What if you spent years of your life seeking spiritual enlightenment, but were looking in the wrong place over a long time? It’s happening right now to millions of seekers around the world. That’s why Dr. Robert Forman has written his revolutionary book. Told in often poetic prose, it offers new direction for people looking for a sane and healthy spiritual pathway in our increasingly confusing world. Traditional spiritual models are giving seekers a wrong and frustrating impression about spiritual enlightenment. By exploring his own 39 year experience of spiritual enlightenment, Dr. Forman offers a remedy to folks who are: Convinced they don’t have the right stuff to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime: Disillusioned by spiritual teachers who don’t live up to their lofty self-portraits: Worried that choosing a spiritual life means leaving their everyday life behind: Hungry for a different way to be, but unable to express it. Through metaphor, humor, vulnerability and achingly beautiful prose, Dr. Forman’s book offers newfound hope to spiritual seekers everywhere.

Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be

O BOOKS

Contents

Acknowledgements..........................................xviPrologue..................................................1Part I: Discovering It, Dismissing It.....................5Both/And It...............................................6Waiting for Enlightenment.................................8Its Context...............................................11Seeking It................................................17Longing for Enlightenment.................................20It Enters.................................................25Becoming It...............................................31Disillusionment, Part I...................................42Full Catastrophe Disillusionment..........................47Locus Classicus...........................................56Hindu Enlightenment.......................................57Buddhist Enlightenment....................................60Christianity..............................................63Enlightenment: a Definition...............................69Confirmation..............................................72Part II. Quo Vadis........................................77The Question..............................................78Working in It.............................................81Coming Up to the Line.....................................87It and Ducks..............................................90It and Sexuality..........................................94It And Dragons............................................103Sensing It................................................112It and Ethics.............................................115The Cloud of Unknowing....................................122The Peculiarly Spiritual Life.............................127Buddha Alone in It........................................129It in a Group.............................................135It in Duet................................................143It in Marriage............................................149Letting go of the But.....................................156Walking with It...........................................161Unresistant to It.........................................163Success and Failure in It.................................167Yawning the world into It.................................173A Team in It..............................................177Silence at Work, Writ Large...............................185Part III. Reflecting On It................................189Standing up Straight in It................................190Craving It................................................193Its Fluidity..............................................197Alone.....................................................201Endnotes..................................................205

Chapter One

Both / And It

I am writing from my meditation hermitage in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I've never come in winter before. It's blazing cold. I'll be here longer than I've ever stayed. And I've never had to regulate the wood burning stove that dominates the downstairs. Even worse, I had the foolish idea that I should come here to write a book, but I'm scared that I will have nothing to say and that I will fail—miserably, embarrassingly, fail. So much for being the noble ascetic writer alone in his garret!

If I tell the real truth, as I hereby vow to do throughout this book, just now I'm anxious. I am thinking about a comfortable bed and a heating system that turns itself on and off and wondering when I can leave without losing face. And I think it might snow.

Anxiety like this sneaks in between thoughts—a ghostly and bitter sinking of the solar plexus. It is sure of itself in a way I am not. It knows that I cannot, that even to try will end in shame, and that I was a fool even to come. "You cannot, you cannot," it repeats. I am afraid.

So I lean into this sinking dread. And as I do, I sense something else here: an openness, a spaciousness. In a way I cannot say, this "something else" is larger than the fearfulness. It is wide, translucent, empty, yet almost a something. It is strange and appealing, this whatever-it-is just below my fears, this steadiness. It is kindly, comforting, like a billowing blanket on a tired evening, a gentle velvet warmth in forearms and calves, an effortless waking softness that stretches through my skin, beyond my body, across the room and out the walls into the dusky hillsides in the distance.

And so I sit, this vast empty me beneath this fearful me, much as I have done for nearly 40 years. This listening, holding, witnessing, vast me is here. It is who or perhaps what I am. And yet this other me, this worried, scared, laughing me, is also here, astonishingly, miraculously unhealed.

I am closed and afraid. And I am as vast as the colorless air.

I don't know if I am a human being held in the arms of an endlessness, or a vastness having human fears.

Being both these things at once is the peculiar miracle of my life, and of many lives of people on "the path." Learning to live them both, and well, is the challenge.

Waiting for Enlightenment

It wasn't supposed to be like this. When we took up meditation in the early seventies, we all were going to gain enlightenment. It would be life-shattering, the end of all neurosis, clean. It was to be the end of all suffering, the revolution of the soul. Enlightenment will, we heard,

... put an end to all suffering; filling the heart with happiness brings perfect tranquility to the mind.

As enlightened beings, we would not be a little happier or just more content. Such people are filled with happiness. The realized man, the illumined soul ... ahhh ... he will be steeped in perfect joy. All his desires would be fulfilled, all his suffering at an end.

A soul evolved to this cosmic state is eternally contented. When we became truly without stress, having utterly relinquished the knots and tensions that had held us in our mundane egos, we would live eternal freedom in divine consciousness.

My guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, used to recite some of the Indian texts he had memorized in his youth. Quoting the Hindu Upanishads, for example, he assured us that,

When [the individual soul] it discovers the Atman Full of dignity and power, It is freed from all its suffering.

When a man knows [the infinite], he is free: his sorrows have an end ...

I wanted that. I didn't want to be happier, I wanted perfect happiness. I didn't want less suffering, I wanted to be utterly free from suffering. Not fewer but all my sorrows should end. I wanted the life Maharishi described: dignified, full of power, helpful to others, deep, suffering-free.

That was the deal. We'd meditate. We'd do our yoga. We'd let go our stresses. We'd work for the TM movement. And we'd gain divine consciousness, full-on perfection, Enlightenment. My Buddhist friends were well on the way to Nirvana. My Christian friends were going to gain Heaven on Earth. And wouldn't it all be grand?

Dr. Charles Tart, eminently sane scientist of meditation that he is,...