. . .
— twitter user @PrinceVogel
I stumbled upon the tweets quoted above the other day (courtesy of big baby rocket man I have to quote them here like this since tweet embeds don’t work here anymore, it seems), and it stimulated some thoughts in me and challenged some ways I view the notion of enlightenment. Here are some of those thoughts.
The tweet expresses a take on the relation of enlightenment and ordinary human social life. It refers to two Zen heuristics or phrases about enlightenment:
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
and
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
(—Dogen)
According to these viewpoints, enlightenment—the popularly conceived goal of spiritual practice—is not some terminal state wherein one arrives or dissolves and never returns from, but instead an ephemeral and rather secondary thing from which one always returns into a similar state one was in before it.
—
When you gain insight into your true nature—when you dissolve the culturally conditioned illusory strings of habitual identification with an abstraction of yourself defined by social conventions and terms—you see that the whole world is what you are. You are a pattern in the world, of the world, the very world itself, and all of the expressions of the world are the same fundamental continuum—and even calling it fundamental easily forms a redundant idea of a separation between it and the things apparent in it. They are the same; there is no need to emphasize that somehow only on the deeper levels it is one with all within it, because this tends to lead to the supposition that one ought to unravel all the "false" things before being able to identify with the ground of being—which is the thought that OP in this tweet seems to me to be constrained by. He admittedly feels that the human social realm is in contraposition with the physical world; or rather that they should not in any case be held together, that they are fundamentally very different and separate realms, and that one cannot consider the adages of chopping wood and carrying water or mountains being mountains to apply into the human social realm. Which I disagree with.
When you attain unity with the ground of reality, you see everything that finds expression within it—the field of the dharmadhatu—to be intrinsically one with it. Nothing can stand apart from it. Only those still blinded by their individual conceptual mental matrices covering their perception of reality can be so bound by their rules to think that something existing in a different conceptual class is expressive of it being disjunctive with something in another class—such as the human social reality (or letting oneself be a normie) on the one hand and the impersonal physical reality (mountains) on the other. And this, and the overcoming of this, seems to me to be the essence of that which is referred to as "enlightenment."
It happens in conjunction with becoming aware of the nature of one's true self, of the Original Mind, of all those big things which are referred to in different nondual doctrines; and part of this is the recognition of one's own self being spread out all over the world as well as being one with its source—seeing that it is you who is circulating your blood just as much as it is you who is shining the sun, per Alan Watts. Thus it's also you who is making all the social dramas happen; they are epiphenomena of the very same fundamentally unified ground of reality as the waters and the mountains are, and thus to proclaim that they are in exclusive disjunction is merely an expression of one's own ignorance; avidya, "lack of vision,” which would be healed by "enlightenment."
The thing most retreat into things like Zen (or Buddhism more generally), or any other kind of a systemic search for enlightenment, is exactly the hellscape that is the social reality when one is not seeing it for what it is; is under its spell; takes it seriously; and misequates oneself with the role assigned to oneself by the cultural ecology one inhabits. Thus this drives the easily held notion that to attain enlightenment is to stand apart from the social reality, because it is seen as illusory—and of course to attain the Biggest Thing, the Ultimate Apex of All Human Spiritual Aspiration should mean the destruction of all illusions, right? But this is expressive of a lack of insight into the nature of illusion, enlightenment and the human social realm.1
Thus, in the most mature and refined spiritual practices and schools of thought, such as Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, spiritual attainment is not seen as something demanding a terminal sacrifice of participating in worldly things. The Mahayanic ideal of the Bodhisattva says that the most refined adept of all needs not retreat into Nirvana like a coward; he is so deeply smart, his sword of Prajna is so sharp, that he sees without any need to expend effort on his own part the unity that Nirvana and Samsara share—thus not needing to escape from one's prior position in Samsara into some ideal position in Nirvana, seeing that they are already one and the same, two sides of the same coin. And being the same coin, to be in either side is to (implicitly) be in the other too—so nothing needs to be done.
If you get a glimpse into the totality of reality beyond your ordinary socially inherited sense of identity (in enlightenment), what results is the realization that the persona given to you is not real. Beyond that, nothing in this ephemeral manifest reality is real; it is all a holographic projection of pattern and form into a field of vibration fundamentally unpreoccupied with being any specific kind of way. The mature realization is not to withdraw from it, or any of its manifestations; it is to let oneself be whatever one intrinsically feels called to be—to vibrate in the way that one naturally vibrates as an intimate expression of the fundamental continuum of reality.
This does not by any means impose a demand to avoid normalcy in social conduct. It gives zero direction or guidance as to what one ought to be, because it is about liberation and freedom.2 And, consequently, after you attain this understanding or liberation, you are always free to be either a normie or a weirdo. It makes zero difference. In many instances though it is of great practical utility to appear as a normie—and when you understand that no way in which you appear in the grand drama makes any fundamental difference to your true nature, you are free to play that role if it fits you better, just as any other role. “You” as an individual subpattern within the grand field of reality are never anything more than an evanescent appearance; no matter how spiritual or or weird or normal or enlightened or integrated it might seem.
Thus, most importantly, the insight one gains from a mature understanding of enlightenment is that nothing within the total field of reality exists in a state of explicit disjunction or contradiction between the grand scheme. Everything within it—waters and mountains on the one hand, and the human realm of social drama on the other—is It, You; each subpattern patterning in its unique way, however different and distinct in superficial appearance or conventional significance.
—
When people think about a Self-Actualized Enlightened Being, the image tends to be of a yogi rapt in ecstasy or something like that; someone sitting cross-legged with their eyes rolled to the back with their eyelids closed, evidently feeling really great. Certainly this is one way to go about it. My point, however, is that that is not in any sense better or more enlightened than to be a regular human being; in fact to me there is much more appeal in living out one’s life as a superficially normal person, whilst always knowing something that everyone else around you denies themselves the sublime joy of knowing. But that’s just me.
You are of course free to stimulate your Kundalini all you want, to hanker after the most potent and burning blisses and esoteric bits of understanding through committed spiritual seeking however much you like. But just as anything else, all that comes and goes. And when you have been in it for a bit—just like getting rich suddenly and getting used to all the nice things money can buy—you’ll grow a bit disillusioned. It gets a bit boring.
And soon, you might find yourself wondering—how fun would it be to forget all this shit and start over again? And the mountains will begin looking like mountains again; and being a normie might start looking like a thrill like no other.
Thank you for reading.
Indeed the human social realm is illusory; but it is illusory in the sense of the root word of the term illusion: the Latin word ludo, referring to play. Thus to recognize its illusoriness is not an invitation to retreat from it; it is an invitation to participate in it in its true spirit! As a drama; as a game. Of course another significant etymological relation is the word persona, which means a mask. You are not the masks you wear; and this is what you recognize or remember in enlightenment—and thus you are always free to wear the mask of the normie or the bohemian alike.
I don’t conceive of freedom here as total randomness or a lack of structure, but as an absence of obstruction within certain bounds. To feel the need to withdraw from society because one feels obstructed or limited by it is motivated by a habitual inner blocking against it. To be liberated (a jivanmukta) is to be free from this blocking, and the way to become free from it is to let oneself block—and what better way to practice this skill than in the constraining domain of social reality?