Paul Brunton was one of those people who didn’t feel all was quite right with the way he had been bought up to view the world. Born in 1898 he had no internet to jump onto but lived in a time when stories of certain “wise” people living in India had reached the UK.
So he did what any other unhappy person would do (not!), took the long boat strip to India and travelled in search of someone who could explain his discontentment.
Ultimately via scam merchants and low level mystics he came to Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi where Brunton claimed to have found enlightenment. Later he wrote what he learnt in multiple books including “The Short Path to Enlightenment” which also gave rise to the phrase “The Long Path”.
Now enlightenment always seems like a good thing to have and a short path to get there seems attractive so it all makes for a great title. I’m not here to review the book but to consider these two phrases for what they are and if one is “better” than the other.
But lets start from the top and work our way backwards to get a better understanding of what Long and Short really mean by asking a fundamental question:
How can you tell if you’re enlightened?
I would summarise this in three statements:
1. You don’t feel the need to tell people you are enlightened
2. You accept the “illusion” and can work with it.
3. You can still your mind without effort
Now I’ve chosen my words very carefully here as I’ll explain now.
You don’t feel the need to tell people you are enlightened
If you feel you are enlightened – you know there is no “good” or “bad”, only “is” and you can still your mind whenever you want – then you also have put your ego in check.
You’re ego wants to show others how special you are and seek their acceptance, approval and praise so it wants to shout your achievement from the rooftops in order to get that feedback.
You have probably seen such egos in play in countless forums, YouTube comments, etc. That egoic need to seek the acceptance of others remains in these people regardless of what they put down in words. Until they can resolve this they will never get closer to enlightenment.
Important point here – I doubt anyone is actually “enlightened”, just some are closer than others. Now if you believe you are that’s just like claiming to a person in New York that you are in London when you are in fact in Brighton.
If you fully convince yourself that you are in London then you are never going to get any closer. In fact you stand the very real possibility of continuing to believe you are in London even as you travel further away to Paris, Madrid and beyond.
If you’re proximity to englightenment versus that of others concerns you then you are also no closer or further than they are. That is just the ego once again trying to give you a “success” label which you want over others.
If you really are enlightened (or getting there) you might make suggestions to others about how they could be to or share things you have done that have been helpful for you but you wouldn’t need to point out how enlightened you are in the process because your ego would not be in action.
As a prime example when Anthony De Mello was asked by a student “Are you enlightened?” he replied “What does it matter?”
You accept the Illusion
If you are making progress towards enlightenment then you can understand that the world is as it is – that things like “good” and “bad” are labels made by humans. Without humans those things would simply be and that is exactly what they are.
Understanding is one thing, accepting is another. You hear of an earthquake that has killed 100 people – isn’t that just awful? No, that just “is”. This does not mean you do not care and can offer no compassion or support. You can, you are just doing it without your mind being clouded with emotion.
Someone asks you for money to help the earthquake victims – well its just so awful you have to give something! No, wait a minute. Who is this person? Will the money I give actually reach the victims? How will the money be used and is that the best way to help?
By asking all these questions you appear not to “care” by the standards of modern society which expects “right now” responses but actually you care far more than the person who feels compelled to give and then relieved of guilt despite that fact that their contribution might not help at all.
So if you can accept things are as they are, not just understand they are as they are (and see the difference between understanding and accepting), then you are certainly on the enlightenment track.
You can still your mind without effort
I almost wrote this as “You can still your mind at will” but that actually suggests some control is needed. An ability to stop the chattering in your mind whenever you want to or need to and for long periods (say an hour or more) is a definite sign that enlightenment is happening.
In reality most people distract the mind to stop the flow of thoughts rather than still it completely as I’ll talk about in a moment.
The Long Path to Enlightenment
The Long Path is what many people, I would say most people, are on and (spoiler) there is no short path for them.
A good section of these people may not even know they are on the Long Path. I was recently talking with one woman who said she did jigsaw puzzles to relax. What was she actually doing? By carrying out a task that requires just enough focus to keep the mind busy she was stopping the constant chattering of her mind.
That chattering that asks why someone did something to you, how you are going to act at an event tomorrow, whether or not you are going to get praise for something you are working on, etc.
Another person told me they walked around their garden twirling a stick. Again just enough focus that the mind has no room to chatter.
Both said that the relaxation they attained lasted long after the activity stopped.
If you start to dig into meditation a common piece of advice is to observe your breath. It’s no different to the jigsaw or the stick, it’s a focus – you might even say a distraction – to stop the mind chattering.
Jigsaws, sticks, breath, whatever it may be – these are sometimes referred to as “forms of meditation” and many people do them without even considering them to be meditation at all. What they are is a start towards enlightenment.
Even the meditation that observes the breath is a Long Path activity because you have not stilled the mind by decision but by distraction.
Understanding Enlightenment vs Enlightenment
I didn’t get the difference here straight away. To explain I was painting mugs when it all happened. I won’t go into the long story of why but suffice to say it was work I didn’t really enjoy. I just had to paint the rim and the handle but the paint I had to use was difficult to apply so it could take up to 10 minutes to do each mug – no really! I probably wasn’t that good at it either but there we go!
I didn’t need much focus of the mind which meant my mind could wander for hours and most of the time it wandered into complaining territory about all the things I could be doing if I wasn’t painting mugs.
One day someone I knew who had been criticising me for my lack of emotions recommended that I listen to Anthony de Mello as a self help exercise. My ego was very bad at accepting criticism but it was twice as bad at being seen as closed minded so when more mug painting was required I listened to one of his lectures on YouTube.
At some point, probably an hour into the lecture, I saw the light. “That’s it” I thought. “That is it!”. “That is how I should be living life”. To be clear I realized that my life did not have to change, neither did anyone else’s, it was me who needed to change the way I was looking at it.
Painting mugs was not something that needed to make me unhappy, I had decided that. In fact, when I thought about it I had heard a great many interesting things on the radio and in lectures which I never would have, had I not been seated for hours with paint brush in hand.
I actually began to look forward to painting mugs as it gave me more time I didn’t otherwise usually have to listen to more of De Mello and people like De Mello.
Small example there but a fundamental one. Now to be clear I sort of thought I had Enlightenment nailed but all I had actually done was understand what it was and how it could be attained (or got close to).
Thinking that I had enlightenment held me back for a while but eventually I understood that I just understood it. How?
Well if you’re close to enlightenment you can observe your thoughts and emotions but not react directly to them. You know you are starting to get angry, you see that anger emerging but you are not engulfed in it.
You know that thinking – “Why did I get so angry?”. Well enlightenment is about recognizing that anger in real time. If you are able to do that then it won’t cloud our judgement or reactions.
It was only when I realized that I was not observing it in real time, especially when someone was critizing me, that I realized I didn’t have enlightenment nailed at all!
From there it’s practice. The more you practice observing the emotion, even after it has happened, the faster you start to make that observation. So it starts with “Wow I got angry yesterday when he said …”, then it becomes “Wow I got angry 6 hours ago when he said …”, then “Wow I got angry a few minutes ago when he said ….” and eventually “Wow I can feel that anger starting up because he just said …”.
As soon as you are doing it in real time you can drop the emotion. Why? Because by then you have looked underneath the anger and discovered what caused it. Perhaps you deserved the criticism, perhaps you are receiving critism from someone who’s acceptance you don’t really need so why is it bothering you?
Whatever the reason you are able to think “OK, here comes some anger, let it come and be, I’ll ignore it and think instead about how to handle my response to this situation without being clouded by that emotion.”
Note here you are not “fighting” the anger or “containing” it. You are letting it flow.
Eventually, after that, anger no longer appears because it knows it has no affect.
But that practice – which can take years to fine tune – is the Long Path.
Understanding the Illusion and Accepting the Illusion
Just as letting your emotions flow but not being engulfed by them is a good step so is being able to accept the illusion (nothing is “good” or “bad” – society creates these as illusions).
In the second De Mello lecture I listened to he said, “There is no explanation you can give that would explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world … your thinking mind cannot make sense out of it. For that you’ve got to wake up and then you’ll suddenly realize that reality is not problematic, you are the problem.”
I understood this (that it is us that decides how “good” or “bad” things are) but it took a long time for me to accept it. Seeing “Bad” things still made my desire for “justice” cause unhappiness for a long time after I heard these words.
I struggled to get my head around the fact that I could care without being unhappy, that unhappiness really is a pointless step. Like this:
I saw bad news -> it made me unhappy -> I did something about it. OK. Why is that middle step there? Because that is the way we were taught to be. We must get unhappy to give us the motivation to do something. But when you think it about it like this it isn’t true at all. You can just get on and do something but if there is nothing you can do the unhappiness is equally pointless.
But – and here is the big but – without unhappiness hanging around you get to think out and put into action what you might do with a clear mind and also with a mind that understands the consequences of those actions may not be positive no matter how much good intention there is behind them.
This is really important – “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions” as the saying goes. But accepting that what you do might make a situation worse even if you really think it will make it better is a vital part of living with the illusion.
Its the part that means, as long as you gave some clear thought to an action, you can live without regret.
You see regret is an odd ball. What is it really? You’re thinking that if you did something differently things would have turned out “better”. In fact you have no way of knowing this – all you have done is create a fantasy world in which you took a different action and everything came up smelling of roses. But you don’t know that, you just made it up.
I spent many years thinking if I had taken a different job after University my life would have been “better”. Only when a friend (who doesn’t practice enlightenment at all) made an off the cuff comment “Are you Sure?” was it that I began to question my fantasy world.
Suddenly all those comments you may have heard or made – “You’re life is much better because you met me”, “If only I had listened to her”, etc. – fall away as completely non-sensical. You can’t possibly know because you never lived “that” life.
This is not an excuse to never take any action again in the future. Its a reason to accept you carried out those actions after thinking clearly about them (without emotion) and knowing you did them based on the knowledge you had at the time. Then, even if your actions cause things to go wrong somewhere down the line (and they will cause things to go wrong for someone somewhere – you may just not be aware of it) you do not become engulfed in regret.
Again this doesn’t feel as if it comes naturally. It is against everything you were taught and against the way society seems to operate. So it takes time and practice – it is the Long Path.
Stilling the ego
As you start to practice these things more and more – observing your thoughts and emotions, observing the illusion, stilling your mind – you start to obtain a deep sense of peace and real happiness.
The trouble is you really want people to know about it. You feel you have “achieved” something that others have not achieved. Truth be told you feel you are a “better” person than them. If only everyone could be like you then world would be a “better” place.
This is your ego rolling in. You know it is because it is thinking in terms of “better” and “worse”. When you refer back to the illusion, the place where those words have meaning, you realize you are no better than anyone else and you do not know that the world would be a better place – that was a fantasy you invented and played out in your mind.
The world would actually be no different, it would just be.
So the last hurdle on the Long Path is to recognize the ego. Not to fight it – just as you don’t fight your thoughts and emotions. You let the ego flow and observe it. The more you do this the more it subsides in its desire to let everyone else know how “special” you are.
The pitfalls of the long path
Mindfulness, enlightenment – whatever you want to call it – is increasingly popular in society as a goal. It has become fashionable and people want to have it. So it is no surprise that there are a zillion tools to help you do it.
But the tools often become a distraction. The Eastern saying is that “When the sage points to the moon all the idiot sees is the finger” and it is all too true.
God is a prime example. If we want to sum up all of creation we can use a word – let’s say we use the word “God”. Then some people crowd around the word “God” and argue about what it means. Is it a person? Does this person want us to live our lives in certain ways? Does this person see some things as “Good” and some things as “Bad”?
“God” was only meant to be a way of describing all of creation but suddenly lots of people are focused on the word, fighting wars about the word or killing others because of the word.
On a less dramatic level there are no end of self-help guides for enlightenment that offer tools and then lots of people get bogged down in discussing the tool and how to use the tool correctly and who invented the tool and whether or not it is the best tool. That’s like two sages pointing at the moon and everyone sitting around arguing about which finger was better.
As such I’ve heard the Long Path sometimes described as actually being circular. If you get obsessed with one of these tools you never get any further and its easy to get obsessed because enlightenment is, fundamentally, so simple that we often struggle to accept it could be so straight forward.
The practices involved in enlightenment can be hard and take time to achieve while focusing on a “tool” is easier and more manageable. But it can actually block the path.
The Short Path
So is there actually a short path? Yes but very, very few people get to follow it. I thought I had because I understood it but understanding it and living it are very different.
Those who follow the short path are often people who have had dramatic experiences. They might have lost everything they were told was important in an accident or a war.
This sudden loss is enough for them to wake up, see the illusion and understand their mind. Does that make them lucky? Perhaps only compared to those who experience the same and do not wake up. For them the outcome is Trauma as their minds fight to regain what the illusion tells them they must have.
The short path is not always glamorous. Andy Puddicombe is a prime example. He suffered a serious of bereavements that made him question everything so he moved from a centre of Western Culture (the UK) to becoming a Monk in Asia for 10 years.
He then spent years teaching Westerners how meditation was actually accessible and his small practice may have continued that way until the end of his days had it not been for a chance meeting.
Andy shows the characteristics of someone well on their way to enlightenment and he went there via the Short Path:
– he suffered a major trauma which shattered the Illusion
– he spent time, energy and focus to understand the mind
– without claiming to be a guru or such like he then devoted time to helping others understand their minds, without any major expectations
– when someone suggested using technology to scale his teachings he went with the flow, not knowing if the outcome would be good or bad .. or both
And that is a key point here. The app he created could be seen as the tool which has helped millions become aware of enlightenment (“good”) or it could be seen as the tool which has distracted millions from enlightenment (“bad”). However I suspect to Andy the tool just “is” – anything else is just a label placed on it by the Illusion.
The Short Path was not short because it was quick – it was short because his realisation came quickly but exploring and understanding that realisation still took many years.
When Paul Brunton wrote “The Short Path to Enlightenment” we was offering people a quick way to get to Andy’s realization but for many people they are too intertwined with their egos to make that jump in one book.