Ornoth

“No matter how much I meditate, I’ll never become Enlightened, whatever that is.” So said an experienced practitioner during one of my meditation groups’ Q&A periods.

I had a strong and immediate reaction, because her understanding of Enlightenment is based on a frustratingly common misconception, and her despairing attitude is completely unnecessary.

To be fair, most Buddhist texts do an awful job explaining Enlightenment (aka Nirvana, Nibbana, arahantship). It’s usually described as a one-time, life-changing accomplishment that completely and permanently obliterates our greed, hatred, delusion, and all the doubts and dissatisfactions of normal life.

That’s a great goal to aspire to, especially if it motivates you to meditate. But there are three big drawbacks.

The first problem is that greed, hatred, delusion, and doubt are an unavoidable part of life, and no human being can fully eradicate them. Chasing such an unattainable goal engenders a whole spectrum of painful, destructive mental states that conflict with the growth of wisdom: insufficiency, striving, comparing oneself to others, frustration, self-doubt, and ultimately failure.

The second problem is that the idea of Enlightenment as a permanent state contradicts the Buddhist belief that everything is impermanent. As described, Enlightenment is a specific mental state, and all things—especially all mind-states—are temporary, ephemeral, and guaranteed to change. Enlightenment as a one-time, irrevocable transformation just doesn’t jibe.

And finally, in my experience Enlightenment simply doesn’t exist. I have never met any meditator—lay or monastic, teacher or student, male or female—who claimed to be Enlightened, or who claimed to have met someone who was.

So much for the formal, upper-case noun “Enlightenment” as described in the suttas and as envisioned in popular culture. But let’s draw a distinction between formal “Enlightenment” and the lower-case adjective “enlightened”.

The former implies a mythical, permanent, once in a lifetime achievement. But if we use “enlightened” to describe a particular action, or a momentary mind-state which may come and go over time, we come much closer to something useful: an action or state of mind that any human being could achieve, if only for a brief time.

What is an enlightened action? It arises from a mind-state of intimacy and connection with all living beings that struggle with suffering. Enlightened acts exhibit love, compassion, delight, and stability, and are free from self-referentialism.

While most of us don’t think that way most of the time, we can and do experience those ah-ha! satori moments of insight when we can see a different, more enlightened way of being. And our practice is to recognize those moments, allow them to guide our actions in the world, examine the results of those actions, and cultivate more such enlightened moments.

This is something everyone can experience and aspire to, without incurring all the striving, comparisons, and failure of chasing some grandiose vision of permanent “Enlightenment”. And when we view enlightened mind-states as temporary, they do not conflict with the law of impermanence. And most importantly, this ”momentary enlightenment” is eminently achievable.

And if you somehow still believe in that permanent state of “Enlightenment”, in practice that's still nothing more than consecutive moments of enlightened behavior.

So let me summarize my view of Enlightenment:

• Enlightenment is not what you’ve been told. Enlightenment is simply stringing together enlightened mind-states and actions more and more frequently.
• At first, this may not be quickly or easily achieved. But early results produce confidence and progress that gradually accelerates.
• Enlightenment is definitely not a permanent, one-and-done accomplishment. It’s something that requires diligence, effort, and commitment over time.
• It’s unrealistic to expect Enlightenment to erase all the complexities, doubts, and selfishness of normal life, but it will greatly reduce them.
• Letting enlightened moments motivate our behavior still results in the same radically transformed way of thinking about, relating to, and responding to normal life, enabling us to minimize our own suffering, and that of all living beings.

So don’t tell me you’ll never be Enlightened. The real-world possibility of Enlightenment is as close as the very next action you take.

Among the books I got this Xmas were two with a common theme: bicycle racing. Having little else to do this week, I sat down and read them both on Saturday, and I found an interesting, if not totally unexpected, commonality.

First, I’d like to share a few citations with you. I’ve kept a larger part of the context, but I’ve bolded the particularly pertinent sections.

The first excerpt is from Tim Krabbé’s novel “The Rider”, his not-really-fictional telling of his participation in the 150k half-day Tour de Mont Aigoual race. It’s one of the few true classics of the genre:

In interviews with riders that I’ve read and in conversations I’ve had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering. […] How can that be: suffering is suffering, isn’t it? […] Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. ‘Good for you.’ Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That’s why there are riders. Suffering you need; literature is baloney.

The next two excepts are from Lance Armstrong’s new/second book, “Every Second Counts”:

I’d suffered more in winning the Tour a second time […] But in a way, suffering made it more gratifying. Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It’s a great enhancer. It might last a minute, or a month, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a greater space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities—not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

And he goes on to say:

The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, or fear, or uncertainty, what you experience is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities. Pain is good because it teaches your body and soul to improve.

Here’s one final example, from Paul Fournel’s Oulipo avant-garde classic “Need for the Bike”, wherein he talks about bonking, which he calls “blowing up”:

Why not give up the bike after a blowup? Because the blowup is a journey, and the cyclist is first and foremost a traveler. Then because, after a blowup, your organism is altered. There’s a kind of purification in falling flat, an impression of fasting. A threshold is crossed …

I find it interesting that suffering is such a universal thread in writing about cycling. The discussions go far beyond the more familiar “no pain, no gain” mantra and describe suffering as necessary, integral to happiness, and even transformational. The texts, especially Krabbé and Fournel, wax poetic when talking about the suffering of cyclists, reading more like Zen Buddhism or Existential philosophy than a description of riding a bike. Here’s more of Fournel’s treatise on bonking. Note the eloquence and panache that he uses to describe this most humbling of experiences.

There are warning signs of a blowup, but they aren’t appreciably different from from the signs of normal tiredness. Now that I think about it, metaphysical anxiety might be one hint. Riding is absurd—climbing to descend, going in circles, behind this mountain there’s another, why hurry? … Riding is absurd like peeling vegetables, skiing, thinking deeply, or living. The moment these questions come up, while you’re riding, you should take note. That’s when your quads are demanding more oxygen from your heart than your lungs can provide. That’s when it gets foggy. If you’re on a friend’s wheel, he’ll pull away by two bike-lengths without accelerating. You come back, dancing on your pedals, but then you lose the two lengths again. You do this rubber-band trick ten or so times, and then you let him go, telling yourself you’ll catch up soon. In fact, the next time you see him is when he turns around and comes back, worried, to find out what happened. At that point you won’t recognize him, or, better yet, you’ll recognize him, but only as someone who might buy your disgusting bike.

Well, if drugs make for more interesting novelists, and tortured lives make for better painters and composers, why shouldn’t the kind of cycling-induced mental impairment I talk about in this previous post (Defining the Natural High, 6/11/03) produce better philosophers? It does, however, make me wonder about my recent enquiries into Existentialism and Buddhism, though!