Enlightening Nonsense

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I like happiness as much as the next guy, but it’s not happiness that sends one in search of truth. It’s rabid, feverish, clawing madness to stop being a lie, regardless of price, come heaven or hell. This isn’t about higher consciousness or self-discovery or heaven on earth. This is about blood-caked swords and Buddha’s rotting head and self-immolation, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something they don’t have.

—Jed McKenna

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The latest pieces I’ve shared with you have been mostly silly nonsense, some of which may be true, most of which is totally useless, other than for entertainment. Well…if you had the eyes to see and the ears to hear, you could find the deeper Truths in the pieces. But after hearing the comments from you dummies over the years, it is clear to me that your eyes are filled with sand and your ears are filled with wax and that you are all morons. So I thought I would give you something that you could actually use to lube up your tool and stroke, it versus etheric truths that, like a dog whistle, has a bunch of canines jumping up and down and drooling but doesn’t do much for your impotent ears.

RULE #1 OF WRITING: Don’t insult your audience.

But I am so confused. All the yoga posers have told me that “truth” is a high virtue. So, if I were to propagate the same lie that all your so-called teachers do, that “You’re doing so well, dear” I’d just be another lying sack of shit. While your teachers are asleep, they have a minor excuse. I am not and so I don’t. You people are stupid. How’s that for some truth?

If you were ignorant, I would be like, “Not a problem,” as we all start off that way and we all remain ignorant to what we don’t know until we know it. We go into the library and ask the librarian for a book on building a shelf because we just don’t know how to do it. Everyone starts somewhere. Even the Buddha had to remember how to walk as a baby, despite the fables that said he was spit out of his mother’s vagina, landed on his feet, walked seven steps and declared, “I am the most enlightened being!” The spit out the vagina thing may be true, as his mother was the pioneer in shooting ping-pong balls out of her vagina, but the other stuff? Come on now!

So no librarian is going to laugh at you and say, “You don’t know how to build a shelf? What are you some kind of idiot?” And if she does, tell her that her dried out vag hasn’t been penetrated in so long because of just this attitude. But one is stupid if he reads that one book on building a shelf and thereafter declares himself to be a carpenter. In the worst-case scenario, which is prevalent in the world of pseudo-spirituality, he declares himself a “Master” carpenter and more idiots start to flock to him as he recites what he read in a book or a collection of books and pawns it off as his own.

“Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” I don’t forgive you. Wake Up! Or don’t—but at least be honest about it. You’re not a child anymore and the time for childish things is over. I’m not saying you shouldn’t play with blocks and shit your diaper—heck, I do these two things every day. Just the other day I created a whole metropolis with my blocks and took a nice steamer in my adult diaper. But I didn’t claim that I was an architect and a “feces stylist.” I just like piling up blocks and dumping in my pants, probably a carry-over from all the German scheizer porn I was forced to watch during my three-year stint in a jail in Berlin. In my defense, I didn’t know that wearing underwear was a requirement and the reason the broomstick was sticking out of my ass was because I accidentally sat on it.

You have been preached to that Enlightenment is about being some faggy little do-gooder. Being a faglitadoo has zero to do with Waking Up. You can follow all your feed the hungry, don’t say dirty words, loving-kindness nonsense until you’re blue in the face, this will only give you Awakening blue-balls—if Waking Up is what you are really after. But you’re not. And we both know that. Or maybe only I know that. You still are convincing yourself that by baking brownies for the retarded home that you are not an inmate yourself.

Now listen, you deaf fucks, doing “good” works may make you “feel” better about yourself and the shitty reality you have invested in—and that is perfectly fine—if that is what you desire. Hell, if I were going to spend my eternity in the Matrix, why wouldn’t I want to be, as Cypher said, “Someone important…like an actor”? To be a homeless beggar in the Matrix means you are sub-moronic, not even smart enough to go beyond that lot in the sleep life. It’s like going on a Total Recall mind vacation and choosing Jersey as your destination so you can hang out with those fools on Jersey Shore. You have no creativity at best and are a mental midget at worst. But investing in the mind is not what will Wake you Up, regardless of whether it is big or small, but going beyond the mind.

Buddha was determined to Wake Up and find the eternal, the truth of being beyond aging and getting fat and wrinkly and having your boobs and balls experience the effect of gravity. He was willing to try anything—and did. He starved himself with different ascetics. He learned different techniques of meditation. He was a student that excelled beyond all others—because he wasn’t trying to bolster his ego with special powers or a Diploma of Spirituality, but because the ordinary blindness was no longer bearable to him.

It wasn’t until one final teacher told him that all that nonsense from The School Of Truth Through Torture was just crap. He told Buddha, “All you have to do is be a Witness to the mind and all its madness and this will help you go beyond mind. And when you go beyond mind, that is the state of Enlightenment you are seeking, the eternal Truth that doesn’t decay.”

And the first thing Buddha did was eat a fuckin’ meal, because he was half-dead from starvation. He received his food from an “Untouchable” and at night—two no-nos according to the rules of The School Of Truth Through Torture. So, through the magic of prehistoric Hollywood, the “Untouchable” had her name changed to something that elevated her status and Buddhists and other offspring of The School Of Truth Through Torture decided that all the austerities that Buddha subjected himself along the way were a part of his Awakening process. They were, in a way, but only to show him that all those ways that utilized concentration and control of the mind and body were still focusing on the temporal and that he had to go beyond all of these if he was to reside in the eternal.

When you look at what is pawned off as spirituality today, all you see is more of the same School Of Truth Through Torture. Stand on your head and you’re a hatha yogi. Work for free and you’re a karma yogi. Blow up innocent people and you’re a martyr. And for those who are too stupid for even these ridiculous paths, you can always become a Catholic, where you are beaten with guilt as preached by a bunch of pedophiles who wear dresses and silly hats and have somehow managed not to be flogged as common fags—who they themselves happen to preach against.

I, too, was a spiritual sinner. I thought that there was a “way,” a method, a practice, a discipline, a service, that if done for enough years would make me Enlightened. It wasn’t until I had my first taste of Enlightenment, what in Zen they call Satori, that I came to the yoga class I was teaching regularly and said with excitement, “I’ve come to realize that yoga is completely irrelevant to Waking Up!”

I had to cap my passion when I saw blank faces staring back at me of people who had already invested in an undergraduate degree at The School Of Truth Through Torture and they weren’t too happy with this graduate level teacher who was essentially saying, “Everything you learned before was completely useless.” I still had enough of a foothold in common reality to realize that this kind of talk only led to crucifixion and pulled myself back into density, as in stupidity and not using “spiritual” lingo, and said, “Uh, okay then. Stand at the front of your mat, feet together. Inhale, raise your arms above your head…”

And thus began a challenge for me, to continue to earn a salary selling 8-track players when I could so easily see that the future was digital. This is also part of the reason that I’ve been fired from just about every job I’ve ever held. Well, that and the fact that I tended to steal co-workers lunches from the staff refrigerator and piss in the orange juice container.

Long juice fasts, vows of silence, mantras for hours on end, saying cheesy things like, “Namaste” or “May all sentient being be liberated”—they’re perfectly fine activities for the dream world but completely irrelevant to Waking Up.

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“However, the simple fact remains that enlightenment and mysticism have little or nothing in common.”

—Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

by Jed McKenna (p. 40)

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Is there an activity one can partake in order to Wake Up? I am not like Jiddu Krishnamurti who can just say, “Don’t do anything” and think that will help anyone. I am also not like him in that as awake and as brilliant as he was, he seemed to have flushed his sense of humor down the toilet with his dream reality. And I have a bigger dick than he had, although his balls had pretty good girth.

Here are a few steps to Waking Up. Unlike the so-called Mystery Schools that are prevalent in commercial spirituality, their appeal is not in their Escher-like impossibility to traverse. Actually, there is little appeal in walking these steps because you won’t climb to the top of some magical pyramid where on arrival you will suddenly be able to fly. And there won’t be 72 virgins waiting to fuck you dry up there either (because they’ll be with me!) You will find yourself alone, no celebration from the gods, no angel music playing, no Enlightened masters welcoming you with open arms. But if you actually make it up there, you won’t want those annoyances disturbing the quiet buzz of being your Self and not needing anyone to validate it.

(1) Start to get rid of what is not you.

This is a lot harder than it may seem because right now you actually believe a lot of bullshit is actually you. One way to start on this is to stir up all the suppressed stuff that society and your church and your family and your teachers have shoved down your throat and have a good purge. When eating some bad seafood, a good puke is all the purging you really need. So what is the finger down the throat spiritual equivalent?

The mystic Osho designed a multi-part meditation he called Dynamic Meditation that was designed to stir up all the madness and then reside in the Witness beyond the madness. It has five parts. The FIRST STEP is 10-minutes of chaotic breathing. Breathe deep and exhale through the nose chaotically, i.e. not orderly. You can breathe out forcibly in pieces one time, all at once the next. Have pauses in between. Just not systematic, structured. Be a chaos!

The SECOND STEP is going completely bonkers. Yell, scream, laugh, cry, hump—allow all the madness to come out of you. It is best to allow it to come up and out on its own but if you need to do a little “acting” to get things going, why not—you’ve been acting a character that you have come to know as your “self” for a lifetime! Do this step for 10-minutes as well.

The THIRD STEP is jumping up and down with your hands above your head and shouting the Sufi mantra “HOO!” each time your heels hit the ground. This rings the sexual/emotional chakra, where most of us in today’s society reside, like a bell and sends the energy upward.

After 10-minutes of HOO-ing comes the FOURTH STEP where you freeze. Do not move a muscle. Do not lower your arms. Do not pass GO and collect $200. As a matter of fact, do not play Monopoly at all! This is the real “meditation” of the exercise. Just be a Witness. After 15-minutes of being perfectly still and a Witness, the FIFTH STEP is celebratory dancing for 15-minutes. Enjoy, celebrate, become the dance, become the celebration.

Osho’s peeps have created under his supervision a CD that has music that is not only designed to let you know when to change steps but also to facilitate each step. You can purchase it at: http://www.oshoviha.org/discourses. Tell them that Swami X sent you. At the moment I don’t get any kickbacks but who knows, maybe they’ll send me a CD or some green if enough dreamers start to say, “Enough already! It’s time to get out of bed!” and buy stuff through them. I have one copy of the Dynamic Meditation CD and will sell it if you contact me. I also have a dog for sale that chews up everything in sight but other than the thousands of dollars of damage she had done, she’s pretty sweet. Although she does curse like a sailor!

You don’t have to do Dynamic Meditation. You can just go nuts for a period of time and then freeze and Witness. It doesn’t hit all the bases the Enlightened master Osho covered when designing this meditation but this is not baseball and if you miss a base no one is calling you out. And also, not everyone wants to put in a friggin’ hour jumping and screaming like a wack job every single day either.

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I would also stop reading spiritual nonsense, besides my Enlightening Nonsense un-blog, of course, and a few others like Jed McKenna’s books, Osho books/audios/videos, Adyashanti audios and books and maybe a little Jiddu Krishnamurti, like Freedom From The Mind for a little palate cleanser. These books talk about Waking Up. Other books talk about having prettier dreams. I am not saying there are no other teachers or books teaching Waking Up. I am just saying that in the hundreds I have read, these are the handful that I have found.

I just read through Yoga on War and Peace by Pundit Rajmani Tigunait Ph.D. the other day in my skim-and-toss process and was amazed at what garbage it contained, garbage that most on what they call the “spiritual path” will think is a gourmet meal. Just about all the so-called spiritual books I’ve come across have little to do with Waking Up. Reading Tigunait’s tripe, it is hard for me to imagine that that fool is awake, just peddling more bullshit from his teacher who apparently lived with Himalayan masters and was able to pass nothing on to his main student but bullshit. Maybe that is exactly what he acquired in the mountains. Might not have helped him to Wake Up but bullshit does sell.

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“The inquiry into truth begins only when you drop all believing. You say, ‘I would like to encounter the truth on my own. I will not believe in Christ and I will not believe in Buddha. I would like to become a christ or a buddha myself, I would like to be a light unto myself.’ Why should one be a Christian? It is ugly. Be a christ if you can be, but don’t be a Christian. Be a buddha if you have any respect for yourself, but don’t be a Buddhist. The Buddhist believes. Buddha knows.”

—Osho from Your Answers Questioned (p. 107)

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(2) Be a Witness in everything you do.

I found my first taste of residing Awakening, as in it lasted more than the time it takes to get to the center of the Tootsie Roll Pop (three licks according to the owl), happened when I had been pretty consistent with my kriya yoga disciplines and was teaching yoga almost daily. I don’t attribute the door of perception opening due to any particular technique but more the state of remaining a Witness during those techniques.

I would do different pranayama breathing exercises and meditation for about 45-minutes, twice a day and the residing awareness was that I was a Witness outside and observing the body doing the technique. I found myself less bored by thinking, “Only thirty more of these breaths and then I can watch South Park” and when a thought came it was more of just, “It doesn’t matter what number breath I am on or how long it takes—that’s just background to my Witnessing.”

I found teaching yoga daily that I didn’t have to think about sequencing or stories or anything. Usually I would just come in with a theme I wanted to play and the words would just come out of me and the sequencing would just flow—sometimes even sequencing ideas that I never did before. And that beyond the technique Witness would just be observing and then a fragmented small part of my ego would say, “Oh, cool!”

At times I would even come in with a theme idea and then became aware that some other theme wanted to be played that day. I remember sitting down at the start of the class with a theme like “Non-Violence” (yes, I was still a yoga poser at that time!) and suddenly something else wanted to come through and play, like Authenticity. I even had a debate with myself thinking, “Oh come on now, I was all prepared to do a Non-Violence theme!” After a minute of this, I was finally like, “Fine, I’ll do your Authenticity theme! But for the record, I’m against it.”

I’m not saying I would channel the classes, that the spirit of Patanjali was coming through me or something very Ouija board like that. The instruction still was mine and had my flavor. The stories were still mine and had my insanity. I just got out of the way and became a Witness to the magic of flow. It was like I was watching this character that plays at being me as almost being a marionette that I controlled without strings, words or will—only by getting out of the way and Witnessing. To me that was Enlightenment and I didn’t need any angels singing to announce that I had arrived.

You don’t need a particular ritual or practice or magic incantation to get started. And Witnessing can be done at literally ANY time, be it washing a dish, walking on the sidewalk, meditating or making love. I do think it is helpful to find a consistent practice that helps you to feel in flow and to set aside a regular schedule to do it loyally. I doubt most of the losers reading this are getting laid on any regular schedule, so you’re better off choosing meditating over making whoopee.

I plan to write another piece on what Meditation is and what it is not and don’t want to get too sidetracked at this moment but since it does relate to what I am talking about, and is not a Family Guy side joke that has no relevance whatsoever, here goes. A lot of people tell me that their “meditation” consists of imagining some pristine environment, like a pure snowy mountain or a green pasture or an angelic realm. I don’t consider this meditation but fantasizing and whenever someone tells me of one of these “meditations” my usual response is, “Great, you figured out how to get high without drugs! I still prefer my crack pipe.”

Getting high, or an altered state, has nothing to do with Waking Up, despite this being what most people think Enlightenment is all about. BUT, if you can keep the Witness present and the focus on the Witnessing and not the flowery fantasy, then I think it can be a useful exercise in the Waking Up process, if waking up is really a process and not just opening your eyes and stopping sleeping. Otherwise I think you’re just as well fantasizing about getting some dick or pussy.

(3) Journaling.

Jed McKenna in his books calls this “spiritual autolysis,” meaning you are using this method to discover and self-cannibalize anything of yourself that is not true. The Enlightened master Adyashanti said journaling was a big part of his process of Awakening as well. And the sole practice, or maybe “soul” practice, that Ramana Maharshi told his followers was called Self-Inquiry, which basically was asking the question “Who Am I?” and seeking to get to the bottom of it.

By putting something in writing, especially in the 3-D world and not just on your computer, you are actually putting into this plane of existence a clarity and a commitment to come to know the Truth from the false, the wheat from the chaff in Jesus-speak. You will start to see that just about everything you thought was “you”—from your beliefs, to your feelings, to even your identity with your body—is just a collection of other people’s software that you have been downloaded with right off the shelf. It could be your parents, your priests, your politicians, the “spiritual” teacher that won the Gandhi look-alike contest or your last girlfriend. What do you know for certain?

I would challenge that you don’t even know your birth date, that if your parents came to you today and said, “We just found your birth certificate and you were actually born one year later but we wanted to enroll you in The School of Truth Through Torture” earlier and so we lied about your age and over the years we started to believe the lie as truth,” you’d sit there like a dummy as you came to realize that even your age was not known by you for certain.

This can further help you to strip away all the false that you have identified as Truth and as your Self. You don’t necessarily need to write it out but, as I said, it will probably be more useful than just thinking about it because it will make it more “real” to see a shelf full of notebooks filled with your spiritual vomitous. At least it will be hard to deny. When I shut off my computer, I can still deny all the child porn sites I’ve visited that day. But the pictures of young boys and girls naked plastering my walls is much harder to deny.

(4) Get back in touch with your intuition.

Once you realize that you don’t really know anything for certain and you can rely on no one and no resource to help you discover your personal Truth, it can feel pretty friggin’ disorientating. The New Age lie is that “All is bliss.” Yeah, all is bliss in the world of delusion where good deeds means your ego is bolstered by others outside of you who support your “good works,” as well as all those who reside inside of you and make up your conscience and actually block you from full access to your consciousness. But outside The School of Truth Through Torture and in The School Of Waking The Fuck Up, all your good deeds are worth no more than a heap of shit in the pasture and while you may think they smell like a bouquet of flowers because of the thoughts that have been placed in your head by others who were also asleep, despite publishing a few dozen books or running a yoga studio, they smell a lot worse than cow shit to those with any awareness outside of the dream.

Two people lie asleep in bed. One dreams she is a great sage and the other dreams he is a mass murderer. As one who is Awake and peeking through the window to their bedroom while playing with yourself, do you see either of these sleepers as being “better” than the other based on the content of their dreams? As someone Awake, you may not even register the content of their dreams as anything other than being in the broad file of “Dreaming.”

No one can really help you walk the path. This is something you have to do by yourself and all alone. To be a little cliché, some may offer you road maps or be “fingers pointing to the moon,” blah, blah, blah, but in truth, their maps are of their particular path, outdated for you. Your path will not be “the road less traveled” but one that has not been traveled by anyone else—ever.

(5) Start to do things that you like to do and stop doing things you don’t like to do.

Remember, if you haven’t fully cleared out the garbage, there will still be a few half-eaten éclairs sitting in there that you may mistake for what you “like,” as you haven’t allowed yourself to sit with an empty bucket for long enough for those old familiar smells and tastes not to suck you into the trash bin.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGHTcF4thLw&feature=related]

Here’s one criteria for doing what you choose to do: Don’t do it because it will score you points with another, or it will “burn” your karma, or get you into Heaven, or it is a “good” thing to do. Do it because it rings your inner bell and make you sing and dance a two-step, or heck, even a four-step!

You may find that many of your friends and associations start to drop out of your existence because, “I never really liked dominoes and that’s the only reason I ever hung out with Janelle,” and now the thought of continuing to play the same role of “False Me” is unbearable. You might even feel like you’ve outgrown your friends. Be careful not to grab a hold of this as mortar for building your spiritual ego wall even higher. You are not “better” than them, per se, they just want to lie in bed and dream while you want to Wake Up and get out in the fresh air. Nothing wrong with lying in bed; you’ve just chosen a different activity.

NEWSFLASH: Some of their dreams—if not all of them—will probably appear better than your fresh air reality while you are getting your bearings and teaching your lungs to breathe real air instead of Matrix air again. They are dreaming of lying on a pristine beach in Hawaii while you’re walking around a cold winter in New York City with each placement of your foot trying to avoid stepping in dog shit.

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“If you’d told us the truth, we would’ve told you to shove that red pill right up your ass.”

—Cypher talking to the unconscious Morpheus in “The Matrix”

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The truth is, most of you don’t want to Wake Up. I remember having this realization when I wrote “The Blue Pill” [See http://rebelyogi.com/the-blue-pill.html]. Those who are attached to forever “journeying” and being in one or more “spiritual” groups might look at this as yet another journey into your held-onto-with-a-death-grip fairy tale of what Waking Up really means, all inclusive with dreams of flower gardens and palm trees. For once you give up the “mission” of Heaven or Enlightenment or Bliss, all of a sudden for the first time in your life you have a lot more free time to face your Self and you may not recognize her and then you’ll find yourself sitting not with a stranger but as a stranger.

This is a journey into the abyss and as everything you thought was “you” starts falling away like a leper dropping his nose and ears and lips, not only are people going to stare at you like you are a freak and you will stop being invited to the spiritual social clubs, but you will start finding yourself a complete freak as well and may even wish for the time when you had long blonde hair and full red lips and high cheekbones and talked about which yoga studios you liked best and what mantras really tickle your mouth and which Hindu god you think is the coolest. But once you burn the bridge there is no turning back. Your only option now is either madness or Enlightenment…and probably a bit of both.

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Self-realization isn’t about more, it’s about less. The only construction required for awakening is that which facilitates demolition.

—Jed McKenna

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You are on the side of the highway holding a sign that says, “TAKE ME TO THE MOON.” Everyone who slows their car says, “I can take you to California” or “South” or somewhere else. Some clever guys tell you, “I’ll take you to the moon, honey,” but you are not talking in metaphors. You saw what happened when Jesus did that—no one knew what the fuck he meant—and you don’t want a repeat of that whole mess. You literally mean you want to go to the moon.

You might even meet an astronaut who will tell you he will take you there. But don’t believe him. Unless he gives you the keys to his rocket ship and points you in the direction that he took to get to it, run as if he is a psychotic rapist—because he is and he is trying to force his hand into your own self-discovery.

Whether they are doing “good” works or not, no one can take you to the moon but yourself for the moon you seek is not in the sky but it is your very being.

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“Make no mistake about it—enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

—Adyashanti from The End of Your World