The Path of Ontognosis

Dear Dharma Friend, (That means you.)

To celebrate the birth of Ontognosis, four of my students have formed a quartet called "Pronto and the Ontognostics.” Here they’re jamming on a Manhattan rooftop, offering a free concert to a flock of pigeons.

We usually think of the quest for enlightenment and Self-realization as endemic to the East, but throughout the centuries there have emerged various Western paths to higher consciousness, created by poets, philosophers, and visionaries. It’s the same mystic melody, but played in a different key.

I now present to you “Ontognosis,” a new Western path to spiritual awakening. It reveals the contradictions intrinsic to the effort to be, i.e., to achieve selfhood. That knowledge is the catalyst to mystical illumination.

If you seek enlightenment —amidst the perplexities of your everyday life—then Ontognosis is your path. Here, then, is a bit more about it.

The Ten Salient Features of Ontognosis

1. Ontognosis Doesn’t Involve Eastern Practices such as breathing exercises, meditation, chanting, prayer, contemplation, mantra recitation, ascetic practices, and yoga. Rather, we utilize an ability in which Westerners are quite proficient, namely thinking. But the thinking that we employ isn’t the abstract and theoretical variety. Rather, Ontognosis involves a certain mode of critical thinking designed to reveal our unconsciously held conceptual frameworks. Once brought into the light of day, we can be liberated from them. Of course, any traditional Eastern practice might still be of much value, in a supplementary way, even if Ontognosis is your path.

2. Ontognosis Illuminates the Internal Dialogue — Eastern paths recommend gaining distance from the distracting thoughts or emotions that comprise the internal dialogue. A student of mine recently wrote me, ‘When I was a disciple of a renowned Tibetan Buddhist Llama and asked what to do about painful emotions he would reply, ‘Just pay them no mind.’ But, I’ve sadly found that such wellintentioned advice was insufficient.’ The good news is that thoughts, emotions, and unconscious pursuits, when illuminated, prove to be empty and void, and fall away. Consequently, there’s no longer a need to distance oneself from what’s revealed to be illusory. That’s the intent of Ontognosis and why it’s liberating. 3. The Negative, i.e., our Suffering, is Our Guiding Star — As C.G. Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Here, again, to become free of the negative, we must illuminate all that is dark, including our everyday conflicts, fears and anxieties. What we gain, as a result, are powerful clues to who we really are and what life is all about

Even what you consider to be your favorite joke is a Rorschach test

4. We Illuminate the Symbolic & Mythic Dimension of Being — Eastern traditions fail to reveal the profound depths of our everyday interests, desires, conflicts, and anxieties. Ontognosis, by contrast, uses our everyday life as a path to awakening. Everything — from the foods that we like and dislike, to the clothes we wear, the car we drive, our favorite joke, to the problems with our golf swing offers clues to who we are and what life is all about. Even how you prefer to eat your eggs, can be a doorway to the mystical.

5. We Illuminate the Conceptual Dimension of Being — We can’t be inwardly free, if we unconsciously subscribe to concepts, theories, and ideas that significantly shape, distorts, and cloud our awareness. These theories include those that are metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, historical, social, political, and economic. For example, quite prevalent today is the belief that artificial intelligence and other technology can cause the world to evolve into a Utopia. Harboring false hopes rob us of the lucidity, focus, and energy needed to precipitate awakening. 6. We Uncover Our Mode of Being — There have been various schools of existential therapy that bear certain similarities to Ontognosis, including Menard Boss’ Heideggerian ‘Dasein Analysis,’ Rudolph Allers’ ‘Ontoanalysis,’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existential Psychoanalysis.’ In addition to being grounded in existentialism, they all share a certain holistic dimension. For example, Sartre contends that a person’s mode of being finds expression in all aspects of his (or her) being. Thus, for example, our favorite food, our relationship difficulties, the way we walk, and he way we wear our hair, are all related. Thus, contrary to Buddhism a person isn’t merely a collection of unrelated skandas (aggregates) but a unified being. The difference, though, between Ontognosis and the other existential modes of analysis is that the goal of Ontognosis is neither mental health, nor existential authenticity, nor the usual sort of enhancement of one’s life. Rather the goal of Ontognosis is mystical awakening. 7. Ontognosis Isn’t Psychotherapy — Psychotherapy utilizes a psychological level of analysis. Ontognosis dives deeper into the philosophical level of analysis, specifically into the “critical philosophy” of thinkers like Nagarjuna and Immanuel Kant. It seeks to uncover the unexamined metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that we subconsciously harbor, and which is the fundamental source of psychological suffering. This level of analysis is the crucible where innertransformation takes place.

The mysterious presence of an onion

8. We Discern How Our Inner Development Parallels the History of Consciousness. The various stages of consciousness, through human history beginning with the ancient myths and then as embodied in ancient philosophy, all the way to modern philosophy — are unconsciously reflected in one’s inner development. But to truly achieve Self-realization requires that we consciously recapitulate that dialectical development. The Buddhists, to the contrary, advise that we abandon the boat that carried us to the other shore — which, if I might extend the ancient metaphor a bit — I take to mean, by the boat, the entire history of consciousness that dialectically brought us to where we currently are. To change metaphors, when we peel away the skins of the onion of being, in an effort to get to the hollow core of the onion, the various skins, which we would foolishly discard, are the Self, and must be known as such to have a full Selfrealization. 9. Ontognosticism Shifts from the Primacy of Being to Emptiness. In certain respects, Ontognosis is allied with the Kyoto School, which was founded by Kitaro Nishida in 1913. That isn’t surprising since they too sought to integrate Zen Buddhism, with Western philosophy. Besides the shift from Being to Emptiness, both the Kyoto School and Ontognosis seek to help people to effectuate a cognitive shift from objects to that of the space surrounding objects, from identity to infinity, from sounds to silence, from thinking to pure awareness, from the ego to the Self. I’m reminded, in this respect of the shaman Don Juan Matus instructing his student Carlos Castaneda to look at a tree, but rather than gazing at its leaves to instead gaze at he shadows between the leaves. Eventually, one realizes that one’s true being isn’t one’s ego, but rather what Shankara, of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, refers to as the witness. To effectuate this cognitive shift, is to enter a state of presence.

So much of the art of living depends on maintaining our balance

10. Ontognosis Balances Existential Dread with Transcendence.

Transcendence can take a variety of

forms, including wonder, amazement, awe, and astonishment. Transcendence can also be found in the comic vision of life. Ah, back again to Don Juan Matus! He also taught Carlos the importance of balancing the terror of life with the wonder of life. Only then can we gain the psychological equilibrium needed to tread the difficult path to Self-realization. Ontognosis utilizes not only wonder, but amazement and healing laughter to prevent the spiritual journey from becoming dreadfully serious.

So there you have it! Isn’t it wonderful how this list of Ontognosis’ salient features comes out to exactly ten items! Perfecto! Uh, actually “imperfecto.” That’s because the choice of ten salient features was purely capricious. After all, I could just as well have chosen five, or seven, or easily arrived at over 300 salient features of Ontognosis, were I crazier than I am.

Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, knew something about the arbitrariness of classification. In 1942, he wrote an essay entitled, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” which brilliantly satirizes animal taxonomy and classification in general. If we follow Borges’ reasoning, any classification — such as the ten salient features of Ontognosis — must, by logical necessity, be arbitrary. After all, for a classificatory scheme to be logically necessary, rather than arbitrary, would presuppose that we understood the entire universe, which is infinite. Why is that so? It’s because any particular thing is internally related to every other thing in the universe.

In any case, since the infinitude of a particular thing’s relations to everything else in the universe is unknowable, it follows that nothing is truly knowable in itself alone. Furthermore, if it can neither be known through itself alone nor in relation to the infinitude of other things, putting it into some sort of classificatory schema can only reveal superficial similarities and differences between the members of a class, and can’t truly advance our understanding of anything being classified. Each and every being must, therefore, elude our conceptual grasp, rendering it ultimately unintelligible.

Indra's infinite net of jewels (Courtesy of NASA)

This is akin to the Buddhist notion of Sunyata, or emptiness. It points to the lack of self-sufficiency of any particular thing or idea. It’s likewise akin to the Hindu and Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s infinite net of jewels, in which each jewel reflects every other jewel in the infinite universe.

Furthermore, if any particular thing can neither be understood via a classificatory schema nor can it be understood in its

infinite relations to other things or ideas, it therefore remains a profound mystery. What remains, according to the Buddhists, is its unintelligible “suchness” or “thisness.” It can indeed be intuited non-dualistically. That is certainly an amazing cognition. But it can’t be known as we usually mean it.

If you can grok any of this, you’re on your way to mystical awakening.

Good luck on your journey and remember that nothing worth doing is easy. As Spinoza wrote, “All things excellent in life are as difficult as they are rare.” Best Wishes, Dr. Mark Dillof Director of the Academy of Mystical Illumination

Check out our FREE Mysticism Course

In this FREE 3-lesson course, you’ll discover the path of Ontognosis, a western path to enlightenment. Here’s what makes it different: Eastern meditative paths seek to quiet the intellect. The Western path, by contrast, is grounded in our unique strength as Westerners, namely thinking, but not the abstract kind taught at colleges. Rather, we teach existential thinking, also known as thinking with one’s gut. It powerfully illuminates the darkness within.

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