Question: What do you want?
Answer: Cosmic consciousness (what visionary artist-mystic William Blake called “imaginative vision” and psychologist Albert Maslow referred to as a “peak-experience,” known in Zen Buddhism as satori or sudden illumination).
This can be accomplished—religiously or secularly—through different pathways.
The Contemplative Pathway (choose your religion—a word that derives from Latin meaning reconnection—or no religion at all): meditation, repetitive prayer/affirmations, yoga, fasting, sensory deprivation, eye-gazing, chanting, singing, dancing, holotropic breathwork and/or drumbeating.
The Sensate Pathway: A special piece of art that appears unexpectedly or the right bar of music (usually live vibration) at the right moment.
Adamic Ecstasy: Hitting rock bottom.
A near death experience.
The Naturalist Pathway: A surprise union with nature through transformative triggers such as sunrises and sunsets, starry skies, a crescent moon with earthshine, groves of trees, carpets of flowers and/or sacred sites of natural beauty.
The Intellectual Pathway: Epiphany through mystical knowledge.
Entheogens: If it doesn’t happen naturally, there are “kykeons” (elixirs, potions, drugs) that bring on alternate or non-ordinary states of consciousness to help people along: Ayahuasca/yage (DMT), peyote (mescaline), magic mushrooms (psilocybin) and ergot/lysergic acid (LSD), though some including the 1960s philosopher Alan Watts consider these mind-manifesting (psychedelic) substances an unworthy shortcut to true mystical experience (yet worthwhile, in Watts’s opinion, based on his own indulgence but only if taken under ceremonial, controlled—not casual—conditions, or as Timothy Leary advocated, the right set and setting: a positive mindset and a calming social-physical environment).
The ultimate Watts revelation under the influence: “Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn’t being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It’s a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn’t happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely and purposeless play—exuberance which is its own end. Basically, there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. There isn’t anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn’t happen to anyone! The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take on reverberation.”
This passage, from The Road to Eleusis, by R. Gordon Wasson, sums up that type of experience:
It permits you to see, more clearly than our mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other places of existence, even to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel than an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape. All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the animals—they look as though they had come straight from the Maker’s workshop. This newness of everything—it is as though the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, “Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes.”
There is a good case to made that the visions behind every major religion (and minor ones too) began with psychedelic plants and fungi, all the way back to the stone age.
Indigenous Mexicans called magic mushrooms “flesh of the Gods.”
Carl Jung boiled down personality types into two categories: Sensing (just the facts, ma’am—logical positivism) and Intuitive (gut instinct). Needless to add, those in the latter category are more prone to cross the razor’s edge toward cosmic consciousness than the former.
Albert Maslow divided religion into two categories: Peakers and Non-Peakers. (Maslow also pointed out that the latter, mechanistic materialists, never understand the former.) Peak experiences are emotional, arrive with an element of surprise and lead to spiritual rebirth. And though peak-experiences are temporary one can stay “turned on” through what Maslow called a “High Plateau of Unitive Consciousness”—thereby enjoying serenity and happiness on a permanent basis, otherwise known as… enlightenment.
Question: What is enlightenment?
Answer: Realization of the non-necessity of everything.
Tangentially, how would I know if this has happened to me?
A feeling of selflessness, timelessness (entirely focused on the present), effortlessness and richness; heightened awareness, elation, serenity; a sense of revelation and connection to people and nature and personal identity replaced by unity.
W. Somerset Maugham strove to define this experience in his 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge when protagonist Larry Darrell, near the story’s conclusion, witnesses a sunrise over the Himalayas:
How grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor... I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I’d never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forego it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstasy of my bliss. When I came to myself I was exhausted and trembling.
Eighteen centuries ago, the Roman-Egyptian philosopher Plotinus provided his own take on blissfulness: “Lose your ego, penetrate the whole world.”
If you are fortunate enough to manifest cosmic consciousness, never analyze it because the bliss you feel will instantly be suffocated by the forever intrusive chattering monkey.
Or as Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza put it, when we subject a strong emotion to analysis its effect disappears.
The tendency among those who enjoy mystical experiences is to turn their backs on the lives they’ve been leading and devote themselves to spiritual matters.
Late one November evening in 1654 the brilliant French scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal (said to have in IQ of 195) experienced a two-hour mystical transformation—and thereafter gave up all scientific work, turning instead (for the rest of his life) to matters of spirit and philosophy.
When, at the age of 53 in 1744, Emanuel Swedenborg experienced visions, he discontinued his work as an inventor and focused only on spiritual awakening.
Tangentially, what do you do after enlightenment?
Chop wood, carry water, as before—but chop and carry mindfully.
Enlightenment should hardly be seen. Explaining this, Thomas Moore paraphrased a parable spoken by Jesus of Nazareth: Spirituality is (or should be) “tinier than a mustard seed; less noticeable than a weed.”
In other words, although self-actualized, live life as before and don’t talk about it to anyone because a) few will understand what you’re talking about (especially mechanistic materialists, who will believe you have gone insane) and b) everyone must discover it through their own pathway.
Question: May I say something?
Answer: First ask yourself, will your words improve the silence?