everything is not illuminated

and perfection isn't real

The first time I went to my Zen teacher’s studio,¹ I asked him what I now know is a ridiculous question. Watching him with curious eyes—I’d never been in the company of a Buddhist priest before . . . was he animal, vegetable, mineral?—I asked him, “Do you ever get angry?” The man exuded calm so I had to wonder, but the question itself seemed to spark something in him since he straightened and looked at me squarely, “Of course I do. I’m human.”

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It was the first of many loving corrections from an extraordinary teacher who’s been an integral part of my life now for almost 18 years. Flint’s adjustments to my words and deeds are powerful and skillful—some subtle, some direct—and they consistently do the most important thing for any student of personal development, which is that they conjure my own wisdom and my own understanding, inviting those resources to flow from the deep, even if it takes a day, a week, a month, ten years for one particular wave to surface.

@Cordell got the memo.

I’ve been practicing Zen just long enough to be intermittently useful to others, and I sometimes get questions I used to ask my own teachers² in the early days. One of those I’d like to touch on involves perhaps the most pervasive delusion about personal growth, inner science, and spiritual practice: completion.

You know instinctively what I’m talking about. It’s common for wisdom seekers and students of human-potential to get funny ideas about what we’ll acquire and who we’ll become after we’ve practiced³ for a good while. In my own life, I often hear those funny ideas when there’s a skirmish or a conversation that goes sideways. The person I’m engaged with will spontaneously hurl some version of the same question:

You’ve been doing inner science and great psychotherapy for YEARS—haven’t you got it all figured out by now? Aren’t you supposed to be enlightened?!

I laugh-cry inside when I hear this question because it reveals a root misunderstanding about what contemplative practice and good therapeutic tools look like in application. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on our parts—who doesn’t want to be the person our dog thinks we are?—but that hidden longing doesn’t matter. What matters is that with this question a delusion is set loose upon the Earth, one so common and so misguided that it needs a serious scrubbing. So, I brought steel wool:

Contemplative practice and inner science, even combined with excellent therapy, will not turn you into a saint.

There is no such thing as a perpetually compassionate human heart, an endlessly insightful human mind, and eternally generous human hands. Everything is not illuminated, and the process of emotional, relational, and spiritual maturation is never—not ever—complete. Anyone who thinks, suggests, or presents otherwise you should be very wary of.

The Buddha himself—revered for his wisdom beyond wisdom, his supreme enlightenment under the Bodhi tree—nevertheless was working with a human brain. I’d be surprised if you could find a neuroscientist willing to conclude that his Default Mode Network didn’t have an occasional reality distortion that bewitched him.⁴ As Flint might say, Of course he did. He’s human.

Perhaps the most relevant difference between Buddha’s brain and ours was summarized in an exchange between Joko Beck and my other lifelong teacher, Peg Syverson: “There is no difference between you and me—only I’m a little quicker.”

Trust me, I want to believe in abiding bliss and paint-by-number harmony as much as anyone, but I’ve been in the arena long enough to know that inner work, if it’s authentic, involves trips back-and-forth between the mud and the sky. If we aren’t taking those harrowing trips, we aren’t doing the work.

Mistake-making, learning, unlearning, and relearning is a reliable way to know that inner science is sincere.

The tender process of honest self-inquiry is the gate to soften games of protection and start waking up to what we do. Joko got quicker at dropping distortions because she did the humbling work of self-examination,⁵ over and over and over again. There is no other way.

If you choose to embark on a journey of growing up and waking up⁶—or if you are already on that path—then I want to encourage you with something real and true, something you can always count on:

In this human life, there’s no such thing as enlightenment.

Inner work doesn’t buy you a stairway to heaven and living human beings don’t vibrate to higher realms. Nothing embodied is or ever will be flawless, immaculate, or numinous. Our shaky imperfection thickens the plot as the path of self-knowledge and self-authorship spirals up and down, backward and forward, plummets, rises and falls.

Try not to take any of it too seriously. Just see if you can show up to be polished. And pay no mind to uninstructed worldlings who assert that eventually you should be beatific. May they know the gritty reality of inner work simply by doing it themselves.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Ram Dass:

To one continuous mistake -
Sun

1. The general term for a Zen practice space is a zendo, but Flint Sparks was also a clinical psychologist so we met in his therapist office + Zen practice space.

2. I’ve had the great fortune of having not one, but two, exceptional Sōtō Zen teachers, both high-integrity priests with dharma transmission, which neither of them would use as street cred.

3. For those of you from other spiritual traditions or various fields of personal development—when I use the word ‘practice,’ what I’m generally referring to is a commitment to the emotional, mental, and spiritual labor of waking up to what we do.

4. Technically, for this distortion to have been a moment of de-enlightenment, Gautama would have had to attach to it and take it seriously in some way through thoughts, habits, assumptions, actions, and so on. But you get the idea: No one has perfect thoughts and conduct all the time; not even the most awakened among us.

5. Eventually, no-selfing—but that’s another conversation.

6. Flint Spark’s description of his double-helix model that describes how pragmatic spirituality (and associated techniques like mindfulness) informs psychological growth and psychological explorations, in turn, can soften our defenses and open us to our larger spiritual nature.