What Am I Looking At?

I never did find a definition I liked, for "enlightenment"

A plant in a glass globe

Writing about the spiritual is, by its nature, elusive. Often I wonder if there is any point to doing so. Today it seems worth trying again.

There are many writers who seem more interested in teaching and making active recommendations about spiritual practice than I am. I can’t say I fully trust any of the spiritual teachers I’ve encountered. I am not sure what it would take for me to start trusting one teacher enough to publicly endorse them and accept their teachings without reserve. There are some, I think, who are more trustworthy, but at the same time, no one’s teaching is perfect for everyone. As a corollary, I don’t expect anyone to trust me particularly when I write about this subject.

With that said, I try to be trustworthy anyway. There is no area of human endeavor where it’s more important to be rigorous and honorable than this one.

I recently read a piece by Sasha Chapin titled, “My mind transformed completely, and there were some tradeoffs,” in which Sasha talks about downsides of the cognitive shifts he has experienced. It’s extremely rare for spiritual practitioners to do this; I read such reports with interest and I think Sasha’s is good. It made me think of my absolute favorite example of the genre, which was written by the famous meditation teacher John Yates, also known as Culadasa. Before Culadasa passed away in 2021, he was embroiled in a scandal, and soon before his death, he released a 33-page letter about it (you can read the PDF here).

When people become famous spiritual teachers or psychologists, they typically attempt to distill and teach methods based on their own practices. Culadasa was one such. His book The Mind Illuminated influenced the meditation practices of millions, including me. This is definitionally an attempt to shape ourselves while following in these people’s footsteps; there can be transmission in any medium, but instructing others in a daily practice is an especially powerful method. Thus, when famous teachers have scandals — and almost all of them do, eventually — I always wonder whether it’s possible to identify aspects of their methods that contributed to the personality involved in the scandal. The awesome thing about Culadasa’s post-scandal letter is that he directly addresses this question.

I’ve spoken to several people who have their own interpretations of Culadasa’s letter. One teacher in my local community expressed strong distaste, as he perceives the letter to be self-congratulatory. In the letter, Culadasa explains that a major aspect of how he ended up in the scandal was by over-focusing on the present moment — which is, in a sense, precisely what his method was intended to teach, much like others in the “be here now” schools of spirituality that seem most common around the world of “alt spirituality” nowadays. Therefore, Culadasa’s admission of fault can come off as a backhanded, bombastic claim that he “got in trouble by being too enlightened,” i.e., secretly self-congratulatory. But that isn’t how I read it. Maybe that’s because, by the time I read Culadasa’s letter, I was already wondering whether the ideal of the “present moment” is the best way to relentlessly focus attention in the first place.

“Enlightenment” is not a clearly-defined term. As one rappels deeper and deeper into the spiritual rabbit hole, one soon realizes that different schools of thought have rather different definitions of the concept. As a fairly innocuous example, some schools insist that losing one’s inner monologue is a prerequisite, and others don’t. (A friend of mine once commented, “it’s amazing how many [spiritual teachers] will say that other teachers aren’t truly enlightened. You could draw an incredible graph of how everyone thinks everyone else isn’t enlightened.”) Additionally, in reading stories of people who claim enlightenment, one finds examples of people who did it counter to the expectations of their own schools; so even if a student joins a school and adheres to the school’s definition of enlightenment, the definition may not be consistent within the school.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being more present, generally, especially when you consider where most people in our society are starting from. But can serious tradeoffs occur when someone goes hard in that direction, as Culadasa believed? Even worse, there is no counterfactual for a given teacher: How would we learn what Culadasa would have been like if he’d studied a different style? So how might we approach figuring this out? Sasha and others in my local community, like the lovely Kati Devaney, are interested in studying this sort of thing using scientific tools. Maybe eventually these studies will give us finer-grained answers to these questions. In the meantime, I’ll take Culadasa’s word for it.

How much does any of this matter? It might depend on whether enlightenment is the (or a) goal for spiritual practice. Should it be? I remember that I had a list of goals in 2016. Enlightenment was on that list, but I haven’t gone back to the list in a few years. I never did find a clearly articulated definition I liked. In the meantime, I’ve met with teachers in a few traditions and learned about milestones from them, and I’ve achieved milestones that mattered to me, some of which weren’t on my original list.

I think I have something to say here, and yet it is increasingly rare that I try to say it directly, increasingly common that I seek to start from standpoints that aren’t mine. I find myself using metaphors so simple that I would have been embarrassed to use them in my twenties: Polarity, polarization, echoes, shadows; sources of light. I find myself with a felt sense of different religious traditions: The flicker in the chalice of Unitarian Universalism, the clean clear candle-flame of Catholicism. All of these are magical frameworks created in service of the Divine, reifying an ideal of the world through their rituals, shaping their adherents as the adherents channel them.

As a single mother with a very small child, in the last three years I’ve spent a lot of time at home. These years have not been spent in silent meditation, or anything like that, but in unbelievably intimate contact with my son; many of my hours are consumed with practical logistics. Throughout, I’ve spent a lot of energy creating a home that feels comfortable, functional, and also beautiful. I would never have deliberately set up my life to be the way it is now. I have never had a more humbling or demanding experience than becoming a single mother. I can’t say it’s been easy or fun. I am unfathomably grateful.

What am I doing, day by day? I pray intermittently, at home, but I also spend a lot of time not praying: Just trying to see.

What am I looking at?

Another post I recently saw here on Substack was Jane Psmith’s review of Alexander Langlands’ Cræft. “We can say,” writes Psmith, “that Old English cræft broadly means something like ‘a person’s ability to bring his will to bear on the world, and his skill in doing so.’ There’s one more meaning, though… cræft as spiritual or mental excellence…. Cræft as virtue is not an internal moral condition, it’s an internal activity, a kind of doing or making of the soul.”

If I were to direct you to one teacher of spirituality and witchcraft, I would direct you to Thorn Coyle, who has had zero scandals as far as I know, which is impressive if only by comparison to other spiritual teachers. If I were to direct you to a definition of the word “magic,” there is one cited in David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous and other works, its originator unknown: “The ability or power to alter one's consciousness at will.” Over a century ago there was another writer, Éliphas Lévi, and while I have not read his books, I have seen several of his paragraphs cited repeatedly: “There are four indispensable conditions: An intelligence illuminated by study, an intrepidity that nothing can check, a will that cannot be broken, and a prudence that nothing can corrupt and nothing intoxicate.” Or, as Lévi shortens it, the task is this: “To know, to will, to dare, and to be silent.”

I’ve never had plants before. A friend helped me get some cuttings. Some of the cuttings came in a glass jar, where they tangled and grew around each other. Meanwhile, there’s a vertical strip of wall in my home, upon which now hang several glass globes. One day I disentangled some cuttings and put them in the globes. The cuttings, separated from their original tangle, have unusual shapes, very different from how they would have grown if they’d never spent time together in the jar.

You come to where you are with some idea of what you want, but that idea, inevitably, like everything else about you, is shaped by where you were before.

It takes a lot of practice, I suspect, to see more of what is and can be.

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I posted a couple larger pictures of the plants on Instagram and on Twitter/X.