Alan's blog Events News: Business donations doubt expectations micro-patronage morality
by Alan
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Micro-patronage is a macro-flop
Spurred on by the success of other sites employing the micro-patronage business model, I had hoped to finance the Open Enlightenment project with recurring low monthly donations by generous readers. However, this approach has always sat uncomfortably with Dunc, and so after a good deal of debate and deliberation, I have relented and cancelled the forthcoming micro-patronage drive.
This does mean that certain objectives have been put on the back burner, but we are still open to donations and – as Duncan has been fond of telling me recently – we are still going to be doing everything we have planned anyway!
Onwards and upwards…
The Lack of Truth
Enlightenment is a piss-poor strategy for saving the world.
Spiritual practice uncovers ever more refined levels of subtlety. Enlightenment, sadly, is too subtle to prove much practical use in solving material problems, such as vanishing rainforests, whales, the energy crisis and people not playing nice. Scientists and politicians will make the greatest impact on these problems, not spiritual sages.
Enlightenment is not the end of delusion, greed and hatred; it’s the seeing-through of these things. This means that it’s not (in itself) the solution to evil. What it is the solution to is the lack of truth.
Trying to teach enlightenment, you soon run into this problem on a practical level. People are interested in enlightenment as the answer to all kinds of issues, but in fact it addresses only one issue: truth.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with giving up smoking, eating more healthily, or finding the willpower to jog around the park. Yet meditation classes are full of people with aims like these. Usually, they don’t stick at it for long.
Issues like these are fulfilled at certain times in life more than at others, because things like jobs, money, relationships and health by their nature come and go. When we have them, or if it seems there’s no prospect of obtaining them, then there’s no reason to practice either, and so people with these aims tend to fall away.
The lack of truth, however, remains an issue despite life’s vicissitudes, because even when I’m beautiful, rich and regularly getting laid, I can still lack truth. Until enlightenment, only the lack of truth provides constant motivation. The people who see the job through are those who accurately perceive their lack. Feeling your lack of truth, you simply cannot abandon practice, no matter how pleasurable or how shitty the circumstances of your life become. Connecting with your genuine desire to save the planet, however, or to love others, or to become the happy and generous person you know you would be if only you stopped smoking, or whatever, is unfortunately beside the point. These are laudable aims, but too gross by far to be anything enlightenment can provide.
The people that get the job done are those who see and feel their lack of truth. In other words, the best students are those who have already learned to teach themselves.
For the rest, the best approach (albeit heavily disguised) must be to teach what they haven’t recognised: their lack of truth. Yet it’s hard to understand this idea, let alone accept that enlightenment has nothing to do with anything else. And it’s an issue that only a few seem constitutionally driven to confront. But when people ask me whether enlightenment is ‘worth the effort’, I catch a glimpse of the screaming gulf that separates someone driven by truth from someone who isn’t.
Enlightenment is a myth to anyone who hasn’t perceived their lack of truth. For teachers to represent enlightenment as having anything to do with being happier, healthier or more popular; with saving the planet, world peace or the evolution of humanity, runs the risk of providing only more reasons not to practice, because enlightenment is not the means to achieve these things.
If I make it sound as if enlightenment isn’t ‘worth’ it, then please think again. If we attach a value to truth, then we make ourselves the measure of truth. Yet we can proceed towards enlightenment only when we accept the truth as the measure of ourselves.
Before this gets too needlessly messianic, I’ll shut the fuck up. Suffice it to say that after this, if you’re still consumed by a genuine need to experience truth, then one day soon you probably will.
Alan's blog Events: 21awake 4th Turning buddhism dialogue hear and now project history involvement meditation satsang teaching tradition
by Alan
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The 4th Turning
The Buddha turned the Wheel of the Dharma three times:
In the 3rd Century BCE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the first time and created Theravada, a renunciatory and monastic approach, with an emphasis on the Four Noble Truths and the Three Characteristics.
In the 1st Century CE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the second time and created Mahayana, the Way of the Bodhisattva, with an emphasis on Emptiness and Compassion.
In the 7th Century CE, the Buddha turned the Wheel for the third time and created Vajrayana, the tantric route to enlightenment, with an emphasis on the essential Buddha-nature of all things.
Over the many centuries since the last turning, the Dharma has spread to the West and the world has undergone globalization. We live in a very different society and culture to the one the Buddha was familiar with almost 2 and half millennia ago, and many of the old ways of living the Dharma are no longer relevant to a human living in the 21st Century.
As a community of spiritual practitioners it is up to us to recognise that we are participating in the turning of the Wheel of the Dharma for a 4th time, as we explore and investigate what it means to live the Dharma in the 21st Century, and seek to answer such questions as:
What is the best way of approaching enlightenment and how do we make the Dharma accessible and relevant?
Is monasticism no longer appropriate or even necessary to seriously engaging with the Dharma?
What role does sexuality and romance play in spiritual development?
How is social media transforming spiritual culture and community?
What would Buddha look like as a millennial, awakened human being?
As part of the 4th Turning, I’m endeavouring to establish a monthly meeting of like-minded souls in order to discuss all of these questions and much more.
The first group meeting happened on Sunday, 29th Novemember 2009, at the wonderful Royal Academy of Arts in London. Out of the 15 or so members of the google group, 5 showed up, and what a pleasure it was to meet them!
Rohan of 21awake introduced us to his Hear and Now project, a contemporary and accessible guided meditation scheme for practitioners on the go. An innovative and promising endeavour!
Interest was shown in a weekly satsang/sitting group that I will organise to take place in a fortnight.
Stay tuned for the date/time of the next 4th Turning meeting, and come and join the revolution! (Alternatively, set up a group in your area!)