The house is like a small community. People come, stay for week or a year, friendships form, difficult good-byes are said. I'm sure the relationships in the house are deeper and more complex than I describe, but I am pretty insulated from the day-to-day affairs of the household and its occupants, and that's a good thing.
For the last five months or so we've had a mother and daughter with us. The mother, Maria, is one of the many who show up with pretty distorted views about what enlightenment is. I can't really teach her anything for now, I can only encourage her to take a look at her basic assumptions and develop a willingness to revisit them in a new light. As is often the case, she'll probably prefer her romanticized beliefs over the harsher realities and move on rather than change. The misconception about enlightenment stems from, or is at least compounded by, the fact that
most of the world's recognized experts on the subject of enlightenment are not enlightened. Some
are great mystics, some are great scholars, some are both, and most are neither, but very few are awake.
This core misconception will be a big theme in this book because it's the primary obstacle in the quest for enlightenment. Nobody's getting there because nobody knows where there is, and those who are entrusted to point the way are, for a variety of reasons, pointing the wrong way.
At the very heart of this confusion lies the belief that abiding non-dual awareness—enlightenment—and the non-abiding experience of cosmic consciousness—mystic union—are synonymous when, in fact, they're completely unrelated.
It's possible to have either without the other, and there are countless millions of cases of mysticism and cosmic consciousness of varying degree for every one case of enlightenment. Of course, true cases of enlightenment are unlikely to attract attention to themselves,
so it is certain that there are more than is apparent (like vampires!). However, the simple fact remains that enlightenment and mysticism have little or nothing in common.
Anyone, myself included, who has had a taste of mystic union will naturally assume it to be the very summit of human experience, which I believe it is. It would follow from there that
anyone who enjoyed more frequent access or greater ease of access to such a
rarefied state would be at or near the summit of humanity.
All well and good until such a one is labeled spiritually enlightened.
He or she may be a divine avatar or love incarnate or the supreme godhead, but enlightenment is something else.
The critical distinction is that one is in the dream and the other is not.
One is truth-realized and the other is not. One is within consciousness and one is independent of consciousness.
The enlightened have awakened from the dream and no longer mistake it for reality.
Naturally,
they are no longer able to attach importance to anything.
To the awakened mind the end of the world is no more or less momentous than the snapping of a twig.
"The wise see the same in all," says the Gita. "The wise are impartial," says the Tao. The enlightened cannot conceive of anything as being wrong, so they don't struggle to make things right.
Nothing is better or worse, so why try to adjust things?
Members of movie audiences don't leap out of their seats to save characters in the film. If the movie shows an asteroid blazing toward the earth, the screen remains unscorched and the moviegoers don't race home to spend their final hours with loved ones. If they did, they would be hauled off to the nearest mental health facility and treated for a delusional disorder.
The enlightened view life as a dream, so how could they possibly differentiate between right and wrong or good and evil?
How can
one turn of events be better or worse than another?
Of what real importance is anything in a dream?
You wake up and the dream is gone as if it never was. All the characters and events that seemed so real have simply vanished. The enlightened may walk and talk in the dreamworld, but they don't mistake the dream for reality.
Enlightenment is about truth. It's not about becoming a better or happier person.
It's not about personal growth or spiritual evolution.
An accurate ad for enlightenment would make the toughest marine blanche.
There is no higher stakes game in this world or any other, in this dimension or any other.
The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they're paying it.
In the simplest terms, enlightenment is impersonal, whereas what is commonly peddled as enlightenment is personal in the extreme. We'll cover this in more detail as we go since I guess that's what my life and the house and this book are all about. Suffice it to say for now that one of the most mission critical tasks on the road to enlightenment is figuring out what enlightenment is not.
It's funny who gets into the house and how they come. Apparently you don't just show up with your bags and make yourself at home. Maria came from California with Annie, her seven year- old daughter, to be here. She heard about it through the grapevine or from someone else who had been here or something like that. But Sonaya doesn't let people in that easily. (I didn't know all this until Annie explained it to me.) Maria and Annie were sent to a rooming house in town and were advised to come out for daily visits to see how they took to things, and how things took to them.
Annie also told me how things like chores, meals, bathroom schedules, and other such household matters worked. She seemed to have a pretty good handle on all of it and I was surprised, as always, to get a glimpse of what a complicated ship Sonaya was running, and how skillfully she ran it.
"Do you like Sonaya?" I asked Annie.
"Sonaya is love," Annie replied, as if the question were too stupid to ask, which, I suppose, it was.
Sonaya arrived five years ago and simply took over. In the first few months of her time here I learned that she had been with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness for about twenty- five years. She had run households and kitchens when she was with them, too. Her devotions hadn't shifted, she once explained to me. When she was with them she wasn't really with them but with Krishna, and now she wasn't really with me, but with Krishna.
I got it. Not immediately, but eventually I realized that in all things, in every action, in every second of every day, she was practicing a
conscious devotion to her lord. It might look like she was cooking for the group or washing floors for her own sense of cleanliness or managing the complexities of a diverse group of people for the benefit of those people or running an accidental ashram for me, but once I got the hang of her and really started paying attention to the way she paid attention to, well, everything, then I saw it. She was present in every moment, and every moment was a devotion to Krishna. It had nothing to do with me or the house or the whole whatever's-going-on-here thing. Sonaya was doing what Sonaya did, and this was just the place where she did it.
And who or what was Krishna to her? Was he the blue-skinned youth of portraits? Arjuna's charioteer? Vishnu? Brahma? I don't know. Sonaya has never been my student in any sense. She has never asked me anything and I have never been tempted to translate her worldview into my terms or mine into hers. She has the most beautiful and fully integrated faith I have ever been privileged to observe. She could command armies or govern nations with the same apparent ease with which she runs this house. She shines. She is always radiant and soft, even when she's being hard. If there's a mystic in our household, it's Sonaya—she's the mystical one. She possesses effortless correctness and imperturbability at all times and in all things. She is above and beyond the tasks and chores in which she is constantly absorbed. She, like me, is a different order of being, but neither caterpillar nor butterfly. I don't know what that makes her, but I am profoundly grateful to have her near.
From my point of view, of course, Sonaya was heaven-sent. There is no house without Sonaya. No book. No me prattling on and on. Well, I'd still be prattling, but probably only with a slightly malnourished and deathly bored dog for an audience. I love this planet and this universe and this whole human thing, and one of the reasons I love it is because of the magic that holds it all together. When I look at Sonaya I see that magic most clearly.
Annie delights me. I'm not really able to form attachments with adult humans, but cats, dogs, and children are a different matter. Annie leads me by the hand through the gardens and behind the summer kitchen and down to one of the ditches that run along the road. The property is full of mysteries and wonders that she must share or else she will simply burst as new mysteries and wonders constantly pour in. I'm her relief valve of the moment. As long as she reports to someone the exact wonderfulness of each wonder, she can cross it off her burgeoning list and move on. There's no time for me to take a closer look at the deer prints in the mud of an adjacent farm field because we have to get over to the mailbox to take note of a spider web complete with spider and captured prey, then to the lar
gest of the oaks on the property to see an abandoned bird's nest, then to the river birches to see an inhabited bird's nest, and we have to hurry or else we won't have time for follow-the-leader before meditation.
A little judicious route-planning might have economized our energy expenditures, but Annie is fabulously well-to-do in this regard and naturally unmindful of those less fortunate. Nevertheless, I am able to hold my own for the first two or three minutes of follow-the-leader. After that, the somersaults, cartwheels, bunny-hops, puddle-stomps and imaginary hopscotch begin to take their toll and I am forced to retire to the less strenuous pursuits of gasping and moaning. I collapse into the grass to await the arrival of stretcher- bearers. Annie helps me wait by sitting on my chest and bouncing.
Meditation is 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. No one is required to meditate, but everyone is asked to be quiet during this period. I don't meditate much, and when I do it's usually early in the morning, so I like to take advantage of this quiet period to sit on the front porch or in the living room. It's generally understood that this is a time when I'm available to anyone who wants to talk. Sometimes one person comes along and focuses on their stuff of the moment, and sometimes a group will form and a broader dynamic will play out. I don't have a preference. It's usually a pleasant time for me.
The material I teach presents no problems or challenges for me. That's what being a master means, I suppose. I know this stuff front and back, in and out. I could teach it in my sleep and maybe I do. What is a challenge is how the information is received. Most or all of what I say fits into the receiving brain in a particular place, but there's always something already there. It's never an empty slot just waiting to be filled. Not only will every slot already be filled, but there will also be security—probably very tight security—guarding it. If I taught English Lit to eighth graders it would just be a matter of keeping it interesting so the connection stayed open while I uploaded new info, but this is different. No one comes here for their first exposure to the spiritual dimension. Everyone comes pre-edu- cated and the education they arrive with is, for all practical purposes, worse than useless. That's what I deal with and I'm not a master of cranial lock-picking, I just try hard to do my bit and know that success and failure is out of my hands.
It's amazing how desperately we cling to our beliefs. As history shows,
the fastest way to reduce otherwise decent people to a state of savagery is by tampering with their belief system
.
The word for someone who does so is heretic, and historically the punishments reserved for him are more brutal than for any other class of offender.
The point is that by the time people come to me, their beliefs
are securely in place.
No one approaches me and asks to have their hard- won beliefs demolished. They come to build upon what they already have and to continue along the course they've already begun. Demolition, though, is exactly what they need. If, that is, they want to wake up.
But that's a very big "if." How many of them really want what it really is? My opinion is that only a fraction of one percent of seekers of enlightenment are even pointed in the right general direction. I would also say, however, that the percentage is slightly higher if you're looking at the group that has made it to this house or to this book, to me and this message. At the time of this writing, the message you find in this book and that I share with our guests at the house—enlightenment stripped of its spiritual trappings—is uncommon in the extreme. I say that a higher percentage of people sitting with me or holding this book desire enlightenment for what it really is because we all get what we need when we need it.
If the universe has set you in front of me or put this book into your hands, then in all likelihood you are closer than most to honestly confronting the stark reality of your situation.
It works both ways— when the teacher appears, the student is ready.
Very seldom does someone come along who has already started down the path I extol.
Paul was an example of one who did.
He was
already in the right mindset
and well on his way.
For him I was a counselor, a gentle guide and a reassuring voice in the relentless battle he was waging.
But that's a rare exception.
Most of those who come to the house have already bought into or been sold on the whole sweetness-and-light spirituality thing. They want to become better people, more open, more loving, happier, closer to God, and they want to achieve spiritual enlightenment because, as everybody knows, that's where the spiritual path leads.
The yellow brick road may be a trip,
but it's all about Oz, baby.
They've been sold on the enlightenment thing and that's what they want. I don't know what they think enlightenment really is because I only have them to go by and they don't know. I ask and I usually get the same vague answers about higher consciousness, tat tvam asi, unity, bliss, oneness, no-mind and so forth. They peddle the same stuff to me that someone else peddled to them with no real understanding being developed during the layover. Small wonder, since—to borrow from Gertrude Stein—there's no "there" there. What they're describing is, for the most part, a whimsical, mythological sort of Heaven/Shangri La/Nirvana for the Hindu/Buddhist/New Age crowd who have managed to step out of their Judeo-Christian upbringing. There's just enough merit in their notions of enlightenment to make it sell, but at the end of the day you're either
a caterpillar or a butterfly, and the only way anyone will ever have even the slightest sense of what it means to be a butterfly is to become one.
There are no butterfly experts among the caterpillars, despite innumerable claims to the contrary, and I encourage my students to at least consider the possibility that the world is up to its poles in caterpillars who quite successfully convince themselves and others that they are actually butterflies.
Or, to say it plainly,
the vast majority of the world's authorities on enlightenment are themselves not enlightened. They may be something, but they're not awake. An easy way to distinguish between caterpillars and butterflies is to remember that the enlightened don't attach importance to anything, and that enlightenment doesn't require knowledge. It's not about love or compassion or consciousness.
It's about truth.
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