part0011

A YOUNG MAN RAISES HIS HAND to ask a question. I nod and he starts talking about himself; his story, his circumstances, his experiences, his feelings, his beliefs, his spiritual history. I won’t try repeating what he said because I don’t care and neither should he and neither should you. None of that personal crap matters. Awakening in or from the dreamstate is an impersonal process, and all that biographical baggage amounts to nothing more than the debris with which we conceal, mask and distract from the only thing that does matter, which is making it to and through the black hole within; the only spiritual path there is .

It’s surprising how often people mistake this process for housekeeping instead of arson. I’m pretty sure that if you start telling a Roshi about your feelings, you’re gonna get a taste of the stick. I wouldn’t hit students with a stick for asking dumb questions because it seems like too much bother. Like, is there an etiquette or protocol? Do I have to get up and come over to you? What if you flinch and I don’t get a clean shot, do I get a do-over? A mulligan? How many tries do I get? Or do you approach me to get hit? How does that get conveyed to you? Is there a gesture or a command I’m supposed to give, or does anyone who talks to me have to come within hitting distance first? What’s that, like three feet? I don’t want anyone within ten feet of me. And what if you’re one of those people who like to get whacked? That could get pretty weird pretty fast. The whole stick-hitting thing sounds like more trouble than it’s worth, but I could see where a phaser set on stun, mostly, might solve a lot of these problems. I could blast whoever I want and they’d just take a little timeout and be okay, mostly, within a few hours. I’m sure the first twenty pages of the phaser instruction manual would contain bold red warnings like “Never point at people or animals!”, “Can cause blindness, brain damage, paralysis, or death!”, “If hit by phaser, seek immediate medical treatment!”, and all that paranoid legal junk, so I’d probably have to get special insurance and have students sign waivers absolving me in advance for any physical and emotional scarring, post-spiritual stress disorder, melted fillings, light-to-medium scorching, and bladder-control issues. I guess the Roshis have it pretty easy, or maybe they just have good lawyers.

“It’s not me that should be interesting to you, it’s you. You should totally blow your mind. Every one of you should find yourself to be far and away the most magnificent, amazing, remarkable thing in creation. That’s not make-real, happy-time ass-talk, that’s absolutely how you should look at yourself and your fleeting moment of in-character awareness and cocreative partnership. If you’re not the single greatest miracle of creation by your own reckoning, then you’re not paying attention. This goes right to the heart of all this awakening and spiritual stuff. Make a real effort to open your eyes and understand who and what and where you really are. When you think of yourself as just one more cow in an endless herd it doesn’t sound so special, but that’s not what you really are, that’s just the lie that’s been burned into you like a brand. When you’re asleep you see yourself as just another cell in a huge organism made up of billions of similar cells, but when you open your eyes and see for yourself, you discover that you’re singular and unique; sui generis , a class of your own. You are not a part of a larger being but a full and complete being in your own right, and you’re the only one of your kind.

“You’ve been brainwashed by the promise of heaven and reincarnation and immortality to live your life as if it goes on forever and there’s no urgency, but the urgency is real and you’re already late to the party. You have a small window of time to wake up and figure out what’s going on. You are consciousness and the universe is consciousness, no difference. You are a point of awareness with a body for a vehicle and a planet for a playground in a timespace energymatter reality, but this setup doesn’t last forever. The truth is that you are the diamond heart of awareness at the center of your own personal universe; how is that not the coolest thing ever? What could possibly be more amazing to you than you? Not what came before but what might lie ahead. Not what you are right now but what you might become. I have no idea what your potential is, but more importantly, neither do you. I don’t mean potential like you might get a degree or run for office or become a priest or the head of a drug cartel, I mean that you could do things in the realm of emotionally- powered cocreative intelligence that you’ll need a new vocabulary to describe. You could go somewhere that doesn’t appear on any map and become something no one has ever dreamed of. Compare that potential with the life you’re living now which is probably so tightly-scripted and rigidly defined as to be hardly worth getting out of bed for. Feel free to be offended, by the way; if truth hurts then pain is your friend. If you could see the difference between your juvenile reality and your adult potential, you’d have no other thought than to make that transition regardless of any other consideration. The reason you don’t live in a state of constant total amazement is not because it’s not constantly totally amazing, but because you’re constantly totally asleep, and I guess you agree which is why you’re here instead of with any of the countless New Age smoke-blowers and ass-talkers who tell you to sit down, shut up and close your eyes; to be mellow and find peace in your confinement. I’m not saying you should turn into a total dipshit about it, I’m saying that if you take your situation for granted and waste your life as just another cow in the herd, then you’re already a total dipshit. Again, feel free to be offended, but point your anger in the right direction. Don’t waste it on me. You may be the victim of this crime, but you’re also very much the criminal.”

I pause and take a drink of oversweet lemonade and discretely spit it out before continuing .

“By my estimate, we only have a few viable years – something in the twenty-six to thirty-four age range – during which we can marshal sufficient mental focus, emotional energy, and physical stamina to bring about change, to retrace every step back to the beginning and start over in the right direction. That’s basically the map of the death-rebirth process; the undoing of negative progress being the death part and setting out in a positive direction being rebirth. They don’t tell you about that in the spiritual marketplace because their success depends on assuring eyes-closed, fear-based, halfborn people that their eyes are open and that they’re capable of great spiritual things. They tell us that where we are now is just fine, that our beliefs and assumptions are all valid and correct, that all we have to do is learn some stuff and practice some techniques and have a nice little epiphany and we’ll win the big spiritual prize and be the envy of family and friends and live happily ever after. That’s what we want to hear – that it’s all rebirth and no death – and that’s what they tell us because the spiritual marketplace isn’t truth-driven or results-driven, it’s consumer-driven. In this sense, it’s no different from anything else in the dreamstate. All ministries serve the opposite of their stated purpose, and the Ministry of Awakening is no exception.

“I am a point of awareness looking out from inside this physical vehicle onto a surrounding dreamstate reality. This character I play is like a rental car to me and this dreamstate is like a motel. I have no real connection to it, no pride of ownership, no sense of permanence or belonging. That’s the reality of you too, but you’re so caught up in the illusion of selfhood that you can’t distinguish passenger from vehicle or guest from motel. We’re all just finite units of infinite awareness. We gather bits of debris and combine our flotsam with neighboring jetsam to form islands and archipelagos and continents. We find company and connection in these ramshackle floating structures, but no configuration of emotional rubbish can change the fact that we are each alone on a shoreless sea.

“Awareness is perfectly impersonal. There’s no my awareness or your awareness, there’s only awareness itself. The truth of you and the truth of Buddha, Hitler, Stalin, and Christ is the same truth. All truth is one truth, all consciousness is one consciousness, and that thou art. Once we release our desperate hold on the accumulated detritus of selfhood and allow ourselves to sink beneath the surface, two things happen; first dis integration, then re integration. We recede from personal appearance and proceed into impersonal awareness. This is the one and only spiritual path; everything else is about maintaining and reinforcing the illusion of selfhood. We become attached to ego primarily and the world secondarily. Self and other. First and foremost we attach to the person we find ourselves to be – body, mind, thoughts, feelings – then, that core self becomes the hub for all the countless attachments we pick up as we go. The process of awakening from delusion entails the severing of these attachments progressively; weakest to strongest. This process is self-regulating and once it starts, all we can do is hold on and try to survive from one downsizing to the next. It takes a year or two, it’s painful, it sucks, but eventually you come to the kill-the-Buddha moment when you confront the mother of all attachments; self itself. This is the war we wage when we confront the black hole within, but now it all comes down to the final conflict and there are only two warriors left standing; fear of no-self and hatred of false self. The real war is about destroying the illusion that there was ever a self or a dreamstate in the first place, so in the end, no one is left standing and no one wins. In other words, the greatest trick Maya ever pulled was convincing the world that she exists.”

“In an adult society, we wouldn’t be discussing escape from the dungeon because we wouldn’t have gotten locked up in the first place. You wouldn’t mistake the segregated state for a permanent condition so you wouldn’t form an unhealthy attachment to your juvenile character. Rather than a belated, self-instigated transition in your twenties or thirties, you’d undergo a timely, natural transition at the age of sexual maturity. Being raised by adults, your youth would be spent exploring and discovering and finding your own way in the world. Your inner black hole would not be buried under a mountain of emotional debris, it would be sitting out in the open, waiting for you to make a healthy transition from the sandbox of the child to the unlimited cocreative playspace of the adult. As an adult, your time and lifeforce wouldn’t be wasted on the denial of no-self and projection of false-self, so they could be put to much better use. You’d have an open and honest relationship with your own mortality so you wouldn’t have to fabricate and inhabit a fairytale narrative to shield you from truth.

“An adult society would be much less cohesive than the juvenile herd. Remove the gravity well of fear and everyone would naturally drift apart. Such a society would not need a shared false-narrative to provide meaning and context because alignment with your own unique spiritual DNA provides all the meaning and context you need. The meaning would still be artificial because all art is artifice and your life is your work of art. The context would still be false because all games are false and your life is just a game you play. Understood correctly – directly, honestly, fearlessly – what need could there be for fabrication and lies?

“I’m on my journey, you’re on yours, and maybe once a month we meet at the farmer’s market and swap stories about how you’ve learned to raise and shape massive stones with your voice and how I’ve learned to channel the goddess of illusion. We’d share our experiences while you gave me a haircut and I repaired your shoes. That’s probably when savage hordes would ride in from distant lands and cut off our heads, burn our homes, steal our children and reestablish an eyes-closed, fear-based society, but our adult-based utopia would have been nice while it lasted.

“The big difference would be kids. The parent-child bond would look very different in an adult society; still powerful but less possessive and needy. In an adult society, children would not be used to plug the inner black holes of the parents by creating the illusion of meaning, context and purpose, as they are now. How do you raise someone to become a Human Adult? Through non-interference, release, trust. By letting nature take its course. By pushing them out of the nest at the appropriate time to fly or die. You teach them to read, write and reckon, give them access to a library, and then when the time comes, kick them out and wish them well. Maybe not quite that heavy on the tough-love, but close.

“We accept that going to school, getting a job, getting married and having kids is the highest ideal to which we might aspire, that retirement and grandkids are the rewards for a life well-lived, that shuffling cradle-to-grave like mindless drones is the path of the righteous, but if you’re just one cow in an endless herd, then in what sense are you anything more than a commodity? If you can be replaced like a lightbulb, then you’re just an interchangeable part. In the expression of our spiritual DNA, we are all unique; no one is replaceable or interchangeable. However many snowflakes might exist, each one forms the nucleus of its own dreamstate universe. No snowflake can ever come again and no two can ever be the same. In one sense, what you become while you’re here doesn’t matter, in another sense, it’s the only thing that does.

“Imagine how your life might be different if you’d spent your early years in a nurturing, growth-conducive environment instead of being sentenced to rot in government storage facilities, if you’d been raised by adults to become an adult instead of sitting in classrooms hour after week after month after year, learning and discovering nothing of value, accomplishing nothing more than the systematic disposal of your formative years, and therefore, your life. Most of the spirit-neutering, mind-numbing garbage we’re force-fed in school wouldn’t even exist as subject matter in an adult society and might be replaced by weird-sounding subjects like Wei Wu Wei, Cocreative Integration, Dreamstate Reality, Transpersonal Navigation, and Subtle Energy Dynamics, but even those would be as unnecessary as classes in Standing, Walking and Running are today. You’d master these subjects as easily and naturally as you mastered your mother tongue. What might any of us become if we found our direction early and followed it through life? What are we really capable of? That’s what the question of an adult utopia really boils down to; not what are people capable of or what is a person capable of, but what you are capable of? What might any of us become in this life given an upbringing that was not in violation of the natural order, raised by people who were not themselves morbidly obtuse in a society that wasn’t fanatically devoted to the crushing of the human spirit? Imagine what your life might have been had all forces not conspired against you.”

Speaking in my capacity as an apple tree, somewhere around the age of thirty I underwent a radical course correction and have since followed a fixed outbound trajectory. These books I write are the record of my journey, brought into focus and refinement through the writing and editing process itself. I go where my course takes me and I use the externalized thought process of writing to make sense of it as I go. What does an apple tree do? It takes what it needs from the soil, air, sky, and the perfect intelligence that informs all things, and through some weird alchemy, it turns all that into an apple. Same with me, only books .

As I said early on, I didn’t receive the Total Knowledge Package with this enlightenment deal, so what I know is what I’ve figured out for myself and much of it has come as a surprise. When I started writing the books twenty years ago, I thought my topic was waking from the dreamstate – enlightenment – but I soon learned that one or two books were more than enough on that subject and that my unique trajectory was becoming more about waking in the dreamstate – adulthood – and here we are in my tenth book. “Camerado, this is no book,” said Whitman, “who touches this touches a man.” You can say I’m just another New Age hack cultivating my reflection in the eyes of readers, or you can look from a higher perspective and see me not as a person but a function; I am an apple tree and I exist to produce this particular fruit. I act, but I don’t reflect on the fruit of my act, and by my fruit shall ye know me. Does that mean my books are pure truth handed down from on high? No, maybe it’s all lies and bullshit. Maybe instead of apples I’m producing stinky assfruit and by my fruit you know me as a stinky asstree. I don’t think that’s the case, but even if it were, that would be my function and I’d perform it. Obviously we’re not limited to only creating good, honest, morally upright fruit. The universe doesn’t care what we create, only that we do .

Once you set out on a straight-line trajectory, you have no idea where your journey will take you. Maybe you begin as a painter and that evolves into inventing some new class of artwork based on the atmosphere instead of paint; setting the aurora borealis to music or composing thunderstorms, but still with further to go. I have no idea what anyone might become or what fruit they might bear, I simply believe that anyone can find their outbound trajectory and follow it as far as they’re able and that no two journeys will produce the same discoveries or yield the same creative output. What might Thoreau have become had he not died in his forties? Was he really a naturalist, or was that just his early course? Where might his trajectory have taken him given another thirty or forty years? Jim Morrison might have gone far beyond poetry and music if he’d had the chance. Who knows? No one knows anything – I certainly don’t – but that’s the nature of the dreamstate. Obviously, we’re here to play and create and explore, not walk in circles, eating, mooing and mating, blinded by our own dustcloud and imprisoned by fear… Wait, scratch that. Obviously, that is why most of us are here since that’s what most of us do, but maybe you can do something different.

If I write another book, I’ll call it Jed Talks 4 : Beauty Enough to Stop a War . In it, I’ll take a break from criticizing eyes-closed, fear-based humanity and start singing its praises. I’ll try to express the true magnificence and wonder and complexity of the dramatic dreamstate, and the infinite consciousness and perfect intelligence underlying it. We kings and slaves, sages and scholars, artists and warriors and kids of all ages have mounted and manned this diverse, long-running, theatrical production, and one of the benefits of awakening from the spectacle – the un suspension of disbelief – is the ability to view it in the new light of detachment. I see all this from the enlightened perspective, which you might not like as much as you’d like. You’ll love it when you’re here beside me, but you won’t like hearing it described from where you are. You won’t agree that the horror-and-suffering end of the experiential spectrum is just as perfect and wondrous and beautiful as the love-and-beauty end. That’s a tough cross-paradigm sell, but what are we doing here if not elevating and expanding our perspective? You must learn to see with the same eye a mound of earth and a heap of gold, a cow and a sage, a dog and the man who eats the dog. I’m not suggesting that you feel that stomach cancer is the same as a basket of puppies, but there is a perspective from which they’re exactly the same, and that must be what you’re here to see because that’s where all this leads.

We look through the filters of preference and bias and emotional discrimination, but we can flip those filters out of the way and see with naked, unaided, uncorrupted eye. You don’t have to form preferences and take sides and judge everything you behold, you can just look, just see, just sit back and wonder at the mystery and majesty of this production; not as a player on the stage but as a spectator in the nosebleed seats from where you can’t tell good guys from bad guys because from this altitude, all the players look like ants, which is, of course, what we really are.

Life is about creation. The creative process is fully scalable; the same process that weaves a basket into being weaves galaxies into being. The point of creation is creation; it is an end in itself, and whether you consider yourself creative or not, you are a part of creation, no more or less than any other. The powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. A tree that does not produce a fruit may itself be the fruit; they also serve who only fill out the forest. Even if you’re not starting wars or writing symphonies or building a better mousetrap, you’re as much a part of the grand dramatic spectacle as those who swing the swords and sing the arias.

If you gave me a million dollars, I’d buy a tractor and some attachments and stick the rest in my sock drawer and forget it’s there. If you gave me a child I’d give it back. If the Nobel committee called, I’d change my number. I have all the purpose and meaning I need right here in my own private dreamstate. I have my health, I know my function, and I see my path forward. That’s the goal of spirituality, the realization of the Taoist ideal, and the only adult utopia we can ever hope to find.