Nonduality

The Dazzling Dark

A Near-Death Experience Opens the Door to a
PERMANENT TRANSFORMATION
by John Wren-Lewis
Prof. John Wren-Lewis
93/108 Elizabeth Bay Road
Elizabeth Bay
Sydney
NSW 2011
Australia
In our last feature of this issue of What is Enlightenment?, we are pleased to p
resent the vivid and thoughtful account of a former spiritual cynic s experience o
f being suddenly and unexpectedly catapulted into an altered state of consciousn
ess. Fascinating as a unique expression of transcendent realization, John Wren-L
ewis description of his powerful spiritual experience is deeply moving and profou
ndly inspiring. His perspective is unique, he claims, not only because his awake
ning was thrust upon him without him seeking for it, but also because, for that
very reason, he questions many commonly held beliefs about the nature of spiritu
al awakening.
While his experience is undoubtedly genuine, as his description of it makes very
clear, many of his conclusions about the nature and meaning of the whole event
of spiritual transformation express the familiar view that beyond the ultimate f
act of being itself, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about the meaning of be
ing itself. We look forward to future dialogue with him to question some of his
conclusions in the hope of bringing light to this most challenging area of relig
ious thought, i.e., is there meaning and significance to life itself and to cons
ciousness being aware of itself, or is the fact of life and consciousness meanin
gless beyond the fact that it simply is?
John Wren-Lewis is a man whose fearless and refreshingly irreverent stance makes
him willing to question many ideas that for too long many would not dare to que
stion. Andrew Cohen first heard of John Wren-Lewis when he received a letter fro
m him in 1991 describing his experience and asking advice. In response, Andrew c
alled him and they had a lively exchange. In March 1995 when Andrew Cohen was vi
siting Sydney, Australia, where John Wren-Lewis lives, they had several public a
nd private meetings together. John Wren-Lewis is an awakened man who is unusual
because, in spite of having many strong opinions based on a lifetime of intellig
ent exploration, he remains open-minded and ever-curious.
Before his experience occurred, John Wren-Lewis, mathematical physicist and huma
nist psychologist, was a primary exponent of the Death of God movement of the 1960
s. He has published extensively and held several professorial appointments in th
e United States and the United Kingdom. He is currently hard at work finishing T
he 9:15 to Nirvana, a book that further elaborates on the subject of this articl
e.

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Some, if we believe what they tell us, are born with God consciousness. Some str
uggle to achieve it by strenuous spiritual practice, though by all accounts the
success rate isn t (and never has been) encouraging. I had God consciousness thrus
t upon me in 1983, my sixtieth year, without working for it, desiring it, or eve
n believing in it, and this has understandably given me a somewhat unusual persp
ective on the whole matter. In particular, I wonder if discipline isn t altogether
 counterproductive in this context and the idea of spiritual growth totally mist
aken.
Before I had my experience, I was a Freud-style skeptic about all things mystica
l. I wouldn t have called myself an atheist or materialist; in fact I d published ex
tensively on the need for a religious world view appropriate to a humanity that
has come of age in the scientific and technological area.(1) But I emphasized that
such a faith would have to be essentially positivistic, focused on the human po
tential for creative change, which I believed could become as effective in the s
ocial realm as it has been in the physical realm. I even believed it possible th
at the creative human personality might eventually discover technologies for tra
nscending mortality, but I saw mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due
to failure of nerve in the creative struggle.(2)
What happened in 1983 could be classified technically as a near-death experience
(NDE), though it lacked any of the dramatic visionary features that tend to dom
inate both journalistic and scholarly NDE accounts.(3) As I lay in a hospital be
d in Thailand, after eating a poisoned candy given me by a would-be thief on a l
ong-distance bus, there were some hours when the medical staff thought I d gone be
yond recall. But I had no out-of-body vision of what was going on, no review of
my life, no passage down a dark tunnel to a heavenly light or landscape, and no
encounter with celestial beings or deceased relatives telling me to go back beca
use my work on earth was not yet done. And although I d lost all fear of death whe
n eventually resuscitated, this had (and has) nothing to do with believing I hav
e an immortal soul that will survive death.
On the contrary, it has everything to do with a dimension of aliveness here and
now which makes the notion of separate survival a very secondary matter, in this
world or any other. In fact it makes each present instant so utterly satisfying
that even the success or failure of creative activity becomes relatively unimpo
rtant. In other words, I ve been liberated from what William Blake called obsessio
n with futurity, which, until it happened, I used to consider a psychological impo
ssibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten years now this liberation h
as made the conduct of practical life more rather than less efficient, precisely
because time consciousness isn t overshadowed by anxious thought for the morrow.
I didn t even notice the change straightaway. My mind was too busy catching up on
why I was in a hospital at night, with a policeman sitting at the foot of the be
d, when the last thing I could remember was feeling drowsy on the bus in the ear
ly morning and settling down for a comfortable snooze on what was scheduled to b
e a seven-hour journey across the jungle-covered mountains. I d suspected nothing,
because the donor of the candy a charming and well-dressed young man who d been ver
y helpful with our luggage had left the bus some miles back. With hindsight, I gue
ss he decided that retreat was the order of the day when he saw that my partner,
dream psychologist Dr. Ann Faraday,(4) wasn t eating the candy he d given her. (Ann s
heroic rescue, when I started turning blue and the bus driver insisted I was ju
st drunk, is quite a story in its own right, but not the point here.)(5)
The fact that I d undergone a radical consciousness shift began to become apparent
only after everyone had settled down for the night and I was left awake, feelin
g as if I d had enough sleep to last a lifetime. By stages I became aware that whe
n I d awakened a few hours earlier, it hadn t been from a state of ordinary unconsci
ousness at all. It was as if I d emerged freshly made (complete with all the memor
ies that constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness that was somehow
radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness or pure consciousness that h
ad no separation within it, and therefore no space or time.
There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity. In fact the sense of a stop
in time was so absolute that I m now convinced I really did die, if only for a few
seconds or fractions of a second, and was literally resurrected by the medical te
am, though there were no brain-wave monitors to provide objective confirmation.
And if my conviction is correct, it actually counts against rather than for the
claim so often made by near-death researchers that personal consciousness can ex
ist apart from the brain. My impression is that my personal consciousness was ac
tually snuffed out (the root meaning, according to some scholars, of the word nirva
na ) and then recreated by a kind of focusing-down from the infinite eternity of t
hat radiant dark pure consciousness. An old nursery rhyme conveys it better than
any high philosophy:
Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of Everywhere into here.

Moreover that wonderful eternal life of everywhere was still there, right behind m
y eyes or more accurately, at the back of my head continually recreating my whole pe
rsonal body-mind consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! and now! and now
! That s no mere metaphor for a vague sensation; it was so palpably real that I pu
t my hand up to probe the back of my skull, half wondering if the doctors had sa
wn part of it away to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn t in the least a feeli
ng of being damaged; it was more like having had a cataract taken off my brain,
letting me experience the world and myself properly for the first time for that lo
vely dark radiance seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy.
I felt like exclaiming, Of course! That s absolutely right! and applauding every sin
gle thing with tears of gratitude not just the now sleeping Ann and the small jar
of flowers the nurse had placed by the bedside, but also the ominous stains on t
he bed sheets, the ancient paint peeling off the walls, the far from hygienic sm
ell of the toilet, the coughs and groans of other patients, and even the traumat
ized condition of my body. From the recesses of my memory emerged that statement
at the beginning of the book of Genesis about God observing everything he had mad
e and finding it very good. In the past I d treated these words as mere romantic p
oetry, referring only to conventionally grand things like sunsets and convenient
ly ignoring what ordinary human consciousness calls illness or ugliness. Now all
the judgments of goodness or badness which the human mind necessarily has to ma
ke in its activities along the line of time were contextualized in the perspecti
ve of that other dimension I can only call eternity, which loves all the product
ions of time regardless.
It was mind-blowing even then, when I was taking for granted that this had to be
a jumbo-sized mystical experience visited on me, of all people, as a kind of cosm
ic joke, from which I must quite soon return to normal. I envisaged making public
recantation of my antimystical views and joining the formerly despised ranks of
spiritual seekers. Because my skeptical bias had been recreated along with the r
est of my memories, I toyed with the possibility that I might simply be sufferin
g some aftereffect of the poison, which the doctors had diagnosed as probably be
ing a heavy dose of morphine laced with cocaine. I didn t really believe this, how
ever, because there was no trace of the trippy feeling that was always present whe
n I took part in a long series of officially sponsored experiments with high-dos
age psychedelics back in the late 1960s.
Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the following days, weeks,
months, and years, any ordinary kind of drug explanation was obviously ruled ou
t. Moreover my bewilderment was intensified as I discovered how all kinds of nega
tive human experiences became marvels of creation when experienced by the Dazzlin
g Dark. To convey even a fraction of what life is like with eternity consciousne
ss would take a whole book and I m currently in the last stages of writing one. It
must suffice here to illustrate two features that have most impressed me and ot
hers who know me, notably Ann.
First, if there were a section in the Guinness Book of Records for cowardice abo
ut physical pain, I would be sure of a place there. But with eternity consciousn
ess, pain becomes simply a warning signal which, once heeded (irrespective of wh
ether a physical remedy is available), becomes simply an interesting sensation,
another of nature s wonders. The Buddha s distinction between pain and suffering, wh
ich I used to think was equivocation, is now a common experience for me. And sec
ond, my erstwhile spectacular dream life has been replaced, on most nights, by a
state which I can only call conscious sleep, where I m fully asleep yet distantly a
ware of lying in bed. It is as if the Dark has withdrawn its game of John Wren-Le
wising to a nonactive level where the satisfaction of simply being is totally unr
elated to doing.(6)
The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the most extraordin
ary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn t feel extraordinary at all
. It feels quintessentially natural that personal consciousness should be aware
of its own Ground, while my first fifty-nine years of so-called normal consciousne
ss, in ignorance of that Ground, now seem like a kind of waking dream. It was as
if I d been entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate individu
als struggling in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction and significance.
Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened life, becau
se the rest of the world is still taking the separation state for granted, and m
y own resurrected mind still contains programs based on the assumptions of that st
ate. So in the early days I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual se
eker in the hope of finding help. It came as a real disappointment to find that
no one I consulted, either in person or through books, had a clue, because ancie
nt traditions and modern movements alike take for granted that the kind of etern
ity consciousness I m living in is the preserve of spiritual Olympians, the mystic
al equivalent of Nobel laureates.
Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of its own which i
s gradually enabling me to deal with the adjustment problems and a fascinating pro
cess it is. In the meantime, however, I m very concerned that all the seekers I co
me across accept as a law of the spiritual universe that they have to be content
with years perhaps many reincarnational lifetimes of hopeful traveling, rewarded at
best with what T.S. Eliot called hints and guesses (7) of the eternity-conscious s
tate, whereas I see that state as the natural human birthright.
My intensive investigations in this area over the past decade have left me in no
doubt that proponents of the so-called Perennial Philosophy are correct in iden
tifying a common deep structure of experience underlying the widely different cult
ural expressions of mystics in all traditions. Nonetheless I find no evidence wh
atever for the often-made claim that these traditions contain disciplines for at
taining God consciousness that have been empirically tested and verified.(8) On
the contrary, the assumption that God consciousness is a high and special state
seems like the perfect defense mechanism for not asking whether spiritual paths
are really leading there at all. Yet this is a very pertinent question, since ma
ny mystics whose utterances most clearly resonate as coming from life in the ete
rnity-state have asserted that their awakening was an act of grace (or words to th
at effect) rather than a reward for effort on their part.
Indeed the more I investigate, the more convinced I become that iconoclastic mys
tics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti(9) were right in asserting that the very
idea of a spiritual path is necessarily self-defeating, because it does the one
thing that has to be undone if there is to be awakening to eternity: it concentr
ates attention firmly on futurity. Paths and disciplines make gnosis a goal, when
in fact it is already the ground of all knowing, including sinful time-bound knowi
ng. To me now, systems of spirituality seem like analogues of those dreams which
prevent waking up (for example, to wet a thirsty throat or relieve the bladder)
by creating a never- ending nocturnal drama of moving towards the desired goal,
 encountering and overcoming obstacle after obstacle along the way, but never ac
tually arriving.
In other words, I ve begun to realize that my former skepticism wasn t all bad. I th
ink now that I was like the ignorant peasant boy in Hans Christian Andersen s famo
us story who simply wouldn t go along with the courtiers wishful thinking about the
emperor s glory in his new clothes. My mistake was to put down the impulse that c
auses spiritual seekers to want a greater glory than ordinary life affords and m
akes them hope it s there in the great traditions, even when they have no experien
tial evidence of it. Or to switch to an even older fable, I decided that heavenl
y grapes must be delusory when I could see that none of the ladders people were
climbing in pursuit of them ever reached the goal.
Now I not only understand the urge to find something altogether beyond the shall
ow satisfactions and the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of this petty pace, but I
know from firsthand experience that the joy beyond joy is greater than the wildes
t imaginations of a consciousness bogged down in time. But I can also see that t
he very impulse to seek the joy of eternity is a Catch-22, because seeking itsel
f implies a preoccupation with time, which is precisely what drives eternity out
of awareness. Even disciplines designed to prize attention away from doing are
simply another form of doing, which is why they at best yield only occasional gl
impses of the eternal Ground of consciousness in Being.
So what to do? One thing I learned in my former profession of science was that t
he right kind of lateral thinking can often bring liberation from Catch-22 situa
tions, provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in
the form of metaphysical speculations beyond experience. This is the exploratio
n to which my life is now dedicated. It s a research project in which anyone who s i
nterested can join, because the very fact of being interested means that somewhe
re at the back of your head you are already as aware of the Ground of consciousn
ess as I am. So rather than take up my little remaining space with any of my own
tentative conclusions, I ll end with a couple of cautionary hints.
First, beware of philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a framework of gr
owth or evolution, which I believe are the great modern idols. Both are importan
t phenomena of eternity s time theater, but as paradigms they re old hat, hangovers
from the age of empire-building and the work ethic. We should know better today,
when astronomers have shown that the kind of planetary destruction that was onc
e imagined as a possible divine judgment could in fact be brought about at any t
ime by the perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.
The I want it now attitude, so often deplored by spiritual pundits as a twentieth-
century sin, is in my view a very healthy sign that we are beginning to be disil
lusioned with time-entrapment. A truly mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutio
nary, a paradigm of lila, divine play for its own sake, where any purposes along
the line of time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction th
at is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the ins
tant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all manifestation, irrespective
of whether, from the purely human standpoint, the manifestation is creative or
destructive, growing or withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading
out.
My second warning is to mind your language, for the words we use are often hooks
that catch us into time entrapment. For example, when we use the term self with a
small s to describe individual personhood, and Self with a capital S for the fullnes
of God consciousness, the notion of the one gradually expanding into the other
becomes almost inescapable, again concentrating attention along the time line. M
ystical liberation, by contrast, is the sudden discovery that even the meanest s
elf is already a focus of the Infinite Aliveness that is beyond any kind of self
hood.
Again, when the word home is used to describe eternity, there is an almost irresis
tible temptation to think of life as a journey of return, whereas mystical awake
ning for me has been like Dorothy s in The Wizard of Oz: the realization that I ne
ver really left home and never could. Here too T.S. Eliot has the word for it: Ho
me is where one starts from. (10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant vo
yaging out from the eternal Home into the time process to discover new productions
of time for eternity to love as they arise and pass away.
Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to spiritual seek
ers is to experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting which is wha
t the Buddha urged a long time ago, though not too many of his followers have ev
er taken that part of his teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern move
ments alike may be very valuable as databases for new adventures, but to treat t
hem as authorities to be obeyed is not only unscientific it seems actually to go aga
inst the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is apparently the name o
f the time game
.
I suspect gnosis comes as grace because there are as many different forms of it as
there are people. Yet because we re all in this together, sharing experience is i
ntegral to its fullness. Whatever experiments you make, share your failures, your
hints and guesses, and your awakening too if it happens, with warts-and-all hone
sty, because everything that lives is holy.
NOTES
1. See for example my book What Shall We Tell the Children? (London: Constable,
1971) and the quotations from my earlier writings in J.A.T. Robinson, Honest to
God (London: SCM Press, 1963), the foundation work of the Death of God movement in
the mid-1960s.
2. See especially my article Love s Coming-of-Age in C. Rycroft, ed., Psychoanalysis
Observed (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1968).
3. The best overview of this subject is still C. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: T
he Near-Death Experience in Mediaeval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford Univers
ity Press, 1987). There is now also a Journal of Near-Death Studies published qu
arterly by the Human Sciences Press in New York.
4. See Ann Faraday, Dream Power (New York: Berkeley, 1973) and The Dream Game (N
ew York: Harper & Row, 1976/1990).
5. A fuller version of the story is told in my article The Darkness of God: A Per
sonal Report on Consciousness Transformation through Close Encounter with Death i
n the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1988), pp. 105-121, and
in my forthcoming book The 9:15 to Nirvana. At the time of this incident, we wer
e on holiday from fieldwork in the Malaysian jungle which led to exposure of the
Senoi Dream Tribe legend as a fraud. See Ann Faraday and John Wren-Lewis, The Sell
ing of the Senoi, in Lucidity Letter, vol. 3, no. 1, (1984), pp. 1-2.
6. For further details, see my article Dream Lucidity and Near-Death Experience:
A Personal Report in Lucidity Letter, vol. 4, no. 2, (1986), pp. 4-12.
7. See T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, 5, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1
944/1959). As an example, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon Pr
ess, 1974) relates Merton s discussion with a very high Tibetan meditation master
in which they both admitted to each other that breakthrough into direct realizati
on still eluded them after thirty years of assiduous practice. A high Tibetan lam
a once told me he expected to spend many more reincarnations before reaching a s
tate of continuing eternity consciousness.
8. See for example Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & R
ow, 1944) and Ken Wilber, The Atman Project (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1980).
9. For notes on Krishnamurti in this respect, with particular reference to recen
t reports of his alleged affair with a married woman disciple, see my article Dea
th Knell of the Guru System?: Perfectionism vs. Enlightenment in the Journal of H
umanistic Psychology, vol. 34, no. 2 (1994), pp. 46-61.
10. T.S. Eliot, East Coker, 5, in Four Quartets.