Die Like An Idiot

Q: Dear Robert, I have read both of your books and watched many of your videos. As soon as I first ran into you through your Batgap interview, I intuitively knew you were the real deal. This encounter with your work as a writer and photographer has been a major life-changing event for me. I want to let you know how truly thankful I am for this.

Recently, I suddenly realized that my real motivation was that I desperately wanted to awaken before I die, “pour ne pas mourrir idiot” as we say in French: “so I would not die as an idiot”. I don’t know where that thought originated, but it has imposed itself on me. It’s like I know for sure that I am not awake at the moment, and I accept it as it is for the time being, but what a terrible waste my life would have been if I should have to face death as a not-awakened human being. What a strange (or stupid) thought, I think. Could you comment on this?

Thank you,
Edith

Photographers, 2016

Hi, Edith.

You are most welcome.

Some people say there is no such thing as being “awake.” Others say being awake means you no longer have any sense of being a separate self. I disagree with both of those views.

In my observation, many people sleepwalk through life. In that condition, which I have called the hypnotic trance, one simply accepts beliefs and dogmas about what is real and what it means to be a living human animal that they have heard from other people—often from religions, philosophies, and other seemingly authoritative sources—instead of asking essential questions and searching for answers within one’s own everyday experience.

I see that sleepwalking, and I see an end to it—a snapping out of the hypnotic trance. The end of sleepwalking is marked by unwillingness to accept answers from others. Instead, one looks to one’s own experience as the primary source of information about what matters and what doesn’t. That is what I mean by “awake.” From my perspective, the difference between an awake human and a sleepwalker is stark and obvious.

On the other hand, some do not deny that sleepwalking is a common human condition but imagine themselves to be "awake" because they have convinced themselves that “there is no such thing as a separate self.”

Such people imagine that the sense of being a human animal—born as the outcome of two other human animals mating—who lives for a time, has all kinds of perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and other experiences, and then dies is nothing but an illusion. I know you are familiar with that opinion. It is common among our Facebook friends who follow spiritual teachers or, even worse, fancy themselves as spiritual teachers.

Since you find my words and images worthwhile, let me address the fear of “mourrir idiot” from my point of view.

First, in a way, we are all idiots. What we know about anything is much less than what we do not know. That is the human condition. The brains we use to see, feel, reason, and decide are primate animal brains, the power and scope of which is limited, not unlimited, and which are not fit instruments for knowing “Truth.”

What we call truth or reality is a human point of view based on human science and philosophy. How that view corresponds to any greater reality is unknowable except as speculation. We don’t know what anything “really” is. In that sense, we are all idiots.

So, if we are all idiots, what does it mean to be awake? It means, I am saying, that one understands human cognitive limitation and lives without beliefs such as “there is no separate self.” When awake, one hears such words but understands that the speakers of them are idiots just like oneself, whose information and intelligence are limited, and so such words define nothing. Any words on these matters represent one of many possible points of view, all limited and self-referential, not “truth.”

When we see human limitation for what it is, we are “awake,” I say, in the only way we ever can be awake: alone in each moment, relying upon our present understanding of what is occurring and what those occurrences add up to, without reliance on the thoughts and “truths” of other idiots. “Awake,” as I wrote in The Ten Thousand Things, “is when you don’t follow.”

We all die, and what we experience at that moment seems relatively unimportant. To me, it is how one lives that seems essential, and the key to that, in my view, is to be without dogma of any kind, including the idea of “no separate self” and other claims of so-called non-duality. To not care what other idiots make of the undeniably mysterious experience of being here. To find one’s own mind and live by one’s own lights.

We don’t know what any of this is, where it came from, of what it consists, or where it is headed (if anywhere). When we see our total ignorance of final matters and embrace that ignorance fully, we are, I say, “awake,” idiots though we are. With these human minds of ours, that’s the best we can do.

Sending love.

Dear Robert, thanks a million for your reply. I don't know if my mind is playing tricks on me now, but just reading your words a few minutes ago seems to have done it for me... satori? I don't know how long it will last (hopefully till I die), but the feeling is ecstatic! You are really cool, Robert. Thank you for being so generous with sharing your point of view. Being an idiot and knowing I am one has never felt so good! Love You, man.

Jillian: Hi Robert - your answer, like your book and your speaking in general, makes perfect, clear sense. However, concerning “mourir idiot,” could we not also be referring to dying without having had a profound awakening experience or ‘peak experience’? I heard you describe your version of this in a recent interview (and many people have their versions). Without one or more of these experiences, I wonder if one can arrive at a complete and unprimed acceptance of reality as it is (or of life as it unfolds) without cross-referencing one’s own understanding with those of others who no longer have this need.

I think everyone is different, Jillian. My experiences are mine alone. No one else can have them or fully understand what they are and what they mean or don't mean. I don't even know what they mean. I may have ideas about all that, but ideas are not "Truth."

If I could erase The Ten Thousand Things and write it again, I might leave the "sudden seeing" part out and just write about what living is like for me right now. Stories about one's past may not be as helpful to others as I imagined mine would be when I wrote about them.

At the time I wrote 4T, someone I respected had been referring to me as "an awakened presence"--you can read his opinion in the forward to the book--and I must have felt that I needed to explain that in some way. But it cannot be explained except by saying what it is not. For example, it is not belief in God or non-duality. It is not imagining that I am something other than a human primate animal and that what I "really" am is "pure consciousness." All that popular nonsense.

I do understand what you are saying about dying without having felt the profundity of being. My reply is the same as I gave Edith. What you feel at the moment of death, to me, seems relatively unimportant. It is how one lives that seems to matter.

If one can only see it, every moment is a peak experience. It is simply amazing to be alive and conscious. Somehow, the alterations of fear and boredom have obscured that amazement for many of us. Those of us who are not always frightened or bored may have arrived at this lovely state of awakeness to our ordinary humanity in radically different ways. All I can do is express what it is like for me.