You are enlightened. You knew it when you were a young child. You will know it again, soon. The question is, "When?"

"Me like it." Judson Laurence Stocking, the birth of consiousness at two years of age.

Note from the Editor

On February 17, 1990, Jerry realized enlightenment, and Pax, which means Peace in Latin, now resides within him. Enlightenment is Losing Your Mind is Jerry's fourth book and was written in just eight days, with Jerry as more of a witness typing at the keyboard than an author. After some consideration Jerry decided to use a pen name for the first time--Pax. Not coincidentally, our children, Emily and Judson, have been calling Jerry, Pax, for years. Finally, we caught on to it as the name of Jerry's perception of enlightenment.

As the editor I have read Enlightenment is Losing Your Mind six times. My term for this book is "elusive." So many times after completing a chapter, I couldn't remember the content of what I had just read. However, I was more acutely aware of changes within me--aware of subtlety and process. This resulted in healthy doses of disorientation. I found myself laughing more often at nothing than at something. From my experience, this consistent phenomenon is part of using the book as a tool to lose your mind.

At first I wanted to understand and control what I was reading--figure it out. I soon relaxed and just enjoyed myself, trusting that I would learn what I needed to learn. Realizing that children learn constantly through play, I played "reading the book."

Pax wishes you well. He wishes you peace, confusion, and love, along with the perception of your own enlightenment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction - page 1

Chapter 1 - Fork in The Road - page 5

Chapter 2 - Opening, The Present - page 11

Chapter 3 - Conciousness - page 17

Chapter 4 - Awareness is Now - page 22

Chapter 5 - Difficult Play - page 28

Chapter 6 - Reality and Illusion - page 32

Chapter 7 - Immediate Results - page 39

Chapter 8 - Mind -- Brain - page 47

Chapter 9 - Who Are You? - page 53

Chapter 10 - Spirit and Spirituality - page 60

Chapter 11 - Nothing is Complete - page 72

Chapter 12 - Crazy and Enlightened - page 80

Chapter 13 - How Easy? - page 90

Chapter 14 - Anatomy of Thought - page 97

Chapter 15 - Sublety and Mushrooms - page 107

Chapter 16 - The System, 1-2-3 - page 112

Chapter 17 - Patterns - page 125

Chapter 18 - Qualtity of Life - page 136

Chapter 19 - Happy Because - page 150

Chapter 20 - Paradox Between - page 155

Chapter 21 - Control Group - page 163

Chapter 22 - Assertion--Declaration - page 169

Chapter 23 - Domestication-Eclipse-Freedom - page 179

Chapter 24 - Where You Stand - page 187

Chapter 25 - In For a Landing - page 197

Chapter 26 - Tell Me a Story - page 209

Chapter 27 - How Long? - page 221

Chapter 28 - Question?? - page 226

Chapter 29 - Beyond Compare - page 236

Chapter 30 - Yes--No--Maybe - page 239

Chapter 31 - Love--People - page 247

Chapter 32 - -- - page 254

Chapter 33 - Free Choice? - page 258

Chapter 34 - Believe It or Not - page 272

Chapter 35 - Geometry and You - page 281

Chapter 36 - The Landscape - page 291

Chapter 37 - More Doing - page 297

Chapter 38 - Meaning - page 305

Chapter 39 - A Short Cut? - page 309

Chapter 40 - Bringing It Together - page 316

Chapter 41 - Why Illusion? - page 321

Chapter 42 - Light - page 329

Glossary

Index

 

 

Introduction to Enlightenment is Losing Your Mind

A frog made seven jumps from lily pad to lily pad, making certain to land safely in the center of each pad, and reached a point halfway across the pond.  Not being one to stop and assess things, the frog jumped from pad seven and landed instantly on the opposite bank, never touching the next lily pad.  This instantaneous arrival did not seem like an instant to the frog, who not only landed on the next lily pad but continued to jump from lily pad to lily pad, finally reaching the bank.  On what bank it landed, the frog could not be sure, but it was stable dry land, with support different from that offered by the lily pads.

Thought provides you with padding to fall on, in the inevitable event that your thinking lets you down short of your goal.  As you call moving from thought to thought, progress, time is created and the space between thoughts is entirely ignored.  Enlightenment is always closer than your next thought.

Maybe you don't like the "Everything is illusion" route.  Perhaps you have a need for there to be things, a mind, and people.  Although it isn't likely to happen, you can recognize your enlightenment while keeping all of your current perceptions intact.  A Koan, supposedly, worked for many a student in the East.

As you become aware of more subtleties around you, discovery will be yours.  You will continue to notice new and different things; you will enter new worlds of both cause and effect where life makes sense to you and then makes no sense at all.  You will hold on and let go until that becomes your pattern.  Depth and revelation will be yours.  You will discover that anything you can perceive must have been there all the time.  Yet it may not be there at all.  Watch out for meaning.

Anything you can perceive now, you could always have perceived.  To put it less accurately and more usefully, given how you think, "Anything that is now has always been."

"Anything that is now has always been."

Let that sit with you for a little bit.  It is different to be told something than it is to discover it yourself.  The idea "Anything that is now has always been," brings you halfway across the stream.  It is half of the Koan.  Before you think another thought, there is the possibility to transport yourself to anywhere without landing.  You must jump but not land; then you can land anywhere.  As long as you jump and land, you will be caught in the world of cause and effect.  If you jump to jump, rather than jump to land, everything becomes possible for you.  Reality is revealed.  Spirituality is consciousness focused on reality.  You become purely spiritual, and you transcend any possible bonds to illusion while becoming the whole.  When you are the whole, then you are already everywhere.  There is nowhere to get to.  You already arrived.  Perfection.  But, if you leap and then land, you miss it.  You must just leap.

Complete the other half of, "Anything that is now has always been."

Perceive without thinking.  Observe without being the observer.  The other half will be obvious.  Come up with answers, many answers, until you have one that you can trust.  Whether you have never done an exercise from a book, have always done exercises from books, or have done some exercises, DO THIS ONE.  Do not read on until you have pondered the other half of the idea "Anything that is now has always been."  What comes next?  What allows you to be between thoughts?

Have you figured out the answer?  If so, that is not the answer.  If you have discovered the answer without figuring it out, you just might have it.  If the answer provides you with tremendous relief, sets you free and unburdens you from fear, then it is the answer.  If not, ponder it some more.  If, "Anything that is now has always been," what then?  What is the other half?

Hint:  If you can't wait for the answer, relax and think of Jack Benny.

 

Chapter 1 Enlightenment is Losing Your Mind

     Fork in The Road

There were odd-shaped groupings of symbols, pointing which way to go, but not in an obvious manner.  They were in the shapes of complex V's.

Closer examination revealed that all of these symbols were, in fact, piles of bones, human bones.  Each grouping seemed to be put there as some kind of mirror, reflecting and taunting the fork in the road.  It was not until some time later that it became clear to me exactly what these shapes represented.  The circle was a skull resting on tap of the rib bones and back bone.  Radiating out from this center point were the large thigh bones and then coming back toward, but not quite reaching center again, were the calf bones.

At first I thought this might be a warning for me.  It was, but not directly.  The bones were the symbolic remains of a person left undisturbed in a full lotus position for long enough.

No book learning would have revealed this to me.  It arrived as an insight, at this fork in the road at which I found myself frozen as I assumed the lotus position myself:  filled with the fear of taking the wrong fork, or not taking the right one.  With the irony I hove since come to expect from life, it should have been obvious that both paths ultimately led to the same place.  There was a little solace in the company here; certainly my predecessors were dead but at least they had shared my present dilemma.  If they had been a bit more gregarious, they could have talked back as I spoke to them of the problems that faced me this day.  It seemed that the further our civilization progressed, the more important and thus terrifying became the simplest either/or.

Thinking that one is the master of his or her fate is fine until one is presented with a dilemma.  That is when mastery is proven.  "To whom would I have to prove my mastery?" that was the fear, the seemingly unanswerable question.  If this had been a democracy, the only live vote would have been mine.  In retrospect, the absence of any other species' bones at this crossroads should have told me something.  It could have revealed to me that only the thinking being is able to become immobilized by a fork in the road.  Or perhaps, it is only the conscious being who even considers the possibility of splitting the universe into right and wrong or good and bad.  Animals happened by from time to time, but they always kept moving.  They occasionally paused to smell one of the V-shaped piles, either they were curious or tantalized by the lingering possibility of food, but on they went.  Animals don't care which route they take, this was a human trap.  No food needed to be used for bait, a simple split in the road was sufficient to trap a thinking being.

I sat, able but unwilling to move.  The world went on around me as I searched for reasons to take one path over another.  Any incentive would do, or even a little perspective reminding me that I had been at many such intersections before, and it had never mattered which way I went.  Finally, motivated only by the symbols of my brothers and sisters around me pointing to either path, I rose.  Stiff-legged, hungry, still confused, and yet resolved not to die here, I walked down one of the paths, the right one if memory serves me well.  I walked for several hours, and finding nothing particularly noteworthy, turned and walked back to the crossroads and took the other one.

Spring is a blessed time for those who carry a confidence within them that they are on the right path because they have longer to walk in the light, but, for me, this spring day just provided more light on a longer day of confusion.  The days were getting longer, and I would only discover later that the whole idea of day and night was available to push me along the path game.

Once I found myself, I could move equally well in day or night or not move in either but still cover much ground.  As that gift filtered through me, night and day became the some and there were no longer forks in the road.  Now there is openness in all directions.  Thank goodness, or perhaps God, that this gift of finding myself did not happen too early for me, or I would surely have been lost.  I think fondly of the days when I clung to structure as same of the best days possible, when I can remember them.

It only took doubling back once, second guessing myself, to have the courage to move on down the left fork.  Luckily, I soon forgot that fork in the road and stopped entertaining the thought of what I might be missing if I had just persevered on the other path.  It seems that I could acclimate myself to anything once I stopped thinking about what might be missed if I had just stuck to the other path.

I walked on.  Slept.  Walked in my dreams, and then woke.  There was a different flavor to the walking in my dreams.  More seemed possible and I pondered how little effort seemed to go into dreams while waking often seemed so difficult.  What if dreams were an invitation to step upward and avoid the whole horizontal progress all together?  Imagine entering a world of vertical invitation?  What then?  Were horizontal steps wasted--aging us, but not increasing our potential?  Certainly raising an object increased its potential energy, why not us?  I attempted to raise my dreams in my awakening, and was partially successful, though not in the usual sense.  This experiment didn't get me anywhere physically, but it did lead to more smiles and much less seriousness.

I had passed another test; the fork in the road dilemma.  With each test came certain rewards but also the certainty that the next test would be a bit more interesting and challenging.  Moving and changing seemed to be the constants in this equation.  I could only count on what I could control, and I could only control what I perceived to be both other and less than myself.  Ironically, the moment I demeaned anything that thoroughly, I couldn't care about anything.

Many years earlier man had tended his flocks, until he built fences to do the tending for him.  Mathematics seemed to be the fences that I used to tend all my possible flocks, but try as I might, I was still more fascinated by the wild things, the untamed thoughts, than I could ever be with anything that had succumbed to my domestication.

Fencing my thoughts was another fork in the road, though not so obvious as the physical one.  The test now was to let go, or hold on.  Another invitation to split, even if all I did was dignify the idea of division.  This nuclear decision consumed my energy; I could no longer walk or even move.

There were no symbolic V-shapes in the road now, only lush green growth.  Surrounding me was the wet smell of plants in perfect humidity, growing each moment and so near to flowering.  Suddenly the first flower bloomed and then so many more in all the colors of the rainbow and with a sweet deep smell that I will remember forever, if I can.  To always breathe in the smell of fresh rose petals--this is the promise of being a king, a ruler at least in one's own mind.  The current offer is to be immobilized by the visual and olfactory beauty of the moment and to remain here, transfixed, just long enough to be pollinated.  Unite with the plants and take on a different kind of movement by playing on the breeze while remaining rooted in the dark rich soil.

I woke to discover that I had been digging downward with dirty fingernails, hands clenched into a claw shape to facilitate the digging.  In my dream it appeared that I had risen when all the time I was edging ever so slowly downward.  Dreams, it seemed, could not be counted on.  There is the inevitable awakening to discover what one has done while asleep.

Laughter came as I moved the dirt out from under each fingernail to the nail of my right index finger, dropping some to the ground in the process, and finally looking for something to clean under my index fingernail.

Hands still dirty, I moved onward without walking, wiser but not sufficiently so.  A little more open than before.  Eating a meal of profound variation.  My uncertainty vanished into nothingness and I mentally and physically stretched and took in a deep breath at the same moment, observed, and then released the breath with no regret or need for the possible next one.  The air was no longer mine as it had always been before, nor was the breath individual.  I blew upward, effortlessly but hard, and the stars moved.  They swirled, carried around by my breath, only to return to their original position again, or perhaps close enough to convince me of their location.

 

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