a tragic sensibility

Speaking personally, I feel certain only about finding myself “here” somehow, prior to explanations, first causes, or any of that stuff. Beyond that, I have no answers, so I have nothing to teach. My “message,” if you want to call it that, is not explanatory in the least but only a kind of reminder of the vastness of the universe and the epistemological limitations of the human mind. A taste of that perspective may end one’s interest in “spirituality”—the kind that can be taught, I mean—permanently. That is where Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “the flight of the eagle” begins. Another thing Mr. Krishnamurti liked to say is, “Be a light unto yourself.”

Speaking broadly and generally, spiritual students and retreat attendees may say they want to “awaken,” but they don’t mean it. They seem to want to remain in the same old trance state: “myself the witness, or myself the realizer.” But call it what you will; identities like that are impediments to understanding, not a path to it. There is, I say, no path. There is only this right now, precisely as it is, like it or not.

In satsangs with an adored figure sitting on a stage pontificating and subtly or not so subtly preaching about how wonderful it is to be awake, or in the foolish books they write, the consumers of this product are getting precisely what they desire: a vicarious experience without much skin in the game. One can talk about “no-self” from now until the cows come home, or “love,” or “oneness,” or “non-duality.’ So what? Talk is cheap. You still wanted something: a seat close to the stage and to be recognized.

Those satsangs, from my vantage, feel far too optimistic. The darker side of seeing things as they are seems all but filtered out, not because the teacher is lying to the students, but because the teacher and the students are colluding in the selfsame trance, reifying via repetition a supposedly “spiritual” realm in which everything is just peachy.

That is the essence of the trance of transcendence, as I call it, which entails and is sustained by seeking ever subtler justifications for the natural defense mechanisms against despair, hopelessness, and just plain sadness about the human condition.

No! Everything is not just peachy. I feel a profound sadness as I watch us humans destroying the very environment on which we all depend—this beautiful world of oceans and flowers. This sadness I feel, this deep melancholy, has no remedy.

Yes, greedy, pig-at-the-trough types abuse their power to keep the money machine working overtime, but that is only the most minor contributor to this sadness. Their visage is ugly, and their hearts seem barren, but they are not really the problem.

The problem, as I see it, is not politics, albeit corrupt and criminal, or corporate greed, but that even the most honest, most well-meaning person who fully acknowledges the global warming syndrome has not the ghost of an idea what to do about it.

Yes, you can say we need to cut back such and such a percentage of human energy consumption, which may improve matters fifty years from now. You can say it, but a cutback like that will not happen, and we all know it. Our human mind has not evolved to manage distant consequences but to consume and procreate, and that’s the problem. We are damned good at filling every niche where even a penny can be made or some pleasure procured, and we seem unable to stop.

It’s worse than that. More and more, competent climatologists express the view that it is not just too late for cutting back to matter much, even fifty years on, but that phenomena that had not been anticipated are combining in a kind of synergistic runaway process that accelerates this catastrophe, which is no longer expected in the future but is happening right now, far sooner than previously forecast. We feel it here in Baja California Sur, and I bet you do, too.

I do not usually speak of these matters because why? Just to bum everyone out so we can sit around saying that humanity is fucked and we can’t do fuck all about it?

No. I bring it up here as an example of unavoidable pain. Every person I know whom I consider “awake” suffers this kind of pain constantly—sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background. It casts a pall.

This is the opposite of transcending anything. This is the unavoidable embrace of a tragic sensibility. Explanations notwithstanding, this sadness and the tragic sense of life, not transcendence and victory, is what we awake ones are really dealing with.

“Enlightenment” does not bring water to the thirsty or feed anyone. That is what I mean when I talk about “seeing things as they are.”

In light of this fraught situation, it is little wonder that so many people who consider themselves sensitive and “spiritual” want to be hypnotized, and the deeper the trance, the better. The trance of transcendence: a hypnotic induction that whispers over and over again that this world is only a kind of dream and that behind it or supporting it abides an entirely different world—a world of perfection, a permanent, unchanging, intelligent, non-dual, benign world where “consciousness” could never hurt anyone.

Really? And you know that how exactly?