The most recent visitor to the house to accomplish full awakening was Paul. For the last two weeks he was here I didn't speak to him at all. I only saw him occasionally as he went off for walks or while he sat on one of the garden benches amid the blowing snow. That doesn't mean that's all he did, that's just all I know about. I don't go down and hang out with the guests much and I'm sure that far more goes on in this house than I'll ever know about. I would guess, however, that Paul wasn't doing a lot of socializing during this period.
It was winter when he told me. A crisp night but not frigid, fresh snow on the ground. One of those nights that all the stars came out for in a crystalline vision that awed the wind to stillness. A night so clear and silent that it felt staged. A perfect winter evening like we see here maybe once or twice a year. That's why I was out walking in it. At a crossroads a couple of miles from the house
Paul joined me. I was pleased to see him. I'm always pleased to see anyone when they get where I believed Paul was at that point.
He joined me silently and we walked on. It was ten minutes before he spoke.
"I'm done."
I smiled as warmth poured through my heart. Warmed by the memory of the day I came to the same startling and improbable conclusion for myself, and warm for the times I had heard it from others. Warm knowing the journey one takes to arrive at such a place and warm knowing what lies ahead.
That's how it is when you get here—no bells and whistles, no radiant backlighting, no choirs of angels. As Layman P'ang put it, you're
"just an ordinary fellow who has completed his work."
"I have no more questions," Paul said.
He didn't just mean he had no more questions for me, he meant he had no more questions, period.
That's how it is when you get to the end, you're just done.
What he wasn't saying, though he could have, was that
he now knew all there was to know—everything.
He had arrived at the end of knowledge and now possessed the only perfect knowledge.
He wasn't saying it because it's too big to say, but I knew he was thinking it because it was true and it's too big not to think.
We continued walking. The moon was three quarters full and lent a radiant sheen to the fresh snow spread like a satin sheet over a slumbering earth.
Paul didn't say anything else until we got back to the house. It occurred to me that he had probably been "done" for a few weeks and had spent the time getting accustomed to this new and unexpected state.
That's how it is at the end. Even if you've been told a thousand times that there's an end to knowledge—to seeking—you're stunned and perplexed when you reach it. You've spent a few years fighting battle after battle, each more grueling than the one before, and never, never, with any expectation whatsoever that you'll ever really emerge victorious in this life.
And then, one day, there it is.
Nothing. No more enemies, no more battles. The sword that seems welded to your hand can now be dropped, once your fingers can be pried from it. There's nothing left to contend against and nothing left that must be done, and there will never be anything that must be done ever again.
Even then, it's very possible that you don't know what you are or where you are.
It's just over, and nothing comes along to replace it. In novels you see freshly converted vampires wondering what their new status entails. "Am I a vampire or just nuts?" "What's the deal with garlic and crucifixes and sunlight and coffins?" "Am I immortal? How do I verify it?" "What's true and what's myth?" It can be like that.
I've heard that the Zen guys say it takes ten years to get the hang of it, and for them that means ten years in the most conducive imaginable environment—a Zen monastery where it's all enlightenment, 24/7/365. Imagine, on the other hand, spending that adjustment period in the midst of a society that devalues spirituality and in which even the spiritual experts are unwitting masters of disinformation. That can be a damned peculiar ten years.
And what comes after? Well, as I understand from practitioners of Jnana Yoga who have spoken to me of it, (my apologies to them and anyone else whose teachings I'm distorting in this book), one emerges from that ten-year period of assimilating as a jnani—one who knows. That's what I am, I suppose, but the process of reduction that brought me from ajnani to jnani is not over.
Even now it takes a conscious effort to maintain my false self,
my dream character—
to animate it, to keep it running.
And this trajectory I'm on will take me as close to non-existence as anyone can get and still have a body.
In other words, I will continue to channel progressively less and less energy into my dreamstate being,
my teaching will reduce down to it's most refined and least tolerant form, my interest will withdraw from the world, and I will become as minimal as a person can be.
Whether or not Jnana Yoga or Zen Buddhism or any other
system confirms this process is moot because I confirm it myself, directly. I
don't defer to teachers or teachings. I see myself receding in this manner.
Writing this book has accelerated the process,
but this is where the road has always led.
When Krishna finished what he came to do he entered a forest and just kept walking until he collapsed from fatigue. A passing hunter mistook his feet for the ears of a deer and killed him with a single arrow. That walk might be viewed as the progressive withdrawal of energy, so maybe when my time comes I'll just walk off into the tall corn until I drop from fatigue, and have my feet mistaken for ripe ears of corn by a passing John Deere harvester.
I don't defer to teachers or teachings? Wow. That sounds like I'm already pretty intolerant, so maybe it's something I should expand on a bit.
Here's the deal:
I am fully enlightened—fully truth-realized. I am here, live, on the scene, and I have chosen to describe it as I see it.
I don't defer. I don't rely. If what I describe conflicts with the ten- thousand other reports—no matter how revered those reports and those who filed them may be—then to me those reports are nothing more than fable and folklore and should be consigned to the dustheap of history.
The simple fact is that I am here and "here"
doesn't look all that much like anyone says it does and I'm not going to waste my time or anyone else's pretending otherwise.
It should be noted that "here" isn't mist-enshrouded or poorly lit. It's neither mysterious nor mystical.
My knowledge is unflawed and my vision is unobstructed.
This is a tricky point to make, but a critical one. I am not interpreting. I am not translating. I am not handing something down that was handed down to me. I'm here, now, telling you what I see in the most straightforward possible terms.
If that sounds harsh, then get used to it. This is a harsh business. I'm not writing this book to make money or gain followers or to be popular. I'm writing it to get it out of my system.
My message isn't that you should believe me about what it's like here, but that you can come see for yourself.
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
— Walt Whitman —
Returning to Paul's transition, the analogy of a caterpillar- chrysalis-butterfly transformation is also apt. (We must rely heavily on analogies—the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, and all that.
Unlike the newly emerged butterfly, however, the freshly enlightened have
no primal instinct to inform and guide them.
When I myself went through this experience I knew it was immense. I knew it was uncommon in the extreme. I knew it was the supreme accomplishment beside which all others paled to insignificance.
I could look at or listen to any person and know instantly that they hadn't been through it.
And yet, I wasn't to know for years that it was enlightenment.
Damned peculiar.
When I finally did put it together, it was a very comforting— albeit mind-boggling, earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting—realization.
I had spent years as a closet butterfly moping around with caterpillars and dreaming highly fictionalized dreams of becoming a butterfly. I knew that I was distinctly different from the caterpillars.
I knew that an uncrossable chasm separated us, that
I wasn't one of them anymore, that they weren't like me nor I like they.
I knew I was able to communicate with them only in the most superficial sense based on my rapidly fading memories of their language and habits.
What it took me a while to understand, though, was that the reason I wasn't one of them anymore was because I was something else, and that the difference was absolute.
I had earned admission to a whole new reality but I hadn't yet passed into it because no one
explained to me that this new order of being I had become was what caterpillars meant when they said "butterfly."
After all, who is there to explain such a thing to someone who doesn't even know enough to ask?
Damned peculiar.
How is such a state of ignorance and confusion even possible? Simply put, caterpillars are egregiously misinformed on the subject of butterflies, just as we see in the novels and film that humans are egregiously misinformed on the subject of vampires. And who's to correct them? Vampires don't hang out with humans. Vampires don't return to educate humans, don't mingle with humans, don't care one way or another what humans think. Why should they? They're beings of an entirely different order with only the most superficial similarity to the order of beings to which they once belonged.
And that's very much what the enlightenment thing is like. Instead of vampires and butterflies, just imagine being the only adult in a world of children.
Really. Imagine how you'd develop over the years. Imagine how your feelings about children might change. Imagine the person you'd become.
Damned peculiar.
How many people actually get this far? How many people are really enlightened? Many claim it, but how many actually are it? I have no idea, but I would guess very few. Some of those in a position to speculate have estimated that one in ten thousand take to the idea and one in ten thousand of those actually make it, meaning one in a hundred million.
Thinking worldwide and timewide, I'd agree that it's in that range—that there are a few dozen truth-realized beings alive on earth at any time.
And how many of those few dozen, like myself,
make an effort to assist others? Make themselves known?
Less.
That's quite understandable, really.
Once you get past the notion that duality (by any name) is "bad" and unity (by any name) is "good," you also get past any need to "help" or "save" anyone.
I, for instance, don't do what I do because I think it needs doing. I am moved by no ethical or altruistic motive.
I don't think something is wrong and that I have to make it right. I don't do it to ease suffering or to liberate beings. I do it simply because I'm so inclined. I have a built-in urge to express what I find interesting, and the only thing I find interesting is the great journey that culminates in abiding non-dual awareness.
I heard that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was very happy with his reclusive life in the foothills of the Himalayas and may never have rejoi
ned society, but that he began hearing the name of an Indian city in his head. It simply appeared unbidden in his thoughts. When he finally mentioned it to someone, they advised that the only way to get the name of the town out of his head was to go there. He did, got swept into a speaking engagement, and the whole Transcendental Meditation movement grew out of it. That makes sense to me. You observe events and you allow the flow of things to do the steering and you go where you go.
So here I am, knowing something that other people want to know and, in this particular instance, being in the right place to say some things that will simplify
life for Paul at this point in his journey.
There isn't much precedent for a person to stop being one kind of being and start being another, and no one is ever prepared coming into it. It may be absurd to speak of it, but it's far more absurd to live it.
If this all sounds exceedingly strange, let me assure you, it is. And it's something I prefer not to let others struggle with when I see them freshly emerged from their two years, give or take, of soul- wrenching conflict.
So, as Paul and I stood in front of the house and that glorious crystalline night, I was pleased to say to him:
"Welcome."
We spent the next hour discussing weird things like vampires and butterflies and solitude and the next day and the next decade.
"You get the gateless gate thing now?" I asked.
"Oh," he said as comprehension dawned in him. "Ha!" he laughed, which is about all you can do.
I didn't say anything. I wasn't teaching now. I wasn't trying to draw him out or guide him toward certain realizations. He'd already done it all. I was no longer Paul's teacher—he had destroyed me as his teacher.
In a very true sense he knew every bit as much as I did.
Enlightenment isn't like graduating high school only to start college, or even finishing college to enter the "real" world. It's the final graduation. No more hunt, no more chase, no more battle. Now you can go out in the world and do whatever you want—learn guitar, jump out of airplanes, write books, tend grapes, whatever.
Our teacher-student relationship was over. This conversation was just one guy who'd been around for a while showing the new guy the ropes.
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