Enlightenment: Tears in the Rain

continuing from the dialog at I-I pod on the question what is enlightenment ? this is part two of  the below post: enlightenment one, oh one?

most of the western world associates the word enlightenment with a hugely important movement in the 1700's in europe that transformed the old world monarchies, religious hegemony and persecution of science and art in powerful ways that go to the essence of what the founding fathers of america were so passionate about….

i might also say - you have enlightened me - after a session with my computer techie….

but in the context of this discussion i think we mean something else.

enlightenment is used to indicate a very special state of consciousness that is not passing but has become stablized in a specific individual and makes them almost beyond human in the way they experience and percieve life. yes?

this idea is, shall we say, archetypal. while it is different culturally in important ways, it is in some ways on a par with the saviour archetype from the middle east (then of course we get the avatar/guru/god-man archetype that adi da, sai baba, osho, maharaj ji and others have exploited to great effect) , and perhaps also has some commonalities with the arthurian hero returning from the quest transformed and bearing the grail cup…

now there are important differences here, but to extend the mythic symbol bit -  there is a literal meaning to virgin birth and to world savior too, there is a literal meaning to a griffin, but these things are understood by reasonable people not to indicate literal events or entities but to be symbolic, archetypal constructs that carry psycho-spiritual meaning.

so too, i am saying with enlightenment.

i wanted to play a little with this:

from the hindus we get the central metaphysical dynamism of enlightenment - the soul is reincarnated again and again based on the karma of the soul at death. the world is understood to be a lesser realm of suffering and illusion (samsara) spiritual insight begins when we realize that the world of appearances is ultimately unsatisfying and contaminated - we then begin to strive for nirvana - literally the annihilation of the egoic patterns that keep us chained to the wheel of rebirth - because we want to go beyond all that into atman-brahman.

now this striving for nirvana is performed by yoga, meditation, puja to various deities, fire ceremonies, austerities in some cases as severe (for the saddhu) as reliquishing possessions piercing or cutting the flesh, and covering oneself in ash from the funeral pyres daily to show ones diminishing attachment to the world, the body etc…certainly sex and tasty food are foregone in the interest of cultivating a taste for something higher than the sense pleasures..

so this is transcendentalism.

the goal is to transcend the world in order to find god.

period.

in this quest, a guru is deemed useful. the guru is one who is already enlightened. he has tasted nirvana in his deep meditations. he has purified mind and body enough to sit in states of nirvanic bliss for hours at a time and to see beyond the veil of illusion to his true nature as atman - which is the spark of divine brahman consciousness in each of us. no longer is he identified with the push and pull of his karma, he is now free and has penetrated to a stabilized consciousness of the mystery that the unenlightened do not understand.

this transcendentalist essence at the root of this set of dynamics is not unique to india, but it is where we get the archetype of the enlightened one from. this material resonates with our own deep (and i would say erroneous) judaeo-christian mythic dualisms between god and the world, this life and the next, the shame of the senses, sexuality and the purity of the spiritual life etc… and the need to submit to the strong and wise parental figure - be it god or the guru, the patriarch or the priest.

of course the buddha comes along.

now the buddha wanders for 6 years in search of enlightenment - becoming so adept at the practices that each master offers him a franchise (which he refuses), so skinny that you can see his spine from the front, so commited that he gives up his super-priviledged background in order to find freedom from death, old age and sickness. in order to know what is really valuable in life.

ultimately the buddha discovers that the radical asceticism of the saddhu is empty, that the quest to find and identify with atman is a waste of time.

the buddha returns from his long night under the bo tree with a nascent psychotherapeutic approach to meditation. his four noble truths outline a psychological tangle that he says we can be free of by following an 8 fold path.

the buddha becomes identified as the definitive archetype of enlightenment, but now the realization is not one of nirvana and atman or ultimate self, but one of no-self and the nature of suffering. the buddha's methodology is less rooted in the mythic dynamism of reincarnation and the possibility of getting off the wheel and more concerned with the here-and-now reality of your life as observed through the dedicated practice of insight. his is again a nascent existentialist psychotherapeutic approach to meditation.

now as is always the case we

1) tend to imagine that the human being and the archetype they represent are one and the same. we imagine, erroneously, that a human being can become an archetype. so the buddha is seen as a somewhat superhuman figure - this is rooted n our need to believe that somehow human beings can overcome our limitations - little things like oh, death, for example - and become heroic immortal spiritual beings. it is this archetypal conflation that hovers behind all humans who claim enlightenment and it is fundamentally incorrect and rooted in magical thinking and existential denial.

so we fetishize the enlightened person and imbue them with the primal energies of our anxiety soothing fantasy of overcoming death. this will often completely obscure out ability to see clearly the nature of what is happening in relaity with the guru, their community and ourselves - which would actually be the opposite of any kind of meaningful enlightenement in my eyes - but more on that later…

2) this process tends to lead to the creation of a religion. the awakened special person becomes deified and their observatiions from a discrete state of consciousness get turned into doctrine that is believed in but usually not based in much direct experience.

so what i am attempting here is to prepare the way for a few distinctions:

a) there is a difference between a practice-based spiritual path of inquiry that is a journey into acceptance of the human condition and one that (consciously or not) is running a dualistic transcendentalist program. the non-dual schools in both hindu and buddhist teaching are uncommon. for example the yoga sutras of patanjali so venerated by yogis are explicitely dualistic and spring from the hindu outline i gave above. for example goenkaji's free meditation ten day retreats that are the introduction to vipassana for many people are explicitely dualistic. they perpetuate an intense inner conflict in the name of awakening and encourage a kind of over-identification with certain aspects of our being and complete dissociation from and repression of other aspects - in order to become enlightened.

now we can see the western version of this shadow denial showing up in people like ted haggard, yes? or say george w. bush.

one of the great advances in our understanding has to do with the jungian concept of the shadow, which stands on the shoulders of freud's concept of the unconscious. with these two principles in hand we see that a more integrated path is about exploring  our depths rather than overcoming them. owning our shadows with awareness rather than excoriating them with self-righteous sado-masochism. (sound a little extreme? well, think of the fakirs and saddhus, think of the self-flaggelating priests and torturing inquisitors, think of the islamic  jihadists….i use the term sado-masochistic very intentionally and calmly…)

so this brings us to tantric, non-dual paths and philosophies - unfortunately fraught with their own problems, but more interesting at least to me. :O) more later….

b) there is a difference between paths that subtly or not so subtly perpetuate category error beliefs in divine human personages and ultimate states of consciousness, overcoming of deathy, eternal life, miracles etc   ( see sai baba, adi da, the entire history of christianity etc, for why these deeply flawed premises lead inevitably to disaster..) and paths that are about seeing reality clearly and growing cognitively beyond the point of idealizing , fantasizing and the narcissistic need to be perfect or be close to someone who is perfect…

c) there is a difference between recognizing developmental stages and following a path of peak experience of various states that later become integrated into permanent traits, all the while staying grounded in real life and releasing illusory prerational metaphysical beliefs in favor of the awesome mystery of life in-us-as-us with no promises and no talismanic protection from evil, no perefect synchronistic fantasy of control over reality or special treatment form the universe on the one hand, and the idea that developental stages lead ultimately to a stage in which all development is transcended and all develomental deficits, existential anxieties and traumatic scars are magically erased, on the other.

i think that the non-dual pespective in its updated form includes the kind of discernement that allows us to see this life, warts and all, anxieties and all, is itself sacred - that in fact sacredness (like god) is a human consttruct that has erroneously been projected outside of the human experience. that in fact it is our very mortality and the imperfection, nay, tragedy of the human experience that makes our moments of insight, freedom and compassion so intensely valuable and beautiful. and it is precisely their fleeting nature - lost like tears in the rain - that makes them so powerful in spite of and because of  their mortal decay.