This is the first in a series of posts outlining the development process for a new online/in-person course called Unleash Your Inner Light – Mastering Enlightenment in Four Effortless Steps.
Kilgore Trout took a leak in the men’s room of the New York City movie house…
There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel.
This was it:
Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with:
To be
the eyes
and ears
and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe,
you fool.
–Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Non-Dual Integration
In February and March, I used my Life Story Crafting model to tell the transformational true story of my non-duality retreat. After I posted The Key to All Mythologies, I did what my culture has trained me to do. I thought to myself, “Well, that was interesting. What next?”
I Googled “non-duality integration.” Because cracking the code of non-duality without integrating it into my life is a little like graduating from medical school and deciding, “Well, that was fun. Maybe I’ll go to law school now.” What’s the point of having a life-changing experience if you just go back to your old way of life?
Three Schools of Non-Duality
The first similarity I noticed between non-duality and awakening or enlightenment was that the approaches to integration were the same.
No approach necessary: you don’t have to do anything to integrate it. It’s what you already are.
Paradox approach: Here’s a puzzle I created to frustrate you and never let you forget that I’m smarter than you are.
Direct approach: a short series of meditations designed to help you experience non-duality directly.
Direct Approach
No surprise here. I chose the direct approach, which led me to a non-duality guy named Rupert Spira, in whom I found a second similarity between non-duality and awakening/enlightenment. There’s a vast gulf between “happiness experts” who have read the research and will teach you how to meditate because it is good for you (without actually meditating themselves) and meditation practitioners who simply answer questions if you ask them. I could tell from Spira’s quiet, deliberate manner that he’s more interested in practicing than preaching.
Effortless Approach
Spira calls his approach to non-dual realization and integration direct and effortless, which leads to a third similarity. Recognizing non-duality, like focusing on your breath in meditation, is simple, but not easy.
Why? I was taught to believe that anything worthwhile requires hard work. No pain, no gain, right? That’s why meditation is often described as simple but not easy. When at first you don’t succeed, it’s hard not to try harder.
Ending the Search for Enlightenment
After finding Spira’s three-step approach to non-dual realization and integration, I went directly to his YouTube channel hoping to find a list of Q&As that I might refer to if I ran into stumbling blocks. There I discovered a free five-day course called “Ending the Search for Enlightenment.” I signed up immediately.
Here’s the deal with sales funnels. I give you my email address and you give me something that seems extremely valuable at the low low cost of FREE. (A recent offer I accepted was a five-day seminar on Compassion in Therapy featuring every best-selling author in the field. It’s a fire hose of information to digest in five days, so at the end, they offer me life-time access for the low low cost of $299. Ca-ching!) That’s when I hit unsubscribe. The way to achieve direct/effortless liberation from getting scammed by email marketing campaigns is to know how they work.
Garden Hose, Not Fire Hose
This time, the information didn’t come at me like a fire hose, more like a sprinkler.
I fell asleep during the longest of the guided meditations, which ran an hour and a half, but the total running time was 6:31:00, manageable for me over the course of five days. There were only two drawbacks to them. They were delivered as streaming videos, and they didn’t come with a bell at the end to signal the meditation has ended. Of course, in non-duality, there is no distinction between meditating and not meditating, so I kind of get it.
The super-sized meditation actually included all three stages of the non-dual teaching as outlined in Rupert Spira’s books, so I recorded the audio from that and added a bell to the end before getting hit with the $299 charge I expected for lifetime access.
The Gift That Kept on Giving
When I received the sales pitch email on the sixth day, instead of starting with the up-sell, it started with this:
We hope you enjoyed this Guided Meditation Series. It’s our pleasure to share with you the audio recordings of the series, which you can download below as mp3 files and listen to offline at any time, as well as the complete video series if you prefer to stream.
Huh?
Thankfully, the bottom of the page had a soft sell:
Transparent Body, Luminous World
Guided Meditations (MP3s and ebook)
If you would like to deepen your understanding, Rupert’s Transparent Body, Luminous World, which contains over 30 hours of specific guided meditations and an ebook of transcriptions, would be a perfect continuation to this Ending the Search for Enlightenment Guided Meditation Series.
If he hadn’t tried to sell me something, I would have questioned his sanity. But his small concession to sales funnel capitalism made me wonder whether he was actually more interested in spreading the benefits of non-duality than lining his pockets.
(If you’re interested, you can access the full course here.)
Being Enlightenment
Along with the Day 5 meditation, I received a bonus meditation: Being Enlightenment, in which Rupert Spira makes a provocative claim.
“Enlightenment or awakening is just an exotic term that signifies the knowing of our own being as it is, its knowing of itself before it is colored or qualified by any particular experience.”
Now, knowing our own being as it is, before it is colored or qualified by any particular experience may sound like an exotic state itself, but it’s a place I’ve been several times, with and without psilocybin. And it’s not at all exotic when it comes to non-duality.
Does Non-Duality = Enlightenment?
I know that the Dzogchen (non-dual) teachings were traditionally held in reserve for only the most advanced students, but was that good pedagogy or simply a master/student power play?
Later in Being Enlightenment, Spira says, “We may not ever have an experience to which we can point as an enlightenment experience. We may never have the thought or feeling I am enlightened.”
As I added bells to the end of the mp3s and listened to them a second time, a nagging question arose. Was I, in fact, already enlightened? Was this something I had simply overlooked?
