Sagehood

Enheartenment / Sagehood

The Way of the Sage

The way of the Sage is a consciousness maturation path that involves access to what has been called Nonduality, Nondual Suchness, No-Thingness, the Void, or Ground of Being, which is an aspect of Reality, God, or human consciousness, depending upon your paradigm. In Theohumanity. Nondual Suchness is an intrinsic aspect of God, wherein the Maker-Creator is the ultimate yang aspect of God and Nondual Suchness the ultimate Yin. In addition to how Theohumanity offers the first noncontradictory paradigm of how these two historically incompatible understandings of humankind's spiritual focus have never been metaphysically mutually exclusive, it also offers a dharmic path that gradually leads to what Buddhism has called Nondual enlightenment that one moves on one's own and requires no proximity to the teacher.

Access to Nondual Suchness has been considered the apex of human consciousness attainment in traditional Zen Buddhism for over twenty-five hundred years, since Prince Siddhartha became interested in eradicating suffering in the world, became the Buddha, and his work moved from India to China and Japan. Unlike Personhood, where the you you have defined as you is transmuted into something else, in Sagehood practice the you you have defined as you is obliterated altogether, at least temporarily, with life-changing and profound effects on your state of consciousness afterward. Its access is referred to most commonly as satori, the breaking through to a condition of consciousness without content wherein your sense of personal ego is changed forever in what has been called enlightenment.

Theohumanity offers its own frame of reference for both the content and context for the Sagehood practice that has resonant similarities and bold dissimilarities to both traditional and modern perspectives. It explains what happens in Sagehood practice with an entirely different algorithm, one of healing the fear of ego-death, rather than the traditional algorithm of either transcending an ‘illusional’ ego or doing away with suffering. This change has paradigm-shattering effects on the effort to attain Sagehood and what traditional Buddhistic teachings have had to say about what they call the state of enlightenment.

In that way, Theohumanity demystifies the state of enlightenment and shows why Nondual-enlightened teachers who inappropriately elevate enlightenment to the overly significant spiritual proportions they do have so little to offer others in terms of real change. Without the prior enlightenment of your emotional body in Personhood practice, enlightenment of the mental body only in Sagehood practice will create deep impotencies and incompletenesses relative to authentic spiritual maturity. What has been called enlightenment that 2500 years of Buddhistic guidance addresses, and the form of enlightenment offered by all the lineages linked to those traditions, is only one-third of the requirements needed to create true spiritual maturity. Its elevation as the end-all/be-all of spiritual pinnacle attainments is a gross reductionistic distortion of what it actually means to authentically mature as the divine being that you are in any manner of balanced fashion.

Access to the Nondual Aspect of God is only one-third of your spiritual maturity requirements in that it involves the de-dualization of the governing dynamic of your mental body only. The dualizing function of your mental body, as it imparts to you your normal waking kind of consciousness, embeds you so deeply into its one mode of apprehending reality as dualistic content that it screens out the meta-context of reality for all of what you experience as life experience.

In other words, accessing the Nondual Aspect of God results in a state of consciousness wherein all content-centered aspects of life become wholly transparent, instead of seeming ‘real' or ‘solid,' by being ‘backlit,' as it were, by the eternally-suffusing ‘Light' of Nonduality that has been there all along but of which you were not previously conscious. That Which has always been prior to the mental body and within Which all dualistic states inhere thus becomes 'visible' and what is called enlightenment ensues. Once you disembed from dualistic content and instead see through everything this way, over-attachments and over-identifications to everything in life, within you as you, and without you as everything else, fall away forever. This does not mean one withdraws from one's dualistic life or sees dualistic life as illusional as so many distortions of Buddhism maintain: rather, it imparts a bittersweet and loving immediacy and a non-attached abidance with the miracle of life in all of its forms and expressions in ways that were impossible while still in slave to the mental body's deadening gridwork overlay of the actual aliveness of every aspect of life.

The dualizing mechanism of the mental body is analogous to the gridwork archeologists overlay on a dig, where a system of man-made square plottings of cord or string are arranged over a nondescript expanse of soil in order to catalogue which artifacts that are eventually dug up came from which part of the dig. What you call the experience of life as a human being comes at you like that expanse of soil, with no natural boundary or edge that says ‘here is the end of one area’ and ‘here is the start of another area.’ Then your mental body overlays that expanse or Buddhanature of life with its own gridwork system that you so identify with, it seems as if life is made up of the gridwork overlays and not the unsegmented expanse.

In that way, your mental body artificially overlays a gridwork of ‘this is this’ and ‘that is that’ segmented system onto an otherwise unsegmented or seamless ‘everything is everything’ dynamism of life. As a result, your mental body imparts to you the ‘illusion’ that life is made up of essential ‘this-or-thatnesses,’ when that experience is completely created by the dualistic gridwork governing dynamic of your mental body.

So in the simplest sense, enlightenment as taught in Buddhistic traditions for millennia is about losing that mental body-created artificial gridwork that makes life seem to be comprised of essential ‘this-or-thatnesses.’ This artificial and segmented overlay-version of reality comes to you courtesy of your mental body that occurred so early in childhood, you are of the opinion that it is ‘the’ way to experience what you call human life, when it is only one way to do so. Learning to experience human life in other ways or modes of consciousness, in this case, as arising within in a seamless, borderless, and featureless Nondual Ground of Being, changes your life forever in ways that you can’t possibly imagine while you remain a slave to your mental body-mediated perceptions and apprehensions.

This imparts to you a deep peace and serenity from which you then experience how deeply others are trapped in frenetic active and reactive fusion to content-based elements of human life, and you see how disturbed everyone is made by those over-attachments and over-identifications. You experience for yourself then how deeply the dualistic mode of apprehending life everyone thinks is normal actually both limits and distorts reality, imparting only a very narrow bandwidth of reality frequency and not the entire picture.

At first you are appalled at how deeply asleep everyone is to how ‘buried’ their consciousnesses are as they over-stimulate themselves with all manner of entertainments and distractions. These over-stimulations are used as a way to create and maintain a false propped-up sense of self-aliveness or self-continuity in an otherwise ‘dead’ artificial reality of mental body-created dualisms as you come to experience that the Real Aliveness of the Buddhanature of life requires cessation of being a prisoner to dualistic modes of life. In those modes, human beings entomb themselves with deep and abiding secondary investments into mental-based formats of human life without knowing how doing so creates so much unnecessary suffering.

But very quickly you then move to an almost indescribable compassion. In the state of your own grace and equanimity, you can’t help but wish to do your small part to help awaken them from the slavery of serving a reality parameterized by the dualistic filter of their mental body that keeps them unconscious of the eternally-suffusing Nondual Light of this intrinsic Aspect of God. You want to show them how the effect of that unconsciousness keeps them unnecessarily suffering in certain profound and specific ways. But even though this compassion to serve is strong, you don’t over-invest in providing such a function, because you no longer invest deeply in any specific outcomes of life in any arena of endeavor, including the one that wishes to help others lift the veil of their entombment.

In that way, one way to describe how you move out of dualistic-dominated ways of apprehending life is that what you call normal waking consciousness experiences content-as-content in such a way as to fill the ‘space’ of consciousness completely full of ‘solid’ content, with little ‘room’ in the consciousness for ‘space’ around that content. This means that you relate to the content of life experience as it seems: ‘solid’ people, ideas, goals, happenstance, actions, and reactions that seem real and important, and you secondarily relate to all of that with all your attendant over-attachments, over-identifications, and over-repulsions. Another way of expressing this is that when in such a fused-to-content state of consciousness, you are convinced that your own personal take or perception of the world is 'the' world, instead of just your own version of it. Until you are able to create some meta-space around your own conditioning as to how you process reality, you will be ensnared in content-as-content fusion states that make it then seem reasonable to kill supporters of some other country's soccer team, justify killing others who don't agree with your own conditioned definitions of God, or think that human life is solely about over-indulging human appetites of all kinds.

As you begin to erode the hold dualism has on your consciousness, those content-centered aspects of life experience are slowly experienced within a greater context or space within which all of that content exists, a second stage of content-in-context. As this happens, your over-attachments, over-identifications, and overreactions to life content begin to loosen. You begin to see how unaware you have been of how deeply you were living in a kind of tunnel-life that kept you from seeing your state as embedded or buried into things in solid ways that created states of anxiety and suffering that are completely unnecessary and not really intended to be the normative manner within which human beings are meant to operate and live. That tunnel-life is the kind of life we all have by default until we de-dualize the mental body and its hold on how we experience what we call and define reality.

As you move further, the context for the content or space around which you have begun to experience content aspects of life itself becomes a new form of content as you learn to focus upon that context space meditatively. This creates a stage of context-as-content, where secondary and far more subtle attachments and identifications to both content and context aspects of life are even more deeply shed, and the Nondual Ground of Being is begun to be experienced as a kind of featureless Unified Oneness tying together every’thing’ that is.

Most spiritual wayfarers get stuck here, making Nonduality, the ultimate Meta-Context, a kind of Content characterized by a dominant Oneness-Bliss feature. But Nonduality is featureless and non-characterizable, and has no state-content whatsoever. ‘It’ is not experienced as anything, least of all Bliss, which is one of the most powerful content-states there is. That serenity and equanimity follow the excruciating erosion of all existential foundations of who and what you call you after the featurelessness and contentlessness of Nonduality wipes out any ability for the content you call you to ‘exist’ in It, does not mean enlightenment is about reaching for that state.

Your motive must not be to attain any kind of ‘positive’ state of consciousness in the context of trying to rid yourself of any kind of ‘negative’ or suffering state of consciousness. In that way, the motive to gain enlightenment in order to end suffering, cannot and will not ever result in the fullest authentic enlightenment of the mental body. Doing so, as virtually all the so-called enlightened teachers in the west do, especially those in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, only traps the teacher and their students in yet another dualistic loop still slave to the polarities of positive and negative. This predictably and invariably renders the goal and the effect of enlightenment as a drug to stop suffering, one of the most powerful drugs available to human beings, to consciously or unconsciously escape from the travail of being burdened within the so-called ‘negative’ or suffering aspects of a dualistic ego-based life.

Only the purest forms of Zen Buddhism, and they are very rare, avoid this Bliss-bloated error that supports all kinds of secondary distortions in modern Buddhistic teachings. The whole spectacle of the Advaita production of satsang is itself a product of this pseudo-enlightened teaching. The rare and humble dharma talks of a true Zen master do not contain any of the glamour surrounding the teacher that is part and parcel of the satsang dynamic, or possess the extensive marketing features of using photos and pictures of these kind of teachers as a way to display the ‘enlightenment’ energy in their faces and sell their wares to a naive public seeking deliverance from ‘negative’ states of consciousness. True Zen masters just come out of their quiet places every once in a awhile to offer some insights to students and then go back into their quiet worlds.

By default, without prior enlightenment of the emotional body that deconstructs the strategic selfhood of the seeker, all forms of Buddhistic enlightenment of the mental body will inevitably necessitate the attainer’s over-attachment to the enlightened state, because the original motive to end suffering was a strategic effort to avoid suffering engineered by the unhealed strategic selfhood of the enlightened human. Mis-motivated seekers who thus only want relief from suffering, consciously or unconsciously crave to add an aspect of ‘enlightened person-ness’ to their still-present strategic self-image to give value to themselves as such, because a state of true self-worth and authentic being had never been created prior to their enlightenment.

Instead, the only true goal of honest enlightenment effort must be to heal the fear of your seemingly permanent loss of the base of your ego-foundation from the way you had experienced it your entire life prior to that development, not to try to escape or transcend any kind of suffering or attain some kind of Bliss-suffused life.

This is why Theohumanity’s redefinition of the task involved in Nondual enlightenment practice is as a healing of the fear of ego-death, not of transcending suffering or the ego as has been the defined task for 2500 years, is so important. It re-parameterizes the entire process of Buddhistic enlightenment metaphysics from that of a Now-based seductive drug to take you out of your suffering or out of the wheel of rebirth, to one where you are led more and more deeply into existentially-deep terror and agony about letting go of how deeply you want to hold on to how you have always related to your own sense of individualized selfhood.

A healthy ego is required for the attainment of true spiritual maturity, because only a truly mature and healthy ego is not looking for any escape of suffering, support for wounded self-images, or flight from earth-life, because all such unconscious motivations and conscious intentions in that direction are healed in enlightenment of the emotional body Personhood practice. But since we’ve not had the means until now to truly create a healthy ego because the criteria for a state of real self-authentication or self-essentialization is so much steeper than the mere strategic self-actualization projects offered by both mainstream and new age-based modalities of psychology, we have not had a way to understand or embody how states of ego and states of trans-ego truly relate and move with each other.

Finally, as the dualizing parameters of the mental body molt away altogether as you heal the fear of ego-death inherent in Sagehood attainment, the stage of context-in-context occurs, wherein all dualistic apprehensions of mental-based content and greater context are seen as non-hierarchally identical, all an ephemeral arising out of the featureless Ultimate ‘Meta-Context’ of Nonduality that is the Ground-Reality out of which all mental or dualistic apprehensions of life arise, including the apprehension of Oneness.

Here is the permanent falling away of all of your mental body-based over-attachments and over-identifications to dualistically-parameterized life experience and the permanent change in consciousness that then accompanies that attainment, which cannot ever truly be attained while you seek such an changed outcome. The ‘I’ created in Personhood thus moves to the ‘I Am,’ one-half of Sainthood attainment in Theohumanity, and then the ‘I Am’ moves to the Nondual-based ‘I Am Not’ in Sagehood.

Theohumanity offers a dharma aided by a teacher that includes both an excruciating difficult and merciless path of radical self-inquiry linked to long-term de-dualization meditative effort that together will slowly but surely weaken the dualistic boundary-edges the mental body overlays upon a seamless universe. This will allow the Nondual Aspect of God beyond Its Oneness Aspect to one day burst through to your local consciousness-expression of Its Divine Nature, and you are
forever changed as enlightenment of your mental body is attained.