The Eternal Tao Might Be An Asshole

on why enlightened people disagree

Why are all the enlightened people fighting each other?

I interviewed a bunch of people on the 'awakened' spectrum a while back, prompted because a very dedicated monk informed me that a very respected meditation teacher was not enlightened. I was fascinated by this spiritual infighting and wanted to know how many enlightened people thought the other enlightened people were stupid.

Some awakened people agreed with each other, but many others asserted that all the people answering differently from them weren't 'truly enlightened.' Some people say enlightenment can happen spontaneously; one authoritative practitioner insisted it must take at least 14 years, minimum, and anyone who’s trained less than that is delusional. Some say it can happen through psychedelics, others insist meditation only. Many believe that enlightenment causes moral behavior, that you cannot both have achieved awakening and also do immoral things. But last week I listened to a friend tell me how they just met a very famous enlightened meditation author who behaved with dismissive egotism. "Enlightened people, man", my friend sighed, shaking their head sadly. And don't forget the likes of horny Culadasa, bioterrorist Osho, or the alcoholic Alan Watts, all revered spiritual teachers with less-than-enlightened seeming behavior.

The field of awakening is a mess. What's going on?

Imagine you're a dude who digs holes in your backyard for fun. You dig every day for many years, uncovering new, different types of dirt. One day though, you come across a lightbulb underground, which has come a little loose. You tighten the lightbulb, and it turns on. After this, digging becomes a little boring, and so you fill the hole back in.

You tell your friends about the lightbulb, and they try digging in their backyards. They come across the same layers of dirt, it takes them quite a few years, but occasionally a friend will come report to you that yes - they found and switched on their lightbulb.

Lightbulb switching becomes A Thing; people start coming to you to figure out how to switch on their lightbulb, and you sit grandly and tell them - you must first clutch a shovel, and then you must dig. Here is how you dig - like that sort of swinging motion. You probably will first find some soft loam, and then a claylike subsoil. Then, with much effort, you may stumble upon a reddish iron soil, which will eventually give way to a coarse rock. Below this you'll find the bedrock, and upon chiseling through, behold - you shall find the lightbulb.

You send away a student with this information, and they come back only a week later. "I've turned on my lightbulb," she says.

You know this is ridiculous, so you tell her so. "It takes minimum four years to even begin approaching the reddish iron, there's no way you've gotten through to the lightbulb so soon." You decide to test them. "Tell me - the lightbulb - how far did you need to turn it before it switched on?"

"I labored three days and three nights to turn it, I rotated it nonstop." the student quivers.

"That was not the lightbulb," you say. "That was probably simply a glowing rock. The lightbulb is but a simple flick, the lightest of touches." You know the student is misguided; in her enthusiasm to have her lightbulb on, she didn't work hard enough and grabbed onto the first shiny thing.

--

Many years later, you hear tales that the Misguided Student has become a teacher in their own right, telling people how to switch on their lightbulbs. Except they're wrong - everything from this tradition is full of errors. They're reporting the wrong lengths of time, the wrong order of dirt compositions. They aren't even using shovels right - they say you have to stick the handle in the soil and then howl at the sky, that the vibrations of your howling will shake the soil loose. You can tell these people have no idea what digging really even means. Unfortunately you can't directly enter anybody's backyard to see for yourself, so you'll never know for sure - but you're pretty sure whatever they're doing is not the thing you’re trying to teach.

But this is only the beginning. Legends of the lightbulb have floated into culture, and there's a thousand different wrong ways people are trying to get to it.

Some people have invented heavy machinery - giant claws that tear up their entire backyard. This is dangerous; people sometimes fall into these gaping pits and break their ankle; people can't use their backyard at all, some people do permanent damage and never recover.

Others are using boreholes, where they just plunge right in, insist they changed their lightbulb, and bounced right out. These people have no knowledge of any of the dirt, or the technique of shoveling, or the ways to prop up the walls to make sure it doesn't collapse, or even what the lightbulb looks like. But that doesn't stop them from going around, confidently proclaiming their lightbulb is switched on.

Still others take the opposite route - they scoff at the fact you only took five years to switch your bulb on, and say you certainly must be mistaken. In fact to reach the bulb without breaking it, you must claw the dirt away with your fingernails, painstakingly; bandaged fingers are a sign of good labor. It'll take fourteen years, at least, under strict mentorship so that you are certain you're digging in the right direction and understand what it is you're seeing. This Very Serious Tradition wears somber clothes and wakes up before dawn and views you as a careening fool who has simply gotten distracted by a shiny rock of your own that you mistook for the Answer.

---

So - what's happening? What the hell is going on?

The first thing is simple - I think people actually have different dirt compositions in their backyards. While most minds look pretty similar, which causes some strategies to work for a lot of people, it's not universal. Some might have thinner total layers, some might have have them all switched around, and very rarely, others might have random sinkholes leading straight to the source. If you're a teacher and have had a lot of success with people with a certain type of mind, you might be unable to notice when people's brains actually wildly differ. If someone reports finding bedrock immediately, they’re probably misguided - but some of them might not be, and those people would be better suited for the rarer, wilder methods, not your well established slow tradition.

Secondly: the digging itself is not enlightenment - but it is usually a prerequisite, and it ends up really upheaving your mind. You have to sit down and Look, and then things shift beneath you. You have to get out of your own way, but it's hard to get out of your own way without changing dramatically.

You might find yourself heaving away the rock of an old trauma, dusting away insecurity, filling a bucket of attachment to your temporal being, whatever. These things have impacts. People often report that the Journey In causes deep calm, more ethical behavior, self acceptance, universal love, sexier voices, etc.

These are tightly correlated with the lightbulb - and the further down, the harder they are to disambiguate - but the dirt is not the lightbulb.

My guess is that many enlightened people have in fact switched on their lightbulb, but have gotten their lightbulb confused with the bedrock that was encased so tightly around it. And thus they teach ah - to be enlightened, you must have ethical behavior - or, - to be enlightened, you must no longer experience anxiety - or whatever was the composition of the stone that happened to lie closest to their personal bulb.

And many people who haven't switched on the lightbulb at all are similarly confused. They've undergone such radical change, become completely self accepting, have labored for years in the earth - they of course have something really valuable to teach. They advertise lightbulbs, but in practice teach dirt-hauling as its own goal. What is enlightenment if not clearing the pit out of all your stones of trauma?

My guess is a lot of people mistake a teacher's relaxed charisma as enlightenment in this way. I sometimes hear people talking about other teachers reverently, saying they ‘emit a field of peace’ or ‘have a psychedelic presence’ or whatever. Someone seems to have all their problems cleared out - this is hard evidence of something real and important! The person radiates wisdom and love! If that's not enlightenment, then what is?

Really, I think a lot - if not a majority - of the enlightenment-meditation-jhana schtick isn't about enlightenment at all, but rather some version of self help. Digging holes in your mind is pretty good, and other people can see it's good for you, so they dig too, and people say it's about lightbulb turning, and it is true that at bedrock levels things do get pretty existentially weird - but most of the time it's really just about living your life better. I think this is good and wholesome and very fine, and worth pursuing in its own right. But much of the time, it's not enlightenment.

The saying goes - before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Enlightenment itself changes nothing, and if it's changed something, it's not really enlightenment. The tao that can be named is not the eternal tao; the moment you've cracked a rock and point to it as proof is the moment you've named the wrong tao.

And so - maybe you’ve dug, turned on your lightbulb, and decided to move on with your life. You’ve filled the hole back in so you can do other things with your backyard. Maybe the insecurity boulder gets dumped back where you found it. You’ve seen it, you remember it’s in there somewhere, but it’s beneath the regular field of your attention. And so, you might get horny and chase after a student, or become an alcoholic, or a bioterrorist. The tao that can be named with good behavior is not the eternal tao, and this means sometimes true eternal tao is a real asshole at dinner parties.

I think this is also why some enlightened people say enlightenment ‘isn’t a big deal’ or ‘changes nothing’, and these are the people I tend to believe the most. If you’re down in the muck and you’ve finally done it, you might see clearly that getting enlightened is really the most trivial act. After the sweat and dust and injuries from years of hauling out the earth above it, in the end, it’s just the faintest little motion, like exhaling, or laughing - thoughtless, easy, built into your bones already. All the effort was just to get to the point where you could see it.