The Enlightenment Technique, Ch 2; AUDIO

From: The Transmission of Truth; 1981;
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 favour 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 volcanos 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 thev'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 outbasket 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. Some-where 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 wilfully. 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 wilful 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.

The Enlightenment Technique, Part I
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 Enlightenment Technique
In any Enlightenment Intensive only the following exact technique is to be
used:

1.   Position: Two individuals (not involved in trying to straighten out their relationship) both sitting on chairs or on the floor, a distance apart that is mutually acceptable to them.

2.   Instruction: One partner says directly to his partner "Tell me who you are." The only other instructions to be used are, "Tell me what you are," "Tell me what life is," "Tell me what another is." Only the "Tell me" form is to be used.

3.   Reception: He, the one who has just listened to the instruction, accepts the instruction from his partner.

4.   Contemplation: Having accepted the instruction, the contemplator sets out or intends to directly experience, in this case, who he is. He is to be open to a direct experience of who he is, while keeping his intention to directly experience himself. If he is not able to contemplate, lesser forms of meditation are temporarily accepted by the master. It is then the master's job to gradually teach and encourage the person to contemplate.

5.   Communication: He, the contemplator, is to communicate to his partner as well as he can whatever occurs in his consciousness as a direct result of contemplating. He must use words plus any other method to communicate.

6.   Listening: His partner is to watch, listen and understand as well as he can.
He should say nothing, and should not nod, smile or evaluate his partner in any way.

7.   The contemplating partner is to repeat steps four and five on his own, keeping
a rough balance between time spent contemplating and communicating, until the
five minute gong sounds.

8.   Acknowledgment: The listening partner then says to his partner, the contemplator, "Thank you," or any other words that convey the same meaning as thank you, without putting a value judgment out, so that his partner is acknowledged for his response to the original instruction, two above.

9.   The roles reverse. The former contemplator says to his partner, "Tell me who you are." Steps three to eight are repeated.

All errors consist of varying the technique, either by leaving out a step, doing it only partially, or doing something else instead. Help the participant to do the technique as well as he can and accept that; do not insist on perfection to start with; gradually work with him toward that.

From: The Transmission of Truth; 1981
The Enlightenment Technique
Part II

The Enlightenment Technique is remarkably effective if followed by a participant on an Enlightenment Intensive. But that's a big if, It is my experience that if a participant will do the Enlightenment Technique, within a day and a half he will always have an enlightenment experience, It seems impos_sible to avoid. So, what happens instead is that people don't do the technique or they do it in a very thin manner. Even if it's only pretty well done three-quarters of the time, it will still produce an enlightenment experience in about a day and a half. The problem is getting the person to do it, and in this you will encounter two difficulties. One is their understanding of what it is that they are to do, and the other is the mental, emotional and physical barriers that arise when they try to do the technique. Your job is first to make clear to the parti_cipants what the technique is, and second, to give them the support to get through the barriers that arise, Therefore, you must understand very, very clearly not only what the technique is, but why it is that way.

Earlier we were discussing the subject of being open and what occurs subjectively when one is being open to whatever may occur in one's consciousness as a result of intending to directly experience the object of enlightenment. This includes being open to having a direct experience. The participant should be intending to have a direct experience. Without that intent there's no openness; without the openness you don't really have the intent. And this gets us to the point of dis_cussing what intent means.

We intend to move to St. Helena. We're not hoping; we are going to go there. So, intent and hope are not synonymous at all, Intent is even more than expectation. In just plain En_glish, you're going to do it. Intent is more than just a wish: "Gee, I wish I were in St. Helena. I wish I could go to St. He_lena." That's not going to do it. Intent has commitment involved in it. Your ego is often hesitant to make a commitment because you might fail. This is where the difficulty lies in getting people to intend to directly experience the object of enlighten_ment: they often fall short, In fact, almost all the time they're going to fall short and they might fall short the entire intensive. And people don't like to fail. They don't like to come up empty-handed. So they say, "Well, I'm just going to sit here. Maybe something will happen, maybe it won't, and then they're covered, they won't really have failed because they won't really have in-tended. There's a certain virtue to that approach to things, but in a wilful technique you use your will. This is a wilful tech_nique except for the conclusion which is the enlightenment exper_ience itself.

The next question is, what is one going to intend to do? The crux of the matter is in two words: direct, and the object of their enlightenment. Direct and object are the key words. What does direct mean? There's no way to explain it, You could hit around the edges, but in the end you're going to have to be satis_fied with a primitive idea of the word direct. It's not that in_direct a word. You can define it negatively by saying that it is through no process or means or via. Then the participant will very often think and say' "Well, then how do you do it directly?" There is no how involved. They say, "Well, then what do I do?" Your response is, "You intend, that's what you do. You intend to di_rectly experience the object of your enlightenment." If they come back to you and say, "Now look, the word 'direct' as you have ex_plained it, and the word 'experience' are mutually contradictory because experience involves process, which is indirect." You say, "Yes, that's correct." But what else are we going to do in the English language? We're using the word 'direct' to modify the word 'experience,' to say that what we mean by direct experience is whatever the essence of experience is that excludes process. And they are to intend to directly experience whatever the object of their enlightenment is. We've already discussed that what the object actually is is different from the idea of the object.

Then what is the participant's job? In the technique it is to remain open to whatever may occur in his consciousness as a result of having the intention to directly experience the ob_ject of his enlightenment. That's a mouthful of words, but it's a rigorous description of what they have to do. They are not to just remain open to whatever may occur in their consciousness. You have to get this clear with the participants, otherwise they're just going to sit there and be open. At the same time, if you intend to go to St. Helena, you don't have to keep con_stantly thinking the thought in order to still have the inten_tion. You don't have to think, "I intend to go, I intend to go, I intend to go..." You just say, "Well, I'm going. That's it. That applies from now on. That's my intent." You don't have to keep running the thought through your brain. So if one intends to directly experience the object of his enlighten_ment, one simply means it. This is what an intent is: you mean it. Then you remain open to whatever may occur in your consciousness as a result of that intention. You don't have to keep thinking the thought of the intent: the intent is opera_tional.

We've already discussed what open means: not having pre_conceived ideas, and not trying or intending to make it come out a certain way. And yet people do have all kinds of preconceived ideas about what enlightenment is and what a direct experience would be, and who it is that they are. Now, when something does occur in their consciousness that is a result of having the in_tent, they should communicate this as well as they can to their partner. Here is where the power of this particular technique takes over. We've been talking for a long time about just getting up to this point, and now we come to power time. Because up to this point the technique is really not much different from any good Zen master's instruction. But at this point the individual is to communicate what has occurred in his consciousness as a result of his intention. Other things that occur in his con_sciousness are best ignored, but one shouldn't wrestle with them mentally either, like trying to clear them out of the mind or
look them over or think about them. Those things that show up that are not a result of the intent should be ignored. The participants should ignore them as well as they can.

Ignoring is a very powerful technique. When you don't add your energy or your life to something it tends to wither, or at least wander away. It is not possible for a participant on an Enlightenment Intensive to deal with everything in the mind. To deal with everything in the mind you've got yourself a ten to twelve year project, working eight to ten hours a day. Working eighteen hours a day on an Enlightenment Intensive is not going to compensate for that, in a three day period. Therefore, one should ignore those things that are not cogent to.the exact intent one has in the
Enlightenment Technique.

The standard to use by which to discriminate what is cogent and what is not is this: if, to the participant himself, something has come up as a result of his intention, then that is what he should communicate. But if, to him, something has not come up as a result of his intention, or if he doesn't see any connection between what has occurred and his contemplation, then he should ignore it. This is how to handle the communication aspect of this technique, and this is how you should explain it to the participants. It is a subjective judgment on the part of the participant whether or not to communicate something, and that judgment should be based on whether or not the participant feels that something has occurred as a result of his intention to directly experience the object of his enlightenment. The participants are not to communicate whatever occurs. They are to communicate only that which occurs as a direct result of their intention.

You should explain this to the participants and see how well they do with it. If someone is taking advantage of what you've said to just chit-chat, stop him. Become his subjective judgment for him, and intervene. If you need to, sit down next to him and, whenever he says something, inquire if it's directly connected to his intention to~directly experience the object of his enlightenment. Have him explain the connection. He'll be cured in ten minutes or so.

At the start of the intensive, for the first few hours, people tend to either talk and talk or sit there and not say much. You should let that occur. As soon as possible, however, you should instil in the participants the power of discrimination between what is cogent to communicate and what isn't, and simultaneously encourage them to communicate to their partners those things which they feel are cogent. The rest of what occurs, which the participant feels is not cogent, should be ignored.

We can't set down firm guidelines for what to communicate. The only guideline is, "Do you see any direct connection to your contemplation, or not?" On an Enlightenment Intensive, it is better to give people the benefit of the doubt and guide their consciousness to following the general guideline I have given you. That will leave room for error but the trend will be in the right direction, and that is better than having to spend the entire time learning and applying rules. Errors are not so bad unless they are consistent. When they are consistent, step in and make the correction.

Another aspect of the communication part of the Enlightenment Technique, which you should make clear to the participants, is this: when a participant communicates something to his partner, he should be trying to get the partner to understand what he has to communicate, rather than just saying the thought out loud. If you as a participant say, "Who I am is a computer analyst," and you see a blank stare on your partner's face, then you can tell he doesn't understand what a computer analyst is. He may think it's a new kind of psychiatrist who does his psycho_analytical work by using computers. As a master you should clarify to the participants that they are to try to get their partner to grasp or have an understanding of what has been said. You notice I use the word 'try.' It is not always possible to achieve an understanding. So every word of this Enlightenment Technique is carefully chosen: they should try to get their partner to understand. After reasonable efforts of trying -I know that's a vague phrase, but it is the best we can use -after reasonable efforts of trying, if an understanding is not being reached, they can abandon trying to get that particular communication across. The reason you should not go for complete understanding is that it is not necessarily possible. If it is not, they should abandon trying to get that communication across. Or, you could step in as the master and say, "Explain that to me." It might take ten seconds for you to understand it. Most of the time just have them go on to other things. But they should try and make a reasonable effort to be understood. One of the most serious problems in communication is people skipping over things that are obvious, things that they just don't say or don't want to say. There could be a variety of reasons why they won't say it: they want to protect their image, they're embarrassed, or they think that it's not permissible to discuss certain things in a group situation like this, especially about sex. "I know who I really am. I'm a rapist. In my heart I'm a rapist. I never let it out, but I'm a rapist," They're afraid to say something like that, You have to invite them to say these things. You have to create an atmosphere in which it is all right to say these things and confess the things that they usually don't say about themselves and who they are. There are a variety of ways to do this. One is to invite them by saying, "It's OK. This is the place. In order to really make progress this is a necessity, so we all do it," and that kind of thing. But the most important thing of all is to create a safe situation in which it's actually all right to say these things. You create this by not having a consequence put on them when they do say something. And if they see that some time has gone by and no matter what they've said so far, no consequence has been put on it, then they'll risk the heavy ones.

The main person who puts consequences on communications is the partner. This is so important that it is a major error if you permit trip-laying to occur. Trip-laying is one of the most serious things that can creep into an Enlightenment Intensive. It's serious because it happens often and it's easy. There are lots of ways it could happen. For example, a person finally says, "Yes, I know who I am, I'm an angel." And his partner says, "Hah, if you're an angel, I'm Saint Peter himself." About three-quarters of the people will resign from the human race, or the race of angels, at that point. They'll say, "OK, that's it. I'm saying nothing about anything that's close to my heart." And they close down. If someone telling someone else who they are and who they're not helped enlightenment, we'd all have been enlightened eons ago. The enlightenment experience is a direct experience, and it does not come from another person. It comes from one's own internal openness to the truth of the matter, and not from someone else imposing an idea or an image, a foreign evaluation or a trip, from the outside. As a master, do not permit triplaying. Stop it instantly: firmly and nicely, but instantly. Stop any evaluation or judgment which occurs verbally or through gestures or facial expressions about the person's communications. Ridicule is the worst, And one very subtle thing you have to watch that partners will do, and this is probably the greatest weakness in the whole enlightenment format, is that when it comes their turn to talk they talk about what the other per_son just got through saying. For example, they'll say, "Well, I think you're on the right track." So you have to work with the partner to get them to not judge or lay a trip.

Your greatest problem here as a master will be to listen, through your monitors and through your own ears, to what the listening partners are saying, especially when it's their turn to speak because then you have to actually hear it. It's easy to tell when they've spoken out of turn, When you see any lip move at all on that whole line of listening partners - whomp! -you're right there correcting it. Your attention has to be on all those people. Your monitors are involved in individual situations, but you've got to have your attention on the whole crowd. I have my psychic ear so attuned, backed up with my physical ear and my eyeball that I'm in touch with every one of those people and if they say something - "whoom!" - I snap my fingers and call my monitor over and say, "So and so is talking out of turn." Your monitors have to work very hard to see to it that the partners do not speak out of turn, es_pecially during the opening two or three periods.

The whole thing that goofs up ordinary communications between people is judging and interrupting. Especially be_tween husband and wife. Even the judgment could be put up with if they didn't interrupt each other when they were trying to say something. There's one simple principle: don't inter_rupt. Take turns. You talk for five minutes, I'll talk for five minutes. If a husband and wife just did that and still laid trips on each other they'd still make it through. So partici_pants should not speak when it's not their turn and when it is their turn to speak, they should be speaking about and dealing with their own situation, the things that have come up in their consciousness as a result of their contemplation. It's often easy to detect when they are not doing this because when the changeover comes they start talking immediately. There's no period of contemplation that takes place first. Sometimes you can go in and query them, "I notice you're talking immediately. Are you having the intent and doing your contemplation?" "Well, I was thinking while the other person was talking." "You're supposed to be listening while the other person is talking. Even if something comes up while you're the listener, you should still contemplate only when it's your turn," The one way to tell whe_ther they're judging or not is that they don't have anything to say about what their partner said. If they're not judging, then when it comes their turn they just contemplate, and there's no judgment. But when you see someone laying a trip or speaking without contemplating, check into it and correct it if necessary.

The role of the listening partner is to listen and under_stand as well as he can. There's no guarantee that they're going to be able to understand everything. But they should try to understand as well as they can, and to say nothing. The only thing they say is the instruction and "Thank you," when the moni_tor says "Thank your partner."

Watch gestures and facial expressions. Some people get really good at it. These can be even more evaluative because gestures are powerfully received. On the other hand you may get the automaton type with the unblinking, straight-faced robot ef_fect, You'll see the active partner lean over and snap his fin_gers in front of his partner's face and say, "Hey, Harry, you there?" As a listening partner you just sit there and listen, that's all, Try to understand what your partner is saying. You can laugh if your partner says something that's funny, but not unless your partner is laughing first, because some people are so weak that if their listening partner starts to laugh first, they'll start to laugh too but they really feel ridiculed. So it should be something that's actually funny and if they're laughing about it, that's OK, You don't want to stop that kind of stuff. Sometimes I've seen them fall right off their stools, because some things are just so hysterical. Permit that kind of thing. Be very liberal at that point. But if you see them express judgment, you be right there to stop it.

People will fall short of doing the technique perfectly. If you ask them on the opening gun to do it precisely as I've set it forth here you will have almost one hundred percent failure, They can't do it. You have to keep reminding them, instructing them, see where they're failing the most and correct that part and take what you can get. It's like a corralling job. You have your ponies, and your monitors and you are grad_ually corralling them down through this chute. And they'll bounce this way and they'll run off that way and somebody will go that way and a whole crowd will go with them because they heard them doing it that way, and you send out your sideman and he corrals them back and gradually, little by little, you get them through this chute of doing the technique. Some of them will still be lagging and not doing it too well by the end of the intensive But the technique is self-correcting and this is one of its greatest virtues. It tends to reinforce them when they do it according to the way you tell them. They think, "Ah-ha, hey, hey, that's what you want - that makes sense, that's what I'll do." If it wasn't for that I think I'd have abandoned this whole thing. But you know you're onto something when you have a self-reinforcing phenomenon taking place; when you have something that's operational, that can be used by people and that's somehow based on truth. When a technique is self-rein_forcing and feeds back into itself, then when they do that tech_nique even close to the right way they go, "Ah, yes, results, progress, I'm getting somewhere, it feels right in my guts," and so they're encouraged to do it more that way, As time goes on their experience gradually grows, they're brought closer and closer to the technique as I've given it to you.

Say somebody has just been thinking about who he is and has not been dealing with himself at all. And yet you've told him to intend to directly experience himself. And you've said, "Not an idea about yourself, but the real self." Well, he heard that and sometime on the first day he discovers, "Hey, I'm just dealing with ideas about myself. What about the real me?" And this will touch his internal sense of Truth. He will finally hear what you said twelve hours before. And the clever ones will say, "Why didn't you tell me in the first place?" knowing that you did. They know it was their own difficulties and technique errors that were in the way. And the ones not so kind don't put it that way, but you don't care as long as they're learning to do the technique correctly.

If you wanted, you could just type up the technique on a card and give it to them and gradually let them learn it for themselves, and after five or ten intensives they would begin to catch on to it. You can do that if you want to, but I think it behoves you to take considerable time and effort to explain it, especially as their experience grows. A very good time to ex_plain the technique is in the five minute break before they resume. You can take each five minute period before they're ready to begin again and you explain to them another aspect or facet of the technique. Slowly, it begins to soak in, hour by hour, day by day.

One thing I haven't discussed here is why the interval of contemplation and communication is the way it is. On the first intensive I did not have the five minute change-over. I let them talk until they were finished and they say "OK" and they would change over at that point. I found that some people were not very considerate of other people, and during one sitting one partner might talk 95% of the time and the other would talk 5% of the time. It just wasn't fair, so that is one reason. Another reason is that the people got so deeply involved that they got in over their head. They would get so deeply into the depths of their mind and into emotional states that they would get lost and swept away. They'd be crying and kicking the floor and they'd lose all sense of the world. This has some virtues for certain purposes, but what it does is tend to exclude a large part of society from being able to participate in Enlightenment Intensives because it gets too heavy too quickly for them. When the period goes on too long people get emotionally overwrought. They get into the subconscious too deeply and they lose touch with the environment and they flip out. They get hysterical, go unconscious or doze off. Some people can dope off in ten seconds but for most people it takes more than five minutes. And the reason for doping off, getting sleepy, heavy-headed or spaced out is that the flow is going in one direction for too long. What you have to do is reverse the flow. You have them change roles and that snaps them out of the state. Some people will complain, "I was just getting going and I got cut off with that gong. I was just getting rolling." Yes, perhaps there is a liability to this arbitrary gong firing off, but the other liabilities are much greater. And besides, when they talk about just getting into it, what that means is that they were sinking deeply into their mind and their emotional traumas and those were starting to take over. What happens then is that they lose their orientation toward enlightenment and get caught up in phenomena and dramatizing. That's all right for Primal Therapy, Spiritual Emotional Release, and that sort of thing, but that's not what we're trying to do on an Enlightenment Intensive. Here we're trying to get people enlightened.

By watching empirically in actual sessions, and trying various lengths of time, I have found that four minutes and thirty-seven and a half seconds is the optimum length of time. They'll start to double-cycle on you at that point. In other words, they will do a contemplation and communicate what comes up, and this, on the average, comes out to take a little over four and a half minutes. Past that point they go into it again and they start over again. So the average cycle comes out to between four and a half and five minutes. And the average that I worked out was about four minutes and forty seconds, There's an advantage to not making it a full five minutes because of that reason, and also because it gives you a little extra time to make up for any sloppiness of your following the schedule, We'll talk about schedule problems later.

If you make it shorter than that period of time they don't have a chance to get enough into their contemplation or to com_municate to their partner. Some people will talk all the time. Other people will contemplate all the time, Neither is correct. Over the long run they should come out to be approximately even, talking approximately half the time and contemplating half the time. In any one five minute period there may be more talk be_cause they didn't get a chance to finish communicating what occurred in their last five minutes. Or they may contemplate the whole time. But over the long run the times should average out to roughly half and half, Watch them and see whether they're doing it that way or whether they talk or contemplate all the time.

At first they tend to talk a lot. They've got a lot of ready made answers about who they are and preconceived ideas about who they are, and they're not really experiencing much of anything and their contemplation is weak. All right, let them run off at the mouth for a while. But by eleven o'clock on the first morn_ing, start to turn the screws on them and tighten up how they're doing the technique. By that time you can tell who the talkers are. They almost never contemplate, and they'll defend them_selves gloriously by saying, "Well, I know what I want to say, I've been thinking during the whole time my partner's been talking," or "I think as I go," There are people who think as they go and there is a certain virtue to this, but somewhere along the line they've got to get over thinking and start to intend to directly experience their object and be open to whatever may occur. At some point you've got to cut these people off. Yes, let them go through their think, think, reasoning process, but somewhere along the line cut it off, I've seen people talk their way from one end of an intensive to the other, And if they ever do have an enlightenment experience, it's very shallow, Your job is to watch these people, When I say "you" I'm talking to you as master and that includes all your monitors, They are extensions of you. But that five minute period is a good one, I have experimented with shorter times. longer times, ten minutes, seven minutes, three minutes, two minutes. Between four and a half to five minutes is right.

The technique as I have given it here is polished and proven. One of its greatest virtues is that it tends to be self-correcting. If you were to set two people down with the intention to get enlightened, by the time three or four months had gone by, they would end up, if they were sincere and intel_ligent people, with the same technique. In fact, that's how this technique in its final form came about: although the basic concept came in a flash, the final form came out empiri_cally, from working with hundreds of people for hundreds of thousands of hours. From 1968 to 1978 I spent about a tenth of my life on Enlightenment Intensives, about one full year, and I analyzed the technique and broke it down, piece by piece, inch by inch. What I've given you is the technique that came out of those experiences and the core of this whole course is contained in that technique. The rest of the course is built around that core, and is necessary, but without understanding the core, the Enlightenment Technique, you will not really be able to follow the rest of the course. For example, when we talk about how to do interviews you should understand the technique rigorously because interviews are primarily based on the technique. Giving talks to your people is primarily based on the technique and explaining it to them. About the only other thing you have to do is to be a master If you understand the technique inside and out, the rest of it, in_cluding being a master, will tend to fall in line after a while.

So understand this technique, and during the question and answer periods that we have in the course have your questions ready so that if you need any clarification on this technique you get that clarification. Every part of this technique has sound reasons behind it as well as years and years of experience, so if you have any doubt or confusion, get it clarified, Study the technique, write it out, go over it, and memorize it word for word. Then do whatever you have to do to understand it com_pletely.

The Enlightenment Technique, Part II
Study Questions

1.   What are the two main difficulties that keep a participant from doing the technique?

2.   How does a master get a participant through his difficulties in doing the technique?

3.   What is the relationship between being open and intending to have a direct experience?

4.   What does intent mean?

5.   Why do people find it difficult to consciously intend or to have the intention?

6.   What is the participant to intend to do when doing the En_lightenment Technique?

7.   What does "direct experience" mean? Why are the two words contradictory?

8.   What is the next step in the technique after the participant has intended to directly experience the object of his en_lightenment?

9,   What are the main things people have preconceived ideas about in an Enlightenment Intensive?

10,   What is the factor that provides the power of the enlighten_ment technique?

11.   In this technique, what things should be communicated and what things should not be communicated?

12.   What should the participant do with things that come up in his mind that are not a result of his contemplation?

13.   What does one do as the listening partner?

14.   How is the technique self-reinforcing?

15,   Why is the standard period of the Enlightenment Exercise five minutes (or four minutes and forty seconds) in dura_tion and not longer or shorter than that?

16.   Why is allowing trip-laying a major error?