Sorting the Chaff from the Wheat

If there's anything Jed McKenna helps his readers do in The Enlightenment Trilogy, it is exactly that: Sorting the chaff from the wheat. In a world with shelves full of phony spirituality, which is often more useful as a drug to alleviate the pain of this life, or obfuscate it with rose-colored glasses, these books stand out as a hard-hitting alternative. There were always some "bonus materials" which were included in the e-book versions, but which have now been published in print as well, and this little volume is absolutely worth its weight in gold. To give a bit of the flavor, I'll quote some typical statements towards the end of the book:

... Most people get through the day by believing that if they don't break too many rules too much, they automatically get promoted up through the ranks; be it one life and straight to the top or a climb of many smaller steps. This comes to us from Maya's Ministry of Deferral & Procrastination, which promotes a doctrine of plausible denial and applied non-aggression, and where the motto is Rock the Cradle, Not the Boat. (p. 179)

My assistants and proofreaders warn me that people don't like to hear themselves portrayed so negatively. That surprises me. I would think that most folks, if they took a minute to sit down and really think about it, would blubber in joyous relief to find out that what they've been calling life was really just the most meager level of subsistence and that there were infinitudes more to this whole thing then they'd been led to believe. (p. 181)

Although my primary epiphany could be summed up as Truth Exists, it was actually much more complicated than that. The flip side of Truth Exists is This Ain't It. (p. 189)

These quotes are indicative for the quality of the book. It is truly hard-hitting from beginning to end. No sacred cows are spared, and he is consistently funny in the way he points up the fallacies, with which our ego, or "Maya" keep us wrapped around the axle, so we can't see for the life of us what's going on. Meanwhile he delivers among others a very clear expose of why it pays to get in the observer seat, and watch ourselves play the role which we think is our life, for it is the way to bring the ego's machinations to the light, and exposure is the only thing which will de-fang the ego in the long run. It cannot stand the light.

Besides other things, this book, and the entire series always seems helpful again in having a healthy respect for the ego, which can help us towards clarity as to why we do not want to hear the things that either Jesus, or the likes of Jed McKenna had to say, and why also Buddhism has nothing to do with who and what the Buddha was, and what he had to teach, just like Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. Simply put, we prefer to keep on dreaming. In the The Book of Thomas this theme is picked up among others in Logion 13, where Thomas after having spoken privately with Jesus, is asked by the other apostles what Jesus said, and he responds that they'd stone him if he told them. Accepting the atonement for ourselves, as the Course calls it, or reaching Human Adulthood, as McKenna calls it, is possible only if we are under no illusion as to why we resist it so much, and get very honest with ourselves and with that Internal Teacher, that quiet voice that will lead us to the truth if we let ourselves be led.

To conclude, I'll cite two priceless paragraphs on Buddhism, from page 47 of the book, noting that these comments apply to a lot more than just Buddhism:

Typical of their insistence on reconciling the irreconcilable is the Buddhist concept of Two Truths, a poignant two-word joke they don't seem to get, and yet this sort of perversely irrational thinking is near the very heart of the failed search for truth. We don't want truth, we want a particular truth; one that doesn't threaten the ego; one that doesn't exist. We insist on a truth that makes sense given what we know, not knowing that we know nothing.
Nothing about Buddhism is more revealing than the Four Noble Truths which, not being true are of dubious nobility. They form the basis of Buddhism, so it's clear from the outset that the Buddhists have whipped up a proprietary version of truth shaped more by market forces than any particular concern for the less consumer-friendly, albeit true, truth. (p. 47) 

I would hardly know what to add to that, so I won't try, except to say, run, don't walk to your nearest bookstore to get this little gem. Jed McKenna's Notebook: All Bonus Content from The Enlightenment Trilogy By Jed McKenna

On Outing Shakespeare

Well, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has thrown his hat in the ring on the controversy regarding Shakespeare's identity, and his choice for the role is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
Of course those of us who have read Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe might have been expecting some such developments. The interesting thing is that this opinion comes from outside the circles of the high priests of Stratford upon Avon, not to mention from outside the clerical circles of wider literary scholarship who have traditionally maintained the myth that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. A book on this controversy which I have earlier discussed on this blog, 'Shakespeare' by Another name: The life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the man who was Shakespeare, by Mark Anderson, and it already had convinced me pretty much, although I was by that time prepared to be open to that kind of development, exactly because of Arten's comments in Gary's book.
Here's how Arten said it;

 ARTEN: Sure. The gentleman who wrote the Shakespeare material was an Earl whose family's crest bore the image of a lion shaking a spear. To honor his family he was sometimes toasted at Court with the phrase, "Your countenance shakes a spear." But this Earl was forbidden by Queen Elizabeth the First, who was a political genius and very controlling, from putting his name on his work. There was a social stigma attached to the stage at that time. Plays, especially comedies, were not considered to be serious literature and were beneath the dignity of royalty.? (from Gary R. Renard, The Disappearance of  the Universe)

We are now probably not far away from a point that anything written about Shakespeare is fairly much irrelevant unless you appreciate that the writer of the words "all the world's a stage" in fact was in fact very much an actor on that stage who had known success and failure spectacularly, with a rich formal education, as well as plenty of lessons from the school of hard knocks, enough so that indeed it allowed him to gain an entirely different perspective, in what is customarily called enlightenment, allowing him to see through the whole charade from another vantage point, which A Course in Miracles describes as the view from "above the battle ground":

   Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

It is the sure knowledge that nothing is to be gained from anything in this world, which alone grants us the serenity and the sublime humor with which Shakespeare looks at the world. As Gary has recently observed somewhere, it is also the smile of the Mona Lisa. It is the manifestation of the peace of mind of Logion 42, "Be passersby."
It is like the shift of looking at Moby Dick through the eyes of Jed McKenna, to be looking at Shakespeare through the eyes of the Earl of Oxford, who in worldly terms was a nobleman at the Court of England who was decidedly past his prime, but who had acquired the perspective necessary for the task. It is also like realizing that Thomas Jefferson could not be understood and appreciated unless one realized the multiple levels of complexity and inner contradiction in his life as reflected in his relationship with Sally Hemings. Prior biographies do not only need to be corrected on that point, but entirely rewritten, for the man cannot be understood any other way. His fascinating relationship with Jesus, as evident from the Jefferson Bible, is another dimension of his character that has been widely missed, and treated at best as a curious episode, but not understood for being the central key to his character which it is. So, it seems we are having an interesting time of it with a massive reframing of some very interesting accepted truths in our culture, which turn out to be falsehoods.
In learning to step back from our own life, by adopting that view from above the battleground, it becomes easier to spot these things, for as we begin to understand that the classrooms of our life are in fact just that, it begins to make sense how Edward de Vere was able, as he stepped back from the wreckage to understand the whole story on a new level, including seeing it in the holographic framework of his life's experience and learning, in which Shakespeare's endless anachronisms becomes understandable as it is meaning, or content for which he merely finds the form to express it from the repertoire of his life and learning, Part of this learning involves this experience of déjà vu across time and space, for some people that goes with lively "past life" experiences (General Patton is my fave for that) for others it remains more ethereal, as simply deep insights and joining in an experience which we suddenly recognize at a deeper level.

Well, it's time to re-read Moby Dick. I've been promising myself to do so, but I think I finally will. When I read Jed McKenna's book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, which in some ways is a commentary to Moby Dick, I realized that it was too long ago since I read the book.

Jed's treatment of the book is absolutely refreshing, and is completely in line with the tenor of all of his books, which are full of humor, and make you want to throw the majority of would-be spiritual literature into the dumpster - oh what a relief! Let's have a sense of humor, folks!

Fundamentally, McKenna proposes that the Ishmael character in Moby Dick, who is the ostensible author, represents the observer aspect of the mind. He is there at the outset, and he survives the wreckage in the end, thus learning how the ego's self-destruction amounts to naught. In terms of the Thomas gospel, it is thus a reminder of saying 42 "Be passersby," or, in terms which A Course in Miracles would use, accustom yourself to the view from above the battleground (see ACIM:T-23.IV), where you're watching the action instead of haplessly thinking you are the action, this is the way to freedom for it helps us not to get taken in by the ego's drama, and making room for the discovery of who we really are, the dreamer of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VII), and not the hero of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VIII). To put it a different way, by identifying with the hero of the story, we forgot we were the director of the movie, and we end up believing our own lies, and by getting witnesses for my story, I try to keep myself convinced that it is real, i.e. I keep myself from waking up. Conversely the moment of waking up is a quiet one, in the eye of the storm, when we realize that all of the ego's death and destruction is just nothing, the blood is red paint, and by realizing that we realize this it just follows that we're not our ego. And this is certainly one reason that any attempt to help others by preventing the suffering prolong the agony, and thus does not help at all, but offers the ego another way out, which is not to say to be kind, cold, and heartless, but it does say don't buy into the story, for that makes it worse. Helping in this fashion is just another case of soft healers making stinking wounds, when the healing lies in our ability to make the other choice in the mind, and thus to know "I could see Peace instead of this." (ACIM, Lesson 34)

Thus Ishmael's realization at the end of the Moby Dick story, that the whole turbulent vortex of the ship going down did not suck him in, but he merely floats away and gets picked up by another ship, represents in a way the realization that it all was "much ado about nothing," to use Shakespeare's words. Seen that way, it becomes clear that Moby Dick is the story of Herman Melville's own spiritual awakening, in which he can see that the whole drama of the ego amounts to nothing, and in the end will "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M13.1:2). And so, the whole movie was naught but a distraction, meant to shift our attention from the mind to the world, and keeping us engaged fixing problems, without noticing they can't be fixed because the movie has already been made. The biggest clue for this in most of our lives comes from noticing one day that I set up similar problems all the time, and since I'm the only constant in the story, it may then dawn on us how and why the belief in an ego-identity in fact is the cause of the problem, and we are free to choose to no longer identify with it. Or, as the Course puts it in the Dreamer of the Dream section:

Now you are being shown you can escape. All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM:T-27.VII.2)

Certainly, at the end of Moby Dick, it all disappears into the nothingness from which it came, the sea being the prime symbol for the unconscious. It was all a dream, and by accepting the atonement for ourselves, i.e. by learning that nothing really happened, as Ishmael does at the end of the book, we begin to realize finally that by choosing the Holy Spirit in lieu of the ego, we are giving up nothing and gain everything, which is another frequent theme in the Course, as in here:

Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him. Everything you made has never been, and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourself. (ACIM:T-12.VIII.6)

Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

Oh well, this is to continue discussion of books I put on the reading list in Closing the Circle, either because I read them or because I recommended them "for further study." This one is a gem, and one of the most fun books about spirituality you could ever read. In short, I recommend it.

While per se the path that this book describes diverges in form from A Course In Miracles, it manages to clean up an awful lot of garbage, misunderstandings and plain misinformation, which plagues the whole category of spiritual literature. Why is that so, you ask? In the end it's simple, besides making interesting conversation, e.g. "I'm spiritual, not religious," is in vogue just now, nobody really wants to have anything to do with spirituality in the first place. That's exactly what I said. Nobody really wants to have anything to do with spirituality in the first place. And the reason for that is oh so simple. It is the same reason as why Jesus said that the Kingdom he talked about was not of this world, so that if we're at all attached to this world, which we all are if we take our personalities at all seriously, then we would not be interested in Jesus and/or his Kingdom, and we would be deeply offended by the irreverence of Jed McKenna.

McKenna does not leave any comfortable pseudo-truths in tact, but barges straight into the uncomfortable fact that undertaking a serious spiritual path means to always challenge everything and never ever stop questioning everything, until you get to the bottom of it all. A Course in Miracles says:

To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure but it will jeopardize your learning. No belief is neutral. Every one has the power to dictate each decision you make. For a decision is a conclusion based on everything that you believe. It is the outcome of belief, and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom sinlessness. There is no substitute for peace. What God creates has no alternative. The truth arises from what He knows. And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation rose in His Mind because of what He knows. (ACIM:T-24.in.2)

McKenna's book, and in fact all his books, see www.wisefoolpress.com reflect this spirit, no holds barred inquiry, until there is no place left to hide. That is what it takes. The shelves full of supposedly spiritual literature, are full of prayers, affirmations, meditations, etc. as if these were so many more skills we have to learn. All of that is BS, and McKenna does not leave those illusions in tact, and demonstrates very tangibly that the truth is on the other side of all that hoopla, and therefore that 99% of all spiritual literature belongs in the garbage. What makes these books great, is that they are written in an absolutely enjoyable style. Once in a while I find people who are offended by his approach, which is irreverent to say the least, but far more people seem to realize that it is really helpful how they puncture all these little balloons of pseudo-spirituality. Putting out the garbage does help you move on to the next thing, and that's the huge service that is given by these books and their author. So if you're serious about spirituality and are fed up with pablum, run, do not walk to the store, and buy these, or order them.