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The Life Of An Enlightened Person

The Enlightened Life Can Sometimes Look A Lot Different Than You Might Imagine

Why are unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.

- Wu Wei Wu

Emptiness engenders compassion

- Milarepa

If there was anyone who knew how to cultivate compassion, it was Milarepa.

Milarepa was an enlightened Tibetan spiritual master who was born in 1452.

He is considered one of the greatest Buddhist masters who ever lived. During his lifetime, Milarepa established the lineage of the Kagyu sect; however, he is very highly venerated, to this day, by all schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

Milarepa was a murderer. He murdered many people.

Later he felt immensely sorry for these acts. Eventually, Milarepa found a great spiritual master, Marpa-the-Translator, and after many, many years of the most intense physical labour and spiritual practice, Milarepa achieved enlightenment.

Drukpa Kunley was another highly respected Tibetan spiritual master. He was born a few years after Milarepa in 1455.

After his enlightenment, Drukpa Kunley, became famous throughout Tibet for his “crazy wise” methods of enlightening others.

Many of those who came to him for instruction were women, whom Drukpa Kunley would give his blessing in the form of sexual intercourse. Kunley’s penis became so famous that it is still referred to by present-day Tibetans as the “Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom.”

Drukpa Kunley wished to communicate that one could be enlightened and teach enlightenment and have a very healthy sex life.

In fact, anyone that came to him for his teaching was instructed to bring with them a beautiful woman and a bottle of wine!

Drukpa Kunley was known for other outrageous behaviours, such as: walking around naked, offering his testicles to a visiting holy man, and painting penises on the monastery walls.

And yet … Drukpa Kunley is considered by Tibetan Buddhists as one of the greatest enlightened beings who has ever lived.

Out of these stories of Milarepa and Drukpa Kunley, it is Milarepa’s that seems to align with ideas of what the enlightened life might look like.

Milarepa was a murderer. Milarepa repented and went on to do spiritual practice very intensely for many years.

Milarepa achieved enlightenment. And because of that enlightenment, Milarepa went on to live a good life.

Drukpa Kunley’s story is a little harder to understand. Especially, when we learn that Drukpa Kunley killed people after his enlightenment.

Can you be enlightened and still get drunk and have lots of sex?

Can you be enlightened and kill or hurt people?

Can you be enlightened and be a bad person?

Can you be enlightened and be unethical?

What would the life of an enlightened person look like exactly?

To begin to answer these questions, we first need to ask:

What is enlightenment?

Enlightenment is the radical and unshakable insight that there is absolutely no person.

There is no ‘you.’ Your sense of being a separate self is an utter illusion.

Therefore: no one can become enlightened because enlightenment is seeing clearly there is no one to get enlightened!

‘Sailor’ Bob Adamson, one of the very few Western students of the highly regarded Indian spiritual teacher, Nisargadatta Maharaji, and now in his 90s, tells those who visit him at his home in Melbourne, Australia:

If you have a choice between a million dollars and enlightenment, pick the million dollars. At least with the million dollars, there will be someone there to enjoy it!

This is the central paradox of enlightenment:

No one sees that there is no one.

Nothing actually happens.

If you believed you were a cat and then one day you stopped believing you were a cat, what has changed?

Did you go from being a cat to being transformed into a human? No. Nothing happened. The fact is you were never a cat.

An oft-repeated example is that of the “snake” and the “rope.” You get startled walking on a path because you see a snake.

You jump back in terror. Then you realise that it is only a piece of rope. Instantly, you relax.

What happened? Nothing. You merely perceived things as they actually are. Nothing changed. Nothing happened.

So the question becomes:

How can I perceive that there is no separate self? How can I be enlightened?

“You” can’t. There is no “you.” There is no such thing as an “enlightened” person.

If someone says: “I am enlightened,” they are deluded.

The Buddha, mere days after his awakening, was asked by a group of monks he met on the road: What have you attained? He replied: “I have attained nothing.”

Does The World Exist?

I might not exist. But does the world exist?

The world is apparently real — meaning it both Is AND Is Not, simultaneously (as quantum physics similarly states).

However, the “I,” or sense of separate self, is completely unreal. The “I,” or sense of separate self is utterly illusory.

If the “I” exists, then show it. Point to it. You can’t. No one can because it doesn’t exist.

Most radically, truly, and ultimately, the sense of “I Am,” the sense of “awareness,” or “consciousness,” the very sense that you exist, is a mere brain-generated illusion.

Nisargadatta Maharaj suggests that you meditate on the sense of I Am until you realise the illusory nature and non-existence of the I Am or the sense that you exist.

You absolutely do not exist AND the world is only apparently real.

There is No-Thing. There is only This. And there is no one to know what This is. There is only pure mystery.

Can you show me something, anything, outside of This?

Everything is empty. “Everything” is unbounded. Without purpose. Without meaning.

There is only freedom or vast unboundedness.

There is nothing you can do. Because there is no you. And yet …

The Seeming Transformation Of Life

There is an apparent change in how life is lived.

Firstly …

Relieved of any sense of separate self, thinking is transformed.

Thinking slows. Often there are vast intervals between thoughts.

The “working” mind (functional thinking) becomes extremely efficient when needed.

Goals of any kind fade. Replaced with the mere & simple thought:

What is the next obvious thing to do?

Life seems very simple.

There is a growing sense that there is nothing wrong anymore.

There is a growing sense of being intensely present (as no one).

There is a growing sense that everything is happening by itself.

There is a growing sense that “cause” is illusory. Everything is happening Now. This has come from nowhere and is going nowhere.

There is only This. Show me something outside of This. It is not possible!

And …

There is a growing sense of compassion.

Emptiness As The Ground Of Compassion

The empty self is quite naturally filled by the apparent Other. “I” feels the Other as “themselves,” thus empathy and true compassion arise without effort.

Indeed, emptiness engenders compassion.

As Nisargadatta Maharaj said:

As wisdom I know I am Nothing. As Love I know I am Everything. Between the two my life flows.

Or to put it another way:

Love = Selfless (i.e. empty self) Attention.

However, emptiness can also be expressed problematically if not pathologically.

All humans intuit to varying degrees the emptiness or existential nothingness at the centre of the sense of separate self and of existence.

In the West, the intuition of emptiness (expressed in Western philosophy often as nihilism) is conceived as a lack.

This inherent sense of lack, according to the scholar David R. Loy, is seen as needing to be overcome or obsessively filled.

This explains the West’s hyper-consumerism, narcissism, and obsession with things and status.

We obsessively spend our days in a desperate attempt to fill with consumer goods the void intuited at the centre of existence.

The East (even though becoming more and more Westernised every day) has traditionally seen emptiness, not as a lack, but as pure potentiality.

That is to say, emptiness is seen as pure allowing. That which allows anything at all to exist.

Emptiness is seen as the generative ground from which anything at all can arise.

Out of the silence, ANY sound can arise. Any sound from a car crash to a Mozart opera.

Out of space, any (apparent) object can appear.

Everything arises out of nothingness and returns to it.

Notice this:

This sense of “I,” this illusory sense of separate self is very fragile. It disappears completely in deep, dreamless, sleep. It disappears completely between thoughts.

The Spontaneous Ethics Of Taoism & Confucianism

Both Taoism & Confucianism offer theories of how to live ethically without a sense of self.

According to Taoism, when the illusion of a separate self is seen through, then a deeper intelligence emerges.

This is the intelligence of the Whole, also called the Tao. A deeper intelligence or guidance prior to thought.

Actions happen in the Tao spontaneously, without the need of thought.

Most importantly, ethical action (or appropriate action) in Taoism is grounded in spontaneity.

Actions that happen naturally and spontaneously tend to emerge from the thought-less, self-less and naturally occurring Wholeness of the Tao.

Spontaneous action emerging from Wholeness (Tao), therefore, tends to be ethical, non-violent, benign, and profoundly appropriate, because it is utterly devoid of self-interest.

Without self, there is FLOW.

Both Taoism & Confucianism understand that:

No Self (emptiness) = Spontaneity

True Spontaneity = Appropriate (ethical) Action

However, Confucianism teaches that human spontaneity (the basis of ethical action) can only occur within clearly prescribed relations and ways to behave in those relationships.

Relationships such as parent/child, boss/worker, husband/wife, etc.

This Confucious approach, and its stress upon the importance of prescribed relations in the allowing and expression of spontaneity, has filtered down culturally to many Asian societies.

Similarly, the Buddhist notion of Anatman (no-self) has filtered down culturally in many Buddhist Asian countries, so the ideal ethical character tends to be one that demonstrates, particularly in ethical situations, the least amount of self.

This is often shown by a lack of perturbance or displaying an inscrutability, particularly in the face of testing situations.

According to the philosopher, Emanuel Levinas, every morning when we wake up we are confronted with an ethical situation:

How are we going to negotiate our relationship with the Other (all that is not me)?

For any philosophy or religion that takes our sense of separate self as a given, a clear and concise ethics is necessary to help navigate the relations between “me” and everything that is “not me.”

Christianity for example (as well as other Abrahamic religions) has endless rules and suggestions on behaviour and how one should act in relation to the Other.

Buddhism, on the other hand, has a mere five precepts for lay practitioners.

A Buddhist was asked by a Christian what the difference was between their two religions. The Buddhist said that was easy; he then asked the Christian, “When you are in a room by yourself, there is you and there is God, right?” “Yes. That is true,” replied the Christian. “Well, for a Buddhist alone in a room, there is only God.”

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