Just Another Person on the Internet Who Thinks They Know
Today I was told that teachers were afraid of me. By “teacher,” I’m referring to people who make their living by teaching some form of enlightenment spirituality. To be honest, I don’t know how true it is, but hearing it was surprising to me and decidedly not enjoyable. I mean, I know I bug some teachers, but I just don’t see myself as someone to fear. After all, I’m just another person on the internet who thinks they know.
The fact is that anyone who would claim to be enlightened is just another person who thinks they know. This isn’t to say they don’t know necessarily, but that even if they did actually know, they’re still going to have to be a person who thinks they know. Pixels on screens is the great equalizer here, and a lot of don’t knows are selling really well as knows today, while perhaps many more knows are lost in the obscurity of not caring if it’s known that they know.
When I comment on something that a teacher says online, it’s usually because I see how the entailments of the language they are using can generate conceptual notions that I’m convinced will prevent the attentional act of recognition commonly referred to as self-realization or enlightenment. This is not likely a problem for everyone, but I’m sure it was once a problem for me. Perhaps I’m being grandiose to imagine it would be a problem for anyone else, but I believe it’s a function of the fact that some of us are visual thinkers, that we make pictures and maps of things to understand them, and so, will do the same for the idea of enlightenment. The problem arises with the fact that what we notice at the moment of enlightenment was always with us, front and center in our perception. You see something you’ve always seen. Now imagine having what amounts to an incorrect picture of it. There’s no way you are going to see something you’ve never actually not been looking right at when you think it is something else entirely, like that idea you got from that guru you saw one time, or that thing you read in a book, or that time you took acid with your friend and plumbed the mysteries of the universe. You get distracted by the ideas, and that precludes any kind of authentic recognition from occurring.
If we grant it’s established that ideas about enlightenment can interfere with the actual act of attentional recognition, the memetic landscape of spiritual enlightenment culture begins to look like a garden full of poisonous fruit. At least, that’s how I’ve been seeing it for a long time, which is why I occasionally find myself pointing out something in the words of this or that teacher and very often find myself not being appreciated by them for it. That’s understandable. I accept this as the cost of my particular approach. But I certainly never set out to be feared, if that’s actually true, and it has me rethinking my approach (again.)
I believe there is a hidden cost to enlightenment teaching as a business, that being that the message will almost invariably get modified by the commercial imperative. To be blunt, you have to sell what people want to buy, and what people want to buy is ways to be and stay happy, and the fact is that the most useful enlightenment teachings are rarely about being happy at all. In this way, the commercial imperative keeps the garden of poisonous fruit copiously watered, because ideas to help people be happy sell like cold, juicy strawberries to those lost in the hot desolation of their personal problems.
If I’m being honest, my approach to the problem of that garden has been slash and burn all the way, continuously, since before the end of the last century. That’s on me and my tendency to be triggered to react when exposed to language about enlightenment I find offensive for reasons given. A friend recently speculated this might be the result of a moral injury, and I can admit that I was very angry to discover that the purity culture I had adopted at the beginning of my exploration was revealed to be something that was obstructive as well as completely useless and unnecessary as a practice. It’s also something that is still being employed by cults around the world as a means of thought control to this day.
It is this anger that has driven my practice as a critic of much of spiritual enlightenment culture. At the moment of my own recognition, I saw how ridiculously far off the purity culture-influenced ideas I had adopted about it were, as well as any idea that made it grand, spectacular, or somehow much different than how we are existing right now as ordinary human beings having an ordinary human experience. This immediately forged what has been my part-time vocation for the last 20-something years and I’m still on the coast from that moment.
Making teachers angry is the collateral damage that happens when I get triggered, and while I could not disagree if they think I’m a jerk, I’m always trying to be less of one. I honestly don’t like making enemies, and I much more enjoy being friendly than otherwise. Additionally, my comments are always meant to be more about what and how they are saying something rather than themselves as human beings. I’m looking to provoke a discussion, not start a war. With that said, some teachers may want to consider that the “damage” we’re talking about here might be a function of their own overidentification with their ideas, and that this particular breed of boundary issue might be something to be more mindful of. After all, anything that I write about what they are saying is purely the product of just another person on the internet who thinks they know.
