Seeking Truth – or why ‘paths to enlightenment’ don’t really work.

Let’s start with this statement and then unravel the jumper from there:

Everything that you seek is already present, at all times, within your consciousness. Your own awareness, and the experience of being awareness, is the truth that you are searching for. It cannot be found outside yourself because there is no outside of yourself. That would be like being the greatest mathematician in the world googling how to add up and subtract.

So, maybe it’s just me, but whilst I can understand how adopting different spiritual paths is an interesting experience and another way of delving into the great dressing-up box that is our span on Earth, I find it hard to understand how they can bring anyone closer to an enlightened life; so long as the idea that there is something special about that path which will magically make them more than what they were before is there.

I was told recently by a friend that her spirituality was the thing that brought her ‘closer to Spirit’. Which makes sense as long as you believe in the separation of Spirit and yourself, but I don’t know how you’re supposed to ‘get closer’ to that which you already are. Perhaps, instead of getting closer to Spirit, it would make more sense to say that a spiritual path – whether that’s Buddhism, Sufism, Taosim, any of the -isms or -anity’s you can think of – brings you closer to realising yourself as spirit.

And it’s funny, because spirituality as a journey has given us so much that is beautiful and valuable – music, stories, poetry, art – but a lot of spiritual paths also seem to focus more on striving to get somewhere than the beautiful things you might experience as you travel. People strive to meditate properly, people strive to perfect or embody the teachings of their particular -ism, or strive to get beyond the teachings, when all anyone ever needs to do is just stop striving.

I spent years looking for spiritual awakening down different garden paths. Taosism, Buddhism, Paganism, Christianity; I’ve skipped across religions looking for the ‘right’ meaning like other people go through different coffee brands seeking the perfect Fairtrade medium roast.

And here’s the most important thing I learned from all of them:

The path you walk looking for the truth is nothing like the truth itself.

Enlightenment: the droids you were looking for.

The truth of empty and awake consciousness in all things cannot be realised as long as you are hellbent on donning mystical robes or drinking wine/blood at an altar or chanting for four hours in an attempt to find it hidden somewhere else. It’s everything, you don’t even have to go looking for it, you lucky bugger, because it’s there! Searching for enlightenment through religion or a spiritual ‘path’ is like leaning out of your window and asking people in the street for directions to the building you are in.

There’s that lovely quote from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas which states;

Jesus said, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained.  Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

Because the light that is over all things – consciousness, divine emptiness, god-self – can not by its very nature be found in one thing more than another. It just is everything. I don’t know, maybe we need to update that saying to; ‘Open the Diet Coke; I am there. Get in the leaky shower, and you will find me there.’ Maybe.

The other reason that pathways to spirituality are so popular is because they appeal to our ego as they are sold to us. The idea that once you’re on a spiritual path; once you start chanting or drumming or praying or whatever, is that you’ll just feel better. You may even enter a permanent state of bliss where you have no more problems or challenges and every day is full of bird song and sunshine.

Which is great, apart from one tiny flaw.

It’s bollocks.

Wanting everything to be ‘better’ or desiring to enter into a state of blissful happiness is another, sneakier way that the ego slips back into the mix and retakes the controls. Want and desire will always come from spending too long on the Merr-ego-round, because the awake conscious in all things we talked about earlier doesn’t want or need anything. Ever. It doesn’t need to have mystical experiences and talk to Angels or Devas or whatever to feel better. It doesn’t need to feel ‘better.’ It doesn’t need.

And as soon as you realise that that which you are is that which does not desire or need anything? That’s enlightenment. That’s the freedom you were looking for. That isn’t getting ‘closer to Spirit’, it is being Spirit. So by all means, have a ball being on a spiritual path – I love the creative work that people’s journeys though spirit take as much as the next person – just…try not to mistake it for actually Being. That’s all.

Just saying.

Rocking the Boat – or – letting go of others’ opinions.

Here’s why this one is hard. We’re taught from a young age to behave in a way that invites approval from others, and avoid behaviour that invites disapproval. In a lot of cases this makes sense, I ‘approve’ of not beating up other people in the street, for example. But beyond the obvious, we’re conditioned with subtle behaviours that hinge on the approval or disapproval of others, especially those who are closest to us, and carry these throughout our lives like a giant bundle of bricks on our backs.

Whether or not this manifests as feeling guilt-tripped every time you need to take a break from the kids, or leave the ironing that little bit longer in the basket, or think ‘Christ, this is boring.’ at work, or whatever. Humans are creatures of habit, and we’re really, really good at getting stuck in self-perpetuating cycles we don’t like simply because we’ve become used to them. So used to them that we’re scared of what might happen if we break out.

My personal experience of this is long and tiring. I didn’t want to talk openly about having bi-polar disorder for a long time because I was worried it would upset my family. Same with coming out as being genderfluid. I’ve let my disability dictate what I ‘allow’ myself to think about doing with my life because of the ‘What the fuck?’ I encounter when I start doing what I want despite my mobility issues. I know that my family worry too much about me; and even with my shiny perception of life I am loath to actually hurt and disappoint them. Of course I am, who wants to cause pain and worry to the people you love?

But.

You can’t live your life according to what makes other people comfortable, and trying to do that is one of the biggest lead-lined coffins we create for ourselves as we travel through life. Keeping yourself and your dreams tightly locked away because someone at some point is desperately going to try and piss all over your parade.

Opposition from others takes many forms, from, ‘Why would you do that? Look at the state of the world, you’re lucky to even have a job!’ to ‘Stop it, you’re upsetting your Mother.’ We’re told every day to just be satisfied with the life we have, to not rock the boat, to just squish ourselves down that little bit more so that we fit nice and snug into that lead-lined box.

The boat that rocked.

Well, balls to it.

See, it’s not like those of us who are lucky enough to have a job don’t know it. And it’s not like we don’t know our decisions might upset our Mothers; it’s just that the desire to be free outweighs the desire to keep the status quo, and that in itself is one giant leap because the truth is that freedom, real freedom, is fucking terrifying. I’m writing a poem that I will perform on Wednesday which is about the awareness of time passing and how it is so important to just drop the bricks you’ve been carrying and go for it:

See, the view from my window is the cemetery,

And I’m strangely comforted to know that one day

One of those stones

Will be my own.

So when I need to pose the question

‘Should I take a risk to progress?’

I look out my window and ask the dead

Their answer is always, ‘Yes.’

Other people’s opinions and oppositions come from a place of fear. Whether that’s fear of what will happen to you, or the more subtle and poisonous fear that comes from wanting you to stay right where you are so that they don’t have to look at their own lives and see what could be changed; what risks they could take but aren’t taking. The things they could do to make themselves a little more free, but are too scared to contemplate.

Ultimately, without risking it all to progress, you’ve got nowhere to go except around and around in the same circle. You might think it’s safer to stay in the un-rocked boat – but what you don’t always know is that the boat is anchored and isn’t going anywhere. If you even want the chance to discover the pure sands, coconuts and palm trees you’ve been dreaming about, you’re going to have to jump. No matter what anyone says.

The TROLOLOL meditation.

I talked in Seeds of Suffering Part II about opposition. About the ways in which I find my mind un-awakens itself all the time. The most obvious of these is what I like to call ‘Perception Troll Face.’ nb. If you are confused by the words ‘Troll Face’, see here for details.

Perception Troll Face is what happens every time you think something like:

‘I’m unlovable’

‘I should be achieving more’

‘What are they thinking about me?’

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘I can’t do this’

And other versions of the complex mental contortions we twist ourselves into so that we can kick ourselves in the teeth.

Perception Troll Face is a clever fucker, though. It comes in many ultra-casual, ultra-believable guises. Everyday stuff like feeling awkward around strangers in case they’re judging you (unless they’re coming at you with an axe in which case feel free to feel awkward and judged and run away/have a fight). The awkwardness deepens as they internally freak out about you judging them, and the whole conversation becomes trolled by perception.

Or when ‘I should’ comes into play. There are certain times when ‘I should’ is pretty compatible with respecting all beings in the dance; like ‘I should wash my hands before I perform this keyhole surgery.’ Or ‘I should not flick cigarette ash in the face of the premature baby.’ Or whatever. Common politeness and respect are less ‘I should’s’ and more ‘I choose to’s’ anyway. But I mean stuff like ‘I should earn more money to buy that new car I’m told will make me happy.’ Or ‘I should try and fit myself into children’s clothes to be desirable.’ You know the shit I’m talking about.

Even the really, really subtle stuff like being bored at work, guilt about not living up to other people’s expectations, feeling rubbish about your paycheck, feeling rubbish about your partner/lack of partner. Feeling rubbish. All cunning little piranhas in the otherwise smooth river of your life. Like those brown envelopes with the clear windows you know are from the Inland Revenue.

I find it helpful, whenever I get those thoughts -whenever I feel myself carefully wrapping my awake self back up in bandages that appear to keep it safe from sharp edges but are in fact sewn throughout with razor blades, to try what I call the quick TROLOLOL Meditation.

* Sit or lie down.

* Breathe in and out ten times, becoming aware of the sensations in your body.

* Let whatever thoughts you have arise naturally. It doesn’t matter if they are positive or negative in nature, just observe what’s happening in your mind.

* Imagine your thoughts are wearing the troll face and singing the trololol song, like so:

* Realise how completely and utterly pointless all of those thoughts are. Maybe even have a giggle.

* Get up and do something else. Write a poem, water a plant, clean the bathroom, make a sandwich.

* And try not to blame me if you have that fucking song in your head all day.

Chop Water, Carry Wood.

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” – Zen Proverb.

After a glimpse of enlightenment, which the conditioned mind is so good at deluding itself about that you may have forgotten what it felt like already – well, what the hell do you do with the rest of your life?

The saying above teaches us that to remain as much as possible in awake-mind is to devote mindfulness and attention to all of your daily tasks; ironing, eating, shagging, whatever it is you do every day, to place your full attention upon it and disengage from unnecessary thought.  For example, whilst typing this I am not just burbling away in my head, hoping people will like it (fictional future!) or staring out of the window at the people walking past (although I am, but hopefully not in a creepy way). I am also very aware of how my fingers feel on the keys, the pleasant tapping of my nails, the sounds of the café around me, the extreme yellow of the daffodils on the table. It’s simply a different, deepened awareness of what is in front of and around me.

Well, all this is great, but how does it translate into what happens next? If awakening does anything, it forces us to let go of things that aren’t really real (which is, of course, almost everything). The problems arise when we translate our awakening in the complete insanity of the world around us and think, ‘But how will I live if I let go of this/that?’ How will I make enough money to eat and live indoors? How will I have a relationship? What will people think of me?

Ultimately, of course, the path of being awake means that you must be prepared to let go of everything. Relationships and sleeping indoors included. That doesn’t mean I’m advocating becoming a homeless wanderer tramping the length and breadth of the country clad in only a smelly loincloth (unless you’re desperate to, in which case, have a ball!) It simply means that all of these things, attached to them as we are and as comfortable as they are, are like everything else – impermanent, transient, irrelevant. It’s how we deal with the reality of that moment-to-moment which defines our experience.

And that’s a hard thing to say. It’s a hard thing for me to say, certainly. I don’t have a relationship to lose, but I am very attached to sleeping indoors and eating food; and disability means that ease of transition from one place to another, or going out to get the food in question, or anything, is harder than it is for people whose limbs/other bodily bits/brains aren’t weird and contorted. So, to say ‘I am prepared to let go of my comforts,’ as I am now sounds like suicide. It possibly is. But how much of my life am I prepared to spend being too afraid of loss to do anything? Not a lot, is the answer.

After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. But be prepared for everything to turn upside down until you’re chopping water and carrying wood. If that means you do end up walking from Land’s End to John O’Groats in a smelly loincloth, well, have fun. Stop by sometime, let me know how it’s going. If you let me know in advance I’ll get some cake.

Seeds of Suffering II – Opposition.

So, in Seeds of Suffering Part I I wrote an…overview, I suppose, on my thoughts and experiences of disability and enlightenment. I did say that part II would be a look not at the ways in which I strive to be Awake, but all the ways I oppose natural Awakening in my everyday life.

Imagine that you are a galaxy and that at the centre of yourself is a timeless void. Not a black hole exactly, just a vast and silent Space. Imagine that around it are lots of twinkling stars flaring and intricate nebulae trailing their dust throughout the black and formless stuff. Whirling around and around, endlessly spinning and glittering prettily. That’s sort of what our perception is like when seen from the outside. We are, in our truest state, the timeless hole at the centre, but we focus on the pretty stars because they look interesting and complicated.

Every second, we have the choice of perceiving from the place of Absence (the silence) or the place of Resistance (the pretty stars). This is a look at the ways I find myself cocking it up from day to day and going star-gazing instead of black-hole surfing. Just in case you find it helpful

Identity.

The dissolution of identity is one of the best, and most fun, games you can play to pass the time. The first thing is to remember that identity is not personality. Personality is great fun – it’s like having the biggest dressing-up box in the world inside your head. The problems happen when you identify with any of it. Essentially, when you forget that you’re playing Cowboys and Indians (or a 21st century version, I don’t know…Bankers and Everyone Else?) and actually start believing you are one.

The ego, of course, loves to hang around identifying with all this stuff because it’s like a flower that constantly needs to be topped up with water. It always needs to be fed by new self-images, so it can make up stories so convincing you forget you were the storyteller and end up being one of the characters. It’s like when you get so emotionally involved in a film you embarrass yourself by shouting ‘How could you do that to Sam, Frodo!’ out loud in the last five minutes. Hypothetically. A lot of our inner chatter comes from thinking through the filter of our perceived identities, which is basically spending your life talking to an imaginary friend.

Anyway, the point is that as soon as you’re prepared to put the costumes back in the box you realise that you’re really kind of like the invisible man, and under the clothes was well, nothing. Which is fine. Although people might say things like; ‘Eat the sandwich, I want to see if I can watch it go down!’ Which could be irritating.

Investing in thought.

I touched on this briefly in my last post. It’s not really your thoughts that are the problem. You could meditate for twenty solid years and still think things, even things like, ‘Must buy bread.’ It’s not the act of thinking that’s really the issue, it’s how much you invest in your thoughts. How much of your thoughts you perceive as having anything to do with reality at all. Watching your thoughts with interest from a distance, or the Space/Silence, is useful and is also a bit like visiting a bad cinema. You can’t really believe this movie got made; it’s badly shot, the plot is nuts, and the protagonist is a babbling neurotic mess you wouldn’t wish on a psychiatrist you hate.

Having a thought is not the same as investing or believing in it. All you have to do when you start thinking in a way that affects how you feel is stop the delusion that it has shit-all to do with what’s actually happening.

Misperception of consciousness = resistance.

This is simple. Allow my adventures in photoshop to explain:

*If perception’s face is baffling you, see the Troll Face meme for details.

Unawakened perception is trolling you, all the time. It loves to tweak and filter reality in such a way that you believe that your consciousness is a separate being from everyone else and everything else. In reality, the Space, or the great awake, or the Emptiness, or whatever you want to call it, is manifesting itself through being everything. That includes you. Identity is one way of being trolled by perception, the other is separation.

Your conditioned layers of consciousness, (labels like Good, Bad, Mother, Son, Man, Woman, Both, White, Black, Vietnamese, Artist, Writer, Olympic Swimmer, Mad, Sane, Christian, Pagan, Atheist, etc) are all part of the Identity Game and completely irrelevant to emptiness manifesting itself, and, like the rest of your personality, are going back in the toy box when you die anyway. Identity plays a big part in making everything look different when everything is in fact the same.

Separation, then – from anything – is a myth. Like independence. Or happiness. Or Pringles apparently being a kind of cake. So don’t worry about it.

Occasionally, on your journey, as you divest yourself of your unnecessary layers of consciousness, this will happen:

Oh fuck, it's Trolling Buddha.

Don’t be discouraged by Trolling Buddha. Trolling Buddha is another way of experiencing powerful resistance. It’s total madness to resist reality as it is, but that’s what we spend 99% of our time doing. It’s like when you sit in meditation and your mind burbles away and attacks itself. Which is why meditation is fucking hard work, because the Ego-Toddler, which wants attention and constant feeding of thoughts and anxieties and fantasies and distractions, beats on the door and has a tantrum. The mind says, “Shit, there’s nothing to worry about, I’d better make something up!” Which is insanity. If someone told you, “I feel like killing someone but there’s no one here to stab, I’m going to put the knife in my eye!” You’d tell them to get professional help. Preferably from a long way away.

You know when Trolling Buddha is skulking around the edges of your head because ego will start to infiltrate your practice and you’ll think you’re doing a grand job of Awakening the unenlightened and lose sight of the fact that we’re all enlightened to start with, and that the Emptiness is looking at you with the interested but slightly pitying gaze of someone watching a dog trying to get into vacuum-packed ham.

So, there you go. Opposition 101 as I experience it. Identity, Resistance, and some bad photoshop.

Seeds of Suffering – on disability and enlightenment. Part I

For a start, I kind of dislike the term ‘enlightenment’. Mostly because it’s been so hijacked and distorted by organised (and some disorganised ) religions or belief systems that it seems to have come to represent a spiritual goal that must be achieved through strife rather than a simple awakening to the nature of reality as it is.

Anyway, sniffy grudges aside, this article is, of course, my opinion and should not be taken as me trying to be a mouthpiece for anything when really I’m just putting down my own thoughts. I’m sure a lot of people (should anyone read it!) will take issue with how I view enlightenment or awakening outside of a traditional teaching structure and also with how I view my disability. To which of course I say: ‘Pfft, feel free to feel however you want.’

It is certainly true that one of the best ways to be still with your thoughts is to be unable to move very much. For the last year and a half, I have had almost nothing but time alone with my thoughts; sometimes it’s just been me and four walls for months on end. That’s how to learn how to sit. Lose your mobility. Lose your ideas about the future, lose your future, lose your comforts, lose almost everything.

Because then awakening won’t come as such a shock. When you stop investing energy in your thoughts about what will happen when and realise that the silence you were surrounded by and started to hate is actually what you were looking for; and it’s funny because when I was able I spent a lot of time running around looking for the silence. I ran off and sought it in nature, or meditation (which for me back then was another, more complex form of running away), or art. I kept searching for the thing that would make me whole and fill up the emptiness for years, without getting that the emptiness was always what I was seeking. When the world is asleep and it’s just me and the dark and I’m wondering how I’m even supposed to draw in another breath – that’s what I was looking for. That’s exactly what I was looking for.

Because everything stops. There is nothing to do, there is nowhere to go. Everything is absolutely silent and still. You dissolve, you cease to function as you knew functioning. When your existence as you think of it reaches such a crisis point that it is unable to continue to delude itself.

And that’s why when people liken awakening or enlightenment to a slowly opening flower I want to hit them in the face, because Awakening is more like the flower being hit with a mallet – if it does manage to spring back up, most of it will be gone. Whatever remains probably won’t even be recognisable as a flower anymore. Awakening isn’t blissful or peaceful or mystical with Angels or Spirit Guides jollying you along. It’s uncomfortable. It’s complete demolition. It’s breaking down everything you’ve built around yourself your whole life until nothing remains. It’s everything you thought you knew falling away like a cliff falling into the sea and taking the lighthouse with it.

It also does not mean that you open your eyes to the nature of reality and suddenly everything miraculously resolves. There is no spontaneous healing or closure. Challenges don’t cease, but they way you think about them is turned on its head. Because for years and years I’ve been listening to the voice that chatters away in the front of my head; and you know what? After awakening, it’s still there, but I’m not really investing in what it’s saying any more. There is no Moulin Rouge’s Harold Zidler waggling ginger moustaches in my face to get my attention and shouting ‘Invest!’

Your thoughts and emotions are really important and meaningful!

A friend of mine once said: ‘Your disability is like a forced retreat.’ And I manfully resisted punching him. I’m glad I did, because of course he turned out to be right (he usually is).  That’s not to say I don’t still get days where I cry for hours in the bath at the complete clusterfuck everything appears to be, because I do…And that’s fine. Because everything I think I am experiencing; my opinions, my ‘happiness’, my ‘unhappiness’, my desires, my attachments – are all things I have to put back in the toy box at death, which could be in a minute, in a week, in eighty years. They are all things based on the illusion that what I am seeing around me is real. They are all, ultimately, completely irrelevant. The great emptiness at the heart of everything will continue to express itself perfectly from second to second whether ‘I’ am here or not.

And really, this is only a part I because, jeez – if I tried to get it all in this post it would reach from here to the end of bandwidth. So, part II will be about opposition, and all the ways in which I find I manage to un-awaken myself throughout the course of my days, especially by buying into the idea that I have an identity.  You may relate and go ‘Ah-ha! I do that!’ or you may not. Until then, I don’t know; have a cake or a cup of tea or something nice.

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

Shoot that Mother Duck(er).

I’m not doing so well at the moment. I’ve overdone walking short distances recently and my chronic tendon problems are back, which means I am stuck in the attic, only just able to get downstairs to make tea, for the forseeable future. Again.

Now, I’m 26. Before my accident I was a different person, used to climbing distant hills for the hell of it, dancing under midnight skies for the hell of it. Now, all of that joy of movement has gone, replaced by a deep, deep fear. The fear that whispers; ‘If you never get that back, there’s no point in living. We’ll drag it out a little longer – maybe until you’re twenty-eight, or thirty, yeah? We’ll try to make thirty, and if you’re still unable to walk further than town, we’ll end everything.’

The thing is, I believe that bargaining voice. I believe it when I tell myself that since the greatest pleasure I ever had – walking alone in nature – is denied me, and shows no signs of coming back, that it might be time to take the back of my head off. I don’t know if that voice will ever go away; maybe just change the dates, fudge the details, so that every new bargaining tool I can think of gets thrown into the mix until my suicide becomes dependent on how hard it’s raining, or if Tesco’s is shut. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the endings we make up for ourselves in our heads affect the outcome of the story. My best friend said to me today ‘The thing is, your thoughts are the big Mama duck, and your feelings are the ducklings. They follow their Mama around without question, they go everywhere she does, even if that place is mad and dangerous.’

Which is some of the best advice I have ever been given, along with; ‘In times of stress, be your own Mother.’ (Which is why after staying up crying hysterically until three in the morning, I am not at work, still in my pyjamas and fluffy bedsocks at midday, cuddling a soft toy Moomin and bigging myself up).

But when you live with chronic pain and limited mobility, it’s often the only thing that you think of. It defines everything, it is the big Mama duck, leading her dumb kids into endless cycles of what-if-what-if-what-if-what-if.  What if this pain never ends and I end up homeless, mad and crippled for the remainder of my short life? What if it gets too much and I just selfishly overdose, devastating my family and friends – how many eulogies have ‘What a bastard’ in them? What-if-what-if-what-if I end up in a prison of four walls again, only able to see the sky through the window? What am I going to do?

And you know, I still don’t know what I’m going to do about all this. This post wasn’t a ‘working it through’ exercise, just a ‘everything’s gone to shit again’ moment with additional clarity. Because, well, yeah…All that could happen. It also might not – but so fucking what.

Really. So fucking what.

I am not prepared to spend the next two years in the same downward spiral of the last two years. If that means I have to just shoot the Mama duck and let the ducklings do their own thing, then that’s what I’ll do. The stories I’m telling myself about this situation never end well. All of my endings suck. The hero dies horribly,  and a fat duck full of negative thoughts dances on his grave, laughing in a sinister way. Well, fuck that; death will happen at some point anyway, I may as well release all of my trapped hairy poisonous spider thoughts and let them roam free in the park where unsuspecting toddlers play.

I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of being in pain. I am tired of my life. I may be about to lose my job. I’m moving house again in a month or so. I don’t know where I’m going to get the money from. I cannot stand for longer than a few minutes right now because of the pain in both ankles. I am fucking tired of my life and I’m not afraid to come here and say it. What happens next is down to me and the Tao, but look away, kids, I’m going to get out my invisible gun and shoot the Mother Duck. It’ll kind of be like that scene in Bambi. So, you’ve been warned.