The Trouble with Enlightenment: Roshi Joan Joan Halifax Roshi Joan wrote this in response to a student’s inquiry about enlightenment and teachers. About enlightenment: my sense is that we usually project our awakened nature (and our worst aspects) on to others. The whole human spiritual project is fundamentally an endeavor related to the retrieval of our projections and discovering who we really are. Too often, we lay our buddha nature on a teacher; then when we discover that this person is simply a human being, probably with big feet of clay, the next thing we do is try to destroy them, or maybe we abandon the awakening project altogether. What a waste! What needs deconstruction is not the teacher but the ego that is preventing us from seeing our basic nature, who we really are, which is not a god or angel but a human being in a wider identity of all. As you recall, I have pointed out the three stages in the student/teacher relationship: idealization, demonization, normalization. I would suggest that these three stages go both ways..... from student to teacher, and teacher to student. Not unlike parenting, I suppose....... The power of normalization is that there is a fundamental relaxation of the exhausting and irritating relational processes of demanding, defining, defending, destroying, and distractibility on both sides of the equation. For me that is what might be called intersubjective awakening. It is also what it means to love, to really love. Not some squishy sticky experience, but the kind of love that arises from seeing reality clearly, including the human reality, and in the midst of this, practicing three things: clear perception of the whole catastrophe, humility, and unconditional regard. You might remember the discussions I was having recently with a particular group about an endeavor to define enlightenment. I said: the only enlightened people I know are dead. I made the same remark recently at a gathering of contemplatives and scientists. (Yes, we get to put aside for the moment that we are all fundamentally enlightened and we just don’t know it.) The thought of enlightenment, among other things, creates a lot of consumerism, including ego-consumerism. IMHO, I believe that we have to be just upfront human beings, and being one of these is no small task only because we have to undo so much strange conditioning. That is, at least, one reason why we practice.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 18:02:30 +0000
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