This

  I questioned him about what he thought enlightenment was, and why he would keep calling himself enlightened. Wouldn’t making a point of calling yourself enlightened be believing that you are a small and separate self that can be enlightened? From my reading and experience, most people who seemed to be truly enlightened didn’t often go around emailing people, dubbing themselves as enlightened. Still, how could I know if this guy was actually enlightened or full of shit? He talked about reality in a way that sounded enlightened to me, using language like “Light of Light,” “Infinite Joke,” “Being-Consciousness-Bliss.” But I wondered why he believed in something like astrology that, in my perspective, was just another new-age ego reification attachment based in unscientific and unscrupulous myth? Why did he desire other substances to be in his mind so often if his mind was already completely settled and content with how everything is here and now?

  The more we talked, I noticed the desire in me growing to understand, to figure it out. For me, that is a very obvious sign of my ego trying to make some things happen. I could see that these questions weren’t really about him. They were about me. Did I (mis)understand enlightenment? Had the awakening that I had experienced to ultimate reality been full “enlightenment,” or were there other stages of spiritual development that I had yet to attain? Did any of that categorization really matter?

  The ego can be a clever bastard sometimes. In this case, my ego had tried to move from the experience of freedom to an identity of freedom. It was similar, even if far more subtle, than the old internal struggles of whether to believe or not believe in God, how to control my music career, or come to peace with Lucie’s Down syndrome diagnosis. It was a snag, like a tiny, invisible edge of a fingernail catching on silk. It was another toy in some corner of my mind wanting to be a real boy, a shadow that wanted to be a special someone who was enlightened. But alas, toys cannot be boys, and illusory, grasping egos can’t be enlightened any more than closing fists can be opening hands.

  That snag became yet another attachment that had to be let go of repeatedly before I eventually felt the constriction fully release. When it finally did, it literally felt like a tiny and subtle knot being uncoiled in my brain. That shadowy sense of self that had reemerged from the depths of my mind with its desire to be an enlightened self simply disappeared into the night, and there was, once again, just THIS.

  When the river reveals these sorts of shadows and unearthed constrictions in us, it is a great grace. One must first realize that some part of their body/mind is holding onto something in order to let it go. Letting go: That’s the one spiritual move (or unmove). It’s not even something that you “do” as much as something you stop doing. It’s not belief as much as it’s trust. It’s not trying to change anything, but simply being.

  We cannot choose to do this or that in order to someday attain enlightenment. Such an act would still be an act of grasping. Trying to let go is still clinging. Letting go is enlightenment.

  Of course, there may be times your body just isn’t ready to let go. The karma simply hasn’t run itself out yet. The trauma has not been worked out of your muscles in a safe space yet. And that’s okay. In the same way that I can’t drop a pencil and honestly expect it to float in midair, I can’t force my mind or body to let go of things that they aren’t ready to let go of, because there isn’t a separate self within my body to control my body with.

  A separate I is an illusion, a story being told in my brain. In fact, recent brain studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain implicated in much of our personality, planning, and overall captaining of the ship—seems to be sort of like a storyteller that is often just watching things happen in other parts of the brain and then telling the story within the conscious experience that “I did that.” You can directly observe the “I’m making this happen” phenomenon by simply observing your breath for a while. You can make it seem like “you” are consciously controlling your breath, but, of course, when you stop doing that, your breath continues perfectly naturally without a break between conscious and unconscious “control.” In reality, there is no real, separate you controlling anything. By the time you consciously decide to do something, brain scans have shown that other parts of the brain had already started things in motion. The narrator of your consciousness just catches up a split second later with its “decision.”

  This can be either a freeing or frustrating realization. Most of us are clutching the bar on the roller coaster, hoping to in some way control the ride. Others of us throw our hands in the air and laugh through the screams. Regardless of the illusory nature of the free will of the ego, we do all have experience, at least, of the subjective reality of making decisions; so, practically speaking, if there is anything to do with these ego snags, shadows, and constrictions that come up within us, it’s just to notice the tension and then let it go as much and as often as you feel able to. While sheer effort cannot make you something you are not (you’re already THIS ), the subjective experience of effort is necessary for you to meditate, to practice, to go to therapy, to do whatever it is that you need to do in order to see what you feel like you need to see and let go of what you need to let go of.

  Be kind and patient with yourself in this process of becoming free. To worry about it does nothing except exacerbate the problem. We cannot practice spirituality in order to discover freedom; the practice of spirituality is freedom. The time, energy, and practice is simply the training of our bodies and minds to not continue to grasp at the futility of our illusions and desires. Freedom is not something to be found somewhere else, it is simply THIS—here and now. There is nothing to be attained. No self to improve. Nothing to practice and no one to do the practicing. There is no battle to be won. There is nothing to lose and nothing to gain. Enlightenment is simply the most natural way for a human to be (even if that sometimes means a bit of weed or astrology are involved).

  Putting THIS into practice is the simple and natural surrender to the infinite and eternal creative life of the ever-unfolding now. It is “Not my will, but Thine be done.” Or as Ram Dass might say, just watch it all happening here and now, baby.

  How a specific wave reaches the shore is not up to any individual wave. But when I stop spending all my mental energy on the futility that is resisting the current, I am free—not free in the sense that I, little ego me, can do whatever I want or that I never experience loss, pain, or sadness, but free in the sense that there is nothing to be afraid of anymore. All of these emotions are simply happenings—another movement of the water, another timbre within the symphony. When you see THIS, you are free to fully experience it all, unfettered and wildly alive.

  Practicing Being

  “Draw bamboos for ten years, become a bamboo, then forget all about bamboos when you are drawing.” —GEORGE DUTHUIT

  In the last chapter we saw that freedom is letting go. Salvation is surrender. Knowing this, we can see that we need not practice meditation in order to try to get closer to enlightenment. Meditation is enlightenment.

  Early in the spiritual path, many of us tend to think of spirituality as some sort of austere other to ordinary life. But like Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century monk who famously “practiced the presence of God” primarily by washing dishes in his monastery, we can learn to “pray without ceasing.” I used to think that Paul’s admonition to pray without ceasing meant that I had to figure out how to think about something else (God) while doing ordinary things. But that’s not what freedom is. It’s actually the opposite. Freedom is not getting pulled away from THIS into that. Brother Lawrence did not need to work to try to abstract God into language and think about that while washing those dishes. On the contrary, the more fully present he was with those dishes, the more fully present he was with God.

  When spiritual practice is about somewhere other than here or now, it is not good spiritual practice. That is nothing but ego gratification. Good spiritual practice is whatever helps us become more present to THIS. Wi
th that in mind, it is clear to me that most of the heavy lifting in my spiritual practice has been done with music.

  Music is something that is always and only experienced in a present moment. You can notate representations of sounds in a way that will lead a skilled musician to play music in a particular sequence, rhythm, and emphasis. You can discuss the harmonic theory that the composer had in mind. You can try to extract meaning from and describe past performances of music, or analyze the planned instrumentation choices or song structure, but you can’t ever experience music itself except within the precision of a moment. As a musician, to hesitate is to miss the beat, to lose your place. On the other hand, to rush—to get too anxious or excited and then to force something to occur before its time—is awkward to the ear. To play musically, one must become, as the Zen Buddhists might say, like a ball floating on the river. The note must be played not too early and not too late but simply where it ought to be. The most musically mature people are those who have learned to relax and let the music happen through them. Good music is never a result of forceful competition between performers trying to overpower one another but of people finding a common flow with one another. With music, there is only flowing with it or not flowing with it. In fact, the music is the flow. But getting there takes practice.

  There have been a few times after a musical performance that I have been asked about the scales I was using while improvising. Those asking this question have often been aspiring improvisers themselves who want to take something concrete from the performance that they can practice at home. Mastering new scales is, after all, a necessary discipline for any competent improviser. Unfortunately, I never have a very practical answer to give these curious concertgoers because I don’t think of scales anymore while I am improvising on a stage. In fact, I’m rarely thinking of anything at all during a performance, especially if it’s a good one. In those moments, my mind and body have simply melded into the music. The notes I play are more like breathing than thinking. If there’s any thought, it’s the sound of the music itself, and not the theoretical building blocks like scales that make it up. Of course, to get to this point, I had to do a hell of a lot of thinking about scales.

  When one first begins to learn to improvise, it is not usually best to immediately dive into the deep end of the pool of free jazz or avant-garde composition, but instead to start with something simple. For instance, the teacher may play something like a C7 chord, and the student is instructed to spontaneously play some sort of melody over the top of the chord. But of the infinite possibilities before the student, how is she supposed to know what to play without it sounding like utter nonsense? This is where scales become helpful. Scales provide the basis for the idea of “correct” notes. If the chord is a C7, the teacher will teach a series of notes (a mixolydian scale, for example) that will sound generally pleasing to the ear within that C7 context. C notes, the student learns, are correct. C# notes are not correct. The student is instructed to go home and practice that C mixolydian scale over and over again until it is clean, comfortable, and internalized. The mastery of this scale will eventually allow the aspiring improviser to freely play any of the notes in the scale without worrying that any of them are going to ring out as dissonant or unpleasing to the ear. By knowing the scale, she does not necessarily need to know what every note she plays is going to sound like before she plays it in order for her to improvise a relatively “correct” solo. She can simply trust the scale to not lead her astray.

  As time goes on, and the improviser becomes more confident with that C mixolydian scale, perhaps she learns a new scale that can be used over a C7 chord—a G minor pentatonic scale, for example. By playing only the notes in a G minor pentatonic scale, the improviser can elicit a different sort of feeling over the exact same chord. At this stage, she still doesn’t need to know exactly what every note will sound like before she plays it, but as she becomes more acquainted with the feelings of the two different “correct” scales, she can alternate between them in order to elicit the general feelings of those scales as she desires.

  As the improviser continues to practice and grow through the years, she will likely add many other scales to her toolbox, each with their own unique flavor. At a certain point of her musical development, something interesting begins to happen; she begins to internalize the sound and feeling of the scales in the same way that one internalizes the rules of grammar or the natural cadence of a native language. At some point, all of the scales and feelings of those scales become like second nature, and she no longer needs to think in terms of scales during an improvisational performance any more than she needs to think in terms of the alphabet while having a conversation with someone. At some point, the guard rails fall off, and there is just the sound of the notes played over the chord. At this point, there are no more “correct” notes, no more rules or guidelines or structures of limitation. There is only the music, only THIS.

  Isn’t this also how it goes with religion? When we are young, we need someone to tell us the appropriate places to place our fingers on the frets. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Love thy neighbor as thyself. For years, we need to practice those scales, trying to learn how to not be completely selfish assholes all of the time. We learn how to love. Eventually, after years and decades of diligent practice, we start shedding the training wheels. We don’t need the Ten Commandments posted on our wall in order to not steal. We just don’t want to steal. Early on in our spiritual practice, we need black-and-white rules that tell us what is permissible and what is not. Eventually, as we mature, we are able to handle more complexity and nuance. We are able to see that there is no such thing as an “incorrect note” or that “everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.”

  The sort of maturity required to skillfully navigate the gray spaces usually takes many years of disciplined, hard work. Handing a trumpet to someone who doesn’t play and saying, “there are no wrong notes,” will not result in the same sort of music that came from the lips of genre-defying Miles Davis. One must learn to walk before learning to run. You can’t effectively break the rules until you know the rules. I think this is where mystics come from.

  As I have learned more about the different mystical traditions in the world, it has struck me how the great traditions all start sounding the same at a certain depth. At the outer (exoteric) and shallower (fundamentalist) levels of religion, every tradition is incredibly different—some wear robes and bells and chant om to themselves, while others wear skinny jeans and put on rock-and-roll shows on Sunday mornings for a bearded being in the sky. But when you find the people who have seriously practiced their scales for decades—those who have lost their own ego supremacy in the nondual fullness of THIS—they all start sounding a lot alike. For example, the teachings and spirituality of Father Richard Rohr (a Christian, Franciscan mystic) have a lot more in common with Ram Dass (a Hindu mystic), Hafiz (a Sufi mystic), or even Lao-Tzu (credited as the founder of Taoism) than they do with most other Christian teachings you might come across. I think this is because when you hear a master play, you are not simply hearing the fearful steps of a person trying to remain within an individual scale anymore. At this stage of spiritual maturity, there are no more “wrong notes.” A person like Richard Rohr is not afraid of traditions or metaphors outside his own. In fact, he’s learned from them.

  Improvisers have personalities. They have likes and dislikes, and some masterful improvisers that have transcended individual scales still tend to sound more at home in some scales than in others. Father Rohr talks about Christ a lot. Ram Dass talks about Maharaj-ji a lot. But neither of them are trapped inside of their own stories. The individual scales have been transcended to the place where there is only the music—only THIS.

  The reason music and religion have been my primary spiritual practices is not because music and religion are superior to other human disciplines, but because these are the primary stories I’ve inhabited in my
life. The truths of THIS could just as easily be spoken of through the lens and language of business, law, science, fashion, sports, food, or any other story that people experience THIS through.

  THIS doesn’t happen somewhere other than your normal, boring, everyday life. Nirvana is not limited to meditation retreats or sensory-deprivation float tanks. It is also a way of experiencing staff meetings and rush-hour traffic. Freedom from suffering doesn’t necessarily mean you get a new job or a bunch more free time to bliss out on acid. Freedom is being in on the Joke and playing it however you’d like. It is watching your boss get mad at you with the underlying confidence that it’s just a dream. When you know you’re dreaming, you’re free to play whatever games you wish.

  Letting go is freedom, but it is not simply freedom to dissipate into oneness. It is freedom to be. And to be human means to create, to tell and embody stories.

  As I explored in my first book, The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators,21 to be a human being is to be a creator. It is to imagine a world and then shape the world around one into that image. This way of being and making is not limited to the fine arts, but to all human endeavor. Accountants use spreadsheets; painters use canvases; carpenters, hammers and saws—but all rearrange reality according to their perceptions and desires. We are made of stories, and those stories are inherently generative. We are music making music. We are spotlights, wandering through infinity, shining our awareness here and there, discovering and creating order with our imaginations.