (about 1260 - 1328), who used such phrases as:

“God is is-ness”
“Creation is the giving of being”
“God is like nothing so much as being. To the extent that anything has being it resembles God.”

It was more recently used by German theologian and Pastor, Paul Tillich (1886 - 1965), who made it a core part of his philosophy, although as far as I know, Tillich didn’t relate it to practice.
 

By the way (please indulge another small digression), my searches also threw up the Ancient Egyptian concept of Nun as pertaining to ground of being, but I thought that’s getting too far away from things I know at least a bit about.
 

Also of more direct interest and relevance was Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh (1926 - 2022), who described the phrase as his favourite description of God. You may be surprised to hear a Buddhist monk talking about God but he had this to say on the subject:

“The Buddha was not against God. He was only against notions of God that are mere mental constructions that do not correspond to reality, notions that prevent us from developing ourselves and touching ultimate reality.”

Thich Nhat Hanh brought together Nirvana, God and ‘ground of being’ when he said:

God as the ground of being cannot be conceived of. Nirvana also cannot be conceived of. If we are aware when we use the word ‘Nirvana’ or the word ‘God’ that we are talking about the ground of being there is no danger in using these words.

There are also promising and similar ideas within Dzogchen, the Tibetan origin of Zen Buddhism.
And then my researches hit gold! I found that the recently retired spiritual writer and speaker Adyashanti had produced a series of meditations that don’t just describe what he calls ‘the Divine Ground of all Being’, they take you there! (Details of CDs that include his meditations can be found in ‘Sources’ below.) He puts this into the context of interconnected layers:

1. The contents of awareness – the world of form
2. Conscious awareness itself – the experience of the contents of consciousness
3. The Divine Ground of Being - the dark void from which everything, including consciousness, emerges.

Adyashanti is another of those who say that it cannot be understood by the thinking mind, nor can it be described with words, although his meditations use words to evoke an experience of this dark void…

I have used Adyashanti’s guided meditations on the ground of being several times at the time of writing and each time they evoked that ‘beyondness’ place that jhana meditations have also evoked.

So, is understanding or experiencing ‘the ground of all being’ useful to those of us with an interest in the awakening process? Anyone who shares my interest in exploring uncommon experiences in distant regions of the mind may well find that it is worth looking into.

Also, it is in the nature of meditation that one can find oneself suddenly and unexpectedly having an experience that one has never had before. This may be concerning to some, so knowing that others have had similar experiences and that no harm will come, can be very reassuring. This applies particularly to experiences that are so hard to say anything about that the closest one can get is something like, ‘a dark, silent void’.

This is a work in progress. At the moment all I can really say is that I stumbled into an extraordinary experience while meditating and that my researches into it so far, are pointing in the direction of what some have referred to as the ground of all being, or similar phrases. There are a couple of aspects of this that I would like understand better:

    • If I persist with meditations that evoke this experience, will they result in insights or changes in the longer term?
    • If others try these meditations what will their experiences be?
    • Suppose the descriptions of ground of all being are accurate and it really is the ultimate reality that underlies all existence, where do we go with our meditations? How do we explore that?

Lots of potential in this one… (sorry!)

“Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”

Albert Einstein

Sources

Adyashanti (2015). Abiding in the divine ground meditation. Guided meditations: Evoking the divine ground of your being. Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True.

Kessler, H. G. (1971). The diary of a cosmopolitan.

https://www.yesvedanta.com/sat-chit-ananda-meaning/
https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/5838/sat-chit-ananda

Key words

Adyashanti, awakening, Buddhism, divine ground, God, ground of being, liberation, meditation, Meister Eckhart, nirvana, Tillich,  

Link

https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2024/07/ground-of-all-being-exploring-deep.html