ooooh.
Fun thread. Really loving your responses, Mordant.
As a zen practitioner, enlightenment is my explicit 'aim', I guess. It's a paradox spoken about by a few masters: the aim or goal is the greatest hindrance to enlightenment.
As has been said, goals, aims, considerations of 'what enlightenment is like' and the such reside quite firmly in the mind, which only ever works in the sense of the future or the past. In this way, enlightenment can't be 'understood', or even 'experienced' in a certain sense ('experience' usually considered as a experience that happens to something/someone).
It's a bizzarre subject to talk about and I'm not sure there's that much i can say about it that has not been said before. Even when trying to dispel myth/mystery/LSDwank, one always ends up talking about enlightenment as something pretty mysterious, largely because most people who talk about it don't know it, and those people who do know it see the impossibility of using language to describe something that resides outside of language (how could the mirror show itself?).
I'm interested in Ev's mention of a 'short burst of enlightenment'. It reminds me of a story I read by a French lady who basically 'became enlightened' without any prior practice, warning, or backup myth to help her. A secular psychologist (I think) who one day just lost her Mind (Mind in the Zen/Buddhist sense of 'ego/thought/selfthing'). She described the loss of all the drives and goals and aims she used to construct her Self and the immense fear and panic she experienced in being in this situation. Something like realising the loss of something that you'd assumed was you forever, seeing the 'you' was actually a lie, but not being sure what to do now. I think she went on to get advice from some more traditional teachers of enlightenment who helped to ground her experience somewhat in the context of previous people's enlightenments. I can't remember her name, but she wrote a book about it called something like 'Touching the Infinite'. Really interesting for that 'outsider' perspective on the situation. She may, or may not, have been called Susan.
I generally understand the whole enlightnment thing as this dropping/loss of the Self. Many masters speak of things such as 'the drop of water falling back into the ocean' - stuff about realising oneself to be an unbroken part of the universe, one's consciousness being that same no-mind as everything else. 'Susan' spoke of a deepening in her situation, like a calming whereby she started to accept what was happening and it brought new insight. She spoke of how the 'meaning' of human existence seemed to be that the universe could become conscious of itself - our 'normal' consciousness being akin to a seed in which consciousness grows to the point where it can happily merge with the (?) again...
Obviously, the whole thing is rather ironic, as Dogen (i think) points out, the being that is trying to become enlightened (to become one with the universe) is, and always has been, already one with the universe and could be nothing other. Strangely, there still seems to be a necessity to try to realise this, as too many LSD Messiahs who have read that 'everyone is enlightened anyway' and believe it proove.
As for the 'astral plane' and stuff, I've heard it described that the enlightened person is equally existent in both the physical and non-physical, where living humans (with the exeption of Bauls and the like) are usually resident in the Physical and spirits (or whatever one might call those sorts of things) are more resident (or conscious) of the non-physical. The more aware you become of either, the more aware you become of the other, to the point where (in enlightenment maybe) you realise the two are equal and co-dependent parts of existence. There is no hierarchy between the two 'realms', as some forms of Christian mythology (for instance) suggest.
There's a danger with Drugs and trips that one may have lovely pictures painted for you and end up getting attached to the picture, which could lead you astray. This was a real problem for me for the first few years of my practice, where I had had certain experiences on mushrooms to which I attached importance. This led me to assume that my 'goal' in meditation was towards the states-of-mind I expereinced on hallucinogens, which gave me unfulfilled expectations of euphoria, as well as a bit of a fear complex about the whole thing (Horrible self-loss bad trip...) In creating wonderful (or dreadful) expanses within the mind, such drugs can help to tell us things about ourselves, or open us to the possibilities of a life different to how we are accustomed to view it, but I believe they can largely be detrimental to a path towards enlightenment. Obvously, this is more in reference to the path of meditation, but I think the situation hold true for most approaches to enlightenment - if you are after direct clarity of one's consciousness, it seems to make sense not to muddy it up with hallucinogens. Sure, Bill Hicks said LSD was a squeegie for his third eye, but I just think he was wrong.
It's weird how much myth and pomp gets built up around enlightenment. I don't know if it's a symptom of the idea being brought into a Christian culture and seen through that lens (the ideal of an omnipotent, omnipresent God getting grafted onto the idea of a 'universal consciousness'), but there seems to be a kind of 'superhuman' view of the Enlightened One having direct consciousness of EVERYTHING EVER RIGHT NOW or something. I was sooo surprised when my master answered 'I don't know' to a question for the first time. I've got used to it now, but it's a strange thing for me to compare my personal experience of (someone who says they are and who I beleive is) and enlightened being with the ideal sent out by so many people. A co-disciple still has a hard time with the fact that our master has dietary requirements and intolerances, that he's allergic to wool, that he doesn't know certain things, that his spelling isn't great, that he farts... From what I can tell, enlightenment is something a lot more basic and fundemental than attaining TEH MATRIX WARRIOR SKILLZ.
Obviously, I still harbour the suspicion that my master is just hiding these abilities from us, but that's by-the-by.
So yeah, from my perspective, the thing is a strange paradox whereby if you project and aim towards the goal, this aim stands to get in the way of the reality, but if you just slump into 'well i'm already enlightened, so I don't care', you're equally projecting and sticking in the Mind. It's a matter of becoming more and more aware of one's situation in the moment, of taking one's consciousness away from reliance on the Mind and towards a more natural 'flow' with the rest of the world.
Oh, and it's most definitely not about shutting oneself away in solitude. The ascetic ideal just seems to negate life. If you can't be enlightened while doing the shopping, working as a postman, attending a concert or fucking your lover, you're not enlightened. Unless you just don't want to do things, I suppose. Some people just like to play scrabble. |
