(Note: this is a draft chapter, to be edited and included in a future book)
Spiritual teachings tend to focus on creating insight in a person’s mind, but rarely talk about how to bring that insight into every aspect of life. Conversely, therapy can help a lot with creating internal alignment and awareness, but almost never addresses what is beyond the personality. A nondual informed therapy addresses these limitations and expands the realm of psychotherapy where it can act as not only a mental/ emotional healing space, but a catalyst for enlightenment.
Conventional therapy reaches its limit because it will not question status quo elements of cultural understanding – particularly the solidity of the individual personality. It will not do so, even though everything points to the fact that our clinging to this edifice is the cause of our most profound suffering. The sense of self is the next frontier. If we keep going in the direction that psychotherapy has been going, which is increasing awareness, mental flexibility, increasing acceptance and fluidity – we are already dismantling our concepts of identity. Psychotherapy is equipped with the tools for further dismantling, but not a map of how to take it further.
Tools of cognitive inquiry, mindfulness, somatic release, trauma healing, relational dynamic exploration – all of these, if we just continue to deepen and don’t stop at the conventional wall of the individual, can lead us to the impersonal, and to a much greater peace. We can take these tools and go all the way to the nature of our very being: impersonal, detached, loving, wise, and free of suffering.
And what is another word for a state or understanding that utterly free of suffering? Self-realization, or Enlightenment.
But of course, as soon as we use this word, a host of connotations arise that seem to remove this from a natural and organic progression of understanding, and make it something exotic, out of reach, fantastical. And that is part of the problem.
We have to take enlightenment down from its pedestal.
We have to be able to talk about enlightenment not as a lofty state for exalted spiritual disciplines, but as the natural, essential, eventual insight and understanding of one’s own nature that comes with sincere exploration. It is there, like healing, for anyone sincere and courageous and open minded.
And then if we start acknowledging enlightenment as real, available, and natural, then we can acknowledge that everything written about it, by anyone who any understanding, seems to always indicate that it is imminently available – not as a future state of mind, but as a present layer of being. Enlightenment, it is repeatedly said, is merely the recognition of our own essential being.
If we stay with the metaphor that enlightenment is the river realizing that it has always been the ocean, then we can see that whatever this water is – it is also that which is constantly with us, leading us forward, carrying us ever step. That is true whether or not we admit the reality of the ocean, and even if we refuse to admit that there is any such thing as water at all.
Whatever enlightenment is, it is necessarily just as much and end as well as the means.
This has always been a bit of a counter intuitive idea, but not only is it repeated in every spiritual teaching, it is demonstrated in the modes of our therapeutic healing, and it is most importantly, our actual experience.
How is it demonstrated in our therapeutic healing? By seeing that consistently, the healing force in our mental and emotional wellbeing, is a loving-kindness that is intelligent, present, and aware – and the more unconditional it is, the more healing and clarity it can bring. This unconditionally accepting awareness is just a secular way to describe the nature of our essential self. To keep to our metaphor, it is a description of the wetness of water, it is the hint of the sea that we already are.
That we already use the qualities of the sea – its wetness – to bring us to greater peace and insight and understanding, is a cosmic hint to the current underneath this whole process of life.
Psychology wants to understand the mind, and psychotherapy uses this understanding to help moving people towards what we always want: peace, happiness, fulfillment. You can call the goal of psychotherapy many things: healing or self-actualization, but those are ultimately just about attaining the deepest happiness there is – the joy of fully knowing your true self. And so, the goal of psychology is ultimately the same as the goal of spirituality: enlightenment.
It’s just that in the realm of psychology, we don’t call it that. We call it ‘peace’ or ‘happiness’ or even just ‘sanity’. But all of these point towards the same thing. And if we take peace, happiness, sanity, and make it unshakeable, and absolute – then isn’t that just describing what the spiritual texts call enlightenment? That’s pretty much the litmus test of enlightenment, if not its definition.
One way to define sanity is that one’s mind aligns with the consensus reality of your particular time and place. If your mind is out of alignment with the cultural norms – even if you are accurately perceiving reality – then those around you might call you crazy. Sanity is, after all, purely a cultural diagnosis.
But what would be a cross-cultural, universal definition of sanity? It would be that sanity is simply when one is in alignment with reality. This new definition would allow us to make sure we aren’t just staying in a culturally narrow definition that shifts according to time and place. In this case, any moment of non-alignment with reality is a moment of insanity.
This may seem heavy handed, but it is crucial that we get clear on this. Almost no one is always sane, all the time. We don’t like to consider ourselves insane, but every slight misery or stress or fear reveals a moment of confusion. Sanity is a floating scale, a spectrum. All of us have moments. So that is also a word that is interchangeable – insanity is confusion.
Confusion is a lack of clarity of what actually is. Confusion is not seeing reality clearly. It is solved not merely by cognititve understanding – which is certainly one way – but with emotional alignment with what is real. And we usually refer to this, as non-resistance.
All our suffering, small to large, exists on a spectrum of resistance to what Is. When we are hugely resistant, there is huge suffering. When there is no resistance, there is no suffering. We follow non-resistance and acceptance to its logical end – because our essential nature is that which is inherently devoid of any possibility of resistance.
This total acceptance is at the core of our being. We could call it absolute unconditional love. When we are in pain and fear, we seem distant from it. And so in our healing and soothing, this acceptance reaches back from our core to bring calm, clarity, and correction to our mind. This is exactly the wisdom that conventional psychotherapy uses to bring help and healing to even the densest pathology or problem. It is the core relational stance of the therapist to the client, and it is the core of the wisdom that a therapist tries to help the client to plug into in themselves, in order to find their own peace. This is present in everything from DBT, CBT, EMDR, IFS, ACT, you name it.
So we notice here that there is a line that can be drawn through the healing practices of therapy that continues into the realm of so-called ‘spiritual enlightenment’.
It is like our enlightenment is always not just beckoning us forward, but actually, it is reaching back for us – touching us in every moment of grace, love, truth, beauty, forgiveness and connection. These are all hints of our true nature, our resting place in, and as, peace.
Surely peace must be a synonym for real sanity. We are not always in peace, just as we are not always sane. It is always in us, and paradoxically, we always move towards it, but always find it within, like it is already there.
Really, enlightenment is just sanity. And true sanity is enlightenment.
Some people are pursuing security, love, healing, self-growth. Others are pursuing God, truth, peace or liberation. It’s all the same process, the same spectrum, and all of it leads to the same place. We just don’t always know how to name it. That’s because how we articulate our goal actually reveals where we are in relationship to it. Whatever you think the end, the point of life is; that articulation will grow and change as you do. If that isn’t changing, you are not growing. The creek does not know how to describe the sea; the sea does not need to. But the wetness of our water is always present.
When we acknowledge this, we enter a new paradigm, where enlightenment is natural, available, ordinary, and inevitable. It is just the logical outcome of self-awareness and inquiry. After all, it is simply the understanding of our own true nature. If we don’t normalize this, we will not bother to look for it, or at least we will not look for it in the place where it actually exists: in our selves.
So we must make enlightenment no longer special. We must see that it is nothing other than out birthright, our Self. If we cannot do so, we remain psychologically stuck and complacent. But when we do acknowledge this, we can recognize and work with this flow. We can see that we are already in its movement, like a river moving towards the sea.
We might consider that if in finality, we utterly recognize that we are, and have been one with the sea, then metaphorically we might see that we must right now be made of water. Whatever we are moving towards, we are moving with. We cannot become something that we are not already.
I love that the buddha said that we he attained absolute perfect enlightenment, he attained absolutely nothing. And that is why it was absolute perfect enlightenment (reference, diamond sutra*). That sums it all up, right there.
This is what the wisdom teachings say again and again. Enlightenment, self-realization, is not the acquiring of anything, or the adding of anything to you. If anything, it is just the subtraction of obstructions. And the obstructions are internal confusions and resistances. Peaceful, awake awareness is our core, our essence. When everything else is stripped away, this is what is left.
No wonder that those who have found the truth tend to dislike the very word enlightenment. It is generally unhelpful. It implies something lofty, rather than low. And no wonder that it tends to go by many other names. It is the realization of the truth Self, and that Self is what is guiding us in every step.
Enlightenment is not just the goal, it is also the way.
Peace is not merely the goal; it is the nature of our being.
It is implicit all the time, as wetness is to the river. It is the sea already in the drop of water.
Metaphorically, we are already using the water as the substance of healing. We use love to come to greater love. We use truth to come to greater truth. We use sanity to come to fuller sanity. We use awareness to come to more awareness. What else would there be to use? Nothing else but water could bring us closer to the sea.
It’s just that our culture, social systems, economic and political structures – all of these seem to try to ignore the water, to push us against the current. And by working without truth and love, they pull us away from our natural sanity into fear, which is the core of all pathology. As fear in a culture increases, so does its insanity – they are one and the same. Fear points away from the truth of our being. In fact, we could say that this is a useful definition of fear. It is just a flag, an alarm that tells us that we are going against the current.
So even if this language of enlightenment seems like a stretch, it’s actually already what we are doing. But by being deliberate about it, by acknowledging that this is the only game we’ve already been playing, the whole process can get a lot less confusing.
Consider what can happen if we normalize this, if this could be mainstream. The next chapters explore common themes in psychology and therapy, and show how they can be illuminated by this consideration.
