Pre-Enlightenment Intensive Teaching
The core practice that we use during an Enlightenment Intensive is called the Enlightenment Technique.
It's a remarkably effective practice that helps people cut through the mind like a sharp knife cutting through the tangled undergrowth of a jungle. If you would like to begin learning the technique or improve your practice and understanding of the Enlightenment Technique so that you may more effectually cut through the barriers of the mind, you may like to read The Enlightenment Technique by Charles Berner.
This essay deserves to be read many times over as it dissects the technique and answers many questions about how it works. Here's just a few questions and brief answers that the essay covers.
Here's a few lines from the first paragraph:
"Understanding the technique makes it possible to conduct an Enlightenment Intensive properly. There is a lot to understand. You should aim for a complete understanding of how the technique works so that you can see why it is constructed the way it is. If you do not understand it all, you will not appreciate the great truth and power that is contained in it and you will be tempted to vary it, thinking that one way is as good as the other. You will drift away from the exact technique, as many people have, with the result that the power of it will weaken and weaken and you will end up with some ordinary activity."
"Understanding the technique makes it possible to conduct an Enlightenment Intensive properly. There is a lot to understand. You should aim for a complete understanding of how the technique works so that you can see why it is constructed the way it is. If you do not understand it all, you will not appreciate the great truth and power that is contained in it and you will be tempted to vary it, thinking that one way is as good as the other. You will drift away from the exact technique, as many people have, with the result that the power of it will weaken and weaken and you will end up with some ordinary activity."
1. According to this chapter, how does the mind come into being?
The mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals.
The mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals.
2. How does identification interfere with enlightenment?
It would be relatively easy to contemplate ‘What am I?’ if one didn’t have a mind. But when one tries to contemplate what he is the mind gets in the way because of all the ideas that are stored there that have to do with what he is: ideas about himself that he has not understood, ideas from the social environment which have made him think one way or the other about what he is, and a lot of things about what he is that he has not been able to get understood by other people. So, when one tries to contemplate what it is that he is, he gets all these things in the mind instead of what he actually is. That is why it takes years and years of solo contemplation to try to find one’s way through the morass of the mind.
It would be relatively easy to contemplate ‘What am I?’ if one didn’t have a mind. But when one tries to contemplate what he is the mind gets in the way because of all the ideas that are stored there that have to do with what he is: ideas about himself that he has not understood, ideas from the social environment which have made him think one way or the other about what he is, and a lot of things about what he is that he has not been able to get understood by other people. So, when one tries to contemplate what it is that he is, he gets all these things in the mind instead of what he actually is. That is why it takes years and years of solo contemplation to try to find one’s way through the morass of the mind.
3. What does communicating the contents of the mind do to the mind?
When something is completely received, it leaves the realm of the mind and enters the realm of knowingness.
When something is completely received, it leaves the realm of the mind and enters the realm of knowingness.
Reading and reflecting on this essay and then answering the end-of-chapter questions will give you a good indication of how well you understood the chapter.
Here’s a list of questions that are answered in the essay.
1. According to this section, how does the mind come into being?
2. How does identification interfere with enlightenment?
3. What does communicating the contents of the mind do to the mind?
4. What should the active participant do first with the instruction from the listening partner?
5. Explain how the technique works, in detail, up to the point covered in this section.
6. What are the two processes involving the mind that make enlightenment most likely?
7. How would you tell a participant to contemplate?
8. If a participant is thinking about who they are, is this the best way of doing the technique?
9. What makes someone have a vested interest in staying identified with certain states of being?
10. What is the difference between a participant being in "fantasy land" and being in reality land"?
11. What is the effect of having a live individual giving the instruction to another, and that instruction being received by the active partner?
12. What is the meaning of "being open" when doing the contemplation in the Enlightenment Intensive technique?
Study and learning about Truth, Reality and Love can help bring understanding by clearing the mind which prepares one for directly experiencing the Great Awakening.
1. According to this section, how does the mind come into being?
2. How does identification interfere with enlightenment?
3. What does communicating the contents of the mind do to the mind?
4. What should the active participant do first with the instruction from the listening partner?
5. Explain how the technique works, in detail, up to the point covered in this section.
6. What are the two processes involving the mind that make enlightenment most likely?
7. How would you tell a participant to contemplate?
8. If a participant is thinking about who they are, is this the best way of doing the technique?
9. What makes someone have a vested interest in staying identified with certain states of being?
10. What is the difference between a participant being in "fantasy land" and being in reality land"?
11. What is the effect of having a live individual giving the instruction to another, and that instruction being received by the active partner?
12. What is the meaning of "being open" when doing the contemplation in the Enlightenment Intensive technique?
Study and learning about Truth, Reality and Love can help bring understanding by clearing the mind which prepares one for directly experiencing the Great Awakening.
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“Recognize, that full understanding comes only through an inexpressible mystery. It is not until your thoughts cease, not until you abandon seeking for something, not until your mind is as motionless as the mountain that you will be on the right road to the Gateway of Stillness that I call enlightenment. Recognize that your awakened mind comes in a flash and is the Buddha itself.” Hung Po |
The Enlightenment Technique: Part 1
Charles Berner
The Enlightenment Technique was first published in The Transmission of Truth, which is the primary source material for training new facilitators of the Enlightenment Intensive. I have also published this and other essays in Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Intensive: Volume 1.
The Enlightenment Technique: Part I
The core of the Enlightenment Intensive is contained in the Enlightenment Technique. Understanding this technique makes it possible to conduct an Enlightenment Intensive properly.
It seemed to me that the age-old technique of reflecting on "Who am I?" was a very good one. But it was slow. I wondered what could be done to speed it up. I had years of experience in working on communication techniques, learning how people could communicate better with each other, especially on a one-to-one basis. For years I had worked with the dyad format and investigated its various aspects and I had made some fundamental observations. I observed that the mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals. That is a core principle. The mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals. For example, if I say something in this talk and you don't understand it, then we will have contributed to the mind and put more into it because communication will not have successfully taken place. If, on the other hand, you understood it, then we have successfully communicated and it is not stored in the mind. When something is completely received, it leaves the realm of the mind and enters the realm of knowingness. This is another important principle. The Enlightenment Technique is partially built around these observations and fundamental principles.
The mind is filled up because it is a storage of those things which are not understood, integrated, or fully experienced. For example, someone may have been through a trauma in the past in which things were too intense for him and he had stored them in his mind for further integration or for later integration. He integrated part of the experience at the time it occurred. But the part that wasn't understood or wasn't experiencable given his current ability is suspended in the mind. Did you ever have a desk with a "Pending" box on it? Well, that's the mind. You think, "Someday I'm going to work on that stuff." And later you work on some of it and you handle a few of the sheets on the top but then ten more come in and it's just too much to do at one time. You glance at it and you think, "I don't understand that. I'll work on that later." That is what the mind is made up of. It's chock full. Also, you throw outgoing messages into a similar basket marked "Outgoing" but nobody ever comes by to read them. The messenger never comes by to pick them up and deliver them. So other people have not received your messages for them and these also are stored in the mind.
It would be relatively easy to contemplate "Who am I" if one didn't have a mind. But when one tries to contemplate who he is the mind gets in the way because of all these other ideas that are stored there that have to do with who he is. And there might be a lot of ideas about himself that he has not understood, ideas from the social environment which have made him think one way or the other about who he is. There may have also been a lot of things about who he is that he has not been able to get understood by other people. Therefore, in the mind are all kinds of stored ideas, experiences, feelings, traumas, and memories, all about oneself. So one tries to contemplate who it is that he is and gets all these things in the mind instead of who he actually is. That's why it takes years and years of solo contemplation to try to find one's way through the morass of the mind.
If listening to someone tell you who you are did any good we'd all have been enlightened long since. If having data in the mind led to enlightenment, then we would already be enlightened because there's plenty of correct information around about who you are, but it is not a direct experience. It is information from somebody else, which is an indirect experience. Memories, impressions, fear of "What if I were this?" are all stored up in the mind and these impressions in the mind are not enlightenment experiences. They are impressions in the mind.
I once had a participant who, when first asked who he was, pulled out his driver's license and showed it to his partner. This was his identity. People have identified themselves not only with ideas in the mind, but personality traits in the mind. In other words, they're being "nice guys." So there are these various personality traits with which they have identified themselves. They are not those things in fact, but just like an actor playing a role who has forgotten who he is, these people have become identified with personality traits which are contained within the mind. They have forgotten that they are playing a role or personality.
Now, worse than that, they get a vested interest in certain states of being. They have a reputation or they're trying, even more basically, to tell people something by being a certain way. For example, they want to be loved. That's a pretty common trait. And so they be a certain way in order to invite that love; aggressive, passive or neutral, it doesn't matter. The mind can justify how being a certain way will produce whatever they want. So not only have they become unconsciously identified with something, but they often have a vested interest, a use for being a certain way and thinking of themselves as that. And all of this masks who they actually are. It all interferes with the process of contemplation. All this stuff is stored in the mind. Our job is to help them to de-identify, give up their investment and dissolve away or separate out the mind from who they are so that at last they can experience who they are.
In the classical techniques of just contemplating, the aspirant gradually burned out the mind. If you stared at a rock long enough it would dissolve away. It would take staring for a long time, about four hundred billion years or so. Breathing on a rock would gradually wear it down a little faster by wind erosion. Running water would make it go a little faster. Taking a hammer out and smashing it or pouring chemicals on it might dissolve it away in minutes. So there are different rates at which you can dissolve away identifications, confusions, traumas, and vested interests that are contained in the mind that make the mind stick and hold on.
The most powerful means to dissolve the mind is through communication because, as I said earlier, the mind is the suspension of attempted communications which were not fully communicated between individuals.
With this observation and principle what I did was to have people first contemplate who they are and then communicate to a listening partner what occurred in their mind as a result of that contemplation. When the things in the mind are communicated, they dissolve and vanish out of the mind to the degree that they are received and understood by another individual. That is the crux of this principle and the crux of the power of this technique.
I have tested this technique and I have compared it to other methods of enlightenment, and depending upon the skill of the master, the experience of the participants, and the length of time of the Enlightenment Intensive, this technique is about fifty to a hundred times more rapid in producing enlightenment experiences than the classical techniques.
You should try to understand the mechanism by which this technique works. If you don't understand it you'll never be able to really understand why I've set up the technique and the format the way it is. You'll just think it's some arbitrary thing that I thought up and you'll vary it and change it and you'll teach people whom you teach later on in ways based upon what you personally favor and not based upon these fundamental observations of life. You'll decide that it's not such a good technique after all. You'll want to change what you're doing with it. Instead of trying to get people enlightened you'll try to make them feel better or get them high or get them to have some sort of elevated experience or have them get off on the contact with each other or work on straightening out their relationships. All of these are noble and useful ends, but they don't lead to enlightenment.
If you want to work on getting people enlightened, you should understand how this technique works. If you understand how it works, you will not be tempted into the million and one possible variations that could be used instead of this technique. I have trained people in the past to master Enlightenment Intensives and many of them have varied the technique. And the reason why is because they have not understood the mechanism on which the technique is based. So you should learn this well.
First of all, we work with two live individuals who are immediately available to each other during the entire technique. The Zen Buddhists developed a pretty good method because every once and a while you got to go see the Roshi, to find out whether or not you had experienced kensho, or enlightenment. You'd get in line, move your way along to the Roshi's room, and go in and see the Roshi. You'd say something, a word or two, and he'd reach over and grab his bell and ring it, and you'd be dismissed. After you had been turned down a lot you'd quit going in any more. But they realized the value of this contact with the master, so they would have the chief monk, which we call the chief monitor, drag you in. There are stories of people screaming and crying, "I won't go see him! I determined I'd never go again."' But they knew the value of this contact with the master and dragged him in anyway.
Originally, in Soto Zen, they would have the monks face a blank wall because, according to the story, this was the way Boddhidharma did it. But later on in the Rinzai Zen school they turned the monks around. In Soto they were on both sides of the room facing the wall and the Rinzai masters turned them around so they faced each other. Their reason is that it increased the tension. In effect, it increased the contact and built up the energy and accelerated the process. There are those who will argue that the Soto method is better. My observation is that the Rinzai way is better because the monks face each other.
The Rinzai masters did another thing: they used koans, a key question, a riddle, whereas the Soto masters did not. In Rinzai Zen they would contemplate a koan such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" which is a classic koan which many people are familiar with. There are lots of other ones. Another koan that you could use is "Who am I?" That's a riddle. But the Rinzai masters never got as far as moving those two monks a little bit closer to each other so that when one came up with something he would communicate it to the other. Thus enters the Enlightenment Technique.
The Enlightenment Technique adds communication to contemplation. The communication does not begin with the contemplation, it begins with an instruction from one individual to another. I had first thought that it might be possible to just have both people sitting there contemplating and when one came up with something he would say, "Hey, this is what I came up with." But that doesn't follow a good communication cycle because it interrupts the other person's contemplation too irregularly. It's too informal. So we have the communication formally begin with one individual giving an instruction to another. This adds the power and the consciousness and the life of another being. When one says, "Tell me who you are," if the other accepts that instruction as an order from his partner then the two have come together and they are joining forces against the receiver's mind and its confusions, reluctances, identifications, unconsciousness, and investments. The life from both of the conscious entities is added together. No wonder this technique is so powerful. But it is only powerful if the first individual, when he says to his partner, ''Tell me who you are,'' actually wants his partner to tell him who he is, and if the receiver of that instruction accepts that as an order from his partner. This is what gives the power to the technique. So, the giver of the instruction should mean it. Just saying, "Tell me who you are," would not be proper. If people take the attitude, "I got to say this, they told me to say it, but I really don't care who you are. I came here to find out who I am," this is not proper. Such casual attitudes are often common in the first part of an intensive, but as the contact and camaraderie between the individuals begins to grow, the participants become interested in each other. The love and contact and openness among them begins to grow and after a while when they say, "Tell me who you are, they mean it, It is important to allow this contact to build. Even though the participant has been told hundreds of times, "Tell me who you are," and he knows what his partner is going to say, you should not cultivate a casual attitude about that. You should instead teach them to respond to their partner. Their partner has made a request, "Tell me who you are," and their own attitude should be, "OK, I'm going to do that," so that they're working together as a team. This combines the power, the life, and the consciousness of the two partners.
You see, the power of any one individual's mind is equal to that individual's own personal power. This is because subconsciously he is putting his power into his mind, Take the ego for example. The ego is that very deep-seated identification. One thinks of oneself as something and will defend his investment in that thing being who he is. He will justify it and make it be what he is and put his own power and consciousness and life into that state of being. Therefore, it's almost impossible for an individual, by himself, to defeat his own mind because his mind has gotten its power from himself and it's equally as strong as he is. It's equally as conscious and equally in the conflict.
Now that the participant has accepted the instruction from his partner, the contemplation phase begins. I have broken this phase up into various parts so that you can better understand the technique and the mechanisms of contemplation, so that you can properly instruct your participants how to do the technique.
First of all, we always have an object in the Enlightenment Technique. We have an object of enlightenment. One is trying to have an enlightenment experience with regard to something. The ones I have selected are the whoness of an individual, the whatness of an individual, the whatness of life and the whatness of another. There are a lot of things you could work on, but I won't go into that now. What we're going to work on in this example is the whoness of the individual, who it is that he is. This is the object. Now, the partner says, "Tell me who you are." The individual at this point should intend to directly experience who it is that he is. But the problem is that people often don't have that intention. Instead what they do is think about themselves, and they do this by a logical process. In other words, they try to figure out who they are. They don't have their attention on their actual self at all. What they're doing is thinking over some abstract concept of selfness. It's even worse if they're working on life: "Now what could life possibly be? Let me figure this out." And they're not addressing life itself. They're addressing some sort of idea in their mind about life and not life itself. It's like the difference between a volcano enthusiast reading a book on volcanoes or going on a field trip and actually kicking a volcano in the side. When people work on who they are they often think about things like psychological studies on people, and they don't go off on a field trip to actually experience themselves. So they're in academic-land. They're in abstract-land instead of reality-land. They're running around in their minds dealing with ideas about themselves and they're not dealing with themselves.
Unfortunately there is no way to stop people from doing this, at least somewhat. If we could, we would stop them immediately. But people are not capable of this raw experience in the beginning. In fact, they try to directly experience who they are but they can't manage it because the mind gets in the way and comes up with ideas about who they are instead of touching the real thing. So what are you to do? As a master you could make a great mistake by encouraging their activity of thinking about, rather than dealing with, the actual object of enlightenment itself, which is their actual self. A lot of people working in this realm, not understanding the Enlightenment Technique properly, have permitted this sort of thing to go on, or encouraged it. You can't really stop it in the beginning, but you should tell them what you want them to do rather than telling them to do something other than that. In the case of an Enlightenment Intensive, what you want them to do is to intend to directly experience the object itself, and not just think about or deal with thoughts about that object. In this case the object is one's self.
People can't always do it. If they could they would immediately be enlightened on the first shot. Therefore, it's an error to give the instruction, "Directly experience yourself," because they can't do it. If you tell them to do that you are setting them up for a failure. You shouldn't tell a person to do something he can't do. Instead you should say, "Intend to directly experience yourself." That people can do. They can have the intent. They may have difficulty carrying it out because the mind begins to throw up all these ideas about themselves, identifications, confusions, and all these things they've been told. But they can still have the intent. In fact, these things come into their consciousness as a result of this intention to directly experience who they are.
So contemplation, using the Enlightenment Technique, is begun by intending to directly experience the object of enlightenment. There are three things in that statement of contemplation: intending, intending that the experience be direct, and having an object to intend to experience directly. Unfortunately, as I said, most people will have difficulty grasping what you want them to do, so on an Enlightenment Intensive you have to explain to them over and over and over again what it is that they are to do in their contemplation, because the mind keeps trying to do something else, and people unfortunately are identified with the mind. They think that what the mind is doing is what they are doing. So if the mind starts doing something, they start justifying why they are doing it. You have to convince them that they can ignore what the mind is doing and go ahead and intend to directly experience who they are. The mind is doing all these other things, but they should just have the intent. The mind is thinking about it and trying to remember and figure it out and trying to visualize who they are and doing all these different mechanisms that the mind gets into, but they shouldn't invest themselves in these mechanisms of the mind. Later on in the technique they are going to communicate these things to their partner, which will remove them from the mind. But right now we are in the contemplation phase and the way you break this identification between the individual and his mind is by telling him to just be open to whatever may occur. This is the final clincher on the contemplation activity.
Being open means to not have preconceived ideas, to not try to put something there to experience. People have preconceived ideas about who and what they are that come from the mind. They have preconceived ideas about what enlightenment is or supposed to be like. They are always wrong. There may be some element of correctness to their preconceived ideas, but so far as enlightenment is concerned they are wrong because their ideas are ideas and as long as they are ideas, they are not enlightenment. Enlightenment is not an idea; it's a fact of pure consciousness.
In explaining the Enlightenment Technique I've used this term "open" and it's a very primitive word in English. If people don't understand open there's not any word with which you're going to do any better. When I teach yoga I call it surrender, but when I teach enlightenment I call it open. It's the same thing, but I think you'll have more luck with "open." People will sometimes ask you, "What do you mean by 'open'?" I mean just the ordinary, everyday meaning, what everybody knows open means. If they don't know that, there is no amount of words that you are going to do any better with. When you open a door, you open a door; whey you open a can of beer, you open a can of beer. There is nothing hidden or mystical or deep about it, it's just open, in the ordinary sense that they are being open. It's like they leave their field of consciousness open to whatever may occur as the result of having the intention to directly experience the object of their enlightenment.
You see, in the mind itself are all kinds of ideas, one way and the other, and the mind overlaps and sits in the ocean of the field of consciousness. It fills the field of consciousness and overlaps it. When the mind finally becomes empty or at least separated from the field of consciousness, then the enlightenment experience is possible.
As you know, many classical techniques try to empty the mind of its content so that the person can have a deep experience of Truth, and this is correct. The question is how is this mind to be emptied? There are two basic ways to empty it. One is to burn or dissolve away the contents of the mind, and the other is to separate the mind from the field of consciousness so that the mind is over there and the field of consciousness is here. Did you ever notice that you could have one thing in your mind or you could have another thing? The content of the mind can change and what you're doing is taking various parts of the mind and bringing them into the field of consciousness. Now what if you brought a part of the mind that had nothing in it into the field of consciousness? You would have a blank mind. Some people feel that a blank mind is enlightenment, but it is not enlightenment. Many people confuse having the void, or sunyata, or blank part of the mind interpenetrating and overlapping the field of consciousness as the enlightened state. It is not enlightenment. If someone has told you it is, they are simply wrong. Yes, a blank mind filing the field of consciousness sometimes enhances the probability of an enlightenment experience occurring. The chances are greatly increased, more so than if the mind is full of things. When the busy part of the mind is filling the field of consciousness it is difficult to have an enlightenment experience. Therefore many of the Buddhists have practiced contemplating the void in order to try to get a blank mind. This is why they do it, to increase the probability of enlightenment; because, in any reasonable period of time, it is very unlikely that you are going to empty the entire mind of all its content and dissolve it away so that there's nothing left in the mind at all. In a reasonable period of time the only remaining method that you can use to have an enlightenment experience is to take the mind and put it some place else, leaving the field of consciousness empty. So the Buddhists were correct in their approach.
The difference in essence between Buddhism and yoga is this difference. In yoga what you are trying to do is to dissolve the entire mind and its entire content out of existence so that there is no content to the mind at all, anywhere. Yoga is defined as "chitta vritti naroda," which is a state in which the mind no longer has any content. The Buddhist technique is to take all the stuff that's in the mind and put it some place else other than in the field of consciousness so that the field of consciousness is empty. The mind is lurking over in the distance, ready to strike, but in the meanwhile you can have a direct experience of Truth while the content of the mind is literally out of the scene. It is not in the field of consciousness.
So, when one is being open to whatever may occur in the mind, one is not trying to put something there to work with. Being open tends to move the mind away. When something does occur in the mind, then you have the participant communicate that to his partner and when it is understood by his partner that part of the mind which is in the forefront of consciousness will dissolve away because it has been received. Your in-basket has been read. Now you can throw the paper away because the other person understands, he's gotten the message. Since who one is, is constantly being brought to mind by the question itself, that part of the mind having to do with who one is will not move away. Since part of the mind is filled with thoughts of who one is, that part does not separate from the field of consciousness. In this technique it is communicated to the partner, dissolved out of existence, and then that part of the mind is pure and clean. Then, anytime one intends to directly experience who he is, the part of the mind related to who he is comes in and is empty because that's what has been previously brought up and communicated and there isn't anything left to bring up any more. Eventually, it's all communicated out and there isn't anything left in your out basket and you have a blank mind on the subject of who you are. This is not enlightenment. But we've set up the situation in which enlightenment can very likely occur because the mind is blank with regard to who you are. In this situation one can just intend to directly experience who one actually is and the mind is not interposing itself by putting ideas, memories, conclusions, beliefs, traumas and other things into one's consciousness. The only thing left is one's self.
Unfortunately, I've seen people sit for hours in that state and still not directly experience who they are. What is to be done about it? There's almost nothing that can be done. Somewhere along the line they will either experience directly who they are, or they won't. There are factors which affect the probability and I'll talk to you about them another time. But the participant is now in the optimum situation in which if they actually do experience who they are it will be a direct experience because there is no longer any imposition of the mind.
Sometimes perceptual activities will interpose themselves at this point, like feelings and visualizations in the sense of pure light. People will often come up with this at about this stage. They feel that who they are is a bright light. A bright light is not enlightenment. A bright light is a bright light. It's nice that they are experiencing bright lights, but they aren't setting out to get bright light enlightenment, they are setting out to directly experience who they are. When the experience comes, it is self evident, so when people are set into the technique and they are intending to experience who they are directly and finally the mind is gone, you have reached a very nice place. At this point, all you have to do as a master is keep them there and sooner or later they will directly experience who they are.
What is occurring in almost every instance at this point is these people are still trying to see who they are. They think, "Where am I?" About all you can do is try to dissuade them from trying to perceive who they are because they're the perceiver. They are actually identified with the perceiver, the one who perceives things, and so they're trying to see. What you do is to try to get them to give that up and discover that they are the seer. When they discover that they are the seer they will de-identify from the seer and they'll say, "Wait a minute, now I can't even see? You won't let me do that? What have I got left?" They may have physiological troubles at this point; they may have pains or get sick to their stomach, because now the Truth is imminent and intimate, They'll try anything. They are not doing this willfully. This is just the effect of several identifications, core states of being which are now being separated out. And through no mechanism at all, through no process at all, and from having done absolutely nothing, they will become enlightened. In the end, enlightenment is not a willful thing. It is a spontaneous event. You cannot make it happen. All you can do is set up the situation in which the probability is maximized. And the Enlightenment Technique is designed to do that and it does it.
Now the individual has to communicate to his partner what has occurred in his mind as a direct result of his contemplation. In the next talk I'll break that down for you and also discuss the partner's role in that activity so that we complete this discussion on the Enlightenment Technique. There's a lot to understand in what I just got through telling you. You should have it crystal clear in your own mind with a complete understanding of how it works so that you can see why the technique has been set up the way it has. If you don't understand it all, you will not appreciate the great truth and power that is contained in it and you'll be tempted to vary it into something else thinking that one way is as good as the other. You will drift off the technique, as many people have, and the power of it will weaken and weaken and you will end up with some ordinary activity. Therefore, I want to continue explaining this very clearly so that you understand this material and the whys and wherefores of all of it.
Study Questions
1. According to this section, how does the mind come into being?
2. How does identification interfere with enlightenment?
3. What does communicating the contents of the mind do to the mind?
4. What should the active participant do first with the instruction from the listening partner?
5. Explain how the technique works, in detail, up to the point covered in this section.
6. What are the two processes involving the mind that make enlightenment most likely?
7. How would you tell a participant to contemplate?
8. If a participant is thinking about who they are, is this the best way of doing the technique?
9. What makes someone have a vested interest in staying identified with certain states of being?
10. What is the difference between a participant being in "fantasy land" and being in reality land"?
11. What is the effect of having a live individual giving the instruction to another, and that instruction being received by the active partner?
12. What is the meaning of "being open" when doing the contemplation in the Enlightenment Intensive technique?
The core of the Enlightenment Intensive is contained in the Enlightenment Technique. Understanding this technique makes it possible to conduct an Enlightenment Intensive properly.
It seemed to me that the age-old technique of reflecting on "Who am I?" was a very good one. But it was slow. I wondered what could be done to speed it up. I had years of experience in working on communication techniques, learning how people could communicate better with each other, especially on a one-to-one basis. For years I had worked with the dyad format and investigated its various aspects and I had made some fundamental observations. I observed that the mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals. That is a core principle. The mind is generated when something is not communicated between individuals. For example, if I say something in this talk and you don't understand it, then we will have contributed to the mind and put more into it because communication will not have successfully taken place. If, on the other hand, you understood it, then we have successfully communicated and it is not stored in the mind. When something is completely received, it leaves the realm of the mind and enters the realm of knowingness. This is another important principle. The Enlightenment Technique is partially built around these observations and fundamental principles.
The mind is filled up because it is a storage of those things which are not understood, integrated, or fully experienced. For example, someone may have been through a trauma in the past in which things were too intense for him and he had stored them in his mind for further integration or for later integration. He integrated part of the experience at the time it occurred. But the part that wasn't understood or wasn't experiencable given his current ability is suspended in the mind. Did you ever have a desk with a "Pending" box on it? Well, that's the mind. You think, "Someday I'm going to work on that stuff." And later you work on some of it and you handle a few of the sheets on the top but then ten more come in and it's just too much to do at one time. You glance at it and you think, "I don't understand that. I'll work on that later." That is what the mind is made up of. It's chock full. Also, you throw outgoing messages into a similar basket marked "Outgoing" but nobody ever comes by to read them. The messenger never comes by to pick them up and deliver them. So other people have not received your messages for them and these also are stored in the mind.
It would be relatively easy to contemplate "Who am I" if one didn't have a mind. But when one tries to contemplate who he is the mind gets in the way because of all these other ideas that are stored there that have to do with who he is. And there might be a lot of ideas about himself that he has not understood, ideas from the social environment which have made him think one way or the other about who he is. There may have also been a lot of things about who he is that he has not been able to get understood by other people. Therefore, in the mind are all kinds of stored ideas, experiences, feelings, traumas, and memories, all about oneself. So one tries to contemplate who it is that he is and gets all these things in the mind instead of who he actually is. That's why it takes years and years of solo contemplation to try to find one's way through the morass of the mind.
If listening to someone tell you who you are did any good we'd all have been enlightened long since. If having data in the mind led to enlightenment, then we would already be enlightened because there's plenty of correct information around about who you are, but it is not a direct experience. It is information from somebody else, which is an indirect experience. Memories, impressions, fear of "What if I were this?" are all stored up in the mind and these impressions in the mind are not enlightenment experiences. They are impressions in the mind.
I once had a participant who, when first asked who he was, pulled out his driver's license and showed it to his partner. This was his identity. People have identified themselves not only with ideas in the mind, but personality traits in the mind. In other words, they're being "nice guys." So there are these various personality traits with which they have identified themselves. They are not those things in fact, but just like an actor playing a role who has forgotten who he is, these people have become identified with personality traits which are contained within the mind. They have forgotten that they are playing a role or personality.
Now, worse than that, they get a vested interest in certain states of being. They have a reputation or they're trying, even more basically, to tell people something by being a certain way. For example, they want to be loved. That's a pretty common trait. And so they be a certain way in order to invite that love; aggressive, passive or neutral, it doesn't matter. The mind can justify how being a certain way will produce whatever they want. So not only have they become unconsciously identified with something, but they often have a vested interest, a use for being a certain way and thinking of themselves as that. And all of this masks who they actually are. It all interferes with the process of contemplation. All this stuff is stored in the mind. Our job is to help them to de-identify, give up their investment and dissolve away or separate out the mind from who they are so that at last they can experience who they are.
In the classical techniques of just contemplating, the aspirant gradually burned out the mind. If you stared at a rock long enough it would dissolve away. It would take staring for a long time, about four hundred billion years or so. Breathing on a rock would gradually wear it down a little faster by wind erosion. Running water would make it go a little faster. Taking a hammer out and smashing it or pouring chemicals on it might dissolve it away in minutes. So there are different rates at which you can dissolve away identifications, confusions, traumas, and vested interests that are contained in the mind that make the mind stick and hold on.
The most powerful means to dissolve the mind is through communication because, as I said earlier, the mind is the suspension of attempted communications which were not fully communicated between individuals.
With this observation and principle what I did was to have people first contemplate who they are and then communicate to a listening partner what occurred in their mind as a result of that contemplation. When the things in the mind are communicated, they dissolve and vanish out of the mind to the degree that they are received and understood by another individual. That is the crux of this principle and the crux of the power of this technique.
I have tested this technique and I have compared it to other methods of enlightenment, and depending upon the skill of the master, the experience of the participants, and the length of time of the Enlightenment Intensive, this technique is about fifty to a hundred times more rapid in producing enlightenment experiences than the classical techniques.
You should try to understand the mechanism by which this technique works. If you don't understand it you'll never be able to really understand why I've set up the technique and the format the way it is. You'll just think it's some arbitrary thing that I thought up and you'll vary it and change it and you'll teach people whom you teach later on in ways based upon what you personally favor and not based upon these fundamental observations of life. You'll decide that it's not such a good technique after all. You'll want to change what you're doing with it. Instead of trying to get people enlightened you'll try to make them feel better or get them high or get them to have some sort of elevated experience or have them get off on the contact with each other or work on straightening out their relationships. All of these are noble and useful ends, but they don't lead to enlightenment.
If you want to work on getting people enlightened, you should understand how this technique works. If you understand how it works, you will not be tempted into the million and one possible variations that could be used instead of this technique. I have trained people in the past to master Enlightenment Intensives and many of them have varied the technique. And the reason why is because they have not understood the mechanism on which the technique is based. So you should learn this well.
First of all, we work with two live individuals who are immediately available to each other during the entire technique. The Zen Buddhists developed a pretty good method because every once and a while you got to go see the Roshi, to find out whether or not you had experienced kensho, or enlightenment. You'd get in line, move your way along to the Roshi's room, and go in and see the Roshi. You'd say something, a word or two, and he'd reach over and grab his bell and ring it, and you'd be dismissed. After you had been turned down a lot you'd quit going in any more. But they realized the value of this contact with the master, so they would have the chief monk, which we call the chief monitor, drag you in. There are stories of people screaming and crying, "I won't go see him! I determined I'd never go again."' But they knew the value of this contact with the master and dragged him in anyway.
Originally, in Soto Zen, they would have the monks face a blank wall because, according to the story, this was the way Boddhidharma did it. But later on in the Rinzai Zen school they turned the monks around. In Soto they were on both sides of the room facing the wall and the Rinzai masters turned them around so they faced each other. Their reason is that it increased the tension. In effect, it increased the contact and built up the energy and accelerated the process. There are those who will argue that the Soto method is better. My observation is that the Rinzai way is better because the monks face each other.
The Rinzai masters did another thing: they used koans, a key question, a riddle, whereas the Soto masters did not. In Rinzai Zen they would contemplate a koan such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" which is a classic koan which many people are familiar with. There are lots of other ones. Another koan that you could use is "Who am I?" That's a riddle. But the Rinzai masters never got as far as moving those two monks a little bit closer to each other so that when one came up with something he would communicate it to the other. Thus enters the Enlightenment Technique.
The Enlightenment Technique adds communication to contemplation. The communication does not begin with the contemplation, it begins with an instruction from one individual to another. I had first thought that it might be possible to just have both people sitting there contemplating and when one came up with something he would say, "Hey, this is what I came up with." But that doesn't follow a good communication cycle because it interrupts the other person's contemplation too irregularly. It's too informal. So we have the communication formally begin with one individual giving an instruction to another. This adds the power and the consciousness and the life of another being. When one says, "Tell me who you are," if the other accepts that instruction as an order from his partner then the two have come together and they are joining forces against the receiver's mind and its confusions, reluctances, identifications, unconsciousness, and investments. The life from both of the conscious entities is added together. No wonder this technique is so powerful. But it is only powerful if the first individual, when he says to his partner, ''Tell me who you are,'' actually wants his partner to tell him who he is, and if the receiver of that instruction accepts that as an order from his partner. This is what gives the power to the technique. So, the giver of the instruction should mean it. Just saying, "Tell me who you are," would not be proper. If people take the attitude, "I got to say this, they told me to say it, but I really don't care who you are. I came here to find out who I am," this is not proper. Such casual attitudes are often common in the first part of an intensive, but as the contact and camaraderie between the individuals begins to grow, the participants become interested in each other. The love and contact and openness among them begins to grow and after a while when they say, "Tell me who you are, they mean it, It is important to allow this contact to build. Even though the participant has been told hundreds of times, "Tell me who you are," and he knows what his partner is going to say, you should not cultivate a casual attitude about that. You should instead teach them to respond to their partner. Their partner has made a request, "Tell me who you are," and their own attitude should be, "OK, I'm going to do that," so that they're working together as a team. This combines the power, the life, and the consciousness of the two partners.
You see, the power of any one individual's mind is equal to that individual's own personal power. This is because subconsciously he is putting his power into his mind, Take the ego for example. The ego is that very deep-seated identification. One thinks of oneself as something and will defend his investment in that thing being who he is. He will justify it and make it be what he is and put his own power and consciousness and life into that state of being. Therefore, it's almost impossible for an individual, by himself, to defeat his own mind because his mind has gotten its power from himself and it's equally as strong as he is. It's equally as conscious and equally in the conflict.
Now that the participant has accepted the instruction from his partner, the contemplation phase begins. I have broken this phase up into various parts so that you can better understand the technique and the mechanisms of contemplation, so that you can properly instruct your participants how to do the technique.
First of all, we always have an object in the Enlightenment Technique. We have an object of enlightenment. One is trying to have an enlightenment experience with regard to something. The ones I have selected are the whoness of an individual, the whatness of an individual, the whatness of life and the whatness of another. There are a lot of things you could work on, but I won't go into that now. What we're going to work on in this example is the whoness of the individual, who it is that he is. This is the object. Now, the partner says, "Tell me who you are." The individual at this point should intend to directly experience who it is that he is. But the problem is that people often don't have that intention. Instead what they do is think about themselves, and they do this by a logical process. In other words, they try to figure out who they are. They don't have their attention on their actual self at all. What they're doing is thinking over some abstract concept of selfness. It's even worse if they're working on life: "Now what could life possibly be? Let me figure this out." And they're not addressing life itself. They're addressing some sort of idea in their mind about life and not life itself. It's like the difference between a volcano enthusiast reading a book on volcanoes or going on a field trip and actually kicking a volcano in the side. When people work on who they are they often think about things like psychological studies on people, and they don't go off on a field trip to actually experience themselves. So they're in academic-land. They're in abstract-land instead of reality-land. They're running around in their minds dealing with ideas about themselves and they're not dealing with themselves.
Unfortunately there is no way to stop people from doing this, at least somewhat. If we could, we would stop them immediately. But people are not capable of this raw experience in the beginning. In fact, they try to directly experience who they are but they can't manage it because the mind gets in the way and comes up with ideas about who they are instead of touching the real thing. So what are you to do? As a master you could make a great mistake by encouraging their activity of thinking about, rather than dealing with, the actual object of enlightenment itself, which is their actual self. A lot of people working in this realm, not understanding the Enlightenment Technique properly, have permitted this sort of thing to go on, or encouraged it. You can't really stop it in the beginning, but you should tell them what you want them to do rather than telling them to do something other than that. In the case of an Enlightenment Intensive, what you want them to do is to intend to directly experience the object itself, and not just think about or deal with thoughts about that object. In this case the object is one's self.
People can't always do it. If they could they would immediately be enlightened on the first shot. Therefore, it's an error to give the instruction, "Directly experience yourself," because they can't do it. If you tell them to do that you are setting them up for a failure. You shouldn't tell a person to do something he can't do. Instead you should say, "Intend to directly experience yourself." That people can do. They can have the intent. They may have difficulty carrying it out because the mind begins to throw up all these ideas about themselves, identifications, confusions, and all these things they've been told. But they can still have the intent. In fact, these things come into their consciousness as a result of this intention to directly experience who they are.
So contemplation, using the Enlightenment Technique, is begun by intending to directly experience the object of enlightenment. There are three things in that statement of contemplation: intending, intending that the experience be direct, and having an object to intend to experience directly. Unfortunately, as I said, most people will have difficulty grasping what you want them to do, so on an Enlightenment Intensive you have to explain to them over and over and over again what it is that they are to do in their contemplation, because the mind keeps trying to do something else, and people unfortunately are identified with the mind. They think that what the mind is doing is what they are doing. So if the mind starts doing something, they start justifying why they are doing it. You have to convince them that they can ignore what the mind is doing and go ahead and intend to directly experience who they are. The mind is doing all these other things, but they should just have the intent. The mind is thinking about it and trying to remember and figure it out and trying to visualize who they are and doing all these different mechanisms that the mind gets into, but they shouldn't invest themselves in these mechanisms of the mind. Later on in the technique they are going to communicate these things to their partner, which will remove them from the mind. But right now we are in the contemplation phase and the way you break this identification between the individual and his mind is by telling him to just be open to whatever may occur. This is the final clincher on the contemplation activity.
Being open means to not have preconceived ideas, to not try to put something there to experience. People have preconceived ideas about who and what they are that come from the mind. They have preconceived ideas about what enlightenment is or supposed to be like. They are always wrong. There may be some element of correctness to their preconceived ideas, but so far as enlightenment is concerned they are wrong because their ideas are ideas and as long as they are ideas, they are not enlightenment. Enlightenment is not an idea; it's a fact of pure consciousness.
In explaining the Enlightenment Technique I've used this term "open" and it's a very primitive word in English. If people don't understand open there's not any word with which you're going to do any better. When I teach yoga I call it surrender, but when I teach enlightenment I call it open. It's the same thing, but I think you'll have more luck with "open." People will sometimes ask you, "What do you mean by 'open'?" I mean just the ordinary, everyday meaning, what everybody knows open means. If they don't know that, there is no amount of words that you are going to do any better with. When you open a door, you open a door; whey you open a can of beer, you open a can of beer. There is nothing hidden or mystical or deep about it, it's just open, in the ordinary sense that they are being open. It's like they leave their field of consciousness open to whatever may occur as the result of having the intention to directly experience the object of their enlightenment.
You see, in the mind itself are all kinds of ideas, one way and the other, and the mind overlaps and sits in the ocean of the field of consciousness. It fills the field of consciousness and overlaps it. When the mind finally becomes empty or at least separated from the field of consciousness, then the enlightenment experience is possible.
As you know, many classical techniques try to empty the mind of its content so that the person can have a deep experience of Truth, and this is correct. The question is how is this mind to be emptied? There are two basic ways to empty it. One is to burn or dissolve away the contents of the mind, and the other is to separate the mind from the field of consciousness so that the mind is over there and the field of consciousness is here. Did you ever notice that you could have one thing in your mind or you could have another thing? The content of the mind can change and what you're doing is taking various parts of the mind and bringing them into the field of consciousness. Now what if you brought a part of the mind that had nothing in it into the field of consciousness? You would have a blank mind. Some people feel that a blank mind is enlightenment, but it is not enlightenment. Many people confuse having the void, or sunyata, or blank part of the mind interpenetrating and overlapping the field of consciousness as the enlightened state. It is not enlightenment. If someone has told you it is, they are simply wrong. Yes, a blank mind filing the field of consciousness sometimes enhances the probability of an enlightenment experience occurring. The chances are greatly increased, more so than if the mind is full of things. When the busy part of the mind is filling the field of consciousness it is difficult to have an enlightenment experience. Therefore many of the Buddhists have practiced contemplating the void in order to try to get a blank mind. This is why they do it, to increase the probability of enlightenment; because, in any reasonable period of time, it is very unlikely that you are going to empty the entire mind of all its content and dissolve it away so that there's nothing left in the mind at all. In a reasonable period of time the only remaining method that you can use to have an enlightenment experience is to take the mind and put it some place else, leaving the field of consciousness empty. So the Buddhists were correct in their approach.
The difference in essence between Buddhism and yoga is this difference. In yoga what you are trying to do is to dissolve the entire mind and its entire content out of existence so that there is no content to the mind at all, anywhere. Yoga is defined as "chitta vritti naroda," which is a state in which the mind no longer has any content. The Buddhist technique is to take all the stuff that's in the mind and put it some place else other than in the field of consciousness so that the field of consciousness is empty. The mind is lurking over in the distance, ready to strike, but in the meanwhile you can have a direct experience of Truth while the content of the mind is literally out of the scene. It is not in the field of consciousness.
So, when one is being open to whatever may occur in the mind, one is not trying to put something there to work with. Being open tends to move the mind away. When something does occur in the mind, then you have the participant communicate that to his partner and when it is understood by his partner that part of the mind which is in the forefront of consciousness will dissolve away because it has been received. Your in-basket has been read. Now you can throw the paper away because the other person understands, he's gotten the message. Since who one is, is constantly being brought to mind by the question itself, that part of the mind having to do with who one is will not move away. Since part of the mind is filled with thoughts of who one is, that part does not separate from the field of consciousness. In this technique it is communicated to the partner, dissolved out of existence, and then that part of the mind is pure and clean. Then, anytime one intends to directly experience who he is, the part of the mind related to who he is comes in and is empty because that's what has been previously brought up and communicated and there isn't anything left to bring up any more. Eventually, it's all communicated out and there isn't anything left in your out basket and you have a blank mind on the subject of who you are. This is not enlightenment. But we've set up the situation in which enlightenment can very likely occur because the mind is blank with regard to who you are. In this situation one can just intend to directly experience who one actually is and the mind is not interposing itself by putting ideas, memories, conclusions, beliefs, traumas and other things into one's consciousness. The only thing left is one's self.
Unfortunately, I've seen people sit for hours in that state and still not directly experience who they are. What is to be done about it? There's almost nothing that can be done. Somewhere along the line they will either experience directly who they are, or they won't. There are factors which affect the probability and I'll talk to you about them another time. But the participant is now in the optimum situation in which if they actually do experience who they are it will be a direct experience because there is no longer any imposition of the mind.
Sometimes perceptual activities will interpose themselves at this point, like feelings and visualizations in the sense of pure light. People will often come up with this at about this stage. They feel that who they are is a bright light. A bright light is not enlightenment. A bright light is a bright light. It's nice that they are experiencing bright lights, but they aren't setting out to get bright light enlightenment, they are setting out to directly experience who they are. When the experience comes, it is self evident, so when people are set into the technique and they are intending to experience who they are directly and finally the mind is gone, you have reached a very nice place. At this point, all you have to do as a master is keep them there and sooner or later they will directly experience who they are.
What is occurring in almost every instance at this point is these people are still trying to see who they are. They think, "Where am I?" About all you can do is try to dissuade them from trying to perceive who they are because they're the perceiver. They are actually identified with the perceiver, the one who perceives things, and so they're trying to see. What you do is to try to get them to give that up and discover that they are the seer. When they discover that they are the seer they will de-identify from the seer and they'll say, "Wait a minute, now I can't even see? You won't let me do that? What have I got left?" They may have physiological troubles at this point; they may have pains or get sick to their stomach, because now the Truth is imminent and intimate, They'll try anything. They are not doing this willfully. This is just the effect of several identifications, core states of being which are now being separated out. And through no mechanism at all, through no process at all, and from having done absolutely nothing, they will become enlightened. In the end, enlightenment is not a willful thing. It is a spontaneous event. You cannot make it happen. All you can do is set up the situation in which the probability is maximized. And the Enlightenment Technique is designed to do that and it does it.
Now the individual has to communicate to his partner what has occurred in his mind as a direct result of his contemplation. In the next talk I'll break that down for you and also discuss the partner's role in that activity so that we complete this discussion on the Enlightenment Technique. There's a lot to understand in what I just got through telling you. You should have it crystal clear in your own mind with a complete understanding of how it works so that you can see why the technique has been set up the way it has. If you don't understand it all, you will not appreciate the great truth and power that is contained in it and you'll be tempted to vary it into something else thinking that one way is as good as the other. You will drift off the technique, as many people have, and the power of it will weaken and weaken and you will end up with some ordinary activity. Therefore, I want to continue explaining this very clearly so that you understand this material and the whys and wherefores of all of it.
Study Questions
1. According to this section, how does the mind come into being?
2. How does identification interfere with enlightenment?
3. What does communicating the contents of the mind do to the mind?
4. What should the active participant do first with the instruction from the listening partner?
5. Explain how the technique works, in detail, up to the point covered in this section.
6. What are the two processes involving the mind that make enlightenment most likely?
7. How would you tell a participant to contemplate?
8. If a participant is thinking about who they are, is this the best way of doing the technique?
9. What makes someone have a vested interest in staying identified with certain states of being?
10. What is the difference between a participant being in "fantasy land" and being in reality land"?
11. What is the effect of having a live individual giving the instruction to another, and that instruction being received by the active partner?
12. What is the meaning of "being open" when doing the contemplation in the Enlightenment Intensive technique?