In my search for meanings and answers I’ve come across dozens of offerings from people or systems which claim to hold the key.
They have ranged from religions (from Christianity to Paganism) to semi-religions like Witchcraft to Buddhist based approaches.
Religion?
Now I’ve never been comfortable with any of the religions because they are the most obvious in demanding a leap of faith. You have to believe in something for which there is no proof.
Usually you rely on what others have written – things like the bible and the scriptures – to be your evidence but what other humans have penned is hardly the rock solid proof needed.
To this the reply is usually “You have to have faith”. You just need to believe and if you do then you can explain everything away in one stroke. Bad things are God’s punishment and good things are God’s rewards.
Life after death is sorted and its really great so nothing to fret about there.
It all works because once you have taken the leap of faith to believe in something that no one can prove exists your mind is open to believe other things with only the flakiest of evidence.
It’s as John Crossan says – “You’ve left your brains in the parking lot“.
Personally I’d much rather say “I just don’t know” than do that which means, for me, religion is no answer at all.
Witchcraft?
Witchcraft type approaches require the same. One of the central concepts is vibration. You need to raise your vibration level and feel the vibrations coming from other people and other things.
Vibration isn’t the monopoly of Witchcraft of course. Some fairly enlightened people like Eckhart Tolle sign up to the idea as well.
Same approach really. If you believe in vibrations you will feel vibrations but first you have to take the leap of faith and believe.
Many would argue this isn’t quite true, you just need to open your mind to them and you start to pick them up. I’d say that’s the same sort of thing as a leap of faith. There’s no real proof that the whole vibration thing actually exists beyond the knowledge that atoms do vibrate.
Can we harness that? Nothing to show for certain beyond people who started believing and then felt a whole lot better – but that is purely psychosomatic.
Numerology, recall healing, auras, astrology, spectrum, etc.
The list of things to believe in if you would only believe goes on. If you believe you had a past life that is affecting your current one then it will be. If you believe numbers explain things they will. If you want to believe the planets and stars are the key to your future they will be. If you believe your aching shoulder is caused by a bad memory it will disappear (or become much less acute) when you believe the bad memory is resolved.
Many of these systems work really well because they create a vagueness that gives you enough information for you to interpret them into your life and then announce how accurate they are or were. At the same time for those of us who ‘just believe’ we are very good at screening out the bits which don’t fit at all.
I had my stars professionally read when I was a student (I was working in the garden of an astrologer sometimes used by the police and he offered to do a reading to show my skepticism was misplaced) .
I was blown away with how accurate it was. A few years later I found it again in the bottom of a draw and re-reading it with a fresh pair of eyes I was surprised at how wrong it was.
My life had not changed in any major way – it was just that I read it, by chance, from a more balanced angle and noticed that while there were plenty of things that were true there were also plenty of things that were false. Moreover when I thought about it vast tracts of the text could be a applied to many of the people I knew.
Enlightenment?
It’s less than a year ago that I started this journey and I remember listening to Anthony De Mello’s ‘Rediscovering life‘. Highly skeptic though I was I let the tape roll as it were.
When De Mello started talking about how long it could take to get to enlightenment I thought “here we go” because all these self discovery options also seem to have the same angle – it is going to take time and usually someone is offering you a handy way to spend your money during that time.
He also maintained that he could not make people enlightened, just show them ‘signs and pointers’. That all seemed like get out clauses to me at first.
His argument was that enlightenment could not be explained in words. I really thought he was on to the “you just have to believe” track but I was determined to remain open minded enough … at least to get to the end of the 4 hour audio!
Its just as well I did because it turned out I was creating suspicions in anticipation for something which did not exist.
It is true enlightenment cannot be explained in words but that is not because you have to believe, its just that language is a bit rubbish at communicating certain things.
Watch the sun rise and feel the amazement of every moment. Then try and explain it to someone else so they will feel exactly what you felt and understand exactly what you saw and experience exactly what you experienced. Not possible.
So what about the idea that it takes ages? Rediscovering life made a lot of sense to me so I went on to listen to his audio book Enlightenment. In it he recounts the story of the lady and the tramp.
The point of the tale is that it can take years to achieve Enlightenment or it can happen over night.
This wasn’t, after all, a belief system that required a long term buy in and one that demanded you forsake all others. It wasn’t one that asked you to ‘just believe’ in anything.
More importantly it isn’t really a belief system at all. As De Mello puts it “You are brainwashed when you take on an idea which isn’t yours”.
Enlightenment certainly wasn’t, from his angle, an idea. It was more a ‘have a look over there and see what you find .. there is no rule book needed to do that’.
Pure enlightenment
I term De Mello’s approach pure enlightenment because nothing was really required. But enlightenment in general doesn’t completely fit that bill.
I mentioned Eckhart Tolle who echos much of De Mello but then goes further to talk about vibrations and concepts like the Pain Body. While I think both are very good mental structures to help organise the mind in difficult times they are also both things for which there is no evidence at all.
In other words some people who preach Enlightenment do also require a leap of faith. But there is a branch of it that does not and if anything gives me faith its one that demands none.