Philosophical Ruminations: A Rant
To say that I have grown immensely in the PCC program would be a drastic understatement. Like I said in my presentation, I “coincidentally” began the master’s program at the beginning of my Saturn Return during a very tumultuous time in both my professional and personal life and emerged from the program far more mature and integrated as a human being.
To be honest, I did not know a lot about the program at first, but as soon as I read the name of the program out loud to girlfriend at the time, something within me completely lit up. My intuition got a hit.
In a meeting I had with Professor Jake Sherman at the end of the semester, he reminded me that I am not the only person that felt lured into the program. There is a magnetic pull one feels into the PCC that reminds one of its origins and roots. With visionaries such as Sri Aurobindo, Alan Watts, and Haridas Chaudhuri playing a significant role in the birth of the school, I knew going into it that it wasn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill philosophy program that likes to harp on the meanings of words and pull students sideways with expectations of rigor and logic that do not honor the way in which reality wiggles. In other words, I knew going into the program that there would be synchronicities, magic, and moments of perceptual and self-reflective insight. I could smell the waft of enchantment from thousands of miles away while speaking to Robert McDermott on the phone. I could hear the whispering wisdom of Whitehead, see the enchanted vision of Aurobindo, and dance to the words of Alan Watts as they beckoned me into my creative and spiritual purpose.
When I think about the final decision to say “yes” to the program, I remember the words of Robert McDermott: “In the PCC, we do philosophy the proper way, the way it is supposed to be done!” I didn’t even ask him what he meant by this, but the force and passion with which he said those words convinced me that this was the correct decision. It is interesting to note that, before being fully accepted into the program, I had to hop on a call with him. To this day, I am not sure what happened in the meeting room with the faculty, but from what I have come to understand, some of them may have been a little skeptical of my participation in the program. Did they believe I was not quite mature enough? Mystical enough? Wise enough? Or perhaps I was too ideological and passionate? To this day, I do not know. However, my talk with Robert did go well, and as soon as I was accepted into the program after writing another letter to the faculty members, I put my head down and kept my heart open. Now, as I am nearing the end of the program, I can comfortably say that it was one of the best choices I have ever made. Yes, there was a massive financial commitment to make, but apart from that, I gained an experiential, participatory, and all-encompassing approach to philosophy and the cosmos — and I am now using all this knowledge in my coaching career to help people live authentic, integral, and healthy lives.
Since I have started the program, I have started my own spiritual/life coaching business and launched a men’s program with a friend of mine, Alex Litwin, called Awakened Brotherhood. In the first year of my coaching business, I managed to sign ten clients. And in Awakened Brotherhood, the first cohort consisted of 16 men. Both businesses carry the principles of the PCC program within them. We do experiential exercises and creative discussions on the topics of consciousness, meditation, and the cosmos in a style that is entertaining, engaging, relevant, and sincere.
Even though it is extraordinarily difficult to write about everything I have downloaded during my time in the PCC, I can try to sum it up in just a few words: the cosmos is an enchanted place. Indeed, what makes the program so special is its emphasis on a reenchanted cosmos, one that is filled with archetypes, magic, spiritual energies, planets, ideas, and evolutionary forces that are driving this world forward and driving the spirit backward, into remembrance. However, it would be inaccurate to only mention the esoteric or spiritual aspects of the program because it is also rigorous in a creative sense. You cannot get away with being a new-age hippie in this program without also being a good writer, a brilliant articulator, and someone who understands the evolution of consciousness from a birds-eye view. Even though my final presentation was about the nature of spiritual enlightenment, I had to wear formal attire.
Yes, I took classes on Patanjali’s yoga sutras, but I also took a very rigorous class on Research and Methodology. One taught me the art of surrender, the other one taught me the art of research, argumentation, and rigor in the process of being a scholar. These two go together — and that is what the PCC program is all about. You do not leave merely a monist or a Buddhist (though, of course, they are not trying to push you in any one direction); you leave looking at the Whole from every angle. In other words, the PCC does not allow you to cut any corners. And why would you want to do that? Cutting corners is the reason why so many self-proclaimed enlightened teachers create cults and sexually abuse their students. Cutting corners is the reason why there is such a cataclysmic situation on the earth right now. It is simply not enough to only become a good philosopher — one needs to become a good human being, a whole human being, someone with a sensitivity to the nature of experience, a good historical sense, and a love for the Truth. (capital ‘T’) We must wake up and grow up.
Although many people would argue that the stairway to heaven requires us to let go of our acquired knowledge, I would argue that everything we have learned can be implemented in a manner that is aligned with a divine whole. In the words of Rupert Spira, we can “know a thousand things but only love one reality.” (Spira 2007) For me, this sums up the PCC program perfectly. Unlike other philosophy programs, the PCC has a clear vision and lures you into one, unspoken truth without telling it to your face. There is a certain rhythm you catch when you are done studying Alfred North Whitehead, Richard Tarnas, Patanjali, Alan Watts, and Keiji Nishitani. This rhythm, believe it or not, is highly practical, and thus goes against many of the opinions people might have of philosophy being impractical. What could be more practical and helpful than taking a long, hard look at oneself and questioning their relationship with the world? What could be more practical than purifying one’s consciousness, exploring the evolution of consciousness, and orienting your life around values and ideas that will shape and inform a sustainable future? The idea that philosophy is an abstract and impractical field of inquiry rests on a misunderstanding that philosophy is merely “talk about talk,” as Alan Watts would say, a tedious analysis of the meanings of words, and an overly logical exploration of the nature of reality that pays no respect to its undeniable wiggliness.
I do not at all intend to write off the logical, linguistic, and analytical sides of philosophy — I am just saying that, at the end of the day, all of us are going to die. So, those things are nowhere near as important as a pure heart and a wise mind (which is far different from a clever mind and a closed heart). These are more important than anything else because they prepare us for death and improve the chances of us understanding the present moment. They also improve the chances of understanding what Raimon Panikkar meant when he spoke about the ontological significance of what I previously called Rhythm: the organic dance and unfolding of the universe. When we purify our hearts and return to the source of reality, we attune ourselves to The Good, The True, and The Beautiful. We catch on to the rhythm of reality and dance well because of it. And that is the point of life. We are here, you see, to attune ourselves, chip away at the illusions holding us at bay, and know what it is like for atman to become atman-brahman. That culminating process is not at all mechanical or discovered as something objective — and thank goodness for that. If it were, perhaps science would have decoded it by now. But as Rupert Spira said in his book on The Nature Of Consciousness, there can be no end to objective knowledge, no “aha” that finally brings the final sword down in the search for truth in the scientific process. There are an infinite number of things to know, so the wisest thing is to become intimate with the knower. When one is familiar with the knower, then everything known has a role to play in expressing and pointing to the knower. In other words, knowledge becomes far more purposeful and practical when it is used on behalf of the eternal knower. That is the advaitin intuition.
Another intuition worth pointing out here is that reality is not linear, nor is time, real-time — the type of time St. Augustine alluded to when he said these words: “I know what time is, but when you ask me, I don’t.” (Watts and Augustine, 2011) In other words, I know what life is when I am living it, but when you ask me to tell you what life is while I am busy living it or immersed in it, well, there is the problem: I must pause and ruminate about something that comes so naturally to me. I must try and explain what is so evidently clear and so tantalizingly close to my experience — which is not easy because I am embedded in experience, flowing in experience, and not separate from the very thing you want me to describe. Perhaps that is why the teaching of silence that the Buddha gave was as effective as it was: silence has no room for separation. Silence has no room for questions about reality that take reality out of its resting place.
Based on everything I have just said, you are probably not going to be surprised, dear reader, that my main area of concentration was spiritual enlightenment. Oh yes, I just used those words — and I mean them too. I don’t want to share my “story of enlightenment” for the hundredth time (basically all my papers include the story in different shapes and forms), but I do want to say a few words about enlightenment that are now coming to me based on the many lessons I have learned in the PCC program.
Call me crazy, but I think that we are all here to return home. We are all here to remember who we were before our mothers and fathers conceived us, as the Zen Koan goes. Although this may sound a little cliché at first, and maybe even a little comforting, make no mistake about it: “Enlightenment,” as Adyashanti said, “Is a destructive process.” (Adyashanti 2009) Since it has nothing to do with the limited sense of self that we are often caught up in, with what Alan Watts calls “the skin-encapsulated ego,” it is revolutionary in every sense of the term — so revolutionary that no field of study — not cosmology, philosophy, anthropology, or psychology — can approach it because it is the field upon which all of these are a manifestation.
Most of the fields mentioned above presuppose the existence of the self, the cogito, or the sense of “somebodiness.” And they do so because history has uniquely situated itself around the “study of humans,” implying that humans are things unto themselves, a mammalian species that develops over time, gets born, and dies. Herein lies the dreadful assumption that lies at the root of our materialistic age: we have, with a certain sense of hubris, placed ourselves in the center, and because of this, remain blind to the infinite, “Whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” In other words, we have forgotten about absolute questions, deeper realities, and hauntingly beautiful truths that the mystics, sages, and great spiritual teachers have pointed to. This forgetfulness may very well be playing a necessary role in the evolution of consciousness (disenchantment may be a form of enchantment, as Tarnas said) but it is still a form of forgetfulness that tugs at the very foundation of what we call existence, and since it tugs at the foundation, the entire house, with all its fields of inquiry, stand on shaky ground. Thus, it reads in one of the verses of the Bible:
“And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Zondervan, 2013)
Even though there are great advances being made in contemplative studies and the study of consciousness, for example, enlightenment stands on an island of its own, like many of the advaitic teachers who spoke about it, such as Jiddu Krishnamurti. In other words, it cannot be associated with any field of study because it is not on the relative playing field — and it cannot be studied as an objective field of inquiry. In fact, studying enlightenment may take us further away from it because many forms of study emphasize (a) a subject — or person — who studies, and (b) an area of study to investigate that is separate from the subject. Enlightenment dissolves and relinquishes this division. In fact, it is more accurate to say that it obliterates them, swallows them up, and makes them seem unimportant. It does this because it is the source of reality itself, and thus carries an absolute quality that is self-luminous, one-pointed, and heavy in its weight of importance.
To put it another way: once you have tasted God, actually and undeniably, many things become unimportant, such as the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (bless that man). His dense and unbearably difficult words are quickly forgotten and so are the ruminations of someone like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not to take away from the mark they left on the history and development philosophy, nor is it my intention to discard them as fools. They were, of course, geniuses in their own rights, but the evolution of consciousness, and consequently the evolution of philosophy, needs to take a turn toward a direction that is far more sustainable, wholistic, and spiritual. For these purposes, we must turn to people like Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and teachers who are embodying — or at least seem to be embodying — the tenets of spiritual enlightenment, such as Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, and Eckhart Tolle. Fortunately, the PCC program includes some of these philosophers who did not buy into the mainstream scientific materialism narrative.
While reading some books by the so-called great philosophers, like Heidegger and Kant, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “This is all very interesting, but did they have a mystical experience that caused them to weep uncontrollably for ten minutes? Did they taste the peace that passeth all understanding?” I mean no disrespect to these gentlemen, but the times are changing, and now more than ever before, I think that we may have to let go of our loyalty to the giants of philosophy who built their house on sand.
To go back to my original point: enlightenment stands alone on its own, as a truth that is the Truth, as a pathless land with no associations, no conceptual friends, and no representations. Enlightenment — the subjective non-experience of unity — is a void, the ultimate irrationality, the source of all reason, the placeless space that is absolute in every which way. Nishitani put it like this: “It is a cosmic sky enveloping the earth and man and the countless legions of stars that move and have their being within it. It lies beneath the ground we tread, its bottom reaching beneath the valley’s bottom. If the place where the omnipresent God resides be called heaven, then heaven would also have to reach beneath the bottomless pit of hell: heaven would be an abyss for hell.” (Nishitani 1982)
But we must be careful here, because we don’t want to forget about the ethical and moral dimensions of experience. This would be a good time to dispel a myth and point to an overlooked issue when it comes to the topic of enlightenment: although enlightenment is intricately connected to what we call agape (divine love) or karuna (compassion), it is very easy to delude oneself into imagining that enlightenment has happened when it has, in fact, not. Without intending to ruminate too much on the awakening I had at the age of 28, I will just say that peace, compassion, and love came very naturally to me that week. These were things I didn’t have to cultivate in myself, for when the awakening occurred, I recognized them as proper qualities of myself. I realized what Sri Nisargadatta meant when he said these words: “Love is knowing I am everything, wisdom is knowing I am nothing, and between these two my life moves.” The point about it being natural is the most important of all, because if love is forced — or even practiced — it is not yet at its full capacity. It must be exuded from one’s very being and capable of touching the lives of those who encounter it in an effortless way. But again, we must get out of the way for this to happen, that is, the ego that does its “sloppy daydreaming,” as Murdoch once put it, needs to be extinguished once and for all. Until this happens, everything we do in the world will not penetrate the core of Being itself.
It is not enough to understand this on a conceptual level, however. We have to wake up from the idea of being a person. We must wake up from the dream of God and see the dream for what it is: maya (illusion).
But we also must be careful when we use this word — maya — because as with most topics that are connected to spiritual liberation, there is nuance, paradox, and subtle problems that lurk beneath the surface here. When I use the word “maya” I very much use it in the same way that Rupert Spira does — not as something that is purely unreal, but as an appearance of the real that is unreal. Here’s another way to put it: everything in the phenomenal world is real, but it is not what it appears to be on the surface. For example, when we see pictures on a cinematic screen, it is a mistake to understand the pictures as independent of the screen. They borrow their existence from the screen, and in that sense, they are an illusion. But because they borrow their existence from the screen — which is real — one can say that they are real.
If this is still confusing for some readers, perhaps these words from Ramana Maharshi will clear up the cloudy sky: “The world is an illusion. Brahman alone is real. The world is Brahman.” (Adyashanti and Maharshi 2010) Adyashanti’s commentary on these words is particularly effective: he does not read these words as being philosophical, but rather indicative of the very real journey to spiritual enlightenment. Let’s start with the first sentence: “The world is an illusion.” In this sentence, he is pointing to the illusion of flux, phenomena, and all the attachments that come with the small self attempting to stake its claim in the world. The world is very much synonymous with Rupert Spira’s definition of the mind, which includes thoughts, sensations, and perceptions. As soon as we identify with these, we are lost in illusion. In the second sentence, Ramana Maharshi says, “Brahman alone is real.” And what is Brahman? I hesitate to define it because, as with all things in this territory, it is ineffable. However, as a concession to the finite mind, we can think of Brahman as “contentless awareness.” It is a quality of knowing that is free from anything that it knows. It is the screen upon which all the pictures flicker back and forth. Then he does something interesting in the last sentence by telling us that “The world is Brahman.” In this statement, he is bringing back the forgotten son, so to speak, and pointing to an aspect of the spiritual journey that reclaims the world as the face of God. In just three sentences, Ramana Maharshi has brilliantly articulated the path for us. First, we look around in pure and utter disbelief at the nature of change and flux. We feel in the depths of our bones that “this too shall pass.” All around us, we see death, old age, poverty, heartbreak, and time in a consistent state of flux, waiting for no one. As soon as we see this, we leave our metaphorical home, like Buddha did, to explore what is real. And on this journey, we might have our first satori or “aha” moment of the nature of awareness as a quality of Being that is free from the world, an essence of knowing that is pure, self-luminous, transparent, and infinitely spacious. If I may be so inclined during this time to oversimplify it, we discover during this time that awareness is God — and God is real because, unlike the world, it does not come and go. It is that which holds and contains all coming and going.
But the last step — “The world is Brahman” — is the most important because it reintroduces the world back into the picture. It is a tantric turn that begins to reintroduce the world back into the practitioner’s orientation. This is the last step in the spiritual process: to gain the world after waking up from it and to see it in its purest form, as wholeness.
I only felt called to write about that process of awakening because it is what struck me at the moment, and because it resembles the way I guide my clients through a spiritual coaching session. My coaching sessions tend to move in a thousand different directions anyways, and I never restrict myself to follow a certain structure; but to be honest, I think that is one of the key reasons why they have been so effective in the lives of my clients.
Discovering the profession of coaching has been nothing short of extraordinary. Here was a profession where I could be myself, ask powerful questions, and use my sensitive makeup to tune in deeper, listen in closer, and engage with people in a style that is reflective of the philosophical process.
Since coaching has played such a significant role in my professional and personal life lately, and since it has incorporated a lot of what I have learned in the PCC program, the last half of this essay is going to be dedicated to writing about my journey in the profession so far. I hope that some of the reflections I offer will be taken with a grain of salt, for I must admit, dear reader, I am often overly passionate most of the time — and I am not always correct. But I am always desiring to be correct, and I hope that is enough. In fact, this is something I remind my clients of nearly every day: you do not have to be a perfect human being to guide others, but you do have to be passionate about being perfect, even though the very idea of perfection — which is different to wholeness — is a will o the wisp, something impossible to obtain. The bottom line is this: as human beings, we are always going to be imperfect. After all, to be human is to function in time and to battle with the back and forth that goes with it. In time, we experience trauma, heartache, and grief, and occasionally stub our toes or roll our ankles while walking in the supermarket. We are going to upset others, hurt others, and embarrass ourselves. It doesn’t matter who you are — a saint, mystic, plumber, or builder — life is going to bring us to our knees; our humanity is going to get the best of us, and somewhere down the line, we are probably going to fart in public or feel unseen by someone we deeply love. What are we to make of all this? Well, the first thing to remember is that it is okay. It is okay because we are all fumbling and stumbling toward the finish line. And yet, as true as this is, it is also important to remember that we are more than human and more than time. To use the words of St Augustine yet again (because they are so brilliant): “I know what time is, but when you ask me, I don’t.” The temptation to speak about time, or to explain it, is very indicative of human imperfection. We want to know. We want to figure it all out. We want the symbols of life and the pointers to the moon to be the moon itself. That is a real part of the human journey. We are caught up in representations, metaphors, and symbols. Explanations have a tricky way of making us feel smart and safe. We might even enjoy the illusory sense of separation that comes with placing ourselves here and the world over there. Analysis, explanation, and intellectual precision — these are all wonderful qualities of the human journey. However — and this is important to remember — we are not just that. The transcendent and the immanent seem to be co-existing in the same space. We are in the world but not of it, as Jesus said; human beings but God as well, the atman pretending to be an ego, the screen that is independent of but not different from the pictures flickering on it.
We could say that self-realization is the moment when a person’s tension between the transcendent and the immanent comes to an end, when the parts all begin to reflect the whole, when the ground of Being or contentless awareness (Brahman) precipitates into the human experience, and in a rather miraculous way, incarnates into time but embodies the timeless.
When this occurs, life is no longer an arduous exercise of pushing and pulling — it becomes a purposeful celebration where one just sits back and enjoys the ride. As difficult as this may be to believe, I think it is important to remember that this has nothing to do with belief. But the only way to illustrate this is through a real-life example. So, here is one: when you go to the theaters and sit back to watch a movie, there is a high chance that your body and your mind become completely captivated by the movie in front of you, especially if you are watching a movie on a big screen and it is filled with the most dramatic of scenes. But no matter how horrifying or captivating the movie may have been, no matter how many times you were pushed to the edge of your seat and nearly peed your pants, as soon as it ends, you come back to yourself and remember that you are not the movie or the characters in it. In other words, you remember that you are the witness. I have found that this analogy is one of the best when it comes to self-realization. When we discover that “Brahman alone is real,” it is immensely liberating. To know that we are not the mind or body, or even the doer, is to know freedom. As I discussed earlier, there is more to the process than merely waking up from the world, but once you have verified the authenticity of awareness as an independent quality outside of experience, as a knowing that is the witness of all experience, life is no longer a war to be fought. And that is something worth fighting for.
Now then, what does this all have to do with my coaching journey? Well, my practice is devoted to sharing this truth with others in a way that is passionate but not overly hierarchical or authoritative. I try to pass the slip of enlightenment and enchantment to others in ways that do not come across as if I am a “holier than thou” figure. I try to pass them the baton of invisible hope when they are not looking by being myself, asking the right questions, and painting pictures with my words that incorporate the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, the poems of T.S Eliot, and the stories of people like Ram Dass, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Adyashanti — all of whom have touched my heart in deep and profound ways. In other words, my coaching practice is a conglomeration of many different things — philosophy, spirituality, poetry, wellness, and fitness — that all lead back to the ONE thing, the most important thing: happiness, true happiness.
I understand that many people, like Jordan Peterson, might disagree with me on this one. According to him, happiness is not what we should be aiming for, but rather “a burden to carry that will make life worth living.” For Peterson, life is all about finding a cross to carry and taking on a lot of responsibility. Although I am not at all an enemy of responsibility, this take on life is, dare I say, unwise and ungraceful, to say the least. For it completely neglects the orientation of sophia, which has to do with opening oneself up to life and creating space within oneself for life to move through you. (Panikkar 2013) One could say that this orientation is feminine in nature, but like the word “masculine” there are some connotations with gender that are worth avoiding. For these reasons, I prefer the words “solar” and “lunar” (lunar pointing to what is typically referred to as feminine and solar referring to what is typically referred to as masculine).
Until an individual develops the orientation of sophia, life will always be a mountain to conquer, a “cross to carry,” or a building to climb. There will always be an attitude toward life that is heavy laden, serious, and one-dimensional in its idea of ambition and success. In short, when one is highly developed on the solar side but underdeveloped on the lunar side, life is viewed through the lens of “conquer and dominate.” But let’s be honest: grabbing one’s sword and charging out into the battlefield is no longer working (did it ever work?), and sacrificing one’s health, happiness, and well-being for the sake of others and calling it meaningful might be an ego trip. What we need, therefore, is not a new philosophy or a new extreme (I am talking to you men out there who listen to Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson), but an orientation that is highly balanced and holistic.
Obviously, this balance does not come overnight, but to say that it is something we acquire over time through arduous effort would also miss the point. It’s far subtler than that, and far more nuanced than a goal to reach that requires following certain steps and instructions on a consistent basis. It’s more of an unraveling than anything else. We cannot open ourselves up to the essence of life by sheer ambition. Ambition will take you far, but it will not take you deep. What is needed, therefore, is an orientation to life that sees and interacts with life intimately, on a moment-to-moment basis, as if it is a lover. This intimacy arises as the result of deep listening. In fact, that is exactly what the philosopher and founder of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, Richard Tarnas, invites us to do to cure ourselves of the disenchanted worldview. Here is a wonderful excerpt from his magnum Opus, Cosmos, And Psyche that gets right to this point:
“What is the cure for hubristic vision? It is, perhaps, to listen — to listen more subtly, more perceptively, more deeply. Our future may well depend upon the precise extent of our willingness to expand our ways of knowing. We need a larger, truer empiricism and rationalism. The long-established epistemological strategies of the modern mind have been both relentlessly limiting and unconsciously “constructing” a world it then concludes is objective. The objectifying ascetic rationalism and empiricism that emerged during the Enlightenment served as liberating disciplines for the nascent modern reason, but they still dominate mainstream science and modern thought today in a rigidly undeveloped form. In their simplistic myopia and one-sidedness, they seriously constrain our full range of perception and understanding.” (Tarnas 2007)
Without neglecting the important role of the scholastic and academic circles, we should be careful of limiting “the larger, truer empiricism” Tarnas is speaking of to philosophical and scholastic approaches to life. For that would limit the extent to which an ordinary human being can participate with the cosmos with grace and flair. After all, wasn’t Jesus — who is arguably the most influential figure to have ever lived — born to a peasant family in rural Bethlehem? And wasn’t the teacher of Ram Dass (formerly known as Richard Alpert) basically illiterate? Doesn’t the same go for the great Advaita teacher, Nisargadatta Maharaj?
Although I basically agree with Richard Tarnas about the importance of a new worldview, I don’t necessarily think that a worldview — even if it is enchanted — is going to cure us of the mess we are in. It will certainly help, but what’s needed for everyone is not a new set of beliefs about the world or a new philosophy about what the world is or is not. What’s really needed is for everyone, in their own time, to wake up from the world through what is now known as a spiritual awakening. Why? — because a spiritual awakening gets rid of the very center which has created the disenchanted worldview. It strips the ego of its illusory power. When this occurs, there is really no need to try and believe we live in an enchanted cosmos or read books by others who tell us that it is — we begin to embody the principles of an enchanted cosmos effortlessly because the center — or cogito — that inherently functions from a disenchanted place has vanished.
When the center vanishes, the whole is seen and felt in one’s bones, synchronicities no longer become surprising (Tarnas speaks about this as well), and most important of all, the subject-object distinction that has run rampant in the post-modern mentality starts to look like the illusion it really is. In other words, when one has woken up to the nature of reality, we realize that it is the opposite of a mechanical process. The idea of it being a mechanical process in the first place is based on the structure of subjectivity that has shaped the postmodern worldview. In the elegant words of Rupert Spira, “The finite mind projects its limitations onto the world.” (Spira 2017) And in the ever-so-precise words of Richard Tarnas, “If we have learned anything from the many disciplines that have contributed to postmodern thought, it is that what we believe to be objective knowledge of the world is radically affected and even constituted by a complex multitude of subjective factors, most of which are altogether unconscious.” (Tarnas 2007)
So, I don’t think it is a far stretch at all to say that my work orients itself around the importance of spiritual awakening and all the pitfalls, delusions, and subtleties that come with it. By asking the right questions and hopefully inspiring my clients with a story or two about a great mystic or saint, my hope is that they look around at the life around them and become struck with awe and wonder. And there is always something to be amazed by, no matter how ordinary or mundane it first appears to be on the surface. In fact, one could argue that enlightenment is a process of dying into the ordinary and realizing that the ordinary is extraordinary. Once, when a Zen master was asked by a disciple what enlightenment is, he replied ingeniously by saying the following words: “When I walk, I walk. When I eat, I eat. When I sit, I sit.” This may not appear to be very fanciful or mystical at first, but that is probably because spiritual enlightenment has been falsely associated with mystical and esoteric things. Plus, how many of us sit when we sit and eat when we eat? A lot of us tend to think about the party tomorrow when we are eating breakfast the day before or allow our mind to go a thousand miles an hour when we are walking in a pristine, natural environment. In other words, many of us are captivated by the swirly and conditioned habit of the mind to perpetually be elsewhere.
So, when it comes down to it, enlightenment is nothing but an abidance in timeless awareness — or pure consciousness — that doesn’t get caught up in the back and forth of the mind. One’s identity is stable, a sense of peace that is not of this world. Jesus referred to it as “The peace that passeth all understanding.”
When I ran into a friend I haven’t seen in four years at the Denver airport, he asked me what my niche is. As you can probably tell, based on the many aspects of my coaching that I have shared, the word “niche” doesn’t sit well with me. I am all over the place, but I am in the eye of the hurricane traveling to all these places. When I thought of this “eye,” which is renowned for its quietude and composure, even amidst the raging catastrophe happening all around it, I decided to respond by telling him that I help people to calm down and be grateful for the beauty of life. Although a little part of me shirks at the over-simplification of this statement, another part of me adores it. The part of me that shirks a little is the philosopher, the one who loves nuance, complexity, and the challenge of “effing the ineffable.” “It’s a lot more intricate than that!” says he. The one who adores the statement is the mystic inside of me, the one who trusts the innocence of love, the elegance of simplicity, and the purity of heart.
When I obtained my first client, Ryan, I was blown away by how easy it felt to do this work. “Finally,” I thought to myself, “I have found a job that isn’t sucking the soul out of me!” In many ways, Ryan — whom I have worked with for an entire year — was the perfect first client. He is sensitive, empathic, and tired of trying to find his place in a world that is deranged and egotistically driven. When we started talking, I felt a stream of inspiration coming through me that felt sacred and divine. We spoke about relationships, grief, meditation, purpose, and philosophy.
What’s interesting to note here is that Ryan became my client during the thick of my Saturn Return, at the age of 28 — a month before my 29th Birthday — when it is hypothesized that someone finds their real occupation and purpose in life (Tarnas 2007). Without pretending that I am an expert in astrology, I think it is safe to say that this synchronicity shook me out of the mess I was in during my early twenties when I struggled immensely to find an occupation that meshed well with my sensitive self. I knew then that any job in corporate was a deal with the devil, at least for my personality and emotional makeup. After having a prophetic vision of God at the age of twenty-one and doing so much LSD that I began to energetically distance myself from society and all its madness, becoming a trip leader for Backroads was probably not a good idea. Nor was becoming a server in a restaurant with chefs that liked to get high on cocaine and drink alcohol where no one was looking. Nor was working at a bookstore for $200 a week.
However, I got all those jobs because I needed to — and because it was necessary for my karmic unfoldment. I was foolishly stumbling all over the place in my early twenties because that was the only way for my bottom to land in butter. As William Blake once said, “A man who persists in his folly becomes wise.” (Blake and Beer 2007) In my case, this is certainly true. I traveled to India with no money and worked in bookshops for very little to no money so that I could eventually find something that is valuable and meaningful. If I had rushed this process and followed my dad’s advice by working in corporate or becoming a fireman (what a hilarious image to conjure up), I would have suffered immensely.
But it wasn’t easy. Choosing myself and deciding to walk my path was one of the hardest decisions I had to make because it meant that I had to break ties with the unconscious and energetic pressures of my father. Even though many of my brothers are making more money than me, they are walking on my father’s path because they can see the path in front of them.
So, since I started in the PCC program, it has been about saying “yes” to purpose, saying “yes” to happiness, and saying “yes” to the risks that seem incredibly scary. One of those risks was taking out $100 000 in student loans. From one perspective, this sum of money for education is ludicrous. However, when I look at that number now, I do not shirk or shrink in my seat anymore because taking out that much money was worth it. It gave me time to reflect, time to find my purpose, and allowed me to stay in Kauai, where I met the love of my life, Elise. In addition to this, when I started the program, no amount of interest accrued on my loans, thanks to the COVID emergency plan. I am saying all of this because, at the end of the day, I am grateful. I am grateful for being accepted into the program, learning so much from it, and having enough funds to stay in one of the most gorgeous places on earth. There was also an interesting relationship with money that developed when I took that much money out: I suddenly started to attract larger sums of money into my life and open to more abundance, in all its many forms and shapes.
Now, as I slowly merge into the new year and let go of a program that has held me through so much, I hope that I can give back to the world by using the tools of enchantment to remind everyone that, on earth, we are briefly gorgeous, but as life itself, we are always, eternally gorgeous.
Citations
Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. United Kingdom: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.
Spira, Rupert. The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter. United Kingdom: New Harbinger Publications, 2017.
Holy Bible: New Interntaional Version. United States: Zondervan, 2013.
The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment. Canada: ReadHowYouWant.com, Limited, 2009.
Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. United Kingdom: University of California Press, 1982.
Panikkar, Raimon. The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity. United States: Orbis Books, 2013.
Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. United States: Penguin Publishing Group, 2007.
Beer, John. Blake’s Humanism. United Kingdom: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007.