A phenomenal quote from Jack Engler’s article, Practicing for Awakening:
Instead of practicing for awakening as a real possibility, we hold enlightenment up as a remarkable and rare attainment, the highest ideal of the spiritual life. But enlightenment doesn’t work as an ideal. As an ideal for a few, it distances us and discourages us. At the same time, of course, this puts it comfortably out of reach where we can venerate it without feeling we have to do anything about it. And then we have to defend ourselves against our disappointment that it will never be ours. So we take the opposite position that it doesn’t really matter anyway—all that matters is being awake in the moment.
This may be true, but here it is used as a rationalization. By minimizing its importance, we make our own self-doubts and insecurities easier to live with. Idealizing awakening and minimizing its importance are both defensive, and repeat what has already happened in the history of Buddhism. Awakening was a common occurrence in the beginning if we believe the suttas; over the centuries it came to be viewed as a rarer and rarer event as it took on more of a mystical aura, and most Buddhists eventually abandoned the aspiration for awakening in this lifetime. Is this coincidence?
This is kind of what I was trying to get at here and here, but coming at it from a different angle. This point, I think, is super critical to our understanding of the spiritual path. If we don’t know that awakening is possible, and it isn’t our deepest aspiration and resolve, then the likelihood of actually waking up becomes almost nil. Engler, later in the same article puts it this way, “Without this will or desire or intention to awaken, awakening will not happen.” Clear enough.
(Hat tip to Dave Lovas for sending this article my way.)
