Supermind and the Primordial Avoidance

Ken Wilber

Image by Jake Kobrin

Ken offers a fascinating preview of his upcoming book, The Religion of Tomorrow, where he describes
the highest structure of conscious that has yet evolved — the all-pervading, all-embracing stage known
as “Supermind” — making this one of the finest meditations on your own Highest Self you could
possibly ask for.

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 Ken Wilber: This is a short excerpt on Supermind from a six hundred-page book called The
Religion of Tomorrow, which will be out from Shambhala the season after they release the coming book,
Integral Meditation. So it will probably be a little more than a year from now, Integral Meditation
should be out next fall. I discuss Supermind in four or five places in the book, and each place goes over
a different aspect of it. This is just one of the aspects. So it’s not a complete discussion, but it’s a part of
an overall discussion.

Supermind is the epitome of freedom and responsibility. You, and in the deepest sense you
alone, become responsible for the entire planet and all of its beings. Immanuel Kant beautifully defined
a “cosmopolitan” as one who feels that, “when anyone anywhere suffers, I suffer” – a profound world-
centric awareness. And the ultimate cosmopolitanism is when one feels that, when anyone or anything
anywhere suffers, I suffer, because I am them.

Supermind is that type of all-inclusive, all-pervading, all-embracing responsibility. And it starts

with being able to hold the entire kosmos in your awareness, without shutting out so much as a single
item. Absolutely everything entering your field of awareness, with no exceptions whatsoever, is fully
and totally embraced, saturated with love, radiating from the infinity of your own heart-space, streaming
from the radical fullness of your very own being, and reaching out to each and every thing and event, in
each and every direction in the known ends of the Kosmos itself. There is simply nothing anywhere, at
any time, on the outside of this awareness. It is “one without a second.” And having no outside, it has no
inside either, but simply is.

To contract at all in the face of this undivided wholeness awareness, this total painting of all that
is, existing in this timeless all-inclusive present, is to set in motion the self-contraction, the separate self-
sense that latches onto the relative, finite, conventional small self – a necessary functional entity for this
manifest world created by the True Self itself, along with the rest of creation – but latches onto that
small self, or “I”, as if it were itself the True Self, or “I-I”, thus setting in motion the entire train of
events known as ignorance, illusion, Maya, deception, the fallen world, the world of the lie. This is
transmitted in each and every lower structure present, and the radically enlightened nature of Supermind
becomes lost and obscured in wave after wave of avoidance.

And that avoidance rests on this: what we might call “primordial avoidance”, the very first subtle
looking away. If we go back to the single, indivisible, total painting notion, there is some element, no
matter how small or seemingly insignificant, that for whatever reason I don’t want to look at, to be
aware of, to notice, to allow into my awareness – that single, primary turning away, looking away,
moving away. That primordial avoidance sets in motion the events that are, at this level, the dominant
cause of the world of Maya, illusion, ignorance, deception. And every level, top to bottom, is infected
with this delusion.

Primordial avoidance — whether in the ever-present nondual state of unity, or turiyatita

consciousness, or in Supermind, or both – is the simplest of actions. This entire world is arising moment
to moment, and the entire world is arising in your field of awareness, as your awareness. I am That, at

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which point there is neither a separate “I Am”, nor a separate “That”, just the hyphen. As with the Zen
master, “when I heard the sound of the bell ringing, there was no bell and no I, just the ringing.”

You can practice that awareness now by either getting into the witnessing stance, a stance of the
pure observing self, and observing the entire painting with no avoidance. Or let the painting turn into
that big blue pancake and fall on your headless nondual unity state – just the entire painting, in all its
depth, arising moment to moment where your head used to be. Either way, stay with that total painting
awareness, and look carefully if there are any items that you are shy of, or reluctant to feel, or may be
laced with fear or anxiety, or perhaps discover a numbness hiding something you don’t want to feel.

But almost certainly, sooner or later you will find something that you turn away from, that you
look away from, that you move away from. It might even be that your awareness gets lost in thought and
you lose awareness of the painting altogether. In any event, it is the precise moment of dropping
wholeness, or dropping the totality, by either losing the whole painting or simply losing just one of its
smallest items. Both of those are already out of touch with the totality, a looking away and turning away
and moving away.

This will simultaneously throw you into a contracted space as well as a temporal time. As the
emergence of the subject/object duality creates the distance or space between the seer and seen, and the
loss of the timeless now or present squeezes the present into the passing present, which then doesn’t
include the past and future, but is surrounded by the past and future. You look away. You turn away.
And thus you move away. You look away in space, and thus begin to move away in time. And out of the
timeless now and present presence, you find yourself lost in temporal musings, time wondering, past and
future thoughts, cut off from the Now moment. And with that, you are out of the whole and into the
space-time world of finitude, isolation, suffering, separation, and death. Separate entities come into
being. And therefore separate entities can disappear from being. They can, that is, and for the first time,
die.

The cure? Watch that looking away; watch that turning away; watch that moving away. Pay
attention. Give awareness to that very first looking away, however it appears. Watch that turning away,
and thus watch that moving away. Watch that primordial avoidance in its very subtlest, barely noticeable
forms. Watch that primordial avoidance as it first turns away from, and leaves out, some item, however
apparently insignificant, of the total present painting. Some looking away, some avoidance, some
contracting.

The very act of avoidance puts us into a world of choices, usually in terms of opposites, with one
of the poles positively sought and one negatively avoided. Suddenly we want pleasure, avoid pain. We
want good things, avoid bad. We lust for grandeur, turn away from mediocre. Seek fortune, fame,
greatness; despise destitution, ignominy, insignificance. We avoid or look away from some item or
aspect in that total painting. We just don’t like it, and thus we contract, tighten, narrow our awareness.

It’s not that any of those choices are bad; they’re bad when we don’t simultaneously see the total
painting of which each is a simple element. We forget the whole, grasp for parts. Only the whole is full,

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its parts are all pieces. Only the whole itself doesn’t suffer, its parts all suffer. Only the whole doesn’t
die, its parts all die. Only the whole embraces all time within it, its parts exist only within time. That
very first, however seemingly insignificant, primordial avoidance of even the smallest item throws us
out of, contracts us away from, a total painting awareness and into a world of parts – of broken,
fragmented, tortured, tormented, doomed to die parts. And thus, as Thoreau put it, “the mass of humans
lead lives of quiet desperation.” And, the quote finishes, “go to the grave with a song still in them.”

This points out one of the difficulties faced by many of the truly higher structures and states,
namely the balancing and integrating of ultimate realities with relative realities. How do we keep both
the ultimate reality of the total painting in mind, as well as the relative realities of any of its individual
parts?

The primary solution to this quandary lies in the real meaning of nonduality, as contrasted with
something like, say, pantheism. For pantheism, this total painting metaphor is taken as being the total
truth. Spirit, the Ultimate Divine, is simply the sum total of all manifest things and events. Pantheism
might choose Gaia, meaning the whole manifest universe, as its God or Goddess, forming a Great Web
of Life with each individual thing and event being a particular strand in that overall web. Now, that
version of divinity does indeed face all the problems of parts and the whole and how to give each its
deserving due. And for each individual thing, there is the question, “what part of the whole are you?”

But nonduality doesn’t work that way. For the nondual vision, one hundred percent of infinity,
being utterly dimensionless and spaceless itself, is fully present in every single point of space, or in each
and every dimension of manifestation. All of infinity is present at each finite point, and thus all of
infinity is present right here. Likewise, 100% of eternity, being itself totally without time, is fully
present at each and every point of time, so that all of eternity is present right now. Thus Wittgenstein’s
point that if we take eternity to mean not “everlasting temporal duration,” but “a moment without time,”
then “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

So there isn’t the awkward question, “just what part of the whole am I?” For nonduality, every
single point can say “I am the full infinity, existing in a full eternity.” The real timeless, spaceless, thus
truly eternal, infinite Ultimate Reality or Spirit is not some stretch of time, however long, nor some span
of space, however big, and thus is simply not a sum total of all space and all time like Gaia, but is rather
100% fully present in every single point of space and time, anywhere and anywhen.

This is why all of the infinite, and all of the finite, are nondual or “not two”. And all of eternity,
and all of time, are nondual or “not two”. So you don’t get in touch with the timeless now by trying to
restrict your attention to the passing present moment — without thinking of past moments or future
moments, just focusing on the immediate present – because that doesn’t give you a real timeless eternity,
but simply the passing temporal moment.

Real eternity includes present thoughts, past thoughts, and future thoughts. All of them are
arising in the present timeless Now moment – a Now moment that doesn’t exclude the past or future, but
embraces them. The Christian mystics point out this difference with the terms nunc stans and nunc

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fluens. The latter, the nunc fluens, the passing moment, is the relative now moment, set apart from the
past and the future. Whereas the former, the nunc stans, the non-moving moment, is the timeless Now,
inclusive of all past, present, and future thoughts, since all are arising in this Now moment.

So the passing present is definitely something you can focus on, get in touch with, be aware of.
And many practices have you do just that, usually thinking it’s the eternal Now you are contacting. But
the real eternal Now, the present timeless Now, is not something you can contact, but something you
can’t escape. All you are ever really aware of is an all-inclusive present Now moment.

Think of the past. That thought is occurring now. And when the past actually happened, it was a
now. Likewise, think of a future event, and that too is a present thought. And when that future becomes
real, it will also be a Now.

The only thing that you are actually ever aware of is a timeless Now, and in a headless space that
embodies 100% of infinity. This is why the true paths of the great liberation uniformly maintain that
enlightenment or awakening is not something you can attain. Rather all of it is fully, completely present
in this Here and Now moment. This is why the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, the central text of Mahāyāna
Buddhism, repeat over and over that if the seeker could just understand that enlightenment cannot be
attained, that is its self realization. And it can’t be attained because 100% of eternity is already fully
present right now. How can you possibly achieve something that is already the case?

Your present awareness is a headless unity, nondual, infinite, and eternal, or timeless now
awareness. Your awareness is exactly like that, and has always been like that, even when you didn’t
realize it. This is all that actually ever is really happening. The reason that primordial avoidance is the
beginning of what is referred to by the traditions as the “illusory world” is that it isn’t actually
happening. It’s not the real state of affairs. In reality, there is only the nondual, whole, timeless Now
moment. We can pretend to avoid that, but the results are not a real state or real condition, but a pretend
state, an illusory state, a state that actually isn’t even really there.

This primordial avoidance, as noted, illusorily occurs with all individuals at whatever structure
level, and thus practicing being aware of it is a good idea for anybody at any stage. Looking directly at
illusions tends to dispel them. But however you practice it, definitely spend specific periods paying
attention to your primordial avoidance – your avoidance of the present totality of the whole painting of
manifestation, and how you initially, very subtly, barely noticeably, turn away from something, look
away from something, move away from something in the fullness and wholeness of the entire painting
of your overall present. There is some impulse, some item, some something – a thought, a sensation, an
image, a physical location, a person, a religion, an idea, a desire – something that you simply do not
want to fully look at, to openly let into your awareness. And thus you look away. You turn away. You
move away. And therein is the origin of humanity’s suffering.

With Supermind, because of its all-pervading, all-embracing nature, including all the major
structures all the way back to the Big Bang, you also have the sense that you are rather literally looking
out of the eyes of all sentient beings. Precisely because Supermind – unlike Big Mind – does indeed

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include all previous lower structures going all the way back, again, to the Big Bang. This is more
noticeable when you rest on the observing side part of the street than on the observed painting side. But
in any event, you are not looking at, say a deer; you’re looking as the deer. You are looking out of the
eyes of the deer as it looks at the world. Your sense of I-AMness and the deer’s sense of I-AMness are
one and the same feeling.

And this certainly is the case for all human beings. But it’s also true for all insects, all bacteria, et
cetera. You look at another person, and you are your Self, looking at your Self – that is, your Self,
capital S, looking at your Self, capital S. There’s a distinct feeling that you are the I-AMness that is
directly each individual’s own interior state. And that happens to be literally true, and that the overall
number of real Selves, or Big Minds, is but one – Schrodinger’s “consciousness is a singular, the plural
of which is unknown.”

This type of omnipresent awareness is common with both the witnessing state and the nondual
state, and Big Mind states in general. But again, the difference with Supermind is that it is capable of
feeling how Big Mind is experienced by each structure and level of consciousness itself. Big Mind
experienced at, say, the orange level is how Big Mind looks through orange at the world. Supermind’s
experience of Big Mind, however, is to be able to experience how Big Mind looks at every major level
of development that has emerged to date, bottom to top.

This is why when, say, orange has an experience of Big Mind and looks at a deer, it might indeed
feel that its own I-AMness is the same as the I-AMness of the deer. But that experience is actually much
closer to orange’s I-AMness than a deer’s. Supermind however, can get much closer to how a deer is
truly feeling in its own I-AMness. The point is that, to the extent that such empathetic reasoning is
possible, Supermind will come closest to being able to do so. And in its absolutely inclusive nature, truly
does so.

So Supermind is indeed a union of formless emptiness and the entire world of form. But with
Supermind, the world of form actually becomes truly whole for the first time. All lesser structures still
have structures “over their heads”, and thus although an experience of Big Mind at, say, amber, will
indeed be a unity consciousness of emptiness and the entire world of form, nonetheless the form in that
case only goes up to the world of amber. All higher worlds of form – orange, green, teal, turquoise,
indigo, and so on – are still over its head. And you clearly cannot be one with something that doesn’t
even exist for you.

So at any unity consciousness short of Supermind, the Big Mind is real, the pure emptiness is
real, but the form is partial, limited, fragmented. And thus these actually represent, if we can put it this
way, a partial enlightenment or a limited enlightenment. Not at Supermind, which in transcending and
including virtually all levels of form that have emerged to date, is a full and complete wholeness, a
genuine unity, a real nondual oneness, a union with a genuinely entire world of all form.

Thus in truly combining, or rather in realizing the always already union of emptiness and all
form, this is the realization of the true total painting of all that is, including not only an unmanifest

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infinity, an eternity at each and every point of the manifest total painting, but a realizing a genuinely
total total painting, with nothing whatsoever left out of manifest existence, because Supermind directly
knows all of existence in all of its levels and dimensions by acquaintance, by identity, by being, and not
merely by description, by naming, by describing.

This is a wholeness of which there is no greater wholeness. And each moment, as a new subject
occasion emerges and adds to that whole, the new whole is now embraced within Supermind’s own self-
liberating, ongoing, full and all-embracing wholeness. And where the infinity and eternity of this
wholeness is always already given and can never be attained, and the ultimate reality of the entire show
is fully present here and now, the relative reality, the actual evolutionary structures and emergent
realities, those have to grow and develop and evolve through time, intentionality, effort, and work.

The pure Being is always present and always given. The temporal Becoming is the work of
Spirit-in-Action over time, and has to be engaged as a genuine growth process. Big Mind is given.
Supermind is earned. And thus, where Big Mind is always present, Supermind is, in part, an emergent, is
a product not only of Being, but of Becoming. Not only emptiness, but emerging form. And uniting
those two, Being and Becoming, eternity and time, is simply another side of Supermind’s genuine
wholeness beyond wholeness.

Experiencing one’s own deepest I-AMness or True Suchness as looking out of the eyes of all
sentient beings, is simply one of the ways Supermind’s all-structures nature is reflected in the manifest
universe. This all-eyes experience is sometimes had by Big Mind at a lower structure or level, but
precisely because that level is lower or junior, it is significantly more limited than Supermind’s all-
structure awareness.

And as for Supermind itself, whose all-eyes experience is actually backed with an all-structures
awareness, this awareness of looking through all-eyes becomes a good indicator of any sort of residual
primordial avoidance. With human beings, for example, if any racist or sexist or religious prejudices
remain, however modest, they will show up in this awareness as a reluctance to fully, totally, genuinely
identify with the other person if they are being held in a biased manner. For a white WASP male it
might be an African American, a Jew, a Hispanic. If sexist, any woman. If ageist, any old person. If
religious, any Catholic, Muslim, or Hindu, and so on.

One will simply, subtly turn away, look away, move away from people held prejudiciously. The
deep subconscious thought is, “I don’t want to look through that person’s eyes, I’m not going to touch
that person, certainly not identify with them or how they see the world.” This is the result, pure and
simple, of fixations remaining at the amber or lower ethnocentric levels, prejudices that, in a full and
normal development, would have been erased in a move to orange worldcentric awareness. But attached
to, split off and rendered unconscious, these malformations have accompanied development at each and
every one of its higher transformations, clear and unmistakable proof of the capacity of lower level
deformations to remain in existence, even at the higher and wider and deeper forms of consciousness,
malforming and distorting each in the process – often, in fact, giving the prejudice more power as the

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higher levels’ more sophisticated cognitive powers come online, able to more aggressively rationalize
and operationalize the bias. And this is also a perfect reminder that just because we have a higher level
of development and a higher level of consciousness, does not in any way in itself guarantee things have
become better.

In short, Supermind looks and directly feels indeed like a superhuman capacity, seeing through
all the eyes of sentient beings everywhere as an infinite and eternal pure Spirit, as nondual Suchness,
and as a reflection of its all-structure resonating capacity. But seeing isn’t quite right; there’s no sense of
a subject seeing objects. There is simply a wide open space with phenomena arising within it moment to
moment, with no looker or watcher or seer. Just things exactly as they are, self-arising, self-liberating,
hanging in the air of thusness, and interiorly resonating with each and every structure it encounters, so
that Supermind reaches out and embraces every single thing and event in the entire Kosmos, known and
unknown.

Though reaching and embracing are not quite right either. There is just the uttermost simplicity
of a pure, clear, open spaciousness that already is indistinguishable from everything already arising in
and as its radiant clarity. Its very interiors feel, radiate, as infinity, or open to absolutely all, infinity
being the lining of every finite event anywhere in existence, whether we are specifically aware of it or
not. Supermind is inwardly touching everything, from the dark matter of the universe, which is some
96% of this universe – poorly understood, but no matter in this case: infinity is still its ground.

The countless undiscovered and unknown galaxies, planets, supernovas, all touched and
grounded and implicitly felt by Supermind, your own deepest You, as a direct texture of its own being,
and a product of its own hyper-full overflowing, which you can feel bubbling out of yourself and all the
way to the ends of the world, and through each and every structure, top to bottom, and reaching out and
touching all.

Or better, being the clear, open spaciousness that all things and events, known or unknown, are
always already arising in, and perfectly one with, the very nature of their natures and the condition of
their condition; the Jell-O holding all the pieces of fruit up and suspended in a jiggly Jell-O fruit cup.
Supermind is electrically and shockingly interwoven seamlessly with all that is, in every dimension, in
every realm, in every possible universe manifest, saturated with the existence of all that exists, shot
through the eternal, timeless moment of every stretch of time, the infinite spaceless point of every
stretch of space, looking out of the eyes of anything anywhere that looks, flowing out of the structure of
each and every being and each and every level that has emerged to date.

Its being is this ongoing, endless wholeness with all structures and all realms, with manifest
qualities – another name for love, which is the “all” that Supermind’s utterly nondual awareness is,
everywhere and everywhen. Go to the very ends of the manifest universe and you will there find love,
holding everything together. Go to the very ends of time and there is love, embracing all and carrying it
forward. Go to the deepest interior you can find in yourself or any other, and love will be smiling back at
you. Love, Eros, as Spirit in Action, the very motor of this and every manifest world, the gasoline on

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which the great machine of manifestation runs, without which, things and events would merely hang in
midair, with no push or pull to set them moving in any direction at all. But dose the scene with perfume,
the scent of an all-pervading background love, and watch them all begin to move and dance more and
more insistently, looking all but for one thing: ways to come together into greater and greater wholes,
deeper and deeper yearnings, higher and higher ones, leaving a stratified universe, a grand layered
holarchic display of the degrees and depths of love itself, from the infinitesimal to the infinite,
culminating at this particular time in historical unfolding in Supermind, where you can feel the depths of
your own love holding the entire Kosmos together, beginning to end, top to bottom, inside out, and in all
ways, moving into greater and greater gorgeous glory and radiant embrace.

This is the contagious condition you could never have forgotten. This is the royal reality that
primordial avoidance only pretended to avoid. It lied about its lie of separation. It never really occurred.
This is the home you never left, and the return that is always already promised to you anytime at all you
wish to reclaim it. This is the interior of the entire world, and the wrapping in which the gift of the
universe came when delivered to your door. And all is as simple as the call of the whippoorwill in his
haunting quiet song, penetrating the darkness of a late still eve on a moonlit summer’s night.

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