The world has no shortage of spiritual gurus. Some are helpful, but many are fads. But they’re all trying to help us fill the emptiness that we sometimes feel in our lives.
Cutting through the bullshit is Jed McKenna - a fictional character and author of Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, and some other books too.
Jed’s an interesting guy. He comes across like a regular, chill dude. His sharp writing is a breath of fresh air compared to other fluffy spirituality books.
But unlike a regular, chill dude, Jed is enlightened (whatever that means). According to him, he sees the truth as it is (whatever that means):
“Enlightenment isn't when you go there, it's when there comes here… It's not a fleeting state of consciousness, it's permanent truth-realization—abiding non-dual awareness… For instance, I myself am enlightened, right here, right now. I am free of delusion and unbound by ego...”
The rest of us? We live here in the illusion of Maya, a dream state that we mistake to be real life.
Jed points out 3 ways in which common spiritual paths might be leading us astray:
They encourage reaching enlightenment, but most of us don’t actually want it.
They promise having no fear and always being in bliss.
They talk of surrendering to the world in a way that many interpret as becoming passive characters in their own lives.
1 Most of us don’t want to be enlightened
Jed shakes us up with an important realisation: most of us who have spiritual inclinations don’t actually want to become enlightened. Instead, our egos lead us in superficial spiritual circles just to feel good about ourselves.
And I think he’s right. The question is:
Do you really want to embrace the infinite and dark abyss of all your beliefs being false?
Do you really want to burn your ego down to the point where there is no self to be?
Do you really want to destroy your attachment to literally everything, both good and bad?
Probably not. I don’t.
I, for one, would like to love my future kids rather than face this dilemma:
“So I ask again and again, if I had a child, would I bond with it even though I no longer have a bonding surface? Would I love my own child? I am certain the answer is no and I am certain the answer can't be no.”
2 Most of us mistake spirituality as a way to overcome fear and be in bliss
When we imagine spiritually enlightened people, we probably think of people that look like this:
We think of people that are calm, serene, and almost other-worldly. But according to Jed, enlightenment isn’t about this at all. It’s an unrelenting mission to figure out what’s true, by ditching everything that’s false. A lot of what we believe turns out not to be true when we look closely, so the journey is terrifying. He says:
The desire to slay fear is itself a fear-based emotion. Fear can only be surrendered to; the thing feared, entered.
He also shows us what this path - a perpetual and terrifying freefall - looks like for one of his students called Julie:
“… Julie has effectively stepped from an airplane without a parachute. Now she's in freefall. She may fear that she's going to suffer a bloody impact with the planet hurtling up to greet her, but that's just a residual fear pattern that no longer applies. At the precise moment of impact, the planet will disappear, and nothing will take its place. Her freefall won't end, but it will no longer feel like falling because there will no longer be anything to reference it against; no wind, no whoosh, no fast-approaching planet.”
What we learn is that enlightenment isn’t about always being happy. It’s about facing the truth, and the truth is endlessly scary.
3 Most of us think about spiritual surrender wrong
Spirituality has undertones of surrender. There’s this idea that the universe is perfect, things will happen as they will, and we should just let go. Jed also talks about surrender - he talks about “taking our hand off the tiller” - but not in a hippy-woo-woo way:
“We might equate surrender with abdication of self-responsibility, but it's really just the opposite. It's where we dispense with intermediaries like priests and doctors and government, and take our lives into our own hands.”
Jed uses the great example of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ahab is maniacally driven to kill a giant white whale that ripped his leg off. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to defeat the monster, even if it destroys him. On the surface of it, this doesn’t sound like surrender. But you see, Ahab is surrendering his whole being to the act of killing this whale.
He gives it all he’s got - that’s surrender.
Is spirituality leading you down the wrong path?
The trouble with spiritual gurus we look up to is that they speak of a way of being that can only be verified by personal experience. When we read their writings, all we see is how our state of being doesn’t measure up to theirs.
That leaves us feeling insufficient and longing for more. Enlightenment just becomes:
Another desire,
Another trick of the ego,
Another distraction from what’s right in front of you.
Worse than that, it seems the only way to verify enlightenment exists is to become enlightened yourself. No words can encompass what it’s like, so following these imprecise words won’t get you to where you actually want to be.
As they say, the map is not the territory.
This leaves us with a vanishingly slim set of spiritual tools:
“…the only real spiritual teaching is think for yourself and figure out what's true, and that's what I'm saying here. I mean, seriously, what else is there to say? If you want it, it's yours. If you don't, whatever.”
One Liners
“Good rule of thumb: the easier you can predict how the sentences you’re reading will end, the more likely they came from a chatbot.” -
Recommended reading from Substack:
😌
’s guide to mindfulness.🚦
’s Mother Road.🥒
in praise of freshness and routine.💡
on rediscovering your expansive self.🌱
on planting and persistence.
Recommended reading beyond Substack:
Thanks so much for including me here, Zan! And it was so fun to catch up with you on zoom the other week. Onward into the abyss!
I loved reading this Zan! Echoed many of the same thoughts I've had along my journey. Enlightenment is just a fancy word for freedom, it ain't something sexy or exotic that is to be glorified - I see it as a the basic OEM state of being human. It's freedom from identification to material things, thoughts, feelings... whatever. It's all about attachment and identification - not losing yourself in objects that are not you, so you can actually show up in whatever situation and experience it fully.
But it doesn't mean you stop experiencing or feeling things, or stop loving your family, or stop getting pissed off when someone does something shitty to you. I think part of the issue is that all of the stuff around spirituality and "enlightenment" is stuck 2000 years in the past - it's so un-relatable to now it's not funny. It's also not a destination or state to attain - even spiritual gurus get caught out with spiritual bypassing or the birth of a new spiritual ego who seeks under the veil of attaining or achieving something. Fascinating to me.
As for the ego stuff, that's another thing I found to be a farce. If you're already aligned in your life, you don't actually change. In fact, I find you become more you than ever before. And you don't stop being human either or feeling the full range of human emotions. I don't know why spiritual gurus and content seem to denigrate this experience through what seems like slamming the 'ego' or 'separate self' (perhaps it's just what is perceived from the outside, and I don't think it's intentional or malicious). I believe the entirety of the human experience should be celebrated, rather than diminished!
Basically, it's not a state to attain, defeats the whole purpose. But there's so much misinfo and understanding out there it's no wonder it's so confusing to the point where it just turns people off.
Thanks for posting this Zan, sparked a lot of thought for me and you've only inspired me more to get my thoughts out in a post sometime, because "enlightenment" definitely needs a rebrand 😛