What’s so infinite about ordinary being?

In the search for unity, some religions could not solve the problem beyond the finding of a duality of causes, one good, the other evil. Others went as far as finding an intelligent personal cause, a few went still further beyond intellect, beyond personality, and found an infinite being.

~Swami Vivekananda in the Febuary 1895 issue of the New York Medical Times.

The idea that our simple awareness (awareness in its raw, aconceptual condition) is something that is infinite is the Moby Dick of folk theories of enlightenment. It’s an idea that’s attractive for many reasons, including being something that allows flimflamming “gurus” to take millions of dollars as well as being something that can help us when we’re feeling lost and powerless. By remembering that we’re infinite inside—even God herself—according to Vivekananda, we can take solace from that belief and feel a little better about ourselves. It’s likely that Vivekananda was talking about God in an impersonal presentation rather than a personal one, but nonetheless, I believe many people do and have taken it in a much more personal way, and I believe that the popular new age meme known as the “law of attraction” has at its core the idea that ultimately, we are all God and infinite.

Looking at the use of these notions as something that should be changed is like looking at an 8500 meter mountain covered in centuries of snowfall and ice with a teaspoon in your hand while you resolve to dig the thing to sea level. I find the idea to be standing as the basis of almost all New Age-type spiritual ideology, which is very popular and getting ever more popular day-by-day. Basically, it’s not going away, no matter who says what and when to who.

But there is a great hazard in believing these things about yourself if you are seeking to know who you are at the center of your being. The reason has to do with the linguistics of the concepts ‘infinite’ and ‘God’. Each of these terms is defined within a frame, the network of other concepts that inform us about particular words and what they mean. So, when you think of “infinite,” there are the ideas of “endless,” “unimaginably huge,” “stretching to forever in every direction,” etc., all of which comprise the frame that allows us to understand what ‘infinite’ means. (I suspect there are many more entailments within this frame than mentioned here.)

With the notion of ‘God’ come a frame that includes “infinite,” “everywhere,” “everything,” “all-powerful,” “all-seeing,” “loving,” “wrathful,” etc., also with many more entailments. Both of these present something like a linguistic picture that we use to imagine what these words mean. Those pictures are carried by the frames.

Stepping up to the idea of spiritual enlightenment as it is most commonly portrayed, as being one with God and infinite like God, we cannot help but to employ those “pictures” handled by those frames when we think of ourselves at our most intimate center.

So, when you consider what you are seeking as spiritual enlightenment, the frames do their job and you sort of put a picture together based on what you’ve learned about it. That picture occupies your attention. And that is the whole rub in a pocket. You are distracted from the real center of your being—your simple awareness before it becomes feelings and ideas and sensations—by the ideas you have about being enlightened.

Those ideas present enlightenment as the most spectacular achievement anybody can come to experience. How could it not be that? You are literally God once you become enlightened, according to the folk theory. It is this overwhelming elevation of the notion of spiritual enlightenment that’s keeping people from spiritual enlightenment more than any other socio-cultural factor in play, in my opinion. It’s one of the most grandest overshots in the history of human civilization.

I know it sounds like hyperbole, but it’s not. Our simple awareness, when encountered directly via the agency of our attention, can present as something that might seem to be infinite, but only to the embodied mind, and only because it is aconceptual. The perfect lack of concept that our simple awareness enjoys is the only thing that can actually define it for us, period. This means that all the concepts which constitute the frame for what we might call “spiritual enlightenment” are ultimately wrong, more or less. But, because our simple awareness can present to the embodied mind as something that seems infinite, those who come to what is called spiritual enlightenment can get caught up in this presentation of the aconceptual.

So, are these people wrong? I’m going to say yes, that it is only by inference that one may characterize our simple awareness as something that is infinite. The aconceptuality of simple awareness get “interpreted” in a way that is deemed to be infinite, rather than it actually being infinite.

Do I know that I’m absolutely right about this? Not really. What is aconceptual is aconceptual. I have no direct knowledge that it isn’t infinite. I can only see its aconceptuality and assume that to call it infinite is an inference based on the tendency for the embodied mind to make something out of it that seems infinite.

Either way, to think of our simple awareness as infinite before it has come to be recognized in that direct, experiential manner that people call spiritual enlightenment is not really likely doing much good for the reasons stated above, that the concepts embedded in the frame that helps us to understand the word ‘infinite’ becomes a standing distraction every time we consider ourselves at our most intimate center.