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Did you know that everything you hear about enlightenment is a lie? That’s right! Don’t believe a word of it!

This is where we can get tangled the most – lost in words, believing that the great teachers are trying to tell us something intrinsic about reality when they utter their wise phrases.

But none of it is true.

You see, Awakening is an experience, like love or the flavour ‘sour’. We could write whole books about these things, and explain them as best we can, but we’ll never actually know what love or sour is unless we experience those things for ourselves. In fact, if we try to understand love or sour with words and ideas alone, we can form some pretty strange ideas about what these things are. But if we just go out and find our dream mate, or stick a slice of lemon in our mouth – well, we’ll know instantly what all those words were trying, so fruitlessly, to point toward.

And there is the key we have to remember – words can only point us in the direction of experiencing reality – they can never be a substitute. And a skillful teacher will use words to point you in the right direction.

This takes a special skill, however. Since the thing we’re trying to explain is so . . . um . . . indescribable, it can be equally pointed to with seemingly opposite ideas. In this way, I’m equally ‘right’ when I say that the world is ‘oneness’ as when I say the world is ‘multiplicity’. And if I turn it around, I’m sort of ‘lying’ when I say it either way. Especially if I am trying to get you to believe that I’m saying something ‘real’ about reality.

A skillful teacher, then, will have to first discern what your mind is assuming about reality. They can then use words to point you in a direction that will ‘un-do’ your assumptions.

You can imagine a monk arriving in a monastery. The master sees the monk, and discerns instantly that the monk believes the world to be full of separate objects. So the master sets the monk to meditating on the Oneness of the universe.

After many moons of meditation, the monk returns, excited. She explains that she now understands the true nature of reality, and senses no separation between herself and the rice bowl. She understands the true harmony within which all ‘things’ dwell!

The skillful master discerns that she does, indeed, sense that all things are one. So he takes up the rice bowl and cracks it over her head. Rubbing the egg-shaped bruise forming on her head, she asks why he did such a thing.

“If you and the bowl are one, then why does it hurt so much?”

Oneness and Multiplicity are equally ‘wrong’ when it comes to discerning reality. The reason? Because both are concepts — ideas we’re using to try to put reality in a bottle. It’s only when we leave all our ideas behind that reality becomes apparent, and we actually taste the lemon or experience love.

Understanding this, you can be your own best teacher. Once you think you’ve got reality figured out, you can assure yourself that you’re dead wrong, and start trying to figure out the opposite of what you’ve come to believe. Keep this up, never allowing yourself to cling to any idea at all, and pretty soon you’ll just get exhausted and ‘poof!’, reality will spring before your eyes, and that’s all there is to it.

Of course, there is a catch. The catch is that as we begin to examine our ideas more and more closely, we get ever more ingenious in making up new ideas that seem like they’re not ideas. Since you probably wouldn’t be on this quest unless you really, really wanted to become enlightened or awakened, it can get very tempting to begin to overlook the fact that some of these subtle ideas are still ideas. Many people can get rid of most of their ideas, until they encounter some of the really entrenched ones. Time, for instance, which we’re very loathe to let go of. We can think that there is no past or future, but come on – we all know tomorrow and yesterday exist! 

Or Self. We can talk like we don’t have a self, but if you look carefully, you’ll find that even many of the greatest teachers of our day will, in the end, posit some sort of idea of Self, even if it is so subtle and vague as ‘our higher self’, or ‘unity with All’, or some other such idea that equates us with an incomprehensible universal force. You don’t need ideas like that if you discern reality directly, because those are only ideas – inadequate descriptions that can never approximate the actual experience.

So you can see how everything you read about enlightenment is a lie. Applied skillfully, the words are just meant to undo our assumptions about the world. Applied without skill, they create new assumptions, accomplishing nothing except to make us better at the game of dualism.

Luckily, you can always make words work in your favor — if you simply remember that words can only point us in the direction of actual, direct experience.