Untruth Un-realization

Truth realization is all the rage in enlightenment circles. Everyone wants the esoteric knowledge, the deep hidden truths that no one but the in-crowd knows.

They hold fast to the idea enlightenment as the discovery of some transcendental truth, but I think Jed McKenna was much closer to the mark when he described enlightenment as ‘Untruth Un-realization’.

When someone speaks of no-self, which after all is what enlightenment really is, the natural question one wants to ask is, “yes, but how do you know there is no self?”

Logical as it may seem, this is actually the wrong question.

It’s the wrong question because searching for enlightenment is not a matter of setting out to prove the nonexistence of self.

The search for enlightenment is about seeing the falseness of your own self. When you see the self you hold in your mind is false, when you really see it, it disappears. The absence that remains is referred to as no-self.

So the question is not how one knows there is no self, but how one knows the self to be false. And the answer is to see that it is nothing more than a creation of your own mind.