One of the big misconceptions about enlightenment is that it answers all existential questions. It does not. It merely reveals our true self to be completely satisfying, regardless of whether those questions are answered. But the questions still matter!
The Problems with The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle is one of the leading people converting the exciting findings of nonduality into boring, syrupy, non-intellectual crap. True, he says many things that are correct and, for some people, no doubt useful. Yes, his overall message is probably fine, like some processed cereal is fine.
But overall, his blandness, his confusion of categories, his poor thinking and lazy analysis of important texts... it's all so boring. Like a copy of a copy of a copy, it is tired, mixed-up, and cliched.
I'm practically put to sleep by The Power of Now, the book that, Oprah-assisted, catapulted him to Deepak-Chopra (I have problems with Deepak, too, which I'll get to another day) levels of stardom.
What are its problems? Many, but I'll limit my findings to a key few.
Four mistakes people make when engaged in self-inquiry
Self-inquiry, the spiritual technique that the Hindu sage Sri Ramana Maharshi recommended, is the royal road to seeing through the illusion of self. I explain it briefly in this video and more extensively in my book. It involves trying to locate where the feeling "I am" is coming from.
It's a very simple exercise, but it is easy to make mistakes. Here are four common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Making it an intellectual exercise
You are experiencing the sense that "I am" (as in "I am reading these words") right now. That sense, that feeling, is what you are trying to examine.
This is not an intellectual exercise. It is not about thinking about what science and philosophy are telling us the "I" is or isn't. It is not about whether "I" have free will, or the kind of "I" that we think of when we say try to think of ourselves as being part of a larger community or society. These are all fine ways of thinking, but they are not the self-inquiry game.
Self-inquiry involves examining our experience, our feeling of the I, and trying to find out just what it is. What exactly is it?
For example, we might find that feel something irritating, and identify it as a) a physical pain because we have something in our shoe, b) an emotion because we are angry at someone, c) a memory of something unpleasant, etc.
In the same way, we ask what is this sense of I? To answer the question, we have to hold that feeling with great concentration. And then as soon as we think we've held it, we then apply a rule: whatever we experience can't be the I, because "I experience it." So what is the I? We keep looking.
Mistake #2: Only doing self-inquiry at set times
Self-inquiry can at first be practiced in a formal way, while sitting for some period of time. But this is just the beginning.
Self-inquiry should eventually be done at all waking moments, while talking, cooking, cleaning, working, and doing any other of life's daily activities.
"But how will I do my work?"
It's a mistake to believe that self-inquiry interferes with work. There is a bit of practice required at the beginning, but basically self-inquiry does not interfere with doing. You are not the true doer, and self-inquiry is helping you see that.
To get to enlightenment, self-inquiry must be engaged in with great intensity at all times.
Mistake #3: Not paying attention to distractions and resistances
When you get distracted or feel like doing something else, your mind and heart are trying to tell you something. These messages are not to be ignored.
If you do, they will keep interfering with your practice, and will stop you from progressing.
Interpret the messages by expressing what they feel like (I call this process "metaphorization") and attempting, through imagination and action, to figure out what they mean.
Mistake #4: Expecting to find the I
First, this process is not going to be instantaneous. It is going to be frustrating. It is going to be confusing. It would be perfectly normal not even to quite understand what you are doing or what you are trying for at times. Keep going.
More importantly, you cannot find the I. That is the point of the exercise. That feeling is the illusion we are trying to see through. As long as the feeling of the I remains, you must pursue it, but the end of that pursuit will be to have it suddenly and strangely disappear! It's what I call the "spacious mind" in my book. Ramana Maharshi calls it the "I-I." You will know it when it happens.
That's the shift we're aiming for. It will disappear -- and then seem to reappear. As many times as it reappears, you must re-examine that feeling. Eventually the disappearance will sink in, and it will become apparent that it had never appeared in the first place. That's the delightful, hilarious contradiction.
Life is a dream made from limitations
Imagine you’d taken a massive dose of LSD — and the experience lasted a lifetime. That’s what life essentially is. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, imagine, think, and feel — including our very ability to see in an individual perspective... these are all one continuous designed experience. And it is made out of limitation. Limited perspective. Limited capacities. That’s what makes for the spectacular work of art that is our experience of life.
The fundamentals of the spiritual search
The goal of enlightenment: get to the true Self, the source of meaning, freedom, peace, and perfection
The basic point of the spiritual search is extremely simple: it is to get in permanent touch with the true Self. This true Self is not the true Self in the sense of what you really enjoy apart from societal and family pressure, though getting in touch with that true Self is in fact part of the search.
How to Become Enlightened Ultra-Fast
A quick explanation of self-inquiry, itself just a way of seeing through a habitual way of thinking.
The end of means-end thinking?
"What should I do?" This is a question that the mind is confronted with every day, often many times a day. After a long spiritual journey, I am no longer confused about who I truly am. The Self shines clearly, but the mind and the body go on. Action and thinking go on. And so questions of decision-making, too, go on. And it remains a tricky puzzle how to go about it.
From the tiniest decisions to the largest ones, every decision requires numerous sub-decisions. Even something as simple as what restaurant to go to requires making decisions about how much time to spend on the decision, which information to heed (my own past experience, reviews, word of mouth?), and so on.
If you try to think it all out, you get stuck. If that's true of figuring out where to eat out, it is far truer of bigger decisions: choices of how to start a business or career, how to navigate a relationship, how to relate to yourself.
It's true that in real life we simply cut the decision-making process short for lack of time. But in theory we would like to know on what basis we cut it short. How should we think about how we make decisions -- including the decision of when to cut the decision-making process short?
Spiritual realization gives the whole discussion a massive twist.
Don't look back
The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice tells a tale of wild love gone wrong. Orpheus, the world's greatest musician, who with his harp and his voice could "soothe the savage beast" and melt even the rocks, falls hard for the stunning Eurydice. Eurydice, alas, is bitten by a venomous snake, and dies, drifting off to the underworld. Orpheus travels there and sings songs of such rending grief that even Hades, the lord of the dead, is moved, and tells Orpheus that Eurydice will follow him back to the the land of the living on one condition: that he not look back even once.
On metaphorization and the validity of every experience
In the nondual scheme of things, our true Self is pure being, awareness, and bliss. What we seem to be -- our individual selves -- are a sort of image, a kind of dream. How can the suffering in the dream be given validity, be made meaningful, be not simply an illusion? Well, one way is through what I call metaphorization.
Desire is a game of 20 questions
The game of 20 questions, where you get that many yes-or-no questions to guess .the particular thing another person is thinking, used to be a great way (ok, a decent way) to pass the time on car trips in the era before smart phones.
The series of questions, if cleverly asked, acted as an efficient path by which the answerer could tell you if you were getting hotter or getting colder, closer to or farther away from the answer. But every answer opened the space for more questions. If you figured out that it was an animal, then you could then ask whether it was a mammal. Otherwise you knew the entire idea of animal was simply getting "colder" and you'd move on to something else.
Desire is the same way. We don't know our real desires in full. We discover them progressively over time. Our imagination and our actions are questions. "Do I want this kind of thing?" we seem to be asking someone invisible. Then our emotions and our experiences are the reply. If we notice and express what it is like to have those emotions and experiences, we can grasp whether we are getting warmer or colder. If we are warm, we refine our hypothesis, staying within the same category. If colder, we try something else. On and on goes the game of learning what it is we want.
For in this game, there are not just 20 questions but an unlimited number... and multiple seemingly paradoxical answers may be given. The other player sometimes seems to cheat. Which is in fact, we may find, the most important answer of all...