Open Enlightenment

A Non-Duality Meeting

I went to a non-duality meeting at the weekend led by a young teacher named Jeff Foster. Between ten and fifteen people showed up at a room in Brighton’s Quaker Meeting House to hear Jeff tell them how ‘this’ is ‘it’.

The creation in our minds of an individual gives rise in turn to a seeker that then invents an ‘it’ for which it is seeking. Awakening occurs and seeking stops when we have seen through both the quest and the individual and realise that ‘it’ was actually ‘just this’ all along.

This is classic advaita thinking. More specifically, it’s ‘direct path’ advaita. Almost every question from the audience was a variant of: ‘What can I do to get enlightened?’ And every answer Jeff gave was a variation on: ‘Nothing. This is it, already. There’s no “you”, no “it”, let alone any action to be performed that could draw one of them toward the other’.

‘But before your awakening,’ I asked Jeff when my turn came, ‘you had a practice that you performed?’

Jeff laughed and assured me he tried and practised everything, constantly, until it drove him to depression and despair. But then he woke up and saw how no practice had anything to do with ‘it’.

‘Sure. But I’m interested in what we’re doing now,’ I said, ‘and how these meetings function as a means of enabling people to awaken.’

‘So am I,’ laughed Jeff. ‘This is just something that I offer.’

I suggested that it was useful for people to have a practice. It didn’t matter so much what it was, as long as it enabled us to experience for ourselves how it has nothing to do with enlightenment. Every seeker reaches a point when he or she begins to see ‘it’ regardless of whether they practice well, badly, or not at all. It’s only at this point the teaching that ‘there’s nothing to do’ begins to make proper sense.

In reply Jeff said something that made me think very carefully. He said: ‘Every practice fails.’

It’s true – because every seeker is destined to realise that enlightenment is not something he or she could ever cause to happen. How could you make something happen that lies beyond your experience?

‘I failed,’ Jeff said. ‘I failed to find what I was looking for, because it was here all along. Every seeker fails.’

‘But every seeker must go through that experience for themselves,’ I said (thinking to myself: because sitting here and telling ourselves there’s nothing to be done isn’t likely to do much good).

‘But then everyone will try to “fail”,’ countered Jeff.

In the break I chatted with some other attendees. One had recently become interested in spirituality and for just over a year had been meditating diligently. Then he came across the non-duality teachings. He stopped meditating and started attending non-duality meetings instead.

I didn’t talk with him long enough to gain an understanding of the experiences he’d had. I hoped he was at the point where his practice had shown him there’s nothing to do, rather than simply being attracted to this as an idea. Perhaps it has a different effect on some, but I can’t see how the rhetorical game of a non-duality meeting encourages people to examine their experience rather than just think about it. Let’s not forget: it wasn’t non-duality meetings that led Jeff to his awakening. He tried everything, and practised until he exhausted himself.

I didn’t disagree with anything Jeff said, only the style of his teaching. As Jeff said, all practices fail, because no seeker discovers what they imagined they had set out to find. Likewise, all the maps and models for ‘getting there’ are stories, self-fulfilling prophecies (for the most part) that create the kinds of experiences they pretend to describe.

Ultimately, the practices, maps and models are just flipcharts, touchscreens and PowerPoint slides. Just supports for different styles of teaching.

Jeff Foster on YouTube, making an interesting point about the nature of depression.

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10 ideas I’ve changed my mind about since becoming enlightened

Here are ten ideas I’ve changed my mind about since my enlightenment in March 2009:

1. The arrogance of psychological development

According to the Integral crowd, pluralism allowed us for the first time in history to recognise the existence of many perspectives. This puts the postmodernist at an advantage to any of the lower stages of psychological development, but at the cost of a narcissism based on moral superiority. Postmodernists can be infuriatingly patronising.

Due to the extreme equality of all values and viewpoints held by the postmodernist, any genuinely new perspective to develop after postmodernism must inescapably reintroduce the concepts of hierarchy, progress and values; the very same concepts championed by modernism. And so it is not uncommon for the post-postmodernist (or integralist) to be mistaken for a modernist by the postmodernist, and the sadly predictable patronising ensues (which is doubly frustrating when you’re more than familiar with postmodernism).

I’ve been on the wrong end of a patronising postmodernist a few times, and I’ve been so enranged and sickened by his or her unexamined smugness, that I’ve responded by informing them that, actually, I’m at a level of development above and beyond theirs, and so they’re just incapable of understanding me. Ha!

In other words, I’ve been arrogant and patronising myself. Rather than seeing this behaviour as inherently postmodern, I’m convinced the integral or spiral dynamics model of psychological development actually promotes arrogance. If this is the case, I don”t believe spiral dynamics is the best tool with which to approach the problems of any given perspective, or a profitable lens with which to view each other.

There is an assumption in the Integral view that developmental stages are in themselves arrogant and patronising, when in truth only humans have that honour.

2. Occultists need to be convinced that magick is about enlightenment

I’ve spent the last few years trying to rehabilitate magick as the Western tradition of enlightenment. I used to think magick was important in this respect, but I was missing the point. The Great Work has never been about the tradition of magick itself, and persisting in trying to convince occultists and everyone else of what magick is really about ultimately has nothing to do with enlightenment.

I always assumed magick was important for the Great Work; when in reality, enlightenment is not bound to any tradition whatsoever. Isn’t it time for a Western tradition accessible to a majority – instead of a minority – living in the 21^st Century?

3. Magick is different to other traditions of enlightenment

Reading contemporary Western Buddhist literature can easily lead to a very narrow expectation of the type and variety of meditative results; when compared to the reported interactions with non-human intelligences, dreams, oracles, visions and synchronicities of magick, a dry meditative practice can seem like a very boring path to enlightenment.

In the past I’ve emphasised the difference between magick and other less ‘exciting’ traditions, which carries with it the assumption that a straight up insight practice doesn’t engender the same variety and type of experience as, say, invoking the Holy Guardian Angel.

But this assumption has no basis in reality; after all, it is the process of enlightenment that is the root of the vast diversity of mystical and magical events, not any single technique or tradition. Perhaps it would be to everyones benefit if magicians talked more about the developmental stages of spiritual development, and Buddhists more regularly described their meetings with spirits, the occurrence of life-changing visions and the development of psychic powers.

4. Ritual and meditation are demonstrably synonymous

I’ve tried many times over the course of three years to show how the practice of ritual can lead to the same process of insight as straight-up meditation. The assumption here is that a technical explanation for how the two seemingly separate acts both engender the same result is directly related to helping others reach enlightenment; but it isn’t. (This is also tied up with convincing others that magick is an enlightenment tradition, as discussed above.)

So I’ve ditched the comparative, specific tradition-related practical approach that attempts to prove a technical synonymity, in favour of a simple symbol that helps to explain enlightenment on its own terms. It proves nothing, but I’m pretty sure it’s helpful.

5. Enlightenment is a science

Personal verification of the promise of enlightenment is to be expected of a genuine, spiritual practice. In order to stress my conviction in the reality of enlightenment (and magick), in the past I have jumped on the ‘deep science’ bandwagon and tried to argue that enlightenment is an injunction that brings forth data that can be verified by peers, thus making it a bone fide science.

But exactly how is arguing whether or not enlightenment is a science (in a specialised sense of the word that only a philosopher might be familiar with) in any way related to a). personally getting enlightened or b). helping others get enlightened? Is it not enough to say enlightenment requires no belief or blind faith, just the will to verify its reality for yourself?

God knows, I am not a scientist in the accepted sense of the word, and neither are the majority of people I know who have actively engaged with enlightenment. Of the scientists I do know, it wasn’t any notion of performing ‘deep science’ in order to prove anything that made them decide to take up insight practice or draw a circle on the floor in order to summon a spirit.

Attempting to prove that enlightenment is a science, as if this is necessary before we might delude ourselves, is simply ridiculous and missing the point.

6. The virtue of the language of the Relative and the Absolute

For me, enlightenment has always been about answering questions such as ‘why am I here?’ and ‘what is the true nature of reality?’ I think these are questions worth asking, and I strongly believe enlightenment provides the answers.

With so much extreme postmodernism floating around, especially within contemporary occult culture, any notion of pursuing the Big Questions required a reactionary language with which to discuss them. Absolute relativity is a myth completely divorced from reality, and it leaves the inquisitive lost in a sea of meaningless perspectives in a universe inherently devoid of value. It was necessary to re-introduce the idea of the Absolute itself, something outside of the individual, but that could be discovered by it. The language of the relative and the absolute has proved useful as a means of navigating away from the insanity of radical postmodernism.

However, such language is inescapably dualistic, and by this I mean it fosters a conceptual divide that doesn’t really exist. And if Absolute Relativity is a myth, why should we entertain the Relatively Absolute into the bargain? Furthermore, talk of the absolute only reinforces the human propensity to invest in the One Correct Answer or a Unified Theory of Everything. I fail to see how this is profitable.

I believe there is a much more beneficial way to approaching enlightenment that doesn’t require first challenging postmodernism, and then erecting a conceptual divide between enlightenment and everything else. I hope to post further developments in this direction in the near future, whilst resolutely refusing to try and prove anything, resolve contradictions or create the One Mighty and Complete System that Accounts for Everything.

7. Morality, psychology and insight are three separate lines of development

Daniel Ingram’s masterpiece Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha provided me with a pure insight model, divorced from the fantasies of many of the models of enlightenment taught by so many Buddhist traditions.

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory showed me how development in insight can help the progression through the psychological stages of Spiral Dynamics, but that it was perfectly possible to be enlightened at the Traditional stage as it was to be at the Integral stage.

As a non-Buddhist, and being particularly inclined to Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, I wrote off the Buddha’s training in morality as just another example of religious dogma.

But my experience of the process of enlightenment has demonstrated that a). a pure insight model is impossible, b). enlightenment has its own unique psychological development and c). its own unique moral development too.

The ‘discarded’ models of enlightenment certainly require revisiting (I will be writing something up soon), and I hope in the future there will be some research into the psychological effects of enlightenment, with the creation of an accurate psychological developmental model specifically related to enlightenment. I’ve begun to address Enlightened Ethics, which I plan to develop into a method of conscious integration.

8. Enlightenment is not a matter for hard science

While I still believe it is absolutely wonderful that enlightenment is a personal, direct experience that must be verified and understood first hand, thereby invalidating any idea of a priesthood or church, I can no longer believe in strictly relegating hard science to the physical world, and enlightenment to the spiritual level of experience alone, based on the assumption that one has no business with the other. After all, in the final analysis enlightenment has nothing to do with the spiritual level of experience either. The freedom of enlightenment has demonstrated to me firsthand that my identity is not bound up in any of the levels of the Great Chain of Being, and so I no longer have an aversion to discussing the physiology of the enlightened brain for fear of becoming a materialist reductionist.

In fact, I wholeheartedly wish to encourage the notion that enlightenment is a question for science. Not because I believe enlightenment is nothing but a product of the brain, but because I believe the brain must necessarily demonstrate a correlate with the enlightened experience. My identity and perspective on the world is so radically different than it was beforehand that I find it hard to believe my brain is still the same as it was pre-enlightenment. The great thing is, there is still no real research in this area (yes, there have been studies of meditators brains and so on, but there is no reason to assume the test subjects were enlightened or even engaged with the process).

I’m really excited by what might be discovered by hard science in the realm of enlightenment. If only I had money to invest!

9. The Goal mentality

For three and a half years I had one goal in mind, and for three and a half years I struggled to practice the methods of enlightenment correctly and at the right volume in order to ensure success. And when I reached the goal, this investment had negative consequences in the form of frustration, helplessness and fear. Yes: immediately after enlightenment, I had a really shitty time. (I’ll go into this at a later date.)

Of course, early on I learned that after the first peak experience of enlightenment it isn’t you that ‘does’ the process of enlightenment, but the process that ‘does’ you. But I never consciously integrated this experience – I wasn’t even aware that I could or should! – and I persisted in re-enforcing a habit based on the belief that I must chase a goal that I would eventually achieve through my own doing (and the sooner, the better!).

So what happens when you suddenly gain the ability to see every deeply held false opinion you have about yourself and reality for what they are? What happens when you can suddenly and clearly perceive that virtually your entire being is habitually dedicated to a behaviour and way of thinking that is based on an incorrect assumption?

Just because you are enlightened, it doesn’t mean the habits and behaviours based on ignorance disappear over night. They must be replaced by new, enlightened behaviours.

In terms of enlightenment, the goal mentality sets you up for a big fall. While it is very important to realise that both a daily practice of active transcendence and a willing participation is required to attain the very real event of enlightenment, this should not translate to a gung-ho balls-to-the-wall chase for awakening. Such an attitude belongs to the beginner who has not yet had the personal insight – granted by the process of enlightenment – of realising there is much more to reality than the whims of the ego. It appears that without a conscious integration of this insight, the participant is left with a lot of pain and a good deal of work to do post-enlightenment.

10. Maps are always useful

I have personally found maps very useful in my development, as have many of my friends. I used to think everyone should be armed with as many maps and models as they could find, until I met a raw beginner who, ascribing to the goal mentality, had tied themselves up in knots trying to figure out where they ‘were’. Exactly how the headache and expended energy used in trying to find a resolution to this problem were helpful in his achieving enlightenment escapes me (as it turns out, he was slowly but surely making good progress, almost in despite of ‘where’ he thought he was at).

I came across maps just near the end of my first cycle through the stages of insight, and so I already had a good deal of the basic spiritual experiences under my belt. It was a simple question of aligning my experiences with a model to see what fit, and it wasn’t long before I could accurately judge my position. But would I have found maps and models as useful as a beginner with absolutely no experience whatsoever? Would I have memorised the language of the maps and frantically applied them to every little intellectually ‘insight’ or physical peculiarity that might arise during meditation, ending up wondering if i had just landed Naïve Enlightenment or if I was close to the end of the process by experiencing enlightenment in real time?

I can’t be sure, but what I am sure of is that models aren’t always good for everyone all of the time.

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A Business Case for Enlightenment?

I’ve always felt very strongly that enlightenment should not be treated as a commodity; being nothing less than the full realisation of what it means to be human, and as the birthright of every man, woman and child on this planet, where are we to find the moral justification for a teacher who determines access to their teachings on financial grounds?

Osho is one example of such a guru, where the entrance fee to his ashram in Pune, India, and the requirement of the purchase of not one but two robes before you can even begin to meditate, ensures the exclusion of the impoverished Indian people from his organisation. And what are we to make of Genpo Roshi, who charges several thousand dollars for the privilege of a five day retreat in his presence? Does his marketing right hand man, Bill Harris, really need a personal jet in order to spread the dharma?

From Socrates to Crowley, the idea of charging for enlightenment has been deemed ethically inviable, and the most popular means of a full time spiritual teacher putting bread on the table has been the concept of dana or donation. Indeed, this appears to be the preferred business model for many fine websites that produce ‘enlightened’ content on the web today, and myself and Duncan adopted this approach with our occult website The Baptist’s Head. Over a couple of years we managed to produce thousands of pages of material and a number of free books, and the feedback we regularly receive suggests this material is highly valued amongst our readers. The Baptist’s Head has been a labour of love, and the truth is we would have produced the content regardless of any idea of financial return; but we did expect that with the odd donation we would at least cover our minuscule server costs.

Despite the praise and the high hit rate, I can count the number of donations we received over two years on one hand; we didn’t cover our costs. This hasn’t been a problem because both myself and Duncan have worked full time as well as maintaining the site. But if I’m honest, I have personally found this lack of financial aid disappointing. However, even more disappointing is the sad fact that even a highly polished and quality service such as Buddhist Geeks – a website that produces a podcast every single week with leaders in the field of Buddhism – has to be run on a spare-time basis too. In my opinion, the content of both The Baptist’s Head and Buddhist Geeks far surpasses the 99.9% of vapid, pointless bullshit produced by professional sites and publishing houses in the field of spirituality that the public are more than willing to keep in business. My faith in the public’s propensity to financially reward those services that only suggest a donation is almost non-existent.

I’m now onto a new project with Open Enlightenment and I fully intend to teach full time, employ a number of staff and build an organisation – complete with a centre in London – that can provide public access to quality material and teachers. The motivation for this project has its basis in the very same ethical stance that informs the refusal to make enlightenment a commodity: enlightenment should be available to everyone!

But how best to fulfill this ambition without charging for enlightenment, or without providing an amateur service? Let us not be naive: without some serious money, Open Enlightenment will never be anything more than just another part time internet project, and I refuse to dream so small. All the good will in the world does not change the fact I will have to charge for talks, workshops and retreats in order to cover venue costs, because I don’t have free access to a venue or retreat centre. And If I want to build a centre myself, where is the money going to come from if not from profit?

If I seriously wish to open a centre in London, should I run OE as a business and charge for every talk, podcast, article and retreat? Or should I register OE as a charity, and hope for some big donations? Should I attach a fixed price to material, or suggest an amount for donation? What about a membership scheme?

I imagine it is going to take some time to flesh out all the details, but of one thing I am sure: I would like to try and get OE up and running with as little money involved as I can. To do this, I would like to proceed on a gift economy basis. This means I am willing to trade my time as a teacher – perhaps in the form of talks, workshops, retreats or one-on-one sessions – for help in creating Open Enlightenment. This means that OE is not just my project, but (should you be willing to help) your project too.

We’ve already found a web developer to help build a site, and hopefully a designer to create the brand. We also know a builder who would like to build the OE centre should we find the capital. But we need a lot more, such as marketing materials, media equipment, and venue access.

If you are interested in participating in the Open Enlightenment project, please e-mail me with the skills or resources you have to offer, and we can see if we can realise the OE dream together, as a community. I’m hoping this approach will be a great success, because it will certainly determine how we proceed with OE in the future.

Any suggestions or comments are most welcome!

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The Diamond

Enlightenment is not an idea.

Do you believe Taoism is about Taoism, even when Laozi wrote ‘The Tao-Path is not the All-Tao. The Name is not the Thing named.’?

Do you believe Buddhism is about Buddhism, even when the Buddha taught the emptiness of all things?

Do you believe Philosophy is about Philosophy, even when Proclus reasoned the One that cannot be hypothesized?

Do you believe Sufism is about Sufism, even when Mohammed said ‘Allah, the One, independent and besought of all, He begets not nor is He begotten, and there is none like unto Him.’?

Do you believe Advaita is about Advaita, even when Shankara argued ‘Brahman is the only truth’?

Do you believe Magick is about Magick, even when Crowley proclaimed ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law!’?

To those who cannot see past ideas, all of these teachers and teachings appear contradictory and exclusive, each promoting their own absolute dogma at the expense of the others.

Yet how many teachers of enlightenment have taught that their teaching alone is true?

For those who cannot see past ideas, one facet amongst an infinite number is taken to be the whole diamond; and the discovery of the truth of another facet is taken to mean the existence of two diamonds, not One.

Yet how many teachers of enlightenment have taught the existence of many enlightenments, or that enlightenment can mean many things?

Unable to see past ideas, and conditioned to find the One Correct Answer, the beginner – seeing many facets of the diamond – cannot help but doubt if he has found the right teaching, to the extent he will either endlessly flirt with one tradition after another, or combat his uncertainty by convincing himself of the shortcomings of any method but the one chosen. The reflection of one facet is held superior to the reflections of the others because not only does conditioning demand it, but the practitioner has not yet seen the diamond personally.

But even the enlightened human may be guilty of persisting in the ignorance of trying to find the One Correct Answer, despite possessing the knowledge that the absolute truth is not an idea. When this happens, the enlightened human forgets the diamond all together when concerning himself with but one facet, and yet having knowledge of the diamond, will struggle in vein to raise up an amalgamation of various reflections to the status of the diamond itself. When this happens, the enlightened human may even deny the existence of the diamond by claiming only reflection exists. For such a confused human, enlightenment is not understood as knowledge of the Tao, Emptiness, the One, Allah, ‘not-two’; the illusion that the absolute is differentiated persists, almost as if enlightenment had never occurred. Of what use is enlightenment to such an individual if it is not or cannot be lived?

Can you admire the reflection of one facet without taking it for the whole diamond?

Can you appreciate the existence of many facets without denying the existence of the diamond itself?

Can you appreciate that no facet is the diamond itself, no matter how glorious, comprehensive or reasonably sound its reflection?

Can you hold within your gaze each and every facet, in all their relatively diverse, contradictory and paradoxical beauty, without trying to resolve them in to a single reflection?

Can you see past all reflections to the diamond itself?

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