Closing Thoughts
To
be awakened is to participate in creative acts of engagement with the
world in which we exist, including its historical and symbolic
structures. If anything, that is the game we are called to engage with,
if we awaken as human-beings and not as transcendent super-humans. These
creative acts of engagement are ultimately a form of communication.
After freedom is gained from the me-making self obsessions and their
rootedness in layers of conditioned illusion, to communicate with other
human beings may be understood as a recognition of that same potential
in the individual, but it may simply be the earned ability to see the
individual simultaneously as a product of their world and as a free
individual at once and speak successfully to both. For genuine
communication to take place we can either baffle and amaze our
interlocutor with our new bangles and jewellery, as some do in a sort of
weak narcissistic act of parenting, or we can communicate to the
individual as a resident of the world they inhabit and to the roles that
they are embedded in. It seems to me that the image of the Buddha that
has been passed down to us is of the latter model, even if it is a mock
image. It seems to me that many traditional Buddhist teachers, who may
be quite awake, believe that the best means for them to continue the
latter tradition is to spread and sustain the tradition that has enabled
them to reach the point they are at. But, for others, and I think this
is where a creative act emerges that is of greater value, a pushing
through, or delivery of a blindingly sharp observation of alternatives
that speak to the time we are in is the most powerful options available
to a person who is actually able to see and who feels that drive to
disrupt the norms of the status quo. Those are the voices that echo
through history in a sense, that are more likely to produce actual
change outside of a small circle of followers, or a shift in
consciousness within a collective. This type of act, or dedication to
pushing through the status quo is what is needed for any real change to
occur and for the awakening of an individual to be of any lasting value.
Within
Buddhism there are socially sanctioned means and avenues for expressing
the compassionate drive to help others, and alleviate suffering in the
world. The establishment of norms regarding the type of behaviour
exhibited by a semi-awake, or awakened individual may be laid out for
him or her. This gives social recognition and a meaningful role to the
individual, as well as a clear direction and avenue for expressing the
compassionate act. But what of those who do not exist within such solid
social constructs? And what comes next? Two key terms reoccur again and
again within Mahayana Buddhism: compassion and wisdom. Compassion seems
to provide a usable metaphor for proceeding after the dissolution of the
phantom-I. Compassion can be understood as to be with another and able
to comprehend their experience and their suffering. Empathy is a natural
sign of boundaries weakening between one individual and another and
their experience and compassion appear to imply that we are able to
connect well enough to another to know their experience. If the false
self structure is dissolved, then the natural ability to be with others
certainly must increase as a result. We may cease to suffer, but there
is no reason to believe that we stop feeling the suffering in others. I
would be highly suspicious of anyone who makes such claims.
Wisdom
may be in part not the ability to validate Buddhist themes, but an
increasing perception of what is unfolding and what is important within a
given circumstance through more complete and unhindered participation,
and hopefully the ability to communicate to that. Needless to say, these
two would really warrant a further essay.
Concluding the experiment
In
this essay I have attempted to reconfigure enlightenment taking
Buddhism as the essential source and then attempting to shed some of the
baggage that accompanies common attitudes towards enlightenment. I have
been a faithful Buddhist Modernist in the way David McMahon has defined
in his great book, by uniting disparate elements from different
Buddhist traditions, whilst utilising modern thought methods for
attempting a fresh look at a normally abstract phenomena. I have
abandoned reincarnation and mentioned science too. In my case this has
all happened consciously however and I have done my best to be true to
my remit – to avoid any talk of special, or consigning any particular
special category to Buddhism. I have utilised elements of Buddhism
consciously and realistically do not see how it is possible to achieve
the premise laid out in this essay for awakening without methods and
observations that have proven to work and that have survived long enough
to be available today and that emerge from Buddhism. Meditative
techniques that derive from Buddhism are an effective means for
developing clarity in awareness and thought and they provide a basis for
exploring the key themes of death, impermanence and the suffering self
and the phantom nature of the I. Buddhism is not a single authority on
any of these topics however. It also fails in many regards to provide an
adequate means for understanding the relationship between the
individual and society, which is no surprise considering it emerged as a
tradition over two thousand years ago when the world was a very
different place.
I
have tried to define enlightenment as awakening from and as freedom
from specific forms of entangled suffering and illusion regarding the
phantom-I. I have taken a model prominent in early Buddhism and utilised
by some modern Secular Buddhists and reworked it to extract a view of
four stages that may be loosely considered an overlay for a lived, human
felt adventure, through which, increasing freedom is obtained as we
wake up to the nature of the phantom-I, as it is, embedded in multiple
structures of me-making. I have tried to make it clear that I consider
it a perfectly human and perfectly possible endeavour and after all
perhaps not as complex as it is traditionally made out to be.
This
naturalised approach seems highly reasonable and functional, and a
further step in removing the mystique that surrounds the romanticised
interpretations of the path and lengthening of goals to abstract dream
like distances, out of reach of mere mortals, where hence we can only
dream of knowing. Such indulgent watching does not serve the purpose of
reducing suffering, whether emotional, mental, physical or other. Only
sober engagement and avid exploration will lead us into gaining clear
insight into how we are in the world and how this world is and how the
two interact and depend on each other and how we are both singular and
collective beings and the causes of our suffering and the sustainment of
that suffering is found in both
