Jed McKenna's Theory of Everything: The Enlightened Perspective

by Jed McKenna

Outside the rabbit-hole, away from Maya, there is absolutely no you or me or anyone else, but in the rabbit-hole, life is a whole lot more comfortable if you relax and play along.

impossible would be any entity knowing more than I Am.

Therefore, any other beings, no matter how subtle or advanced, would necessarily be like us; inhabitants of a false paradigm, defined by false beliefs.

Because all I can ever know is I Am, I can never be certain that I am not the only conscious entity in existence – the sole beholder.

The real point is not to make better sense of appearances, but to understand that appearances are nothing more than nothing. No perception is more true than any other. Everything in the apparent universe possesses an exact and knowable value: I Am is one, everything else is zero.

No, there is not, and this is a very important point. The only argument against C-Rex is that it’s ridiculous. That’s it, that’s the full width, breadth and depth of the argument against the C-Rex model. No facts, no proof, no science, no math, no indisputable knowledge or airtight logic, just the overwhelming unbelievability of the idea that there is no universe outside of consciousness.

That’s a real good thing to understand. Once you understand that, then you can understand how truth can be so unhidden, yet so unfound.

It is the sheer unbelievability of C-Rex that protects it from detection. The flipside of this is the total believability of U-Rex, and the fact that everyone unreservedly agrees that U-Rex is reality.

Another real good thing to understand is that there is no such thing as a rational person. We are emotional creatures with some token capacity for reason. This isn’t something we have to take on a case-by-...

As I’ve said, nothing is being withheld from us. There is no agent or agency in charge of keeping us ignorant of our own nature. There is no conspiracy to keep us in the dark. It is our belief in the reality of reality that keeps us from noticing that it’s a...

do you hate false-self more than you fear no-self?

There is no universe out there, there is no proof, or even evidence, that there is, and anything that says otherwise is just a belief.

nothing more than I-Am/Consciousness can ever be known.

The amount of reinforcement a model needs runs in inverse proportion to its structural integrity; a strong model needs little or no reinforcement, a weak model needs a lot. We don’t need cathedrals and rituals and torture squads to convince us that the sun is a source of warmth and light, but if you want to go the other way and

say the sun emits the cold and dark of night, then you’re going to need alot of costumes and ceremonies and guys with hot pliers.

For reasons of accuracy, I sometimes exchange the awkward term spiritual enlightenment for the awkwarder term truth-realization, and even the awkwardest term untruth-unrealization. The last is the least misleading because one does not realize truth. (You want truth? Consciousness is Truth and you are Consciousness. That’s it. Congrats.) Rather, one undergoes the long self-peeling process of unknowing what is untrue – everything except I Am.

I draw this distinction because realization is the

false promise many are making; that enlightenment, for instance, is a realization, and that all you have to do is listen and learn and perform practices and try really hard and be really patient and you will have this wonderful realization and be really enlightened. Realizations aren’t the final destinations they’re often promoted as, they’re just another kind of belief, like a depiction of a place. If the place doesn’t really exist, then a depiction is the best version of it, but if the place does really exist, then a depiction is the worst version of it. We settle for a depiction on the assumption that the place doesn’t really exist, or that we can’t really get t...

I am on the stage, but I’m also out in the audience, and from that perspective, everything on the stage is the same, just as everything on a movie screen is light. Everything on the stage – you and me and table and chairs and time and space and all the rest – is just a shifting pattern of light on a screen. This is not a mystical revelation, it’s just perception undistorted by layers of false belief.

Simulacra and Simulation, a 1981 essay by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, describes what he calls the precession of simulacra. He describes the way we have moved away from the direct and authentic experience of reality, to a symbol-based simulation of reality in which the symbols have evolved through several generations until they no longer represent anything real, only prior abstractions. He’s talking about developments

in the last hundred years, but it’s interesting to note that what he’s saying in the micro is what we’re saying in the macro; that the map has become the terri...

Consciousness needs no depiction. Here you are, right now, right in the thick of it. What good is a theory of everything reduced to words or symbols compared to the direct experience of being? The only thing to realize is that the seeker ...

First Step; what made a sane and respected sea captain go so insane that he arrived

at a new and unsuspected kind of sanity.

That’s the period of long, slow compression where one explores every possible avenue and slowly discovers that there is nothing to be found. This is experienced as a shrinking of the world, a constriction of reality and self, and it tightens and tightens until it creates a pressure so unendurable that the First Step is taken involuntarily, spontaneously, irrevocably. So that’s a little bit about the real journey of awakening which I provide here to illustrate my point about the difference between theory and practice. Awakening isn’t a theory, it’s a jou...

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. Anais Nin

What’s the meaning of life? That’s like asking what’s the favorite color of life. Same as yours. What else? The meaning of life is whatever yours means to you. If you’re not sure of the meaning of your life, look to your struggle, and to the causes and fruits of your struggle. Look to your strongest emotions; love, fear, hate. What do you want to create, preserve or destroy? What’s the worst thing you could lose or the best thing you could gain? Maybe your meaning is the thing that most defines you, like an institution or an affliction. Your meaning might be as general as duty, or as specific as killing an enemy.

What is the meaning of consciousness?, and the only possible answer would be, Consciousness Is.

They’re all doing pretty much the same thing everyone is doing; struggling against the black hole within,

But no-self is true self, no-meaning is true meaning, and no matter what you create, preserve or destroy, you can never put a dent in that.

We yearn for meaning, but since no-self is true self, the realization of one’s perfect meaninglessness is the key to liberation. This is the realization that makes the First Step possible and begins the actual journey of awakening, but it’s not really a realization and the First Step isn’t an act of volition...

What’s the difference between me and you? Between anyone and anyone else? Is it only belief that sets one being apart from another? In U-Rex, the answer is obviously no, but in C-Rex, it’s obviously yes. That might seem absurd, but as the fog rolls out and the dream recedes, reality simply evaporates, leaving us alone in a desert landscape where the absurd becomes the obvious.

The journey of self-discovery is not one of self-exploration but of self-annihilation.

You must illuminate the shadowlands of your interior spaces and sever the tendrils of emotional energy that anchor you to selfhood and the dreamstate.

There is no reconciling the irreconcilable, and apart from I Am, the only thing we can say for sure is that we can’t say anything else for sure. It bears repeating; knowing what we cannot know is one of the most important things we can kn...

Every...

we know about who and what we a...

If you were to sit down and have a candid conversation with that aspect of yourself which is not intoxicated with wrong-knowing, you would be told that the person you think you are is no more closely related to what you really are than anyone else. Not only are you not you, you bear no resemblance to you and have no relationship to you. You could just as easily be anyone else, and maybe you are. In fact, you might be everyone and everything else. In fact, maybe you must be. This whole person...

Brainwashed U-Rex cultmembers (you, I assume) believe in the existence of a physical universe out there, but no one has ever perceived it directly and no one ever will.

Everything we experience through the senses is already second-hand at the moment of perception because the brain doesn’t perceive anything, it just sits in its lightproof box and translates incoming sense-data into perceptions. Your alleged brain doesn’t see, hear, taste or touch anything. You have no direct contact with a universe out there, only an internal movie, a projection on the screen of the mind. No one can ever perceive anything out there directly.

The trick is drawing a distinct line between real and true. We can’t accept anything as true except I-Am/Consciousness, but whatever we believe is

real, is real.

Then the artificial environment you went to such lengths to get out of would be looking pretty sweet, and escape would be looking pretty dumb, like breaking out of a submarine or a spaceship.

He’s discovered that he’s a prisoner in protective custody, a holodeck character who can’t exist outside

of his holographic environment. He’s still on the stage, but now the illusion has been shattered; no more meaning, nothing left to do, just a whole lot of whatever.

He is, as Layman P’ang said, neither holy nor wise, just an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

What a true Truman returns to find is a Seahaven full of actors. What he once saw as people like himself are now something else; something bewildering and unrelatable. One thing he knows is that they don’t know what he knows. They haven’t undergone those personal unravelings and stood at that final door. They haven’t made the ultimate journey from which return itself is an illusion.

They don’t know where they are. So what, at most, are they? Children, straw dogs, zombies. Non...

clear new eyes, better or worse than another. Not bad, not good, just asleep at most and non-sentient apparitions at least. They are set design, props, extras. He is no longer one of...

Movie Truman walks out of Seahaven into a new life of love and freedom, but our true-man is now consigned to walk alone in a world that he knows is not real, cloaked in a body and persona to which he feels no connection, surrounded by actors playing a pointle...