Archive for the ‘Meditation’ Category

You Are Already Enlightened!

That’s right, and no – I’m not joking.

Zen Masters have publicly said that we are all enlightened, the trick is knowing it (or getting in touch with it). And if you haven’t any idea what it feels like to connect to this state of being then all I can say is it is very difficult for anybody to express in words. To briefly try (not the main point of this post) let me paraphrase Rachel Pollack’s words about the Hanged Man tarot card (from her book Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom): It’s feeling free to be who you are, even if everybody else thinks you have everything backwards; it’s the feeling of being deeply connected to life.

But here’s the rub: “perfect enlightenment” is probably a myth. A beat up. It’s a bit like saying ‘perfect musicianship’ or ‘perfect scientific methodology’.

These things most likely can’t exist and in fact, certainly in the case of artistic endeavour, absolute perfection ruins things. It stifles the life out of things and therefore makes them inherently imperfect again in some kind of weird feedback loop to nowhere.

The flaws are an integral part of the appeal, of what’s good about things.

And yet “imperfect enlightenment” is so discounted, or just not thought of, as to be almost completely overlooked. This is akin to refusing to acknowledge somebody’s skill (in any given area) just because they are not 100% perfect at what they do: “Sorry mate, you’re great at guitar, but I will only come to hear the most perfectly brilliant player who can prove they are better than Hendrix. Nothing else is good enough.”

And yes, enlightenment is a skill set, one that stems from a knowledge base deep enough to allow for the practising of the skill set. That is why meditation is always referred to as a practise, for when you meditate you are practising enlightened states of being (although meditation is not the only way to do so).

New Age Wankers Ahoy!

Enlightenment has become a bit of a wanker-flag over the last few decades. It brings to mind shonky gold-digging gurus and shiny-toothed charlatans. But bear in mind, these types always claim ‘perfect enlightenment’ and Steve and I here at Rebel Zen are NOT by any means claiming this. We are simply claiming that after a lot of personal work we have improved our already inherent, imperfect enlightenment experience. And so can you. And you can make use of the myriad of information that is available to you – in historically unprecedented amounts – to do it yourself. No gurus needed.

Not that you should discount bona-fide gurus out of hand. If it works for you, go for it. But buyer-beware (and all gurus are selling something, even those who say they aren’t).

And to Prove I’m not a Guru-Basher…

At the risk of sounding like I’m telling you what to do, may I suggest that you don’t meditate or read or pray or chant or practice martial arts or flower arranging to get closer to achieving enlightenment. Rather, do so to improve or deepen the enlightenment experience you are already having.

And for those moments when you truly don’t feel very enlightened at all, when you’ve lost your temper or said something cruel or disappointed yourself, I will leave you with the words of the very inspiring Swami Shankarananda:

“Very often our awareness is limited by our limited understanding of who we are and what the Universe is about.”

Amen.

After all, we are just a bunch of imperfectly enlightened beings, let’s take it easy on ourselves…

By Séamus Anthony Ennis

This afternoon I was munching my way through my lunch when I slipped and flicked a forkful of baked-beans and sauce all over my jumper and trousers. I experienced a flash of irritation, quickly replaced by amusement. I was at home by myself – messing up my clothes mattered even less than it usually would (which would not be much).

As I pondered the several squishy beans and blobs of red-orange goop I had so randomly, yet skillfully arranged on my off-white sweater, I had what I will reluctantly call a Magic Bean Moment. I am reluctant to call it this because it makes me sound like a dork. But that’s ok because I am a dork. And one with baked-bean stains on my jumper to boot.

‘Describe this Magic Bean Moment, Dorky McDorkison’, I hear you ask. ‘What did it look like?’

‘Like squished beans on a jumper,’ I reply, dorkily, ‘only kind of magical.’

Very Mild Superpowers

Even though we all have them, Magic Bean Moments are hard to describe. The closest I can come is to waffle about the rare small moments where the mundane is seen through a prism of the fantastic. A ‘moment of clarity’ where the normal appears Divine; the small appears enormous; the subtle becomes obvious; the truth becomes apparent; the God in all common things becomes easy to see. It is a feeling of peace and transcendence; the exact feeling that some of us spend hours (even days or weeks) trying to recreate through determined spiritual practice -rituals, meditation, prayer – sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

What is this? Why is it that I sometimes meditate on the Tao for hours only to feel nothing but ordinary? And why, suddenly, when I am not looking for it, do I see the Divine, clear as day, in the most ordinary of things? And why is it often so hard to deliberately capture this sensation again? Or to describe it in words?

My only answer is that it is not that we have seen the Divine, but that the Divine has chosen to reveal itself to us at this moment. It reminds me of an (admittedly cheesy) inspirational saying in a frame that hangs on the wall at my parent’s house:

‘Happiness is like a butterfly; if you chase it, it flies away; when you turn your attention to other things, it comes and gently lands on your shoulder.‘

It also reminds me of an Irish comedian, David O’Doherty, who claims to have very mild super powers.

Mushrooms in a Hurry

I remember having one of these moments was a boy.

I was riding in the back seat of my mother’s red Vauxhall Viva (a kind of car for those of you not born a million years ago). Mum was trying to negotiate a right turn across an intersection. Never a fan of driving, she was having a hard time of it while I was blissfully daydreaming in the back seat.

Questions arose like mushrooms in a hurry.

How do we know that all of this is real? All of a sudden it all seemed more like a dream than reality. And yet everyone was always so serious about everything. Obey the rules or else. Be good or God will get upset, and so on. How did we know that God even existed? He didn’t seem to be around much. And if we didn’t know if God really existed or not, and if ‘reality’ as we knew it seemed unreal and like a dream, what proof did we have that things are what we have decided they are?

I probably wasn’t yet aware of the word ‘arbitrary’, but if I had been, it would have been perfect for the moment.

Naturally, being a small dork, I decided to ask Mum for some clarification.

‘Mum, is life real?’

Mum, clenching white-knuckled to the steering wheel, still hadn’t managed to turn right.

‘I don’t know, and I don’t care!‘ came the strangled reply.

Suffice to say, this was not the answer I was hoping for, yet I felt very peaceful, as if asking these questions were in itself enough. (Or maybe it was because, although, sure, the delivery needed some work, Mum’s answer was actually quite Zen really).

This is it!

The second time that I remember having this experience was just after I had begun to experiment with meditation about nine years ago.

I was sitting at the train station in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor, staring at the bricks on the other side of the tracks when suddenly everything normal seemed truly incredible. I was overtaken with a feeling of intense bliss. Coupled with this feeling came a difference of vision – as in the way things actually looked through my eyes. Looking at all the simple, inanimate, everyday objects around me – like the rocks between the tracks, the litter spread here and there, the bricks, the benches, the rubbish bins, the chewing gum trodden into the bitumen – I saw an energy, a connectedness, a oneness, a mystery, a beauty, a love inherent in all these things.

And then I caught my train, and the Magic Bean Moment was gone.

I thought I might have been going a pleasant variety of crazy, but, asking around, I discovered that quite a few people I knew, the spiritual and the cynics alike, had experienced similar, fleeting moments of incredible transcendent clarity.

If you haven’t experienced this, then I have one word for you: Meditation. Give it a go.

These Magic Bean Moments are amazing, but for every one of these moments, we all have thousands that feel far from transcendental. Some feel so ordinary they are almost intolerable. At these times we are asleep, we have disconnected from the Universal Consciousness, forgotten to see the world through the wondrous eyes of a child. Sudden flashes of Divine Consciousness are reminders to wake up. To stop projecting forward or backward in time and just be in the moment. To remember that this is it. The present moment is all we have, and all we will ever have.

Magic Bean Moments are a gift, sent to remind us that we are extremely lucky to be given the opportunity that is life, that this life we have is not going to last forever, and that the Divine is everywhere – even in the baked-bean stains on a dork’s jumper!