Training & Enlightenment (en)

Once you start to get interested in the topic of enlightenment, you will surely come across a manifold of books and teachers praising their new and guaranteed method for happiness and awakening. From fasting, over various yogic exercises to affirmation and of course meditation. The corner stone of every modern, spiritual, cosmopolitan or just self-improvement-oriented business person, meditation is the essential heart of every productive morning routine. It is the unquestioned key to higher states of consciousness and life. This gets supported by mythical stories about meditation from the east. First and foremost the story of Buddha who is said to have reached enlightenment after meditating for seven long days under a Bodhi tree. This and other stories are countlessly repeated when people try to justify their own approach or why you need (!) to buy their special book or training program or retreat.

Now, when you meet someone like this the next time, someone who tries to tell you want you need to do to feel better let alone become more 'awake', ask this person with emphasis whether he has reached the state of enlightenment himself. If the person will say 'yes' then you are standing in front of a scammer or a complete moron, as if he would have achieved this state he would not bother you with what you have to do to attain happiness. If he is a sincere person he will admit that he has not reached enlightenment as such, probably followed by long explanations that he still made a lot of progress, why he is sure that it is still the right way or by referring to other popular figures who are proponents of his method such as meditation. I highly recommend to do this and be really persistent in one's inquiry. It might save you a lot of wasted time and money.

I will give you an example of this. I once read a chapter by Erich Fromm about the practice of the mode of being that he expounded upon in his book 'To Have or To Be'. This chapter was meant as the last chapter of the book offering practical tips for his reader but was deleted from the final version by Fromm himself in the end. And in this chapter there was one sentence in particular which I found extremely crucial. Over the whole chapter Fromm describes various spiritual approaches for the attainment of 'being' (or enlightenment) and talks about many different authors from various cultures to back it up. But in one sentence he admits that he himself (writing this book in his last years) has not reached the very experience or state himself. He admits that compared to the great masters he is a non-initiate. What a statement! Unfortunately, this does not hold him back from going on in his explanation how important awareness and reflection exercises are to reach this state (which he has never reached himself). So, this is one example of how even somebody so well renowned and no doubt very likable can fool the believer into something that he actually has no expertise to talk about. It is a bit like somebody telling you what you must do to become an astronaut who has never been an astronaut himself. We would never take such a person seriously and rightly so. But in the field of enlightenment and self-improvement it seems that many people are so desperate that they are easily fooled by people who talk about the fanciest things but are in the end outsiders to the truth themselves.

A philosopher who took this point very seriously was Jiddu Krishnamurti. When people asked him about meditation or enlightenment he would uncompromisingly question their motivation (Why do you wanna meditate? Why do you wanna become enlightened?) to show them that all of their trying to become enlightened, to become better, only kept alive the conviction that they are not enough, not perfect, not whole yet and so kept them away from the very realization of enlightenment, i.e. the realization of their own wholeness, their own perfection.

So, lean back, relax and enjoy the show. Don't let others fool you into buying their new whatever bullshit. There is no magic pill and there is no need for it. A real master will never tell you that you have to do anything to become whole. He will insist that you already are (because this is the truth he realized).