part0017

“Once upon a time I felt so painfully constrained that I was consumed by a burning mania to get free or die trying. I didn’t attain real freedom, of course, I just broke out of my juvenile structure, and that allowed the natural unfolding of my spiritual DNA. That’s all anyone can do; escape from their egoic restraints and expand into their transpersonal, transegoic potential. That’s awake in the dreamstate. There’s also awake from the dreamstate – enlightenment – but that’s more like freedom from appearance, consciousness without an object, which probably isn’t what you’re asking about.”

She stares blankly at me. My answer does nothing for her, but I didn’t think it would. The three states of consciousness are awake from the dreamstate, awake in the dreamstate, and asleep in the dreamstate. She seems to think there’s another one called freedom, or maybe she’s referring to adulthood which may look like freedom through a child’s eyes. If adulthood is what she’s after, I’ll have to disappoint her. There are exceptions, but the belated transition to adulthood most often occurs between twenty-six to thirty-four, so what I’m really telling her is that she missed the boat twice and there won’t be a third. Breaking out of the herd and resuming one’s normal course of development is a young person’s game, and this woman is not young.

I inhabit the spacetime, energymatter, causalistic, dualistic dreamstate, but this isn’t my paradigm-of-residence any more than it’s yours. The dreamstate is an artificial reality, so it’s obviously no one’s home. We identify with our body, our place in space and time, our country and our planet, our family and our society and, of course, our ego-self, but all that is just appearance, and that thou aren’t. This is where revisiting your assumptions can make a real difference.

Our brightest minds aren’t always our best thinkers, which is good news for people of modest intellect such as myself because it means we’re not excluded from this ultimate game. It’s not a great intellect that’s required, but a functional intellect uncorrupted by fear-based emotion. Erasmus estimated our emotion-to-reason ratio at 24:1 which seems right. Mind is the dreamstate killer, but it can’t do much harm when swaddled in layers of emotional insulation. To have any hope of awakening in or from the dreamstate, we must minimize the negative impact of emotion and maximize the power of thought through the process of spiritual autolysis, not merely in the sense of writing, but in the sense of going to war with pen for sword and yourself as enemy.

The power of thought is your secret weapon – pashupatastra! – and you’ve had it all along, but thinking doesn’t work the way you think it does. It can’t be done in your heart-controlled head, and that’s why I am now offering, for a limited time only, Sri Sri Sri Sri Jed’s Spiritual Autolysis Super Seminar. For less than the cost of a few new cars, you can attend a weekend workshop with me in which I’ll teach you about this groundbreaking process and how it can guide you into the fun and exciting world of spiritual enlightenment. Or, for the budget-minded seeker, we offer the entire course on DVD for less than the price of a Caribbean cruise for six. Actually, all you need is a pen, some paper, and a desire to get real. Keep doing spiritual stuff if you think it’s working for you, but remember, you already have the power to awaken both in and from the dreamstate, so the only question is, do you want to be one of the first fifty to sign up and receive a free Tibetan singing bowl? Operators are standing by.

I share a story about former galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, which the librarian does not seem to appreciate. Zaphod was sentenced to enter a contraption called the Total Perspective Vortex; a small torture chamber in which one was, for a brief instant, forced to confront their complete and total insignificance by seeing the immensity of time and space with themselves represented by a tiny dot in the middle labeled, “You are here.” The direct awareness of one’s meaninglessness was so devastating that everyone who entered the Total Perspective Vortex fell out, not just dead but soul-crushed. Delightfully egotistic and egoistic Zaphod, however, survived. He interpreted this not as a revelation of his total nothingness, but as confirmation that he was, as he’d always assumed, the center of the universe. And he was correct. The infinite universe is just a belief. Your awareness is your only direct experience of reality and, like Zaphod, you would be correct in considering yourself to be the center of your own private universe.

“We are unique crystalline snowflakes in an endless blizzard of unique crystalline snowflakes,” I say, ignoring her theatric eye roll. Fifteen or twenty people are listening in now so I’m trying to make this of general interest. “We shine the light of our lifeforce through our unique crystalline pattern into the dreamstate theater, and we inhabit the reality we project.”

“Meaning,” she continues, “that we’re prisoners of what you call our spiritual DNA? We can never be free?”

She’s like a dog digging for a bone she’ll never find because she only dreamed it in the first place. She won’t awaken in or from the dreamstate, but like anyone, she might have a more pleasant experience of it if she were hauling less baggage. Happiness increases with the slicing away of false beliefs, but Ellie seems not only attached to her burden, but eager to increase it.

There is a fruitbearing apple tree nearby. I summon it to my aid .

“Behold yon apple tree,” I say. “What freedom does it have? It expresses its own unique pattern without volition. How free or unfree does it feel? What choice does it have in anything? An appleseed can’t choose to become a daisy or a pony; does that make it unfree? It has a built-in pattern it must follow or it will fail to germinate and never discover its potential. Where in nature does freedom exist?”

I continue before she can bang the gong of freedom again.

“Behold me. I am awake both in and from the dreamstate – both adult and enlightened – but what freedom do I have? Several decades ago I experienced an explosive event that sent me hurtling off in a single, specific direction. That direction of travel is not what I do , it’s what I am , but it’s still just a role I play. I’m just going along for the ride, enjoying the show and playing my part. What other freedom can there be but the freedom to express your authentic nature? To discover your nature by expressing it? The closest thing to the freedom you seek is found through the severing of attachments, including the attachment to freedom.”

No real freedom is possible because there’s no real self to be free, but what about the appearance of freedom? The faux-freedom of the faux-self? Is that possible? Sure, why not? What can’t be dreamt? Paint your prison cell with green fields and blue skies and puffy white clouds and pretend you’re a bird. Or paint it with ghosts or aliens or higher-order beings, or angels and demons, or the psychedelic vomit of your subconscious, whatever your egoic structure calls for. That’s what Ellie keeps calling for. She doesn’t want freedom, she wants a spiritual makeover. She doesn’t want to escape captivity, she wants to be happier within it. That’s why she finds my answers unsatisfying; they don’t fit her question. I don’t have all answers to all questions, I only have one answer and it’s your job to arrive at the right question. Spiritual teachers are doing their students a disservice by validating invalid questions when they should be swatting their students mercilessly with sticks, but then they’d lose their students and couldn’t play teacher anymore. If you were sitting across from me right now and you started blubbering about your feelings or experiences or hopes and dreams, about freedom or love or bliss or compassion or whatever visions of sugarplums dance in your head, instead of hitting you with a stick, I’d give you a jolt with my Wakey-Wakey Taser to snap you out of it, or maybe I’d use the longer Satori Now! Cattle Prod so I didn’t have to reach so far. Zap! Right on the third eye. Shocktipat! I bet that would leave a mark. *

“Freedom exists in context. If you were caught in a bear trap, the freedom-urge would be so powerful that you’d chew off your leg to achieve it. In spiritual terms the question is, what do you want to be free from so desperately that you’d chew off your own head?”

“So we’re not free to choose what we’ll become?” she insists. “We’re not really free at all.”

“Like yon apple tree, there’s no need to decide what you’ll become, only to allow the natural unfolding of what you are. Expressing your unique pattern, your spiritual DNA, is your natural source of happiness, anything else is just compensating for being out of alignment with your nature. That misalignment is really the only thing to be free from. No one is born to the herd. It’s not in anyone’s authentic nature to be a productive member of society and go to church once a week and Disneyville once a year. That’s halfborn, herdbound pattern, not fullborn, individual pattern.”

“You still haven’t answered her question,” says the librarian’s accountant-ish husband who looks like he’s comfortably settled into the herd and unlikely to be making any life choices bigger than Accord versus Camry. (I would later learn that the librarian was a chemist and the accountant was a labor negotiator.)

“The answer is to use the spiritual autolysis process to explore your desire for freedom; figure out what it really is and how to get rid of it. Freedom is just a buzzword. It’s not a goal, it’s an obstruction, so you have to dislodge it to restore free flow. You need freedom from your attachment to freedom. That’s where you’re stuck, and you can use the writing process to get unstuck.”

I’m eager to dislodge this freedom topic and restore some flow to this conversation.

“Imagine you’re a spaceman in your spacesuit working outside your spaceship,” I say, ignoring her pained expression and gutteral moan. “One minute your dramatic context is representing your family, country and humanity in space, playing many roles to many audiences in a full, rich, complex life, and the next minute your tether snaps and you go floating off into the void with no hope of rescue. Just like that, all context is gone and you’re completely on your own. You’ve died out of your life, but you’re still alive. You’re free now, but you can’t exert any control over your situation. Your trajectory is determined from the outset, so unless you get hit by a satellite or bump into a comet, that’s your speed and heading for the rest of your life.”

“And what’s the point of this hypothetical scenario?” asks Ellie impatiently .

“The point is that it’s not hypothetical, it’s where you are right now. You’re still tethered to the mothership which provides the illusion of context and meaning, but free-floating in black, empty space is where you really are. It’s not until your emotional tether snaps that you awaken to the reality of your situation. So that’s where we are in this metaphor; your tether has snapped and you’re floating off into the void. What’s next?”

I wait a few beats before answering my own question for the entire group.

“What’s next is the Total Perspective Vortex; the shrieking madness of the relative mind confronting absolute truth. Self confronts no-self. Finite brain confronts infinite mind. That’s enlightenment; awareness without appearance, consciousness without an object. A little of that kind of freedom goes a long way. Within moments, you’ve had enough freedom and you want your dreamstate back. You want lies and drama and pain to give you purpose and meaning. You want context even if it’s false. You want other people to love and hate. You want your beloved beliefs and opinions to give you shape and definition. You want the pain of a toothache and the boredom of standing in line. You want goals to achieve and battles to win, even if it’s just a pointless game. You want to slip back into the only character you’ve always played, even if it was never really you. You want to feel hope and connection, and you don’t care if it’s a lie because nothing is worse than nothing. A dreamless sleep is one thing, but a waking dreamlessness is totally something else. Anything that distracts from the mind-ravaging horror of Nothing Forever is good, even delusion and ego. Any context is better than no context. Freedom is the real prison and the dreamstate is the only escape. Maya’s not keeping us from truth, she’s saving us from it. Nothing Forever is the nightmare scenario, not just for us but for consciousness itself. Brahman needs Maya, but Maya doesn’t exist so Brahman has to dream her into being. In the same way that we’re stuck in small cells and decorate them to keep ourselves amused, Brahman is stuck in the infinitely empty cell of Nothing Forever, and creation is the paint job that keeps Brahman amused. Infinite consciousness creates a faux reality from which it can’t escape because there’s nothing out there; the dreamstate is the escape. The false-finite is the solution to the problem of the true infinite. Maya and the dreamstate and even the ego-self aren’t some terrible enemy to be overcome, they are salvation itself. Of course it’s all bullshit; it has to be. Maya is protecting us from the real reality of Nothing Forever. She’s not a goddess, she’s God, and the dreamstate universe you inhabit is her creation. That’s what’s really going on here. Pretty trippy, right?”

I nod vigorously in agreement with myself. I expect the assembled group to instantly achieve abiding nondual awareness, but what I get instead is Ellie asking, “So you’re saying freedom is bad?” I’d like to encourage her to revisit her clearly ironic attachment to freedom, but her dogged persistence is wearing me down.

“The freedom-urge is good in the context of motivating change, but it isn’t the dreamstate that you want to be free from, it’s the prison of your own egoic shell. Like everyone, you’re stuck at a developmental age between ten and twelve; that’s what you want to be free of. Arrested development is the only spiritual issue anyone needs to address.”

I can see she’s about to ask about freedom again, so I rush ahead before she gets the chance.

“The purpose of the dreamstate is to create the appearance of false-something despite the reality of true-nothing. The dreamstate is a refuge from truth where awareness can experience drama and conflict and spectacle as an antidote to boredom. That’s why waking from the dreamstate is the booby-prize; you’re effectively tunneling out of a cosmic playground and into the prison of Nothing Forever. Mind is the dreamstate killer, but do you really want to kill the dreamstate? Where would you be without it? We think Maya and ego and emotional attachment are the enemy because they separate us from the holy grail of truth, but it’s really the other way around; we’re not in the dreamstate to find truth, we’re here to get away from it. Maya’s Palace of Illusion is a prison from one perspective and salvation from another, and Maya herself, despite not existing, is both jailer and liberator, demon and angel. That’s why adulthood is better than enlightenment, why false-relative is better than true-absolute, why containment is better than freedom. The dreamstate isn’t the problem and truth isn’t the solution, it’s the other way around.”