Back to basics: What is enlightenment?
It feels like nowadays, the question about human enlightenment is becoming more and more urgent, a pressing and burning question that has to be addressed and solved as soon as possible. It needs to be done for the sake of the salvation of the self as well as the salvation of the collective world we inhabit, which is ultimately the consequence of decisions taken by humans in our extremely short history as a species (within the great planetary time-scale).
It is evident for us that we do not live in an enlightened society, it seems that we collectively act more like the opposite of that. In this regard, any curious researcher or spiritual person understands relatively well that the Western world is extremely stupid and ignorant in its collective actions: a culture based on the idea that humans are somehow superior to all living creatures, that human purposes are the only thing that matters, and that the web of living creatures around them is something to be exploited and extracted in order to fulfill imagined human purposes of consumerism, militarism, industrialism, nationalism and so on.
If Western culture were a movie, it would be the most boring and predictable one: the deluded monkeys destroy and trash the environment that holds them and, by doing so, they self-destruct by failing to understand that they depended on their environment. Are we so miserable, idiotic and predictable as a species? How are we unable to perform anything better than that lame and poor story?
But what exactly is an enlightened person like? What is genius? Who do we listen to? It seems that our basic problem nowadays is to be able to recognize an enlightened one when we are confronted to him or her. If only we could be able to find the criteria that would allow us to know which people got the world right and which people got the world wrong.
History introduces us to a few examples of enlightened people that have changed the world forever: the Buddha (Siddharta Gautama - IV century BC), Muhammad (VI century CE) and Jesus. These enlightened heroes have each specific stories. In the case of the last two (Muhammad and Jesus), one can find reference to a divine being that somehow enters into contact with these enlightened people. In the case of the Buddha there is no such higher being.
History introduces us to a few examples of enlightened people that have changed the world forever: the Buddha (Siddharta Gautama - IV century BC), Muhammad (VI century CE) and Jesus. These enlightened heroes have each specific stories. In the case of the last two (Muhammad and Jesus), one can find reference to a divine being that somehow enters into contact with these enlightened people. In the case of the Buddha there is no such higher being.
In the case of Jesus, he doesn't really need to "do" anything in order to become divine or enlightened, since he was simply anointed by the higher being. Jesus is a passive hero in the sense that his spontaneous way of being is enlightened, loving, wise, whatever one wants to call it...In other words, he is effortlessly divine, so that in his very way of being he manages to deliver the message of God, of whom he is the Son. In short, Jesus effortlessly behaves like a God.
In the case of Muhammad, the story is different because it is schemed as a revelation. The higher being does not precisely anoint Muhammad, but he establishes contact with him, so that Muhammad becomes a kind of channel of communication between the higher being and humanity, making him a prophet that delivers a divine message to the public.
In the case of the story of the Buddha, for the hero it is the toughest one because he is totally on his own. There is no higher being that anoints him or passes a divine message. Not this time. Unfortunately for him, he is all alone with his individual existence. From this starting point, enlightenment is not something that one is endowed with, but rather Siddharta has to practice and practice and practice in order to reach enlightenment. In this sense, the Buddha is enlightened by personal effort.
And what does he practice? Nothing more than concentrated contemplation of what happens when one is alive. And with this contemplation he draws conclusions and ideas that are helpful to be healthy and to be able to accept life in all its dimensions: "one suffers in life"; "one can practice a peaceful attitude"; "one can practice a kind attitude"; "one gets caught up in the hooks of craving, hatred and certainty"; "one can practice avoidance of dogmatism" and many more.
From my experience, I think we can synthesize the aspects of these different stories into a new story of enlightenment, which is the enlightened shaman or the shamanic hero.
As Terence Mckenna puts it succinctly, "the key is the psychedelic experience". One immediately needs to turn to the synonym term for psychedelics, entheogens. This term is derived from two words of Ancient Greek, ἔνθεος (éntheos) and γενέσθαι (genésthai). The adjective entheos translates to English as "full of the god, inspired, possessed", and genesthai means "to come into being.". In this way, entheogen literally translates to become full of god.
This is reminiscent of American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's views on the divine and infinite nature of all individual human beings, that is somehow veiled and clouded by our cultural conditioning: "God dwells in thee, it is no metaphor nor parable...clouded and shrouded there doth sit, the infinite embosomed in a human".
The cultures where entheogen consumption is central are manifold. Jeremy Narby, anthropologist and ecological activist, describes his story of discovering this entheogenic gateway in the Amazon as follows: (here's a link to the source interview)
One of the mysteries you encounter as an anthropologist when you work with indigenous amazonian people is that when you ask them how do they know about the medicinal properties of plants, they say "well, knowledge from the plants comes from the plants themselves... and what happens is that our ayahuasquero shamans take plant mixtures and in their visions they communicate with the spirits of different life forms", and that's where they get the information from... It took me about a decade just to be able to stand in front of that statement and take it at face value.
This is the basis of the shamanic schema of enlightenment: we have the existence of a Plant-other (we cannot be sure if it's really a higher being in the sense of being eternal or infinite) that provides information and knowledge, thus enlightening humans when they consume a brew like ayahuasca (that the amazonians call the television of the forest). However, when the ceremony and visions are over, humans are on their own to practice whatever the plant-other has taught them (like using the medicinal properties of specific plants). The enlightened shaman is thus a synthesis of the most popular enlightenment stories: there is effectively an Other that knows and teaches, there is revelation of messages and teachings to humans and there is consequent effort required to put these teachings into practice.
It is obvious that this story of enlightenment is beyond the frame of Western metaphysics because western metaphysics believes that nature is dead, automata, that it is just a complex mechanic devoid of self-hood. What this shamanic frame presupposes is that there is a way that allows the plant-other to enter people's experience, so that the human body behaves as a sort of antenna that - when one consumes ayahuasca- is able to tune into the television of the forest.
It is obvious that this story of enlightenment is beyond the frame of Western metaphysics because western metaphysics believes that nature is dead, automata, that it is just a complex mechanic devoid of self-hood. What this shamanic frame presupposes is that there is a way that allows the plant-other to enter people's experience, so that the human body behaves as a sort of antenna that - when one consumes ayahuasca- is able to tune into the television of the forest.
Jeremy Narby poses the right question when he asks: Why do the plants provide that knowledge? What's in it for them? Fortunately, he gets a unanimous response by many different shamans: Plants have been around a lot longer than we have and they care for us like grandparents care for their grandchildren. So they can't say no when go to them -especially for healing and information that would be good for life- so they like to help us, it's a pleasure for them to serve.
The rest of this essay covers central aspects of enlightenment that I have grasped myself with the help of shamanic revelations and also covers a method to reach it. I do not claim it is the only method, I only claim that it is one possible method.
The rest of this essay covers central aspects of enlightenment that I have grasped myself with the help of shamanic revelations and also covers a method to reach it. I do not claim it is the only method, I only claim that it is one possible method.
Conceptualizing enlightenment
It is no surprise that if one is set to reach enlightenment, one needs to imagine or conceptualize what this state might be like. The most important trap that one has to avoid is this: projecting enlightenment into the future, thinking of enlightenment as a goal, something that one will eventually become. This is deceitful because enlightenment is reached only through concentration focused into the present moment. If one lives enlightenment as an image of a future, goal-like state, then one misses the entry point to enlightenment, which is the present moment.
The holder
It is no surprise that if one is set to reach enlightenment, one needs to imagine or conceptualize what this state might be like. The most important trap that one has to avoid is this: projecting enlightenment into the future, thinking of enlightenment as a goal, something that one will eventually become. This is deceitful because enlightenment is reached only through concentration focused into the present moment. If one lives enlightenment as an image of a future, goal-like state, then one misses the entry point to enlightenment, which is the present moment.
The holder
In this section I will call the human being the holder, because when he and she is awake he and she is holding the body, holding the jaw to close the mouth, holding the head up, holding the legs to walk, holding the tongue to lick, holding the eyes open, holding the anal sphincter, holding the urethral sphincter, and many more. The holder or "the body grip" is the most basic mind-matter relationship, enabled by what we experience as sensations: sensations of muscles, sensations of uprightness, sensations of movement, sensations of tension, sensations of weight. Our grip of sensations is the basis for "animating our body" towards life-oriented actions: walking, eating, reaching, manipulating, etc.
Enlightenment can be reached by making the holder disappear. And how does one make the holder disappear? First of all, one has to make a deal with a plant. Cannabis use will radically heighten the perception of bodily sensations, so it will be a lot easier to do what is needed to make the holder disappear, namely, releasing the body: Releasing the arms, releasing the legs, releasing the jaw, releasing the stomach, releasing the head, releasing the sphincters and so on. When one releases the body, one will feel like starting to fall back. When one releases the body even more, one will feel like falling back further and further. One is falling back into the empty place.
The empty place
"Now I mainly dwell by dwelling in emptiness" said the Buddha when referring to his enlightened state of mind. The empty place is the place of enlightenment, and it is important to note that it is a place. Many people have the idea that enlightenment happens when you have insights and general ideas about reality. I argue that the causality is misunderstood. What actually happens is that when one falls back by releasing the body grip, one falls back to the empty place. When one gets closer to the empty place, one stops getting involved and drawn into the inner world as well as the outer world. The empty place is an excellent point of view because one can reflect into one's own relationship to both outer and inner world: one's relationship to words, one's relationship to inner sensations, one's relationship to culture.
The empty place is called this way because it is a place where one arrives when the holder is increasingly disappearing. In other words, it is empty of the holder. Since one is falling back, it is lived as a distanciation from the holder, which has two central aspects. The first of them is that through this distanciation one can start to see what the holder is doing all the time in day-to-day life. The holder is involved in the world, believing, craving, understanding, being affected by the world (inner and outer). The place that is empty of the holder is dis-involved of the world, because without the holder, no world, no belief and no craving can be held at all.
The second central aspect is that we should understand the empty place as mind becoming or reuniting with matter. As we know, matter is represented by being inert and inanimate, whereas mind is what is animate and active. What is done by the mind when it releases the body grip is to come back to the place where it emerged, which is matter. This is why the empty place is very similar to our idea of death, since the practice is about going back to being inanimate bodies. Of course, one's death is not at stake by using this method and one should not be afraid of it.
A few central conclusions one can draw by getting closer to this empty place are the following:
1) Matter has a spontaneous tendency towards animation or mindedness: Before life started, we know that proteins spontaneously start to organize in order to produce effects and relate to other molecules.
2) Life is a phenomenon of reflection of the Universe: when these proteins and systems of molecules create a membrane that distinguishes them as units, they separate from their environment. However, these organisms need to interpret their environment so that it means something for them. In other words, organisms need to perceive the environment, and in order to do so they need to filter signals that they encounter according to their perspective. In this way, the fundamental job of living organisms is to create meaning out of the signals they encounter, making creativity a fundamental trait of living organisms. In this sense, what scientists call mind or individual existence or subjective experience is an interface created by the organism, a place built up to mediate the organism-environment relationship in a unified manner. Mind is made of nothing more than meaning. Living organisms need to create mind in order to be aware of their surroundings and act in order to stay alive.
3) The radio-body: The consequence of (2) is that the form of a mind depends on the physiology of the species, which is something we relatively understand. Birds' physiology allows them to perceive the magnetic field of the planet and our physiology does not. In this sense, bodies are like radios, their components are able to interpret certain kinds of signals and are unable to interpret others.
What we can infer is that through the ingestion of psychedelic molecules, we become a kind of super-radio that is able to perceive things that were before invisible for us due to our bodily structure. In metaphoric terms, when we consume psychedelics our antennas become hyper-sensitive, so that we are able to tune into what the Amazonians call the television of the forest and learn things from this place.
We must note here that the notion of "reality" is utterly misleading because the "reality" that our endogenous physiology produces is always going to be partial, in the sense that it does not interpret all the possible signals out there. We have no basis to claim that our "regular radio broadcasting" is somehow "more real" than the "super-radio broadcasting" that we can achieve with psychedelics.
Enlightenment can be reached by making the holder disappear. And how does one make the holder disappear? First of all, one has to make a deal with a plant. Cannabis use will radically heighten the perception of bodily sensations, so it will be a lot easier to do what is needed to make the holder disappear, namely, releasing the body: Releasing the arms, releasing the legs, releasing the jaw, releasing the stomach, releasing the head, releasing the sphincters and so on. When one releases the body, one will feel like starting to fall back. When one releases the body even more, one will feel like falling back further and further. One is falling back into the empty place.
The empty place
"Now I mainly dwell by dwelling in emptiness" said the Buddha when referring to his enlightened state of mind. The empty place is the place of enlightenment, and it is important to note that it is a place. Many people have the idea that enlightenment happens when you have insights and general ideas about reality. I argue that the causality is misunderstood. What actually happens is that when one falls back by releasing the body grip, one falls back to the empty place. When one gets closer to the empty place, one stops getting involved and drawn into the inner world as well as the outer world. The empty place is an excellent point of view because one can reflect into one's own relationship to both outer and inner world: one's relationship to words, one's relationship to inner sensations, one's relationship to culture.
The empty place is called this way because it is a place where one arrives when the holder is increasingly disappearing. In other words, it is empty of the holder. Since one is falling back, it is lived as a distanciation from the holder, which has two central aspects. The first of them is that through this distanciation one can start to see what the holder is doing all the time in day-to-day life. The holder is involved in the world, believing, craving, understanding, being affected by the world (inner and outer). The place that is empty of the holder is dis-involved of the world, because without the holder, no world, no belief and no craving can be held at all.
The second central aspect is that we should understand the empty place as mind becoming or reuniting with matter. As we know, matter is represented by being inert and inanimate, whereas mind is what is animate and active. What is done by the mind when it releases the body grip is to come back to the place where it emerged, which is matter. This is why the empty place is very similar to our idea of death, since the practice is about going back to being inanimate bodies. Of course, one's death is not at stake by using this method and one should not be afraid of it.
A few central conclusions one can draw by getting closer to this empty place are the following:
1) Matter has a spontaneous tendency towards animation or mindedness: Before life started, we know that proteins spontaneously start to organize in order to produce effects and relate to other molecules.
2) Life is a phenomenon of reflection of the Universe: when these proteins and systems of molecules create a membrane that distinguishes them as units, they separate from their environment. However, these organisms need to interpret their environment so that it means something for them. In other words, organisms need to perceive the environment, and in order to do so they need to filter signals that they encounter according to their perspective. In this way, the fundamental job of living organisms is to create meaning out of the signals they encounter, making creativity a fundamental trait of living organisms. In this sense, what scientists call mind or individual existence or subjective experience is an interface created by the organism, a place built up to mediate the organism-environment relationship in a unified manner. Mind is made of nothing more than meaning. Living organisms need to create mind in order to be aware of their surroundings and act in order to stay alive.
3) The radio-body: The consequence of (2) is that the form of a mind depends on the physiology of the species, which is something we relatively understand. Birds' physiology allows them to perceive the magnetic field of the planet and our physiology does not. In this sense, bodies are like radios, their components are able to interpret certain kinds of signals and are unable to interpret others.
What we can infer is that through the ingestion of psychedelic molecules, we become a kind of super-radio that is able to perceive things that were before invisible for us due to our bodily structure. In metaphoric terms, when we consume psychedelics our antennas become hyper-sensitive, so that we are able to tune into what the Amazonians call the television of the forest and learn things from this place.
We must note here that the notion of "reality" is utterly misleading because the "reality" that our endogenous physiology produces is always going to be partial, in the sense that it does not interpret all the possible signals out there. We have no basis to claim that our "regular radio broadcasting" is somehow "more real" than the "super-radio broadcasting" that we can achieve with psychedelics.
4) Material actions vs. Spiritual actions: we know that the world is going bad: global destruction of nature, climate chaos, rise of techno-fascism, war, and a long etcétera. How do we change the world? How do we save the world? What should we do? The situation is titanesque, we have 7 billion individual existences, each one of them confronted to a globally interconnected techno-capitalist matrix. It is David against Goliath. The individual against the cultural matrix.
I will explain why the framing of the salvation of humanity needs to be completely changed, since in its current form it is misleading and unfruitful. The first part of the answer comes from a trap that arises with the question: What should I/we do (to save the world)? What is deceiving about this question is that it is usually asked within the confines of a materialistic world that is obsessed with material actions, so the trap is that one spontaneously thinks that in order to save the world one has to perform material actions.
I personally disagree with this approach because I am on the side of radical ignorance: we have not figured out what we are or why we are alive, we have not figured out how are we constantly hypnotized into reproducing the cultural-symbolic space we inhabit, so we have not figured out what has to be done in order to save the world. If anything, the great attempts to change the world seem to be constantly absorbed by the dominant capitalist ideology, as was the case with the hippie movement.
In this sense, my approach is much humbler. I will not perform material actions but I will rather concentrate on spiritual actions, an example of them is to approach the empty place, in which I will slowly gather the treasure of insights that one can gain from the perspective of the empty place. Then, as that treasure is accumulated, we will ultimately know exactly what to do in order to save the world. And I think that a big part of the answer is to arrive at the feeling that the world in which we live is just a collective hallucination that we are taking too seriously. For example, we know that some previous monkeys imagined that there were imaginary lines in geography, they called them frontiers and they took these lines seriously, and here we are centuries after, enslaved into nation-states because we are still taking those imaginary lines too seriously.
Finally, one needs to note two things. The first of them concerns orientation. When we ask the question of what to do to save the world, the world is imagined as what is outside of us or what is in front of us. Saving "the world" has thus an outward or frontward orientation, whereas the empty place -the place of enlightenment- is reached by orientating oneself in the completely opposite direction, an inward or backward orientation. The world is oriented forward, it is a race to win, to succeed, to act, to perform the script within the capitalist utopia's theater; the empty place is oriented backwards, it is retreat for perspective-taking, for self-knowledge and for observing the dynamic of how the person is the by-product of the hypnosis performed by cultural symbols. The world is the place of symptoms, so it is not the place that will get us to heal the root cause of the wounds of the mind; the orientation has to be inward.
It was never about changing the world, it was all along about changing one's relationship toward the cultural matrix. Our sin is the sin of innocence because as babies and kids we just accept whatever we are shown, we spontaneously identify with the signs we are confronted to, and we take those signs seriously, as real: money, gender dualism, archetypes, authority, frontiers, the state, and so on.
The second final aspect is an acknowledgement of the availability of our psychedelic weapons. Strangely enough, it is an optimistic situation: the way out of the civilization impasse requires recognizing plants and mushrooms as teachers, so we get out of the techno-capitalist imbroglio hand by hand, in symbiosis with these beings. Dennis Mckenna calls these plants and mushrooms "the Ambassadors from Gaia... they happen to make these messenger molecules that are useful for communicating with the complex brains of these problematic apes that evolution has spawned (that would be us)".
I will explain why the framing of the salvation of humanity needs to be completely changed, since in its current form it is misleading and unfruitful. The first part of the answer comes from a trap that arises with the question: What should I/we do (to save the world)? What is deceiving about this question is that it is usually asked within the confines of a materialistic world that is obsessed with material actions, so the trap is that one spontaneously thinks that in order to save the world one has to perform material actions.
I personally disagree with this approach because I am on the side of radical ignorance: we have not figured out what we are or why we are alive, we have not figured out how are we constantly hypnotized into reproducing the cultural-symbolic space we inhabit, so we have not figured out what has to be done in order to save the world. If anything, the great attempts to change the world seem to be constantly absorbed by the dominant capitalist ideology, as was the case with the hippie movement.
In this sense, my approach is much humbler. I will not perform material actions but I will rather concentrate on spiritual actions, an example of them is to approach the empty place, in which I will slowly gather the treasure of insights that one can gain from the perspective of the empty place. Then, as that treasure is accumulated, we will ultimately know exactly what to do in order to save the world. And I think that a big part of the answer is to arrive at the feeling that the world in which we live is just a collective hallucination that we are taking too seriously. For example, we know that some previous monkeys imagined that there were imaginary lines in geography, they called them frontiers and they took these lines seriously, and here we are centuries after, enslaved into nation-states because we are still taking those imaginary lines too seriously.
Finally, one needs to note two things. The first of them concerns orientation. When we ask the question of what to do to save the world, the world is imagined as what is outside of us or what is in front of us. Saving "the world" has thus an outward or frontward orientation, whereas the empty place -the place of enlightenment- is reached by orientating oneself in the completely opposite direction, an inward or backward orientation. The world is oriented forward, it is a race to win, to succeed, to act, to perform the script within the capitalist utopia's theater; the empty place is oriented backwards, it is retreat for perspective-taking, for self-knowledge and for observing the dynamic of how the person is the by-product of the hypnosis performed by cultural symbols. The world is the place of symptoms, so it is not the place that will get us to heal the root cause of the wounds of the mind; the orientation has to be inward.
It was never about changing the world, it was all along about changing one's relationship toward the cultural matrix. Our sin is the sin of innocence because as babies and kids we just accept whatever we are shown, we spontaneously identify with the signs we are confronted to, and we take those signs seriously, as real: money, gender dualism, archetypes, authority, frontiers, the state, and so on.
The second final aspect is an acknowledgement of the availability of our psychedelic weapons. Strangely enough, it is an optimistic situation: the way out of the civilization impasse requires recognizing plants and mushrooms as teachers, so we get out of the techno-capitalist imbroglio hand by hand, in symbiosis with these beings. Dennis Mckenna calls these plants and mushrooms "the Ambassadors from Gaia... they happen to make these messenger molecules that are useful for communicating with the complex brains of these problematic apes that evolution has spawned (that would be us)".
Dedicated to Terence Mckenna
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