So there I was, four years into graduate school, a decade after the great unmingling, having studied all these traditional accounts of moks.a, Nirvana and Christ Consciousness, now confident I knew what the word “enlightenment” actually pointed to. And now facing one enormous question. Well three actually.
The first question was this: when you get the pot of gold that you wanted and it’s not what you thought, well, what then is it?
Whatever had happened to me, and now I was pretty sure this was at least a good chunk of the enlightenment for which I had been longing so avidly, it was not enough. It didn’t make me chipper. It didn’t end my troubles. It didn’t make me good at my job. It didn’t even make it clear which job I should be doing. Even carrying an infinite silence, I wasn’t better off in any obvious way than any other broke graduate student. Paul McCartney’s “such a joy, joy, joy” this wasn’t! No wonder I didn’t dance for joy back when it began.
Yet, I also knew even then, nor was it nothing. Something did seem to be happening inside. A quiescence — permanent, kindly and slowly expanding—at the level of your own awareness is…well… new. I was a different kind of being than I had been, though I couldn’t say quite how. I couldn’t understand much of it, but nor could I deny it. In my everyday life, it wasn’t at all obvious what practical difference this strange new way of living really meant. So here was my first question: What real difference does this sort of shift make?
The post modern version of this same question is this: as described by the Upanishads, the Buddhist texts, Daoism and other spiritual teachers, millions of human beings have shaped their lives around the search for the enlightenment. Have all those people merely assured themselves that there is enlightenment and then striven to answer the question that they themselves had posed? Is there any there there?
My second question grew out of the first. If this ain’t “it,” then what is? If “enlightenment” as the East describes it or the “heaven on earth” that the West describes just aren’t, for us, complete spiritual goals, then what might be? For folks like me, who live a post modern, post Freudian, post true-believer, sexually active, mortgaged life, what might be a or perhaps the plausible spiritual goal? What is a telos worth pursuing? What are or should we complex westerners really be after today?
And my third question: how do we get that? If daily meditation or Yoga or Tai Chi aren’t enough to get us to that more plausible spiritual goal, what practice or set of practices might?
As I’m sitting here, warm in my hermitage, it occurs to me that my questions were not unconnected to the fact that I’m here in Western New York, and here in the 21st Century. I’m an American, a westerner. I’m neither Hindu, Buddhist nor Daoist. And I don’t live in a monastery (though this is pretty close!). Enlightenment was an answer to a problem that traditional Hindus and Buddhists had: the resolution of samsara. They assumed that we all live and die and then get ourselves reborn again. And then we live, die again and get reborn again. And again. … without end. Their question was, how do we get off the mouse wheel?
The answer for a Hindu or Buddhist was enlightenment. If you metaphysically separate yourself from that which suffers, if you stop identifying with the self that gets reborn, you will become free of the endless cycle of rebirth.
Nice answer. But not my question. To me rebirth is an interesting possibility. But on what happens after you die, for me the jury is still out. Maybe we get reborn. Maybe we go to heaven or hell. Or maybe we don’t. Certainly how to come to terms with death, bereavement and loss are important matters, for sure! But what happens after you die is not my life-issue.
My issue, and the issue of most western, modern folks I know, has something to do with living. My spiritual questions have to do with how to live a life, if you will, or perhaps how to live with others. How do we be happy or satisfied? How do we live well in our marriages, our friendships, our workdays? How do we find fulfillment? When we heard about “eternal contentment,”49 what we wanted was an answer to our longings for personal, individual satisfaction.
What I was looking for, what we were all looking for, I think, would have to have here and now practical value. I personally wanted to end my depression and resolve my anxieties. I wanted a great relationship. We wanted meaning in a complex urban life and work worth doing. Our questions had to do with finding find real, living, full-bodied fulfillment and lightness in our shoes.
And if enlightenment as I came to understand it wasn’t by itself doing this, then what will? And how?
So here are the triple questions that I have been asking and trying to answer with my life.
1. What actual, practical differences do shifts like these make?
2. If such existential shifts aren’t enough for us, given who we are and how we think, what might be enough?
3. How do we foster that?
These are deep and difficult matters and well worth answering. Not so that we can grade each other or ourselves. (God forbid!) Not so we can gloat. (Even worse!) No, it is important to get a fix on our telos, our life-goals, to understand where we are (or should be) headed. In which direction do we point our horse?
Once we know where we want to go, it becomes easier to understand how to get there. And even if we never get to the final telos (even if we probably never will) at least we’ll be moving in roughly the right direction. Quo vadis?