Open Enlightenment

The free Open Enlightenment ebook

After two days of furious writing (and a lot longer to format), here’s the Open Enlightenment ebook.

Taken from the introduction:

The purpose of this ebook is to start an honest and informed conversation about what it means to be human in the most profound sense.

For the first time in history we have access to all of the world’s religions, and more importantly, a rational and evidence based account of their origins and history.

Combined with personal, direct exploration of spiritual experience, and an open, accessible and cross-traditional body of ‘spiritual peers’, we have arrived at the point in our development as a species where a new perspective on ourselves and our place in the world is steadily coming into view; a perspective that both recognizes the reality and authenticity of spiritual experience and honors the spirit of science, without entertaining either religion or secularism.

The book is divided into short chapters, where a number of statements outlining this new view are explored. However, it is hardly comprehensive, and is only intended as a starting point.

I hope you enjoy it, pass it on to your friends and join in the conversation!

Bookmark this article

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.

Bookmark this article

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.

Bookmark this article

Meditation Practice Group in Brighton, UK

Beginning on 16th November, 2009, I’ll be leading the Monday evening unguided meditation group at The Bodhi Garden in Brighton, UK.

The group begins at 6pm (doors 5.45pm) and will end at 7.15pm. Sessions will consist of unguided meditation for up to one hour, with an optional discussion session on practice afterwards. If you’re new to meditation, come along a few minutes early if you’d like some guidance before the sitting.

Please see The Bodhi Garden website for details about the centre and its location.

Bookmark this article

The Myth of Lineage

There is a common misperception in the West regarding tradition, especially as it relates to lineage within a school that facilitates enlightenment. The two main elements of this misperception are:

In the East, there are unbroken lineages of enlightened teachers/students that transfer the dharma successfully from generation to generation, evident in many of the schools of Buddhism.

In the West, there is and never have been any awakened lineages to speak of. As a result, no Western ‘tradition’ really has anything to offer comparable to the Eastern schools.

But what exactly is meant by ‘dharma’?

Is the dharma the teachings of Siddartha Gautama (563-483 BCE)?

If this is the case, then dharma transmission is nothing but the teaching of concepts, method and culture that have accumulated over the last 2,500 years since the historical Buddha lived. This is completely divorced from the actual experience of awakening, and transmission of the dharma would not require direct, personal experience of enlightenment in order to become a ‘dharma heir’.

Indeed, we can see such a culture evident in Japanese Buddhism, where certain Zen schools are owned by families who pass down the ‘possession of the dharma’ from father to son. This is dharma transmission as family business.

Furthermore, it is common scholarly knowledge that there exists no authentic record of any lineage dating back to the historical Buddha, none whatsoever. Any lineage claiming such a thing is a result of an attempt at some point in the past to raise the profile of the school in question.

Is the dharma the order or law of the universe?

Again, this is not the experience of enlightenment, but a conceptual model or framework of reality. Does the ‘transmission’ of such a model equate with the direct personal experience of awakening?

Is the dharma the transmission of awakening itself?

The Record of the Transmission of the Light reports:

Once, the World-honoured One (Buddha) held up a flower and blinked his eyes. Kashyapa broke out in a smile. The World-honoured One said, ‘I have the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma, the ineffable mind of nirvana. I entrust it to Mahakashyapa.’

The moment that Kashyapa smiled is the moment he became awakened in the presence of the Buddha. Regardless of the historical accuracy of this record, the phenomenon of the transmission of enlightenment from one person to another is not just reported by Buddhism; for many Advaita Vedantist’s, it is the only way to achieve enlightenment.

However, although it may appear as if ‘something’ is transmitted from a teacher to a student, the truth of the matter is that what is recognised during enlightenment is not a ‘thing’ locatable in space/time, nor is it something that is ‘missing’, ‘lost’ or ‘lacking’ that the newly awakened student ‘receives’ from outside of him or herself. Similarly, it is not that the Buddha or any awakened individual has ‘gained’ that which is recognised at enlightenment, and so it is not possible for that person to ‘give’ it to anyone either.

This does not mean that awakening cannot and does not occur in the presence of someone already awakened, as my own experience is testament to. But a more fitting understanding of the phenomenon might be the idea of resonance, as if something about the behaviour of the awakened individual can cause another to resonate in a similar fashion to foster a recognition of his or her own, much like a vibration at a particular frequency can cause objects to vibrate in a similar fashion (note that this is just a metaphor; I am not positing ‘enlightenment vibrations’).

It follows then that the dharma as direct, personal awakening is not something that can be possessed, owned or given by any lineage; but a lineage that teaches an understanding of enlightenment – dharma as the teaching of the Buddha and as a model of reality – and helps to facilitate enlightenment in students – which includes the presence of awakened individuals – is certainly something of value.

However, exactly how many lineages match such a description?

Genesis of a tradition

What are the possible origins of a tradition, school or lineage? Here are a number of elements that may play a part in their creation:

• An individual’s experience of awakening
• An individual’s particular understanding and model of reality
• Politics
• Greed for power/money/sex
• Business
• The kudos of being a holy teacher

No doubt there are many more, but this is enough to understand that there is a staggering number of possible combinations of the above that may go in to the creation – and revision – of a tradition.

For instance, someone who has a good model of reality after years of sitting and study might start teaching for the kudos and the access to easy sexual conquests.

Or a genuinely awakened person might decide to make a lot of money out of the fact they are the real deal.

Or someone who really wants to help others experience enlightenment might also enjoy wielding political power.

Even if we leave the question of motivation out of the equation for the moment, and just focus on the authenticity or quality of a teaching or school, we should be aware that:

• Just because an individual has had a genuine awakening, it doesn’t mean he or she can produce an accurate understanding of the experience or a useful model of reality, nor does it mean he or she will or has helped anyone else experience enlightenment, even if a lineage is produced in his or her name, and even if to this day it remains ‘unbroken’.
• Just because an individual has spent many years with awakened teachers, and has a firm understanding of an accurate model of reality and enlightenment, it doesn’t mean he or she has had a genuine awakening, even if he or she decides to set up a school or lineage.
• Just because a lineage teaches a model of enlightenment, it doesn’t mean it is accurate or helpful, that any of the teachers have any direct experience of what they are talking about, or even that the lineage began with an awakened individual.

Given everything considered above, the idea that we should simply look to the East to find ‘unbroken’ lineages of enlightened, ethical and wise individuals is naive at best. A failure to consider the many possible variables involved in a school that promises dharma transmission is no doubt a large enabling factor to the countless abuses perpetrated by guru after guru in the late 20^th century (and which no doubt still occur today).

Next time you come across an ‘unbroken’ lineage, you should ask yourself exactly what is ‘unbroken’: a certain view of the world? A business model? An empty, irrelevant and unaccessible culture? Superstition? Abuse?

Or that rare thing: a group of genuinely awakened individuals, with a good understanding of the phenomenon, whose main concern is helping others to wake up too?

Right on our doorstep

We can now offer a slightly revised definition of the dharma:

The signifier: a model that describes reality based on awakening/enlightenment

And the signified: That which is recognised at awakening/enlightenment, including our relationship to ‘that’, the resulting view of the world, the way we live according to ‘that’ and the beliefs we hold about ourselves, each other and reality.

Although there is much historical evidence to suggest the ‘unbroken’ lineage of a number of occult or secret traditions of enlightenment in the West, we have no way of knowing just how many authentically awakened individuals were a part of these lineages, what was transmitted, what the motivations were behind many of them and their members, or even who the traditions started with. Sound familiar?

However, we do have many surviving Western teachings or models of reality – examples of the signifier – in the works produced by the Greek philosophers, such as Plato, Plotinus and Proclus; the Christian mystics, such as Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Theresa of Avila; the Medieval alchemists, such as Paracelsus and Agrippa; the Renaissance Hermeticists and Christian Cabalists, such as Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno; the Elizabethan magicians and alchemists, Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley; the Rosicrucians and the countless mystery schools; the Freemasons, such as Elias Ashmole; the Traditionalists, such as Julius Evola and Rene Guenon; the Fourth Way and G.I. Gurdjieff; and the traditions of Thelema and the A.’.A.’., founded by Aleister Crowley and continued by Robert Anton Wilson.

(Of course, there have been many ‘pseudo-traditions’ in the West, such as Theosophy and the Typhonian O.T.O., but again, this is just as prevalent in the East.)

I have to agree with Pierre Grimes when he claims that there is not any metaphysic – produced by anyone, anywhere – as profound as the one offered by the Greeks; and I have personally found the models offered by all of the above Western schools helpful, accurate, challenging, insightful and rewarding. And many of them speak in a very profound sense to my experience of enlightenment.

What this means is that there have always been people in the West experiencing enlightenment – albeit underground for a good millennia and a half – creating a spiritual culture as colourful and as rich as any found in the East. If you are interested in awakening, might there be something of value to be found here?

Ultimately, I don’t believe in tradition; unless there is another type of human being on this planet, with a different brain or mind or heart, the answer to the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What is the truth?’ is the same for all of us. It doesn’t matter whether we are born in Burma or Birmingham, whether we are Hindu or Atheist, whether we are a part of a tradition or not, whether we know someone awakened or not; enlightenment is a human phenomenon, it’s everyone’s birthright, it’s possible for anyone to experience it and there are no definite limitations to who might provide a useful, accurate and helpful view of awakening and reality itself, regardless of lineage, culture or geographical location.

So I think it is time we dropped our naive infatuation with the East as somehow more ‘spiritual’ than the West, as well as our naive disregard for the Western pioneers of enlightenment who more often than not taught awakening at great risk of torture and murder. Rather than investing in the silly notion that the Buddha magically appeared in the East as the very first awakened individual and produced a number of unbroken lineages of realised humans right down to the present day (only coming to the West very recently), we should instead consider enlightenment as a human phenomenon that has occurred to many people all across the globe – as it did during the Axial Age, in three other places besides India: Greece (Philosophy), Israel (Monotheism – but not as we know it today!) and China (Daoism) – that is not dependent on adopting any single culture or religion.

Enlightenment is a human phenomenon, not the product of any lineage or school; isn’t it time we approached it as one? What might we be missing if we pigeon hole ourselves as ‘belonging’ to a ‘tradition’?

Bookmark this article

The London Open Enlightenment Group

I recently posted a pledge to start an ‘Open Enlightenment group’ in London if ten people were interested. Well, it turns out that ten people are interested, and so I will indeed set up the group.

The first step is for everyone to meet up in central London somewhere (that’s free, say a pub or cafe) to discuss exactly what I have in mind, what everyone would like from the group and where might be the best place in terms of location to start weekly sessions.

Even if you haven’t signed the pledge, or you missed it, the invite still remains open to join in!

I have a proposed learning structure based upon my three major awakenings, which I describe as the ‘relationship model’. Sitting or meditation is a relationship with yourself (my first peak awakening occurred during a daily sit), discussion between peers is a group relationship (my partial awakening occurred during a discussion with a friend), and Q&A (satsang) or a 1-to-1 session is a relationship with a teacher (my final awakening occurred during a satsang with a guru in India). I think a good spiritual practice should include all three.

This means that there are 3 major components to the structure: daily sitting (with weekly meet ups to instruct/provide support), group meetings to discuss everything and anything related to enlightenment/dharma/practice – especially as an emerging 21^st century spiritual culture, and group/1-to-1 meetings with a teacher (me) to ask questions directly about awakening or to take instruction.

It should be noted that although I will be fulfilling the role of teacher within this structure, that relationship is only 1/3 of the model. So although a teacher – as an example of an awakened human – is important, it doesn’t take precedent over having access to a group of peers (of which a teacher is ultimately but one of many), or the development of the necessary relationship with yourself.

Before I timetable any of this though, I thought it would be best to allow you (should you be attending) to have some input as to what form these three components take (how many group sits a week? Will the group sits and questioning naturally merge?), hence the initial meeting.

Needless to say I’m very excited about getting group up and running in London, and I’ll post details of a proposed time and place shortly.

Any comments/suggestions welcome!

Bookmark this article

The Milestones of Meditation

You don’t have to meditate to experience enlightenment, but a lot of people do, and it’s probably fair to say that meditation is the most popular technique for getting it done. Yet it struck me recently how I’ve never come across a model for the progress of insight phrased in terms of the development of meditation technique.

I was thinking about this because I’d noticed a couple of important milestones in my practice that I’d never seen listed in any of the classic descriptions of enlightenment. These milestones, I realised, were developments within meditation rather than stages of insight per se. Having understood this, it seemed possible to describe a whole model based on technique, although the model closely follows the contours of the classic Theravada four-path insight model.

The first milestone

In terms of meditation technique the first milestone is passed when the meditator overcomes completely his or her aversion to sitting.

I noticed this for myself after the attainment of stream-entry (or the grade of Magister Templi in the western magical tradition). Beforehand, there was often a sense of disinclination toward the prospect of sitting, of having to resolve oneself against one’s natural desire. But at the first milestone in my new model this is eradicated, although in a curiously paradoxical fashion: one’s aversion to sitting becomes itself an object of interest.

After stream-entry the involuntary expressions of aversion that arise at the prospect of sitting become a source of motivation. There is no longer any question of whether one will sit or not. The meditator has understood that the resistance to sitting offers a juicy opportunity for investigating how ignorance partitions certain sensations away from others (i.e. the sensation of not wanting to sit is isolated from the feeling that one should sit) in order to create an impression of a self.

The second milestone

This, like all the others, also appears as a deeply experienced paradox, but is most likely not established until the meditator has a few fruitions under their belt.

Simply put, on passing this milestone we begin to notice a new level of stabilisation in our technique, to the extent that we begin to become aware of what we are not currently aware of.

If we are focusing on the breath, for instance, or other sensations in the body, then when the mind wanders we are not completely absorbed in the wandering, but a kind of paradoxical consciousness enables us to see that we have wandered and we remain focused during the wandering in a way that enables meditation to continue rather than to be grossly interrupted.

In other words, there is no longer any ‘break’ in our meditation when the attention loses focus upon the object. The focus remains even during the wandering; it is merely a change of object that has occurred.

Again, this breakthrough in technique represents an erosion of the sense of self. Formerly, if the mind wandered from the object, there was an experience of a ‘break’, as if the change in focus represented a transition from a self that was meditating and focused to a self that was not meditating and unfocused.

The leap in technical competence that is achieved with this second milestone comes about because the meditator has examined reality thoroughly enough to observe that sensations of being focused and unfocused are simply that, and do not imply a self separate from those sensations that somehow can ‘have’ a focus to gain or lose.

The third milestone

The first milestone concerned the challenge posed to meditation by the ‘self’, and the second concerned the challenge posed by the ‘object’. The third milestone undoes the very basis of both of these.

Prior to this milestone, when we sit we are driven by a desire or the idea of a goal that is to be achieved. After this milestone, our practice is informed by a curious sensation that whatever idea or goal we set ourselves, our current experience is already it. This development represents a deep acceptance and a letting go of the idea that in our meditation there is anything to be surmounted.

The experience that our current awareness is already ‘it’ is not wish-fulfilment, but the simple realisation that nothing ‘extra’ is needed for us to see what is. Our meditation now becomes fulfilling to a degree that we had not imagined possible, yet at the same time it’s clear the practice itself is entirely redundant.

This milestone is passed shortly after the attainment of third path (or the grade of Magus) and represents a deep and dramatic shift. The notion of meditation technique itself now comes into question and is seen through. Indeed, it’s probably advisable to abandon whatever practice one was doing formerly at this point, in order to understand clearly that whatever that practice was, it isn’t responsible for what can now be seen, for how could it possibly be that experiencing reality as it is should involve ‘doing’ or ‘seeing’ anything? This is already it! That’s the realisation that underpins the shift in technique at this stage – a shift towards abandoning technique altogether.

The fourth milestone

The third milestone is a curious echo of the first: the overcoming of the aversion to sitting (‘don’t want to’) is superseded by the more inclusive realisation that meditation isn’t necessary (‘don’t need to’).

Similarly, the fourth milestone is an echo of the second: the realisation that there is no ‘break’ in awareness is superseded by the more inclusive realisation that there is no difference between meditating and not.

The practice of meditation is, in a sense, destroyed at enlightenment. There simply isn’t any difference between meditating and not meditating. The culmination of the progress of insight, from the perspective of meditation technique, is to arrive at a point where there is no longer any technique whatsoever, because when a person who has experienced enlightenment sits, then they’re just sitting.

Bookmark this article