Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha ENLIGHTENMENT

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

30.MODELS OF THE STAGES OF ENLIGHTENMENT 

Before I discuss the various models, I should begin by saying that
this is almost certainly the most easily misconstrued chapter in this
book. Further, if you are a big fan of standard Buddhist dogma, I
strongly recommend that you stop reading this chapter now and skip to
the conclusion of this book. Seriously, I’m about to get quite irreverent
again, but in that irreverence are bits of wisdom that are hard to find so
explicitly stated elsewhere, so dismiss this chapter at your peril.
The temptation when thinking about enlightenment is to come up
with something defined that you can imagine, such as a state or quality
of being, and then fixate on that ideal rather than doing the practices
that lead to freedom. It is absolutely guaranteed that anything you can
imagine or define as being enlightenment is a limited and incorrect view,
but these views are extremely tempting just the same and generally
continue to be very seductive even through the middle stages of
enlightenment. Every possible description of the potential effects of
realization is likely to feed into this unfortunate tendency.
Thus, my distinct preference when practicing is to assume that
enlightenment is completely impractical, produces no definable
changes, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the scopes of the other
trainings. This means that I take it as a working hypothesis that it will
not make me a better person in any way, create any beneficial mental
qualities, produce any states of happiness or peace, and provide no
additional clarity into any of the issues surrounding how to live my
ordinary life. I have experimented with adopting other views and found
that they nearly always get in the way of my insight practices.
A view so easily becomes sacred, and thus the temptation is to not
investigate the sensations that make up thoughts about that view, but
rather to imitate the ideal expressed in the content of that view. This can
seem like practice in fundamental insight, but it is not. I realize that I am
not doing a good job of advertising enlightenment here, particularly
following my descriptions of the Dark Night. Good point. My thesis is
that those who must find it will, regardless of how it is advertised. As to
the rest, well, what can be said? Am I doing a disservice by not selling it
like nearly everyone else does? I don’t think so. If you want grand
advertisements for enlightenment, there is a great stinking mountain of it

there for you partake of, so I hardly think that my bringing it down to
earth is going to cause some harmful deficiency of glitz in the great
spiritual marketplace.

Bill Hamilton had a lot of great one-liners, but my favorite
concerned insight practices and their fruits, of which he said, “Highly
recommended, can’t tell you why.” That is probably the safest and most
accurate advertisement for enlightenment that I have ever heard. There
was a famous old dead enlightened guy (whose name ironically eludes
me at the moment), who was known to have said, “I have gained
absolutely nothing through complete and unexcelled enlightenment.” A
friend of mine thinks it was the Buddha, and it may have been.
Regardless, it is traditional to advertise enlightenment in the negative in
the Buddhist tradition and many others, either stating what it is not or
stating what is lost at each stage, but it is so very tempting to imagine that
“freedom from suffering” will naturally translate in to a permanent state
of mental happiness or peace, and this can tempt one to try to mimic
that idealized state. That would be a concentration practice.
Having said all of that, the fact is that the models of the stages of
enlightenment are out there and available. Even when they are not
explicitly mentioned, they have an obvious influence on how people
describe realization. Thus, I have decided to try to work with them so
that they might be used in ways that are helpful rather than harmful.
This is more difficult than it may initially sound.
There are days I wish the words for awakening didn’t exist, the
models had never exited, and that the whole process was largely
unknown to the ordinary person so that it would be less mythologized
and aggrandized, thus making conversations about it much more normal
and less reaction-producing. I wish we could start over, strip away all the
strange cultural and mythical trappings, create simple, clear terms, and
move on with things.
There are other days when I think that at least people know it might
be possible, even if most of what has been said about it is pretty fantasybased. My greatest dream is that the current generation of enlightened
teachers will go far out of their way to correct the descriptive errors and
false promises of the past and lay the groundwork for perpetuation of


these reforms despite the economic and social pressures to do
otherwise. One of the issues holding this back is that unfortunately only
a few have gone far enough to see how the vast majority of the golden
dreams of enlightenment do not hold up to reality testing. Another is
that putting one’s self on an artificial pedestal can be rewarding in many
ways. One way or another, the number of voices trying to bring things
back in line with what can actually be done is small in comparison to the
forces that want to make it into something grand and thus largely
unattainable.
Before I get too far into the details, I should explain that the most
essential principle I wish to drive home is that THIS IS IT, meaning
that this moment contains the truth. Any model that tries to drive a
wedge between the specifics of what is happening in your world right
now and what awakening entails needs to be considered with great
skepticism. With the simple exception of the fact of poorly perceiving
the sensations occurring now and habitually coming up with the illusion
of a separate, continuous individual, nearly all of the rest of the dreams
are problematic to some degree. This basic principle is essential to
practice, as it focuses things on the here and now, and also happens to
be true. Back to the complexities…
The mental models we use when on the spiritual path can have a
profound effect on our journey and its outcome. Most spiritual
practitioners have never really done a hard-hitting look at their deepest
beliefs about what “enlightenment” means or what they imagine will be
different when they get enlightened. Many probably have subconscious
ideals that may have come from sources as diverse as cartoons, TV
shows (Kung Fu comes to mind), movies, legends, 60’s gurus, popular
music, popular magazines, and other aspects of popular culture in
general. More formal and traditional sources include the ancient texts
and traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, Kabbala
(however you spell it), Christianity, Western Mystical Traditions
(Alchemy, Theosophy, Golden Dawn related traditions, etc.), the
ancient Greek mystery schools (including the fragmentary writings of
those like Heraclites), and the non-aligned or ambiguously aligned
teachers such as Kabir, Khalil Gibran, J. Krishnamurti, and many
others.


Modern fusion traditions, such as the various new versions of
Buddhism and other traditions that are present in the West, also have a
wide range of explicit and implied ideals about awakening. Plenty of
people also seem to take their own inborn higher ideals for themselves
or others that have arisen from sources hard to define and made these a
part of their working if usually poorly-defined models of enlightenment.
There is also a strong tradition in the West of believing that
enlightenment involves perfecting ourselves in some psychological
sense, though this is also prominent in certain Eastern and traditional
models as well in slightly different forms.
Just about all of these sources contain some aspects that may at
times be useful and other aspects that at times may be useless or even
send people in the wrong direction. The number of contradictions that
can be found even within each specific tradition on the subject is much
larger than I think most people imagine. For instance, those who
attempt a systematic review of the dogmas of enlightenment within the
Pali Canon will find themselves tangled in a mass of widely divergent
doctrines, myths, stories and ideals, and this is only one tradition.
Thus, to take on the subject of the models of the stages of
enlightenment is a daunting task, but by breaking it down into simplified
categories, some discussion of this wide mass of dogma and half-truth is
possible. I will use both simple, broadly applicable models and also
discuss specific models that come from some of the traditions and try to
relate these to reality. In the end, relating them to reality is essentially
the practice, and that falls to you.
I consider this attempt to be just one addition to an old tradition that
attempts to reform the dogma and bring it back in line with verifiable
truths, albeit one that is more specific and comprehensive than any that
I have found. Each new culture, place, time and situation seems to need
to do this again and again, as the forces within us and society that work
to promote models that are out of touch with the truth of things are
powerful and perennial, with money, power, fame, ideals of endless
bliss and pleasure, the enticing power of the ideals of self-perfection and
the pernicious inertia of tradition being chief among them.
In that same vein, this chapter is very much a situation in which I
claim a very high level of realization, write as if what I have achieved is


sufficient authority to write a chapter such as this one, and then present
it as if this is a definitive text on the subject, sufficient to contradict
significant portions of 2,500 years of tradition and the teachings and
writings of countless previous and current commentators. While it is
hard from my current vantage point to not believe this to be true,
anyone with sense will read this chapter with appropriate skepticism,
and this, as I see it, is one of the strengths of properly applied
Buddhism and rational thought in general. The Buddha was forever
asking people to not take his word at face value, but instead to do the
experiment and see if they come to the same conclusions. I recommend
the same. If you are able to achieve something beyond what I state is
possible, more power to you, and please let me know how you did it! I
would feel real regret if I thought that this work had hindered anyone
from achieving their full human potential, and am always looking for
practices and concepts that are useful.
Here is a list of the basic categories of models that I use, though
most traditions contain a mix of most or all of these. There are probably
other aspects of the dreams of enlightenment that I have failed to
address, but this list should cover most of the basic ones. I look at each
of these as representing some axis of development, and basically all of
them are good axes to work on regardless of what they have to do with
enlightenment. That said, from what I have already written, it will not be
hard to pick out my favorites:

1. Non-Duality Models

 Those models having to do with eliminating or
seeing through the sense that there is a fundamentally separate or
continuous center-point, agent, watcher, doer, perceiver, subject,
observer or similar entity.

2. Fundamental Perceptual Models

: those that have to do with directly
perceiving fundamental aspects of things as they are, including
perceiving emptiness, luminosity, impermanence, suffering, and other
essential aspects of sensations regardless of what those sensations are.
3. Specific Perceptual Models: those that involve being able to perceive
more and more, or all, of the specific sensations that make up
experience with greater and greater clarity at most or all times, and
usually involve perfected, continuous, panoramic mindfulness or
concentration at extremely high speed.


4. Emotional Models: those that have to do with perfecting or limiting
the emotional range, usually involving eliminating things like desire,
greed, hatred, confusion, delusion, and the like.
5. Action Models: those that have to do with perfecting or limiting the
things we can and can’t do in the ordinary sense, usually relating to
always following some specific code of morality or performing altruistic
actions, or that everything we say or do will be the exactly right thing to
have done in that situation.
6. Powers Models: those that have to do with gaining in abilities, either
ordinary or extraordinary (psychic powers).
7. Energetic Models: those that have to do with having all the energy
(Chi, Qi, Prana, etc.) flowing through all the energy channels in the
proper way, all the Chakras spinning in the proper direction, perfecting
our aura, etc.
8. Specific Knowledge Models: those that have to do with gaining
conceptual knowledge of facts and details about the specifics of reality,
as contrasted with the models that deal with perceiving fundamental
aspects of reality.
9. Psychological Models: those that have to do with becoming
psychologically perfected or eliminating psychological issues and
problems, i.e. having no “stuff” do deal with, no neuroses, no mental
illnesses, perfect personalities, etc.
10. Thought Models: those that have to do with either limiting what
thoughts can be thought, enhancing what thoughts can be thought, or
involve stopping the process of thinking entirely.
11. God Models: those that involve perceiving or becoming one with
God, or even becoming a God yourself.
12. Physical Models: those that involve having or acquiring a perfected,
hyper-healthy or excellent physical body, such as having long earlobes,
beautiful eyes, a yoga-butt, or super-fast fists of steel.
13. Radiance Models: those that involve having a presence that is
remarkable in some way, such as being charismatic or radiating love,
wisdom or even light.
14. Karma Models: those that involve being free of the laws of reality or
causes that make bad things to happen to people, and thus living a
blessed, protected, lucky, or disaster and illness-free life.


15. Perpetual Bliss Models: those models that say that enlightenment
involves a continuous state of happiness, bliss or joy, the corollary of this
being a state that is perpetually free from suffering. Related to this are
models that involve a perpetual state of jhanic or meditative absorption.
16. Immortality Models: those that involve living forever, usually in an
amazing place (Heaven, Nirvana, Pure Land, etc.) or in an enhanced
state of ability (Angels, Bodhisattvas, Sorcerers, etc.).
17. Transcendence Models: those models that state that one will be free
from or somehow above the travails of the world while yet being in the
world, and thus live in a state of transcendence.
18. Extinction Models: those that involve getting off of the Wheel of
Suffering, the round of rebirths, etc. and thus never being reborn again
or even ceasing to be at the moment of enlightenment, that is, the great
“Poof!” on the cushion, not to be confused with the more mundane
atmospheric consequences of a legume-based diet, as anyone who as
been on a vegetarian meditation retreat knows all too well.
19. Love Models: those that involve us loving everyone and/or everyone
loving us.
20. Unitive Models: that you will become one with everything in some
sense.
21. Social Models: that you will somehow be accepted for what you may
have attained, that you have attained something when people think you
have, and variants on these themes.
Like me, you have probably run into most or all of these ideals of
awakening in your spiritual quest and probably within yourself at some
point in time, either consciously or unconsciously. Given all of these
high ideals, it is not surprising that we find the task of awakening
daunting if not preposterous. Imagine yourself as the universallyaccepted radiant immortal angel bodhisattva bright-eyed yoga-butthaving all-loving one-with-the-universe endlessly mindful perfectly
healthy emotionally perfected psychologically pure endlessly altruistic
non-thinking desire-free psychic-superhero star-child of light, and then
notice how this image may be in some contrast with your current life. If
you are anything like me, you may notice a bit of a discrepancy!


I will take on each model, relate them to a few of the traditions, and
try to make sense of where these ideals came from. I will also address
which ones are realistic and which are just a bunch of beautiful dreams
that can either help you identify areas to work on or really screw up
your spiritual quest if you are not careful. You will note that none of
these models come from any formal tradition. In order to relate them to
the traditions, here is a list of some models from Buddhism:
1. The Four Path Model from the Theravada, which involves becoming
a stream-enterer, second path, third path and then an arahat (however
you spell it).
2. The Five Path Model from the Tibetans.
3. The Ten Bodhisattva Bhumis from the Tibetans.
4. The ideal of Buddhahood from all the Buddhist traditions.
5. The Sudden and Gradual Awakening schools of Zen.
There are other models from other traditions (e.g. St. John of the
Cross’ Ladder of Love), and I have already mentioned these in the
section on the Progress of Insight. I’m not going to go into much detail
about them here, but when you are familiar with the models I am going
to discuss you should be able to make some sense of them.
THE NON-DUALITY MODEL
The Non-Duality Model is without doubt my favorite of them all. It
essentially says that the goal is to stop a process of identification that
turns some patterns of sensations into a Doer, Perceiver, Center Point,
Soul, Agent or Self in some very fundamental perceptual way. By seeing
these sensations as they are the process can gradually be seen through
until one day there are no more sensations that trick the mind in this
way. My favorite quote that articulates this model is the one that goes
something like, “In the seeing just the seen, in the hearing just the
heard, in the thinking just the thought,” and thus I may repeat this quote
a few times just to make the point of how profound it is. Basically, there
is just a field of sensations, as there was before, but now all of these
sensations are progressively just seen to be as they are, and all the
sensations that we generally call “me” are just a part of this process.
This model does not imply anything else, promises nothing related
to any other models except in some loose way the Fundamental
Perception Model that I will talk about shortly. The Non-Duality Model


is the one of the most practical models for practice, in that it focuses on
simply seeing things as they are right now.
I will talk more about this model as we go, and have already talked
about it often in a less direct way. I present it first to serve as a foil or
counterpoint to all of the other models, and it is the only model that can
withstand reality testing without qualification or difficulty. All of the
other models may contain some degree of truth somewhere in them,
either literally or poetically, but this one you can hang your hat on all
the way through. This awareness develops gradually with some sharp
jumps along the way, leading to the endless debates about sudden and
gradual schools of awakening, a subject that will hopefully become more
clear as we go, but probably deserves some mention here.
THE SUDDEN SCHOOLS OF AWAKENING
There are schools of awakening, particularly some Zen (Chan)
traditions from China and Korea, and some interpretations of
Hinduism, though this is not a complete list, that say that awakening
happens in one big shift and that’s basically it, regardless of exactly how
you define “it”. They deny the claims of the progressive schools
(Theravada, Tibetans, some other strains of Zen, most schools of
Sufism, Qabala, other Western Traditions, etc.) that there is mappable
territory before awakening and that there might be lots to do after
stream entry or whatever you want to call it. Possible explanations for
these schools include:
1. There may be a few rare individuals that somehow manage to go
straight to full awakening due to whatever interesting way they are
wired or practiced, though I have never met anyone who did this.
2. There may be schools founded or influenced by people who got to
the first stage of awakening and somehow never realized there could
be anything more than that or got trapped in a lie about being fully
awakened when they hadn’t yet realized there was more to go and
never retracted their initial, erroneous claim.
3. There are people who just thought that was the dogma somehow
and stuck with it regardless of any issues of actually having insight.
4. Other explanations I haven’t thought of or run across.


Being as every single person I have ever known has followed a
progressive path, including myself, it is very hard for me to believe the
sudden claims except for keeping open the possibility that there may be
the exceedingly rare practitioner who occasionally manages to pull this
off and thus imagines based on their limited experience that this is how
it happens in general. In short, if you manage to do this, more power to
you, and please let me know. Otherwise, I would bet on the gradual,
progressive schools, and if you attain something that you are pretty
impressed by, give it time to see how it holds up when the troubles of
the world come knocking at your door over the months and years after
that shift of perspective.
THE FUNDAMENTAL PERCEPTION MODELS
Related to the Non-Duality Model, and also useful for practice, are
the Fundamental Perception Models. I say models here because various
traditions emphasize different qualities of reality as being essential. For
instance, the Theravada uses the Three Characteristics of
Impermanence, Suffering and No-Self, as you already know well by this
point. The Mahayana traditions (Tibetans in particular), may emphasize
Shunyata or emptiness, and the Vajrayana traditions may emphasize
luminosity or the space-like meditative equipoise of Dzogchen. They
may also talk about Maha Ati, or express fundamental truths in some
other way.
These models may directly state or imply that enlightenment
involves continuously perceiving these aspects of things in all sensations
at a conscious level, so that every waking instant we were flooded with
the sense of impermanence or luminosity or whatever as our dominant
experience. While attempting to perceive this at all times is excellent
practice advice, particularly when on retreat, were these models true
then realization would seem to involve flooding the consciousness of the
individual with a ton of information at all times. While there may be
moments or bursts of this sort of perception in enlightened individuals,
this is not what finally happens. Instead, with strong awareness of how
things are, a process of identification stops, the switch is thrown, as
noted above in the Non-Duality Models. By following the practice
advice of the Fundamental Perception Models we may come to stop this
process

However, as the Buddha said, do not imagine that you must
continue to carry the boat once you have crossed the river. While
enlightened individuals can at a whim notice the true aspects of
sensations, just as color is clear to a person with good eyesight (assuming
they are not color-blind), so these things are clear to an enlightened
being to various degrees as they progress along the path. That said, just
because one can perceive something doesn’t mean that particular aspect
is the dominant aspect of consciousness at all times. In short, the
Fundamental Perception Models are very useful for practice, but do not
quite accurately describe the final result.
THE SPECIFIC PERCEPTION MODELS
Specific Perception Models essentially state or imply that an
enlightened being will be constantly hyper-aware of every single
sensation that arises in their field of perception, including not just the
ultimate aspects of the Fundamental Perception Models, but also every
single little detail of the content of those sensations, achieving at all
times the perfected fusion of the completely open and panoramic
perspective of High Equanimity with the laser-like precision of the
Arising and Passing Away at its height. It implies that rather than
stopping a process, enlightenment is about becoming so fantastically
alert that you see not only the true nature but also the specifics of each
and every sensation that arises at all times. This is not even close to what
happens in reality. While enlightened beings will cycle through those
stages, when mindfulness is low each of those stages will present in a low
key way, and only for moments here and there will there be anything
like that kind of awareness, though when enlightened beings are on
retreat and/or really powering the mindfulness and concentration they
can temporarily achieve something that resembles these high ideals.
The Specific Perception Models are another instance where practice
instructions get turned into an ideal of what is supposed to happen in
exactly the same way as happens with the Fundamental Perception
Models. They become one more example of carrying the boat after we
have crossed the river. Again, mindfulness comes and goes, sleep comes
and goes (though the Tibetan teachings on dream yoga are very
intriguing), concentration comes and goes, various perspectives and

perceptual thresholds parade through, and the cycles of the ñanas
continue on and on.
The ideals in this model and many models that follow it are
sometimes used as a weapon by those who like to criticize those who
rightly or wrongly claim to be enlightened. Examples include, “Don’t
you remember when I said (such and such)?”, “Didn’t you notice how I
cleaned the bathroom?”, or “How could you have forgotten to pay the
power bill?” The implication inherent in each of these is that
enlightened being should have perfect awareness of all aspects of their
sensate reality as well as perfect memory of all of those aspects. This
ideal is unfortunately completely bogus. I so wanted to be a Sensation
Perceiving Superstar with a photographic memory and have been sorely
disappointed. As basically everyone out there has some aspect of this
model in their working definition of what “enlightenment” must be,
these ideals can be a particular problem in relationships, particularly
business relationships and romantic ones for those who are out of the
closet about enlightenment.
In this basic vein, this brings up another selling point of realistic,
down-to-earth, human models of what awakening brings. If you tell
people you are enlightened and also promote very high, idealized,
delusional, perfectionistic models of awakening, those who actually get
to know well will realize how full of shit you are, particularly people
such as spouses or partners, business associated, best friends and the
like. Further, the more you get stuck trying to be like the person you
dream you are supposed to be rather than who you are, the more you
can get isolated in your false and pretentious fantasy land, locked away
from the grounding, healing, and helpful reality testing that comes from
community and real, intimate human relationships. However, if the
Specific Perceptual Models are a problem in this way, you haven’t seen
anything until you get to the Emotional Models.
THE EMOTIONAL MODELS
The Emotional Models are so fundamental to the standard ideals of
awakening as to be nearly universal in their tyranny. You can’t swing a
dead cat in the Great Spiritual Marketplace without hitting them.
Almost every tradition seems to have gone out of its way to promote
them in the most absurd and life-denying terms available, though there


have been attempts at reform also. I must give thanks for the attempts,
however ineffective, bizarre, mythologized, cryptic, and vague, that the
Tibetan and Zen traditions have occasionally made in this regard, and
morn their nearly perpetual failure to make these issues clear. At least
they tried, whereas the Theravada basically has really not tried in any
significant way in 2,500 years so far as I can tell. If I am wrong, please let
me know.
These emotional models basically claim that enlightenment involves
some sort of emotional perfection, either gradually or suddenly, and
usually make these dreams the primary criteria for their models of
awakening and often ignoring or sidelining issues relating to clear
perception of the true nature of phenomena. Usually these fantasies
involves elimination of the “negative” emotions, particularly greed,
hatred, anger, frustration, lust, jealousy, and sadness. At a more
fundamental level, they promise the elimination of all forms of
attraction and aversion.
As I am sure you can already tell, I am no fan of these models of
enlightenment. In fact, I consider their creation and perpetuation to be
basically evil in the good old “You Should Burn In Hell For
Perpetuating Them” kind of way, though as guidelines for trying to be
kind and behave well (training in morality) I find them of value. I know
both what hints of truth they contain and also what a marketing ploy
they are, and will attempt to make both aspects clear. This is not easy to
do, and the dogma of the Emotional Models is so deeply ingrained in us
all that shaking it can be the work of a lifetime even in enlightened
beings.
The practical application of making this distinction is based upon
the fact that we will try to realize the model we consciously or
unconsciously adopt. It is extremely tempting if we buy into the limited
emotional range models to go around imitating an emotionally limited
state, repressing or ignoring aspects of our basic human nature. There
are some benefits to repressing the manifestations of negative emotions
while simultaneously being conscious and accepting of the fact that
difficult emotions occur. However, if we repress them and also pretend
that they don’t exist, this sort of cultivated denial can also produce huge
shadow sides and a lot of neurotic behavior.


A far more practical approach is to accept that we are human, try to
be decent in a normal sort of way rather than in a grandiose spiritual
way, and to assume that reducing and eliminating the illusion of the
dualistic split is possible through doing basic insight practices. Reducing
the sense of a split can provide more clarity, allowing us to be the
human beings that we are with more balance and less reactivity in the
face of that humanity.
THE THERAVADA FOUR PATH MODEL
The root of the problem in standard Buddhism comes to us from
the Theravada Four Path Model. This is the original model presented
in the Pali Canon and the oldest model we have to work with. All the
subsequent schools (Mahayana of various strains and the Vajrayana)
react to it in their way but are still influenced by it even if they say they
are not, so you need to know it to understand the debate.
Actually, the problems began long before in ancient Hinduism
(which had a huge impact on Buddhism, despite what some Buddhist
will tell you) and probably before that, but this is as good a place to start
as any. I shouldn’t blame ancient India for what is really a perennial
human wish. Let’s face it: we all want emotional perfection, as a large
chunk of the pain felt in modern life relates to people’s emotions
causing trouble. I will claim that not perceiving our emotions clearly is a
far greater problem than the emotions themselves, but I am clearly in
the minority in this regard. As I stated in the chapter called Harnessing
the Energy of the Defilements, there is a lot to be said for aspects of
what we usually consider the bad emotions. It is important to realize that
empty compassion underlies all our emotions, whether filtered through
the illusion of duality or otherwise.
The Theravada Four Path Model is a model involving four stages of
awakening, namely First Path or Stream Entry (Pali: sotapanna), Second
Path or Once Returner (sakadagami), Third Path or Never Returner
(anagami) and finally Fourth Path, Holy One, Saint, or Conqueror (
arahat, arhat, arahant, or arhant, pick your favorite spelling). The terms
Once Returner and Never Returner have to do with issues relating to
the dogma that those who have attained to second path cannot be
reborn more than once before attaining arahatship, and certainly not in
the lower realms (hell realms, hungry ghost realms or animal realms),


and that those of third path, if they do not attain to arahatship in this
lifetime, will at worst be reborn into a heaven realm where the
conditions are optimal for achieving enlightenment. However, the core
of the Theravada Four Path Model is the dogma that enlightenment
involves progressively eliminating the Ten Defilements in the following
manner.
Stream Entry eliminates the first three defilements: skeptical doubt,
attachment to rites and rituals, and personality belief. Second Path
attenuates the fourth and fifth defilements, usually translated as greed
and hatred or more technically as attraction and aversion to everything
that is not a jhanic state. Third Path is said to eliminate those same
fourth and fifth defilements however translated. Fourth Path, that of
arahatship, eliminates the remaining five defilements of attachment to
formed jhanas (the first four jhanas), attachment to the formless realms
(the second four jhanas), restlessness and worry, “conceit” (in quotes
because it is a bit hard to translate), and something called “the last veil of
unknowing”.
It is important to note that arahats that are said to have “eliminated
conceit” (in limited emotional range terms) can appear absolutely
arrogant and conceited, as well as restless or worried, etc. That there is
no fundamental suffering in them while this is going on is an utterly
separate issue. That said, conceit in the conventional sense and the rest
of life can cause all sorts of conventional suffering for arahats just as it
can for everyone else. While I am on the subject of conceit, perhaps I
should take on the subject of the word “ego” in a more comprehensive
way than I have done so far.
The pop psychology meaning of the word “ego” is something like
arrogance, pride, narcissism, and a failure to take into account the
feelings, rights and/or existence of others. This is also the definition that
is the most commonly behind such mainstream Buddhist statements as,
“That action or statement that I really didn’t like had a lot of ‘ego’ in it.”
I think that this definition of ego can sometimes be slightly useful for
training in morality if we are very kind to ourselves and those around us,
but often it seems to me to be pop spirituality turned into a weapon and
a form of denial of someone else’s difficulties, feeling and suffering


Worse, people often take this definition, mix it in with their own
insecurities and unfortunate fear of existing or asserting themselves in
the conventional sense, and then take this neurotic mixture and use it to
continue to flog themselves and those around them. Please don’t do
this. It is misguided and will not help you or anyone. This pop
psychology definition of ego also has nothing to do with enlightenment
in the formal sense, and so don’t bring it to mind when you read this
chapter except to dismiss it.
Another definition of ego is the formal psychological one put
forward by Freud. In this definition, ego is the moderator between the
internalized parent or police of the super-ego and the primal drives of
the id, those being largely for reproduction and survival. In this sense,
ego is an extremely good thing and should be cultivated consciously and
without restraint. This definition has to do with the more formal
psychological concept of “ego strength,” a strength that is very positive
and necessary for the deep and often difficult personal growth that we
all want for ourselves. One of the explicit requirements for entering
intensive psychoanalysis is high ego strength, the ability to face one’s
reality and dark stuff without completely freaking out. Thus, eliminating
this form of ego would be a disaster.
For reasons completely beyond me, the word “ego” is also used in a
high mystical sense to describe the elimination of the experiential
illusion of there being a special reference point as described in the
chapter on the Three Characteristics in the section on no-self. One who
had eliminated this form of ego, which is in this case a useless illusion,
might describe their experience in this way, “In this full field of
experience or manifestation, there seems to be no special or permanent
spot that is observing, controlling, separated from, or subject to any
other point or aspect of the rest of this causal field of experience or
manifestation.”
This is the experience and realization of the arahat. Notice that this
definition of ego seems to have nothing whatsoever with the other
definitions of ego. This is exactly the point, and so I strongly advocate
never using the word ego in the context of describing realization or the
goal of the spiritual life, or at least not doing so without extensive
explanation of this particularly special and uncommon usage of the


term. Those who do otherwise continue to cause an astounding amount
of unrealistic, disempowering and life denying thinking in mainstream
Buddhists. It is my sincere wish that the misuse of the word ego and its
associated negative side effects stop immediately and forever. Back to
the models…
As the Theravada Four Path Model explicitly states that realization
is all about eliminating greed, hatred, restlessness, worry, etc., this is as
explicitly a limited emotional range model, and, as expected, deserves
some serious skepticism. In fact, this is a good time to go into what I
love and despise about the Theravada. I absolutely love their emphasis
on the Three Characteristics, love the astounding power of their
techniques and am grateful beyond words for the maps they provided
me for the territory before stream entry, however incomplete and
idealized. I am profoundly grateful, at times to the point of tears, and I
mean that, for the monasteries I got to sit in, for their preservation of
that which is true and useful in Buddhism for 2,500 years, and for the
chance to have sat with real, enlightened teachers because of their
perseverance and work.
And yet, their maps of enlightenment still contain a hefty helping of
scary market-driven propaganda and so much garbage that is lifedenying, dangerously out of touch with what happens, and an
impediment to practice for millions of people. That the enlightened
lineage holders of the modern Theravada and their ex-monk Western
counterparts don’t have the balls to stand up and say, “We are deeply
sorry that for 2,500 years our predecessors perpetuated this craziness to
put food in their bowls and fool ignorant peasants so that they might be
supported in their other useful work, and we vow to do better!” is a
crying shame.
They are chained to the texts, myths and the ancient lies, seemingly
doomed to indoctrinate and brainwash generation after generation of
monks, practitioners and devoted followers with their delicious poison.
What a freakish paradox that the meditative techniques and
technologies that I consider among the most powerful and direct ever
created should come from a tradition whose models of awakening
contain some of the worst bullshit of them all. I have sat with numerous
arahats who were monks or former monks who just couldn’t seem to


overcome their indoctrination and so when giving dharma talks would
habitually mix in the crap with the gold when it was obvious they knew
better.
I have at times dreamed that all the teachers from all the lineages
would get together in secret, come up with a plan to jointly get
themselves out of the trap, and in a big formal ceremony present the
truth as a new beginning, like a mass intervention, like a family gathering
around an alcoholic to try to force them to reform their ways. None of
them on their own seem to be fully able to take the heat, as each one
that steps out of line in a direct fashion tends to get blasted, though
there are exceptions, such as Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the
Laundry. Thus, I think they should all try to do it together, with Zen
Masters, Lamas, Rinpoches, Tulkus, Sayadaws, Achaans, and their
Western counterparts all standing side by side saying, “Enough is
enough! We are declaring a new era of honest, open, realistic dharma
teaching, free from sectarian fighting, free from preposterous models of
awakening, and free from denial of humanity!” Enough of my ranting,
back to the models…
I have no major beef with their description of stream entry. It does
make people realize somewhat that rites and rituals are not the primary
reason that they got enlightened, though I know of a number of
practitioners that got enlightened with the help of techniques that were
very ritualistic and continue to include rituals of various sorts in their
practice, and why not. Stream entry does counter in some semiintellectual way the sense that there is a permanent, separate self, though
exactly how they know this is much more vague and mysterious to them
than at the higher stages of awakening, though it beats the pants of any
understanding of this that is pre-stream entry.
Further, they know that awakening is possible and can be done in
this lifetime, assuming they know they are awakened in the first place,
which strangely not all enlightened beings do. Those persons that
encounter these understanding outside of established traditions may fail
to recognize that what they have understood is called awakening and
other names. Regardless, stream entry is known as the opening of the
Dharma Eye, as contrasted with the Wisdom Eye of arahatship. These


are simply poetic metaphors for some aspects of clearly perceiving
things.
My real problem with the Theravada Four Path Model comes as
soon as it starts talking about second path, i.e. the attenuation of greed
and hatred or attraction and aversion, and by the time it promises
eliminating these in their ordinary forms as they say occurs in third path,
I think that serious critique of their language and dogma is called for.
What they are attempting to say is that the sense of the observer, center
point, continuous and separate subject, watcher or however you want to
describe the sense that there is some Self at the center of all this stuff
that so compelling seems to divided into Self and Other is, in fact, just a
bunch of sensations. When these begin to be perceived as they are, the
sense of how special the center point is begins to lose its grip on
perception, which begins to become wider, more inclusive, and more
even in its basic treatment of phenomena. Thus, as there doesn’t seem
to be so much of a this side and a that side, attempts to get away from
that side when it is bad, get to that side when it is good, or just tune out
to the whole thing when it is boring diminish at some basic perceptual
level, and so the system functions better as it is better at realistically
interpreting the information coming into it.
This is a very tough thing to talk about, and certainly doesn’t sell as
well as saying, “Do these things, and you will be free from all negative
emotions,” or worse, “We did these things and so are free from all
negative emotions, and so you should worship us, give us donations,
support our center, buy our books, give over power to us, think of us as
very special or amazing, stand in awe of us, sleep with us, allow us to act
like raving nutcases, etc.” I think you get the picture. Thus, what
happens in reality is that segments of the process of making specific
categories and patterns of the causal, sensate field into a separate “self”
is reduced and then stops. However, many of the traditions advertise
eliminating negative emotions and the sensations of craving or aversion.
The two couldn’t be more different, and yet they are described as being
the same.
A REVISED FOUR PATH MODEL
Here is my revised version of the Four Path Model, and this is the
primary model I use when describing awakening, talking about my


practice, and helping others practice. I think that using the original
terminology and revising its definitions allows a lot of good material in
the Pali Canon to be used, thus provides a link to previously done work.
However, I realize that using terminology that already has such deep
cultural and dogmatic resonance may be a problem. For those who want
something new, I will shortly present a rephrasing of this model that I
call the Simple Model.
In the Revised Four Path Model, Stream Enterers have discovered
the complete discontinuity that is called Fruition and sometimes called
Nirvana or Nibbana (Sanskrit vs. Pali). This is the first of two meanings
of Nirvana, with the other being Fourth Path. Stream enterers cycle
through the ñanas, know that awakening or some different
understanding from the norm is possible, and yet they do not have all
that different an experience of most sensations from those who are not
yet stream enterers. They may correctly extrapolate a lot of good
dharma insights from momentary experiences, particularly high up in
High Equanimity and the three moments before a Fruition, but this is
not the same as living there all the time. In fact, most stream enterers
have a very hard time describing how things have changed in terms of
their daily life except that they cycle and can understand the dharma in
ways they never could before.
Those of Second Path have now completed a new insight cycle.
They understand the process by which enlightened beings make further
progress and equate progress with further cycles of insight, which is
partially true. More model-obsessed or intellectual practitioners at
second path may get very into fractal models, consciousness models,
enlightenment models, various integrative theories, and that sort of thing
at this stage of practice. Psychological issues tend to be a bit more of a
big deal during this phase, and psychological development become
interesting to them in some way. By this point most people, though
certainly not everyone, also have a pretty good understanding of the
basics of the samatha jhanas, and these can be very fascinating. What
they may be most bothered by is that cycle after cycle of practice, duality
remains the predominant experience most of the time.
Those of Third Path have shifted their understanding of what
progress is from those of Second Path, and have begun to see that it is


about perceiving the emptiness, selflessness, impermanence, luminosity
etc. of sensations in daily life and begin to see that they have the ability
to do this. This can be a long, developmental process from the first time
they notice this to it becoming a nearly complete experience. Thus,
Third Path tends to be a long path, though it doesn’t have to be.
At the beginning of Third Path, most practitioners think: “I’ll just
complete more cycles of insight, like I did before, and this will do the
trick.” They don’t tend to understand what it is they have attained all
that well yet, nor its deeper implications. By the mature stage of Third
Path, which can take months to years to show up, the practitioner is
more and more able to see the emptiness, selfless, centerlessness,
luminosity, etc. of phenomena in real-time, so much so that it can be
very difficult to notice what artificial perceptual dualities remain.
As they cycle, they will enter new territory, possibly causing some
uncertainty or instability, and with each Review phase they tend to really
feel that they have done it until they begin to notice the limits of their
practice. There can be this nagging something in the background that
things aren’t done, and yet figuring out exactly what the problem is can
be very slippery. It is a bit like being in the stages before stream entry,
trying to figure out what exactly needs to be done. They need to notice
something that has nothing to do with the cycles, to finally untangle the
knot of perception at its core, but doing this can be a real trick. It is a
very strange place, as one seems to know the dharma all the way to the
end and yet somehow it just isn’t quite enough. In that vein, it is
interesting to note that I wrote the vast majority of this book while I was
some sort of anagami, and on reflection I got just about everything right.
My emphases are slightly different now, but the basics are all the same.
As things progress, anagamis begin to tire of the cycles to a small or
large degree and begin to look to something outside of them or not
related to them for the answer to the final question. Finally, the cycles of
insight, the states of concentration, the powers, and all the other perks
and prerogatives of their stage of awakening or concentration abilities (if
they developed them) hold no appeal and only lead to more
unsatisfying cycles.
I completed around 27 full, complete insight cycles with mindblowing A&P Events, Ass-kicking Dark Nights, Equanimity phases, and


what seemed to be brand new, fresh Fruitions and Review phases
between third and fourth path. There is nothing special about that
number, both because it is just a guess and because of the reasons I
stated when describing the phenomena of Twelfth Path. The later cycles
got faster and faster, so that by the end it seemed I was whipping one
out every few weeks or even every few days, but they still seemed to be
leading nowhere.
It was only when I had gotten so sick of the cycles and realized that
they were leading nowhere that I was able to see what has nothing to do
with the cycles, which also wasn’t anything except a strange untangling of
the knot of perception of them. The cycles, for better or worse, have
continued just the same. Thus, there is not much point in counting
cycles or paths, as they don’t necessarily correlate well with anything past
the first two or three, and issues of backsliding can really make things
complex, as I explained earlier.
Finishing up my Revised Four Path Model, arahats have finally
untangled the knot of perception, dissolved the sense of the center point
actually being the center point, no longer fundamentally make a
separate Self out of the patterns of sensations that they used to, even
though those same patterns of sensations continue. This is a different
understanding from those of Third Path in some subtle way, and makes
this path about something that is beyond the paths. This is also
poetically called the opening of the Wisdom Eye. What is interesting is
that I could write about this stage quite well when I was an anagami, but
that is a whole different world from knowing it like arahats know it.
The Wisdom Eye may seem to blink initially. It may go through
cycles of flashing open just after a Fruition and then slowly fading over a
few hours (at least on retreat) as each round of physical sensations, then
mental sensations, then complex emotional formations, then lastly
fundamental formations such as inquiry itself move through and
become integrated into this new, correct and direct perception of reality
as it is. Review cycles may occur many times during each flash, but when
the eye is open they seem rather irrelevant in comparison to keeping the
level of clarity and acceptance high enough to keep the eye open. When
the eye fades and the knot of perception seems to retie itself, the
familiar insight cycles may seem like pure drudgery, with the focus


drifting back to getting lost in the cycles and then gradually shifting again
to getting clear enough to get the eye to open again. The themes that
occupy center stage go through a cycle that is very much like a progress
cycle.
Finally, the Wisdom Eye cycles and insight cycles all converge, and
the thing stays open from then on, which is to say that at that point it all
seems the same whether or not the eye is open, which it actually was.
That being seen, nothing can erode or disturb the centerlessness of
perspective. Done is what is to be done, and life goes on. That there are
arahats who have opened the Wisdom Eye but had it fade and those
who have opened it and had it stay open is rarely mentioned but worth
knowing.
For the arahat who has kept the thing open, there is nothing more to
be gained on the ultimate front from insight practices, as “done is what
is to be done”. That said, insight practices can still be of great benefit to
them for a whole host of reasons, there is a ton they can learn just like
everyone else about everything else there is to learn. They can grow,
develop, change, work and participate in this strange human drama just
like everyone else. Practicing being mindful and the rest still helps. They
also cycle through the stages of insight, as with everyone above stream
entry, so doing insight practices can move those cycles along.
A SIMPLE MODEL
In earlier versions of this work, I had a model called The Heart
Sutra Model. The Simple Model is the less mysterious, stripped down
version of that earlier model, though in its essence it is the same. While
in one sense it is also rephrasing of the Revised Four Path Model, as it
has no numbers, and is free of the traditional names, it has some
advantages over that terminology.
I present this somewhat novel model here because it focuses on real
insight directly and treats any emotional benefits of this as side effects.
Further, there are often too many cycles of insight before arahatship,
making the Four Path model troublesome. This phenomena of too
many cycles (which I will sometimes call “paths” with a lowercase “p”)
between each of the Four Paths gets worse as one works towards final
awakening. As Bill Hamilton put it, and I have learned the hard way,
“The arahat fractal is vast.”


The Simple Model does not reinforce fascination with content, nor
with life denying ideals or limited emotional range models in the way
that the traditional Four Path Model often does. It does not tempt one
to count paths. It keeps the focus on precise inquiry into the truth and
one’s experience of it or lack thereof.
This model basically says that enlightenment is about direct insight
that progressively reveals something different in the relationship to the
field of experience and gradually allows things in it to be held in their
proper proportion. Thus, it is a Non-Duality Model.
The first understanding is that sensations are sensations, thoughts
are thoughts, and this forms the basis of further inquiry. When the
universal characteristics of these sensations begin to be seen, this
represents growth in understanding. When the whole sense field is
known directly and completely as it is, this can cause an entrance into
Fruition through one of the Three Doors, and represents the first stage
of awakening.
When one appreciates the cycles of the process of awakening and
has completed at least one more new progress cycle, this is the next
stage. When one begins to appreciate the emptiness, luminosity,
centerlessness, agentlessness, etc. of phenomena in real-time and this
becomes the focus of practice rather than Fruition, this is the next stage.
When the sense of the watcher, observer, subject, controller, doer, etc.
is seen completely as it is and the knot of perception untangles, that
simple, fundamental way of perceiving things is the next stage of
awakening. When that untangling stays untangled, that is the next stage.
As that understanding is integrated into our lives, that is the next phase,
though it is more an ongoing process than a stage.
The problem is that the traditions seem to want to make this
understanding into so much more than it is, such as add ideals of
emotional perfection onto this. There is some truth in the models
dealing with emotions, but it has to do with things moving through faster
and being seen more clearly. It does not have anything to do with bad
emotions not arising. I hate to even go here, as my goal is to give the
emotional models the bashing they richly deserve, but I also want to not
throw the baby out with the bathwater. Thus, here it goes.


As the deep-seated perceptual sense of a separate, continuous,
permanent, observing Agent stops being extrapolated from the same old
patterns of sensations that seemed to be those, there is this wider
inclusive something that can come into the consciousness of the
enlightened individual, depending on their level of awakening. There is
also a slowly growing directness of perception that comes as reality is not
filtered so exclusively through thought. These two can combine to give
the emotions of enlightened beings less sticking power, so that they may
move through more quickly than for those that are not enlightened, and
also may be seen more quickly and clearly as they arise and vanish.
There may also be less blind contraction into thoughts and emotions
and a wider perspective, thus giving the other parts of the brain more of
a chance of creating moderated responses to the emotions. That said,
even when seen through, there seems to be a biological component to
how emotions move through that can only be expedited so much.
Anyone who thinks these highly qualified statements are anything
like a vision of emotional perfection or the elimination of all negative
emotions is not paying attention! That is the last thing I wish to imply. I
merely wish to say that there is some increased clarity about our basic
human experience and it can help, but that is all. That said, you would
be amazed how angry, lustful or ignorant enlightened beings can be, and
they can still do all sorts of stupid things based on these emotions, just
like everyone else. The ability to moderate responses to emotions can
sometimes give the impression that those emotions have been
attenuated, but that is not the same thing, and there is my nice transition
to the Action Models.
THE ACTION MODELS
The Action Models tend to involve certain actions that enlightened
beings cannot commit or certain actions they must commit. Both types
of models are completely ridiculous, and so we come now to the first of
the models that simply has no basis in reality. The traditional Theravada
models contain numerous statements about what enlightened being
cannot do or will do that are simply wrong. My favorite examples of this
insanity include statements that arahats cannot break the precepts
(including killing, lying, stealing, having sex, doing drugs or drinking),
cannot have erections, cannot have jobs, cannot be married, and cannot


say they are arahats. They also state that unordained arahats must/will
join the Theravada monastic order within 7 days of their realization or
they will die. Needless to say, all are simply absurd lies, lies that have
unfortunately often been perpetuated by arahats.
There is also another more subtle and seductive view, and this is
that enlightened being somehow will act in a way that is better or higher,
though they won’t define what those actions might be or what actions
they might avoid. I consider this view very dangerous. While I wish to
promote the shift in perception that I call awakening and other names, I
don’t want to make out that somehow this will save anyone from stupid
actions or make them somehow always know how to do the right thing
or avoid screwing up. Such views are a setup for massive badness and
huge shadow sides, as anyone who has spent enough time in a spiritual
community knows all too well. As Zen says, “The bigger the front, the
bigger the back.”
The list of highly enlightened individuals who have bitten the
proverbial dust by putting themselves up on high, screwing up and then
being exposed as actually being human is remarkably long, and the list
of spiritual aspirants who have failed to draw the proper conclusions
about reality from the failures of the enlightened is even longer. There
are many schools of thought on this issue, and I will give them formal
names here, though in reality they don’t think of themselves this way.
The Halfway Up the Mountain School essentially believes, “Those
who screwed up and caused a scandal were only part way up the
mountain, only partially enlightened, as anyone who was really
enlightened couldn’t possibly have done those terrible things.” While
clearly some were only partially enlightened, or perhaps not enlightened
at all in the technical sense, a number of those who screwed up clearly
knew ultimate reality inside and out, and so this model misses many
important points.
There is the Crazy Wisdom School that believes, “Enlightened
beings transcend ordinary reality and with it ordinary morality, so that
they are the natural manifestation of a Wisdom that seems crazy to us
foolish mortals but is really a higher teaching in disguise!” While not
entirely absurd, as there are many cultural aspects and societal rules that
can seem a bit childish, artificial, unnecessary, unhelpful or naive in the

face of realization, the Crazy Wisdom School provides too easy an
excuse for plenty of behavior that has been and is just plain bad,
irresponsible, stupid and needlessly destructive.
Then there is my school, for which I don’t have a catchy name, and
it promotes the view that, “Enlightened beings are human, and
unfortunately humans, enlightened or otherwise, all screw up
sometimes. There is nothing special or profound about this.” In short,
my school categorically rejects the specific lists and dogmas of the
traditional Action Models in all forms, from the preposterous lists of the
Theravada to the subtle sense that enlightened beings somehow are
guaranteed to perpetually act in “enlightened” ways, whatever those are.
That said, the ability to see things as they are does allow for the
possibility of more moderated responses to situations and emotions, as
stated earlier. That is a very different sort of a concept from coming up
with a list of things that enlightened being never would or could do, and
it certainly doesn’t mean they will necessarily act the way we think they
will. Further, while this is not an exhaustive list, the behavior of any
being is always affected by the following:
1. The standard laws of the natural world
2. The limits of their level of realization
3. The ingrained habits of the realized individual, including their
personality quirks and “stuff”
4. The residue of the shadow sides of the techniques and traditions
they used to attain their understanding (don’t underestimate these!)
5. The fact that mindfulness waxes and wanes (at least in arahats and
below and in all realistic definitions of buddhas)
6. The fact that confusion and stupidity can still occur exactly as before
7. The limits of the relative knowledge and experiences of the realized
individual
8. The psychological and physiological issues that apply to the brain
and body of the realized individual
9. Their cultural upbringing and the relative mores created by it.
You will notice that this is quite a realistic and long list. Thus, the
dogmas of the standard action models, while containing a few grains of
truth, are simply wildly inaccurate, and generally represent some of the
worst of the models of enlightenment.


A closely related issue is the tensions between the “technically
enlightened” models and the limited possible action models. There are
schools of thought that say, “One enlightened action and one is a
Buddha, one deluded action and one is an ordinary human being.”
These have their value from a certain behavioral point of view, and can
serve as a valuable reminder to all that conventional morality tends to be
an extremely good idea most of the time. I, for one, think that everyone,
regardless of purported realizations or a lack thereof, should be held to
a high and fairly traditional moral standard, though in some human, just,
and forgiving way. However, teachings based on some arbitrary ideal
called “enlightened action” can begin to diminish the importance of
direct realization of the truth of things and reinforce the mythical
garbage of the limited possible action models of realization.
There are people who are “technically” unenlightened (meaning
that they have never completed even one progress of insight or attained
to any direct understanding of emptiness or non-duality) who
nonetheless live lives that would be considered unremittingly saintly by
even the very highest standards. I have been fortunate enough to have
met a few of these people and continue to stand in awe of them. Just so,
there are those who are “technically” very highly enlightened, perhaps
even arahats or buddhas, who nonetheless can appear exceedingly
ordinary, seem to be of distinctly questionable moral virtue, or even
sometimes be downright debauched and outrageous. I have met a good
number of these also.
While the failure of the limited  or enlightened actions models and
limited emotional models is a huge disappointment from one point of
view, it also means that there is hope for the rest of us. Our lives are it,
our emotions are it, our habits are it, our limitations are it, our neuroses
are it, our issues are it, and our shadow sides are it. How can we attain
understanding if we do not see clearly into reality as it is? How can we
see clearly into reality as it is if we spend most of our time thinking that
it isn’t good enough to even examine clearly?
THE POWER MODELS
On a rather different tangent, enlightened beings are often believed
to have various kinds of powers, typically extraordinary ones, and thus
we have the Power Models. The converse of this is the belief that


people who have extraordinary powers might be or must be
enlightened. However, the relationship between the powers and
fundamental insight are slim, though not non-existent. Psychic powers
come out of samatha or concentration practices, particularly the fourth
samatha jhana, though they also may arise in the stages of the Arising
and Passing Away, High Equanimity, and sometimes in other stages and
states as well. Some people just seem to have them regardless of their
concentration or insight abilities. If you didn’t read the section on the
Psychic Powers in the chapter on the Samatha Jhanas, please do so now.
Note, nearly all of the states and stages where the powers arise can
be attained by beings who have not yet reached the first stage of
awakening, and so we can see that there is no clear connection between
nearly all of the powers and awakening. The short-list of powers that are
the exclusive domain of the enlightened are attaining to Fruitions,
attaining Nirodha Samapatti (a deep state described in the Appendix),
and being able to talk about the dharma from their own direct
experience of it. There are some other things to be said about how the
stages of realization make a few other things available, but this is a
subtle, complex topic that I may take on at some later time.
It is true that along the way to awakening it is hard to avoid chancing
into all sorts of experiences that are described in the standard lists of the
powers, and it is also much easier to develop the samatha jhanas when
you are in the Review phase of a path than it is if you are not
enlightened. However, developing those into powers that can be
attained again and again is a completely different matter and still
unrelated to enlightenment except on this one front: there is something
about the direct perception of the interconnection of things that does
lend a certain something to utilization and development of the powers.
Thus, we see some hint of why there are these models of awakening.
However, as stated above, these are associations and nothing more. In
summary, just because someone has powers doesn’t mean they are
enlightened, and just because someone is enlightened doesn’t mean
they will have any psychic powers that are not directly related to their
clear perception of things.


THE TIBETAN TEN BHUMI MODEL
This is probably a good time to introduce the Tibetan Ten
Bodhisattva Bhumi Model. The word “bhumi” mean ground, or
something like level. It is a model of progressive stages of enlightenment
that gets very different emphases depending on the author, but one of
those emphases has to do with powers and how many duplicates of
one’s self one can manifest psychically. I actually like the Bhumi model,
as other takes on it have to do with giving up the notion of personal
territory and realizing shunyata or emptiness and deeply integrating that
into our perception, paradigm, practice, and personality. It is a model
that addresses many fronts, only one of which unfortunately is the
powers.
The details of the Ten Bhumi Model can be found in various
Mahayana texts, such as “The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom” and
“The Jewel Ornament of Liberation”. Chogyam Trungpa gives a nice
description of it in The Myth of Freedom. Some texts also list other
numbers of bhumis, such as 7 or 13, but they all share similar elements.
I do not consider myself an expert on this model, though I do
understand the territory it covers. It is a very complex model that
ascribes a wide range of exceedingly high and complex criteria involving
emotions, paradigms, concentration abilities, perceptions, psychic
powers and a whole host of other aspects to those of each stage. Thus,
from my point of view, it is fraught with problems and assumes
simultaneous, synchronized development on numerous axes, a notion I
consider a bit naïve and idealized. However, like most of the teachings,
it contains some very interesting points made in what I consider very
unfortunate ways. Thus, I recommend you check it out cum grano salis,
particularly if you want to understand Tibetan texts or do practices in
that tradition.
Lining the model of the Bhumis up with the Four Paths also
involves some controversy. That the first bhumi is stream entry is
straightforward. Beyond that, things get difficult. At points I have lined
anagamihood up with anywhere from the 4
th
 to the 7
th
 bhumis and
arahatship with anywhere from the 6
th
 to 10
th
 bhumis. These are not
perfect correlations, and if you spend some time reading about the
model you will see why. I recommend that you check out the sources


listed above if you are interested in further information about the
Bhumis.
The biggest problem with this model is that it delineates the number
of duplicates of one's self that one should be able to manifest as
bodhisattvas at each bhumi, and as the bhumis progress the numbers
quickly get so large as to be absurd. Why some whackjob included this
bizarre ideal of many-fold bi-location in the model I have no idea, but
somehow no Tibetan since has had the balls to throw it out, and so a
thousand years later they are still stuck with it. Aside from these
problems, the texts that describe the bhumis makes for very interesting
reading, particularly in the middle stages of enlightenment.
THE TIBETAN FIVE PATH MODEL
While I am on the subject of the Tibetan Models, I will present the
Tibetan Five Path Model. In this model, the details of which can be
found in various places, such as Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche’s book
Dharma Paths on Snow Lion. As that book does such a good job of
explaining the dogma and is not expensive, I will give only a brief
treatment of that model here.
First Path covers the territory from just beginning through the
Arising and Passing Away, and is called the Path of Accumulation. In
the territory of First Path, one accumulates direct insight into the true
nature of sensations by direct investigation of impermanence and the
selfless nature of phenomena, as one does in the first four ñanas.
Second Path, that of Unification, encompasses the territory from the
Arising and Passing Away, through the Dark Night, to High Equanimity
and the first taste of Stream Entry. These are perfect correlations also,
and thus have already been described. Third Path is the Path of Seeing,
and encompasses Stream Entry, and then begins the Fourth Path, that
of Meditation, which encompasses the rest of the Ten Bhumis. Third
Path is described as a plane taking off, and Fourth Path as it flying
higher and higher. Fifth Path is that of Buddhahood. As you can see,
the Five Path Model does not really add anything to the other models,
but knowing it will help you understand the correlations between the
terminology when you are trying to cross over between the writings and
oral teachings of various traditions. Back to the generic models…


THE ENERGETIC MODELS
In nearly the same vein as the Power Models are the Energetic
Models. They tend to involve ideals that imply that enlightened beings
will have all their energy channels clear, their chakras or energy centers
all the right shape and color and all spinning in the correct direction,
their aura large, regular, and some nice color such as white, gold or
violet, and in general have perfected their energetic system, regardless of
the particular energetic system model being used. The simple fact of
multiple models and visions of what a perfected system should look like
is already a red flag for anyone paying attention, as the various traditions
can't even agree on how many chakras there are, much less the rest of
the details. I have noticed that these things are very scriptable, meaning
that one’s concepts of what is supposed to be happening can influence
what one perceives in these areas. These models also leave much to be
desired, and generally are referring to things that happen in the A&P
and the fourth jhana, as are the powers models.
Kundalini phenomena, where all the energy (prana, lung or chi)
blasts through the central channel (shushumna), are very common in
the A&P Event. Some traditions associate this event with awakening,
though I consider this erroneous and premature, though I can
understand why these stages impress people so much. It is during the
A&P that some practitioners with a bent or talent for doing so may
perceive energy channels, sometimes in outrageous detail, and be able
to see chakras and the like. However, anyone who can do this in a
sustained fashion will note the following: that in the Dark Night the
channels are a mess in most people, and that in High Equanimity the
focus shifts to experience itself, not nearly so much what is in that field
of experience, and thus the channels can be difficult to perceive or a
secondary background aspect of what is going on. Further, enlightened
beings cycle all the time, their moods and health and other factors
change all the time, and so what their channels are doing and how they
perceive them will change all the time, leading to nothing resembling the
stable, clean, orderly, perfected, predictable energetic state promised in
the energetic models.
Thus, the energetic models are another example of a transient side
effect of some people’s practice being incorporated into an ideal of


awakening. While energetic practices are very interesting and may lead
to lots of insights and other nice effects, that is not the same thing as
enlightened being having stable, perfected energetic systems. My friend
Kenneth has asked me to add that there is something good that
progressively awakening does to the channels and energetic system, and
I have to agree. However, defining exactly what positive changes are
made is difficult, and none of the models I have seen really do an
adequate job or contain enough flexibility to accommodate how
dynamic our energetic systems are. Suffice to say, this is one more set of
models that is getting at something but contains much that needs
revision.
THE SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE MODELS
Specific Knowledge Models basically state or imply that
enlightenment will somehow magically provide hidden conceptual
information about all sorts of specific things in life, such as the workings
of particle physics, how to bring about world peace, who one’s disciples
should marry, and the like. Some go further and state that
enlightenment progressively brings complete omniscience, meaning the
ability to know everything about the whole universe simultaneously.
While these might seem to some people like reasonable things
enlightened beings should somehow know, let’s include other things it
might be good to know, such as how to create safe, inexpensive lithium
ion batteries for electric cars, how to consistently beat the return of an
S&P 500 index fund over the long haul, how to balance the federal
deficit while providing everyone with good social support but not raising
taxes, how to instantaneously make every blue-collar Republican realize
that they are voting against their own self-interest, and how to build a
fusion reactor that is safe, inexpensive, produces enough energy for
everyone, and has no radioactive disposal issues. When you look at
these, the concept of specific knowledge gained by merely seeing the
true nature of ordinary sensations begins to seem as ridiculous as it
really is.
The only specific thing I did gain a little insight into was the beauty
of differential equations that discuss the oscillation from the imaginary
quantities (potential) to real quantities (manifestation), but that’s about
it. Other than a bunch of direct knowledge of how the mind works and


a whole lot of knowledge about what a load of crap most religious and
mystical dogma is, and that includes Buddhist Dogma, I didn’t really get
any specific knowledge of anything else. So much for that idea…
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS
Here is another thing that didn’t happen: psychological perfection.
While the mainstream Western Buddhist world is absolutely drowning
in notion that somehow Buddhist practice will either eliminate all their
psychological “stuff” or cause them to become self-actualized in the
good old psychoanalytical sense, nothing could be further from the truth
except perhaps the Action Models. I think that I learned more about
reasonable psychological health from reading one book on
Transactional Analysis (Vann Joines’ TA Today) than I did from over a
decade of highly successful Buddhist meditation. That doesn’t mean
that I have achieved perfect psychological health, not by a long shot!
Focusing on psychological growth is an epidemic disease in Western
insight practice. Many of the major retreat centers that purport to foster
insight practice in the US and Europe are actually bastions of the worst
pop psychological bullshit retrofitted with a bastardized Buddhist front.
You have only to go to a few small group meetings on retreats, as I
mentioned in Part II, to hear that the vast majority of people who are
supposed to be doing insight practices are actually just wallowing in their
own neurotic crap. Sure, they may be highly intelligent, super
sophisticated, fantastically well-rationalized, pseudo-Buddhist
practitioners of the Great Sacred Neurotic Crap Wallow, but they are
wallowing just the same.
As I mentioned before, that this sort of behavior is tolerated on
meditation retreats at all is mind-boggling, but that it gets reinforced and
rewarded as often as it does is a crying shame that reflects as badly on
the teachers as it does the practitioners. I have had insight teacher after
insight teacher try to focus on what I was feeling and how my
relationships were going when all I wanted to do was talk about my
attempts at insight practices, as I assumed, often wrongly, that they were
insight teachers.
While the dharma is vast, and the teachings of the wisdom traditions
contain a lot of material for helping grow psychologically, that doesn’t
mean that it has anything to do with awakening or insight practice at all,


and letting people get stuck there does them little service, if you ask me,
which you clearly did, as you are reading this book. Again, as I said
before, working on one’s psychological stuff can have its value, but I
firmly believe that keeping the line between insight practice and
psychological work drawn as firmly as possible is essential to doing
either well.
Further, it is oh so easy to imagine that the teachers on the front
cushion couldn’t possibly be as neurotic as we are, and before you know
it we have the breeding ground for massive shadow sides, exploitation,
isolation, and scandal just like we had with the models that purport
emotional perfection. The Jet Set culture of teachers popping in, getting
up on the front cushion, spouting their beautiful ideals, and jetting off to
somewhere else before anyone can see them as the humans they really
are only goes to reinforce these dangerous notions. It is just so easy to
project all kinds of wondrous qualities on to them when the dream is so
nicely laid out and the opportunities for reality testing so few. Clearly,
that suits most of them just fine, or they would go more out of their way
to counter those notions, but, as they quickly learn, countering those
notions just doesn’t sell, and getting caught up in that sort of
transference feels mighty friggin’ nice.
Thus, I think that the models that reinforce the notion that
psychological perfection or freedom from our psychological stuff will
come simply by seeing through the sense of a separate, permanent agent
are a serious problem for these major reasons:
1) They simply aren’t true.
2) They cause practitioners to get caught up in their stuff rather than
focusing on the Three Characteristics or something equivalent, thus
squandering the vast majority of Western Buddhist practitioner’s scant
retreat and practice time.
3) They allow teachers to be able to ride the hot air of these
preposterous ideals to dangerous heights.
4) They contribute to the erroneous sense of the gap between this
ordinary, human existence and awakening by creating unrealistic ideals
and goals.
Most Buddhist practitioners that I know have something like one of
the following belief structure


1) That awakening is impossible, so the best thing to try for is
psychological or emotional health or perfection.
2) That awakening is psychological or emotional perfection, so by trying
for psychological or emotional perfection one is doing the practices that
lead to awakening.
3) That awakening involves psychological or emotional perfection, so it
clearly is impossible, and by sitting they are trying to accomplish
something else, but if you ask them what that is they are usually unable
to answer clearly.
What is so ironic is that awakening is hard but clearly not
impossible, and not nearly as impossible as achieving psychological or
emotional perfection. In fact, seeing sensations clearly enough to see
that they are all just happening and coming and going is extremely
straightforward once you finally realize that is what you are supposed to
be doing. Further, when I think back on all the things I have done,
including going to medical school, spending a year in India working as a
volunteer there, and finishing a medical residency, I must say that the
work I went through to get those things was significantly more than the
work it took to get to stream entry and even arahatship. It is not that
getting stream entry was easy, just not as hard as plenty of other things I
have done. I attribute my success to a vast array of factors, but two that
are relevant here are a tolerance for pain and having a good working
model. That model was one that was blissfully free of the notion of
emotional or psychological perfection.
When I think about what it would take to achieve freedom from all
psychological stuff, the response that comes is this: life is about stuff.
Stuff is part of being alive. There is no way out of this while you are still
living. There will be confusion, pain, miscommunication,
misinterpretation, maladaptive patterns of behavior, unhelpful
emotional reactions, weird personality traits, neurosis and possibly
much worse. There will be power plays, twisted psychological games,
people with major personality disorders (which may include you), and
craziness. The injuries continue right along with the healing and
eventually the injuries win and we die. This is a fundamental teaching of
the Buddha. I wish the whole Western Buddhist World would just get
over this notion that these practices are all about getting to our Happy


Place where nothing can ever hurt us or make us neurotic and move on
to actually mastering real Buddhist practice rather than chasing some
ideal that will never appear.
All that said, there is some debate about what factors or progress
allows some people to just notice the Three Characteristics of the
sensations that make up their world in the fact of their stuff as opposed
to those who just flounder in their stuff. Some would argue that you
have to have done enough psychological work and deal with enough of
your issues to get to the place were you can move on to the next stage. I
must reluctantly admit that there is probably some truth to this.
However, I didn’t consider myself particularly psychologically advanced
when I started insight practices, as I had all kinds of stuff to deal with
and still do, and yet somehow, perhaps through good instruction,
perhaps through some other factors I have yet to identify, I was able to
practice well despite it all and make the shift from being lost in content
to noticing how things actually are.

THE THOUGHT MODELS

Speaking screwed up models, we have the Thought Models. These
are models that tend to focus on something different happening with
thoughts in those who are awakened, rather than simply seeing through
the thought patterns that create a sense of a center point or special,
permanent, separate self. These idealized models include not thinking
certain thoughts, such as enlightened beings being unable to think the
thought “I” or “I am”, not thinking at all and thus stopping the process
of thought, or some other modification to thoughts, such always thinking
good thoughts, whatever those are.
I got an email a while ago from a seemingly nice engineer who said
basically: “I did some Taoist practices, got enlightened, and now am
incapable of thinking any thoughts or visualizing, yet I seem to function
normally. What do you think of this?” I put a lot of thought into my
response, and so am including it here, in slightly edited form:
“One of my dead teachers, Bill Hamilton, used to talk about how
people's conceptions of what was supposed to happen would have some
influence on subsequent events, with some question about what that
influence was. We used to discuss this often, with possibilities including


1) People with different models of awakening might actually achieve
different results. I am no fan of this proposition but admit the
possibility.
2) People with different models might achieve the same thing but
describe it differently. I believe this one more than the first.
3) Some combination of these.
4) People might fail to achieve results but be scripted to report or
believe that they had achieved something in line with their own working
model. This is a common occurrence, one that I have observed in
myself more times than I can count and also in the practice of many
other fellow dharma adventurers. Bill would often mention people's
ability to self hypnotize into semi-fixed states of delusion. He had a long
run of hanging out in scary cult-like situations with psychopathic
teachers and got to observe this first hand in himself and others: see his
book Saints and Psychopaths for more on this.
5) People with different models and techniques might have very
different experiences of the path along its way: this is clearly true in
some aspects, and yet the universal aspects of the path continue to
impress me with their consistency and reproducibility regardless of
tradition.
6) Other possibilities we hadn't considered, in the style of Donald
Rumsfeld’s famous Unknown Unknowns…
The “no thought” question is an interesting one. It is commonly
used in some traditions as being the goal, these including some strains
and descriptions of Hindu Vedanta, multiple non-aligned traditions, and
others. Zen sometimes toys with the idea on its periphery. As to
Taoism: I did a bunch of reading of the old Taoist masters some years
ago, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert on it's current practice or
dogma.
Buddhism does not generally consider not thinking or not being
able to visualize among its goals, which brings us to the points
mentioned above. For instance, the Awakened Buddha often says things
in the old texts like, "It occurred to me that I should wander by stages to
[such and such a place]." Or, "This spontaneous stanza, never heard
before, occurred to me." These obviously are thoughts. Furthermore, if
we note the old texts as reference, all of the enlightened disciples of the


Buddha and the Buddha himself were described as thinking thoughts.
Further, many of the Buddha's disciples could visualize, as could the
Buddha, and if we look to modern times you can't be a tantric master
without some strong visualization abilities.
Further, the notion that one can write an email or do engineering,
which inherently involves abstraction (mathematics) and other concepts
being converted into actuality, or even speak and have it not involve
thought, is one that I think is merely a conceptual understanding itself
and thus an arbitrary designation. Further, as intentions fall into the
realm of thought, and all physical actions are preceded by intentions by
the fixed mechanics of the system, the notion that action can occur
without thought falls into the same camp. This also applies to all such
things as memory, which you clearly demonstrate, as this inherently
must involve thought essentially by definition (with caveats as above).
Given those assumptions, the question I ask is: have you simply
stopped calling those processes "thought" so as to fit with an arbitrary
and dogmatic model? Perhaps have you forced yourself to stop noticing
that mental processes occur as you thought that was supposed to
happen? Maybe you have achieved something real and because of your
preconceptions choose to describe it through that terminological filter,
or have achieved something completely different from those that is not
on my radar screen for whatever reason, possibilities including my own
delusion or lack of experience, just for the sake of completion and
reasonable skeptical doubt, which is always a good idea.
The terminology that I am used to involves seeing thoughts as they
are, thus having them be just a very small and transient part of the
natural, causal field of experience. However, it must also be admitted
that, since thoughts can only be experienced as aspects of the other five
sense doors, then labeling thought as thought is also just an abstraction
and just as arbitrary as is labeling the other 5 sense doors as such. These
are simply convenient designations (thoughts) for the sake of discussion.
When one notices that all things simply arise on their own,
including those sensations that may or may not be designated as
thoughts, to be empty of a self, as they are and always have been, with
no separate or independent observer or controller or doer that is not
just a part of the field of experience or manifestation, then one has



understood at some level what the Buddha advocated that people
understand. Thus, the model that I prefer, as it is practical, non-esoteric
and direct, is that:
1) Sensations that can be labeled as thoughts occur.
2) Thoughts are natural, causal, and essential to nearly every function
we perform.
3) Thoughts are not self, not other, part of life, and empty in the good
sense.
4) They always have been this way, before and after any spiritual
achievement, and when their true nature is seen, they are still as they
were.
An essential question regarding enlightenment is: does it make
things different from how they were, or does it merely reveal a true and
accurate perception or perspective on how everything always was? I
advocate a moderated version of the latter view, as I believe it is more
helpful to practice and more accurate. Thus, in this view, which is just
one view, anything that could happen before, such as thought or
visualization, can happen after, with the only thing changing being some
untangling of the previously held knot of tangled perception.
In terms of my experience, another interesting conceptual
designation, and using relative and down-to-earth language, I can make
my inner voice as loud as it could be before, it is much more clear than
it was before, it is perceived as part of the natural field of causality in a
way that it was not before, and mindfulness comes and goes as before.
In high jhanic states the inner voice is very subtle, but I can still visualize
as before, sometimes with even more clarity depending on practice
conditions. In short, I have not lost abilities nor have I changed much
about the way the system operates. That said, something is clear that was
not clear before, and the sense of a special center point seems seen
through, though the sensate patterns that made it up generally seem to
still occur as before, and it is only the perception of them that is
different.” (end of email)
As you can see, I sometimes write long emails for worthy dharma
questions, but must admit I only have the time to do this because the
number of people who ask me questions as of this point is so very small.
Anyway, back to the models…


THE GOD MODELS
On a very different tangent, we have the God Models. While
Buddhism pretends to be an exception to the theological traditions,
many Buddhists essentially worship the Buddha as a God just as
Christians worship Jesus as a God. Further, the vast majority of the
traditions that promote awakening involve some sort of theological
background or underpinning, including Hindu Vedanta’s focus on the
divine nature of things, Islam’s Sufi’s focusing on The Friend or
dissolving in Allah, and Christianity’s various dissolution in God
metaphors, such as the Divine Marriage. Buddhism has the same
problem at times with the phrase Buddha Nature. These are interesting
models to talk about, and basically the question comes down to the
distance between “God” and one’s life. Those who believe in a God that
is a separate entity are already in trouble. Those who believe this entity
is far off in Heaven or largely unavailable are really in trouble. However,
those who believe in a “God” that is right here, right now, and present in
all things, including themselves, have a fighting chance, and this is as
practical a model for awakening as any other, if done correctly, which it
almost never is.
The problem comes for those who believe in God Free Zones, that
is, those places where God is not. These tend to be people who believe
in a limited, abstract God. Most people who believe in God have not
taken the time to consider the question of whether or not they believe in
God Free Zones or a limited God. In fact, most people who believe in
God in the monotheistic sense would be offended by the notion that
their God was somehow limited. However, if you question them about
whether or not God is in their toilet paper or in a rock, or perhaps
more specifically IS the toilet paper, and is the rock, is their weird
popcorn fetish, is the annoying itch in their armpit, and actually is
everything else, even most people who in theory believe in an
omnipresent, unlimited, all-powerful God won’t go that far. This is too
bad, because if they did, they would have a good working model for
realizing that THIS IS IT, and so we are back to my original, simple,
excellent premise and test for good models of awakening.
Here’s how this works: if you believe that you are trying to see God,
and you believe that all creation is a manifestation not just created by


God, but in fact IS GOD, they you are back to basic insight practices:
seeing the sensate world exactly as it is, because there you will find
ultimate reality, or “God”, if you want to call it that. When the center
point is seen through by your careful investigation of all these
sensations, or all the aspects of God, then all that is left is just all these
sensations as before, that is, all this God. Thus, if one is willing to really
believe in a omnipresent God, then by truly, deeply, directly perceiving
all sensations to be just part of the causal, natural unfolding of what they
label God, all the boundaries between what were self and other can be
seen through, and the phenomenal world is left doing its thing, thus the
practitioner realizes they always were part of God, in a sense, though
these designations are merely terminological one way or the other.
Thus, the problem with God models typically is that people don’t
take them far enough, because if they do they can get into something
really good, though they could get their just as easily without them. All
the other ideals that are involved in becoming God or seeing God are
just more odd dreams and possible side effects of spiritual practice. I
have a few friends who saw visions while on LSD in which “God” told
them useful stuff, and this is fine, but this is back in the realm of the
powers and has nothing to do with awakening and only a very limited
amount to do with “God” in the ultimate sense.
THE PHYSICAL MODELS
On a completely different track we have the Physical Models, which
tend to involve some kind of physical perfection or stylization. The old
Theravada texts go to great lengths to list the 32 interesting physical
qualities of the Buddha, such as having 40 teeth and arms so long that
he could touch his knees without bending down. It is interesting how
things change, as in our modern context that would make him look
more to us like a dentally challenged Cro-Magnon than a spiritual
superhero, but I digress.
Numerous pop culture sources make us associate interesting
physical qualities or ideals with spirituality, particularly yoga magazines
and martial arts movies. There is not much more to say about these
models other than they are amusing and completely inaccurate. We
may imagine that somehow enlightenment involves some kind of
physical health, or think that awakening or insight practice may cure


some illness, but I wouldn’t bank on anything like this at all. That said,
my friends who regularly do practices like yoga and Tai Chi do tend to
look good, and this only makes sense. However, this is not related to
ultimate realizations except peripherally in that those practices involve
mindfulness and if done well can lead to real insights.
THE RADIANCE MODELS
Related to the Physical Models are the Radiance Models, which
tend to involve imagining that enlightened beings will have some kind of
remarkable presence, usually involving radiating love, charisma,
wisdom, peace or even physical light. A friend of mine used to joke
about this by saying that people in Western Vipassana at the Insight
Meditation Society thought that an arahat would be someone like Dipa
Ma (a talented practitioner of vipassana and samatha who died an
anagami by her own admission) but with light shining out of their ass.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but it makes the point that these ideals
are so ingrained in us from many traditions that it is hard to not imagine
that enlightened beings must have something remarkable about them
that you could feel or see.
Everyone knows that all saints have light coming out of their heads,
as did Jesus. You have only to look to medieval paintings to confirm
this. The stories of the Buddha are full of his marvelous presence. In
fact, his very first interaction with a human after his awakening went
something like this. The Buddha had gotten up after exploring the
depths of his realization and abilities. He decided to go try to find his
five companions who had been with him during his period of grave
asceticism, and surveying the world with his psychic powers found they
were at Benares. He took off walking down the road between Bodh
Gaya and Gaya, and the first person the Buddha talked to after his
awakening that wasn’t a god or a giant snake was the monk Upaka. I
quote the Buddha as he tells the tale, as rendered in Bhikkhu Ñanamoli
and Bhikkhu Bodhi’s The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha,
Sutta 26, as it is so priceless and such a wealth of information about the
origin of these models and ideals:
[Upaka said] ‘Friend, your faculties are clear, the color of your
skin is pure and bright. Under whom have you gone forth


friend? Who is your teacher? Whose Dhamma do you
profess?’
I [The Buddha] replied to the Ajivaka Upaka in the stanzas:
‘I am one who has transcended all, a knower of all,
Unsullied among all things, renouncing all,
By craving’s ceasing freed. Having known this all
For myself, to whom should I point as teacher?
I have no teacher, and one like me
Exists nowhere in all the world
With all its gods, because I have
No person for my counterpart.
I am the Accomplished One in the world
I am the Teacher Supreme.
I alone am a Fully Enlightened One
Whose fires are quenched and extinguished.
I go now to the city of Kasi
To set in motion the Wheel of Dhamma.
In a world that has become blind
I go to beat the drum of the Deathless.’
[Upaka replied] ‘By your claims friend, you ought to be the
Universal Victor.’
‘The victors are those like me
Who have won to destruction of taints.
I have vanquished all evil states,
Therefore, Upaka, I am a victor.’
The passage is remarkable in that it sets out a large number of
criteria and specifics about what awakening means to the Buddha and to
Buddhism in such a short space. Further, what is interesting is the


number of times the word “I” appears. In fact, “Buddha” means
something like Awakened One, or “I am awake.” Thus, we see that the
Buddha had no trouble talking about what he had done and who he
was, nor did he have trouble thinking the thought “I”.
We note his remarkable presence and skin, and so have the first of
the Buddhist Radiance Models and Physical Models. We note that he
says he is superior to the Gods, which is sort of a God Model in and of
itself, except one better. He describes being free of all the taints and evil
states, which is a complex mix of Emotional and Psychological Models.
He also adds the drum of the Deathless, and here we have hints of an
Immortality Model or an Extinction Model, and while formally
Buddhism would reject both of these associations, aspects of both show
up often in the texts anyway. There is also a Transcendence Model, as
he says he is unsullied by all things, and also a Specific Knowledge
Model, as the Buddha says he is a knower of all. In short, he says he has
accomplished something remarkable, and asserts that he is going to go
tell others how to do exactly the same thing he did, or is he?
The question of how the Buddha’s realization relates to what he was
trying to teacher others is a complex one. There are numerous passages
where he says he is quite different from and superior to all other
enlightened beings, and draws a clear line between himself and arahats.
Thus, we have to look carefully at what his claims about himself have to
do with others, and I devote the whole next chapter to this complex
issue. Suffice to say, the problem comes in when the ideals the Buddha
discusses as applying to himself, however mythologized we think they
are, are applied without careful investigation to enlightened beings of
theoretically inferior degree. Then there is the slippery question of the
Tibetans who purport to produce full Buddhas in one lifetime…
Back to the issues of whether or not enlightened beings have a
special presence. I have seen examples of both, though I suspect that in
most cases their presence was largely that way before they started doing
spiritual practice. Many people who have asked me questions about
practice over the years have hesitantly asked me if there was something
remarkable about my presence or how I was able to keep my
realizations hidden at work. I am both sorry and happy to report that I
have no problems in this regard at work and as far as I can tell have

nothing whatsoever that is unusual about my presence that wasn’t there
long before I got into all of this, other than the confidence and passion
with which I speak on the dharma. In short, the physical models and
radiance are just nice propaganda and another trap that people fall into,
both in their own practice and when evaluating the possible level of
realization of others.
THE KARMA MODELS
Karma models involve the promise that somehow realization
eliminates, exhausts, cancels out or moderates the forces of causality
that would cause bad things to happen to the realized being. Karma
involves action and its consequences, and in its simplest form is
essentially the statement that causes lead to effects in a lawful way. The
subject is imponderable, as the forces and factors involved are so vast
and complex that no mind can fully comprehend them. That said, many
models and Buddhist ideals subtly or overtly present models of
awakening that promise some sort of relief or freedom from adversity.
However, if we look to the life of the Buddha, who by definition is
as enlightened as it gets in Buddhism, lots of bad things happened to
him, at least according to the texts. He had chronic headaches and back
pain, got illnesses, was attacked by bandits, people tried to kill him, his
own order broke into warring factions, people harassed him, and so
forth and so on. Thus, it is clear that even the Buddha was not free from
the laws of karma, and so it would seem naïve to assume that we were
also.
However, the karma models raise an interesting question, that of the
timing of the fulfillment of the promises of enlightenment and what this
has to do with death. The Theravada claims that the moment of
complete freedom from suffering is at the death of an arahat or
Buddha, as it is only then that there is no more coming into further
birth and there is the complete cessation of the senses that cause pain
and discomfort. The Tibetans would disagree, focusing on the perpetual
life or continued series of rebirths of a Buddha or Bodhisattva
throughout time to help awaken other beings. These conflicts bring us
to other models, but in fact are paradoxes created by misperception.
However, the karma models are not entirely junk. By seeing each
thought, state and emotion as it is, there is an increased ability to simply


watch these arise and vanish on their own, thus allowing for the causal
force of them to not wash through to the future without some
moderation of intelligence and wisdom. In this way, past causes, habits,
tendencies and the like can be mitigated through clear seeing, and the
actions we take based on these that create future causes can be done
with more awareness, clarity, and a broader, more inclusive perspective.
This is not the same thing as eliminating all “negative” karma, but it is
practical, realistic and verifiable, and thus represents the grain of truth
found in the Karma Models.
THE PERPETUAL BLISS MODELS
Perpetual Bliss Models focus on enlightenment bringing on a state
of continuous happiness, peace, joy, or bliss. These are commonly
found in Hinduism, though they are in full force in Buddhism and
other traditions as well, e.g. Christianity’s “the peace that passes all
understanding.” Buddhism often describes Nirvana (Nibbana) as
synonymous with the highest happiness and the end of suffering, and
this end of suffering is the natural corollary of the Perpetual Bliss
Models. Perpetual Bliss Models and their corollaries are so pervasive in
the world of awakening as to be a central, nearly unassailable tenant of
most people’s core beliefs. I am sorry to say, they need serious revision.
The first point is that about impermanence. Bliss, peace, happiness,
as well as their counterparts pain, chaos, and misery, are all transient
phenomena, subject to conditions, arising and passing like the weather.
As Zen says, the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows march
through our lives according to the laws of reality that have always been
in place. This returns us to the great question of realization: does
realization change things or does realization reveal how things always
were? I advocate a modified version of the latter view, both for practice
and for having sane models, but the dogma and those selling something
often stray into the promises of a radically different and better existence.
The standard Buddhist argument is that by removing the condition,
namely ignorance or misperception, the suffering caused by this
condition is also removed. The question then is how much suffering is
caused by that particular condition and how much is caused by just
being alive. I assert that most of our suffering is caused by simply being
alive, but must concede that there is something about changing


something in the relationship to the ordinary facts of life and humanity
that does help, and why I am so reluctant to admit that there is some
sort of peace that comes from realization is a question I am still looking
into. While I strongly believe that there are practical reasons not to sell
things in this way, I suspect that some residual quirk of my personality is
also at play here, and you may have already come to that conclusion.
The other side of the Perpetual Bliss Models is the notion that
somehow one will enter into a permanent jhanic state, such as the 4th
jhana or some sort of Nibbanic jhana. These versions of the bliss
models imply perfect, continuous concentration untouched by
circumstance or enhanced by some sort of inborn wellspring of jhanic
qualities. As noted above, all the concentration states are temporary, not
related directly to realization, attained both by some who are
enlightened and some who are not, and thus are a false promise.
However, as so many people get a taste of jhana and are sure this
must just get better and more continuous as they progress, they end up
cultivating these states again and again and get nowhere in insight
practice. Further, why would someone who was hanging onto a bliss
model want to look into suffering? They don’t, and so the chances of
them coming into real insight territory or handling the Dark Night well
are slim. Now, it is true that there is some sort of relationship between
the perspective on things that occurs in the first four jhanas and the four
paths, and the panoramic perspective of both the fourth samatha jhana
and the panoramic perspective of arahatship share some positive aspects
in common, but they are not the same thing, and even mentioning these
patterns and parallels is dangerous, as it can cause a lot of misguided
effort and assessment of where people are on the path. I think that this
is a good place to introduce the Tibetan concept of the Three Kayas, as
it has some useful aspects that help make sense of these things.
THE THREE KAYAS
Contrary to what some Tibetan Buddhists would tell you, arahats
have a deep understanding of what is meant by their teaching of the
Three Kayas or “Bodies of Understanding.” For me, the Three Kayas
are very close in meaning and implication to the scopes of the Three
Trainings. Arahats understand the fullness of the implications of having
been born and of there still being a body and mind (called the


“nirmanakaya” or “manifestation body”), relating to training in morality.
All teachings of dependent arising, interconnection and
interdependence fall into the realm of the nirmanakaya.
Arahats know intimately the fullness of the ordinary realities of the
human condition: sickness (physical and mental), health, sorrow, joy,
conflict, harmony, pleasure, pain, clarity and confusion, stupidity and
brilliance. All of these manifest according to the same natural laws that
have always been in effect, contrary to popular belief. A body was born
and it will get sick and die. The Eight Worldly Winds of praise and
blame, fame and ill repute, success and failure, and gain and loss still
blow impersonally as always. The laws of biochemistry, physics and
physiology still hold. We still have to pay taxes. From a cynic’s point of
view, the nirmanakaya is the most disappointing aspect of
enlightenment. Did one really imagine that somehow it would be
otherwise? Don’t believe the hype! Another of the great Bill Hamilton
one-liners was, “Suffering less, noticing it more.” The more we wake up,
the more we notice exactly what it means to have been born.
The nirmanakaya is what is meant by this passage pertaining to the
arahat: “The disturbances resulting from the taint of being can no longer
be found here, the disturbances related to the taint of attraction can no
longer be found here, the disturbances related to the taint of aversion
can no longer be found here, and yet there remains the disturbances
inherent in these six sense doors that are dependent on a body and
conditioned by life”, from Sutta #121, The Shorter Discourse on
Voidness, in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Notice that
this says, “six sense doors.” Arahats still think, contrary to occasional
myths about “stopping thought”, as noted above. While the content of
thoughts is still inherently dual, the true nature of the way thoughts
manifest is absolutely non-dual. Arahats know both aspects of thought
directly, a bit like being able to see waves on the ocean and yet also that
the whole thing is made of water and intimately connected. No wave
would ever be fooled into thinking that one wave was watching,
controlling, or isolated from another.
The nirmanakaya is also the aspect of understanding that has to do
with personality, habits and issues of character. Don’t imagine that just
by understanding the full ultimate truth of phenomena that these things


will somehow lose their considerable causal inertia. To paraphrase Chi
Nul, a great Korean Chan monk, just because the Sun is shining brightly
doesn’t mean that all the snow will instantly melt.
On a related theme, the nirmanakaya also relates to the facts of the
physiological inertia and biological conditioning of the bodily aspects of
the emotional life. The mind of a true arahat is extremely resilient, but
the flesh works according to the same laws that were in place before.
The spacious mental resilience of an arahat has some positive
consequences for physical life, but it does not completely transform it.
Thus, physical sensations associated with hunger, pain, tiredness, sexual
arousal, nervousness, fear and all the rest are still intimate realities for
the living arahat when they arise and are not inconsequential, though the
points made above in the Karma model about seeing things arise and
vanish still apply. The nirmanakaya includes issues of biochemistry and
neurochemistry, and all of the issues of mental pathology that may go
along with these.
The nirmanakaya bears out the truth so well articulated by Lao Tzu
when he talked about dark and light containing one another and
difficulty and ease complementing one another. No level of
enlightenment will allow one to just pick one’s favorite half of reality or
humanity and eradicate the rest. This simply never happens and is not
possible.
I think that everyone on the spiritual path should occasionally sit
down with a piece of paper and list their favorite half of reality that they
imagine or wish would be left if they got fully enlightened, and then list
all the aspects of reality that they wish or “know” would vanish forever.
They should then list the things that they imagine would show up as a
result of full realization that are not here now. The differences between
these lists often point directly to what blocks the development of
wisdom from clear acceptance and understanding of reality.
Even arahats and buddhas have a favorite half of reality as well as
dreams about how things could be, so these dreams are not the
problem. The difference is that highly realized beings understand
directly that both the “good” and “bad” halves are of the nature of
ultimate truth, including all thoughts about them, and this makes all the
difference. These sensations flicker effortlessly and vanish, getting no


more nor less consideration than they are due. The point I am trying to
make here is to include the sensations that make up your world in your
practice, and don’t retreat into idealized fantasies of what realization will
be like, though notice such sensations if and when they occur.
Lastly, the nirmanakaya relates to our “stuff,” our issues, our
childhood traumas, our dark secrets. I have routinely mentioned that
when doing insight practices one should try to see these things at the
moment-to-moment level. However, one must also find a way to deal
with our stuff in the traditional ways, or perhaps non-traditional ones.
Just do this work when not doing insight practices. While there are
connections between these two types of work, they are often in direct
conflict. Make time for the macroscopic, when we face and learn about
how to live well in the world in terms of emotions, issues, conflicts,
tears, joys, people, jobs and relationships. However, also make time
during which you resolutely put all of that behind you, time when you
stay at the level of flickering sensations. Unhealthy fixation on either
perspective is guaranteed to cause problems.
Arahats also have a wondrous understanding of all of this that is
unique to them and buddhas (though there may be hints of it at third
path) called the “sambhogakaya.” They know that the full range of
phenomenal reality and even the full range of the emotional life can be
deeply appreciated for what it is. They see that the world of concepts,
language, symbols, visions, thoughts and dreams is fundamentally the
same as the world of materiality, that they both share the same essential
nature from an experiential point of view. The first line of the Gospel of
John, “In the beginning there was the word, and the word was God,” is a
nice way to put it. For those who find this phrase too cryptic, I
paraphrase it as: “From the beginning, concepts, words, dreams, visions,
and the realm of thought have always been an aspect of ultimate reality.”
Further, in some strange way even the worst of the world has a
richness of texture that can be deeply enjoyed, and a mysterious and
sometimes awe-inspiring glory mixed into it, inherent in it. What they
were looking for was permeating all the sensations without exception
that had made up their world all along! What staggering irony this is,
and what a silent joy it is to discover this at last. This is what is meant by


“the bliss of Nirvana.” It is a more subtle understanding than the
nirmanakaya and in some largely mysterious way does not contradict it.
Beyond even this, they also understand in real time what is meant by
the dharmakaya, that somehow none of this is they, and that “what they
are” cannot be fundamentally harmed, disturbed or affected by the
world of phenomena in any way. The dharmakaya seems to
simultaneously pervade all of this, not be all of this, and be utterly
beyond all of this. It seems to be permanent and yet unfindable, be
empty and yet aware. Even this paradoxical language is hopelessly crude
and from a certain point of view unnecessary, though an arahat would
know directly what it is pointing to. This is what is meant by “going
beyond birth and death,” “Samsara is Nirvana,” “the arahat is traceless
here and now,” “True Self” and “no-self.” Interestingly, the
nirmanakaya also relates directly to both “True Self” and “no-self.”
There is something beautiful and yet tragic in this, a “dark comedy” as a
friend of mine put it.
To even say that the dharmakaya is a very subtle understanding
makes no sense, as the understanding of dharmakaya arises more from
what is absent rather than a sense of the presence of something. On the
other hand, the presence of everything bears witness to it.
All three understandings (the nirmanakaya, the sambhogakaya, and
the dharmakaya) are accessible to the arahat at any time by the mere
inclination towards them, which is to say these perspectives arise
dependent on causes in their own time. They are three complementary
perspectives on the same thing. It is like being able to see the validity of
the perspective of all of the three people in the classic Taoist painting
called “The Vinegar Tasters,” with Confucius and his laws for living in
the world relating to the nirmanakaya, Lao Tzu and his deep
appreciation of life relating to the sambhogakaya, and the Buddha and
his emphasis on Nirvana and going beyond suffering, birth and death
relating to the dharmakaya. Most people think of this painting as a
Taoist slam on the other two traditions, but I think that the deeper
meaning is much more useful.
The teaching of the Three Ultimate Dharmas of materiality,
mentality and Nibbana that I articulated earlier is closely related to the
Tibetan concepts of the Three Kayas or aspects of the fully enlightened


condition. The nirmanakaya relates to form, the sambhogakaya relates
to the enjoyable, quiet and spacious peace of the fully enlightened mind
that unifies the mental and physical into the same field of experience,
and the dharmakaya relates to Nibbana.
Were only the nirmanakaya true, we could say that unitive
experiences are the answer and that we are the whole field of
experience. Were only the dharmakaya true, we could say that
transcendent “experiences” are the answer, that we create and know the
whole field of experience, that we do not exist, and that we are the
deathless or God. Neither of these frameworks can clearly explain
things on their own, and so, as mentioned in the chapter called No-self
vs. True Self, none of these descriptions really holds up to reality testing
on its own.
Presenting the Three Kayas also allows me to continue to hammer
relentlessly on the point about people wanting to find some spiritual
reality other than this one. The huge temptation when walking the
spiritual path is to try desperately to find a way to get the simple ease of
the sambhogakaya and the indestructible, transcendent and deathless
luminosity of the dharmakaya while secretly hoping that the down to
earth, mundane, intimate, visceral, vulnerable, and often embarrassing
nirmanakaya will just sort of crawl away and die or at least radically
reform itself. The nirmanakaya is often treated as though it were the
bastard stepchild of the fully enlightened condition, but you can’t have
one without the others. Intimacy with reality is bought at the price of
attaining transcendence beyond reality. Transcendence is bought at the
price of attaining intimacy with reality. These inescapable facts should
not be forgotten.
The all too common temptation of those who advertise and sell
spirituality is to sing the praises of the sambhogakaya and dharmakaya
while trying to gloss over the profound yet down to earth implications of
the nirmanakaya. Buyer beware! If enlightened beings didn’t feel the
fullness of their humanity and the ordinary world, compassion for
themselves and others would be completely impossible. From a Tibetan
point of view, it is because enlightened beings progressively lose their
artificial defenses against the nirmanakaya that they have no choice but
to be bodhisattvas, which brings us nicely to our next model…


THE IMMORTALITY MODELS
The Immortality Models are significantly more prevalent in Tibetan
Buddhism than the other strains, thought they also appear in Pure Land
Buddhism and are found elsewhere. While all strains of Buddhism on
the one hand categorically deny immortality as the goal based upon the
standard tenants of Buddhist logic, plenty then turn around and sell
immortality like used car salesmen. So many Buddhists want to be up in
the Heaven called Nirvana as empty yet separate beings who don’t exist
and yet live forever as Bodhisattvas saving the world.
While there are lots of good points in the Bodhisattva Vows, this is
yet another case of bait and switch where the results will be a bit more
down to earth than most people are bargaining for. However, many
Buddhists are so brainwashed into the ideal of becoming Amazing
Super Beings that they readily give up the notion that they could really
understand anything in this lifetime in exchange for the dream that
some zillion lifetimes down the road they may get to be Spiritual
Superstars. However, as their mentality can be essentially like people
who have bought into some weird cult, I don’t recommend trying to
convince them otherwise, as it generally just pisses them off. Just do
your practice, take care of your own understanding, and then see what
you can do from there.
Now, as before, there is some weird truth to the immortality models
on two fronts. First, from a technical point of view, what is traditionally
called the Dharmakaya, Deathless, Nirvana, Tao, Void, Buddha
Nature, etc. is indestructible, timeless, etc., but this is because it is not
anything specific. This has already been discussed, and simply stated,
from this point of view the notion of death or impermanence simply
does not apply. The flip side of this, that of the ordinary, transient
world, Nirmanakaya, etc., is that causality rings on indefinitely. This is
an interesting way to look at things, and a very practical, insight-oriented
way.
From the point of view of time, cause and effect, things ripple out
into the universe like drops of water cause ripples in water. This
process, that is to say the world and us, has always been empty. If we are
anything, it is a pattern of rippling sensations arising from causes and
effects and leading to causes and effects. Thus, we send ripples of


whatever and however we are out into the causal future. If we are
enlightened, that is one aspect of what ripples out into the patterns we
call time, and these ripples go on without definable end. Teachings of
reincarnation are getting at this point in their somewhat problematic
way. Thus, we see that there is something to the Immortality Models,
but they are not very helpful for doing insight practices except to help
one appreciate causality. I think they are much more useful for training
in morality, despite their obvious paradigmatic problems.
One great traditional analogy goes as follows: If you lit a candle,
then lit another candle with that candle and then blew out the first one,
what is transmitted? This is causality without a permanent entity,
resonance without continuity, an artificial but useful recognition of a
pattern, and nothing more.
THE TRANSCENDENCE MODELS
Related to the Immortality and Bliss Models, we have the
Transcendence Models. These essentially promise that you will have
the best of both worlds: you will get to be in the world while not of the
world, be able to enjoy all pleasant things while being immune to pain
and difficulty, and thus live in a protected state of partial, selective
transcendence. A lot of people try to emulate such a state in their
practice: when presented with suffering they either look away from it or
try to make their attention so wide or vague that they don’t notice it, and
when pleasant things arise they try to hang on to those experiences and
expand them. While such a perfectly natural thing to do, this is the
exact reverse of insight practice, and yet they may deeply feel that this is
practicing for the transcendence they have been promised.
As stated earlier, the predictable and obvious truth is that
transcendence is bought at the price of a very deep, direct intimacy with
life, all of life, both good and bad. Similarly, this deep intimacy with life
is bought at the price of transcendence. While everyone nearly
automatically looks to the good side of both, few consider that
realization brings a deep, direct experience of all that is painful and also
the reluctant understanding of how empty and ephemeral pleasure is.
One must be careful here, and I don’t advocate buying into either
extreme. Our ordinary lives have all this already, so don’t look for
something that is different from what is going on. Instead, look into your


life as it is and see the Three Characteristics of it directly, instant by
instant. This is the gateway to the answer to the strange paradox that all
this is pointing to.
THE EXTINCTION MODELS
On the flip side of the Immortality Models, and somewhat contrary
to the Transcendence Models, we have the Extinction Models. These
are essentially a promise that insight practices will either have you never
be reborn again or will make you non-existent somehow in some
ordinary sense. The first basic flaw in these models is that they presume
an entity to which these things can occur, which from an insight point of
view is already a problem. Insight practices at their best presume
emptiness as always having been the case, and so to posit that there is
something that was reborn flies directly against their root premises.
Thus, the notion that there is someone who either will not be reborn
again or will somehow cease to be (assuming they were “being” before),
is absurd and doesn’t belong in the language of ultimate wisdom.
However, page after page, Buddhism promises that there will be no
more coming into any state of being, no more rebirth, no more self, and
that somehow this will get someone off of the wheel of suffering.
Here we get into as gray an area as it gets in spiritual language.
Between the weird promises of the Immortality Models and the weird
promises of the Extinction Models, we can really get into paradigmatic
trouble. Somehow we are sure that one of these must be right, or maybe
both are, or perhaps neither are, or some other combination we
currently can’t conceive of must be the correct one. However, all of
these models are based upon a fundamental flaw, the misperception of
sensations and the conclusion based on this misperception that there
was some separate, permanent us that all these dualistic concepts can
apply to. There is not, nor has their ever been, though sensations occur
anyway. It is a convenient, practical, working assumption, a convention,
a way of speaking, but nothing more. Thus, all of these curious notions
simply do not apply. Simply practicing and perceiving sensations clearly
reveals the way out of these paradoxes.


THE LOVE MODELS
On a completely different note, there are the Love Models. These
are hard to relate to any previous category except perhaps the
Emotional Models, but they essentially involve some combination of us
loving everyone, feeling love all the time, becoming Love itself, being
loved by everyone, or some combination of these. The first two are
commonly found in various references, such as Sri Nisargadatta
Maharaj’s famous quote, “Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me
I am everything. Between these two my life flows.”
This is really not a bad quote as quotes go, as it tries to encompass
the apparent paradoxes of spiritual understanding. It is basically a
restatement of the Tibetan concept of balancing emptiness and
compassion, and I like it for this reason. However, lots of people think
that enlightened beings will be radiating love all the time, walking
around saying loving things, feel profound love for all things at all times,
and the like. Unfortunately, things couldn’t be further from the truth.
While it does get sometimes easier to take the wider world of beings
into consideration as the center point is seen through, this is very
different from walking around in a state of continuous love.
More sinister, deep, rarely articulated and yet compelling is the
notion that somehow we will get enlightened and then people will not
just like us, they will love us. Wow, does that one not withstand reality
testing. Take the history of any of your favorite spiritual superheroes,
the Buddha, Jesus Christ, St. John of the Cross, Rumi, etc. and notice
the reactions people had to them. The notion that somehow you will be
embraced, accepted, appreciated, respected, adored, cared for, or even
liked by anyone just because of realization is, tragically, just another
beautiful, delusional dream. In short, think twice before quitting your
day job or walking down the middle of the street in your guru outfit
proclaiming your realization for all to love.
Now, it is true that you can borrow a lot of pre-programmed respect
from some people just by ordaining, which, viewed another way, means
that ordination might get you the respect that your realization should, in
some idealized universe, provide for you. However, this will be to a
strangely select audience, and the games you have to participate in to be
a part of that group are significant. You can also get a lot of respect by


getting on some senior teacher list, but there are subtle forces that then
come to bear that will have you denying a lot of your own humanity
when in public, thus leading to the shadow sides I mentioned above.
These points also hint at the Social Models that will follow in a bit.
THE UNITY MODELS
Related to the Love Models are the Unity Models, those that
promise a palpable sense of your connection to everything else. This is
another one of those models that contains some sort of truth, but is in
fact one far extreme side of the unity/extinction paradox. What we
generally imagine is that we will stay an agent, a separate, conscious, incontrol being and yet will be part of everything in some mysterious way,
such as either feeling everything else at all times or even more ludicrous,
being in control of everything else at all times. I have already spent a lot
of time on this model in the section called No-Self vs. True Self and in
previous models, so will move on with the simple statement that those
that believe in unitive models are missing something fundamental.
THE SOCIAL MODELS
In the same vein as the Love Models are the Social Models. These
tend to involve all sorts of social implications or issues around
enlightenment. For instance, we may imagine that enlightenment will
automatically have certain desirable social implications, such as being
accepted in a particular social role, such as that of a teacher, guide,
mentor, spiritual friend, guru, leader, avatar, etc. This usually involves
some poorly defined group of people accepting us. While spiritual
attainments and unrelated qualities can sometimes inspire people to
view us in these ways, there are absolutely no guarantees.
As I have pointed out before, plenty of people with wisdom have
been ridiculed, ostracized, persecuted, attacked, jailed and murdered
when they spoke from that place. In short, any social implications of
one’s realization (assuming one is correct in claiming or believing it) will
be at the mercy of ordinary causal reality, just as with everything else,
and ordinary causal reality can really suck sometimes. Further, the vast
majority of people don’t really have any clue what enlightenment is
about, don’t think that enlightenment really exists today, may not have
enlightenment as part of their view of what possible or even desirable,


or may even find the notion that you think you are enlightened to be a
threat to their religious beliefs or an indication of your grandiosity,
arrogance, delusion, or psychosis. Having lived with these issues for
over a decade, I can tell you that these reactions are as likely to be
found in the social circles of Buddhism as they are in the social circles
of any other meditative or non-meditative religious or non-religious
tradition.
Other Social Models involve enlightenment having something to do
with other people’s opinions regarding whether or not we are
enlightened, meaning that enlightenment is purely a social convention
or collective designation and has nothing to do with reality or the
individuals perception of it. In this model, just as we may elect a
president (or at least believe we are casting votes for one), so it is with
enlightenment. This is actually fairly common in a number of Western
Buddhist circles, including some major retreat centers, in which they all
bow to the senior teacher list and yet hold the paradigm that no one
really gets enlightened. While all basically the neurosis of spiritual
children, there are actually some real, practical truths hidden in this
model.
While our direct perception of reality will depend on our practice
and insights, any attempts at directly promoting similar insights in others
will be greatly helped or hindered by what people think of us, whether
or not we are given some title, whether or not a lineage accepts us as a
teacher in that lineage, and whether or not the concepts and language
we use to describe and sell our realization fit in with the cultural
expectations and norms of our social circles. Further, there are those
who falsely think they are enlightened because someone else thinks they
are, and plenty of people on senior teacher lists that probably shouldn’t
be there.
One way or another, it is worth examining our deepest beliefs
regarding the social implications we imagine will occur when we get
enlightened or more enlightened. These can have a big impact on our
practice, our motivation to practice, and what kind of successes and
failures we have in spreading insights around once we have insights
ourselves. Unfortunately, most of our beliefs are likely to be somewhat
unrealistic, springing from the understandable human need for


recognition, role, and social status. Again, the further we find our
dreams from our current reality, the more we need to look at what is
happening right now, with those dreams and needs being one small part
of the transient, causal sensations that are arising and vanishing.
Stated in practical terms and by way of example, you could be a
foreign medical grad that had trained well in some foreign school,
completed a good foreign residency, be perfectly qualified to practice
from the point of view of knowledge, experience and talent, and yet not
be allowed to practice in the United States until you had jumped
through all the hoops. The same problem can arise when people go
outside of a tradition or partially outside it and yet do very good insight
work. They have the knowledge but not the social designation. Like the
Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz who lacks a diploma, those who are
enlightened who have not gone through standard channels can run into
problems. That said, it also gives the freedom to speak out without
worrying about those channels liking what you say, and there is much
about the standard channels to speak out about.
I myself exist in a gray area like this, as do many modern teachers. I
have accomplished much using the techniques of the Theravada, a
tradition that explicitly says that only monks can know what I know and
usually only recognizes monks as lineage holders. This is a cultural and
social problem, and highlights the truth embodied in the social models.
I suspect there will be a lot more of this as the dharma moves into the
modern era and more people are successful. We need to come up with
solutions to this problem that neither artificially elevate people nor
artificially prevent them from sharing what is they know that is of benefit
to others.
THE THREE YANAS
While I am generally a die-hard fan of the Theravada, I have a great
appreciation for much of the rest of Buddhism and the world’s other
great mystical traditions. In that spirit, I offer the following. Traditional
Tibetan training is broken down into Three Yanas or vehicles: the
Hinayana, the Mahayana and the Vajrayana. These correspond very
nicely to the needs of practitioners at various stages of the Simple Model
presented above.


The Hinayana is a set of techniques and practices that closely
resembles many of the traditional trainings of the Theravada, and these
are often confused for this reason. (There are some historical
relationships between the two that I do not wish to go into.) The
Hinayana’s emphasis is on basic morality, stabilizing the mind, and
looking into the Three Characteristics, i.e. all of the fundamental
practices and emphases that I mentioned in Part I. It is designed to get a
person to the first stage of awakening, i.e. first path, which the Tibetans
would call third path in the Tibetan Five Path Mode, or attaining the
first bhumi.
Getting to the next stage of the simple model or third path involves a
deep appreciation of interconnectedness in real time and a willingness
to surrender to it. The Mahayana path provides methods for
understanding this in abundance with its strong emphasis on helping
others and on the intrinsic emptiness (“shunyata”) of phenomena. The
Bodhisattva Vow, a fundamental part of the Mahayana path, not only
expresses a deep willingness to surrender to and understand
interconnectedness, but its emphasis on not becoming a full buddha can
help people get away from the temptation of purely future-oriented
goals and grandiose visions of perfection that can still be quite a
challenge at this stage.
To get to the next stage, one must completely understand the
intrinsic luminosity of all phenomena without exception. The Vajrayana
path, with its emphasis on intrinsic luminosity and Tantric techniques
that work with the awakened nature of the fullness of the emotional
range, fits very well with the needs of one trying to gain the final
understanding that emptiness is form. Dzogchen teachings also explicitly
emphasize inherent luminosity and that all things are of the nature of
truth.
I am still a big fan of the Theravada, obviously, but I have a strong
appreciation for the tailored beauty of the Three Yana system of the
Tibetans. It has an uncanny sophistication to it and is part of what
happens naturally even if you are following Theravada techniques. I am
also a big fan of Zen, particularly its strong emphasis on keeping things
down to Earth, e.g. “After enlightenment, the laundry.” If you learn any
of these traditions well, you will come to see that they each contain the


others. As always, it is not the tradition that is important, but that it work
for you.
In short, the non-duality models are the only models of awakening
that hold up without apology, qualification or exception. The rest of the
models have serious problems, though each may contain some amount
of truth in it, however poorly conveyed. Given sufficient experience of
the real world, those who believe in literal interpretations of such
confused models as the limited emotional range models and limited
possible action models will either:
1) Be forced to come to the conclusion that no living being meets
their definitions of enlightenment,
2) Be forced into a dark corner of borderline-psychotic
rationalizations of what actually happens, or
3) Be headed for a very rude awakening indeed, to make a bit of a
bad pun.
There is only one thing worse in my mind than students getting
caught up in the dogma of the worst of the models, and that is realized
teachers getting caught by them. Just as it is disappointing when those
with long retreat resumes but no fundamental insight want to encourage
faith in their beautiful tradition by appearing to know more than they
actually do, it is doubly disappointing when realized beings can get
caught in these fallacious models, acting as if they worked in the fantasyland way that most people think they do. I know exactly where they are
coming from and how tempting this is, but I dream of a day when such
things never happen. The dharma world would be so much better off if
teachers were honest about what realization is and ain’t, both with their
students and also with themselves. Don’t think this sort of dishonesty
doesn’t occur. I have seen some of my very best and most realized
teachers fall into this trap and have also done so myself more times than
I can count. Learn from those who have had to learn the hard way and
are willing to admit this.
DITCHING OUR “STUFF” VS. DITCHING THE SPLIT
While these two models are stated implicitly above, I thought I
would summarize them again to make sure that I have made this
important point clear. There are models of awakening that involve
getting rid of all of our “stuff”, i.e. our issues, flaws, quirks, pains


negative emotions, traumas, personalities, cultural baggage, childhood
scars, relationship difficulties, insecurities, fears, strange notions, etc.
Such models underlie most of the mainstream visions of spiritual
attainment.
What is funny is that lots of people spend so much time working so
hard to get rid of all their stuff but think that enlightenment, i.e. ditching
the illusion of the dualistic split, is largely unattainable. I have exactly the
opposite view, that ditching the split is very attainable but getting rid of
all of our stuff is completely impossible. When I hear about those who
wish to attain a type of Buddhahood that is defined by not having any
stuff, I usually think to myself that the countless eons they usually claim
are necessary to accomplish this are a gross underestimation. The real
world is about stuff, and enlightenment is about the real world.
What is very nice about ditching the split, aside from the fact that it
can be done, is that now we can be friends with our stuff naturally, even
if it sucks. We can work with it as well as can be expected and from a
place of great clarity and understanding. Stage by stage, ditching the split
makes all the slow but necessary healing so much easier or at least more
tolerable. Thus, take the time to work with your stuff, or try not to, as
you like. Our stuff is here and being dealt with anyway. However,
seriously consider also doing the practices that can ditch the split, i.e.
those that ask us to see the true nature of the sensations that make up all
of our stuff and our attempts to deal with it.
Try these two scenarios on for size and see which seems to fit with
your goals for your life, with your vision of a life well lived. In the first,
imagine working with your stuff as best you can for most of your life,
never really knowing what is just needless mind noise and mental duress
caused by a lack of basic clarity. In your old age you do the practices
that lead to realization. The benefits of that level of understanding may
then be used for yourself and others during the remaining years of your
life.
In the second scenario, you take the time early in your spiritual
practice to attain to realization, following the precise instructions and
recommendations of a well-developed insight tradition. You then use
that level of increased clarity, acceptance, intimacy with life and
transcendence to work on your stuff and benefit others for the rest of


your life. The second approach seems vastly superior to me, but it is still
possible that these things are a matter of taste. One way or the other,
take responsibility for the choice you make.
THE “NOTHING TO DO” AND “YOU ARE ALREADY THERE” SCHOOLS
On a somewhat different note, I feel the need to address, which is to
say shoot down with every bit of rhetorical force I have, the notion
promoted by some teachers and even traditions that there is nothing to
do, nothing to accomplish, no goal to obtain, no enlightenment other
than the ordinary state of being, no practice or tradition that is of value,
no technique that will help. The other side of this same coin is the point
of view that you already are realized, already there, already completely
accomplished, and you essentially should be able to just be told this by
them to understand it for yourself, which, were it true, would have been
very nice of them, except that it is complete bullshit. The Nothing To
Do School and the You Are Already There School are both basically
vile extremes on the same basic notion that all effort to attain to mastery
is already missing the point, an error of craving and grasping. They both
contradict the fundamental premise of this book, namely that there is
something amazing to attain and understand and that there are specific,
reproducible methods that can help you do that.
Here is a detailed analysis of what is wrong with these and related
perspectives. Some defenders of these views will claim that they are the
most immediate, most complete, highest and most direct teachings that
one could promote, but I will claim that they do not lead to much that is
good that cannot be attained by conceptual frameworks that are not
nearly so problematic or easily misconstrued.
First, these notions encourage people to not practice. The defenders
can say what they like, but again and again I see people who subscribe to
these sorts of notions resting on their cleverness and grand posteriors
and not actually getting it in the same way that my accomplished
meditator friends get it. It seems so comforting, this notion that you are
already something that you, in fact, are not, or that there is nothing that
you could do that would be useful.
The notion that people already are something begs the question:
What are they? These views tend to imply that they are already
something such as perfect, enlightened, realized, awakened, or


something even worse such as Awareness, Cosmic Consciousness, The
Atman, an aspect of The Divine, etc. all of which cannot actually be
found. While Buddhism does sometimes go there, such as using terms
such as Dharmakaya and Buddha Nature, these are very slippery, high
concepts that were added later and require a ton of explanation and
practice experience to keep them from becoming the monsters they
nearly always become in less experienced hands.
Awakening involves clearly perceiving universal characteristics of
phenomena. While one can attempt to rest comfortably in the
intellectual notion that these universal characteristics are there anyway
and be comforted by teachings such as easily misconstrued statements
like, “I have gained nothing by complete and un-excelled
enlightenment,” the whole, core, essential, root point of all this is that
there is something to be gained by becoming one of the people that can
actually directly perceive the true nature of things clearly enough to
fundamentally change the way reality is perceived in real-time. The
straight truth is that the vast majority of people do not start out being
able to do anything even close to this, and most are lucky to be able to
stay with three breaths in sequence before wandering off into their
neurotic crap, much less understand anything liberating about those
breaths. The notion that everyone already is someone who can perceive
reality the way the masters do without effort in real-time is a fantastic
falsehood, lie, untruth, and in short, one great load of apathy-creating
insanity.
If one goes around asking people without very good insight into
these things, i.e. the unenlightened, about basic dharma points, points
that are obvious to those who have learned to pay attention well, one
does not find that everyone already is a person who is perceiving things
at the level that makes the difference the dharma promises. Further,
even those of lower levels of enlightenment generally have a hard time
saying they really are able to perceive the emptiness, luminosity,
selflessness, causality, transience, ephemerality, etc. of reality in realtime at all times without having to really do anything. In short, the
notion that this is as easy as just being what you already are is wildly off
the mark, as the vast majority of people are woefully underdeveloped on
the perceptual front in question.

Thus, all reality testing reveals that the two schools are missing a
very fundamental point: while the universal characteristics are always
manifesting in all things and at all times, there are those who can
perceive this well and those who cannot, and meditative training,
conceptual frameworks, techniques, teachers, texts, discussions and the
like can all contribute to developing the internal skills and wiring to be
able to fully realize what is possible, as thousands of practitioners
throughout the ages have noticed. I myself have known before and after,
meaning that I know what I was capable of perceiving and
understanding before I underwent meditative training and after, and no
amount of being fed the concept that I was already as developed as I
could be, was already enlightened, was already there, had nothing to do,
nothing to develop, was already as clear as I could be, was already
perfectly awake, etc. was going to make the difference that practicing for
thousands of hours over many years did.
It would be like saying: you are already a concert pianist, you just
have to realize it, or you already are a nuclear physicist, you just have to
realize it, or you already speak every language, you just have to realize it.
It would be like saying to a two-year old: you already understand
everything you need to know so stop learning new things now, or to a
severe paranoid schizophrenic: you already are as sane as anyone and
do not need to take your medicines and should just follow the voices
that tell you to kill people, or to a person with heart disease: just keep
smoking and eating fried pork skins and you will be healthy, or to an
illiterate person with no math skills who keeps having a hard time
navigating in the modern world and is constantly ripped off: no need to
learn to read and do math, as you are just fine as you are, or saying to a
greedy, corrupt, corporate-raiding, white-collar criminal, Fascist,
alcoholic wife-beater: hey, Dude, you are a like, beautiful perfect flower
of the Now Moment, already enlightened [insert toke here], you are
doing and not-doing just fine, like wow, so keep up the good work,
Man.
Would you let a blind and partially paralyzed untrained stroke
victim perform open-heart surgery on your child based on the notion
that they already are an accomplished surgeon but just have to realize it?
Would you follow the dharma teachings of people who feed other


people this kind of crap? Those who imagine that everyone somehow in
their development already became as clear and perceptive as they could
be just by being alive is missing something very profound. Do they
imagine that you can just remind people of these things and suddenly all
wisdom and clarity will suddenly appear? This is mind-bogglingly naive.
I have gained so much that is good and lost so much that is bad by
learning to practice well, learning to concentrate, learning the theory,
learning insight practices, going through the organic process of the stages
over decades, reading the stories, reading about the lives of the great
practitioners, having dharma conversations with dharma friends,
debating points, wrestling with difficult concepts and how to apply them
to my actual life, teaching, learning, studying, playing with the powers,
writing, realizing how things are, and delving deeply into the sensate
world that I am astounded that anyone would want to try to reduce
something so grand, wonderful, deep, rich, amazing and profound to
such a paltry, ridiculous concept as the notion that all that is already in
place in everyone regardless of what they have done or not done. All
those benefits, skills, abilities, powers, states, stages, experiences,
insights, and fundamental perceptual changes simply were not available
until I did the work, took the time, participated in the process, and no
amount of anyone telling me it was otherwise would have helped or
made it so.
I know of no examples where the necessary and sufficient causes for
the arising of these benefits did not involve some kind of work. In short,
I say to those who persist in promoting the Nothing To Do School and
the You Are Already There School: STOP IT! You are spreading
craziness, and this is craziness that many people will not be able to tell is
craziness, and that appears to include those who promote these fallacies.
While I usually do not go so far as to tell people that there is something
so deeply wrong with what they think and how they communicate it that
they should stop it immediately and forever, this particular point is a
great example of something I consider abhorrent and worthy of
profound revision.
Regardless of any kind intentions, the teachings of these schools
take a half-truth that seems so very nice and seductive to us neurotic
practitioners who just can barely stand another achievement trip and


have such a hard time with self-acceptance and turn that distortion into
sugary poison. There is no need to tie the three useful concepts of 1)
no-self, 2) self-acceptance in the ordinary sense, and 3) the notion that
the sensations that lead to understanding if clearly perceived over and
over again are manifesting right here, right now, to such a perversely
twisted yet seemingly benign and similar concepts as the ones they
unfortunately promote.
FINAL POINTS
Spirituality that ignores or covers up our inevitable dark or
undesirable sides is doomed to be bitten and burned by them. Models
of realization that involve high ideals of human perfection have caused
so much dejection, despair and misguided effort throughout the ages
that I have no qualms about doing my very best to try to smash them to
pieces on the sharp rocks of reality. They are not completely useless,
and there is some value in keeping the standards to which we aspire
high as we will see in the next chapter, but most of the time are taken
way too seriously to be helpful at all.
It is clear that those who adhere the most rigidly to the selfperfection models of enlightenment are also very often those who
believe enlightenment is the least attainable and feel the most
disempowered in their practice and spiritual life. Not surprisingly, those
with the highest standards for what realization will entail often have the
lowest standards for their own practice and what they hope to actually
attain in this lifetime. They are the armchair quarterbacks of the
spiritual path. Becoming grandiose about aspiring to a high ideal seems
to be a common coping mechanism for dealing with a lack of
confidence and insight. As Christopher Titmuss, one of my best and
most honest teachers, often says, “We do not come from a selfperfection lineage.” There are those who do explicitly come from selfperfection lineages. I wish them good luck. They’ll need it.

Bud Karas