Seven Steps to be Your Own Guru

1. Know for a cold, hard fact that your nonconceptual awareness is always right here in front of you as your perception of the world.

When people decide to seek enlightenment, there is a 24-hour a day hurricane of ideas for them to sample, much of which are completely superfluous to the truth of the topic and plainly wrong. Enlightenment is really just witnessing the most basic thing your brain does, which is to build a world out of perceptual and conceptual information. The enlightenment part comes from the simple act of noticing this directly, outside and apart from any of the perceptual or conceptual content.

In every second we are aware, what we need to notice to become enlightened is right there in front of us as what we are seeing. This can be noticed directly as something I’m calling the nonconceptual phase of awareness. This is the tabula rasa of perception. Upon this slate our brains render the world, both inner and outer. And here is the truest thing one can ever say about it: there is nothing that can said about it, because anything you say is inescapably bound by concept and rendered entirely impotent as a description.

When I say you can notice the nonconceptual phase of awareness, I am describing an act of attention, and I describe enlightenment as an attentional skill. To my mind, attention is absolutely everything in one’s life. You can know nothing without your attention. It’s the pen your brain uses to draw the details of the world. I do not believe the attention we use to notice the nonconceptual is any different than that which we use to notice a bird in the yard. However, what we are noticing is completely different, because it has been the only thing that has been unchanging and ubiquitous in the entirety of our life’s experience. In other words, it’s closer to us than our own breath.

I believe this ubiquity is at least one of the primary obstacles to coming to notice the nonconceptual. It’s something you’ve never not seen, ever. There is absolutely nothing to contrast it with, nothing that describes it, and I’m going to argue that any attempt to describe it can only result in a distraction from it. The term “attentional blindness” applies very well here. How can it be possible to notice that?

2. Practice simple, positive object, focus-based meditation techniques.

If you accept my definition of enlightenment, it’s plainly obvious why we need to meditate. Meditation is cross-fit for our attention. But unlike cross-fit, we are only developing a singular “muscle,” and so, we only really need a few simple techniques.

What I’m about to say next is going to get me in trouble, but I’m not talking about guided meditation here. I don’t feel it’s harmful in any way, and many come to moments of comfort and grace by that means, but it’s not developing attention, it’s telling a story with suggestions about how you might feel, and like the internal experience factory that it is, the subconscious mind produces results based on those suggestions. I believe this is the essence of all religion and belief.

So what am I talking about? The very most basic kind of meditation, which is to pick an “object,” that is, something to focus on internally, and then spend time sitting comfortably and quietly attempting to keep one’s attention on the object. The “reps” happen when your attention falls away to mind wandering or listening. This is very important: do not get mad at yourself for losing focus. It’s unnecessary, because it is by losing focus and bringing attention back to focus that you acquire the skill of meditation. That’s one rep. It’s a mistake to think that being good at meditation is about keeping focus. Being good at meditation is about losing focus and bringing it back with equanimity no matter how many reps you do. I will say though that the goal is to do less and less reps over time because the duration of each rep is getting longer. But being mad at yourself for doing lots of reps is completely counterproductive, and you can still develop attentional skills no matter how many reps you do.

As far as which objects to use, a simple word or phrase will work. It can be in any language, even gibberish if you want. You could pick a number even, although I’d recommend just sticking to one. Sounds that you remember or generate internally will also work. You can also follow body sensations. I learned to watch the sensation of my breath at my nostrils tips (or lips when I can’t breath through my nose.) The former are called mantras, the middle shabda, and the latter is a form of Vipassana, which is a Buddhist-based practice that is fairly secular.

Here’s another opportunity for folks to disagree with me, as the words shabda and mantra usually describe holy sounds and various combinations of mystically-charged Sanskrit syllables which emanate from your mind as vibrations that reverberate across the Cosmos, helping to bring about a New Age where we all get transported in a Holy Ascension to a place where peace and comfort will reign forever. While that’s all very hopeful and a huge component of the culture around the practice of meditation, I’m going to say you can completely ignore all of it and leave it at that.

The action of meditation is very simple, it develops attention. Anything else is either a side-effect or a distraction. There may be pleasant distractions, and perhaps even helpful ones in our pursuit of happiness, comfort and adjustment, but it’s the strengthening of our attentional muscle that I believe is the purest essence of what meditation is about.

As far as time spent doing meditation? You can sit for x minutes a day in the morning, afternoon, evening, whenever. It doesn’t matter, as long as you are doing those reps. You can do more tiny sessions or some bigger ones. Maybe more is better than less, but less is WAY better than nothing, so don’t make an unrealistic goal and then quit because you can’t meet it. If you do one minute of meditation a day, it can be enough, although I’d recommend trying for 10. If not everyday, maybe every few days.

But before you begin meditating, know this: there will be “experiences.” For some reason, when you begin to sit and focus, your mind starts doing things, strange, unusual things. Some of these things may feel like energy coursing up and down your body. There were plenty of times I got a stiff boner meditating at the temple I attended. It wasn’t because I was thinking about sex (although it often led to that distraction as a result), it was simply one of the anomalous things that happens during meditation.

I’m going to make a special point around the concept of “anomalous.” That’s all it is. While the world is full of the ideologies that “explain” these experiences, I will contend that none of them are anything more than people talking out of their ass about the spurious experiences they encountered in meditation. In my very strongly held opinion, any and all meditation experiences are entirely superfluous to the task at had, which is doing reps to strengthen attention. As far as I am concerned, you can throw the whole culture of spiritual “energy” out the window. In my experience, it is entirely unnecessary to the endeavor of enlightenment. This isn’t to say it doesn’t work for others, I know it does and I use some of these techniques myself. But to my mind it’s another category of practice from meditation, and whenever I had a glorious meditation experience in the temple hall, I never talked about it to anyone else in my life and I basically just let it go as another anomalous cognitive event. I truly and deeply believe this is all that they are.

3. Examine your assumptions and beliefs about enlightenment.

This is where we talk about another massive enlightenment stumbling block: concepts about enlightenment. I’m convinced they can prevent noticing the nonconceptual.

This is the part where I confess to being enlightened. That said, I can only objectively be somebody who says they are enlightened, and this presents three potential explanations. One is that I’m lying. After all, people make millions of dollars off the idea they are enlightened. Both male and female commercial spiritual entrepreneurs are treated as living deities. People are throwing themselves at these figures 24-hours a day. It’s a very high perch, and it often gets so high as to defy all accountability and assailability. It’s a great gig, and you can get away with murder, literally.

The next class of claimant are the deluded, those who are gravely mistaken about the state of their enlightenment. This is where I imagine I’m going to land with most of my readers. I can’t blame them, because before I came to my own enlightenment, I’d have thought the very same thing. Just the fact that I’m using personal pronouns is going be enough to disqualify me with many.

The final class of claimant are the ones who know. I’m happy to report that they are scattered across the internet, not in great supply but certainly more common than many people believe. Again, they are probably dealing with people who believe they are deluded, but they quickly learn to not care. After all, you know what you know.

So what I know is this. I was in psychotherapy with my therapist who is also a Sufi sheikh, which is basically a guru. I put him in the third category of claimant. We were doing our usual somatic approach where I’d talk about something I was dealing with and then he’d ask me to go inside and describe what it felt like. We had been doing this a few times a month fairly regularly for about 5 years. At this particular time, I don’t recall what I was exploring, but I do recall getting to something that I could not describe. He kept probing, asking for more description, and I told him there was nothing to describe. It was just nothing that was like a something.

At this point he got pretty excited and said that I was seeing the “Self.” This is the term we used to talk about nonconceptuality. It’s based in my history as a student of Vedanta, which is what my other guru was showing me at that time.

When my therapist made that exclamation, I thought he was nuts and didn’t know what he was talking about. What I was seeing was nothing. It was no big deal, at all. Zip. There was absolutely not a single extraordinary thing about it, so I could not accept that this was the Self.

So I left and went about my week. Sometime before my next session, I had a dream. I was in a nature park in the Berkeley hills in Northern California and was suddenly swept off my feet and into the air by a comfortably warm wind. I floated slowly above a tiny dance music festival. There were pop-up canopies where people were selling clothing and trinkets as the music played. Then the airscape shifted. I was now in a perfectly still, perfectly consistent, unmarred, entirely undisturbed gray mist whose temperature and all other aspects were utterly neutral. I floated motionlessly in that mist. And then I woke up.

The next time I went to therapy, I described my dream. This time my therapist got even more excited. While he didn’t yell, he definitely raised his voice to say, “That’s it! That’s the Self! I can’t believe this! It’s showing itself to you!”

Once again, I still didn’t have a clue and thought he had gone overboard. I left that session perplexed and thoughtful. “What the fuck does he mean,” was the primary thought.

So that evening I’m standing in front of a restaurant with one of my best pals waiting to be seated. We had just smoked a blunt. (This will be another obvious sign of my lack of veracity on this topic for many.) We’re just standing there, pleasantly stoned, as I’m looking at the cover of one of the free alternative newspapers published in the Bay Area as it sits in the window of the sidewalk paper box. Suddenly, I noticed it again, that “nothing that was like a something” that I’d described to my therapist. This was the moment of realization, when my attentional function developed the ability to reliably fall back on and notice the nonconceptual at will.

In that instant I had a threefold reaction. The first was astonishment at how obvious it had always been. The second was wondering how I could have ever missed it, and the third was realizing that it was because of all the ideas that I’d been carrying about it over my 12 years of practice at that time. I realized that I was distracted by those ideas and this is why I was unable to consider the truth of what my therapist was showing me.

This is why I am convinced that ideas about enlightenment can easily kill enlightenment. I had two chances to get it but missed. Thankfully, the third time was the charm. (There was actually a shot at it in the early 80s too, but it was before I had any concept of enlightenment at all.)

So what has enlightenment taught me? Mostly that it’s absolutely no big deal as a lived experience. You don’t become one with God, or the universe, and you don’t disappear into the depths of existence, never to be again. You simply see that your awareness is ultimately nonconceptual and that your experince of existing has its basis in the nonconceptual rather than that cluster of ideas about yourself, the universally reviled and the tragically misrepresented ‘ego.’

Here’s another point I make that will draw a lot of fire: ego does not prevent enlightenment. At all. Ego is simply how the brain renders our existence to ourselves. It’s how I know I’m Jody. People mistakenly think that by being a “Jody,” I can’t be enlightened. They believe that ego and enlightenment cannot occupy the same space, that these are opposites. This is all poppycock. Enlightenment is an attentional skill that involves an act of noticing, and folded into that act is the knowledge of what is being noticed. This all happens aside the operation of that set of ideas which defines my identity as a person. When you can notice the nonconceptual, you can notice that it’s where your sense of being arises, that it’s you, all the while remembering that you are a person and operating as one, and that only happens by the agency of what people call the ego.

There is a book to write about how the concept of “ego” has been twisted into a very effective means of mind control by charismatic, and usually quite sociopathic cult leaders. It’s the number one tool employed for keeping the flock hewed to the will of the guru. Anything that calls the guru’s wisdom into question is dismissed as the product of a resistant ego, and since the ego is almost universally characterized as the number one nemesis of enlightenment, any “true” seeker is going to avoid that characterization at all costs as they attempt to establish their position within the cult hierarchy under the guru. So…

4. Do not follow commercial gurus.

They have nothing to teach you. Nothing. (Except maybe how to become a scamming guru yourself.) They just want your money. I’m not saying they are all evil and none of them want to help, just that they are all clueless about the distracting effects of their rhetoric about enlightenment. I’ve dubbed this common pool of rhetoric that almost every commercial guru draws from the folk theory of enlightenment. It’s my critique of what I call Spiritual Enlightenment Culture, which is the current landscape of ideas about enlightenment that is available on the internet, much of which is based on the historical misinterpretations of Hindu Vedanta by Western appropriators like Helene Blavatsky, Charles Leadbetter and Alice Bailey, as well as a few Hindu emissaries who came to the West but did not grasp how their ideas were going to land in the Western minds they were trying to reach. Vivekananda and Yogananda stand out in this category.

Basically, the FToE is the constellation of linguistic entailments that arise out of the notions that being enlightened is the equivalent of being one with God, or the universe, or of basically not existing as a person anymore. It’s built on a composite Hindu/Buddhist platform of ideas that are primarily pan-psychic, that is, they propose that our consciousness is the same as a timeless universal consciousness that is purported to exist. Some people call that God while others keep it at the universe, but all those people believe that becoming enlightened changes you into something fundamentally different, and I’m calling that out as poppycock, because the only thing that can be said about the nonconceptual is that it is nonconceptual.

The problem of the FToE is simply the distraction it causes. If you have an idea about what enlightenment is like, how can you possibly see the subtle truth of it as it stands before you? Your attention is always and unfailingly going to go to the idea before it can notice the truth. The fact is that no idea describes enlightenment, so why have them at all? Because those ideas support a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise all across the world, and this is why the FToE is here to stay.

I have a confession to make. When I first recognized the nonconceptual as the nonconceptual and discovered the ideas I was holding about enlightenment were likely what had been holding it at bay by their power to distract my attention, I got a bit angry. I’ve been told this is the result of a moral injury, but it was kind of in reverse. The injury was not caused by any moral failing on my part, it was caused by my reaction to having been so completely misled by Spiritual Enlightenment Culture, which up to that time I had trusted to guide me. My primary upset was over the idea that the world and worldly activities like enjoying parties and having sex were the main things preventing enlightenment, besides the ego. After all, during the 90s I was deeply involved in the dance music scene in the Bay Area, when we were putting on brilliant parties and I was more or less fearlessly exploring my own sexuality. However, during that entire time, I was feeling more or less perpetually guilty about it all. I was surrounded by wonderful, supportive friends, but because of the standard prescription against partying and sex that is embedded in almost all Hinduism-derived Spiritual Enlightenment Culture—where celibacy is the highest ideal and it is believed that every male orgasm brings the depletion of a substance which is essential for the production of enlightenment—I had a guilt hangover that I could just not kick. That is, until the attentional skill of enlightenment dawned. Then I saw clearly and beyond all doubt that is was all more or less nonsense, and I felt aggrieved.

This is what got me started on the path that has brought me to this moment now as I type this essay. It’s been 24 years now, and during that time I’ve made it my mission to educate people about how ideas about enlightenment can prevent enlightenment, as well as pointing out the commercial gurus who are the biggest perpetuators of these ideas on the planet, and it’s pretty much all of them, because even though all these ideas can prevent enlightenment by way of the distraction of attention, they can also provide real comfort and solace when they are installed as personal belief. This is what drives the entire enterprise of Spiritual Enlightenment Culture and the business of every commercial guru, the sale and distribution of beliefs which enhance personal experience. While enlightenment is still imagined to be the goal, in SEC it’s really just the carrot on the end of the stick the guru holds as she or he leads you to the happiness you have been paying them for, because telling somebody they are God, even if they don’t feel it or see it, can go a long, long way to helping people feel better about themselves, and that is the number one reason people are seeking gurus, in my opinion. They simply want to feel better about themselves. This is an entirely noble goal, but there are better ways to achieve it than following a schlocky spiritual guru as he rides a motorcycle around India in flowing robes to seek more fame and attention. All you have to do is…

5. Plumb your depth.

That is, know thyself. It’s much easier said than done. First and foremost, it requires sincerity, honesty and some personal integrity. You have to be willing to be self-critical without being self-defeating. You have to recognize your errors and immediately cut yourself some slack for them. You have to get outside your own head to get inside it. I describe it as making yourself your favorite science project. It’s the project of developing your meta-cognition, that is, knowing the operation of your mind from within and without in a more objective sense, the way a neuropsychologist would look at it.

I’m convinced that almost everyone going to a commercial guru for guidance would be much, much better served by a qualified psychotherapist. That is the role that gurus are occupying for the lion’s share of their following, but very, very few of them can operate successfully in this role, mostly because they are unqualified and/or unable to give the kind of personal attention this project requires. Having a good psychotherapist can provide a kind of touchstone that will allow a person to gauge where they’ve been and where they want to go in their personal development, which I would characterize as the identification of trauma, dealing with it and integrating that experience into your life. This is called integrating the shadow, and while you can make some significant progress on your own, you can also make significantly more progress by having an accredited shadow hunter with you, and that’s what a good psychotherapist is in the end, your friendly neighborhood shadow hunter.

I don’t think I could say that doing this alone will result in enlightenment. But it does result in a better adjustment to your life as it is and how it wants to be expressed, and that more relaxed and flexible cognitive environment is likely to be way more conducive to the emergence of what turns out to be a more subtle and precise employment of one’s attention.

6. Stay normal.

All that really needs to be said here that you don’t have to change much about your life in order to be enlightened. This is in direct opposition to what almost all the commercial gurus say, which is that you have to reject this, that, or the other thing so as to become more pure so you can hold more holiness in your life. This is pure fantasy as far as actual enlightenment is concerned, but the idea and those similar drive the behavior of probably over a billion people. It’s all for naught. Enlightenment is always right in front of you no matter what your moral condition is. This isn’t to suggest it’s ok to be evil, just that even the evil are always looking directly at their nonconceptual awareness. I would imagine that being evil is not an aid on the path, but you can certainly make the case for there being some evil gurus down through history.

Another aspect of staying normal is not changing your social circle around your spirituality. This is a great way to get caught in a groupthink, which is like folk theory of enlightenment university. This isn’t to say don’t go to meditation classes or hear teachers speak, just that you need to always trust your own intuition when people are suggesting what to believe. So many fall into belief in the rush to make connection with others. This is the very essence of the mechanism of cult membership.

7. Fall in love with the Universe.

This is where I get religious. I have to begin by saying you don’t ever have to be religious to get enlightened. You can skip this whole step and still come into the required attentional skill, as long as you meditate some. No God required. But if I’m to be honest, my personal religion, one that I put together for myself from the materials I came across and enjoyed the most, has played the largest role in my personal journey.

I fell very hard for yoga religion and spirituality in my mid-20s. I lived at a yoga ashram for a year in rural San Diego County, and was a member of a Hindu philosophical organization for 20-some years after that as well as a Hindu temple organization for about 10 years. Through all that ideological density I was able to forge my own path. I’ve believed what I’ve believed, often over what all my teachers were telling me. At the Hindu philosophical organzation, the congregation got tired of my questioning of my own guru during the question and answer session after the service and I was eventually ejected as a nuisance. Yet it completes the picture to note that he did tell me to “make your own place,” right before he kicked me out for good.

To be frank, I don’t really think I believe in God, but I’m utterly convinced that the idea of God is the most powerful idea that human culture has ever devised and the reason is only because the idea of God functions as a window into our own subconscious mind. The idea of magic does this as well. One thing that popular neuroscience tells us over and over is that the subconscious mind will always remain 100% opaque to personal observation. This eternal mystery is either generated by the 80-billion or so neurons singing in our heads and bodies or is something we don’t know about. Either way, it is the well of all mystical experience.

The 80-billion strong community that is your nervous system is a very powerful human biocomputer and it does a lot of really incredible stuff, all and only by suggestion alone. This is where I make the grand statement that all religious experience is a placebo effect. [shields UP]

It’s related to that question that we can’t answer, so I won’t argue about it. Either/or, it’s pretty much the same thing. You put in belief and you get out experiences that lead you to believe that something akin to God is working in your life for your benefit. IMO, that’s key to the success of all religion in the world, now and in the distant, ancient past, it got people thinking there is a real, magical force for good in their lives, even while it has been the most destructive social force the planet has ever bore.

You can make this magical force work for you without ever having to believe in magic. Again, not so much to do with enlightenment directly, but perhaps everything to do with establishing a good cognitive environment for its emergence. All you have to do is believe you are in relationship with the universe. That’s it. The ideas or imagery or narratives you employ are entirely up to you. You can sample from existing content as I did, mixing Hindu Vedanta and tantric shaktism with cognitive science, including embodied cognition theory and healthy dose of psychedelic realism. You can also legitimately just make it up as you go along. It’s not what you believe, it’s how you believe it. That’s the trick to your command of imaginal spirituality, the employment of belief as a tool to get the black box to produce bliss.

For myself, it was really easy to believe the universe is a gorgeous and powerful Hindu goddess named Kali. We fell in love in my room at the ashram in 1985. If you’re wondering how I can I say I don’t believe in God while I’m confessing to being in love with God, so am I. It’s like I have no proof that God is real, but I really know that the idea of God appears to do pretty much everything that gets attributed to the “real” God.

I’ve described myself as an atheistic deist. You don’t have to be anything like that. You can believe in God in whatever form pleases you, or you can be a strict atheist. Both may still come to notice the nonconceptual in their lives. It’s just about which approach makes you feel the most comfortable in your relationship with your life, because I‘d argue that having a good relationship with your life enables a cognitive environment more conducive to the establishment of the attentional skill required to notice your own nonconceptual awareness.