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1 in 1 billion: the number of people estimated to be fully Enlightened
by Ken Wilber, the ‘Einstein of consciousness’.
When you hear this, you probably think
‘wow, Enlightenment must be difficult.’
But through my 30,000 hours of spiritual practice,
it became clear that it’s the opposite:
Enlightenment is the easiest thing there is.
Those 30,000 hours turned out to only be about
confirming for myself that it was okay to stop trying.
So I’m here to save you some time by telling you to
stop trying in meditation (or whatever else you’re doing to fix yourself).
Trying; struggling; striving; reaching; grasping; clinging
is precisely what got you into the mess you’re trying to get out of.
When you try, you’re saying ‘this moment isn’t good enough;
I must change it.’
And that’s the whole damn problem.
Now, trying to change your mind in meditation is, relatively speaking,
preferable to trying to change your boss or your reputation
or your fortune.
Those things are as unpredictable as the movement of the wind.
But wait—is your mind really much simpler?
Do you choose your thoughts?
Or are they unpredictable too?
There are countless stories of meditators who announced
that they’d brought the mind under control,
but then some tragedy occurred
or they had to leave their controlled environment,
and their mind manifested all kinds of nasty reactions.
(Examples are documented in Jack Kornfield’s book,
After The Ecstasy, The Laundry.)
Ram Dass said, ‘do you want to be a meditator or do you want to be free?’
The only true freedom is freedom in all circumstances.
In other words, if your freedom depends upon
things being a certain way, it is not freedom—
because there is always the possibility
that something you didn’t prepare for can disrupt a conditional peace.
The only way to realize true freedom is to accept what is—
no matter what it is—
at all times and in all circumstances.
I know that may sound enormously difficult.
It did to me the first time I heard it.
But whether it’s difficult depends how you look at it.
If you take ‘difficult’ to mean ‘going against what is familiar,’
then yes, this acceptance I’m encouraging can be said to be difficult.
You’ve always reacted to things in certain ways in the past,
therefore it is difficult to react to them differently in the present, right?
This is speaking in relative terms, involving the past as something real;
measuring what’s occurring now against what’s occurred before.
Let’s consider, instead, absolute terms;
let’s consider what’s occurring now by itself.
First, something happens.
Second, you make a particular choice—though you’re likely not aware of it.
You choose to either accept or reject what is happening.
If you choose to accept it, you’re fine—
we’re not concerned with that outcome here.
But if you choose to reject it—if you resist, deny or hate it—
then you have a problem.
And you may feel that you have no choice in that moment,
but bear with me a moment.
Your mind, in this case, becomes like a clenched fist
around the thing you’re rejecting.
‘It shouldn’t be this way,’ you feel.
And in that moment of rejection, it is as if the object has the power
to make you think and feel certain ways.
Say, for example, you hate motorbikes.
Perhaps you lost your father when someone crashed into his.
Your hatred is an interpretation. A valid one, as interpretations go,
but an interpretation nonetheless.
Now, someone else, who’s had only good experiences with motorbikes,
may appreciate your feelings about them,
but make no such rejection of motorbikes in their own experience.
The motorbike, itself, does not have a magical aura that makes people feel a certain way.
As you encounter it, it is first and foremost a sensory appearance—
something seen, heard, felt.
Only second is it what it is to you—a subject of your interpretation.
Your perceiving the motorbike as visual, aural and felt phenomena
is an entirely different set of mental processes
to the interpretation you make afterward.
This is how you experience all things,
and wisdom traditions figured this out experientially
thousands of years before science confirmed it.
Now, imagine you engage in exposure therapy
to address your fear of motorbikes.
This is a sound strategy.
But it does nothing about the other things in the world that bother you.
It is like shooting and killing a single enemy
while a thousand others approach.
Next, imagine you engage in effortful meditation
with the goal of changing your mind.
Perhaps you deliberately visualize lots of things you reject
and train yourself to accept them.
This is an excellent strategy.
But there’s still the chance that something you never considered
will show up in your life, which you will reject
due to some unfavourable association.
Thus, though you may spend tens of thousands of hours in meditation,
still you will not be free.
This strategy is like trying to prize open the fingers of your clenched fist
after it’s already grabbed onto the objects of your rejection.
Finally, imagine you adopt the practice of resting naturally
as the awareness that is the essence of all appearances;
the awareness that does not and cannot reject
because it is the essence of the experience of rejection, too.
Imagine that when you encounter that motorbike, you simply observe it
impartially,
along with the chain of attendant mental, emotional
and physical reactions—
without judging, labeling or describing them.
In this way, though the fire of resistance, fear and hatred may still burn, you add no more fuel to that fire;
you stop investing the experience with further meaning.
No longer are you ‘someone with a phobia of motorbikes’.
The cocktail of sensations to which you used to apply that label
may still occur,
but you just watch them come and go
like clouds moving through the empty sky.
And as you practice this more and more—
with varying degrees of success and failure—
you realize something profound:
You are not the clouds.
You never were.
You are the sky.
Practising in this way is, at first, like simply relaxing that clenched fist,
instead of trying to prize it open.
But sooner or later you realize that it isn’t a practice at all.
Rather, it’s recognition that your clenching—your rejection—
was only ever a bunch of mental/emotional processes
which were, themselves, just more clouds.
Making this recognition is like simply not grabbing onto things
in the first place:
not investing things with meaning; not wishing they were different—
then being upset when they’re not.
In this recognition, fear is dissolved; rejection, resistance and hatred are dissolved.
You realize that nothing ever harmed you and nothing ever can.
Because you’re not the hurt, scared individual
that’s being terrorized by the things it encounters all day.
But, rather, you’re the aware pure space that is the essence
of both the scary things and the person who is scared.
Both the scary things and the one who is scared
come and go as appearances within that space, but never affect it.
This is why you feel like you’re the same ‘you’
experiencing everything, even though your appearance changes.
This recognition is the only freedom there is.
It is the only freedom that cannot be caught off guard
by something unexpected.
Practising with one appearance in this way
is practising with all appearances.
In doing so, you realize what the Buddha called ‘the deathless’:
timeless awareness; the basis of all phenomena; your true identity.
Ken Wilber knew what he was saying.
On the one hand, fully Enlightened beings are unfathomably rare.
On the other hand, everyone is enlightened already—
because they cannot escape their true nature.
The key point is not effort nor luck but recognition.
The only difference between those 1 in 1 billion and the rest
is that they realized, beyond doubt, their true nature.
You can too.
With love from my desk,
dg💙
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