Jaguar Prince

Please read this contribution by Steven Norquist and tell me, tell us what you think about it.

Here's a short extract:

Let me talk briefly about practice. Meditation and book study are useful and can ripen an individual towards awakening, but the most important thing is to change your perspective. You must learn to see what is really going on. Understand, in reality everyone is enlightened, but not everyone knows how to perceive this. The reason is, enlightenment is so natural, so obvious, that from birth we have become accustomed to ignoring it in preference to anything else that manifests. Mediation can train you to still the mind and gain concentration but it will not give you enlightenment. A radical shift in perspective must occur, the habitual focus of your awareness and your way of perceiving must be changed.

Study of books will not get you there, you need a shock. The easiest way I know is for an enlightened person to talk you into this perspective shift. The best books I have read were the ones that talked you into enlightenment. Feeling experiments such as the house scenario above are good to help evoke the feeling of enlightenment. Feel what it is like to not be there. The real breakthrough will come when you “feel�? the truth.

It’s creepy, not blissful or ecstatic. It should scare you, the body should react defensively, or there could be uncontrolled laughter at how stupid you have been for so long. It’s like one of those 3D dot pictures, you stare and stare at those dots until bingo the picture emerges! After that, you can always see it, you can’t unlearn it. The same with enlightenment.

Basically any practice that can shock you into seeing what is really going on is acceptable. But understand, you want to know what's really going on, to feel it, to contact reality. It shouldn’t take long, a few years at most, less for some. If a practice or a teacher tells you it will take 10 or 20 years, find a new practice or teacher. Remember you are your own salvation, ultimately it is you who will wake you up. Any method that can shock you into seeing what is really going on is acceptable but the perspective shift must occur.

It seems to me that he's had an "experience", but I can't figure out why and how his having had this enlightenment thing has made him believe that he is somehow infallible about the ultimate truths of Life and knows exactly everything there is to know about spirituality and morality.

From a Zen point of view, it seems to me that what Steven is talking about is one of the stages of enlightenment, the one called:

The All is returning to the One.

But "the One has to return to the All" for enlightenment to be complete.

There is a fine story in the life of Ramakrishna, when he gets to know an advaita teacher who helps him have his final awakening, or rather one of his most powerful awakenings. But the man has cancer and suffers terribly. So he decides to commit suicide (logical from the point of view of advaita since everything is a mere play) by drowning himself in a river, but when he gets there, he has a sudden vision of his body as the body of the Goddess and can't carry out his plans.

BTW, I've just found a comment on Norquist's article on the Web that I find consonant with my own appreciation:

"I also read through Steven Norquist's article. He has some powerful observations to share, and he clearly triggered a lot of interest and deep reflection among readers. I understand his article very well, because I went through exactly the same kind of experience he
did on my own path to enlightenment. Is he describing the experience of enlightenment? No. But that does not mean that what he is experiencing is not extremely important.

Normal, ordinary experience is what is called "duality." It is the experience of oneself as a
separate being, surrounded by a world of separate objects - what the Tao Te Ching calls "the 10,000 things." Another name for it is - suffering. It is very hard work to be a single, separate individual in an enormous universe surrounded by people and objects
with their own agendas, and everything seemingly random and rather pointless. The one silver lining in this extremely stressful way of perceiving existence is that it is untrue - it is an illusion. But, as we all know, when you're in that illusion, and everyone else around you is telling you the illusion is real, it is difficult to break free.

Yet the urge to break free remains. And if we have some inkling that this ordinary point of view called duality is false, the strength of our intention can shift us out of that awareness into something completely different, something that can be called "total unity." From this point of view, there is only one without a second. The appearance of moving parts in the world is seemingly unreal. No actors, no objects, just oneness. From the point of view of total unity, struggles vanish, motivations vanish. After having spent lifetimes trying to escape from the
illusion of duality, the perspective of total unity
looks pretty good.

But then, after a while, a cold, awful realization sets in - there's no love in it. In total oneness, there is no one and nothing to love, no
one to feel compassion for, no higher purpose to fulfill. The one silver lining in this extremely
stress free way of perceiving existence is that it is untrue - it is an illusion. But, having tasted the perception of total unity, nobody wants to go back to duality. Is there another way of perceiving reality? A third way? A middle way?

There is. The third way of perceiving things is to see things as "unitive multiplicity," "diversity in oneness," "two-in-one," or "nonduality." In this state of awareness, one experiences simultaneously both the absolute unity of all things, and one honors and delights in the divine play of life. A person is peaceful and calm because one can see that all is
eternally well with the world, and one is fully
engaged in the adventures and challenges and the delights of life. In nondual awareness, there is the wisdom that all is one, and there is also love and compassion for others. It is the best of both worlds.

Steven's challenge is to let go of his judgement towards seeing things as a multiplicity, and to honor that the perception of multiplicity is just as much a part of true reality as is the perception of total unity. Then he'll find love; then he'll find motivation to act in the world. Then he'll be happy."

From here

premjan

From my perspective I would describe it as the necessity of bhakti (faith) even after achieving jnana (wisdom). Otherwise Shiva (transcendent knowledge) turns into Shava (the dead body).

Generally women (e.g. Mirabai) have a greater affinity for bhakti to begin with and can achieve jnana with some effort, whereas some men (philosophers) are well-suited to jnana, and others to raja yoga (meditation). Karma (work) as of the Bhagavad Gita, is universal and suitable to all.

Knowledge (e.g. the apple of Eden) is inimical to life hence it is only sought and attained by few and once attained it is available for the use of all.

Knowledge benefits other more than the attainer. Yet it may be possible to bridge the gap between Knowledge and Faith by some means (service of others).

KnowNothing

Whatever premjan, thankfully Master Yi didn't fill my head with all that lingo.

"It’s creepy, not blissful or ecstatic. It should scare you, the body should react defensively, or there could be uncontrolled laughter at how stupid you have been for so long."

The first time I "saw it" I was scared. Thankfully master Yi was there to assure me that all was well. At other times i laughed as described. The day my son was born was one of those occasions. Now I strive to "see it" all of the time rather than just in "moments of enlightenment". My new profession helps me here. I "see it" in the students regularly. They teach me far more than I teach them it seems. I was told that this would be true.

"Steven's challenge is to let go of his judgement towards seeing things as a multiplicity, and to honor that the perception of multiplicity is just as much a part of true reality as is the perception of total unity. Then he'll find love; then he'll find motivation to act in the world. Then he'll be happy."

This is very well said and is the reason that I left the temple. Temple was great for clearing the mind but it was ultimately unfulfilling. I had to return home. back to the source as it were. To see it in the new light.

Will I progress from here? I don't know. Life is good though. I think I'll go for a walk in the rain.

Philippe*

I think if we consider the awakening of the spirit in the sense of destructuration of the common individuality and erasing of the ego there is something like a return to a virgin state like the babies' one. Babies have a virgin spirit at birth, their sensitivty is optimal without a charged, non-integrated, load consciousness that structures the sense of ego. The more you get in age, generally the more you lose your malleability and sensitivity, there is an enthropic phenomenon not only physically but on a psychic level due to a load consciousness, saturated by what we can call the samskaras (latent bio-psychic imprints creating imbedded circuits at the origin of behaviours) accumulated through life that feeds an individuality working around the ego. And moreover if you look well at the new born babies, they look a bit like buddhas.

Philippe

Copernic

I always equated "enlightenment" with modern art and really good jazz. Some people get it...most people don't yet they're the ones who are most likely to talk about it....to woo women, probably.

premjan

I didn't have any master so I had to learn it from reading so I just gave you the vocabulary that I related to at the time.

JubalDiGriz

Hmm. My personal experiences suggest to me that Steve go stuck. What I think he is describing I went through myself, and held on to it briefly as a vision of the One True Universe. But I soon basically realized that the experience was my conceptions of the universe leaving. That didn't seem like "enlightenment", a worthy goal to reach for and the apex of human wisdom.

I see that moment as laying clearing the table of ideas, getting all the junk off so I would have room for seeing, accepting, and understanding all the Truths I could find.

This perception of things as one-in-all-in-one-in-all is, to me at least, just the very beginning of the quest of enlightenment. Sometimes I consider it is not something achieved at all, but an infinite path to be traveled down.

Based on my own experience and what I've heard from other people, I think training often hurts the seeking of enlightenment. All training resides in dogma, inflexible truths and rigid thinking. Like anything, there are a few good things to learn, and many hurtful things to learn. Guides and masters and reading...eh. One has to start somewhere, but for me at least the usefulness of such things left quickly. On occasion I experience something that I wonder if has been recored before and a consult such sources, but I always find in the end that what can be conveyed in words always shades and covers the meanings I can discover myself.

premjan

I think knowledge-style enlightenment is definitely cold in nature (I compulsively sought out human company after what I thought was enlightenment).

perfectbite

Paraphrasing: 'There's no love in the state of enlightenment. It's cold'

MNerrrpt! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
(Very loud 'teeth on edge' very annoying Klaxon, flashing lights, live sparks dropping from the ceiling, fearsome guardian gods with very sharp weapons that they know how to use solidifying right in front of one's eyes ready to do battle eyeing you. Volcanoes going off, the Earth spinning out of control, the space time continuum irrepairably warped etc. etc. you get the picture.

Go to jail, do NOT pass GO, do NOT collect $200.

If one thinks one has attained an understanding that is equivalent to enlightenment then that is not enlightenment.

There is nothing that can be called enlightenment and it is impossible to come to enlightenment through even the slightest intellectualization or deliberate non-intellectualization no matter how devout or sincere or intelligent or scholarly one is.

You don't find enlightenment, Enlightenment finds you.

premjan

heh around and around we go.