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Appendix IV 307
complex, the difficulty in transforming from soul to spirit, occurs on a level so evolved that it afflicts only advanced meditators.
The nature of these higher complexes, such as the Apollo and Vishnu, was made painfully obvious to me in my own meditation. By the time I had finished writing No Boundary (Wilber, 1979), my meditation practice, while not exactly advanced, was no longer in the beginner’s phase. The leg pain (from the lotus posture) was manageable, and my awareness was growing in its capacity to maintain an alert yet relaxed, active yet detached stance. But my mind was, as the Buddhists say, that of a monkey: compulsively active, obsessively motive. And there I came face to face with my own Apollo complex, the difficulty in transforming from the mental sphere to the subtle sphere. The subtle sphere (or the “soul,” as Christian mystics use that term) is the beginning of the transpersonal realms; as such, it is supramental, transegoic, and trans-verbal. But in order to reach that sphere, one must (as in all transformations) “die” to the lower sphere (in this case, the mental-egoic). The failure to do so or the incapacity to do so is the Apollo complex. As the person with an Oedipus complex remains unconsciously attached to the body and its pleasure principal, so the person with an Apollo complex remains unconsciously attached to the mind and its reality principle. (“Reality” here means “institutional, rational, verbal reality,” which, although conventionally real enough, is nevertheless only an intermediate stage on the path to Atman; that is, it is merely a description of actual Reality itself, and thus, if clung to, eventually and ultimately prevents the discovery of that actual Reality.)
The struggle with my own obsessive/compulsive thinking—not particular obsessive thoughts, as per specific neurosis (which is often indicative of an Oedipus-complex holdover), but the very stream of thought itself— was as arduous a task as I would ever handle. It was the most difficult battle I had ever faced; were it 1% more difficult, I would have failed miserably. (An excellent account of such initial battles has been given by Walsh, 1977, 1978). As it was, I was fortunate to make some progress, to be able eventually to rise above the fluctuations of mental contractions and discover, however initially, a realm incomparably more profound, more real, more saturated with being, more open to clarity. This realm was simply that of the subtle, which is disclosed, so to speak, after weathering the Apollo complex. In this realm, it is not that thinking necessarily ceases (although it often does, especially at the beginning); it is that, even when thinking arises, it does not detract from this broader background of clarity