Enlightenment is Not Serious

Let’s talk about enlightenment and its unserious side. 

Often we fall into the trap of idealising enlightenment. We believe in the sexy words, like enlightenment, awakening, consciousness, pure being and nothingness, and so on. 

Today we look at the opposite perspective. That’s not to say that all of the theories and fancy language aren’t important as a pointer, but at some point you maybe have to let go of it, and you maybe have to realize the unseriousness of all of this.

What is Enlightenment?

If you let me define enlightenment as realising who you really are and the falseness of your ego, experientially it’s like realising you are just a character in a film. Just as the character has no reality to it, your sense of self has no reality to it.

When Tom Cruise plays a film character, I’m pretty sure that most of the time he remembers that he’s actually Tom Cruise, not the character that he’s playing. This is despite the fact he’s got a costume on, he’s imitating a voice, and using words and phrases he never normally does.

He doesn’t forget who he really is. He’s Tom Cruise. 

That is a good analogy for what enlightenment is like, or this particular facet and level of it. It’s like realising you’re been plugged into a 3D world with a subjective experience. You’ve been plugged into the world of your senses, sight and sound, your body and mind, and the sense of linear time.

You realize you’ve been plugged into all of that your entire life, and that all of this isn’t actually who you are.

Again, this sounds very sexy, but the experience is not that sexy.

You look in the mirror and realise that this person is a facsimile, a facade, a caricature of your pure self.

What is your pure self then, you might ask? Your pure self is just pure openness.  It’s the backdrop. It’s the container for everything that you experience.

Why We’re Not Enlightened

I have to thank Michael Singer who wrote The Untethered Soul for showing me this, because I’ve never seen it explained so clearly before.

The reason we’re not enlightened is not because our true self has disappeared. It’s because we get addicted to all of the content of our experience, and this obscures our true self.

We get addicted to our mind. We get attached to our emotions. We get attached to our past and future. Unsurprisingly, we wind up with an extremely strong sense of identity.

Even though deep down inside we know that all this is just a mirage, it’s so convincing. It’s so consistent. It seems so real, and it seems to fit with everything else that we’re experiencing.

It doesn’t help that we live in a society that is pretty unenlightened. If you’re on the path to enlightenment, I bet you know few people who are. Our society and culture enforces our selfhood, not through evil, but through ignorance. 99% of people in the world don’t know who they really are beyond their ego. They have never experientially contacted their true self.

After reifying the self for decades of your life, it’s no wonder you’re addicted to who you are, to this apparent person, to the person you see in the mirror, the clothes you wear, what other people think of you, your self-image, your thoughts and your memories and your emotions and your ideas and your desires. You have no chance but to think that that’s who you actually are. 

Does it mean that that’s not who you are? We could split semantic hairs on this, but let me ask: When you play a video game, are you the character that you play?

I guess it depends how you look at it. The trick is that if you 100% believe that this person is who you are, then it does matter a great deal. You’re bound to suffer the consequences.

Why It’s Not Serious

On one hand, enlightenment is very ordinary. 

Nothing in your experience needs to change, no emotions need to change. You don’t go anywhere.

You just realise the game you’ve been playing your entire life, which is to try and build up this identity, to take everything really personally, to forget that you’re actually the pure beingness behind everything you’re experiencing.

You realise how seriously you’ve been taking this whole thing, and you discover that life is absolutely not serious.

Why It’s Serious

On the other hand, we should take enlightenment very seriously. As Sasaki Roshi said, “All your problems go back to your belief that you have a self. There is no thing called a self.”

It’s a disaster to identify with the hurricane of thought, with the past and future, with your personal history. It’s a disaster to believe you’re this person, who apparently is going to become someone and get recognised, who wants to adjust the world to suit itself.

I speak as someone who’s had severe mental issues in their life, and I can tell you that taking ourselves too seriously is a recipe for disaster.

You have forgotten how much suffering happened as your identity was forged and as you learned how to function as a human.

Enlightenment has the potential to free us from that suffering. That’s why it’s so powerful.

Detachment

A fundamental part of the enlightenment experience is detachment from yourself and from the world. You discover that the world was not exactly as you believed it was, it only seemed that way because of how you identified with your character.

We must remember this, otherwise enlightenment becomes something else. It becomes an aggrandisement of the self, and it takes on all the spiritual paraphernalia that we’re all familiar with, like peace and joy, smiling and having a calm exterior, having a certain body language.

We can’t conflate and confuse enlightenment for these things. Unless you realise that you aren’t who you think you are, all of the spiritual accoutrements are useless. Enlightenment is a very internal experience.

And you don’t have to perfect this human self. That is part of the delusion of the human self, of wanting to get somewhere in life, of wanting to be more beautiful, of wanting to have more, of wanting to have an image to the world. This is all part of the character you’re playing in this video game of life.

Balancing Seriousness and Play

The goal is to balance the serious and unserious sides of enlightenment.

On one hand, stop taking this identity so seriously, stop taking enlightenment so seriously, stop taking your meditation practice so seriously, stop taking the idea that you’re going to get something from this so seriously. Stop taking the idea of spiritual growth so seriously. 

If you take it too seriously, you’re not going to realize this deeper truth of who you really are. Who you really are has nothing to do with the content of the human self. It’s about realizing that you’ve been experiencing this content your whole life. 

On the other hand, if you don’t meditate, or persist, or realise that spirituality is real and not some New Age hocus pocus, you’ll never be free of the cage of self.

Both sides of the equation are crucial here. Otherwise we fall into addiction with one side or the other.

Taking it too seriously is thinking we are some saint or some purified being that’s come to awaken the world. Or thinking that we’re going to become spiritually advanced in some way, or that we’re going to become an amazing meditator.

Not taking it seriously enough is not doing it at all. It is the condition of 99% of the world, who are just drunk on this self, totally addicted to it.

We find the middle way. Not addicted to enlightenment, not averse to enlightenment; not addicted to the self, not averse to the self.