> For the record, this is not nearly as confrontational > as you're going to imagine it is. It's just the result > of me remembering a talk I heard once from a spiritual > teacher, and tripping on it over coffee this morning. > > In a room full of a couple of hundred strong, ded- > icated seekers, he paused in what he had been saying > and looked out at the room and said, "None of you in > this room are ever going to become enlightened. Not > one of you." > > He paused to allow that to sink in and then continued, > "No one can ever become enlightened. You can become > *enlightenment*, but you have to leave your self behind > to do it."
Just to finish the story, and to avoid the possible conclusion that what was said was Just Another Intellectual Model, at that point the teacher in question stopped talking and launched into a two-hour comedy routine about the Antichrist making the rounds of television talk shows and being interviewed by Jay Leno, *during which*, as far as I can tell from what everyone in the room reported later, he somehow managed to "take" all of us to enlightenment itself, so that we could experience it for our- selves, and thus more easily find our Way back to it later, on our own. It doesn't make a bit of sense, but it worked. Go figure. This is *not* an advertisement for that par- ticular teacher (he's daid, and wouldn't appeal to everyone if he were alive) or a particular teaching, just to suggest that reading about a "place" is not IMO the same thing as actually going to (or, more accurately, becoming) that "place." The other teaching I'm remembering this morning, and pondering now over lunch in this cafe (having pondered the remembrance above over breakfast in a different cafe) is from Dr. Phil. Whatever else one may think of him, he's got a pretty great one- liner that he uses when dealing with someone who seems to be expressing a particular approach to their life that they have been following for some time now. He just asks, "How's that workin' for you?" On this forum and several other spiritual forums, I read post after post from seekers who are strong proponents of the approach they've been taking to the study *of* enlightenment for some time now. In some cases that "some time now" covers decades. And at the same time, these strong seekers say that they have never personally experienced that which they are seeking; their approach has helped them to become more comfortable intellectually with the idea of enlightenment, but it hasn't really ever enabled them to experience enlightenment. And yet they never seem to *consider* Doing Something Different, trying another approach, just to see if that might achieve a different result. In my experience, that process of Doing Something Different contains a certain kind of magic, and often results in long-time seekers having a strong realization experience. The Something Different *per se* does not IMO "cause" the realization so much as it "allows" it. Choosing to Do Something Different involves a kind of "letting go," and *that* seems to trigger the realization. One dude I know -- a Buddhist monk I met in Holland who had been celibate for over a decade without ever having had a realization experience -- just got up from his evening meditation one night and said "Fuck it!" out loud and went out on a crawl of Amsterdam's most lovely brothels. He boinked until he could boink no more, and then, walking back to the rooms that he shared with his fellow monks near the university, he watched the sun rise over the canals and had a Self Realization experience that has not left him since. Go figure. It doesn't make a bit of sense. But it worked.
