What I think
A fun read about an enlightened man (Jed) going about his days and reacting to the various people around him. It’s probably easier to digest if you’ve gone a bit deeper with mindfulness.
Self-destruction books are far more useful than self-help, and this is one of my favorites.
My biggest aha from reading Jed McKenna is that you can’t aim at the state you want to arrive at directly.
That’s probably why it always feels weird when people ask me for advice. I know deep down I don’t have anything to offer. Real advice to anyone would be: go do stuff and find out. Or get lost and then see where you go. And so on. But we distract ourselves with easier-to-follow instructions. The best thing I did was stop doing everything in my life, and that’s when things started to make sense.
The real challenge with this is that you can make actual improvements in your life by “doing,” but I do wonder if there’s always a hidden cost to that mode of being. On my current path, I feel like I have an invisible governor slowing me down sometimes. It’s hard to know if I should try to override this and “push” harder or just keep coasting along.
What the book is about
Jed McKenna is a spiritual teacher who claims to be enlightened and has no interest in sounding spiritual. The book follows him through ordinary days with the students around him, answering their questions bluntly. His method is simple and relentless: keep asking what’s true, write it out, and cut away everything that isn’t.
Highlights
Nothing is wrong
The truth, though, is that nothing is really wrong. Nothing is ever wrong and nothing can be wrong. It’s not even wrong to believe that something is wrong. Wrong is simply not possible.
To the awakened mind the end of the world is no more or less momentous than the snapping of a twig.
The enlightened cannot conceive of anything as being wrong, so they don’t struggle to make things right.
I think of belief and faith as being ways of dealing with things you can’t know for sure, and I am not involved in not knowing for sure. Homey don’t play dat. I don’t have any gaps I need filled.
The pull of the group
The first thing we want to do when we begin our journey is find the companionship and validity that comes with an established group, and in so doing we effectively end the journey before it begins.
my take
The desire to “find the others” is vital. You do need people to support you on a new path. But if we mistake belonging for arrival, we risk getting stuck before we get started.
there’s really only one real cult—the Cult of False Self—and everyone is a fanatically devoted member.
That’s what a society really is, a little band of humanity huddled together against the specter of a pitch black sea. Everyone is treading water to keep their heads above the surface even though they have no reason to believe that the life they’re preserving is better than the alternative they’re avoiding. It’s just that one is known and one is not.
Imagine you’re in the audience watching a play, and you slowly come to realize that the actors don’t know they’re actors. They think that they’re normal people going about their normal lives, unaware that they’re on a stage, performing.
Ask what’s true, and write it out
Here’s all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know.
Just try to say something true and keep at it until you do. Write and rewrite. Make it cleaner and cut out the excess and ego and follow it wherever it leads until you’re done.
Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin’ match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can’t do that while it’s still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent.
You can’t become something by imitating it
Non-attachment isn’t a key to liberation, it’s a by-product.
It’s the belief that if you want to be Christ-like, then you should act more like Christ—as if the way to become something is by imitating it. If you want to be an enlightened person, the thinking goes, you should act like an enlightened person. Utter nonsense, of course, but widely accepted.
The very act of fighting for liberation had imprisoned me.
If you’re not amazed by how naïve you were yesterday, you’re standing still. If you’re not terrified of the next step, your eyes are closed.
Letting the world take care of itself
Basically, the act of faith in something other than self allows you to release the tiller—to surrender.
A poem by Ryokan comes to mind: Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
I play video games, read books, watch movies. I’d say I probably blow several hours a day that way, but I don’t see it as a waste because I don’t have anything better to spend my time on. I couldn’t put it to better use because I’m not trying to become something or accomplish anything.
Words are a lousy means of communication, brains are no place for serious thinking, and indescribable experiences are silly things to try to describe.