Open Enlightenment

Alone With Ghosts

Fancy a change from your usual meditation practice? Give this a try:

He who practices sadhana is supposed to go at night to a deserted house, a mountaintop, or a cemetery. There he must sit astride a corpse that has been laid on its belly, facing north. He must draw on the corpse’s back a graphic symbol (yantra), usually an inverted triangle, representing Shakti. At this point he evokes elementary forces by reciting mantras and by projecting prana in the corpse with the purpose of animating it… If the rite is successful, this force actually manifests itself in the corpse, whose head will then spin around and speak to the apprentice. The apprentice must be able to impose his will right away on the ‘ghost.’ This practice is considered terrifying and most dangerous. [1]

Maybe it’s not so easy in modern times to dig up a fresh corpse as it may once have been. But suppose that wasn’t the case and you had the means – are you up for it?

Even supposing the head doesn’t turn around and speak (which I imagine is quite likely), this would still be probably one of the most frightening experiences of your life. Even to reach the point where you had proved to yourself the spell didn’t work, you would have to master a massive whack of fear that it just might.

And if the corpse actually did turn around and speak? Well, then you’d have to master a whole whack more…

On Halloween this year I’ll be doing my own version of this ritual. I’ve arranged to spend the night all alone and in the dark in a very haunted place: The Old Police Cells Museum, in the basement of Brighton Town Hall.

Some of the cells have been renovated and turned into a museum, but the remainder are still derelict. They were in use throughout the 19th century, right up until the 1960s. A police chief was murdered there in the 1840s, and who knows how many poor souls died or languished down there in misery. No wonder the place has a reputation for being vigorously haunted.

I’ve wondered for a while about making a point of facing my fear and doing something like this, so I’ve decided to collect sponsorship for the challenge. The proceeds will be split between the museum and the local branch of a national mental health charity, Mind.

I’ll have a night-vision camera for company, but I’m not planning a ‘paranormal investigation’. Instead, I want to see how good my meditation skills are at dealing with fear.

I recently read an account by a paranormal investigator of his most frightening moment. He fled from a house after being physically attacked by a poltergeist:

As I stood in the back garden I contemplated my future in paranormal research. I thought I had been in acceptance that such phenomena existed but apparently not. I had been fooling myself! This was all a bit too real for me… [2]

Fear and reality go hand-in-hand. We can’t fear something unless it becomes real; fear of something that isn’t real we instead call ‘worry’ or ‘anxiety’, whereas – as in the example above – the more real something becomes (especially when it hasn’t quite been recognised before) then the more incredibly, mind-blowingly scary it suddenly is.

But where is ‘real’ when we look at it in our experience? A sensation of reality involves things becoming vivid and impactful. Yet if things are not vivid or impactful, is our experience therefore less or only partially real?

I don’t think so. If it were, then we couldn’t recognise non-vivid experiences as being real – and yet we do. Also, the opposite couldn’t happen either: an experience such as travelling at speed would never cease to be vivid – but of course, over time it does.

Reality is not a concrete quality that experiences do or don’t have, but a description of our relationship to experience. In sensations of threat, awe or powerlessness the causes of these feelings spring into vivid relief as being ‘out there’ and a strong sense of reality is initiated. But this feeling of reality is just the flip-side of the sense of self; generally, the less there is of self, the more reality – and vice versa. But the fact we can recognise and shift between either implies that both are there, bound up in each other. It’s the habit of drawing a dividing-line in different places that makes some experiences feel more real than others.

Now, I’m not saying that being punched in the back by a poltergeist didn’t happen to the paranormal investigator, or wasn’t real, or that he was chicken. But although you can change your circumstances (by running into the garden, for instance) there’s never anywhere to hide from experience. Everything in experience is always how it seems, whether that means things feel vague, or else that things are far too weird or vivid to bear. Fear is what arises when we assume we can somehow hide from experience. If we remain accepting of experience then fear will not arise – and if it does, then we should accept that too.

I’d say it wasn’t quite the case that our paranormal investigator didn’t believe poltergeists were real; he did, I’m sure, but it was the experience of being punched by one that drove him into the garden. Who can say they wouldn’t have reacted the same?

Will I be able to spend a night in haunted cells without cacking my pants? I doubt it. It’s going to take every gramme of willpower to keep me down there. Hopefully, the even worse prospect of letting down my sponsors will keep me standing firm(ish). But if I’m able to make use of them, there should be plenty of opportunities to work with my fear.

I’ve set up a new blog for this project, with more information, a diary of the build-up to the event, and various observations on the paranormal. Drop by if you’re interested – and wish me luck!

References

[1] Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992), p. 96.

[2] Steve Mera, ‘The Invisible Assailant’, Paranormal Magazine, 50 (August 2010), p. 51.

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Occult Experiments in the Home

This post is a shameless plug for my book on magick and the paranormal, Occult Experiments in the Home, which has recently been published.

The connection between paranormal phenomena, spirituality and enlightenment is a topic that has long been close to my heart. I never suspected that a childhood fascination with ghosts, UFOs and tarot cards would lead me to a serious engagement with Buddhism, meditation and the nature of reality.

Intuitively we recognise certain experiences as ‘paranormal’, yet the apparent causes of these experiences contradict rationality. Magick, meanwhile, is a set of practices that set out on purpose to bypass rationality, in order to shape experience according to the magician’s will. Magick – in other words – is a means of creating the paranormal.

Take any of the paranormal reality shows that are quite common on television these days. It’s pretty obvious that the presenters of these shows are hyping up situations in order to create the very type of experiences they supposedly set out to ‘investigate’. If only these shows weren’t so constrained by the demands of the entertainment industry, we’d see quite clearly that they are contemporary examples of magick in action.

Yet magick has uses that far exceed television shows. Magick intervenes directly in the processes that create reality. What we experience as reality is not seamless and given, but the product of a linked chain of processes. In Buddhism this chain is called ‘dependent origination‘ and is the subject of highly detailed exposition. For the purposes of practical magick, however, a far simpler model usually suffices: desire shapes belief, which shapes perception, which shapes reality.

For many magicians, reshaping reality is the extent of their practice and many of them end up spending their lives simply and repeatedly bending reality in order to realise their desires. But magick takes its place among the world’s genuine spiritual traditions when its principles are applied to desire itself, and to the notion of the self that we suppose is the source of those desires.

Every magician gains clear and first-hand experience of how reality is a construct, amenable to desire, but few take the logical next step to examine how desire and self are merely constructs too. One means of arriving at this understanding is meditation. In this way, every act of meditation is also an act of magick.

All the major spiritual traditions employ some form of meditation, and also some form of magick as well. Christianity, for instance, uses prayer as the basis of meditation, and various rituals – such as the Eucharist – to invoke the presence of God through magical means. The classic Buddhist texts on meditation, Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, also include extensive discussion on cultivation of siddhis or ‘supernormal abilities’. Evidently, meditation and magick are inseparable. You cannot realise what reality truly is (or – rather – isn’t) without realising at the same time the extent to which it can be bent, manipulated and taken apart.

Every meditator practises magick and every person who has experienced enlightenment is a magician.

Magick can be a fast-track to enlightenment – or, at least, a valuable catalyst to the process, because it demonstrates so vividly to the practitioner the utterly fabricated nature of reality. Whenever we bypass or bend reality with magick, a paranormal experience is the result. A paranormal experience is the strongest possible assurance of and motivation toward the realisation that reality is all made up.

The spiritual traditions differ markedly in their attitudes towards the usefulness of the paranormal. Western magick, of course, places it right up front: first, take reality apart; next, the self. But the risk here is that we have so much fun bending the world to our desires that we never bother to look very hard at what we suppose is doing the bending.

Other traditions ban their students from any reality-bending altogether, until they’ve made headway first in understanding the nature of the self. The risk here is that by denying them access to magick, students never have the powerful experiences that can propel them over the hump of over-conceptualisation and give them the motivation and understanding required to examine the self effectively.

The paranormal plays an integral, subtle but easily overlooked role in the development of authentic spirituality. This is the basic theme I develop in the book and trace through a variety of types of paranormal experience. If this appeals to you, then I hope you might give it a look.

It’s available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, or from wherever you prefer to buy books.

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God Does Not Exist: Some Thoughts on Anselm’s Ontological Proof

Obviously, God doesn’t exist. But this is not to be mistaken for a statement of atheism, because consider: if God did exist then, like everything that exists, It would be inside the universe and part of the creation rather than creative.

If God existed It would have characteristics, in which case other things would be comparable with It. Many of the problems of orthodox religion, such as how God can be omnipotent or good, given the presence of evil in the world, are created by naively attributing characteristics or existence to God.

Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) ontological proof of the existence of God is an example of this error. God, argues Anselm, is by nature perfect, in which case It must possess the characteristic of existence else It would be lacking something (i.e. existence). Thus God, being by nature perfect, therefore must exist [1].

There’s nothing more human than wanting to bring God closer and make It ‘real’, but therein lies the source of Anselm’s error. A human being exists. To remove our existence is to take away all our characteristics. Without existence we cannot be a self, and the self is that which needs to exist. However, self is transcended when our dependence on existence is recognised and we understand how the self (unlike God) subsists only in things as a creation and is not itself creative. In other words, we draw closer to God on realising how the self does not exist.

Anselm Of Canterbury (1033-1109)

Anselm recognised that God is ‘perfect’, dependent on nothing, absolute, but his argument attempts to draw down God rather than encouraging us in the necessity to rise to It. God’s perfection is neither threatened nor completed by the possession of existence, because the instant that something exists it becomes dependent, contingent, relative to all things.

The absolute Itself does not lack or require existence because existence is the producer of lack, the basis of the need in things to assume an appearance of self.

The Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking (1911–1994) devised a parody of Anselm’s argument, which uses similar premises to arrive at the opposite conclusion: the non-existence of God. It goes like this:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. Therefore, God does not exist.

Rather than a joke or parody, I consider this a good working description of the nature of the divine.

Note

[1] Here’s a translation of Anselm’s argument in full from chapter two of his Proslogion:

[W]e believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God? But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak – a being than which nothing greater can be conceived – understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist. For it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, another to understand that the object exists. For when a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding be he does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, he both has it in his understanding and he understands that it exists, because he has made it. Hence even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. And assuredly, that than which nothing greater can be conceived cannot exist in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality, which is greater. Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

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Discrimination

According to the Western magical tradition, ordinarily we live in Malkuth (Hebrew, ‘The Kingdom’), which is the emanation of Creation furthest removed from the Godhead. To some, this is a cause of major concern; to the rest of us, an assurance we have seats closest to the silliest, weirdest, most diverse and fucked-up stuff that could possibly be allowed to happen.

Each emanation of the Creation has an associated virtue and a vice. In Malkuth the vice to watch out for is avarice or inertia – which makes sense, because there’s so much to distract our attention down here it’s easy to get swept up into things and not let them go. The virtue offered by Malkuth, however, is discrimination. To many this might sound so politically incorrect that we ought to avoid it as well. But no, it’s good to discriminate.

The answer to the Zen koan, 'Where is this?'

Sometimes in comments on this website there’s a tendency toward views such as, ‘It’s all the same thing,’ or, ‘There’s no real dichotomy.’ Sometimes it gets boiled down even further into, ‘All you have to do is watch the breath,’ or even, ‘There’s no need for any questions. Just be.’

When I hear myself sounding like this I check if I’ve fallen into the vice of inertia through neglecting to maintain discrimination. The old saying that ignorance is bliss is presumably also true the other way around. Luckily, when we feel bliss creeping up, we can always stamp it out by discriminating.

It is never bad to think ‘too much’ about enlightenment, spiritual development, or anything else. Go on: think, think, think, question, question, question, doubt, reason, theorise and ponder! Enjoy! Only we must take care not to think wrongly.

Do you really think that thinking will make the Absolute wither and fall away like a raisin that slipped between our fingers down the back of the sofa? Who’s the one with an inflated view of their own thinking: the one who uses thought freely whenever and however, or the one who refrains from doing so, because he or she believes their thinking is so damned awesome it could actually stand between them and the Truth? No, it was not thinking that ever prevented someone from realising something.

What is thinking anyway? Those who have decided it’s ‘bad’ are the least likely to take a good look at it. Many assume that everything which happens in the mind is thought, but the mind is a bizarre zoo of alien animals. Thoughts are only a single species among the creatures that live there. In learning the appearance and habits of the beasts of this internal zoo, discrimination proves itself a virtue.

So let’s think about thinking. Here’s a puzzle: if I’m asked to think of a mountain, how do I know it’s that mountain I’m thinking of and not another?

If this sounds a stupid question, consider if I’d been asked to imagine rather than think. If someone asked me to imagine Mount Everest, say, it’s possible I might have summoned to mind an image of Mount Fuji instead. Or even if someone had asked me to summon my personal memories of my trip to Everest (supposing I’d been), it’s still possible that something might slip into those memories that actually happened the time I went to Fuji, not Everest, or that perhaps never actually happened anywhere at all.

Where imagination and memory are concerned then what we imagine or remember may turn out not to be what we supposed they were. But this is never so with thinking, because when we think then by definition we know what we mean. Thought is self-evident. We cannot think five and discover later that we were actually thinking four. I cannot think about discrimination only to discover later that I was actually thinking about cat food. Thinking is unique among the other processes of our mind in the way it offers self-evidency. Mental images, signs and memories are not self-evident to us in the way our thoughts are. Thinking is the only means by which self-evidency arises.

This makes thinking special and precious indeed. For sure, thoughts can lead us astray from what’s true into what’s irrelevant and false. But without first knowing what we mean – without self-evidency, in other words – then neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’ even gets off the ground.

Mnt. Everest or Mnt. Fuji? Images can mislead. Yet our thoughts afford phenomenological sufficiency.

There is something profoundly human, profoundly mysterious about thinking. We cannot get to the bottom of thinking, but I suspect this is because that for human beings it doesn’t have one. I often feel very pleased with myself going around telling people, ‘There is no self; there is just Emptiness,’ but the inconvenient fact remains that it still looks very strongly to me as if I’m the one having these thoughts at this moment, and that no one else will know unless I go to the bother of blogging them.

I strongly suspect that it is the mysterious process by which thinking creates self-evidency that is also at the root of how the world is full of individual human minds. The notion of a separate self can be exposed as an illusion. The notion of a separate mind, however, endures beyond enlightenment because – although there is no self – minds are individual.

Maybe Descartes shouldn’t have written ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but, ‘I think, therefore I individualize.’

There is no evidence for a self, but there is certainly evidence for the mind: thinking. But to say that thinking makes us individual doesn’t imply there is anything extra ‘doing’ it. Thinking arises spontaneously in human beings; we don’t need and there is not in us anything required to ‘do’ it. Anyone who tries to stop their thoughts learns quickly that it can’t be done. The mind thinks like the lungs breathe.

To reject thought is a flight away from the mind and spirit toward (odd as it might seem at first) the self. But think about it: to cast off thought, the means by which the world becomes self-evident, is to try to opt for something that isn’t here already. It is to trade reality for fantasy. Many suppose that if thinking would stop there could be transcendent peace, but this is the peace of mindlessness. Drink ten pints of beer or chug a couple of valium to produce a similar if less skilful effect.

To find peace through thinking requires discrimination. Pin down thinking to see it for what it is and isn’t. We wouldn’t ever set it aside, once it stands revealed to us as the root of our mysterious individuality, and a uniquely human means of making and changing the world.

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Announcement

Readers of this site may have noticed I’ve been quiet for a while. This is because I’ve spent some time reviewing what I’ve written here so far. It’s not been an easy decision to make, but I’ve now decided that I have not experienced enlightenment after all.

This may come as a shock to some readers, and I hope you will accept my sincere apologies if you feel I have misled you over the previous months. In particular I would like to apologise to our critics on this site, who have kindly been pointing out what has only become obvious to me very recently. If only I’d had the intelligence to recognise the compassion and truth in what they have been telling me all along, this would have saved a lot of uncertainty.

It was looking back and reviewing the content of what I’ve written here that finally brought home to me the truth that not only have I not experienced enlightenment, but I am indeed very wide of the mark of ever doing so. My writing now strikes me as shallow and lacking seriousness. There is too much humour and levity in its tone for someone who has truly had the kind of experiences I once believed that I had had, and too little humility and quietness.

I’m not sure where I go from here. For now I think it’s important to keep the material I’ve written as a potent warning to others seekers on the path against being misled in the way that I have misled myself over the previous months.

I hope this date proves a major turning point in the recognition of what’s true and what’s not.

[Note: That 'date' was April 1st and this post was, of course, my April Fool joke. But hopefully this prank has raised some interesting points for discussion in the comments thread.]

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Your Ideal Teacher

A man turned up at the meditation group I lead – because occasionally someone does show, although mostly it’s only me. The advertised intention of sitting and talking about how to meditate doesn’t seem to appeal to many people. However, this guy turned up, and so we sat for forty minutes and then we talked about technique.

Two people were in the room. One of them had come to practise and learn, and the other one was supposedly in a position to teach. I asked the guy what he had experienced during the sitting and he mentioned something about his mind wandering and a pain in his leg.

I’d have been open to hearing how he’d felt when his mind wandered; or what kind of things it wandered into; or the type of pain afflicting his leg; or how the pain made him feel. Instead, I was puzzled by how he wouldn’t or couldn’t respond to my prompts. It didn’t feel that he was avoiding an answer; it felt instead as if it seemed to him that he’d said all it was possible to say.

He hasn’t been back since, so I’m left with the puzzle of how someone sits for forty minutes and notices only that his leg hurts and his concentration is poor. That isn’t much of a return on forty minutes. Casting back to how things were when I started doing this stuff myself, I think I’ve arrived at an answer: the guy assumed there was nothing more to say because what he experienced was just him.

You know how people say, ‘Is it warm in here, or is it just me?‘ [1] That’s a polite thing to say in social situation. But in meditation it’s deadly. The point of meditation is to realise how there’s never any ‘just me’.

If a sensation arises of heat or leg-pain or concentrating poorly, then the point is to be see that. I suspect that when I asked the guy what happened during those forty minutes, what went through his mind was something like this: ‘Well, my leg hurt and my mind wandered, but that’s just me.’

We begin practice with an unenlightened mind, which entertains this weird notion that experience is ‘transparent’. Experience arises, but the unenlightened mind looks straight through it; or it kind of looks at it, but without seeing – like that type of blindness where the eyes are working perfectly, but neurologically something is screwed.

This way of seeing is the trick we use to create a self. Instead of ‘heat is arising’ we understand ‘I am hot’; the heat is turned into the property of something and now appears to be ‘just me’.

Enlightenment is the lived realisation of how this is only a trick.

So that guy who came to the group isn’t stupid; he’s just unenlightened. My problem is how do I teach him something different?

Puppetji. Some see in him their ideal teacher, whereas others see just a bundle of colourful rags.

In most teaching situations we have the luxury of assuming there’s something to learn, someone to learn it, and someone to learn it from. In the enlightenment game, however, the object of the lesson involves realising how not one of these assumptions holds. The enlightenment game is not a typical teaching situation, like the type we’re accustomed to from school or college.

It’s said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. But this doesn’t mean that after we’ve read some Ken Wilber a wise old turbaned geezer will show up on our doorstep. It doesn’t even mean that we need to scour the phonebook and find a turbaned geezer. This old truism is pointing instead to how students and teachers are dependently co-arising. Our education system justifies itself by designating certain individuals as teachers and paying them a salary for what they do. But cast your mind back over your life, and you’ll probably find that the people who taught you the most important lessons probably weren’t even conscious of doing so, let alone drawing a paycheque for their service.

A teacher is a teacher only in the mind of a student. There is nothing inherent in a person’s words or actions that can cause others to learn from him or her. If teachers really did exist outside of students’ minds, then teaching would be a very easy job instead of an impossible one.

It was Sigmund Freud who famously declared there were three ‘impossible’ professions: teaching, government and psychoanalysis (Freud 1937: 248). The reason they are impossible is because they seek to change people. Freud learnt the hard way that changing people is pretty much the hardest thing when he discovered how the human personality is built upon a bedrock of narcissism. The ego, by definition, cannot bear the prospect of becoming what it’s not. This obstinacy is exactly what the ego was designed for.

‘Does everyone find change difficult,’ the ego wonders, ‘or is it just me?’

But there is a way around the ego: the arrival at a lived understanding of how the ego is based upon illusion. Freud didn’t admit this ‘mystical’ possibility within his system, and even if he had the problem of the ego’s narcissism remains; he would simply have added a fourth profession to his list: the enlightenment game. Indeed, the teaching of enlightenment is perhaps the most impossible profession of all, because it involves not only teaching, but also an understanding of the human personality (‘psychoanalysis’) and the instilment of self-regulation and self-discipline into the learner (‘government’).

Sigmund Freud. Some see in him a pioneer of human psychology, whereas others see just a sexist, racist, dirty old man.

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t try to teach this stuff, or that teachers shouldn’t bend over backwards to make themselves clear and take responsibility for their teaching. But it’s important to recognise that the learning of enlightenment cannot take place within the standard model of a teaching relationship, because the teacher cannot take responsibility for the factor that ensures success: the learner’s recognition of their own lack of truth [2].

The recognition of the lack of truth is the route around the bedrock of narcissism. Without recognising the fundamental lack of truth in our perception, we’re doomed to the standard assumption of, ‘well, that’s just me.’ The bedrock of narcissism that Freud uncovered (Freud 1937: 252) is this very habit of assuming there’s a ‘me’ that cannot be seen beyond.

Perhaps one of the reasons the guy hasn’t been back to the group is that he thought I was a poor teacher, or perhaps he found my manner condescending, or something else pissed him off. In a standard teaching situation, these might indeed get in the way of success and he would be well advised to look elsewhere. In the enlightenment game, however, it’s more complicated, because it’s clear the student is making a demand on the teacher for truth, instead of focusing on the lack of truth within himself.

By assuming that a teacher must fulfil certain criteria or behaviours, the student is trying to satisfy his or her own narcissistic desires in a projected form. Think about it: if the ego is an illusion then that’s true now, already. If we suppose that something has to be fulfilled before we can see this, we are merely adding a new desire to our experience.

There’s nothing wrong with this in a standard teaching situation. The aim of the enlightenment game, however, is to make our demands the object of enquiry, not to allow them to form the basis of our motivation.

Of course, institutions that teach enlightenment have recognised this problem and have devised different models of teaching for circumventing it.

In the east we have the guru system. The guru looks superficially like a standard teacher idealised to an absurd degree. Sadly, many students fall into the trap of regarding their guru as precisely this – their ideal teacher. (And so, unfortunately, do many gurus.) However, by surrendering our will, judgement and probably a hefty proportion of our income to the guru, the authentic goal of this system is to confront us with our own narcissistic demands, because once we have genuinely allowed the guru complete dominance over our lives, we’re left staring those demands right in the face.

The western approach to the problem is more radical. The western occult tradition throws out altogether the standard model of the teacher and urges upon us a bizarre array of daimons, Holy Guardian Angels, invisible colleges and ascended masters. Although communication with ‘imaginary’ beings is greeted with scorn by most people, it’s a model that has much to recommend it, when practised correctly. It’s a major milestone in magical practice, the first time we receive from a non-human intelligence a message that completely contradicts our conscious assumptions and as a result leads us toward new understanding.

The western model, by advocating surrender to a teacher who doesn’t even exist (in the human sense), can steer us quickly around the ‘it’s just me’ of ordinary perception into a stark confrontation with the radical otherness of our own experience, far more quickly than the guru method. The reason is that it demonstrates more graphically our lack of truth, because there’s nothing like a chat with a discarnate being for forcing us to concentrate and interrogate very closely indeed our experience, motives and demands. In contrast, dependence on the idea that a human person can grant us what we desire will tend to work in the opposite direction. Yet it must be noted that neither of these models guarantees against the mispractice of projecting our narcissistic demands onto the other, whether that other is human or astral [3].

Some people assume that anyone who claims to have played out the enlightenment game is therefore obliged to teach, or automatically assumes the position of a teacher, and that this obliges them to say certain kinds of things or act in particular ways or adopt certain models of teaching.

To this I’d respond with a big smile and a loud and hearty ‘Fuck off!’

I’m a teacher of enlightenment to the degree that anyone regards me as such. If anyone decides to do this, but then discovers that what I write seems condescending, negative or spurious, then I hope they’ll confront the doubt and the need for self-affirmation that underlies their projection. I’m not arguing that I don’t manifest those qualities, but no one will get enlightened by trying to fix my faults rather than examining the experience provoked in themselves by those faults.

Someone might take my advice to recognise their lack of truth as a boastful claim that I possess a truth that they don’t. I remember reading Daniel Ingram for the first time, and feeling sick with envy and resentment for weeks on end at the access to truth that he (the lucky, arrogant, smug bastard) evidently had. But sitting with that unbearable envy and resentment, and using it to explore my relationship with my own lack of truth taught me more than I could ever have imagined.

The experience of the lack of truth is enlightenment. When our lack of truth is fully realised there is no longer any ground to experience, and then a whole new order of truth is able to enter our being, risen from falsity.

When the student is ready, anyone and anything is a teacher. One day, I hope that players of the enlightenment game will do away altogether with the notion of teachers, and we’ll wake up to a new aeon in which everyone is recognised as a messiah.

Notes

[1] This expression has at least two meanings. Firstly it can mean, ‘Am I the only one who is hot?’ But secondly it can mean, ‘Is it only due to my peculiarities that I come to possess this sensation of heat?’ It’s the second meaning that I’m focusing on here. The first meaning concerns the sensations, but the second is focused on the self that is supposedly feeling them or generating them.

[2] In a standard teaching relationship it is the transfer of a skill or body of knowledge which is the factor that ensures success, and a good teacher should most definitely be willing to accept responsibility for this!

[3] For example ‘prayer’, when understood as the practice of making petitions to God, is a depressingly common example of this error.

References

Freud, Sigmund (1937). Analysis Terminable and Interminable. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 23. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

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The Lack of Truth

Enlightenment is a piss-poor strategy for saving the world.

Spiritual practice uncovers ever more refined levels of subtlety. Enlightenment, sadly, is too subtle to prove much practical use in solving material problems, such as vanishing rainforests, whales, the energy crisis and people not playing nice. Scientists and politicians will make the greatest impact on these problems, not spiritual sages.

Enlightenment is not the end of delusion, greed and hatred; it’s the seeing-through of these things. This means that it’s not (in itself) the solution to evil. What it is the solution to is the lack of truth.

Trying to teach enlightenment, you soon run into this problem on a practical level. People are interested in enlightenment as the answer to all kinds of issues, but in fact it addresses only one issue: truth.

Enlightenment has nothing to do with giving up smoking, eating more healthily, or finding the willpower to jog around the park. Yet meditation classes are full of people with aims like these. Usually, they don’t stick at it for long.

Issues like these are fulfilled at certain times in life more than at others, because things like jobs, money, relationships and health by their nature come and go. When we have them, or if it seems there’s no prospect of obtaining them, then there’s no reason to practice either, and so people with these aims tend to fall away.

The lack of truth, however, remains an issue despite life’s vicissitudes, because even when I’m beautiful, rich and regularly getting laid, I can still lack truth. Until enlightenment, only the lack of truth provides constant motivation. The people who see the job through are those who accurately perceive their lack. Feeling your lack of truth, you simply cannot abandon practice, no matter how pleasurable or how shitty the circumstances of your life become. Connecting with your genuine desire to save the planet, however, or to love others, or to become the happy and generous person you know you would be if only you stopped smoking, or whatever, is unfortunately beside the point. These are laudable aims, but too gross by far to be anything enlightenment can provide.

The people that get the job done are those who see and feel their lack of truth. In other words, the best students are those who have already learned to teach themselves.

For the rest, the best approach (albeit heavily disguised) must be to teach what they haven’t recognised: their lack of truth. Yet it’s hard to understand this idea, let alone accept that enlightenment has nothing to do with anything else. And it’s an issue that only a few seem constitutionally driven to confront. But when people ask me whether enlightenment is ‘worth the effort’, I catch a glimpse of the screaming gulf that separates someone driven by truth from someone who isn’t.

Enlightenment is a myth to anyone who hasn’t perceived their lack of truth. For teachers to represent enlightenment as having anything to do with being happier, healthier or more popular; with saving the planet, world peace or the evolution of humanity, runs the risk of providing only more reasons not to practice, because enlightenment is not the means to achieve these things.

If I make it sound as if enlightenment isn’t ‘worth’ it, then please think again. If we attach a value to truth, then we make ourselves the measure of truth. Yet we can proceed towards enlightenment only when we accept the truth as the measure of ourselves.

Before this gets too needlessly messianic, I’ll shut the fuck up. Suffice it to say that after this, if you’re still consumed by a genuine need to experience truth, then one day soon you probably will.

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Magick

A life-long interest in the paranormal led me to occultism. From there it was a short hop into spiritual practice. And from there (conceptually, at least) only another step toward enlightenment.

The insights I’ve gained I owe to magick more than religion. Tarot cards, ouija boards, ghost-hunting and UFO-spotting, sorcery, invocation of spirits and demons – these have played a role in my enlightenment. Going to church, puja to Buddha, adhering to the eight-fold path – have played none.

Yet the difference between the eastern paths to enlightenment and the western magical tradition is not that great. The eastern traditions – Buddhism included – accept the validity of magick and sanction the development of magical abilities, but this is often treated as an extra and there are frequent cautions against acquiring magick at the expense of insight.

What we call ‘reality’ has no intrinsic existence. The lived experience of this understanding is awakening, but what follows even from the mere idea is a notion that ‘reality’ is, therefore, quite malleable stuff. To an extent, it can be bent and shaped at will. Reality is determined by our perception, and perception by our belief. Magick is an intervention at both these levels (and others besides) to alter reality. Meditation is an act of magick.

There is nothing like magick for gaining a first-hand experience of the insubstantiality of reality. The danger is that we may become so occupied with our bending and shaping that we never get around to realising how the bender and shaper too lacks any inherent existence.

Here lies the underlying tension. If we allow people the leeway to muck about with their reality, can they be trusted to progress beyond magick? But if we protect them with faith and rules from the temptations of anarchy, will they garner enough insight to understand the vital role of magick in seeing through the self?

People do not get enlightened by following rules or by proving an idea – not even their own. People get enlightened by having the courage to pick apart their experience and discover something that transcends all rules, ideas and experiences.

But the rule that there are no rules is a rule. And the rule that we should not make up rules is a rule. And the rule that there is no need for rules is a rule.

When people tell me I shouldn’t hold a certain view, or that I don’t need to hold any view, what I hear (all too often) is someone merely parroting an idea.

Probably it was an idea given to them by a teacher, intended to protect them from a pitfall further along the path. But now they’ve mistaken it for a reality, and although they’d do better to concentrate on taking it apart (after all, isn’t that what the teacher always says?), instead they’re waving it in other people’s faces.

The hard part is accepting that you’ve fallen into the trap of faith and religion. The remedy, however, is always magick.

Just keep waving that wand and eventually – poof – it’ll all disappear.

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Evil, Be Thou My Good

There’s emptiness, and there’s the experience of emptiness.

In what follows it’s important to recognise this difference.

Emptiness itself is beyond experience, whereas the experience of emptiness – of course – is not. But even the experience of emptiness verges upon the ineffable. ‘Non-dual awareness’ is a common description of it, as is the sensation of there being ‘nothing to do, ‘nowhere to be’, and so on. The experience of emptiness is also described as realising or being in the presence of ‘God’, and it’s here, perhaps, that we see most clearly the danger of confusing the experience of the absolute with ideas or with visions of it, although these may indeed also arise at times within consciousness.

Judas: 'Why am I the odd one out?' Christ: 'These halos are a visual metaphor, Judas. Get a clue!' (Simon Ushakov, 'Last Supper', 1685)

The halos around the heads of saints in religious paintings, for example, are a visual or experiential dramatisation of a human being’s experience of emptiness. But on a literal level a halo simply looks bizarre, because it’s pointing to something that from the perspective of everyday consciousness makes no sense.

Feelings accompanying the experience of emptiness often include a sense of paradox that reaches into the very depths of being; or a feeling of ultimate freedom and release; or a sensation of infinite goodness and perfection. But what I want to explore are occasions on which I’ve experienced something very different.

This has arisen only twice – so far. The first time was at third path. At third path the experience of emptiness in real time becomes established for the first time, so I’d be surprised if anyone stumbled across it any earlier. (Although I’ve been involved in this game long enough to appreciate that it shouldn’t be entirely ruled out!)

As I sat one day, emptiness flipped from the realisation of perfection into its opposite. Instead of completeness there was utter lack. Instead of being with God, I was at the furthest point distant from Him. Existence became a curse and the mere feeling of being alive the cruellest imaginable torture, visited equally on all creatures.

This, of course, was the experience of emptiness. I could see that emptiness itself was still the same – i.e. empty. If it hadn’t been the same, then something about it would have changed, and if a ‘something’ was involved then that wasn’t emptiness. So the problem, I assumed, lay somewhere in me.

But the second time it happened was at fourth path, and consequently this has proved much harder to explain.

If we use The Heart Sutra to describe the difference between third path and fourth, then at third path we see ‘form is emptiness’. In other words, we look for phenomena and discover we cannot find them, because – we have realised – they lack any intrinsic self. At fourth path, however, we realise that ‘emptiness is form’. At third, we failed to find any intrinsic being, yet we still assumed a solid centre-point from which to launch our investigation. We started with the assumption that there is ‘form’ that can be empty. At fourth path, this is seen through. Because we now see that there is not even a self that can realise ‘form is emptiness’, suddenly the opposite proposition is the only one that makes any sense: ‘emptiness is form’. In other words, because emptiness has invaded everything (although it was always there from the beginning, of course) emptiness is now our only possible starting point, and from it everything that appears proceeds.

So when, sitting more recently, I saw again how human existence is the furthest possible distance from God; recognised being, once more, as ultimate cruelty; and witnessed reality in its true guise as an utter bag of turds, it was now with a fuller realisation that, actually, this isn’t really a problem.

I don’t mean that this stopped me from feeling like my guts were dropping through the floor, but only that I could see there were never any guts to drop through the floor in the first place – which, if anything, only compounded my view that the universe really was a pile of shit.

Why should we assume that the experience of emptiness is always ‘white light and perfection’? Well, most of the time it is, and there are good reasons for assuming that it should be so. Proclus, in his Elements of Theology, proposes:

If… all beings desire The Good how is it possible that there should be any thing prior to this cause? For if they also desire that which is prior to The Good, how can they specially desire The Good? But if they do not desire it, how is it possible that they should not desire the cause of all, since they proceed from it? If therefore The Good is that on which all beings depend, The Good is the Principle and First Cause of all things. (Proclus: Proposition 7)

In other words, emptiness and ultimate goodness are one and the same. The Good, by definition, is what all things desire, because even if we desire something we know is bad or that proves to be bad, by definition we desire it because it is better in some respect, even if it’s only in the sense that it can do more harm. Examine what’s behind any desire and ultimately the examination points to a desire for the end of desire itself. This entails the surrender of the self into emptiness, into the absolute, or (as Proclus calls it) ‘The One’. Here, in the realisation of emptiness or The One, there is no longer any desire for the Good, because there is only the Good itself.

Emptiness, therefore, is the Good.

In addition, Proclus has this to say:

Hence those things which in a certain way or respect fall off from The Good, at the same time lose the participation of The One. And those things which become destitute of The One, being filled with separation, are equally deprived of The Good. Goodness therefore is union, and union is goodness, and The Good itself is one, and The One is that which is primarily Good. (Proclus: Proposition 13)

So I’m left puzzled by my experience. Proclus seems to be saying here that we fall off from Goodness only to the extent that we fall off from The One. In other words, you can’t have emptiness without Goodness. Yet that’s exactly what I did have! Everything was the worst it could be, yet at the same time it was perfectly bad, perfectly evil, and my own deplorable condition was simply an inseparable aspect of the universal corruption.

All that you ever wanted to know about everything, were too afraid to ask, but probably suspected anyway.

Despite rumours to the contrary, arahats are still subject to the cycle of insight (Ingram 2008: 316), so I’m tempted to conclude that these kinds of experiences are simply ‘dark night’ territory in a post-enlightenment style. Whether the experience is of perfect goodness or of perfect evil, it participates in the absolute only in its ‘perfect’ aspect. The rest is, in a sense, irrelevant.

On the Kabbalistic Tree of Life the bottom-most sphere of creation is known as Malkuth, which means ‘The Kingdom’ and represents the everyday physical world. Its position at the very bottom indicates its status as the end-point and summation of creation, yet it is also at the furthest possible remove from God.

Whichever view is afforded to you of the universe possibly doesn’t matter: it is ultimate evil and the most elaborate expression of the Divine. In either case, both descriptions point to the same place.

References

Daniel M. Ingram (2008). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. London: Aeon Books.

Proclus, Elements of Theology.

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Doubting Thomas

Hearing that I’d set myself the goal of enlightenment, someone quipped: What if you get enlightened and then realise you don’t like it?

At the time I thought this was stupid. Now, I’m not so sure.

It was March 2009 when I broke through into fourth path – or ‘full’ enlightenment, according to the Therevada model. Beforehand, I could see emptiness pretty much constantly, but it seemed to occupy a particular region in the field of awareness; ‘it’ and ‘me’ appeared distinct. On the commencement of fourth path, this sense of separation collapsed. Emptiness expanded within awareness to include self. In every direction I discovered emptiness. ‘Inwards’ was just another direction; there was no longer anything special about what appeared to be ‘internal’ sensations.

At first it was difficult to put a finger on quite what had happened. Enlightenment is not an act of will – it happens regardless – so with it comes no implicit realisation of what it is. Enlightenment isn’t like putting a hat on your head; it’s like having a hat drop on you. You feel it and wonder: ‘Hey! What the fuck is this?’

Most immediately, enlightenment presented itself as having nothing to do with any of the practices I’d been engaged in. The idea that meditation – or any activity whatsoever – had any bearing upon it was laughable. So this was how I spent the first few days, walking around, seeing emptiness everywhere and realising there was nothing to do and nowhere to go because ‘just this’ was ‘it’ all along.

Alan had been there a couple of weeks already. ‘Now try some Ramana Maharshi self-inquiry,’ he suggested. ‘It’s mental!’

I took his advice and recoiled from the profound shock of it. When I asked ‘Who am I?’ formerly the answer was always in the shape of an idea or sensation. But now the answer was crystal clear and returned in the form of an experience: emptiness. That ‘thing’ beyond awareness, which was neither an idea, sensation, feeling, thought or perception, which was infinite, eternal, changeless and unconditioned – well, that was ‘me’. And I could see also how this realisation of ‘I am that‘ is available right now to everyone on the planet.

But this is where the warm and fuzzy part of the story ends, because the past six months have been more of a struggle than I ever expected. That quip about ‘what if you get enlightened and discover you don’t like it?’ has returned to haunt me.

Here are some words describing how I’ve felt since that big special moment back in March: doubtful, depressed, frustrated and pissed off.

‘You can’t be enlightened, then,’ is the obvious rejoinder, in which case I point the reader back to what I’ve written above. None of that recognition of emptiness in all things has ever gone away or faded since the moment it first reared up. Abiding non-dual awareness has taken up home in me and seems resolved to stay. It’s unaffected by anything I do or not do. If I’m happy, I see it; but so too if I’m miserable, bored, being stupid or acting like a git. Becoming kinder or happier, therefore, does not depend on my gaining some supposed ‘deeper insight’ into the nature of reality. How can you go ‘deeper’ into something than realising it doesn’t exist? Being kinder and happier depends simply on practising those behaviours.

It’s doubt that has been my biggest tormentor. The commentator in my head continues to insist: ‘This can’t be real. This can’t be it. You’re going to lose it, aren’t you? Is it still there? Go on, check! You’re deluding yourself.’

But every time I check I see the same. Yet this constant checking fails to abate the need to check again and test and console myself with the proof of it, which is then immediately doubted all over again.

It’s stupid. I see it clearly, but that doesn’t prevent it from happening. It reminds me of the friend of a friend who was diagnosed as schizophrenic: ‘I know the voices aren’t real,’ this person reportedly said, ‘but it doesn’t stop me hearing them.’

I don’t have schizophrenia; just an acute case of karma. When I meditate now, the focus has shifted slightly from the nature of stuff arising to its nature as arising stuff. It comes, persists, insists, impermanent, without essence and unsatisfactory, but it arises nevertheless – according to some configuration that lies far beyond my personal awareness.

We generally label this unacknowledged configuration in the way our thoughts and impulses arise with the word ‘habit’. I never dreamed that one of the main lessons of enlightenment is how deep and intractable the grip of habit is upon our lives.

Habit is empty, of course. It’s not a thing in itself but, like everything, phenomena created from a circumstantial pattern of other phenomena, passing itself off as something distinct. But habit doesn’t need to be absolute (impossible, naturally) in order to exercise an iron grip; it’s the position where it sits that gives it its power. In the realm of the senses, whatever presents to awareness comes via the sense organs. Analogously, in the realm of the mind, arising thoughts and ideas seem first to have been filtered through a layer of habit.

Looking back across my life and considering the habits of thought I’ve acquired from education and experience, it’s clear that doubt and negativity have always been my trusty friends.

I test ideas by attacking them and doing my best to rip them down until there’s nothing standing. If anything remains, then I take this as a sign it might be true. It’s my rule not to take on trust anything I haven’t first tried to tear apart.

This hasn’t been an intellectual choice. (I doubt that such a thing is possible.) Early upbringing and character have determined how I approach ideas. I’ve never adopted a philosophy that I haven’t seen through and grew sick of in time. This has led to dark episodes of disillusionment and confusion – but I don’t altogether regret them. I couldn’t have arrived at the insights I’ve accumulated without this attitude, for the good reason that I’ve never spared myself or my own experience from this same urge to tear things apart.

Skepticism gets things done. Negation is probably our most powerful intellectual tool. Think, for instance, of how vipassana depends upon rejecting every single notion or idea and proceeding on the basis of immediate experience alone. Or think of how the conceptualisation of God, the Absolute, only gets anywhere when approached in the apophatic mode – i.e. in purely negative terms.

The Vimuttimagga categorises people into three basic types: the walker in passion, the walker in hate, and the walker in infatuation. My type, the one that ‘is given to fault-finding’ and ‘does not cleave (to what is good)’ (p. 56) is the walker in hate.

Each type works toward self-realisation at a particular speed and finds the going more or less difficult. The walker in passion gets there quickly, because he or she is accepting, intent on good and faithful to their ideals. Well, good for him! Yet, surprisingly, the walker in hate gets there quickly too, because ‘hate and intelligence are alike owing to three traits: non-clinging, searching for faults, repulsion’ (p. 56).

Being of a destructive cast of mind is helpful on the path to enlightenment. But – as I’ve realised – those same habits may not prove so helpful afterwards, because you cannot tear down emptiness. When emptiness is apparent in everything, the capacity to negate is pointless, self-contradictory. And equally, you cannot doubt the absolute; doubt is relative when set against the absolute, and is rendered futile.

Yet my habits of a life-time are not going to vanish overnight. Especially not when they’ve proved so helpful and successful in the past.

The Incredulity of Thomas (Caravaggio).

I take consolation in the story of St. Thomas, the one who doubted the resurrection until he’d personally seen the risen Christ and stuck his fingers in Christ’s wounds. ‘Do you believe because you see me?’ says Christ to Thomas. ‘How happy are those who believe without seeing me!’ (John 20: 29).

Exoteric Christianity is big on the notion of belief, so it’s easy to read this as Jesus admonishing Thomas for his lack of faith. But I think Christ is simply pointing out that Thomas might be less miserable if he didn’t keep constantly testing the fuck out of everything.

The risen body of Christ is not an animated corpse, but a metaphor for the body post-enlightenment. (The dharmakaya, it’s called in Buddhism.) To stick your fingers in the wounds of Christ is the pointless attempt to probe or grasp at absolute emptiness with the relative mind. Is it still there? Is it truly real? Is He truly resurrected? These are futile attempts to establish a proof beyond that which is proof already.

Indeed, happy are those not stupid enough for this!

Reference

Upatissa (1995). Vimuttimagga (‘The Path of Freedom’), trans. Rev. N.R.M. Ehara, Soma Thera, Kheminda Thera. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

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