--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Dec 5, 2007, at 10:17 PM, Bhairitu wrote: > > > > > Vaj wrote: > > > > > > Dying in the dark night? Samadhi is death, and I'm sure > > > more than a few here have experienced this, but not > > > everyone has long, drawn out "dark nights". > > > > And there's nothing more boring on this list than speculations > > about enlightenment. :D > > Yes I know....BUT please let me tell you about mine! :-)
This strikes me as more of a real insight than it is a snippy remark. :-) That's really the whole *problem* with discussing subjective experiences of enlightenment or the enlightenment process -- they're subjective. They are just the experiences that *one person* had with the enlightenment process and, because others might have *different* experiences, might not be "relatable to" by others, much less be some kind of "roadmap" for them. It strikes me that describing one's personal exper- iences of realization or enlightenment are a lot like telling someone about the powerful dream you had last night. You woke up from the dream still reeling from the profundity it had for you; it was a kind of revelation. And so you sit down over coffee or tea with a friend and try to tell them about the dream you are still so caught up in. The problem is, when this happens you are often SO caught up in it that you don't notice that your friend's eyes glazed over after 20 seconds and that they're sitting there politely pretending to listen to you while really thinking, "When will this END?" :-) To some extent, I perceive a similar problem when it comes to trying to relate experiences of enlight- enment to others. I've been around the spiritual block enough to know that there are a HUGE variety of experiences that people talk about and attach the term "realization" or "enlightenment" to. Some of them I can relate to my own experiences, some I cannot. The ones I can relate to are at times interesting and/or useful to me. The ones I can't relate to in any way tend to make my eyes glaze over. And I don't think I'm alone in this reaction. I mean, if you were to be sat down over a cup of coffee and tea and forced to listen to Shankara's tales of his personal experiences with enlighten- ment, they'd be kinda different than if Milarepa had sat down opposite you. Or Chogyam Trungpa. Or the Sixth Dalai Lama. Milarepa would be "filtering" his subjective experiences of enlight- enment through his personal history of being a badass siddha and a murderer; Trungpa through his personal history of being a womanizer and a drunk; and the Sixth Dalai Lama just a womanizer and a rebel who wanted no *part* of the role they'd cast him in. Could you relate to their experiences, if yours had been more along the lines of Shankara's, or those of some other "sweet saint?" And yet all of them *might* have been enlightened. So now consider the problem of listening to the descriptions of enlightenment across the Internet, coming from people we've never even met. For all I know, they *might* be enlightened. But if their tales of *their* subjective experiences of the enlightenment process don't "map" to mine, then either the result is going to be boredom or a sense of cognitive dissonance, not the imparting of useful information. Me, I'm comfortable with the idea that pretty much everyone who has ever had the long-term experience of realization or enlightenment has gotten there their own Way, and that the subjective experience of both the path that took them to where they had always already been and what life looked like once they got "there" could be completely different. Given 100 enlightened beings, I would expect to hear 100 *different* stories, 100 *different* sets of experiences. And yet, in tradition after tradition, in teacher after teacher, the language they use when discussing enlightenment to others tends to be along the same lines as if they were discussing one of their dreams. They merely assume that the way that *they* exper- ienced things is the way that others will experience them. They don't *understand* when the eyes of people who have never experienced a "dark night" glaze over when they start talking about theirs as if it's a universal truth, a step that everyone has to go through on the pathway to enlightenment. It's as if in the early "excited, gotta tell every- body" stages of realization or enlightenment, the newness of the experience is still overwhelming for the people trying to sit people down and lecture them about "what it's like," just as it would be if they were trying to relate a dream. They're still so overwhelmed by their own experience that they don't get that they're not conveying anything useful or meaningful to the people they're lecturing to. Maybe over time the enlightenment or realization "settles in" and they can find some way of pointing a finger at it that enables everyone who listens to look in the same direction for what it's pointing to. I hope so. But I sure know that attempts to lecture the rest of us here on FFL about "what enlightenment is like and what you have to look forward to when you become as evolved as I am" have often felt more like someone giving us the finger.
