Self-Realization & Enlightenment

In all my reading on spiritual matters I thought I understood what enlightenment meant.  I’m not so sure anymore.

I’d assumed that “enlightenment” and “self-realization” were one in the same.  The questioning technique of Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj, the “Who am I?” question, seems to tease out the “self-realization” aspect.  Having tried this question on for size myself many, many times, I think it would be better to ask “What”, or “Where” am I?  ”Who” always results in either the obvious answer of “me”, or, if delved in deeply enough, the scariest answer of all, “I don’t know”.  ”I don’t know” screws with you on many levels, and tends to make you shake your head whilst your lips hang loose and slap against opposing cheeks making a sound like whacking a wet turkey with the palm of your hand.  Try it if you haven’t already (the question, not whacking a wet turkey).  Seriously.  Go look for yourself.  Ask yourself who you are, then look… really look.  It’s so obvious to say that you are your body, but that’s just not true.  I’m stuck with being inside my brain somewhere, but I’m working on it.  I can’t quite accept the fact that “I” am not in here at all even though I have had that terrifying realization (which I have put under the bed for now).  ”What am I?” is a little more forgiving.  It allows for there to be a who, but at the same time, gives you an out by allowing the who not to matter.  You can be something other than this body with the “what am I?” question.

Either way you go – “who” or “what” – the ultimate answer to the question reveals the “self-realization”.  After all the exercises in who or what the hell you are, the ultimate answer is supposed to be that you are this space-like awareness in which all of this happens.  Thoughts, sensory inputs, vision, the world, other people, war, coffee, whatever… it’s all happening in and because of that which you truly are.  Well, it just so happens that that’s where I’m stuck.  I’ll call that point zero, or the starting point.  I’ve become very accustomed to the housing I believe myself to be (or be in), and whatever noticing that is supposed to happen that points me to see that I am that space-like awareness is turning out to be an extraordinarily difficult task.  And I wonder, if I finally realize my true nature, become self-realized, what then?  Is that the end of the road?  Is there no further spiritual development?  That’s where I begin to wonder if “self-realization” and “enlightenment” are two different things.

Self realization, if I’m right, just means you figure out that you are not what you thought you were all along.  I like think there would be an “ah ha” to go along with that realization, but maybe not.  Whatever.  Now you know that you are not this body, that you are this no-thing that is aware of everything, but can’t be pointed to.  Good.  What about “enlightenment” then?  Is it enough to realize your own true nature?  Is that enlightenment, or is enlightenment a further realization that occurs after self-realization?

Alright.  Shop’s open.  C’mon with the c’mon.  Talk to me, Goose!

Thread

I think I’ve allowed my curious mind to get the best of me.  I just realized that I’m not in search of enlightenment, even though that’s what I’ve been calling it lately.  I’m not in search of some spiritual experience, or some extended blissful state.  I never wanted that at all.  I’ve just been following leads, that’s all.

I want to know how stuff works.  I remember questioning things as a child, like how Santa could get down that little opening in our fireplace, and how he never got burnt (I made my parents put out the fire one Christmas Eve).  I’m very good at fixing just about anything.  I fix all the vehicle problems (well, there was that transmission thing I didn’t even begin to attempt), I fix lawn mowers, pressure washers, washing machines, dryers, dish washers, electronic gizmos, microwaves, just about anything.  I take them apart to see how it works, then I fix them.  If I can see how it works, or how it’s supposed to work, I can fix it.  And now…

I didn’t want to know how reality worked.  At least I didn’t set out to want to know that.  I’ve said it before, but I just stumbled upon that damned book that started all of this way back in 1990.  This book set into motion a very powerful tug that led to some very, very deep questions on my part that led to the dismantling of my religious beliefs and brought about a change in the way I think about what’s really going on here.  The prologue of this book is titled Nothing Is Real.  Whoa!  Started checking out sometime shortly after that.

It’s all so mind-boggling, that quantum physics stuff is.  For instance, to get the full-scale implications of the size and location of atomic particles, let’s make the nucleus of an atom the size of a grain of sand.  To be a correct scale model, we would put that grain of sand inside a 14-story building, and the electrons floating around that nucleus would be on the outside of that building, 14-stories away, and be the size of dust particles.  Isn’t that unbelievable?  What that means is that almost 100% of an atom is empty space!  I mean, what the hell?  And how many atoms are in a human body?  7 billion billion billion (I looked it up)!  7 followed by 27 zeros.  And 99.9999-something percent of that is empty space!  Then you start dissecting the subatomic particles and it’s even crazier than that.

I just couldn’t stand the implications of all that.  How does it work?  Why is it here?  How does it relate to me, this funkily arranged menagerie of particles and atoms?  The scale!  The odd behavior at the subatomic level.  And then, somehow, there’s a “me” in all of this… a thing, I don’t know what, that sees and knows all of this.  How is that possible?  How do I have consciousness if everything is all just a vast soup of quantum potential.  Is everything conscious?  Is everything really interconnected to the point that there are no real distinctions between “things”?

I have asked myself these questions for years.  After a while, every so often, I just drop it because life is going on.  Gotta make dinner, go to work, sit in a meeting, read the paper, give the baby a bath, worry about a bad situation… life.  Then, every once in a while I get that wild hair and search the internet for some more mind-blowing stuff.  One day I was flippin’ channels and stopped on Wayne Dyer.  I never heard anyone talk like that before.  I bought all his books, and BAM!, I’m in.  Byron Katie was next.  That was really mind-blowing.  Searching the internet, I found out about A Course In Miracles.  Got the book, read it, got more questions.  Back on the net…. Buddhism next.  Then Tao.  Then The Tao of Physics.  Next thing you know I find Gilbert Schultz, and wham!, that thread led to Advaita, and nonduality, and here I am.

I never meant to be in search of enlightenment.  I was just following the thread that I pulled out from behind that bookshelf on a boat in Florida 19 years ago.  I have to admit that this is a lot more fun to try to figure out than is Chaos, or Superstring theories.  I can relate to you Advaita Clowns – you are real people with real-life experience of what the quantum physicists are mathematically “proving” and experimenting with.  And hell, I hate math, so looks like I’ll follow this thread for a while… until it leads me somewhere else.

Cockney

This is for you EU clowns… There’s a site that will accentize anything, even websites.  So Lune and Suzanne were goin’ on about Cockney rhyming one day, and I saw that this thing does Cockney, so here ya go.  My blog in Cockney. (Click the “Dialectize” button to complete the transformation… it’s hilarious!)

13.73 Billion Years (Give or Take)

Well I’m back in the deep end again.  I should have been a philosophy major in college.  But neeeeeewww… I hadda jurn the NAVY!  But, you know what?  If I hadn’t joined the NAVY, I wouldn’t have learned electronics, and if I didn’t learn electronics, I wouldn’t have done so well in the class, and I wouldn’t have gotten to pick what kind of ship I wanted to be on, and where I wanted to be on it, and I wouldn’t have gotten stationed in Mayport, Florida on that broken down destroyer, and I wouldn’t have found “In Search Of Shrodinger’s Cat” tucked behind a bookshelf, and I wouldn’t have read it one boring night while having to stay on the ship, protecting it from the Cuban invasion, and I wouldn’t have thought how cool this quantum mechanics stuff was, and I wouldn’t have started questioning the things I’d always taken for granted, and I damned sure wouldn’t be telling y’all this stupid story.

Now.  Kinda glad things worked out the way they did.  A secret  I learned a while back reminds me that this was the ONLY way it could have happened.  And here I am, in this particular point in my life just absolutely AMAZED at how the universe took 13.73 BILLION! (+/-0.12 billion) years to bring itself to the small body-mind named Mike, and question what the hell is going on!  Of course, all of that’s based on a few assumptions on my part, but you get the idea.

So, what the hell is going on here?

And for those of you that know, or maybe care… Randall’s still with me, putting up with my crap!  I’ll keep you posted, but I think you’ll see it in the tone of my posts if something is realized.  Huh?

Pathless Path(etic)

I’m having some good conversations about some of my longstanding questions with Randall (thanks man!).  I’m taking some thought-provoking steps back and having another look at things I’ve been assuming for a very, very long time.  It’s funny the things you take for granted without questioning.  I consider myself a very critical thinker/questioner of things, which is what I had attributed to my searching, and what has brought me to where I am on this “path” (hate that word too).  Questioning Christianity broke me out of that nonsense, as well as questioning every other religion I’d come up against.  But to question things about your own existence is another story altogether.

Randall keeps asking me “Is that true?”  How do I know that I am my body, for example?  Of course, it goes deeper than that, but it’s good for me to be able to analyze this way.  Rupert Spira is a phenomenal help at understanding this too.  He sounds like a scientist, questioning everything from the standpoint of actual experience.  Check out Randall’s new blog to see and hear what Rupert says.  I’d seen him before after Chris at StillnessSpeaks.com and I had traded emails on the subject of my search.  It’s funny how I’m bumping into things again and again that I thought I’d left behind, but apparently wasn’t quite finished with – obviously.

So this is exciting for me.  More deep thought moments, questioning things in a different way, not knowing what the answers will be, but ready to face them nonetheless.  I’m not kissin’ Randall’s butt or anything like that, and it may just be too early to tell what’s gonna happen, but he’s being patient with me.  His last words in the last email…

Just relax about it all – this is truly the most simple thing.  The pulling in seeking just solidifies the frustration.  Just trust your own intuition – something resonates so we just will uncover the assumptions and see if they are true.  It’s really no big deal at all.

Thanks, man!  I hope this doesn’t drive a rush of hippies to you for salvation.

I’m The Man In The Box

Somehow, don’t ask me how, I found this video.

 

 

It’s Kabbalah, and I don’t know anything about it, nor do I care to get into it either.  I looked it up and saw levels and names and crap, so it instantly turned me off.  But, the thing in the video about the box with 5 inputs was a good analogy of what’s going on.

I’ve felt trapped.  Not trapped as in being in a life I didn’t choose, or like being with someone I don’t love (which is completely the opposite for me – I LOVE my life, I LOVE my beautiful wife, and I LOVE my beautiful children!), but trapped in the sense that I’m stuck inside this body with 5 senses as my only way to navigate and experience whatever it is that’s actually out there.

5 inputs is all I’ve got, and like this video shows, they’re all very specifically limited, and “I” never, at any time, am able to directly contact reality.  It’s always, I mean ALWAYS, filtered, dumbed down, and delayed.  It can be a very claustrophobic feeling if you think about it long enough.  I am in here, receiving inputs and reports on how things are out there from a very limited set of instruments.  Somehow I’m able to navigate this reality fairly well, which is amazing to me.  What else is out there that I cannot perceive?  Why can’t I step outside and just melt into all of it like I think I should be able to?  Why do I need this body to experience the reality at all?  It’s soooo limited in it’s perception.  Why am I stuck?  Why are we stuck?  What else is there, and why aren’t we allowed to “see”?

We try to investigate ourselves.  Who am I?  What am I?  What do we have to work with?  The mind?  The mind, conditioned by however many years of experience and programming and memory of what our senses have told us about our existence, seems incredibly ill-equipped for the task.  But what else is there?  You know that phrase “think outside the box”?  How cliche, but can you really do that?  The body’s the box.  The mind, as far as I know, is inside this box.  The mind is what does the thinking.  Thinking must occur inside the box.  You can’t escape it!  Of course there’s an “outside” the box, otherwise we wouldn’t need our senses to tell us about it.  Just what that is is a self-humbling mystery.  What I am is just as mysterious.

To put absolute meaning to any of this is so way out of my league.  Why are we here?  Where is here, and how can we know?  How can we really know anything at all?  What does that mean?  Like the sages have said, all we can really know for sure is we exist.  Actually, all that can be known for sure is that I exist.  I don’t know about all you other clowns.  Without me, you wouldn’t be here either.  Ha!  You’re welcome.  I exist, so you get to exist as well.  Down on your knees, you ungrateful bastards!  (No, really, I love you guys.  You know that, right?  Hello….?)

I’m Baaaack…

I’ve been busy lately. A newborn fills your life with so much more than you can imagine. More than I remembered, but it’s all familiar territory nonetheless. I haven’t been able to write – wait, no, that’s not true… I could’ve written many times, but I’m too damned lazy. So let’s say I’ve been too wonderfully wrapped up in being with my family full-time again (since the six-month layoff) to be bothered with blogging. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been jumping up and down on the mental hi-dive board waiting for the right moment to do a double back flip with a twist into the deep waters once more. I have. And having another baby just makes it all the more colorful and poignant.

Since posting the videos by Dr. Hagelin, I’ve been flung off on a tangent and reconnected with my original search – the slippery world of quantum mechanics. Digging through old books in the garage, I pulled out three that I’m reading all at once.

• The Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav
• The Tao of Physics, by Fritjov Capra
• Radical Nature, by Christian de Quincey

These, as well as many other books read in the early days, have re-acquainted me with the scientific notion that, at the basic level, everything is the same, and that nothing happens without consciousness.  It’s just absolutely mind-blowing stuff when you get down to it.  The fact that me, this body, this mind, can question the origins and location(s) of consciousness (itself) is just… well… bizarre.

Meanwhile, I commented on a post of Randall Friend’s on his website.  To wit:

Dude, I swear to God you’re writing to me personally. Reading in the “reading room”, having already heard and learned the nonduality lingo I automatically discard the pointers, even the “who am I?” question.

Charlie said it, “Very clear!”. But… not really. Very clear in that I have a very real, conceptual understanding of all that you say here. I seem stuck, and I very often give up because the stuckness is something I’m not used to and I certainly don’t like.

You were here too, Randall. What was it that pushed you over the edge. There must’ve been a light that just all of a sudden came on, and you said, “oooohhhh… I get it now.” C’mon man… hook a brother up.

Thanks for the congrats, by the way.

Mike

Randall then replied:

Mike,

“Who am I?” runs aground because there is no answer. The mind wants to place “who-ness” or “what-ness” upon the “I” – the only conclusion which can be reached is THAT you are, but that doesn’t need to be reached because you already know that.

Instead of asking “who am I?” ask “What IS I?” What really IS it? Then we’re immediately discerning the identifications which are placed upon “I”. Notice how so much is added on top of the simple “I” – every idea, every thought, every perception and sensation.

When we just stay with the simple “I”-ness, we find it’s nothing more than the background activity of knowing. “I” IS Awareness or Being, which doesn’t require a search, doesn’t need to be found. It is always there through all the frustrations, always there while the conceptual understanding flourishes, always the case.

Just notice that “I” is awareness. And awareness is limitless. Therefore “I” IS limitless. There isn’t anything more to it.

The giving up and going back head-first is just what IS – it may or may not resolve itself, and it is irrelevant. You already ARE that “I”, are you not? It isn’t a matter of getting anything. It’s seeing what you are not. Seeing what you are not, in identifications, you come to see that you are actually ALL, you are the wholeness or Oneness already.

This joy you are finding in the birth of your baby boy – that joy doesn’t come from outside, from situations. That joy is your Self shining, the absence of the “wanting self”. That joy cannot be found in objects or situations but is revealed or uncovered when, like when Owen was born, there was nothing being projected. Nothing missing. Nothing being sought after. Just pure joy, pure unfettered bliss. Limitlessness. That IS your Self, shining.

Yet if we hold on to that experience of Joy, we want it back – then the “wanting or seeking self” returns, once again what IS is not good enough, your Self is once again seemingly obscured, that “I” is again taken to be limited.

Yes, from one perspective there seemed to be something missing and something which triggered a recognition. But that trigger wasn’t some new statement, some ground-shaking pointer. It had been heard a thousand times but was ignored. In fact what the pointers point to was already known, already intimately familiar. The “knowing of my Self” didn’t come in new. It was already obvious but only overlooked BECAUSE it was being sought after, BECAUSE it was assumed to not be there, assumed to be the PRODUCT of the search.

Therefore that “wanting self” was functioning at top speed. When it was recognized that “I AM that ‘I’” and that “I” isn’t anything which can be quantified or conceptualized, yet is the most intimately-known reality, the pure subjective “space” or background or activity of knowing, then the “wanting self” fell away forever – there is and never was anything to get.

It was recognized that “I” am already full and complete, already limitless – not only does that “I” not need anything it literally cannot GET anything – therefore what is needed? What else can be gained? Seeking then just falls away naturally as completely unnecessary.

“I AM THAT” was then just a simple statement of actual, nondual reality, what IS, and not some spiritual bullshit.

THIS, right here and now, just THIS, is Advaita, nonduality, Oneness. Oneness isn’t the product of the spiritual search and does not come in anew. Oneness is unavoidable, already inescapable. What IS, is Oneness. Whatever THIS is imagined to be in mind, whatever THIS is split up into in concepts, whatever THIS is appearing as or experienced as, THIS is IT. Oneness is already the case.

You’re welcome to email or call anytime – if it may help to clear up any doubts. There are no donations requested or accepted. But the recognition of your Self isn’t waiting on the next book to be read or an email or phone call to some damn “guru” – you already ARE that “I”, are you not?

Just find out what “I” actually is, and isn’t.

love
randall

I love that last paragraph!  Randall, my friend, I might just take you up on that.  I’m damned tired of this nonsense I’m continually carrying on about.  And, if I get all pissed off about it, he’s close enough that maybe I could throw a rock at him or something (just kidding Randall).

It’s just so easy to say, “I am the background, that unending, eternal expanse of nothingness in which everything arises”, and I actually can mentally grasp that concept and declare it to be the truth.  I am that.  But the feeling, or conscious recognition if you will, isn’t there.  It’s all an idea.  Going along with something that kind of makes sense, but not really.  OK, Randall, if you’re reading… get ready.  I’m a comin’.

Miracle of Life: Owen Joshua Ayers

Owen Joshua Ayers

Well, here he is… our newest little boy, Owen Joshua Ayers.  For those of you who followed it on Twitter, you got a semi-blow-by-blow.  If not, Owen was born at 12:54 pm (EST) on Wednesday, October 21st.  It was a beautiful experience, and Kelly did an amazing job.

You know how they say that if you can suspend thought for just a moment you would allow the presence, who you really are, to seep in and it would expand and all that?  After coaching and saying, “PUSH!” about 50 times, this little guy came out and all time stoo still.  No thoughts, no mind chatter.  Just absolute brilliant joy and an overwhelming sensation of LOVE!  I wouldn’t call it enlightenment, but if that’s what enlightenment is like, then I don’t think I would be able to function.  Owen is my third child, and that feeling never dulls.  It’s so beautiful.  Thank you all for being a part of it!

Goin’ Deep!

I’ve prided myself on being able to resist the temptations of impulse buying while waiting my turn in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.  There must be an enormous amount of marketing research that goes into how to stash the aisle ways with eye candy, and junk you just can’t pass up.  It almost pisses me off sometimes to think that our weaknesses are being preyed upon.  Yet, there I was, in an abnormally long line at the checkout.  You can’t help but look at the junk they’ve got piled around you.  What else are you going to look at?

There, in the magazine rack is a Time special, “Your Brain: A User’s Guide”.  The subtitle… “Preserving Your Memory.  Men’s Brains vs. Women’s Brains.  Why We’re Conscious”.  That last one did it for me.  I had to have it!  Suckaaaaah!

There’s an article in this thing called, “The Riddle Of Knowing You’re Here”, by Steven Pinker.  A quote from this article stood out to me:

Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion.  Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.  These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

How odd.  The claim that the “I” is an illusion created by the brain after sorting out which process inside itself was the loudest just seems so… what… strange I guess.  Consciousness is a result of brain activity?  So, does this “result of brain activity” know of its own activity fooling itself into believing it exists?  The author who, no doubt, would classify himself as an individual, an “I” with a conscious, in effect, writes an article that says he doesn’t exist, that he is an illusion that happens as a result of brain activity.  Who knows this?  Is consciousness, the result of brain activity, realizing itself as being nothing more than the result of brain activity?  Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?

Can consciousness only be the result of brain activity, a by-product of brain-ness?  The brain develops, or maybe creates meaning out of purely mechanistic “things”, from purely mechanistic “things”.  How can consciousness be a by-product of something that doesn’t have consciousness?  It’s magic!  Of all the accidents in nature that led up to the conglomeration of atoms, cells, tissues, and systems that make up a human being, consciousness is a magical by-product of a haphazardly pieced together bundle of nerve cells inside a skull?  Oops… how did that happen?  To me, that’s just as silly as organized religion.

I don’t know what consciousness is to be honest with you.  I don’t know where it comes from, how it got here, or where it is.  I can only say that it exists.  This renewed line of questioning (yes, I’ve been here before) is leading to another round, and sort, of seeking.  Back to the original seek.  That of the nature of reality as defined by the sciences. I’m sure it’ll all come full circle, but for now I’m re-reading the older stuff.  There’s a link between science and spirituality.  At some point they merge… they must!  I won’t stop until I find that truth, whichever route it must take.

Another Perspective: Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

Have a look-see.  I’m curious what you guys think about this.  Let me know.

 

 

And part 2…