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

For Jenn and Morganmy 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

Chris Grossos Everything Mind is a raw, real, authentic look at what is traditionally known as Enlightenment or Awakening or the Great Liberationthe 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 everythingthe 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. Whats more, you can directly and immediately have this experience for yourself and find out whether you believe it is true or not. Most peopleeducated or uneducated, rich or poor, brilliant or averagewho have had a strong Enlightenment experience claim that, as one recently told me, It was the most real reality I have ever known. The worlds 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 Mindand Chriss 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 Chriss words, you can believe him. There are no lies in his narrative lines. Hes seen where lies lead; hes 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 twoWaking Up to Everything Mind and Cleaning Up our shadow elements. He doesnt 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 itbelieve me. The stages in the path of Growing Up are not like that. You cant 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 correctlythey 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 cant 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, worldviewsand 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 Upwhich go back at least fifty thousand years to the earliest shamansthe 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 questionsone of Kohlbergs 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, whats right is whatever I say is right, whatever I want, and if I want to steal it, Ill 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 stagewhich is more complex and more developed than the previous egocentric Yes stageis known as: ethnocentric (extending identity from the individual self to a particularethnicgroup or groups of peoplea clan, tribe, race, sex, nation, religion, and so on; care (extending care from oneself to caring for an entire groupbut just that one group, seeing everybody else as an outsider or other who doesnt 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