You Are That Which Observes

 “Whatever happens, happens to you by you, through you; you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.”

― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The trouble with most people's concept of Enlightenment is that they think it adds something to them. It doesn't. The Ego wants to add things, to become more, to be important, to have a shiny "I Am Enlightened - Look At Me!" badge, but it can't.

YOU, the Ego, is that which is awoken from.

You never existed. You were just a construct, reliant on false memories, conveniently forgetting those gaps in time when you didn't exist because you forgot to pay attention to the thoughts.

Let me make that  clear again:

The little you, the Ego, CANNOT be enlightened, because it's not real.

For anyone who is still trapped in seeking and not understanding, Enlightenment takes things away, it does not add them. The truly enlightened know very little, because we are trying to express truth and truth cannot be expressed well in language.

What you truly are exists before language.

• You do not see, seeing happens.
• You do not taste, tasting happens.
• You do not touch, touching happens.
• You do not hear, hearing happens.
• You do not smell, smelling happens.
• You do not THINK, thinking happens.

You are as real as the 'it' in the phrase "It is raining".

Post-enlightenment brings with it the realisation that there is no 'do-er'. That life just happens and that you are not the body, or the mind, but you are the totality of everything.

You no longer 'know' anything that can be expressed well in language, because language cannot express that Truth. The best we can do is 'truthy' posts, like this one.

You don't need some super-experience of one-ness, some Samadhi High, because those are experiences, and they only happen to the ego. It just becomes something you understand, that you cannot find an edge to the real 'you'. That you cannot imagine a place in the universe where 'you' do not exist, because what you actually are contains the whole universe.

You truly are the Creator and Destroyer of all you perceive.

Use Only Enlightened Teachers

In this day and age where there are thousands of so-called gurus, we have to be careful who we choose to listen to because if we make the mistake of following someone who is ego-centered in their true intentions, then we will lose time, money, and opportunity costs (among other things). -- Paul Lenda (Shift)

There are many false teachers and charlatans in spirituality. In all kinds of spirituality. The main concern in this blog is that of post-enlightenment, liberation, freedom from the ego and, even in those pursuits, there are many false teachers.

A false teacher is anyone who is trying to teach you something which they do not truly understand.

Some do it because they want money, or because they want fame, or because they want followers. All of them are lying to you. All of them are wasting your time, insofar as time exists. You need to be wise to find the true teachers and yet, until you truly understand enlightenment you are unable to separate the false from the true.

Take for an example: Buddhism.

There are many branches of Buddhism. From the Tibetan style to the Zen style and everything in between. I am sure there are many enlightened teachers in many of those styles, and yet there are more who are not. 

I have listened to teachers in Buddhism who obviously have no understanding of the enlightenment process, other than that which they have read in books, or been taught by their equally inexperienced teachers.

Enlightenment is not an experience for the ego, just to clarify that once again. 

Enlightenment involves a total absence of ego. The ego is that which is seen to be false, to never have existed, to be merely a convenient construct like all language.

If a teacher is not capable of looking at you and the world from beyond the seat of the ego, then they cannot teach you. If they want your money, or your loyalty, or your worship, or your body then you can be sure that they are not Awake.

I met a leader of a spiritual tradition a few years ago who was teaching workshops and trying to bring people to a point which we would term enlightenment, but had never discovered that they, themselves, did not exist. 

They said all the right words but they interspersed it with name-dropping and tales of their personal interactions with famous people. Some of those famous people truly are awake, but this teacher, this leader, is not.

It is easy to fool people because the people do not know they are being fooled.

Enlightenment is a paradox and only someone to whom it has occurred can understand that paradox. Much of our teaching on enlightenment is misunderstood because those hearing cannot grasp the viewpoint from which we speak.

It is not hard to wake up as long as you are willing to let go of all your baggage. 

There can be no conditions as you approach enlightenment. You cannot hold anything back. You must give up every opinion, every belief, every position, every story because only egos hang onto those.

It has been very hard to write this blog post, to try to clarify the difference between an enlightened teacher and a charlatan. I seek no followers. All my needs are met by the universe because I am the universe. I give instruction freely and I have no time for charlatans.

Truth is the most important thing in a post-enlightenment worldview. This is why the answer to many of the questions people ask me is often "I don't know.", because that is the truth.

In an ego-less world we embrace uncertainty. As a teacher of mine once said many years ago:

"You can either be right, or you can be Awake – the two are mutually exclusive."

Water Does Not Care What Is In It.

"Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil."

-- Marcus Aurelius

Fred Davis recently said "THIS has to be enough". He is of course referring to What Is.

There is only what is, as I have said before, because there is no such thing as what is not. We can only have what we have. We can only experience what we experience. So where does that leave us?

Right here. Right now.

This has to be enough. There is nothing else. As long as you have desires for something that does not exist, for something other than that which is, then you will create your own suffering.

That is what ego does; one could almost say its job is to do that.

The ego was a survival mechanism. I suspect its original design was all to do with creating circumstances in which the organism could survive, even if that meant banding together with other organisms. The problems arise when it begins to believe that it really exists.

It's like when you go to watch a movie. 

You know you're just watching a movie. You know you paid your entrance fee. You know you are sitting there with drinks and snacks and perhaps in the company of friends, but in order to enjoy the experience you deliberately forget all that. You become so involved in the story playing out on the screen before you that you forget that it is not you. You forget that it is a story. You become fully immersed in the story and, usually, quite enjoy it.

Life is the same. 

The character, the ego, the little me – whatever you want to call it – is just a story. 'What you really are' is here to experience that story. There is nothing wrong with not waking up and realising that it is a story, because that would be what is happening and there is never anything wrong with what is happening. The whole universe is perfect just the way it is. That which you truly are understands this. The ego does not.

Awakening, Enlightenment, Unity with God – whatever you want to call it – is simply what you are when you realise that it is just a story.

There is no you. There never was a you. There never will be a you. There is only this, right here, right now.

Egos spend the majority of their time living in a world that does not exist, a world of their own imagining. If only I had more money. If only I had a better job. If only I wasn't so fat. Feel free to add your own to the list. It is all just a list of things that do not exist created by ego, because it does not think that This is enough.

Enlightenment is not a state of permanent bliss, because enlightenment is not a state.

It is very nice to sit around and feel total bliss, but total bliss is just an arising in what you truly are. To what you truly are there is no difference between Hitler and Schindler.

There is no good or bad, they are just points on the same sliding scale of okayness.

Opinions, beliefs, positions, values and stories are all the realm of the ego. They are all arisings. You, whatever you are, observe all those things and therefore are not those things.

Your true nature accepts everything just as it is. 

I do not know what it is, I just know that it is perfect.

Poking a Stick Into the Mud

She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.

– – Lao Tzu

Today my ego decided to argue with reality. Seriously.

The ego mind, which can never grasp Liberation, decided to argue about non-duality.

In most discussions about enlightenment, non-duality is the core of the realisation. There is no separation. Individuation exists only in language. It should therefore be easy to persuade an ego that it is wrong.

It isn't.

The ego has a memory of the enlightenment experience. In the ego's memory of the enlightenment experience, the ego was sitting on a chair in a medical centre not thinking, just looking around. In this memory the ego is obviously thinking as it is inventing what it was doing by piecing together glimpses of what was stored in memory at the time.

In every memory, the ego sees itself as being the central actor. Therefore, as far as the ego is concerned, there was always a duality. The ego was looking. The ego was noticing that it wasn't thinking. The ego is feeling pleased with itself because it became enlightened at that moment.

Only, it didn't.

Egos cannot be enlightened since they are a fictitious construct, a character, something that does not exist until after the events in which it believes it took part are over. In order for ego to exist, language and thoughts have to happen first. It is easy to prove to yourself, your real self, that language and thoughts do not occur until after the moment has passed.

For example, you are looking around and you see a cat. That is it, seeing has happened and microseconds later a thought arises and labels the thing you saw as a cat. Another thought may then arise about what kind of cat it was and memory will be consulted, colours will be assigned, comparisons will be made. All of this is happening after the seeing took place and did not exist at the time of the seeing, when Awakeness Is.

The ego has no input into the Now. The ego inserts itself later, when it uses thoughts and language and memory to create a story. To the ego, there will always be a duality.

Enlightenment involves complete non-attachment, including non-attachment to language and labelling. Without labels there is no other, there is just What Is.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

– – Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey translated by Stephen Mitchell

Muddy Waters - a Brief History

(At some point I will write a full history of my Seeking and the mess of the life I led, but for today this will have to do.)

Early in 2016 I hit a huge depression, again. I suffered with depression since my teenage years, so this was nothing new, but this time something was different. I was totally dissatisfied with 'life' as I knew it. Nothing interested me any more.

This came about after an illness hit me in late 2015. I had been going to the gym, working out and losing weight, and was in pretty good shape. I was 'sitting' daily for at least twenty minutes and watching the thoughts rise and fall.

The illness lasted about six weeks and that was long enough for my mind to spin me right down the rabbit hole of listlessness, despair and pointlessness. If I'd had an off switch, I'd have seriously considered hitting it and ending it all right there, but I had one responsibility that I could not reject and that was to my wife. I promised her that I would not leave her to struggle on her own as she became ill twenty years ago and has needed care since then.

My only reason to live was to provide for her. It was not much of a life, as anyone trapped in depression can tell you. I had to keep going, so I turned once again to my 'spiritual quest', or Seeking, as I had so many times in the past.

I was originally destined for the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1975, but the Seminary and I parted company after my young ego caused enough problems for them to expel me. I turned my back on the church after that and began Seeking in earnest. I investigated and tried everything from Witchcraft and Kabbalah to Rosicrucianism and Spiritualism. My parents threw me out when I was around 18 (that ego again) and I ended up living in a squat in London for 6 months, eating in soup kitchens and having my first real run-in with the Law.

After time that included several years in the British Army, and a failed marriage, I tried to settle down with my new, wonderfully sensitive wife, but my ego caused more trouble and I nearly blew that on more than one occasion.

Still Seeking, in the 1990s I discovered Buddhism and learned to sit and to focus my mind in a small NKT house in Cheshire. I attended some weekend courses and progressed well, even getting taught by their small Tibetan leader, Kelsang Gyatso. People now tell me that they are a 'cult', but back then they gave me a good grounding in training my mind.

I never liked the bowing and scraping to statues and pictures, it felt like 'Catholic Buddhism', but they set me on the path to enlightenment. I left them after a couple of years, read several Zen books and then sat on my own for almost two decades, through depression after depression. Until that last one.

I realised I had to sort this out. I had to fix 'me' somehow. That's how a lot of Seekers feel, I suppose. We had moved house and the only meditation groups up here were NKT and Naqshbandi Sufis. I opted to try the Sufis, and I am glad I did.

Their root teaching is about dissolving the ego in 'Allah' or 'The Beloved' and attaining Union with the Divine Essence. I tried to sit and relax and feel the 'transmission', but my mind wandered so I went back to watching my breath to rein it back in. I 'opened my heart' in the way they advised and found I was starting to benefit, so I stepped up my practice from 45 minutes a day to two hour long sessions a day. Just sitting.

Over a period of almost three months I worked hard and gradually chipped away at my ego, allowing it less and less control over my life. Things I had studied in Zen for years started to make more sense. Sufi books also made sense. Their idea of Enlightenment includes this overwhelming Love in Union with the Ultimate and I was ready to go for that, if it happened, but I was impatient and years of building up my egoic defences had left my root personality quite sociopathic. I had now started to feel 'emotional things' and knew that it was cracking. I could almost taste the breakthrough.

I remembered the Zen teachings about 'not pursuing states' so I began to reject the 'desire' for them and to concentrate on pure, burning personal inquiry.

“Who am I?” was the focus of my meditation. The answers came and were discarded when disproved.

I am not this body. I am not in this body. I am not my personality. I am not my desires. I am not my thoughts. The fire of inquiry burned hot. My body temperature stayed elevated too, some kind of side effect of the meditation, but I did not sweat. My wife started calling me her big hot water bottle.

One day, I had mailed a package, listening to the birds calling, and returned to the medical centre to wait for her. I sat down and just looked out the skylight window and waited. Just sat. That's all.

After around five or six minutes I realised I had not had a single thought. I looked around me at What Is and just Seeing was happening. I had no desires. I had no further thoughts, and when one eventually arose it was just “I Am.”

No mystical bells, whistles, Angels or waves of Love. Just This. Just What Is.

That night I told my wife what had happened. She asked if I was sure this was 'Enlightenment' since it didn't match our expectations. (She was Seeking too). I agreed to take further enquiry and check.

I grabbed three books off the Kindle Store and spent that night and the next morning working through “Gateless Gatecrashers”, “Awaken Now: The Living Method of Spiritual Liberation” and “Liberation Is: The End of Seeking”.

When she came down at lunchtime, I just leaned close to her and whispered: "I Am Awake".

Watching the Mud Settle

There is no easy way to say this other than to come straight out with it.

I am awake.

Apparently, those were the words that Buddha uttered when a man on the road asked him what he was. I have been told that the word 'Buddha' actually means one who is awake. I guess that makes me a Buddha. (Laughing here)

I would like to point out here and now that the uses of the words like I, me and mine can cause all kinds of problems in the awakened state, but language is its own limitation. I will try to differentiate between the awakened view and the ego view where I feel it is necessary, but on the whole such writing can become very clumsy.

I woke up from the dream state on 1 April 2016. The people over at the website called 'Liberation Unleashed' refer to Awakening, or Liberation, as the 'cosmic joke'.[1] It seems appropriate that it happened for me on the date that it did.

The whole reason I am writing this is to also try to address the post-liberation state, not to become yet another unit that is solely dedicated to teaching the process of becoming enlightened, but that may change. I have no idea what the Universe might have planned for this unit and the awake-ness that uses it.

You see, that right there is an example of the language that comes about when you try to be precise about the distinction between the ego, the body and consciousness.

I am awake. I have always been awake. I am not a body. I am not an ego. I am not thoughts. I am not beliefs. I am not opinions. I am not stories.

The ego personality was not awake. It is not awake. It can never be awake, because it is an illusion.

All those texts that I read for years about attaining enlightenment suddenly make sense. I suspect that people have failed to become enlightened over the years because they did not realise that the texts and the teachings were presenting two different views.

People think that they are an ego. They believe their ego is real. They identify themselves as their ego. Their ego maintains control and hides reality from them. Reality is always there. Awake-ness is always there.

This is why so much of the training that is undertaken by mystics such as the Sufis, the cloistered monks of Christianity, those seeking Advaita, practitioners of Zen, Chan and other forms of Buddhism and a myriad of other seekers is focused on dissolving the ego, even if they don't call it that.

Once you are awake, the ego is seen to be fiction. The ego is seen to be a character that you have played for your life so far. All the separation is an illusion. As Fred Davis from South Carolina would say, 'there is a sense of Fred-ness, but there is no Fred.' [2]

I think that is enough for today. It took 41 years to get here, so I guess 'my' ego was particularly pigheaded. Now the real work begins.

Chop wood, carry water.

[1] http://liberationunleashed.com/
[2] http://awakeningclaritynow.com/