The thing about becoming more conscious is that you discover a deep well inside yourself which is full of peace but also suffering, it’s like a can of worms you wish you never opened. You wish you could become unconscious of being conscious. But you can’t, there’s no going back once you start to become conscious that we are physically on this beautiful earth for a short time, but that there’s much more to our existence than that. When you realise that every breath you take is actually the same breath that I take, the same breath that our ancestors took, that we are all connected, all equal, all beautiful and all flawed, then you are irrevocably changed. From Putin, a man who has committed terrible crimes against humanity, to the beautiful heather growing on Horn Head as I look out my window in Donegal. We don’t have life, we are life, we are all different expressions of the same thing.
Life is simple yet incomprehensible, there’s peace and happiness but also pain, agony and terrible suffering. After the Ecstasy explores and discusses this side of spiritual awakening, the side that is not so often spoken of, the laundry as Kornfield calls it, the dirty side we don’t want anyone to see. The contradictions.
The book is split into four parts: Preparation for Ecstasy, The Gates of Awakening, No Enlightened Retirement and Awakening in the Laundry. It’s an incredible collection of first-hand accounts from monks, priests, nuns, gurus, lamas and other spiritual people about their experiences of awakening and their spirituality. There are references to poets like William Blake, philosophers such as Socrates, renowned zen teachers, famous Tibetan masters, mystics, rabbis, the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, the Tao. Kornfield includes mythological stories such as that of Icarus who flew too close to the sun, it spans history and cultures around the globe from India to Japan to the Native American Sun Dance. It is a widely researched, comprehensive account of spiritual awakening across the world. I kept thinking I wanted to thank Jack Kornfield for the gift of this book.
First there are lots of beautiful accounts of the initial joy of awakening, of finding the Divine in a summer sunset, the eyes of a child, the taste of an apple. There are dizzying accounts such as one from a rabbi who describes his awakening thus:
‘My eyes were closed and as I quietly prayed a huge transcendent light began to glow around me, as if it were shining through the world’.
Another teacher’s story describes her feeling as ‘I suddenly understood completely; Everything is all right just as it is! The whole world is completely, profoundly whole…..There was an amazing physical dimension to it as well. My whole body dropped away, the shell or container of myself vanished, the bottom of the world dropped out’.
I filled myself up with these stories and felt really good. I thought about my own moments of awakening. I went back to a journal entry from 2015 which went like this:
“Just walked up from the bus station this evening in the middle of storm Eva. I was cold, wet and being blown about like a leaf. But I felt happy. I enjoyed it. I felt God. I am starting to see God in everything, in the rattle of a window in the night, in the splash of a puddle as a car races through it, in the woman in Tescoes who didn’t have a club card so offered me her club card points. I am starting to see a light and a brightness all around, particularly in the sky. This morning the sky was bright blue decorated with clouds and a red sun peeping through, this is God”.
Towards the end of 2015 I had my moment of Ecstasy. It came after a period of intense suffering in the beginning of the year, which was my annus horribilis. In January 2016, in the midst of my ecstasy I left Ireland and embarked on a life-changing journey in the east which culminated in a four year stint living in Japan. But it wasn’t all happy-camping from then. In fact, after my period of joy, I had darker periods than ever before, a heart-break in Japan which made me think about ending my life. It was almost as if my new capacity for unbounded joy also created a well of seemingly infinite pain. ‘But how’ I asked myself? ‘Even though I know God is with me, even though I pray, I meditate, I try to show compassion and love to everyone I meet, I know that God is everywhere, how can I still suffer so much?’
Chapter 5 is entitled ‘Nothing and everything’ and begins with a quote from Kalu Rinpoche ‘You live in an illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality but you do not know this. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing. And being nothing, you are everything. That is all’.
I thought about this quote for a long time. ‘Being nothing, you are everything’, huh? Isn’t this a contradiction? I was confused. There follows a quote from Emily Dickenson ‘I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too?’ The biggest question in philosophy is ‘Who or what am I?’. I know this is about about ego-lessness or ego-death, that by detaching from a fixed belief about ourselves, we enable life to flow through us, we are freed from restrictions about who we should be, who society expects us to be. When people ask ‘What do you do for a living?’, people often reply ‘I’m a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor’ or whatever, but the question was not ‘Who / what are you?’, it was ‘what do you do?’. Teaching is what you do, not who you are (personally speaking). Why define and restrict yourself?
But I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Is this double-think? Young children are ego-less and unconscious, but we are taught as children to develop personalities, to create identities. Are we then supposed to spend our adulthood trying to divest ourselves of this personality again?
We use a lot of ‘I’ when we speak English. In Japanese, they don’t really use the word ‘I’. There is a word for ‘I’, it’s ‘watashi’, a clunky and cumbersome word and it sounds unnatural to use it. But there is a deeper reason for why the Japanese don’t use the word ‘I’ and it’s about the ego. In Japanese, it sounds egotistic to use the word ‘I’; to talk about yourself, to bring attention to yourself is really unattractive and kind of rude. In Japanese society, you shouldn’t try to stand out from the crowd, you are not amazing and special, you are just like everyone else. You are part of the whole, you are nothing and thus everything. I think this is why the Japanese team lost the recent World Cup in penalties against Croatia. During play they showed amazing teamwork, as a team they were powerful, they worked so well, but when it came to individual players having to stand on their own and score using only their own wits and strength, they couldn’t do it, they had no power.
It’s very interesting that language is not just a way of communicating but a way of thinking. In Irish we don’t become our feelings in the way we do in English; we say ‘I am sad’ or ‘I am happy’. In Irish we say ‘Ta bron orm’ or ‘ta athas orm’ which means that sadness or happiness is on me. By saying that sadness is on me, we recognise that it is just a fleeting feeling, it is on me right now but I know that it will pass, I did not become the sadness.
The Dirty Laundry really starts in Chapter 10, which is entitled just that and it is really hard to read. To be quite honest, it stumped me. Half-way through this chapter I put the book down and didn’t come back to it for a couple of weeks. Even when writing this blog I took an over-night rest before coming back to write this part. Why is this part so hard to accept? Because this is what really illustrates the contradiction within awakening. This chapter tells stories of enlightened people abusing their power. It opens with a quote from Kanju Khutush Tulku Rinpoche “People commonly feel that because I am a living Buddha I must experience only serenity, perpetual happiness and have no worries. Unfortunately this is not so. As a high lama and incarnation of enlightenment I know better”. In one way I find this quote liberating, that despite being enlightened you are still human with human failings, an excuse for being flawed, but in the context of the stories that followed, I found this idea chilling, like being human was used as a justification for committing horrendous crimes against people.
Author Radha Rajagopal gives an intimate account of discovering that her teacher Krishnamurti, who brought the gift of courage and awakening to tens of thousands of students worldwide, was in fact living a secret life of ‘hidden abortion, duplicitous cover-ups, growing attachment to luxury, and an arrogance and rigidity that led to prolonged legal battles with his own staff”. There follows more stories like this and a statement that the abuse of power is in fact a common area of danger in spiritual communities. Who can forget the story of hot yoga which spread across America in the 1970s? The yoga sequence was devised by a man called Bikram Choudhury who became the celebrity face of this type of yoga and shot to world-wide fame, until the story broke of his dirty laundry; widespread abuse, sexual assault and exploitation of the young women and men he was teaching. I watched the shocking series on Netflix a few years ago. There’s also a horrific story of the transmission of HIV by a teacher who told his students that his special powers would serve as protection. These spiritual teachers, although they undoubtedly brought joy and learning to many, also brought terrible pain and suffering. How can this happen? Kornfield draws on the story of Icarus to illustrate the problem. Icarus, with his man-made wings forgot he was human and flew too high, the sun melted the wax on his wings and he fell into the sea and drowned. These teachers too, surrounded by crowds of disciples who think they are perfect, forget they are human and get intoxicated, disconnected, out of touch with what’s important and fall into the shadows. My therapist is a very wise woman and the mantra she constantly repeats to me is to ‘stay grounded’, it’s great advice.
Kornfield summarises the problems as mis-use of power, mis-use of money, mis-use of sexuality and mis-use of alcohol and drugs. He explains that one can be enlightened, while remaining unconscious in certain areas, that consciousness in one area does not necessarily transfer to other parts; a Catholic nun can have a close relationship with God but have troubled or destructive relationships with her family. When I was in Japan, I learned that monks are considered businessmen. They make a good salary, many of them drink alcohol, they go to kabakuras (a club where hostesses are paid to entertain customers) and they gamble. I struggle to understand how people can teach spirituality while engaging in these anti-spiritual practices.
The lesson in After the Ecstasy is that the journey is not linear but continuous and as human beings we are never safe from temptation to negative action. Isn’t that depressing? Kornfield uses the evil character of Mara, who tempted the Buddha, to explain this. Just as in the stories of the Buddha where Mara never goes away, awakening happens in cycles; periods of joy and openness are often followed by periods of fear and contraction. Initial enlightenment is only the beginning.
I suppose this is why people go off into caves to find their silence, their solace, their God, it’s the only way to escape temptation which is all around us all the time. But what happens when they come back into society? There is a story about a Tibetan monk who spent 10 years in meditative solitude in a quiet cave. When he finally found peace and bliss he felt he was ready to emerge and go back to the world. As he approached a village, he could hear the sounds of the marketplace and he walked towards it. On the busy street he met a man carrying a full bag of vegetables on his head. In the chaos the man bumped into the monk and the bag of vegetables tumbled as did both men. The monk got really angry and shouted at the man to watch where he was going. Being peaceful while alone in a quiet cave is all good and well, but how do we maintain this in the chaos of the modern world? Most people don’t have that luxury of going off into a cave for a long period. We have to find a way of living simply, lovingly, peacefully amidst the chaos of our modern world.
Being spiritual in the modern world is really hard. You almost have to step outside society in order to live simply. I feel that in many ways our overly consumerist, materialistic society in the West is in direct opposition to spirituality. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet everywhere we go, everywhere we look here in Ireland, a Christian society, we are bombarded by ads telling us we need this car that would nearly wet the tea for you, or this air fryer which will make your life so much better and to spend spend spend . Socrates, who lived a simple life famously said ‘I love to go to the market and see all the things I am happy without’. I really admire people who manage to live simply and not accumulate things they don’t need. I would like to ask them ‘do you have to turn off your radio, your tv, the internet?’. I really try but fail all the time.
Fr. Peter McVerry’s motto is ‘live simply, give generously’. One thing I have learned through travel to other countries is that there is no one way to live, but I daresay this way is a damn good one. But to live simply is to live differently to the majority. Simple diet, simple dress, simple action. People like Fr Peter McVerry and Mother Theresa are physical embodiments, indeed physical expressions of spiritual awakening, but I have no doubt that Fr. McVerry suffers as did Mother Theresa.
No Enlightened Retirement is a really important chapter, which further explains the hard truth that with the peace of enlightenment, pain is never far away, that no experience of awakening places us outside the truth of change. The cherry blossoms in Japan last about two weeks every spring but they are talked about all year round. They are beautiful because they are transient, the beauty lies in their change. If they were there all year around we wouldn’t find them so beautiful, we would take them for granted and stop noticing them. I learned the truth of change during a Vipassana meditation retreat in India in 2016. We heard this word over and over again ‘annica’ which means ‘everything changes’. It’s a beautiful word which I came to love ‘annica, annica, annica’. As I sat with intense excruciating pain in my legs and my back, I watched it change, evaporate and leave my body. At that moment I realised a power inside myself, a power not to react, a power to remain equanimous through pain and to watch it change. If I could just translate this to my everyday life….
As Kornfield says ‘Our problems are our teachers’. Our problems make us examine ourselves and bring us back to truth, the dirty laundry is an invitation to truth, suffering is the gateway to awakening. Zen Master Dogen said that a zen master’s life is one continuous mistake – that is, an opportunity to learn, one mistake after another. Kornfield uses the great phrase ‘discriminating wisdom’. It means that yes, we need the support of teachers and friends but we must develop our own authority, our own ‘discriminating wisdom’, we have to give birth to ourselves, the ultimate struggle. ‘No teacher can give us the truth or take it away. In the end we will find that our own heart holds the simple wisdom and unshakeable compassion that we have sought all along’.
Life and the spiritual journey is absolutely full of contradictions. We look for a truth, something to trust, to ground us. We are encouraged to let go and trust, but to trust what? We have seen that it can be dangerous to trust each other, even dangerous to trust an enlightened spiritual guru. All we can trust is our own truth. And what is that? I think the only thing we can trust is change.
Part Four of the book is entitled Awakening in the Laundry and it explains the mandala of awakening. A mandala is an image which represents the great circle of existence, it can be simple or complex…did we need another contradiction? The point is to include everything, to embrace the opposites and travel ‘the middle path’. The lesson is that enlightenment doesn’t save us from suffering, it actually creates it over and over again and asks us to honour it, to embrace it. Not to let go of the pain but let go into the pain.
The realisation I came to about the contradiction is that you have to just live your life, that sweeping your kitchen floor, attending work meetings, spending time with loved ones and dare I say not-so-loved-ones, this is just as much spiritual practice as prayer, meditation, yoga and volunteering. This is life, laundry and all.
As Kornfield says “In a mature heart our spiritual life becomes more about mercy and loving kindness than about struggles over self or battles with ego or sin. We can be present for what Zorba the Greek called ‘the whole catastrophe’”.
Feel the joy, feel the suffering and embrace it all.
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