This

  I didn’t feel loved by my mommy, so I want to make a lot of money and have somebody notice me.

  Or . . .

  I felt unsafe as a child, so I must be the only person who can take care of myself.

  The ego is the result of a human organism’s desire to be permanent. It is a coping mechanism and a clever way for an organism to survive and procreate. Our evolved fear of death gets expressed as the story of a permanent, real, and consistent “self” that can have free will and make decisions and not simply be at the mercy of the gods or the wind. These ego stories can infuse our bodies with confidence and zeal that make it easier to survive and build civilizations, but the stories are illusions nonetheless. Helpful illusions. Until they aren’t.

  Who you think you are is just stories conflicting with other stories. In other words, you actually don’t even have a fucking dog.

  Fred was convinced that he had a problem with walking his dog in the rain even though he doesn’t have a dog, just as the spiritual seeker is convinced that she has an ego problem even though “she” doesn’t even have an ego as she thinks of it. She only enacts an ego experience moment to moment because she desires that rather than THIS.

  The irony for both Fred, the phantom dog walker, and the spiritual seeker is that the source of their anxiety is precisely their desire to become free of their anxiety. They both want to be better. They both want to transcend that which doesn’t exist. They both are fully engaged in futility. Fred takes classes and takes credit for making progress when the weather cooperates with his desires. The spiritual seeker meditates or reads the Bible for hours on end and then thinks she is making progress when she feels less “carnal” or more loving for a time. Fred seeks freedom by desiring to not be someone who walks his dog in the rain. The spiritual seeker longs to be spiritual by being “more” than she is in this moment. But what is the “more” that the spiritual seeker is searching for? Connection with God? She already has it. She already is it. The only thing keeping her from this realization and experience is her belief that she has to achieve or protect it somehow.

  For so many of us, our biggest problem is actually that we think there is a problem. We try to resolve this perceived problem of desire by increasing our desire. This desire clinging to desire clinging to desire creates a wheel of suffering that we attach a false identity story to. The only way to escape this vicious cycle of desire and suffering is to let go of the wheel altogether.

  You, beloved, are not a small, separate something that exists over and against a bunch of other somethings. You are the river. You are the whole works, being and doing and spinning stories like a million flashing sunbeams on the surface of a lake. All of the problems and solutions are simply movements within Yourself.

  Dear friend, striving to solve your ego Problem of not-okayness by trying to be something or someone other than THIS is as futile as you constantly pushing your feet down to hold the earth in its orbit around the sun. There’s nothing you can do to make yourself better because what you think of as you doesn’t really exist. There’s nothing you can do to make your ego permanent, immortal, or consistent. All of that is a dream within a dream—a happening swirling around an infinite number of happenings, none of which are intrinsically separated from each other. You are the same Music as the period at the end of the sentence. You are the same Ocean as the airplanes, hotels, coffee shops, and living rooms it was typed in. You are the author and reader of this book; you’re its printing, its impact, its being forgotten, and its eventual disintegration back into the earth. You are THIS moment, the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. Be who and what you want to be, here and now. It is You who are doing none of this and doing all of it. You have no “free will”19 but for your one Supreme Free Will that is doing it all in the one timeless Now of the current’s flow. And sure, you are even that illusory ego that thinks it has the Problem. So, walk the dog in the rain, or don’t, but I dare you to look down at that leash you’re holding and see if there’s anything actually attached to it other than the stories in your mind.

  I Am

  Did you forget who you were for a moment there, my Self?

  Do you think you are simply the sum of a million little accidents?

  A finite set of tubes, skin, blood, bones, and goo?

  What a story!

  What an adventure!

  Next time, if you get caught in that dream within a dream and you want to remember,

  Just lean in and I’ll whisper your name.

  “I Am.”

  ___________

  12. While many people today consider science the antidote to myth, the practice of science is still a human meaning-making, and therefore “mythic,” endeavor (as defined above). As the modern age has demonstrated, rational and scientific thought can help us build and destroy with tremendous power, but it cannot, by itself, determine what or how we should build or destroy. Science cannot, by itself, offer any sort of moral, spiritual, or aesthetic guidance to humanity. For that, we need myths. Without myth, there would be no possible meaning derived from experimentation.

  13. This might be objectionable to some atheists or others who might want to pride themselves on being myth-free, but atheism or scientific naturalism are still ways of rendering an otherwise unintelligible cacophony that is the universe into an understandable, and therefore “mythic” construct, even if that construct uses words like “chaos,” “natural selection,” or any other human constructs to create or destroy meaning.

  14. A. H. Almaas, Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2014).

  15. Obviously, some level of belief is necessary to function in the world. If I didn’t believe milkshakes were less healthy for me than water, I would weigh significantly more than I do.

  16. By karma, I simply mean the unfolding action or doing of the All.

  17. I’m sure there are many who would question the truthfulness or reliability of this realization, as my mind was in an altered state when I experienced it. And that’s fine. I don’t feel a need to prove anything to anyone. But the way I see it, whether a person needs a rocket ship, a book, a tribal narrative, or a tab of LSD to realize the earth is round, the earth is still round.

  18. I use the word idol here in the same way as I do in the rest of the book—in the Judeo-Christian sense of a physically or conceptually crafted object used to turn infinity into something controllable, understandable, and ownable. Whether it is a literal golden calf or the idea of an infinite, mysterious being, as soon as one can possess it, it is an idol. For more on this, I would recommend reading Peter Rollins’s The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction (Brentwood, TN: Howard Books, 2013).

  19. The idea of “free will” is a construct built upon an assumption of a “me” who is separate from the All.

  7. Forgetting the Ox

  THE FOURTH NOBLE TRUTH

  The Way

  Becoming Free

  Practicing Being

  Telling Good Stories

  THIS Is God

  THIS Is Awareness

  Maui (2017)

  THIS Is Love

  The Problem of Evil

  Free to Suffer

  Becoming Free

  “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, they cannot see the kingdom of God.”

  —JESUS

  Enlightenment. Nirvana. Moksha. Freedom. Realization. Salvation. Union. Satori. Samadhi. The Kingdom of Heaven. Call it what you like, but it’s real and almost entirely missing from the Western imagination. The language isn’t missing—I grew up talking about salvation all the time. We were not only “saved,” meaning that we were on God’s good side and the ones who would get to dwell with him for all eternity, but we were “being saved” as well. This meant that we were being purified and made more like Christ while we awaited his final return. In other words, salvation was always about something other than THIS. We would be fully saved someday if . . .

 
; In the same way, people in the West have taken the word enlightenment and used it in ways that the ancient traditions never intended. For a Hindu person, to be enlightened is to have seen through the illusion of separateness and experienced union with the divine. Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” more accurately defines enlightenment in the eyes of Western individualism—thinking for oneself rather than simply following another’s direction. In more contemporary language, the term woke, a popular slang word used to denote someone who is awake or enlightened, has nothing to do with waking up to the nondual nature of ultimate reality, but instead is about becoming more aware of the important, relative truths of social and racial justice. Ancient terms like awake or enlightened are so distant from our collective consciousness in the West, that we can’t even begin to distinguish the difference between the unity of ultimate reality that transcends story and the particulars of the relative reality of our stories. In other words, we’ve fundamentally lost sight of our own seeing.

  Even before my spa episode, as a “progressive Christian,” words like “salvation” or the “Kingdom of God” had become weak clichés in my ears. They were essentially metaphors for healthy living, and the sort of language that Jesus would use, like needing to be “born again,” had frankly become a little melodramatic. Jesus went around talking about how the sort of life he was inviting us into would cost us everything. It was like a pearl of great price for which you had to sell all of your possessions. Being born again required surrendering your life, even to death. This language made more sense when I was a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, where I might have to become a martyr in the end-times while battling the antichrist or something. But after becoming “enlightened” to Western secular individualism and progressive ideologies that no longer interpreted the Bible literally, all of this “you must be born again” nonsense was a bit extreme and embarrassing.

  And then I took magic mushrooms and was born again.

  And now, I can see not only what the hell Jesus was talking about, but why he would use such extreme language.

  Enlightenment—or nirvana, the Kingdom of God, etc.—is not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So many of us “spiritual people” are, like the apostle Paul, trying to “finish the race,” as though spirituality was a sport and salvation was the trophy we get at the end. Whether our prize is everlasting bliss with a bunch of virgins, strumming a harp in mansions of glory with driveways paved of gold, ruling the universe with Christ for all eternity, escaping the karmic wheel of birth and death, or transcending the ego into that blissful state of nonattached, nonduality—we want to figure out how we can attain it. We buy the books. We attend the conferences. We wear special clothes and skip meals and scour through old, boring sacred texts. We kneel, pray, and meditate for hours at a time. We overlook broken and violent religious systems, with their manipulative altar calls, racist and patriarchal power structures, child-molesting priesthoods, scientifically dubious ideas, or oppressive control mechanisms, hoping that if we persevere, we will eventually win. We will eventually get the gold star, the cookie at the bottom of the jar, the “well done, good and faithful servant.”

  What most of us are often actually looking for when we seek our spiritual prize—enlightenment, realization, salvation, or the like—is for the reality of this moment to be something other than what it is. We don’t want to be THIS. We want to be that. We don’t want to have THIS. We want to have that. We don’t want THIS moment here and now, but rather some other imaginary “better” one that would make our vaporous ego shadows into permanent realities. But if that’s your game, I have news for you, friend. There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. There is only THIS.

  By that, I certainly don’t mean the same thing as people often mean when they say something like “This life is all there is.” Or “Nothing exists that we can’t see.” When I say that THIS is all there is, I mean that if you did happen to find yourself singing with the angels in Heaven someday, what could that possibly be other than THIS? In other words, where can you experience anything other than right here and right now? If and when that happens, it will be THIS. Until it happens, it remains as an illusory that. There is nothing real that is not THIS, including enlightenment. Like Ramana Maharshi said, “It is false to speak of realization. What is there to realize? The real is as it is always. We are not creating anything new or achieving something which we did not have before.” When you fully see through the illusion of that, you will see that even the illusions we create and the ego games we play are ultimately really still THIS—still the river experiencing itself. Awareness of nondual oneness and distortions of awareness of nondual oneness are both still part of nondual oneness. Ignorance of the nondual is also the nondual. There’s no escaping it. You can’t be anything but the fullness of the All expressed as you are here and now.

  Still, all paths are not the same. Ramana Maharshi quotes are powerful for a reason. He did seem to live in a way that was more “realized” or “enlightened” than most people, even as that realization led him to denounce the idea of realization. So how does one move forward on the spiritual path, becoming more free, more alive, and awake? Surely, there is more to it than the dissolution of the ego and one’s sense of separateness? After all, just because I (this particular organism) have been able to experience the freedom from attachment, and therefore suffering, the same will not necessarily be true for those around me. And if we truly are all connected as One, then none of us is truly free until all of us are free. A man does not stick his hand out of a jail cell only to forget about the rest of his body.

  It is for this reason that the process of becoming free must continue beyond any individual’s personal awakening to THIS. One only need look at the lives of countless spiritual gurus who talk the talk of having seen the light, only then to use their “spiritual enlightenment” in ways that end up oppressing or duping others. Sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, and any other sort of bigotry can still lurk in the shadows and patterns of a mind that has let go of its own sense of separateness and suffering. As such, attaining nondual awareness is not the be-all and end-all for the journey of a spiritual person who is not limited by the selfishness of only their own freedom, but rather is caught up in the loving work of the freedom for all living beings.

  As Ken Wilber writes about in his book, The Religion of Tomorrow,20 the spiritual path cannot only be about “waking up” or becoming enlightened to ultimate reality, because that experience will still be processed through the stories, perspectives, and shadows of the awakened person. Waking up is about coming to see the illusion of separation. It is the cessation of the false self that causes us to suffer and to strive. It is about seeing ultimate reality with a clear and ungrasping mind. Wilber argues that “waking up” must be accompanied by “growing up” and “cleaning up” in order to be healthy and holistic.

  Growing up is about dealing with those fundamental mythic structures and points of view through which our state of being is lived. Our worldview determines whether we interpret the all-pervading light that we may see in our deep meditative state as God, an angel, a bodhisattva, an alien invasion, or a firing of neurons. An awakened perspective can still be embodied in a person whose view of the world is entrenched in authoritarianism, exclusivity, superstition, xenophobia, or bigotry.

  Wilber points out how the East has often focused much more energy on waking up, and therefore often has better practices and philosophies toward that end than we do in the West. For all of their waking up, however, they have often left out important aspects of growing up that have ultimately hindered their spiritual progress and health. Many in India, for instance, have woken up to the nondual isness of reality but remain in harmful caste systems that value certain people over others.

  Conversely, in the West, we have collectively done a lot more growing up with some of these sorts of social justice issues—the feminist movement, civil rights, scientific inquiry, equa
lity, etc. Of course, we still have a long way to go in all of these areas, but at the helm of Western moral and social development, we are often further along in “growing up” issues like this than many other places in the world. As far as waking up, however, the West is almost entirely asleep. As far as academia and power systems are concerned, the movement towards waking up to ultimate reality is not even present in our awareness.

  As Wilber argues, a healthy spirituality would do well to include progress in waking up (realization of ultimate truth), growing up (maturity in relative truth), cleaning up (psychological shadow work), and showing up (compassion and activism).

  Spiritual maturity takes time, energy, and practice.

  In the fourth and final of the Noble Truths in Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama laid out his eightfold path for reaching nirvana, the cessation of suffering—right views, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Obviously, much has been written about all of this, and the specific traditions of Buddhism differ greatly in their approach, perspectives, and emphasis on all of it. For the purposes of this book, this fourth and final section will focus on exploring what I have found to be helpful pathways for experiencing deeper and deeper levels of freedom and enlightenment where life is lived to the fullest—not imprisoned by suffering, not blinded by illusion, but fully present, content, and awake.

  But it is important to realize that in talking about the Way, we are not talking about a list of things that one has to do or believe in order to achieve enlightenment, as though enlightenment was some sort of a badge of honor or trophy to be won so that the ego feels better about itself.

  In 2017, I received an email from a twenty-year-old from Missouri who told me he was enlightened, and he thought that from following my work, I might be too, unless I was just bopping in and out of temporary states and experiences of realization. I was intrigued. He came and spent a few days at my house with me. He smoked a lot of weed. He was into astrology. He told me that he wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump was enlightened and just screwing around. The kid made me laugh, and I really liked him, but occasionally I would notice there was something about the way he talked about enlightenment that elicited some friction within me.