Is this enlightenment or not?

[lightmystic]

Hmm.....that's good to hear these stories zendancer. I did not know about such things.

I definitely relate to a small extent, in that I was already an avid seeker, and then this amazing experience dawned, and I knew that nothing would ever be wrong again. And that lasted for three days and then went away. hehe.

So then there was this mad scramble out of my own box of confinement. That was the beginning of what I would consider my dark night of the soul and final descent into what would lead to the end of me.

But it seems to me that, if it's really been recognized, then even experiences that are not blissful can be recognized as that same thing (at least to some extent). And if it hasn't really been recognized then it seems like people would notice that sooner if they are honest with themselves. Honestly, the whole idea that people can "lose it" is a bit confusing for me. Maybe because they have concepts about it and it's suddenly no longer conforming to what their concepts are about it? Is that what you think?

[zendancer]

LM: That is certainly one possibility, but I tend to think about like this. Thoughts can be "sticky," and even someone who gets fairly clear can start following thoughts and get stuck again. I think that's what happened to the guy I mentioned earlier. After a huge experience, he got free. He wrote a book and attracted a lot of followers, but somewhere along the way he began to enjoy being a guru and he began to imagine that everyone occupied a certain level of understanding. I think he rated Jesus and Buddha as 1000 with other teachers in the 600-900 range, and average folks in the 300-400 range. Of course, he decided that he was so clear that he was at least a 999, so he would test people, determine their level, and suggest that they needed to adopt him as a teacher. I liked the guy and even went to one retreat with him, but as soon as he opened his mouth, I knew that he had lost the clarity that he once had had. I thought it was interesting, and after I got home, I sent him a copy of one of my books, thinking that he'd enjoy it. Apparently he did, because he called me on the phone a few days later and told me that he rarely reads spiritual books, but my book had given him some big laughs. Then he told me that he rated me a very high level (I've forgotten the number, but it was a higher level than he rated Zen Master SS, whom he had never met!) I was polite, but the entire conversation struck me as hilarious. ZMSS was one of the deepest teachers I've ever met, and for this guy to think that I was at a higher level seemed positively hysterical. Bottom line? The guy had lost his clarity and gotten attached to a bunch of nutty thoughts.

Anonji, who posts on this board, presents what I think is a pretty good model of what is happening as we go from childhood to adulthood. He is the first person I have encountered who has focused upon the effect of sensory experience versus intellectual experience. Children interact with the world through direct sensory experience. They do not spend much time reflecting. As they grow older, they gradually exchange direct sensory experience for intellectual experience. As children, they see and interact with the real world. As adults, they see and interact with an imaginary meta-reality that they create and maintain in their heads. As adults, they spend almost all of their time thinking, reflecting, fantasizing, calculating, cognizing, evaluating, opinionizing, and talking to themselves. The path to reality lies in changing one's mental habits so that one once again sees and interacts with the real world through direct sensory perception.

The woman I knew who was clear for many years lost her clarity after she returned to graduate school and began to spend most of her time in her head again. Eckhart says that his big experience eliminated 90% of his thinking, and I have no reason to doubt what he says. He was lucky because he didn't have to make any effort; he simply had a big experience and....poof....most of his thinking stopped. I often kid my thirty-year old daughter by saying, "Stop thinking and all of your problems will disappear." When I say this, I am only slightly kidding; there is a lot of truth to this claim. Have you seen the movie, "The Hurt Locker?" Near the end of the movie, the two main characters are driving along in a Humvee. One of the guys is psychologically shattered from his war experiences, but he realizes that his buddy is in a different state. He looks over at him and asks, "How do you do it?" (by which he means, how do you stay so cool in conditions of such extreme danger?) His buddy is smoking a cigarette and he casually responds, "I don't think about it." I almost fell out of my movie seat because I started laughing so hard. It was so Zen, so perfect, and so true.

For most people thinking creates all of their problems. This is why meditation is so helpful to beginners. It slows down their thinking and creates a little bit of mental space. This allows insights to occur. At a certain point on the spiritual path thinking ceases to be a problem because we see through the thoughts and don't get attached to them. Some people call this "Staying in the train station." (Trains of thoughts come and go, but we don't get on board; we just stay in the station and watch them pass by.) Most people spend every waking moment of the day riding their thought trains.

IMO it is NOT a coincidence that every good teacher I've met in the past chooses to spend a certain amount of time in silence. They may not pursue a formal kind of meditation, but they do something--perhaps take a long walk everyday--that allows them to be silent and directly interact with the world through their senses. I'm sure that they find this silence as deeply satisfying as I do. Cheers.

[lightmystic]

Zendancer,

Thanks for your clarity. This is really helping me.

I definitely relate to and agree with most of what your saying, but there is still something that I find confusing. Enlightenment, for me at least, seems to be a recognition of who and what we are. It seems to be a recognition that changes the way thinking happens. I certainly recognize that the change is by degrees and is ever deepening, but it is just mystifying how the innocence of experience can just completely go after this. I'm just not sure that it can.

Perhaps it's not the level of realization that I keep thinking you are referring to. There is this pre-cursor sort of realization that seems pretty common from what I've seen, and definitely went through it myself. I call it Awakening, referring to it as a state where one has recognized themselves to be That Which Cannot Be Said but have not gone through the disappearance of the individual yet. Theoretically the disappearance of the individual is the natural result of staying with that initial recognition, but there does seem to be a very big difference in understand in practice.

The reason I'm suggesting this is because my experience is such that I can never un-know at the most fundamental level, and I cannot perceive life as other than That. It's ALWAYS been that. Even if some part of me doesn't know it on some level, the MOST fundamental level always does. And the other levels seem to follow more and more based on that. If the openness itself IS what we are, then getting stuck in these concepts is mystifying to me. Isn't That Which Cannot Be Said what one would WANT to abide in after recognizing it's inherent safety?

There is a great value to silence, and it seems an integral part of the integration process. That said, the more integration there is, the more everything, including thoughts themselves, appear as that same silence. So why would one choose one thought over another? It's ALL silence. The only choosing mechanism is the function of personality. And that choosing is just a natural unfolding process.

I guess the mind can stop temporarily and then that could just not be integrated. Perhaps that's what you're saying? Because that I relate to and makes sense. The other I'm having trouble relating to, but I would like to hear what you think.

Thanks. Again, I appreciate your clarity on this subject.

[zendancer]

Lightmystic: I got timed out, so I hope this doesn't get posted twice.

Let me approach this one step at a time because there are several issues involved here, and I may not even understand the questions correctly. As I noted in another post, the definition of enlightenment that seems most appropriate to me is "the deep and continuing realization of oneness"--the realization that no personal entity of any kind exists except in the imagination. There are no "trees, "computers," or "human beings " anywhere in the real world. There is only THIS. At this moment THIS can be imagined to be a body/mind typing on a computer. Probably most people who are drawn to a message board like this have had some kind of insight into this. At the least, it is possible to intellectually understand that all of the boundaries we commonly cognize are arbitrary and artificial. With college students I often suggest several thought experiments. I ask them to consider, precisely, where the boundary lies between their hand, arm, and wrist. Or, I might ask them if a glass of water on their desk is really a glass of water or themselves? I will then ask them to drink the water and tell me, precisely, when the glass of water ceases to be a glass of water and becomes them? Or, I will ask them to make a fist and then open their hand and tell me where the fist went? In many ways I try to show them that all of the boundaries that seem so real are all in their heads; the things they imagine have no independent existence. So, it is possible to have an intellectual understanding of our oneness, but a direct understanding is something far more powerful.

A kensho experience (or an experience of seeing into one's true nature), is mind-boggling for most people because suddenly selfhood disappears completely and there is only the direct experience of oneness. I used to read about such experiences and get very excited, but I couldn't imagine what the people were experiencing. One fellow wrote, "I felt peculiar and then ....zzzzt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my own body. I had never known this world. Everywhere I looked I saw myself and every man on the street was the same me." Later, I had that kind of experience myself, and then I understood. In one fraction of a second I came to realize that the entire universe is alive, conscious, intelligent, and unified. In my case, I walked around for two days in an extraordinary state of mind. I knew what people were thinking, and had many other non-local kinds of experiences. Unfortunately, after two days I returned to my old reflective habits of mind and my sense of intimate connectedness began to disintegrate. That loss sent my spiritual search into hyperdrive! LOL. I became an absolute fanatic, because what I thought I had lost was so incredible. Of course, I hadn't really lost a thing, but it took fifteen more years before I realized that who I thought I was was a figment of imagination. The ego is a very tough structure and it can co-opt almost any kind of experience. Fifteen years later I had an experience after which I realized that I was the entire dynamic process that had created the illusion of a personal self, gone on an imagined search for the truth, and ultimately woke up to itself. So, we can have a shallow intellectual understanding that the universe is a unified whole, and we can also have a deep and continuing direct realization of the whole. By the time this happened to me, the whole issue had become quite subtle. I had had many unity-conscious experiences and I had found the answers to hundreds of existential questions, but there was still the deep-seated sense that there was a personal "me" that needed to get to an enlightened state. When I finally saw that the one seeking enlightenment did not exist and had never existed, then I was free and my long search came to an end. The final realization, for me, did not have any bells or whistles. It was sort of like, "Oh yeah, What an idiot I was. There never was a me (in the way that I had thought)."

Second point: does enlightenment change one's thinking? Well, yes and no. After my first kensho experience, all kinds of ideas changed instantly. Prior to that experience I was a hard-core conservative type person who believed in capital punishment; afterwards I couldn't imagine killing someone because he or she is ignorant (yes, you've got to put killers in prison to protect other people, but you don't have to kill them). In the same way, lots of other ideas changed 180 degrees or disappeared completely. My second big experience totally eradicated the idea of "meaning" for me. I realized that all of our usual ideas about meaning are products of imagination. From that point on I distinguished between relative meaning, which is imaginary, and absolute meaning, which is direct. Zen has many koans about meaning and after my second breakthrough, I could see all of the answers to those koans without effort. Another deep experience freed me from the idea of running off to the wilderness to get enlightened. I realized that if it ever happened, it would have to happen in the context of my ordinary daily life (this may not be true for someone else, but I knew it was true for me). Gradually, as the years went by I understood more and more, and I was finally left with only one question by the time I realized that I was not who I had thought. However, and I think this is an equally important point, during those years my habits of mind had changed dramatically. When I first began, my mind was a mess. It talked and thought incessantly. I never had a second of silence. As the years went by, I finally broke that habit and quit spending time reflecting or fantasizing. I became a person of action and I spent a lot of time directly interacting with the world through sensory perception. There were lots of ups and downs, but it was a bit like creating one of those weighted dolls that look like a bowling pin or a shmoo (can't think of the name of those dolls at the moment.) The less I reflected, the more ballast got added to the bottom of the doll. Early on, lots of things would knock me down and I would gradually get back up, but with time, the doll grew heavier and heavier and barely wobbled under the onslaught of daily problems. ZMSS used to call this, "making your center stronger and stronger." In conclusion, seeing into one's true nature will certainly change one's thinking about the most important issue of all, but other experiences and events in one's life can have equally powerful effects. One of the interesting things about this path is that deep insights have never felt to me as if they had anything to do with thinking. The direct experiences seem to occur through some unknown organ of perception, and thinking about it only seems to occur afterwards. One last note; I never felt like any of my experiences changed the WAY I thought; they only changed WHAT I thought, and the biggest change was often that my thoughts about a particular issue simply stopped.

One of the points you made that I think is really important is your point about staying with the perception of who you are beyond thought. I reached a point where I understood almost everything, but was still not satisfied. I knew that I wasn't enlightened, but I vowed to keep my attention focused on direct sensory experience until I could find what I needed to find. I remember saying to myself, "I don;t care if it takes a million years, I'm going to keep looking and listening and directly interacting with the world until I merge with the truth." I call this sort of thing, "trusting yourself 100%." Of course, later I realized that there was no me that needed to merge with the truth (LOL), but the intention to find the truth was incredibly powerful. Anyone who has had a fundamental insight into their true nature should simply trust that experience and stay with the initial recognition. Anyone who has the desire to wake up has that desire because that is what the universe, itself, desires. Some people call this "listening to the still small voice within." Gangaji has said that the only legitimate desire is the desire to wake up. All other desires can be discarded. Fame? Fortune? Power? Finding the perfect mate? Rubbish! Most people who find the truth reach a point where there are willing to give up everything (including themselves) in order to find it

Next issue: You wrote, "Isn't That Which Cannot Be Said what one would want to abide in after recognizing its inherent safety?" First of all, who is the one who would want to abide anywhere? The one who wants to abide somewhere is an illusion. There is no need for safety because there is no one who needs to be kept safe. IT does whatever IT wants to do, and that's just part of the fun. IT loses itself, IT plays games with itself, IT imagines that it is this or that, IT gets stuck in concepts, IT frees itself, and IT also finds itself. This is what IT/we do. I think this non-abidingness was what Jesus was referring to when he said, "The foxes have their holes, etc, but the son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." I think he was saying that he lived in the unimaginable emptiness of what is and that he had no home in any conventional sense.

I may not understand your comments about silence. You wrote, "the more integration there is, the more everything, including thoughts themselves, appear as that same silence. So, why would one choose one thought over another. It's all silence." This may be a semantic thing, and maybe we should use the word "emptiness" rather than silence. To me, silence means no words in the head. If words appear, they're just words, and its no big deal. It's all part of the emptiness of what we are. I also don;t think that we ever choose one thought over another because there is no one who can choose. Thoughts simply appear or they don't appear. For whatever reason, the universe, manifesting as particular body/minds, seems to occasionally enjoy word-free silence. I was simply observing that most of the good teachers I've met set aside time for silence and direct perception. As I posted somewhere else, I love Eckhart's statement in which he said, "If someone asked me to name my greatest achievement, it would be attaining freedom from the compulsion of incessant thought." Eckhart knows that he didn;t have anything to do with his becoming freed from thought, but I still like the quote. It captures my own feelings about this pretty well.

Some people may not have ever suffered from the disease of incessant thought, but for those of us who have, it is easy to identify with Eckhart's comment. It also may have something to do with the kind of work we do. I find that I need a certain amount of silence periodically to help balance out some of the crazy stuff that I have to deal with. However, please don't get attrached to any of these words; I'm only using them to point to something that lies beyond them. Cheers.

[lightmystic]

Well, I appreciate you posting all that, but I don't really feel like it addresses what I'm saying. Perhaps I can clarify.

Yes, I understand everything you've said about Enlightenment. That is my experience too and it has never gone away. I feel we are on the same page about this so I don't want to spend a lot of time re-hashing it.

I guess what your saying is that people have a temporary experience and then think that they've got it. That's hard to believe, because it was always so obvious to me when it went away, but I guess that's just me. When I say silence I am referring to what you mean by Emptiness. Why wouldn't emptiness be with emptiness? Why would it resist when it recognizes itself as emptiness? Emptiness that doesn't know it's emptiness (i.e. ignorance) appears to be resisting itself. When it realizes what it is, it stops resisting itself. That is what I'm saying when asking how Emptiness can realize itself to be Emptiness and still resist itself. The answer, of course, is that it can't, and so if it "went away" then it was never really understood to begin with, because of course it cannot go away. It can just feel that way at first. Once it's seen clearly on the most fundamental level, it's obvious that it can never go away even if we wanted it to for some reason.

It's certainly true that there is no individual, as that is the experience. But the personality persists, at least for now, like it always has, it's just that it's not limited to what I am. But it's that personality's resistance or non-resistance that lets life feel open or not. I feel like all my time is simultaneously spent in silence and not. I guess there is actual spent just sitting, but it's not really a conscious thing. It just happens naturally. Anyway....

I guess you answered my question: it cannot be lost once it's seen for real. If it feels lost, then it hasn't been seen for real. I don't know how people can be confused about thinking they've got it when they haven't for long periods of time, but that's just how it is I suppose one way or the other....

[zendancer]

LM: I see it more as a habits-of-mind type of thing. A little child thinks, but maybe only 5% of the time. It spends 95% of its time directly interacting with the world through its senses. As the child grows older, it spends less and less time in direct perception and more and more time interacting with ideas about the world. A child actually constructs a meta-realistic simulation of the world in its mind and that meta-reality gradually replaces the real world. As adults, we probably spend less than 1% of our time in direct perception and more than 99% of our time thinking and talking to ourselves.

After a big-bang experience, many of us are taken out of our heads for a while and we live in the world much like little children. Then, after a few days (or years in rare cases) our old habits of mind return, personal selfhood reappears to claim the experience, and we end up with a deep sense of having lost something precious. So, what we might call "final" enlightenment is a more deeply internalized or "embodied" recognition of the truth, and how that final step occurs is a total mystery to me. For that matter, all the other steps are pretty mysterious too.

I wouldn't agree that the truth cannot be lost once its seen for real. I saw the truth clearly in 1984 and lived in it for two days, but for all practical purposes I then lost it. Yes, nothing had really changed, but I didn't know it. I returned to a "me in here" looking at "a world out there." It felt like I had been kicked out of paradise, and in a sense that is what happened. My ego returned along with my old self-centered perspective. It took fifteen more years to discover that my "me" was a complete fiction. During that fifteen years I INTELLECTUALLY knew the truth, but that was a poor substitute for the direct experience. If your recognition of the truth never changed after your initial discovery, then that is pretty rare. From reading tons of spiritual literature from all over the world, I think that most people go through a set of experiences something similar to my own. The people who got it all in one blast and kept it are very rare and I can only think of four at the moment--Buddha, Eckhart, Ramana Maharshi, and Hui Neng. There are probably some others, but very few compared to the number of people who have found it (sometimes repeatedly), lost it (sometimes repeatedly), and then found it again.

Like you, I find it is hard to talk about what life is like at the present time. Nothing I say can really capture the reality. Of course, that doesn't stop us from trying......(LOL). Cheers.

[lightmystic]

Hey Zendancer,

Yeah, that was much clearer. Thanks. Yes, I suppose it does come down to habits of mind. I got it an lost in many times in my search. This culminated in a very clear 3 day completely getting it which then went away. Everything felt so confining after that in comparison. That was the descent into my dark night of the soul and was ultimately the beginning of the very end of the journey. So I definitely relate.

The key, I think, isn't that the truth can never go away once it's seen, but rather that it can never go away once seen on the most fundamental level. Without it being seen at that level, then it definitely comes and goes to some extent.

And once it's seen on the most fundamental level, it can still not be seen at less fundamental levels, and that seems to change over time as the process of thinking changes over time. But the fundamental knowing can never be lost once it's seen at that MOST fundamental level.

Sept 2, 2009 8:27:43 GMT -5 zendancer said:

LM: I see it more as a habits-of-mind type of thing. A little child thinks, but maybe only 5% of the time. It spends 95% of its time directly interacting with the world through its senses. As the child grows older, it spends less and less time in direct perception and more and more time interacting with ideas about the world. A child actually constructs a meta-realistic simulation of the world in its mind and that meta-reality gradually replaces the real world. As adults, we probably spend less than 1% of our time in direct perception and more than 99% of our time thinking and talking to ourselves.

After a big-bang experience, many of us are taken out of our heads for a while and we live in the world much like little children. Then, after a few days (or years in rare cases) our old habits of mind return, personal selfhood reappears to claim the experience, and we end up with a deep sense of having lost something precious. So, what we might call "final" enlightenment is a more deeply internalized or "embodied" recognition of the truth, and how that final step occurs is a total mystery to me. For that matter, all the other steps are pretty mysterious too.

I wouldn't agree that the truth cannot be lost once its seen for real. I saw the truth clearly in 1984 and lived in it for two days, but for all practical purposes I then lost it. Yes, nothing had really changed, but I didn't know it. I returned to a "me in here" looking at "a world out there." It felt like I had been kicked out of paradise, and in a sense that is what happened. My ego returned along with my old self-centered perspective. It took fifteen more years to discover that my "me" was a complete fiction. During that fifteen years I INTELLECTUALLY knew the truth, but that was a poor substitute for the direct experience. If your recognition of the truth never changed after your initial discovery, then that is pretty rare. From reading tons of spiritual literature from all over the world, I think that most people go through a set of experiences something similar to my own. The people who got it all in one blast and kept it are very rare and I can only think of four at the moment--Buddha, Eckhart, Ramana Maharshi, and Hui Neng. There are probably some others, but very few compared to the number of people who have found it (sometimes repeatedly), lost it (sometimes repeatedly), and then found it again.

Like you, I find it is hard to talk about what life is like at the present time. Nothing I say can really capture the reality. Of course, that doesn't stop us from trying......(LOL). Cheers.

[zendancer]

LM: Agreed, and that has been my experience. Once the recognition has become embodied (beyond the level of the intellect), life can be ordinary again. Your actions are empty and there is no clinging to ideas. If things work out as expected, fine, and if they don't work out as expected, also fine. There is a total acceptance of what is.

Zen Master Hakuin was an interesting case. He had numerous experiences, both big and small, on the way to a full understanding, but he claimed that his biggest experience occurred long after he attained satori. He was meditating one night and the sound of the falling snow triggered something deeper than anything he had ever experienced prior to that. In fact, his entire biography is pretty fascinating. He studied under a tough Zen Master, and after he presented his understanding to his teacher after his first big experience, his teacher knocked him off the porch into the mud, laughed, and said, "You poor hole-dwelling devil." Hakuin didn't get full understanding until after his teacher had died.

Ramana is probably the most amazing story. It's hard to imagine how deep somebody would become after sitting in samadhi for seven years. Zen calls accumulated spiritual power "joriki," and I'd say that Ramana must have radiated the power of a joriki-fueled nuclear power plant. LOL.

[divinity]

Absolutely if you stop thinking about the negatives in your life they will dry up and blow away most often in an amazingly funny way.