Inattentional blindness and nondual occlusion

Today I experienced a spectacular instance of inattentional blindness. Driving to the home supply store, I took a different route than my usual. I was picturing that the road I was on would be just south of the store I was heading to. When I came to the intersection and looked north, I saw a different store. So, without looking right, I made the left turn and went north in search. I soon realized that the home supply store was at the intersection I turned left at, only it was just to the right. It must have been clear as a bell in my peripheral vision, but because my mind’s map had it to the north of the intersection, I didn’t even bother to look.

This is perhaps more telling of my mental condition than what I’d really like to say, which is that nondual occlusion is just like inattentional blindness, and may even be a special case of it. By holding the ideas generated by the folk theories about our own nondual awareness, our attention is steered away from what’s always right there. We aren’t looking there because we’re imaging that it’s something else entirely, our idea of it. The truth is that anything we can imagine will always be something else entirely.

The downer trope of “higher” consciousness

An aspirational spirit is one of the greatest gifts of human life, but when the aspiration is for “higher” consciousness, we couldn’t employ a poorer term to describe it. The higher=better metaphor forms the seed crystal for a significant chunk of the folk theory of enlightenment, and it appears to occlude a recognition of nondual awareness by defining it as something we are not—right now. But it appeals to our biological prerogative to ascend the hierarchy, which is probably where the whole aspirational thing got its start.

Nondual enlightenment is not a jump from lower to higher consciousness, it is a lateral shift in the perception of awareness, one that comes as a recognition of awareness that has been ongoing. Like the sailor who went around the world to find his greatest love in his old neighborhood, the question becomes, did he ever really need to leave? Some would say yes, perhaps out of an appeal to romance, but while many travel long and hard on the spiritual path, not very many ever seem to arrive at their intended destination, and this may only because their idea of where they were headed has always been entirely wrong.

The fantasy known as “no ego”

Referencing the map for a moment, we can see that the entire constellation of ideas I’m calling the folk theory of enlightenment find their center of gravity in the notion of “no ego.” There are millions of people around the world fervently and sincerely trying to destroy their own sense of themselves as a path to nondual enlightenment.

Our sense of ourselves is our social nav system. Nondual enlightenment does not affect the nav system, as it’s always shining within the nav system’s functional awareness. Every enlightened person on the planet has a nav system. We experience our nav system, our sense of self and place in the world, as our personality.

But what we don’t need is to be that personality. We aren’t ever that anyway. None of us. But most hold an idea that we are. There’s a lot to support the idea. Here’s my body, I’m somehow in it. That’s all it takes—the idea of there being a “me” contained by my body—to make a me. That’s what the Upanishads refer to as the ahamkara, and that’s what’s been called the “ego” ever since Helena Blavatsky and others brought home the booty of the Vedas to misconstrue for the Western world.

So we can all stop hating on ourselves, and love who we are, and then learn firsthand that we aren’t. Expecting to lose our sense of ourselves in order to know ourselves can only result in an occluding idea about not knowing ourselves. The misuse of the term “ego” by gurus has traditionally been a significant business driver, but only by means of the prophylactic effect of the notion.

Dead gurus rule the FToE

As far as gurus are concerned, there are a whole lot more dead ones than living. But ashes on the Ganges or in a grave somewhere else, dead gurus project great power into the present nonduality spirituality zeitgeist.

Fortunately, there are some good ones among the bad. But even these get deified, their simple lives transformed into ornate and fantastic hagiographies. While their nondual understanding remains unquestionable, the details of their lives as “recorded” by those who’ve written about them are usually blazing with 8 coats of white paint, and then detailed with all manner of assumption about their lives, all based squarely within the folk theory of enlightenment.

Basically, the life stories of the saints are stocked to the rafters with occluding notions about nondual enlightenment. As quaint and inspiring as they can be, they aren’t really helping people come to their own nondual understanding, and aren’t likely to have much one-to-one correspondence with the actual events of that life, anyway.

There is also the cross-cultural gap that exists between an Indian guru’s life and that of their modern western admirers. For instance, all the Victorian prohibitions against what is for most folks, an entirely normal sex life. Again, folk theory comes into play as the notion that sexual activity depletes spiritual energy, providing the occluding idea that as long as I’m having sex, I won’t come to enlightenment.

Most hagiographies contain stories of miracles. Some are almost entirely miracle stories. Our appetite for miracle stories is enormous. So much so that I’m going to conjecture that there is a neurological basis for being interested in and believing miracle stories. Miracle stories are the purest of the pure heroin of the folk theory of enlightenment. We can thank many living and most of the dead gurus for pushing it on us.

Deployment of the FToE

I’m convinced that the mere suggestion of what it would be like to be God, everything or nothing is the standing wave of the FToE in global culture. This wave has produced ripples in the form of mystical literature, most of which include descriptions of spiritual experience that support the inherent notions of the FToE.

And then there are the popular gurus, those men and women who have risen to godwo/man status in the media age. Their followers usually number in the millions, world-wide. Often, but not always Indian, these folks are banking on the notion that the devotees will believe them to be God. And all over the world, there are people who are neurotypically-driven to accept that a person can be more divine than themselves, the biological alpha. It’s in our genes to follow those we perceive greater than ourselves. But the horrible rub here is that any real guru knows that their enlightenment doesn’t make them any different, better or special than anyone else. But that doesn’t sell, while being special kills.

Which is why a guru will deploy the FToE in their satsang’s weltanschauung. By this we mean let slip little astounding facts about themselves and their spiritual experiences. These are almost instantly amplified throughout the org, reinforcing commitment to someone who is obviously a very holy person.

If we look at the current landscape of superstar gurudom, a few peaks stand above the rest. A brief list would include Ammachi, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Sai Baba, Kalki Bhagavan, and the off-like-a-bullet newcomer, Nithyananda. All of these individuals are thought of as divine. While they may not openly admit this themselves, they sure as hell aren’t trying to stem that belief in their satsang, as evidenced by Swami Amritswarupananda’s bald-faced miracle-mongering on the Amma org’s official website:

What will I get from Amma? Of course, in this world, where everything revolves more around taking than giving, it is quite understandable that people want to know what they will get from Amma. Okay, let us think in the same line. What does Amma give? Amma gives everything.

“Be specific! I don’t have a house. Will she give a house?”
She will.

“I am sick and don’t have enough money to undergo the necessary treatment. Can Amma help?”
Absolutely.

“I cannot afford my son’s education. What can Amma do for me?”
Plenty.

Amma only knows how to give. This giver of givers doesn’t take anything except our darkness, pain and sorrow. In return Amma offers the light of pure love and peace. To put it in another way, Amma gives life . She gives more life. More life means a deeper life, a deeper understanding of life, a life rooted in higher values.

All of the gurus I mentioned are using this kind of idea to cement their hapless followers into place. The effect of this is wild financial success, but at the expense of massive amounts of occlusion, and often a good deal of disillusionment. The divine guru metaphor is a sales driver made of dreams, when being awake is what most are really after. But the notions of enlightenment provided by the example of the divine guru keep us asleep and comfy in our ignorance. Repeat business is where you make most of your profit.

Why get so torqued about the FToE?

There have been several occasions when I’ve stopped to look at all this and thought, “does it even make sense to delineate a folk theory of enlightenment?” I can’t say I truly know that answer. But my explicit sense has little bearing on my implicit nature, which appears to be compelled to address these issues.

At a certain point in my life, I was able to see clearly that the ideas I had picked up about nondual enlightenment were wrong. Very wrong. Totally wrong. And it annoyed me. Then it occurred to me that maybe having those ideas were working to somehow prevent this very simple, extremely subtle shift in perception from happening. And that idea stuck.

I have no proof that what I’ve called “occlusion” actually occurs, but the nondual sage Nisargadatta bandied the term on occasion. And it makes a kind of neurological sense.

If you consider an idea, such as a set of expectations about nondual enlightenment, you’ve got to agree that it has a corresponding pattern of connection between neurons. Every time the word “enlightenment” enters your conscious awareness, that network of cells gets fired, and we have the experience of those images. If you’ve yet to come to your own nondual realization, those images have the effect of being proxies. Awareness goes with juice—if you ask me—and so if the juice is on those images, awareness will rest there. The source of awareness is occluded by the concept’s neurological effect. There’s only a micron more to go at all times, but awareness is used to present the image rather than the always present, closer-than-our-own-breath reality of itself.

That reality is the fact that we are only primordial, pure, eternal awareness. And it’s really no big deal, at all. We are always that, and always have been. You don’t get somewhere new, you see what was always here.

But such a tremendously big deal has been made of it. Huge. Monstrous. And that monster gets between us and our sun, which has always been who we really are. That monster is occlusion.

Quixotic flourishes aside, I must again say I have no proof any of this is true. I’m just going on pure gut feeling and putting it out here. Best case, a few folks can relate and establish a bit more clarity over these issues. Worst case, I look like a fool. I’ve had plenty of practice at that, so if that’s what comes to be, I’m prepared to rock out with my cock out.

A quick introduction to the folk theory of enlightenment

The folk theory of enlightenment is very simple to outline. Think of what it would be like to be God, the entire universe, or nothing, and you’ve pretty much got it covered. This system of ideas can be maintained as a feature of spiritual culture entirely by the brain’s automatic imaging capacities, no metaphysical philosophy is necessary outside of the ideas that we are ultimately God, the universe, or nothing.

The whole complex of ideas rests on the notion of “no ego,” but it is the primary metaphors of “empty,” “power,” and “purity” which anchor the folk theory in place, providing the root for three composite metaphors: the non-existent being, the powerful being, and the perfected being. The terms in red are transformations of identity, either of being divine, or of being non-existent. The black text shows some of the conceptualizations and imagery which make up the body of the folk theory. These are the occluding ideas of the folk theory, those notions which may actively prevent the recognition of one’s own nondual awareness.

Over the course of at least the immediate future, I’m going to be unpacking this map, as well as providing examples to show how and where the folk theory is operating in nonduality spirituality. Until then, have a look at the slides I presented along with my talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference.

All the happiness there’s no one there to have

Last Saturday, I presented a 45-minute talk called “The Folk Theory of Nondual Enlightenment” at the 2009 Science and Nonduality Conference in San Rafael, CA. Not too long after I arrived, it occurred to me that nonduality spirituality seems to be becoming the new “Secret,” especially now that we’re in the post-sweat lodge of death-era.

This is good news for a poor economy, but only more bad news for nonduality spirituality. It’s been taking a beating from the commercial Indian gurus for years, and now it’s about to be inundated with nondual therapists and all the bunk happiness and success hawkers who won’t be selling the “Secret” anymore.

In the rapidly developing economy of nonduality spirituality, ignorance is going to be the number one commodity, and with more and more teachers promising what will always only be a shimmering dead end, there’s plenty of need for discriminators in the community. I’ve appointed myself to the position of a discriminator. All are welcome to help.