Letter from the Field: A Beautiful Response from the Subject of the “What Initial Awakening Is” Post

This is my friend’s unedited (except for typos!) letter that arrived the day after the original post went up. I’d include it as part of that post, but hundreds of people have already read it as it was, and I don’t want to short-change them. My friend is callin’ like he’s seein’ ’em. I’m very pleased for him. This teaching is not for people who are beginners, it is for people who have and cultivate, as Suzuki Roshi said, “Beginner’s Mind.”

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Hi Fred,

Just wanted to follow up with you since I saw your post this morning. I wrote a letter to myself a couple days ago, as the first entry in a new notebook titled “Spiritual Maturity”. I think it’s great you decided to share my experience with your audience, and I truly hope that it can reach someone similar and prevent them from wasting so many years of their life. The truth is, I was doing nothing but waiting long before I met you. I’ve been doing nothing but waiting for about 4 years, maybe almost 5, since my first big awakening experience. I think that is why, once you started telling me the truth, it took so long for me to get it. I was already extremely set and invested in my ways. 

Anyway, I’m pasting the letter I wrote myself below. If you think it could help anyone, feel free to post it – or not. Also feel free to remove any sections or edit it at will or do whatever you like with it. I just really want to help others avoid the mistakes I made. 

Also, I want to schedule a clarity session with you. I think now that I’ve accepted the way things are and am no longer fighting the obvious fact that the relative does matter, I will be much more open to what you have to say. Perhaps totally open for the first time. I think it would do me a lot of good to talk to you from this new perspective of things.

The Current State of Things

For the past four years, following my first explosive awakening experience to the true nature of reality, no progress has been made. Ironically, all during that time, there was the belief that completion was just around the corner; a mere insight away.

During most of that time I assumed, and acted based on the assumption, that I was a senior in college on the brink of graduation. When in reality, I had only received an acceptance letter into the College of all Colleges; I wasn’t even a freshman. When I would come across the idea of “coursework” I would think it below me, that it was reserved for others who had not seen what I had seen, and that it was there so that they could understand what I had already come to understand. But no, not me, I had special permission to cut straight to the finale, I had a special seeing very early and was all but ready to graduate. I was pretty much done, I assumed; just waiting for it be “official.” Then the waiting went on and on over the years and became impatience; and the impatience became frustration, which became confusion, strife and more suffering.

It took four years to see that I was wrong; four years to see through the story that I was special. Ironically, given this analogy, it was the same amount of time one generally spends in college to reach completion! 

How could I have been so arrogant and self entitled? I don’t think it started out as arrogance, though. I think it started out as simple naivety. Perhaps that’s even a good quality when beginning this. Otherwise it might seem too overwhelming, too impossible. At some point though, it turned into indignation. That transition sparked the onset of, in hindsight, a profound arrogance. Any time there was any mention of doing some type of work, especially if it seemed difficult or time consuming or related to the relative human side of things, I immediately dismissed it as below me. I thought that since I had seen the ultimate nature of reality several times that I didn’t need that. I thought all that stuff was for people who hadn’t seen it yet. I thought that once you saw it, that was it.

Those beliefs, wherever they came from, and the steadfast adherence to them without question, were the self imposed limitations on any form of further progress, as well as the catalysts for the arrogance and confusion that grew over the years.

This all led to a state of affairs that had me sitting around just waiting for enlightenment to happen, albeit quite agitatedly and impatiently; which was expressed through more and more reading of the same stuff over and over again, hoping that something would just “click” and I would finally be done. A lot more could be said about that and the effect it had and how it evolved and got worse, but at it’s core, that is what has been going on for all these years: waiting. Not just waiting… waiting and demanding, expecting, because I deserved it, was owed it. 

Now when I look I can see that the awakening experiences I had, where the ultimate nature of reality was revealed clearly to me, were simply a door opening that created the possibility for me to begin the real journey towards enlightenment, an “inner revolution”, it becomes immediately clear how immature and childish I have been. Sadly, that immature and childish orientation mutated and grew into an arrogant and angry knot of resistance and suffering. At it’s core though, it was and is still simply an immature viewpoint based on limited understanding and a lack of investigation of faulty assumptions, combined with an unwillingness to consider another possibility; the possibility that I was wrong, and Fred was right; the possibility that the relative does matter and is not irrelevant after a clear awakening experience. I think, in hindsight, at the most basic level, a lot of this stemmed from not wanting to face life, wanting to avoid painful, difficult life circumstances – wanting to escape. 

So this is the current state of things. I am a beginner. I know nothing more than I did four years ago. I am very blessed to have received this ultimate of all “acceptance letters”; this invitation to go all the way that appears in the form of a glimpse of the true nature of things. Truth be told, I don’t know if I am a beginner or not, or if there is an “x year curriculum” ahead, but I am greatly humbled and know that I do not deserve anything because of what I’ve seen. I know that I am not further along than anyone else, and that I am not above anything, and that perhaps I need to take a serious look at my life and what I want and start doing something to get there. Nothing happens when you’re waiting.

One insight that has become clear since the above recognitions occurred, is that none of this awakening stuff is up to me; I have no say in how it should go, and thoughts or beliefs I’ve had or have about that, regarding what should or shouldn’t be required for enlightenment to happen and be final, are completely irrelevant. What do I know? If this is how things appear, then this is how things are. I do not make the rules, I have zero input on them, and to think anything to the contrary is, in my opinion, the highest form of arrogance. Even trying to interpret What Is based on my conceptual models or fit it into any kind of frame of understanding is a form of arrogance and misguided intentions. Who the hell am I to argue with What Is? If What Is shows up as one needing to work towards enlightenment after an awakening experience, then who the hell am I to say “no, that is wrong because there is no one here to meditate and I heard another teacher say that so it is true, I’m not going to do anything because it’s already here and complete”. Yet the fact is, what is appearing before me now is clear evidence that a lot of work does need to be done once that invitation is sent in order to reach enlightenment, that I am immature and childish and that I need to change that.

I’m not going to argue with it again this time… If later down the line something else appears before me that is contrary to this, so be it. But right now, this is what is, and I have no say in the matter so I’m going to hop on board; because trying to say it should be “this” way (whatever way that is), has brought nothing but pain and confusion and suffering for a very, very long time. 

So if there is one lesson I’ve learned over the past four years (other than seeing that the relative does still count) then it would be that I do not get a say in the way things are, and any attempts to suggest that things should be some way other than the way they are is an exercise in futility and will do nothing but keep you stuck and unhappy. Arguing with What Is is not a wise thing to do… utterly pointless. Specifically, arguing with Reality about what does or doesn’t need to be done for embodiment.

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