Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [3]
And what happens if we follow that dangerous path to the end? We’ve had numerous hints that ought to give us a clue. They linger darkly on in our collective memories: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Final Solution, “9-11.” We might even be able to rattle off the dates of these awful events—but the lesson, we haven’t yet absorbed. And until we really learn it, kids will keep getting new dates to memorize for history class.
When you hold something sacred, you try to hold that thing apart from the rest of the universe. But this really can’t be done. Nothing can be separated from everything else. Red is only red because it’s not green or yellow or blue. Heavy metal is heavy metal because it’s not polka or barbershop. Nothing in the universe has any inherent existence apart from everything else. Good is only good when contrasted with evil. You are only you because you’re not everyone else. But this kind of separateness isn’t really how the universe works.
You cannot possibly honor God if you can’t honor every last one of God’s manifestations. Killing someone in God’s name is ridiculous. If we do that, we are killing God and killing truth.
But what is truth? What is God? How can you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, these lofty ideas?
Truth screams at you from billboard cigarette ads. God sings to you in Muzak® versions of Barry Manilow songs. Truth announces itself when you kick away a discarded bottle of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. Truth rains on you from the sky above, and God forms in puddles at your feet. You eat God and excrete truth four hours later. Take a whiff—what a lovely fragrance the truth has! Truth is reality itself. God is reality itself. Enlightenment, by the way, is reality itself. And here it is.
And just FYI: Even if you run and run and run forever you can’t possibly escape reality. You can fervently deny the existence of an Ultimate Truth or of God, but reality is always right there staring you in the face. And you can search and search for enlightenment, but you’ll only ever find reality.
You won’t find enlightenment by eating ‘shrooms or smoking some really primo weed. And enlightenment’s not in books. Not even this one.
Some people think enlightenment is some kind of superspecial state without questions or doubts, some kind of absolute faith in your beliefs and the rightness of your perceptions. That’s not enlightenment. In fact, that’s the very worst kind of delusion. And just so we’re clear from the get-go, let me state for the record that I have not “attained enlightenment.” Never have and never will. And yet, there is something, and even though this experience doesn’t change anything at all, it changes everything.
To “know” that what you believe is absolutely 100 percent now-and-forever utterly and completely True is the sickest, most vile, and most foul perversion of everything worthwhile in humanity, of all that is right in the world. Truth can never be found in mere belief. Belief is restricted. Truth is boundless.
Truth doesn’t screw around, and truth doesn’t care about your opinions. It doesn’t care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it. It couldn’t care less what religion you are, what country you’re from, what color your skin is, what or who you’ve got between your legs, or how much you’ve got invested in Mutual Funds. None of the trivial junk that concerns most people most of the time matters even one teensy-weensy bit to the truth.
Oh, and one other thing: The truth is not open to negotiation—not by you, not by me, and not by the Leader of the Free World or the Moral