How I became Enlightened
/So if you have some time for entertainment watch the video of this 11 year old kid's TED talk. His story is here! and worth a quick read too. He is not actually a kid, he is an emanation of the Dao! The take away from his talk is very simple, STOP LEARNING!
Of course the obvious corollary to this kid's video is: stop teaching.
The common response to someone who says, I'm not interested in learning, is, you're so arrogant everyone can benefit from learning. Not true. In learning, as in fighting, time is damage.
Particularly when it comes to meeting new experts or masters, everyone will tell you to show up with an empty cup. How can you learn if your cup is already full? they say. The propagators of upright conduct will tell you that if you show up with an agenda it will obscure your ability to see what is there.
But I say nay! show up with a full cup and if you are lucky it will get spilled! The purpose of a class is to compare what is in your cup to what is in the cups of other people in the class, including the teacher. It is a place to compare notes, to test your experiences against the experiences of others. Who wants to teach people with empty cups? That's boring.
I've spent the last three months working on a book while staying and clearing brush at a Buddhist Retreat Center. There is a substantial library here and I've had a chance to interact with lots of people on the subject of enlightenment. But actually I already had incredible resources among my friends and family.
One of the many arguments spinning around is whether one needs to be subordinate to a teacher in order to pick up enlightenment skills. The best argument is that the default relationship in our society is equality and friendship. But to become enlightened your teacher may need to tell you that you are an idiot, a blind fool and a moral disgrace, for example. In our cultural milieu of equality as a default, those kinds of words would end the relationship, so you need to be subordinate to the teacher. Interestingly however, all of these enlightenment traditions come from Asia where hierarchy is the default relationship. This creates all kinds of confusion. They obviously have to overcome the hierarchy thing to become enlightened. So my conclusion is that whatever ones default relationship to a teacher or a teaching is, has to be overcome. It has to be overcome because it is an illusion and illusions take an enormous amount of effort to maintain. However, if it is a default illusion, one everyone else in your culture shares, than that effort is a BLIND SPOT, and you won't even know you are exerting that effort!
The other interesting argument spinning around is about how you might know if someone is enlightened.
Here is a talk by the Buddhist Geek Society about the science of enlightenment:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.org/audio/Episode266_Mindful_Binge_Drinking_and_Blobology.mp3
What a mess! What a mess! Here is my take. The only test we have for enlightenment that has any meaning has to do with how a person handles change. Particularly changes to ones identity. So to test for enlightenment we have to confront a person with a direct challenge to their world view. We push them past their limits and see how they adapt. Facing death head on would be good but perhaps impractical. We could perhaps have them talk to a rapist who not only loves raping but thinks it is the funniest thing he has ever done or will ever do in his life. It kind of depends on the person, I can think of a lot of things that would shock other people into an identity coma, but it's much harder to think of such a thing for myself. Anyway, once we solve the sampling problem (from the mp3 talk) and the control problem (also from the mp3) then we can come up with a list of things likely to knock someone's identity into next Thursday and see if they react differently then people who have not had 5+ years of enlightenment hazing.
That's all folks!
