It Will Always Be A Mystery.

There are so many ways to avoid "awakening" or whatever you wish to label it. It's strange, how we use the story to make our characters feel less worthy than they already do. It seems such an elusive thing, something so special, this enlightenment thingy. "When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears" is a snippet of supposed wisdom that is bandied around a lot. So we find a nice, enlightened spiritual teacher, who wears floaty clothes and eats only wheat grass and goji berries. They must be well-educated, and teach with great knowledge of all the traditional roads to enlightenment, especially Buddhism and the Tantra. They sit on a raised platform, and invite everybody to see the energy, to mind the gaps between thoughts, and to find the stillness from which all things emanate. The disciples look up at him (or her) with great awe and reverence, and project every relationship they've ever had on the poor guy. They either despair of ever being so wise and awake, or want to sleep with him. They do as he says and things get really interesting. The story revs up. They start to "know themselves" really well. They analyse their dreams as instructed, and use them to correct their "wrong" behaviour. They read great tomes filled with complicated instructions on how to change the way they think and perceive reality. They meditate, and sometimes find a great long gap between the thoughts. The disciples start to think this really must be a great thing they're doing, because they feel better; reality is more bearable. The teacher pays a lot of lip service to oneness. There is no one, they inform the devotees, and there is nothing. We are all each other. However, in order to see this you must buy my book and attend my seminars and have an exclusive, and expensive, satsang with me. The disciples work their socks off, they get to a place where they are in an ivory tower and simply notice what happens, detached; or they open their heart and feel the oneness, and they write down all their dreams and determine what the Universe must be telling them; they notice the grand synchronicity that happens, in a beautiful dance of duality, and feel they are ever closer to awakening, but that they'll never get there unless they work very very hard. They are already there. There is nothing else. No one can teach another to be. They are. No one can teach what is, it is. The great thing about these teachers and their students is that they might work so hard and try so much and still feel separate and unworthy - so they give up. And see that it is all just a story, albeit a very interesting one, perhaps filled with revelation and self-knowledge. It doesn't matter what the story is. It will always be a story. It will always be a mystery to the mind, especially the mind that believes it can all be figured out. The cleverer the mind, the more minutia the mind can grasp about the nature of reality, the more interesting the story - and the more elusive "awakening". Yet there is nothing wrong with any of this. As ever, it unfolds just as it must. But perhaps there are more apparent individuals who give up and see how sweetly prosaic it all is, how ordinary. How exactly what is happening, whatever that seems to be, no matter what it is, is the great mystery right in front of them, and in them, and in everyone and everything that seems to be. This is it. No one can teach it. It is.