Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection

by Peter Brown

The fortunate truth is that we ALL have intimate access to Reality; in fact we have never experienced anything ELSE, and ARE nothing but Reality ourselves, inherently. So all we need to do is take stock of the actuality of our situation.

At first, I thought that everybody, all the adults, were in on it and knew what it was, and I just didn’t get it because I was a small child; and that as I grew I would begin to fathom it and grow into this certain knowledge, maybe be “initiated” into it when I reached a certain age. But of course as I grew, the world and the many human explanations for it that I encountered seemed to make less and LESS sense, and I began to have the horrifying suspicion that despite my expectations, maybe all these “adults” didn’t have any more of a clue than I did as to what was “going on”, maybe even LESS of one. I

So even in the depths of confusion, nothing whatsoever other than the natural, unadulterated being/functioning of the unique, mysteriously self-existing consciousness is happening,

Consciousness is inseparably one with any experience it has. There is zero distance between any experience and the “perceiver”. When consciousness experiences “something”, it IS that “something”.

think “I’m a guy and I’m doing this and that, and my goals are such and such, and I’m sitting here in this place and I’m getting kind of bored, maybe I’ll take off and go have a beer.” All that may be TRUE, on ONE level, but there’s so, so, so much more that’s also in the reality of my experience that I’m ignoring by that storyline. So if I settle for that storyline I’m lying to myself. I’m oversimplifying. I’m taking an infinitely complex situation manifested by absolute universal intelligence and turning it into a simple cartoon. And maybe, if I open to that infinite complexity, there’s something enormously valuable there that I’m missing. THAT’S the point. When we open to what our consciousness actually IS, by looking at its full expression, we might find out that, “Oh my God! This consciousness is actually everything; and I AM that consciousness. I don’t exist in the WORLD, the world exists IN THIS CONSCIOUSNESS and I am that consciousness.”

Every experience we have, every sound we hear, every sight we see, every thought we think, is a bursting forth of mysterious energy into present consciousness. And WHAT is bursting forth is of course consciousness itself. And what’s PERCEIVING it is also consciousness itself. And what it’s MADE of is consciousness itself.

-Then when I’m scared or something, it’s just a reflex... It’s karma, the patterning of the flow of things, the ongoing expression of the energies that you are. The play goes on; Alex will continue to be Alex. But the WAY Alex is is the result of all the chaotic programming that makes him what he is. The genetic heritage and all the environmental accidents that have shaped him into what he is, functionally. So he’s basically a reactor; he reacts to the situations that he perceives going on around him, in accordance with the way his temperament, his personality, his karma, dictates. Right? But what does that have to do with YOU? And what relationship to all that does the fact that you are the disembodied consciousness that’s EXPERIENCING it have? Look and see, look at that. What’s experiencing you, WHAT’S looking through your eyes RIGHT NOW? It’s what you ARE, isn’t it?

It’s a matter of being a scientist, saying “Okay, I don’t know what’s going on. Let me try and figure it out. What’s the raw data?” Well, the raw data is that experience seems to be happening. I don’t have a CLUE what that ACTUALLY means, but we’ll call it experience and that it seems to be happening, whatever THOSE two words mean. Examine that closely, experientially, not conceptually. Look at what it really is. Go into your experience; you ARE your experience. Embrace it, texturally. Hug it. Feel it. Your experience is like a tub of warm jello. Feel it, go into it. Don’t model it or pick it apart or analyze it. Just BE it. Feel what it feels like. What does time feel like? The passage of time has a texture. It’s amazing! FEEL it. We usually don’t notice what it actually is because we’re thinking of our models. Space has a texture, being itself has a texture.

It’s just you interacting with your karma, the play of the energies that you ARE. Everything and everyone that you experience is a convenient enactment of your karma, like in a dream. Everyone shows up in your life as a convenient extra on the set of the “You Show”, and they are all fulfilling exactly the role you need them to, for the “You Show” to be what it is. As the plot of the “You Show” develops, the characters in the show develop or drop out and new ones will come in. It’s all subjective. You’re not “moving through” because there’s nothing there to move through. It moves through YOU if anything. It’s you moving through you. It’s your pattern of yourself, your karma moving through your consciousness. And everything that you see is just a depiction of that, exactly like a dream. When you go to sleep and dream, there are all these various forms, and very elaborate involvements, all of which are just a depiction of meanings that are important to you on an intimate level. So it’s not like there’s anything there that you’re moving through. It’s more like, you’re there, and your “youness” is showing up as all of this display.

If we have a self image which accurately reflects what our ACTUAL self is, we would see that we are complete, we are inviolable, we lack nothing, we are eternal, we can’t die, we can’t be born; so in that context, the concept of “a problem” can’t exist meaningfully. But that’s a framework that we generally don’t have, ONLY because we are invested in other imaginary frameworks.

It’s manifestly obvious that consciousness appears from nowhere. Continuously. It never stops. Try this: try and stop your consciousness, try and STOP being aware of the present moment right now. Try it. There’s no off button. Ain’t gonna happen. And also notice that this consciousness is always there when you are. And it’s even there when you’re not. It’s more subtle to notice that, but as you go to sleep, if you pay close attention as you do, it’s quite noticeable that your consciousness persists. You can notice when you fall asleep the phenomena vanish as “you” do, but they vanish IN CONSCIOUSNESS, and reappear there as you wake up. It’s not like there’s nothing and then consciousness appears; there’s consciousness, and then phenomena appear in it as you wake up. There’s no “there” there if consciousness isn’t there.

We may have leaped to conclusions at some point, that “Oh, I’m a human being living in a material world, and there're various things I need to do if I want to achieve happiness” and so on, but we can back up from that. We can say “Ok, I jumped to that conclusion at one point in my life. But is it REALLY true? Let me reexamine the evidence. The evidence is all still here; the initial conditions from which I originally drew those conclusions, consciousness, is still here. The body is still appearing, all these things are still here. Let me reexamine that, and see if there are any clearer ways I can piece all this evidence together, and maybe arrive at a more accurate picture of what’s going on; I don’t necessarily have to be stuck with my old unexamined conclusions, just because I’ve been living with them for all these years.” And we may find that some of our root assumptions that have gone into building our stories about what our situation is, are erroneous or arbitrary, and just won’t hold water as certainties. There might be OTHER possible interpretations that bear looking into. That’s the point - to investigate for yourself. The point is for us to not just take things for granted, because we may have been sold a bill of goods; by our own ignorance, as well as by the ignorance of those around us; by interpreting accidental events in our lives as if they meant something, when they may not have in the sense we have taken them to.

But we’ve all been seduced by lies; been seduced by stories that we’re separate independent beings, that we’re incomplete, that we’re not good, or certainly not perfect. That if we only do “such and such” then we’ll be better and things will be ok. This is the constant pattern that is continuously reflected in society’s “consensus reality”. It’s ubiquitous, implicit in advertising and media, the way we’re raised, the mindsets of the people who raised us. All this cultural information that we encounter as children, it’s all permeated with this idea of being “separate” , “incomplete”, “lacking”, “inadequate”; and if you only do something, if you only succeed, if you only make money, if you only find love, if you’re only “spiritual” enough in some particular way, if you only can become beautiful, if you’re only smart enough, if you’re only ANYTHING, fill in the blank, then it’ll all be somehow remedied.

You can’t find an “end” to anything. In experience you can’t find an end; there're no edges, no borders, no boundaries to ANY aspect of experience, of reality. Since there're no ends, no boundaries, no fixed reference points, where do you start from? Where do you end up? All systems of human thought boil down to having arbitrary fixed points that are defined into existence, and then the whole system of thought, a whole metaphysic, is developed from there. But if you look closely, there ARE NO FIXED POINTS in the actuality of our experience, so these systems are entirely arbitrary. Everything collapses. And what it collapses to is the reality of experience BEING AS IT IS, which is ultimately beyond analysis. It’s self-evident, TOTALLY obvious, but we can’t SAY what it IS.

Then would you allow disease without doing anything about it? Allow it or fight it, because fighting disease is ALSO a part of the infinite, open-ended reality process, too. But everything we do; everything we allow; everything we strive for, everything we fight against; all of those things are all inextricably part of the same flow, of the same system that reality is. So there’s no reason to differentiate any of them out, or to single any of them out as being good or bad, or a problem or a solution, because we CAN’T know.

Because the one thing leads to and includes all the other things ultimately. So fighting disease ultimately perpetuates disease as well as healing disease. They’re each part of the system that makes disease, and part of that same system that heals disease. Life and death are in the same inextricable relationship. So why bother to single them out? I mean, part of the problem is semantic; the way we use language, we have all these separate words, so we think there must be separate things. We have disease, we have health, we have war, we have peace; we have success, we have failure. And the semantic logic implies that if we have all these separate words, there must be actual separate conditions that they indicate, right? So we come to think we live in a world that’s sliced and diced into all these separate conditions, objects, and actions; but the reality of our situation isn’t actually LIKE that if you look closely. I think you’ll find that reality is an inclusive flow that includes all of its various designatable phases and states necessarily. So the fact that there're all these separate words doesn’t necessarily mean that there're separate, discrete things. There’s only one thing; there’s only the flow of being. There’s only the Tao. You know, whatever you want to call it.

My experience gets so clear at times, but then there’s this supposed guy who gets into a funk... What would be a good thing to do? Well, look at what the “funk” is made of. It’s made of energy in consciousness, just like a vision of clarity is made of energy in consciousness. Are they really fundamentally different? Why prefer the one to the other? Why do you think clarity IS clarity; why do you think “being in a funk” is NOT clarity? -Well I know it doesn’t feel good... Right. But instead of defining it as not feeling “good”, define it as feeling a certain way; and if you look closely it doesn’t even feel a certain way, it feels a continuously changing range of ways, each of which is infinite, subtle, and indescribable. But you collapse all that infinite range of qualities simplistically as “a funk” and “not good”. You’re oversimplifying. And you can look at that, if you can, WHILE you’re doing it and see if what you’re thinking about it is actually TRUE, is an unchallengeable and TOTALLY accurate depiction of what it actually IS.

to see that the appearances aren’t a problem... Yes. It’s not that it’s NOT a problem, it’s that you’re thinking of it as a problem because you think the situation is a certain way, and you CAN’T KNOW what it is in reality. Because the reality of every situation is infinitely complex and beyond summing up in some simplistic concept, or even in a very elaborate concept. No matter how subtly we think of anything, we can’t possible grasp all the ramifications inherent in what it is. Because everything is infinite, and our thinking is finite.

The point is that all of this mechanism is already in place, it’s the natural unfolding of the universe, of reality; so the expressions of it are already prefigured as the show unfolds. So there’s no separate you that has to hold control, or a separate you that COULD lose control. You are already the whole mechanism and the whole mechanism is doing what it’s doing, which is making you what you are and making you motivated to do what you do.

--- -I see myself compulsively driven by my “little” self, trying to be safe and happy... Yes, IT will never stop trying to work out its safety, but you’re NOT IT. You’re what’s EXPERIENCING it. The ego doesn’t need to stop doing what it does; that’s what it’s for, that’s its job, fighting for safety and so on. But it’s not YOU, it’s just a spontaneously occurring phenomena in consciousness that you’re experiencing. It doesn’t need to be different than it is, because there’s nothing actually at stake as far as YOU’RE concerned. If your supposed “character” in the drama of “your” life succeeds or fails, what difference does that make to the consciousness experiencing those experiences? It’s like worrying about whether the hero in a dream you’re having in your sleep lives or dies... What difference does that make to YOU? And even that those supposed conditions (success or failure) are FACTS, is a very oversimplified interpretation of vastly complex and unknowable realities, and hence NOT actually true. -So