08 What are we actually after?
WHAT IF YOU SPENT YEARS AND YEARS OF YOUR LIFE SEEKING RELIGIOUS OR SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT, BUT WERE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE THE WHOLE TIME? IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW TO MILLIONS OF SEEKERS AROUND THE WORLD. IF THE TRADITIONAL TAKE ON ENLIGHTENMENT IS WRONG HEADED, WHAT MIGHT BE A SANER TELOS FOR US TODAY?
BY ROBERT K.C. FORMAN, PH.D.
afternoon was at least a good chunk of the very enlightenment that the ancient texts had been describing and that I’d been pursuing. The reason I struggled to understand it,
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and why I’m telling you this, is that what had happened to me wasn’t at all like what it was cracked up to be. It didn’t make me happy. It didn’t end the worries and fears that had led me into the spiritual path to begin with. An infinite silence at my core, yes, but I wasn’t better off in any obvious way than I might have been. Enlightenment just ain’t what we
n January 4, 1972, at 4:00 in the afternoon, on a 9 month long meditation retreat, I went through a spiritual
transformation. My sense of who or what I was shifted. I suddenly became utterly separate from all that I did, said or even thought. You couldn’t miss it. My sense of who I was became what they call ‘universal consciousness’. And it turned out to be permanent. I didn’t know what had happened to me.
It would take me some ten years of regular meditation, graduate work in religion and study of the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures before I came to understand that what had shifted in my life that
expected, and it’s not what I was after. I’d dare say it isn’t what any of us on the spiritual path who live post modern, post- Freudian, post true-believer, sexually active, mortgaged lives actually are after either. Paul McCartney wrote a little ditty
about enlightenment, calling it “such a joy, joy, joy”. Joy, joy, joy this wasn’t! In my work organising spiritual
teachers and leaders, I’ve had occasion to interview five people with virtually identical enlightenment experiences. They all had similar reactions: interesting, yes. Important, yes. But they still struggled in the rest of their lives. Harvard scholar Jeffrey Martin has been studying subjects who report
enlightenment. Very little of how they are in the world, he says, is unusual. They often maintain their addictions, their mental disorders, their racial and gender biases, and so on. He finds virtually no differences in their personalities. ‘Enlightenment’, mtoksha, nirvana,
Christ Consciousness, means something very specific. It can be seen most clearly in a famous passage from the Upanishads: Two birds, Inseparable companions, Perch on the same tree. One eats the fruit, The other looks on. The first bird is our individual self, Feeding on the pleasures and pains of this world; The other is the universal Self, Silently witnessing all. To be ‘enlightened’ is like being two
‘birds’ at once. One part of us pecks noisily and flutters about. It’s the half that lives our outer lives. The other half just ‘looks on’. Whatever we might do or think, the active and noisy part of us is ‘silently witnessed’ by that second bird, the quiet ‘universal Self’. That second half of us knows consciousness in some unusually deep way; and it remains aware of or ‘witnesses’ whatever our active side does or thinks.
The same is seen in Buddhism’s famous Dhammapada: “the mind is kept independent of its own thoughts. (¶45)” We stay independent of whatever we see or think: one part of us sees and acts; the other doesn’t. Again, we’re like two birds. Don’t mistake this for an emotional
disconnect, by the way. It’s more a deep sense of remaining peaceful and unchanging while the changes take place around us. Enlightenment then is a shift in the
structure of who we are. What we see, think and feel keeps going as before, but we remain at some deep level unconnected with it. That’s what happened to me in 1972,
and to the others that I’ve interviewed. There’s a lightness that comes with this shift, a sense of freedom in what we’re about that it seems to foster. It is as interesting as it is valuable. But, by itself, it wasn’t enough for me.
Nor is it enough for most of us moderns. It doesn’t make us good at our jobs, it doesn’t even make it clear which job we should do. It doesn’t help us be a good wife or husband. It’s a sense of spaciousness, of freedom, yes, but it’s not a personality transplant.
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