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THE INHERENT PERFECTION OF IMPERFECTION This book is an exploration of our situation. Most people, if they even care, labor under the mistaken notion that “enlightenment” has something to do with what we DO in our lives; cleaning up our behavior, ratcheting up our compassion, clearing up our obscurations, purifying our bad karma, thinking positive thoughts, thinking NO thoughts, helping little old ladies across the street; in general trying to emulate what we imagine an “enlightened being” acts like - as if the behavior makes the condition.
That’s ALL hogwash. It turns out that “enlightenment” is the inherent condition of Being itself. So it’s already a done deal. Nothing IN being needs to be cleaned up, purified, made more positive, made more compassionate. The mediocre, imperfect victim most of us fear ourselves to be is already God, without needing to lift a finger! Our world as it is is Heaven, our life already a pageant of Divine Celebration. Hallelujah!
The very fact that any particular condition in our experience even EXISTS at ALL, means it has already crossed the finish line. Being equals enlightenment. Period. If any condition IS, it is inherently absolutely perfect. The clouds in the sky, the shit in the toilet. Tag, YOU’RE IT. You may as well sell your mala and trade in your meditation robe for a bikini and go work on your tan, it won’t make the tiniest bit of difference to the ACTUAL condition of anyone or anything whether or not you do.
You’d think that fact would put a lot of people in the “spirituality” industry out of business, wouldn’t you? But I’m afraid they don’t have to worry, and can probably go on selling water to the fish for the foreseeable future. The unfortunate fact, at least for those of us pushing for the dissemination of this truth, is that people are pretty damn absorbed in their dramatic struggle to find what they haven’t lost, and are pretty likely to go on muddling along the “path to being” and the “journey to now” like tired horses with blinders on, even though they ARE, and exactly WHEN does it happen to be?
OUR SITUATION Reality is indescribable; yet we each know it intimately, never having known anything else whatsoever. But we might not KNOW that we know it. We commonly mistake our conceptual misinterpretations and oversimplified understandings of what reality is, arrived at through our programming and early assumptions, to be true. We thereby become blinded to the obvious fact of the way reality is already ACTUALLY functioning in, and as, our experience RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.
Our only impediment to true self-knowledge is our inaccurate beliefs about what we are and what the world is, which we mistakenly hold to be true. The solution to this impediment is to examine the ACTUALITY of our experience, and using discrimination, logic, and direct seeing, understand for ourselves the inaccuracies of our previously-held modeling of our situation, and let go of erroneous beliefs about “the world”. This is really a very simple process; it is only WE that can complicate it.
We each have accumulated a complex story about what we are and what our lives are, that incorporate many assumptions and conclusions that were arrived at when we were immature and did not have the discriminative capacities to critically examine them. These assumptions may have been learned from the teaching or example of those we perceived around us, our families and immediate culture; and we accepted them as truth, and incorporated them…
We have tended to be seduced by the emotional investment that arises from some beliefs we may have arrived at; for example “I am separate from the universe”, “I am vulnerable and potentially in danger”, “I am needy and might not be able to get what I need”, and so on. Building on these and similar basic beliefs and their elaborations, most of us concoct an elaborate soap opera with ourselves as the star, full of…
Thus most of us find ourselves living in a fantasy, a dream-world, ignoring any actual experience that doesn’t fit in with our oversimplified and…
So what can we do to “wake up” from this internally consistent dream of self-importance based on fantasies? The fortunate truth is that we ALL have intimate access to Reality; in fact we have never experienced anything ELSE, and ARE nothing but Reality ourselves, inherently.…
AI Summary
Dirty Enlightenment by Peter Brown presents key insights from the contemplative tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.