But first….
VIVA MEXICO!
It’s Cinco de Mayo.
One hundred and forty-four years ago, an out-numbered and out-gunned
army of 4,000 Mexicans tossed a French puppet-government out of Mexico in support of
their democratically elected president, Benito Juarez.
Viva Cinco de Mayo! It’s more than just an excuse to drink tequila.
The following article was commissioned by The BXU! Team and is posted on Non_Featured_Content
as well as here. If you don’t object to the likelihood of being
exposed to deliberately offensive comments and some possibly
pornographic profile pics accompanying them, join the discussion over
there. I prudently disabled the profile pics in comments here
when Greyfox reminded me that he could lose his public library computer
privileges if a librarian were to happen to see one of those little
animated sex acts over his shoulder.
What IS enlightenment
anyway? I don’t know, not in
any holistic all-encompassing sense. It means different things
to
different cultures, and even to different individual people within a
single culture. Its form and significance shift in sync
with
evolving consciousness. Can we all agree that it involves
transcendent awareness,
understanding and/or wisdom?
Probably not. We are not likely to find
universal agreement on any abstraction, and in this world few things
are more abstract than enlightenment.
Can we all agree that
“enlightenment” involves
light?
Certainly not. I
won’t
stipulate that, except in the most
metaphorical sense. Is the “lightness” in
enlightenment a matter of photons, or of intellectual brilliance, or of
levity? Is it appropriate to take enlightenment
lightly? If
not, why not?
If you say you can explain what enlightenment is, I suspect your sincerity, your
sanity,
your wisdom, your awareness, or all of the
above. At its most holistic and sublime, enlightenment is
as infinite as the Tao. The Tao that can be spoken of is not the
true Tao.
Chapter One of the Tao Te Ching says,
The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery -
The gateway of the manifold secrets.
As attractive as a “photon” model or a “brilliance” model of
enlightenment
might be, it might be philosophically safer to postulate an enlightenment that
nullifies gravity. When we start talking about
spirituality in terms of light and darkness we’re on shaky ground
indeed. Some people are likely to fall into absolutism,
moralism,
and other dualistic
fallacies if we venture into that realm. It’s a single
short
and perilous step from darkness versus light to wrong versus
right. I don’t want to go there.
When you know, you know you know. When you don’t know, you
don’t
know you don’t know. If you think you know, you may feel as
if
you have seen the light, when in fact you have been hoodwinked and are
dwelling in delusive darkness. 
As I said, let’s don’t go
there.
If we confine our discussion to the English language, we’re going to be
discussing:
(A) the enlightenment that gave a name to the European
reform movement
of the Eighteenth Century, which precipitated the French and American
Revolutions and many other equally deep but less bloody disagreements;
or
(B) a spiritual state of being with connections to the Buddhist and
Hindu concepts of satori
(often in Western culture conflated with samadhi) and
nirvana,
Eastern ideas that have
been incompletely understood and translated as “enlightenment” in the
West; or
(C) our various idiosyncratic impressions of what enlightenment
is.
As usual, I choose (D), “all of the above.”
First of all, my idea of enlightenment departs from the “satori” model
because satori implies a single sudden qualitative leap in consciousness, a
*SNAP* from the world of illusion (maya) into absolute awareness and liberation from ego. Thus far,
everything I have experienced in this finite observable universe has
been relative. In ordinary discourse, if I use the term,
“absolutely,” it is merely a figure of speech denoting a definite
decisiveness. “Absolute,” to me, is like “infinite” and
“vacuum”,
an abstract marker or placeholder, an explanatory principle whose
extreme totality provides a convenient rhetorical contrast to
relativity.
Satori is a “peak” experience. Generally speaking, few
people
have either the ability or the desire to dwell on a peak. It
is
possible, in the specific case of the satori peak, to sustain that
state of blissful oblivion. One school of thought considers
this
a worthy and desirable objective. In some cultures one might
be
able to survive for an appreciable period of time in that
state, seated beside the road with a begging bowl. To current Western
culture, there is scant perceptible difference between sustained
satori
and severe substance addiction or simple insanity.
Some gurus warn against becoming addicted to satori and remaining in a
blissed-out state to the detriment of one’s physical health and social
obligations. An analogous situation, expressed in shamanic
terms,
would be to journey to the Otherworld and stay there. For a
shaman, getting lost in the Otherworld would not be a desirable
outcome, neither for himself nor for his clients, because a shaman goes there for access to power or
knowledge that will be of use to him in this Middle World we call
reality. In order to make productive use of what he finds in the Otherworld, he must first return to this world.
The
relative desirability or undesirability of self-annihilation is as
fundamental to a paradigm as a paradigm is to personality or
culture. I choose to inhabit a theoretically
infinite
reality in which
experience, in a life lived consciously, reflectively and introspectively, brings a
series of mini-satoris, epiphanies in which we learn
something previously unknown or unimagined, uncover a false belief
and replace it with one which is in closer alignment with perceptible
fact, and/or realize our place as part of all that is. Each
such
epiphany brings us relatively closer to the
elusive illusive absolute enlightenment, without precluding
further attainment of ever higher peaks. That model of
evolving
awareness works in institutions and cultures as well as in individual consciousness.
For example, take the preceding two millennia
(please!): the Age of Pisces. It got off to a promising start with the loving
revelation brought by the incarnation of the Christos, about the
universal brotherhood of humanity in the parental love and guidance of
the creator. Not absolutely true and complete, it was
nevertheless relatively enlightened, and just about the most progressive idea that was then
comprehensible to our species. It was certainly more humane,
progressive and constructive than most of the diverse belief systems
then in currency on Earth.
Those new ideas spread quickly to every part of the planet, but they
were diluted and polluted along the way with “old” ideas — the
religious and
philosophical baggage carried by the individual apostolic
missionaries,
and a diverse collection of existing beliefs that were incorporated
with the apostolic
message to make it more palatable to the locals.
Just as
beliefs
from the Piscean Age are now resisting being supplanted by Aquarian
concepts, during the Piscean Age the ideas and practices of the
preceding Age of Aries (such as burnt sacrificial offerings to God) receded
reluctantly,
kicking and screaming into the oblivion of the past.
By the end of the first quarter of the Age of Pisces, many of our
planet’s people were reactionarily expressing the antithesis of the
message of Christ. Later centuries would call that time the
Dark
Ages. Fast forward to about three centuries before the end of the
Piscean
Age, and you find many people who were able to recognize the errors of
their ancestors. Looking back upon the Dark Ages and the
paternalistic, authoritarian, feudalistic culture that grew out of
that
era, they called
their understanding “Enlightenment.” They wrote and painted and
sculpted and taught and fought to bring their culture into closer
alignment with the principles of universal equality under
God.
That’s one view of enlightenment, the Eurocentric Piscean Age
perspective. In a fairly typical reaction to epochal
progression,
Western New Age philosophy has rejected the contemporary view current
in its own culture in favor of nirvana/satori, a more exotic and ancient
idea. It is
similar, I think, to the way many adolescents in rebellion against
their parents find themselves more in harmony with their
grandparents, against whom their parents had rebelled. The
New Age movement is joined at the hip (like Yin and Yang, the two inseparable halves of the Tao) with a
concurrent phenomenon, the Archaic Revival,
which means, “shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the
defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of
the
people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony!” (Terence
McKenna)
Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil’s Dictionary,
defined “nirvana” as, “a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to
the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it.” Satori,
in an online New Age
Dictionary,
is defined thusly: “The direct experience of realizing the
nature
of Mind, the ego’s obliteration, the experience of our living, sacred
Self. Satori demonstrates beyond all doubt that we and God
are
one in [sic] the same. Until we experience Satori we merely believe
that there is the divine within us.” [emphasis
added] This,
except for the ego-annihilation, is semantically very similar to gnosis,
the intuitive awareness of truth gained by direct mystical contact with
Spirit. Gnosis (silent “g”) shares its linguistic roots with
knowing and knowledge (silent “k”). As “I believe,” (faith) was the
keynote of
the age of Pisces, so “I know,” (gnosis, awareness, or even
“enlightenment”) is the keynote of the Aquarian Age.
Enlightenment
by Van Morrison
Chop that wood
Carry water
What’s the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Every second, every minute
It keeps changing to something different
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It says it’s non attachment
Non attachment. non attachment
I’m in the here and now, and I’m meditating
And still I’m suffering but that’s my problem
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Wake up
Enlightenment says the world is nothing
Nothing but a dream, everything’s an illusion
And nothing is real
Good or bad baby
You can change it anyway you want
You can rearrange it
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
Chop that wood
And carry water
What’s the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
All around baby you can see
You’re making your own reality everyday because
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
One more time
Enlightenment. don’t know what it is
It’s up to you
Enlightenment. don’t know what it is
It’s up to you everyday
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It’s always up to you
Enlightenment, don’t know what it is
It’s up to you, the way you think
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