Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be

O BOOKS

Contents

Acknowledgements..........................................xviPrologue..................................................1Part I: Discovering It, Dismissing It.....................5Both/And It...............................................6Waiting for Enlightenment.................................8Its Context...............................................11Seeking It................................................17Longing for Enlightenment.................................20It Enters.................................................25Becoming It...............................................31Disillusionment, Part I...................................42Full Catastrophe Disillusionment..........................47Locus Classicus...........................................56Hindu Enlightenment.......................................57Buddhist Enlightenment....................................60Christianity..............................................63Enlightenment: a Definition...............................69Confirmation..............................................72Part II. Quo Vadis........................................77The Question..............................................78Working in It.............................................81Coming Up to the Line.....................................87It and Ducks..............................................90It and Sexuality..........................................94It And Dragons............................................103Sensing It................................................112It and Ethics.............................................115The Cloud of Unknowing....................................122The Peculiarly Spiritual Life.............................127Buddha Alone in It........................................129It in a Group.............................................135It in Duet................................................143It in Marriage............................................149Letting go of the But.....................................156Walking with It...........................................161Unresistant to It.........................................163Success and Failure in It.................................167Yawning the world into It.................................173A Team in It..............................................177Silence at Work, Writ Large...............................185Part III. Reflecting On It................................189Standing up Straight in It................................190Craving It................................................193Its Fluidity..............................................197Alone.....................................................201Endnotes..................................................205

Chapter One

Both / And It

I am writing from my meditation hermitage in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I've never come in winter before. It's blazing cold. I'll be here longer than I've ever stayed. And I've never had to regulate the wood burning stove that dominates the downstairs. Even worse, I had the foolish idea that I should come here to write a book, but I'm scared that I will have nothing to say and that I will fail—miserably, embarrassingly, fail. So much for being the noble ascetic writer alone in his garret!

If I tell the real truth, as I hereby vow to do throughout this book, just now I'm anxious. I am thinking about a comfortable bed and a heating system that turns itself on and off and wondering when I can leave without losing face. And I think it might snow.

Anxiety like this sneaks in between thoughts—a ghostly and bitter sinking of the solar plexus. It is sure of itself in a way I am not. It knows that I cannot, that even to try will end in shame, and that I was a fool even to come. "You cannot, you cannot," it repeats. I am afraid.

So I lean into this sinking dread. And as I do, I sense something else here: an openness, a spaciousness. In a way I cannot say, this "something else" is larger than the fearfulness. It is wide, translucent, empty, yet almost a something. It is strange and appealing, this whatever-it-is just below my fears, this steadiness. It is kindly, comforting, like a billowing blanket on a tired evening, a gentle velvet warmth in forearms and calves, an effortless waking softness that stretches through my skin, beyond my body, across the room and out the walls into the dusky hillsides in the distance.

And so I sit, this vast empty me beneath this fearful me, much as I have done for nearly 40 years. This listening, holding, witnessing, vast me is here. It is who or perhaps what I am. And yet this other me, this worried, scared, laughing me, is also here, astonishingly, miraculously unhealed.

I am closed and afraid. And I am as vast as the colorless air.

I don't know if I am a human being held in the arms of an endlessness, or a vastness having human fears.

Being both these things at once is the peculiar miracle of my life, and of many lives of people on "the path." Learning to live them both, and well, is the challenge.

Waiting for Enlightenment

It wasn't supposed to be like this. When we took up meditation in the early seventies, we all were going to gain enlightenment. It would be life-shattering, the end of all neurosis, clean. It was to be the end of all suffering, the revolution of the soul. Enlightenment will, we heard,

... put an end to all suffering; filling the heart with happiness brings perfect tranquility to the mind.

As enlightened beings, we would not be a little happier or just more content. Such people are filled with happiness. The realized man, the illumined soul ... ahhh ... he will be steeped in perfect joy. All his desires would be fulfilled, all his suffering at an end.

A soul evolved to this cosmic state is eternally contented. When we became truly without stress, having utterly relinquished the knots and tensions that had held us in our mundane egos, we would live eternal freedom in divine consciousness.

My guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, used to recite some of the Indian texts he had memorized in his youth. Quoting the Hindu Upanishads, for example, he assured us that,

When [the individual soul] it discovers the Atman Full of dignity and power, It is freed from all its suffering.

When a man knows [the infinite], he is free: his sorrows have an end ...

I wanted that. I didn't want to be happier, I wanted perfect happiness. I didn't want less suffering, I wanted to be utterly free from suffering. Not fewer but all my sorrows should end. I wanted the life Maharishi described: dignified, full of power, helpful to others, deep, suffering-free.

That was the deal. We'd meditate. We'd do our yoga. We'd let go our stresses. We'd work for the TM movement. And we'd gain divine consciousness, full-on perfection, Enlightenment. My Buddhist friends were well on the way to Nirvana. My Christian friends were going to gain Heaven on Earth. And wouldn't it all be grand?

Dr. Charles Tart, eminently sane scientist of meditation that he is, put it this way. Serious spiritual seekers like me and he himself,

[tended] to think of enlightenment as all or none. Somebody is enlightened or somebody is not enlightened.

And because this was so, to gain enlightenment would be to become perfect.

In this all or none model of enlightened functioning ... [we think] every single thing an enlightened person does must be perfect.

Enlightened gurus like Maharishi, Swami Muktananda, Rajneesh or a Zen Roshi like Eido Roshi carried a presence unlike anything most of us westerners had ever encountered. They seemed like god-men. So it was disconcerting to witness, over the years, their feet turning more into clay than we expected: Rolls Royces, sexual dalliances, strange money management, faked miracles, the full catastrophe.

One purportedly realized soul led his followers to stage a bloody gas attack on a Tokyo subway station.

No, enlightenment turned out to be far more ambiguous than the single summum bonum, the supreme good, for which I and so many others had been longing.

So here I sit, in just that ambiguity, steeped permanently in some approximation of the openness to which enlightenment points, yet at the same time anxious about the loneliness and the cold and whether I'll have anything worthwhile to say. Whatever this strange both/and life is, it is far more ambiguous than any all or none, or indeed anything I could ever have imagined. I am way too much beast to be a god-man and far too much god to be beast.

Its Context

This strange state of both/and affairs began January 4, 1972, in the Hotel Karina, Mallorca, Spain, at 4:00 in the afternoon. That was the time when the vastness that has no beginning began.

Before that afternoon, I had only known this world: things, thoughts, people, hopes, dreads, loves and losses. After it ... well I'm getting ahead of myself.

Mostly being in this world meant being anxious: "generalized anxiety disorder," one doctor called it. "Post adolescent anxiety identity diffusion," said another. To me it was just life.

Anxiety had been with me since before I can remember, which is only about 11. I doubt I even knew the word "anxiety" at eleven. Certainly I didn't know that I was in it, any more than a fish can know it's in water. But it was the ocean in which I swam, every minute, every day.

As I was reasonably successful in high school, it remained in the background. But when I got to the University of Chicago (well-dubbed, "where fun goes to die") I was, for the first time in my life, in a huge class of kids, all of whom were, like me, presidents of their classes and leads in their high school musicals. It's hard to prop yourself up when you're nobody special.

By midway through my second term, I was spiraling into what I can only describe as psychological collapse. The worst part of serious depression is that you can't imagine that it ever was or will be different. It gets harder and harder to hold up your head, to get to class or even to smile, and your life slows into some ever more languorous ennui. By the end of my second term I was pretty much plastered to an orange naugahyde chair in the dorm's windowless TV room, living on vending machine ice cream sandwiches and watching Star Trek reruns till three in the morning.

Towards the end of that first year, I was walking back from the laundry room through the dormitory's moldy basement tunnel. I suddenly heard whispering voices around me. I looked around, but all I saw were dusty corners and peeling overhead pipes. Though I was alone, I heard more and more voices, all at once. Something about being a fraud, about not being who I claimed I was. Ten, twenty, eventually maybe a hundred voices, all unintelligible, all accusing. I've never been so terrified. Lasted about 10 minutes.

About two weeks later the whispers came again. Same laundry room, same basement passageway. Hundreds of voices, all at once this time, terrifying, accusatory, cacophonic.

When they came a third time, this time while I was walking across the quad in a cold late evening's mist, I was afraid I was actually losing my mind. (I was probably right.) So I made my way to the school's mental health clinic, where they assigned me to Myra Leifer, a short Israeli woman. Myra was cute as hell and seemed to genuinely care. Although the whispers came back one only more time, the anxious churning in my belly never abated.

By my third year the churning in my gut had become nearly unbearable. Some unfathomable despondency had taken over my life, as if I was disjunct, living somebody else's life.

The worst of it came on March 15 of my third year. Chicago dyes the Chicago River green for St. Patrick's day, and I found myself sitting on the edge of a rusty I-beam on one of its bridges, staring dizzily down into the green slime below, wondering what it would feel like to hit the water from such a height and whether I would be conscious enough for my swimmer's instincts to take over. No whispering voices this time. No strong emotions. Just curious what it would be like to drown.

I sat on that I-beam for a very long time. Why I didn't jump I don't actually know. But something, some shred of hope or determination or cowardice or life instinct led me to climb down from that beam.

This is something I'm grateful for but will never understand. Even at my most lethargic, something in me just never gave up. (This wasn't true for all of us, by the way. During my third year one of the four of us depressives that sat together in front of the TV till three in the morning actually killed himself.) I have no idea what it was in me that led me to climb off that I-beam and not him.

It was that life instinct, I suppose, that led me into therapy with Myra, to try Zen, to enroll in yoga class and to study a little psychology. None of it seemed to help back then, not really. But that drive to fix whatever the hell was wrong with me, the passion to find a life worth living, to keep going in the face of discouragement and pain, is probably what's kept me going. It's also no doubt what's gotten me to this place, to this book and to the ambiguous spaciousness I feel just now. Despite my anxious and depressive solar plexus that would not abate for 20 years, I never stopped trying.

I didn't have words for it at the time, but during the fall of my senior year I had my first spiritual experience. I used to race my cream colored MGB sports car on back roads outside of Chicago in "motocross" races. One Sunday I was careening at some ungodly speed when all of a sudden, everything else in my life seemed to drop away. All my anxieties, all my thoughts and feelings, even the loneliness just disappeared. For a few moments it was just me, the steering wheel, the hood, and the road. That was probably my first moment of real peace, and at 87 miles an hour no less. And some sort of beacon, as it turned out.

I made it through college by 1969. A college roommate had tried Transcendental Meditation (TM™) and claimed it was giving him some peace of mind. So when I got dumped by one last girlfriend, Lisa, I hitchhiked to Boston to learn it. Hope is a powerful magnet and nothing else was calling me.

I soon found myself standing in my stocking feet in a sweetly incensed room next to one Dan Raney, my TM "initiator," holding an orange I'd found in my sister's fridge and the wilted flowers I had stolen from someone's apartment flowerbox, listening to him chant a strange little song to the gaudy print of a half naked guru on his little altar. He was singing the Sanskrit song not to me but for me, I felt. The moment felt important, as if this neatly dressed fellow was chanting new possibility.

When he finished we bowed. Then he instructed me to repeat a mantra, a one syllable Sanskrit word, verbally then mentally. Within a few minutes I heard inside what seemed like ten, twenty, eventually perhaps a hundred monks whispering this meaningless syllable right alongside my own mental repetitions, as if they were buttressing my own reedy voice with their gravelly resonance. This was almost as terrifying as those whispers a few years before. But these were singing in unison, and were kindlier, more compassionate and not at all angry. There was something here, I felt: a power, a resonance of love I couldn't have found on my own.

Every time I meditated that week I heard them, with a combination of enchantment, fascination and dread. I'd come out of every meditation drenched. As the week ended though, they just vanished. I've never heard them since. I still don't know who they were or what unclaimed corner of my psyche they'd come from or what they were doing. But perhaps they'd accomplished what they'd come for. Whatever was going on though, those first meditations were certainly intriguing enough to keep me going twice a day, every day.

Within a few months I began to notice odd little effects. My skin would twitch, like a horse might shoo off a fly, more often in meditation than out. I jiggled my legs a little less, I thought, both inside and outside of meditation. My breathing seemed to be slowing down a bit.

About three weeks into meditating, I got summarily canned from an auto mechanic's job. I was just too depressive, I suspect, too low energy. I went home and turned on a Saturday football game (something I never do). I had been canned before, but this time, for no obvious reason, I began to cry. In all my adult years, I had wanted to cry, needed desperately to cry. But even with Myra Leifer I had been way too blocked up. But that day, sitting in front of that ridiculous football game, I just wept. I cried, unable sometimes to catch my breath, over the job I couldn't keep. I bawled for all the years and for all the sadness I'd carried without knowing why. I wept for I didn't know what. I'd stop, grab a Kleenex, and then crank up again. I sobbed and stopped, sobbed and stopped for something like an hour and a half.

I felt more cleaned out that evening than I could ever remember. This meditation stuff seemed to be doing something!

About two months later, I signed up for my first weekend meditation retreat. Not much seemed to be happening during the weekend, except a lot of time with our eyes closed. But driving home was amazing! The fields and scrub oak barrens seemed welcoming somehow, gracious. It was as if the cranberry bogs and country roads were smiling. For an hour I felt, well, actually happy!

I was hooked. Boring, interesting, tired, energetic or deep, my meditations became the bookends of my daily routine. Like clockwork, twice a day, morning and evening. Haven't missed a day since (egad! 42 years!).

I developed my first real friendships that year. Phil Goldberg, a lanky, funny "Hin-Jew" as he called himself, invited me to play some jazz with him. (We were terrible). I enjoyed my roommate Jussi and his two unbelievably big wolf hounds.

I got (and kept) a job at Strawberry Records, and enjoyed chatting people up about Beethoven and Renaissance madrigals. I got involved there with gorgeous, alto voiced Carol, whose cheeks were hiker-rosy and whose tie dyed skirts swirled when she walked. We'd have long heartfelt talks on breaks from the record shop. I loved to tell her over dinner of my meditation moments and hear of her spiritual insights on her woodsy walks.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be by Robert K. C. Forman Copyright © 2010 by Robert K. C. Forman . Excerpted by permission of O BOOKS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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