Is Doing Nothing the Secret to Enlightenment?

 Nothing is more obvious in the business of living than our capacity for action. A casual assessment of ourselves at almost any time is likely to reveal a checklist of things that need to be done.  Things that are urgent but also some reminders of things that should be done, important things that never have been done.  Actions that you are convinced you ought to do to enhance your health, happiness, and sense of fulfillment.  And from another angle, we are, many if not most of us, driven to act, perform, and exert ourselves in one way or another.

What I’ve described above is true of the normal, sensible world that we all recognize, inhabit and view as real. However, our normal view of life and reality, while serving our everyday needs and experience, is questionable. It is possible to think of things differently, as for example through the perspective of science or metaphysics. A strictly scientific picture of reality is radically different from the world we apprehend via our five senses and practical understanding. Our black hole ridden expanding universe seen through the lens of quantum mechanics is wildly different from anything we can normally imagine.

The same radical shift of perspective is involved when we contemplate reality from a metaphysical perspective.  But what is that? Metaphysics takes common sense and science into its purview but asks different questions and attempts to take hold of the most fundamental ideas and concepts meant to explain the essence of reality. But there is something else about metaphysics that needs to be underscored.

 There are things that happen that defy common sense, and more challenging, that contradict fundamental assumptions of science.  These are apt to cause the wings of metaphysics to flutter. Take a rare phenomenon that I have studied and written about at some length—levitation. Yes, now and then, and under certain circumstances, people’s bodies defy that all-potent force of the universe, gravity, and float freely in space.   Such law-defying behaviors are called anomalies by some, miracles by others of religious persuasion.

But now, in the case of the anomaly of levitation, how does the metaphysics come in?    The answer is simple.  The records show that when Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Copertino fell into an ecstatic trance, their bodies lifted off the ground into space to the repeated astonishment of witnesses. The curious effect of this phenomenon is to shatter the metaphysical assumption of so-called physicalism.  There is no physical explanation of levitation.  One case will not do the trick.  But when the evidence builds with a multitude of phenomena that defy physical explanation (not just levitation) we are inclined to reject physicalism or materialism (if you prefer).  It turns out that mental or conscious states now qualify as fundamental factors in the structure of reality. That is an important idea with important metaphysical implications.

Instead of physical reality being construed as fundamental, mental or spiritual reality is. In fact, this shift toward the mental is something quite radical for science. To illustrate, here is a quote from Max Planck, one of the founders of modern physics: “The universe is made of consciousness, not atoms.” Surely a remarkable statement from a great physicist.  We are now able to elaborate on the odd title of this essay.

To do this we have to move from physics to mysticism. Mysticism is the study of extraordinary experiences associated with joy, peace and enlightenment. Mystical experiences may arise spontaneously in various ways and contexts ranging from religious to yogic, psychedelic, or near death.  One of the most famous mystics was the German Meister Eckhart who lived in the Middle Ages. He wrote extensively about his experiences and his ideas were often so strikingly original that he got in trouble with the religious authorities of his age.  Dying into nothingness seems to be the secret of enlightenment.

Mystics in general are explorers of the deeper regions of our consciousness.  We might put it this way.  We are all immersed in the personal field of our experience and consciousness. Our normal, everyday consciousness is occupied with our needs, desires, moods, challenges; our physical environment and activities—all facets of our normal conscious life. And all quite remote from the mystical dimension of our being.  It’s fair to say that our normal, everyday consciousness veil from our mystical potential.

Our mystical consciousness lies deep within us and is in principle accessible.   The great and obvious obstacle is that our consciousness is normally engrossed and entangled in and by the relentless struggles of our existence.  Even, says Eckhart, when we are engaged in doing the noble and heroic things of a virtuous life.  For as such our consciousness is still trapped in what we might call the sub-mystical universe.  To reach toward the realm of mystical consciousness is a radical enterprise.  Meister Eckhart prescribes a method, a practice, for breaking through the barriers that stand between us and the ultimate mystical experience, namely, detachment.  The secret is not doing, radical detachment.

After all, it would be naïve to suppose that access to the supreme human experience could be anything less than radically challenging. It can be no easy task to break free from our habitual psychic existence, the product of all our achievements and failures.  The task then is to empty oneself completely.  To do so, as Eckhart put it in a way that shocked the scholars and church leaders of his day. In effect, by emptying our minds of all distractions we force the divine to enter and fill our consciousness.

To detach oneself from every conceivable psychic distraction is to open oneself to the highest form of consciousness. So, like certain Buddhist schools of thought, emptiness and the void become symbols of the path to enlightenment. Another analogy occurs to me from what in modern times we have learned from the near-death experience. People who die and become detached from everything for short periods and then are resuscitated—the result is a powerful mystical experience.  The modern near-death experience seems to confirm the philosophy of the great medieval mystic on the role of detachment in achieving enlightenment.  Finally, I recommend for case histories of extraordinary phenomena that graphically describe the reality of the transcendent, my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief (Anomalist Books or Amazon