It would be nice to believe that my words were clicking in her mind like the beads of an abacus, but I know they’re not and I’m comfortable with that. “Act, but don’t reflect on the fruit of the act,” said Krishna to Arjuna. Sign me up.
(Enlightenment as truth-realization, not a chosen path or mystical state)
“It’s very simple,” I tell her. “Enlightenment is truth-realization. Not only is truth simple, it’s that which cannot be simpler; cannot be further reduced.”
One doesn’t select truth-realization over mystical union the way one chooses soup over salad. In fact, one doesn’t choose enlightenment at all. If anything, one is more likely to be the victim of it, like getting hit by a bus.
Treat it like you’re creating your own personal mission statement using those two elements; what you’re moving toward and what you’re moving away from. Okay?”
“It’s not a race, it’s just life. There is no finish line, no winners or
She believes, in the broadest sense, that something is wrong and that she can make it right. What that something is, what’s wrong with it, and how it can be fixed all differ from person to person, but the general pattern is always the same: The truth, though, is that nothing is really wrong. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be wrong. It’s not even wrong to believe that something is wrong.
“The belief that something is wrong is the fire under the ass of humanity,” is how I explain it to Sarah.
Of course, wrongness isn’t entirely imagined. A certain amount of rightness and wrongness is hardwired into the human machine. Hunger is wrong, eating is right; celibacy is wrong, seed-sowing is right; pain is wrong, pleasure is right, and so on. But those are all biological directives, enforceable only within the context of the physical organism, violations resulting in progressively worsening discomfort and possibly death.
(Fear of no-self as the root beneath all other fears)
The fear of no-self is the mother of all fears, the one upon which all others are based. No fear is so small or petty that the fear of no-self isn’t at its heart. All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.
You will never achieve spiritual enlightenment. The you that you think of as you is not you. The you that thinks of you as you is not you.
Let’s capitalize that: The First Step. I know that many people spend many years in meditation and spiritual practice without achieving full awakening, and I know that they think it’s because they haven’t crossed the finish line yet, but it’s actually because they haven’t crossed the starting line yet: The First Step.
Once the First Step is taken the rest of the journey is sure to follow, unless you die or sustain a massive head wound.
(Ego’s will to survive through teachers, teachings, and spiritual seeking)
Allegiance to any spiritual teaching or teacher—any outside authority—is the most treacherous beast in the jungle. The first thing we want to do when we begin our journey is find the companionship and validity that comes with an established group, and in so doing we effectively end the journey before it begins.
The power of our devotion to teachers and teachings is not a reflection of their value, but of ego’s will to survive. It’s ego—the false self—that exalts the guru and declares the teaching sacred, but nothing is exalted or sacred, only true or not true.
Anyone familiar with the process of deprogramming someone who has been brainwashed by a cult will be able appreciate what’s really involved in breaking free of this kind of allegiance, but there’s really only one real cult—the Cult of False Self—and everyone is a fanatically devoted member. Awakening is the process of deprogramming. Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.
satisfied to simply pursue enlightenment. Dedicating one’s life to lofty spiritual ideals is every bit as life-defining and purpose-giving as the quest for heaven or power or money or love. Just because there’s a flashing neon sign above the door that says “Free Enlightenment! The Shortest & Easiest Way! The One True Path!” doesn’t mean that what goes on inside is really about enlightenment, or that the people who go in really want it. Quite the opposite.
In nearly all cases, the enlightenment being bought and sold is not truth-realization at all, but a state of consciousness so crazy-ass wonderful that you’d have to be an idiot not to want it. So insidiously wonderful, in fact, that its radiance has blinded untold millions of seekers to the fact that it doesn’t exist.
The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. in waking up.
That’s how it is when you get here; no bells and whistles, no radiant backlighting, no choirs of angels. As Layman P’ang put it, you’re “just an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.” “I have no more questions,” Paul said. He didn’t just mean he had no more questions for me, he meant he had no more questions, period.
(What awakening actually looks like at the end: nothing left to do)
Paul didn’t say anything else until we got back to the house. It occurred to me that he had probably been “done” for a few weeks and had spent the time getting accustomed to this new and unexpected state. That’s how it is at the end. Even if you’ve been told a thousand times that there’s an end to knowledge—to seeking—you’re stunned and perplexed when you reach it. You’ve spent a few years fighting battle after battle, each more grueling than the one before, and never, never, with any expectation whatsoever that you’ll ever really emerge victorious in this life. And then, one day, there it is. Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles. The sword that seems welded to your hand can now be dropped, once your fingers can be pried from it. There’s nothing left to contend against and nothing left that must be done, and there will never be anything that must be done ever again.
Even now it takes a conscious effort to maintain my false self, my dream character; to animate it, to keep it running. And this trajectory I’m on will take me as close to non-existence as anyone can get and still have a body.
The simple fact is that I am here and “here” doesn’t look all that much like anyone says it does and I’m not going to waste my time or anyone else’s pretending otherwise.
If that sounds harsh, then get used to it. This is a harsh business. I’m not writing this book to make money or gain followers or to be popular. I’m writing it to get it out of my system. My message isn’t that you should believe me about what it’s like here, but that you can come see for yourself.
Unlike the newly emerged butterfly, however, the freshly enlightened have no primal instinct to inform and guide them. When I myself went through this experience I knew it was immense. I knew it was uncommon in the extreme. I knew it was the supreme accomplishment beside which all others paled to insignificance.
When I finally did put it together, it was a very comforting—albeit mind-boggling, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting—realization. I had spent years as a closet butterfly moping around with caterpillars and dreaming highly fictionalized dreams of becoming a butterfly. I knew that I was distinctly different from the caterpillars. I knew that an uncrossable chasm separated us, that I wasn’t one of them anymore, that they weren’t like me nor I like they. I knew I was able to communicate with them only in the most superficial sense based on my rapidly fading memories of their language and habits. What it took me a while to understand, though, was that the reason I wasn’t one of them anymore was because I was something else, and that the difference was absolute.
Instead of vampires and butterflies, just imagine being the only adult in a
world of children. Really. Imagine how you’d develop over the years. Imagine how your feelings about children might change. Imagine the person you’d become.
That’s quite understandable, really. Once you get past the notion that duality (by any name) is “bad” and unity (by any name) is “good,” you also get past any need to “help” or “save” anyone. I, for instance, don’t do what I do because I think it needs doing. I am moved by no ethical or altruistic motive. I don’t think something is wrong and that I have to make it right. I don’t do it to ease suffering or to liberate beings. I do it simply because I’m so inclined. I have a built-in urge to express what I find interesting, and the only thing I find interesting is the great journey that culminates in abiding non-dual awareness.
Enlightenment isn’t like graduating high school only to start college, or even finishing college to enter the “real” world. It’s the final graduation. No more hunt, no more chase, no more battle. Now you can go out in the world and do whatever you want;
Nobody’s getting there because nobody knows where there is, and those who are entrusted to point the way are, for a variety of reasons, pointing the wrong way.
At the very heart of this confusion lies the belief that abiding non-dual-awareness—enlightenment—and the non-abiding experience of cosmic consciousness—mystic union—are synonymous when, in fact, they’re completely unrelated. It’s possible to have either without the other, and there are countless millions of cases of mysticism and cosmic consciousness of varying degree for every one case of enlightenment. Of course, true cases of enlightenment are unlikely to attract attention to themselves, so it is certain that there are more than is apparent (like vampires!). However, the simple fact remains that enlightenment and mysticism have little or nothing in common.
consciousness. The enlightened have awakened from the dream and no longer mistake it for reality. Naturally, they are no longer able to attach importance to anything. To the awakened mind the end of the world is no more or less momentous than the snapping of a twig. “The wise see the same in all,” says the Gita. “The wise are impartial,” says the Tao. The enlightened cannot conceive of anything as being wrong, so they don’t struggle to make things right. Nothing is better or worse, so why try to adjust things? Members of movie audiences don’t leap out of their seats to save characters in the film.
Enlightenment is about truth. It’s not about becoming a better or happier person. It’s not about personal growth or spiritual evolution.
An accurate ad for enlightenment would make the toughest marine blanche. There is no higher stakes game in this world or any other, in this dimension or any other. The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they’re paying it.
Everyone comes pre-educated and the education they arrive with is, for all practical purposes, worse than useless.
shows, the fastest way to reduce otherwise decent people to a state of savagery is by tampering with their belief system. The word for someone who does so is heretic, and historically the punishments reserved for him are more brutal than for any other class of offender.
No one approaches me and asks to have their hard-won beliefs demolished. They come to build upon what they already have and to continue along the course they’ve already begun. Demolition, though, is exactly what they need. If, that is, they want to wake up.
They want to become better people, more open, more loving, happier, closer to God, and they want to achieve spiritual enlightenment because, as everybody knows, that’s where the spiritual path leads. The yellow brick road may be a trip, but it’s all about Oz, baby.
There’s just enough merit in their notions of enlightenment to make it sell, but at the end of the day you’re either a caterpillar or a butterfly, and the only way anyone will ever have even the slightest sense of what it means to be a butterfly is to become one. There are no butterfly experts among the caterpillars, despite innumerable claims to the contrary, and I encourage my students to at least consider the possibility that the world is up to its poles in caterpillars
An easy way to distinguish between caterpillars and butterflies is to remember that the enlightened don’t attach importance to anything, and that enlightenment doesn’t require knowledge. It’s not about love or compassion or consciousness.
It’s about truth.
toward enlightenment—is to be henceforth and forever excluded from the whole human thing.
diamond at the heart of all fears; fear of no-self. She’s very self-possessed on the outside; calm, smooth, convinced that she’s a very open and spiritually attuned person, but I’d much rather be with a raving loony who was directly confronting their bullshit than someone who spends all their energy repressing it.
(The black hole at the core of self: truth covered by who you are)
Here’s the most directly I am able to say this: The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else—everything else—is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who is just going about their normal human existence undistracted by the larger questions, that rubbish and debris is everything that makes them who they are. But to someone who wants to get to the truth, who they are is what’s in the way.
All fear is ultimately fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of that hole is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole,
“Have you heard the term makyo?” I ask her.
“It’s a Zen thing. Very handy term. In Zen, no one is interested in spiritual growth. No one is interested in self-exploration or self-realization. They’re not trying to become better people or happier people. They’re not following a spiritual path, they’re following a wake-the-hell-up path. They’re completely focused on the hot and narrow pursuit of enlightenment. There’s no consolation prize, no secondary objective. Full awakening is what they signed up for. Of course, as students, they have no real idea of what such a pursuit actually entails, so it’s the job of the master to see that they stay on course. With me so far?”
There are many things to see and do on the path to awakening. It’s all new and magical. There are points, for instance, where you can stop and develop what you might consider special powers; prophecy, telepathy, mediumship, magical arts, plate spinning, whatever. During Zen meditation—zazen—the student might merge into timeless unity consciousness. He might unravel all the complexities of his life in a single glorious sitting. He might feel that he has vomited a gigantic ball of molten lead that has resided in his chest for years. He might descend into the pits of hell and slay all his demons. After such experiences, he might run to his master to share his victories and experiences, thinking he’s well on the road to enlightenment, only to have the master splash him with cold water by calling it makyo.”
“When a Zen master uses the term makyo, he’s telling his students that the precious gems they’re stopping to pick up or the pretty flowers they’re pausing to collect only have value or beauty in the world they’ve chosen to leave behind. The Tao says ‘beware the flowery trappings’ because, in order to possess them or benefit from them, you must cease your journey, stay in the dream. Ultimately, they’re just a distraction from the tricky business of waking up. Breaking free of delusion takes everything you have. The price of truth is everything. Everything. That’s the rule and it’s inviolable.”
I’d probably start hitting the student with a stick at this point, which is one of the perks of being a Zen master. “You’re supposed to be dead! Why aren’t you dead? Why are you coming to see me? You’re the problem! Get out and come back when you’re dead. That’s the guy I want to talk to, not a stupid dream character. Now GET OUT!”
That essentially defines the quest for enlightenment; the you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into brief existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a dream character, of course, unless it’s your goal to wake up, in which case the dream character must be ruthlessly annihilated. If your desire is to experience transcendental bliss or supreme love or altered states of consciousness or awakened kundalini, or to qualify for heaven, or to liberate all sentient beings, or simply to become the best dang person you can be, then rejoice!, you’re in the right place; the dream state, the dualistic universe. However, if your interest is to cut the crap and figure out what’s true, then you’re in the wrong place and you’ve got a very messy fight ahead and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.
it doesn’t require knowledge to be enlightened any more than it requires knowledge to obey the law of gravity or be bathed in sunlight.
“The universe will give you whatever you want, Marla. That’s how it works, even if you don’t know it. It can’t be otherwise. You don’t have to be worthy, but you do have to know what it is that you want. You have to focus. Try to do that. Try writing out what it is you want and condensing it down until you’ve reduced it to a concise statement of desire or intent. Your path can only be meandering and your life a blur until you do that. Come talk to me when you have something, okay?”
(Spiritual autolysis: writing the truth until you have stated it)
“You’re welcome. The process of Spiritual Autolysis is basically like a Zen koan on steroids. All you really have to do is write the truth.” “Write the truth?” “Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yes, that’s all there is to it. Just write down what you know is true, or what you think is true, and keep writing until you’ve come up with something that is true.”
“It doesn’t matter where you start, just grab a thread and start pulling. You could start by using Ramana Maharshi’s query, ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What is me?’, and then just work at it. Just try to say something true and keep at it until you do. Write and rewrite. Make it cleaner and cut out the excess and ego and follow it wherever it leads until you’re done.” “And how long does that usually take?” “I would think a couple of years. But when you’re done, you’re done.”
Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can’t do that while it’s still in your head.
“No. Thought, whether in the brain or out, is a creative tool, and Spiritual Autolysis is a creative process, just like any other. Just like building a bridge.”
“I don’t know what all these different paths are, Arthur. Spiritual Autolysis is an intellectual endeavor, but I balk at calling it a path of intellect. It’s a process of discrimination, of unknowing what is untrue, of progressively stripping away the false and leaving only what is true. Discrimination is used in a machete-like manner for hacking one’s way through the dense underbrush of delusion, or, if you prefer, in a swordlike manner for hacking off one’s own delusion-riddled
I used to be pretty well versed in spiritual literature and I recall that there’s a lot of talk about different paths, but from where I sit it’s just another way of distracting yourself from the difficult work of breaking free. No theory of paths is of any practical value in waking up. The very idea that there is set path, much less a choice of paths, that one need merely follow is ruinously misleading. In short, this path business is just another case of the blind leading the blind; part of the vast mythology created by caterpillars teaching caterpillars how to become butterflies.
Use the process of Spiritual Autolysis as a means of expressing your own highest knowledge for someone else’s benefit. And, of course, keep improving it until you’ve stated the truth.” “Which I’ll never do?” “What, state the truth? No, of course not.”
“Truth exists!” my mind was shrieking. “It doesn’t matter what it is or where it is.
program. I bought a computer and spent hours every day hunched over the keyboard trying to express the truth. I read and I wrote. I edited, discarded, and rewrote. Every few weeks I would delete all my files, reformat all my disks and burn—literally, in a kettle barbecue—all my notes and handwritten pages. I almost never read anything I wrote because the mere act of writing it rendered it obsolete in my thinking. I severed all ties—no job, no friends, no family—and had only a few possessions. I did nothing else. I had no other thought. I went for long walks, thinking, pounding away at whatever door I was stuck behind at the moment.
And then one day after a couple of years of this I was suddenly done. Just like that: Done. Although I didn’t think of it in these terms, I had become enlightened, satoried, awake, truth-realized, a jnani, Buddha, whatever you want to call it. Getting the hang of this new state, however, would take me another decade.
That’s where I am now. Empty space is my reality. The void. No-self. I abide in non-dual, non-relative awareness. This is the part that can’t be explained. I can’t frame it in words even for myself. No one can say “I am enlightened” because there is no “I” to it. There is no such thing as an enlightened person. The person writing these words, the person that speaks to the students, isn’t the enlightened one. My personality, my ego, what appears to be me, is just an afterimage; a physical apparition based on residual energy patterns. Jed McKenna is like the outfit an invisible man wears so that he can interact with people without freaking them out.
(Truth is everywhere and always: the abiding non-dual state)
Truth doesn’t need to be sought because it isn’t lost. It’s not at the end of some path waiting to be discovered. It’s not the result of practice or growth or learning. Truth is everywhere at all times; never absent, never distant. Truth isn’t the tricky thing, it’s the simplest thing there is; that which can’t be simplified further. Possessing the ability not to see truth, now that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. Basho
I think of storms as boisterous sound and light shows put on by the universe for those who have the sense to appreciate the majesty and grandeur of them. Nothing to do with enlightenment, just something I like.
I understand Zen perfectly—at least my own highly distilled version of it—but, strange as it may sound, I’ve never really made the connection between Zen and Buddhism. For one thing, I never figured out how desire got to be the bad guy and compassion became the good guy.
What Andrew had to say about the Buddhist concept of non-attachment was not so much that he didn’t understand it as that he was having trouble achieving it. That, of course, led to the apparent paradox of the desire to be desireless being itself a desire, and that whole tail-chase.
If you want to be an enlightened person, the thinking goes, you should act like an enlightened person. Utter nonsense, of course, but widely accepted.
It’s easy to look at an enlightened guy and say ‘Hey! He only eats rice. We must only eat rice if we wish to attain Nirvana!’ But, of course, that’s not true. If the enlightened guy jumped off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge?”
Wake up first, and then you can have non-attachment by the truckload.”
“And when that day comes,” I added, “you’ll have a hard time remembering what was so bad about attachments, and you might even miss some of them.”
The next thing Andrew and I got into was what it meant to be in the world but not of the world. This didn’t take long because the answer is largely the same as it was for non-attachment: “It’s nothing you have to worry about now,” I told him, “it’s just something that takes care of itself when the time comes. There’s no point in understanding it.”
“From my perspective,” I told him, “unenlightened people seem like a characters in a soap opera. That’s what I see when I watch people with all their concerns and hopes and dreams and conflicts and dramas. That’s not meant to diminish the human experience in any way, and anyone watching from my seat would say the same thing, but when I say soap opera, that’s what I mean; a maudlin, hysteria-ridden, unconvincing, poorly scripted and clumsily acted fiction of no importance and limited entertainment value. I used to be the same as anyone else, of course, living my life as an unwitting character in the
soap opera, but now I’m not.
“So here I am, on stage right now, this very minute, speaking with one of the characters in the soap opera. This particular character has a storyline that revolves around breaking out of the soap opera itself. This particular character wants to know whether it has an existence outside the dramatic framework of the soap opera, or whether it is nothing more than a two-dimensional character that will cease to exist when the writers kill him off or the show gets canceled. Will this character succeed or fail in his bid for freedom? Will he continue in his quest or change course? Does it really matter? Tune in tomorrow to find out.”
The soap opera analogy is very succinct in making the two points that Andrew and I had been toying with; one, that Andrew himself was a fictional character, and two, that all importance is illusory. But there was another point to touch on while we were in the neighborhood.
He gave that some thought. “My true self?” “Oxymoron. There is no true self. Truth and self are mutually
exclusive.”
There is a benefit, however, to realizing that who you are has little or nothing to do with you. It may be difficult to imagine not taking yourself personally, but it can be done when you see clearly that who you are has little or nothing to do with you.”
They think that it’s vital that their information be correct and precise. They think that this is like school where you have to understand one thing before you can understand the next thing. But all that is about knowing and this is about unknowing.
Waking up isn’t a theoretical subject one masters through study and comprehension, it’s a journey one makes; a battle one fights. Teachers want to be popular and appear wise, so they answer whatever questions anyone thinks to ask, as if they were teaching the next generation of teachers rather than helping people wake up.
Mountain: The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment, Mariana Caplan has this to say about the Sirens’ song of enlightenment: “The most common, widely-held fantasy about enlightenment is that it is freedom from suffering, the transcendence of pain and struggle, the land of milk and honey, a state of perpetual love, bliss, and peace. Enlightenment represents the collectively-shared dream of an idealized and perfect world of pure beauty and joy. It is not only New Age fantasy, it is the secret wish of all people. It is our shared dream of salvation. But it is only a fantasy.”
In short, like most spiritual seekers, Andrew never signed up for enlightenment at all, but for a heaven-on-earth fantasy called, in this case, Nirvana. The question is, once disabused of the fantasy, does the seeker’s enthusiasm automatically transfer to the reality? In other words, if you ordered a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and a cherry, would you be just as happy if the waiter gave you a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?
“forget it. It’s a non-issue. Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether. Words like suffering and happiness and compassion are just bags of rocks. Eventually, you’ll have to set them down if you want to keep going.”
“There are times in the process of waking up when those who have traveled the path before you can come to your aid and provide a clue as to your next step. That’s really all that any teacher or teaching can really provide; the occasional signpost. It may be in a big general way, like the word further, or it may be in a small specific way, like the kill-the-Buddha thing.
highlighter. She reads aloud the clearly marked passage ascribed to Buddha. I know it well, but it’s pleasant to hear it read by someone for whom it’s new. “I will obtain the Ultimate Truth and Ultimate Reality,” she reads slowly, thoughtfully. “That is the ultimate aim of my life in this world—whether my body may remain with me or go to pieces. My bones and flesh may go into complete annihilation or remain with me; I shall obtain the True Form of the Universe. Through innumerable incarnations, good results; I have obtained a human body. I will not lose this golden opportunity and will certainly obtain samadhi and the Real Form of Consciousness. Calamity may come or go, mountains may break upon my head, but I will not leave my promise to obtain nirvanam.”
Real Zen is about the hot and narrow pursuit of enlightenment; the shortest distance between asleep and awake. No rules, no ceremonies, no teachings, just the muddy, bloody battle of waking up.
“Yeah, Yamamata Roshi. He talked about one-pointedness and life in a Zen monastery and all sorts of things that sounded really interesting. He told a lot of great stories about people who would do Zen and then just out of the blue, Bam!, they’d be enlightened! Maybe someone would say just exactly the right thing at just the right time and—” “Bam!”
She knows that money is just something that flows; that it comes and it goes and that if you don’t disrupt the flow there’s always plenty. It’s me who sometimes forgets.
Jolene wasn’t familiar with the Plato’s cave allegory, much less my cinematic variation, so I took it from the top and ran through it quickly. “There’s a guy sitting in a movie theater, but he doesn’t really know he’s in a theater. He’s seated in such a way that all he can see is the screen; no other seats, no other moviegoers, just the screen. What’s more, he’s shackled. He can’t move around, can’t look around. His head and body are held in place by chains.” “This isn’t really Plato, is it?” “Not only that, but he’s been here his entire life. It’s the only reality he’s ever known; sitting here, watching images on the screen and listening to the soundtrack. That’s all he knows of reality.”
“It’s the deal you make every time you go to a movie. You agree to relax your discrimination and let the movie in. You know the movie isn’t reality, but you will sit quietly for two hours and allow yourself to experience it as if it were. You suspend your disbelief in order to form an empathetic bond with the plight of the characters and the movie, in return, agrees not to over-strain credulity and make it too difficult for you to believe. Make sense?”
“Just a little heads up, Jolene. People don’t like to have their version of reality fucked with. Try it if you still need to get it out of your system, but prepare yourself for unpleasant results.”
Steering someone away from their altruistic impulses at this early stage warrants it.
Right now there’s a specific passage I’m looking for and I think I can find it in one of the upstairs book collections. I’m a fan of transpersonal psychology in general and Dr. Stanislav Grof in particular.
It’s truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.” “And that is?” “That we don’t know anything; can’t know anything.” “Can you define ‘anything’?”
“Solipsism is defined as the belief that the only thing you can know for sure is that you exist, and that any other true knowledge is impossible. But, like I say, it’s not really a belief, it’s just the way it is.”
“Oooh,” I coo appreciatively. “Good question. Both are true. Yes, I have an ego and it looks similar to the one I dropped to, as you say, achieve nirvana. But then I came back all enlightened and everything, and I needed something to wear. I look around and there’s my discarded ego lying in a pile on the floor so I slip into it and here I am.” This is something a lot of students and seekers get hung up on and there’s really no satisfactory answer except to say “Come see for yourself.”
Ramana Maharshi addressed it this way: “The ‘I’ casts off the illusion of ‘I’ and yet remains as ‘I’. Such is the paradox of Self-realization. The realized do not see any contradiction in it.”
The result isn’t enlightened-self or true-self, it’s no-self. When it’s all over it’s time to be a human being in the world again, and that means slipping back into costume and getting back on stage.”
Julie seems to have that ability to relax into the moment and let the universe do the driving. If there was a secret to happiness in life, I’d say that was it.
“—and he’s fulfilling his role. He sees the future flowing towards him and he moves with it. He’s not stopping to consult someone’s book of rules.” “So if the flow tells you to launch a war—?” “Sure. You launch a war.” She pauses to ponder. “I think I’m like that at times, in the flow, but not always, not in big things. I think I’d be scared to set my morality aside.” “That’s perfectly natural. It’s a trust you develop a little at a time as you learn to relinquish the illusion of control.”
“Very much so. Basically, the act of faith in something other than self allows you to release the tiller; to surrender. Whatever the reason for doing it, whatever name you give to the new steering agent or agency, it’s going to be a very positive change because it’s going to be the infinite and unerring intelligence of the universe that takes over.”
This is the householder versus renunciate question. Anyone who wants to repackage enlightenment for mass consumption must first create the illusion that it’s comfortably within the consumer’s reach. It may be true that the price of truth is everything, but true don’t pay the bills. In the commercial model, the price of truth is whatever you can comfortably afford.
Those lured in by the simplicity and directness of self-inquiry are sucked into a morass of teachers and teachings, gurus and babble, ego and delusion, from which they are not likely to soon emerge.
Yes, it’s cheating, but everyone’s okay with it. Spiritual enlightenment gets redefined as something attainable by ego, and now the equation works to everyone’s satisfaction. Ego gets to continue the noble quest and a thriving spiritual industry continues to thrive. Of course, no one gets the grail, but if you understand the fundamental conflict, you’ll see that no one really wanted it anyway.
Here’s all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know.
Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know. In other words, go jump off a cliff. Don’t go near the cliff and contemplate jumping off. Don’t read a book about jumping off. Don’t study the art and science of jumping off. Don’t join a support group for jumping off. Don’t write poems about jumping off. Don’t kiss the ass of someone else who jumped off. Just jump.
To switch analogies, it’s like lucid dreaming. You achieve normal waking consciousness within the dream so that you’re in the dream but not of the dream.”
“I don’t know, that seems like too much. On the other hand, I look back on my own life before enlightenment and zombie doesn’t seem too bad. Like I was sleepwalking, or like I was alive but I wasn’t there. That sounds backward, but that’s what it’s like. Let’s use lucid dreaming again. If you woke up inside a dream, how would you see the other people in the dream? How seriously would you take things?”
When you hear someone say that searching for enlightenment is like fish in the ocean struggling to find water, this is what they mean. One fish may know it and another may not, but they’re both swimming in an ocean of water and always were.”
“When someone says that they became enlightened in an instant, they’re probably talking about the transformation brought on by a transcendental experience; an experience of mystic union or some variation of it. It’s powerful and can be quite transformative, but it’s not enlightenment. Enlightenment isn’t flashy and it doesn’t just occur like an epiphany.”
Simply put, I don’t think. I don’t make choices or decisions. I don’t weigh possibilities and select one over others.
No decision in my life is made through ratiocination. I wait for unfolding. I sense currents and I flow with them.
You don’t have to be enlightened to operate this way; you just have to release the tiller. Once you do, an entirely new way of flowing through life opens to you; a way that is based on rightness and sensitive to not-rightness. So when I look at my own life, my own story, I look for the pattern, the unifying theme, the sum of the parts that explains my existence.
I’m sure there are plenty of smart ways of starting a bonfire in the rain, but one thing I’ve discovered is that the smart way is seldom the best way to do anything. I used to try to be smart and now I don’t and everything works a whole lot better. Stopping being smart was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.
“What an utterly insane and magical ride we’re on. Is this not the damnedest thing? Is it not?” Everyone is nodding, responding to the energy; feeling it, bouncing it back. I feel them and they feel me and we all feel this thing that we’re sharing and creating together.
“When you start bursting with that whole mystical love-gratitude thing,” I tell them, “Rumi’s your guy.”
“You want to bring this whole thing down to the level where you can deal with it, but that’s not possible. Truth isn’t an idea or a concept. It’s not in libraries or in the words of sages. It doesn’t come in a flash of insight or a peak experience. It’s not a feeling of bliss or ecstasy. It’s not a concept to be understood or a feeling to be experienced. It’s not in your heart or your mind. It’s further.”
I am saying is true, just as when they are expanding consciousness or receiving shaktipat or chanting sacred gibberish elsewhere, they know in that same inside place that it may be something, but it’s not true, and that their secret reason for doing it is fear of what is true.
Ego abhors a vacuum, so everybody’s scrambling to create the illusion of something where there’s nothing. Belief systems are simply the devices we use to explain away the unthinkable horror of no-self.”
black despair is the knowledge that that’s what’s real; everything is futile.
That’s the point. That’s the reason that the big questions get the big production. This isn’t a song we’re singing or a mountain we’re climbing; it’s a dream we’re unweaving. There’s absolutely no chance that we’re going to unravel a fantastically complex, multi-layered tapestry in a single evening, but the thread we’re tugging on tonight can never be retightened. The fabric cannot be mended.
“No belief is true. No. Belief. Is. True.”
Our existence is utterly, perfectly, gloriously meaningless.
Truth is infinitely simple, delusion is infinitely complex. There’s no overestimating our ability to avoid making eye contact with the obvious. Maybe some of them will now scramble deeper into their stories, but for those who are here to hear, the leveling note has been sounded.
“Fuck bliss,” I tell them. Silence. “Bliss is for children,” I say. “Bliss is for tourists, for rubes. Do you really think that spiritual enlightenment is going to be like an endless orgasm?” This provokes a few muffled titters. “A permanent high? Heaven on earth? No more problems, no more worries, just sitting around being happy all the time? Doesn’t that sound a little, I don’t know, sleazy? Like all we’re really doing here is trying to cop a great buzz?”
Unchallenged beliefs can define you and determine the course of your life.
“I’m just saying, that’s the deal, it’s built in. There’s no alternative, everyone is full of shit. By shit I mean falseness; false beliefs, false perceptions, and the false personality that’s based on them. It’s like when you’re asleep and dreaming, your dreams are full of what your waking self would consider falseness, right? Not real? When you wake up you see them as absurd fictions and wonder how you could have believed they were real while they were happening, right?”
Walking or biking, even by myself, doesn’t get me out of it because my mind stays on it; keeps gnawing at the challenge of how to say things better, more clearly. But I can spend an entire day at the dropzone and not think about that stuff at all.
Whoever was responsible for the idea of dividing self into lower and higher parts committed a serious crime against humanity. This division has given rise to the notion that the lower (ego and immature) self must be overcome while the higher (unitive and whole) self must be sought as the goal of human realization.
I’ve watched much smarter people than myself, much braver people than myself, break their ships fatally on the rocks because they were too full of themselves to release control. This stuff isn’t about brains and balls, it’s about desire and flow and purity of intent.
Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says that there are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes. The other is to wash the dishes in order to wash the dishes.
If I were one of those revered Japanese masters I’d probably make myself slave in the kitchen for ten years without ever speaking to me.
The two states are diametrically opposed right at the core of self-awareness; at the very heart of what it means to be. I would describe the awakened state by saying that because I have no sense of self, I have no sense of possession or right or entitlement. I don’t take anything for granted. Nothing is mine; it’s all on loan and it must all go back. My body is not my body, my life is not my life. I want nothing and I want for nothing. I am free.
waking state ranges from a kind of bubbly cheerfulness to an almost embarrassing level of giddy delight. I may drift off into a game or a movie or a conversation for a while, but the center to which I always return, upon which I turn, is comprised of awe and gratitude and great gladness. This is the clear and natural state of the awakened perspective.
(The awakened state: awe, gratitude, and flow without a deciding self)
The process of awakening might be viewed as the transition between these two poles; the journey from fear and wrong-making to gratitude and open-eyed acceptance. If you don’t see what I am calling fear, rest assured, you can. Make the effort to see it somewhere and you will begin to see it everywhere, including, most importantly, in yourself. Don’t, however, rely on your current definition of fear and look for that. You won’t find it. Loosen up. Bring your A game. Observe, think, dissect, detect patterns. Watch for motivations, then find the motivation beneath the motivation.
to get it out you must let it in, breathe it deep, and allow yourself to become sickened by it. The way out is through, and there can be no rebirth without first a death.
Chris is speaking passionately now, empowered by his own dismay. One hears conspiracy buffs speak in similar tones, puffy with self-importance and smug in the belief that they have penetrated more deeply than the common run—the herd—into the hidden realms. Running apart from the herd is certainly better than running with it, I could tell Chris, but of no substantive difference if you’re still running in the same direction.
when it seeks to transmit knowledge than when it is merely processing it for its own needs.
Life is not a race and the only destination is the journey itself.
All his knowledge and his urgent desire to express it and to have it validated stems directly from his ego’s need for reassurance that he is far ahead of the curve, which stems from his fear that he is far behind it.
considered synonymous with “awake,” or that truth is thought to be found through years of deprivation, or that desire and materialism have become the fashionable enemy of spiritual development.
The emperor has no clothes, and sooner or later everyone is going to see what’s staring them right in the face. When that happens, perhaps, there will be a major shift; a mass exodus away from the complexity and futility of all spiritual teachings. An exodus not outward toward Japan or India or Tibet, but inward, toward the self; toward self-reliance, toward self-determination, toward a common sense approach to figuring out just what the hell’s going on around here.
Enlightenment—truth-realization—is exactly the same for all beings in all times and all places. Any attempt to dress it up or to make it proprietary merely obscures it and makes it less accessible. Seeing exactly how obscured and inaccessible it has been made tends to frustrate me, at least for a few seconds until I remember that everything’s exactly as it should be and cannot, in fact, be otherwise.
Krishna cheats, lies, murders and is cowardly at various times throughout the great epic, and that’s something that anyone coming from a God’s-a-jolly-good-fellow mindset might have trouble processing. Krishna, however, is not a god of love and light; he represents the whole thing, so in him all qualities must be found.
The debate over free will versus predetermination provides a particularly good example of this teaching process. Students are perplexed by this question because they focus on an answer when all their attention should remain on the question. “Stay with the question,” I tell them. “Don’t worry about the answer, just get the question right. Examine your assumptions.” Soon enough the question itself has been destroyed and, along with it, many layers of delusion.
The only construction required for awakening is that which facilitates demolition.
“But what about when people explore their inner selves? Make journeys of self-discovery? Aren’t they going within to find the truth?” “They’re just exploring the ego—making a study of the false self—which is a lifequest as valid as any other. But you don’t wake up by perfecting your dream character, you wake up by breaking free of it. There’s no truth to the ego, so no degree of mastery over it results in anything true. Putting attention on the ego merely reinforces it.”
It’s not fear of death that drives humans, it’s fear of non-being. Oblivion.”
That’s why depression, for instance, might be hard to combat; because it can be perfectly rational response to a highly irrational situation—namely, life—especially when the depression revolves around futility or insignificance. After all, you can’t be much more futile or insignificant than a character in a dream. The way to defeat rational depression is not to try at all costs to turn back from it or to cling to the illusion of meaning, but to plow right on through it and see what’s on the other side.
“Perception is reality. There is nothing else. Just like in a dream.”
Die while you’re alive and be absolutely dead. Then do whatever you want: it’s all good. Bunan
“The truth of the situation is that eventually, there’s nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void. The abyss. Eventually, every water-treader has to deal with the fact that it’s just him, the infinite ocean and nothing in-between.”
“Basically, yes. The body is just a rental car and this planet is just a motel. This is nobody’s home, though some treat it like a permanent residence; as if the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you pick up and move on. How absurd, and yet, how absolutely vital to the experience. Look at things in this light and you’ll see the countless ways in which society encourages the externalized self and mocks, discourages and combats the very notion of turning inward.
“And it takes, like, every ounce of energy just to stay afloat and stay with the group. I can see that. All anybody’s really doing is pretending. Everything I’ve ever done… my whole life…”
What else could possibly matter?’ I look at other people going about their normal lives and I want to scream! To shake them and wake them up! How can anyone watch a movie or go to work or eat a sandwich with this huge freakin’ thing staring them right in the face? I mean, am I going insane? I know I’m not, but am I? Is this normal? Really, you can tell me. Am I being, like, the most total whack-job?”
“It’s not that it’s bad… well, yeah it is. It rewrites everything. You don’t really know what I mean by everything yet, but you’re starting to. Your life has just entered a period of revolution and I think you can probably expect not to be really settled again for quite some time.”
Zen guys, among others, talk about this part, but for the most part a severe psychological break is not a big selling point for a spiritual teaching. People want all the goodies—the perfect knowledge and the freedom from suffering and all that—but no one wants to pay for it. This is the price, where Julie is now, or the beginning of it anyway. The simple fact is that it’s a bloody mess, and the love-and-bliss crowd doesn’t sign up for that. They want the enlightenment that doesn’t include relinquishing one’s place among fellow water-treaders. They don’t want to stop treading, don’t want to slip, alone, into blackness. They want the other enlightenment, the one where they can stay with the group and keep their carefully constructed personalities and just be happy. Preferably, really really really happy.
sends one in search of truth. It’s rabid, feverish, clawing madness to stop being a lie, regardless of price, come heaven or hell. This isn’t about higher consciousness or self-discovery or heaven on earth. This is about blood-caked swords and Buddha’s rotting head and self-immolation, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something they don’t have.
Truth is a uniquely challenging pursuit because the very thing that wants it is the only thing in the way of it. It’s a battle we will kill to lose and must die to win. The great enemy is the very self that wages the war, so how can there be victory? When self is destroyed, who wins? Why would anyone, knowing the price of victory, undertake so senseless a battle?