Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing ET1

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. Abandon your assumptions and approach it from the other direction; not from within but from without, not from the micro but from the macro. Even from men and women who are successful, calm, poised, and self-possessed, fear exudes like a noxious stink. If we exude it too, then we are not aware of it, not sensitive to it and not offended by it, but it’s there, everywhere, in everyone, and once you can sense it directly and recalibrate your filters accordingly, you will have made a major stride toward dispelling your own toxic cloud.

Admittedly, this is all a bit theoretical. I didn’t come at the whole thing from this angle and I don’t know if it can be done. I just know what I see and that it’s there to be seen by anyone who looks—really looks in a hard, thoughtful manner through fresh eyes—and I know that any time we see more of what is true and less of what is false, we are making actual progress.

Do you want to awaken? To stop being a false, artificial, self-benighted being? Then developing and sharpening this sense—the ability to detect fear and the source and emanations of fear—amounts to nothing more than disengaging your own autoimmune system; the subsystem of ego that keeps this poison from making you sick. Yes, 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.

The man in whom Tao acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise others who do.

He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.

He goes his way without relying on others
And does not pride himself on walking alone.

While he does not follow the crowd
He won’t complain of those who do.

Rank and reward make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame do not deter him.

He is not always looking for right and wrong
Always deciding “Yes” and “No.”

The ancients said, therefore:

“The man of Tao remains unknown.
Perfect virtue produces nothing
No-Self is True-Self
And the greatest man is Nobody.”

Chuang Tzu

The reason for all the excess is that there’s no saying it directly because there’s no it, so everything has to be communicated indirectly—what it’s not, what it’s like—never what it is.

SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT IS the damnedest thing.

It is, literally, self-defeating. It is a battle we wage upon ourselves. 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?

Arjuna wouldn’t. He weighed the cost against the gains and set down his weapon rather than launch such a war. The Bhagavad Gita is the story about why he picked his weapon back up. It is summed up in these two lines:

The unreal has no being;
The real never ceases to be.

Sonaya scrunches down into a more relaxed position and puts her feet up on the coffee table next to mine and we sit silently; tranquil, content, happy just to watch the shifting sky and idly wonder what’s coming next, but not worried, knowing, each in our own way, that whatever’s coming is gonna be good. But hey, that’s a no-brainer—

It’s all good.

Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death—
it is form, union, plan—
it is eternal life.

It is Happiness.

Walt Whitman

“Lao Tzu said that what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

She is looking at me hopefully. “Say that again.”

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

She nods, thinking; thinking as hard as she can. She’s in a mild state of shock brought on by the emotional toll of this whole thing building up in her over several days and further exacerbated by poor diet and lack of sleep. On top of all that there’s the total disruption of normalcy, the thrill of self-discovery and the fear of entering unknown waters. Quite a mix. I know one person who had to be handcuffed by police, strapped face-down on a stretcher and transported by ambulance to a facility for psychological observation at this approximate stage of the transformation. It can be a dicey 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.

I like happiness as much as the next guy, but it’s not happiness that 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.

“We’re all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is. We reinforce the illusion for each other. That’s what a society really is, a little band of humanity huddled together against the specter of a pitch black sea. Everyone is treading water to keep their heads above the surface even though they have no reason to believe that the life they’re preserving is better than the alternative they’re avoiding. It’s just that one is known and one is not. Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water. All fear is fear of the unknown. If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group lie by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics. If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group. To deny at all costs the truth of the situation.”

Of course, battling past the ego to get to the truth has been at the heart of countless spiritual teachings in countless countries for countless centuries. Ego-death as a means to no-self—abiding non-dual awareness—is what this journey is all about. That’s the reason behind the devotion, the prayer, the meditation, the teachings, the renunciation. Anyone headed for truth is going to get there over the ego’s dead body or not at all. There’s no shortcut or easy way, no going under or around. The only way past ego is through it, and the only way through it is with laser-like intent and a heart of stone. The caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly, it enters a death process that becomes the birth process of the butterfly. The appearance of transformation is an illusion. One thing doesn’t become another thing. One thing ends and another begins

And why do so few succeed in this greatest of all journeys? For the simple reason that success, within the context of the dream, is pointless, whereas failure, or, at least, struggle, is very much to the point. Chasing enlightenment holds as many lessons for the unawakened soul as any other pursuit in the dreamscape of ego-bound reality; as any other ride in the park. The supposed mega-bliss of spiritual awakening is a carrot dangling from a stick no less than love or wealth or power. In other words, actual enlightenment is seldom the point of the quest for enlightenment. And why should it be? Success in realizing one’s true nature is absolutely assured because, well, because it’s one’s true nature. The greatest wonder isn’t that you’ll make it back, it’s that you made it away. Returning is the motion of the Tao. Struggling to achieve truth is, in its own way, as preposterous as struggling to achieve death. What’s the point? Both will find you when it’s time. Should we worry that if we fail to find death, death will fail to find us? Of course not, and neither death, nor taxes, nor gravity, nor tomorrow’s sunrise is as certain as the fact that everyone will end up fully “enlightened” regardless of the “path” they take.

So, if I have to be interested in something, this seems like a good choice; watching the homeward migration of souls. And if I have to have a job, this seems like a good one; standing on the distant shore, keeping a beacon fire burning, helping newcomers ashore, offering a welcome and pointing out some of the sights.

Die While You’re Alive

Die while you’re alive
and be absolutely dead.

Then do whatever you want:
it’s all good.

Bunan

In the Ward of Fevered Minds

Bed after bed, child after child.
Some calm, some thrashing.
Some laughing, some wailing.
Calling for mommy.
Calling for God.

One sits up, eyes open, asking.
I go to him, sit, answer.

He nods, falls back, gone again.

I was once in a bed like them—
fevered, deluded.

Now I’m in a chair—
I suppose it’s better.

A roomful of loonies.

I return to my crossword puzzle
Until the next one sits up, asks.

Jed McKenna