Open Enlightenment

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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Selling Enlightenment

How do you ‘sell’ enlightenment?

I was discussing this with someone recently, who made the point that the only way to sell enlightenment is to make an appeal to the ego. ‘Get yourself enlightened,’ we should be saying, ‘because then you’ll be happy beyond your wildest dreams, you’ll realise everything you desire and (if the person happens to be approaching enlightenment from the tradition of western magick) your magical powers will increase to an awesome new level!’

In support of his argument my disputant pointed to an example in the venerable Shinzen Young. In a video entitled ‘After Enlightenment, What’s Left? What’s the Point?’, Shinzen ‘sells’ enlightenment as follows:

As time goes on [after enlightenment], more and more of what’s left is the effortless flow of Emptiness, which doesn’t sound that appealing, until you actually experience it, and then it’s like – well, if you had a choice of living one day that way or living your whole life not that way you’d say: ‘well, I’ll take that one day and you can kill me at the end of the day’. That’s how good the effortless flow of Emptiness is.

It seems Shinzen is presenting enlightenment here as something so damned good he’d rather be dead than not have it. Just look at him in the video! The guy’s sixty-five (oh, he drops that in so incidentally), and he’s sitting there grinning and happy, looking like he’s in his mid forties. If this were an advertisement for cheesecake he’d take a big bite, smile into the camera and say: ‘Mmmmm. You just won’t believe how good this is,’ and we’d all be out buying cheesecake tomorrow.

But it left me feeling uncomfortable, because the more I thought about it the more I realised I wouldn’t trade one day of enlightenment for a lifetime without it. Every time I think about it and weigh it up the answer is the same: No, I choose unenlightenment. Enlightenment for one day is simply not equivalent to a lifetime’s experience of non-enlightenment. So you can stick your cheesecake, Shinzen!

My reaction, I realised, is because like most advertisements this one actually creates the desire it offers to satisfy.

We’re human beings and enlightenment is a natural development of our nature. It’s our birthright. Consequently, there is no lifetime lived without the possibility of enlightenment. The idea that you or anyone could possibly live a life without a chance of getting enlightened is an anxiety-provoking fiction. The potential for enlightenment is with you at every second and only you can realise that potential. There’s no need for you to buy ‘cheesecake’ because you and your life are complete right now without it.

Now don’t get me wrong. Of course, this isn’t to say there’s nothing that needs to be done. (If only that were true…) There may be work to realise our goal; there may even be work to realise that we have a goal in the first place. But what’s certainly the case is that buying cheesecake won’t help, because it’s our effort that will win the day, not some product that someone wants to sell us on the basis of a lie – the lie that we are ever without the possibility of enlightenment.

Honestly, though, I don’t believe Shinzen is selling or intending to sell enlightenment in his video. But advertising and selling are so deeply engrained in our culture that we’re prone to interpret him in this way. Capitalism, in order to sell stuff, is constantly engaged in a process of making commodities out of things, whether they’re material objects, ideas or experiences, and seeking to persuade us of their value. This process of reification runs precisely contrary to the type of insight that leads to enlightenment. I stumbled across a vivid illustration of this a few months ago: an account of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who had his first awakening when his teacher held up a hundred rupee banknote and enabled him to see that its ‘value’ was a completely imputed quality (Rabten 1989: 48). The ‘value’ of the note is in the mind of the beholder, but nowhere in the paper and ink of the object itself. So if awakening is attained by seeing through the imputed value of things, we hit a problem as soon as we try to sell awakening because this involves not only (i) imputing a value to it, but also: (ii) turning it into a commodity or thing; and then (iii) creating a desire in the potential customer for it.

I never imagined it would happen, but for the first time since my student days I feel drawn again to the insights of Karl Marx. One day, Marx had an ‘awakening’: he looked around and realised that there are no ‘things’. With retrospect, a lot of Marx’s ideas seem not to have panned out, but that basic insight is just as true today. There are no computers, fridges, cars, buildings, bridges or roads: there is just stuff that human beings have put together. There are no ‘things’ apart from the effects of the labour of putting stuff together.

Of course, there are profound differences between the Buddha and Marx’s ideas. The Buddha’s concept of ‘dependent origination’ applies irrespectively to all phenomena, whereas Marx’s insights singled out the labour of the working class as the origin of value and the source of all commodities. Labour, for Marx, was reality’s bedrock. But Marx’s ideas are still useful to enable us to understand that if we commodify enlightenment then we are doing the dirty work of capitalism: we are making the fruit of effort seem like a ‘thing’ that someone can ‘have’. If enlightenment is sold on the basis it will solve all problems, then it becomes a kind of dream that in itself may indeed supply comfort – but only to prevent us from seriously examining our lives. Or it may be sold as something ‘exotic’, in which case people may well show up in droves for a weekend of chanting, incense, and a nice sit-down in silence on a cushion – but will return to their working lives too refreshed to actually engage with the reality of their experience.

No buyer ever likes to admit they’ve been swindled or conned. But in the case of enlightenment, unless the buyer realises there’s no value in the hundred rupee note, no commodity they ever needed in the first place, then they’re not getting the real deal. ‘Selling’ enlightenment must somehow allow us to step entirely outside the roles of buyer and seller.

Reference

Geshe Rabten (1989). Song of the Profound View. London: Wisdom Publications.

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The #1 Secret to Achieving Enlightenment Here and Now, in This Lifetime

Authoritarian gurus will try and take it from you; enlightenment doubters and cynics will try to undermine it.

When we choose to ignore the advice of a guide or teacher we dishonour it; when we fail to believe in ourselves and each other we lose it.

The number one secret to enlightenment is not a technique, a special mantra or a bizarre diet. It’s much more human than that.

The number one secret to achieving enlightenment here and now in this lifetime – as I have done and many, many others walking this planet right now have done – is integrity.

Is that all?

Perhaps you were hoping for something along the lines of a pseudo-mystical notion of interconnectedness and an instruction in positive thinking, but then there’s no accounting for taste.

We can all exercise integrity; I just think many people don’t know how. So here it is:

Integrity means that we are honest with ourselves and each other, on the basis that we are all capable, trustworthy and good.

No, honestly.

Do you really believe there is such a thing as enlightenment? Integrity means you consider on what basis you do or do not believe such a phenomenon exists. Who or what is your source for what you believe enlightenment is?

If you doubt such a phenomenon exists, be honest with yourself: do you have an accurate and believable description of what enlightenment is, and do you really have sufficient grounds for believing it isn’t real?

If you believe enlightenment exists, be honest with yourself: on what grounds is the description of enlightenment you believe in accurate and believable? What are your grounds for accepting the reality of such a description?

It takes integrity to understand that just because you have read a few New Age paperbacks you are not qualified to identify the ‘Big Special Event’ you have just experienced as enlightenment; or that reading a few philosophy texts qualifies you to dismiss all ‘Big Special Events’ as nothing but overactive imagination, delirium, insanity, or lies.

We show a lack of integrity when we doubt ourselves, others and the countless millennia old spiritual traditions for claiming that not only does enlightenment exist, but that anyone can experience it should they be willing to investigate the field of spirituality, identify the good teachers from the bad, discover and apply the good maps and models of the territory leading up to and beyond enlightenment, practice a time tested daily meditation for life, and find others – especially those with more experience under their belts – with whom to learn with and from.

Integrity means that you would form your expectations of enlightenment on the teachings of people – both alive and dead – who have displayed integrity themselves. A teacher displays integrity when she is honest about what she does and does not understand, what she has and has not experienced, how someone can experience what she has experienced and openly encourages the discussion of doubts, confusion and difficulties that a student might be facing.

A student exercises integrity when he reports experiences that he thinks might be significant to the teacher, but openly accepts what advice or opinion his teacher gives. It takes courage to admit the inescapable truth that we make mistakes about a lot of things a lot of the time. It’s not a sign of weakness to be helped or guided by others.

It shows a spectacular lack of integrity when a teacher refuses to discuss enlightenment or anything else that a student might encounter, refuses to address or is unable to welcome doubts, confusion or difficulties raised by a student, or instructs a student to perform any action that brings harm – whether mental, emotional, physical or financial – to himself or anyone else.

It shows a lack of integrity when a student is unwilling to address or welcome any doubts, fears or concerns over his teacher’s conduct as a result of it harming himself or others.

Ultimately, if we want to experience enlightenment then we must be true to what we think may have happened, both internally as our practice progresses and externally as we observe our behaviour and the actions of our teachers. Internally, this means not being afraid to try and accurately assess our experience in the light of the many models we have for describing what type of ‘Big Special Event’ might have occurred, but also admitting the limit to which our experience and knowledge can help in such an assessment. Externally, this means not being afraid to openly discuss any doubts or difficulties we might be having with our teachers, or to admit where our own behaviour is falling short of our practice.

Entertaining fantasy about enlightenment or absolute doubt in the reality of spiritual experience are both symptoms of a lost belief in the inherent virtue of humanity. Integrity is faith in ourselves and each other, and without it we are lost.

I have every faith that we are capable, despite what authoritarian gurus might preach, or the arguments made by those patronising teachers who refuse to talk about enlightenment on the grounds that we will only harm ourselves with such knowledge.

If you can exercise integrity when it comes to spirituality, then you don’t have very far to go.

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5 Ways in Which Andrew Cohen’s Teaching is Wrong

I have no doubt that Andrew Cohen experienced enlightenment in 1986, simply because a few years ago I experienced a ‘transmission’ effect, or what I prefer to call intersubjective enlightenment, twice in his presence when attending a couple of his public talks (I’d had numerous partial awakenings before then during my personal practice, which is why I believe the intersubjective enlightenment occurred at all, and both ‘transmissions’ eventually faded. This occurred a year or so before my ‘full’ enlightenment). There is also a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest this kind of phenomenon happens a lot around Cohen.

However, I’m convinced Cohen has no real understanding of how he experienced enlightenment, or why some people have a peak or partial awakening in his presence. I believe Cohen’s understanding and teaching of enlightenment have both suffered greatly as a result of the ignorance and lack of integrity of his ex-guru, Poonjaji. At the moment of enlightenment, and the aftermath that follows, a great deal of time and care needs to be taken to ensure that the experience is understood and integrated in the most honest, sane and healthiest way possible; what you don’t need is a supposed ‘master’ telling you that he has been waiting for you his entire life and so can now retire, that you will be bigger than the Buddha, that you will create a ‘revolution amongst the young’, and that you are fit to teach by virtue of the experience alone.

If, at the time, Cohen had access to a good teacher who didn’t feel the need to set him up as some infallible guru, things might have worked out very differently and a good deal of suffering might have been spared Cohen, his family and followers.

This piece is not aimed at Cohen personally, but at his teaching, how it inaccurately describes enlightenment and how that misunderstanding may have come into being; I believe our collective understanding of enlightenment is more important than what we personally think of any man professing ideas about the phenomenon.

My understanding of Cohen’s teaching is taken from andrewcohen.org; his books Living Enlightenment, In Defense of the Guru Principle, and A Story of an Awakening; attending two of his talks on Evolutionary Enlightenment; and Enlightenment Blues and American Guru, written by two ex-students.

Here are five ways in which I believe Andrew Cohen’s teaching is inaccurate, unhelpful and misguided:

1. Impersonal is not the same thing as Kosmocentric

Cohen describes his teaching as Impersonal Enlightenment. By this he means that every single event in a person’s life can be seen from an impersonal perspective, and this is both the view afforded by enlightenment, and the perspective we must adopt if we are to experience enlightenment permanently.

However, enlightenment is not the realisation of impersonality, which is just the other half of the personal (where one is, you will most assuredly find the other). Enlightenment is the inclusive transcendence of everything that has gone before, both the personal and impersonal alike.

And the emphasis I want to make here is that the event is inclusive, not destructive, dismissive or repressive. What is recognised at enlightenment I like to call Original Nature, and the personal viewpoint is just as much Original Nature as the Buddha, George W. Bush or the Number 73 bus to Islington. The realisation of enlightenment is that only Original Nature is; and so the personal is just as much Original Nature as anything else.

Cohen further aligns the Impersonal with his ‘fifth tenet’ of evolutionary enlightenment, which he calls For the Sake of the Whole:

The movement of spiritual awakening is part and parcel of the cosmic process of development, and the purpose of enlightenment is ultimately to bring the light of awakened consciousness to the process itself.

Is the personal not a part of this process too? Is the ‘whole’ not whole enough to include the self and the ego?

Developmental psychologists describe the process of moral growth in three stages: egocentric, when we are concerned only about ourselves; ethnocentric, when our concern grows to include our family/tribe/nation; and worldcentric, when we are concerned with the welfare of all human beings. Ken Wilber, Cohen’s friend and collaborator, adds a further stage called kosmocentric, which is concern for all things manifest and unmanifest, or what we might call the perspective of enlightenment. Usually, spiritual development facilitates this moral development, which is why the Axial Age traditions all profess universal compassion as the bedrock of authentic spirituality.

Just as enlightenment is inclusively transcendent of what went before, so too is each stage of moral development, with ethnocentrism transcending but including egocentrism, and worldcentrism transcending but including ethnocentrism, and so on. Wilber describes pathology as a failure to integrate and honour a preceding stage of development; and so in Wilber’s terms, Cohen’s view of a kosmocentric process that does not integrate and honour the personal, but in fact attempts to suppress or destroy it, is in fact a pathological moral development.

2. Judgement only begets judgement, not transformation

Cohen’s ‘ultimate spiritual practice’ is his third tenet of evolutionary enlightenment, Face Everything and Avoid Nothing.

This almost sounds like genuine spiritual practice, in the sense that compassion, openness and awareness is brought to bear on any phenomena that may be encountered, especially the often buried psychological and emotional material that informs current behaviour. But ‘face’ does not mean ‘accept’, and ‘everything’ only refers to the activity of the ego.

For many years the only ‘spiritual exercise’ that Cohen prescribed was the forming of groups where the apparent egotistical faults of each student would be discussed and the person in question would be berated for failing so miserably, which sometimes lasted for many hours. In order to overcome the ego, the student would have to apologise in earnest, promise to change, and – if the reports of his ex-students (including three former editors of EnlightenNext magazine) are to be believed – donate a large sum of money to make amends. This led to an anxiety-ridden, back-stabbing, paranoid, cold and financially-strapped sangha, where an individual would be terrified of falling out of favour and being ‘sent away’ by Andrew. It’s hard to see how any spiritual development might have occurred.

Ignorant, greedy, and hateful behaviour has its roots in the belief in a subject, and the often unconscious, non-verbal and unquestioned beliefs about the self and reality that have been adopted from very early on in life. It takes a great deal of personal exploration and care to discover these hidden beliefs about the self and reality – even after enlightenment –  and a great deal more patience, time and compassion before our behaviour changes to a personal expression of the perspective of enlightenment: open, free, compassionate and curious.

Judgements about the subject only further enforce the idea of the subject, and do nothing to mitigate the already existing judgements buried deep within the psyche. We only act out of selflessness when we have no reason to chase or avoid anything, and so it is only by bringing compassion to bear on what we are chasing or avoiding that we cease to act ‘egotistically’.

Compassion – first and foremost for the self – is genuine spiritual practice; enforcing judgement upon your students can only be the result of an inability to bring compassion to your own ego first.

3. Romantic relationships are not a hindrance to awakening

Due to Cohen’s confusion of the impersonal with the kosmocentric, he believes that all aspects of life must be engaged without engendering personal attachment. For Cohen, romance is a major obstacle on the road to enlightenment, and his teaching has evolved from enforced celibacy on his students, to enforced sexual relationships where any romantic attachment must be suppressed.

(Of course, celibacy has been a common practice amongst dedicated seekers for millennia, as an aid in reducing distraction from the spiritual life. I think this approach is fundamentally flawed and misguided, which is a topic for a whole other post.)

As I have already touched on above, the personal domain is a healthy and necessary part of the greater kosmocentric vision; and it is completely possible to experience enlightenment and remain habitually attached to all manner of worldy things at a personal level (consider the great number of gurus who certainly appeared fully realised, but who have had affairs with students, abused drugs and alcohol and revelled in messianic fantasy).

My own personal experience is testament to this: I fell head over heels in love with my wife a year before my enlightenment, and our relationship played a major role in my spiritual development. My friend Duncan Barford had been in a ten year relationship at the time of his enlightenment, and I don’t know of one single person who has experienced enlightenment or is making genuine spiritual progress (as outlined by models of the territory from many traditions, including Buddhism) who is not in a committed and loving relationship.

It is again ironic that Ken Wilber also testifies in Grace and Grit to the fundamental role his deeply romantic relationship to his wife played in his spiritual progress. Perhaps Cohen should actually familiarise himself with Wilber’s work sometime?

4. God does not need our help

Cohen firmly believes that ‘God’ – the creative principle that created the universe and drives evolution – needs our help to manifest its greatest desire, which is ‘to emerge’:

http://www.andrewcohen.org/quote/?quote=114

Although I would agree to some extent with the notion that ‘God’ is becoming aware of its self through the manifest universe, it most certainly does not need our help in order to emerge. For 14 billion years the universe has managed to get along just fine without human consciousness; and furthermore, as humans we are part and parcel of the process of the universe, not separate from it, and this includes the desire for enlightenment and our spiritual development.

Everything is Original Nature, from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs to the ignorant ape who has never heard of enlightenment to the actual event of enlightenment and the resulting fully realised human being. At what point is Original Nature not unfolding as Original Nature? At what point is Original Nature missing from the universe, requiring our personal intervention in order to help the universe along?

Isn’t it a little bit narcissistic to believe that the fulfilment of God’s greatest desire rests on our decision to pursue ‘evolutionary enlightenment’?

5. Enlightenment is not the end in personal development

Cohen prescribes the adherence to five tenets in order to experience enlightenment, and he believes the same five tenets describe the state of enlightenment itself. However, whereas it requires great effort and integrity on the part of the seeker in order to reach lasting enlightenment, the person who is already ‘fully enlightened’ expresses the five tenets effortlessly. In other words, Cohen believes that enlightenment spells the end of personal, spiritual practice and development.

What Cohen doesn’t realise is that understanding, wisdom and virtuous action do not come part and parcel with enlightenment, regardless of whether it is permanent or not.

A ‘fully enlightened’ human being is just a human being who has recognised Original Nature. The recognition has absolutely no bearing on the person’s intelligence, teaching ability or integrity. This is why spiritual practice is not just a means to enlightenment, but an end in itself; and how much more important is it for the person post-enlightenment, considering the possible implications of misunderstanding enlightenment for the person’s ego, behaviour and the culture that may grow around him or her?

I’m convinced that it is this belief in the conference of perfection through realisation that has led to Cohen’s pathological brand of enlightenment, and his inability to recognise the workings of his own overblown ego, visible to everyone else but himself and his followers. If you were told that you were perfected, without ego and ready to teach – in the midst of the profound, life-changing event of enlightenment – by someone you believe is also perfect, and then great numbers of the best and the brightest of the spiritual scene begin to treat you as if you were indeed perfected and without ego, hanging on your every word and showering you with gifts, how likely is it that you would attribute any of your thoughts, beliefs or actions to something you and everyone else is certain no longer exists? With a heavy investment in the egoless model, and re-enforced by group behaviour and shared bliss states, it doesn’t seem quite so puzzling how a guru and his followers can spend a lot of time feeding the guru’s ego, only to suffer as a result without ever realising exactly what the problem is.

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Technical Morality

It’s common amongst Gen-Yers to have an inherent intolerance for authority or moralising of any kind; we want clear, honest information fast, and how we use it is no one’s business but our own. I think this is admirable to a degree, and I sympathise with the anti-guru approach that results from applying this view to spirituality.

This attitude is prevalent in the emerging ‘practical dharma’ movement, exemplified in forums/wikis such as the Dharma Overground, Kenneth Folk Dharma and our very own Baptist’s Head Discussion Forum (for those coming at enlightenment from a magical perspective). Methods and technicalities are distributed, discussed and implemented, and the users enjoy the empowerment that comes with ultimately relying on their own dedication and judgement.

But is it possible we might be making a fundamental error in reducing spirituality and enlightenment to simply a matter of technique and a model of possible territory?

Should ethics have a more central role in ‘practical dharma’ beyond its usual sidelining as something that is solely a matter of personal choice?

For a couple of years I was only concerned with methods and maps because I believed they referred to something discoverable and verifiable; morality could not offer such objectivity, being primarily concerned with value judgements.

Time and again I see this approach demonstrated on the forums mentioned above. Technical discussions are generally fruitful, but if someone’s behaviour is called in to question, the discussion quickly degenerates in to a tedious name-calling impasse. At this point, morality might skulk out of its dark hiding place and suggest we all just try to get along; deep down, no one involved in the discussion really respects such a suggestion.

And time and again I see arrogance, egotism, envy and a lack of respect displayed in these forums. Lord knows, I’ve contributed enough of that myself over the years.

Hang on

But what if morality does have the same gold standard as methods and maps?

What if, rather than being a mechanism as is usually assumed, the method is actually a moral act?

What if meditation isn’t just something that happens once a day on a cushion for half an hour, but is in fact a specific morality – based on an experientially verifiable practice, not supposition – that informs how we treat ourselves and each other?

The overwhelming evidence, both personal and scientific, shows that meditation mitigates anger, hate, greed, and self-interest, and gives rise to a conscious expression of our original nature (whether we call that nirvana, God or the Tao), whose characteristics are acceptance, interest, openness and love.

It might come as a surprise, but THESE CHARACTERISTICS ARE THE METHOD.

When we apply these characteristics to our experience, we engage with authentic spirituality. This is meditation. There is not one single bone fide approach to enlightenment that doesn’t work in this way. Whether actual recognition of our original nature has occurred – known as enlightenment – makes no difference to the validity of the practice, beyond increasing the depth and potential of the expression; furthermore, enlightenment does not guarantee its conscious expression in our behaviour: practice is an end in itself, not just a means, and if practice is abandoned after enlightenment, then of what value is enlightenment to anyone, including ourselves?

With all of the above in mind, how ethical is it to ‘evaluate’ someone’s progress without addressing the potential (and the all too common) conceit and arrogance that arises as a result of having verification from an ‘expert’ – who only deals in the ‘real world’ technicalities of enlightenment – that yes, you really are an accomplished meditator, you’ve mastered the formless realms and you very well maybe enlightened.

Where is the integrity and mindfulness here? Should this advice always be given to anyone who asks, regardless of their mental state or psychological predisposition? And what if the ‘expert’ is wrong?

The student in this example is not even in the position to accurately judge at what stage he or she may be at, let alone have the forethought and insight to be mindful of any possible unique but unhealthy reactions to this information, or the probable egotistical and conceited emotions and beliefs that may result from being informed of such a position.

In an online environment where autonomy is promoted, and when dealing with conceit so close to the heart that we cannot recognise it ourselves, it is virtually impossible to highlight these shortcomings and prescribe a particular approach without causing offense.

But if everything I have written has a solid basis in reality, then the degree to which we indulge anger, hate, egotism, greed and ignorance is the degree to which we are TECHNICALLY failing. Hate isn’t bad simply because we don’t like it; hate is an indication of a lack of awareness, openness, interest, love and acceptance. Hate is an indication of a lack of application of our method, and a lack of how much we understand our original nature.

To dish out judgements on other people’s progress and attainments without also addressing their morality shows a practical shortcoming on the ‘expert’s’ part; to ask for a judgement of our progress without being willing to accept a similar evaluation of our morality is a practical failure on ours.

I’ve recently been asking myself how often do I bring the ‘practical dharma’ to my daily life, and I can tell you, it’s very rarely as much as I would like.

How about you?

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Would The Real Jed McKenna Please Stand Up?

Jed McKenna is an enlightened teacher who lives in a big house in the wilds of Iowa. Ever since he became enlightened, students have flocked to his door. Luckily, he has a housekeeper who’s a karma yoga fiend and looks after everything to do their needs. Jed himself just gets on with being ‘the enlightened guy’. If he feels in the mood, he talks to the students, but he doesn’t set them specific tasks or instruct them how to meditate. One or two of them every year end up enlightened. Yet most of them (he says) are clueless.

Jed’s teachings are hardcore. He seems the real deal. His definition of enlightenment is abiding non-dual awareness; anything to do with ‘states’ or ‘ideas’ isn’t it. He points this out tirelessly to his students. Jed says most teachers of enlightenment are useless, because what they describe as enlightenment falls obviously into the category of states or ideas. The vast majority of people don’t get enlightenment and never will. There are only a handful of enlightened people on the planet at any given time. (Although this seems a bit odd, when squared with Jed’s claim that he enlightens a couple every year.)

He takes it up a notch even further when he states that suffering and compassion have nothing to do with enlightenment. He doesn’t get why people imagine they do. His only teaching is this: search in your experience for what’s true, and don’t stop looking until you’ve found it. He has been known to dispense this wisdom whilst eating beef sandwiches or playing a game of Tomb Raider.

Jed is wonderfully home-grown. He loves wide open spaces and knows how to fix things. His hobbies include skydiving and mountain-biking. He quotes Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson. He makes it obvious that to be enlightened doesn’t require a Japanese accent, a bald head or robes.

Jed’s most acclaimed book is Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing. I highly recommend it. Since this he’s written two more – which I haven’t read, but the reviews suggest they’re not as good.

The only problem with Jed is that he doesn’t exist.

Please, Jed – I hope one day you’ll step forward and prove me wrong about this, but search for Jed on Google and all you’ll find is a link to his publisher, a few interviews, and a horde of bloggers agreed that ‘Jed McKenna’ is just the pen name of some mysterious author: a J.D. Salinger of the spirituality scene.

Search for Jed’s ranch and you won’t find it. Search for Jed’s students and no one is offering any testimonies. All that’s out there is the books.

One blogger reckons Jed is Adyashanti, but I don’t know: Adyashanti doesn’t strike me as your frontiersman type. Another blogger pointed the finger at Ken Wilber – and this I can almost believe. Jed writes a lot like Wilber, and even shares some similar verbal tics, but his prose is way better. (Check out Wilber’s Boomeritis if you don’t believe me.) If Jed is Wilber then there’s a ghost writer also on board, because there’s no getting past the fact that Jed writes like a pro.

A lot of the debate circles around the idea that it doesn’t really matter whether Jed exists because he’s all about seeing through the ego. This is very nice, of course. I’d say it doesn’t even matter if Jed is enlightened; his teachings are certainly authentic.

But what does matter, sadly, is that if Jed doesn’t exist then there’s no one teaching in the style he describes. The quotations from Walt Whitman, the stripped-down approach, the uncompromising insistence on abiding non-dual awareness: it means no one has the guts like Jed to actually teach this way. The books are simply the wet-dream of an enlightened teacher who knows deep down that this style will never fly whilst people remain stuck into their own fluffy New Age wet-dreams instead.

Call me naïve, but I have a hope that the aim of ‘Jed’ is not simply a scam to shift a load of books. It’s fictional, for sure. But I think it’s the work of an enlightened teacher writing about the way he’d really like to teach, if only his students would give him the chance.

Reference

Jed McKenna (2002). Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing. Wisefool Press.

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