Spiritual bullshit, and why Neo took the wrong pill

The issue of 'spiritual bullshit' is one that any sincere truth-seeker sooner or later encounters. As a good lead-in to this topic, it's helpful to look at the Zen concept of makyo.

Makyo in Japanese literally means 'the devil in phenomena'. Technically, it has to do with various states of mind that arise in meditation, especially fancy visions that, in some respects, herald deeper meditation practice. These visions, or other states of mind, are ultimately to be ignored however, because they are illusions, even if impressive ones.  

On a more subtle level, what makyo refers to is the seductive power that the mind has to pull us away from our pursuit of the ultimate truth (assuming, for a moment, that we have made ultimate truth a priority). When we sit in meditation, or when we attempt to employ deep inquiry into our essential nature, we inevitably face the 'monsters' of distraction. We get pulled away from our original quest. We get diverted, and in so doing, we fall into elaborate dream-worlds. In our very attempt to become more clear, we simply develop a new type of confusion -- 'spiritual' confusion.

The so-called spiritual path is full of 'traps' that will seduce the average seeker and send them down rabbit holes chasing illusory worlds. In the iconic movie The Matrix, when Morpheus offered Neo the 'red or the blue pill' -- with the red pill representing so-called 'awakening' and the blue pill a return to his conventional life -- he, of course, chose the red pill, and subsequently entered into all sorts of wild experiences.

From one perspective, he should have stuck with the blue pill, and just added the ingredient of awareness. The main idea of living an awake life is to engage 'ordinary reality' -- the 'blue pill' -- with awareness. The red pill led Neo further into fantasy, into makyo, and into the most problematic of all 'reality-tunnels' for the seeker of truth: to dream that we are awake. (Which then, of course, requires a further dream to justify the last one -- or in the case of The Matrix, a sequel).

Gurdjieff, that radical and crude Greek/Armenian mystic/shit-disturber, once famously disparaged all kundalini experiences as mere 'imagination', or altered-states of consciousness. He said that we have the remarkable ability to dream that we are awake. Much as we can have a 'lucid dream' at night, a dream where we somehow know that we are dreaming, so too can we generate a mental state, within our spiritual practice, where we are convinced that we are now awake -- when in fact, we've simply entered into a more psycho-spiritually sophisticated dreamworld.

Much of modern-day spirituality is in fact a type of extended makyo. We live during a time of chronic attention-deficit and mass delusion on many levels. The population spike of the past century, and the glut of available information via endless advances in communication technology (my once cool cell phone, recently replaced by a cooler Blackberry, is totally passe), means that the average person is now bombarded by all sorts of 'wavelengths' that contribute toward destroying their capacity for attention. In the spiritual, esoteric, 'inner work' domain, there are no more 'secrets'. Everything is available. But does it make any difference?

For the truth-seeker, yes, because the temptations are magnified. As St. Augustine once whined, 'I can resist anything but temptation'. We live in the Golden Age of temptation. Accordingly, it becomes all the more important to become more and more discerning, in particular, about the distinction between makyo and Reality.

And yet, how do we know behind which door Reality is hiding, if we don't know what Reality is? That is the eternal mind-fuck, but it is also the ultimate Zen koan. And our guide is, in this case, nothing else but a burning desire for the highest truth. Now, in my last blog, I stated that passion is better than desire, and ultimately that is true. But questing for truth does in fact begin as a desire. Nurtured, however, this desire becomes passion. And our passion for Truth, if we stick with it, soon becomes a vehicle by which we examine ourselves from two essential angles: the spiritual, and the psychological.

The former, the spiritual, is all about the ultimate truths of existence. It is straightforward enough once looked deeply into: the individual ego-identity is an illusion, there is no real 'free will' (how could there be, if the separate ego-self is an illusion?), separation/isolation is a mirage generated by the ego, there is only One Reality, and so forth. The more tricky aspect is the psychological domain, because it is here where the ego makes its 'last stand', so to speak -- and where it puts up a bloody good fight.

There's a stage in the ancient Chinese Zen master Kakuan's 'Ten Bulls of Zen' where he mentions the sudden realization that all thoughts are originating from the 'Source', because only the Source is real. Until we understand this point, we are deeply susceptible to the trickery of the ego, foremost of which is the viewpoint that I am here, knowing the truth, and that (or you) is over there, separate from the truth. From that place, it is possible to have all sorts of spectacular spiritual experiences, something like going to a fireworks show: I am here, and these cool fireworks are over there. I am here, and God ( or Truth, or Christ, or Buddha, or the Infinite, take your pick) is over there. 

To grow on the path of awakening, is to become more and more honest about our spiritual bullshit -- the ways in which we glorify our spiritual experiences, or our 'understanding', all the while, remaining a distinct 'someone' from these experiences and understandings. The ego-self is in a perpetual state of recoil, and is endlessly creative in its ways of isolating itself. It is also highly skilled at co-opting anything, in particular spiritual principles. I am a person with spiritual insight and understanding. The ego frames 'understanding' as an object to be owned, as yet another toy to buttress or exalt itself with.

In short, if we're truly interested in awakening, we need to go beyond distractions and their power over us, and we need to remember, on a daily basis, what really matters. We need to confront ourselves on our almost endless capacity for creating spiritual distractions by exalting experiences -- everything from the subtle visionary makyo of meditation to the wild visions of an ayahuasca journey -- and enjoying the isolation of the ego-self that these experiences allow for, and ultimately reinforce.