Spiritual enlightenment

[Purple Rabbit]

Enlightenment Or The Dark Path To Nausea

The motive for me starting this thread has been the book Spiritual Enlightenment - The Damnedest Thing by mystery writer Jed McKenna (I've read the dutch version, not because I like a handicap, but because I have a handicap: being dutch). Surfing the web I stumbled on it. Intrigued as always by wild claims on the nature of reality and some vague wish at the back of my head to some day delve deeper into claims of spiritual enlightenment that eastern philosophies seem stuffed with, I decided to purchase the book and read it.

The identity of the author behind the name Jed McKenna is not known and on the internet there is some speculation about this. My first idea about the book when I read the cover was that it covertly was a skepticism on enlightenment. That idea stuck with me to the end of the book. It certainly is a skepticism on the New Age types of spiritual enlightenment that necessarily involve feelings of oneness with the cosmos, nirvana, mini gardens, incense, transcendental meditation, guru's and the like. McKenna strongly argues that true enlightenment has nothing to do with all of that, that it is very plain and basic. It is nothing but knowing the Ultimate Truth. What that Ultimate Truth is in plain english is never fully revealed however. The kind of enlitghtenment McKenna describes is IMO best described by trancendental dillettantism: see how I enlightened and deeply intangible I am for you silly unenlightened ones, while I am simply riding my mountain bike and doing all kinds of regular stuff that regular guys do.

The claim that Jed in this book makes is that normal people are really in a state of sleep, that they are in grand role playing game and are unaware of it, that the normal things people bother about (culture, family, science, society, motherhood, fatherhood, emotion, moral values, institutionalized religion) are totally irrelevant and essentially without any meaning. Even identity, the self, is without meaning. Destruction of the idea of self and of all the convictions that make up the self is therefore essential to become enlightened. This observation that nothing matters leads to a strong feeling of utter detachment. IMO it is a totally indigestible concept. But of course the writer has anticipated these feelings of his readers. He counters this with the mysteriousness of becoming enlightened. All his disciples wrestle with the idea to give up identity (if they are far enough to see that this is what has to be done) but he feels compelled to 'help' them on the way to nothingness with the promisse that reality in its ultimate nakedness is at the end of this dark tunnel. The carrot always just out of reach. At no point one is able to test the validity of his claim or to assess if the price to be paid outweighs the sacrifice. The claim of Jed being enligthened and enlightenment in general is a non-falsifiable one and never it is fully clear what is meant with that elusive state of enlightenment, what is meant with Ultimate Truth. However a few things shed some light on that. It is clear that Jed is a relativist, there is no absoluteness in what we can know, and from this he concludes that since meaning has no absolute basis in reality, the only absolute is that reality does not really exist. Central to this is the idea of non-dualism, one has to strip all perception from that what is not absolutely true to reach oneness with reality.

Yet in the book he describes how he is enjoying the jacuzi, playing tomb raider, biking, eating and other very eartlhy pleaures. Procrastination is his thing. This certainly feels like a big fraud and an overt denial of the non-dualism he proclaims. I was apalled by the seemingly naive responses that Jed encounters in the dialogues with the various people (mostly followers living on his ranch) he deals with. They all at some point in the discussion are confronted with his downright denial of any meaning in their lives whatsoever, including denial of their identity. Throughout the book his arrogance and self-love shines through. He 's the man, he is the enlightened one, most if not all others are asleep or in a fake zombielike state living fake lifes. At the end of this book this got me to the point were it indeed induced strong feelings of nausea. No I am not the emotional type, but still this feeling overtook me.

While I am an relativist regarding knowledge myself (absolute knowledge is unattainable for humans) I do not think the conclusion from that is therefore that nothing has meaning. Being imperfect does not equate to absolute nothingness of all that exists. It seems a mix up of knowledge of reality and reality to me. Indeed in a deterministic universe relative meaning may be the only kind of meaning that ever will have meaning. Of course Jed will easliy do away with this kind of reasoning as the struggle of self for survival, and I am incapable to ultimately refute that on reason alone as I am ultimately not capable of refuting the possibility of some god existing somewhere.

I am curious whether any of you wants to share his/her expriences with spiritual enlightenment. I think it is a kind of claim that is even harder to get rid of than traditional religion involving one or more gods. When all the cartoon religions with hells, heavens, angels, virgin, snakes and apples have dwindled into oblivion, this may be the kind of religion we will stillbe left with.