Outline of a Spiritual Journey Toward Enlightenment
Now, all this enlightenment stuff is pretty darn simple. All we have to do is to find the difference between what is ‘real’ in the world, and what is just made up in our imaginations.
Most of us, considering ourselves sane and relatively normal, think we know the difference. We look about ourselves and think that everything we see around us is real. And we’re quite sure that the guy in the straightjacket, who thinks that pink elephants are trying to hunt him down and squash him, is living in his imagination.
Clear-cut so far. But then along comes an obnoxious Zen person or non-dualist or Advaita Vedanta practitioner, and they start telling us that we are living in our imaginations, just like the guy in the straightjacket.
At first we might not believe it. After all, if you want to see reality, just take a look around you! But then they might ask you a simple question, such as – ‘do you know what a wrist is?’ And you answer ‘yes’, and then they ask you to show them where your wrist stops and your forearm begins . . . and suddenly you suspect that maybe you aren’t quite so sure about things after all.
In fact, the more you look around yourself, the more you notice that all the lines you’ve drawn in the world are pretty blurry – and sometimes we can feel a little silly for having been so blasé about thinking that our definition of the world was so clear-cut.
At this point we have two choices – we can continue down the path to figuring out what is ‘real’, and what is made up in our imaginations, or we can just retreat into the comfortable old way – ignoring the fact that everything is blurry, and sticking to our guns even though we know that we’re really putting on blinders.
If you continue trying to figure it out, you’ll start venturing down the ‘spiritual’ paths. And soon all sorts of new people and influences will appear, all of them telling you what the truth really is. Soon you’ll be trying to balance your chakras, align your subtle energies, achieve special states of mind through meditation, and possibly communicate with otherwordly entities.
This is an easy place to get tangled. There are all these new offerings with fancy names, often spoken by masters of one tradition or another. You can soon be led to believe that if you don’t follow this path or that, you’ll end up in hell or experiencing endless rebirths as earthworms and tadpoles. Karma, rebirth, dharma, dukkha – all these things are swimming about in your head, making a big, confusing stew of new rules you have to follow and new ways that you can be frustrated because you can’t balance out your life.
But at some point, it might dawn on you that all these new offerings are quite a lot like the old ones you used to think were real – just like money, time, and wrists. People talk about these things as if they are real, but no one has ever really pinned down exactly what these things are. Soon you realize that they are all just ideas, and one isn’t very different than the other. In fact, they’re all pretty much the same, in that they divide the world up into pieces that only exist in our imaginations. Then we have to try to figure out how those pieces fit together!
‘How, then,’ you start to ask yourself, ‘can I ever see anything that’s not merely in my imagination?’
This is where it gets tricky. For instance, someone might tell you to practice your meditation diligently, but without any desire for results. Well, how the heck do you do that???
Before long you’ll begin examining your thoughts more carefully, and noticing that it’s really easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are, for instance, meditating without any expectation, when in reality you’re really really hoping that you’ll get enlightened soon. Because then life will be peaceful and wonderful!
Eventually something magical can happen. Maybe it happens when you become so exasperated that you finally give up, and then you try meditating one more time with a ‘no-effort’ attitude, and then it all becomes clear. Or maybe you examine your mind’s activity so carefully that you discover the only thing left that you could call ‘real’ is the activity itself. Or maybe you examine every single imaginary thing you’ve created in your mind, and dissolve them one by one until all you’re left with is . . . Just As Is.
This thing people call awakening or enlightenment can’t be described, because as soon as we put words onto it, our symbol-addicted mind will turn it into a new object, and then we’ll feel that we know what it is when we really don’t (just like a wrist). It’s only when we finally put our words and imaginings aside that reality can be Just As Is.
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