Jed McKenna - Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment (The Enlightenment Trilogy Book 2)

S PIRITUALLY

I NCORRECT

E NLIGHTENMENT

Jed McKenna

Electronic Edition

Dear Mr. McKenna,

I finished reading your book Spiritual Enlightentnent: The Damnedest Thing and I'm so mad, I could chew nails. While you tout your book by its very title as a spiritual book, it is nothing about spirituality and was very disturbing to boot. I wish I'd never read it but believe me, if you write another book, I'll not be buying it.

Do you realize that if people do as you suggest that their lives would be ruined? Maybe you never had anything to lose, but most people do. It's like some fairy tale world you live in, where you think everyone is independently wealthy and are able to come and go without commitments to an employer, to say nothing of family, friends, and community. Like you think a mother can leave her children to go off on this spiritual pursuit or wild goose chase, I'd call it. Who would do that? What for? Who would want to? Not realistic, not happening at all.

I have responsibilities to my family, friends and my community. I do volunteer work at a local shelter and organize food drives for the poor in my community. I am a member of the women's guild of our church. I help my children with their homework, provide good meals and a clean, happy home. They have extracurricular activities like dance, soccer, music lessons that enrich their spirit. You expect me to drop everything I value in my life, things that give meaning to my life. It would be flushing everything I value down the toilet. Real lives are at stake here and you talk as though it's nothing more than a stage. Get real. What you call enlightenment, I call a horrendous nightmare.

I can't imagine how or why you say such things. Just to sell books? Even if the things you say are true, who cares? What's so great about Truth? I'd rather have my family and my life where I believe real spirituality is available to each and every one of us through kindness, good will, an open heart and mind. What would you know of that with your nihilism and your void? I think it's rich that someone would write a book about spiritual enlightenment who admits they don't even know what the word spiritual means.

So, maybe you will sell a lot of books. I don't know why anyone would accept your version of spirituality. It's the opposite of everything that's good and beautiful about life. It is opposite of love and (-rod and family and yet what's it all for? There's no point. Even you yourself say that there's no point. Yet you advocate to your readership that they put all else aside to become, in essence, total failures. The damage I would do to other's lives would be irrevocable, they would hate me and for what? Absolutely nothing.

Judging from all the rosy testimonials in the front of your book, there are people out there who believe you are a great spiritual master. I don't think you have a spiritual bone in your body. I've had the wonderful privilege of being in the presence of individuals who were truly enlightened but you are nothing like them. Put that in the front of your next book so people like me won't waste their time.

Reprinted by permission.

Name withheld by request.

Seattle. Washington

This book is dedicated to

H ERMAN M ELVILLE

Contents

Wisefool Press 305

Do not think the Buddhas are other than you.

Dogen

Loomings

And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick

ALL ME AHAB.

Though, in truth, I am more Ahab than Ahab. I am the underlying reality of Ahab; the fact upon which the fiction is based. Captain Ahab is a rendering; the literary likeness of a true thing. I am that true thing.

One might reasonably expect the shelves of our libraries to be spilling over with tales of courageous men and women who've dedicated their lives to the selfless quest for truth, but, in fact, such tales are so exceedingly rare that we may fail to recognize them when they do appear. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is not a book about whaling or madness or revenge, it's a book about one thing and one thing only: Man's pursuit of truth; truth at any price. Captain Ahab is not just a literary character, he is a human archetype; a fundamental yet unknown human archetype.

All the world's a stage, all the men and women merely players, and Captain Ahab is the final role; the role that sets us free. Whoever wishes to awaken from the dreamstate of duality into the reality of their being must step out of their current character and into the role of Ahab; must become Ahab. Ahab is monomaniacalfocused entirely on one thing to the exclusion of all elseand that's the way out of the dream.

The only way.

2. California Dreaming

The Spiritual Master is absurd, like everything else. He is a Function that serves to Enlighten or Awaken beings from this condition that is absurd and unnecessary to begin with. The occupation of the Spiritual Master is as absurd as anything anyone else does, you see. Therefore, it requires a Sense of Humor, or the Enlightened point of view.

Da Avabhasa

I HATE LA .

There, I said it. I hate LA and LA hates me.

I don't know why Los Angeles and I hate each other, but I must admit I'm a little embarrassed about it. For me, LA is a no-flow zone where things don't work in the smooth, easy way to which I'm accustomed. Maybe it's only a no-flow zone because I hate it, but I think the no-flow came first.

I usually just try to stay out of LA, but that's hard to do when flying into LAX. Christine and I are picked up at the airport by Henry, a man who stayed with us at the house in Iowa for several months a few years ago. When he heard that I was coming out he was very eager to put us up. Now we're in LA and I have the uneasy Hotel California feeling I always get when coming here that once in, I'll never get out.

Christine is like my personal assistant, I suppose. A few years ago Sonaya started sending someone with me whenever I traveled to take care of things. I always argued against it but Sonaya wouldn't listen and now I'm hooked. The additional cost of a travel assistant is a small price to pay to avoid dealing with hotel clerks and rental car clerks and airline clerks and all the rest. She probably saves me more than she costs anyway. Usually, when I travel now, a few times a year, I call Sonaya and ask if she has anyone who'd like to go with me. Christine has done this several times. She's a bit on the small side and quiet, dresses in very conservative grays and blacks, but she eats clerks for breakfast and we never get jerked around. She runs interference for me, providing a protective layer between me and a world in which I no longer function very well. She's very religious, I think, and has no sense of humor; not a playful bone in her body. I think she sees me as a likable idiot, but I wouldn't bet on the likable part.

Henry is a very likable person. Very open and talkative. Unabashed. If penile dysfunction is what's on his mind, then that's what you're going to hear about. Penile dysfunction is not what's on his mind at the moment, but what is on his mind actually makes penile dysfunction sound pretty appealing. During the drive he speaks animatedly about the new spirituality they're inventing, he and his California friends, a fully integrated spiritual lifestyle that allows them to live their beliefs 24/7, as he says. A fully integrated spiritual lifestyle; that's what he keeps calling it.

Fizzle, I think. That's how the acronym would be pronounced.

Once again I am struck by the fortress-like impenetrability of the walls ego erects around itself. I remember Henry as an earnest, attentive, and thoughtful person. I don't recall ever thinking he might really buckle down and wake up in this life, but I do recall that he was trying to achieve some level of self-honesty and might manage to make a break from his ego. Now, listening to him talk about his newfound integrated spirituality as we drive through interminable LA, I am saddened to see that he has spun away from his honesty and is now cozily nestled in a self-gratifying, ego-preserving cloak of spiritual hedonism.