Everything Mind: What I’ve Learned About Hard Knocks, Spiritual Awakening, and the Mind-Blowing Truth of It All

124 Pages·2015·1.09 MB·English

by  Chris Grosso

For Jenn and Morgan—my loves, my light, my grace
And for Abby, Onyx, Bentley, Sam, Mocha, Bowser, Diesel, Toby, Mae,
Snowball, and Curious.
Thank you for teaching me the true meaning of unconditional love and
acceptance.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 The Goddamn Red Pill
CHAPTER 2 Calculating Infinity
CHAPTER 3 The Hope and the Hurt
CHAPTER 4 Breathe in the Fire
CHAPTER 5 For the Love of the Wounded
CHAPTER 6 Last Night of the Earth
CHAPTER 7 Blood, Broken Bones, Violence, and Other Joys of Meditation
PRACTICE BREATH AWARENESS
CHAPTER 8 Left Behind
PRACTICE MEDICINE BUDDHA
CHAPTER 9 Death in the Air
PRACTICE SHADOW SELF
CHAPTER 10 One Foot Out of Hell
CHAPTER 11 Outside the Confines
CHAPTER 12 The Chemistry of Common Life
PRACTICE TONGLEN
CHAPTER 13 Give Me the Underdogs
CHAPTER 14 Mastodon, King Kong, and Inspiration
CHAPTER 15 In All the Worlds until the End of Time
CHAPTER 16 Love. Serve. Remember.
PRACTICE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE
CHAPTER 17 We Are the Storm
PRACTICE INNER BODY AWARENESS
CHAPTER 18 In Pieces
PRACTICE THE FIVE REMEMBRANCES
CHAPTER 19 The “End of My Rope” Is a Noose
PRACTICE CHECK YOURSELF
CHAPTER 20 At the Mountain of Madness
PRACTICE DIE, DIE, MY DARLING
CHAPTER 21 No Apologies
CHAPTER 22 Tony Hawk, Public Enemy, and the Universe Inside
CHAPTER 23 On Suffering (And How to Fit the Entire Human Race into a
Single Sugar Cube)
PRACTICE ONE WITH THE ETERNAL EVERYTHING (GUIDED
MEDITATION)
CHAPTER 24 Bleed into One
PRACTICE MARANATHA MANTRA
CHAPTER 25 Jesus Hates Me?
PRACTICE CENTERING PRAYER
CHAPTER 26 Truth Seekers, Lovers, and Warriors
Inspiration
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by the Author
About Sounds True
Copyright
FOREWORD
Chris Grosso’s Everything Mind is a raw, real, authentic look at what is
traditionally known as Enlightenment or Awakening or the Great Liberation—
the discovery that we have an identity not just with a small, separate, finite self
or mind (what Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego”), but also with a
radically whole, infinite, all-embracing, and all-encompassing self or mind
known as Buddha Mind, Christ Consciousness, Purusha, or Big Mind. Chris
very appropriately calls this Everything Mind. “Everything” because, unlike the
small mind or self, which identifies basically with just the “skin-encapsulated
ego,” Big Mind or Everything Mind identifies with everything—the entire
manifest and unmanifest universe, the Ground of all Being, Godhead, the
Kosmos, Buddha-nature, Brahman. Call it what you will, it is what there is and
all there is. As the Upanishads famously put it, tat tvam asi: You Are That.
This might sound far-out and woo-woo, except that thousands and thousands
of people over at least two millennia have had this direct and immediate
experience of Enlightenment or Awakening, and their collective testimony is
consistent, compelling, and altogether believable. What’s more, you can directly
and immediately have this experience for yourself and find out whether you
believe it is true or not. Most people—educated or uneducated, rich or poor,
brilliant or average—who have had a strong Enlightenment experience claim
that, as one recently told me, “It was the most real reality I have ever known.”
The world’s Great Religions were founded by men and women who originally
had one of these Awakening experiences, realized that it had put them in touch
with a Divine or Ultimate Reality, and set out to share that realization with
others. There are traditions and practices and exercises that still exist today that
can put you directly in touch with this all-pervading, all-embracing Everything
Mind—and Chris’s book is loaded with examples drawn from those that he has
tried himself and found to be most valuable. He sets these forth in a clear,
straightforward, no-nonsense fashion, which he elucidates with his trademark
raw, authentic, and brutal honesty. This is indeed a no-bullshit spirituality, from
one who has gone from gutter to glory, from ravaging drug addiction to the
process of Awakening, from a living hell to a radiant heaven here and now. One
thing is sure: as you read Chris’s words, you can believe him. There are no lies
in his narrative lines. He’s seen where lies lead; he’s been there, done that, and is
now done with that, leaving only raw truth bleeding from a vulnerable, open
heart.
If you look around the world of self-improvement or self-transformation, you
notice that there are three main paths offered by various schools around the
world. There is the path of Waking Up offered by the schools of the Great
Liberation and aiming for Enlightenment or Awakening. There is the path of
Cleaning Up, which aims to re-own and re-integrate previously repressed and
dissociated shadow material, helping ameliorate any neuroses. And there is the
path of Growing Up, the major stages of growth and development that all our
multiple intelligences go through as they move from their earliest, immature, and
undifferentiated forms to their highest, most mature, most differentiated and
integrated forms (in other words, what happens as we actually “grow up” in any
of our capacities). Chris stresses the first two—Waking Up to Everything Mind
and Cleaning Up our shadow elements. He doesn’t directly address Growing Up,
but it is implicit in virtually all his recommendations, so let me say a few words
about this so you can better understand where Chris is coming from, and because
it is important that all three paths be engaged simultaneously, otherwise the
result will turn out to be partial, fragmented, broken, tormented.
The path of Waking Up is a series of direct and immediate experiences that
you are fully aware of as they happen. If you feel, for example, a loving oneness
with the entire universe, you will know it—believe me. The stages in the path of
Growing Up are not like that. You can’t see them by introspecting. They are
more like the rules of grammar. Everyone who grows up in a particular culture
ends up speaking that language more or less correctly—they follow the rules of
grammar. Yet, if you ask any of them to actually write down the rules they are
following, very few can do so. In other words, they are following a large set of
explicit rules but have no idea how they are doing it, let alone what those rules
actually are. They can’t see these rules by introspecting.
The stages in the path of Growing Up are like those rules of grammar. They
are hidden values, meanings, needs, motivations, understandings, ethics and
morals, worldviews—and they govern how we see and interpret our universe.
They are not discovered by looking within, but by observing and interacting with
many people over time. (In fact, they are so difficult to spot that, unlike the
direct experiences of Waking Up—which go back at least fifty thousand years to
the earliest shamans—the rules of the stages of Growing Up were only
discovered about one hundred years ago.)
The way you do this is similar to the way American psychologist Lawrence
Kohlberg explicated some of the major stages of our moral development (our
moral Growing Up). You start by asking a series of questions—one of
Kohlberg’s most famous was, “A man is married to a woman who is dying of a
particular illness. The local drugstore has a drug that will cure her, but he is very
poor and cannot afford it. Does he have the right to steal it?” Kohlberg received
three basic answers to this question: “Yes,” “No,” and “Yes.”
When he asked the reason for the first “Yes” answer (why the husband had
the right to steal the medicine), the person would answer with something like,
“Well, what’s right is whatever I say is right, whatever I want, and if I want to
steal it, I’ll steal it.” This stage is variously called egocentric, narcissistic,
preconventional, and selfish. It looks after itself, and only itself; it cares for
itself, and only for itself. It is where all humans begin their growth and
development to higher, wider, deeper stages of identity and capacity as they
follow the path of Growing Up.
The “No” reason was, “What society says is true and its laws cannot be
broken at all, so nobody has the right to steal this.” This stage—which is more
complex and more developed than the previous egocentric “Yes” stage—is
known as: ethnocentric (extending identity from the individual self to a
particular—“ethnic”—group or groups of people—a clan, tribe, race, sex, nation,
religion, and so on; care (extending care from oneself to caring for an entire
group—but just that one group, seeing everybody else as an outsider or other
who doesn’t deserve care); or conventional or conformist. The thought process at
this stage is mythic and fundamentalist, with a strong “law and order” tendency
and beliefs like “My country, right or wrong,” or “My religion, right or wrong.”
In terms of spirituality, somebody at this growth stage will believe, for example,
that all the myths in the Bible are literally true, that Moses really did part the
Red Sea, God really did rain locusts down on the Egyptians, Christ really was
born from a biological virgin, and so on.
The final “Yes” reason was, “He has the right to steal it because life is a
universal value and worth more than the forty dollars that the medicine costs.”
This highest stage, based on universal principles that are true for all humans
regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, is known as worldcentric, rational, post-