“Hey, I love (your YouTube channel) Spiritually Incorrect, especially the episodes with Judy Cohen. I have a question that seems like a big problem in the search of whatever this is. What do you do after you have had the experience that people call “enlightenment”? I remember Rupert Spira saying something along the lines of, “love and do whatever you want.” I find this unsatisfying. Sometimes it feels like I’m suspended in space and have nothing to grab onto. Should I join a religion? Just focus on what makes me happy? Again, these seem a little unsatisfying in the face of this massive question, but maybe life is unsatisfying. Thanks again for your interviews.
- A lost 25 year old from Toronto.”
.
***
.
You are entering a grocery store. In front of you lies a vast produce section filled with fruits and vegetables of all shapes and varieties. Beyond that, lining the perimeter of this immense store, lie a dairy section carrying an assortment of milk-based products, a meat section, a fish section and a bread section. The interior of the store is lined with aisle after aisle of canned and packaged goods - beans, flour, coffee, chips, oils, jams … you name it, the store’s got it. There is even a cooked food section that contains premade meals ready to go - simply pop the lid and pop it into your mouth.
The only purpose of the store is for you to buy food to feed yourself so you can stay alive and thrive. There is no limit on what you can buy or how much you can buy. The only limit is how much money you have to purchase the food. If you are short on money, you will need to find a way to get some. Or you will need to shop selectively in order to make your money last.
Now, some people will go straight for the cooked food section because they don’t want to bother figuring out how to put a meal together. Others will buy some standard ingredients and will follow some basic recipes to prepare their meals. Some of the more creative ones will experiment with ingredients in order to experience how they marry together and may create new forms of gastronomic expression.
There is no right or wrong way to shop in a grocery store. Nor is there any superior nor inferior technique. The end result is simply that food goes into your mouth and you remain alive.
Life is no different. It is a series of experiences whose only overarching purpose is to sustain our minds and bodies so that those experiences can continue. There is no right or wrong way to live it. Nor is there a superior or inferior technique to living it. The end result is simply that one lives and thrives until one can live and thrive no longer.
Some people will choose precooked formulas on how to live their lives simply because these prefabricated lifestyles are easy and do not need much creative energy to sustain. Others will use a few standards variations of tried and true lifestyle recipes which they will use to add some dimension to their experiences. The truly creative ones will experiment with every opportunity they can get a hold of, no matter how exotic - sometimes succeeding in achieving rare and elevated experiences, and at other times arriving at painful and unpalatable experiences that they would rather never repeat.
Regardless, none of this really matters. For just as the only purpose of the grocery store is to provide you food to put in your face, the only purpose life serves is to provide you life experiences for you to live through.
The problem is most people don’t see the world as a grocery store. They see it as some kind of quest towards an undefined “higher purpose”. And so they make up all kinds of arbitrary values for approaching it as if these values were somehow inherent in the environment itself. They may look down upon the folks who opt for the precooked section as “lazy” or they may think of those who are experimenting with their recipes as “self-indulgent and irresponsible”. They may think of those shopping in the meat section as “heartless savages” or those buying candy and snacks as “not being health conscious”.
But just like the grocery store has no preference for what you buy or don’t, life similarly does not care for what you experience or don’t.
And this is essentially what enlightenment experiences reveal, either gradually or suddenly. The sheer impersonal nature of life. It is we who make it personal, because it is we who create the sense of there being a person separated from the totality in the first place.
Your quote of Rupert Spira’s is only partially accurate because it outlines just one of a sequence of possible scenarios.
“Love and do what you want” is but one scenario. But there are others just as valid, such as:
“Don’t love and do what you want.”
“Love and don’t do what you want.”
“Don’t love and don’t do what you want.”
“Be ambivalent and don’t care about what it is you want.”
Enlightenment experiences are not necessarily alignment experiences. They do not guarantee that your life will be purposeful, enjoyable, easy or even likeable. They do not guarantee that your mind will not continue to be a source of perpetual frustration. They do not guarantee that your body will not continue to break down and cause you to suffer. They do not guarantee that your life will not feel like an endless tedium whose end you will eventually welcome with some sense of relief.
That is the bullshit marketing campaign of enlightenment that could not be further from the truth.
All enlightenment reveals is that none of it really matters all that much. It isn’t personal. Life is not happening to you. Life isn’t about you. There isn’t even a you from its perspective. There is only life. And when the impersonal witness inhabits consciousness, we begin to see through the eyes of Life rather than that of the isolated person.
Then we can live our lives much like we shop in a grocery store. Browsing, picking, choosing, consuming.
Life doesn’t give a shit whether you’re lost or found, satisfied or unsatisfied, joyous or miserable, driven or depressed. Just like the grocery store doesn’t care whether you are eating fruits and vegetables, gorging yourself on candy or choking on ghost peppers. It cashes you out on all your purchases anyways.
So, to answer your question: “What do you do after enlightenment?”
You simply do you, boo.
What else is there to do?
You say you feel unsatisfied, suspended in space with nothing to grab onto? You and the whole planet, buddy. Literally, the Earth - suspended in space with nothing to grab onto.
Should you join a religion? Sure, go for it! Just focus on what makes you happy? Give it a go! You can do it all. Or none of it. It doesn’t actually matter to anyone but you. Just like nobody actually gives a shit whether you shop in the dairy aisle or the candy aisle.
So experiment. Listen to Spira, or don’t. Listen to Eckhart, or don’t. Listen to Ramana, or don’t. Listen to Jesus, or don’t. Or simply listen to yourself, or don’t! It’s irrelevant to the act of living itself.
If you find peace, great. If you find misery, that’s fine too. If you find your “purpose”, super. If you feel purposeless all your life, ain’t nothing wrong with that. If you love your life, kudos to you. And if you can’t stand it, you will eventually get kicked out at closing time anyways.
If enlightenment experiences could provide any kind of advantage whatsoever, then the only one I can think of is that they en-lighten you. As in, they allow you to take life a lot more lightly (and much less seriously!). Just like grocery shopping isn’t a big deal and certainly not something to have a meltdown over, neither is life.
The only reason you feel like you need a satisfying answer to what you have called “this massive question” is because you are really under a massive misconception.
There is no massive question. There isn’t even a little question. In fact, there’s no question at all. There is only life.
And you can question it all you want, but you won’t get any answers. Just like you can question a brick wall all day and the only thing you will be met with is stone-cold silence.
If you saw someone talking to a brick wall you would call them loco. Well, that’s essentially what questioning life is. A form of insanity. Because it presupposes a subject disjointed and disconnected, floating in the imaginary ethers, who then makes life into an object to be interacted with, manipulated, controlled or allowed, and eventually questioned. But there is no such subject.
Life is subject, object, verb and predicate all rolled into one.
Life is living itself.
It isn’t about you. It never was.
“Some people will choose precooked formulas on how to live their lives simply because these prefabricated lifestyles are easy and do not need much creative energy to sustain.” That’s THE most beautiful and subtle swipe at religion I’ve ever seen 😂
Thanks for this reminder, life doesn’t give a f**k whether I’m living it or not, but I will continue to visit the grocery store, until it closes its doors on me, forever
Dualism is like sex with a sex doll; non-dualism is also like sex with a sex doll. No sex dolls were harmed in forming this opinion.