Being Buddha: Living Awareness in the Unreal World

The following may be the most revealing, most interesting, most insightful that I have ever attempted. In my “New Years message”, I challenged each of you to become yourself…to discover that you are already enlightened. But if you take that challenge and turn it around, you might realize that I’m really asking you to deny everything you’ve ever believed.

I was asking nothing less than a mental leap into the unknown…into what may be nothing more than an aberrant mental error. That this error happens to be shared by Jesus, the Buddha, all the saints, wise men, gurus, shaman, Kaunas, magi and mystics for the past several thousand years is merely coincidence. And yet…somehow…we share the same vision: the truth that lies behind all the religions in history.

Still…from your point of view…I was asking you to do the impossible: to accept a mental picture of the existence and consciousness that was really far beyond your comprehension or imagination.

Over and over again, I have described myself as living in heaven; firmly grounded in harmony and bliss. I describe a situation where two worlds are superimposed over each other. You and I, we both live simultaneously in both worlds.

What I have failed to detail, is the fact that I cannot escape also living in the unreal world. Although grounded in the real world, I spend as much time in the unreal world as anyone else.

All of this occurred to me last night as I watched “An American President” on TV for perhaps the fifth time…the story always gets me. I cry in several scenes. Of course, I’m also a sucker for Shakespeare in Love, Funny Girl, Love Story….et al.

Romance is the most enticing emotion in the unreal world. It is also the cleanest and purest and the closest to approaching enlightenment itself…but it is also ultimately unreal. To be truly aware is to be like Jesus. You cannot love one more than another. The love you feel for a daughter or sister can be no deeper or stronger than the same unconditional love that you might feel for the incompetent sales clerk on the other end of the phone.

Conceptually speaking, for a professed Buddha to be hooked on romantic comedy is roughly equivalent to robbing grocery stores. Philosophically, there is little difference.

On the other hand, the unreal world…where I spend as much time as you do…is a world that is totally judgmental. Remember that the unreal world is a fully dualistic world, built entirely of words: of every possible variant of good and evil, right and wrong.

In this unreal world, I cannot help but be judged and found deficient. Unless…as many do…I simply sit and meditate with a silly grin on my face...I am subject to judgment. Anything that I might enjoy can be judged as less than spiritual. Every smile and every frown can be labeled as emotion or personality.

With every judgment…which is impossible to avoid…I can be found wanting. And if I can be found any less than perfect…when I have already declared myself awakened and therefore perfect…then I am equally guilty of either lying or just merely exaggerating the extent of my spiritual consciousness.

At that point, of course, nothing that I ever say can be taken at face value.

The reason that I happen to be perfect, by the way, is because there are no words with which to judge me in the real world where I exist…and no error that I am capable of committing.

Remember that I am defining enlightenment as the ability to discern the real from the unreal. The awakened and the unawakened both exist simultaneously in the real and the unreal worlds; the unawakened are firmly grounded in that unreal world of words whereas the awakened is rooted in the real and immediate.

To the unawakened, the unreal seems to be thoroughly real.

The unreal is the illusion.