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When I was an undergraduate back in 1968, Carlos Castenadas’s book The Teachings of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, had just been published and was all the rage on college campuses. Castenadas, a strangely reclusive figure who nonetheless went on to publish 14 more books, proved that the Yaqui way of knowledge was also a yankee way to wealth and fame. The books, which some critics claim were largely fictional, included and glorified a version of shamanism that emphasized physical deprivation and the use of psychotropic plants and herbs to induce a euphoric state. As I recall there was a lot of sweating and throwing up involved.
I do not understand why, over the centuries and in many different cultures, so many came to believe that the path to enlightenment should be dark. Where did that idea spring from? This notion that the road to nirvana or heaven or wisdom or whatever you choose to call it should be paved with pain? Sackcloth? Horsehair shirts? Tattoos and mutilation? Rituals of deprivation, snakes and strychnine? Hard beds, cold rooms, hot deserts? The belief that we had to abuse our bodies to free our minds? Or that we had to cloud our minds to glimpse the beauty of our souls? I can think of nothing less in tune with the music of the spheres.
Similarly I am profoundly amazed by our seemingly fearful obsession with how the universe will end. Will all the stars slowly drift apart until unimaginable distances cast existence into static isolation? Or will the opposite be it’s fate? A "reabsorbtion" of all the matter and all the energy of all the universes into an infinitely tiny point that either reignites in a cosmic “do over” or winks out into a chilling darkness beyond all darkness?
I would assert that neither the dark and painful road to enlightenment nor the tortured tale of the universe's demise will come to pass. Simply because both are discordant. I do not argue with the current insights made possible by the telescopes, satellites and computers of modern cosmology. We now know more about the structure and nature of the physical universe than ever before and that is awesome. The intellectual retreat advocated by the “flat-earthers” and the “climate-change deniers” would be an unprecedented act of existential cowardice.
Similarly, I would not gainsay the wisdom enshrined in ancient rituals. However, those rituals were part of a cultural whole and to extract portions of them from that nurturing environment and attempt to transplant them into the strange soil of “apps” and iExistence seems a travesty on a par with the great cultural rapacity of the Anglo expansion across America in the early years of our nation, and similar vainglorious adventures throughout history and around the globe.
It occurs to me that the simple reality is that in the realms of both these wondrous mysteries - the physical and the metaphysical - we have not yet discerned the answers for which we long, and we grow increasingly impatient. I would counsel patience and a longer view. After all it took us a long time to realize that we would not sail off the edge of our little speck of rock whipping around our life-giving sun, and even longer to realize that we were on a little speck of rock whipping around that minor star. So I would suggest a refocusing of some of our efforts.
It occurred to me the other night, well, actually very early the other morning, while musing on the fickle nature of dreams and where they went when I woke up, that the complexity of enlightenment is an optical illusion. You know, like those little books you can buy at the check-out at the grocery store. There is a picture of an ornate goblet, but if you gaze at it long enough and allow your eyes to defocus just a bit, you see instead the silhouettes of two faces staring at each other. And then, for life of you, you can’t see the goblet anymore.
We have been staring at the silhouettes for so long that we can no longer see the goblet. The silhouettes have their history in that path to enlightenment that runs through deprivation and pain, through gods and realities that require us to suffer to gain entry to that “better place” that we murmur about at funerals, “s/he is in a better place,” - you know the one. Perhaps the goblet is a better option.
The third tenet of Distilled Harmony is “distill complexity.” Most often the tenet gets invoked in the service of the first two - Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty. This is no exception. We need to let our eyes defocus a bit to see through the complexity of painful enlightenment to the more harmonic, simpler enlightenment beyond.
It would seem that there are a couple of basic concepts that underly the notion of enlightenment. Fundamentally, enlightenment implies an understanding of, and being in harmony with, the nature of existence. The four tenets of Distilled Harmony - foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity, and oppose harm - define my understanding of how we can come to live our lives in that enlightened space. However, if we unpack the word a bit further some other issues suggest themselves. And here I freely admit I am stepping outside the boundaries of my good buddy The Oxford English Dictionary. But think about it for a minute: en-lighten. To make lighter. Perhaps to both make something brighter, more observable, and to make it weigh less, be less cumbersome.
Back it the 1940s the imminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger, he of the famous cat, had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the second law of thermodynamics, that everything tends toward decay and disorder, may not have gotten it exactly right. In his book What is Life he opines that when it comes to life “We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it.” Right on, Erwin! My bias obviously is that everything eventually tends to order and harmony. And, taking the long view, science supports my bias. Every major scientific discovery of the last quarter of a century or so has grown from hypotheses drawn from the notion that "given what we already know, this is how it should be.” Still, we continually look for evidence that Einstein’s notion of an orderly universe might have been wrong. But doggone it, the little guy keeps coming up right! And it might be well to remember that he was the one who wrote, “God does not play dice with the universe.” The more we think the universe is riddled with complexity, the more we run up against the relatively simple E=mc2 - an inscription that makes the task of understanding the universe lighter.
It does not seem unreasonable to assume a corollary assumption to Einstein’s assertion: the universe does not play dice with god. If we assume “god” to be that universal, harmonic orderliness of the universe. Why would that orderliness demand that we travel through pain and darkness to observe and understand the light? Why would that orderliness reveal its light to one group of individuals and not to others? Surely that contrary perspective does tend toward decay and disorder. More inviting is an orderliness that advocates that we foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm. In following that path we can more easily see, and join in, the harmony of existence. Why else would we call it enlightenment?
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