by Greg Goode
That’s a nice image from Steven Harrison. It points to the social construction of the “enlightenment” concept. Although there are traditional teachings with strict and specific definitions of the term, those traditions themselves are also social contexts. And for those people seeking enlightenment who don’t see themselves as belonging to a traditional form of spirituality, “enlightenment” is quite a vague term. Its vagueness allows it to be filled in with whatever the heart desires, and most of the images have their social and cultural elements. The particular content of the images spring from whatever is considered desirable by the subculture where the term is employed.
Different traditions have their different models and personality profiles associated with enlightenment. These profiles carry images. In Zen the image is that you are stern, spontaneous, efficient and unpredictable. In Tibetan Buddhism you are kind, you laugh a lot and you become philosophical if the need arises. According to the Western satsang motif, your eyes are open and deep, you don’t blink very much, you are mostly silent and if you speak it is very slowly. These images usually involve some form of being regarded by others.
This is why people don’t usually imagine being enlightened yet residing in a cave or on a desert island. That would be too boring, and it doesn’t contain any of the cultural desiderata that constitute the Enlightenment concept. No one imagines being enlightened in situations where other people are totally oblivious, treating you the same old way as before. You’d think, “What would be the point?”
Of course the teachings differ, but aren’t they all talking about the same thing? Isn’t true enlightenment the same everywhere?
You might feel like this is an essential place to begin. After all, no one wants to think that they are proceeding in the wrong direction. But as you proceed, you will find something curious happening. As your inquiry deepens, you will feel more and more free from the spell of images, including images of enlightenment. This reflects greater confidence, and less concern that you might have pursued a wrong path. You will enact fewer comparisons between self and others. You will be captivated by the warm, sweet calling of the search for the truth of yourself. It is what Jean Klein calls “higher reasoning.” It doesn’t take place through comparative images, but through a deep and intuitive opening towards perhaps a feeling of sweetness, or as a feeling of always having been home.
So as I get closer to enlightenment I will think less about enlightenment?
That’s good! (laughing) The closer you get, the less it seems like a thing or destination or state or possession. The same can be said of every other “thing” as well!
This is also reflected in the various spiritual teachings too, if you look at them as a discourse. In a given book, website, or metaphysical tradition, you’ll notice something happening as you progress through the material. The advertising portion of the teachings (the face they present to the public in the spiritual marketplace) relies more on the kinds of concrete enlightenment images we spoke about before. This is because these parts of the discourse also serve the purpose of getting you interested in the higher-level teachings. The more advanced the teachings, the less they paint pictures, and the more they concentrate on searching for the truth of things.
Increasing the Sense of Separation?
At certain times, you advise people to inquire deeply, or look into certain things. Doesn’t this advice as advice merely strengthen the sense of personal doership? Isn’t it less nondual when you advise people what to do?
The avoidance of recommendations is an idea from the teachings that used to be called “non-doership teachings” and which are now called “neo-advaita” teachings. I see spiritual advice as being on a par with what a physician or auto mechanic would tell you, and no spiritual teachings object to these conversations! So I don’t think that advising someone to try something will cause the damage claimed by these teachings. In fact I think that advice will help in many cases.
Can you give an example?
First, let’s see an example in which advice might not help. Some people feel a lot of guilt or anxiety from wanting to control or choose in just the right way. They might feel that their particular identity is closely tied up with being the agent of actions, and they feel the need to do the “right” things. They might be the people who say, “That’s what I do, it’s who I am.” In these cases, hearing spiritual advice can increase their anxiety, as it only gives them more stuff to do, which they must perform correctly. In these cases, the anxiety can be reduced when they see the automaticity of actions they had thought they were responsible for. If actions are automatic events, then the whole notion of responsibility loses its stinging personal, judgmental, moral tone. The neo-advaitin descriptive teachings are a very effective and immediate antidote for issues like this. They hit the spot perfectly.
But there are many issues which aren’t so explicitly tied up with choice and control. There are many people who don’t feel that much investment in being a doer or controller. Their issue might be self-esteem, or they might feel identified with the body, or a set of memories. Prescriptive language can help in these cases.
Advice and recommendations don’t exacerbate every issue the way they might exacerbate a feeling of controllership. In fact, the irony is that the neo-advaitin’s carefully worded descriptive phrasing is lost on many students anyway. Many students just translate the teacher’s descriptions right back into prescriptions for themselves. The teacher’s “There’s no one here” becomes the student’s “If I keep attending these talks, then there will be no one here for me, either.”
For example, in the direct path, one of the principal teachings is to take your stand as awareness. Once you know the truth even intellectually, you take your stand as that which you already know yourself to be. You don’t need to wait for a transformation. Your subsequent experience will come to confirm the stand you have taken. Notice that this is a kind of doing, not just a case of hearing descriptions. And notice the irony that in spite of the neo-advaitin teacher’s characterization of things, the student still sees himself as listening to the carefully crafted non-prescriptive descriptions. So he’s still doing stuff!
But there really isn’t a doer. So why speak as if there is?
(laughs) It seems like there’s no doer. But does it seem that there really is a body or mind, or pencil or teacup? That’s just the point. In the very same way that there’s no doer, there’s nothing else either. So why stop short? Sure, there’s no separate controlling entity. If it’s all awareness, then for the same reasons, there are no independent thoughts, feelings, actions, movements, objects, bodies or worlds. Speaking in terms of a doer isn’t metaphysically different from speaking of a mind/body mechanism. If you say that one doesn’t exist, then why does the other exist? Why stop right there? The same analysis applies to both, and to every supposedly objective thing. Inquiry will have stopped short, gaps will arise, separation will be felt, because the basis to which you used to attribute doership will be left in place.
For now, you can look at speaking in terms of a doer, like speaking of a sunset even though the sun doesn’t actually settle down, or speaking of your car not “wanting” to start up even though your car doesn’t have desires. In fact, all speaking is like this. Things don’t exist “out there,” independent of awareness. There is no borderline between “in” and “out.” Things are merely awareness itself. This frees you from the responsibility to “accurately” capture things by speech, and yields the freedom to speak of everything.
A while ago, you said that advice is empty. Is this what you meant?
Good point! Yes, doership and the separate existence of a controlling entity aren’t special metaphysically. Everything is empty of separate existence in this same way. All events of speaking, and all other things, are just like this.
The “Enlightenment” Story
Why don’t you tell your enlightenment story in these conversations? After all, it’s on your website.
Yes
, such a story often tends to get the conversation going; but as the conversation proceeds, that story quickly melts away into what is always impersonally present everywhere. In this way, you could look at it as a bit of fragrance but not the rose itself. There are many other bits of fragrance as well.
There are several reasons I don’t tell that story a lot. One is that stories like these can give the wrong impression about self-inquiry. They give the impression that the goal is a desirable personal state, such as a wonderful new set of feelings and experiences. Quite the opposite is the case. It is not personal. It is not home improvement. Rather, the goal is to know that in which the personal arises, that which is one’s true nature. This knowing cannot be personal. As Jean Klein once quipped, “You can’t see it; it’s behind you.”
Another reason I don’t use that story very much is that “enlightenment” is a systematically vague term, especially outside traditional or detailed spiritual contexts. In traditional Shankaracharyan Advaita Vedanta or Madhyamika Buddhism, the terms are carefully defined, and people tend to agree on the vocabulary. But if you’re not in a context like that, “enlightenment” is too vague to be useful. It functions like a placeholder for people’s fondest wishes, hopes and dreams. For one person, enlightenment means getting over a hatred of their parents. For another, it might mean being able to travel internationally by levitation!
And then there’s this. I find that when people hear these stories, their sense of separation is increased. They begin to divide people up into two classes, the “haves” and “havenot’s.” They feel left out. They look upon having such a story as the mark of success. The more they hear these stories, the more they desire to be among the “haves.” Their spiritual search turns into a yearning to have a story of their own to tell.
Of course for a smaller group of people, it actually is helpful to hear stories like these. They want to speak to someone who presents himself as clearly having found what they themselves are seeking. This gets them going. So the story helps them choose a teacher, and the motivation helps internalize the teachings. But sooner or later they too will face the issue of attachment to these stories, to the expectation of gaining a new status or possession.
And what was your story?
(smiles) Do you perhaps fall into the latter group of people?
(laughs) I guess so!
It took me a long time before I knew there was such a thing as these stories. I didn’t know how people reacted to them, that they were “an item,” or sought after. I began to learn about this sometime later. One evening, I wrote an e-mail message about something that had happened years before when I was reading a book in the subway station. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone before. I didn’t associate the word “enlightenment” with it. “Well, then, you’re enlightened!” was the response. People came to regard it as “Greg’s enlightenment experience.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until a few years later when I met more people involved in spiritual culture.
I also began to notice how people who didn’t have a dramatic, transformational story to tell felt like they were missing something. They didn’t consider themselves “done” until they too had a story. Often they tried to replicate the circumstances of their favorite stories, by traveling to the same place, or by trying to re-create the same set of circumstances they had heard about.
OK, so what was this story?
Ever since childhood I’d always been interested in finding out what or who I was. Who am I? What is the world?
What is the difference? After living these questions for a long time, clarity came in two stages. The first stage could be characterized as the dissolution of the sense of separateness into effortless witnessing awareness. The second stage could be described as the peaceful collapse of this witness into pure awareness itself.
This first stage came about through my suspicion that my nature depended on the willing, controlling, choosing function. Over the years I had seemingly eliminated every other possibility. I knew I couldn’t be the body, the DNA, the brain cells, the mind, memories, values, or the waking, dreaming or deep sleep states. I felt that I was constant and featureless, observing these things as coming and going phenomena.
But I did have the sneaking suspicion that what made me Greg was the faculty of willing and choosing. I felt that if I could put my finger on this, it would be like revealing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
So I began to try to accentuate this feeling, to bring it out into the open. I looked back through my life and asked myself, “When have I felt the most myself, the most like Greg?” The answer came that it was when I was deciding or choosing, especially those things that were out of the ordinary for me, such as my decision to take ballet lessons so I could audition for a job at Disneyland, or to join the Army, or go to graduate school, etc.
I set about trying to find the hidden place where this chooser resided. Shortly thereafter, I came upon Ramesh Balsekar’s book, Consciousness Speaks. This was mid-1996, and here was a book that was all about the very issue of “doing” that I was already considering.
After a few months with this book, I was standing in Grand Central Station waiting for the subway to take me uptown. I was reading this one page of the book, and I saw in a flash that there can’t be any choosing center. Choices and willing are just as unplanned and spontaneous as any other arising phenomenon. There cannot be a locatable center, here or anywhere else. All such “places” were seen as nothing more than arisings in awareness. The notion of people as separate centers of identity dissolved in a brilliant ball of light emanating from my chest area and expanding outward. Life became an effortless smooth flow, and the experience of myself or anyone being a separate center or independent individual has never returned.
The second stage was after this. There was no more individuated center or sense of choosing. There was no personal scorekeeping or interpersonal comparison. No sense of personhood in “myself” or attributed to any “one” else. There was no suffering or place for it to reside. There was, however, an ever so subtle sense of an offset – between this spacious awareness and the appearances that arose in awareness. This offset was experienced as a neutral but curious difference between subject and object. An example would be the difference between an arising sound and the awareness to which this sound appeared. The very experience of this arising, sweet as though it was, seemed as though it constituted an offset.
This offset didn’t match the descriptions from the great texts I had read, such as the Ashtavakra Gita, the Mandukya Upanishad, and Nagarjuna’s Treatise on the Middle Way. So I began to investigate what this offset could be.
I found that these great texts weren’t much help when it came to what I considered to be the mechanics of this offset issue. No teacher’s book of dialogs was any help either, because people just weren’t asking about stuff like this. I wanted to know what accounted for the felt distinction when appearances were nothing other than awareness itself.
One day, a very subtle and sophisticated teacher tried to answer this question. He said that you can know that appearances are nothing other than awareness because they arise, subsist and subside into awareness. There can be, he said, nothing other for these appearances to be. But this was merely restating what was already my day-in and day-out experience. But I also had a strong feeling of kinship with the great texts, and a feeling of inspiration from them. I actually had an inviting feeling that this gap would soon dissolve. Yet this teacher’s explanation seemed second-hand and inferential like “therefore it must be so.” It didn’t seem direct like “gapless awareness is my experience.” I still felt this gap. And I thought that he probably did too.
Some time later, Francis Lucille told me he honored the teachings of Sri Atmananda and gave me a copy of Atma Darshan. When I read this small book, which is actually quite modern in spirit, I found that it put the finger on the issue of offset. Reading it and living with it, I experienced just the antidote to my impression of a gap betwee
n subject and object. Atmananda’s exposition dissolved this distinction. This offset had no more room to be a separate “thing.” It was no longer felt, it no longer made sense. Thanks to Francis’s kindness and Atmananda’s crystal-clear teachings, this sense of offset peacefully and joyously melted into the brilliant clarity of awareness, never to arise again.
Did you ever forget? Many people forget this and have to remember it again, myself included.
Not at all. It isn’t the kind of thing that comes and goes. It isn’t the kind of thing that is subject to forgetting or remembering. Sometimes psychologists call things like this a global shift in perception. It doesn’t require rehearsal.
It’s sort of like when I was 10 years old and I found out there was no Santa Claus. That Christmas Eve I had tiptoed downstairs about 3 a.m., in breathless anticipation of my Christmas gift. It was a bicycle that year. I saw my parents wrapping and labeling the presents. “Oh honey,” said my mom to my dad, “Let’s say that the bicycle is not from us but from Santa,” as she wrote out the label. “Ah-ha!” I thought. “So that’s how it is.” And I never experienced Santa again in the same way. It became a polite community fiction. It wasn’t something I ever had to remind myself. I never forgot. I’ve never fallen back into the belief that Santa Claus really does exist; I’ve never had to remind myself that he doesn’t.