The revenant of self

Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. – Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu)

I have an embarrassing confession to make.

About a year ago I was hypomanically messing around with my own head and trying to mess with my uncle’s head when I had a little accident.

I broke my moral code.

I don’t just mean I breached it, though I did, I mean I utterly smashed it and was left in no doubt whatsoever that I was a moralising hypocrite and had been for a very long time.

It gets worse.

With my moral code gone I realised that my much cherished self-worship of my own knowledge and intelligence was an utter conceit with no objective justification whatsoever. It was complete wank. The ego I had been relying on for so long to defend me from the contempt of others and of myself just shrivelled and died in my hands.

It was an incredibly traumatic experience and for a few seconds I was sure that the ten year battle I had been fighting against my own suicidality was lost. I could not possibly bear this. I would have to kill myself as soon as I could.

Then something happened that is very difficult to admit to others – much less write in a blog – because I know it will be misinterpreted.

I realised enlightenment.

I say I realised it rather than achieved it because it was not an achievement and because I now know I have always been enlightened. I just couldn’t see it before because my own over-inflated self-image had been in the way.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think being enlightened makes me wiser or better than anyone else. In fact for the first time I really knew I was nothing special. Neither an ascended master nor a condemned sinner. Nothing at all really. Yet everything there is.

I have no idea whether my experience matches that of the Buddha or of holy men who claim to be one with God – though I do find it significant that the words of such people seem to have far more substance and relevance to me now. I’m quite sure though that I lack a lot of the discipline and accomplishment that enable such people to not only realise their enlightenment but to live it and emanate it.

I don’t think I earned it either.

Not by virtue of almost a decade of paralysing grief and despair nor through my study of philosophy nor my bipolar nor my meditation practice. It just happened. I don’t know why but I’m sure glad it did. If I believed in God I would probably call it an act of grace.

It didn’t make me wiser or more loving or less of an arsehole. In one sense it changed nothing at all.

But it does seem to have cured my depression and made me less judgmental and completely changed my perspective of myself and how I fit into the universe.

Because you see, I’m perfect. Everything is. I don’t know how to explain that in a way that would make sense to anyone who doesn’t already know, but it’s true.

I guess the key is that I finally clearly saw what my ego is and how irrelevant it is to what I really am. I didn’t just understand it theoretically from a book or say it to myself out of false modesty – I really saw it. And I still see it.

But just because my ego is down, I don’t think it’s out.

For about a week after my realisation I walked around in a state of utter bliss, completely open and accepting of everything and thoroughly enchanted by the way everything fitted together and balanced in perfect harmony. A lot of the questions I had long asked about myself and reality were either answered or simply evaporated into irrelevancy.

But I couldn’t function like that for long.

I quickly discovered that my mindfulness practice had not been what I had thought it was and I was unable to do anything that required forward planning. And though my blissful state seemed to touch everyone I interacted with I couldn’t hold meaningful conversations about day to day things – I could only respond to what was happening in the moment.

So I put my ego back on. Which is to say I once again ‘inhabited’ the sense of a continuously existing self and all the social masks I needed to interact with my fellow human beings and carry out my daily tasks. I can still see my ego for what it is and can still remove it at will – though ‘will’ is definitely the wrong word. But it’s ‘sticky’. It’s as if by acting through my ego I am becoming re-addicted to it – re-identifying with it – and I need to regularly find the space to let it go and reground in what I found last October.

One result of having such a beautiful and life changing experience is that I would really like to be able to share it. I look around and see lots of people suffering in ways I once did and feel overwhelmed by compassion and the need to help them if I can. But there are two problems.

The first one is that I don’t really know how I attained my own enlightenment. I’m a bit like the 100 year old asked the inevitable question of how she managed to live so long. She might say “Going to church every Sunday” or “Always eating my greens” or “Sex and drugs and rock’n’roll”, but the fact is she doesn’t have a clue. She just knows she’s not dead yet.

I’m in the same boat. I can tell people everything I know about myself until they die of boredom but I still don’t think I’ll have communicated anything important that will help them realise their own enlightenment. They’re probably in a completely different situation to any I have ever been in and if they are ever going to get there they will have to find their path themselves.

The essential experience seems completely incommunicable anyway. There just aren’t words for it and when I do try to express it I feel that I am lying no matter how hard I try to speak the truth.

The second problem is the question of what might happen if people start believing not only that I’m enlightened, but that I might have something relevant to say about it.

Like I said, my ego is kinda ‘sticky’ and it just loves praise. I’m pretty sure I know what would happen to me if people started treating me like a wise man or a guru or something. It’s bad enough when I get complimented for something I do or get a blog post freshly pressed. My ego just laps it up. It makes me feel good. I start to feel more comfortable in my own ego and reluctant to take it off.

I think I’ve run across a few other people who’ve realised the same sort of enlightenment I have. I think I’ve seen even more of them on the self-help bookshelves and in the media being treated as gurus or spiritual teachers. With the exception of a handful of very modest private people and two Buddhist monks (both now deceased) it seems to me all of these people have become enmeshed in their own egos again. What may have started as a sincere desire to help others find what they had found turned into a self-justifying quest for fame, money and power. I would be very foolish to imagine the same thing wouldn’t happen to me.

So I guess it’s lucky that I probably can’t tell anyone anything about realising enlightenment that they don’t already know. If I did I would probably create a monster of myself and lose the very thing I was trying to teach.

Perhaps the only answer is for me to go and live in a cave or a looney bin or somewhere else I don’t have to try to prove anything to anyone. Then I can take off my ego for good and simply bask in perfection. As long as the psychiatrists don’t have some sort of injection to cure enlightenment that is.