The Riddle of Enlightenment

Can you hold two mutually exclusive principles as true at the same time?

The bliss that comes from the self as it dissolves into God is immeasurable and indescribable. I mean that literally: If I am at all talking about the bliss that comes from samadhi or satori then I am now speaking from an ego rooted in time and space.

I’ve had numerous experiences of ego dissolution, many blissful and a few frightening ones.

• I remember riding a train after a weekend of intense spiritual training with my teacher, and as I was starting out the window at the landscape, I became the landscape. I was the train, the window, and the flowers passing me by. I experienced complete union in that brief moment, just a few seconds, and then returned to my mind, which said, That was amazing! The feeling of peace, that everything was perfect just as it is, was emblazoned in me. But the moment I was able to describe that experience, in words, I was outside of it.
• I was once walking through my neighborhood, and the thought flashed through me: Where is Patrick? And the answer came as swiftly: Nowhere and everywhere. Suddenly, my mind let go of any attempt at holding onto a coherent sense of self, and I felt what it was like to be just a series of reactions — what the Buddhists call “causes and conditions” — without any core sense of being. I felt the loosening as the self dissolved into nothing more than a host of causes and effects. There was no “core” me. I felt the utter simplicity of it all and fell to a fit of laughter on the street.
• Countless times, I have been filled with Light for hours, barely aware of the contours of my body, or able to hold a thought. I could not really hold a conversation or do much of anything. From the outside, I must have looked like I was high on some kind of synthetic drug.
• During an ayahuasca retreat, on two of the three nights, I had my sense of self — my identity as Patrick — taken away from me. The message that it is an incredible gift it is to have a sense of self, to have a name, was delivered when they were returned to me.

The thing about enlightenment — if that’s what we mean by these kinds of ego-dissolving experiences — is that the bliss is not a place from which you can live. You can’t remain there. The veil is pulled back so you can peek inside the matrix, and the curtain is drawn again.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

We are both human and divine. We are darkness and light. We are energy and matter — both wave and particle. We are material and spiritual beings.

This tension gives rise to the perceived conflict between separation and oneness, or duality and transcendence.

Many people chase transcendence, ascension, or enlightenment — the state of merging with the universal and leaving behind duality, which is our sense of self in time and space as separate from other beings.

Yet we are meant to experience both. Enlightenment is a process of seeing through the illusion of the self. The illusion is not that we have a self. The illusion is that the sense of self that we have is all there is. We have a self because we create one. But it’s the creation of something that pretends to be all there is, the whole truth of who we are.

We are also not a self, and experiencing that dissolution is, as I said, quite blissful. But that doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to leave behind the self forever or somehow not living every moment in the bliss of selflessness is a failure. It’s not.

Rather, we experience the wonder and bliss from selflessness by returning to self, and leaving again, coming back into bliss, and then back into self. Oneness comes from separation. Transcendence comes from duality. These are not socially constructed binary oppositions, like Democrats vs. Republicans, gay vs. straight, rich vs. poor — means by which our egos simplify the world. These are dialectical forces that give rise to our world. Without darkness, there is no light. Time exists and does not exist; there is no time but the present moment, yet there is a future where your physical body will perish.

Think of yourself as an infinity symbol, separating into two strands that unite as one, and then separating again into two, again and again. You are the drop of water that becomes part of the ocean, only to then migrate again into moisture and fall back into the ocean as a drop of rain, cycling through oneness and separation in a never-ending process.

Enlightenment is not occupying one state at the expense of the other. It is the paradox that these seemingly mutually exclusive states require each other, to hold both as true at the same time even though one seemingly negates the other.

Enlightenment, then, is your capacity to live in the paradox by holding them as simultaneous truths without resolving their incompatibility.

There is great freedom in this view of enlightenment. Like another dialectic, freedom can be found in constraint — in this case, in the constraint that we cannot fully escape being a self, rooted in time and space, at least not until death. That constraint — of being a material being — affords us freedom from our expectations or fear of failure that we are never quite there.

Freedom comes not from escaping the self, but from escaping the illusion that the created self is all there is. This is the freedom that allows for the self to be created and recreated anew, from moment to moment. It is this capacity to see the self as a portal to the infinite that allows us to resurrect ourselves, from moment to moment, where one moment can be bliss, and the next moment a body. What wonder and joy come from occupying a self who might dissolve into divine union and then return again to form! Isn’t that the cycle of life and death itself, all while still living in a body?

Accept that you cannot be merged with God and at the same time be a human being with an ego walking round in time and space interacting with other humans. Yet you are both, at the same time. You are the riddle that cannot be resolved.

Many thanks to 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. for this week’s prompt on Enlightenment,

and last week’s prompt on Freedom.