Why I Am Not Enlightened
I finally figured out why I'm not enlightened. Over 30 years ago, when I had just made the proverbial first step on a "journey of a thousand miles" I heard the following well-known tale: A man approaches a Zen Master and asks to be shown the path to enlightenment. The Master replies, "Okay, follow me," stands up, and walks the man to a nearby river and into the water. Without warning, the Master forces the man's head under the water and holds it there as he struggles violently for his life, until he is nearly dead. At last the Master pulls the man up, gasping for air, and says, "When you want to be enlightened as badly as you wanted to take your next breath just now, come back and see me."
At the time, as a youthful spiritual adventurer, the story inspired me and got me fired up, and fueled the years of seeking, meditating, and exotic travels to distant lands that followed. Yet now, looking back, I'm wondering if I could have saved myself a lot of trouble had I simply answered the question implied by that story honestly: No. No I do not want to get enlightened more than life itself, more than I would crave my next breath in that situation.
Again and again in the spiritual literature, and particularly in the fierce world of Zen, we come across stories that are similar. In ancient China, it is said that Hui-ka came to Bodhidharma's cave and waited for the monk to accept him. After standing there for days with no sign of the teacher coming out to greet him, it began snowing. When the snow had reached to Hui's waist, Bodhidharma finally came out and asked,
"What is it you want?"
"My mind is not at ease," Hui replied.
"The Way is long and difficult," said Bodhi, dismissing him.
Hui took out his sword and chopped off his left arm and handed it to the Master, and was accepted.
Another tale tells of the Zen master who was once threatened by a gruff Samurai holding a sword over him, saying, "Don't you know who I am? I am someone who could cut your head off without a second thought or batting an eye," to which the Master replied, "And don't you know who I am? I am someone who could offer you his head to cut off without a second thought or batting an eye."
In one of his previous incarnations, the Buddha is said to have offered his body as food for a hungry tiger.
And so forth and so on; the message seems to be that enlightenment, or the realization of Truth, is not a casual affair for mere spiritual tourists, but only for the very rare individual willing to sacrifice any and everything, including his or her very life, in its pursuit.
Alas, most of us, myself included, are merely in search of, at best, "feeling better," while possibly surrounding ourselves with consoling aphorisms and beliefs, incense, and countless books on esoteric subjects written by others who themselves have not made the final cut, so to speak. (The late Douglas Harding, one of the few who seemed to know of what he spoke, titled one of his books, On Having No Head). But let's face it: of all the people that you and I know who have spent a good deal of their lives sitting on meditation cushions, chanting in Sanskrit, gulping psychedelics like M & Ms, and subscribing to The Yoga Journal, how many have achieved the pinnacle of human possibility that all of the great spiritual teachings insist is available to anyone, if only we wanted it as badly as air and life itself?
It would mean putting enlightenment at the top of our To-Do list and priorities, ahead of career, family, comfort and security, things which, speaking for myself, actually comprise some of my favorite parts of being alive. In the Christian world, of course, Jesus was a "fisher of men" and told them to put down their nets right then and there and "follow me." Like the Moonies in the early days, those who joined up never even called home or checked in with their parents. (Perhaps today the families of Peter, Judas and the rest would kidnap them and deliver them to a deprogrammer). Same for the monks who divested themselves of all worldly goods and personal attachments to traipse through the forest with the Buddha. The Jews, naturally, didn't have much choice. Following Moses into the desert for 40 years seemed at first as if it would definitely be a step up from brutal slavery, but a lot of them bitched and moaned about it anyway. Even they didn't always want their freedom more than the familiarity of the less than optimal life they knew.
Ram Dass once spoke of a picture he saw in the newspaper of an abused and battered infant wailing as it was taken out of the arms of its mother, reaching back desperately for its abuser. The message was clear: we are wired to choose the familiar and the comfortable at any cost. I attended a two-week retreat in Rishikesh, India with contemporary guru Andrew Cohen once, and he made it crystal clear at the outset that it was imperative that we "want to be free more than anything else," and that we needed to be "deadly serious about it." I've never really been deadly serious about anything (except maybe my record collection) so that put me off a bit, especially since the most enlightened people I had come into contact with over the years always had at least one thing in common: they laughed uproariously and often. (Actually, to be fair, so did Andrew.)
I recently finished reading Spiritual Warfare by Jed McKenna, who, like Andrew and many others who walk among us these days, presents himself as someone who is "done," in the sense that prior to enlightenment, we are all perpetually in a state of "becoming," as distinct from finally being released into the vast mystery of Present Being, with no further demands of life, only curiosity and radical amazement. Jed is done with all becoming. So he, too, naturally, makes statements like, "All that's required is an arm and a leg? That's it?" He can't believe his good fortune to learn that "waking up" is such a bargain. Living without a few limbs, he says, is far preferable to even one more moment of living a lie.
Okay, I think I've made my point: the reason I am not enlightened after all these years is that I value my arms and legs too much, not to mention my wife and family, and last but not least, air. (My favorite.)
Now, for the opposing view: the most provocative statement I ever heard Werner Erhard make-yes I know he is controversial and either adored or despised, but this is worth considering-was that over the years, he had witnessed thousands of people literally give up everything in their pursuit of enlightenment. He had seen them give up their jobs, their families, spend their fortunes, devote years of their time, meditate until their knees were destroyed, "ANYTHING," he said, "except the ONE THING required in order to be enlightened. That, no one will give up." He paused for emphasis, then shouted, as was his style, "PEOPLE WILL NOT GIVE UP THAT THEY ARE NOT ENLIGHTENED. IT'S TOO TERRIBLE TO GIVE THAT ONE UP! THEY HAVE TOO MUCH FUN DOING THINGS THAT ARE GOING TO ENLIGHTEN THEM!" He went on in a softer voice, "Now, did I just say you shouldn't do things that are going to enlighten you? No; do them. But do them because it's fun to do them! I would do them. I do do them. But not because they're going to enlighten anyone. You can't get enlightened. But you can be enlightened."
It's the perennial paradox. There are many spiritual teachers and schools of thought who remind us continuously that, "this is it," that we are, each of us, always already enlightened. That it is impossible to be otherwise, and any effort whatsoever in the direction of enlightenment can only, by definition, be a journey further from it, since it is where, unbeknownst to us, we are starting out from. A religious way of stating this would be to say that we are always already in the Presence of God. If God is Omnipresent, the Source and Substance of Everything/Everywhere, (and for the non-dual people, also the Non-Source and Non-Substance of Nothing/Nowhere, and really neither of those two, nor both; confused yet?) then there is absolutely nothing any of us could do, obviously, to either bring in or remove God from the scene.
Our True Nature is who we already are, not something we can become or attain in the future. The paradox becomes that we somehow don't recognize this fact and spend years searching for something that was never lost, and if we're fortunate, we'll run into a teacher along the way who will simply, as the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition puts it, "point out" what is perfectly obvious. Jed McKenna calls it "opening your eyes," Gurdjieff and many others refer to it as "waking up." It has been called God-Realization, Self-Realization, Enlightenment, Liberation, or simply being real and authentic, resting in the center of our original, True Nature and living life from that place rather than looking for it.
So those seem to be our two main choices: Either we're presently, already enlightened and simply don't know it, and there may or may not be teachers or methods that can help us achieve the recognition that there is nothing to achieve; or, we're clearly very far from enlightenment and we need to be willing to sacrifice our very lives to get to the Truth, and there may or may not be teachers or methods that will help us achieve that. In either case, good luck! In the meantime, it seems to me that it behooves us spiritual seekers to get on with our day.
Image by quinet, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
Tweet- 10-20-10
- Eliezer Sobel's blog
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Addendum and Confession !
Note than in the above I've used the concept of 'light' and 'dark' only for poetic effect, to attract your attention!I don't really see these two 'aspects' as 'light' and 'dark'.
While existence does have pleasure and pain, it still 'perfect' in a special kind of way. If you examine deeply you will see that if you tried to design reality in a better way, it couldn't be done.
The delicious mixture of permanence and impermanence, predictability and unpredictability, influence and uncontrollability, independence and oneness, sameness and difference gives just a taste of this.
"On an island of gold, ordinary stones are hard to find."
It's simple..Really!
sharing enlightenment
Enlightenment
glue
lovely
Lovely job Eliezar.
I recognize the seeker, being an old hand myself - btw I still have both of them and hope to keep them.
I liked hanging out with the dilemma as I read your piece, and I wonder if those old stories aren't really stories, like Christian miracles. I doubt the guy waited till the snow was waist deep and then cut off his arm, smells like a tale. I think it's a mythic story that tells a part of the truth. Werner, and Buddha who advocates the middle way are speaking to other parts.
Andrew
http://RadicalRelocalization.com
"They'll never see us coming!"
To You Say Your Not Enlightened, Only Makes You Enlightened
I really enjoyed reading
Enjoy everything, need nothing
-----------------------------------
http://jiveny.wordpress.com
On Jim Carey and comedy!
Hi guys....
Has anyone seen Jim Carrey You Tube exulting the virtues of reading Eckhart Tolle and discovering the Now? What a selfish millionaire! To paraphrase Joseph Conrad, Jim Carry doesn't realise that his life, his very essence of his character, his capabilities and audacities, are only the expression of his belief in the safety of his surroundings." So let's parachute Jim Carry onto a desert island, without his philanthropic support, his starry eyed hangers-on, and his electric barbed wire fence; and let's see how mindful and how Now Jim Carry can get.
Tolle reckons that these are wrong thoughts created by my overly switched on ego. Ego is bad in the New Age and Eckhart Tolle is big in the New Age. However, I don't detect malice or charlatan trappings in his wrap, and he's probably on-to something with his zen tool bag. Firstly, what do all these Eastern people mean by ego? Ego, you know, is not who you really are. You see, ego is like a cancerous tumour, churning out thoughts and thoughts are toxic. It doesn't matter whether they be negative thoughts or positive thoughts, because the thinking is what we need to stop. But why is thinking bad? Well when we introspect, that is, when we think to ourselves, we are living in past and future time zones, when our true standing ground should be right here right now, in the now. The now is the only thing that you will ever experience. So this is why introspection is the wrong way of doing stuff; thinking to oneself is a noisy veil, clouding the real you. Mindfulness helps to switch those thoughts off, to still your mind, to gently float down stream (sorry I couldn't help myself) and enter eternity. It will be like removing cataracts from a blind man. We are all blind. If we you can conquer your thoughts, then you will awaken.
This sounds silly, but having said that, I have read Tolle's books and listened to his audiobooks and I can't help but be impressed. I don't know if it’s his wacky German accent or the fact that he can talk this stuff for over an hour from the top of his head but he got through to be in a little way.. I hate gurus but this stuff is useful is what I am saying. There is obvious marketing trickery going on but that's the industry we live in. So if you can ignore the hype of blissful peace, then this book is worth a go.
A big downside though, and it’s a biggy; is Tolle's idea that a majority of people are waking up and ergo the more people wake up the more flowers will spread. This is all logically sound and numerically comfortable; but if you walk down the book isle to the politics section, then the minority still run the world, they have always ran the world and they are a small minded, mean spirited, spiritually broken minority who worship the profits rather than the prophets. But that's another syllabus.
God, these pampered, Hollywood machine parts need to find better drugs. (Please feel free if you need to skip this startling but somewhat mumbo-heavy paragraph). Anyway, if you're a rich Westerner, then this Tolle character is on to something good. Originality is isn't; just keep this in mind, what Eckhart Tolle is expounding is a re-packaging of Eastern wisdom for our tiny attention span selves. Eckhart Tolle's wrap has an Eastern flavor that promises an easily digestible morsel of liberation if you put the hard work in. In the Eastern version of our wretched state, we are not wasteful crap excreting anuses because of The Fall, but our wretched state comes from our ignorance to the truth that we are all God almighty! We are all aspects of divinity, but we are asleep to this truth. You just need to awaken your mind to this realization. It's the idea that mind created the world by stepping out of eternity. By stepping out of eternity, mind brought along the illusion of time, with its poles of past and future. Tolle calls the illusion of time, our unconscious state and the Now our awaked state. The Now is out-of-time, and because temporal change belongs to time, the Now is a time-less One reality. We can better visualize this One reality by thinking of eternity or The One or The Now (all the same thing) as a revolving ball or globe. The part of the globe going downwards is the past and the part arising towards us is the future; the North pole is stationary isn't it, so the North of the globe is the Now (because it is outside of the revolving part we call time; get it?). The Now is the stationary part of the globe and time is the mere moving image of the globe (eternity) or as Plato said of it, time is the moving image of eternity. It is eternity that projects time onto the walls of the cave', like on a cinema screen. You can also think of the eternal One as a dangling disco ball in a night club and the lights cast by the ball are time and space and plurality. All these are cast onto existence by the disco ball (eternity). This is why the flow of time is an illusion and the eternal 'Now' is our only ground of existence. So Tolle is saying that past and future are not real, but we spend most of our waking moments living in the past and future. We stress about an incident that happened years ago or we worry about an uncertain future; like voices, our memories and worries drowning out the moment blabber on and on in a relentless drone, like a record repeating for years. Tolle calls this past-future time-binding state our unconsciousness. Our obsession with past and future is our hypnotic state. Let us awaken! Awakened consciousness is when we get into The Now. So in order to escape the world of illusion and stepping back into eternity, we must switch off the mind, its thoughts and dreams and all other illusionary smoke screens. If you manage to still your mind, it will be like removing catarax from a blind man. Eckhart Tolle awakened long ago, this is why he wrote The Power of Now; because he can see more than we blind sleepers.
Right then, that's the philosophical flailing out of the way, now onto the fun bit, is all this `we are all connected' and time being an illusion idea true? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant reached this Hindu conclusion in the icy little Prussian town of Konigsberg some 250 years ago, independent of any Eastern influence. Kant's philosophy is the culmination of the western journey and it came full circle and agreed with sages of India. Is this a coincidence?
The Eastern idea of we being little bundles of space-time, manifesting out of the navel of Brahman, is more sophisticated and a truer explanation of our sorry state than the western idea of a man in the sky, who, to use Milton's phrase, hung the stars like lamps in heaven, or God the Father, who guides the flight of every atom and the fall of every leaf. This is why intellectuals run off to India! Erwin Schrodinger believed this and there were many early 20th century scientists that believed in something similar to the above. Those eastern gurus and sages knew a thing or two about existence and this is why Eckhart Tolle sounds so wise and calm, because he speaks a truth that the Bible and Koran bashers out there would have you not hear. Tolle is a soothing lubricant, to sooth the aches of trendy nihilism, the consumer, the rat race and the humiliation of the work cycle; a cycle that disembowels us through advertising and envy and shopping and sexual frustrations. These are the reasons why Eckhart Tolle's popularization of the East is catching Oprah and Jim Carrey in a fit of excitement; they may not realize it, but what Tolle is offering is an escape hatch to a calmer place.
But you need to live in a mansion to practice living in the moment! Or you need to be a hermit, which, funnily enough, is what Eckhart Tolle is (as too is The Miracle of Mindfulness Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh). Most of us live in the real world. If you're looking after a three year old and you are working your own little rat race and if you're trying to study and write, all of the time; then living in the moment is not easy. Our society is run on the lowest common denominator mode of capitalist existence, so only the rich can pursue this bourgeois game.
Now about Jim Carrey and Oprah and Tolle, they are later-day escape artists, trying to leave us plebs behind! Now you yourself may choose to leave this word of skyskrapers, Starbucks, finace and monkey politics. However, if you want Sarah Palin to become the next emperor of the world, then your moral duty is to throw you own dirt back at the powerful! I hope this helps!
We exist between the Goddess and the Garbage
I never ever experience the world as an unfathomable and dreadful riddle; on the contrary, I take the world to be self evidently 'obviously-the-case' and such a matter of course as two plus two equals four. I have tried, I really have. From what I have read, all is not well in the garden of the enlightenment industry. Sensitive types scratch their heads to fathom the recesses of their brains, but all my friends, and my dog, all seem unconcerned with, as they say, the terror of being a crap excreting ape.
I have researched my indifference and realized that a polarity exists. One end is my world, with the cars and skyscrapers, sports and X-Box, and the other end is the place only the Einstein's and Plato’s comprehend. So our normal state is the Garbage and its opposite it the Goddess. Now I obviously am nowhere near the Goddess and neither are you, but those who have glimpsed her divinity, thankfully write their experiences for eternity. They are awake and we are asleep apparently. Our sleepy state is call avida (Sanskrit. Opposite to Vidya, or Video… to see).
The Buddha taught that the 'everything is fine', avidya state is personified by the average sentient being. But what is Garbage then; Albert Einstein once said that we do science and metaphysics to escape from everyday life, "with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness"; so the dreary is the Garbage; because the mundane is necessary for survival but not for enlightenment; the Garbage is the natural animal state. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, who was no stranger to the delirious God-complex, said that man is a rope between ape and overman; this is the same polarity of Goddess and Garbage.
I have chosen the word garbage by the way, not in a condensing or a put down, but the fact that consumerism is not the height of human achievement but rather, consumerism is indeed garbage, and, more importantly, both words begin with a 'G'. Consumerism promotes the hoarding of garbage, and garbage is the stuff we throw into our bins, as well as the stuff we buy from the supermarket shelves; the disposable stuff we consume. This is the lower state. This lower state is the most life affirming way to live, as the Goddess-state can lead to psychosis and the brutal thunderclap of HALT, and also the dreaded shake-down by the ontological police. In other words; walking around in Goddess-mode will get you knocked over by a bus! The mundane now is vital for survival and this is why the brain shields us off from the trance-like Goddess state. Look at it this way, if our cave dwelling ancestors were aware of the Goddess-state, they would bet eaten by a saber tooth tiger.
This is why the dreary Garbage is essential for survival and this is why you are not enlightened yet. The average person, then, is unmoved by the weight of all these life grappling worries; why should he be? The mind of the consumer is a mirror of an outside world of man-made machine parts, this is why we all share the same outlook, sport the same floppy hair and share the same taste in shoes. Most people never see the world as Einstein saw it. They are driven by the machinery of marketing and pop culture, moved around like auto-bots; they resemble meat puppets moved by extraneous forces. This is their only reality. Herman Hesse said that "the bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire." Now, under the surface of this reality, the ever present inner consuming fiie burns like a fierce meat hook, and this meat hook is personified in the image if the meat grinder of ontology; which grinds away, indifferent and blind..
The meat grinder, once known as the Brahman, is the space that's been worrying the psychotropic sages and telescopic seers of the world for eons and this space is a blank to the average person, because the average person inhabits near safe and comforting garbage side if the pole. But only an elevated position allows a glimpse over our wretched ephemeral cinder block existence and an ecstatic springboard over the cold meat grinder. Therefore we walk a pole between Goddess and Garbage.
If we are honest, we live mostly in the Garbage end, the mystic thought, resides at the far extreme of the pole because the mystic is moved by the brutal thunderclap of 'hey, there is more to life than this', and strives to witness the telescopic eons that can be glimpst. As for ourselves, we are all asleep apparently.
There is a parable of our sleepy state in a famous story of a king questioning the Buddha. The king asked the Buddha, "are you a god'? The Buddha said "no". Then the king then asked, "are you a saint"? "No", replied the Buddha. "Are you a magician" asked the king? "No" said the Buddha. Then the king asled, "what are you"? The Buddha replied simply, "I am awake".
Only cult leaders demand such
The specific teachers quoted here in support of the notion that enlightenment demands a radical commitment, sacrifice, or obedience are all well-known to be abusive or even outright cult leaders. Andrew Cohen now has 3 books written about him by former students listing his abuses---one of which is written by his own mother! (Mother of God)
Jed McKenna is a pseudonym for a fiction writer who may or may not be a teacher of anything and may or may not be enlightened. Werner Erhard is a highly controversial figure who was famous for calling people inauthentic assholes and not letting them leave the room to use the bathroom. His legacy is the highly aggressive Large Group Awareness Training cult-like weekend workshop.
I do think that to be enlightened, we must be willing at times to face what is uncomfortable with courage, compassion, and awareness. I used to think that this must be done in a violent, self-destructive manner. I have since discovered that such aggressive deconstruction causes more problems, more suffering, than simply facing reality in a more gentle, kind, and loving way. Cult leaders encourage people to give up everything, especially family and work and identity, in order to further enslave them under their authoritarian rule. Teachers who are less self-involved encourage people to symbolically give up everything, to end grasping and thus the root of suffering...but to do so in the midst of life, of work, and of family.
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As longs as there's an "I", there will never be Enlightenment