GUEST POST: From Seeking to Awakening by Christopher Warnock

Hello, everybody! Welcome to the first article in a new series I’ll be hosting.

I’ve asked several of my students to write articles for Awakening Clarity Now. I’ll publish them as they arrive. It seems to me that hearing from some recently awakened people would be interesting and insightful for you. There’ll be some personal history, and some spiritual history, but other than that I didn’t give much in the way of direction. We’ll get what we get.

I very much enjoyed reading this first article, and I’m sure you will, too. It’s written by Christopher Warnock, who is a smart, funny, and multi-talented guy who lives out in Iowa City. Chris woke up with me some months back and has been saturating himself with The Living Method ever since. He plans to take some of what he’s found here back into his own Zen tradition. He is a well known astrologer by trade, whose hobby is being a White Knight attorney for the disenfranchised.

The Book of Undoing audiobook is selling steadily on iTunes, Amazon, and Audible.com. Repeated listening to such a layered teaching is hands down the best way to internalize that book. It’s really set up as a two-voice play to begin with, which is why I chose a talented actress to “act it”. You can hear a five minute sample here. 

Finally, if you’re thinking of doing an Awakening Session, please consider doing an Introductory Session first. They’re not expensive, and they are very helpful.

And now, here’s my friend Chris! [Editor’s note: Chris uses the term “darvish”, which is a traditional spelling of the more commonly seen “Dervish”.]

Spiritual Biography: From Seeking to Awakening

by

Christopher Warnock

I’m lucky, the broad outlines of my path to awakening have almost always been clear to me. I’ve never been able to stop following it for long, since I was inexorably pulled. Eventually I became able to heed subtler and subtler guidance as I progressed. The pain, while considerable at times, was somehow carefully calibrated to keep me moving along the path, without completing crushing me.

Probably the most traumatic experience of my life was my first experience, since I was separated from my mother at birth, put in a foster home and then adopted at 9 months. These painful separations left a deep emotional and karmic imprint. I really can’t stand new or unfamiliar situations and my automatic assumption is that change is likely to be very, very bad.

My adoptive parents dutifully provided the trappings of a middle class existence, but never really connected to me. I think they found me inexplicable and intimidating, since I always went my own way, accompanied by flashy polymorph intelligence and wide knowledge to go along with a very dominating personality and a heaping scoop of arrogance. Basically, they ignored me, while any attention was likely to be disapproving.  

My escape was always an incredibly wide ranging addiction to reading. Even as a kid my reading revealed to me that I wanted to be a lawyer like Clarence Darrow, who spoke for the oppressed, and I also wanted to be a wizard.  Though refracted though a 12 year old’s consciousness, this is the path I walk to this day.

I went my own way by spending 3 years in Scotland for college. Then I took a detour, down a dead end. I had a choice between working really hard and going to Cambridge for a Ph.D in history or going to law school at the University of Michigan which meant taking it easy, plus the prospect being rich and powerful. I went to law school, which I immediately hated. I was lucky in this seemingly bad choice since I met my wife there and because law school actually has nothing to do with being a lawyer.

In law school they convinced us that the only possible goal was a big law firm in New York or Washington, DC. I thought that’s what I wanted so I worked as a summer associate for Baker/Botts, the Bush family law firm. My office that summer was next to James Baker III, the son of the Secretary of State, and I got to go with him to Cincinnati to sell a $50-million-dollar office building.

While I consciously thought this was where I belonged, I just couldn’t conform. There was certainly a lot of ego in my rebelliousness, but there was also a deeper refusal to be sucked off my true path into this world of wealth, power and injustice.   I did end up going to Washington, but entering into the worlds of politics and law, I was simultaneously pulled into conscious spiritual seeking for the first time. Like many, I did lots of reading and dipped into many different spiritual paths.

I had an early interest in Zen which led to two interesting experiences. One was visiting a local DC karate dojo, since I had read in Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture about the connection of Zen to martial arts. They had a sensei and looked the part in their karate gi’s. As class was winding up, there was a commotion outside. One of the students had gotten beat up by a homeless person. I found it ironic that all this martial arts training hadn’t taught him how to fight! The necessity to meld practice and theory in real life application has stuck with me in my spiritual work.

The other Zen or rather Buddhist related experience took place at night on the Metro, DC’s subway. I was standing in a quiet subway car at night filled with passengers, and I looked up and every person in the car had a shining, golden Buddha at their heart.

Despite these preliminary glances in the direction of Buddhism, I was guided instead to Sufism. There was a khaniqah (meeting place) of the Iranian Nimatullahi Sufi order in DC that I started attending. I soon was initiated as a darvish. This Sufi order practiced sama, a ceremony with ecstatic zhikr, chanting the names of Allah, to traditional Persian musical accompaniment of drums and sitar. We were privileged at this khaniqah to have some of the finest Iranian traditional musicians play for us; Iranian traditional music is primarily Sufi music. Here is a video of Ustad Lotfi who played for us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46QfWjeq8s8

This was my first actual experience with a traditional spiritual path that looked beyond the ego self and sought divine union.   The visionary experience I associate with the Sufis was somewhere between seeing in my mind’s eye and a waking dream: of walking in a very bright sunlight in a very white Middle Eastern or North African city, through winding streets, to a dark room filled with darvishes in sama.

I spent a good amount of time in DC with a friend who was an Ethiopian Rastafarian and introduced me to many Rastafarian elders, including Ras Pidow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiXJWMP1S8c

I studied traditional logic and mystical philosophy with an Iranian ayatollah. I was lucky to not be a “bookstore Sufi” but to be guided and in a sense, compelled to actually participate and deeply enter into these spiritual paths.

At the same time I was rising spiritually, I was falling into lower and lower circles of DC legal hell, from the big firm, to the IRS to finally being a contract public defender. There I found my niche and found I loved the law when I could speak for justice and ask for mercy. I began to step beyond just my own clients and cases, looking for systemic injustice and then developing cases to try to help the system right itself. I found I enjoyed appellate law the most, since it was focused on developing legal rules of wide application.

But working within a major urban legal system exposed my wife and I to a great deal of systemic injustice. Our clients were almost all African American, poor and involved with drugs, either as addicts or minor players in drug trafficking. With a good deal of work and skillful legal means, we managed to help many of our clients, at least with their legal problems.

Even at our best, however, we were helping people on the worst day of their lives go from -10 to -5. There’s only so much of this that one should take. About 5-10 years of this practice was enough, though the understanding of how our society actually works, the place of power and oppression in this system, and the realization that the wise and determined application of skillful means could affect change, was extremely useful.

As part of my seeking I had also been guided to astrology, particularly traditional Western astrology. Astrology was a key part of the Western university curriculum, particularly for doctors until the triumph of atheistic/materialism in the “Enlightenment” Traditional astrology allowed for very precise, accurate prediction of future events. I studied by correspondence with a teacher and began to practice on my own.

The incredible accuracy of traditional astrology was tangible proof to me that the Cosmos was ordered and not random, that the spiritual realm existed and in fact, that traditional philosophy was correct, that the spiritual precedes and underlies the material at every moment. Realizing the underlying spiritual patterning of my personal arising, as manifested in my birth chart and the patterning of all arisings, was very useful in my spiritual seeking.

After about 15 years in DC the noise, chaos and crowding of a big city, which had seemed so exciting at first, began be tiring. It was too expensive to ever get a house. We decided to move back to the Midwest to my wife’s hometown of Iowa City since we wanted to live in a college town.

After a year of looking we got our first house in our favorite neighborhood. While we didn’t realize it about half a block down the street was the Iowa City Zen Center. Why not? We began sitting regularly, then began attending sesshin at Ryumonji, a Zen monastery about 3 hours away in Northeastern Iowa. I sat zazen, sitting meditation, every day for 4 years, and even began sitting a full 40 minute sit in the morning and one in the evening. But I did not awaken from or during zazen.

What is awakening in Zen? A well know Zen definition of awakening is:

A special transmission outside the scriptures

No reliance on words and letters

Direct pointing to awareness

And the attainment of enlightenment

This is not a condemnation of scriptures, words and language, just a refusal to stop with them. The key here is that direct pointing that results in awakening is essence of Zen.

Koans, dharma combat, sutra chanting, Zen ritual, zazen (sitting meditation) are all quite wonderful supports for awakened mind. But they are not methods for awakening. Perhaps we could say that awakening seems to take place more often under certain conditions.

Those conditions are an awakened teacher and a method of direct pointing. This is why I came to Fred Davis. Though Fred wasn’t really there when I showed up, and when awakening came, I had already left. I’m still showing up a lot of the time, but less and less as awareness becomes clearer and clearer. I still find it useful, for now, to operate within Zen and with a Zen persona. I continue to have law as my hobby, working here in Iowa for fair play for landlords and tenants.

Of course, this all has been an overview of my spiritual path, looking from 10,000 feet so to speak. It’s a lot easier seeing the overall direction and pattern now, but living through it on the ground, walking step by step, was a lot more painful and seemed much more chaotic at the time. Still, it all happened, so it was clearly all necessary!

Renaissance Astrology website
http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/

Iowa Tenants’ Project website
http://www.ictenantsclassaction.com/

Christopher Warnock
July 16, 2014