Spiritual Enlightenment - The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna

Author:Jed McKenna [McKenna, Jed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

It's probably twenty minutes before everyone settles down. When

they do, the talk gradually turns to matters that various members of the group have obviously been discussing amongst themselves. I am content to sit back, listen, and get a feel for the different personalities and how they interact with each other. Occasionally I am called upon to hand down a ruling, but I keep it brief and generally bounce it back in the form of a question. It's all very light and easy.

At one point one of them, a pretty sincere guy named Brendan, asks me what the meaning of life is, but he tosses out the question in a casual way suggesting that he considers it unanswerable, so I let it

go-

"Jed," says one of the guys, Randy, "when you say that there is nothing to know in order to be enlightened..."

"Yes?"

"I just can't reconcile that with any of the world's great teachings and religions. I mean, what about Yoga and Vedanta and Buddhism? What about Greek and German philosophers? What about Christianity and Islam and Judaism? How can there be nothing to know?" Obviously this is something he's really struggling with. "It's

incomprehensible. It's just too much. I can't get a handle on it."

There is a murmur of agreement. The questions seems to resonate with all of them.

"I know what you mean," I reply. "The only thing to get a handle on is negation—the tearing-down process. I know you want to learn something, to embrace something, to understand. Humans are comprised of emotion and intellect, so it's only natural to want to follow one or both of these aspects of ourselves inward to the truth, but you can't. You could spend a thousand years with your nose in books or at the feet of masters and still be no closer to waking up from delusion. The fact is that no amount or combination of knowledge can bring about truth-realization."

Everyone is attentive now. This is something that has concerned them all. They are seated and standing, a few are kneeling or seated in the wet grass, but they are all focused on the words like campers listening to a ghost story.

"Nor is it something you grow into or develop. It's not an emotion or a state of consciousness. This can be a little trickier to understand until you realize that emotion and consciousness are the same thing, or, more accurately, that emotions are states of consciousness. For example, half an hour ago I came down to the fire and started talking and we all entered into a non-ordinary state of consciousness together—a sort of group euphoria. Fifteen or twenty minutes later we had all returned to ordinary consciousness. That's an example of an altered state, not so different than being in a blinding rage or head-over-heels in love. You look back on something like that from your normal state and it seems like you were a different person. Drugs, breathwork, meditation and other things can alter your state of consciousness, but self-realization—truth-realization—isn't a state of consciousness.

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