Enlightenment Handbook, Part Two
Your definitive guide to becoming an obnoxiously happy person. Part two.
If you’ve spent some time perusing the Enlightenment Handbook Part One, you’ve learned a little about the different models of reality, and hopefully you’ve played around with altering your reality by changing your model. It’s rather easy, actually, and though most people can’t fly or levitate after a model change, our model can have profound effects, even on portions of our life which we considered ‘beyond our control’ in the past.
The whole reason we looked at models of reality was not to help us make a million dollars. It was to convince us that what we call ‘reality’ is possibly just everyone agreeing on the latest trendy version of ‘real life’. Different ages and different cultures have different versions. And everyone in those ages and cultures knows that their version is the real one. Obviously, if you moved to a tropical island where everyone lived in a ‘technology-less’ lifestyle, it wouldn’t take you long to adopt new values and ideals. This just shows us that the ‘important’ things in life tend to be a matter of social consensus – not a matter of ‘reality’.
So if we can change our model that easily, what does that tell us about ‘reality’?
Obviously it’s a bit more malleable than we thought. The example of the cube can also help make this clear.
There is a ‘reality’ you can directly experience. But it’s not anything like the reality you now call real. If Intention-Manifestation was successful for you, you’ve seen that you can alter your reality fairly easily. If it wasn’t, you can come to the same conclusions by carefully examining your current version of reality. Many articles on this site are designed to do just that. Start with A Car Called Rocket or What Is Death?.
So we have reality just sitting there, ready to be fully experienced, but we sipmly can’t see it. We’ve gotten so used to the habit of laying our models over reality that we can only see our models and ideas! Try some of the Identity Games to see how your mind usually breaks up the world without you even knowing it!
What Use Are Models?
Models aren’t necessarily bad things. And if you want any hope of negotiating the checkout at the grocery store, you’d better have a working knowledge of how your culture’s model works. The problem with models arrives when we forget that the model isn’t reality! When we think the model is reality, we get into all sorts of problems, because all models are built out of ‘parts’, and those parts have to relate to each other. Parts can sometimes get along, but sometimes they don’t get along, and when they don’t, then we get quite upset. This is when we get angry at our spouse because they aren’t doing their duties around the house, or fall into despair or frustration when we don’t have enough money to pay the bills.
If you’ve tried I-M, and followed some of the links to the other articles, you’ll have begun to see, quite clearly, how your mind habitually clings to certain ways of dividing the world. Since these divisions aren’t real, and since you can decide whether you want to take those divisions seriously or not, then it’s time to ask yourself a question.
If your model isn’t making you happy, why are you using it?
If your model gets you frustrated or upset, why are you using it?
To be a little more clear, the problem isn’t that you’re using the model, but that you’re taking it seriously. If you think it’s real, and thus you’re taking it seriously, then your model is going to send you down the path of ‘ups and downs’ in life. What’s the point? Why spend all this energy believing in a model when it’s just causing you grief?
And models do take lots of energy. Lots. You probably don’t realize it, because after you’ve used a model for a few years, it becomes habitual. But once you start paying attention to how flimsy your model really is, and notice how much energy you have to spend ignoring the model’s faults, and trying to piece together all the imaginary conflicts within the model . . . well, it begins to become exhausting to upkeep your model. This can actually become a good thing, because after you get exhausted trying to upkeep your model, you’ll eventually just give up – and that’s when things get really clear.
All we need to use if we want to really see ‘what’s up’ with our model is Awareness. That’s all. We are all pretty savvy folks, and if we turn our Awareness in the right direction, we’ll see for ourselves what’s going on.
Let’s Take A Look
Let’s imagine a person who has a high-stress job. There are a lot of expectations at work, and she doesn’t always feel that she gets recognition for what she does. Tomorrow she has to make a report to her boss, and she knows it’s not going to be good. She’ll probably get yelled at, and that promotion she was hoping for isn’t going to happen.
Feel her turmoil. Consider what she feels is important.
First, there is the fact that her self-esteem hinges on this job. After all, it’s pretty high-paying, and her friends think she is a high-powered business woman. If she doesn’t strive to please her boss, she might lose her job, and what would her friends think of her then?
Second, there is the security. It’s important to have a job, right? After all, there is so much to upkeep – the car, the house, the kids, the pets, the cell phones and cable and internet and . . .
Now take a moment and see that the problem isn’t really her job or her life situation. It runs much deeper than that. Because she is in her job and life situation based on her model of reality – her assumptions about what is real, what is important, and what life is all about.
These are the things that create her situation.
Solving the Problems
Self-help books and spiritual teachers will offer all sorts of ways to solve the basic problems of life. But all of these ways are typically based on the same old Standard Dualistic Model.
You see, Dualism works on a basic principle. First it divides the world up into bits. For instance, we’ve all been taught that a person’s emotions are different ‘things’ than the person. In other words, the person stays the same, but emotions come and go.
Then, after the division has been made, we have a puzzle to solve. We have to figure out the relationship between the person and the emotion. When this relationship seems positive (our friend is in a good mood), we tend to be happy. But when this relationship seems negative (our friend is in a bad mood), we tend to be angry or frustrated. In fact, when our friend is in a bad mood for a prolonged period, we might even cease to be friends with them, because ‘they can’t control their emotions’, or ‘they aren’t making an effort to nurture the relationship’. Many marriages end just for this reason.
Then, along comes the self-help book or counselor or spiritual teacher, and they try to tell us how to modify the relationship between person and emotion. They might tell us to put ourselves in our friend’s shoes, so that we can understand their current bad mood. But all of these tactics turn out to only work for a while, because what they are really doing is reinforcing the initial problem. The problem being that you believe there is a division in the world (person/emotion), and because people and moods will always be organic, unpredictable things, we’re bound to get frustrated with the whole affair at some point.
We play this same game with ourselves – we divide ourselves from our emotions, and in this way we can get upset with ourselves for snapping at someone, or for being mean, or for being frustrated or angry. It’s a very odd and very destructive game, but we are so used to it that it seems ‘normal’.
Think of it this way. Imagine you go to a hospital for psychologically unstable patients. And one of the residents tells you that the nurses turn up the heat during the day. They turn it up to 200 degrees! And because they turn it up, he has to take all his clothes off. And then he gets in trouble for running around naked!
You might think the person was a bit crazy. And that the problem was that he thought the nurses were turning up the heat. This seems obvious – he has a delusion that is causing all his problems.
This is just the same thing that is happening with us! Except the counselors aren’t telling us that our delusion is the problem! They are telling us that we should try cold packs, or try relaxing or meditating during the times when the heat is turned up so that we don’t overheat!
This is because all of the people trying to help us are suffering from the same delusion. They can’t tell us what the real problem is, because they, like us, believe that the nurses are turning the heat up to 200 degrees!
In this way our problems never get solved, and our lives move in cycles of happiness and sadness, peace and frustration, calm and anger.
So What’s the Answer?
The answer isn’t to find new and creative ways to look at our life situations. It’s not about developing new skills, or better ways to deal with negativity.
The answer is to see things the way they really are. It’s that simple! That’s what enlightenment is all about.
Doing this is as simple as looking at the color yellow and recognizing it as the color yellow. It’s really the simplest thing in the world, because all it’s asking us to do is to see What’s Really Going On.
But for most of us, it seems terribly difficult, because What’s Really Going On is always with us. It’s like trying to see the tip of your nose – we’re very used to ignoring it, even though we can see it all the time. What’s Really Going On is the way that the world looks when we don’t make all those divisions I was talking about above. It’s what the world might have looked like to our senses when we were babies – nothing had names, and nothing was divided into ‘things’ such as trees and cars and mommy.
You see, we were taught to divide the world up into things, but no one ever told us that the divisions were just made up. Really, a person isn’t any different from their emotions. The person and the emotions arise together, and they are both part of the same shebang. If someone had taught us that people and emotions go together just like water and wet, then we wouldn’t be so confused. We wouldn’t get angry at someone if they were in a bad mood, because we wouldn’t think of the ‘bad mood’ as something the person was ‘doing’. It would be what the person ‘is’ in that very moment. It might sound strange, but that realization makes all the difference, and leads us to perfect compassion with ourselves and others.
What’s Really Going On
What’s Really Going On can’t be described, in the same way that words can’t describe a color or a person. But What’s Really Going On can be experienced, just as you can experience a color or a person. Your challenge will be to stop trying to see what’s Really Going On, because all of our efforts are based on that process we described above – dividing the world and creating relationships. For instance, if I try to become enlightened, I do this by creating divisions (me vs. enlightenment), and then trying to figure out the relationship between those two (how do I gain enlightenment?).
The same old craziness.
Remember, the key is to see What’s Really Going On. To see that the nurses aren’t really turning up the heat every day. Seeing What’s Really Going On is passive, not active. It’s what happens when we Just See, and make no effort at all.
Oddly enough, this can be tough because we habitually think we have to apply effort to solve problems. This, however, is the one thing that requires no effort at all. That’s why our last moment of life can often be the moment when we ‘wake up’ and see What’s Really Going On. Because at that moment, we finally give up, realize that there’s nothing left to do, and suddenly, there it is, so obvious that we can’t imagine we didn’t see it all along. The world is unbelievably marvelous and perfect and we suddenly understand how everything works.
This can happen for us right now. All you have to do is nothing. But of course, this is a different sort of ‘nothing’ than just lazing on the couch. This site is full of articles all pointing toward the same thing – as you read them, just remember that they aren’t literal truths – only pointers toward seeing What’s Really Going On.
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