Open Enlightenment

Permission to Satsang

Over the holidays my mum asked me how my writing was going. I shrugged my shoulders because progress had been slow (as it always is in the publishing world). But then I remembered there was a new development, and proudly announced that I had held my first satsang recently. I’m not quite sure she fully understood the concept of a satsang, but she nevertheless looked puzzled and asked me that if I was teaching surely I would need some type of qualification from someone. Without going into too many details, I told her my experience spoke for itself, and left it at that.

But experience alone doesn’t make a good teacher, does it?

I’ve said it on this site before, and I’ll say it again: just because you’ve experienced awakening, it doesn’t mean you fully understand it, have an accurate and healthy approach to it or that you are teacher material (not to mention that some awakened people don’t want to teach at all!).

Top Secret

A few commentators on this site are students of Shinzen Young, who advocates maintaining a relationship with a teacher – or someone more advanced along the path – regardless of whether you’ve experienced enlightenment or not. I reached enlightenment without a teacher, and I was lucky enough to do so without making too many big mistakes; but I’m not naive enough to think I won’t make mistakes in the future, and so taking Shinzen’s advice, a few months ago I decided to see if I could find a teacher before taking up the mantle myself.

Of course, Shinzen would be the obvious choice (as recommended by his students), but after reviewing what he offered I decided I really needed someone closer to home who I could talk to face to face. After a bit of a search, I came across Mr. X (I’m not giving his name because I’m not sure he wants any attention), a dharma heir to Master Gudo Nishijima of the Soto Zen lineage. Being a big Dogen fan, I hoped we might have a common ground on which to discuss enlightenment. I prayed he wasn’t going to be one of those strange breed of Zen types who refuse to talk about awakening.

I need not have worried; Mr X was open about enlightenment and versed in many traditions (even my own). His enlightenment had been a gradual falling away affair after his life took a difficult turn, as opposed to my three stage awakening, but he recognised that the process unfolds in a variety of ways (although he seemed to take some time probing me before he seemed sure I was enlightened). I was convinced that his awakening was authentic due to my experience of intersubjective enlightenment upon first meeting him, and because he spoke to my experience.

At the end of the discussion, I was quite thrown when Mr. X asked me what I actually wanted. Why had I come to see him? Was I looking for confirmation of my experience, for permission to teach? I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone’s confirmation or permission (God forbid!), and although I arrived at his doorstep with no clear reason to be there, what I did get was an interesting insight into Mr. X’s experience as a teacher.

Mr. X had begun teaching Zazen and the dharma as per his lineage, and although at one point he had a modest Sangha, he eventually decided to stop teaching a group, to close down his popular website, and to carefully vet any prospective students.  He had met too many ‘damaged people’ he said, and his lineage, no doubt thanks to the popularity of Brad Warner, tended to attract for the most part people who were only interested in having a Zen teacher or belonging to a Zen lineage for the kudos. Mr. X was pretty sure he could make a lot of money if wanted to by publishing the couple of books he had written, shaving his head and by giving talks wearing the special Zen robe he had received at dharma transmission. But this to him has nothing to do awakening or helping others get there.

This gave me a lot to think about. Exactly why did I want to teach? To make money? To be a famous teacher? Was I prepared to take on the responsibility of dealing with ‘damaged people’ or insincere seekers?

Mr. X’s advice was to think about teaching very carefully, and to write a book. That way, people would have something of substance.

The Satsang Has Landed

After thinking about it for a long time, I decided that teaching was a natural progression for me (I am of course already writing a few books!). I think there is much more to be gained by sharing my knowledge and experience than there is from hiding away for fear of having to deal with difficult people or their issues (which I already have some experience with after running a popular occult website for a few years). And of course, I can always visit Mr. X should I need advice.

Whether or not I will make a good teacher remains to be seen. And here’s hoping I don’t become an ego-maniac…(I can hear Duncan now: ‘What do you mean, ‘become’?!’)

My first satsang happened on 17^th December 2009 at the Bonnington Centre in Vauxhall, London. 5 people turned up (7 including me and my wife) which isn’t bad for an inaugural meeting on a cold, wintery night in London. I very much enjoyed myself, although I must confess I found the experience a little bizarre, sitting in an armchair in the middle of the room dispensing off the cuff ‘wisdom’ (ha!), but I was surprised at how relaxed and easy the night went, and at how great the people were who came that night (thankfully no ‘damaged’ people!). I hope everyone else got as much out of it as I did.

I look forward to making the satsang a weekly occurrence (possibly starting mid January), and I hope to record the results and maybe post them here for those who might benefit from them.

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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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Shinzen Young

Shinzen Young is one of those rare Buddhist teachers who actually teach enlightenment. You can find his website here, and here’s a whole bunch of great videos .

Thanks to OE reader C4Chaos for the link to this wonderfully frank and in-depth discussion of Shinzen’s approach to teaching enlightenment. Shinzen is the real deal: a bone fide spiritual authority (in the sense that he has experienced everything he talks about) who accurately describes the territory and gives a great overview of what to expect, even after enlightenment, which is very rare indeed.

I’m not sure that I would agree with Shinzen that the first experience of enlightenment permanently does away with the notion of the self, because in my experience the final stage of enlightenment – what Shinzen calls the 4^th stage in the interview – involves the dropping of something fundamental that is not touched by the peak and partial awakening stages beforehand, which is why it remains permanent. (It’s the difference between Adyashanti’s ‘awakening’ and ‘liberation’.) But this is splitting hairs really; his model of four stages is useful and accurate, as I’m sure a lot of Ingram fans would agree.

However, Shinzen doesn’t make the mistake of putting all of his eggs in one basket by only recognising a gradual process of stages, and marginalizing anyone else’s experience that doesn’t fit this model (something I’ve only just recently learned this year); progress with enlightenment can be unnoticeable for a long time, and for some people there may not have been a before or after at all. I think a lot of ‘practical Buddhists’ could learn a lot from this man.

Shinzen has certainly helped in disabusing me of the idea that after enlightenment there is nothing left to learn on the subject, and if I could have him as my teacher, I certainly would.

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