Is It Worth It?

Let’s wrap things up, shall we? 

            We started with a question that branched off into further questions which in turn implied but did not engage a host of still other questions, likely engendering a few doubts, certainly some disbelief, but hopefully stopped short of eliciting outright disgust and rejection.  I have a theory, a private theory that is propped up by the unsteady pillars of a few barely related texts, and while in my head the lines are all pulled tight, I’m afraid that as I’ve laid it out on paper there remains a lot of slack.  Ultimately that’s ok, because, well, it’s nice to have things rattling around in your head to write about later.

            What is enlightenment?  That, I believe, was the original question.  The ultimate answer as I see it, traced out along the pathways of physical materialism (the belief that there is no secret spirit stuff in the universe, only atoms and what they compose), transience (all things that are shall pass away), meditational mental management (clearing out the zatsunen), and the hemispheric specialization the brain (roughly speaking, the fine-toothed comb and the wide lens) is that Enlightenment as it is depicted (and here I realize I must further limit myself) in Zen traditions is a particular brain state functioning on more universal right-brain circuitry.  The earth is old and your moment upon it infinitesimally short, what is soon shall no longer be, to desire is suffer (the gap between wanting and having is, as I’m sure everyone can appreciate, bridged with red lines), if you wipe away the accumulated grime of the ages everyone is made of the same things (they say that all things are a manifestation of the Buddha essence which doesn’t make any sense to me but what does make sense to me is that everyone is the incalculably improbable product of vast ages of natural events, ranging from the initial spark of the universe to the cooling of plasma oceans through star-forming, planet-building, interstellar bombardment, the filling of the oceans,  the long, steep climb to unicellular organisms, multi-cellular ones, mats of algae, the Cambrian explosion, climbing out of the oceans and a massive asteroid that kills off the dinosaurs and now we’re in an Ice Age and good luck surviving that but those little African rat-like things that we probably came from were tough and I’m summarizing here but lo and behold, inexplicably, nigh impossibly, here we are).  Words get in the way, reason is misleading, and the only way to true peace is to sit quietly and tap into it.

            I would suggest that it’s not enough to just sort of agree with these principles.  You’ve got to be like Pythagoras looking at triangles; you’ve got to feel it.  There is a path to enlightenment, and in order to get there you have to walk it.  This means throwing away the world.  Remember Dogen-Zenshi?  Now I’m paraphrasing, but essentially he says that anyone who truly wants to reach enlightenment and stay there must throw away his family, throw away his name, throw away his home and all that he knows and move to a monastery at once.  He’s probably right.  Remember Jill Bolte Taylor?  Remember her standing at the shower head, euphoric as the 37-year mish-mash of her fabricated self fell away leaving behind nothing but peace in its wake?  You can get the peace.  You can have eternal bliss at every moment of your life, but it comes with a price.  You must pay for it with your self.  You must pay for it with your passion, with your rational mind, with your ambition and your desire to be a thing in the social world.  A man named Echkhart Tolle had a similar experience to Jill Bolte Taylor, except without the stroke.  In The Power of Now, a fascinating if potentially misleading account of alternate states of consciousness, he talks about his moment of release from self and how he enjoyed it as a homeless man sitting on park benches for a couple years.  Everything was so beautiful, he said, that he felt no desire to ever do anything.

            You can have that, too, if you want.  But you can’t at the same time be a mother or an elementary school teacher or a police officer or a musician, well maybe you could be a musician, but you most certainly couldn’t go to law school.  You’re not going to be advocating for social change and you probably won’t give a shit about global warming.  In general I imagine you would be pleasant to be around, but you definitely would have transitioned to a different and very foreign phase of personhood.  I thought about this kind of stuff for longer than perhaps I should have, and ultimately rejected it because that’s not really the sort of life I want to live.  Maybe that’s just my ego taking over, but if so I’ll let it steer me away form that cliff.  It seems to me that we were born into this world, so we might as well interact with it as much as possible before it’s all gone.

            At the same time, I don’t think “enlightment chasing” is entirely worthless.  At the end of her TED talk, Jill Bolte Taylor suggests, in a time-tested synergistic fashion, a type of duality for human nature that I can actually get behind.  At once, you can be a “classic” human being, thinking, rationalizing, weaving past experience and future hopes into a self with a defined identity and intense singularity while at the same time being aware of the deeply codependent experientially “universal” being accessible to you through meditation and other right brain on-ramps.  I am who I am, and I’m not willing to give that up, but sometimes it feels good to be nothing at all.  Occasional trips out there might make me better equipped to be me, who knows.