So often you might here someone ask a mystic what to do about a situation in life and receiving the reply “Who is the person asking?” which sounds like a sort of cloudy fob off.
But it is at the core of enlightenment because most people know about themselves but they don’t know who they are.
Here’s Anthony de Mello describing the difference using a Green Mango!
It’s as if you had never tasted a green mango and you ask
me, “What does it taste like?” I’d say to you, “Sour,” but in giving you a word, I’ve put you off the track. Try to understand that.
Most people aren’t very wise; they seize upon the word — upon the words of scripture, for example — and they get it all wrong.“Sour,” I say, and you ask, “Sour like vinegar, sour like a lemon?” No, not sour like a lemon, but sour like a mango. “But I never tasted one,” you say. Too bad! But you go ahead and write a doctoral thesis on it. You wouldn’t have if you had tasted it. You really wouldn’t. You’d have written a doctoral thesis on other
things, but not on mangoes.And the day you finally taste a green mango, you say, “God, I made a fool of myself. I shouldn’t have written that thesis.”
Now back in the non-fruit world a great many people spend a great amount of time and money with psychiatrists. This is finding out about yourself – your story (or as Eckhart Tolle puts it, the story of the little me).
You can spend your whole life in Therapy and learn a huge amount about yourself without knowing who you are.
While de Mello uses Green Mangos, Tolle uses honey. You can study it scientifically, carry out experiments on it, research its creation and history but you never really know it until you taste it. This is the fundamental difference.
Enlightenment is about the tasting, not the testing. Enlightenment is about understanding you are none of the things in your ‘story of me’ as these are all transient and can change.
The real you (not the about you) is the awareness of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. When you are your thoughts you are controlled by your ego.
Your thoughts say “I am a victim” and your ego latches onto this for identity. Often then you remain a victim for years, perhaps even a lifetime, because your ego has defined you as that.
New events that happen in your life are defined by the identity. Deep down it is not an identity but your opinion. You can know that because you can meet people who don’t think you are a victim.
And from here the famous Buddha quote “Do not search for the truth, just cease to cherish opinions” suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.
Trying to know God
Now if we generally make the same mistake between knowing about ourselves and actually knowing ourselves it is not surprising that mainstream religions make the same error with God.
None of the members or preachers in religious movements have actually experienced their ‘God’ but that doesn’t stop them from creating entire philosophies about what their God is like and what their God expects from people.
Just like de Mello’s green mango they write all sorts of things about their God because they have made a label that they want to explain.
Occasionally followers and even teachers of the religion realise this. A follower suddenly understands that their religion is all just speculation and the wake up from it.
Preachers do to. In the Catholic church Thomas Aquinas was one of the more famous because when he realised he had simply been theorising all his life he went silent.
He wrote “About God we cannot say what he is but what he is not” just as with the Green Mango, until it has been tasted, we cannot know what it tastes like … only what it does not taste like.
Knowing enlightenment
The same is true of enlightenment. It is beyond language so language can only be used to point the way, not describe enlightenment itself.
It is the root of the quote “Those who say do not know and those who know cannot say”.
This idea that we can only describe what it is not is also the reason behind Nisargadatta Maharaj’s book being entitled ‘I am That’ where he then spends an awful lot of time saying “Not that!”