Dr Ben-Zion Weiss

From a talk given at Blavatsky Lodge on 6 May 2009

Back to Articles

We began with acknowledging the Gadigal Clan of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land of the city of Sydney. I played my Wiradjuri Emu Dreaming clap sticks; to evoke the heart beat of the Earth our mother, according to the indigenous consciousness. I then sang the Shalom Benediction, as a greeting in peace from my Jewish ancestors. I encouraged the audience to join me so we could experience the way music and group singing can evoke a sense of collective consciousness. Through silence and sound we create music. Sacred music can evoke a sense of the unitary consciousness through the vibration and the use of the mantric phrase, Shalom. This Hebrew word is part of a traditional greeting in the Middle East, Shalom Alechem, which means ‘peace to you’. In Arabic this becomes Salaam Aleichem. The word Shalom also implies wholeness and integration. Its three sounds evoke the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, so as a greeting it also expresses the wish that all your energy centres or Sephirot are in balance with the universe. A profound greeting!

In my talk I began with the story of my journey, which is consistent with the social ecology model that is the basis of my practice as a social ecologist. In social ecology we begin with the personal consciousness, our psychological domain. This expands to the social consciousness that emerges from our personal experiences in society, our sociological domain. Our social life is contextualised in an ecology through our inter-relationship with our community in the natural world or the built environment, which provides an ecological consciousness. These are held within a cosmological consciousness that is our spiritual domain.

For myself, this journey began in my growing up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney in a Jewish family, refugees from Eastern Europe. While I was born in Romania, all my education and life from the age of 5 was in Australia. As is traditional for Jewish boys in the orthodox community, I attended Cheder 3 times a week, until I was Bar Mitzvahed at 13. This cultivated a strong Jewish consciousness in my home life and community of origin as well as the Australian Anglo-Christian consciousness in my contact with the wider community at school and university. The confusion and conflicts inherent in growing up in such contrasting experiences of the different consciousness of these different communities were probably the beginning of my exploration of a creative consciousness.

Back to the top

However, my university studies in chemical engineering developed an equally strong sense of a scientific and technological consciousness, which led to my rejecting the Jewish religious consciousness of my youth. That all seemed so medieval and archaic in the light of the modern world I was living in, 20th century Sydney. I am using the word consciousness in a number of ways in this talk. Primarily it relates to awareness and ways of thinking and seeing the world around us. Pure consciousness is very mysterious, in that we cannot see it directly, any more than the eye that is looking can see itself, except in a mirror. Likewise the consciousness that is looking cannot see itself, however we can experience pure consciousness in deep states of meditation, which is what later drew me to yoga and Zen Buddhist practice. Another way I can experience different forms of consciousness is through language, story, poetry, music, drama, art, imagination, science, mysticism and deep inquiry. It is through my consciousness that I construct my understanding of the world.

There is a Zen story that illustrates this point. It’s the story of the flag at the gate. In ancient times at Zen monasteries in Japan they would fly the flag of the monastery at the gate. One day two monks were standing at the gate. One of them looked up at the flag and said, “Look, the flag is moving.” His companion looked up and said emphatically: ”No, it’s the wind that’s moving!” His companion disagreed and they stood there arguing back and forth for a while. Then the Master came by and overheard the argument. He interjected: “It’s not the flag, it’s not the wind, it’s the mind that’s moving!” As with other teaching stories, the idea is that the Zen student meditates on the story and different students may focus on different interpretations of the story.

For me, the story shows the different levels of consciousness of the monks and the master. At a more literal and material level there can be a conflict about whether the wind or the flag is moving. One could also say that they are both moving. However at the level of consciousness of the master, it’s the mind that’s moving. My experience of Zen practice made me very aware of the many movements of my own mind, especially in the early days of a 7 day sesshin. By the third day the mind moved less and by the 6th I would experience periods of great stillness of the mind.

Back to the top

It was through a number of years of Zen study and practice with Robert Aitken Roshi, a Zen master from Hawaii, that I began to feel I connected to my mind in a new way. Zen taught me much about the nature of mind, and was thus very useful for my understanding of mental consciousness. My entry into Zen came through my yoga teacher John Cooper, who was also a Theosophist. It was through attending a number of his talks over the years at the Theosophical Society that I was introduced to the society. It was also through my yoga studies with John that I first discovered I was actually in my body. It happened after a number of years of attending his weekly classes and his Summer intensives at NSW uni that one day I was doing paschimottanasana (a sitting head to knee pose) and I realised that I was actually in my body. Up till that time it was like I lived my life in my mind, that was somehow attached to my body. But in that yoga class I developed a real sense of body consciousness from the inside.

Back to the top

My introduction to yoga had been through actor training and I had begun to do actor training when I became quite disillusioned with the world of the chemical industry as a young chemical engineer. The theory I learned when I studied this subject turned out to be very different from the practice. My experience of the industry was that all it was interested in was making a profit. Neither people working in the industry nor the environment were important. Pollution was totally accepted as an inevitable by-product of the industry, because it was too expensive to exercise pollution controls. Likewise worker safety, while given some lip service, was also sacrificed to the god of money, as I found to my own cost when I had a serious industrial accident and ended up in hospital with a greatly reduced lung capacity after inhaling some very toxic gases. This convinced me to seek another way of spending my life and so I chose to become a film-maker.

Film was a medium I’d developed a great love for as a student and my creative consciousness was feeling very neglected in my engineering work. So I began to study acting and apprenticed myself to a photographer who photographed actors and models for their portfolios. I later attended Swinburne Institute of Technology, a film school in Melbourne. This pursuit of the creative consciousness led me to work in theatre for which I also wrote and directed. Finally I returned to uni to study the arts and majored in Drama, French and Theatre Studies. All this led to my wanting to write a book called The Buddha Nature of Theatre, which took me into the realm of Zen studies. To write about Buddha Nature, I felt like I needed to know what it was. It was something I’d read about, but I didn’t really understand what it was, and so I decided to find out.

My interest in both Buddhism and the performing arts actually grew out of my search for creating a more peaceful world. This is how my personal story takes on a more social significance. As a child of Holocaust survivors, I was conscious of the highly destructive nature of war and as a uni student in the 60s I was conscious of the war that Australia was engaged with. So, when I realised that science wasn’t going to save the world, as I had been led to believe, I thought maybe the answer was in the arts. The arts could draw attention to serious social issues and communicate them, but then I found that the arts industry was just as driven by profit and making money as the science industry had been and this greatly limited what one could communicate. This dilemma led to a deeper process of inquiry through reading, films, theatre, travel, conversation, writing and drama education. The idea of writing a book about The Buddha Nature of Theatre came while working in a big city bookshop as a student. It came out of the ether one day when I was working in the shop, dusting books in the later afternoon and it initiated a whole other level of inquiry into the nature of consciousness itself. This brought in the spiritual and the ecological domains.

Back to the top

It later led to my training with Joanna Macy in her Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age workshops, which were to become her Deep Ecology processes. This opened me up to the Buddhist consciousness of our interconnectedness. As well it led to my involvement with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship who, together with the Vietnamese community, brought Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) to Australia in 1986, the International Year of Peace. Thay taught this Buddhist idea of our interconnectedness as interbeing. At that point in my life I felt I was getting closer to my life work, especially when I read Peter Russell’s classic work, The Awakening Earth, in which he traces the evolution of our human self-reflexive consciousness. I decided to explore drama and yoga together in a process I called Drama Yoga, so bringing eastern and western ideas together. This was a very powerful process, indeed it was so powerful that I felt like I needed some guidance. So I put out for guidance and the universe sent along the invitation to train in the Alternative to Violence Project (AVP). Through AVP I came into contact with Dances of Universal Peace and Sufi practice and then I knew that I was finally home.

Back to the top

Many years ago I read a book by Mouni Sadhu, in which he said that once we choose to go on the spiritual path, then we are guided. That has certainly been my experience. When I read Krishnamurti, I called that guidance choiceless awareness. Now, as a Sufi student of Hazrat Inayat Khan, I call this the spirit of guidance. Whatever name I choose, the process feels the same. It’s been a process of my becoming aware of deeper levels of consciousness. Like the monks in the Zen story, I too was caught up in debating whether the wind or the flag was moving. Today I’m much more aware that it is the mind that’s moving. In one of Ervin Lazslo’s more recent books The Consciousness Revolution, he, in dialogue with Peter Russell and Stanislav Grof proposes that what we need today, to create a more peaceful world is a revolution in consciousness, that would be inspired by artists. This idea resonates with one I had many years ago, when in conversation with a dear friend, who has since passed, I said the world today needs a revolution of the mind, before we can hope to make things better. At the time I had no idea of what that might involve, just as later The Buddha Nature of Theatre idea came to me long before I could understand what that might entail.

I now have a glimpse of that revolution in the great work of Jean Gebser, the Prussian born, Francophone Swiss philosopher who mapped out a series of what he called mutations of the structures of consciousness. Influenced by his meeting with Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser came up with the idea that the next stage of consciousness needed in the world would be integral consciousness. Gary Lachman, in his highly readable and inspiring book, The Secret History of Consciousness, comes to a similar conclusion as Lazslo, Grof and Russell. Lachman places Jean Gebser’s work as the climax of his secret history, which begins with people like Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists as early forerunners of this evolutionary process. Ken Wilber has promoted integral consciousness widely in his writings in the US, and analysed the possibilities of this integration process in great depth.

Back to the top

But in the end, I would argue that analysis is not enough, because it is still a left over of the mental consciousness of the last 500 years. It is the creative consciousness of a Sufi teacher like Hazrat Inayat Khan, a classical Indian musician, who was instructed by his teacher to harmonise east and west through his music, that points the way to an integral consciousness. It was under his inspiration and that of his son Pir Vilayat Khan, as well as the dance great, Ruth St Denis, that Murshid Samuel Lewis dreamt up the Dances of Universal Peace. Here is a way to practice integral consciousness, through mantric sound, sacred movements and enchanting melodies, drawn for all the major spiritual traditions of our Mother, the Earth.

As the Sufi poet Rumi says:

we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dust

the stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dance

Back to the top

Combs, A., 2002, The Radiance of Being, St Paul Minnesota: Paragon
Cooper, D.A., 1997, God is a Verb, New York: Rivershead
Khan, H.I., 1996, The Mysticism of Sound and Music, Boston: Shambhala
Lachman, G., 2003, A Secret History of Consciousness, Great Barrington, MA: Lindesfarne
Lazslo, E., Grof, S., Russell, P., 2003, The Consciousness Revolution, London: Elf Rock
Liebert, D., 1981, Rumi, Fragments – Ecstacies, New Lebanon: Omega
Russell, P., 1985, The Awakening Earth, The Global Brain, London: Ark

Back to the top